Flock is going after a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com that has collated public records files released by police.#Flock
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How Benn Jordan Discovered Flock's Cameras Were Left Streaming to the Internet#podcasts
How Benn Jordan Discovered Flock's Cameras Were Left Streaming to the Internet
On the podcast this week, I talked to YouTuber Benn Jordan, who has done some of our favorite reporting on Flock, the automated license plate reader surveillance company. A couple months ago, he found vulnerabilities in some of Flock’s license plate reader cameras.
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I have been following Benn’s work for a while, and soon after that video came out, he reached out to me to tell me he had learned that some of Flock’s Condor cameras were left live-streaming to the open internet. In this episode, we discuss how he discovered the issue and what happened next.
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Articles and videos discussed:
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.404 MediaJason Koebler
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Scientists discovered that some dogs, known as Gifted Word Learners, can passively pick up language and may possess toddler-level cognitive skills.#TheAbstract
‘Gifted’ Dogs Learn Human Language, Study Finds
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that lurked in the dark, pulsated with light, wagged a tail, and called it a night.First, scientists have yet again spotted a bizarre object in space that has never been seen before—the universe just keeps serving them up. Then: news from the biggest star in the sky, a tale of eavesdropping dogs, and a jellyfish sleepover.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
You don’t want to be on this Cloud-9
Astronomers have glimpsed a new type of cosmic object—a starless clump of dark matter that never quite worked up the oomph to become a galaxy. Known as Cloud-9, the entity is located about 14 million light years away and likely provides the first look at an ancient dark matter halo.
Dark matter, as you may have heard, is weird stuff that has never been directly detected or identified, but nonetheless accounts for almost all matter in the universe. In the early universe, clumps of dark matter formed halos that attracted gas, sparked star formation, and evolved into the first galaxies. But while all galaxies appear to have dark matter halos, not all dark matter halos turned into galaxies.
Scientists have long speculated that some halos may have never accumulated the right amount of mass to make a star-studded galaxy. For years, astronomers have searched for the gravitational signatures of these dark starless “failed galaxies,” which are known as Reionization-Limited H I Clouds (RELHICs).
Now, a team reports that the first clear RELHIC candidate ever discovered, providing support for the standard model of cosmology, also known as the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model, which is the current working framework of the universe.
Digitized Sky Survey image covering a 10′ × 10′ region around Cloud-9. Image: Anand, Gagandeep S. et al.
“The abundance of halos far exceeds that of known galaxies, implying that not all halos are able to host luminous galaxies,” said researchers led by Gagandeep S. Anand of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This has been interpreted to mean that galaxies only form in halos that exceed a ‘critical’ mass.’”“Our results make Cloud-9 the leading RELHIC candidate,” the team continued. “This provides strong support for a cornerstone prediction of the Lambda cold dark matter model, namely the existence of gas-filled starless dark matter halos on subgalactic mass scales, and constrains the present-day threshold halo mass for galaxy formation.”
Cloud-9 might one day accumulate enough mass to pass the threshold for star formation, allowing it to eventually graduate into a galaxy. But for now, it is a galaxy school flunkie.
In other news…
Big star go boom soon
WOH G64, one of the largest stars in the sky, is nearing its death. At about 2,000 times the size of the Sun, this supergiant would extend beyond Saturn if it were placed in our solar system.
Scientists have speculated that the recent dimming of the senescent star might signal a transition from a red supergiant to a yellow hypergiant, making it one step closer to supernova. But a new study reveals evidence that WOH G64 “is currently a red supergiant” and its changing light may be influenced by a companion star in orbit around it, making this a binary system.
Concept art of WOH G64. image: ESO/L. Calçada
“For a long time, WOH G64 was known as the most extreme red supergiant outside our Galaxy,” said researchers led by Jacco Th. van Loon of Keele University. “However, in a matter of years it has faded” and “its pulsations have become suppressed.”“We have presented evidence that the remarkable changes witnessed in the 21st-century in the optical brightness and spectrum of the most extreme known extragalactic red supergiant, WOH G64 may be due to binary interaction,” the team continued, noting that “we may be witnessing the birth of a…supernova progenitor.”
Fortunately, this time bomb is located 160,000 light years away, so we are well beyond the blast radius. Whenever WOH G64 does explode, the supernova could be bright enough to see with the naked eye from Earth, despite its location far outside the Milky Way.
Learn with doggo-lingo
It’s not your imagination: Your dog might actually be a really good listener. While it’s well-known that dogs respond to a variety of commands, researchers have now demonstrated that some pooches, known as Gifted Word Learners, can pick up new words just by passively overhearing their owners’ conversations.
Over a series of experiments, researchers gave dogs fun toys to play with, which their owners then named in conversations that were not directed at the dogs. The pets were then able to identify the toys by the labels at a rate significantly above what would be expected by chance, even though they had never been directly taught the words.
A dog that participated in the study, enjoying the toys. Image: Don Harvey
The findings suggest that some dogs may have sociocognitive skills parallel to young toddlers, and further confirms that a variety of animals can demonstrate various degrees of language comprehension. But the best part is the following detail about how the effervescent joy of dogs was accounted for in the experimental design.“Because dogs are neophilic and often get excited by new toys, we gave them ample opportunities to interact with the toys without hearing their labels,” said researchers led by Shany Dror of University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna.
Science completed? Check. Dogs got loads of playtime? Check. Win-win.
Jellyfish naps > cat naps
We’ll close by yawning and going back to bed—a waterbed in this case, because this is a story about the sleep cycles of marine animals. To probe the broader evolutionary purpose of sleep, scientists monitored periods of slumber and wakefulness in the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea andromeda and the anemone Nematostella vectensis.
The results revealed that these animals had remarkably similar sleeping habits to people. “Like humans, both species require a total of approximately 8 hours of sleep per day,” said researchers led by Raphaël Aguillon, who conducted the work at Bar-Ilan University, and is now at IBPC Paris-Sorbonne University.
“Notably, similar to findings in primates and flies, a midday nap was also observed in C. andromeda,” the team added.
Talk about sleeping with the fishes! The upshot of the study is that sleep has evolved across all animals with a nervous system to help repair damaged DNA, a benefit that is apparently worth the vulnerability of a resting state. But for our weekend purposes, my takeaway is that even jellyfish enjoy a midday nap, so go ahead and take that siesta.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
NASA’s Hubble Examines Cloud-9, First of New Type of Object
A team using Hubble uncovered a new type of astronomical object — a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud, a remnant of early galaxy formation.NASA Hubble Mission Team (NASA Science)
This week, we discuss viewing terrible images online and giving out zines at a benefit show.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: The 'View From Nowhere'
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss viewing terrible images online and giving out zines at a benefit show.EMANUEL: I’ve seen a lot of terrible videos in my years online but by far the most upsetting type of video shows police using excessive force and especially videos of police killing people. There are more graphic videos from battlefields and other dark corners of the internet but what happened to Renee Nicole Good this week could happen to anyone living in America, and when I imagine the tragedy that has been visited on her loved ones I can’t help but imagine how easily I or anyone I care about can find ourselves in the same situation.
