SoylentNews

janrinok writes:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/therapeutic-hpv-vaccine-cervical-cancer

An experimental nasal vaccine could one day serve as a treatment for cervical cancer.

In mice, the vaccine unleashed cancer-fighting immune cells in the cervix and ultimately shrank tumors, researchers report November 12 in Science Translational Medicine.

The vaccine targets a cancer protein made by the human papillomavirus, or HPV, and takes a therapeutic approach rather than a preventative one, says Rika Nakahashi-Ouchida, an immunologist at Chiba University in Japan. Treatments like this are urgently needed for people who have already been infected with HPV and now have precancerous lesions growing in their cervix, she says. "We believe these vaccines could expand treatment options for patients."

Globally, some 660,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year, with most caused by HPV. Current HPV vaccines like Gardasil-9 are preventative, blocking the virus from infecting the body and stamping out new cases of cervical cancer. A large 2024 study in Scotland, for instance, reported zero cases of cervical cancer among women vaccinated at age 12 or 13 since the country began its vaccination program in 2008.

But preventative vaccines can't quash existing infections. Infected people who develop cancer must rely on treatments such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Therapeutic vaccines, which direct the immune system to attack cancer, offer a potential new treatment. While many groups are developing such vaccines for cervical cancer — most as injectable shots — none are available for use. Nakahashi-Ouchida's team tried a different approach: a nanogel vaccine squirted into the nose.

The team's gel carries a protein from a cancer-causing HPV strain; researchers modified the protein to be harmless. In mice with cervical tumors, vaccination prompted an immune response to migrate from mucosal tissue in the nose to tumor tissue in the cervix, the team found. Those tumors then started to shrink.

"I was very excited to see that," Nakahashi-Ouchida says. She hadn't been sure that nasal vaccination could spark a response in tissue as distant as the cervix. In other experiments in macaques, the vaccine also spurred cancer protein-targeting immune cells to beeline to cervical tissue.

Nakahashi-Ouchida says there's much to do before such a vaccine is ready for clinical use. She'd like the vaccine to include cancer proteins from other HPV strains, for one. With such tweaks and further testing, she estimates a nasal vaccine for cervical cancer could be available in about five years.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Zig prez complains about 'vibe-scheduling' after safe sleep bug goes unaddressed for eons:

The Foundation that promotes the Zig programming language has quit GitHub due to what its leadership perceives as the code sharing site's decline.

The drama began in April 2025 when GitHub user AlekseiNikiforovIBM started a thread titled "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely." GitHub addressed the problem in August, but didn't reveal that in the thread, which remained open until Monday.

That timing appears notable. Last week, Andrew Kelly, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, announced that the Zig project is moving to Codeberg, a non-profit git hosting service, because GitHub no longer demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence.

One piece of evidence he offered for that assessment was the "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely" thread.

"Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected," Kelly wrote. "After the CEO of GitHub said to 'embrace AI or get out', it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started 'vibe-scheduling' – choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked."

Kelly's gripe seems justified, as the bug discussed in the thread appears to have popped up following a code change in February 2022 that users flagged in prior bug reports.

The code change replaced instances of the posix "sleep" command with a "safe_sleep" script that failed to work as advertised. It was supposed to allow the GitHub Actions runner – the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow – to pause execution safely.

"The bug in this 'safe sleep' script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever," wrote Zig core developer Matthew Lugg in a comment appended to the April bug thread.

"That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."

[...] While Kelly has gone on to apologize for the incendiary nature of his post, Zig is not the only software project publicly parting ways with GitHub.

Over the weekend, Rodrigo Arias Mallo, creator of the Dillo browser project, said he's planning to move away from GitHub owing to concerns about over-reliance on JavaScript, GitHub's ability to deny service, declining usability, inadequate moderation tools, and "over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web (or what remains of it) among other problems."

Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal and reusable software.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/this-cellular-trick-helps-cancer-spread-but-could-also-stop-it/

The tale of the princess and the pea describes someone so sensitive that she can detect a single pea beneath layers of bedding. In the biological world, certain cells show a similar heightened sensitivity. Cancer cells, in particular, have an extraordinary ability to detect and respond to their surroundings far beyond their immediate environment.

