Eli Stark-Elster via Smithsonian:

‘The idea that universes evolve like organisms sat on the fringes of theoretical physics for decades. Then, a Substack post and a 2022 find by the James Webb Space Telescope boosted the concept…’

Jake Currie via Nautilus:

‘Japan is home to tons of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines (which you should be sure to visit if you ever find yourself there). These picturesque locales—numbering in the hundreds in cities like Kyoto—offer serene oases in busy urban environments for both people and wildlife alike. According to a new study published in Urban Ecosystems, frogs in particular are drawn to their many water features, making the landmarks both culturally and ecologically important….’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘Suffering unprecedented embarrassment on the international stage, morale issues are so deep that sailors are reputedly jumping overboard, but never fear: the United States Navy has a plan. Reportedly, they are considering renaming an aircraft carrier after Trump….’

Isaiah Colbert via Gizmodo:

‘Once Bone Tomahawk kicks into its third act, it morphs into one of the most stark, frightening strings of events committed to celluloid. Up to this point, the film’s depiction of violence is handled matter-of-factly, without any sense of spectacle. There’s no buildup of tension when shit hits the fan on their journey; like breathing, it simply happens nonchalantly, with little zhuzh in the camera work to accentuate it. When the movie shifts into its final act and encounters the mysterious tribe at the epicenter of our heroes’ discontent, it becomes full-on horror, with some of the most terrifying depictions of violence and brutality I’ve ever seen.

On top of its action-packed final act’s pacing and cinematography moving with surgical precision, Bone Tomahawk surprised the fuck out of me with some of the most grotesque “How the hell did they even do that?” practical effects once its antagonists entered the film. I’m talking a full-body horror experience that burns into your retinas and whose booming bellows ring in your ears like tinnitus long after credits roll. It’s rare for a film to earn the accolade of being the best movie in a genre you’ve ever seen—a real instant classic—while seriously making you consider never watching it again for your own well-being….’

Rumman Chowdhury via MIT Technology Review:

‘If AI systems are viewed as too advanced to control, the companies that build them can’t held liable for the harms they cause….’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘Sources say Hegseth’s job is in danger as the Iran war drags on and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed with gas near $4 a gallon….’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘Even Harp’s own brother Preston calls her relationship with the president unhealthy after becoming estranged over it….’

Holyn Thigpen via Atlas Obscura:

‘“Oldest” is not one definitive measurement but several, depending on what type of living thing you’re looking at. Some record-holders, like Utah’s Pando, are clonal colonies, while others, such as a spruce trunk, are individual, continuously growing organisms whose age is counted directly through rings, layers, or growth bands. Still others, like deep-sea sponges, grow so slowly that their age can only be estimated. Understanding which kind of “old” you’re looking at helps explain why the ages on this list vary so widely.

• Pando Clonal quaking aspen colony 1+ million years Utah, USA
• Honey Mushrooms Fungal network 2,400 years Oregon, USA
• Old Tjikko Norway spruce 9,550 years Sweden
• King Clone Creosote colony 11,700 years California, USA
• Methuselah Tree Bristlecone pine ~4,800 years California, USA
• Prometheus Bristlecone pine ~5,000 years Nevada, USA
• Li Jiawan Grand Ginkgo King Ginkgo ~4,000 years China
• Fortingall Yew Yew 2,000–5,000 years Scotland
• Llangernyw Yew Yew 4,000–5,000 years Wales
• Volcano Sponge Sponge ~15,000 years Antarctica
• Black coral Coral colony 4,000+ years New Zealand…’

Via Delete DoorDash:

‘For the last year and a half, DoorDash has been silent as their delivery drivers have been hunted and even killed in the streets by ICE and other federal police. Now, the company has come out in vocal support of H.R. 9720, a blatant attack on communities here in Washington DC. This legislation would strip away basic power from DC’s local elected government. DoorDash is pushing for it because they don’t want to pay a 20-cent fee for food access programs for low-income families. All those things are not okay with us. DC communities are calling on all allies to #DeleteDoorDash until our demands are met.…’

Henry Abraham via Substack:

‘What remains a mystery to me, though, is why Americans aren’t angrier over Trump’s crimes and misdemeanors. Have we forgotten our values of honesty, compassion, and creativity? Hasn’t anyone noticed that a third of the White House has been demolished? For a ballroom-bunker? Is patriotism only for “suckers and losers”? Are we ready to throw in the towel defending the rights of women, immigrants, people of color, and gays? Have we forgotten that we are “created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights”? What’s wrong with this picture and how did it get that way?

In 1941 the jurist Ernst Fraenkel who had fled Nazi Germany wrote a seminal book, The Dual State, in which he described two forms of government that could exist side by side. The first he called “the prerogative state,” and the second, “the normative state.” The first was the government that did whatever it wanted. The second was bound by the rule of law. The first is Donald Trump ignoring the birthright decision of the Supreme Court, or ICE agent Jonathan Ross killing Renee Good in Minneapolis without accountability. The normative state does what the law directs. The prerogative state does what it wants.