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In an attempt to push more people toward a paying subscription, Grok now refuses to generate images in replies. The paywall is pretty leaky, though.#ElonMusk #xcom #ncii #abuseimagery
With xAI's Grok generating endless semi-nude images of women and girls without their consent, it follows a years-long legacy of rampant abuse on the platform.
With xAIx27;s Grok generating endless semi-nude images of women and girls without their contest, it follows a years-long legacy of rampant abuse on the platform.#grok #ElonMusk #AI #csam
404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. Webloc can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer.#ICE
Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods
A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media.Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for.
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Do you know anything else about this tool? Do you work for ICE, CBP, or another agency? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media.
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At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality.#ICE
DHS Is Lying To You
A maroon Honda Pilot SUV sits perpendicular across a residential road in Minneapolis. At the time, federal authorities were in the neighborhood as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recently announced surge of thousands of officials. A silver Nissan Titan drives up the road and stops because the Honda is blocking its path. Two officers dressed in body armor, pouches, and badges saying “police” exit the Nissan.The two people walk towards the Honda. Someone can be heard saying “get out of the fucking car.” One of them tries to open the driver’s door and reach through the open window. The driver of the Honda reverses and turns, getting straighter with the road. The driver then slowly accelerates and starts to turn to the right, leveling the car out with its front pointing away from the two officers.
A third officer, who has been standing on the other side of the road, pulls out a firearm while the car is turning away from him and fires into the car three times. The officer fires two of the shots when the vehicle is already well past him. He is not in front of the car, but to the side. The officer calmly holsters his weapon.
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In the aftermath of Github banning or suspending dozens of popular accounts, the erotic game modding community wonders if they should move to platforms like GitGoon instead.#Github #platforms #ContentModeration
We talk about the organization mapping America's AI data centers; Grok's AI breakdown; and how we bought 404media.com.
We talk about the organization mapping Americax27;s AI data centers; Grokx27;s AI breakdown; and how we bought 404media.com.#Podcast
Podcast: The People Tracking America's AI Data Centers
We start this week with Matthew’s story about an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. After the break, Jason tells us all about what Grok got up to over the holiday break, and we ruminate on what the breakdown in the information ecosystem means. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about how we bought 404media.com!
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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Timestamps:1:38 - Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters
25:58 - Grok's AI CSAM Shitshow
Subscriber's Story: We Bought 404media.com
The most effective surveillance-evading gear might already be in your closet.#Surveillance #AI
“It is a massive surprise,” said one astronomer who measured the high temperatures of gas in galaxy cluster that existed 12 billion years ago.#TheAbstract
Astronomers Discovered Something Near the Dawn of Time That Shouldn’t Exist
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Astronomers have discovered an ancient reservoir of gas that is too hot for cosmic models to handle, reports a study published on Monday in Nature.
By peering over 12 billion years through time to the infant cosmos, a team captured an unprecedented glimpse of a baby galaxy cluster called SPT2349-56. Cosmological models suggest that the gas strewn between galaxies in these ancient clusters should be much cooler than gas observed in modern galaxies, which has been heated up by the intense gravitational interactions that play out in clusters over billions of years.
But the new observations of SPT2349-56 reveal an inexplicably hot reservoir of this intracluster gas, with temperatures similar to those at the center of the Sun, a finding that is “contrary to current theoretical expectations,” according to the new study.
“It is a massive surprise,” said Dazhi Zhou, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “According to our current theory, this kind of hot gas inside young galaxy clusters should still be cool and less abundant, because these baby clusters are still accumulating and gradually heating their gas.”
“This one we discover is already pretty abundant and even hotter than many mature clusters that we see today,” he added. “So, it's a bit different and forces us to rethink our current understanding of how these large structures form and evolve in the universe.”
The first stars and galaxies emerged in the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, during an era called cosmic dawn. Galaxies gradually accumulated together into large clusters over time; for instance, our Milky Way galaxy is part of the Laniakea supercluster which contains about 100,000 galaxies and stretches across hundreds of millions of light years.
As a baby cluster, SPT2349-56 is much smaller, measuring about 500,000 light years across, and containing about 30 luminous galaxies and at least three supermassive black holes. Zhou and his colleagues observed the cluster with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a highly sensitive network of radio telescopes in Chile, which allowed them to capture the first temp check of its intracluster gas.
“Because this gas is pretty distant, it's very challenging to see the light of the gas directly,” explained Zhou. To probe it, the team searched for what’s known as the thermal Sunyaev–Zeldovich signature, which is a detectable distortion of the oldest light in the universe as it passes through intracluster gas.
The results produced a thermal energy measurement of 1061 erg, which is about five times hotter than expected. While the heat source is still unknown, Zhou speculated that it could be caused by high levels of activity in the cluster, where stars are forming 5,000 times faster than in our own galaxy and huge energetic jets of matter spout out of galactic cores.
However, it will take more observations of these distant clusters to figure out whether the hot gas within SPT2349-56 is an aberration, or if super-hot gas is more common in early clusters than predicted.
“Like every first discovery, we have to be cautious and careful with big results,” Zhou said. “We need to test it further, with more independent observations and comparisons to other galaxy clusters at a similar time. This is what we hope that our community will do next, and we're also planning for follow up observations of other clusters to see whether there is a broader trend or if this system is an outlier.”
The new study is part of a wave of unprecedented observations of the early universe within the past few years. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, has discovered massive galaxies much earlier in time than expected, pointing to a tantalizing gap in our knowledge about how our modern cosmos emerged from these ancient structures.
“It is starting to change our current understanding of how energetic the galaxy formation process was in such an early time,” Zhou said. “Galaxies were formed and evolved with much more violence, and were more active, more extreme, and more energetic than what we used to expect. The James Webb results are also consistent with our current discovery that these galaxies were very powerful in shaping their surroundings.”
Sunyaev–Zeldovich detection of hot intracluster gas at redshift 4.3 - Nature
Detection of hot intracluster gas in SPT2349−56 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array provides new insights into early cluster formation.Nature
The hotel told 404 Media in a statement “We are in touch with the impacted guests to ensure they are accommodated.”#DHS
Hilton Hotel That Refused DHS Reservations Backpedals
A Hilton branded hotel that originally declined to host guests because they were with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has backpedalled, saying in a statement Monday it does “not discriminate against any individuals or agencies and apologize to those impacted.”The episode started earlier on Monday when the official DHS X account posted what it presented as screenshots of emails from the Hilton hotel to officials.
