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The oral drug amycretin resulted in people losing 13 per cent of their body weight over three months. Plus: AI chatbots use racist stereotypes despite anti-racism training.

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Weight loss drug

An experimental weight loss pill looks set to be more potent than existing injectable treatments such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, based on early trial results. The medicine, called amycretin, caused people to lose 13 per cent of their weight over three months, more than twice the amount seen with Ozempic and Wegovy specifically. “This approach seems to be a little bit more exciting, from the limited data that we have,” says Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto in Canada. Read more

Prejudices among chatbots

Commercial AI chatbots demonstrate racial prejudice toward speakers of African American English, despite expressing superficially positive sentiments toward African Americans. This hidden bias could influence AI decisions about a person’s employability and criminality. “We discover a form of covert racism in [large language models] that is triggered by dialect features alone, with massive harms for affected groups,” said Valentin Hofmann at the Allen Institute for AI, a non-profit research organisation in Washington state, in a social media post. “For example, GPT-4 is more likely to suggest that defendants be sentenced to death when they speak African American English.” Read more

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Elaine Knox

Kirsty Sedgman has studied the sociology of manners for years and truly believes they maketh humanity. While many species engage in cooperative activities, our capacity to share and divide labour among strangers is a “remarkable and uniquely human” phenomenon, according to evolutionary economist Paul Seabright. The ability to place our trust in strangers became possible around 10,000 years ago through the development of shared norms designed to encourage prosocial behaviour and discourage deviance. But manners can also be used to divide us, creating hierarchies and masking brutal acts. With so much at stake politically in 2024, Sedgman argues we need to reject the appearance of respectability in favour of building a genuinely respectful world. Read more

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Alexandra Thompson

Assistant News Editor, New Scientist
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