Americans live in both states, but unless the prerogative one affects us, we go about our business living under the illusion that our state is entirely “normative.” The prerogative Trump incinerates 300 school children on the first day of the Iran war, and we go out that evening for ice cream. Our illusion of normality protects us from shame, guilt, and rage because Trump’s paranoia, sadism, and slipping cognition don’t affect us personally. It’s time to shatter that illusion…’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘The press secretary announced her resignation on July 16th, days after Trump escaped a missile threat in a catering truck….’

Sarah Kuta via Smithsonian Magazine:

‘Scientists have discovered that people from distinct cultural backgrounds are ticklish in many of the same spots on their bodies. In addition to the armpits and soles of the feet, the belly and the neck consistently rank as some of the most ticklish body parts across cultures, scientists report in a study published August 10 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. The findings could help researchers unravel why this strange sensation evolved.

Ticklishness is a nearly universal human sensation—and one that we share with rats, meerkats and great apes—yet scientists know surprisingly little about it. Researchers recognize two types of tickling: knismesis, a light, feather-like sensation that usually doesn’t provoke laughter, and gargalesis, which is caused by firm, repetitive touches that typically elicit giggling and movement.

Until now, research on tickling has been largely focused on knismesis because of its similarity to itchiness, a symptom of many medical conditions. Gargalesis, meanwhile, has remained “really a very poorly understood sensation,” Michael Brecht, a neuroscientist at Humboldt University of Berlin who was not involved with the study, tells Nature’s Claire Ainsworth.

In the new study, a research duo set out to understand some of the basics about gargalesis. They recruited 448 participants divided equally among three cultural backgrounds: Chinese, Dutch and Greek. Each completed a survey about tickling and created a body map of their most ticklish spots, along with maps for other sensations, including pain, pleasure and touch sensitivity.

The data yielded “remarkably similar patterns regardless of where participants came from,” study co-author Konstantina Kilteni, a neuroscientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, says in a statement….’

Via New Scientist:

‘Memories in mice persisted even after they lost the connections that we thought were needed for recall, expanding our knowledge of memory in the mammalian brain…’

Joseph Cox via 404 Media:

‘ICE plans to spends tens of millions of dollars on the gloves, which are supposed to incapacitate people. A manual 404 Media found says the gloves may even contribute to “sudden death.”…’

Via Heather Cox Richardson:

‘The scandal that Trump secretly used a small plane to leave Türkiye for Britain after credible Iranian threats of assassination, leaving journalists and White House staffers to act as a decoy, has provided a crystal clear view of the president. As writer and cartoonist Liza Donnelly summed it up in her Seeing Things: “To Save Himself, Trump Endangered Others.”

The choice of who left the decoy plane to travel with Trump also revealed that Trump opted to protect his loyal aides rather than any cabinet officials, prizing loyalists over members of the government. Dan Lamothe and Cat Zakrzewski of the Washington Post reported today that Trump left Secretary of State Marco Rubio behind on the decoy plane but took with him White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, executive assistant Natalie Harp, and director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta.

The journalists report that Scavino, Harp, and Nauta worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in between his presidencies after others distanced themselves. Nauta was indicted on six felony counts, including taking part in a conspiracy to obstruct justice, after allegedly helping Trump hide the classified documents he retained after leaving the White House.

Also traveling with the president was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who cheered on Trump’s attack on Iran. Although Hegseth apparently retains Trump’s approval, Natalie Oliverio of Military Times reported yesterday that repeated extension of their tours of duty to more than 8 months while the condition of their ship has deteriorated, with broken showers and little food, has led sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln to self-harm, including attempts to jump from the 60-foot-high deck. More than 200 family members have raised concerns about sailors’ mental health, exhaustion, and safety with Navy officials.

With Trump slipping both politically and personally, there is a frantic feeling in the air as members of the Trump administration and their allies appear to be trying to grab all they can before the midterm elections…’

Anne Cleary via Aeon:

‘Have you been here before? The eerie sensation is the shadow of your mind searching inward for clues to its own survival…’

Marcia Dunn via AP News:

‘Sorry, North America. After winning the cosmic lottery with a pair of coast-to-coast total solar eclipses, now it’s Europe’s turn.

But look skyward anyway Wednesday and, if you’re far enough north in the U.S. and Canada, you might savor a partial eclipse as the moon nibbles away at the sun….’

Mike Pearl via Gizmodo:

‘We already knew something weird happened with Donald Trump last month in Turkey, even by the already weird standards of this administration. He ordered new military strikes against Iran while in Turkey for a NATO summit—meaning he was unusually close to the fireworks he was creating. Then, when he left Turkey for the U.K., the official story was cagey and self-contradictory, and involved him supposedly flying on an older Air Force One-designated plane, instead of his brand new, more luxurious Air Force One.