“We have noticed an influx of GOV reservations made today that have been for DHS, and we are not allowing any ICE or immigration agents to stay at our property,” one of the emails reads. “If you are with DHS or immigration, let us know as we will have to cancel your reservation.”
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We are experiencing world events like the kidnapping of Maduro through the lens of the most depraved AI you can imagine.#grok
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Hunter-gatherers cremated a small woman in Malawi 9,500 years ago, revealing a glimpse of their capabilities and practices.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover One of the World’s Oldest Cremations
Welcome back to the Abstract, and Happy New Year! Here are the studies this week that stoked the flames, cooled off, then went feral and rogue.First, the ashy remains of a cremation pyre reveal a rare glimpse of an ancient ritual. Then: Uranus is chilling, ham on the lam, and a Saturn without a Sun.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliensor subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
An ancient cremation comes to light
Some 9,500 years ago, a community of hunter-gatherers assembled to cremate a small woman in a ceremonial pyre at a rock shelter near Mount Hora in Malawi.
Millennia passed. Many things happened. And now, at the dawn of the year 2026, scientists report the unearthing of the ashy remains of this ritual at a site, called HOR-1, which is "the oldest known cremation in Africa” and “one of the oldest in the world,” according to their study.
“Archaeological evidence for cremation amongst African hunter-gatherers is extremely rare, with no reported cases south of the Sahara,” said researchers led by Jessica I. Cerezo-Román of the University of Oklahoma. “Open pyre cremations such as that at HOR-1 demand substantial social and labor-intensive investment on behalf of the deceased. Thus, cremation is rarely practiced amongst small-scale hunter-gatherer societies.”
Indeed, before reading this study, I did not fully appreciate the work that goes into cremating a corpse from scratch. For a body to be properly reduced to ash in this prehistoric era, a community had to collect tinder, build the pyre, ignite it, and then keep the flames stoked at high temperatures for around seven to nine hours by continually adding more fuel.
The process would have been long and arduous, suggesting that it held a significant meaning to these prehistoric attendees. This ancient rock shelter was clearly used for mortuary practices over millennia, which “reflect a deep-rooted tradition of repeatedly using and revisiting the site, intricately linked to memory-making,” the researchers said.
The oldest known pyre, located in Alaska, dates back 11,500 years and contains the created remains of a 3-year-old child. But HOR-1 is the oldest example of adult cremated remains found in a pyre. We will likely never know the identity of this woman, or why her death inspired such a carefully coordinated ritual. But it seems safe to assume that the cremation was a significant event for the community that expended so much forethought and labor to perform it.
“While this cremation is highly unusual in the African archaeological record, it contributes to growing evidence of complex social worldviews among tropical African hunter-gatherers,” they added. “These practices emphasize complex mortuary and ritual activities with origins predating the advent of food production.”
In other news…
The inexplicable Uranian chillout
Uranus is so cool. I mean this in the flattering vernacular sense—Uranus is genuinely nifty—but it’s also literally true. Not only is this ice giant the coldest planet in the solar system, its upper atmosphere (the thermosphere) has been getting steadily cooler for the past 40 years—and nobody really knows why.
Scientists now think they have ruled out a hypothesis that linked this long-term thermospheric cooling to a weakening of the solar wind, which is a stream of energetic radiation and particles emitted by the Sun. A new analysis suggests that this weakening effect has reversed over the past 15 years, hinting that it is not the cause of the cooldown.
“We determine that the solar wind kinetic power at Uranus has increased by ∼28% since the start of solar cycle 24 (at the end of 2008),” said researchers led by Jamie M. Jasinski at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“If the solar wind is a driver of Uranus' thermospheric temperature, then one would have expected a gradual increase in the temperature since then. However, the temperature has continued to consistently decline over the same time period. Therefore…we argue that the solar wind kinetic power is unlikely to be the primary driver of thermospheric temperature at Uranus.”
As for the real cause, the truth is still out there. May this mystery inspire a new generation of Uranian scientists.
When pigs sail…
Now, for the incredible adventures of ancient seafaring pigs. Today, many domestic and feral pig lineages are scattered across the Pacific islands of Wallacea, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; their ancestors were schlepped over the oceans by early mariners in several migratory waves.
To learn more about how these boats brought home the bacon, scientists sequenced 117 modern, historical, and ancient pig genomes spanning nearly 3,000 years. The results revealed that pigs from Indonesia to Hawaii are mostly descended from a group of domestic pigs that voyaged with Austronesian-speaking groups from Southeast China and Taiwan about 4,000 years ago.
“Transporting these animals between islands resulted in a distinctive evolutionary history characterized by serial founder effects, gene flow from divergent lineages, and likely selection for specific traits that facilitated the establishment of feral populations,” said researchers led by David W.G. Stanton of Queen Mary University of London and Cardiff University.
In other words, some of the most significant Pacific voyages also doubled as piggyback rides.
A glimpse of a sunless Saturn
I don’t mean to cause alarm, but there’s a rogue Saturn on the loose in the galaxy.
Astronomers spotted this world drifting through interstellar space, untethered to any star, with a trippy technique known as microlensing. When a distant planet passes in front of a star from our perspective on Earth, its gravitational field warps the background starlight, creating a distinctive light signature that exposes its presence (for more on microlensing, here’s a short feature I wrote).
Concept art of a freefloating planet. Image: J. Skowron, K. Ulaczyk / OGLE
Now, a team has captured a microlensing event with telescopes located on both the ground and in space, a combination that allowed them to calculate the foreground planet’s mass (Saturn-ish) and its distance from Earth, which is about 10,000 light years. Based on its mass and its very quick pace through space, this gas giant was probably born around a star, but was flung out of its home system by gravitational interactions between neighboring stars or planets.“We conclude that violent dynamical processes shape the demographics of planetary-mass objects, both those that remain bound to their host stars and those that are expelled to become free floating,” said researchers led by Subo Dong of Peking University.
It’s a reminder that as bad as things seem sometimes here on Earth, at least our planet hasn’t been violently ejected from the solar system to drift endlessly in the dark. Small wins!
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
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After years of debate, scientists found a telltale sign that an ancient ape walked on two legs, making it the oldest known human relative.#TheAbstract
Scientists Identify Remains of the Earliest Human Ancestor
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Mysterious bones that date back seven million years likely belong to the oldest known human ancestor, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.
For years, scientists have debated whether Sahelanthropus tchadensis—an ape known from skull and limb bones found in Chad—was primarily bipedal, meaning that it walked on two legs like humans, or if it walked on all fours like chimpanzees.
Now, a team led by Scott Williams, an associate professor of anthropology at the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, has spotted a detail in the femur bone, known as a femoral tubercle, that strongly suggests this ape was a biped. Since bipedalism is a defining trait of human relatives, known as hominins, the discovery confirms that these bones belonged to the earliest known human ancestor by a margin of about one million years.
