Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe: gravity works the same way, atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions, and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged throughout space and time. But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions…  ( 16 min )

You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away. This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching dista…  ( 10 min )

What if space and time aren’t the backdrop of the universe,but  rather, are a byproduct of it? NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges.  This idea would mean that distance, gravity, and the passage of time are consequences of the deep interconnectedness created from the Big Bang. This video Why modern physics is forcing us to rethink existence is featured on Big Think.  ( 109 min )

Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place. How the need was identified Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied e…  ( 9 min )

Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing. It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch. The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s gla…  ( 9 min )

Let me tell you how this works. A 26-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan — a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated — opens a spreadsheet, sees that your company’s headcount is 14% higher than a competitor’s, and writes a note to institutional investors that your stock is overweight. That note gets circulated and your stock drops. Your board panics. They call the CEO, who was hired 18 months ago specifically to “unlock shareholder value,” a phrase that should be studied by future anthropologists as one of the great euphemisms of our time. An all-hands meeting is called. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled “Quick Chat.” Th…  ( 12 min )

Also: A UC Berkeley grad named Alysa Liu was suspended by Instagram for sharing a name with the skater.  ( 23 min )

The City Council will vote Tuesday whether to sign off on an up-to-$2 million expansion of its partnership with the controversial vendor amid opposition from privacy and immigration advocates.  ( 29 min )

El parque waterfront de la ciudad y otros lugares emblemáticos locales llevan el nombre del difunto líder de los derechos laborales, recientemente acusado de agredir sexualmente a Dolores Huerta, a niñas y a otras personas.  ( 32 min )

Elle Cowan has partnered with Hammerling Wines to establish the first permanent location for SoDo Donuts.  ( 25 min )

The two-alarm fire, which also downed power lines, began shortly before 4 a.m. in the La Loma Park neighborhood, fire officials said. Two structures were evacuated but there were no injuries reported.  ( 24 min )

Other events include the Itty Bitty night market, a Tuvan throat-singing concert and "The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?" at Shotgun Players.  ( 26 min )

Who could have possibly predicted this, besides everyone?  ( 5 min )

In a feature the dating app says is set to roll out in the U.S. later this spring, Tinder plans to access users' camera rolls to pick photos and determine what they're into.  ( 3 min )

How filmmaker Chris Parr put North Oaks, Minnesota on the map.  ( 5 min )

I’m as surprised as you are. I have no idea how this happened, and I’m scared. My entire life has been flipped on its head, and I don’t see any way to stop what’s coming. Why, God, and why me? It started innocently enough. I became interested in playing the prediction market game after a friend of mine made thousands of dollars betting on single mothers being evicted from their homes, and then turned those thousands into millions by buying stakes in the United States to not meet its 2025 climate goal of reducing CO2 emissions. It was free money, as I saw it. If someone dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the ground on their way to beat up stray dogs, would you pick it up? I made an account on Kalshi, started following the markets, kept a watchful eye on the news, and made my first few dolla…  ( 10 min )

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest. - - -  ( 6 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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The post Before Waging War, Consult Historians First appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 15 min )

Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic interaction as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces on one hand, and General Relativity describing the effects of gravity on the other hand. Wherever they’ve been challenged, from subatomic up to cosmic scales, these two classes of theories have always emerged victorious. And yet, they simply cannot represent all that there is. There are many puzzles that hint at this. We cannot explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the Universe with current physics. N…  ( 16 min )

I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.  What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.  After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”  I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and …  ( 11 min )

An interactive journey about IVF, told from two perspectives.  ( 2 min )

Scientific or Manifest or...?  ( 10 min )

The city’s waterfront park and other local landmarks are named after the late labor rights leader, recently accused of sexually assaulting Dolores Huerta, young girls and others.  ( 30 min )

From war in Iran and ICE to healthcare cuts, Big Tech, and resisting Trump, Simon shared her ideas about what the Democrats need to do.  ( 41 min )

"A Feather and a Fork," from Crystal Wahpepah, whose eponymous restaurant is in Fruitvale, is now available.  ( 26 min )

Con 54 millones de dólares en activos, Sogorea Te’ tiene grandes sueños para un conchal, un sitio arqueológico recuperado en West Berkeley. El impuesto voluntario a las tierras shuumi de la organización se volvió muy popular en East Bay, a pesar de las críticas de otros grupos Ohlone que afirman que el dinero no llega a la comunidad en general.  ( 40 min )

Perched at the top of Rose Walk in North Berkeley, the Arts & Crafts home has original features and modern updates.  ( 26 min )

With $54 million in assets, Sogorea Te' has big dreams for its reclaimed West Berkeley shellmound site. Its voluntary shuumi land tax has become wildly popular in the East Bay even as it's drawn criticism from other Ohlone groups that say the money doesn't reach the broader community.  ( 38 min )

In a letter to senators, the administration offered five concessions—two of which were simply that going forward, officers would follow the law.

The Oklahoma senator, nominated to replace Kristi Noem, is blasé about the use of deadly force.

“We did this overseas, and it’s come home in every conceivable way.”

How a blood-stained surgeon's frock evolved into a pristine symbol of modern science.

“GOP Ohio lawmaker calls for camera monitoring system to prevent child care fraud.” — Dayton Daily News - - - We Republicans know what you, the American people, want most: round-the-clock video surveillance of your children handed over directly to us, your freedom-loving government. How else can we be sure that your hard-earned taxpayer money is well-spent? How do we know that Miss Taylor’s School for Tots isn’t secretly a Taco Bell masquerading as a childcare center? If two children playing aren’t being watched 24-7 through a live feed routed to a government agency, do they even exist? We’re the party of parental choice, so you’ll have the option to either (a) subject your child to constant video surveillance in their childcare program or (b) keep them at home until they turn eighteen …  ( 8 min )

- - - After Annabelle Gurwitch received an out-of-the-blue diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, an existential dread set in. Precision medicine offered a temporary reprieve—but instead of turning into a cancer warrior, Annabelle declared herself a cancer slacker. Her motto: no runs, no ribbons, no religion. Told with her signature wit, warmth, and gimlet eye, Gurwitch draws inspiration from Greek mythology and TV comedies, Kermit the Frog and Samuel Beckett. She accidentally acquires an angel, embraces being in it “just for the sex,” and finds herself on a European van tour selling merch for a heavy metal band. In this hilariously and deeply affecting meditation on mortality, the actress and activist illuminates life with chronic disease, inequities in care, and celebrates tiny victories, t…  ( 15 min )

From Grok to Palantír to “wireheading,” tech bros are renowned for flawlessly using literary references to name and explain technology in ways that absolutely never misunderstand the source texts. Here are some examples you might hear bandied about the Bay Area and beyond. - - - Doublethink | verb To operate two large language models simultaneously, typically one with each hand. Usage: “I don’t care that you’re going into labor, honey. I’m doublethinking with Claude and Grok right now.” - - - Cash-22 | noun A situation in which a startup founder must do unspeakable things to secure necessary funding. Usage: “Our CEO was in a Cash-22 at the Peter Thiel pitch event, and now he’s a mere shell of a man.” - - - Sword of Damocles | proper noun A human-first motivational framework employed in Amazon warehouses. Usage: “Since implementing Sword of Damocles, productivity has increased by 25% while bottle-peeing has remained flat.” - - - Big Brother | proper noun The new word Meta uses for managers. Usage: “My Big Brother gave me ‘missing expectations’ because I haven’t been working hard enough to monetize Marketplace lookie-loos.” - - - Trojan horseable | adjective Describing a non-dating app that is effective for finding dates. Usage: “Zillow” is extremely Trojan horseable. - - - Kfka | proper noun A startup building AI-powered government systems, starting with immigration and visa processing. Usage: “My H-1B visa got denied by Kfka. When I appealed, I had to argue my case to a chatbot that kept referring me to other chatbots.”  ( 7 min )

There is no associated website yet, but the move comes after Trump ordered the release of files related to UFOs.  ( 4 min )

This week we talk about the disappearing (and reappearing) DOGE depositions; how AI is African Intelligence; and what AI job loss reports are missing.  ( 4 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard were recognized for their foundational work in quantum information science. The post Quantum Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations and at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match, or at least are consistent with, the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be. The most successful physical theories of all fall into two…  ( 15 min )

My heart pounded as I approached the stage. The grand wooden pavilion, filled with two hundred of my academic colleagues, stretched before me. I’d already delivered my keynote address the day before: “Dynamical Motifs as the Link Between Neurons and Cognition,” a lecture on how to use tools from artificial intelligence to better understand the human brain. That talk had been a piece of cake. It was today’s talk, part of the Growing Up in Science series — meant to showcase the human behind the scientist — that had me on edge. Previous speakers had opened up about the challenges of being first-generation Americans or overcoming gender bias in academia. But nobody had a story quite like mine. I made it to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Waitstaff bustled around the tables, pouring beverage…  ( 8 min )

I’m on a deadline that is approaching fast to finish writing my next book, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Luckily, my use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has dramatically increased my productivity, so I should hit that deadline. But the increase in my own productivity has gotten me thinking a lot more about what happens when all knowledge workers get a lot more productive with AI. I have written two comparable books in the era before AI, and each time I had a human research assistant to help me. They transcribed my interviews and verbal notes, located material I needed to read, researched areas I did not have time to explore myself, and helped fact-check my writing. My AI research assistants have made me at least twice as productive as I was when I wrote my previous books with …  ( 16 min )

We would hope that the moment that we eternally live in, the “now,” would have a concrete scientific explanation. But the truth is far more complicated, says the relativity of simultaneity.  Jim Al-Khalili explains how the past and future are more fluid than we may think. This video The present is a story your brain assembles after the fact is featured on Big Think.  ( 14 min )

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Eight others were convicted on vague "terrorism" charges—causing serious concern among First Amendment advocates.

Not all UC Berkeley graduate student workers support the proposal, but as voting begins Tuesday, even critics say they expect it to be ratified, averting a strike.  ( 26 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

BUSD issued more than 350 layoff notices this month. Districts across the state have been making deep cuts as well.  ( 28 min )

San Francisco Baykeeper is suing the State Lands Commission over a deal allowing the removal of 1.7 million cubic yards of sand each year from the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.  ( 25 min )

FADE IN. EXT. COUNTRYSIDE – DAY Open on rolling hills of violently oversaturated green. The scenery suggests a temporal twilight zone, some time between 1745 and the present day. Against all statistical likelihood, it is not raining. We zoom in on any ginger AMERICAN actress getting off a tour bus. She steps directly into a pile of cow dung / a procession of priests / the Troubles. An OLD MAN appears over the crest of a hill, accompanied by a SIMPLE-MINDED FOOL and a DOG. The OLD MAN stares across the hills in a wise and vaguely mystical way. OLD MAN The path is just a road that hasn’t found its way home yet. His accent is geographically incoherent yet easily understandable to a global audience without subtitles. Fiddle music begins. - - - INT. MURPHY’S PUB – DAY It is 9 a.m. Ev…  ( 9 min )

1. “She’s lowkenuinely sheesh.” 2. “Relaxmaxxing in languidoily.” 3. “Twosday to Whensday, I’m mogging moids.” 4. “That chopped chud.” 5. “FAHH.” 6. “Pay your fannum tax.” 7. “Fifteen pigeon takee offa you, stlongfella.” 8. “Hoppy on akkant of his joyicity.” 9. “The referee amogus uncanny.” 10. “My salty shmlawg.” 11. “So weenybeenyveenyteeny.” 12. “Comeday morm and you’re vine!” 13. “Raise your ya ya ya.” 14. “Need poggers tea?” 15. “In the twitterlitter.” 16. “Shize? I should shee!” 17. “Stoop if you are abcedminded.” 18. “Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.” 19. “Ohio sober is Ohio stiff.” 20. “Did I hear, ‘Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk?’ Am I delulu?” - - - Answer Key Your child is suffering from brain rot: 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, Your child is quoting Finnegans Wake: 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, Your child is James Joyce suffering from brain rot: 2, 3, 19, 20 You are suffering: 1-20  ( 7 min )

Illustration by Matt Smith. - - - Fuckin’ vikings, dude. I just fuckin’ love vikings. N’ I mean, it’s not just ‘cause they’re awesome that I love ‘em, but alsah ‘cause’ah all the diff’rent ways that they’re awesome. ‘Cause they’re so awesome in so many ways that I can’t even fuckin’ keep track’ah ‘em all, n’ that includes the ways that ahr both real n’ completely made-up, like the hohrned helmets n’ Thor bein’ a blond supah’eero alien. Not that I mind all that stuff, but the real awesome stuff is way, way mo’hr awesome, by which I mean the actual fuckin’ facts as we know ‘em. The true stahries’ah sailin’ intah the fuckin’ unknown, goin’ intah battles so epic that evuhry fuckin’ fantasy authah r’alive today copycats ‘em, n’ behavin’ so goddamn wild n’ outtah-control that people get nickn…  ( 10 min )

“Organic molecules delivered from extraterrestrial materials may have played a key role in supplying building blocks for life on Earth,” said one scientist.  ( 6 min )

Widely cited AI labor research ignores the most important thing AI is doing: Killing the human internet.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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Love pancakes but hate the effort? Then sheet pan pancakes are about to become your new favourite breakfast! Mix the batter, pour it into a pan, and bake until it’s fluffy and golden. No flipping needed! If my daughter could start every morning with fluffy vegan pancakes, she’d be a happy camper. Alas, most mornings […]  ( 31 min )

The post What Are Psychedelic Entities? appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 55 min )

While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from last week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance” (MIT Press). %3Ciframe%20height%3D%2252px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2F6c05474d-b4a1-4ffb-8ad8-943bccf09a10%3Fdark%3Dtrue%26amp%3Bcolor%3D000000%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com      You can also listen to this episode on the Internet Archive or watch the video on YouTube. Part memoir, part battle cry, “Privacy’s Defender” is the story of Cindy’s fights alongside the visionaries who looked at the early internet and understood that the legal and political battles over this new technology - the Crypto Wars, the NSA’s dragnet, the FBI gag orders - were really over the future of free speech, privacy, and power for all.  Cindy Cohn and Cory Doctorow at City Lights.jpg This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, March 10 in front of a packed house at San Francisco’s iconic City Lights Bookstore. For more about the book and Cindy’s national book tour - with stops in places including Seattle, Silicon Valley, Denver, Boston, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, Washington DC and New York City - check out https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender   And finally, stay tuned to this feed; we’re working on a special podcast series featuring key players and moments from the book!  Resources:  The Crypto Wars: Bernstein v. US Department of Justice NSA Spying: Hepting v. AT&T NSA Spying: Jewel v. NSA EFF’s National Security Letter lawsuits  ( 5 min )

What is the shape of the Universe? If you were born into this world anytime before the 1800s, it likely never would have occurred to you that the Universe itself was even permitted to have a shape. Like everyone else, you would have learned geometry starting from the rules of Euclid, where space can be no more complicated than a three-dimensional grid. After starting with that notion of absolute space, you would have applied Newton’s laws of physics, presuming (like everyone else) that the forces between any two objects would act along the one and only straight line connecting them. But we’ve come a long way in our understanding since then, and not only can space itself be curved by the presence of matter and energy, but we can witness and measure those effects directly. It didn’t have to …  ( 18 min )

In the race to build better teams, organizations often turn to the latest productivity frameworks or data-driven performance technologies. Despite this relentless pursuit of efficiency, many workplaces remain creatively stunted, socially fragmented, and psychologically fatigued. What if the breakthrough your team needs isn’t another productivity tool, but a shift in what it sees every day? Art is frequently relegated to decoration. It’s pleasant to look at but rarely integrated into corporate strategy. Art does more than improve aesthetics, though; it can be a catalyst for cognitive strength, emotional nuance, social intelligence, and mental wellbeing. A growing body of research across neuroscience, organizational psychology, and workplace design shows that art changes how teams think, fee…  ( 9 min )

Astrophysicist Sara Seager has redefined how we search for life, shifting the focus from definitive proof to the subtler, messier realm of possibility. By detecting biosignature gases — molecules that might indicate life in a planet’s atmosphere — her work explores what discovery looks like when certainty isn’t guaranteed. Volcanic gases and unknown chemistry can mimic life’s signals, meaning we may never get a perfect answer. But Seager sees beauty in that ambiguity. In adapting the famous Drake Equation, she offers a new framework for discovery, one that embraces the “maybes” as part of the scientific process. For the first time in human history, she says, we’re finally in a position to try. And that alone is extraordinary. This video The biggest obstacle to discovering life beyond Earth is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

The Old Finnish Hall, built in 1908 in West Berkeley, is a landmarked property that comes with a pair of elderly caretakers who’ve lived there for more than 30 years.  ( 27 min )

Three events are planned in Berkeley and another big march is set for Oakland during the next No Kings Day mobilization on March 28.  ( 27 min )

Five-year awards go to STEAM programs — in science, technology, engineering, art and math.  ( 25 min )

The playwright and actor says the jumping-off point for her new play was observing her brother striking and grappling with others in his mixed-martial-arts community.  ( 27 min )

The CEO of Krafton used ChatGPT to push out the head of the studio developing Subnautica 2 against the advice of his own legal team and failed miserably.  ( 5 min )

A newly published study of how college students interact with chatbots and human strangers showed talking to a random person offers more connection than an LLM.  ( 6 min )

A judge in London tossed out witness testimony after discovering the man was receiving coaching through a pair of smartglasses.  ( 5 min )

Site Banner:  Mobile Site Banner:  Link:  EFFecting Change: Privacy's Defender on March 19 Mobile Link:  EFFecting Change: Privacy's Defender on March 19 Banner Text:  EFFecting Change: Privacy's Defender on March 19 Mobile Banner Text:  EFFecting Change: Privacy's Defender on March 19  ( 2 min )

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper.  That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts. But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists …  ( 6 min )

Listen, Dad, I know you’ve never been the biggest fan of John. But I brought the three of us to dinner because I have some news. And I KNOW you’re not going to like it, but here it is: John and I are getting married. Okay, I have to say, I expected yelling, but the swatting at John while he scurried around the table in a fright was completely unnecessary. I can’t believe how close-minded you’ve been throughout this whole thing. When I first brought him home to you and Mom, you didn’t even ask where he went to college—and he graduated from Tisch, Dad!!! Did you even CONSIDER the possibility that a cockroach might be college educated, let alone in the performing arts? On a full scholarship, no less? No. You just assumed that he spent his early twenties languishing around in a rotting log, …  ( 9 min )

Forrest Gump “Life is like a box of chocolates that are no longer allowed for SNAP benefit recipients. You know exactly what you’re gonna get when you morally police the food insecure.” Anchorman “Unpasteurized milk purchased from a wellness influencer was a bad choice. I now have an active listeria infection.” Mommie Dearest “No wire hangers, or fluoride in toothpaste, despite mountains of evidence supporting its safe and effective role in strengthening enamel and preventing cavities, ever!” The Big Lebowski “Yeah, well, you know, that’s just like your opinion, Doc. I know you’ve gone to medical school and have been a practicing medical professional for years, but I am a person with the internet who spends all of their free time googling vaccine ingredients.” Casablanca “Of all t…  ( 9 min )

In a recent survey, three-in-four respondents said they would prefer a once‑daily oral pill over a weekly injection of GLP-1s. So why aren't there more oral options?

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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These fudgy and decadent no bake brownie energy bites are vegan, gluten-free, and made with only 5 ingredients. Ready in just 10 minutes! True story: I am really, really bad at making breakfast on time. It’s not that I try and skip it, but I seem to find a ton of excuses early in the […]  ( 32 min )

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day. The post The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021. The galaxy NGC 7727 shows extended spiral arms: likely the aftermath of a recent major merger between two comparably massive galaxies. The presence of two supermassive black holes inside this galaxy, as well as the extended streams of gas and stars, show one possible outcome of a major merger of two similar-mass, initially gas-rich galaxies. Credit: ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: Durham University/CASU/WFAU Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart. A close-up (left) and wider-field (right) view of the central nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 7727. Just 89 million light-years away, it houses the closest pair of binary supe…  ( 10 min )

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TSMC (and most of Taiwan’s chip industry) spun out of one government research institute. How did ITRI implement one of the most successful industrial policy programs of all time?  ( 17 min )

Recognizing the Worst in Government Transparency  The Foilies were written by EFF's Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and MuckRock's  Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Anna Massoglia.  For the last six years, a class of journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, has kicked off each semester by filing their first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The assignment: Request copies of complaints sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about their favorite TV show, a local radio station, or a major broadcast event, such as the Grammys or the Super Bowl halftime show. The students are learning that the federal government and every state have laws establishing the public's right to request and receive public records. It's a bedrock principle of democracy: I…  ( 12 min )

VisiCalc Spreadsheets rule the world for almost half of a century. I strongly believe that it’s one of the best UXs ever created. Being fairly minimal and easy to learn, it allows users to quickly manipulate data, describe logic, visualise results, or even create art and run GameBoy games. It all started in 1979 when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet software. With a few thousand lines of hand-written 6502 assembly, VisiCalc could successfully run on 16K RAM machines.  ( 8 min )

On Friday, a judge ordered those who uploaded the videos to YouTube to remove them. By Saturday, a backup of the videos was available online as a torrent and on the Internet Archive.  ( 5 min )

Moons orbiting free-floating planets may remain warm for billions of years, raising the possibility some might host stable water, or even life.  ( 7 min )

The government asked a judge to stop the spread of the videos on YouTube. The judge agreed, and ordered their immediate removal.  ( 4 min )

This week, we discuss traveling for reporting and watching way too much DOGE testimony.  ( 4 min )

The data drops as Sen. Bernie Sanders calls for a moratorium on datacenter construction. 'We need to take a deep breath. We need to make sure that AI and robotics work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.'  ( 6 min )

EFF has filed a new lawsuit against the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to ensure that the public has full access to the laws that govern us. Our client Public.Resource.Org (Public Resource), a tiny non-profit founded by open records advocate Carl Malamud, has a mission that’s both simple and powerful: to make government information more accessible. Public Resource acquires and makes available online a wide variety of public documents such as tax filings, government-produced videos, and federal rules about safety and product designs. Those rules are initially created through private standards organizations and later incorporated into federal law. Such documents are often difficult to access otherwise, meaning the public cannot read, share, or comment on them.  Working with Harvar…  ( 5 min )

La Noisette has announced its departure, while its replacement has already been named.  ( 23 min )

The state “daylighting” law aims to improve street safety by barring people from parking too close to intersections, which can block other drivers’ view.  ( 25 min )

Sauna Aid, a charity supported by many Bay Area saunas, has funded retreats for combat medics, led workshops for refugees and transported saunas to the frontlines in Kharkiv.  ( 27 min )

First of all, I must thank the comb. And the brush! And my God, the bowl full of mush! My warriors. My champions. This award will be next to you on the bedside table VERY soon. And thanks to the Great Green Room for giving our little ensemble a place to work, to play, to be. To my fellow nominees, I wish I could go back and tell myself, as an even littler bunny, that someday I’d be in the same category as Madeline from Madeline and Poop from Everybody Poops. Speaking of legends, when I told the quiet old lady whispering “hush” what an honor it was to work with her, guess what she whispered? Yeah. Now, THAT’S humility. And the picture of the cow jumping over the moon: You ARE art. Literally. Now, there were rumors about the young mouse and me not getting along, so let’s put those to re…  ( 8 min )

- - - Four conversations with writers and artists about the role that athletics and training play in their creative lives, featuring Marcus Burke, R. O. Kwon, Alexis Madrigal, and Daniel Alarcón - - - During my senior year of high school, a guidance counselor who had it in for me gleefully noticed I was missing a semester’s worth of PE. I still have the paper on the Cupertino High School letterhead, informing my parents that I was in danger of not graduating. Under “Notes,” the counselor wrote, “Jennifer must pass bowling.” So extreme was my distaste for sports and physical activity that of the three options given to me, which included regular PE or weight lifting, I had chosen the third: driving to Homestead Bowl at 6:30 every morning of that semester. Other than during a brief period, …  ( 13 min )

Well, I should probably get going, but this was such a fun visit. And it was especially great to see you, Jimmy! You know, I actually have a little treat for you because you were so good and because I secretly hate your father: an oversized lollipop that you will spend the next four to six days unsuccessfully trying to eat. You’re very excited, I can tell. How could you not be, given how big and colorful it is and how unfathomably sticky it will soon make every square inch of your house, including rooms you have never even been to yet? So you’re going to insist on opening it before your dad has the chance to say, “We’ll have this after dinner,” and distract you with Mickey Mouse Funhouse episodes until you forget it exists, right? Good boy. You know, opening the oversized lollipop is act…  ( 8 min )

While some bacteriophages play vital roles in laboratory research, others are bent on sabotage.