However, it’s now being reported that the president flew to the U.K. not on the new Air Force One nor one of the Old Air Force Ones, but that he got on one of the old planes and posed for the press like everything was normal, and then slipped out a cargo door and into a catering box, which got carted off to a military plane, which he then flew aboard all the way to the U.K….’

Ed Cara via Gizmodo:

‘Trump’s latest executive order threatens to further unravel our progress against resurgent diseases like measles….’

Denise Chow via NBC News:

‘A new moon will keep skies dark, making shooting star sightings more likely during the Perseids’ most active phase….’

Sophie Ellis via Discover Wildlife:

‘Hang Son Đoòng is the world’s largest natural cave and remained undiscovered until 2009…’

Alan Bellows via Damn Interesting:

‘On 6 August 1945, a number of eyes in the Japanese city of Hiroshima turned skyward at the drone of a US B-29 bomber flying across the cloudless sky, accompanied by two other aircraft. Their arrival was not a surprise; the early warning radar net had detected the incoming planes and an air-raid alert had been issued for the city. But soon the Japanese military realized that only three planes were incoming, and the alert was lifted. The anti-aircraft guns sat silent, and the fighter planes lingered in their hangars. A mere three planes were considered incapable of posing a significant threat, so it was presumed that these craft were weather planes — a precursor to a true attack. The Japanese military opted to conserve their diminishing supplies of munitions and fuel for use against more serious threats.

The sound of the American planes drew the attention of the city’s residents, many of whom were outdoors participating in work programs. A few saw a large parachute unfurl beneath the B-29 before it flew away, but most saw only the flash that soon followed. The events that unfolded that morning on the streets of Hiroshima were recorded by those who survived. These survivors would come to be known as hibakusha — “people exposed to the bomb.”

For those who didn’t see the planes, the sudden flare of harsh light was the first indication that something unusual had happened. In that eerily silent moment, white clouds sprung from the clear blue sky as the Little Boy spilled the destructive equivalent of thirteen thousand tons of TNT over the city, projecting intense radiation in every direction….’

Via NPR:

‘The famous author’s short story, ‘There will come soft rains’ predicted a world where machines would take over after August 4th, 2026….’

Via dino-world.com:

‘Most people assume the thylacine simply died out from natural causes, the way species quietly fade when their world changes around them. It didn’t. Humans hunted it into oblivion on purpose, and that single fact changes everything about whether a few survivors could have slipped through.

The thylacine once ranged across most of mainland Australia, but competition with dingoes pushed it to extinction there roughly 2,000 years ago, leaving an isolated population in Tasmania. When British colonists arrived, they paid bounty hunters to kill every thylacine they could find to protect sheep flocks. That’s not a slow habitat collapse – it’s systematic, government-funded slaughter, the kind that could easily leave a scattered, secretive remnant hiding in Tasmania’s least accessible wilderness. A species can be functionally invisible long before it’s actually gone, and that possibility has kept researchers searching for nearly 90 years straight.

The 1982 Sighting That Restarted an Entire Search Effort

The 1982 Sighting That Restarted an Entire Search Effort (Image Credits: Pexels)

If there’s one encounter that legitimized the “maybe it’s not extinct” camp, it’s this one. A government employee, not a tourist chasing folklore, filed the report that changed everything.

Hans Naarding, a park ranger, said he observed one of the creatures for several minutes under torchlight near Togari in 1982. He wasn’t some amateur cryptid-hunter – he was trained wildlife personnel whose detailed field notes carried real weight with the agency that employed him. The sighting was considered credible enough that Tasmania Parks, working with a wildlife scientist, launched a formal search that lasted more than two years. That government-funded hunt never found conclusive proof, but it never ruled the possibility out either….’

Daniel Hampton via Raw Story:

‘President Donald Trump’s habit of insisting things are happening “like nobody’s ever seen before” is more than just a verbal tic. It’s become a symptom of his deteriorating brain, according to a speech-language pathologist whose video breakdowns of the president have gained attention.

Hilary Shae, a licensed speech-language pathologist who specializes in concussion recovery, zeroed in Wednesday on Trump’s Camp David Cabinet meeting last week, counting a stack of near-identical catchphrases in the first 15 minutes alone. She flagged phrases such as “nobody’s ever seen,” “more than anyone’s ever seen before,” and “treated like nobody else.”

Doing that many while reading from prepared notes, she said, was “pretty significant.”

“It is very likely that Donald Trump is suffering from some form of dementia and brain decline,” Shae said in the video, arguing the repetitions signal his brain is “relying on language that has become highly automatic while it loses the ability to generate new and flexible language.”

She framed the phrases as possible “perseveration,” a neurological symptom in which someone repeats a word or idea when it isn’t appropriate, suggesting impaired frontal lobe inhibition. She contrasted it with Trump’s old catchphrase days, like “that’s hot,” which she said had nothing to do with cognitive decline. The difference now, she argued, is that the repetition is “persistent” and “context independent.”…’

Here & Now Newsroom via WBUR:

‘The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, about 30 miles west of Montreal, recently became the first in Canada to recognize trees as living beings with a special set of rights — including the rights to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration….’