“The really novel part of our study is the discovery of a new feature that had never been noticed before, and that's the femoral tubercle,” Williams told 404 Media in a call. “I think that was the final piece of evidence that convinced me that this was a biped, and therefore probably a hominin, because you don't find that feature in anything else.”
“I think this will convince a lot of people, but certainly not everyone,” he added. “There'll be rebuttals. I'm sure that people will challenge it. That's fine. That's how science works.”
Fig. 1. S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human. Image: Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130
Indeed, the remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis have generated controversy since they were initially reported in 2002. Over the past five years, different teams have argued both for and against the hypothesis that this species walked on two legs. This unresolved question inspired Williams and his colleagues to take a “fresh and independent look” at the fossils, he said.The researchers conducted a comparison of the limb bones with other hominin remains, while also re-examining them using a technique called 3D geometric morphometrics. The latter effort exposed a hidden detail: the presence of a femoral tubercle, which is a bony protrusion where the femur connects to the hip.
“It basically prevents our torso from falling backward or falling sideways as we walk,” explained Williams. "Chimpanzees, gorillas, and other apes don't need to have that structure because they don't have to take on a vertical posture like we do. You don't need that structure—unless you're a biped.”
Of course, hominins didn’t just suddenly stand upright one day, and this ancient species shows an interesting mix of features that suggest it still spent plenty of time in the treetops in addition to walking on land. This liminal state between arboreal and terrestrial life persisted for millions of years in hominins until the rise of Homo erectus two million years ago, which is the first hominin to walk in a similar upright position to modern humans.
In addition to pinpointing our own human origins, the fossils offer a possible glimpse of the last common ancestor between humans and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. These two ape lineages split about six or seven million years ago, around the same time Sahelanthropus tchadensis was roaming through Chad.
“The debate about what the last common ancestor was like is really highly contested,” Williams said. The remains of Sahelanthropus tchadensis suggest that human relatives in this era may have been similar in size to chimpanzees and bonobos, but had body proportions more akin to later hominins.
While Sahelanthropus tchadensis can be described as the earliest human ancestor in a general sense, it was probably not the direct ancestor to modern humans. It’s become clear in recent decades that a diversity of hominin lineages emerged and became extinct over the past seven million years, so it’s difficult to trace the direct lineage of our own species, Homo sapiens, the only humans that have survived to the modern day.
“The more fossils that are discovered,” Williams said, “the more complicated the picture looks.”
The nonprofit research group Epoch AI is tracking the physical imprint of the technology that’s changing the world.#News
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Lessons on laying out the 404 Media zine using a relatively weird setup—on Linux, using Affinity, with the help of the Windows translation layer WINE.#zine
The Weird Way the 404 Media Zine Was Built
This post originally ran on Tedium, our zine designer Ernie Smith's wonderful website and newsletter about the Dull Side of the Internet. Check it out here.I write a lot these days, but my path into journalism, going way back to J-School, was through layout.
For years, I was a graphic designer at a number of newspapers—some fairly small, some quite large. I was a card-carrying member of the Society for News Design. It was one of my biggest passions, and I fully expected to have a long career in newspaper design. But newspapers as a medium haven’t really panned out, so I eventually fell into writing.
But I still adore laying out a big project, conceptualizing it, and trying to use it to visually add to the story that the words are trying to convey. It’s not quite a lost art, but I do think that print layout is something that has been a bit back-burnered by society at large.
So when 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who spent years editing my writing for Motherboard, reached out about doing a zine, I was absolutely in. The goal of the zine—to shine a spotlight on the intersection of ICE and surveillance tech—was important. Plus, I like working with Jason, and it was an opportunity to get into print design again after quite a few years away.
I just had two problems: One, I have decided that I no longer want to give Adobe money because of cost and ethical concerns about its business model. And two, I now use Linux pretty much exclusively (Bazzite DX, in case you’re wondering).
But the good news is that the open-source community has done a lot of work, and despite my own tech shifts, professional-grade print design on Linux is now a viable option.
Why page layout on Linux is fairly uncommon
The meme in the Linux community writes itself: “I would move over to Linux, but I need Photoshop and InDesign and [insert app here] too much.” In the past, this has been a real barrier for designers, especially those who rely on print layout, where open-source alternatives are very limited. (They’ve also been traditionally at the mercy of print shops that have no time for your weird non-standard app.)Admittedly, the native tools have been getting better. I’m not really a fan myself, but I know GIMP is getting closer in parity to Photoshop. Inkscape is a totally viable vector drawing app. Video is very doable on Linux thanks to the FOSS Kendenlive and the commercial DaVinci Resolve. Blender is basically a de facto standard for 3D at this point. The web-based Penpot is a capable Figma alternative. And Krita, while promoted as a digital painting app, has become my tool of choice for making frame-based animated GIFs, which I do a lot for Tedium.
But for ink-stained print layout nerds, it has been tougher to make the shift (our apologies to Scribus). And Adobe locks down Creative Cloud pretty hard.
However, the recent Affinity release, while drawing some skepticism from the open-source community as a potential enshittification issue, is starting to open up a fresh lane. For those not aware, the new version of Affinity essentially combines the three traditional design apps—vector editor, raster editor, and page layout—into a single tool. It’s pretty good at all three. (Plus, for business reasons related to its owner Canva, it’s currently free to use.)
While it doesn’t have a dedicated Linux version, it more or less runs very well using WINE, the technology that has enabled a Linux renaissance via the Steam Deck. (Some passionate community members, like the WINE hacker ElementalWarrior, have worked hard to make this a fully-fleshed out experience that can even be installed more or less painlessly.)
The desire for a native Linux version of a pro-level design app is such that the Canva subsidiary is thinking about doing it themselves.
But I’m not the kind of person who likes to wait, so I decided to try to build as much of the zine as I could with Affinity for page layout. For the few things I couldn’t do, I would remote into a Mac.
The RISO factor
Another consideration here is the fact that this zine is being built with Risograph printing, a multicolor printing approach distinct from the more traditional CMYK. The inky printing process, similar to screen printing, has a distinct, vibrant look, even if it avoids the traditional four-color approach (in our case, using layers of pink, black, and lime green).Throughout the process, I spent a lot of time setting layers to multiply to ensure the results looked good, and adding effects like halftone and erase to help balance out the color effects. This mostly worked OK, though I did have some glitches.
At one point, a lime-green frog lost much of its detail when I tried to RISO-fy it, requiring me to double-check my color settings and ensure I was getting the right tone. And sometimes, PDF exports from Affinity added unsightly lines, which I had to go out of my way to remove. If I was designing for newspapers, I might have been forced to come up with a quick plan B for that layout. But fortunately, I had the luxury of not working on a daily deadline like I might have back in the day.
I think that this layout approach is genuinely fascinating—and I know Jason in particular is a huge fan of it. Could I see other publications in the 404 mold taking notes from this and doing the same thing? Heck yes.