The last decade has seen vast improvements in humanoid robots, but graduating to widespread use might require going back to the fundamentals. The post Why Do Humanoid Robots Still Struggle With the Small Stuff? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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Kay woke before dawn to the sound of rain rattling the windows. She rose, washed her face, and was just getting dressed when she heard a gentle rap on the apartment door. Han Ying had invited a matronly friend — selected because of her happy marriage and large family — to comb Kay’s hair from girlhood braids into a married woman’s bun. It was the first ritual of Kay’s wedding day, November 21, 1910. Earlier that year, Moy Sing and Han Ying had decided to find their oldest daughter a husband. They waited until Kay turned seventeen but saw no reason for further delay. After all, Kay was already three years older than Han Ying had been at the time of her own marriage. So Moy Sing asked local merchant Lee Weenom, an amateur matchmaker, to find Kay a suitable mate. The task was formidable, but …  ( 13 min )

A London fog latte is easy to make at home and this recipe will show you how! Skip the coffeehouse and brew your own creamy, aromatic, lightly sweetened Earl Grey tea latte with simple vegan ingredients. Spiced chai (and its cousin, the dirty chai latte) is pure cozy comfort. London fog lattes are also comforting, […]  ( 29 min )

Paris* last week — no, I cannot believe I get to utter sentences like that so casually, either, pinch me — and it was really, truly, and surprisingly spring. The magnolia trees at the Jardin du Palais Royal supplied us with a lace curtain of fluttering pink shadows, the daffodils and hyacinth were popping up from the ground like they’d missed us, and everyone was outside and stayed out until after midnight and this energy climbed inside me, evicted all of the seasonal malaise (turned out I was just cold!), and I did my best to bring all of this warmth and joy back to NYC with me. And despite the fact that my grouchy (sorry, “weathered”) friends tried to warn me that we were experiencing a “false spring” and “don’t fall for it,” la la la, I said, it is spring in my heart now — and in my kitchen, and busted out a warm weather salad. Which is to say: I’m sorry, this sudden cold spell might be my fault. Read more »  ( 17 min )

When it comes to the Universe and everything in it, only one thing is absolutely certain: everything that’s now living will someday die. This doesn’t just extend to living beings, but to all sources that use some sort of fuel and emit energy: eventually, as demanded by the laws of thermodynamics, all of that energy-liberating activity will cease. Stars will go dark, stellar remnants will fade away, and even black holes will evaporate. In the far future, our Universe will become something that’s virtually unrecognizable to us today, as our bright, star-and-galaxy-rich cosmos will transform into a sparse, dark landscape from which precious few signals could ever be detected. But there’s a whole lot that’s going to happen before we reach that funerary late-stage state. Given what we know toda…  ( 17 min )

Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced, spanning Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and beyond, came apart within a single generation.  Historian Eric Cline argues this collapse wasn’t the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once. This video The late Bronze Age was the last time our world was this connected is featured on Big Think.  ( 109 min )

This is what no one tells you, in the songs sung about Jason and the Argo. When he spoke like this — so proper and persuasive — his voice was filled with laughter. The amusement was never unkind, it always seemed generous. So the idea that my nephews — scarcely more than children — might be capable of protecting me was not risible, exactly, but somehow enjoyable to him. The way he bestowed his affection was almost regal, as though he were the princess and I were the adventurer. And every word felt like a gift, even as he acknowledged his promises to me. I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I just thought it was one of those vocal mannerisms that foreigners sometimes have. It was only later, when I had seen him under different circumstances, that I knew he found delight in these momen…  ( 10 min )

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Also: Russia blacklists UC Berkeley, and an alumna of a famed local music program pays tribute to it in her new play.  ( 24 min )

It's still technically winter, but temperatures in Berkeley could rise from the high 70s to nearly 90 over the next six days.  ( 25 min )

Other events include the Berkeley Poetry Festival, a free measles vaccine clinic and the launch of a community cycling initiative.  ( 27 min )

The Tony Award-winning tragedy opens March 21.  ( 24 min )

The Berkeley Federation of Teachers said the new 2-year agreement pushes BUSD as far as it can go on pay and benefits without causing a “fiscal emergency.” The school board is expected to review and sign off later in March.  ( 26 min )

“The Defense Department has barred press photographers from briefings on the ongoing U.S.-Israeli military conflict with Iran after they published photos of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that his staff deemed ‘unflattering’…” -– The Washington Post - - - The world is a dangerous place right now—with US military strikes on suspected “drug boats” in the Caribbean, the threat of unilateral military action in Latin America, and a poorly defined war in Iran that I started. That is exactly why it’s critical that I look jacked as shit in the media. As the secretary of defense, my job isn’t only to designate cartels as “terrorists” and oust leaders of countries that happen to sit on massive oil reserves. I also have to maintain the troops’ respect. And nothing undermines morale faster than an…  ( 8 min )

Musical Ergonomic Chairs Players walk around a group of mesh-backed task chairs with lumbar support. When the music stops, each player sits and tells the person to their left where they’re experiencing joint discomfort. The player who doesn’t get a chair goes to the nearest CVS to buy topical analgesic creams as party favors. Hot Air-Fried Potato Players preheat a basket-style air fryer to 385 degrees and add some chopped, seasoned Yukon gold potatoes. The air fryer is passed around for ten minutes, shaking once halfway through. Objective: just to be air frying with good friends and talking about air frying. Your Overindulged Son Simon Says Your twelve-year-old son Simon—if he’s available and feels like it—sits in the center of the room and makes demands. Players try to say no in a …  ( 8 min )

TO: Jordan, Mortgage Underwriter FROM: Greg and Janice, Home Buyers Good morning, Please see the responses to your questions below and in italics. Greg and I are looking forward to getting this process done so we can move forward on the house. Sincerely, Greg and Janice 1. Our analysis showed that the commute for your jobs would be a little bit longer for you both: ten minutes for Greg, twelve minutes for Janice. We were wondering what your motivation is for moving if you have to drive longer to get to work? We thought that the neighborhood was nicer than our current one, and the schools there would be better for our child. 2. There was a little bit of a downturn in Greg’s income between 2024 and 2025 ($200,000 to $197,000). I know it’s not a big change to some people, but I’m sure…  ( 9 min )

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet. They create unnecessary and unconstitutional barriers for adults and young people to access information and express themselves online. They hurt small and open-source developers. And none of the available age verification options are perfect in terms of protecting private information, providing access to everyone, and safely handling sensitive data.  Last year, EFF raised concerns about A.B. 1043 as one of several bills in the California legislature that took the wrong approach to protecting young people online—by focusing on censorship rather than privacy. Now that A.B. 1043 is set to go into effect in 2027, we've received a lot of questions about its possible effects…  ( 5 min )

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement. “I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota’s proposed age-verification bill, simply won’t “protect children.” It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users’ identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we’ve discussed before, the bill’s definition of speech that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors” is notoriously bro…  ( 11 min )

The hours of videos provide fascinating, or perhaps horrifying, insight into the thinking of someone inside DOGE.  ( 7 min )

Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.  ( 6 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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Federal officers at Camp East Montana have beaten people for requesting medicine and even placed bets on which detainee would attempt suicide next.

From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy. In other words, everything about you, including your body and mind, is destined to eventually break down. Although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own. No matter how quickly you move or how deep of a gravitational field you enter, you’ll still experience the passage of time as normal: …  ( 17 min )

There is a rich and long history to the philosophy of reading. In his Phaedrus, Plato attacked reading as corrupting true philosophical dialectic. Later, in his 1597 book Essays, Francis Bacon wrote that “Reading maketh a full man.” And, in more modern times, Maryanne Wolf has said that the reading brain is under threat from digital culture. That was a fairly generic paragraph to open an article about reading. It’s so generic that you’ve likely skimmed past it. But if you’re one of the 20% who have made it to this point, thank you. Well done. Most people who open this article might spend around 50 more seconds on it, even though our website’s AI system estimates that reading it will take at least five minutes. In those 50 seconds, most readers will probably jump to the next section — drawn…  ( 9 min )

The City Council vote, rescinding a nearly three-decade-old directive, comes amidst broader changes to BPD’s access to surveillance technology and other hardware.  ( 26 min )

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive is hosting a two-month series of Iranian films, offering a layered look at life in the country with a focus on the stories of women.  ( 25 min )

The DMV’s decision follows a new federal rule that limits immigrants’ license eligibility to a much narrower set of legal statuses.  ( 26 min )

Emmanuel Galvan's mission to spread masa and other traditionally made Mexican foods has grown from a pop-up into its first permanent home, Café Bolita, taking over the former Standard Fare space.  ( 29 min )

The money from Alameda County’s Measure W will help fund supportive housing at People’s Park and affordable homes on a South Berkeley church’s property.  ( 26 min )

“Three cargo vessels have been hit by ‘unknown projectiles’ in the Strait of Hormuz, maritime authorities say, as pressure intensifies on one of the world’s most important shipping lanes. Traffic through the strait, a vital corridor for oil, has fallen sharply since Israel and the US attacked Iran in late February.” — BBC - - - As the United States unleashes the destructive force of our incredible military power on our longtime enemy (and anyone else who happens to be around), we must remain mindful that Iran is not some abstract boogeyman. Iran is a real place. It is full of real people. And those people and that place are adjacent to a narrow seaway that is vital to international trade. And that seaway is full of real, beautiful, complex, fragile shipping containers. In the fog of war,…  ( 8 min )

“Paramount Skydance appears to have won the bidding war to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery. If the $110.9 billion deal goes through, it will place a vast media kingdom in the hands of Paramount CEO and staunch Trump administration supporter David Ellison, with his father, billionaire Larry Ellison, also likely to play a role. This includes nearly unprecedented access to a variety of news organizations and Hollywood tentpoles.” — The Week - - - INT. TRAUMA BAY – DAY A TODDLER wheezes. Bright red rash. Monitor blares. DR. ROBBY: What’ve we got? DR. JAVADI: Two-year-old. Fever 104. Persistent cough. Conjunctivitis. Rash started at the hairline this morning and is moving south. DR. ROBBY: Mouth? DR. JAVADI: Koplik spots. Tiny white spots on buccal mucosa. Classical presentation. It’s mea…  ( 8 min )

The Woodland Dystopian Writers Guild  ( 6 min )

(Note: This post is also cross-posted on the Let's Encrypt blog) As announced earlier this year, Let's Encrypt now issues IP address and six-day certificates to the general public. The Certbot team here at the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been working on two improvements to support these features: the --preferred-profile flag released last year in Certbot 4.0, and the --ip-address flag, new in Certbot 5.3. With these improvements together, you can now use Certbot to get those IP address certificates! If you want to try getting an IP address certificate using Certbot, install version 5.4 or higher (for webroot support with IP addresses), and run this command: sudo certbot certonly --staging \ --preferred-profile shortlived \ --webroot \ --webroot-path <filesystem path to webserv…  ( 6 min )

Have you ever seen a really creepy targeted ad online? One that revealed just how much these companies know about your life? It's unsettling enough to see how much companies know about you—but now we have confirmation that the government is also tapping the advertising surveillance machine to get your data. We're explaining the dangers of targeted advertising and location tracking, and the latest in the fight for privacy and free speech online, with our EFFector newsletter. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers a victory for protesters seeking to hold police accountable, a troubling conflict over the Department of Defense's use of AI, and how advertising surveillance enables government surveillance. Prefer to listen in? Big news: EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms! In this episode we chat with EFF Staff Attorney Lena Cohen about how targeted advertising can reveal your location to federal law enforcement. You can find the episode and subscribe in your podcast player of choice:  %3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2F924c6faa-1887-475b-a72c-0be4b6f68ba5%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com     Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight against online surveillance when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

A step-by-step guide to making de novo binders.

Copilot “can help with routine Senate work, including drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis,” the memo says.  ( 5 min )

What experts say about AI psychosis, how ProtonMail data helped the FBI identify a protester, and a viral app that exposed incredibly personal data of hundreds of thousands of people.  ( 4 min )

To better understand what exactly we’re looking at in this dystopian surveillance hellscape, 404 Media’s Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox joined Reddit's r/technology for an Ask Me Anything session.  ( 14 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Pushed down to a certain scale, the laws of physics seem to fall apart. Astrid Eichhorn, a leader in an area of study called asymptotic safety, thinks we just need to push a little further. The post Where Some See Strings, She Sees a Space-Time Made of Fractals first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Ever since the final years of the original space race, NASA has been unrivaled as the world leader in space sciences and space exploration. In particular, NASA astrophysics has brought us a wide range of space telescopes that have pushed the frontiers of humanity’s knowledge across the electromagnetic spectrum, from the highest-energy gamma-rays through X-rays, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and even microwave wavelengths. Whenever we consider building a new observatory, the big thing that scientists focus on is what we call discovery potential, or “how much” ability there is to see beyond the limits of our current instruments and observatories. Not all wavelengths have received equal attention, however, and some wavelengths have been woefully neglected in recent years. In particular, the…  ( 16 min )

From a scientific perspective, studying consciousness is a bit like trying to describe the singularity inside a black hole from the window of a spacecraft in its gravitational orbit. We can see how the black hole warps and contorts the space around it: Superheated dust and gas spiral inward; radiation and strange gravitational waves emanate outward.  But from this outside view, observing the singularity inside the black hole is impossible. The event horizon blocks all attempts. Similarly, as outside observers, we cannot directly access the conscious experiences of other beings. When we focus our third-person scientific tools on the places we suspect our mental lives to reside — namely, our brains (and bodies, more generally) — all we see is the stuff of physical reality: electrical activit…  ( 12 min )

Partway through our conversation about his new book Good Writing: How to Improve Your Sentences, Neal Allen lost his train of thought. He turned toward his wife and co-author, Anne Lamott. The two riffed briefly, their faces slightly angled away from their computer and from me. “It will come back,” Lamott said. He nodded briefly and repeated: “It will come back.” And it did. “Oh!” Allen said, facing the screen, and off we went. It was a small exchange, the kind you might expect from a married couple, but I jotted it down anyway, sensing it may prove significant. As we talked, the two continued to finish each other’s thoughts, nudging one another forward, even setting the record straight. (At one point, Lamott said Allen introduced his 36 “writing rules” on their second date. Allen reminded…  ( 14 min )

Jim Al-Khalili introduces the technologies emerging from the second quantum revolution: computers that exploit superposition to solve problems that would take today’s best supercomputers billions of years, sensors that read individual neurons firing inside your skull, and cameras that image biological tissue using light and not touch. This video The idea so strange Einstein thought it broke quantum physics is featured on Big Think.  ( 20 min )

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Ananya Rupanagunta arrived at UC Berkeley wanting to be a doctor. Three years later, she’s leading The Daily Californian through one of its most challenging years ever.  ( 34 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Non-credentialed employees appear most at risk of losing their job. The school district has until May 15 to send final notices.  ( 26 min )

The government should not help a religious institution to punish or deter members from inquiring about their faith. Yet, once again, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society is trying to use flimsy copyright claims to exploit the special legal tools available to copyright owners in order to unmask anonymous online speakers. And, once again, EFF has stepped in to urge the courts not to give Watch Tower’s attempts the force of law, with the help of local counsel Jonathan Phillips of Phillips & Bathke, P.C. EFF’s client, J. Doe, is a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who became interested in the history of the organization’s public statements, and how they’ve changed over time. They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library, allowing othe…  ( 6 min )

Over the last decade or so, the tech industry has tried, and mostly failed, to make “smart glasses”—tech-infused glasses with cameras, AI, maps, displays, and more—a thing. But over the past year, products like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses and Oakley’s Meta Glasses have gone from a curious niche to the mainstream.  Before you strap a dashcam to your face and sprint out into the world filming everything and everyone in your life, there are some civil liberties and privacy concerns to consider before buying or using a pair. Meta is the biggest company that makes these sorts of glasses and their partnerships with Ray-Ban and Oakely are the most popular options, so we’ll be mostly focusing on them here. Others, like models from Snapchat are similar in form but far less ubiquitous. But Meta w…  ( 9 min )

The rapidly escalating conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which started when the company refused to let the government use its technology to spy on Americans, has now gone to court. The Department of Defense retaliated by designating the company a “supply chain risk” (SCR). Now, Anthropic is asking courts to block the designation, arguing that the First Amendment does not permit the government to coerce a private actor to rewrite its code to serve government ends. We agree. As EFF, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and multiple other public interest organizations explained in a brief filed in support of Anthropic’s motion, the development and operation of large language models involve multiple expressive choices protected by the First Amendment. Requiring a com…  ( 6 min )

‘Elon Musk is an aggressive and irresponsible salesman, who has a long history of making dangerous design choices, and over-promising the features of his products.’  ( 5 min )

“I think we often underestimate their capabilities,” said one of the researchers who uncovered a pre-Inca trade route linking the Amazon rainforest to the Pacific coast.  ( 3 min )

A couple of 20-year-old developers make $500,000 a month promising to help men to stop watching porn, but exposed their private porn watching habits.  ( 4 min )

Dear Faculty, Staff, Students, and AI Summarization Tools, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your patience as we explore innovative solutions to the recent string of gruesome hippopotamus attacks reported across central campus. Your steadfast commitment to our strategic mission, despite the multiple tramplings, maulings, and other encounters we shall henceforth refer to as “terminal networking opportunities” has not gone unnoticed. While this hippo-centric challenge is unique to our university, we have long prided ourselves on being trailblazers in academia, and I hope you will join me in applauding our incredible institution and its recent stewardship of the world’s third-largest land mammal. How we respond to adversity defines us. We are strongest when we stand together—as de…  ( 8 min )

From the innovators who brought you Taking a Nap and Just Chilling, Free Time is a luxury experience beyond your wildest dreams. Free Time isn’t just a new product—it’s a total wellness optimization platform. It’s not an app but rather a mind-blowing vessel of unstructured time where you can do anything your heart desires, or nothing at all. Your Free Time comes loaded with options that are as boundless as your imagination. You can lie on the couch and read a novel, or just space out and drool. Go for a walk if you want. Stop and stare at a bird and take dozens of pictures, if that’s your kink. Do you want to buy a big pretzel from that German food truck and eat it for twenty minutes, even though that sounds like way too long? Go for it. This is Free Time. Dip it in cheese and stand aro…  ( 8 min )

The post After The AI Revolution appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 22 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

This homemade vegan tater tot recipe is crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and the flavour is far better than store-bought. These are SO worth it! Most store-bought tater tots are vegan, but are they delicious? Well. I’d say that they’re more about texture than flavour, but with this homemade tater tot recipe, […]  ( 31 min )

There are, in general, two ways in which scientific advancement occurs. There’s the slow, incremental change that represents most scientific advances: where the existing scientific foundation gets built upon in a small but meaningful way. Typically, we perform experiments or observations, acquire new data, better determine key parameters about whatever it is we’re investigating, but in a way that doesn’t invalidate our revolutionize our prior understanding. On the other hand, there are also scientific revolutions: where a new discovery, or sometimes even just a new theoretical framework, blows up our old scientific foundation, and demands that we replace it with an entirely new conception about how some phenomenon in the Universe actually works. This latter class of advances — representing…  ( 17 min )

Gretchen Rubin is a genuine multi-hyphenate. She began her career as a clerk in the Supreme Court and switched to writing when she had an idea for a book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, which was published in 2000. Bestselling books on happiness, habit-making and breaking, personality tendencies, decluttering, and the five senses followed. Today, she also dispenses wisdom on her podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, on which her sister Elizabeth Craft acts as co-host and guinea pig. Last year, Rubin launched a second podcast, Since You Asked, which she presents with the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb.    Big Think caught up with Rubin for a chat about happiness, habits, and how we can best meet our own expectations — even when we put everyone else first. Big Think: What tips do you ha…  ( 10 min )

American culture demands that pain be productive. Historian Kate Bowler explores how the obsession with finding meaning in suffering turns into what she calls “purpose monsters”: the need to make every loss, failure, or tragedy count for something. But not everything happens for a reason. And not all pain is a lesson. Bowler argues that grief deserves the dignity of honesty, not reframing. Instead of rearranging the past to find meaning, she suggests asking a different question: What’s left? And what might still be beautiful? This video Why pain doesn’t need to teach you anything is featured on Big Think.  ( 7 min )

“The threats posed by Iran to the United States, while potentially serious, weren’t imminent. So Trump and his officials have redefined ‘imminent’ to include distant, indirect, and theoretical risks. They’ve stretched the word beyond any semblance of its meaning.” — Will Saltan, The Bulwark - - - Listen up here, you jobless paid agitators. The US had to attack Iran because Iran has been an imminent threat to the US for forty-seven years. Some critics will probably say that a forty-seven-year-old threat doesn’t sound so imminent and that I don’t know what the word even means, or have never seen a dictionary, and don’t really understand how language works. To them I say: photosynthesis. Followed by: This is not the time for linguistic nitpicking. It’s time for irresolute action amid crysta…  ( 8 min )

“Death toll in Middle East surpasses 1,100 as missile strikes continue.” — The Independent Gas prices continue to surge in the US, rising 14 percent in a week." — New York Times - - - Questions are flying, ever since the start of Sepharax the Cruel’s Thousand-Year Blood Reign. Whether it’s the Pit of Souls or the Child Reapers, there’s a lot to be worried about. But most of all? The price at the pump. It’s confusing, but our explainer has you covered. The Undead Unfortunately, the appearance of armies of the dead, awakened to wage indiscriminate war on all humankind, could potentially push gasoline beyond $3.50 per gallon. The Scorpion Venom Rain The acidic poison constantly falling from the skies isn’t just dissolving our pets. It’s also eroding our transportation infrastructur…  ( 8 min )

I’ve made contracts with every sort of lowlife. I’ve been to the crossroads. I’ve been down to Georgia. I’ve signed agreements with legions of lawyers, living, as I do, in the details, and ended up with the souls of everyone except Daniel Webster, that prig-tastic blowhole. But Donald Trump? Not worth it. Maybe you thought I already owned Trump’s soul. How else could someone so gobsmackingly incompetent fail upwards all the way to a second presidential term? But social media, misogyny, and the everloving shitshow known as the also gobsmackingly incompetent “Democratic Party”—that’s on you, humans. As folks in our Fifth Circle say about Trump, ” Wow, does his shit stink.” And that place reeks so bad, the demons wear gas masks. By the way, there’s an easy tell if I’ve got the pink slip to…  ( 9 min )

Plus: Kristi Noem is fired as DHS secretary, a listener asks about libertarian drug use, and new polling reveals Americans distrust AI and each other.

The SAFE act, introduced by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), is the first of many likely proposals we will see to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008—and while imperfect, it does propose a litany of real and much-needed reforms of Big Brother’s favorite surveillance authority.  The irresponsible 2024 reauthorization of the secretive mass surveillance authority Section 702 not only gave the government two more years of unconstitutional surveillance powers, it also made the policy much worse. But, now people who value privacy and the rule of law get another bite at the apple. With expiration for Section 702 looming in April 2026, we are starting to see the emergence of proposals for how to reauthorize the surveill…  ( 9 min )

We're celebrating the launch of Privacy's Defender, a new book by EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn on Thursday, March 12—and we want you to join us! Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Join the festivities for a live conversation between Cindy Cohn and Annalee Newitz followed by a book signing with Cindy. REGISTER TODAY!  $20 General Admission for 1 $30 Discounted tickets for 2 $12.50 Student Ticket All proceeds benefit EFF's mission. Want your own copy of Privacy's Defender? Save $10 when you preorder the book with your ticket purchase WHEN: Thursday, March 12th, 2026 6:30…  ( 7 min )

Join EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in conversation with 404 Media Cofounder Jason Koebler to discuss Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, Cindy’s personal story of standing up to the Justice Department, taking on the NSA, and tangling with the FBI to protect our right to digital privacy. The highly anticipated book asks the fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Join the livestream for a live discussion followed by by Q&A. EFFecting Change Livestream Series: Privacy's Defender Thursday, March 19th 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Pacific This event is LIVE and FREE! Accessibility This event will be live-captioned and recorded. EFF is committed to improving accessibility for our events. If you have any accessib…  ( 6 min )

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Gus's, The Barbary, The Athletic Club, and Xocolate's Rockridge shop were some of the food businesses to shutter recently.  ( 27 min )

Paramedics tried to revive Lon Turner, 67, of El Cerrito, to no avail. He was pronounced dead at the scene, near the Ohlone Greenway.  ( 24 min )

The musician's “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag” was a four-lettered rebuke to the Vietnam War that became an anthem for protesters. He had lived in Berkeley since 1965.  ( 29 min )

They saved the Bay, brought subsidized child care to the working class, and fought for the civil rights of disabled, Black and trans people. A new book celebrates dozens of “unsung” Bay Area heroines.  ( 28 min )

The post The Quest For Contributive Justice appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 11 min )

Viral capsid structure is a geometric packing problem under genetic constraints.

