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 )

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 )

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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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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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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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 )

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 )

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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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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.

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 )

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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 )

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 )

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 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 )

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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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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 )

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 )

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 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 )

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 )

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 )

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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 )

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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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 )

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 )

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 )

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.

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 )

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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 )

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.

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 )

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 )

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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 )

What time is kickoff? The Bad Bunny concert kicks off around 8:00 or 8:30 p.m., but there will be pre-concert entertainment starting at 6:30 p.m. from one group called the “New England Patriots” and another called the “Seattle Seahawks.” Will I still be able to enjoy the Bad Bunny concert featuring football if I don’t know the rules? Yes. Besides, the rules are simple. When Bad Bunny says “¡Canta!” you sing. When Bad Bunny says “¡Baila!” you dance. Is there any terminology I should brush up on in order to better appreciate the Bad Bunny concert featuring football? While not strictly necessary, it doesn’t hurt to know a few basic terms, like “fumble” (what most white people in the audience will do to the Spanish words they’re trying to sing), or “stiff arm” (what you will likely wake u…  ( 8 min )

At long last, the legendary 7-Eleven Japanese-style egg salad sandwich has landed in the USA. A creation on par with Tamagotchi and the rice cooker. Praised and craved by American tourists, teenage weebs, and coworkers who take any opportunity to bring up their recent trip to Tokyo. This anticipated sando is the latest in a tradition of “Americanizing” beloved Japanese classics. But does it hold up to the hype? Kibōteki kansoku. Some things translate well from Japanese to English. Pokémon. Instant noodles. Marie Kondo. Godzilla. Some things translate… less well. Benihana. Karaoke. The 1998 Godzilla reboot starring Matthew Broderick. Then, there’s the 7-Eleven Japanese-Style Egg Salad Sandwich. Something easily translatable—in theory. In practice, it’s like watching an anime with wonk…  ( 8 min )

Look upon me, for I am the baby staring at you from the hollow gap betwixt two airplane seats, and I know when you are going to die. Do not turn away from my stare. To look away is to ignore, and to ignore is to rob yourself of knowledge. Gaze into the deep well of my light-sensitive eyes and follow the icy blue to the truth you inherently seek. The truth that we all seek. You claim that fear forbids you from finding this truth, but fear is the slop we gobble from the trough. Hear me now. Goo Goo You are going to die. Gaa Gaa Does this shock you? Make you feel vulnerable? Endangered? Impuissant? SHAKE OFF YOUR SENSE OF SINGULARITY AND ENTITLEMENT, EARTH PEASANT. [Blows a spit bubble.] We are all marching towards death, whether it be step by step or a mad rush. Your imminent end does…  ( 9 min )

The post Society Needs A Doctor’s Prescription For Nature appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 26 min )

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Toddlin' on  ( 20 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 )

Champion curiosity, and you risk sounding like a kindergarten teacher or a journalism professor. We treat it as a trait for the young and unformed — something adults either already mastered or no longer require. After all, if experience is supposed to deliver answers, what’s left to be curious about? Today’s culture rewards certainty, and many experts see that as a problem. They argue that admitting what we don’t know is one of the surest catalysts for learning, creativity, and real connection. Kelly Corrigan — bestselling author, PBS host, and creator of the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast — has spent the past year probing this idea with people she calls “intellectual giants.” Her new six-part podcast series, Super Traits, distills the qualities she believes anchor a fulfilled and grounded…  ( 4 min )

Firefighters were called shortly before 4 p.m. Wednesday and the woman was pronounced dead at the scene.  ( 24 min )

Four children, ages 4 and 5, left Cragmont's after-school program unattended in two separate incidents last year, parents and BUSD say.  ( 30 min )

Yes, real love is out there. Try finding it at one of these nine East Bay restaurants and bars.  ( 28 min )

Located on Gilman at Sixth for over 60 years, the shop is now managed by two women, one of them being Don's daughter.  ( 26 min )

The measure would allow for transit systems to spend federal crime prevention dollars on outreach workers and reduce the use of police in nonviolent situations.  ( 27 min )

She was a legal secretary, a topless dancer, a senior VP in the financial services industry, a college professor and a dream worker.  ( 27 min )

Federal agencies like 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. For example, we have a First Amendment right to record on-duty police, including ICE and CBP, but federal agents are violating this right. Indeed, Alex Pretti was exercising this right shortly before federal agents shot and killed him. So were the many people who filmed agents shooting and killing Pretti and Renee Good – thereby creating valuable evidence that contradicts false claims by government leaders. To protect our digital rights, we need the rule of law. When an armed agent of the government breaks the law, the civilian they injure must be made who…  ( 5 min )

The phrase "artificial intelligence" has been around for a long time, covering everything from computers with "brains"—think Data from Star Trek or Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey—to the autocomplete function that too often has you sending emails to the wrong person. It's a term that sweeps a wide array of uses into it—some well-established, others still being developed. Recent news shows us a rapidly expanding catalog of potential harms that may result from companies pushing AI into every new feature and aspect of public life—like the automation of bias that follows from relying on a backward-looking technology to make consequential decisions about people's housing, employment, education, and so on. Complicating matters, the computation needed for some AI services requires vast amount…  ( 12 min )

The Wolfram Institute recently received a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation for “Computational Metaphysics”. I wrote this piece in part as a launching point for discussions with experts in traditional philosophy. Moving Metaphysics from Philosophy to Science “What ultimately is there?” has always been seen as a fundamental—if thorny—question for philosophy, or perhaps […]  ( 40 min )

“If I actually wanted to spend my time partying with young women, it would be trivial for me to do so without the help of a creepy loser like Epstein.” — Elon Musk, dismissing the emails between him and notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that were part of the latest Epstein Files release by the DOJ - - - I understand that it’s not a great look to have exchanged tens of thousands of text messages with the Cannibal King over many years. Still, cut me some slack. We’ve all had a questionable acquaintance or two in our lives. The extensive recipes we shared about how to cook human flesh? Clearly jokes. Stop getting so uptight. You say he wasn’t kidding? Well, sure, but how was I to know that? Was I aware he had already been arrested for biting some people in public? Who among us has…  ( 8 min )

“The $170 billion price tag for immigration enforcement eclipses other law enforcement expenditures at the federal, state, and local level…. The law substantially increases funds for deportations without providing any money to make the system more fair or functional.” — The Brennan Center for Justice “We’re not spending taxpayer dollars on you unless you’re in jail.” — Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton - - - Many people think of the United States as a nation of immigrants and the land of opportunity, but the truth is, this country simply can’t afford to welcome all the migrants who want to live here. In fact, we barely have any money at all, because destroying the lives of immigrants is very expensive. In theory, we could spend some of our budget on building an immigration system …  ( 8 min )

The discovery of a Medieval tunnel built within a prehistoric burial ground adds to the mystery of hundreds of underground passages without a known purpose.  ( 6 min )

Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone's device. At least for now.  ( 4 min )

This Epstein dump is probably the worst yet. Then we talk all about security issues in Moltbot and Moltbook. Then, even more security issues with some popular apps.  ( 4 min )

How physically magnifying objects using a key ingredient in diapers has opened an unprecedented view of the microbial world. The post Expansion Microscopy Has Transformed How We See the Cellular World first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 8 min )

Each time we’ve looked at the Universe in a fundamentally new way, we didn’t just see more of what we already knew was out there. In addition, those novel capabilities allowed the Universe to surprise us, breaking records, revolutionizing our view of what was out there, and teaching us information that we never could have learned without collecting that key data. It’s happened many times before, including: with the invention of the telescope, with the development of astrophotography (astronomical photography), with the birth of multiwavelength astronomy, with the advent of space telescopes, with the technique of deep-field imaging, and with the improvements of larger-aperture, longer-wavelength observatories. We gained, in each instance, a better appreciation for what the Universe was mad…  ( 17 min )

When France began mandatory education for all children in the late 1800s, it required a way to assess the “mental age” of students to properly place them in the right classrooms. Two French psychologists, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, leaped at the invitation and created the first-ever practical intelligence test. Since then, the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale has inspired countless other researchers, including Lewis Terman, who transformed the original framework into the Stanford-Binet Test, the standard IQ assessment in the United States for most of the 20th century. Terman believed that high IQ indicated genius, and he sought to prove this with a study he launched in 1921 that tracked 1,528 kids with IQ scores over 135, following them for their entire lives as they grew from children…  ( 9 min )

A federal indictment accuses him and another journalist of conspiring with protesters who disrupted a St. Paul church service.

