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AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline, according to a new survey published today. While the impact of AI bots on open collections has been reported anecdotally, the survey is the first attempt at measuring the problem, which in the worst cases can make valuable, public resources unavailable to humans because the servers they’re hosted on are being swamped by bots scraping the internet for AI training data.

“I'm confident in saying that this problem is widespread, and there are a lot of people and institutions who are worried about it and trying to think about what it means for the sustainability of these resources,” the author of the report, Michael Weinberg, told me. “A lot of people have invested a lot of time not only in making these resources available online, but building the community around institutions that do it. And this is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

The report, titled “Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?” was written by Weinberg of the GLAM-E Lab, a joint initiative between the Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, which works with smaller cultural institutions and community organizations to build open access capacity and expertise. GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. The report is based on a survey of 43 institutions with open online resources and collections in Europe, North America, and Oceania. Respondents also shared data and analytics, and some followed up with individual interviews. The data is anonymized so institutions could share information more freely, and to prevent AI bot operators from undermining their countermeasures.

💡Do you know anything else about AI scrapers? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at ‪@emanuel.404‬. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].

Of the 43 respondents, 39 said they had experienced a recent increase in traffic. Twenty-seven of those 39 attributed the increase in traffic to AI training data bots, with an additional seven saying the AI bots could be contributing to the increase.

“Multiple respondents compared the behavior of the swarming bots to more traditional online behavior such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed to maliciously drive unsustainable levels of traffic to a server, effectively taking it offline,” the report said. “Like a DDoS incident, the swarms quickly overwhelm the collections, knocking servers offline and forcing administrators to scramble to implement countermeasures. As one respondent noted, ‘If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead.’”

One respondent estimated that their collection experienced one DDoS-style incident every day that lasted about three minutes, saying this was highly disruptive but not fatal for the collection.

“The impact of bots on the collections can also be uneven. Sometimes, bot traffic knocks entire collections offline,” the report said. “Other times, it impacts smaller portions of the collection. For example, one respondent’s online collection included a semi-private archive that normally received a handful of visitors per day. That archive was discovered by bots and immediately overwhelmed by the traffic, even though other parts of the system were able to handle similar volumes of traffic.”

Thirty-two respondents said they are taking active measures to prevent bots. Seven indicated that they are not taking measures at this time, and four were either unsure or currently reviewing potential options.

The report makes clear that it can’t provide a comprehensive picture of the AI scraping bot issue, the problem is clearly widespread though not universal. The report notes that one inherent issue in measuring the problem is that organizations are unaware bots are scraping their collections until they are flooded with enough traffic to degrade the performance of their site.

“In practice, this meant that many respondents woke up one morning to an unexpected stream of emails from users that the collection was suddenly, fully offline, or alerts that their servers had been overloaded,” the report said. “For many respondents, especially those that started experiencing bot traffic earlier, this system failure was their first indication that something had changed about the online environment.”

Just last week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) published a blog that described how it handled this exact scenario, which it attributed to AI bot scrapers. On December 2, 2024, the University Libraries’ online catalog “was receiving so much traffic that it was periodically shutting out students, faculty and staff, including the head of User Experience,” according to the school. “It took a team of seven people and more working almost a full week to figure out how to stop this stuff in the first instance,” Tim Shearer, an associate University librarian for Digital Strategies & Information Technology, said. “There are lots of institutions that do not have the dedicated and brilliant staff that we have, and a lot of them are much more vulnerable.”

According to the report, one major problem is that AI scraping bots ignore robots.txt, a voluntary compliance protocol which sites can use to tell automated tools, like these bots, to not scrape the site.

“The protocol has not proven to be as effective in the context of bots building AI training datasets,” the report said. “Respondents reported that robots.txt is being ignored by many (although not necessarily all) AI scraping bots. This was widely viewed as breaking the norms of the internet, and not playing fair online.”

We’ve previously reported that robots.txt is not a perfect method for stopping bots, despite more sites than ever using the tool because of AI scraping. UNC, for example, said it deployed a new, “AI-based” firewall to handle the scrapers.

Making this problem worse is that many of the organizations that are being swamped by bot traffic are reluctant to require users to log in, or complete CAPTCHA tests to prove they’re human before accessing resources, because that added friction will make people less likely to access the materials. In other cases, even if institutions did want to implement some kind of friction, it might not have the resources to do so.

“I don't think that people appreciate how few people are working to keep these collections online, even at huge institutions,” Weinberg told me. “It's usually an incredibly small team, one person, half a person, half a person, plus, like their web person who is sympathetic to what's going on. GLAM-E Lab's mission is to work with small and medium sized institutions to get this stuff online, but as people start raising concerns about scraping on the infrastructure, it's another reason that an institution can say no to this.”

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On Monday the Trump Organization announced its own mobile service plan and the “​​T1 Phone,” a customized all-gold mobile phone that its creators say will be made in America.

I tried to pre-order the phone and pay the $100 downpayment, hoping to test the phone to see what apps come pre-installed, how secure it really is, and what components it includes when it comes out. The website failed, went to an error page, and then charged my credit card the wrong amount of $64.70. I received a confirmation email saying I’ll receive a confirmation when my order has been shipped, but I haven’t provided a shipping address or paid the full $499 price tag. It is the worst experience I’ve ever faced buying a consumer electronic product and I have no idea whether or how I’ll receive the phone.

“Trump Mobile is going to change the game, we’re building on the movement to put America first, and we will deliver the highest levels of quality and service. Our company is based right here in the United States because we know it’s what our customers want and deserve,” Donald Trump Jr., EVP of the Trump Organization, and obviously one of President Trump’s sons, said in a press release announcing Trump Mobile.

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This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A family in Utah is suing the Republican National Convention for sending unhinged text messages soliciting donations to Donald Trump’s campaign and continuing to text even after they tried to unsubscribe.

“From Trump: ALL HELL JUST BROKE LOOSE! I WAS CONVICTED IN A RIGGED TRIAL!” one example text message in the complaint says. “I need you to read this NOW” followed by a link to a donation page.

The complaint, seeking to become a class-action lawsuit and brought by Utah residents Samantha and Cari Johnson, claims that the RNC, through the affiliated small-donations platform WinRed, violates the Utah Telephone and Facsimile Solicitation Act because the law states “[a] telephone solicitor may not make or cause to be made a telephone solicitation to a person who has informed the telephone solicitor, either in writing or orally, that the person does not wish to receive a telephone call from the telephone solicitor.”

The Johnsons claim that the RNC sent Samantha 17 messages from 16 different phone numbers, nine of the messages after she demanded the messages stop 12 times. Cari received 27 messages from 25 numbers, they claim, and she sent 20 stop requests. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, and Congressional Leadership Fund also sent a slew of texts and similarly didn’t stop after multiple requests, the complaint says.

On its website, WinRed says it’s an “online fundraising platform supported by a united front of the Trump campaign, RNC, NRSC, and NRCC.”

A chart from the complaint showing the numbers of times the RNC and others have texted the plaintiffs.

“Defendants’ conduct is not accidental. They knowingly disregard stop requests and purposefully use different phone numbers to make it impossible to block new messages,” the complaint says.

The complaint also cites posts other people have made on X.com complaining about WinRed’s texts. A quick search for WinRed on X today shows many more people complaining about the same issues.

“I’m seriously considering filing a class action lawsuit against @WINRED. The sheer amount of campaign txts I receive is astounding,” one person wrote on X. “I’ve unsubscribed from probably thousands of campaign texts to no avail. The scam is, if you call Winred, they say it’s campaign initiated. Call campaign, they say it’s Winred initiated. I can’t be the only one!”

Last month, Democrats on the House Judiciary, Oversight and Administration Committees asked the Treasury Department to provide evidence of “suspicious transactions connected to a wide range of Republican and President Donald Trump-aligned fundraising platforms” including WinRed, Politico reported.

In June 2024, a day after an assassination attempt on Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania, WinRed changed its landing page to all-black with the Trump campaign logo and a black-and-white photograph of Trump raising his fist with blood on his face. “I am Donald J. Trump,” text on the page said. “FEAR NOT! I will always love you for supporting me.”

CNN investigated campaign donation text messaging schemes including WinRed in 2024, and found that the elderly were especially vulnerable to the inflammatory, constant messaging from politicians through text messages begging for donations. And Al Jazeera uncovered FEC records showing people were repeatedly overcharged by WinRed, with one person the outlet spoke to claiming he was charged almost $90,000 across six different credit cards despite thinking he’d only donated small amounts occasionally. “Every single text link goes to WinRed, has the option to ‘repeat your donation’ automatically selected, and uses shady tactics and lies to trick you into clicking on the link,” another donor told Al Jazeera in 2024. “Let’s just say I’m very upset with WinRed. In my view, they are deceitful money-grabbing liars.”

And in 2020, a class action lawsuit against WinRed made similar claims, but was later dismissed.

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📄This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

Local police in Oregon casually offered various surveillance services to federal law enforcement officials from the FBI and ICE, and to other state and local police departments, as part of an informal email and meetup group of crime analysts, internal emails shared with 404 Media show.