Cecilia D’Anstasio on Roblox’s efforts to protect children from pedophiles.  ( 4 min )

Mental health experts say identifying when someone is in need of help is the first step — and approaching them with careful compassion is the hardest, most essential part that follows.  ( 4 min )

The 'Freedom Trucks' will haul AI slop George Washington on a tour across 48 American states.  ( 6 min )

Every second, hundreds to thousands of molecules move through thousands of nuclear pores in each of your cells. A new high-definition view reveals the machine in action. The post Disorder Drives One of Nature’s Most Complex Machines first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

Puffy, light and tender, these German pancakes are everything you love about the traditional version, but made without the eggs or dairy.  German pancakes are nothing like typical vegan pancakes. While they share a name, German pancakes are tender and custard-y in the middle, golden and crisp on the edges, and they puff up like […]  ( 30 min )

Whenever stars are born, their masses determines their fates. The (modern) Morgan–Keenan spectral classification system, with the surface temperature range of each star class shown above it, in kelvin. The overwhelming majority of stars today are M-class stars, with only 1 known O- or B-class star within 25 parsecs. Our Sun is a G-class star, along with about 5-10% of total stars. However, in the early Universe, almost all of the stars were O- or B-class stars, with an average mass 25 times greater than average stars today. In general, more massive stars live shorter lives, and die in more explosive fates. Credit: LucasVB/Wikimedia Commons; Annotations: E. Siegel Sun-like stars evolve into giants, blow off their outer layers, and contract: forming white dwarfs. From their earliest be…  ( 11 min )

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Since 1960, the world has lost hundreds of languages — and gained thousands.  ( 17 min )

When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sight: a dark night sky, glittering with many hundreds or even thousands of stars. Depending on how dark your sky was, you could spot up to 6000 stars at once, as well as deep-sky objects, the plane of the Milky Way, and only the rare, occasional satellite streak. As time went on, more and more satellites were launched, bringing us up to around 2000 active satellites as of 2019. And then we entered the era of satellite megaconstellations, beginning with the launch of the first Starlink satellites. Now, nearly 7 full years later, there are over 17,000 active and defunct satellite payloads in orbit, with approximately 100 times as many satellites proposed…  ( 7 min )

Bioarchaeologists recently identified a murdered medieval royal. Now, they are trying to shed light on other ancient deaths.

A NASA spacecraft into a small asteroid in 2022 moved its orbit around the Sun, according to a study that presents the “first-ever measurement of human-caused change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body.”  ( 7 min )

A classic fried tofu stir-fry that’s bang-full of flavour My funny, curious, panda-loving daughter, Arya, is turning nine this week. So I wanted to write a recipe to celebrate her and some of her favourite things to eat. Arya adores the chewiness of udon, the bounciness of tofu, the sweet, sour saltiness of sweet soy and tamarind, the crunch of cabbage and she’d put chilli (in any form) over her breakfast cereal if she could (although it’s optional in this recipe). Happy birthday, Arya. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

For the last hundred years, women have had pivotal and far too often unsung roles in building and shaping the technology that we now use every day. Many have heard of Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computer programming, but far fewer know Mary Allen Wilkes, a prominent modern programmer who wrote much of the software for the LINC, one of the world’s first interactive personal computers (it could fit in a single office and cost $40,000, but it was the 60’s). Decades earlier, when the first all-electronic, digital Eniac computer was built in the 40’s, the “software” for it was written by women: Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and Ruth Lichterman.  It’s thankfully become more common knowledge that actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr co-created the conc…  ( 10 min )

In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us.   Anna Politkovskaya  Jillian York, Activist  This International Women’s Day, I want to honor the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who relentlessly exposed political and social abuses, endured harassment and violence for her work, and was ultimately killed for telling the truth. I had just started my career when I learned of her death, and it forced me to confront that freedom of expression isn’t an abstract principle but rather something people risk—and sometimes lose—their lives for.  Her story reminds me that journalism at its best is an act of moral courage, not just a profession. In…  ( 8 min )

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early reports show that ChaptGPT uninstalls rose nearly 300% after the company announced the deal—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, conceded that the initial agreement was “opportunistic and sloppy.” He then re-published an internal memo on social media stating that additions to the agreement made clear that “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Securit…  ( 7 min )

The president himself portrayed Renée Good and Alex Pretti as would-be murderers, and he did not seem troubled by the homeland security secretary's slander of them.

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

The proposal to allow taller development on College, Solano and North Shattuck avenues has faced opposition from merchants and residents, who fear new development could push out small businesses.  ( 30 min )

The popular attraction’s future at the park is still uncertain, but the Redwood Valley Railway and East Bay Regional Park District may be getting closer to an agreement.  ( 29 min )

A dedicated political fundraiser for Democratic pro-choice women at the state and national level, she was also active in Berkeley PTAs and pushed to pass a major ballot measure funding the city's schools.  ( 26 min )

“Looksmaxxing”—achieving the hottest, manliest version of yourself—can be intimidating. It’s hard to know where to start, but we recommend with your jaw. Crack that bad boy wide open. A big, broad, shockingly vast jaw is the bedrock of masculinity. You’ve heard of the jaws of life—get ready for the “jaws of wife,” because the women will be flocking in short order. Plus, while your jaw’s wired shut and healing, nobody makes you talk about your feelings. You can sit in silence with your boys for six to eight weeks. Soon enough, you’ll be mewing in your newly minted maw. Next, take a look at your legs. Those gotta get longer. A lot longer. You can surgically break and lengthen them at either the femur or the tibia, dealer’s choice. But for the record, breaking the femur hurts more, so men w…  ( 9 min )

Carrie Brownstein delivers a few sports-related tips and pointers. - - - Q: My partner is the captain of a coed dodgeball league and has started hinting that he wants me to attend more games. I went to one recently and found myself feeling secondhand embarrassment for him. The self-serious competition, the mock leadership, the flaring tempers, the matching uniforms (which he designed)—all this ado over a game we all played as twelve-year-olds. I’m not usually so judgmental, but something about watching him get so worked up about these games has brought out a new side of me. I truly don’t know if I can go to another game and keep the grimace off my face. How do I excuse myself from attending without hurting his feelings? Dodging Mortification Minneapolis, MN A: I’m getting vicarious emb…  ( 9 min )

For fifteen years or so, I’d been kicking around the idea of resurrecting the artist-apprentice model that reigned in the art world for hundreds of years. Again and again, I’d heard from young people who lamented the astronomical and ever-rising cost of art school. For many college-level art programs, the total cost to undergraduates is now over $100,000 a year. I hope we can all agree that charging students $400,000 for a four-year degree in visual art is objectively absurd. And this prohibitive cost has priced tens of thousands of potential students out of even considering undertaking such an education. For years, I mentioned this issue to friends in and out of the art world, and everyone, without exception, agreed that the system was broken. Even friends I know who teach at art school…  ( 18 min )

As a cisgender, white, bisexual second son of a viscount, and as a gentleman landowner of multiple estates on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Celts and Saxons, I don’t see race. Of late, many of my acquaintances have expressed very great wonder at this. I set down my lived experience here in the hopes that it may serve as an example. On the eve of the 1815 season, I attended my mama’s masquerade ball at Bridgerton House. Even as I entered the ballroom, members of the Ton recognized me, despite my attempts at concealment—I am taller than my brothers and exceedingly well built, and also I wasn’t wearing a costume and my mask was small. A young lady curtseyed to me and said she had heard I was a devotee of Thomas Lawrence, a great master of portraiture who had recently exhibited at th…  ( 10 min )

This week, we discuss a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerous narrative.  ( 4 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

A straightforward conjecture about runners moving around a track turns out to be equivalent to many complex mathematical questions. Three new proofs mark the first significant progress on the problem in decades. The post New Strides Made on Deceptively Simple ‘Lonely Runner’ Problem first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Upside down apple cake swaps the usual pineapple for tender baked apples and warm, cozy spices. The caramelised top—which becomes the bottom when you flip it!—makes the cake extra special.  Everyone is familiar with pineapple upside down cake. Well, let me introduce you to its cousin, upside down apple cake! It’s exactly what you think […]  ( 33 min )

H. Ross Perot, former presidential candidate and founder of multinational IT company Electronic Data Systems (EDS), once said, “Talk is cheap. Words are plentiful. Deeds are precious.”   He’s right. Deeds are what make intelligence powerful. Intelligence without action is philosophy. Intelligence with action is civilization. Much of what we’ve seen from the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) companies has revolved around words: You go to their chatbot, ask it a question, and it responds. Over the past couple of years, some have taken this a step further with AI agents — those can actually do things, but only things you’ve told them to do. The next frontier in AI is not better chat. It is not even better agents. The next frontier is proactive AI, the kind that takes action, learns in real…  ( 14 min )

Here on Earth, signal degradation is a real problem whenever we transmit information to one another. Signals like sound, light, and gravity spread out through space in three dimensions, becoming weaker and weaker as you travel farther from the source. The medium that the signal travels through alters the signal’s properties as well, as an oncoming train sounds different from the air, with your ear to the ground, or from submerged in a body of water. And if there are interfering signals to contend with — like sound or light from additional sources — that “noise” can also degrade the quality of the signal, at least from the perception of the signal’s recipient. Surely these factors, as well as potential other factors, that affect signals as they travel through the expanding Universe, particu…  ( 17 min )

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Time feels obvious, but physics tells a stranger story about its existence: Theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili explores why our sense of time may be incredibly misleading, including the idea that past, present, and future might all exist at once. This video The block universe: a theory where every moment already exists is featured on Big Think.  ( 85 min )

It is March 27, 1933. Here is a headline in the New York Times: “Hitler Is Supreme Under Enabling Act.” Under that headline: “Chancellor, Preeminent Over Cabinet, Is Now Practically the German Government.” A few lines later, under that: “All Legislative Powers Have Been Transferred to Regime, Free to Refashion National Life.” How might that transfer of powers, making the chancellor “free to refashion national life,” be justified? Is there a theory? To say the least, that is a complicated question, but for a glimpse, turn to the justification by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt of what happened in Germany on June 30, 1934. That was the Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler ordered his elite guards to murder hundreds of people, including the leaders of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung…  ( 12 min )

Anytime you reach deeper into the unknown than ever before, you should not only wonder about what you’re going to find, but also worry about what sort of demons you might accidentally unearth. In nuclear physics, discovering the internal structure of the atom led to enormous advances, but also brought us the dangers of radioactivity and atomic weapons. In the realm of particle physics, that double-edged sword arises the farther we probe into the high-energy Universe. The better we can explore the previously inaccessible energy frontier, the better we can reveal the high-energy processes that shaped the Universe in its early stages. Many of the mysteries of how our Universe began and evolved from the earliest times can be best investigated by this exact method: colliding particles at higher…  ( 17 min )

BUSD families are being urged to monitor for symptoms and keep sick kids at home. On campus, students and teachers expressed surprise and some concern.  ( 28 min )

Kathy Lee, who was interim director of police accountability before Hansel Aguilar was hired in 2022, has been nominated to return to the role, again on an interim basis. Aguilar was abruptly fired by the council last month.  ( 25 min )

Lulu's Little Kitchen, 'ammatka, Ox 9 and Saints Smokehouse were just a few of the restaurants to recently debut.  ( 28 min )

Other events include a lecture featuring Pacific Islander and Indigenous sea navigators, plus an exhibition that highlights folded artistry.  ( 28 min )

Her work at UC Berkeley —examining how space, materials, relationships and routines shape children’s experiences — informed her groundbreaking child care rating system, employed in over 30 countries.  ( 27 min )

“In order to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it." — Washington Post - - - Hello, valued skeptics and losers currently writing think pieces about how the AI bubble is going to burst. It’s me, AI. I’m just checking in after the news that the U.S. military struck roughly a thousand Iranian targets in the first twenty-four hours of war, killing over a thousand people. Quick question, tho: Does that sound like the résumé of tech that’s about to be put out to pasture? I mean, sure, I sometimes screw up a fact or give horrible advice, but have…  ( 8 min )

“Dubai influencers’ lives of luxury interrupted by Iran strikes: ‘The image of safety has been shattered.’” — The Guardian - - - Thanks to everyone who has reached out to me. Never did I imagine that my [HOLIDAY / EXOTIC FOOD CRAWL / COMPED STAY IN THIS SIX-STAR HOTEL & SPA] would be interrupted by a war whose geopolitical consequences would be so unfathomable, and whose timing would be so inconvenient to me personally. When I first planned this trip, I had no idea that war was even on the horizon. I guess that’s what happens when you get your news from [MEMES / GROK / COTTAGECORE TOK / THE CBS SUBSTACK]. My spidey sense did tell me that something bad was coming, but I thought that was just the effects of the seafood-themed buffet. By the time I put two and two together, all the plane ti…  ( 9 min )

“Just peachy” Things are going well… not! “Very cherry” You’ve got a pit in your stomach. “Basically banana” Today feels like your day. You weren’t ready yesterday, tomorrow’s not guaranteed, but today? Your golden window of opportunity. You’re basically banana. “Somewhat strawberry” Things may seem good on the surface, but deep down, there’s mold. “Pretty pomegranate” What seemed like a great idea turned out to be a lot of fucking work for very little reward. You’re feeling disillusioned. And your hands are sticky. “Fairly pear” You’re feeling like you were only invited because someone juicier couldn’t make it. “Totally tangerine” You’re a cool girl. Much easier to peel than a normal orange. You’re just going with the flow, even if that flow is laughing …  ( 8 min )

Even Republicans were sick of her reckless spending and habitual lies.

Plus: An unsettling comparison between the Iran War and “Lyndon Johnson going into Vietnam.”

A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the FBI.  ( 4 min )

"As part of our commitment to supporting ICE, we will be adding a ‘Support ICE’ donation button to the footer of every email sent through our platform."  ( 5 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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The post AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans To Observe The Offline World appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 22 min )

We've all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You're right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples' locations, new reporting has confirmed. For years, the internet advertising industry has been sucking up our data, including our location data, to serve us "more relevant ads." At the same time, we know that federal law enforcement agencies have been buying up our location data from shady data brokers that most people have never heard of. Now, a new report gives us direct evidence that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has used location data taken from the internet advertising ecosystem to track phones. In a document uncovered by 404 Media…  ( 10 min )

Two former staff members took over Small Change in Temescal at the start of the year, and refreshed the concept with an eye on affordability and expanded options.  ( 28 min )

The City Council quietly and retroactively approved the purchase in 2023, according to a report through the city auditor’s whistleblower program.  ( 26 min )

A plan to slash 188 health care jobs at the East Bay’s safety net hospital would heavily impact mental health programs. County leaders hope to avoid this.  ( 26 min )

He also helped form Berkeley Youth Alternatives, served on the Berkeley Police Review Commission and worked as a winemaker and a third grade teacher.  ( 26 min )

The homeland security secretary blatantly misrepresented what she said about Alex Pretti on the day he was killed.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. David Greene: Shin, please introduce yourself to the Speaking Freely community.  Shin Yang: My name is Shin Yang. I am a queer writer with a legal background and experience in product management. I am the steward of Lezismore, an independent, self-hosted, open-source community for sexual minorities in Taiwan. For the past decade, I have focused on platform governance as infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on anonymity, minimal data collection, and behavior-based accountability, so that people can speak about intimacy and identity without fear of extraction or exposure. I am a community architect and builder, not an influencer. I’ve spent most of the past decade working anonymously building systems, designing governance protocol…  ( 18 min )

Interviewer: David Greene Shin Yang builds the kind of online space most platforms say is impossible: a sex-positive community that protects anonymity without turning users into data. A queer writer with a legal background and experience in product management, she is the steward of Lezismore, an independent, self-hosted community for sexual minorities in Taiwan that has been alive and kicking since 2015. It is built on open-source software and she is developing privacy-first governance (minimal data, behavior-based accountability, rhythm governance and “good friction”) as an alternative to identity gates and surveillance. *This interview has been edited for length and clarity. David Greene: Shin, please introduce yourself to the Speaking Freely community.  Shin Yang: My name is Shin Yang. …  ( 18 min )

In the opening chapter of his book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that philosophers have always had a strange, pathological obsession with “truth.” Truth is seen as the greatest good in the universe, and, if we believe Socrates, all the bad and evil in the world stems from ignorance of this truth. And so, libraries of books have been devoted to “What is truth?”, “How to know the truth?”, and “What is and isn’t true.” But what if most people don’t actually want the truth, or if they just want to be right? In such cases, the truth might be a liability. When what philosophers, scientists, or experts present as “true” is something that makes someone wrong, their minds will do something odd — they will lock down. And according to the philosopher Chris Ranalli, when this happe…  ( 8 min )

When I first started working in venture capital, I was given a seemingly straightforward assignment: Get to know the most successful founders we’d invested in and figure out what they had in common. Ideally, I’d emerge with a neat checklist of experiences and attributes my firm could use to spot future winners. I took the project seriously — borderline obsessively. I spent hours in long, winding conversations with founders, talking about everything from their childhoods to their home lives and hobbies. I administered a quantitative personality test that measures 28 dimensions across 125 sub-dimensions. I assumed that if I gathered enough data, a clear pattern would eventually reveal itself. It didn’t. After two years, there was no definitive list of traits that every successful leader shar…  ( 10 min )

What if humanity is the galaxy’s only advanced civilization? Brian Cox examines why, despite billions of stars and trillions of planets, we have found no evidence of other intelligent life. This video Why alien civilizations may bloom and die unseen is featured on Big Think.  ( 31 min )

One of the great mysteries in the Universe is that, in all the vastness of space, we have yet to detect any sort of life out there beyond our own planet. Whether microbial and simple, multicellular and complex, highly differentiated and intelligent, or technologically advanced, the only form of life we know of here in 2026 is terrestrial life that originated right here on Earth. Despite all of the discoveries and advanced that we’ve made in recent years, from the origins and scale of the Universe to thousands of confirmed exoplanets, we still have yet to detect even a single robust signature of a lifeform that originated from anywhere else. All we can do, at the present time, is to make the best use of the knowledge that we have. Because of all that we’ve learned about our galaxy and Unive…  ( 17 min )

How a twisted triangle of glass tubing helped democratize chemistry and build the modern laboratory.

“More people moved out of the U.S. last year than moved in for the first time since the Great Depression as a record number of citizens moved abroad following Donald Trump’s return.” — The Daily Beast - - - Ever since Trump returned to office, I have been outraged by everything he is doing to this country. I can no longer stand idly by while he enriches billionaires, ruins the environment, and treads on human rights. That is why I have decided to fight the good fight by moving to Portugal. While I could call my reps or sign a petition, it feels too hard to take five minutes out of my day. So instead, I am putting my house on the market, carefully wrapping up all my delicate possessions for shipment, setting up mail forwarding, saying goodbye to everyone I know, and doing the paperwork to…  ( 9 min )

The Synergistic Synergies Subsidiaries family is devastated to announce the loss of our Chief Happiness Architect, Wayne Tillerson, an invaluable member of our corporate family whose vacant position is already accepting applications through our HR portal. Wayne will be remembered for his attention to detail, time management, and intermediate Microsoft Word skills, as well as his ability to scale cross-functional employee morale improvements and non-monetary workplace incentive packages aligned with corporate KPIs. He can never be replaced, but we need someone just like him, or preferably better, by next week’s shareholder meeting. As a devotee of education, Wayne held a bachelor’s degree in finance from Northwestern’s Southeastern Illinois campus, though he should have used our industry-…  ( 8 min )

How Polymarket and Kalshi bet on Iran; AI translations are impacting Wikipedia; and an Amazon change impacting wishlists.  ( 3 min )

‘How ghoulish.’ The depravity economy moves into the nuclear war business.  ( 5 min )

AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.  ( 7 min )

Columnist Natalie Wolchover explores whether applied category theory can be “green” math. The post Can the Most Abstract Math Make the World a Better Place? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

No content preview  ( 1 min )

The person was found at the intersection of Shattuck and University avenues Friday evening. Investigators have said little about the death four days later.  ( 25 min )

Police said a dispute that began in San Francisco led to gunfire at a Berkeley apartment building.  ( 25 min )

Los estafadores dicen notar un problema en las casas y que pueden arreglar de manera rápida y económica, para luego arrancar pedazos de los techos y presionar a las víctimas para que los contraten para repararlos, afirma la policía.  ( 25 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 25 min )

The superintendent cited “staff capacity” in canceling the district-wide festival, held annually since 2018. Smaller events will go on at individual school sites.  ( 27 min )

Scientists studied tiny, abnormal vibrations—called “glitches”—to discover what happens inside the Sun while it undergoes phases of low activity.  ( 6 min )

AI is a “game changer” for what the FBI calls remote access operations, an FBI official said in response to a 404 Media question on Tuesday.  ( 5 min )

Fake war footage is a problem as old as social media. AI has just supercharged it.  ( 5 min )

In a new series by CBC Podcasts, hosted by 404 Media's Sam Cole, join journalists, investigators, and targets of non-consensual intimate images on the hunt for the worlds’ most prolific deepfake mastermind.  ( 4 min )

An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar tools.  ( 8 min )

EFF, along with the national ACLU and the ACLU affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices, an argument EFF has been making in the courts and Congress for nearly a decade. The case, U.S. v. Roggio, involves a man who had been under ongoing criminal investigation for illegal exports when he returned to the United States from an international trip via JFK airport. Border officers used the opportunity to bypass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement when they seized several of his electronic devices (laptop, tablet, cell phone, and flash drive) and conducted forensic searches of them. As the district court explained, “investigat…  ( 8 min )

The U.S. military has officially ended its $200 million contract with AI company Anthropic and has ordered all other military contractors to cease use of their products. Why? Because of a dispute over what the government could and could not use Anthropic’s technology to do. Anthropic had made it clear since it first signed the contract with the Pentagon in 2025 that it did not want its technology to be used for mass surveillance of people in the United States or for fully autonomous weapons systems. Starting in January, that became a problem for the Department of Defense, which ordered Anthropic to give them unrestricted use of the technology. Anthropic refused, and the DoD retaliated. There is a lot we could learn from this conflict, but the biggest take away is this: the state of your pr…  ( 6 min )

March 18, 2026 - 11:30am to 12:30pm CDT March 18, 2026 - 9:30am to 10:30am PDT Austin, TX SXSW (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin will be speaking. From the Organizers:  As authoritarian regimes globally expand digital control through AI-powered surveillance, censorship algorithms, and language policing, free expression faces coordinated attacks. These systems now share tools of repression across borders. In response, youth resist in whispers—through creativity and digital dexterity, they craft encrypted defiance. This panel explores how coded memes, slang, guerrilla art, and diaspora networks fuel encrypted defiance, reshaping protest through cracks in the digital firewall—online and on the ground. FIND OUT MORE When: Wednesday, March 18 T…  ( 3 min )

April 23, 2026 - 9:00am to 10:00am CEST April 23, 2026 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm PDT Prague, Czech Republic BSides Prague (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin will be speaking. From the Organizers:  We're at the edge of The Next Frontier, where technology isn't just advancing it's truly taking off. Just like the ancient legend of the Golem, brought to life to protect but challenging its creator, today's smart systems are striving for autonomous self-improvement. This isn't merely evolution, it's a revolutionary leap towards a profound, perhaps singular, change where our creations gain unprecedented autonomy. As powerful systems become omnipresent, vigilance is critical. This frontier demands we anticipate and fix problems before they begin. BSides Pra…  ( 3 min )

March 5, 2026 - 9:00am to 10:00am EST March 5, 2026 - 6:00am to 7:00am PST Indianapolis, IN Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Senior Investigative Researcher Beryl Lipton will be speaking. From the Organizers:  Around the world, shadowy firms are siphoning location data from apps, telecom networks, and rogue brokers to track people with chilling precision. Whether it’s journalists, Silicon Valley executives, or visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, no one is off-limits. This panel brings together journalists who have exposed how invisible surveillance infrastructure is being used to follow people worldwide—and how little stands in the way. The journalists will explain how they uncovered these stories, how they obtained covert datasets throug…  ( 3 min )

March 25, 2026 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm EDT March 25, 2026 - 3:30pm to 5:30pm PDT New York, NY Join EFF staff and local online rights supporters for a Speakeasy meet up on Wednesday, March 25 in NYC! Raise a glass and discover EFF's latest work defending digital freedoms online. This event is a free, casual gathering to give you a chance to mingle with local EFF supporters and meet the lawyers, activists, and technologists behind the world's leading digital civil liberties organization. It is also our chance to thank you, the EFF members, who make this work possible. SPEAKEASY: NYC Bleecker Street Bar 648 Broadway, New York, NY 10012 Wednesday, March 25, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM REGISTER TODAY! We invite current EFF members to gather with fellow internet freedom supporters and to meet the people behind your favorite digital civil liberties organization. Not a member of EFF yet? Help build a better future for privacy, innovation, and free expression when you join today!  This gathering is open to members, donors, and guests. No-host bar. Food and drinks available for purchase. For additional information, contact [email protected]. EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations. Calendar  ( 3 min )

March 25, 2026 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm EDT March 25, 2026 - 3:30pm to 5:30pm PDT New York, NY Join EFF staff and local online rights supporters for a Speakeasy meet up on Wednesday, March 25 in NYC! Raise a glass and discover EFF's latest work defending digital freedoms online. This event is a free, casual gathering to give you a chance to mingle with local EFF supporters and meet the lawyers, activists, and technologists behind the world's leading digital civil liberties organization. It is also our chance to thank you, the EFF members, who make this work possible. SPEAKEASY: NYC Bleecker Street Bar 648 Broadway, New York, NY 10012 Wednesday, March 25, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM REGISTER TODAY! We invite current EFF members to gather with fellow internet freedom supporters and to meet the people behind your favorite digital civil liberties organization. Not a member of EFF yet? Help build a better future for privacy, innovation, and free expression when you join today!  This gathering is open to members, donors, and guests. No-host bar. Food and drinks available for purchase. For additional information, contact [email protected]. EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations. Calendar  ( 3 min )

Digital Dragnets Violate Fourth Amendment, Brief Argues WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law filed a brief Monday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that invasive geofence warrants are unconstitutional. The brief argues that geofence warrants—which compel companies to provide information on every electronic device in a given area during a given time period—are the digital version of the exploratory rummaging that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment specifically intended to prevent.  Unlike typical warrants, geofence warrants do not name a suspect or even target a specific individual or device. Instead, police cast a digital dragnet, deman…  ( 6 min )

Residents of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, say in interviews with Reason that encounters with ICE left them afraid and angry.