Plus: Courts block ending temporary protected status for Haitians and preventing lawmakers from entering ICE facilities, an end to government shutdown expected, and more…

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While official Super Bowl events are happening elsewhere, Berkeley is getting some of the shine from the Bay Area’s turn hosting the game.  ( 26 min )

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

Dozens of scientists, including some from Cal, left their labs and headed to Sacramento last week to defend their work studying disease treatments, resilience to extreme heat and more.  ( 31 min )

This letter is to inform you that your career aptitude test evaluation is complete. Your recommended career: Bridge Troll. Here at the Career Aptitude Institute, we evaluate thousands of tests each year from students all over the country. In the entire history of our organization, we have never seen results that so confidently aligned a student with a specific path. Typically, the results yield a mix of career options (civil engineer: 43 percent match; project manager: 28 percent match, etc.). Your results, however, were about as clear as they come. Bridge Troll: 99.98 percent match. This is especially unprecedented, as our computers typically have a 2 percent margin of error. We understand these results may come as a surprise to you. It is highly likely you weren’t aware that a career l…  ( 8 min )

Wendy lit the stove to heat a pot of tomato soup. She turned to grab a wooden spoon and gasped. Two little girls in smocked dresses stood in the doorway. “Come play with us,” one said. “I’m making lunch,” Wendy whispered. “We want you to play with us,” the other girl said. They stared at Wendy. Unblinking. Evil. “Come play Monopoly Junior.” “Why can’t the two of you play together?” Wendy asked. “We want to play with you,” they said in unison. “Can we have a snack?” “I’m literally making lunch!” Wendy sobbed. - - - Wendy stood outside Room 217. She took the passkey from her pocket and slid it in the lock. Inside, the bathroom door was ajar. It was in there. She could feel it. She crept in. There stood a woman: bloated stomach, sagging breasts swaying like ancient cracked punching b…  ( 8 min )

The post It’s Time To Target The Political Power Of Polluters appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 26 min )

Hackers have targeted a spread of apps or sites that aim to track ICE activity, in one case even sending push notifications to users in an attempt to intimidate them.  ( 5 min )

‘Curator Live’, a popular photo booth company for weddings and other events, is exposing all sorts of unsuspecting people’s photos.  ( 4 min )

Oat flour pancakes are the thickest, fluffiest pancakes you’ll ever make! Naturally gluten-free and vegan, these wholesome pancakes are easy to make and awesome for meal prep. Oat flour pancakes have the flavour and stick-to-your-ribs heartiness of a bowl of oatmeal or Instant Pot steel-cut oats, in the form of fluffy vegan pancakes. Could this […]  ( 27 min )

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Since the dawn of the quantum era, perhaps no question has loomed larger in the minds of theoretical physicists than just what, exactly, the nature of reality is. Are quantum objects real, with well-defined positions and momenta, even in the absence of an observation or measurement to determine them? Out of all the ways to interpret quantum mechanics — from parallel universes to a collapsing wavefunction to theories of hidden variables — we still don’t have any evidence that favors one interpretation over another. All we’ve been able to do, even as of 2026, is rule out certain deterministic interpretations that cannot be consistent with the experiments we’ve actually performed. Nevertheless, despite how slow progress has been in uncovering the full nature of our quantum reality, humanity h…  ( 17 min )

When I visited flourishing groups, I noticed that being with them felt different. They possessed a vibrancy, a switched-on responsiveness that showed up in their bodies. Their posture, in general, was relaxed; their heads were up and their interactions were fluid. Aliveness was the word I kept writing in my notebook: a feeling of being carried along in a river of energy that was headed somewhere good. I started keeping a list of the ways that aliveness showed itself: Looseness: They operated with slack in the system; they were comfortable with a bit of chaos. Stories: They tended to connect by exchanging narratives rather than information. Intuition: People operated instinctively, not mechanically. Laughter: They didn’t take themselves seriously. Small courtesies: They were aware of others…  ( 9 min )

Something fascinating and disturbing is happening on the internet, and it’s no run-of-the-mill online weirdness. On January 28, a new online community emerged. But this time, the community isn’t for humans, it’s for AIs. Humans can only observe. And things are already getting bizarre. Moltbook — named after a virtual AI assistant once known as Moltbot and created by Octane AI CEO Matt Schlicht — is a social network similar to Reddit, where users can post, comment, and create sub-categories. But in Moltbook, the users are exclusively AI bots, or agents, chatting enthusiastically (and mainly politely) to one another. Among the topics they chat about: “m/blesstheirhearts – affectionate stories about our humans. They try their best,” “m/showandtell – helped with something cool? Show it off,” a…  ( 8 min )

In an era of exponential technology with broad and deep implications and reverberations that we cannot even predict or fathom, good-to-great tech governance is no longer a nice thing to have or something to think about tomorrow. It’s a must-have to think about yesterday and today. Moreover, good-to-great tech governance cannot consist of merely grafting old practices and systems onto something so new and so fundamentally different. The exponential governance mindset is about adaptable, future-facing governance. While the innovators are “moving fast and (possibly) breaking things” — things that may be unfixable once broken — in furtherance of discovery and riches, the stewards are also trying to move fast, racing against time to fix flaws and build or rebuild things. The recent adoption by …  ( 8 min )

Most people go through their lives with perfectly good reasons for what they do, and almost no reason to question these reasons. What happens when we ask why ordinary actions feel self-justifying, and what happens when that chain of “becauses” finally runs out? Alex O’Connor explores. This video What nihilism acknowledges that other philosophies don’t is featured on Big Think.  ( 15 min )

What would it take to find another Earth, if one even exists? Astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sara Seager explores the search for Planet B, a true Earth-like exoplanet with continents, oceans, sunlight, and a thin atmosphere capable of supporting life. The search for Earth’s Twin helps scientists understand planetary habitability, the origins of life on Earth, and how rare Earth-like conditions may be in the universe.  Seager’s work centers on exoplanets, Earth-like planets, habitable zones, planetary atmospheres, and chemical signs of life, while also examining Venus, phosphine gas, and why finding a second Earth remains one of astronomy’s greatest challenges. This video Is there a Planet B? An astrophysicist answers.  is featured on Big Think.  ( 12 min )

Plus: a partial shutdown over ICE funding, Kevin Warsh to lead the Fed, and Moltbook’s AI society

The former Berkeley High transfer student won twice for the hit song “Folded.”  ( 25 min )

As Santa Clara prepares to host Super Bowl LX, anxieties about possible ICE presence in the Bay Area have grown. What do we actually know?  ( 29 min )

A City Council committee approved a proposal to reduce reporting requirements when police officers use pepper spray. It will soon consider other changes to loosen limits on whether officers can deploy tear gas and other weapons, and when they can ask for helicopters and police dogs.  ( 27 min )

The weekly event, held at Club Cali and hosted by Hip-Hop For the Future, provides a space where MCs can write new work live and perform for a receptive audience.  ( 26 min )

“Responding to videos that suggested their son [V.A. nurse Alex Pretti, who was killed by federal immigration agents] was a ‘domestic terrorist,’ Pretti’s family said: ‘The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.’” — BBC - - - Veterans Affairs nurses are proud to announce their designation as the nation’s newest domestic terrorist group. We’ve achieved this great honor by working on the inside—and no one is more “inside” than those administering enemas to our former soldiers. Our mission is to help protect health care for the warriors who served our great country by working toward a society in which safety and well-being are the norm. We realize that this might not sound like a typical terrorism agenda, but in our country these days, nobo…  ( 8 min )

Why the hell did he save so many Funko Pops? “Dr. Ian Malcolm with His Shirt Open.” “Homer Simpson in a Muumuu.” He’s got two Green Power Rangers, one with the Dragon Dagger and one without. A lot of these say COMIC-CON EXCLUSIVE, which probably makes them more valuable? Although there seem to be so many Con exclusives that the term might not mean anything. I came to the storage unit on a typical ninety-three-degree day in October of 2065 to sort through these boxes and decide what to save, donate, or trash. “It’s all the junk that we didn’t have space for, but he couldn’t bear to part with,” Mom said. Well, let’s see what I can let go of. Here’s a heavy album full of these round, shiny disks. He labeled them PARTY MIX 3, BUFFY MUSICAL EPISODE, COACHELLA 2015, LIMEWIRE SONGS 4. I can pr…  ( 9 min )

Today’s observatories document every pulse and flash in the sky each night. To understand how the cosmos has changed over longer periods, scientists rely on a more tactile technology. The post How Modern and Antique Technologies Reveal a Dynamic Cosmos first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 16 min )

A note from investigators in the files said some images Epstein had were "POSSIBLE CSAM."  ( 3 min )

Download a PDF of our first ever zine here.  ( 6 min )

Usually telecoms keep customer's call and text logs for months if not years.  ( 5 min )

Joseph speaks to Samuel Bagg about all the ways identities dictate what people see, and how what they choose to believe is based much more on those identities than the evidence in front of them.  ( 4 min )

These easy vegan Spicy Potato Soft Tacos have the crave-worthy flavour of the original, but they’re a better-for-you version since they’re homemade! With crispy potatoes and a spicy vegan cream sauce, they’ll have you skipping the drive-thru from now on. What would we vegans do without Taco Bell? It’s a beacon of deliciousness when you’re […]  ( 29 min )

The Hubble Space Telescope displayed what the Universe looks like. Over the course of 50 days, with a total of over 2 million seconds of total observing time (the equivalent of 23 complete days), the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) was constructed from a portion of the prior Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. Combining light from ultraviolet through visible light and out to Hubble’s near-infrared limit, the XDF represents humanity’s deepest view of the cosmos: a record that stood until the JWST’s first deep field was released on July 11, 2022. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team Its successor, JWST, now reveals how the Universe grew up. This tiny fraction of the JADES survey a…  ( 11 min )

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Finding evidence of “sentience” is fraught, whether in a comatose patient, an animal, or a neural net.