Now, scientists have discovered that even normal cells can achieve this extended sensing ability—by working together.

A study published in PNAS by engineers at Washington University in St. Louis reveals new insights into how cells perceive what lies beyond their immediate environment. These findings deepen understanding of cancer cell migration and could help identify new molecular targets to halt tumor spread.

Amit Pathak, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the McKelvey School of Engineering, described this process as "depth mechano-sensing"—the ability of cells to perceive structures beneath the surfaces they adhere to. In earlier research, Pathak and his team discovered that abnormal cells with "high front-rear polarity" (a feature typical of cells in motion) can detect their surroundings up to 10 microns beyond the layer they are attached to.

This extended sensing occurs as the cell reshapes the surrounding fibrous collagen, allowing it to probe deeper into the extracellular matrix (ECM) and "feel" what lies ahead—whether a dense tumor, soft tissue, or bone. A single abnormal cell can gauge the stiffness of the ECM and navigate based on this mechanical feedback.

The new research shows that a collective of epithelial cells, found on the surface of tissue, can do the same and then some, working together to muster enough force to "feel" through the fibrous collagen the layer as far as 100 microns away.

"Because it's a collective of cells, they are generating higher forces," said Pathak, who authored the research along with PhD student Hongsheng Yu.

According to their models, this occurs in two distinct phases of cell clustering and migration. What those clustering cells "feel" will impact migration and dispersal.

Implications for cancer research and treatment

The extra sensing power of cancer cells means that they can get out of the tumor environment and evade detection, migrating freely thanks to their enhanced sense of what's ahead, even in a soft environment. Researchers' next step will be understanding how that works, and if certain regulators allow for the range. Those regulators could be potential targets for cancer therapy. If a cancer cell can't "feel" its way forward, its toxic spread may be put in check.

Reference: “Emergent depth-mechanosensing of epithelial collectives regulates cell clustering and dispersal on layered matrices” by Hongsheng Yu and Amit Pathak, 11 September 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2423875122

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/samsungs-first-tri-fold-phone-is-here-everything-you-need-to-know

The Galaxy Z TriFold has a massive, 10-inch screen when fully unfolded.

Samsung has officially unveiled the Galaxy Z TriFold, the company's first tri-fold smartphone. The device comes after Huawei launched its Mate XT, but Samsung's approach has a distinctive inward-folding design that keeps the large main screen fully protected when closed.

The Galaxy Z TriFold has a vast, 10-inch screen when fully unfolded, turning the phone into a tablet. When folded, it has a standard 6.5-inch front screen. The design uses a "Flex G" architecture with both hinges folding inward, contrasting with Huawei's outward-folding approach.

The device contains a Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor, 16GB of RAM, and storage options ranging from 512GB to 1TB. The 5,600mAh battery supports 45W wired charging and 15W wireless charging. It features a 200MP main sensor, a 12MP ultra-wide lens, and a 10MP telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom.

The tri-fold weighs 309 grams and measures just 3.9mm thick when fully unfolded. It is rated IP48, meaning it is water-resistant to 1.5 meters but isn't dust-tight.

Pre-orders in South Korea begin Dec. 12, 2025, with a price of around $2,450. The US launch is confirmed for Q1 2026, with availability also coming to China, Singapore, Taiwan, and the UAE. The device launches with Android 16 and One UI 8, featuring multitasking modes that allow three full-sized apps to run simultaneously.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

New research indicates that complex life began forming almost a billion years earlier than previously thought:

New research has uncovered that complex life began forming much earlier, and across a longer timeframe, than scientists had previously assumed. The findings offer fresh insight into the environmental conditions that shaped early evolution and call into question several longstanding scientific ideas in this field.

Led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature (December 3), the study reports that complex organisms arose well before oxygen became abundant in Earth's atmosphere. Oxygen had long been thought to be essential for the development of advanced life, but the results indicate that this requirement may not hold for the earliest stages of evolution.

"The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, with the first microbial life forms appearing over 4 billion years ago. These organisms consisted of two groups – bacteria and the distinct but related archaea, collectively known as prokaryotes," said co-author Anja Spang, from the Department of Microbiology & Biogeochemistry at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.

