Regina G. Barber

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey Short Wavers, Regina Barber here.

And Rachel Carlson.

And today we have our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered.

And today we have the legend, Mary Louise Kelly.

And rethinking how to protect people's mental health when they talk with a chatbot.

The issue is we don't have a big, long-range study on how it compares with other types of dieting.

So an international team of scientists did the next best thing.

They looked at 22 smaller studies that compared intermittent fasting to other dietary interventions like eating less or eating specific types of foods.

They also compared intermittent fasting to doing nothing.

And what did they find?

Case closed?

Well, not quite.

So we asked Matthew Steinhauser about it.

He does metabolic research at the University of Pittsburgh.

He wasn't involved in this research, and he said that the small size of all the studies within this larger review makes it hard to know for certain.

Yeah, it's really scary for a parent like me.

Last year, a number of parents testified to Congress about the dangers of AI chatbots.

A couple of those families believe that AI chatbots pushed their teenage sons to kill themselves.

Our colleague Ritu Chatterjee reported that one family testified that one of the chatbots, ChatGPT, even offered to help write their son's suicide note.