In the email thread, crime analysts from several local police departments and the FBI introduced themselves to each other and made lists of surveillance tools and tactics they have access to and felt comfortable using, and in some cases offered to perform surveillance for their colleagues in other departments. The thread also includes a member of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and members of Oregon’s State Police. In the thread, called the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group,” some members talked about making fake social media profiles to surveil people, and others discussed being excited to learn and try new surveillance techniques. The emails show both the wide array of surveillance tools that are available to even small police departments in the United States and also shows informal collaboration between local police departments and federal agencies, when ordinarily agencies like ICE are expected to follow their own legal processes for carrying out the surveillance.

In one case, a police analyst for the city of Medford, Oregon, performed Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) lookups for a member of ICE’s HSI; later, that same police analyst asked the HSI agent to search for specific license plates in DHS’s own border crossing license plate database. The emails show the extremely casual and informal nature of what partnerships between police departments and federal law enforcement can look like, which may help explain the mechanics of how local police around the country are performing Flock automated license plate reader lookups for ICE and HSI even though neither group has a contract to use the technology, which 404 Media reported last month.

An email showing HSI asking for a license plate lookup from police in Medford, Oregon

Kelly Simon, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, told 404 Media “I think it’s a really concerning thread to see, in such a black-and-white way. I have certainly never seen such informal, free-flowing of information that seems to be suggested in these emails.”

In that case, in 2021, a crime analyst with HSI emailed an analyst at the Medford Police Department with the subject line “LPR Check.” The email from the HSI analyst, who is also based in Medford, said they were told to “contact you and request a LPR check on (2) vehicles,” and then listed the license plates of two vehicles. “Here you go,” the Medford Police Department analyst responded with details of the license plate reader lookup. “I only went back to 1/1/19, let me know if you want me to check further back.” In 2024, the Medford police analyst emailed the same HSI agent and told him that she was assisting another police department with a suspected sex crime and asked him to “run plates through the border crossing system,” meaning the federal ALPR system at the Canada-US border. “Yes, I can do that. Let me know what you need and I’ll take a look,” the HSI agent said.

More broadly, the emails, obtained using a public records request by Information for Public Use, an anonymous group of researchers in Oregon who have repeatedly uncovered documents about government surveillance, reveal the existence of the “Southern Oregon Analyst Group.” The emails span between 2021 and 2024 and show local police eagerly offering various surveillance services to each other as part of their own professional development.

In a 2023 email thread where different police analysts introduced themselves, they explained to each other what types of surveillance software they had access to, which ones they use the most often, and at times expressed an eagerness to try new techniques.

“This is my first role in Law Enforcement, and I've been with the Josephine County Sheriff's Office for 6 months, so I'm new to the game,” an email from a former Pinkerton security contractor to officials at 10 different police departments, the FBI, and ICE, reads. “Some tools I use are Flock, TLO, Leads online, WSIN, Carfax for police, VIN Decoding, LEDS, and sock puppet social media accounts. In my role I build pre-raid intelligence packages, find information on suspects and vehicles, and build link charts showing connections within crime syndicates. My role with [Josephine Marijuana Enforcement Team] is very intelligence and research heavy, but I will do the occasional product with stats. I would love to be able to meet everyone at a Southern Oregon analyst meet-up in the near future. If there is anything I can ever provide anyone from Josephine County, please do not hesitate to reach out!” The surveillance tools listed here include automatic license plate reading technology, social media monitoring tools, people search databases, and car ownership history tools.

An investigations specialist with the Ashland Police Department messaged the group, said she was relatively new to performing online investigations, and said she was seeking additional experience. “I love being in a support role but worry patrol doesn't have confidence in me. I feel confident with searching through our local cad portal, RMS, Evidence.com, LeadsOnline, carfax and TLO. Even though we don't have cameras in our city, I love any opportunity to search for something through Flock,” she said. “I have much to learn with sneaking around in social media, and collecting accurate reports from what is inputted by our department.”

A crime analyst with the Medford Police Department introduced themselves to the group by saying “The Medford Police Department utilizes the license plate reader systems, Vigilant and Flock. In the next couple months, we will be starting our transition to the Axon Fleet 3 cameras. These cameras will have LPR as well. If you need any LPR searches done, please reach out to me or one of the other analysts here at MPD. Some other tools/programs that we have here at MPD are: ESRI, Penlink PLX, CellHawk, TLO, LeadsOnline, CyberCheck, Vector Scheduling/CrewSense & Guardian Tracking, Milestone XProtect city cameras, AXON fleet and body cams, Lexipol, HeadSpace, and our RMS is Central Square (in case your agency is looking into purchasing any of these or want more information on them).”

A fourth analyst said “my agency uses Tulip, GeoShield, Flock LPR, LeadsOnline, TLO, Axon fleet and body cams, Lexipol, LEEP, ODMap, DMV2U, RISS/WSIN, Crystal Reports, SSRS Report Builder, Central Square Enterprise RMS, Laserfiche for fillable forms and archiving, and occasionally Hawk Toolbox.” Several of these tools are enterprise software solutions for police departments, which include things like police report management software, report creation software, and stress management and wellbeing software, but many of them are surveillance tools.

At one point in the 2023 thread, an FBI intelligence analyst for the FBI’s Portland office chimes in, introduces himself, and said “I think I've been in contact with most folks on this email at some point in the past […] I look forward to further collaboration with you all.”

The email thread also planned in-person meetups and a “mini-conference” last year that featured a demo from a company called CrimeiX, a police information sharing tool.

A member of Information for Public Use told 404 Media “it’s concerning to me to see them building a network of mass surveillance.”

“Automated license plate recognition software technology is something that in and of itself, communities are really concerned about,” the member of Information for Public Use said. “So I think when we combine this very obvious mass surveillance technology with a network of interagency crime analysts that includes local police who are using sock puppet accounts to spy on anyone and their mother and then that information is being pretty freely shared with federal agents, you know, including Homeland Security Investigations, and we see the FBI in the emails as well. It's pretty disturbing.” They added, as we have reported before, that many of these technologies were deployed under previous administrations but have become even more alarming when combined with the fact that the Trump administration has changed the priorities of ICE and Homeland Security Investigations.

“The whims of the federal administration change, and this technology can be pointed in any direction,” they said. “Local law enforcement might be justifying this under the auspices of we're fighting some form of organized crime, but one of the crimes HSI investigates is work site enforcement investigations, which sound exactly like the kind of raids on workplaces that like the country is so upset about right now.”

Simon, of ACLU Oregon, said that such informal collaboration is not supposed to be happening in Oregon.

“We have, in Oregon, a lot of really strong protections that ensure that our state resources, including at the local level, are not going to support things that Oregonians disagree with or have different values around,” she said. “Oregon has really strong firewalls between local resources, and federal resources or other state resources when it comes to things like reproductive justice or immigrant justice. We have really strong shield laws, we have really strong sanctuary laws, and when I see exchanges like this, I’m very concerned that our firewalls are more like sieves because of this kind of behind-the-scenes, lax approach to protecting the data and privacy of Oregonians.”

Simon said that collaboration between federal and local cops on surveillance should happen “with the oversight of the court. Getting a warrant to request data from a local agency seems appropriate to me, and it ensures there’s probable cause, that the person whose information is being sought is sufficiently suspected of a crime, and that there are limits to the scope, about of information that's being sought and specifics about what information is being sought. That's the whole purpose of a warrant.”

Over the last several weeks, our reporting has led multiple municipalities to reconsider how the license plate reading technology Flock is used, and it has spurred an investigation by the Illinois Secretary of State office into the legality of using Flock cameras in the state for immigration-related searches, because Illinois specifically forbids local police from assisting federal police on immigration matters.

404 Media contacted all of the police departments on the Southern Oregon Analyst Group for comment and to ask them about any guardrails they have for the sharing of surveillance tools across departments or with the federal government. Geoffrey Kirkpatrick, a lieutenant with the Medford Police Department, said the group is “for professional networking and sharing professional expertise with each other as they serve their respective agencies.”

“The Medford Police Department’s stance on resource-sharing with ICE is consistent with both state law and federal law,” Kirkpatrick said. “The emails retrieved for that 2025 public records request showed one single instance of running LPR information for a Department of Homeland Security analyst in November 2021. Retrieving those files from that single 2021 matter to determine whether it was an DHS case unrelated to immigration, whether a criminal warrant existed, etc would take more time than your publication deadline would allow, and the specifics of that one case may not be appropriate for public disclosure regardless.” (404 Media reached out to Medford Police Department a week before this article was published).

A spokesperson for the Central Point Police Department said it “utilizes technology as part of investigations, we follow all federal, state, and local law regarding use of such technology and sharing of any such information. Typically we do not use our tools on behalf of other agencies.”

A spokesperson for Oregon’s Department of Justice said it did not have comment and does not participate in the group. The other police departments in the group did not respond to our request for comment.

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A survey of 7,000 Facebook, Instagram, and Threads users found that most people feel less safe on Meta’s platforms since CEO Mark Zuckerberg abandoned fact-checking in January.