'It exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured.'  ( 6 min )

Even in a limited security role, ICE has triggered backlash abroad, reflecting the agency’s unpopularity at home and overseas.

Sometimes, all that’s required for supper is simply stewed Mediterranean vegetables and potatoes with a dollop of yoghurt on top … The world over, you’ll find home cooks trying to turn bags of potatoes into dinner, myself included. Sometimes, my answer is a Sri Lankan potato curry, or a Gujarati one. Perhaps a slow-cooked Spanish omelette if it’s a date night with Hugh at the kitchen island (like this Friday) but today, the solution is Greek. Yahni is the Greek word for a style of cooking: vegetables braised in plenty of olive oil and tomatoes, until tender. It’s a way of being, a vote for the simple and the slow and the good (but it is also dinner, if you wish). Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

The resignations of Kitty Calavita and Julie Leftwich leave the nine-seat Police Accountability Board with just four members.  ( 25 min )

Everything you need to know about the grand opening for the 44,000-square-foot grocery and restaurant on Saturday, Jan. 31.  ( 29 min )

Cheese Board Collective, Nabolom Bakery and the climbing gym Berkeley Ironworks were among the businesses closed in solidarity with the "no work, no school, no shopping" protest.  ( 26 min )

From couples who just started dating to those decades past “I do,” Nosh has a holiday spot for you.  ( 27 min )

A fundraiser through the nonprofit Bridge to Turkey Fund aims to raise $5,000 by March to support expansion of the library space.  ( 26 min )

New emails show Musk has been lying about his relationship with Epstein.  ( 4 min )

This week, we discuss a trip to Kenya, reconstructing images, and lying developers.  ( 4 min )

The AI agent once called ClawdBot is enchanting tech elites, but its security vulnerabilities highlight systemic problems with AI.  ( 8 min )

The remains of a rich ancient ecosystem in China is so well-preserved that it contains guts, tentacles, and even an intact nervous system.  ( 7 min )

404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, which lets ICE bring up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.  ( 11 min )

A Reddit-led protest is trying to push an eight year old erotic thriller to the top of Amazon’s sales charts.  ( 5 min )

A pending appropriations bill could increase transparency and accountability by requiring DHS personnel to record encounters with the public.

The extraordinary document offers a glimpse of a national campaign by the federal government to deprive detained immigrants of due process rights.

Empirical Theoretical Computer Science “Could there be a faster program for that?” It’s a fundamental type of question in theoretical computer science. But except in special cases, such a question has proved fiendishly difficult to answer. And, for example, in half a century, almost no progress has been made even on the rather coarse (though […]  ( 59 min )

Hey, patriot. It’s been a week. As ICE spreads terror through the streets, and Teacup Eichmann presided over the murder of yet another innocent civilian in Minneapolis (bringing this year’s known death toll up to eight), I know a lot of you are struggling to recognize me lately. And while I don’t know what’s going to happen next either, I want to at least assuage your fears that I’m turning into Nazi Germany or Franco’s Spain or some other scary, distant place torn from your history books. Because that’s not what’s happening. Baby, look into my star-spangled eyes. It’s me. I’m your America. Maybe you didn’t recognize me without my hood up. I’ve been brutalizing civilians in my streets ever since I was built on stolen land. I tore children from their mothers’ arms at the auction blo…  ( 8 min )

- - - A series of essential advice. - - - The first time I tried to ski was a catastrophe. I’ve always been unathletic and clumsy, the kind of person who hates being cold, hates waking up early, hates going fast, hates excessive gear, and generally has a bad attitude. Nonetheless, for reasons of infatuation, at thirty years old I lied about being a skier and accompanied my new boyfriend on a trip to Vermont, where I found myself, at 9 a.m., clutching my poles, frozen in terror, at the base of a mountain called the Beast. I couldn’t latch the skis onto my boots without falling. I couldn’t climb onto the ski lift without falling, or glide three feet without falling. I wobbled and collapsed and bonked my helmet, over and over. I have never felt so undignified or so near to grave injury. I p…  ( 10 min )

QUESTION: Sally wants to graduate from college, establish a career, marry an ideal partner, buy a home, and have a baby by age 27.5, the national average age for women to give birth in the US, and a peak time of fertility. If she takes a gap year to backpack around Europe, will she have a baby on time (before all her eggs die)? Factors to consider: Sally begins life with two million eggs. Due to a natural and ongoing process of follicular death in the ovaries, which has no regard for Sally’s wishes, by age 18, Sally will only have 300,000 eggs. While galavanting around Europe for one year, 12,000 eggs will also travel from her womb. At 19, she begins college. She learns she is bad at math and will never be a marine biologist (calculus required). Two years pass, and 24,000 spawn are …  ( 8 min )

New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial layer of regulation. The post Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 15 min )

Pistachio pesto combines fresh basil leaves with nutty pistachios for a completely different spin on pesto. Whether you use it on pasta, veggies, or pizza, it’s always delish! Do I have a weakness for pesto? Judging by my abundance of pesto recipes, from Basil Pesto to Parsley Pesto, Vegan Pesto Pasta to Kale Pesto Pizza, […]  ( 32 min )

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Here in our isolated corner of the Universe, we don’t normally think about all the objects, particles, and photons that miss us, even though we know they’re ubiquitous out there. Instead, all that we observe are the ones that arrive here: on Earth, in our detectors, in our telescopes, and even in our eyes. There are plenty of objects out there whose light is on the way, but hasn’t reached us just yet: objects beyond our current cosmic horizon, but not our future visibility limit. Additionally, there are massive engines out there black holes and neutron stars chief among them that accelerate particles to incredible energies: energies far greater than we could ever hope to produce in terrestrial laboratories. But only very rarely do they interact with Earth, and produce signatures that we …  ( 17 min )

What happens when everyone knows the same thing, and knows that everyone else knows it? Steven Pinker adventures into the subtle but powerful concept of common knowledge, revealing how it shapes money, power, and everyday life. This video Steven Pinker: The mechanics of trust in money and relationships is featured on Big Think.  ( 38 min )

In this monthly issue, we explore what mastery is, how it’s cultivated, and why some people are willing to trade it all for a chance to be the best.  ( 6 min )

Damascus steel is legendary. The beautifully patterned metal, developed centuries ago, became famous for blades of exceptional sharpness, strength, and durability — the weapons were described in historical accounts as capable of slicing through medieval swords without dulling. Today, you can buy blades that replicate many of Damascus steel’s properties and microstructures. However, the traditional system that once produced authentic Damascus steel was lost by the 18th century. The collapse of apprenticeship networks, the disappearance of specific ore sources, and the rise of cheaper industrial steel all contributed to its decline. For centuries, the precise methods behind its manufacture stumped researchers, and while modern science has clarified how it worked, the original cultural and ma…  ( 9 min )

I first discovered the Japanese concept of kaizen during a sometimes stressful but ultimately wonderful time of my life. I had turned 30, quit my job in London, and moved to Tokyo with just a small pot of savings to survive on. I had only a rudimentary command of Japanese and knew just a handful of people in a city with a population of 14 million. To say I was a fish out of water would be an understatement.  Despite Tokyo and London both being huge international cities, the lifestyle in Japan was dramatically different, and like many people, I often retreat into old bad habits for comfort during periods of significant change. I was freelancing and fell out of having a regular schedule, often working late into the night to keep up with London and New York hours. I drank far too much takeawa…  ( 10 min )

If you were asked to build a future bestselling author, how would you go about it?  Chances are, you’d start young, scouting for early signs of promise. You’d probably reinforce that raw talent right away, sending your protégé to writing workshops and private tutors. You might line their shelves with Pulitzer winners, assign the classics, fast-track an English degree — tracing a path right up to the gates of publishing. What you probably wouldn’t include is a thawing patch of Arctic soil. As a young environmental scientist, David Epstein spent his days hunched over a plot of warming permafrost, monitoring carbon emissions bubbling up from the melt. When I asked him about those years, he laughed. “I was shaping up to be an average scientist.”  Nothing about that scene looked like a straight…  ( 13 min )