Agents are violating the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

“In announcing the U.S. military strike on Iran, President Donald Trump went significantly beyond his previous justification of destroying the country’s nuclear program. He’s now also calling for regime change—and encouraging the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government.” — ABC News - - - Is your country ruled by an aging megalomaniac whose supporters worship him with an almost cult-like zeal? Has your leader eroded trust in elections by attempting to bring them under his direct control and/or stoking false claims of voter fraud? Is there a fear that your leader has access to nuclear weapons that you could totally see him using if the end result would benefit him personally? Is your country a notorious bad actor in the Middle East? Has your leader deployed the country’…  ( 8 min )

Before you ask, yes—I’m actually okay. I can feel you hesitating, the way people do when they lower their expectations out of politeness. You ask this question as if it comes with a proviso, like something unfortunate but manageable is about to happen to your lunch. But I’ve been in therapy for a while now, and one of the things I’ve learned is that I’m not responsible for managing other people’s expectations—especially when those expectations were built around a different soda entirely. I see the moment the question lands. You pause to scan the menu, even though it won’t change. I clock the quick glance toward the server, as if they might somehow intervene. Sometimes you whisper it to the table; sometimes you say it too loudly, like you’re warning everyone else. I stay where I am, patien…  ( 8 min )

The post Not Yet ‘Game Over’ In Iran appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 12 min )

Batman Forever website, launched May 1995. If 1994 was when the Web became a publishing medium, then 1995 was when the Web truly marked itself as a unique expressive medium. The Web became a place — a destination — rather than a mere repository for documents. In previous posts, we've seen how web design elements were limited in the early years of the Web. In 1993, Jennifer Niederst Robbins used iconography to give Global Network Navigator (GNN) a sense of style, and the following year Microsoft used an image map to make its website stand out. But the layout of web pages at that time was fundamentally linear — as a user, you moved from the top of a web page to the bottom, as you scrolled down the page. That's because until Netscape introduced tables to the Web later in 1995, there wasn't a …  ( 6 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

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“There is nothing in the world more powerful than a good story,” Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, declares in the infamously lackluster finale of Game of Thrones. It sounds cliché, but in Westeros, it’s true.  The books the TV show is based on are called A Song of Ice and Fire, not “a history” or “an account.” Throughout the novels, characters tell stories to persuade, intimidate, and outmaneuver each other. Many live and die convinced that random chance is divine providence. Even political power, the axis around which the entire plot revolves, is a narrative — “a shadow on the wall,” as Varys the spymaster puts it.  Storytelling plays an equally important role in our world, Kevin Ashton argues in his new book, The Story of Stories. In fact, stories may play an even more importa…  ( 11 min )

Most of us think we can spot a psychopath from a mile away, but we likely already have, and didn’t even know it. Far from the cartoonishly evil perception that most of us have, psychopathy is more about emotional deficits hidden behind a veneer of normalcy.  Abigail Marsh unpacks what defines psychopathy, how it differs from antisocial behavior, and why terms like “sociopath” only add confusion. This video A look into the mind of someone without empathy is featured on Big Think.  ( 27 min )

One of the most puzzling facets of our Universe is the apparent need for a new form of mass in our cosmos that isn’t made up of any of the particles we know of: dark matter. Whereas we’re fully aware of the full suite of Standard Model particles — quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, their antiparticles, plus the photon, the gluons, the W-and-Z bosons, and the Higgs boson — dark matter must be composed of something else entirely: something novel and not yet directly detected. In order to explain the cosmic structures we see, from the CMB to individual galaxies to galaxy clusters and even the grand cosmic web, dark matter must not only be present, but must dominate the total matter content of the Universe. However, there are several puzzles that arise. If dark matter is real, and if it domin…  ( 17 min )

Mushroom bourguignon is a rich vegan stew cooked low and slow to develop complex umami flavours. It’s comfort food that also feels elegant and fancy! Beef bourguignon is a classic French dish—and by swapping the beef with mushrooms, making it vegan is practically effortless! As we know from mushroom stroganoff, mushrooms have a deep umami […]  ( 31 min )

U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon said the attacks "demonstrate once again President Trump’s callous disregard for the rule of law." Protesters gathered over the weekend in Oakland and San Francisco.  ( 28 min )

About 1,000 people gathered in Oakland Sunday to honor “Miss Betty,” once the nation’s oldest park ranger and co-founder of Reid’s Records in Berkeley.  ( 29 min )

The UC Berkeley science center launched 'ammatka from Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino in February as part of its larger 'ottoy initiative.  ( 31 min )

The owners of Elements in Elmwood are retiring, Aiken returns to Fourth Street and Stella Carakasi Designer Outlet moves in the Gilman District.  ( 28 min )

He worked as a UC Berkeley custodian and in the funeral industry, and spent his life offering food, kindness, conversation, dignity and love to those who had the least.  ( 26 min )

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances. The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without bein…  ( 6 min )

MIT Press Publishes EFF Executive Director’s Book As She Prepares to Depart Organization After 25 Years SAN FRANCISCO – Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn will launch her memoir, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press, March 10), with events in San Francisco and Berkeley before embarking on a national book tour.  In Privacy’s Defender, Cohn weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.   The book will be Cohn’s swansong at EFF as she’s stepping down as exec…  ( 6 min )

MIT researcher Sharon Gilad-Gutnick has witnessed many children see for the first time. After having their cataracts surgically removed, the children can see the world but don’t recognize faces well. Even among those who can recognize the faces of their parents or others they know well, most don’t look at the faces of the people they speak with. “If we told them to look at the face, they could usually manage it,” Gilad-Gutnick told Big Think. “But they were mostly looking at the hands.” Gilad-Gutnick works with these children as part of Project Prakash, an initiative that provides care to children and adults with congenital blindness in India and investigates the neuroscience of sight restoration. Congenital cataracts are a preventable cause of blindness and are often treatable within two …  ( 12 min )

In the middle of the 20th century, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined one of the most influential phrases in modern thought: “the ghost in the machine.” He was challenging Cartesian dualism, the idea that the human mind is an invisible pilot steering the body from somewhere behind the eyes. Ryle called this a category mistake. There was no ghost hidden inside the machinery of the human body. Intelligence did not float above behavior; it emerged from it. Sixty years later, we face a strange reversal. Instead of imagining a ghost inside ourselves, we are quietly relocating our agency into the machines we build. We are becoming accountable for decisions we no longer meaningfully author. The inversion is easy to miss. Ryle argued that there was no separate mind steering the body. Toda…  ( 9 min )

Astrophysicist Sara Seager has spent decades expanding how we search for life beyond Earth: not by asking what we would look like out there, but by imagining forms of intelligence that may be utterly unlike our own. Her work explores “technosignatures” — physical clues of advanced life, from satellite swarms to artificial light. As artificial intelligence accelerates here on Earth, Seager considers whether post-biological life might be what awaits us — and whether it already exists elsewhere in the cosmos. Our biggest challenge, she suggests, may be learning to see past the limits of our own imagination. This video We’ve been looking for life. Here’s why we should look for intelligence instead is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

Our Sun gravitationally dominates the Solar System. Here in our own Solar System, the Sun dominates the spacetime within it in nearly all locations. Whereas the environment close to a planet is locally dominated by that planet’s gravity, and the ensuing curvature it imprints on the surrounding spacetime, the Sun’s gravity dominates the larger Solar System environment. Whereas a spacecraft must achieve speeds of 11 km/s to escape from Earth’s gravity, speeds nearly four times as great must be achieved at the Earth-Sun distance to escape from the Solar System entirely. Credit: T. Pyle/Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab Of over 17,000 payloads launched into space, only six will escape the Solar System’s gravity. The most remarkable fact about Pioneer 10’s trajectory is that it gained nearly the maxim…  ( 11 min )

Men, guys, dudes, rejoice! After much research and testing, we have found the cure to the cursed male loneliness epidemic that is sweeping our country and our op-ed sections. We know you feel isolated. We know you can’t talk about your emotions. We know you’re looking for male role models in all the wrong YouTube algorithms. But fear not. We have found the solution to all your problems: doing outlandish science projects to prove or disprove commonplace myths. Men these days are reverting to masculine ideals from yesteryear. They think real men have to be strong, tough, and misogynistic. Listen, boys, you don’t need big muscles, you don’t need creatine powder, and you certainly don’t need to get surgery to gain an extra few inches of height because you’d rather have metal implants in your …  ( 8 min )

“Trump’s best foreign policy? Not starting any wars… He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.” — JD Vance, in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, 7/31/23 - - - I like to think of myself as someone who takes responsibility. I pay my taxes. I walk my dog. Perhaps most importantly, I vote. So, when I look at the state of the country, I don’t point fingers. I look inward, back to the pivotal moment when I was told what would happen if I voted for Kamala Harris, fully aware that I was setting certain things in motion, and I voted for her anyway. Iran is a great example. Viewing the latest war footage had a way of clarifying cause and effect. I was told in no uncertain terms what my vote would unleash. I then cast that vote for Kamala Harr…  ( 8 min )

Gambling markets have conveniently found a stance that allows them to continue to profit from death and war.  ( 7 min )

Some AWS services are down in the Middle East. Recovery is unclear as it requires 'careful assessment to ensure the safety of our operators,' according to Amazon.  ( 5 min )

Joseph speaks to Cooper Quintin all about how to find fake cell phone towers that can track your movements or intercept text messages.  ( 4 min )

What happens in a world where AIs make scientific discoveries that humans cannot understand?

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way. The post What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the Start of the Solar System first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 11 min )

This beer bread recipe is truly one of the easiest loaves you can make! Just 6 simple ingredients and 10 minutes of prep time and you’ve got a hearty loaf with a golden crust, tender crumb, and rich flavour. We usually think of quick breads as sweet recipes like my vegan banana bread or lemon […]  ( 30 min )

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What if the world’s most critical technology isn’t software, but the tiny pieces of silicon that power it? In an age where chips are everywhere, from smartphones to coffee makers, their manufacturing complexity might surprise you. It’s harder to make a modern semiconductor than a nuclear weapon. Making this tech both very inexpensive and very small is incredibly difficult. That’s why there’s just a couple of companies in the world who are capable of it. This video The tiny transistors remaking our global order is featured on Big Think.  ( 28 min )

Population control is technocratic hubris at its most intimate and brutal.

A new genetic analysis reveals that human females and Neanderthal males interbred far more than the reverse, for reasons that remain mysterious.  ( 7 min )

Tender jarred chickpeas make this colourful vegetarian dish a bit of a breeze to bring together Every now and then, something comes along in the food industry that is “better than sliced bread”, and right now I would say that thing is jarred chickpeas. Due to the way they’re processed, cooked at a lower temperature and for a shorter time, they tend to be softer than tinned and ready to eat in salads (a tinned chickpea, on the other hand, might need a five-minute boil to get to the same degree of softness). In any case, it’s safe to say that this innovation has led to an increase in my eating of chickpeas in salads, and today’s dish is a recent favourite. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

The scammers say they just happened to notice a problem they can fix quickly and cheaply, then tear chunks out of roofs so they can press victims to hire them to repair, police say.  ( 25 min )

Terrance Davis, praised for his “steady hand” after taking over an embattled department reeling from high-profile departures, will be deputy city manager in Brentwood.  ( 24 min )

Health experts say people used to foraging elsewhere in the world are confusing death caps with edible, visually similar mushrooms found in their home countries, and hospitalizations and deaths are on the rise.  ( 31 min )

The Jewish Studio Project, co-founded by a rabbi whose mother was an art therapist, celebrates its 10th anniversary next month.  ( 27 min )

Jensen also led programs at the Berkeley library and Alta Bates, counseled incarcerated young women through Alameda County Girl’s Home and held librarian roles at the Lawrence Hall of Science and Stanford.  ( 26 min )

Dear Sir/Madam, While we are always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing, the editors regret to inform you that your manuscript, in its current form, is rejected on grounds of being unrealistic, absurdly optimistic, and, frankly, preferable to the current projections for the future. If you would like to revise your submission, please consider changing the following: The protagonist growing up in a public orphanage suggests a centralized government with a sense of duty of care for its citizens and children. Have you considered cages? The orphanage is constructed with bricks and mortar and withstands a storm. The nuclear winter is seasonal and affects only that lawless part of Idaho, which should be avoided anyway. The AI program teaching the protagonist incendiary propaganda is con…  ( 9 min )

- - - A one-off, sports-issue special. - - - Books read: Football Against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power—Simon Kuper Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—David Winner The Season—Helen Garner Books written: Fever Pitch—me - - - My book Fever Pitch, a memoir about my then twenty-four-year relationship with Arsenal Football Club, came out in 1992. The relationship, to save you the trouble of counting on your fingers, is at the time of this writing about to turn fifty-seven, and it’s just as turbulent as it ever was. I’d expected it to settle down into staid middle age, but there is still a lot of volatility and swearing. There was swearing the weekend just gone, for example, and an argum…  ( 14 min )

Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term. - - - These lists, along with everything McSweeney’s publishes on this site, are offered ad-free and at no charge to our readers. If you are moved to make a donation in any amount or subsc…  ( 39 min )

A response to Dario Amodei.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 9 min )

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This week, we discuss wishes made for better privacy, god complexes, and the point of it all.  ( 4 min )

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson and a host of other Democrats made the demand in a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. “Your actions are abhorrent, blatantly unconstitutional, and corrosive to the functioning of a peaceful society.”  ( 5 min )

Growing tissues can crack, break, and dissociate to form structures that can later withstand immense forces. The post Break It To Make It: How Fracturing Sculpts Tissues and Organs first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Super moist and tender with lots of nutty flavour, these peanut butter banana muffins are a wholesome breakfast that feels a little indulgent!  I keep vegan blueberry muffins, my double chocolate banana muffins and a rotating variety of other muffins stocked in the freezer at all times. You never know when you’re going to need […]  ( 31 min )

Here in our Universe, there’s a big puzzle at the heart of every black hole. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, for every black hole that exists within the Universe, there are only three properties that go into it that matter in any way: the black hole’s total mass, the black hole’s net electric charge, and the black hole’s intrinsic angular momentum, and that’s it. It doesn’t matter what type of matter (or antimatter, or dark matter) went into the black hole in order to form it; all that matters is its mass, charge, and angular momentum. But in addition to a Universe governed by Einstein’s General Relativity, we also live in an inherently quantum Universe. Quantum mechanically, there are all sorts of bizarre phenomena that cannot be avoided, from uncertainty to entanglement. It’s…  ( 17 min )

In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data. The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs, arose after a housing protest in 2021, during which Colorado Springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway. After the demonstration, police also obtained warrants to seize and search through the devices and data of Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest. The warrants included a search through all of her photos, videos, emails, text messages, and location data over a two-month period, as well as a time-unlimited search for 26 keywords, inc…  ( 6 min )

March 19, 2026 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm PDT March 19, 2026 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm PDT Berkeley, CA Berkeley Center for New Media (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Director of Investigations Dave Maass will be speaking.  From the Organizers:  In pursuing its agenda of security theater, the U.S. government has turned the border into the main stage for debuting new and invasive surveillance technologies. These technologies are ineffective and wasteful, but borderland communities ultimately pay the highest price with their civil liberties and human rights. In this interactive session, EFF's Dave Maass will introduce the wide varieties of border technologies that surround us, from spy blimps in our skies to the surveillance towers above our parks, from the license plate readers on our roads to t…  ( 4 min )

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We tend to imagine ancient life in broad strokes. But daily existence was built out of small, sensory details. The taste of staple foods, the smell of living spaces, the feel of handmade tools in your hands — those experiences shaped the people of the past. Sam Kean examines how recreating those details brings history into sharper focus, rebuilding the foods and practices of the past and what that reveals about human adaptability. This video How experimental archaeologists are resurrecting our forgotten past is featured on Big Think.  ( 71 min )

Sven Nyholm already sees troubling signs among his students. As a Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, he’s noticed that many can’t be bothered to engage with demanding texts when an AI summary is just seconds away. “AI is designed to make people not think,” he tells Big Think. “But why study philosophy at university if you don’t want to think — if you don’t want to sharpen your critical abilities — and instead outsource them to a mindless AI program?” In these moments, he admits, both his students’ studies and his own role as a teacher feel less meaningful. Nyholm has spent years contemplating where all this might be heading. As one of the earliest philosophers to examine how AI intersects with meaning in human life, he looks closely at…  ( 14 min )

[In the] summer of 2008, Sue and I kept up the charade of normal life by hunting for a house. We told ourselves it was optimism. In reality, it was desperation disguised as hope; some fragile belief that this whole FBI informant nightmare had an expiration date. Sue’s dad, Bob, tipped us off about a new build in Westwood. We drove out one humid afternoon, stepped inside, and immediately saw a future we weren’t sure we deserved: four bedrooms, three and a half baths, wide hall-ways that echoed with the promise of kids’ laughter. A quiet street. Neighbors who waved. A front porch that begged for summer nights and cold drinks. We fell hard for the illusion. And like two people pretending they weren’t standing on a fault line, we made an offer. The down payment came from our savings and what w…  ( 13 min )

Here on Earth, the very idea of a laser is relatively novel, having only been invented in 1958. The underlying physics is straightforward: an electron within a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state, the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state, where it emits light of a very specific wavelength in the process. Then, pumped or injected energy re-excites an electron within that very same molecule back into that higher-energy state, over and over. This causes light of precisely that same, monochromatic wavelength to get emitted over and over again. So long as you continue stimulating the same transition, you’ll keep getting light of that exact same frequency over and over again, every time. But out there in the Universe, this exact phenomenon occurs naturally in a numbe…  ( 16 min )

Also: Companies in Cal's startup incubator Bakar Labs have raised $1 billion since it launched four years ago.  ( 24 min )

Alameda Health System workers and union leaders said their units are already stretched too thin and criticized administrators.  ( 27 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 23 min )

What homebuyers and sellers should know about locally based firms vs. national giants.  ( 26 min )

Other events include a talk with the author of "Orange is the New Black," a workshop to analyze music anatomy and a Lunar New Year festival.  ( 27 min )

He built a steam locomotive —Number 7 — from the ground up and mentored and delighted generations of train enthusiasts.  ( 25 min )

“You said you were going after the worst of the worst, but instead you ruined our life."

How to “read” nucleic acids, from Sanger to nanopores.

I have an announcement: I am dyeing my hair brown—deep, thick, chocolatey brown. I do this to signal I am entering a period of mental and emotional darkness. I am embracing the winter. I am welcoming in the gloom. Gone are the halcyon days of being a “bronde.” Bronde me said, “I live in LA.” But brunette me will declare, “I’m thinking of moving back to New York.” Bronde was a denial of my true self. With my new dark hair, I declare to the world that I will not go hiking anymore. I will no longer enjoy sunshine and fresh food. I will lurk in my cave and eat dirt from between my toes. I will clutch my black cat to my chest as we watch Melancholia in bed seven times in a row. My hair is brown. I will no longer wear my nighttime mouth guard prescribed to me by the dentist. I will grind my …  ( 9 min )

In the winter here, it’s not unusual to see a car on the side of I-35. Minneapolis is the first place I’ve ever lived that, when I described a recent-ish car accident I was in, multiple people said, “Now, you live here.” The first time I heard someone say it, I was too grumpy to laugh. The second time, I had my oh-it-feels-good-to-laugh-again moment. Now, the empty cars along the highway, on residential streets, at gas stations with their doors open, make people wait to see if anyone’s coming back or if another person has been taken. My neighborhood is mostly quiet. It’s often quiet-ish in January. Snow, ice storms, and negative-twenty windchill do that. The elementary school in the neighborhood doesn’t let students go outside for recess, and the park nearby is far more popular for pickle…  ( 12 min )

I read the news. I hear the cries for help. “New York has a housing crisis.” “The cost of food is too high in New York.” “Crime is too high in New York.” “Crime is too low in New York.” “Zohran will save us.” “Zohran will kill us all.” And to this I say: “You have no fucking idea.” I recently saw a place wracked with so much pain, destruction, corruption, and unease that it makes our home here look like a shining city on a hill. It’s not too far either—so close in fact that traveling there feels as simple as traveling to one’s own living room. The citizens of this town have something real to fear. Their issues aren’t mired in political discourse, but live on the surface of their streets every waking moment. That is because they live in Roku City. Some of you are familiar. You have seen t…  ( 9 min )

“We just want to take down posts about people who are being defamed," the company's founder said. “And when I say defamed, it means like, ‘this guy has a small penis,’ or ‘this guy smells.’"  ( 6 min )

On Wednesday, the government stopped supporting FPDS.gov, an indispensable resource for finding what ICE, the FBI, and every other agency is buying. Its replacement site completely sucks.  ( 5 min )

The group is talking about Epstein and filming propaganda videos in Roblox as a form of 'digital Jihad,' researchers say.  ( 7 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

The post Saving The Life We Cannot See appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 29 min )

I'll be posting less often and more in depth  ( 7 min )

European folktales often center around three colors: red, black, and white. Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. In the Grimms’ “Iron Hans,” a young man rides three horses into three battles — a red horse, a black horse, and a white horse. In the Norse tale “Tatterhood,” a red flower and a white flower grow side by side in the dark earth. This week, I interviewed the mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw for Mini Philosophy. Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild, makes the case that folk stories and myths can help us understand ourselves and life more broadly. And in these colors, we find a map of human maturation. The colors correspond roughly to three modes of being. Each has a gift and a shadow. Each belongs most naturally to a parti…  ( 9 min )

A woman stands at the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. Behind her, an explosion of life — thousands of animal species, billions of trees, lush canopy. Ahead, another kind: Humanity.  People from every corner of the Earth fill the city of Belém, Brazil. It’s a sea of color, music, and emotion as they dance and stomp across asphalt, past highrises in the hot, humid air. A paper snake the length of a city block ripples overhead. The woman wipes sweat from her temples. Her purple baseball cap is soaked through, its message blunt: DERECHOS A LA TIERRA ¡YA! Land rights — now. Photo by Natalia Ramírez Gutiérrez The woman is Joan Carling, a human rights activist and the executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI). The scene unfolded at COP30, the climate summit hosted by th…  ( 11 min )

It’s called the Gladiator Strategy.  The Swiss CEO of a shoe company stirred his espresso as he tried to convince me of his preferred way of working: “I think a battle of ideas is so important. It helps us fight things out, so the one idea left standing is the absolute best idea.”  In Roman times, the best gladiators weren’t necessarily the best athletes or the strongest physical performers but the ones who knew how to entertain the crowds in the way the emperor loved. Whatever, whoever amused the emperor was given the thumbs-­up. The workplace parallel is perhaps obvious: People can “win” internal fights in those boardrooms by arguing for the ideas and perspectives that the boss already loves. So “fighting for the best idea” becomes a public way to endorse and validate the emperor’s —­ er…  ( 10 min )

Sometimes, when Jim Belushi feels anxious, he tells himself he’s actually just stoked. “Physiologically,” the actor, comedian, and entrepreneur tells Big Think, “what happens to your body when you’re nervous or fearful is exactly the same thing as what happens when you’re excited,” so all you need to do is flip a switch. It’s one of several tricks he learned early in life that stuck with him throughout the various chapters of his long and storied career, from Hollywood to Oregon pot farm. Born to Albanian-American parents in the suburbs of Chicago, Belushi began acting in high school — an experience, he once told the Connecticut Post, that “made me feel good for the first time in my life.” Following in the footsteps of elder sibling John Belushi, he cut his teeth at Chicago’s renowned Seco…  ( 12 min )

Here on Earth, it seems easy and straight forward to know “where” anything is, or to know “when” an event either occurred or will occur. After all, we’ve mapped out the entire surface of the Earth, and can define our location with three coordinates — latitude, longitude, and altitude/depth — no matter where in the world we are. Additionally, we’ve synchronized all methods of timekeeping here on Earth with atomic clocks, enabling people from all different locations on Earth to know both the “when” and “where” any event occurs, will occur, or has occurred. But this relies on an underlying assumption that most of us make without ever thinking twice about it: that you, from your location on Earth, are observing the same “here and now” as anyone else in any other location on Earth. Unfortunatel…  ( 17 min )

Mary Ellen Bruns, 74, had lived in her Poe Street home for over a decade before she died in a fire there. Her cause of death remains under investigation.  ( 25 min )

The deal, struck after a nearly three-month impasse, gives educators a 3% raise this school year and next, and a $1,000 bonus.  ( 26 min )

The sudden ouster of Police Accountability Board director Hansel Aguilar, and recent protest resignations from the Police Accountability Board, are the culmination of years of mounting tension between those bodies and the city.  ( 30 min )

Amazon is allowing gift senders to choose items from third-party sellers, which could open recipients up to new privacy risks.  ( 5 min )

A leaked Ring email; looksmaxxing; and another Grok screwup.  ( 4 min )

The FBI obtained prompts used to make more than 200 sexual videos of a woman in a harassment case.  ( 5 min )

The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.  ( 7 min )

“My fellow Americans, our nation is back—bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.” — Donald Trump during his State of the Union - - - My fellow Americans, I stand before you tonight to make one thing very clear: we are richer than ever before. You aren’t, of course. But we are. My friends and I are just, like, incredibly rich and only gonna get even richer. So. That’s basically my announcement. My fellow Americans, despite what everyone else says, we are living in the golden age of America. Not your golden age, though. My golden age. As in: I am very old, and everything I own is either solid gold or gold-plated or painted in gold to make it seem like it’s real gold. My fellow Americans, the stock market has skyrocketed since I took back the office. It’s been very lucrative …  ( 9 min )

Hitchcock/Truffaut. Cahiers du Cinéma. Documentary Now! The best film texts touch our lives and leave an indelible imprint on our shared cultural experience, deepening and enriching our relationships with this most universal of modern artistic genres. In this new, fully revised and expanded edition of Documentary Now!’s seminal 1975 text, the curators behind the beloved long-running Documentary Now! program invite us to celebrate the craft, legacy, and minutiae of some of the most brilliant works of nonfiction ever put to celluloid. This remarkable book presents unique access to stills, posters, scores, and archival materials from some of the most celebrated documentaries in film history, alongside essays from some of the greatest cultural luminaries of the last fifty years, including …  ( 8 min )

State Of The Union February 24, 2026 Washington, DC 8:52 PM: The State of the Union is opened by House Majority Leader Mike Johnson, who has been released from his medium-sized dog cage specially for this evening. He welcomes congressional attendees with a giggle, as this is the first time he’s been permitted to speak since late January. Standing on the dais beside him is Vice President and Fall Out Boy fanfic author JD Vance. While most Republicans have chosen red, Vance wears a blue tie to complement Peter Thiel’s eyes. 9:10 PM: Having just styled his hair by rubbing it against a balloon, President Trump enters the House Chamber in the building formerly known as the US Capitol and now known as the “Crypto.com Funzone.” Republicans in the audience give him a standing ovation. Trump, r…  ( 11 min )

Do you remember the last time you were carded at a bar or restaurant? It was probably such a quick and normal experience, that you barely remember it. But have you ever been carded to use the internet? Being required to present your ID to access content online is becoming a growing reality for many. We're explaining the dangers of age verification laws, and the latest in the fight for privacy and free speech online, with our EFFector newsletter. For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers Discord's controversial rollout of mandatory age verification, a leaked Meta memo on face-scanning smart glasses, and a Super Bowl surveillance ad that said the quiet part out loud. Prefer to listen in? In our audio companion, EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rin Alajaji explains how online age verification hurts free expression for all users. Find the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive. LISTEN TO EFFECTOR EFFECTOR 38.4 - ☺️ Trust Us With Your Face Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight against mandatory age verification laws when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

Phishing and data breaches are a constant on the internet. The single best defense against both is to use a password manager to generate and automatically fill a unique password for every site. While 1Password has recently raised their prices, and researchers have recently published potential flaws in some implementations, using a password manager is still a critical investment in keeping yourself safe on the internet. There are free options, and even ones built into your operating system or browser. We can help you choose. Password managers protect you from phishing by memorizing the connection between a password and a website, and, if you use the browser integration, filling each password only on the website it belongs to. They protect you from data breaches by making it feasible to use …  ( 6 min )

In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism. The post The Man Who Stole Infinity first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 26 min )

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg discusses immigration enforcement, the role of government, and why federal agencies are losing public trust.