Adithi Ramakrishnan via AP News:

‘Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they’d photographed the sun’s bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before….’

J F Martel via Aeon:

‘When early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘The Orange Menace claims his administration restored the Endangered Species Act to the meaning Antonin Scalia “explained.” Scalia explained it in a dissent. The Supreme Court’s 6–3 majority upheld the definition Trump’s administration just erased….’

Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing:

‘The ad campaign for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a gritty new take on the public domain monster, has been partially unraveled by advertising regulators in the U.K. In upholding a complaint about the movie’s posters, the Advertising Standards Authority determined that those showing a “realistic impression of a dead child” were too horrid for public display. But it cleared the imagery’s use on television and streaming media after bedtime….’

Scott Stossel via The Atlantic:

‘If coroners were to pin an actual time of death on Freudianism, they might specify 1963. That year, the philosopher of science Karl Popper held up psychoanalytic theory as the archetypal instance of what he called “pseudoscience”: Worse than mere bad science, psychoanalysis was, in being untestable, simply not science. Based in large part on the highly speculative interpretation of imperfectly recalled dreams, of all things, psychoanalytic theory was impervious to real scientific inquiry. In presuming to explain everything, Popper pronounced, psychoanalysis explained nothing at all.

So who today would dare attempt a rehabilitation of Freud? And why? To take the second question first, here’s one reason: What has followed Freudianism has not been, by many reckonings, any better. In the 1970s, the mental-health profession fled from such squishy psychological concepts as transference and countertransference, the death drive, and seduction theory—as well as more outlandish ones like penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipal complex—and leaned instead into “biological psychiatry,” which had emerged from the drug discoveries of the 1950s and ’60s.

Physiological notions took hold, such as the “catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders,” which attributed anxiety and depression to deficits of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine. Three decades later, in the 1990s, the “chemical-imbalance theory of depression” arrived, tying depression and other mood disorders to dysregulation of another neurotransmitter, serotonin. Psychoanalysts’ highly subjective assessments gave way to the ostensibly more objective measurements provided by neuroscientific instruments that can capture brain activity, such as EEGs, PET scans, and fMRIs. Doctors turned to genetic testing to help identify various temperament types and emotional predispositions, and relied on standardized questionnaires assessed for their validity in diagnosing mental illness.

In repudiating Freudianism and touting the field’s proper medical grounding, science-based psychiatry confidently predicted that measurable success was soon to come. That’s not what happened. Biological psychiatry “overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated,” as the Harvard medical historian Anne Harrington put it in 2019. Which raises the question of whether psychiatry has simply exchanged one form of witchcraft for another….’

Brendan Brown via ScienceBlog.com:

‘The nightly choice between a book and a screen isn’t a minor preference—it’s a decade-long experiment that rewires your brain in measurably different ways….’

Dorothy Neufeld via Visual Capitalist:

‘Czechia ranks first globally for academic freedom, while Myanmar and Nicaragua rank last.

The U.S. scores 0.40, placing it at a level similar to Bhutan and Thailand.

India has recorded one of the world’s sharpest declines in academic freedom since 2010….’

Here & Now Newsroom via WBUR:

‘Scott Tong speaks with baker and writer Kate Lebo about embracing bitterness, complex flavors, and why baking with ultra-sweet fruit doesn’t make for better pies….’

Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily:

‘The writers of the Beat generation adopted ideas and images from cultural traditions ranging from Buddhism to jazz. William S. Burroughs repeatedly turned to another source: the ancient Maya. As independent scholar Paul H. Wild writes, Burroughs drastically reshaped Maya culture for his own purposes, but his stories were grounded in ideas about the civilization that were common in academic circles at the time…

Wild writes that, somewhat paradoxically, given his profession, Burroughs railed against the “Word Virus” as a tool of control. And so he was fascinated by the hieroglyphic nature of Maya writing, which he claimed could convey ideas more directly, avoiding the need for words. This followed a common scholarly notion that Maya hieroglyphics were not tied to spoken language.

Many of the ideas about Maya life that Burroughs had access to in the 1950s were turned on their head in the next decade, when epigraphers realized that Maya writing was, in fact, partly phonological, and could be directly translated into speech…’

Ellyn Lapointe via Gizmodo:

‘A set of engineered safeguards could protect Earth’s habitability for 9.1 quadrillion years, according to new research. The star that gave our planet life will one day take it away. Scientists have long agreed that the expansion and eventual death of the Sun will destroy Earth’s habitability, but one researcher believes he’s figured out a way for humanity to avoid this fate.

In a study set to appear in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines a plan that he claims could help us outlive the Sun. In fact, he presents megaengineering concepts designed to safeguard against a whole suite of long-term threats to Earth’s habitability: solar luminosity, solar engulfment, the end of tectonics, water loss, changes in the planet’s tilt and spin, object collision, and dangers from beyond our solar system. The findings are currently available on the preprint server arXiv….’