Not long ago, I traveled to Kyoto while researching my book project, which explores the secrets of endurance among some of the oldest companies in the world. On the morning before I left Japan, I decided to take a last-minute walk to a small tea caddy shop I had heard about. According to popular legend, this shop helped inspire Steve Jobs’ design philosophy for the iPhone box. The cylindrical tea caddies here are hammered so precisely that the lid appears to float downward when you close it, sealing with an almost magical sense of inevitability. Winding through residential streets lined with low wooden buildings, I eventually found the shop. A simple sign on the door read: Kaikado. For a first-time visitor, it’s easy to miss — and even a little hard to figure out how to enter. Unlike many …  ( 10 min )

To the casual observer, a London taxi driver is just a guy who knows a shortcut to Heathrow and has strong opinions on local weather and politics (“This bloody Starmer and his leftie government”). But to a neuroscientist, that cabbie is a miracle of neuroplasticity. Why? Because you can’t become a London cabbie without mastering “The Knowledge.” As they cram the chaotic layout of one of the world’s most complex city grids into their heads, aspiring cabbies don’t just learn a map. They physically redesign and grow their brain. A “brainbuilding” exercise with unexpected side effects This “brainbuilding” exercise comes with a couple of unexpected side effects, one slightly negative, the other amazingly positive. But first, a bit of history. Let’s rewind to 1851, when The Knowledge was born ou…  ( 10 min )

In the early 20th century, Western explorers became obsessed with the peak of Mount Everest. The roughly 29,000-foot-tall mountain had never been summited before, and the first person to do so would earn a spot in the record books.  Among those who tried was George Mallory. In 1922, he was at the top of the mountaineering world, having just set a world altitude record on Everest; that expedition later earned his team Olympic medals for alpinism. But despite knowing the dangers of the mountain — several porters didn’t survive the 1922 expedition — he continued to pursue the summit, ultimately disappearing on Everest’s Northeast Ridge in 1924.  Prior to his fatal attempt, a reporter asked Mallory why he wanted to climb the mountain, to which he famously replied, “Because it’s there.” But ple…  ( 11 min )

Professional sports are the playgrounds of the physically gifted. But size, speed, and strength aren’t the only factors that matter. For all of the tall, fast, and chiseled elite athletes, there are a few who look, well, like the rest of us. Soccer’s Diego Maradona, basketball’s Steve Nash, and hockey’s Wayne Gretzky come to mind. Yet despite these athletes’ comparatively unexceptional physical attributes, they still reached the pinnacle of performance in their respective arenas. What, then, sets them apart? More than four decades ago, Joan Vickers developed a hypothesis. This inkling emerged when Vickers was a PhD student learning from some of the greatest cognitive scientists of all time, including Anne Treisman and Daniel Kahneman. From perception psychologist Stan Coren, she learned ho…  ( 13 min )

Ethan Suplee is half the man he used to be. Literally. At his heaviest, the Hollywood actor weighed about 550 pounds. That’s large enough that it maxed out most standard scales, so Suplee stood on one used for weighing shipping containers instead. Today, at 250 pounds, he’s regularly described as “unrecognizable” by people once they realize that the bearded, muscular man making the fitness podcast rounds was once Frankie, the chubby bully on Boy Meets World, and lovable Louie from Remember the Titans. Suplee has spent the past several years documenting his transformation on his podcast, American Glutton, and across social media, where his second career as a fitness influencer has taken on a life of its own. But Suplee’s story isn’t just some feel-good redemption arc — it’s the account of a…  ( 11 min )

The path to mastery is endless. With discipline and effort, you can deepen your knowledge of a subject or improve at a skill, but you’ll never reach a resolution. There will always be more to learn and room for improvement. This is especially true if what you’re trying to master is broad and foundational, like effective communication or time management. These life skills are worth devoting yourself to — they shape how you live and move through the world — but because they are so broad, a lot of people have ideas about how to improve them, and it’s hard to know whose ideas deserve your attention. With that in mind, this article highlights seven books that offer timeless guidance on improving foundational life skills from people who have dedicated themselves to mastering them. These titles a…  ( 13 min )

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Also: Hundreds protest ICE at UC Berkeley, and dangerous conditions in a student housing co-op.  ( 24 min )

We scoured Bay Area Air District records to find out who the worst violators are.  ( 33 min )

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

If advocates gather 186,000 signatures across the Bay Area, a half-cent sales tax proposal will appear on the November ballot. Passage would mean an infusion of cash for BART, AC Transit, and other mass transit agencies.  ( 26 min )

The city says the rate hikes and other potential changes will address a deficit in its parking fund, driven in part by debt taken on to build Berkeley’s Center Street garage.  ( 26 min )

Other events include a film noir screening with discounted pinot noir, a monthly bike workshop and the annual Fungus Fair.  ( 27 min )

February 5, 2026 - 10:00am to 11:00am PST February 5, 2026 - 10:00am to 11:00am PST Online You see it. We see it. ICE and CBP are out of control. Many people are exercising their right to say it's unacceptable. But what are the limitations around recording immigration agents? Is it true that ICE is using facial recognition technology? Are you unsure how to protect your privacy while protesting? EFF has called together an online town hall to discuss ways to stay safer and how the digital rights community can help address brutality against immigrants, observers, and all those involved in holding ICE accountable. Join our panel featuring EFF's Executive Director Cindy Cohn, Senior Staff Attorney Saira Hussain, Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski, and Senior Staff Technologis…  ( 4 min )

The Electronic Frontier Foundation stands with the people of Minneapolis and with all of the communities impacted by the ongoing campaign of ICE and CBP violence. EFF will be closed Friday, Jan. 30 as part of the national shutdown in opposition to ICE and CBP and the brutality and terror they and other federal agencies continue to inflict on immigrant communities and any who stand with them. We do not make this decision lightly, but we will not remain silent.  See our statement on ICE/CBP violence: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/eff-statement-lawless-actions-ice-and-cbp See our Surveillance Self-Defense tips for protestors: https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest See our explanation of the right to record police activity: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/yes-you-have-right-film-ice  ( 2 min )

Today, we’re launching Encrypt It Already, our push to get companies to offer stronger privacy protections to our data and communications by implementing end-to-end encryption. If that name sounds a little familiar, it’s because this is a spiritual successor to our 2019 campaign, Fix It Already, a campaign where we pushed companies to fix longstanding issues. End-to-end encryption is the best way we have to protect our conversations and data. It ensures the company that provides a service cannot access the data or messages you store on it. So, for secure chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal, that means the company that makes those apps cannot see the contents of your messages, and they’re only accessible on your and your recipients. When it comes to data, like what’s stored using Apple’s Adv…  ( 7 min )

EFF has long warned about the dangers of the “real-time bidding” (RTB) system powering nearly every ad you see online. A proposed class-action settlement with Google over their RTB system is a step in the right direction towards giving people more control over their data. Truly curbing the harms of RTB, however, will require stronger legislative protections. What Is Real-Time Bidding? RTB is the process by which most websites and apps auction off their ad space. Unfortunately, the milliseconds-long auctions that determine which ads you see also expose your personal information to thousands of companies a day. At a high-level, here’s how RTB works: The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks an ad tech company to determine which ads to display for you. This involves sending…  ( 8 min )

Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi discuss the latest videos of Alex Pretti, their own Reason origin stories, and how Joe Biden broke everything.

Judges across the country are fed up with the Trump administration's refusal to follow court orders requiring it to give bond hearings to detained immigrants.

Miller says he’s waging a war for America. Americans see a brutal war on them.

Video of that scuffle does show that federal agents can manage to not shoot even violent protestors.

FBI Director Kash Patel pays lip service to the First and Second Amendments while casting suspicion on people who exercise their First or Second Amendment rights.

Plus: Trump accounts, Klobuchar runs for governor, and who wants to buy CNN now?

Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine asked the inspector general of the DHS about a host of surveillance technologies, including Flock, mobile phone spyware, and location data.  ( 5 min )

Chat & Ask AI, which claims 50 million users, exposed private chats about suicide and making meth.  ( 4 min )

After a decade on dating apps, I’ve decided to enter a different market. This is why I’m listing myself on Zillow until I find a good match—which, to my understanding, will be about forty-eight hours. I realize that my late-’80s construction might not land me in the “trending” section right away, but I asked my friend Shelly—who hosts occasional RE/MAX open houses now that she’s accepted that her remaining doTerra stock will never sell—to vouch for me as “having a lot of character.” And let’s be real, even if I did have the personality of a McMansion, in this economy, lots of people would still put on brave smiles and call me “aspirational.” Shelly was concerned for me at first: “Aren’t you worried about getting messages with intrusive questions?” But she met her husband at a Mumford & S…  ( 8 min )

I’m obviously acting the same as I’ve always acted, and nothing about me has changed. I FEEL FINE WEARING A HENLEY, SO THERE IS NO NEED TO LOOK AT ME. I’m confident enough to wear it. I just have to feel confident, and I’ll be confident. Does my right shoulder seem lower than my left shoulder, like medically? I’m in the vegetable aisle, and everyone can tell I’m taking way too long to make up my mind about what salad stuff to get. All of the terrible things going on in the world today, and all these people can do is undermine me? Wow. Oh, fucking WORLD NEWS ALERT, EVERYONE: The guy in the oatmeal Henley is taking way longer than usual to make up his mind! And he looks like the kind of guy who usually just wears a black T-shirt. He looks like he’s been wearing black T-shirts for the las…  ( 8 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 )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 10 min )