Prokaryotes dominated the planet for hundreds of millions of years before more complex eukaryotic cells emerged. This latter group includes algae, fungi, plants, and animals.

Davide Pisani, Professor of Phylogenomics in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol and co-author, explained: "Previous ideas on how and when early prokaryotes transformed into complex eukaryotes have largely been in the realm of speculation. Estimates have spanned a billion years, as no intermediate forms exist and definitive fossil evidence has been lacking."

To address these uncertainties, the international team expanded upon the existing 'molecular clocks' technique, which estimates when species last shared a common ancestor.

"The approach was two-fold: by collecting sequence data from hundreds of species and combining this with known fossil evidence, we were able to create a time-resolved tree of life. We could then apply this framework to better resolve the timing of historical events within individual gene families," added co-lead author Professor Tom Williams in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bath.

By comparing more than 100 gene families across multiple biological systems and focusing on traits that differentiate eukaryotes from prokaryotes, the researchers began reconstructing the sequence of events that shaped the rise of complex life.

janrinok writes:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/12/01/us-wants-laws-to-force-app-store-age-checks-despite-apples-existing-protections

The United States wants big tech companies like Apple to protect children online by adding age verification safeguards to the App Store. It's a political push that completely ignores what protections Apple already provides to parents and children.

Lawmakers have been particularly keen to protect children from online dangers, and have repeatedly demanded big tech companies like Apple and Google do more to help. In the latest attempt to make big tech bend to its demands, the U.S. government is going after the App Store.

The App Store Accountability Act (ASA) was introduced in May as a way for parents to get more tools to protect their children online. In late November, the ASA was brought up in Congress as part of a raft of measures to keep kids safe online, led by the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).

It's also due to be discussed as part of a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. A report on Monday by The Verge says that the discussion will look at a nine-bill package of measures.

Under the ASA, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John James (R-MI), app storefronts, like Apple's App Store and Google Play, will be required to verify the age of all users in a privacy-protecting way. The result can then be used to limit what apps would be accessible to the user, if they are deemed too young.

Accounts that are used by minors must be linked to a parental account, which would need to provide parental consent for downloading apps or making purchases. App Stores also have to meet standards like providing secure age verification and accurate app age ratings.

While there are some measures in place, such as California's age check law, the intention of the bills are to make things the same across the United States. Instead of dealing with various laws and measures in different states, there would be one set of overriding rules that offer close to the same protections.

Much like many attempts to legislate technology, there is a difference between intention and looking at reality. Had lawmakers looked closer, they would see that Apple already has something in place that does just what they asked.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/CDE-2.5.3-Desktop

Two years and one week since the prior point release, Common Desktop Environment 2.5.3 is now available as the latest iteration of this Unix desktop environment built around the Motif toolkit. CDE has been open-source for more than a decade now but its development not exactly brisk. But for those resisting the likes of Wayland and other modern display tech -- especially with KDE announcing today Plasma 6.8 will be Wayland-exclusive -- CDE 2.5.3 is now available.

CDE 2.5.3 ships with various bug fixes, dtwm now supporting more mouse buttons, some compiler fixes and resolving some warnings, a systemd service file for dtlogin is added, and other mostly minor changes. Besides the dtlogin systemd service file, perhaps most notable otherwise are the fixes for satisfying the GCC 15 compiler.

CDE 2.5.3 downloads and more details on this new point release can be found via SourceForge. Yes, another sign of its times.

While on the topic of CDE, you may also recall the separate NxCDE as a modern CDE effort. NxCDE hasn't seen any release since June 2023 nor any commits to its GitHub repository now in two years.

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Physicists have developed a "physics shortcut" that allows ordinary laptops to solve complex quantum dynamics problems, a feat previously reserved for supercomputers and AI models (Live Science). The breakthrough, from the University at Buffalo, is an extension of a decades-old method called the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA).

