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AI-generated "letters to the editor" are flooding academic publications Nov 24, 2025

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Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of Medicine received shortly after it published a paper of his on malaria treatment in July.

The letter was riddled with strange errors such as critiques supposedly based on other research Chaccour himself had written. So he and his co-author Matthew Rudd decided to dig deeper.

They analyzed patterns of letters to the editor over the last decade and found a remarkable increase in what they call "prolific debutantes" — new authors who suddenly had dozens, even hundreds of letters published, starting right around the time OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out.

Why would academics want to do this? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Chaccour to find out.

Bytes: Week in Review — Meta wins antitrust case Nov 21, 2025

Show notes

The holiday shopping season is here, and AI companies are pushing new chatbot retail partnerships. But, can these tools deliver on their promises to make shopping easier? Plus, the return of Vine, the beloved video app known for its ultra-short absurdist memes.

But first, Meta is not a monopoly, according to a federal judge’s ruling this week in the longstanding antitrust case against the social media giant, which claimed Meta had stifled competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, to discuss all of the above on this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

The difference between Grokipedia and Wikipedia Nov 20, 2025

Show notes

Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched by Elon Musk's xAI last month, promises to be an ideological alternative to Wikipedia. But the tool doesn't just have a different political flavor, argues Ryan McGrady, senior fellow at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He recently wrote, for Tech Policy Press, that Grokipedia takes a more top-down approach to knowledge, one that harks back to less democratized eras.

This school trains the workforce behind China's automated factories Nov 19, 2025

Show notes

China recently came out with its latest five-year plan for growth, which will guide the world’s second largest economy through 2030. In it, top Communist Party leaders have pushed to boost the country's strength in manufacturing to the next level by upgrading older factories with advanced technologies for automation.

The challenge, according to the Chinese ministry of education, is that the sector has tens of millions of open jobs because there aren't enough skilled workers in the labor force to fill them.

One school is trying to bridge that gap. Marketplace China correspondent Jennifer Pak visited it in Nanjing city.

For politicians, what makes a successful TikTok? Nov 18, 2025

Show notes

One thing almost everyone can agree on about Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City: he's very good at vertical short-form video.

Love it or hate it, the format has a stylistic language all its own. So, we asked Joshua Scacco, professor of communications and director of the Center for Sustainable Democracy at the University of South Florida, to help us dissect what exactly makes a political short form video effective.

Bridging the uncanny valley of lab-grown meat Nov 17, 2025

Show notes

About a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from our food systems, and livestock production is a big part of that. Experts largely agree that one of the biggest actions individuals can take to lower emissions is to eat less meat.

But that's a hard sell for a lot of consumers. Americans have actually been eating more meat in recent years, and sales of plant-based meat alternatives have dropped.

There are a lot of companies out there trying to innovate climate-friendly meat and alternatives for the future.

For our podcast "How We Survive," Marketplace's Amy Scott visits a lab at Columbia University where researchers are figuring out how to make a more convincing and enjoyable fake meat.

Bytes: Week in Review – Wikipedia urges AI companies to pay for its data, again Nov 14, 2025

Show notes

This week we learned the Japanese investment firm Softbank sold all of its stake in the juggernaut chipmaker Nvidia. We'll get into why on today's “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.” Plus, Apple is reportedly pushing back the release of its thinnest iPhone, the Air, and Wikipedia is asking AI companies, once again, to pay for scraping its data.

But first, back to that big move by Softbank and its CEO, Masayoshi Son. It cashed out its stake in Nvidia in October, the same month that the chipmaker hit a $5 trillion valuation. The $5.8 billion it netted will be redirected to OpenAI, part of a promised $30 billion to be invested in the maker of ChatGPT.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, about what all this means.

SoftBank Sells Its Nvidia Stake for $5.8 Billion to Fund OpenAI Bet - The Wall Street Journal

SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion - CNBC

Apple Delays Release of Next iPhone Air Amid Weak Sales - The Information

iPhone Air Sales Are So Bad That Apple's Delaying the Next-Generation Version - MacRumors

Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping - TechCrunch

In the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable - the Wikimedia Foundation

How to train your humanoid robot Nov 13, 2025

Show notes

Tech firms are racing to develop robot assistants that can take over our dreaded household chores. But teaching machines to perform these deceptively simple tasks is tedious. They need to observe the actions thousands, sometimes millions of times. And there's a cottage industry springing up to provide this training.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ayanna Howard, roboticist and dean of Ohio State University’s college of engineering, to learn more.

Are there enough workers to build geothermal energy networks? Nov 12, 2025

Show notes

Combatting climate change will likely require a multi-pronged approach to renewable energy generation. After all, it's not sunny or windy everywhere all the time. Geothermal energy, which harnesses the natural heat generated by the earth, can significantly shrink the carbon footprint of heating and cooling buildings. Those systems are currently just a small part of the HVAC market. But the Department of Energy wants to accelerate production by 10% a year. Rae Solomon at KUNC in Northern Colorado reports on how one geothermal project in the municipality of Hayden is progressing.

The old technique that could power future nuclear reactors Nov 11, 2025

Show notes

Some AI companies are turning to nuclear power to meet demand for electricity. But traditional nuclear plants can take decades to bring online.

Now some tech companies are partnering with startups trying to build small, modular nuclear reactors, designed with speed in mind. One such company, Kairos, has a deal with Google to build a fleet of modular reactors. To do so, it’s relying on a technique first developed in the mid-20th century: molten-salt cooling.

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