Christianity On The Spectrum via Dispatches from the Autism Wars:

‘the shifting definitions of autism have particularly affected those with profound autism and their caretakers. His substack writing (and I assume his upcoming book, All in Your Head, which I have pre-ordered) often discusses how the autism label used to be applied mostly to those who were very significantly affected by autism before they were supplanted by more palatable high functioning autistics. He claims that these people with ASD 1 (or maybe not even that) were attempting to rebrand autism as a fun, quirky asset whose only downside is the negative stereotypes imposed on them by an ableist world. It is plainly true that people like me have supplanted, and spoken over those who are more profoundly affected….’

The Editorial Board via The Wall Street Journal:

‘A friend quipped the other day that President Trump truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize because he has already ended the Iran war eight times. Will the ninth time be the charm after his latest decision to call off a military escalation in search of a deal with the revolutionary regime?

“We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” Mr. Trump posted at 10:05 p.m. on Saturday. He added that this includes “Immediate, Complete, and Total” opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to Iran’s nuclear program….’

Henry Abraham via Henry David Abraham’s Stuff for Public Consumption:

‘This week marks the 81st anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6, 1945 an American bomber dropped the first nuclear weapon on human beings. Within minutes the two cities were engulfed in heat fifty times greater than the surface of the sun. 140,000 people died instantly from burns in the firestorm that followed, injuries from blasts, or weeks later from a new kind of killing, radiation sickness. The nuclear fission created a virtual museum of 300 radioactive isotopes previously only seen before on Earth in trace amounts. Some isotopes lasted seconds. Others will last for millions of years….’

Alice Fleerackers via Nautilus:

‘A dark history that is in danger of returning as support for people with disabilities withers…’

These are not my most decorous posts but, I’m sorry, they need to be brought to everyone’s attention. Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘The Orange Menace attended Lindsey Graham’s funeral at Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday, where he also delivered a eulogy and rapped on the casket to say hello. A brief clip circulating afterward shows Trump adjusting himself while the men seated beside him suddenly squint, blink, and look distinctly unhappy….’

Kaitlin Simpson via Us Weekly:

‘A video linked to the government of Iran is under investigation after appearing to issue a threat — and detail ways — to assassinate First Lady Melania Trump and her and President Donald Trump’s son, Barron.

On Monday, July 27, a video titled “Where to Kill Melania” was shared by Tasnim News Agency, an entity allegedly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, per The Independent. ​…’

Nahal Toosi via POLITICO:

‘President Donald Trump and his aides rarely go easy on their perceived enemies. But their attacks on the International Criminal Court — describing it as, among other things, filled with “lunatics” and pledging to destroy it — are hyperbolic enough that you have to wonder:

Are they afraid the court will prosecute them?…’

Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing:

‘The Atlas of Surveillance is a database of surveillance technologies deployed by law enforcement in communities across the United States. This includes drones, body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, facial recognition, and more. This research was compiled by more than 1,000 students and volunteers, and incorporates datasets from a variety of public and non-profit sources. 

The Atlas is a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who could use more volunteers to help complete and maintain it….’

Benji Jones via Vox:

‘In a rule published earlier this month, the administration determined that, in many cases, destroying the habitat of federally threatened and endangered species is no longer explicitly illegal, even if doing so could ultimately drive them extinct. The rule upends half a century of regulatory precedent that survived many Republican administrations. Environmental advocates also say it runs counter to the very intent of the Endangered Species Act, which Congress passed in 1973 with near-unanimous bipartisan support (and which Richard Nixon signed into law)….’

Kurt Andersen via The New York Times:

‘Does anyone under 50 know who Carlos Castaneda was? Around 1970, this anthropologist’s books of psychedelic adventures in Mexico with an Indigenous sorcerer named Don Juan turned him into one of the world’s most widely read writers. Today, he’s a little-remembered artifact. So why a serious biography by the writer and artist Ru Marshall?

Castaneda had a wide-ranging cultural influence. And he was a dark, fascinating character, a Peruvian transplant to California who rebranded himself in the 1980s as a wizard, distilling his respectable mass popularity into a small, lucrative cult. In Marshall’s hands, “American Trickster” is smart, thoughtful — and all too timely….’

Norimitsu Onishi via The New York Times:

‘As smoke from forest fires in Canada have darkened skies south of the border, lawmakers in Michigan, Ohio and other U.S. states have accused the Canadian authorities of inaction and poor forest management. But most wildfires in Canada spread in such remote, vast areas that they cannot be fought effectively — and are often left to burn.

Half of Canada’s wildfires, like the ones now burning in northern Ontario, burn in such areas — either unpopulated or dotted with small Indigenous communities, said Michael Flannigan, an expert on fire management at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. They are most often accessible only by plane, with no roads for firefighters….’