TWA is a semiclassical approach that simplifies quantum math by retaining necessary quantum behavior while discarding less critical details. Historically, applying TWA required re-deriving complicated math for every new problem, making it inaccessible. The team transformed this into a user-friendly "conversion table" that translates a quantum problem into solvable equations, allowing physicists to get usable results on a consumer laptop within hours (University at Buffalo).

This new, practical approach significantly lowers the computational cost and makes exploring certain quantum phenomena much easier. It's hoped that this will save supercomputing resources for the truly intractable quantum systems, while allowing more common quantum dynamics to be studied efficiently on accessible consumer-grade computers (ScienceDaily).

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/03/g-s1-100212/san-francisco-sues-manufacturers-ultraprocessed-foods

The city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against some of the nation's top food manufacturers on Tuesday, arguing that ultraprocessed food from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nestle are responsible for a public health crisis.

City Attorney David Chiu named 10 companies in the lawsuit, including the makers of such popular foods as Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids, Kit Kat, Cheerios and Lunchables. The lawsuit argues that ultraprocessed foods are linked to diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and cancer.

"They took food and made it unrecognizable and harmful to the human body," Chiu said in a news release. "These companies engineered a public health crisis, they profited handsomely, and now they need to take responsibility for the harm they have caused."

Ultraprocessed foods include candy, chips, processed meats, sodas, energy drinks, breakfast cereals and other foods that are designed to "stimulate cravings and encourage overconsumption," Chiu's office said in the release. Such foods are "formulations of often chemically manipulated cheap ingredients with little if any whole food added," Chiu wrote in the lawsuit.

[...] U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been vocal about the negative impact of ultraprocessed foods and their links to chronic disease and has targeted them in his Make America Healthy Again campaign. Kennedy has pushed to ban such foods from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for low-income families.

An August report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that most Americans get more than half their calories from ultraprocessed foods.

[...] "Mounting research now links these products to serious diseases—including Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart disease, colorectal cancer, and even depression at younger ages," University of California, San Francisco, professor Kim Newell-Green said in the news release.

The lawsuit argues that by producing and promoting ultraprocessed foods, the companies violate California's Unfair Competition Law and public nuisance statute. It seeks a court order preventing the companies from "deceptive marketing" and requiring them to take actions such as consumer education on the health risks of ultraprocessed foods and limiting advertising and marketing of ultraprocessed foods to children.

It also asks for financial penalties to help local governments with health care costs caused by the consumption of ultraprocessed foods.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

A boycott is unlikely to work:

The chaotic state of RAM prices continues to impact the industry. According to a new report, motherboard sales have fallen by as much as 50% as a result of the crisis. It has also led to gamers calling for a RAM boycott in hopes of easing the situation, but the reality is that such a move is unlikely to work.

We've covered the memory-pricing crisis since it began, including this deep dive into the problem and how it's caused by demand from AI data centers that require massive amounts of DRAM.

A new report Japanese from outlet Gazlog[site in Chinese] states that out-of-control DDR5 prices are impacting motherboard sales, forcing manufacturers such as Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte to significantly lower their sales targets.

DDR5 prices are simply stupid right now. A 64GB kit is now more expensive than a PS5 console or an RTX 5070. We've even seen several stores remove fixed pricing signs from DDR5 displays, relying on market rates because costs are changing so rapidly each day.

The problem for motherboard makers is that people upgrading from DDR4 or older systems – along with first-time builders --need DDR5 to pair with their shiny new boards. But with prices so high, it's a bad time to buy.

The result is a 40-50% decrease in motherboard sales compared to the same period a year earlier, writes Gazlog, leading to a lowering of sales targets. It's expected that CPU sales will eventually experience a similar fall in sales due to the RAM situation.

In an attempt to fight back, there are now calls on Reddit for gamers to boycott RAM completely in the hope that prices will return to normal

Unfortunately, the rallying cry is likely to have very little, if any, effect. The biggest issue, as we know, is that DRAM supply and future manufacturing capacity have already been bought out by companies to support their aggressive data center-building plans, causing the shortage.