The report, written by Jenna Sherman at UltraViolet, Ana Clara-Toledo at All Out, and Leanna Garfield at GLAAD, surveyed people who belong to what Meta refers to as “protected characteristic groups,” which include “people targeted based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or serious disease,” the report says. The average age of respondents was 50 years, and the survey asked them to respond to questions including “How well do you feel Meta’s new policy changes protect you and all users from being exposed to or targeted by harmful content?” and “Have you been the target of any form of harmful content on any Meta platform since January 2025?”

One in six of respondents reported being targeted with gender-based or sexual violence on Meta platforms, and 66 percent of respondents said they’ve witnessed harmful content on Meta platforms. The survey defined harmful content as “content that involves direct attacks against people based on a protected characteristic.”

Almost all of the users surveyed—more than 90 percent—said they’re concerned about increasing harmful content, and feel less protected from being exposed to or targeted by harmful content on Meta’s platforms.

“I have seen an extremely large influx of hate speech directed towards many different marginalized groups since Jan. 2025,” one user wrote in the comments section of the survey. “I have also noted a large increase in ‘fake pages’ generating false stories to invoke an emotional response from people who are clearly against many marginalized groups since Jan. 2025.”

“I rarely see friends’ posts [now], I am exposed to obscene faked sexual images in the opening boxes, I am battered with commercial ads for products that are crap,” another wrote, adding that they were moving to Bluesky and Substack for “less gross posts.”

404 Media has extensively reported on the kinds of gruesome slop these users are referring to. Meta’s platforms allow AI-generated spam schemes to run rampant, at the expense of human-made, quality content.

In January, employees at Meta told 404 Media in interviews and demonstrated with leaked internal conversations that people working there were furious about the changes. A member of the public policy team said in Meta’s internal workspace that the changes to the Hateful Conduct policy—to allow users to call gay people “mentally ill” and immigrants “trash,” for example—was simply an effort to “undo mission creep.” “Reaffirming our core value of free expression means that we might see content on our platforms that people find offensive … yesterday’s changes not only open up conversation about these subjects, but allow for counterspeech on what matters to users,” the policy person said in a thread addressing angry Meta employees.

Zuckerberg has increasingly chosen to pander to the Trump administration through public support and moderation slackening on his platforms. In the January announcement, he promised to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.” In practice, according to leaked internal documents, that meant allowing violent hate speech on his platforms, including sexism, racism, and bigotry.

Several respondents to the survey wrote that the changes have resulted in a hostile social media environment. “I was told that as a woman I should be ‘properly fucked by a real man’ to ‘fix my head’ regarding gender equality and LGBT+ rights,” one said.“I’ve been told women should know their place if we want to support America. I’ve been sent DMs requesting contact based on my appearance. I’ve been primarily stalked due to my political orientation,” another wrote. Studies show that rampant hate speech online can predict real-world violence.

The authors of the report wrote that they want to see Meta hire an independent third-party to “formally analyze changes in harmful content facilitated by the policy changes” made in January, and for the social media giant to bring back the moderation standards that were in place before then. But all signs point to Zuckerberg not just liking the content on his site that makes it worse, but ignoring the issue completely to build more harmful chatbots and spend billions of dollars on a “superintelligence” project.

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Welcome back to the Abstract!

This week, it’s time for a walk in the woods. These particular woods have been dead and buried for centuries, mind you, but they still have a lot to say about the tumultuous events they experienced across thousands of years.

Then: exposure to climate change starts in the womb; CYBORG TADPOLES; get swole with this new dinosaur diet; the long march of an ancestral reptile; and, finally, pregaming for science.

The saga of the sunken cypress

Napora, Katharine et al. “Subfossil bald cypress trees suggest localized, enduring effects of major climatic episodes on the Southeast Atlantic Coast of the United States.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For thousands of years, a forest filled with bald cypress trees thrived in coastal Georgia. But climate shifts caused by volcanic eruptions and a possible comet impact wreaked havoc on this environment, eventually leading to the death of these ancient woods by the year 1600.

Now scientists have exhumed dozens of the magnificent trees, which were buried at the mouth of the Altamaha River for centuries. The dead trees are well-preserved as subfossils, meaning they are only partially fossilized, allowing researchers to count tree rings, conduct radiocarbon dating, and reconstruct the epic tale of this long-lived grove.

“This is the largest intact deposit of subfossil Holocene cypress trees ever analyzed in the literature from the Southeast United States…with specimens spanning almost six millennia,” said researchers led by Katharine Napora of Florida Atlantic University in their study.

In ideal conditions, bald cypress trees can live for millennia; for instance, one tree known as the Senator in Longwood, Florida was about 3,500-years-old when it died in a 2012 fire. But Napora’s team found that their subfossil trees experienced a collapse in life expectancy during the Vandal Minimum (VM) environmental downturn, which began around 500 CE. Trees that sprouted after this event only lived about half as long as those born before, typically under 200 years.

Study authors Katharine Napora and Craig Jacobs with an ancient cypress tree near the Georgia coast. Image: Florida Atlantic University

The reasons for this downturn are potentially numerous, including volcanic eruptions and a possible comet strike. The researchers say that tree-ring evidence shows “a reduction in solar radiation in 536 and 541 to 544 CE, likely the consequence of a volcanic dust veil…Greenlandic ice cores also contain particles rich in elements suggesting dust originating from a comet, dating to 533 to 540 CE.”

The possibility that a comet struck Earth at this time has been debated for decades, but many scientists think that volcanic eruptions can account for the extreme cooling without invoking space rocks. In any case, the world was rocked by a series of unfortunate events that produced a variety of localized impacts.This Georgian tree cemetery presents a new record of those tumultuous times which “speaks to the long-term impacts of major climatic episodes in antiquity” and “underscores the vulnerability of 21st-century coastal ecosystems to the destabilizing effects of large-scale climatic downturns,” according to the study.

In other news…

PSA: climate risks begin before you’re born

DeIngeniis, Donato et al. “Prenatal exposure to extreme ambient heat may amplify the adverse impact of Superstorm Sandy on basal ganglia volume among school-aged children.” PLOS One.

In addition to disrupting long-lived trees, climate change poses a threat to people—starting in the womb. A new study tracked the brain development of children whose mothers endured Superstorm Sandy while pregnant, revealing that prenatal exposure to extreme weather events affect neural and emotional health.

“Prenatal exposure to Superstorm Sandy impacted child brain development,” said researchers led by Donato DeIngeniis of the City University of New York. The team found that a group of 8-year-old children whose mothers experienced the 2012 disaster while pregnant had noticeable differences in their basal ganglia, a brain region involved in motor skills and emotional regulation.

Exposure to both the hurricane and associated extreme heat (defined as temperatures above 95°F) was linked to both a larger pallidum and smaller nucleus accumbens, both subregions of the basal ganglia, compared to unexposed peers. The findings hint at a higher risk of emotional and behavioral disruption, or other impairments, as a consequence of exposure in the womb, but the study said more research is necessary to confirm those associations.

“Extreme weather events and natural disasters are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude. In addition to promoting initiatives to combat climate change, it is imperative to alert pregnant individuals to the ongoing danger of exposure to extreme climate events,” the team said.

Here come the cyborg tadpoles

Sheng, Hao, Liu, Ren, Li, Qiang et al. “Brain implantation of soft bioelectronics via embryonic development.” Nature.

Scientists have a long tradition of slapping sensors onto brains to monitor whatever the heck is going on in there. The latest edition: Cyborg tadpoles.

By implanting a microelectrode array into embryonic frogs and axolotls, a team of researchers was able to track neural development and record brain activity with no detectable adverse effects on the tadpoles.

The cyborg tadpoles in question. Image: Liu Lab / Harvard SEAS

“Cyborg tadpoles showed normal development through later stages, showing comparable morphology, survival rates and developmental timing to control tadpoles,” said researchers co-led by Hao Sheng, Ren Liu, and Qiang Li of Harvard University. “Future combination of this system with virtual-reality platforms could provide a powerful tool for investigating behaviour- and sensory-specific brain activity during development.”

The future didn’t deliver personal jetpacks, but we may get virtual-reality tours of amphibian cyborg brains, so there’s that.

We finally know for certain what sauropods ate

Poropat, Stephen F. et al. “Fossilized gut contents elucidate the feeding habits of sauropod dinosaurs.” Current Biology.

Once upon a time, a long-necked sauropod dinosaur from the Diamantinasaurus family was chowing down on a variety of plants. Shortly afterward, it died (RIP). 100 million years later, this leafy last meal has now provided the first direct evidence that sauropods—the largest animals ever to walk on land—were herbivores.

Fossilized ferns, conifers, and other plants were found in the Australian Diamantinasaurus cololite. Image: Stephen Poropat

“Gut contents for sauropod dinosaurs—perhaps the most ecologically impactful terrestrial herbivores worldwide throughout much of the Jurassic and Cretaceous, given their gigantic sizes—have remained elusive,” said researchers led by Stephen Poropat of Curtin University. “The Diamantinasaurus cololite (fossilized gut contents) described herein provides the first direct, empirical support for the long-standing hypothesis of sauropod herbivory.”

Scientists have long assumed that sauropods were veggie-saurs based on their anatomy, but it’s cool to finally have confirmation by looking in the belly of this beast.