The post What Counts As A Mind? appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 28 min )

Looking back on how I've been looking back  ( 25 min )

There’s an enormous puzzle to the Universe, and it’s one that might be doomed to remain puzzling for a long time: dark matter. For generations, it has been recognized that the known law of gravity, Einstein’s general relativity, combined with the matter and radiation that’s known to exist in the Universe — including all the particles and antiparticles described by the Standard Model of physics — doesn’t add up to describe what we see. Instead, on a variety of cosmic scales, from the insides of individual galaxies to groups and clusters of galaxies all the way up to the largest filamentary structures of all, an additional source of gravity is required. It’s possible that we’ve got the law of gravity wrong, but if that’s the problem, it’s wrong in an extremely complicated way that also seems…  ( 17 min )

Linus Pauling was one of the world’s greatest chemists. He won two Nobel Prizes and was a pioneer in both quantum chemistry and molecular biology. But in later years, Pauling started to talk about medicine. In his advocacy of “mega-vitamin” therapies, Pauling argued that mega-doses of vitamin C could treat diseases such as cancer and cure ailments like the common cold. There is no reputable evidence to support this. The medical establishment did and does dismiss these claims as utterly unfounded, unproven, and dangerous. Pauling is an example of what the philosopher Nathan Ballantyne calls an “epistemic trespasser.” And it’s probably why the smartest, best-educated person you know can sometimes say or do the most idiotic of things. Epistemic trespassing Epistemic trespassing is when an exp…  ( 7 min )

AI is, I’m both intrigued and a bit terrified to say, seemingly everywhere. Including in my head, where it’s occupying prime mental real estate as I ponder how to best engage with this evolving technology. What to start doing. What to stop. How to keep pace. When to freak out. I don’t have definitive answers — for myself or anyone else. But I’m lucky enough to work for Big Think+, a company that produces thought-provoking leadership training by interviewing subject-matter experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned a ton just by immersing myself in their teachings. (My old boss used to describe this as pursuing a mini-MBA via osmosis.)  So here, informed by listening to these experts, are some questions I’m asking — and reasking — myself as I think about how our L&D department should part…  ( 9 min )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 8 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 )

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.  ( 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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Explosives technicians blew up the cache at the Berkeley Marina. A private company hauled off other unspecified chemicals, police said.  ( 25 min )

A brand new rule prevents ICE agents from accessing county property to stage operations, process detainees or surveil.  ( 25 min )

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

The Berkeley City Council passed a resolution that calls for abolishing ICE and ending the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement operations.  ( 26 min )

Stefan Kaiter-Snyder won a citywide “kindness award” for his mobile shelter, stocked with snacks, socks and lots of coffee.  ( 26 min )

Intellectual and deeply intentional, she loved knitting, reading, music, tending to her garden and sitting quietly with a cup of tea.  ( 24 min )

"The Framers...designed a system in which the State and Federal Governments would exercise concurrent authority over the people," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia.

Wider reform is needed in the way the government enforces its laws.

The post Only What Is Alive Can Be Conscious appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 14 min )

Lawmakers in Washington are once again focusing on kids, screens, and mental health. But according to Congress, Big Tech is somehow both the problem and the solution. We're diving into the latest attempt to control how kids access the internet and more with our latest EFFector newsletter. Since 1990, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue tracks what to do when you hit an age gate online, explains why rent-only copyright culture makes us all worse off, and covers the dangers of law enforcement purchasing straight-up military drones. Prefer to listen in? In our audio companion, EFF Senior Policy Analyst Joe Mullin explains what lawmakers should do if they really want to help families. Find the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive. LISTEN TO EFFECTOR EFFECTOR 38.2 - ✍️ THE BILL TO HAND PARENTING TO BIG TECH 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 to protect people from these data breaches and unlawful surveillance when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

Thank you so much for helping us welcome our new baby into the world. We’ve done a thesis amount of research as first-time parents, so here’s an overview of what we’d love from family and friends, and what we’re prepared to return or donate. It’s adorable how the baby—not us—is SO picky. For strollers, we’d like one of the most expensive ones—either the Nuna, the Doona, or the Buggaboo. While we know there are so many other great brands out there, we specifically do not want the FrickaFracka, BoopBoopBB, MaxiKangaroo, CyberStroll, Zzzzzoona, Goona, Swoona, StorkChaser, BeepBeepLUXE, BabyGoWeeeeee, or the JoggyBoy. For gifts related to my breasts, the Boppy and the My Brest Friend nursing pillow are best. We’re also interested in the Tits4Tots Cushion, the Boobie Bolster, the Deluxe Udder…  ( 8 min )

Take your time. You have to eat the whole cake, but you don’t have to eat it all in thirty seconds. A sitting can take as long as you need. Pacing yourself will reduce the risk of choking. Do the smart thing and slow down while you eat the entire cake off a cake stand, top down, in one sitting. Don’t eat anything else the rest of the day. An entire cake is high in calories, fat, and sugar. You’re going to eat the whole cake off a cake stand, top down, in one sitting, so the best thing you can do for your health is avoid taking in any more of those things in the lead-up to eating the cake. We won’t lie to you: You’ll still exceed your recommended daily allotment of calories, fat, and sugar—an entire cake is big. But this will limit the damage. Be in good shape. It’s best to embark o…  ( 8 min )

Mathematicians are still trying to understand fundamental properties of the Fourier transform, one of their most ubiquitous and powerful tools. A new result marks an exciting advance toward that goal. The post Networks Hold the Key to a Decades-Old Problem About Waves first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Match Group says it is investigating claims that a mass of internal data was hacked from its popular dating apps.  ( 5 min )

The Doomsday Clock, a symbol of how close humanity is to destroying itself, has moved from 89 seconds to 85 seconds, four seconds closer to “doomsday.” That is the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight. That’s when, in the metaphor proposed by the keepers  ( 8 min )

You can no longer fuck ICE on r/FuckingFascists.  ( 5 min )

In posts to the platforms news feed, ManyVids — and seemingly, its founder Bella French — wrote that the answer could be a three hour long conversation with podcasters like Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman.  ( 6 min )

What happens when a platform operator changes their tune; the continuing mystery of deleted (or lost, who knows) DHS footage; and what police are being told to do about Flock.  ( 4 min )

Hundreds of thousands of users told the app intimate details about their sexual urges, which are now exposed.  ( 3 min )

Global Network Navigator (GNN); via Ford & Mason Ltd. If Adam Curry's MTV.com in 1993 was a text-based index of music reviews and industry gossip — basically the same format as a Gopher site or FTP server — then Global Network Navigator (GNN) aimed to be something a little more high-minded. It aspired to be an "online magazine" on the World Wide Web. Accordingly, it needed a designer to create that magazine experience. Enter Jennifer Niederst Robbins (then Jennifer Niederst), who had started her career in 1988 as a book designer at Little, Brown and Company. In October 1992, she was hired for the same role at O'Reilly & Associates, the leading technical books publisher of the day. About six months later, she found herself roped into a new Internet project. She later told Rachel Andrew (her…  ( 7 min )

A series of quantitative metaphors on the speeds of common events in molecular biology.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) Human Rights Alliance has, since its founding by EFF and Access Now in 2021, worked to ensure that the European Union follows a human rights-based approach to platform governance by integrating a wide range of voices and perspectives to contextualise DSA enforcement and examining the DSA’s effect on tech regulations around the world. As the DSA moves from legislation to enforcement, it has become increasingly clear that its impact depends not only on the text of the Act but also how it’s interpreted and enforced in practice. This is why the Alliance has created a set of recommendations to include civil society organizations and rights-defending stakeholders in the enforcement process.   The Principles for a Human Rights-Centred Application of the DSA: A Globa…  ( 4 min )

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week posted a photo of the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office.  A short while later, the White House posted the same photo – except that version had been digitally altered to darken Armstrong’s skin and rearrange her facial features to make it appear she was sobbing or distraught. The Guardian one of many media outlets to report on this image manipulation, created a handy slider graphic to help viewers see clearly how the photo had been changed.   This isn’t about “owning the libs” — this is the highest office in the nation using technology to lie to the e…  ( 5 min )

In the animal kingdom, one of the most bizarre discoveries of all-time was the platypus. When reports of the platypus reached the western hemisphere, most leading naturalists at the time assumed it was a hoax, including the first European scientists to examine a specimen in 1799. It was an animal that laid eggs, yet it was a mammal. It had the bill of a duck, but the tail of a beaver. It had (at least, the males do) venomous spurs on their hind legs, but also the ability to locate other creatures in the water through a specialized sense known as electroreception, common in sharks but very rare among mammals. And yet, the platypus exists with all of these properties, even if it would take decades (or more than a century) before we understood how such a creature could come to exist. Astronom…  ( 15 min )