FunkyLich writes:

A Debian developer gave out the news. Julian Andres Klode wrote in the mailing lists that APT (the package manager tool of Debian Linux) begin requiring a Rust compiler. It goes like:

"I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.
In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing."

source: https://lists.debian.org/deity/2025/10/msg00071.html

I admit to not knowing enough of the "how"-s and "gotcha!"-s of Debian's development to be able to give an educated opinion about this news. But in the overall and what I have seen happening as of late, anything Rust has felt a little too eager to be wedged into any cog and bolt of Linuxlandia as can be possible.

My dormant prophetic eye almost sees a vague vision of something that resembles the Unix Wars of the 90s, but this time happening to Linux, as soon as Torvalds will eventually retire from his role as the benevolent emperor of Linux. The commercial vultures will come from all sides to "improve" it in any way that would suit them in their business, injecting in it endless bloat and useless features that noone asked about, and there will be noone there to stop it with a firm "no!" (and a middle finger up when deserved) like Torvalds does and has guarded Linux from such assaults so far.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Linux phone features 12GB RAM, up to 2TB storage, a 6.36-inch FullHD AMOLED display, and a user-replaceable 5,500mAh battery:

Jolla kicked off a campaign for a new Jolla Phone, which they call the independent European Do It Together (DIT) Linux phone, shaped by the people who use it.

The new Jolla Phone is powered by a high-performing Mediatek 5G SoC, and features 12GB RAM, 256GB storage that can be expanded to up to 2TB with a microSDXC card, a 6.36-inch FullHD AMOLED display with ~390ppi, 20:9 aspect ratio, and Gorilla Glass, and a user-replaceable 5,500mAh battery.

The Linux phone also features 4G/5G support with dual nano-SIM and a global roaming modem configuration, Wi-Fi 6 wireless, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, 50MP Wide and 13MP Ultrawide main cameras, front front-facing wide-lens selfie camera, fingerprint reader on the power key, a user-changeable back cover, and an RGB indication LED.

On top of that, the new Jolla Phone promises a user-configurable physical Privacy Switch that lets you turn off the microphone, Bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish.

The device will be available in three colors, including Snow White, Kaamos Black, and The Orange. All the specs of the new Jolla Phone were voted on by Sailfish OS community members over the past few months.

Honouring the original Jolla Phone form factor and design, the new model ships with the Sailfish OS (with support for Android apps), a Linux-based European alternative to dominating mobile operating systems, and promises a minimum of 5 years of support, no tracking, no calling home, and no hidden analytics.

"Mainstream phones send vast amounts of background data. A common Android phone sends megabytes of data per day to Google even if the device is not used at all. Sailfish OS stays silent unless you explicitly allow connections," said Jolla.

The new Jolla Phone is now available for pre-order for 99 EUR and will only be produced if at least 2000 pre-orders are reached in one month from today [goal met on 7 December -- Ed.], until January 4th, 2026. The full price of the Linux phone will be 499 EUR (incl. local VAT), and the 99 EUR pre-order price will be fully refundable and deducted from the full price.

The device will be manufactured and sold in Europe, but Jolla says that it will design the cellular band configuration to enable global travelling as much as possible, including e.g. roaming in the U.S. carrier networks. The initial sales markets are the EU, the UK, Switzerland, and Norway.

TECH SPECS:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

        SoC: High performant Mediatek 5G platform
        RAM: 12GB
        Storage: 256GB + expandable with microSDXC
        Cellular: 4G + 5G with dual nano-SIM and global roaming modem configuration
        Display: 6.36" ~390ppi FullHD AMOLED, aspect ratio 20:9, Gorilla Glass
        Cameras: 50MP Wide + 13MP Ultrawide main cameras, front facing wide-lens selfie camera
        Battery: approx. 5,500mAh, user replaceable
        Connectivity: WiFi 6, BT 5.4, NFC
        Dimensions: ~158 x 74 x 9mm
        Other: Power key fingerprint reader, user changeable backcover, RGB indication LED, Privacy Switch

Privacy by Design

        No tracking, no calling home, no hidden analytics
        User configurable physical Privacy Switch - turn off you microphone, bluetooth, Android apps, or whatever you wish

Scandinavian styling in its pure form

        Honouring the original Jolla Phone form factor and design
        Replaceable back cover
        Available in three distinct colours inspired by Nordic nature

Performance Meets Privacy

        5G with dual nano-SIM
        12GB RAM and 256GB storage expandable up to 2TB
        Sailfish OS 5
        Support for Android apps with Jolla AppSupport
        User replaceable back cover with colour options
        User replaceable battery
        Physical Privacy Switch

Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

In 1983, before the release of Microsoft Windows, Digital Research GEM, or Apple Macintosh, the office software giant VisiCorp released a graphical multitasking operating system for the IBM PC called Visi On.