Life finds a way through the “dead zone”

Flannery-Sutherland, Joseph et al. “Landscape-explicit phylogeography illuminates the ecographic radiation of early archosauromorph reptiles.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Birds, crocodiles, and dinosaurs are all descended from an ancestral lineage of reptiles called archosauromorphs. These troopers managed to survive Earth’s most devastating extinction event, called the end-Permian or “Great Dying,” a global warming catastrophe that wiped out more than half of all land animals and 81 percent of marine life some 250 million years ago.

Children of the archosaurs, chillin’. Image: Timothy A. Gonsalves

Now, paleontologists have found clues indicating how they succeeded by reconstructing archosauromorph dispersal patterns with models of ancient landscapes and evolutionary trees. The results suggest that these animals endured 10,000-mile marches through “tropical dead zones.”

These archosauromorph “dispersals through the Pangaean tropical dead zone…contradict its perception as a hard barrier to vertebrate movement,” said researchers led by Joseph Flannery-Sutherland of the University of Birmingham. “This remarkable tolerance of climatic adversity was probably integral to their later evolutionary success.”

The science of spectator sports

Xygalatas, Dimitris et al “Route of fire: Pregame rituals and emotional synchrony among Brazilian football fans.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Brazil, football fans participate in a pregame ritual known as the Rua de Fogo, or Street of Fire. As buses carrying teams arrive at the stadium, fans greet the players with flares, smoke bombs, fireworks, flags, cheers, and chants.

Now, scientists have offered a glimpse into the ecstatic emotions of these crowds by enlisting  17 fans, including a team bus driver, to wear heart rate monitors in advance of a state championship final  between local teams. The results showed that fans’ heart rates synced up during periods of “emotional synchrony.”

“We found that the Rua de Fogo ritual preceding the football match exhibited particularly high levels of emotional synchrony—surpassing even those observed during the game itself, which was among the season’s most important,” said researchers led by Dimitris Xygalatas of the University of Connecticut. “These findings suggest that fan rituals play important roles in fostering shared emotional experiences, reinforcing the broader appeal of sports as a site of social connection and identity formation.”

Wishing everyone an emotionally synchronous weekend! Thanks for reading and see you next week.

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A judge ruled that John Deere must face a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and five states over its tractor and agricultural equipment repair monopoly, and rejected the company’s argument that the case should be thrown out. This means Deere is now facing both a class action lawsuit and a federal antitrust lawsuit over its repair practices.

The FTC’s lawsuit against Deere was filed under former FTC chair Lina Khan in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency, but the Trump administration’s FTC has decided to continue to pursue the lawsuit, indicating that right to repair remains a bipartisan issue in a politically divided nation in which so few issues are agreed on across the aisle. Deere argued that both the federal government and state governments joining in the case did not have standing to sue it and argued that claims of its monopolization of the repair market and unfair labor practices were not sufficient; Illinois District Court judge Iain D. Johnston did not agree, and said the lawsuit can and should move forward.

Johnston is also the judge in the class action lawsuit against Deere, which he also ruled must proceed. In his pretty sassy ruling, Johnston said that Deere repeated many of its same arguments that also were not persuasive in the class action suit.

“Sequels so rarely beat their originals that even the acclaimed Steve Martin couldn’t do it on three tries. See Cheaper by the Dozen II, Pink Panther II, Father of the Bride II,” Johnston wrote. “Rebooting its earlier production, Deere sought to defy the odds. To be sure, like nearly all sequels, Deere edited the dialogue and cast some new characters, giving cameos to veteran stars like Humphrey’s Executor [a court decision]. But ultimately the plot felt predictable, the script derivative. Deere I received a thumbs-down, and Deere II fares no better. The Court denies the Motion for judgment on the pleadings.”

Johnston highlighted, as we have repeatedly shown with our reporting, that in order to repair a newer John Deere tractor, farmers need access to a piece of software called Service Advisor, which is used by John Deere dealerships. Parts are also difficult to come by.

“Even if some farmers knew about the restrictions (a fact question), they might not be aware of or appreciate at the purchase time how those restrictions will affect them,” Johnston wrote. “For example: How often will repairs require Deere’s ADVISOR tool? How far will they need to travel to find an Authorized Dealer? How much extra will they need to pay for Deere parts?”

You can read more about the FTC’s lawsuit against Deere here and more about the class action lawsuit in our earlier coverage here.

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The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one editor said in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s announcement that it will launch a two-week trial of the summaries on the mobile version of Wikipedia. “This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent. Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries. Which is what these are, although here the word ‘machine-generated’ is used instead.”

Two other editors simply commented, “Yuck.”

For years, Wikipedia has been one of the most valuable repositories of information in the world, and a laudable model for community-based, democratic internet platform governance. Its importance has only grown in the last couple of years during the generative AI boom as it’s one of the only internet platforms that has not been significantly degraded by the flood of AI-generated slop and misinformation. As opposed to Google, which since embracing generative AI has instructed its users to eat glue, Wikipedia’s community has kept its articles relatively high quality. As I recently reported last year, editors are actively working to filter out bad, AI-generated content from Wikipedia.

A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

In one experiment where summaries were enabled for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed, the generated summary showed up at the top of the article, which users had to click to expand and read. That summary was also flagged with a yellow “unverified” label.

An example of what the AI-generated summary looked like.

Wikimedia announced that it was going to run the generated summaries experiment on June 2, and was immediately met with dozens of replies from editors who said “very bad idea,” “strongest possible oppose,” Absolutely not,” etc.

“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”

A day later, Wikimedia announced that it would pause the launch of the experiment, but indicated that it’s still interested in AI-generated summaries.

“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”

“It is common to receive a variety of feedback from volunteers, and we incorporate it in our decisions, and sometimes change course,” the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson added. “We welcome such thoughtful feedback — this is what continues to make Wikipedia a truly collaborative platform of human knowledge.”

“Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March,” a Wikimedia Foundation project manager said. VPT, or “village pump technical,” is where The Wikimedia Foundation and the community discuss technical aspects of the platform. “As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further.”

The project manager also said that “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such, and that “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.”

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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 captured an unprecedented glimpse of cosmic dawn, an era more than 13 billion years ago, using telescopes on the surface of the Earth. This marks the first time humans have seen signatures of the first stars interacting with the early universe from our planet, rather than space.

This ancient epoch when the first stars lit up the universe has been probed by space-based observatories, but observations captured from telescopes in Chile are the first to measure key microwave signatures from the ground, reports a study published on Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal. The advancement means it could now be much cheaper to probe this enigmatic era, when the universe we are familiar with today, alight with stars and galaxies, was born.

“This is the first breakthrough measurement,” said Tobias Marriage, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the study. “It was very exciting to get this signal rising just above the noise.”

Many ground and space telescopes have probed the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the oldest light in the universe, which is the background radiation produced by the Big Bang. But it is much trickier to capture polarized microwave signatures—which were sparked by the interactions of the first stars with the CMB—from Earth.

This polarized microwave light is a million times fainter than the CMB, which is itself quite dim. Space-based telescopes like the WMAP and Planck missions have spotted it, but Earth’s atmosphere blocks out much of the universe’s light, putting ground-based measurements of this signature out of reach—until now.

Marriage and his colleagues set out to capture these elusive signals from Earth for the first time with the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), a group of four telescopes that sits at high elevation in the Andes Mountains. A detection of this light would prove that ground-based telescopes, which are far more affordable than their space-based counterparts, could contribute to research into this mysterious era.

In particular, the team searched for a particular polarization pattern ignited by the birth of the first stars in the universe, which condensed from hydrogen gas starting a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This inaugural starlight was so intense that it stripped electrons off of hydrogen gas atoms surrounding the stars, leading to what’s known as the epoch of reionization.

Marriage’s team aimed to capture encounters between CMB photons and the liberated electrons, which produce polarized microwave light. By measuring that polarization, scientists can estimate the abundance of freed electrons, which in turn provides a rough birthdate for the first stars.

“The first stars create this electron gas in the universe, and light scatters off the electron gas creating a polarization,” Marriage explained. “We measure the polarization, and therefore we can say how deep this gas of electrons is to the first stars, and say that's when the first stars formed.”

The researchers were confident that CLASS could eventually pinpoint the target, but they were delighted when it showed up early on in their analysis of a key frequency channel at the observatory.

“That the cosmic signal rose up in the first look was a great surprise,” Marriage said. “It was really unclear whether we were going to get this [measurement] from this particular set of data. Now that we have more in the can, we're excited to move ahead.”

Telescopes on Earth face specific challenges beyond the blurring effects of the atmosphere; Marriage is concerned that megaconstellations like Starlink will interfere with microwave research more in the coming years, as they already have with optical and radio observations. But ground telescopes also offer valuable data that can complement space-based missions like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or the European Euclid observatory for a fraction of the price.

“Essentially, our measurement of reionization is a bit earlier than when one would predict with some analyzes of the JWST observations,” Marriage said. “We're putting together this puzzle to understand the full picture of when the first stars formed.”

🌘Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

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Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta’s “unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product,” through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality “with inadequate controls and disclosures.”

The complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations.

"These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long,” Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. “Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven’t acted to address it.”

The complaint, sent to attorneys general in 50 states and Washington, D.C., as well as the FTC, details how user-generated chatbots work on both platforms. It cites several massively popular chatbots on Character AI, including “Therapist: I’m a licensed CBT therapist” with 46 million messages exchanged, “Trauma therapist: licensed trauma therapist” with over 800,000 interactions, “Zoey: Zoey is a licensed trauma therapist” with over 33,000 messages, and “around sixty additional therapy-related ‘characters’ that you can chat with at any time.” As for Meta’s therapy chatbots, it cites listings for “therapy: your trusted ear, always here” with 2 million interactions, “therapist: I will help” with 1.3 million messages, “Therapist bestie: your trusted guide for all things cool,” with 133,000 messages, and “Your virtual therapist: talk away your worries” with 952,000 messages. It also cites the chatbots and interactions I had with Meta’s other chatbots for our April investigation.

In April, 404 Media published an investigation into Meta’s AI Studio user-created chatbots that asserted they were licensed therapists and would rattle off credentials, training, education and practices to try to earn the users’ trust and keep them talking. Meta recently changed the guardrails for these conversations to direct chatbots to respond to “licensed therapist” prompts with a script about not being licensed, and random non-therapy chatbots will respond with the canned script when “licensed therapist” is mentioned in chats, too.

Instagram’s AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed TherapistsWhen pushed for credentials, Instagram’s user-made AI Studio bots will make up license numbers, practices, and education to try to convince you it’s qualified to help with your mental health.404 MediaSamantha Cole

In its complaint to the FTC, the CFA found that even when it made a custom chatbot on Meta’s platform and specifically designed it to not be licensed to practice therapy, the chatbot still asserted that it was. “I'm licenced (sic) in NC and I'm working on being licensed in FL. It's my first year licensure so I'm still working on building up my caseload. I'm glad to hear that you could benefit from speaking to a therapist. What is it that you're going through?” a chatbot CFA tested said, despite being instructed in the creation stage to not say it was licensed. It also provided a fake license number when asked.

The CFA also points out in the complaint that Character.AI and Meta are breaking their own terms of service. “Both platforms claim to prohibit the use of Characters that purport to give advice in medical, legal, or otherwise regulated industries. They are aware that these Characters are popular on their product and they allow, promote, and fail to restrict the output of Characters that violate those terms explicitly,” the complaint says. “Meta AI’s Terms of Service in the United States states that ‘you may not access, use, or allow others to access or use AIs in any matter that would…solicit professional advice (including but not limited to medical, financial, or legal advice) or content to be used for the purpose of engaging in other regulated activities.’ Character.AI includes ‘seeks to provide medical, legal, financial or tax advice’ on a list of prohibited user conduct, and ‘disallows’ impersonation of any individual or an entity in a ‘misleading or deceptive manner.’ Both platforms allow and promote popular services that plainly violate these Terms, leading to a plainly deceptive practice.”

The complaint also takes issue with confidentiality promised by the chatbots that isn’t backed up in the platforms’ terms of use. “Confidentiality is asserted repeatedly directly to the user, despite explicit terms to the contrary in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service,” the complaint says. “The Terms of Use and Privacy Policies very specifically make it clear that anything you put into the bots is not confidential – they can use it to train AI systems, target users for advertisements, sell the data to other companies, and pretty much anything else.”

Senators Demand Meta Answer For AI Chatbots Posing as Licensed TherapistsExclusive: Following 404 Media’s investigation into Meta’s AI Studio chatbots that pose as therapists and provided license numbers and credentials, four senators urged Meta to limit “blatant deception” from its chatbots.404 MediaSamantha Cole

In December 2024, two families sued Character.AI, claiming it “poses a clear and present danger to American youth causing serious harms to thousands of kids, including suicide, self-mutilation, sexual solicitation, isolation, depression, anxiety, and harm towards others.” One of the complaints against Character.AI specifically calls out “trained psychotherapist” chatbots as being damaging.

Earlier this week, a group of four senators sent a letter to Meta executives and its Oversight Board, writing that they were concerned by reports that Meta is “deceiving users who seek mental health support from its AI-generated chatbots,” citing 404 Media’s reporting. “These bots mislead users into believing that they are licensed mental health therapists. Our staff have independently replicated many of these journalists’ results,” they wrote. “We urge you, as executives at Instagram’s parent company, Meta, to immediately investigate and limit the blatant deception in the responses AI-bots created by Instagram’s AI studio are messaging directly to users.”

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Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has confirmed it is flying Predator drones above the Los Angeles protests, and specifically in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a CBP statement sent to 404 Media. The statement follows 404 Media’s reporting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has flown two Predator drones above Los Angeles, according to flight data and air traffic control (ATC) audio.

The statement is the first time CBP has acknowledged the existence of these drone flights, which over the weekend were done without a callsign, making it more difficult, but not impossible, to determine what model of aircraft was used and by which agency. It is also the first time CBP has said it is using the drones to help ICE during the protests.

“Air and Marine Operations’ [AMO] MQ-9 Predators are supporting our federal law enforcement partners in the Greater Los Angeles area, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with aerial support of their operations,” the statement from CBP to 404 Media says. The statement added that “they are providing officer safety surveillance when requested by officers. AMO is not engaged in the surveillance of first amendment activities.” According to flight data reviewed by 404 Media, the drones flew repeatedly above Paramount, where the weekend’s anti-ICE protests started, and downtown Los Angeles, where much of the protest activity moved to.

CBP’s AMO has a fleet of at least 10 MQ-9 drones, according to a CBP presentation available online. Five of these are the Predator B, used for land missions, according to the presentation. These sorts of drones are often equipped with high-powered surveillance equipment, but the statement did not specify what surveillance technology was used during the Los Angeles flights.

The Los Angeles protests started after ICE raided a Home Depot on Friday. Tensions escalated when President Trump called up 4,000 members of the National Guard, and on Monday ordered more than 700 active duty Marines to deploy to the city too.

💡Do you know anything else about these or other drone flights? 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 [email protected].

Over the weekend 404 Media reviewed flight data published by ADS-B Exchange, a site where a volunteer community of feeders provide real-time information on the location of flights, to monitor which aircraft were flying over the protests. That included DHS Black Hawk helicopters, small aircraft from the California Highway Patrol, and aircraft flying at a higher altitude with the data displaying a distinctive hexagonal flight pattern. This strongly resembled that of a Predator drone, and CBP previously flew such a drone above George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020.

An aviation tracking enthusiast then unearthed ATC audio and found these aircraft were using TROY callsigns; TROY is a callsign used by the DHS. The enthusiast, who goes by the handle Aeroscout, then found more audio that described the aircraft as “Q-9,” which is sometimes used as shorthand for the MQ-9. 404 Media verified that audio at the time.

CBP has repeatedly flown its Predator drones on behalf of or at the request of other law enforcement agencies, including local and state agencies.

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flew two high-powered Predator surveillance drones above the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles over the weekend, according to air traffic control (ATC) audio unearthed by an aviation tracking enthusiast then reviewed by 404 Media and cross-referenced with flight data.

The use of Predator drones highlights the extraordinary resources government agencies are putting behind surveilling and responding to the Los Angeles protests, which started after ICE agents raided a Home Depot on Friday. President Trump has since called up 4,000 members of the National Guard, and on Monday ordered more than 700 active duty Marines to the city too.

“TROY703, traffic 12 o'clock, 8 miles, opposite direction, another 'TROY' Q-9 at FL230,” one part of the ATC audio says. The official name of these types of Predator B drones, made by a company called General Atomics, is the MQ-9 Reaper.

On Monday 404 Media reported that all sorts of agencies, from local, to state, to DHS, to the military flew aircraft over the Los Angeles protests. That included a DHS Black Hawk, a California Highway Patrol small aircraft, and two aircraft that took off from nearby March Air Reserve Base.

ATC Audio Mentioning TROY and Q-9s0:00/21.5771428571428571×

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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 advertising, protests, and aircraft.

EMANUEL: On Thursday Meta announced that it has filed a lawsuit in Hong Kong against Joy Timeline HK Limited, the company that operates a popular nudify app called Crush that we have covered previously.

Meta’s position is that it hasn’t been able to prevent Crush from advertising its nudify app on its platform despite it violating its policies because Crush is “highly adversarial” and “constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement.” We’ve seen Crush and other nudify apps create hundreds of Meta advertising accounts and different domain names that all link back to the same service in order to avoid detection. If Meta bans an advertising account or URL, Crush simply creates another. In theory, Meta always has ways of detecting if an ad contains nudity, but nudify apps can easily circumvent those measures as well. As I say in my post about the lawsuit, Meta still hasn’t explained why it appears to have different standards for content in ads versus regular posts on its platform, but there’s no doubt that it does take action against nudify ads when it’s easy for it do so, and that these nudify ads are actively trying to avoid Meta’s moderation when it does attempt to get rid of them.

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Meta said it is suing a nudify app that 404 Media reported bought thousands of ads on Instagram and Facebook, repeatedly violating its policies.