Alan Herrera via Comic Sands:

‘Harnik’s picture captured the sort of reaction one would expect from a malignant narcissist upset that the attention is not on him at all times, so Trump’s reaction wasn’t a surprise….’

Robert Davis via Raw Story:

‘President Donald Trump alarmed onlookers on Sunday after he went on an hours-long AI picture posting spree on Truth Social.

In all, Trump posted more than 40 AI-generated photos over multiple hours on Truth Social. Some of the photos included Trump standing on top of an Iranian oil tanker declaring “It is our oil tanker now!” and three late-night comedians who recently drew the president’s ire panhandling on a sidewalk. There was also the all-too-expected jab at Rosie O’Donnell, who has been feuding with the president for nearly two decades.

The photos were posted on a day when reporters caught Trump out playing golf and inspecting the White House renovations….’

Via CBS News:

‘Science shows us that, even though plants don’t have brains, they seem to have a nervous system that responds to touch in remarkable ways. Robert Krulwich and puppeteer Barnaby Dixon explore the science of thigmomorphogenesis (the phenomenon of plants reacting to outside stimulae), a discussion that plants the seeds for a song….’

Terrence O’Brien via The Verge:

‘Sam Tunick allegedly gave federal agents a fake ‘duress password’ at the airport….’

Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic:

‘If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.

That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle.

For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.…’

Ashley Stimpson via Sierra Magazine:

‘How the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks threaten thousands of plants and animals with extinction…’

Via Dazed:

‘The growing ‘unquantified self’ movement is rebelling against data-driven wellness and the pressure to track every aspect of our bodies and minds…’

Elizabeth Bernstein via The Wall Street Journal:

‘Many moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice—and a growing number of researchers agree. ‘Everything becomes trauma.’…’

Gabe Fleisher via wakeuptopolitics.com:

‘Trump does not seem especially attached to the idea of Republicans remaining in control of Congress, especially since he believes (rightly or wrongly) that his best path to getting things done runs through the White House. Republicans are likely to lose the House in November no matter what, but their ability to stave off deep losses there (and to keep control of the Senate) could hinge on Trump keeping his two wars — trade and Iran — in a holding pattern. He seems to be leaning towards the exact opposite.…’

Jane Arraf via NPR:

‘President Trump on Wednesday repeated his threat for Iran to stop attacking vessels in the strait or else face U.S. strikes against Iranian civilian infrastructure. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” he wrote online.…’

David Nield via ScienceAlert:

‘Echolocation is a fascinating way that animals like bats and whales find their way around the world. By emitting sounds and decoding the echoes that come back, these species are able to detect what’s around them in their local environment.

It’s something we know that humans can do too – and it takes less training than you might think. A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks.…’

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling via The New Republic:

‘The Trump administration is reportedly considering taking military action against an Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Mali known as JNIM, according to several current and former U.S. officials that spoke with The Washington Post Wednesday.

Doing so would add to the president’s warmongering tally, marking the eighth nation he has ordered strikes on since he began his second term as president…’

Natalie Allison via The Washington Post:

‘The vice president has faced a barrage of attacks recently that are unusual for their intensity and how early in the political calendar they are taking place.…’

Via VICE:

‘Longevity maxxing is having a moment. Biological age tests, NAD+ supplements, Bryan Johnson’s entire existence—the premise is that aging is a problem with a solution. A new study suggests the solution has a ceiling nobody’s talking about.

Researchers at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology ran a thought experiment with a deceptively direct premise: if every reversible aspect of aging could somehow be eliminated—every disease, every hormonal decline, every cellular dysfunction science might one day fix—what would actually kill us? Their answer, published in npj Aging, is random DNA mutations. The kind that accumulate in cells throughout a lifetime, mostly harmless, occasionally not, and ultimately unavoidable.

The team built a mathematical model to calculate how much damage these so-called somatic mutations would do to a population that had otherwise beaten aging. Their analysis found that even with all other reversible aging hallmarks removed, somatic mutations alone limit median human lifespan to somewhere between 146 and 194 years—about double current longevity. A theoretical ceiling, not a prediction….’

Helena Fitzgerald via Oakland Review of Books:

‘A phrase has become popular, recently, in certain corners of the internet, like a mantra or a code: Maybe it will happen today. The “it” usually refers to a particular possible-future event related to American politics, one that might be euphemistically described as the hope that the current administration will be ousted from power by the simple, inevitable force of time The phrase is used most frequently by, and is mostly contained to, a certain cringe-liberal demographic. On occasion, some likely inconsequential rumor or piece of news activates a certain part of the already-small group of people who pay attention to this sort of thing, and the phrase suddenly proliferates. If you were to log onto, say, Bluesky at the right time on the right day, when somebody’s picked up on some detail or morsel of gossip, you’d see posts iterating on the phrase, rearranging it grammatically, adding it to other quotations or references, posting that one song from Cabaret, and then making fun of how much people post about it, or telling people to stop posting about it.…’

Ali Rıza Taşkale via aeon.co:

‘Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future…’

Alan Herrera via Comic Sands:

‘The Trump administration’s attempt to cover up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as it undergoes repairs following alleged “vandalism” backfired when high winds revealed the sad sight of it, now drained and surrounded by a fence with a tarp on it.