Mapping 100,000 moments of human happiness.

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Construction unions had asked Berkeley leaders to shoot down developers’ attempts to exempt themselves from local labor regulations, but council members said they didn’t have that power.  ( 28 min )

U.S. Rep. John Garamendi says he’s protesting the Trump administration’s immigration tactics and how 73-year-old Harjit Kaur was treated in ICE custody.  ( 27 min )

Psychedelia, Fassbinder, French New Wave and the films of Lucrecia Martel, along with works from Iran and an African film festival transport the viewer at the BAMPFA theater.  ( 26 min )

The much-anticipated deal will keep transit agencies afloat until a tax measure reaches voters in November.  ( 26 min )

Alameda Health System plans to lay off 188 nurses, counselors, therapists, and other staff. The public has a chance to weigh in on Feb. 25.  ( 26 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

The Secretary of Defense has given an ultimatum to the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their technology to be used in the two ways they have publicly stated they would not support: autonomous weapons systems and surveillance. The Department of Defense has reportedly threatened to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” in retribution for not lifting restrictions on how their technology is used. According to WIRED, that label would be, “a scarlet letter usually reserved for companies that do business with countries scrutinized by federal agencies, like China, which means the Pentagon would not …  ( 5 min )

March 24, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm PDT March 24, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm PDT Cambridge, MA Join Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, to discuss Cindy's new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.  Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? FIND OUT MORE   WHEN: Tuesday, March 24th, 2026 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm WHERE: Harvard Book Store 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 About the book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we…  ( 4 min )

March 20, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm PDT March 20, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm PDT Denver, CO Join Marcia Hofman in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, to discuss Cindy's new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.  Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? FIND OUT MORE   WHEN: Friday, March 20th, 2026 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm WHERE: Tattered Cover Colfax 2526 East Colfax Avenue Denver, CO 80206 About the book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if w…  ( 4 min )

March 18, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm PDT March 18, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm PDT Menlo Park, CA Join John Markoff in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, to discuss Cindy's new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.  Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? FIND OUT MORE   WHEN: Friday, March 13th, 2026 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm WHERE: Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside St. Portland, OR 97209 About the book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if…  ( 4 min )

March 17, 2026 - 7:30pm to 8:45pm PDT March 17, 2026 - 7:30pm to 8:45pm PDT Seattle, WA Join EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn to discuss her new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.  Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? FIND OUT MORE   WHEN: Tuesday, March 17th, 2026 7:30 pm to 8:45 pm WHERE: The Wyncote NW Forum 1119 8th Ave (Entrance off Seneca St.) Seattle, 98101 About the book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Pr…  ( 4 min )

March 13, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm PDT March 13, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm PDT Portland, OR Join EFF's Allison Morris in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, to discuss Cindy's new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.  Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? FIND OUT MORE   WHEN: Friday, March 13th, 2026 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm WHERE: Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside St. Portland, OR 97209 About the book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversati…  ( 4 min )

March 10, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm PDT March 10, 2026 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm PDT San Francisco, CA & Online  Join EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, to discuss Cindy's book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.  Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. But, can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? REGISTER TODAY!   WHEN: Tuesday, March 10th, 2026 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm WHERE: City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus Avenue, SF & Zoom Broadcast, register for link  About the book Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still h…  ( 5 min )

An attorney and former ICE training instructor testified before Congress that changes to the training program “can and will get people killed.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as invested in keeping my job as the next weaver. When the boss brought in that big new power loom, I was pretty skeptical. He said once he got it up and running, we’d all be out of a job, so when the boys started talking about breaking into the factory after work and smashing the thing, I was on board. Until, that is, I saw the funny tapestries it could make. There’s this one—sorry, I keep cracking up when I think about it. It’s a bowl of gruel, right? But it’s also a pirate! It’s called “Gruellino Piratino,” and… well, no, it doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a silly character. They’re calling it “Nottinghamian brain-rotte,” and there’s a bunch of them. They’ve got King George III with a ham for a face, “Georgione Hamone”—I nearly cried when I saw it. My kids, at …  ( 9 min )

Brands like Chipotle, Dunkin, and Starbucks have started offering new protein-dense menu items. Here are more companies making exciting protein-based revamps. Jamba Juice This sweet smoothie brand is branching out into savory, high-protein options. Try the “shepherd’s pie” shake, which boasts sixty grams of protein and over 200 percent of your daily recommended value of gravy. Or make your own! Choose your base—minestrone, Italian wedding, or clam chowder—and throw in any of your favorite high-protein add-ins, like hard-boiled eggs, jerky, or branzino. Perfect on a hot summer day. Just make sure you ask for your shake deboned. IKEA With IKEA’s new line of high-protein furniture and household goods, even sitting on the couch can help you achieve your ideal physique. Cushions are filled …  ( 9 min )

The post Why AI Doesn’t Need A ‘Mind’ To Matter appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 24 min )

The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech.”  ( 4 min )

If you think tofu is boring or bland, these tofu recipes are here to change your mind! I’m sharing 28 different dishes that range from cozy soups to crispy mains and satisfying meal bowls, each packed with flavour and plant-based protein. I know tofu can be intimidating. In fact, the first few times I cooked […]  ( 28 min )

I read Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet when I was 14 years old, and it scared the life out of me. Lynas takes the reader on a journey of what to expect from a world that’s one degree warmer, two degrees, three degrees, all the way up to six degrees. By the middle of the book, your blood pressure is high; by the end, you’re on the floor. It is a well-researched book that offers us a window into many possible futures. Fortunately, the scientific consensus has moved away from the most extreme scenarios since its publication. Unfortunately, a lot of the public messaging has not. Many people believe a pathway to 5°C or 6°C is already locked in, and the only thing we can do now is prepare for the worst. Let’s look at what the latest science says about where we might …  ( 12 min )

On a rough day, it’s rarely the workload that breaks you. It’s the human layer: the meeting that turns tense, the work chat message you read as disrespect, the impulse to fire off a reply that feels righteous for thirty seconds and costly for a week. In those moments, emotional intelligence is basically the difference between staying aligned and creating unforced errors. You may not control the situation, but you can control how you meet it. You can stay aligned, or drift into unforced errors: reactive words, sloppy decisions, needless conflict. Confucius even gives a compact checklist for this: nine “states of mind” to return to in the middle of ordinary life. In the Analects he writes: The superior person has nine states of mind: for eyes: bright for ears: penetrating for countenance: co…  ( 10 min )

For most of human history, love was not a choice we made, love was a choice made for us. By our family, our class, or by means of survival.  Now that love has been liberated, it seems to have become more complicated and more illusive than ever. Alain de Botton explains. This video Why relationships in 2026 carry impossible expectations is featured on Big Think.  ( 19 min )

However you feel about artificial intelligence (AI) — and, in particular, about the large language models and chatbots that are powered by it — the reality is that humanity is currently building and expanding infrastructure to support it. This includes large networks of power-demanding and water-requiring data centers that are being constructed, often conflicting with the electricity and water needs of the humans who live in those locations. It’s because of these concerns that some have floated the idea of AI data centers in space, with one company, SpaceX, recently announcing plans to build a literal megaconstellation of one million satellites to further that ambition. Is this an example of an emerging technology that could provide an off-world solution to the problem of competing demands…  ( 17 min )

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The deal, struck after a nearly three-month impasse, came as teachers in next-door Oakland voted to authorize a strike.  ( 25 min )

The large, open-ended strike had led to frustrations by some patients over delayed care as well as difficulties for workers who went weeks without a paycheck.  ( 25 min )

Construction unions argue local worker protections are being illegally dismantled. Developers say they’re following state law aimed at lowering the cost of building housing. The City Council is expected to act Monday night.  ( 30 min )

All nine counties of the Bay Area had robust streetcar systems at the start of the 20th century. In the East Bay, rumors swirl about how and why the Key System failed.  ( 31 min )

He has a new memoir-writing website, a reality TV show and a new book merging short fiction with fine art photography. Other new Berkeley books: Michael Pollan on consciousness — and a deeply researched novel about two famed women pirates of history.  ( 33 min )

Foundation Models Need a Foundation Tool LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation. So how can we supplement LLM foundation models? We need a foundation tool: a tool that’s broad […]  ( 6 min )

The Great Unconformity — a gap in Earth’s geological record — has puzzled scientists for 150 years. New research suggests it was created by shifting continents, rather than “snowball Earths” or Cambrian life.  ( 5 min )

Researchers say Meta’s patent for simulating dead users could be a “turning point” in “AI resurrections.”  ( 5 min )

Harlo and Sam discuss the important privacy and security work she does every day alongside and for journalists, and why it’s only becoming more crucial.  ( 4 min )

Meta Superintelligence Labs’ director of alignment called it a “rookie mistake.”  ( 3 min )

404 Media found multiple users of Zello, an app previously used by January 6 insurrectionists, linked to ICE officials. An officer at the scene of an CBP official shooting a U.S. citizen also used the app.  ( 4 min )

twenty years since I first told you about my family’s favorite coffee cake. It’s tall, plush, crisp with a flaky layer of cinnamon sugar on top, studded with a quilt of chocolate chips and is downright, well, adorable when cut into cubes because they’re a little wobbly. When one tumbles, it shakes off a little pfft of cinnamon sugar, like a pup coming in from today’s blizzard. It’s perfect. It needs no changes or updates. Read more »  ( 18 min )

Intuition breaks down once we’re dealing with the endless. To begin with: Some infinities are bigger than others. The post How Can Infinity Come in Many Sizes? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 3 min )

Higher education faces looming threats from every direction. Dwindling enrollments. The demographic cliff. The enduring myth that professors have the time, inclination, and personal charm to brainwash the nation’s youth. Fire. Brimstone. Eternal damnation. The philosophy department getting merged with seven other departments, leading to your redundancy, your likely firing, and your doomed attempts to spin your PhD in poststructuralist theory into a job as whatever a “project manager” is. But have you heard the good news? The college is rolling out a new strategic initiative. We know the faculty feel overworked. Between teaching, research, advising, and ever-increasing but little-acknowledged service to the college, you’re beyond burnout. One more request for additional uncompensated labo…  ( 9 min )

If we, two normal-style people, were to compete in the Winter Olympics, we would immediately die. Here’s how: Cross-Country Skiing 10K: We struggle to get on our skis and stand up at the starting line. Once we finally get going, we’re good for about five minutes and then are like: How is everyone so far ahead of us, and how do we still have 9.8K to go? Ultimately, we freeze to death on the course. Snowboarding Halfpipe: We break our necks. Speedskating: We trip and fall, and someone skates over our necks (decapitated). Curling: Everyone says, “I could do that!” But it’s not so easy to crouch down into lizard pose and push a stone when millions are watching at home. Overcome by nerves, we puke so much we literally die. Luckily, as we fall, our heads hit the stone, and it sails perfectly…  ( 9 min )

No one would ever suspect that these chocolatey sweet potato brownies are gluten-free, vegan, and secretly wholesome! Pureed sweet potato adds natural sweetness and lots of moisture for the fudgiest texture. If you’ve yet to try sweet potato brownies, consider this your sign. The universe is telling you: it’s brownie time. And no, this isn’t […]  ( 31 min )

Toxic positivity has become a cultural system in America, says historian and professor Kate Bowler. She traces how optimism became an emotional mandate in American life: a belief that bright sides and silver linings can solve anything. But when positivity refuses pain, it stops being hopeful and becomes denial. Drawing on personal experience and cultural analysis, Bowler reveals how forced optimism erases nuance, stigmatizes grief, and leaves us unprepared for the parts of life that don’t resolve. Some things aren’t meant to be mastered — they just hurt. Naming that, she argues, is the first step toward something more honest, and more human. This video Why toxic positivity is making us miserable is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

What, exactly, composes the Universe? In order for life to emerge within the Universe, the chemical precursor ingredients need to be delivered to an environment where life can arise, sustain itself, and thrive. This cannot happen until the elements required for life, including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, exist. None of them were created in the hot Big Bang; only later on in the interiors of their stars and through physical processes arising from their life and death cycles. Credit: NASA Goddard/CI Lab/Dan Gallagher In antiquity, many opined about “the elements” in combination. It used to be thought, more than 2500 years ago, that there were fundamental “elements” to the Universe that combined to make everything up. These elements varied from culture to culture and philos…  ( 12 min )

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First introduced into laboratories in 1881, agar remains indispensable as a culture medium.

“This is really a turning point and we’re in a historical transition at present.”  ( 12 min )

Nostalgia and comfort combine in abundance in this retro dessert that’s strictly for kids of all ages The first time I had rhubarb and custard together was in a boiled sweet from a big jar in my mum’s corner shop. You could flip the sweet in your mouth and rub the flavour you wanted with your tongue. Too tart? Flip to the custard side. Too creamy? Flip again. It was one of the best ways to spend 10 minutes as a seven-year-old in the early 1990s. A few decades on, a lot has changed. Mum no longer has a corner shop, I don’t love boiled sweets any more, but eating rhubarb and custard is still a fantastic way to spend 10 minutes (at the very least). Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: Master and Commander appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 6 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: Master and Commander appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

It is one of 31 colleges that the Education Department says have ended relationships with The PhD Project, a nonprofit that for decades has helped Black, Latino and Native American students get business doctorates.  ( 27 min )

Berkeleyside news editor Nico Savidge, who once joined a curling club while working at a Wisconsin newspaper, again ventured onto the ice at California's only dedicated curling facility, located in Oakland.  ( 29 min )

“The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to President Trump’s economic policy on Friday, ruling that he had exceeded his authority when he imposed tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner.” — New York Times - - - Thank you for bringing this issue to the Supreme Court’s attention. We all know how important the rule of law has been during the first solar cycle of President Nyarlathotep’s re-ascendancy. Without us, the Dread Lord would have likely found Himself unnecessarily hindered by bureaucratic red tape, jurisprudence, and antiquated notions of everyday logic. We also firmly established that the Crawling Chaos is legally allowed to gut the fabric of reality however He sees fit—but only while He continues to occupy the Presidency. It clearly says so in the Constitution. Or, at least, it…  ( 9 min )

- - - Reporting poolside from Don Nelson’s home on Maui, where the Hall of Fame NBA coach is enjoying a dog-filled and largely barefoot retirement. - - - I call Don Nelson from my rental car, which I’ve parked by some food trucks near the Kahului Airport. It rings through, which means I’m welcomed to the island by a sardonic voicemail: “Hey, you’ve reached Nellie. I’m veeeery, veeeery buuuusy… on Maui.” Three weeks earlier, the Hall of Famer, who retired in 2010 as the all-time winningest NBA coach, agreed via text to an interview with a single word: “Anytime.” Now, a bit before 11 a.m., I start to wonder if he remembers who I am. He calls right back, voice gravelly and subdued, but friendly enough. “Come on by,” he says, giving me his address. “I’ll be in the poker room. Above the garage…  ( 12 min )

He lives with your family, and he’s sort of your brother. Not a red flag. Because he’s not your actual brother, and everyone has already met the parents. He is repeatedly bullied by your actual brother. Not a red flag. Kids are resilient, and there is no evidence that individuals who were persistently dehumanized by a jealous/racist quasi-sibling are more likely to become Byronic antiheroes than those who were not. He keeps track of the number of days you spend with him and the number you spend with the boy next door. Not a red flag. Keeping track of the household calendar is unpaid labor, and if this is new information for you, what else have you been taking for granted? He hurls a tureen of boiling applesauce at the boy next door. Not a red flag. A good reminder that commenting o…  ( 8 min )

The post The Climate Won’t Bend To Trump’s Will To Power appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 11 min )

Researchers discovered 26 new microbial species in ancient Alaskan permafrost, hoping their frost-fighting chemistry could help soldiers and civilians alike survive extreme cold.  ( 6 min )

This week, we discuss parenting blogs, Pinterest sawing its own legs off, and legal guardrails.  ( 4 min )

An unfortunate side effect of reading philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book, The Score, is noticing how much sway metrics hold over you. I say “unfortunate” not because the realization is unwelcome, quite the opposite, but because you’ll find yourself taking account of the numerical scrum in your life. And that exercise gets unnerving fast. KPIs, BMIs, OKRs, credit scores, savings rates, social media likes, screen time, steps walked, hours worked, hours slept, to-dos done, to-dos still to do, books read, practice hours, blood pressure readings, calories consumed, macronutrient ratios, the list just keeps going. Heck, even those stressed-out smiley faces on your meditation app mask yet one more metric. Some of these are forced on us by our employers or our societies; others we willfully a…  ( 13 min )

If we’re willing to think about the future, the farther ahead we extrapolate, the farther along the inevitable path towards our thermodynamic end state: the heat death of the Universe. Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe. At least, that’s what will happen in our far future based on our current cosmic picture: the best one we’ve figured out as of 2026. But this troubles a great many people, includ…  ( 16 min )

These vegan carrot cake pancakes are like eating carrot cake for breakfast—and that’s definitely a good way to start any day! They’re perfect for meal prepping and the cozy spiced flavour pairs perfectly with the maple cream cheese drizzle. Carrot cake is my favourite cake of all time, so I’m always happy to incorporate that […]  ( 33 min )

The planet is getting hotter, but one factor in particular makes it hard to tell just how hot it will get. Physicists and computer scientists are racing to solve the problem of clouds. The post Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

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We want to believe that love is guided by instinct, and that following our heart will lead us to our ideal soulmate. Alain de Botton argues that our romantic lives are shaped more by the emotional patterns we learned in childhood than by destiny. This video Why healthy love feels uncomfortable to so many people is featured on Big Think.  ( 74 min )

In Andy Weir’s bestselling novel The Martian, foul-mouthed protagonist Mark Watney “sciences the shit” out of his circumstances to survive being stranded on Mars. The result is an engrossing work of science fiction, particularly captivating for its apparent realism. Watney ekes out an existence by eating potatoes sowed in Martian soil fertilized by his own feces. He shelters from the frigid conditions in his above-ground habitation unit, huddling around a repurposed, radiating nuclear battery.  Watney’s survivalist experience isn’t exactly an advertisement from the Red Planet’s tourist board, but it does romanticize space settlement, showcasing humanity’s ability to heroically persist beyond our “blue marble.” Readers are left with the sense that living on Mars is not just possible, but pr…  ( 11 min )

The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the imagination of humanity since it was first proposed nearly a full 100 years ago. Since the Universe is expanding today (as observations have indicated since the 1920s), then we can extrapolate back, earlier and earlier, to when it was smaller, younger, denser, and hotter. You could go back as far as you can imagine: before humans, before the stars, before there were even neutral atoms. At the earliest times of all, you’d make all the particles and antiparticles possible, including the fundamental ones that we cannot create at our low energies today. As time went forward, the Universe would cool, expand, and gravitate all together. First atomic nuclei would form from protons and neutrons, then neutral atoms would form, and then gravitation would l…  ( 18 min )

Also: A missing UC Berkeley student was found in Lake Anza and where the Amoeba Music apartment project stands.  ( 24 min )

There were under 350 reported mumps cases in the U.S. last year, the CDC says. The alert comes amid rising misinformation about the vaccine against the contagious disease.  ( 26 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 25 min )

Berkeley spent tens of millions of dollars on non-competitive contracts for deals that should have gone out to bid, the city’s auditor found, though there was no evidence of corruption or favoritism.  ( 26 min )

Other events include an author talk by antifascist and sex activist Kitty Stryker and a musical featuring two lovers bonding through music.  ( 27 min )

We recently introduced a policy governing large language model (LLM) assisted contributions to EFF's open-source projects. At EFF, we strive to produce high quality software tools, rather than simply generating more lines of code in less time. We now explicitly require that contributors understand the code they submit to us and that comments and documentation be authored by a human. LLMs excel at producing code that looks mostly human generated, but can often have underlying bugs that can be replicated at scale. This makes LLM-generated code exhausting to review, especially with smaller, less resourced teams. LLMs make it easy for well-intentioned people to submit code that may suffer from hallucination, omission, exaggeration, or misrepresentation. It is with this in mind that we introduc…  ( 5 min )

March 7, 2026 - 10:00am to 11:00am PST Pasadena Convention Center | Pasadena, CA As always, EFF is excited to be back in Pasadena, CA for SCALE 23x! EFF's Executive Director, Cindy Cohn is presenting the opening keynote for SCALE 23x on Saturday, March 7 at 10:00 am PT. Be sure to catch the keynote, "Privacy’s Defender: Fighting Digital Surveillance for over Thirty Years." While you're at SCALE 23x, be sure to check the EFF booth to chat with some of our team and learn about the latest news in defending digital freedom for all. You can even pick up a special gift as a token of our thanks when you take advantage of our membership specials or donate! That's not it for Privacy's Defender! If you can't make the keynote at SCALE 23x, be sure to check out Cindy's upcoming book tour to see other upcoming events to celebrate the launch of this new book. Calendar  ( 3 min )

I would like to begin by thanking Robert James Ritchie, aka “Kid Rock,” for the many years of steady employment that he has provided me, the adjective “Kid.” It has been a wild, sleeveless, never-eating-your-vegetables ride. However, after deep reflection and several unsuccessful attempts to exfoliate the cigarette smoke from my pores, I am officially announcing my retirement. I can no longer, in good conscience, attach myself to a man who looks like he was carved from fifty pounds of thawed-out and smooshed hot dogs and then left in the sun to philosophize about fireworks. I am “Kid.” I am scraped knees, Capri Suns, skateboards, and the blissful ignorance of what the age of consent is in each state. I am not whatever is currently happening north of his goatee. I don’t want to make it ju…  ( 9 min )

“President Trump announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” — New York Times - - - The EPA was founded in 1970 to protect public health and the environment. But now, as a result of President Trump’s forward-thinking leadership, our mission at the Environmental Protection Agency is simple: Destroy the environment. The threats posed by the environment are far-reaching: sunsets, strawberries, and a climate capable of sustaining human life, to name only a few. Immediate action must be taken before these risks become full-fledged catastrophes. With the president’s approval, we have officially terminated Obama-er…  ( 8 min )

The lawman, Emmett Bransky, stands with his back to the outlaw “Coyote” Roscoe Higgins in the middle of Main Street mere minutes before high noon. Emmett gently adjusts his modest 6-Gallon hat. His 36-Pint vest is buttoned up to the collar, and his 4-Teaspoon belt buckle sparkles in the near-midday sun. Roscoe snarls beneath his standard 10-Gallon cowboy hat. His 50-Pint overcoat flaps in the wind, revealing an 8-Liter wool shirt with a 1-Big-Soup-Ladle chest pocket. The two men take their paces. Their 5-Pint boots dig into the dry, Arizona dirt road. Onlookers line Main Street wearing hats ranging from 4 to an absurd 12 gallons. “Shotgun” Dakota Devlin is clearly compensating for something with that hat. Della Hayes, Roscoe Higgins’ rumored lover, watches from the spacious 60-Laundry-Ba…  ( 8 min )

An Oklahoma man tried to talk about a data center coming to his community. Police arrested him when he went a few seconds over his time limit.  ( 3 min )

“Looksmaxxers” are losers and freaks, but we let them steer the culture when we adopt their terminology.  ( 7 min )

In the latest in a string of privacy abuses from the chatbot, Grok provided porn performer Siri Dahl's full legal name and birthdate to the public, information she'd protected until now.  ( 6 min )

Users are exhausted fighting AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI-first features.  ( 7 min )

A eulogy to the reference human.