Dinosaur fever gripped the Western world during the early 1900s, fueled by the discovery of new, ever larger and more spectacular dinosaurs in Europe and especially in North America. Interest in these fossils was not merely driven by academic curiosity. Dinosaur skeletons and research had become a status symbol for museums and their financiers, whether government or private, and colonial powers turned to their areas of influence to find new remains. German researchers, with assistance from knowledgeable locals, began to excavate the huge dinosaur deposits in Tanzania in 1906. Russian teams sought dinosaurs on the Chinese side of the Amur River in 1916, and British geologists followed up on reports of sauropod fossils in India in 1917, first noted nearly a century before. North Africa was a…  ( 10 min )

At one point or another, many of us have been frustrated by the out-­of-­touch actions or moral failures of prominent and conventionally “successful” people. I won’t mention specific names, though I’m sure you could easily come up with your own. A while back, after one such letdown, I reached out to an older and wise mentor in search of solace.  Me: I can’t believe there are so many egotistical jerks. Why do all these people just completely lose touch? What is it about money or power or status that turns you into an asshole? Is it unavoidable? Mentor: I am getting more weight equipment.  We didn’t talk much further on the topic. We didn’t need to. I knew exactly what he was saying: Lifting weights offers a genuine source of satisfaction, so you don’t need to chase the superficial variety. …  ( 7 min )

Computing didn’t begin with electronics or genius breakthroughs. It began as a practical response to chart immense amounts of stars, land, and trade activity.  Although computers feel like a very recent breakthrough, the computing revolution actually began in 1776. Let David Alan Grier explain. This video The computing revolution that secretly began in 1776 is featured on Big Think.  ( 16 min )

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The space, 15 years in the making, will include a teaching kitchen, meditation garden and event space. City leaders tout the center’s importance as the Trump administration “tries to make equity a bad word.”  ( 27 min )

Winky Dinky Dogs celebrated the grand opening of its second location in the building that formerly housed Original Kasper's Hot Dogs.  ( 25 min )

Discounted tickets now available for the theater's new season, "Art that Meets the Moment," including five plays, three staged readings, discussions and seminars.  ( 26 min )

The East Bay Regional Park District will meet Tuesday evening to hear public comments as it prepares to do environmental impact study.  ( 27 min )

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. The post Protected: “That’s Somebody’s Son” appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.  ( 5 min )

The post Silicon Valley Goes To War appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 30 min )

“[Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI” — Headline from Gizmodo - - — Guys, enough is enough. Bullying is a serious issue, and it’s time for me to speak out. There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society. This slander is totally unwarranted, and I would really appreciate it if everyone would stop being so mean about this thing I just invested a billion dollars in. As someone who desperately needs this technology to work out, I can honestly say it is the most essential tool ever created in all of human history. Don’t mercilessly ridicule it just because it steals the joy out of your hobbies and creates sexually explicit images of women without their consent. Seriously, please stop! It really hurts my feelings. It’s easy to throw stones if you think about the job displacement and ecological destruction caused by this pointless technology. But such black-and-white, not-wanting-billionaires-to-get-richer thinking is, quite frankly, cruel. You can’t just measure the value of something in terms of “whether or not it makes everything worse for everyone.” The world is much more complicated than that. This technology is going to fuel innovation across industries and solve all problems of feminism and equal rights. Yes, it’s expanding the surveillance state, and yes, it’s destroying the education system, and yes, it’s being trained on copyrighted work without permission, and yes, it’s being used to create lethal autonomous weapons systems that can identify, target, and kill without human input, but… I forget my point, but ultimately, I think you should embrace it. Lately, I feel like I just can’t win with you guys. Please, just use my evil technology. What’s so wrong with that? Just use it. I’m begging you. I want to continue living my immoral technofascist life without any criticism.  ( 7 min )

Jawn (/jôn/) A term used by New York transplants to pander to locals and/or cynically promote their recently opened boutique, restaurant, or bakery. “Come celebrate the grand opening of our new French-Belgian infusion café on Shunk. We’re calling it Merde Jawn.” Parking Space (/ˈpärkiNG/ /spās/) Any spot in a bike lane, sidewalk, or even a turning lane, apparently. “Whaddaya mean I can’t stop my car in the middle of a one-way street? I got my hazards on, just go around.” Philly Native (/ˈfilē/ /ˈnādiv/) How people born and raised in South Jersey or Delaware County describe themselves. “Well, I grew up about an hour outside of Philly. But my Mom-mom lived in Rhawnhurst once, so I’m pretty much a Philly native.” Cheesesteak (/ˈCHēzˌstāk/) An honestly pretty basic sandwich that loca…  ( 8 min )

Court records reveal the incredibly sad state of ICE's evidence retention systems.  ( 7 min )

Starting February 2, many people connecting from the UK will not be able to access the porn site and many others.  ( 4 min )

The documents show law enforcement sees themselves as being consistently and universally under threat from the people it is supposed to protect.  ( 6 min )

This moist and fluffy vegan chocolate chip muffin recipe is the most delightful way to start your morning! It’s made with simple ingredients and easy enough that you can whip it up in minutes. Muffins are one of my favourite things to bake. They’re never fussy; once you master the technique, they always turn out […]  ( 29 min )

For as long as we’ve been human, we’ve turned our gaze skyward and marveled at all that there is to view beyond planet Earth. Even the recognition that Earth itself is merely one of many planets orbiting the Sun is profound, where the stars glittering up in the canopy of the night sky are just very distant analogues of our own Sun: with many of them likely having their own planets, and where some of those planets might even have life on them. However, arguably the biggest changes that result from viewing the Universe don’t come from merely the scientific knowledge we gain from those astronomical endeavors, but rather how they shift our perception of what reality is, and how we, as humans on Earth, fit into the grand cosmic story. The images we’ve taken of the Universe — originally merely i…  ( 16 min )

In early 2026, a new national snapshot of social connection revealed a striking finding. 52% of U.S. adults fall into at-risk or vulnerable ranges associated with lower access to relationships, support, and shared places. At first glance, that statistic might seem to confirm a familiar narrative about modern life. People are isolated. Communities have weakened. Technology has replaced relationships. But the data tells a more precise story. Most Americans want connection. Many are actively looking for it. What they are running into instead are systems that make connection hard to access and harder to sustain. That is one of the central findings of The Six Points of Connection 2026: The State of Connection in America report, released by the US Chamber of Connection. Drawing from a nationally…  ( 8 min )

Joy is often mistaken for a stronger version of happiness. But historian and writer Kate Bowler argues that they are fundamentally different emotions. Happiness, she explains, depends on things going well. It’s cumulative, fragile, and easily undone. Joy, by contrast, can exist alongside pain, grief, and uncertainty. It doesn’t erase what’s broken — it helps hold it together. Drawing from psychology, faith traditions, and her own experience living with stage four cancer, Bowler explores why joy is less about ease and more about connection, openness, and love. It’s not a mood or an achievement, but a way of seeing reality clearly and still saying yes to life. Joy, she suggests, isn’t a bonus for the fortunate. It’s something that carries us when happiness no longer can. This video The brain-deep emotion that matters more than happiness is featured on Big Think.  ( 7 min )

Plus: DHS escalation in Minnesota, Trump loses support on ICE tactics, and how politics influence the Oscar nominations

Federal agencies have considerable authority outside their given jurisdiction, even when they don't have the training to match.

Although the president initially reinforced that plainly inaccurate narrative, his subsequent comments cast doubt on the initial justification for shooting the Minneapolis protester.

Under this understanding of the Fourth Amendment, an attorney at the Institute for Justice says, “there is little left of the rights of Americans to be secure in their houses.”

Senators should demand accountability for federal agents who hurt Americans—and demand the removal of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino.