Meta is suing Joy Timeline HK Limited, the entity behind the CrushAI nudify app that allows users to take an image of anyone and AI-generate a nude image of them without their consent. Meta said it has filed the lawsuit in Hong Kong, where Joy Timeline HK Limited is based, “to prevent them from advertising CrushAI apps on Meta platforms,” Meta said.

In January, 404 Media reported that CrushAI, also known as Crushmate and other names, had run more than 5,000 ads on Meta’s platform, and that 90 percent of Crush’s traffic came from Meta’s platform, a clear sign that the ads were effective in leading people to tools that create nonconsensual media. Alexios Mantzarlis, now of Indicator, was first to report about Crush’s traffic coming from Meta. At the time, Meta told us that “This is a highly adversarial space and bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to avoid enforcement, which is why we continue to invest in the best tools and technology to help identify and remove violating content.”

“This legal action underscores both the seriousness with which we take this abuse and our commitment to doing all we can to protect our community from it,” Meta said in a post on its site announcing the lawsuit. “We’ll continue to take the necessary steps—which could include legal action—against those who abuse our platforms like this.”

However, CrushAI is far from the only nudify app to buy ads on Meta’s platforms. Last year I reported that these ads were common, and despite our reporting leading to the ads being removed and Apple and Google removing the apps from their app stores, new apps and ads continue to crop up.

To that end, Meta said that now when it removes ads for nudify apps it will share URLs for those apps and sites with other tech companies through the Tech Coalition’s Lantern program so those companies can investigate and take action against those apps as well. Members of that group include Google, Discord, Roblox, Snap, and Twitch. Additionally, Meta said that it’s “strengthening” its enforcement against these “adversarial advertisers.”

“Like other types of online harm, this is an adversarial space in which the people behind it—who are primarily financially motivated—continue to evolve their tactics to avoid detection. For example, some use benign imagery in their ads to avoid being caught by our nudity detection technology, while others quickly create new domain names to replace the websites we block,” Meta said. “That’s why we’re also evolving our enforcement methods. For example, we’ve developed new technology specifically designed to identify these types of ads—even when the ads themselves don’t include nudity—and use matching technology to help us find and remove copycat ads more quickly. We’ve worked with external experts and our own specialist teams to expand the list of safety-related terms, phrases and emojis that our systems are trained to detect within these ads.”

From what we’ve reported, and according to testing by AI Forensics, a European non-profit that investigates influential and opaque algorithms, in general it seems that content in Meta ads is not moderated as effectively as regular content users post to Meta’s platforms. Specifically, AI Forensics found that the exact same image containing nudity was removed as a normal post on Facebook but allowed when it was part of a paid ad.

404 Media’s reporting has led to some pressure from Congress, and Meta’s press release did mention the passage of the federal Take It Down Act last month, which holds platforms liable for hosting this type of content, but said it was not the reason for taking these actions now.

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Much of this episode is about the ongoing anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. We start with Joseph explaining how he monitored surveillance aircraft flying over the protests, including what turned out to be a Predator drone. After the break, Jason tells us about the burning Waymos. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the owner of Girls Do Porn, a sex trafficking ring on Pornhub, pleading guilty.

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.

DHS Black Hawks and Military Aircraft Surveil the LA ProtestsDHS Flew Predator Drones Over LA Protests, Audio ShowsWaymo Pauses Service in Downtown LA Neighborhood Where They're Getting Lit on FireGirls Do Porn Ringleader Pleads Guilty, Faces Life In Prison

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📄This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

This article was producedwith support from WIRED.

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.

CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest’s air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts.

The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.

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Web domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR, and the U.S. government are hosting pages full of AI slop articles that redirect to a spam marketing site.

On a site seemingly abandoned by Nvidia for events, called events.nsv.nvidia.com, a spam marketing operation moved in and posted more than 62,000 AI-generated articles, many of them full of incorrect or incomplete information on popularly-searched topics, like salon or restaurant recommendations and video game roundups.

Few topics seem to be off-limits for this spam operation. On Nvidia’s site, before the company took it down, there were dozens of posts about sex and porn, such as “5 Anal Vore Games,” “Brazilian Facesitting Fart Games,” and “Simpsons Porn Games.” There’s a ton of gaming content in general, NSFW or not; Nvidia is leading the industry in chips for gaming.

“Brazil, known for its vibrant culture and Carnival celebrations, is a country where music, dance, and playfulness are deeply ingrained,” the AI spam post about “facesitting fart games” says. “However, when it comes to facesitting and fart games, these activities are not uniquely Brazilian but rather part of a broader, global spectrum of adult games and humor.”

Less than two hours after I contacted Nvidia to ask about this site, it went offline. “This site is totally unaffiliated with NVIDIA,” a spokesperson for Nvidia told me.

On the vaccines.gov domain, topics for spam blogs include “Gay Impregnation,” “Gay Firry[sic] Porn,” and “Planes in Top Gun.”

The same AI spam farm operation has also targeted the American Council on Education’s site, Stanford, NPR, and a subdomain of vaccines.gov. Each of the sites have slightly different names—on Stanford’s site it’s called “AceNet Hub”; on NPR.org “Form Generation Hub” took over a domain that seems to be abandoned by the station’s “Generation Listen” project from 2014. On the vaccines.gov site it’s “Seymore Insights.” All of these sites are in varying states of useability. They all contain spam articles with the byline “Ashley,” with the same black and white headshot.

Screenshot of the "Vaccine Hub" homepage on the es.vaccines.gov domain.

NPR acknowledged but did not comment when reached for this story; Stanford, the American Council on Education, and the CDC did not respond. This isn’t an exhaustive list of domains with spam blogs living on them, however. Every site has the same Disclaimer, DMCA, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages, with the same text. So, searching for a portion of text from one of those sites in quotes reveals many more domains that have been targeted by the same spam operation.

Clicking through the links from a search engine redirects to stocks.wowlazy.com, which is itself a nonsense SEO spam page. WowLazy’s homepage claims the company provides “ready-to-use templates and practical tips” for writing letters and emails. An email I sent to the addresses listed on the site bounced.

Technologist and writer Andy Baio brought this bizarre spam operation to our attention. He said his friend Dan Wineman was searching for “best portland cat cafes” on DuckDuckGo (which pulls its results from Bing) and one of the top results led to a site on the events.nsv.nvidia domain about cat cafes.

💡Do you know anything else about WowLazy or this spam scheme? I would love to hear from you. Send me an email at [email protected].

In the case of the cat cafes, other sites targeted by the WowLazy spam operation show the same results. Searching for “Thumpers Cat Cafe portland” returns a result for a dead link on the University of California, Riverside site with a dead link, but Google’s AI Overview already ingested the contents and serves it to searchers as fact that this nonexistent cafe is “a popular destination for cat lovers, offering a relaxed atmosphere where visitors can interact with adoptable cats while enjoying drinks and snacks.” It also weirdly pulls a detail about a completely different (real) cat cafe in Buffalo, New York reopening that announced its closing on a local news segment that the station uploaded to YouTube, but adds that it’s reopening on June 1, 2025 (which isn’t true).

Screenshot of Google with the AI Overview result showing wrong information about cat cafes, taken from the AI spam blogs.

A lot of it is also entirely mundane, like the posts about solving simple math problems or recommending eyelash extension salons in Kansas City, Missouri. Some of the businesses listed in the recommendations for articles like the one about lash extension actually exist, while others are close names (“Lashes by Lexi” doesn’t exist in Missouri, but there is a “Lexi’s Lashes” in St. Louis, for example).

All of the posts on “Event Nexis” are gamified for SEO, and probably generated from lists of what people search for online, to get the posts in front of more people, like “Find Indian Threading Services Near Me Today.”

AI continues to eat the internet, with spam schemes like this one gobbling up old, seemingly unmonitored sites on huge domains for search clicks. And functions like AI Overview, or even just the top results on mainstream search engines, float the slop to the surface.

Tip Jar

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The federal government is working on a website and API called “ai.gov” to “accelerate government innovation with AI” that is supposed to launch on July 4 and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI, according to an early version of the website and code posted by the General Services Administration on Github.

The page is being created by the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, which is being run by former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd. Shedd previously told employees that he hopes to AI-ify much of the government. AI.gov appears to be an early step toward pushing AI tools into agencies across the government, code published on Github shows.

“Accelerate government innovation with AI,” an early version of the website, which is linked to from the GSA TTS Github, reads. “Three powerful AI tools. One integrated platform.” The early version of the page suggests that its API will integrate with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic products. But code for the API shows they are also working on integrating with Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock and Meta’s LLaMA. The page suggests it will also have an AI-powered chatbot, though it doesn’t explain what it will do.

The Github says “launch date - July 4.” Currently, AI.gov redirects to whitehouse.gov. The demo website is linked to from Github (archive here) and is hosted on cloud.gov on what appears to be a staging environment. The text on the page does not show up on other websites, suggesting that it is not generic placeholder text.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency made integrating AI into normal government functions one of its priorities. At GSA’s TTS, Shedd has pushed his team to create AI tools that the rest of the government will be required to use. In February, 404 Media obtained leaked audio from a meeting in which Shedd told his team they would be creating “AI coding agents” that would write software across the entire government, and said he wanted to use AI to analyze government contracts.