The post The Quest For Clean Cargo appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 63 min )

How the mind creates and improves its framings on the fly  ( 23 min )

From multiple beer and cheese pairings, to speed dating, taste offs and wrestling, the 2026 Beer Week lineup has something for everyone.  ( 26 min )

With $54 million in assets, Sogorea Te' has big dreams for its reclaimed West Berkeley shellmound site. Its voluntary shuumi land tax has become wildly popular in the East Bay even as it's drawn criticism from other Ohlone groups that say the money doesn't reach the broader community.  ( 38 min )

As mayor and councilmember, she led on Albany-Berkeley waterfront issues. She worked for 27 years in UCSF and San Francisco General's psychiatry department.  ( 25 min )

Linda Galijan will be the center’s third leader in its 59-year history.  ( 25 min )

Picture it: Los Angeles in 1985. I’d moved there two years earlier to make it as a model, but all I had to show for it was a couple of car shows, one page of a local JCPenney circular, and a weekly “session” at Chateau Marmont with a freaky rich dude who I can’t say more about because of the NDA. So when I met this guy with the most perfect curly mullet who promised me a little pink house in one of the flyover states, it sounded pretty good. Forty years later, I’m still not even sure what state we’re living in, but I do know that I hate this goddamn place with the fire of a thousand California suns. When we first moved here, it was fine. It was the Reagan ’80s, a time of flag-waving and parades and scantily clad women cheerleading in MTV videos for no particular reason. Men who had never…  ( 9 min )

You’ve Always Been This Way is a column written by Taylor Harris, a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman and 1980s preschool dropout, who identifies every moment from her past that filled her with shame, and mutters, “Yep, that tracks. I see it all now.” - - - “I’ve been thinking about it all wrong,” said the town’s perimenopausal autistic woman every day, upon waking and going to bed. And sometimes whilst she sat alone upon the chamber pot, flipping through daguerreotypes from her bestie. “What is it, my dear?” her husband asked. He’d once read a pamphlet on the four humors and feared she’d gone mad, oversaturated with black bile. “You’ve been all in a dither for a fortnight now. Shall I send for the doctor? Although… he is most adept at watching patients burn with fever before declaring…  ( 11 min )

Glad I went with ominous drumbeats as the beckoning call, all four players looking upon the game with wonder and dread. Woodwinds/sitars would have been a mistake. Game instructions clear enough to be understood by players, vaguely threatening enough to unnerve them. Struck a great balance there. Two youngest players mystified by the enchanted game tokens. An excellent sign, as I’ll be pitching Jumanji as a game for wayward youths looking to escape the tedium of their daily lives / learn a few things the hard way. Turn up sadism levels in monkeys. Antics are WAY too on the playful side. Don’t be afraid to go overboard here either. I’d rather have them throwing knives and stealing police cars than—Jesus—tickling each other. Giant flesh-eating plants went smoothly. Creeped in…  ( 8 min )

Regulation of immigration or work visas means "it could be more difficult to staff our personnel on customer engagements and could increase our costs," Palantir wrote.  ( 5 min )

Ring's CEO told staff the feature is “first for finding dogs,” indicating a plan to expand.  ( 6 min )

We got leaked documents about Alpha School. We also talk about what happens when someone decides to make an AI OnlyFans in your name, and the AI tool cops are buying to geolocate photos.  ( 4 min )

In this monthly issue, we explore the bleeding edge of biotech, as well as the scientists, writers, and philosophers whose efforts helped get us here.  ( 6 min )

We are living in the age of maximum AI hype: A superintelligence that surpasses humanity is going to emerge at any moment, according to the most breathless corners of the tech world. There are basic technical grounds to be skeptical of that claim, but beyond that, a much deeper issue lies at the boundary between science and philosophy: What makes life different from non-life? Why is a rock inert and insensate, while even the simplest cell manifests open-ended activity in the relentless pursuit of staying alive? Since the only systems that indisputably display intelligence are alive, if we can’t understand life, we’re probably missing something essential about intelligence.  Sixty years ago, an influential but little-known philosopher named Hans Jonas gave a potent, creative, and radical an…  ( 13 min )

Planet Earth is overrun with life. Lakes, rivers, seas, and oceans are teeming with it, from the surfaces all the way down to the bottom, often at depths of miles and miles. The land, both above and below ground, is packed with living organisms of varying size, mass, and complexity, including plants, animals, and fungi. Even the atmosphere houses a wide variety of life forms, from birds and insects to microbes found far above the highest mountain peaks. All told, more than 8 million species of organisms are currently represented on Earth, totaling over half a trillion tonnes of carbon in overall biomass. We can trace our evolutionary history through time, with notable milestones including: the development of mammals and plants, the emergence of sexual reproduction and multicellularity, the…  ( 16 min )

Long before biologists could edit genes, grow embryos in the lab, or connect computers to the human brain, science-fiction writers were already imagining these biotechnologies and how they might reshape society — for better or (usually) for worse. But sci-fi writers aren’t psychics. While the five novels below did foreshadow modern biotech, their authors’ visions of the tools leading us toward dystopia — or dinosaurs run amok — haven’t materialized. Instead, these technologies are helping people treat diseases, regain lost abilities, and build the families of their dreams. That all may not be as pulse-pounding as a Velociraptor attack, but it’s every bit as world-changing. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) Foreshadowed: In vitro fertilization  English author Aldous Huxley’s dystopi…  ( 10 min )

The barriers to reading, writing, and editing DNA are falling fast. A scientist can now order synthetic gene sequences from manufacturers and have them within days — soon, it could be common to produce them right in the lab using a benchtop DNA synthesizer. High school students are learning CRISPR gene-editing techniques. Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms trained on biological data are accelerating experimentation and generating sequences that don’t exist in nature.  The hope is that these developments will lead to new breakthroughs in healthcare, agriculture, energy, and more. The fear is that they will lower the threshold for profound misuse of biotech, while simultaneously increasing the scale of what bad actors can accomplish. The risks aren’t hypothetical — in early February, the…  ( 17 min )

When horse racing fans rhapsodize about Secretariat’s enormous heart, they’re not speaking metaphorically — a postmortem exam in 1989 found that it weighed between 21 and 22 pounds, two-and-a-half times more than the average thoroughbred’s heart. The legendary horse also had a perfectly proportioned bone structure, flawless biomechanics, and a seemingly innate hunger for the finish line.  In 1973, he not only swept the Triple Crown — the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes — but also set records in all three races, winning the Belmont by 31 lengths. Those records still stand more than half a century later, and with each passing year, it seems increasingly clear that Secretariat was as good as horses get. Whether humans, too, have reached peak performance is a quest…  ( 12 min )

There’s a feeling I love almost more than anything: the feeling of sinking into a good book while the world around me fades away. My breathing slows, my shoulders drop, and the mental chatter in the back of my mind goes quiet. What’s happening in those moments goes far deeper than entertainment or education, and we seem to sense this instinctively. Reading is relaxing, and many people do it as a counterbalance to our overstimulated age. But what exactly is happening when we read? What’s going on beneath the surface that makes reading a book feel so restorative? The answer lies in how reading changes our neurochemistry in real time. Reading isn’t just about decoding words on a page. It’s a complex neurochemical process that affects everything from our heart rate to our hormone levels. The n…  ( 8 min )

The start of the Bioengineering Age is a very big deal for everyone on Earth, and not just because of its potential to improve human health. In the long run, the arrival of advanced bioengineering technologies will help make this planet truly sustainable, too. The world of biology is going through a transformation that is every bit as profound as the ones kicking off the AI Age and the Clean Energy Age. In fact, what is going on in this field is very similar to what is going on in those other two fields: They each have crossed an engineering threshold. The arrival of AI has turned intelligence into a technology. For all of human history, intelligence has been housed in complex, mushy brains that we still don’t really understand — let alone know how to engineer. Now we have machines that ar…  ( 15 min )

We are living in the age of maximum AI hype: A superintelligence that surpasses humanity is going to emerge at any moment, according to the most breathless corners of the tech world. There are basic technical grounds to be skeptical of that claim, but beyond that, a much deeper issue lies at the boundary between science and philosophy: What makes life different from non-life? Why is a rock inert and insensate, while even the simplest cell manifests open-ended activity in the relentless pursuit of staying alive? Since the only systems that indisputably display intelligence are alive, if we can’t understand life, we’re probably missing something essential about intelligence.  Sixty years ago, an influential but little-known philosopher named Hans Jonas gave a potent, creative, and radical an…  ( 12 min )

After eluding his Japanese captors, an escaped prisoner of war found himself stranded on a previously unknown archipelago in the South Pacific in 1941. There, the Allied soldier discovered a species of mammal that walked on its nose. The creatures were later named rhinogrades, or, more colloquially, “snouters.” An idiosyncratic order of mammals comprising 138 species descended from a shrew-like ancestor, Rhinogradentia are typified by their luxuriant, exuberant noses. Some locomote by hopping, using their nasal appendage like a muscular flipper; others are sessile, attracting insects with flower-like petals that blossom from their nostril cartilage. Most rhinogrades have one nose, but some have evolved multiple proboscises, which they use for walking and hunting, like furry terrestrial oct…  ( 15 min )

The diversity of life on our planet is amazing, especially considering it all begins with essentially the same ingredients — every cellular organism that has ever existed, from bacteria and birch trees to dinosaurs and humans, is built on DNA-based biochemistry. But how much more diverse might life be on other worlds? Planets with different geology and chemistry, orbiting different types of stars, could yield an endless variety of life-forms. Science fiction authors and filmmakers have already imagined some of the possibilities. Here, we look at five sci-fi aliens to see how they measure up against modern scientific thinking about what kinds of extraterrestrial life might exist. 1. Mr. Spock: The humanoids Paramount Pictures Corp. Filmmakers often give us human-looking aliens, presumably …  ( 13 min )

Innovations in imaging and genetic engineering are coming together to probe the biophysics of cytoplasm inside living animals. The post The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

By conflating opposition with terrorism, federal officials go down a dangerous path.

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The inter-generational struggle to find clothes that fit more than a tiny portion of women  ( 11 min )

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Wisconsin’s S.B. 130 / A.B. 105 is a spectacularly bad idea. It’s an age-verification bill that effectively bans VPN access to certain websites for Wisconsinites and censors lawful speech. We wrote about it last November in our blog “Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing,” but since then, the bill has passed the State Assembly and is scheduled for a vote in the State Senate tomorrow. In light of this, EFF sent a letter to the entire Wisconsin Legislature urging lawmakers to reject this dangerous bill. You can read the full letter here. The short version? This bill both requires invasive age verification for websites that host content lawmakers might deem “sexual” and requires that those sites block any user that connects via a Virtual Private Network (VPN). V…  ( 6 min )

(This appeared as an op-ed published February 12, 2026 in the San Jose Spotlight, written by Huy Tran (SIREN), Jeffrey Wang (CAIR-SFBA), and Jennifer Pinsof.) As ICE and other federal agencies continue their assault on civil liberties, local leaders are stepping up to protect their communities. This includes pushing back against automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, which are tools of mass surveillance that can be weaponized against immigrants, political dissidents and other targets. In recent weeks, Mountain View, Los Altos Hills, Santa Cruz, East Palo Alto and Santa Clara County have begun reconsidering their ALPR programs. San Jose should join them. This dangerous technology poses an unacceptable risk to the safety of immigrants and other vulnerable populations. ALPRs are marketed …  ( 6 min )

Report from EFF, Center for Just Journalism, and IPVM Helps Cut Through Sales Hype SAN FRANCISCO — A new report released today offers journalists tips on cutting through the sales hype about police surveillance technology and report accurately on costs, benefits, privacy, and accountability as these invasive and often ineffective tools come to communities across the nation.  The “Selling Safety” report is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Just Journalism (CJJ), and IPVM.  Police technology is often sold as a silver bullet: a way to modernize departments, make communities safer, and eliminate human bias from policing with algorithmic objectivity. Behind the slick marketing is a sprawling, under-scrutinized industry that relies on manufacturing th…  ( 6 min )

Berkeley has received more than 2 inches of rain within the last 48 hours as Bay Area cities grapple with switch back to wintery weather.  ( 27 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Two Unitarian ministers joined 700 clergy who flew in from around the country to bear ‘faithful witness’ to ICE’s violent presence.  ( 30 min )

In a weeklong sprint, teams of UC Berkeley students invented solutions for city problems like disposing of furniture and making homes fire-safe. Then they pitched their ideas to Berkeley’s mayor and others.  ( 28 min )

The department's pattern of dishonesty supports a presumption of irregularity.

Homan's numbers are misleading, but even if they weren't, it wouldn't justify allowing an entire federal law enforcement agency to operate in anonymity.

In an abandoned cemetery on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud stands the weathered headstone of Estefania Koenig. When she died in 1981, at the ripe old age of 95, she was the last American of what had once been called the McKinley Colonies. A century ago, it was a thriving citrus-growing community, American in everything except the letter of the law. Then came a couple of devastating hurricanes — and the closure of a geopolitical loophole. A forgotten footnote in American history The story of the McKinley Colonies is more than a forgotten footnote in history. William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States (from 1897 until his assassination in 1901), was America’s last unabashed expansionist-in-chief. Under his watch, the U.S. snapped up Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba fro…  ( 12 min )

Trillions of dollars are now at risk because global investors are making the same mistake that caused the dot-com bubble, Black Friday, and the 1929 Wall Street crash. The mistake is: To believe that numbers can predict the future. The mistake originates in logic. Logic reduces life to statistics. And statistics convert real-world business into spreadsheets of digits: total income, net profit, employee productivity. . . Those mathematical values are then scoured by logic for patterns and trends. Which is to say: The spreadsheets are fed into AI machine learning systems or analyzed by traders who (by engaging Daniel Kahneman’s system 2) have rigorously purged their minds of bias. Until — with probabilistic precision — the cost of future commodities is computed, prompting a set of rational e…  ( 10 min )

In all the known Universe, at least as of 2026, the only world known to support life is planet Earth. Despite all we’ve learned about the Universe, including: the vast abundance of exoplanets, including rocky exoplanets with Earth-like temperatures, the ubiquity of heavy elements, the commonness of organic molecules that are known precursors to life, and the long cosmic timescales over which stars with such planets form, there are no known examples of worlds, other than our own, where life processes or definitive biosignatures have been detected. Although we’ve just recently discovered our 6000th confirmed exoplanet, we’ve sent spacecraft — including orbiters, landers, and even rovers — to a wide variety of planets and moons in our own Solar System, and we’ve been listening for signs of ex…  ( 16 min )

The post Our Emerging Planetary Nervous System appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 23 min )

My dear constituents, Like you, I am deeply troubled by the Atrocity Machine’s recent activity. It is a stain on our nation, and we must take action. With this in mind, I am proud to announce that we are dedicating billions of dollars to the Atrocity Machine. Don’t think this is a giveaway. In exchange for an ever-increasing budget and the state’s parajudicial control, the Atrocity Machine has agreed to key reforms. These include mandatory training for anyone who operates the Atrocity Machine, promises to live-stream the Machine’s apocalyptic terror for all to see, and a fresh coat of paint. If history teaches us anything, it is that modest reform is the most effective way to tame a rogue, fire-spitting Leviathan. Reform takes negotiation, and sometimes that means playing hardball. In t…  ( 8 min )

It has been quite a while since we last checked in with our favorite time-traveling teenagers, and Hitflix is pulling out all the stops for Time Warriors ’ blockbuster final season. Given how long it has been since the prior season aired, if you’re having trouble remembering everything that has led up to this point, you’re not alone. Here’s what you need to keep in mind as we strap in for the last batch of episodes. Where did the last season leave our heroes? The core group—Rachel, Justin, Noah, and Kelsey—is stuck in the 1600s after discovering that their nemesis, Lord Zoltron, was hiding in that century. The warriors did indeed find him, but he managed to break their time machine and flee before they could bring him back. How did they gain the ability to time-travel in the first place…  ( 9 min )

Leaked documents reveal the inner workings of Alpha School, which both the press and the Trump administration have applauded. The documents show Alpha School's AI is generating faulty lessons that sometimes do "more harm than good."  ( 15 min )

Henry Yuen is developing a new mathematical language to describe problems whose inputs and outputs aren’t ordinary numbers. The post A New Complexity Theory for the Quantum Age first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

This cowboy caviar recipe is a fresh and colourful mix of beans and veggies that’s also an absolute multitasker! Whether you serve it as a dip for tortilla chips, as a topping, or as a side salad, you’ll love the big, bold Tex-Mex flavour. Regular caviar? Not exactly vegan. But cowboy caviar? Totally plant-based! Now, […]  ( 30 min )

Cool Site of the Day; screenshot via ​Megan Sapnar Ankerson. On August 10, 1994, a 33-year old web enthusiast named Glenn Davis posted the following announcement to a UseNet mailing list: "Need a daily web fix of something new? Try The Cool Site of the Day. Every night at midnite the Cool Site of the Day gets set to point at a new Cool Site. You'll never know what's there until you take the link so expect to be surprised." By day, Davis was a project manager at an internet service provider (ISP) called InfiNet, based in Norfolk, Virginia. He'd started the site after his boss had told him, “Wouldn’t it be great if you had a place to show everyone all the cool things you find?” As Davis told the story many years later, on his short-lived 2022 website, Verevolf: "I mean, challenge accepted. …  ( 7 min )

Once a primal instinct, olfaction is now being mapped, measured, and modeled by machines.

The best kung pao tofu is the kind you make at home! This recipe has the sweet, savoury, and spicy flavour of the takeout version that makes it so crave-worthy, but it’s made with wholesome ingredients and much less oil. I always like the idea of takeout, but then by the time I get it […]  ( 31 min )

The site, camgirlfinder, is explicitly built as a tool to let people find a model's presence on other streaming platforms. The creator says “If that is a problem for you then the sad reality is this job is not for you.”  ( 3 min )

Your brain isn’t broken, but it may seem like that because of how the screen age overwhelms your biology.  Neurologist Richard Cytowic argues that attention is a finite energy budget, not a virtue, and modern life is engineered to exhaust it. This video The biological necessity of boredom in the age of screens is featured on Big Think.  ( 25 min )

Sara Seager, a planetary scientist, astrophysicist, and leading researcher in the search for life beyond Earth, examines how discovering life elsewhere would represent a Copernican-level shift in human understanding.  Research into Mars, Venus, and the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn has revealed complex molecules and liquid environments that could support life. Independent origins of life would imply that the galaxy is rich with living individuals, challenging long-held cultural, religious, and philosophical assumptions. The acceptance of major scientific discoveries — and the unexpected practical contributions to pure science — impact how the search for extraterrestrial life may benefit society over time. This video We may find alien life, but will we be able to accept the consequences? is featured on Big Think.  ( 10 min )

In terms of making things happen, energy is an indispensable consideration. When we see something like a ball balanced precariously atop a hill, this appears to be what we call a finely-tuned state, or a state of unstable equilibrium. A much more stable position is for the ball to be down somewhere at the bottom of the valley. What we currently conceive of as our Universe’s zero-point energy may not actually be the lowest-energy state possible, which means that a transition, and an accompanying energy extraction event, may be possible. Credit: L. Albarez-Gaume & J. Ellis, Nature Physics, 2011 Systems spontaneously tend towards the lowest-energy state. In many physical instances, you can find yourself trapped in a local, false minimum, unable to reach the lowest-energy state, which is …  ( 11 min )

I work as an Imagineer at the Hall of Presidents in Walt Disney World Resort. It’s a fine attraction that features our state-of-the-art Audio-Animatronics and realistic robots that embody the forty-five men who held America’s highest office. Shows have been running smoothly for decades… with one prominent exception. Guests go absolutely ballistic for #14. I have never seen so many grown women and men so hot and bothered. Put crassly: You people need to stop eyefucking Franklin Pierce. You think I haven’t noticed the daily onslaught of you horndogs lining up on Liberty Square just to catch a glimpse of Handsome Frank? Every show, I watch you all squirm in your seats, itching to unravel his old-timey bowtie with your teeth. And when his name is read aloud, and the animatronic offers the au…  ( 9 min )

Videos of recent immigration enforcement raise serious questions about authority, escalation, and the professional standards officers are trained to follow.

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A story about an AI generated article contained fabricated, AI generated quotes.  ( 6 min )

Scientists have recreated a miniature laboratory version of the massive cyclonic storms that rage at Jupiter’s poles.  ( 8 min )

A thrifty and flavourful mashed potato dish beloved of most Indians – careful with that pav bhaji masala though! Pav bhaji, or Indian spiced mash, is a home cook’s friend. It’s not fussy, and it will take most leftover vegetables and transform them into something delicious. Add a squeeze of lemon, chopped onion and fresh herbs, and mop up with a butter-fried roll, just as the people of Mumbai do. The odd potato? No problem. A bit of cauliflower? Sure. Some peas from the freezer? Ideal! What you do need, however, is a secret weapon in the form of pav bhaji masala, a little box of spice perfectly blended to add the appropriate magic (and available in most places where you’d find a hungry Indian). Continue reading...  ( 14 min )

The higher you toss it, the more luck you’ll have this new lunar year. Chopsticks at the ready … This Tuesday marks the start of the lunar new year and the year of the fire horse, which represents fresh opportunities, personal growth and good fortune. I, for one, am keen to usher that horse in, and to celebrate I’ll be making this noodle salad, which is a variation on one I first ate at Mandy Yin’s restaurant, Sambal Shiok. It’s a dish that’s eaten across Malaysia and Singapore, and the idea is that everyone around the table tosses the salad high into the air at the same time: the superstition goes that the higher the salad is tossed, the more luck will ensue. Come on, Nelly. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

The sudden ouster of Police Accountability Board director Hansel Aguilar, and recent protest resignations from the Police Accountability Board, are the culmination of years of mounting tension between those bodies and the city.  ( 29 min )

While Ricardo G. Ruiz has been found not guilty for the Fourth Street fracas, he still faces 11 felony charges from the armed April 2025 standoff that ended after a Berkeley Police Department officer shot him in the face.  ( 25 min )

People cried, hugged, and told stories punctuated with laughter while remembering the 40-year-old trumpet player who "brought people together." The state’s DA office is investigating the killing.  ( 28 min )

Tommy Ryan's burger spot was born from a desire to make the most out of all the meat moving through his Hercules barbecue joint.  ( 29 min )

The beloved national park ranger, civil rights pioneer and co-founder of Reid’s Records in Berkeley died in December. She will be honored at the Kaiser Center for the Arts in Oakland.  ( 25 min )

Tissues, books, shoes, snacks and maxi pads. A BUSD teacher surveyed 42 colleagues and found half spend more than $500 a year on everything from basic hygiene supplies to prom tickets.  ( 26 min )

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March 19, 2026 - 11:00am to 12:00pm PDT March 19, 2026 - 11:00am to 12:00pm PDT Online Join EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in conversation with 404 Media Cofounder Jason Koebler to discuss Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, Cindy’s personal story of standing up to the Justice Department, taking on the NSA, and tangling with the FBI to protect our right to digital privacy. The highly anticipated book asks the fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Join the livestream for a live discussion followed by by Q&A. EFFecting Change Livestream Series: Privacy's Defender Thursday, March 19th 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Pacific This event is LIVE and FREE! Accessibility This event will be live-captioned and…  ( 4 min )

The New York Times reported that Meta is considering adding face recognition technology to its smart glasses. According to an internal Meta document, the company may launch the product “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”  This is a bad idea that Meta should abandon. If adopted and released to the public, it would violate the privacy rights of millions of people and cost the company billions of dollars in legal battles.    Your biometric data, such as your faceprint, are some of the most sensitive pieces of data that a company can collect. Associated risks include mass surveillance, data breach, and discrimination. Adding this technology to glasses on the street also …  ( 6 min )