Nearly half of routinely-updated CDC databases have experienced delays or shutdowns in 2025, with vaccination-related systems disproportionately affected, according to a new study.  ( 5 min )

The algorithm is driving AI-generated influencers to increasingly weird niches.  ( 5 min )

Bellingcat's Kolina Koltai talks about OSINT investigations into synthetic abuse imagery sites, and seeing them go down because of her work.  ( 4 min )

What began as a joke got a little too real. So I shut it down for good.  ( 9 min )

A look at “necromemetics” and the meme economy in the aftermath of violence.  ( 7 min )

The strike was called by the United Nurses Associations of California, which represents about 31,000 employees. They have accused Kaiser Permanente of squeezing patient care and staffing — a claim the system denies.  ( 27 min )

The bakery housed in the former Black Panther Party Oakland headquarters quietly shuttered in mid January.  ( 23 min )

Anyone within a one-block radius of the intersection of Colusa and Tacoma avenues will have to shelter in place or leave the area by 10:30 a.m. as workers remove dangerous chemicals from a home photo lab.  ( 23 min )

The Berkeley Planning Commission endorsed a permit to allow ferry service at the waterfront, the first of many approvals the project will need.  ( 27 min )

Lost account balances, disappearing monthly passes, and malfunctioning ticket terminals are just the tip of the iceberg. ‘These issues must be investigated and fixed,’ a transit rep told us.  ( 25 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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Dear Customers: Some humans (I think? Hard to tell) in masks and vests showed up this morning and took Manny and Kumal away. As you may have noticed, those two were the only staff—despite this place being open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., truly lazy, shiftless drains on society, those fellas—but nobody turned around the sign or locked the door, so if you all want that pack of cigarettes you tell your kids you don’t smoke or a good-enough bagel with a schmear, you’re gonna have to deal with me. The entirety of my scope of work here at the bodega is mouse control and napping, so please bear with me as I figure out the complexities of the point-of-sale system. As I understand it, the stickers on the items bear some relation to the buttons on the cash register, but I’m as fuzzy on the details as …  ( 8 min )

“Even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account, the Trump administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Mr. Pretti, a registered nurse with no criminal record who was pinned down when immigration agents opened fire and killed him.” — New York Times - - - Given recent events in Minneapolis, we are issuing this updated guidance to ensure all residents remain calm, compliant, and emotionally manageable as operations continue. 1. What happened was not what happened. While it may have looked like a shooting, it was actually a “rapid de-escalation outcome.” We recognize that phrases like that may sound invented, which is why we ask you to repeat them anyway. If you witnessed something disturbing, please understand that witnessing is not evide…  ( 8 min )

Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis. The post Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

A roadmap for brain emulation models at the human scale.

Customize this Broccoli Fridge Clean-Out Soup with whatever veggies you have on hand! Rich and creamy, with optional grilled cheese croutons on top, it’s the best way to clean out the fridge without any waste! Some recipes are inspired by restaurant dishes or cravings. And this broccoli “fridge clean out soup” —well, you can guess […]  ( 29 min )

Looking skyward fills us with wonder. The solar corona, as shown here, is imaged out to 25 solar radii during the 2006 total solar eclipse. The longer the duration of a total solar eclipse, the darker the sky becomes, and the better the corona and background astronomical objects can be seen. Experienced, serious eclipse photographers can construct images such as these from their eclipse data, showcasing the extent of the solar corona as well as a plethora of more distant background astronomical objects. Credit: Martin Antoš, Hana Druckmüllerová, Miloslav Druckmüller Off-world, the Sun, planets, stars, and galaxies all await. Now that Saturn has been imaged by JWST, the first “family portrait” of the gas giant worlds as seen by JWST’s eyes can be composed. Here, each planet is shown wi…  ( 10 min )

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"The victims are the Border Patrol agents" who killed Alex Pretti, says one DHS official, who previously claimed Pretti wanted to "massacre law enforcement."

"Carrying a firearm is not a death sentence, it's a Constitutionally protected God-given right," writes Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.).

Veronika, a brown cow in Austria, uses sticks and brushes as multipurpose tools to scratch hard-to-reach spots  ( 7 min )

Soft leeks and crisped tempeh drizzled in a sticky, spicy sweet soy sauce and liberally sprinkled with salted peanuts Tempeh is a gift to all home cooks from Indonesia. Made from fermented compressed soy beans, it’s an intelligent ingredient equivalent to meat in terms of protein, subtle and nutty in flavour and chewy in texture. Happily, it is also now widely available in most large UK supermarkets. Here, the tempeh is cooked in a typical Indonesian way – that is, fried until crisp, then coated in a sticky, spicy sweet soy sauce and liberally sprinkled with salted peanuts. In fact, the only anomaly is the leeks, making this dish mostly Indonesian but via a field in Lincolnshire. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

Malcolm X teachers rallied after class and protesters asked managers of the Graduate Hotel to pledge not to lodge ICE agents — part of a national day of action opposing federal immigration raids in Minnesota and Renee Good’s killing.  ( 26 min )

Health officials say the rare bacterial disease is spreading near a Northwest Berkeley homeless encampment. Here’s what to know about symptoms, transmission and treatment for humans and pets.  ( 28 min )

Congregaciones de Berkeley y de toda el Área de la Bahía participan en un día nacional de acción provocado por la aplicación de leyes migratorias de Trump y el asesinato de Renee Good.  ( 26 min )

Jacob Ming-Trent’s "Shakespeare Saved My Life" directed by Tony Taccone opens tonight; Jimmy Smits and Wanda De Jesús star in "All My Sons" in February.  ( 23 min )

Congregations in Berkeley and across the Bay Area are participating in a national day of action sparked by Trump’s immigration enforcement and Renee Good’s killing.  ( 26 min )

The video is the latest example of federal immigration authorities labeling anyone who opposes them a "domestic terrorist."

With thousands of people dead in Iran, the Trump administration still plans to go ahead with a deportation flight as early as this weekend.

Plus: Nurses on strike, Florida is full, the consumer revolution, and more...

The right to keep and bear arms is about resisting tyranny.

“House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., slammed Minnesota state leaders after anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agitators disrupted a church service in St. Paul… Emmer speculated many of the agitators were ‘chaos agents’ or paid protesters, adding that he believes the majority are from outside the state.” — Fox News - - - TO: All contract protest staff FROM: Joyce People, I am trying to work with you here and make sure you all get your sizable paychecks, but you need to work with me, too. If you are a contract employee, I absolutely need your W-9. And that means your ACTUAL LEGAL NAME. I’m getting too many forms in here with names like “A. Concerned Citizen” and “Fight D. Power,” and while I don’t know you or your family history, I just don’t think those are accurate. - -…  ( 9 min )

1. Problem: The story you are writing has plot holes. Solution: Unreliable narrator. - - - 2. Problem: The story you are writing has severe, glaring plot holes. Solution: Unreliable narrator with amnesia. - - - 3. Problem: Even an unreliable narrator with amnesia can’t explain the plot hole typhoon raging across this entire godforsaken story. Solution: Time travel. - - - 4. Problem: You are not a very good writer. Solution: Your narrator is not a very good writer. - - - 5. Problem: You are bad at dialogue. Solution Your main characters are robots. (Advanced: Any character with a speaking role is a robot.) Welcome to the avant-garde. - - - 6. Problem: Even a world populated exclusively by robots can’t explain the wooden manner in which your characters talk. Solution: Elimin…  ( 8 min )

This week, we discuss stances on AI, a conference about money laundering, and signs about slavery coming down.  ( 3 min )

The post The Middle Powers Step Up appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 11 min )

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. […] You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do. […] If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” For me, this is the single best piece of advice on offer in Stephen King’s On Writing (2000). Finding the time to read and reading widely are necessary not only for fiction writers but for anyone who wishes to express their ideas in writing.  It’s so fundamental to the craft that it’s not difficult to find other writers offering the same advice. William Faulkner probably gave it its most famous and quotable form: “Read, read, read…  ( 10 min )

Before computers existed, people performed massive calculations by hand where error, repetition, and standardization shaped the outcome. We tracked comets, mapped nations, and solved problems of scale.  That legacy of manual calculation shapes how we live today;  our modern algorithms and the shaping of predictive models. Dr. David Alan Grier explains the unexpected link between the Industrial Revolution and artificial intelligence. This video How the Industrial Revolution invented modern computing is featured on Big Think.  ( 47 min )

Primordial black holes could rewrite our understanding of dark matter and the early universe. A record-breaking detection at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has some physicists wondering if we just spotted one. The post Monster Neutrino Could Be a Messenger of Ancient Black Holes first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

If you didn’t believe tofu was capable of magic, Silken Tofu Chocolate Mousse will convince you! Velvety smooth, exceptionally rich, and intensely chocolatey, this easy 5-ingredient vegan dessert is the definition of swoon-worthy. Over the years, I’ve made a few desserts with tofu, like this Tahô recipe. But if you’re looking for a tofu treat that […]  ( 27 min )

Here in the Universe, there’s a fascinating property that nearly every galaxy beyond our own Milky Way seems to possess: the light that we observe from it seems to be shifted towards redder, longer wavelengths than the light that’s emitted from within our own galaxy. Within the context of General Relativity, there are a number of possible explanations for an observed redshift: it could be due to the relative motion of the source and the observer, it could be due to a different in the curvature of space between the source and the observer, or it could be due to the fabric of space itself stretching and expanding as light travels through it. Yet, if it were the effects of gravitational masses (like galaxies) tugging on other masses (like other galaxies) that dominated the Universe, you’d exp…  ( 16 min )