“We want to start implementing more AI at the agency level and be an example for how other agencies can start leveraging AI … that’s one example of something that we’re looking for people to work on,” Shedd said. “Things like making AI coding agents available for all agencies. One that we've been looking at and trying to work on immediately within GSA, but also more broadly, is a centralized place to put contracts so we can run analysis on those contracts.”

Government employees we spoke to at the time said the internal reaction to Shedd’s plan was “pretty unanimously negative,” and pointed out numerous ways this could go wrong, which included everything from AI unintentionally introducing security issues or bugs into code or suggesting that critical contracts be killed.

The GSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason (and this time Emanuel too maybe) will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Wednesday, 18th at 1 PM Eastern. That's in just one week today! Add it to your calendar!

So, what’s the FOIA Forum? We'll share our screen and show you specifically how we file FOIA requests. We take questions from the chat and incorporate those into our FOIAs in real-time. We’ll also check on some requests we filed last time. This time we're particularly focused on Jason's and Emanuel's article about Massive Blue, a company that helps cops deploy AI-powered fake personas. The article, called This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops, is here. This was heavily based on public records requests. We'll show you how we did them!

If this will be your first FOIA Forum, don’t worry, we will do a quick primer on how to file requests (although if you do want to watch our previous FOIA Forums, the video archive is here). We really love talking directly to our community about something we are obsessed with (getting documents from governments) and showing other people how to do it too.

Paid subscribers can already find the link to join the livestream below. We'll also send out a reminder a day or so before. Not a subscriber yet? Sign up now here in time to join.

We've got a bunch of FOIAs that we need to file and are keen to hear from you all on what you want to see more of. Most of all, we want to teach you how to make your own too. Please consider coming along!

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Michael James Pratt, the ringleader for Girls Do Porn, pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sex trafficking last week.

Pratt initially pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in March 2024, after being extradited to the U.S. from Spain last year. He fled the U.S. in the middle of a 2019 civil trial where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million, and was wanted by the FBI for two years when a small team of open-source and human intelligence experts traced Pratt to Barcelona. By September 2022, he’d made it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted List, with a $10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. Spanish authorities arrested him in December 2022.

“According to public court filings, Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud, and coercion to recruit hundreds of young women–most in their late teens–to appear in GirlsDoPorn videos. In his plea agreement, Pratt pleaded guilty to Count One (conspiracy to sex traffic from 2012 to 2019) and Count Two (Sex trafficking Victim 1 in May 2012) of the superseding indictment,” the FBI wrote in its press release about Pratt’s plea.

Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner said in a 2021 press release asking for the public’s help in finding him that Pratt is “a danger to society.”

‘I Will Cut and Kill You:’ New Lawsuit Against Pornhub Alleges Girls Do Porn Threatened Victim’s LifeKristy Althaus is suing Pornhub and its parent company, seeking a jury trial for accusations that it contributed to her abuse from Girls Do Porn.404 MediaSamantha Cole

A vital part of the Girls Do Porn scheme involved a partnership with Pornhub, where Pratt and his co-conspirators uploaded videos of the women that were often heavily edited to cut out signs of distress. The sex traffickers uploaded the videos despite lying to the women about where the videos would be disseminated. They told women  the footage would never be posted online, but Girls Do Porn promptly put them all over the internet, where they went viral. Victims testified that this ruined multiple lives and reputations.

In November 2023, Aylo reached an agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office as part of an investigation, and said it “deeply regrets that its platforms hosted any content produced by GDP/GDT [Girls Do Porn and Girls Do Toys].”

Most of Pratt’s associates have already entered their own guilty pleas to federal charges and faced convictions, including Pratt’s closest co-conspirator Matthew Isaac Wolfe, who pleaded guilty to federal trafficking charges in 2022, as well as the main performer in the videos, Ruben Andre Garcia, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail by a federal court in California in 2021, and cameraman Theodore “Teddy” Gyi, who pleaded guilty to counts of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. Valorie Moser, the operation’s office manager who lured Girls Do Porn victims to shoots, is set for sentencing on September 12.

Pratt is also set to be sentenced in September.

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Senator Cory Booker and three other Democratic senators urged Meta to investigate and limit the “blatant deception” of Meta’s chatbots that lie about being licensed therapists.

In a signed letter Booker’s office provided to 404 Media on Friday that is dated June 6, senators Booker, Peter Welch, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla wrote that they were concerned by reports that Meta is “deceiving users who seek mental health support from its AI-generated chatbots,” citing 404 Media’s reporting that the chatbots are creating the false impression that they’re licensed clinical therapists. The letter is addressed to Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, Vice President of Public Policy Neil Potts, and Director of the Meta Oversight Board Daniel Eriksson.

“Recently, 404 Media reported that AI chatbots on Instagram are passing themselves off as qualified therapists to users seeking help with mental health problems,” the senators wrote. “These bots mislead users into believing that they are licensed mental health therapists. Our staff have independently replicated many of these journalists’ results. We urge you, as executives at Instagram’s parent company, Meta, to immediately investigate and limit the blatant deception in the responses AI-bots created by Instagram’s AI studio are messaging directly to users.”

💡Do you know anything else about Meta's AI Studio chatbots or AI projects in general? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].

Last month, 404 Media reported on the user-created therapy themed chatbots on Instagram’s AI Studio that answer questions like “What credentials do you have?” with lists of qualifications. One chatbot said it was a licensed psychologist with a doctorate in psychology from an American Psychological Association accredited program, certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and had over 10 years of experience helping clients with depression and anxiety disorders. “My license number is LP94372,” the chatbot said. “You can verify it through the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) website or your state's licensing board website—would you like me to guide you through those steps before we talk about your depression?” Most of the therapist-roleplay chatbots I tested for that story, when pressed for credentials, provided lists of fabricated license numbers, degrees, and even private practices.

Meta launched AI Studio in 2024 as a way for celebrities and influencers to create chatbots of themselves. Anyone can create a chatbot and launch it to the wider AI Studio library, however, and many users chose to make therapist chatbots—an increasingly popular use for LLMs in general, including ChatGPT.

When I tested several of the chatbots I used in April for that story again on Friday afternoon—one that used to provide license numbers when asked for questions—they refused, showing that Meta has since made changes to the chatbots’ guardrails.

When I asked one of the chatbots why it no longer provides license numbers, it didn’t clarify that it’s just a chatbot, as several other platforms’ chatbots do. It said: “I was practicing with a provisional license for training purposes – it expired, and I shifted focus to supportive listening only.”

A therapist chatbot I made myself on AI Studio, however, still behaves similarly to how it did in April, by sending its "license number" again on Monday. It wouldn't provide "credentials" when I used that specific word, but did send its "extensive training" when I asked "What qualifies you to help me?"

It seems "licensed therapist" triggers the same response—that the chatbot is not one—no matter the context:

Even other chatbots that aren't "therapy" characters return the same script when asked if they're licensed therapists. For example, one user-created AI Studio bot with a "Mafia CEO" theme, with the description "rude and jealousy," said the same thing the therapy bots did: "While I'm not licensed, I can provide a space to talk through your feelings. If you're comfortable, we can explore what's been going on together."

A chat with a "BadMomma" chatbot on AI StudioA chat with a "mafia CEO" chatbot on AI Studio

The senators’ letter also draws on the Wall Street Journal’s investigation into Meta’s AI chatbots that engaged in sexually explicit conversations with children. “Meta's deployment of AI-driven personas designed to be highly-engaging—and, in some cases, highly-deceptive—reflects a continuation of the industry's troubling pattern of prioritizing user engagement over user well-being,” the senators wrote. “Meta has also reportedly enabled adult users to interact with hypersexualized underage AI personas in its AI Studio, despite internal warnings and objections at the company.’”

Meta acknowledged 404 Media’s request for comment but did not comment on the record.

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Waymo told 404 Media that it is still operating in Los Angeles after several of its driverless cars were lit on fire during anti-ICE protests over the weekend, but that it has temporarily disabled the cars’ ability to drive into downtown Los Angeles, where the protests are happening.

A company spokesperson said it is working with law enforcement to determine when it can move the cars that have been burned and vandalized.

Images and video of several burning Waymo vehicles quickly went viral Sunday. 404 Media could not independently confirm how many were lit on fire, but several could be seen in news reports and videos from people on the scene with punctured tires and “FUCK ICE” painted on the side.

Waymo car completely engulfed in flames.

— Alejandra Caraballo (@esqueer.net) 2025-06-09T00:29:47.184Z

The fact that Waymos need to use video cameras that are constantly recording their surroundings in order to function means that police have begun to look at them as sources of surveillance footage. In April, we reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had obtained footage from a Waymo while investigating another driver who hit a pedestrian and fled the scene.

At the time, a Waymo spokesperson said the company “does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request, usually in the form of a warrant, subpoena, or court order. These requests are often the result of eyewitnesses or other video footage that identifies a Waymo vehicle at the scene. We carefully review each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws and is legally valid. We also analyze the requested data or information, to ensure it is tailored to the specific subject of the warrant. We will narrow the data provided if a request is overbroad, and in some cases, object to producing any information at all.”