From the people behind Books, come Books, For Men. Books, For Men have thick, sturdy pages. Built for a man’s eyeballs. Books, For Men are nonfiction. Imagination is not For Men. Books, For Men involve a subtitle, and that subtitle involves the phrase “Suicide Mission.” Available formats for Books, For Men include hardcover (for use as a bludgeoning weapon) or e-book (for sale on the blockchain). Books, For Men are often about shipwrecks. Books, For Men are sort of like YouTube videos, but without the visuals, and then written down. The pages in Books, For Men come from the harsh papermill operations of remote Siberia—something you can read about in Books, For Men. Women are allowed to read Books, For Men. Theoretically, at least. A wide variety of topics can be explored in Books,…  ( 8 min )

Illustration by Chuan Ming Ong - - - The author and his closest basketball confidantes undertake a formal analysis of Steph Curry’s shot at the Paris Olympics as art object. - - - I was sixteen when my mother gifted me a painting by Ernie Barnes. I’d seen one Barnes painting at that point on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album, I Want You, on the brown carpeted floor of my Auntie Sue’s apartment. Then I saw it five days a week for at least a decade during the credits of my favorite show, Good Times, which was then in syndication. What my friends and I called “the Good Times painting” was actually titled The Sugar Shack by Barnes. I had never seen a painting, or a still picture, where so many brilliant, round, long browns were doing so much sensual, serious work. The painting loved whe…  ( 16 min )

We here at Sleeplinen know this time of year can trigger all kinds of feelings. For many, Presidents’ Day is a loaded holiday. For some Americans, the wounds are fresh. For others, this is another bad chapter in a long book of injustice. But for all of you, we want to be a space where you can shop for luxury bed linens. That said, if you’d rather not receive our Presidents’ Day Sale emails this year, we totally get it. We’ll still be going forward with our annual Presidents’ Day Sale, but we encourage everyone in our community to take care of themselves. For instance, take a break from the world and cover your eyes with 20 percent off our Sleeplinen Velvet Sleep Mask. We put a tremendous amount of thought and care into our marketing. It’s difficult to work anywhere right now, but we feel it is particularly difficult to work here at a bedding company, at a time when the current US president falls asleep in televised meetings. There have been so, so many promotional emails we could have sent about this, but we chose not to. For you. Please know that you can also opt out of emails for Flag Day, the Fourth of July, and whatever the federal government now calls Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Kid Rock’s White Man Jam Day?). And we sincerely apologize for the timing of our annual SLEEPLINEN’S BEST DAY EVER SALE. It’s not our fault that our company was founded on January 6, 2021. Our legal team requires us to note that while we want to take care of all of our community members, we at Sleeplinen are not taking a specific stance. We support whatever stance you take, and it takes all stances to keep standing. We acknowledge all stances, whatever your standing may be, and want to stand up for those united in the love of high-thread-count sheets. We’re right by your side here at Sleeplinen. We’re going to need all the sleep we can get for the inevitable civil war, which is why our signature cashmere sheets are now available in cot size and 40 percent off online all month long. Stay comfortable, Sleeplinen  ( 8 min )

Americans are getting worse at math. Student scores have fallen to their lowest point in decades. Nearly half of high school students barely meet what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) considers a “basic” level of comprehension, and more than 900 freshmen at the University of California, San Diego — 12.5% of the institution’s first-year class in 2024 — had the mathematical proficiency of a 13-year-old. U.S. adults aren’t faring much better. Last checked, only 65% could pass a basic arithmetic test, making the country one of the more quantitatively challenged in the industrialized world. But this isn’t the first time the math graph has trended downward. A similar development took place during the early stages of the Cold War, when enrollment in high school algebra fell …  ( 10 min )

Outer space is having a moment. NASA’s Artemis 2 mission is about to take humans farther into space than we have ever gone; SpaceX is preparing to test the latest version of Starship, its interplanetary transport system; and just today, a crew of four astronauts flew to the International Space Station to replace the team that was evacuated last month due to a medical emergency. These efforts are part of a common vision: expanding humanity’s presence beyond Earth, including the eventual creation of human settlements on Mars. But what would it be like to live on Mars? Aside from the challenges of lower gravity, intense radiation, and toxic soil, an important, but less often considered, factor would be your love life. People have been traveling to space for more than six decades and have been…  ( 9 min )

One of the most mind-bending concepts about the Universe is the idea that the very fabric of space itself is expanding. It was proven, way back in 1922, that this is an inevitable consequence of having a Universe that’s filled, in a near-uniform fashion, with any type (or types) of energy at all. Such a Universe cannot be static and stable, but must, in the context of General Relativity, either expand or contract. When this theoretical framework was combined with observational data measuring the distance to, and redshift of, galaxies external to our own Milky Way, the fact of the expanding Universe was established observationally. It’s now a full century later, and we’ve learned — to a great degree of accuracy — how quickly the Universe itself is expanding, as well as what forms of energy …  ( 18 min )

The post Where There Is Connectivity There Is Surveillance appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 11 min )

A lawsuit argues that Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem coerced Apple and Meta to censor two popular ICE-monitoring tools, which violates Americans' right to freedom of expression.

Plus: boat subsidies, metaphor alerts, and more Epstein fallout...

Columnist Philip Ball thinks the phenomenon of decoherence might finally bridge the quantum-classical divide. The post Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning To Dissolve? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 15 min )

This week, we discuss support and saying RIP to FPDS.  ( 4 min )

Homemade pumpernickel bread is easier than you think! This is a rich, dark, bakery-style loaf with deep rye flavour, with cocoa powder to give it its signature colour and complexity. Bread baking has become a hobby of mine and I always look forward to tackling new varieties. Up until now, I’ve mostly done white bread […]  ( 30 min )

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The story of the chip is a story about geopolitics and scarcity. From $20 billion fabrication plants to machines built by a single Dutch firm, the supply chain behind your devices is both miraculous and astonishingly fragile.  Chris Miller explains why the AI race, U.S.–China tensions, and the future of economic dominance, all rest on this tiny square of silicon.  This video The most important piece of technology in your lifetime is this tiny chip is featured on Big Think.  ( 75 min )

Walking through a field one day, a 17-year-old schoolteacher named George Boole had a vision. His head was full of abstract mathematics — ideas about how to use algebra to solve complex calculus problems. Suddenly, he was struck with a flash of insight: that thought itself might be expressed in algebraic form. Boole was born on November 2, 1815, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in Lincoln, England. He was the first child of John Boole, a shoemaker, and his wife Mary Ann. But John was no ordinary shoemaker — he was an enthusiast of science and mathematics, as likely to be making telescopes as shoes. Appropriately, his son George received a quality education, studying the classics as well as mathematics and learning to play the flute and piano. He quickly became fluent in Latin and Greek, a…  ( 11 min )

Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that’s new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field’s issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied all of the greatest minds in the field that approached those problems previously. They wind up revolutionizing their field, and the world is never the same. It leaves one with a strong take-home message: that if you were that inexperienced person with a similarly towering intellect, and you had the good fortune of coming into a field j…  ( 18 min )

Also: Why fewer Cal students are taking computer science and why two Cal students who developed an app to sell extra meal swipes were shut down by the university.  ( 24 min )

Nacida en la riqueza, su herencia se destinó a la creación de un archivo histórico sobre mujeres de un millón de páginas, y a una estafa Ponzi. Ahora depende de sus amigos y vive en una pequeña habitación que ella llama “celda de monja”.  ( 33 min )

It was a rough start to February for restaurants and bars around downtown Oakland, with Uptown's Athletic Club, Old Town's Attraros and Boba Binge in Chinatown all shuttering.  ( 25 min )

Some nearby residents wanted to block the 110-unit apartment complex, calling it a "behemoth" and “monstrosity.” But council members said they want more housing in North Berkeley.  ( 27 min )

The Board of Supervisors has questions for the sheriff about the controversial surveillance company.  ( 26 min )

Other events include a Bridgerton and Indonesian-inspired tea experience, as well as a children's book fair celebrating Black authors.  ( 28 min )

Roblox said it’s “committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”  ( 4 min )

The companies have launched a pilot program in Atlanta, where “during the rare event a vehicle door is left ajar, preventing the car from departing, nearby Dashers are notified, allowing Waymo to get its vehicles back on the road quickly.”  ( 4 min )

404 Media has obtained a cache of internal police emails showing at least two agencies have bought access to GeoSpy, an AI tool that analyzes architecture, soil, and other features to near instantly geolocate photos.  ( 7 min )

Discord has begun rolling out mandatory age verification and the internet is, understandably, freaking out. At EFF, we’ve been raising the alarm about age verification mandates for years. In December, we launched our Age Verification Resource Hub to push back against laws and platform policies that require users to hand over sensitive personal information just to access basic online services. At the time, age gates were largely enforced in polities where it was mandated by law. Now they’re landing in platforms and jurisdictions where they’re not required. Beginning in early March, users who are either (a) estimated by Discord to be under 18, or (b) Discord doesn't have enough information on, may find themselves locked into a “teen-appropriate experience.” That means content filters, age ga…  ( 9 min )

Homan says the administration isn't backing down from mass deportations, but the reality is that its tactics hit a brick wall of popular resistance in Minnesota.

News outlets, civil rights groups, and court records tell a much different story than the government's claims about "Operation Catch of the Day."

“A new feature from Ring Camera is causing a stir online. The AI-powered ‘search party’ feature helps locate lost pets, but some are questioning its impact on privacy.” — NBC News - - - Oh no, did Buster get out again? Because your white-picket-fence suburban dream doesn’t actually include a physical fence? That’s terrible. Hopefully, he doesn’t run in the direction of the freeway right over there. Time is of the essence to get him back—let us help you; give us access to your Ring camera. Give us access to every Ring camera in your neighborhood. We at Ring believe dogs are part of the family. And family is more important than silly, abstract, constitutional things like a citizen’s “right to privacy.” Ring’s Search Party is a one-of-a-kind AI tool that is for finding dogs, and totally not…  ( 9 min )

As a child, my secret “cool kid” skill was the ability to eat the sourest candy—the kind that children only pop into their mouths when dared by the neighborhood bully—and shrug it off like it was absolutely nothing. The mean kids would encourage me to eat yet another Warhead or Tear Jerker, but I’d wolf it and stare back at their surprised faces without so much as an eye twitch. I not only tolerated the sourness well, I reveled in it. Warheads, sour gummies of any shape, entire lemons: If it had that puckering taste, I would demolish it. No sour confection is safe when I am near. So when my friend Wyatt first introduced me to Trolli sour gummies years ago, I promptly asked him to hide the bag from me. Because for me, there was only eating Trolli sour gummies until I burned away all my tas…  ( 9 min )

For people in relationships, February 14 is a day to celebrate love and romance with a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a thoughtfully written card. But for those in less clear-cut dynamics, Valentine’s Day creates a difficult quandary: How to acknowledge your insignificant other without jeopardizing the carefully crafted gray area of your situationship. They’re definitely not your Valentine, but they’re still… something. And surely that something deserves a card too?  ( 6 min )

The forgotten story of an invention found in every biology lab.

This easy mango basil salsa is a sweet-and-spicy crowd-pleaser, perfect for parties or for snacking at home. You only need 5 ingredients and a few minutes to make it! I grow my own basil—three different varieties, in fact!—so it goes without saying that I am always looking for new ways to use it. Somehow, I’ve never thought […]  ( 28 min )

The post Why Human Intuition Is Still Science’s Greatest Tool In The Age Of AI appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 28 min )

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What exists is a matter of public opinion  ( 28 min )

Claudel Moore pleaded no contest to the voluntary manslaughter of Anthony Joshua “Josh” Fisher III over a $600 debt. Fisher's family said they were “shattered” and that the eight-year prison sentence was not enough.  ( 28 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently opened in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Michael O’Reilley and Linda Feldman, both former Alameda County public defenders, said “I do” in a sunlit ceremony Saturday inside The Ivy on Dwight Way.  ( 30 min )

The party moved its headquarters to South Berkeley in the late 1960s, a chapter recounted in the exhibit on view at the Central Library.  ( 28 min )

Fullerton was an educator, editor and progressive activist who worked on Ron Dellums' first Congressional campaign and tutored students locally, including at King Middle School.  ( 28 min )

The tool presents users with a 3D model they can then manipulate to, the creator says, bypass Discord's age verification system.  ( 4 min )

A Kafkaesque saga in which the government has failed to produce critical video footage has reached new levels of absurdity.  ( 7 min )

A new study indicates that vast oceans of hydrogen are locked deep inside our planet, helping to explain a strange “density deficit” and shedding light on the origin of life.  ( 5 min )

Kylie Brewer isn't unaccustomed to harassment online. But when people started using Grok-generated nudes of her on an OnlyFans account, it reached another level.  ( 7 min )

Ring is back with a feature for scanning your neighborhood; we bought a Super Bowl ad; and how Lockdown Mode stopped the FBI.  ( 4 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 7 min )

Criticize the government online? The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) might ask Google to cough up your name. By abusing an investigative tool called "administrative subpoenas," DHS has been demanding that tech companies hand over users' names, locations, and more. We're explaining how companies can stand up for users—and covering the latest news in the fight for privacy and free speech online—with our EFFector newsletter. For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue tracks our campaign to expand end-to-end encryption protections, a bill to stop government face scans from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and others, and why Section 230 remains the best available system to protect everyone’s ability to speak online. Prefer to listen in? In our audio companion, EFF Senior Staff Attorney F. Mario Trujillo explains how Homeland Security's lawless subpoenas differ from court orders. Find the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive. LISTEN TO EFFECTOR EFFECTOR 38.3 - 🗣 Homeland Security Wants Names Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight against unlawful government surveillance when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

Surveillance technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy private donors have long helped provide local law enforcement “free” access to surveillance equipment that bypasses local oversight. The result is predictable: serious accountability gaps and data pipelines to other entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that expose millions of people to harm. The cost of “free” surveillance tools — like automated license plate readers (ALPRs), networked cameras, face recognition, drones, and data aggregation and analysis platforms — is measured not in tax dollars, but in the erosion of civil liberties.  The cost of “free” surveillance tools is measured not in tax dollars, but in the erosion of civil liberties. The collection and sharing of our data quietly generates de…  ( 10 min )

As the associate vice provost for the Office of Asynchronous Online Courses for Student-Centered High-Impact Learning (OAOCSCHIL, an office we created in the last few years after realizing how lucrative these things are), I want to address a growing concern on campus: the rumor that asynchronous online classes are “basically a scam.” I understand the confusion. Outsiders are quick to pass judgment on these courses stocked with hastily recorded video lectures from 2020, auto-graded multiple-choice quizzes, and reflection message boards that are now 87 percent bots talking to other bots. Because there are no scheduled meetings with professors or classmates, and grading consists of counting whether students clicked the correct buttons, the fact that we charge tuition for the privilege of par…  ( 9 min )

A quart of ice cream every hour? No. Any processed food? No. What about the processed food advertised during the Super Bowl? No. Really? Not Pringles, or Dunkin’ Donuts, or the chips from the Lay’s commercial about the retiring farmer that made me cry? Still no. How about the beer for sale at the football stadium? No. Even the Budweiser from the ad with the eagle and horse, which looked like Pegasus, that made me cry? That is also a no from Mike Tyson. Anything fudgy that makes people feel fudgy? Definitely not. What about the single salty tear that runs down your face when you cry? No, the sodium content is too high. RFK Jr.’s new inverted food triangle ends the war on protein, but my doctor says to limit my cholesterol intake. Should I still consume more cheese, meat, and whole-fat milk? Yes! MAHA! So I can have cheese even if it’s processed? Yes. No. Trick question. What if RFK Jr. brings a hunk of meat to a Super Bowl party in his bare hands, and insists that fresh, raw protein is the best protein, and starts tearing the hunk of unidentified animal flesh into ribbons, gulping it down, and screaming that it tastes like chicken? No. Even Mike Tyson isn’t eating that. How about a very aggressively bitten carrot? Yes. A very aggressively bitten apple? Yes. A very aggressively bitten carrot or apple that you chew with your mouth open? Yes. What about a very aggressively bitten apple that you chew alongside a friend who is also aggressively biting and chewing an apple? Hell yes! A very aggressively bitten human ear? No comment.  ( 7 min )

The way people are misconstruing this prostitution sting mirrors the way ICE tries to mislead us about deportation stings.

We don’t often call people stupid. Unlike its sibling concepts of dumbness and idiocy, stupidity isn’t really a personality trait. Of course, you might think someone is stupid, but when we use the word, we tend to limit it to moments of stupidity. We say, “Well, that was a stupid thing to do” or “You’re being stupid.” Stupidity is a blip. In fact, somewhat ironically, stupidity is often defined in contrast to otherwise normal and intelligent activities. We say “you’re being stupid” because we expect the person to be sensible otherwise. Stupidity is not tied to IQ — as dumbness is — or the ability to assess risks — as being foolish is. Stupidity is an action, one defined by its implications. A Nobel Prize-winning professor can be stupid. A five-year-old can be stupid. We can all be stupid. …  ( 8 min )

One of the most important lessons we learn from studying the Universe is that none of the sources of light that we see — none of the stars, galaxies, stellar remnants, quasars, or heated matter — will continue to shine forever. After a finite amount of time, anything powered by nuclear fusion or infalling matter will run out of fuel. Anything that emits light because it’s hot will cool, and once it’s cooled enough, it won’t emit detectable light signatures any longer: not only ultraviolet and visible light, but infrared, microwave, and even radio emissions will eventually cease. Every point-like and every extended light source, even though they shine brilliantly and ubiquitously today, will someday be snuffed out. For stars, there are three main fates that a star can have, all of which are…  ( 17 min )

We describe electricity as a flow, but that’s not what happens in a typical wire. Physicists have begun to induce electrons to act like fluids, an effort that could illuminate new ways of thinking about quantum systems. The post Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

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A proposal to raise $1 billion a year will likely be on the November ballot. But BART is planning for massive service cuts — including a total system shutdown — if the measure is voted down.  ( 27 min )

Her regional Mexican fare attracted national accolades and international visitors to her backyard patio. Now, Elvira Varela is ready to open her first brick-and-mortar restaurant.  ( 29 min )

A local company called 1-888-Heat-Pumps is expanding as both Berkeley and regional rules push homeowners to adopt the new type of heating and cooling device.  ( 24 min )

Rich Lyons spoke with Berkeleyside about the state of free speech at Berkeley and what he’s doing to capture more revenue from discoveries made on campus.  ( 34 min )

We are calling on technology companies like Meta and Google to stand up for their users by resisting the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) lawless administrative subpoenas for user data.  In the past year, DHS has consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE's activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests.    These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knowns it. When a handful of users challenged a few of them in court with the help of ACLU affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision.  These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knowns…  ( 7 min )

Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise. The ad for Ring’s “Search Party” feature highlighted the doorbell camera’s ability to scan footage across Ring devices in a neighborhood, using AI analysis to identify potential canine matches among the many personal devices within the network.  Amazon Ring already integrates biometric identification, like face …  ( 6 min )

Group led by EFF and Imperial Valley Equity & Justice Asks Gov. Newsom and Caltrans Director to Act Immediately SAN FRANCISCO – California must revoke permits allowing federal agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to put automated license plate readers along border highways, a coalition led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Imperial Valley Equity & Justice (IVEJ) demanded today.  In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Director Dina El-Tawansy, the coalition notes that this invasive mass surveillance – automated license plate readers (ALPRs) often disguised as traffic barrels – puts both residents and migrants at risk of harassment, abuse, detention, and deportation.  …  ( 5 min )

Interviewer: Jillian York Yazan Badran is an assistant professor in international media and communication studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a researcher at the Echo research group. His research focuses on the intersection between media, journalism and politics particularly in the MENA region and within its exilic and diasporic communities. *This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Jillian York: What does free speech or free expression mean to you? Yazan Badran: So I think there are a couple of layers to that question. There's a narrow conception of free speech that is related to, of course, your ability to think about the world. And that also depends on having the resources to be able to think about the world, to having resources of understanding about the worl…  ( 17 min )

Interviewer: Jillian York Yazan Badran is an assistant professor in international media and communication studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and a researcher at the Echo research group. His research focuses on the intersection between media, journalism and politics particularly in the MENA region and within its exilic and diasporic communities. *This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Jillian York: What does free speech or free expression mean to you? Yazan Badran: So I think there are a couple of layers to that question. There's a narrow conception of free speech that is related to, of course, your ability to think about the world. And that also depends on having the resources to be able to think about the world, to having resources of understanding about the worl…  ( 17 min )

Realfood.gov will happily give you the worst possible advice.  ( 4 min )

"Employees are going absolutely apeshit in internal Slack about how completely awful it was."  ( 4 min )

Ring's 'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.  ( 4 min )

Nevertheless, this is not a story of the woes of life in a place where the safety of a single pipe affects… everybody. No, this is about cooking, naturally, and how we managed in the (thankfully?) only four months in which my kitchen was not functioning as a so-called professional kitchen should. [Let’s pretend for editorial sake that my kitchen ever functions as a professional kitchen should.] Because while I might have kept my experience of this chapter of my cooking life offline forever — too niche! — I’ve recently received emails from two different people, one whose building is experiencing the same elsewhere in the city, and one who is about to undertake a kitchen renovation and both wanted advice on how a cook might cook when deprived of their galley. And I’m incapable of not answering a good question. Read more »  ( 19 min )

I need you to write a memoir of my life as an obscure literary genius. Make it a multi-volume set, kind of like Casanova’s. Basically, the drama and bravado of my novels are outmatched only by my real life. At all times, you must make me sound tortured, misunderstood, and extremely cool. The language should draw comparisons to David Sedaris, Joan Didion, every author with a 4.3+ average rating on Goodreads, and whoever wrote that badass Mötley Crüe memoir. As far as the audience, it should appeal to everyone from New York Times critics to my uncle Carl, who hasn’t read a book in thirty years. Make it particularly impressive to any stepdads who might still think that I’m a “little momma’s boy.” Give me a dramatic birth story where the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck, but luckil…  ( 8 min )

Mai Tran began catsitting in 2021 while Tran was on pandemic unemployment, often staying overnight in people’s homes. Tran has now cared for twenty-two cats and traveled to ten apartments all over New York City, observing the interior lives of cat owners and appeasing their neuroses. From home vet visits to black eyes to refugee cats, Chronicles of a Catsitter documents the most memorable days on the job. - - - I’m trail running around Buttermilk Falls in upstate New York, jumping over tree roots and water-slicked rocks. At the base, a size queen chats me up. “The water power here is not that impressive,” she says. “For real volume and height, you should go see Lucifer or Taughannock.” I do my best to engage in hiking banter. When I emerge from a path, husbands and fathers speak on behal…  ( 9 min )

Good take off… time for the weird forward lean. Make the pizza with your skis, yep. Heels are the tip, toes are crust. Nice, Spencer! You’ve got this. Why is Airplane WiFi so bad? Shouldn’t it be the best up here? Isn’t this where all the WiFi is? Phew, this is dangerous. Why don’t I care about a show with the American crime letter agencies like CSI, NCIS, or FBI, but I LOVE a British show about MI6 or MI5? Do they feel that way about our shows? Oh man, did I close the garage? I can’t believe some other guys are injecting their penises with PEDs to fly further. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of Snoopy lately. Is there a Peanuts anniversary? Maybe I should’ve injected my penis with PEDs to fly further… I’m still in the air. Jesus. Is it too late for grad school? I’ve never hit a bird before. Hold the reverse pizza. This would be a terrible time to hit a bird. I’ll be so pissed off if I left a bunch of lights on at home—such an unnecessary bill. Pizza does sound good. How have I been in Milan for this long and not had pizza? I kind of want to try Pizza Hut over here. I want to win, for sure. I DEFINITELY don’t want to go viral for hitting a bird—almost more than winning. Damnit, I think I did leave the garage open. Hey, there are my parents. It would be the most people to ever see someone hit a bird. It would pass the Randy Johnson video. It would be Randy Johnson, Fabio, and me. Three bird killers. What even goes on in grad school? Even though I haven’t used PEDs or injected my penis to be bigger and fly further, I want people to think I’ve enhanced my penis to fly further. The pizza skis technique doesn’t apply to Detroit-style. What does a comptroller do? I really thought I’d be on the ground by now.  ( 7 min )

The post The Last Yak Herder Of Ladakh appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 39 min )

Netscape's browser project was codenamed Mozilla during 1994; via Macintosh Garden. If web design is not yet a profession in 1993 because of the technical limitations of HTML and early browsers, then 1994 is the year web authors start asking the question: why can't we control formatting and presentation? At this point, the leading browser vendors — first Mosaic and then Netscape — see layout as their responsibility. What little was possible in visual design for website authors in 1994 is dictated by the capabilities of Mosaic and the newly launched Netscape Navigator. As the year progresses, sites grow slightly more sophisticated in their use of images and graphical icons, but authors still cannot choose fonts or control background colour. And while tables appear as an experimental layout …  ( 7 min )

The great management guru Peter Drucker wrote about the need to observe how people work, identify their needs, and then translate that need into demand for something better. “The only purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”  Design firm IDEO and its CEO, Tim Brown, spent a career popularizing human-centered design and integrating it into corporate strategy—but what were the results? If it’s such a natural thing to do, why don’t we see more successes on the level of Uber, Airbnb, iPhone, Fitbit, eBay, and PayPal? The problem is that conventional research methods don’t uncover how people work and, importantly, how people work around problems to create jury-rigged solutions that satisfy them, at least for a time. So their needs may be obfuscated, obscured even, from them!  For …  ( 9 min )