A sneak peek at the inside layout of the 404 Media zine.The ups and downs of print layout on Linux
So, the headline you can take away from this is pretty simple: Laying stuff out in Affinity over Linux is extremely doable, and if you’re doing it occasionally, you will find a quite capable tool.Admittedly, if this was, like, my main gig, I might still feel the urge to go back to MacOS—especially near the end of the process. Here’s what I learned:
The good: Workflow-wise, it was pretty smooth. Image cutouts—a tightly honed skill of mine that AI has been trying to obsolete for years—were very doable. Affinity also has some great effects tools that in many ways beat equivalents in other apps, such as its glitch tool and its live filter layers. It didn’t feel like I was getting a second-class experience when all was said and done.
The bad: My muscle memory for InDesign shortcuts was completely ineffective for this, and there were occasional features of InDesign and Photoshop that I did not find direct equivalents for in Affinity. WINE’s file menus tend to look like old Windows, which might be a turn-off for UX purists, and required a bit of extra navigation to dig through folders. Also, one downside of WINE that I could not work past was that I couldn’t use my laptop’s Intel-based GPU for machine learning tasks, a known bug that I imagine slowed some things down on graphically intensive pages.
I checked, by the way; this was not a WINE thing, it did this in MacOS too. (Ernie Smith)
The ugly: I think one area Affinity will need to work on as it attempts to sell the idea that you can design in one interface are better strategies to help mash down content for export. At one point while I was trying to make a PDF, Affinity promised me that the file I would be exporting was going to be 17 exabytes in size, which my SSD was definitely not large enough for. That wasn’t true, but it does emphasize that the dream of doing everything in one interface gets complicated when you want to send things to the printer. Much of the work I did near the end of the process was rasterizing layers to ensure everything looked as intended.When I did have to use a Mac app for something (mainly accessing Spectrolite, a prepress app for RISO designs), I accessed an old Hackintosh using NoMachine, a tool for connecting to computers remotely. So even for the stuff I actually needed MacOS for, I didn’t need to leave the comforts of my janky laptop.
Looking for a Big Tech escape hatch
Was it 100% perfect? No. Affinity crashed every once in a while, but InDesign did that all the time back in the day. And admittedly, an office full of people using Affinity on Linux isn’t going to work as well as one guy in a coffee shop working with a team of editors over chat and email.But it’s my hope that experiences like mine convince other people to try it, and for companies to embrace it. Affinity isn’t open-source, and Canva is a giant company with plenty of critics, just like Adobe. But there are emerging projects like PixiEditor and Graphite that could eventually make print layout an extremely viable and even modern open-source endeavor.
But we have to take victories where we can find them, and the one I see is that Affinity is a lot less locked down than Creative Cloud, which is why it’s viable on Linux. And in general, this feels like an opportunity to get away from the DRM-driven past of creative software. (Hey Canva, it’s never too late to make Affinity open-source.)
Difficult reporting shouldn’t have to be tethered to the whims of Big Tech to exist. Especially when that tech—on Amazon’s cloud, using Adobe’s PDFs, through Google’s search, over Meta’s social network, with Apple’s phones, and on Microsoft’s operating system—too often causes uncomfortable tensions with the reporting. This is one step towards a better escape hatch.
Affinity for Linux? Canva's next big move could reshape the desktop software market
Canva is seriously considering porting Affinity to Linux - a move that could transform desktop Linux and challenge Adobe.Duncan McLeod (TechCentral)
Joseph talks to Craig Silverman about how open source intelligence (OSINT) has changed over the years, and his new outlet Indicator.#Podcast
The Shifting World of OSINT (with Craig Silverman)
Joseph speaks to Craig Silverman, one of the co-founders of Indicator. Indicator is a new, independent media company that Craig runs with Alexios Mantzarlis. For years Craig has covered the world of ad fraud and disinformation using all sorts of open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques. Definitely check out Indicator at Indicator.media. The site publishes its own investigations but also tips and tricks you can use yourself.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/Lmj42F6HrPo?…The 404 Media Podcast
Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …Apple Podcasts
Don’t worry, we’re not changing our website. But we’re finally the owners of the real deal: a .com domain.#Announcements
We Bought 404media.com
“This is so fucking stressful,” Jason said. On a group call, all four of us—Jason, Sam, Emanuel, and me—were bidding on something that had long eluded us. 404media.com. Not the .co domain we launched with two years ago because that’s all we could afford. But a fully-fledged .com.That September day I was on holiday in an Airbnb. Sam was in San Diego to report on the sentencing of a high profile sex trafficker. Emanuel was home. Jason was also at home and eating a bagel. Ordinarily we wouldn’t be able to buy a .com for two main reasons: they are typically quite expensive, and when we created our company the domain was already in use by someone else.
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Astronomers think they may have captured starlight from the first generation of stars, which shone more than 13 billion years ago.#TheAbstract
Scientists May Have Spotted Light from the First Stars
Welcome to a special holiday edition of the Abstract! It’s been an incredible year for science, from breakthroughs in life-saving organ transplants to the discovery of 3I ATLAS, the third known interstellar object. But we can’t cover everything, so to cap off 2025 I’m pulling together a grab-bag of my favorite studies from the past year that fell through the cracks.First, a bitter feud that has divided dinosaur lovers for decades finally came to an end in 2025, proving at last that tyrannosaurs come in size small. Then: ye olde American cats, the search for the very first stars, and humanity’s chillest invention.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
The Vindication of Nanotyrannus
For decades, a tiny tyrannosaur has inspired big debates. The remains of this dinosaur were initially judged to be a juvenile tyrannosaur, until a team in the 1980s suggested they might belong to a whole new species of pint-sized predator called Nanotyrannus—sort of like a T. rex shrunk down to the size of a draft horse.
This argument has raged ever since, causing bad blood between colleagues and inspiring a longstanding quest to reveal this dinosaur's true identity. Now, in the closing months of 2025, peace has at last been brokered in these bone wars, according to a pair of new studies that cement Nanotyrannus as a distinct lineage of predators that coexisted alongside heavyweight cousins like T. rex.
“Nanotyrannus has become a hot-button issue, and the debate has often been acrimonious,” said researchers led by Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University in an October study. “Over the past two decades, consensus among theropod specialists has aligned in favor of Nanotyrannus lancensis representing a juvenile morph of Tyrannosaurus rex.”