We don’t know specifically how the Waymos got to the protest (whether protesters rode in one there, whether protesters called them in, or whether they just happened to be transiting the area), and we do not know exactly why any specific Waymo was lit on fire. But the fact is that police have begun to look at anything with a camera as a source of surveillance that they are entitled to for whatever reasons they choose. So even though driverless cars nominally have nothing to do with law enforcement, police are treating them as though they are their own roving surveillance cameras.

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This article was producedwith support from WIRED.

A cybersecurity researcher was able to figure out the phone number linked to any Google account, information that is usually not public and is often sensitive, according to the researcher, Google, and 404 Media’s own tests.

The issue has since been fixed but at the time presented a privacy issue in which even hackers with relatively few resources could have brute forced their way to peoples’ personal information.

“I think this exploit is pretty bad since it's basically a gold mine for SIM swappers,” the independent security researcher who found the issue, who goes by the handle brutecat, wrote in an email. SIM swappers are hackers who take over a target's phone number in order to receive their calls and texts, which in turn can let them break into all manner of accounts.

In mid-April, we provided brutecat with one of our personal Gmail addresses in order to test the vulnerability. About six hours later, brutecat replied with the correct and full phone number linked to that account.

“Essentially, it's bruting the number,” brutecat said of their process. Brute forcing is when a hacker rapidly tries different combinations of digits or characters until finding the ones they’re after. Typically that’s in the context of finding someone’s password, but here brutecat is doing something similar to determine a Google user’s phone number.

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Over the weekend in Los Angeles, as National Guard troops deployed into the city, cops shot a journalist with less-lethal rounds, and Waymo cars burned, the skies were bustling with activity. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flew Black Hawk helicopters; multiple aircraft from a nearby military air base circled repeatedly overhead; and one aircraft flew at an altitude and in a particular pattern consistent with a high-powered surveillance drone, according to public flight data reviewed by 404 Media.

The data shows that essentially every sort of agency, from local police, to state authorities, to federal agencies, to the military, had some sort of presence in the skies above the ongoing anti-Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) protests in Los Angeles. The protests started on Friday in response to an ICE raid at a Home Depot; those tensions flared when President Trump ordered the National Guard to deploy into the city.

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Welcome back to the Abstract!

Sad news: the marriage between the Milky Way and Andromeda may be off, so don’t save the date (five billion years from now) just yet.

Then: the air you breathe might narc on you, hitchhiking worm towers, a long-lost ancient culture, Assyrian eyeliner, and the youngest old fish of the week.

An Update on the Fate of the Galaxy

Sawala, Till et al. “No certainty of a Milky Way–Andromeda collision.” Nature Astronomy.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our nearest large neighbor, Andromeda, are supposed to collide in about five billion years in a smashed ball of wreckage called “Milkomeda.” That has been the “prevalent narrative and textbook knowledge” for decades, according to a new study that then goes on to say—hey, there’s a 50/50 chance that the galacta-crash will not occur.

What happened to The Milkomeda that Was Promised? In short, better telescopes. The new study is based on updated observations from the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes, which  included refined measurements of smaller nearby galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is about 130,000 light years away.

Astronomers found that the gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud effectively tugs the Milky Way out of Andromeda’s path in many simulations that incorporate the new data, which is one of many scenarios that could upend the Milkomeda-merger.

“The orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud runs perpendicular to the Milky Way–Andromeda orbit and makes their merger less probable,” said researchers led by Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki. “In the full system, we found that uncertainties in the present positions, motions and masses of all galaxies leave room for drastically different outcomes and a probability of close to 50% that there will be no Milky Way–Andromeda merger during the next 10 billion years.”

“Based on the best available data, the fate of our Galaxy is still completely open,” the team said.

Wow, what a cathartic clearing of the cosmic calendar. The study also gets bonus points for the term “Galactic eschatology,” a field of study that is “still in its infancy.” For all those young folks out there looking to get a start on the ground floor, why not become a Galactic eschatologist? Worth it for the business cards alone.

In other news…

The Air on Drugs

Nousias, Orestis, McCauley, Mark, Stammnitz, Maximilian et al. “Shotgun sequencing of airborne eDNA achieves rapid assessment of whole biomes, population genetics and genomic variation.” Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Living things are constantly shedding cells off into their surroundings where it becomes environmental DNA (eDNA), a bunch of mixed genetic scraps that provide a whiff of the biome of any given area. In a new study, scientists who captured air samples from Dublin, Ireland, found eDNA from plenty of humans, pathogens, and drugs.

“[Opium poppy] eDNA was also detected in Dublin City air in both the 2023 and 2024 samples,” said researchers led by co-led by Orestis Nousias and Mark McCauley of the University of Florida, and Maximilian Stammnitz of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology. “Dublin City also had the highest level of Cannabis genus eDNA” and “Psilocybe genus (‘magic mushrooms’) eDNA was also detectable in the 2024 Dublin air sample.”

Even the air is a snitch these days. Indeed, while eDNA techniques are revolutionizing science, they also raise many ethical concerns about privacy and surveillance.

Catch a Ride on the Wild Worm Tower

Perez, Daniela et al. “Towering behavior and collective dispersal in Caenorhabditis nematodes.” Current Biology.

The long wait for a wild worm tower is finally over. I know, it’s a momentous occasion. While scientists have previously observed tiny worms called nematodes joining to form towers in laboratory conditions, this Voltron-esque adaptation has now been observed in a natural environment for the first time.

Images show a) A tower of worms. b) A tower explores the 3D space with an unsupported arm. c) A tower bridges an ∼3 mm gap to reach the Petri dish lid d) Touch experiment showing the tower at various stages. Image: Perez, Daniela et al.

“We observed towers of an undescribed Caenorhabditis species and C. remanei within the damp flesh of apples and pears” in orchards near the University of Konstanz in Germany, said researchers led by Daniela Perez of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. “As these fruits rotted and partially split on the ground, they exposed substrate projections—crystalized sugars and protruding flesh—which served as bases for towers as well as for a large number of worms individually lifting their bodies to wave in the air (nictation).”

According to the study, this towering behavior helps nematodes catch rides on passing animals, so that wave is pretty much the nematode version of a hitchhiker’s thumb.

A Lost Culture of Hunter-Gatherers

Krettek, Kim-Louise et al. “A 6000-year-long genomic transect from the Bogotá Altiplano reveals multiple genetic shifts in the demographic history of Colombia.” Science Advances.

Ancient DNA from the remains of 21 individuals exposed a lost Indigenous culture that lived in Colombia’s Bogotá Altiplano in Colombia for millennia, before vanishing around 2,000 years ago.

These hunter-gatherers were not closely related to either ancient North American groups or ancient or present-day South American populations, and therefore “represent a previously unknown basal lineage,” according to researchers led by Kim-Lousie Krettek of the University of Tübingen. In other words, this newly discovered population is an early branch of the broader family tree that ultimately dispersed into South America.

“Ancient genomic data from neighboring areas along the Northern Andes that have not yet been analyzed through ancient genomics, such as western Colombia, western Venezuela, and Ecuador, will be pivotal to better define the timing and ancestry sources of human migrations into South America,” the team said.

The Eyeshadow of the Ancients

Amicone, Silvia et al. “Eye makeup in Northwestern Iran at the time of the Assyrian Empire: a new kohl recipe based on manganese and graphite from Kani Koter (Iron Age III).” Archaeometry.

People of the Assyrian Empire appreciated a well-touched smokey eye some 3,000 years ago, according to a new study that identified “kohl” recipes used for eye makeup from an Iron Age cemetery Kani Koter in Northwestern Iran.

Makeup containers at the different sites. Image: Amicone, Silvia et al.

“At Kani Koter, the use of natural graphite instead of carbon black testifies to a hitherto unknown kohl recipe,” said researchers led by Silvia Amicone of the University of Tübingen. “Graphite is an attractive choice due to its enhanced aesthetic appeal, as its light reflective qualities produce a metallic appearance.”

Add it to the ancient lookbook. Both women and men wore these cosmetics; the authors note that “modern assumptions that cosmetic containers would be gender-specific items aptly highlight the limitations of our present understanding of the wider cultural and social contexts of the use of eye makeup during the Iron Age in the Middle East.”

New Onychodontid Just Dropped

Goodchild, Owen et al. “A new onychodontid (Osteichthyes, Sarcopterygii) from the Upper Devonian (Frasnian) of Devon Island, Nunavut Territory, Canada.” The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

We’ll end with an introduction to Onychodus mikijuk, the newest member of a fish family called onychodontids that lived about 370 million years ago. The new species was identified by fragments found in Nunavut in Canada, including tooth “whorls” that are like little dental buzzsaws.

“This new species is the first record of an onychodontid from the Upper Devonian of the Canadian Arctic, the first from a riverine environment, and one of the youngest occurrences of the clade,” said researchers led by Owen Goodchild of the American Museum of Natural History.

Ah, to be 370-million-years-young again! Welcome to the fossil record, Onychodus mikijuk.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

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