It was an "open system", so anyone could make programs for it. Well, if they owned an expensive VAX computer and were prepared to shell out $7,000 on the Software Development Kit.

42 years later, although the mainframe based development environment has been lost to time, enthusiast Nina Kalinina has pulled apart Visi Corp Visi On to reveal some of the strange and curious internals.

https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/vision-sdk/tree/main/note/index.md

In this article, they document some of the internals, clear up some marketing misconceptions, discover some interesting Visi On quirks, and even provide a new application for it.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://boingboing.net/2025/12/03/waymo-drives-straight-into-active-police-scene-ignores-chaos.html

Waymo self-driving cars may know how to get you from point A to point B most of the time, but there are some things Waymos still don't understand. One of these things is that you shouldn't drive directly into an intense scene where multiple police cars are surrounding a vehicle. Unfortunately, that's precisely what Waymo did in this video [Instagram].[Not reviewed --JE]

As the Waymo cruises by, a gentleman gets out of his car and onto the ground at police command. The Waymo doesn't care for this chaos — it simply wants to keep truckin'. I really wish we could see what the passenger was doing during this whole ordeal.

Videos like these are why I refuse to ride in Waymo. These cars seem to lack critical thinking when it's most needed. Luckily, this kind of situation (when it ends safely) makes for a hilarious video.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New research offers clues about why some prompt injection attacks may succeed:

Researchers from MIT, Northeastern University, and Meta recently released a paper suggesting that large language models (LLMs) similar to those that power ChatGPT may sometimes prioritize sentence structure over meaning when answering questions. The findings reveal a weakness in how these models process instructions that may shed light on why some prompt injection or jailbreaking approaches work, though the researchers caution their analysis of some production models remains speculative since training data details of prominent commercial AI models are not publicly available.

The team, led by Chantal Shaib and Vinith M. Suriyakumar, tested this by asking models questions with preserved grammatical patterns but nonsensical words. For example, when prompted with "Quickly sit Paris clouded?" (mimicking the structure of "Where is Paris located?"), models still answered "France."

This suggests models absorb both meaning and syntactic patterns, but can overrely on structural shortcuts when they strongly correlate with specific domains in training data, which sometimes allows patterns to override semantic understanding in edge cases. The team plans to present these findings at NeurIPS later this month.

As a refresher, syntax describes sentence structure—how words are arranged grammatically and what parts of speech they use. Semantics describes the actual meaning those words convey, which can vary even when the grammatical structure stays the same.

Semantics depends heavily on context, and navigating context is what makes LLMs work. The process of turning an input, your prompt, into an output, an LLM answer, involves a complex chain of pattern matching against encoded training data.

To investigate when and how this pattern-matching can go wrong, the researchers designed a controlled experiment. They created a synthetic dataset by designing prompts in which each subject area had a unique grammatical template based on part-of-speech patterns. For instance, geography questions followed one structural pattern while questions about creative works followed another. They then trained Allen AI's Olmo models on this data and tested whether the models could distinguish between syntax and semantics.

The analysis revealed a "spurious correlation" where models in these edge cases treated syntax as a proxy for the domain. When patterns and semantics conflict, the research suggests, the AI's memorization of specific grammatical "shapes" can override semantic parsing, leading to incorrect responses based on structural cues rather than actual meaning.

In layperson terms, the research shows that AI language models can become overly fixated on the style of a question rather than its actual meaning. Imagine if someone learned that questions starting with "Where is..." are always about geography, so when you ask "Where is the best pizza in Chicago?", they respond with "Illinois" instead of recommending restaurants based on some other criteria. They're responding to the grammatical pattern ("Where is...") rather than understanding you're asking about food.