The only evidence that could shatter this consensus would be “a skeletally mature specimen diagnosable” as Nanotyrannus, the team continued. Enter: “Bloody Mary,” the nickname for a near-complete tyrannosaur skeleton found unearthed in Montana in 2006. After a scrupulous new look at the specimen, Zanno's team concludes that it demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon.”
youtube.com/embed/yJw1WUXIFG8?…
These results were reinforced by another study earlier this month that argues that Nanotyrannus was “a distinct taxon…that was roughly coeval with Tyrannosaurus rex and is minimally diagnosable by its diminutive body size,” according to researchers led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University.Nanotyrannus supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs may have been flourishing in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous era—right before they got punched by a space rock. In addition to confirming the existence of a new tyrannosaur, the new studies “prompts a critical reevaluation of decades of scholarship on Earth’s most famous extinct organism,” meaning Tyrannosaurus rex, said Zanno’s team.
In other words, tyrannosaurs of all sizes were running around together at the end of the Cretaceous period. While T. rex will always reign supreme as the tyrant king of its time, we also salute this new dinosaurian dauphin.
In other news…
I can haz seas-burger?
In 1559, a Spanish colonial fleet was dashed to pieces by a hurricane in Florida. Among the many casualties of this disaster were a cat and a kitten, whose remains were found centuries later in the lower hull of a galleon shipwreck at Emanuel Point, near Pensacola.
These felines “are, most likely, the earliest cats in what is now the United States,” according to a study from April filled with fascinating facts about the fallen felines. For example, the adult cat ate like a sailor, devouring nutritious fish and domestic meat (like pork or poultry), with few signs of rodents in its diet.
This suggests the cat “was so effective at controlling rat populations that such prey was an insufficient food source,” said researchers led by Martin Welker of the University of Arizona.
It seems that cats have been impressing people with their legendary hunting prowess for centuries.
The study also includes some fun passages about the prized role of cats as pest control on these European ships, including this excerpt from a marine treatise from 1484:
“If goods laden on board of a ship are devoured by rats, and the owners consequently suffer considerable damage, the master must repair the injury sustained by the owners, for he is considered in fault. But if the master kept cats on board, he is excused from the liability.”
A resolution for 2026: Bring back cat-based legal exemptions.
The search for the ur-stars
For generations, astronomers have dreamed of glimpsing the very first stars in the universe, known as Population III. This year, these stellar trailblazers may have finally come into view, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope and the natural phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which can magnify distant objects in space.
Lensed light from an ancient galaxy called LAP1-B, which traveled more than 13 billion years before it was captured by JWST, contains the expected low-metal signatures of Population III stars, according to a December study.
“Understanding the formation and properties of the first stars in the Universe is currently an exciting frontier in astrophysics and cosmology,” said researchers led by Eli Visbal of the University of Toledo. “Up to this point, there have been no unambiguous direct detections of Population III (Pop III) stars, defined by their extremely low metallicities.”
“We argue that LAP1-B is the first Pop III candidate to agree with three key theoretical predictions for classical Pop III sources,” the team added. “LAP1-B may only represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of the study of Pop III stars with gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters.”
JWST continues to be a JW-MVP, and it will be exciting to see what else it might spy next.
A swing-kle in time
Let’s close out this wild year with some rest and relaxation in the most soothing of all human creations: the hammock. In a study published last month, researchers meditated on the history of these sleepy slings, from their Indigenous origins in the Americas to their widespread adoption by European mariners and settler-colonists.
The work is full of interesting ruminations about the unique properties and its multifaceted purposes, which ranged from rocking newborn babies to sleep at the dawn of life to comforting the ailing in the form of death beds and burial shrouds.
“The hammock facilitated transitions between life stages like birth, puberty, leadership, and death,” said researchers Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania and John Kuhn of SUNY-Binghamton. But it also facilitated more quotidian shifts in the body: sleep, dreaming, entering hallucinogenic states, and healing.”
What better way to celebrate this weird liminal week, suspended between the past and the future, than an ode to this timeless technology of transitions. It’s been so much fun hanging out with you all in 2025, and I look forward to swinging into a New Year of all things Abstract.
Thanks for reading and have a Happy New Year! See you next week.
Comet 3I/ATLAS
NASA missions are working together to track and study this rare, interstellar comet as it passes through our solar system.dghernandez (NASA Science)
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Metax27;s relationship with links and more.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss our recommendations for the year.SAM: Whenever we shout out a podcast, book, TV show, or other media or consumable product on our own podcast or in a Behind the Blog, you guys seem to enjoy it and want more. To be totally real with you, I get a ton of great recommendations from you, the readers and listeners, all year long and am always learning a lot from the things you throw in the comments around the site and on social media. The 404 Media community has good taste.
We talked through some of our top recommendations of the year in this week’s podcast episode, but here’s a more complete list of what each of us has enjoyed this year, and thinks you might also find worth digging into.
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Subscribe nowBehind the Blog: We Have Recommendations For You
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
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More than two miles under the Greenland Sea, tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes live on gas hydrate seeps that leak crude oil and methane.#TheAbstract
In the Dark Arctic Deep, Scientists Find a Hidden Oasis of Strange Life
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Scientists have discovered a hotspot of weird marine life more than two miles underwater in the Arctic, making it the deepest known example of an environment called a gas hydrate cold seep, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
Researchers found the thriving ecosystem some 2.2 miles under the Greenland Sea using a remote operated vehicle during the Ocean Census Arctic Deep EXTREME24 expedition in 2024. Gas hydrate seeps are patches of seafloor that releases large amounts of gasses, such as methane; the newly discovered site is more than a mile deeper than any previously documented gas hydrate.
The discovery sheds new light on these influential seeps, which play a role in the climate and carbon cycle and support chemosynthetic ecosystems that feed on seafloor gasses instead of sunlight. Giuliana Panieri, the chief scientist of the expedition and lead author of the new study, recalled yelling out with excitement when the team received the first visuals of the seafloor hotspot, which the researchers named the Freya gas hydrate mounds.
“It was crazy because we saw several of these mounds, which are filled with gas hydrates, and all the organisms living there,” said Panieri, who is a professor at University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway and the director of the Italian National Research Council's Institute of Polar Sciences, in a call with 404 Media.
“What is fascinating when we have this kind of expedition is the organisms that are living down there,” she added. “At a water depth of almost 4,000 meters, you have these dense oases of organisms. I know that there are many new species. I have to admit, it was very exciting.”
Some of the lifeforms found at Freya mounds: Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV OceanPanieri and her colleagues decided to explore this region after previous detections of massive plumes of gassy bubbles rising up from the seafloor. One of these plumes measured two miles in height, making it the tallest plume of this kind ever found in the oceans. While the team expected to find geological activity, it was still a surprise to see this wealth of gas-stuffed mounds, leaking crude oil and methane, as well as the ecosystem of tubeworms, snails, crustaceans, and microbes that are fueled by chemicals from the seep.
In addition to discovering this biological hub at the Freya mounds, the team also explored ecosystems living on hydrothermal vents in the nearby seafloor in the Fram Strait. Hydrothermal vents form at fissures in the seafloor where hot mineral-rich water erupts into the ocean, and they are also known for supporting rich chemosynthetic ecosystems.