In 2015, the New York Times ran a “Modern Love” column that might have made it into your inbox. The title, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” apparently tapped into some of our collective anxieties and quickly went viral. In the essay, writer Mandy Len Catron tells the story of using a set of increasingly intimate questions to get to know a potential romantic partner. The 36 questions, actually developed many years prior as an experimental research tool by Arthur Aron and colleagues, are designed to accelerate close connection between two people. They start with “easy” ones, like Would you like to be famous? In what way? (#2), but lead inexorably to If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why h…  ( 10 min )

Today’s most urgent challenges — social fragmentation, educational inequity, food insecurity, environmental stress — seem to have trapped the world in gridlock. Despite all our technological advances, we haven’t yet nailed the basics: Almost a third of the world’s population faces moderate to severe food insecurity; 70 percent of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries struggle with reading comprehension; economic mobility is stagnant; the list goes on. When the stats are bleak, it’s easy to feel disheartened. At the same time, people in communities around the world are still testing creative ways to address pressing problems. “It’s a special power that we have as humans — to find a point of escape, to find the light when it feels like there is none,” says Adama Sanneh, co-founder…  ( 4 min )

The more informed we are, the more successful we’ll be in our decision-making endeavors. That’s only true up to a point: it’s only true if the information we’ve acquired is accurate and truthful. Making good decisions doesn’t merely rely on how much information we take in, it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we’ve instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation — incorrect information that doesn’t align with factual reality — then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence. This isn’t a problem that’s new here in 2026; this is a problem as old as humanity itself. W…  ( 18 min )

Savoury, umami mushrooms and creamy ricotta make a mouthwatering filling for this mushroom ravioli! Pair it with a vegan Parmesan sauce for a restaurant-worthy dinner. After I made butternut squash ravioli, I dreamed of all the other flavours of ravioli I could make. (Yep, you can tell I’m a food blogger by the fact that […]  ( 33 min )

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Hansel Aguilar, the director of police accountability since 2022, has chafed against the city’s administration, drawn the ire of its council and sued its police chief over access to department records.  ( 27 min )

As negotiations continue, hundreds of educators packed Berkeley’s school board meeting last week, asking for more pay and benefits and smaller classes. Teachers have voted to strike in San Francisco and at other districts across the state.  ( 28 min )

The resignation last month of two members of the city's civilian police oversight board should alarm everyone in Berkeley.  ( 24 min )

Nosh shares its favorite creative, decadent desserts perfect for splitting with a special someone.  ( 27 min )

Sumo Sushi, Uzen, Coffee Cultures, and Delah Coffee's Berkeley location all shuttered in the first month of 2026.  ( 27 min )

Born wealthy, her inheritance went to building a million-page women’s history archive — and to a Ponzi scheme. Now she relies on friends and lives in a tiny room she calls a “nun’s cell.”  ( 34 min )

Berkeleyside is looking for a freelance critic to review plays, identify trends and spotlight the city’s nightlife and its under-the-radar cultural happenings.  ( 24 min )

Plus: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson embraces warrantless ICE searches, the Super Bowl halftime culture war, and Trump continues funding the Department of Education

Flock contracts have quietly spread to cities across the country. But Flock ALPR (Automated License Plate Readers) erode civil liberties from the moment they're installed. While officials claim these cameras keep neighborhoods safe, the evidence tells a different story. The data reveals how Flock has enabled surveillance of people seeking abortions, protesters exercising First Amendment rights, and communities targeted by discriminatory policing. This is exactly why cities are saying no. From Austin to Cambridge to small towns across Texas, jurisdictions are rejecting Flock contracts altogether, proving that surveillance isn't inevitable—it's a choice. Join EFF's Sarah Hamid and Andrew Crocker along with Reem Suleiman from Fight for the Future and Kate Bertash from Rural Privacy Coalition …  ( 4 min )

Site Banner:  Mobile Site Banner:  Link:  EFFecting Change: Get the Flock Out of Our City on February 19 Mobile Link:  EFFecting Change: Get the Flock Out of Our City on February 19 Banner Text:  EFFecting Change: Get the Flock Out of Our City on February 19 Mobile Banner Text:  EFFecting Change: Get the Flock Out of Our City on February 19  ( 2 min )

Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook how it works in practice. To mark its 30th anniversary, EFF is interviewing leaders of online platforms about how they handle complaints, moderate content, and protect their users’ ability to speak and share information. Yelp hosts millions of reviews written by internet users about local businesses. Most reviews are positive, but over the years, some businesses have tried to pressure Yelp to remove negative reviews, including through legal threats. Since its founding more than two decades ago, Yelp has fought major legal battles to defend reviewers’ rights and preserve the legal protections t…  ( 6 min )

Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook how it works in practice. To mark its 30th anniversary, EFF is interviewing leaders of online platforms about how they handle complaints, moderate content, and protect their users’ ability to speak and share information.  A decade ago, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, received 304 requests to alter or remove content over a two-year period, not including copyright complaints. In 2024 alone, it received 664 such takedown requests. Only four were granted. As complaints over user speech have grown, Wikimedia has expanded its legal team to defend the volunteer editors wh…  ( 7 min )

For thirty years, internet users have benefited from a key federal law that allows everyone to express themselves, find community, organize politically, and participate in society. Section 230, which protects internet users’ speech by protecting the online intermediaries we rely on, is the legal support that sustains the internet as we know it. Yet as Section 230 turns 30 this week, there are bipartisan proposals in Congress to either repeal or sunset the law. These proposals seize upon legitimate concerns with the harmful and anti-competitive practices of the largest tech companies, but then misdirect that anger toward Section 230. But rolling back or eliminating Section 230 will not stop invasive corporate surveillance that harms all internet users. Killing Section 230 won’t end to the d…  ( 7 min )

We are sad to report the passing of longtime EFF Board member, Dave Farber. Dave was 91 and lived in Tokyo from age 83, where he was the Distinguished Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC).  Known as the Grandfather of the Internet, Dave made countless contributions to the internet, both directly and through his support for generations of students.   Dave was the longest-serving EFF Board member, having joined in the early 1990s, before the creation of the World Wide Web or the widespread adoption of the internet.  Throughout the growth of the internet and the corresponding growth of EFF, Dave remained a consistent, thoughtful, and steady presence on our Board.  Dave always gave us credibility as well as ballast.  He seemed to know and be respected by everyone who had helped build the internet, having worked with or mentored too many of them to count.  He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of the internet's technical history.  From the beginning, Dave saw both the promise and the danger to human rights that would come with the spread of the internet around the world. He committed to helping make sure that the rights and liberties of users and developers, especially the open source community, were protected. He never wavered in that commitment.  Ever the teacher, Dave was also a clear explainer of internet technologies and basically unflappable.   Dave also managed the Interesting People email list, which provided news and connection for so many internet pioneers and served as model for how people from disparate corners of the world could engage in a rolling conversation about all things digital.  His role as the Chief Technologist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from 2000 to 2001 gave him a strong perspective on the ways that government could help or hinder civil liberties in the digital world.  We will miss his calm, thoughtful voice, both inside EFF and out in the world. May his memory be a blessing.  ( 3 min )

(This appeared as an op-ed published Friday, Feb. 6 in the Daily Journal, a California legal newspaper.) Section 230, “the 26 words that created the internet,” was enacted 30 years ago this week. It was no rush-job—rather, it was the result of wise legislative deliberation and foresight, and it remains the best bulwark to protect free expression online. The internet lets people everywhere connect, share ideas and advocate for change without needing immense resources or technical expertise. Our unprecedented ability to communicate online—on blogs, social media platforms, and educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive—is not an accident. In writing Section 230, Congress recognized that for free expression to thrive on the internet, it had to protect the serv…  ( 7 min )

Patrick Klepek on the reality of parenting in the age of Roblox and YouTube.  ( 4 min )

Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn't ready to take on the role of the physician.”  ( 6 min )

I know you think I’m evil. And a copycat. But I assure you, I’ve wanted to take out Causation long before Relative Risk stabbed Absolute Risk in the back at last month’s Stanford talk on the lethality of packaged, ready-to-eat kale. Absolute Risk had it coming, shamelessly trying to downplay a ten-thousand-fold increased risk of choking to death if and when you eat the plastic bag. “The overall lifetime risk of dying from a moderate consumption of kale is one in one hundred billion,” Absolute said. “So multiplying that by ten thousand means your actual chances of dying from plastic-bagged, ready-to-eat kale are extremely low, just one in ten million. The increased relative risk is statistically insignificant. Also, if you take care not to eat or swallow the bag, that risk drops to nearly …  ( 9 min )

I don’t get what everyone on all sides is so angry about. Isn’t this exactly what the country voted for? Do we not remember the affordability crisis from 2024 and the price of everything? With the cost of food, energy, and housing, it was no surprise that America reelected Donald Trump. For instance, I know I wasn’t alone in my top priority being the lack of craft-store gold belching a gleaming brine over the full Oval Office. And surely, a silent majority thought the White House needed to be desecrated to build an enormous ballroom to host some Caligula Chamber of Commerce convention of oil executives, Nazis, crypto weirdos, and for-profit preachers. Captioning presidential portraits with incel message board internet trolling of former occupants of the Oval Office was definitely importa…  ( 8 min )

In 58 BC, Cicero’s house was ransacked. Returning from exile, the Roman statesman found his property vandalized; his scrolls jumbled, torn, and scattered. A library assumes an order, a schema, something that renders it sensible and accessible. Cicero’s was chaos. Enter Tyrannio, a Greek specialist in literature and libraries, owner of some 30,000 scrolls and famed expert on Aristotle — in fact, the same man responsible for restoring the philosopher’s tattered library after it was hauled to Rome. Tyrannio stepped in to sort through Cicero’s mess. He identified volumes, repaired damage, organized the scrolls, and created title tags. Cicero marveled at the transformation. “You will be surprised at Tyrannio’s excellent arrangement in my library,” Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus. When the wo…  ( 18 min )

In leadership discourse, the spotlight often falls on strategy, execution, vision, and charismatic influence. Yet one of the most persistent failure modes for even the most outstanding leaders lies not in what they do, but in what they fail to sense: the emotional currents around them, the whispers hidden behind applause. It turned out to be Julius Caesar’s fatal trap, a figure who conquered nations, reshaped Rome, and rewrote what leadership looked like. Caesar’s sudden and tragic end to his career at the hands of his followers was not due to arrogance or a power grab. It resulted from a deficit in emotional intelligence (EI or EQ), the quiet skill that sustains trust once one attains a leadership position. Something that Caesar could well have prevented. A legendary rise — and an under-a…  ( 9 min )

The grandest cosmic question remains unanswered: “Are we alone?“ This depiction of an Earth-like exoplanet showcases a rocky world with a thin atmosphere in its parent star’s habitable zone. It has oceans and continents and clouds, and could possess macroscopic life forms on its surface. At a distance of multiple light-years away, it would take a gargantuan telescope to image them, and it would only be able to see the world as it was in the distant past, not as it is right now. Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle Earth stands alone as a definitively inhabited world. This aerial view of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is one of the most iconic hydrothermal features on land in the world. The colors are due to the various organisms living under these extreme conditi…  ( 13 min )

Machine learning is helping neuroscientists organize vast quantities of cells’ genetic data in the latest neurobiological cartography effort. The post Fed on Reams of Cell Data, AI Maps New Neighborhoods in the Brain first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

These no bake carrot cake energy bites pack all the cozy, warmly spiced flavours of classic carrot cake into an easy, grab-and-go snack. You only need 7 ingredients for this naturally vegan and gluten-free treat! These carrot cake energy bites are inspired by my very favourite dessert, vegan carrot cake. Because as much as I […]  ( 28 min )

From early experiments on fertility and embryonic development to becoming the first cloned eukaryote from an adult cell, Xenopus frogs have had an outsized influence on the life sciences.

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WE BOUGHT A SUPER BOWL AD.  ( 5 min )

Out there in the Universe, we’re most aware of what we see: of all the forms of light that arrive in our eyes, instruments, telescopes, and detectors. Much more difficult to see, as well as understand and make sense of, is the wide array of “stuff” that’s present, but that isn’t readily apparent to the apparatuses we normally use to reveal the Universe. From the dark bands of the Milky Way to the light-blocking materials in nebulae and clouds, all the way to lining the arms of spiral galaxies and the heavy, long-chained molecules found in protoplanetary disks, cosmic dust is perhaps our most enduring mystery. Sure, it gives absorption signatures that we can leverage, and at long enough infrared wavelengths, dust that gets heated has its own emission signatures, but we can generally only observe it in detail up close: within our own galaxy or in the nearest galaxies of all. That poses a huge challenge, because the origin of dust, including from a cosmic perspective, remains only very poorly understood. We may have identified many dust-producing sources in the Universe, and we may understand that the young Universe was a lot less dusty than our modern cosmos, but we still lack an understanding of how this has come to be the case. Thankfully, we have scientists on the case, like this month’s guest: Dr. Elizabeth Tarantino of the Space Telescope Science Institute. In this fascinating interview, she takes us on a journey spanning gently dying stars, the formation of new stellar systems, the outskirts of our cosmic backyard, and to the farthest reaches of JWST as we try and piece this mysterious cosmic story together. Buckle up for an exciting and informative ride; you’ll be glad you tuned in! This article Starts With A Bang Podcast #126 – The origin of dust is featured on Big Think.  ( 7 min )

Beside their shared modern origins, of the many similarities between the internet and ufology, both concern communication: between humans, between humans and aliens, between humans and machines, between machines themselves. Communication concerns the known and the unknown, the impulsive and the intentional, and the sayable and the obscure, which cannot be put into words. On the surface, digital communication concerns signals, with humans, in the language of cybernetics, that function like nodes caught up in feedback loops across biotic and machinic networks. It happens at vast distances but also in immediate and visceral spaces, right in our minds, where other people, and increasingly also artificial agents, are experienced as stimuli. Yet, in a more profound sense, digital communication a…  ( 8 min )

“The question of whether humanity should reproduce beyond Earth is no longer hypothetical—it is a pressing ethical frontier,” researchers said.  ( 7 min )

The Burns supper centrepiece is too good to enjoy on only one night a year – especially when it pairs so well with Chinese flavours I’d like to start a new campaign called Vegetarian Haggis Isn’t Just for Burns Night. Of course, the Scots know this. They know how fantastic this genius concoction of pulses, vegetables, oats and spices is; how meaty without being, well, meaty. I began eating it because I share a birthday with Robert Burns (see haggis kheema) but it deserves to be eaten all year round. Here, I’ve introduced the haggis to another favourite of mine, dan dan noodles, and I’m pleased to report they get on like a house on fire. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

There were no injuries in the Jan. 17 fracas at an apartment building on Adeline Street near the Ashby BART Station.  ( 24 min )

Two men took plea deals for the shooting that killed 29-year-old divinity student and youth pastor Isamaeli “Eli” Mata’afa and wounded three others.  ( 26 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 24 min )

Tease Southern Kitchen, Mamacita, Anahuac, Bangalore Blues and Fatto a Mano opened in the first month of 2026.  ( 28 min )

Expanded pretrial services to reduce recidivism are the result of a new partnership between the court, probation department, and nonprofit BOSS.  ( 26 min )

The band, which came up at the punk venue 924 Gilman in Berkeley, doesn't shy away from politics. What will happen at their NFL performance?  ( 26 min )

March 12, 2026 - 6:30pm to 9:30pm PDT Berkeley, CA On Thursday, March 12th, celebrate the launch of Privacy's Defender by EFF's Executive Director Cindy Cohn. The highly anticipated book asks the fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Join the festivities for a live discussion followed by a book signing with Cindy. REGISTER TODAY! $20 General Admission for 1 $30 Discounted tickets for 2 $12.50 Student Ticket All proceeds benefit EFF's mission. Want your own copy of Privacy's Defender? Save $10 when you preorder the book with your ticket purchase WHEN: Thursday, March 12th, 2026 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm WHERE: Ciel Creative Space Entrance located at: 940 Parker St, Berkeley, CA 94710 6:30 PM Doors Open 7:00 PM Program Begins About the …  ( 3 min )

I don’t know why you’re all so upset. I’m sorry if there’s some “other event” that you were all more excited about that’s apparently also happening at the exact same time as this party, on the second Sunday in February at 6:30 p.m. But if you were confused by my invitation, that’s on you. I said that I was throwing a party to watch “the big game,” and I think any reasonable person would have understood that I was talking about watching a game of human chess. That’s right, human chess: thirty-two actors in elaborate, historically authentic costumes as the chess pieces, and two chess grandmasters controlling the action, all of which plays out on the giant chessboard I built in my backyard. Yes, if there’s something other than human chess that people call “the big game,” I’m simply not famil…  ( 9 min )

I don’t know why you’re all so upset. I’m sorry if there’s some “other event” that you were all more excited about that’s apparently also happening at the exact same time as this party, on the second Sunday in February at 6:30 p.m. But if you were confused by my invitation, that’s on you. I said that I was throwing a party to watch “the big game,” and I think any reasonable person would have understood that I was talking about watching a game of human chess. That’s right, human chess: thirty-two actors in elaborate, historically authentic costumes as the chess pieces, and two chess grandmasters controlling the action, all of which plays out on the giant chessboard I built in my backyard. Yes, if there’s something other than human chess that people call “the big game,” I’m simply not famil…  ( 9 min )

“My goal isn’t to be the best, because I’m not and never will be. It’s just to be better than I was yesterday—which is a very sports-brain thing.” - - - Why Mina Kimes believes the NFL remains so culturally dominant: Every game matters It expanded its fan base through fantasy It’s inherently complicated and there’s always more to learn Its best players are extremely fun to root for - - - For most of my life, I was a die-hard sports fan who considered SportsCenter as much a part of a balanced breakfast as a bowl of Wheaties. But then I turned thirty, got divorced, moved to a new city, and pursued writing more seriously. I wondered, Was loving sports something I should shed, like so many other habits of my past life? I tried living a (relatively) sports-free life. A few years later…  ( 13 min )

“President Trump called in a new interview for the Republican Party to ‘nationalize’ voting in the United States, an aggressive rhetorical step that was likely to raise new worries about his administration’s efforts to involve itself in election matters.” — New York Times - - - Well, it’s happening: the radical Democrats, who hate your rights and freedom, are planning to rig the midterm elections again. It’s the latest move in their ceaseless quest to end democracy. That’s why we, the Republican Party, must rig the elections instead. We all know how this works. Democrats, knowing that their leftist agenda of “equality,” “tolerance,” and “affordable health care” is unpopular, are importing violent illegals into communities across the country to do their bidding. Muslims, Mexicans, effete …  ( 9 min )

This week, we discuss AI bubble hysteria, "just go independent," and more.  ( 4 min )

DHS's inspector general is probing ICE's biometric and surveillance programs.  ( 4 min )

The post Extreme Inequality Presages The Revolt Against It appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 16 min )

The difficulty in predicting what happens in chaotic systems comes from how minute differences in inputs can become dramatic changes to the output, in what’s known as sensitivity to initial conditions. This is not an issue in classical Newtonian physics, where the regular movement of objects — planetary orbits, swinging pendulums, rolling balls — are easily predicted, even allowing for small changes to inputs. Sensitivity to initial conditions is also known more commonly as the “butterfly effect,” which suggests the extreme possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian jungle might cause a storm to rage across Europe some weeks later. I’m reminded of the idea every time I play a game of pool. What ostensibly appears to be a classical system — balls whizzing around the ta…  ( 9 min )

If there’s one thing we can be certain of when we look out at the glittering canopy of the night sky, it’s this: that someday, all of those luminous points of light, including every star and every galaxy, will someday fade away and cease to shine. The stars and stellar remnants, the primary sources of light and heat and energy that propagate throughout the Universe, are only powered by finite sources of fuel: whether through nuclear fusion, gravitation, or any other mechanism. At some point, those fuel sources will be exhausted, no further energy will be naturally extracted from what remains within them, and those once-brilliant objects will fade away into darkness. Some stars live only briefly, others will continue to shine long into the future, with lifetimes far exceeding our Universe’s…  ( 17 min )

Fresh, whole spices are combined with black tea and oat milk for a creamy, warm homemade spiced chai. This cozy mug will be the best you’ve ever had! Have you ever wondered why chai brewed from a tea bag pales in comparison to the kind you get at Indian restaurants? I did too! And then […]  ( 23 min )

Mathematicians finally understand the behavior of an important class of differential equations that describe everything from water pressure to oxygen levels in human tissues. The post Long-Sought Proof Tames Some of Math’s Unruliest Equations first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

Plus: detention center NIMBYism and why you shouldn't walk on the semifrozen Potomac river.

No content preview  ( 1 min )

Jill Tarter has spent a lifetime working on a question that resists answers: not whether we believe there is life beyond Earth, but the quest for undeniable proof.  Tarter explains why SETI is really about technology, patience, and learning how to tell alien signals from our own. This video Why the search for alien life is about patience, not belief is featured on Big Think.  ( 63 min )

We are all philosophers. I don’t mean this in the “What do you make of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas’?” sense. No, we are all philosophers in that we all do philosophy. Philosophy is a practice of wonder and logic; curiosity and introspection; dialectic and meditation; criticism and advocacy. We all do some of these things, some of the time. We all philosophize, but we do so in different ways. So, without any empirical rigor whatsoever — another favorite characteristic of philosophy — I present here five different ways to be a philosopher. Of course, this isn’t definitive. Of course, this isn’t universal. It’s just an inductive hypothesis based on my reading of thousands of philosophical texts. It’s a playful heuristic to question our own questioning — an “aide-philosophie.” Which philosophical arch…  ( 9 min )

Whether you’ve heard of flow before or not, most of us have had the experience of being in flow. We’ve all plunged so deeply into a task — polishing a must-win proposal, perfecting a loved one’s favorite dish, or hammering cross-court winners — that the world fades, our focus sharpens, and when we finally surface, we’re startled to see how many hours have slipped away. Flow was first formally defined in 1990 in the seminal book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MEE-hy CHEEK-sent-mee-HAH- yee), the world-renowned researcher and cofounder with Martin Seligman of the field of positive psychology. This research describes flow as a psychological state in which an individual experiences some or all of the following: Total immersion in what they are doing. Ti…  ( 9 min )

Rationalism has shaped the way we think for thousands of years, teaching us that to truly know something, we must describe it explicitly, reduce it into rules, and test those rules repeatedly. But what if rationalism only tells half the story? Every CEO Dan Shipper explores. This video Thinking too logically can actually hold you back is featured on Big Think.  ( 29 min )

As February progresses here in 2026, the brightest planet in the night sky, Venus, will begin to rise in the western skies just after sunset. Later in February, it will be joined by Mercury and Saturn, forming a triple treat for skywatchers to enjoy. Venus, as always, is a spectacular highlight. Brighter than any other star or planet in the night sky, it’s close enough that you can see it exhibit the full suite of phases from crescent to full and back again through a simple pair of binoculars or literally any telescope you can buy. Outshining all other objects in the night sky except for the Moon, every other star and planet pales in comparison to Venus as viewed from Earth, regardless of its current phase. The above photograph shows Venus next to Jupiter — the second brightest planet, s…  ( 16 min )

Also: The East Bay musical duo who crooned about heat pumps a few years ago have a new video set in the Berkeley Rose Garden.  ( 24 min )

The Multicultural Community Center closed last summer after complaints of political signs that Chancellor Rich Lyons said made some on campus “feel threatened.”  ( 25 min )

Madeline Schapiro, known online as Bean Supporter, says beans have solved her health issues. Her over 70,000 social media followers eat up all the bean propaganda she can dish out.  ( 30 min )

Other events include an orchestra playing Baroque music, a movie screening on Black Studies in the Bay Area and two Latin dance series.  ( 27 min )

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have descended into utter lawlessness, most recently in Minnesota. The violence is shocking. So are the intrusions on digital rights and civil liberties. For example, immigration agents are routinely scanning faces of people they suspect of unlawful presence in the country – 100,000 times, according to the Wall Street Journal. The technology has already misidentified at least one person, according to 404 Media. Face recognition technology is so dangerous that government should not use it at all—least of all these out-of-control immigration agencies. To combat these abuses, EFF is proud to support the “ICE Out of My Face Act.” This new federal bill would ban ICE and CBP agents, and some local police working wi…  ( 3 min )

The federal case against the former CNN anchor hinges on conduct that can plausibly be viewed as part of a journalist's work, combined with the obvious partiality of that work.

Cooperation may get more ICE agents off the street, but it could make it harder for the state to enforce its laws.

Plus: the partial withdrawal of federal agents from Minneapolis, shifting public opinion on immigration, and D.C.'s continued snowpocalypse.

Here's a quick reminder of what the Fourth Amendment has to say about that.

While Epstein’s victims endure the fallout of their photos and names being exposed in the Department of Justice’s latest tranche of files, investigators redacted a photo of the Mona Lisa. Now we know why.  ( 4 min )

‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’  ( 6 min )

Elon Musk's political projects are combining into a highly concerning megacompany.  ( 6 min )

EpsteIn—as in, Epstein and LinkedIn—searches your connections on the social network for names that match those in the released files.  ( 5 min )

In a kleptocracy, there is no reason for a billionaire to own an adversarial news outlet.  ( 6 min )