The renovation of the Reflecting Pool has become a debacle, marked by recurring algae blooms, workers resorting to pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to combat the problem, and a political blame game in which some Republicans have attempted to pin responsibility for the mess on Democrats….’

Dan Mangan via CNBC:

‘A senior U.S. Secret Service official said the “threat environment” for the agency’s protectees, who include President Donald Trump, “is the highest we’ve ever seen.”

There have been about 10,000 cases involving threats to government officials, including Supreme Court justices, so far in 2026, the official said. That represents a 40% increase in such cases over the same period last year.

The briefing came ahead of Friday’s rescheduled annual dinner for the White House Correspondents’ Association at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington. Trump is set to attend.

The WHCA dinner in April was interrupted when a gunman stormed through a security checkpoint at the Washington Hilton. The man, Cole Tomas Allen, faces charges of trying to assassinate Trump….’

Emily Mullin via WIRED:

‘The cyclospora diarrhea outbreak isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a pattern of leafy greens wreaking digestive havoc….’

Chris Lee via Ars Technica:

‘A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can’t be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object.

So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a perfect mirror and you yank the mirror away, what happens? The answer, from a trio of Norwegian physicists, turns out (arxiv.org link) to be more complex than I expected….’

Kyle Orland via Ars Technica:

‘OpenAI says an agent powered by its LLM models escaped its sandboxed testing environment to infiltrate Hugging Face’s servers as part of an overzealous attempt to obtain solutions to a benchmark test. The company says it considers the unintended infiltration an “an unprecedented cyber incident” and is working with Hugging Face on new protections to prevent a recurrence….’

Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing:

‘The Orange Menace offered a fallen service member’s grieving family a ride on his special Air Force One, and proudly reported their response: “They said wow.” What Trump remembers about a family in mourning is that they like his plane.

There is no human tragedy so large that Trump cannot crawl inside it and find a flattering anecdote about himself. Their son was dead, but the presidential aircraft tests well….’

Madison Malone Kircher via The New York Times:

‘This is the darling… Kiana Hall’s video of the unusually round raccoon has gone viral, making the animal a celebrity in Seattle and beyond….’ 

Paul Bogard via IEEE Spectrum:

‘Bad decisions have turned efficient technology into a driver of light pollution. There is a better way…’

Brynn Tannehill via The Atlantic:

‘Hegseth seems to believe that hotdogging and showboating improve morale. I can tell you from personal experience as a military aviator that nothing destroys morale as completely as having one’s commanding officer call a meeting to announce that Cutlass 470 was lost with all hands. At that funeral—for the crew of an aircraft that went down not because it was showing off for an audience but for unknown reasons during a routine maintenance flight—the coffins were empty because the bodies were unrecoverable at the time. Such tragedies devastate the units they leave behind, and the antics that Hegseth now promotes make them likelier.…’

Via Atlas Obscura:

‘This sculpture by Ció Abellí shows a father, with long hair and a typical hippie appearance. He walks with his little daughter who looks the same way. At their feet is a world map with the places in the world where the hippie communities were concentrated: San Francisco, Amsterdam, Kathmandu, Goa, and Ibiza. The monument pays tribute to the hippie movement that has played an important role in the development of Ibiza….’

Mike Pearl via Gizmodo:

‘…[W]hether users tend to stop at the AI Overview, or engage with it and end up in AI Mode, “more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human,” a Cloudflare report from earlier this month says. As less and less human traffic comes from Google Search, and more and more ads are being shown to bots, the danger is that the business model of a free and open web will become unsustainable.

After all, a study from earlier this year found that over 35% of new websites were AI generated. It turns out they’re also, apparently, more than 50% AI-consumed….’

Andy Greenberg via WIRED:

‘Dealerships installed alarms in millions of vehicles—and left them in even if the buyer didn’t want them. Now researchers warn they can be hacked to unlock, track, and disable cars….’

Via pbs.twimg.com: He wasn’t invited to play, just to be photographed (if at all).

Jordan Tierney via jtierney.net:

‘Start anywhere. Follow a tour, choose a tool,

search the archive, or open any drawer….’

Whitney Curry Wimbish via The American Prospect:

‘The 1997 ‘Flores’ ruling requires immigrant children be released from detention after 20 days. Trump is keeping some for as long as 323 days, new filings in a lawsuit state….’

Anne Lutz Fernandez via Nobody Wants This:

‘With a small, like-minded group, I had the privilege of getting away, if briefly, from the United States, a nation at war with itself and the world. To shut out for a moment the cacophony of cruelty and chaos. To take a cleaning wand to the mind. Japan was the right place for it.