The expedition revealed that the organisms living in the hydrate seeps and the vent systems are related, suggesting an ecological connectivity in the Arctic that is absent in other parts of the ocean.
“The Fram Strait of the Arctic is a rare place where deep-sea vents and seeps occur close to each other,” said study co-author Jon Copley, a professor of ocean exploration and science communication at the University of Southampton, in an email to 404 Media.
“The deep Arctic is also a part of the world where there aren't as many deep-sea species overall as other regions, because deep-sea life is still recovering from when a thick ice sheet covered much of the ocean around 20,000 years ago,” he continued. “But hydrothermal vents and cold seeps are an important part of deep-sea biodiversity there today, because life carried on in those chemosynthetic oases beneath that ice-capped ocean.”
Freya gas hydrate mounds with different morphologies. Image: UiT / Ocean Census / REV OceanGas hydrates also store huge volumes of greenhouse gases, like methane, which could potentially be released as ocean temperatures rise, making these environments a bit of a wild card for climate predictions. While the Freya mounds are too deep to be affected by ocean warming, its discovery helps to fill in the map of these oily, gas-rich sites in the ocean.
To that point, these seeps are also potential sites for resource extraction through offshore oil drilling and deep sea mining. A central goal of the Ocean Census Arctic Deep expedition is to explore these remote regions to document their ecological activity and assess their vulnerability to future industrial activities.
“Research has already established that hydrothermal vents must be protected from deep-sea mining anywhere in the world, because of the unique colonies of species that live around them,” Copley said. “Our study indicates that deep cold seeps in the Arctic will need similar protection, because they are part of the same web of life with hydrothermal vents in that region. And there are undoubtedly more deep methane hydrate seeps like the Freya Mounds out there in the Arctic, as other deep bubble plumes have been detected nearby.”
“So our discovery shows how much there still is to explore and understand about Arctic deep-sea life—and the need for caution and protection if the Norwegian government resumes plans for deep-sea mining there,” he added, noting that Norway’s parliament has put these plans temporarily on hold, but they could reverse that decision in the future.
This is why Panieri and her colleagues believe that it is critical to secure more funding and support for Arctic exploration, and ocean research more broadly. These expeditions not only reveal new and exotic organisms, they have also been inspired novel biomolecules used in medicines, among other applications.
“The sea floor and the ocean is almost unknown,” Panieri said. “There is so much to be investigated. I think this is also the take-home message here: Every time that we have the possibility to see the seafloor, we discover something new.”
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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.Deep-sea gas hydrate mounds and chemosynthetic fauna discovered at 3640 m on the Molloy Ridge, Greenland Sea - Nature Communications
This study reveals dissociating methane hydrate mounds on the seafloor at more than 3600 m deep in the Greenland Sea.Nature
In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we’re missing when we stop taking risks.#Music #physicalmedia
How we tracked ourselves with exposed Flock cameras; a year in review; and our personal recommendations on all sorts of things.#Podcast
Podcast: We Tracked Ourselves with Exposed Flock Cameras
We start this week with Jason’s story about Flock exposing a bunch of AI-powered cameras. These cameras zoom in on people as they walk by, sometimes so closely you can read what’s on their phone screen. After the break, we talk about some of our biggest stories this year. In the subscribers-only section, we give some of our personal recommendations of games, other reporting, or just a more chill life.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
- Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves
- Anyone Can Push Updates to the DOGE.gov Website
- Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages
- How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
- Half of the US Now Requires You to Upload Your ID or Scan Your Face to Watch Porn
Mike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages
A photograph of Trump administration official Mike Waltz's phone shows him using an unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages during a cabinet meeting.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.#News
Archivists Posted the 60 Minutes CECOT Segment Bari Weiss Killed
Archivists have saved and uploaded copies of the 60 Minutes episode new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered be shelved as a torrent and multiple file sharing sites after an international distributor aired the episode.The moves show how difficult it may be for CBS to stop the episode, which focused on the experience of Venezuelans deported to El Salvadorian mega prison CECOT, from spreading across the internet. Bari Weiss stopped the episode from being released Sunday even after the episode was reviewed and checked multiple times by the news outlet, according to an email CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi sent to her colleagues.
“You may recall earlier this year when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to,” the show starts, according to a copy viewed by 404 Media.
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Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket joins the pod to talk about indie journalism, the industry, and what's going on in the federal government
Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket joins the pod to talk about indie journalism, the industry, and whatx27;s going on in the federal government#podcasts
Podcast: Marisa Kabas on Landing Big Scoops as an Independent Journalist
Marisa Kabas is the founder of The Handbasket, an independent newsletter and website that has been breaking stories left and right about government workers, the media business, and Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Please go subscribe to The Handbasket here!In this episode of the podcast, Jason and Marisa share notes Marisa about doing journalism without a big newsroom, how the media business has changed over the last decade, and why sources often prefer to talk to journalists who don’t work for mainstream media.
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Stories discussed:
Truth, morality and independence in journalism under the second Trump regime
My full remarks to students and faculty at Grinnell College.The HandbasketMarisa Kabas
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.Or watch it here:
youtube.com/embed/e73spvZnc9s?…Move fast and break people
For Elon Musk's government, the psychological warfare is the point.Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket)
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas
The HandbasketMarisa Kabas
Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking Condor PTZ cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet.#Flock
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An exoplanet located 750 light years from Earth has an atmosphere unlike anything previously known.#TheAbstract
Scientists Discover ‘Black Widow’ Exoplanet That Defies Explanation
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that defied expectations, broke barriers, made trash into shelter, and lived to swear another day.First, there’s a giant, lemony, diamond-studded, black widow in space. I’ll explain. Then: electrons get ready for a close-up, the ultimately tiny home, and why expletives are the hottest new workout hack.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
“Lemonworld”
Astronomers have observed a Jupiter-sized planet more than 700 light years from Earth that is unlike anything spotted before and defies explanation.
Known as PSR J2322-2650b, the exoplanet is shaped like a lemon, boasts baffling skies, and may have hidden troves of diamonds in its belly. The distant world closely orbits a pulsar, a type of hyper-dense dead star that is tugging on the gassy planet, giving it the distended shape.
Pulsar companions are normally other stars. These are called “black widow” systems because winds from the pulsar weather down the stellar companion, eventually destroying it, similar to the deadly embrace of the namesake spider. It is very rare to see a black widow system with a planet as the pulsar companion.
Curious about this unusual exoplanet, astronomers observed it with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), thereby “unveiling a bizarre atmosphere that raises more questions than it answers,” according to their new study.
“PSR J2322–2650b is different from other ultralight pulsar companions, being the only pulsar companion with a mass, a density, and a temperature similar to those of hot Jupiters,” said researchers led by Michael Zhang of the University of Chicago. “The atmosphere of such an object has never been observed.”