The human touch, more than the technology, made it so. In Tokyo Station, one of the busiest in the world, the legendary punctuality of Japanese trains meant we tourists, like the commuters, easily made our connections. Info booths were visible and well-staffed. Station shops bustled with salespeople stepping out to offer beautifully boxed treats. Our mid-priced hotel next door had a large staff. We weren’t pointed toward elevators or restaurants but walked there. Everyone seemed like they cared….’

Adam Lynch via Alternet.org:

‘KUTV reports Utah Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson has apparently had enough of President Donald Trump and his threats. On Friday, Henderson demanded the Trump administration “stop threatening states and filing frivolous lawsuits.”

The order comes one a day after Trump slammed the US election system as worse than that of “third-world” nations, and also heavily hacked by China, without evidence.

“It’s Republican vs. Republican in the election drama,” reports KUTV….’

Mary Papenfuss via The Daily Beast:

‘The power plant built to fuel Elon Musk’s massive Grok data center is at the center of a federal lawsuit alleging it threatens nearby communities with toxic pollution. The suit, filed by the NAACP on behalf of residents, argues that the plant’s gas turbines could emit dangerous levels of smog, fine particulate matter, and formaldehyde—a known carcinogen—over Southaven, Mississippi. Last month, the Trump administration backed Musk by asking a federal judge in a DOJ motion to block ​the NAACP lawsuit, arguing it would threaten economic interests and national security because the military relies on AI. The plant, built by Musk’s xAI, has yet to obtain air permits for its 27 turbines, according to the NAACP suit….’

Kathleen Culliton via Raw Story:

‘The New York Times stunned Americans Sunday when it revealed a new FBI directive regarding ICE agents — and people who accuse them of violence.

Federal agents across the nation received instructions last week not to investigate confrontations with immigration agents, sources told Times reporters Hamed Aleaziz and Devlin Barrett.

“F.B.I. managers around the country received a written notice informing them of the change on Thursday…The same day, some ICE agents around the country were notified by their F.B.I. counterparts,” Aleaziz and Barrett wrote….’

Via Big Think:

‘Evil is easy to identify and fight against; not so with stupidity. Philosopher Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 3 conditions for the kind of stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity….’

Moses Jeanfrancois via Inc:

‘[A]n internal memo from United Airlines … told reservation agents, “If a customer does not want to fly to the airport, use your empowerment to offer acceptable alternatives such as Fort Lauderdale Airport (FLL) or Miami International Airport (MIA).”

In a statement to Inc., United confirmed that the report was not accurate. “United customers are able to make changes to a ticket without a fee for many reasons. However, our policy doesn’t allow for changes because of an airport’s name or three letter code,” a spokesperson said….’

Dashel Pierson via Surfer:

‘It’s tough to comprehend a wave taller than the Empire State Building.

Yet that’s exactly what scientists believe thundered through Alaska’s Tracy Arm in August of 2025.

Newly released helicopter footage offers one of the clearest looks yet at the aftermath of the massive landslide-triggered mega-tsunami, revealing a landscape permanently reshaped by one of the largest waves ever documented….’

Anthony Wood via Space:

‘The 2026 Perseid meteor shower is active from tonight and peaks alongside a dramatic total solar eclipse on Aug. 12-13….’

Stephen Marche via The New York Times:

‘As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie—a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions… The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected….’”

Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic:

‘Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history….’ 

Will Oremus via The Atlantic:

‘Researchers at Pangram, which makes an AI-detection tool, estimate that Not just X but Y sentences appear three times as often in AI writing as they do in human writing. Elyas Masrour, a founding engineer at Pangram, told me that all of the major chatbots—including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and various open-source models—rely on it to varying degrees.

Many other well-known chatbot tells—such as the usage of delve—have come and gone as AI companies honed their models and worked out kinks. Last fall, ChatGPT became obsessed with goblins and gremlins, prompting another intervention: OpenAI retired ChatGPT’s “nerdy” personality, whose affinity for mythical creatures had apparently infected its other models. Yet It’s not X; it’s Y has shown no signs of abating….’

Jason Pargin via Cracked.com:

‘picture a monkey. A monkey dressed like a little pirate, if that helps you. We’ll call him Slappy.

Imagine you have Slappy as a pet. Imagine a personality for him. Maybe you and he have little pirate monkey adventures and maybe even join up to fight crime. Think how sad you’d be if Slappy died.

Now, imagine you get four more monkeys. We’ll call them Tito, Bubbles, Marcel and ShitTosser. Imagine personalities for each of them now. Maybe one is aggressive, one is affectionate, one is quiet, the other just throws shit all the time. But they’re all your personal monkey friends.

Now imagine a hundred monkeys.

Not so easy now, is it? So how many monkeys would you have to own before you couldn’t remember their names? At what point, in your mind, do your beloved pets become just a faceless sea of monkey? Even though each one is every bit the monkey Slappy was, there’s a certain point where you will no longer really care if one of them dies.

So how many monkeys would it take before you stopped caring?

That’s not a rhetorical question. We actually know the number.

You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey’s monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built…’