“In stark contrast to every known exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, we find an atmosphere rich in molecular carbon (C3, C2) with strong westward winds,” they said.
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Molecular carbon is unusual in planetary atmospheres because carbon atoms tend to bind to other elements, producing more familiar compounds like carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is so carbon-dominated, and so depleted in oxygen and nitrogen, that it doesn’t neatly line up with any known planetary formation scenarios. In a sparkling twist, its dense carbon atmosphere may produce soot clouds that then solidify into diamonds, bedazzling its core.Is this a long-lived gas giant that survived the transformation of its star into a pulsar? Or was it born from the debris of the supernova that created the pulsar? And will this black widow system end as others do, with a slow death by pulsar winds? Nobody knows!
“Our findings pose a challenge to the current understanding of black-widow formation” and it will take more observations of similar systems “to determine whether PSR J2322–2650b’s composition is unusual or representative of the class.”
In other news…
An attofirst for attoseconds
Scientists have created the shortest X-ray light pulse ever produced, a breakthrough that could resolve the previously hidden motions of electrons and other particles at subatomic scales.
These newly-demonstrated soft X-ray pulses last for just 19.2 attoseconds, where an attosecond is equal to one quintillionth (10−18) of a second. In other words, an attosecond is to a second as a second is to 31.69 billion years, more than twice the age of the universe.
This is where the science happened. Image: ICFO
“Excitation, scattering, and electron relaxation are crucial processes that control how matter interacts with light,” said researchers led by Fernando Ardana-Lamas of the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Spain. “Their timing influences how chemical bonds form or break, how charge and energy move, and how properties of molecules and materials emerge. Understanding these dynamics requires attosecond resolution, as electronic excitations and dynamics occur on timescales of tens of attoseconds.”“We demonstrated the generation of coherent attosecond [short X-ray] pulses with a duration of 19.2 as, significantly shorter than the atomic unit of time,” a milestone that offers “exciting new opportunities to investigate atomic, molecular, and solid-state physics,” the team concluded.
This high pulse speed is necessary for the development of instruments that could capture the mysterious dynamics of particles on subatomic timescales. Other experimental technologies are still required to make these ultrafast cameras a reality, but for now, here’s to shattering the shutter speed record.
My other house is a tooth socket
Here’s a question for prospective home owners: have you ever considered living in a clump of regurgitated bones? This solution worked out well for Caribbean cave bees that lived some 20,000 years ago, according to a new study that reports the discovery of the first known fossilized bee nests built inside skeletal remains.
Scientists found the honeycombed bones buried in a cave on the island of Hispaniola that was once also inhabited by owls. Since owls regularly barf up pellets—gnarly globs of half-digested prey—the solitary bee species had a ready-made supply of skeletal remains, which were apparently a perfect place to raise offspring.
A part of a fossilized mammal skull, with sediment in a tooth socket that turned out to be a nest built by a prehistoric bee. Image: Courtesy of Lazaro Viñola López.
“Isolated brood cells…were found inside cavities of vertebrate remains,” including tooth sockets and the spinal canal, said researchers led by Lázaro Viñola López of the Field Museum in Chicago. “The high abundance of nests throughout the deposit indicated that this cave was used for a long period as a nesting aggregation area by this solitary bee.”There’s nothing like getting the skeleton keys to your new skeleton house.
A prescription for profanity
Cussing is discouraged in polite company, but it may actually be good for your health and performance, according to a new study that confirms swearing alleviates inhibitions and provides increased endurance during physical challenges.
Psychologists recruited nearly 200 volunteers to hold themselves in a sustained chair pushup while repeating either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds. The results revealed a consistent “swearing advantage” characterized by “significant performance improvements in the swearing condition.”
“These effects have potential implications for athletic performance, rehabilitation, and contexts requiring courage or assertiveness,” said researchers led by Richard Stephens of Keele University. “As such, swearing may represent a low-cost, widely accessible psychological intervention to help individuals ‘not hold back’ when peak performance is needed.”
At long last, science has vindicated the foul-spoken, the pottymouths, the salty-tongued, and the vulgarians. So go forth, ye cursers, and f*ck that sh*t up! It’s the doctor’s orders, after all.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
First Contact
A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...Hachette Book Group
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.
This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Metax27;s relationship with links and more.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: Resisting Demoralization
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss history repeating itself and Meta's relationship with links.JOSEPH: I wanted to add a little bit from behind the scenes of this piece: Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It. As I said on the podcast this week, there are and continue to be many questions around the case. Especially why CBP stopped Samuel Tunick in the first place.
In the piece I did not focus on Tunick’s activism because frankly we don’t know yet how big a role it played in CBP stopping him. I mentioned it but didn’t focus on it. I think regardless, someone being charged for allegedly wiping a phone is interesting essentially no matter who they are.
Yes, it absolutely may turn out that he was stopped specifically because of his activism. Maybe lots of people think it’s very likely that’s the reason. But I can’t frame a story because it feels like that’s maybe the case. I have to go on what actual evidence I have at the moment.
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This week, we discuss history repeating itself, a phone wipe scandal, Meta's relationship with links and more.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
Oversight Democrats released a new trove of Epstein pictures on Dropbox and left the comments on.#News #JeffreyEpstein
AI Solutions 87 says on its website its AI agents “deliver rapid acceleration in finding persons of interest and mapping their entire network.”#ICE #AI
ICE Contracts Company Making Bounty Hunter AI Agents
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that makes “AI agents” to rapidly track down targets. The company claims the “skip tracing” AI agents help agencies find people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly. According to the procurement records, the company’s services were specifically for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the part of ICE that identifies, arrests, and deports people.The contract comes as ICE is spending millions of dollars, and plans to spend tens of millions more, on skip tracing services more broadly. The practice involves ICE paying bounty hunters to use digital tools and physically stalk immigrants to verify their addresses, then report that information to ICE so the agency can act.
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Humanity has talked about aliens throughout recorded history, and obsession that has changed science, faith, and media.#Podcast #aliens
Why Are We Obsessed With Aliens?
The past few years have been very exciting for those who want to believe. The U.S. government has released tantalizing videos and held several gripping hearings showing and discussing UFOs. People who always thought the government was hiding evidence of alien life from the general population saw it as proof that what they’ve said was happening all along. Skeptics have made compelling arguments for why all these revelations could be anything but aliens.But this debate and humanity’s obsession with aliens goes as far back as recorded history. In her book, First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, 404 Media’s science reporter and author of The Abstract newsletter Becky Ferreira delves deep into this history, what it teaches us about humans, and what the near and far future of the search for alien life looks like.
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I had a great time reading Becky’s book and an even better time discussing it with her on the podcast. It’s a great conversation that unpacks why these stories get so much attention, and a perspective on aliens in the news and pop culture that’s rooted in history and science.Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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