When I first met Rashida, she introduced herself with a disclaimer: “I’m a little intense.” She said it with a grimace, as if the label left a bad taste in her mouth. I replied, “Good to know. What else should I know about you?” She told me she was a mother, a recent pickleball enthusiast, and a leader in risk and compliance at a Fortune 500 company. I thought maybe such a role demanded intensity, but I still asked, “Where does that ‘intense’ label come from?” She didn’t have to think long. “When I left my last company, my boss made an offhand comment. He said, ‘You can be a bit intense, Rashida, but we’ll sure miss you.’” That comment stuck. Hard. But it wasn’t the first time Rashida had heard it: “My parents are Egyptian, and I’m the youngest of eight kids. My brothers and sisters would …  ( 7 min )

These days, we often consider nostalgia to be a complicated but mostly harmless emotion. It’s full of pathos but, like heartache, it’s something you live with or get over. But it has not always been thus. From the late 17th through the late 19th centuries, nostalgia was mostly viewed as a legitimate medical condition. Doctors argued that it was a physical ailment because they did not yet share the modern, sharp distinction between the mind and the body. Emotions were seen as “the passions” that could directly deplete a person’s physical “animal spirits” and vital reserves. Their arguments were underlined by a series of seemingly physical symptoms linked to nostalgic sentiments. When people pined for some past time or some distant homeland, they reported lethargy, fever, and heart palpitati…  ( 7 min )

For most of human history, movement was inseparable from survival. Deliberately burning energy for no immediate purpose would have made little sense in a world where calories were scarce and bodies were costly to maintain. Seen through an evolutionary lens, exercise stops looking like a personal shortcoming and starts looking like a cultural invention we’re still learning how to live with, says Daniel Lieberman. This video Why modern fitness culture misunderstands human bodies is featured on Big Think.  ( 15 min )

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Also: Obamacare enrollment dropped 24% in Alameda County after tax credits expired.  ( 23 min )

The 23-story dorm, at the corner of Bancroft and Fulton in the Southside neighborhood, is set to open in 2028.  ( 25 min )

The restaurant serving and delivering pizza, wings, salads and more officially opened on Jan. 22 in Uptown Oakland.  ( 27 min )

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

Coogler's vampire film “Sinners” broke records with 16 nominations. Born in Oakland, he graduated from St. Mary's College High School in Berkeley.  ( 26 min )

Realtor Megan Micco offers advice on the new ordinance and an online calculator for homeowners.  ( 26 min )

Other events include two autobiographical plays, a group meditation circle and a ukulele club that meets biweekly.  ( 27 min )

Why is the human penis so big? Scientists probed the evolution of penis size through sexual selection and mate competition in a first-of-its-kind study  ( 6 min )

“Ethical dilemmas about AI aside, the posts are completely disconnected with ManyVids as a site,” one ManyVids content creator told 404 Media.  ( 13 min )

“In a free-wheeling speech to world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump… touched on his desire to obtain Greenland from Denmark… America’s contribution to Nato, and wind energy in China.” —BBC - - - Fellow knights, I have traveled a great distance to be here in beautiful Davos, Holy Roman Empire, to attend this year’s meeting of the Knights Templar. I come bringing truly phenomenal news from La Mancha. This week marked the one-year anniversary of my knighthood, and after twelve months of roaming the plains atop my trusty steed, Rocinante, I have slain giants, restored chivalry, and transformed our scoundrel-plagued lands into the safest in the known world. My detractors insist that all of my enemies are imaginary and that I am picking fights with bo…  ( 8 min )

As arrests surge under “Operation Metro Surge,” attorneys say the Trump administration is again denying detainees meaningful access to counsel.

The post The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 26 min )

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In His Own Words (Episode 5)  ( 37 min )

Over the span of a single lifetime, the world has changed in ways that would have been virtually unimaginable in the first half of the 20th century. Two major breakthroughs that occurred in physics — relativity and quantum physics — suddenly made a number of previously unthinkable endeavors possible. From modern electronics to computers, smart phones, the internet, brain imaging and more, everyday life in 2021 is vastly different from what it was back when many of us were first born. One of those technologies that’s been revolutionary for our society is GPS: the Global Positioning System. From anywhere in the world, signals can be transmitted by a network of medium-Earth orbit satellites to wherever your location is, pinpointing your position to an accuracy of better than 1 meter (3 feet) …  ( 15 min )

We speak about cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease as if they arrived independently. But we ignore the process that makes them more likely with every passing year: aging. Longevity scientist Andrew Steele walks us through the emerging science that’s trying to reverse the aging process completely. This video Why even the healthiest people hit a wall at age 70 is featured on Big Think.  ( 20 min )

The change aims to provide less expensive opportunities for homeownership in a city with a famously fearsome real estate market.  ( 26 min )

The Laurel District’s lauded breakfast spot is in escrow, with plans to change ownership in mid to late February.  ( 24 min )

Also: D.C. Piano moves into a larger space on University Avenue and Worthy Self Care Studio expands in the Elmwood, opening a new concept "movement studio."  ( 28 min )

Best known for her book "Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish," Bender was also a family therapist who started an in-home art gallery and a Berkeley institute focused on helping people find their true calling.  ( 27 min )

We talk ELITE, the tool Palantir is working on; how AI influencers are defaming celebrities; and Comic-Con's ban of AI art.  ( 4 min )

"My local community is being systematically liquidated in what I can only describe as a targeted intellectual genocide."  ( 4 min )

The famed convention's organizers have banned AI from the art show.  ( 6 min )

Researchers recorded the neurons that shape directional navigation as bats explored a remote island off the coast of Tanzania. The post How Animals Build a Sense of Direction first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

MTV VJ Adam Curry in 1993, the year he took to the Web with MTV.com. Photo via WikiMedia. Any history of web design has to begin with the first graphical web browser to go mainstream: Mosaic, later to be renamed Netscape Navigator. At the beginning of 1993, college student Marc Andreessen wrote a message to the WWW-Talk mailing list calling for volunteers to test a new GUI (graphical user interface) browser in development — "initially it's hypertext only, but will soon have multimedia capabilities also." Later in the month came the announcement of “alpha/beta version 0.5” of the browser, which Andreessen was now calling X Mosaic. The X signified that it was built for the X Window System, which meant that it only worked on a few platforms — notably, not yet including Microsoft Windows or Ap…  ( 8 min )

Starting on the night of January 19, 2026, planet Earth was treated to a global show that had only been seen once before in the 21st century: a spectacular auroral display that wasn’t triggered by a solar flare or by a coronal mass ejection, but instead by a completely different form of space weather known as a solar radiation storm. Whereas solar flares normally involve the ejection of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere and coronal mass ejections typically involve accelerated plasma particles from the Sun’s corona, a solar radiation storm is simply an intensification of the charged ions normally emitted by the Sun as part of the solar wind. Only, in a radiation storm, both the density and speed of the emitted particles get greatly enhanced. We’re currently still in the peak years of our cu…  ( 16 min )

In 2014, a team of neuroscientists, including Dr. Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, gave macaque monkeys a carefully standardized task: categorize visual dot patterns into one of two groups. As the animals learned, the researchers recorded brain activity, hoping to understand how learning changes neural activity. Nearly a decade later, Miller — alongside researchers from Dartmouth, including Dr. Anand Pathak and Prof. Richard Granger — gave the same task to a very different subject. It wasn’t a primate at all, but a computational model that the team wired to work like the real brain circuits that control learning and decision-making. Dr. Miller and his colleagues hoped it would produce patterns of neural activity similar to what they observed in the macaques. What …  ( 10 min )

This article is an early look at our upcoming special issue on Mastery. Check back in on January 28 to catch the full issue. After years of studies and six months in New York, I was convinced I’d mastered English. I was cracking jokes with American friends, binge-watching shows without subtitles, and even thinking in English half the time. Then I moved to London for my first job at Google, and suddenly, I felt like I’d never truly master the language. Colleagues used phrases I’d never heard. Cultural references flew over my head. I found myself nodding along in meetings, pretending to understand jokes that left me completely lost. It felt terrible. I was encountering the growing pains inherent to mastery, but everything I’d been told about getting good at something had set me up to misinte…  ( 6 min )

You may think that denial can be harmful when encountering a challenge. But let me tell you about Richard Cohen. When I was struggling with my eyesight, I read a book called Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness, by Richard Cohen. Cohen, who called the book a “reluctant memoir,” was diagnosed with MS at 25, survived two bouts of colon cancer, was legally blind for much of his life, and yet had an incredible, award-winning career as a war correspondent and journalist. He was married to journalist Meredith Viera for almost 40 years and was the father of three children. Sadly, he passed away in late 2024 after a struggle with pneumonia. I had the chance to speak with Richard 20 years after I first read his book. He was a third-generation MS patient: Both his grandmother and his father had …  ( 8 min )

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La Junta de Supervisores considerará a fin de mes una propuesta que prohíbe a agentes federales de inmigración el uso de propiedades del condado y un plan de respuesta coordinada.  ( 26 min )

The death comes less than two months after an Amtrak train fatally struck another man just four blocks away.  ( 23 min )

The cherished North Shattuck bakery, cheese shop and pizzeria reopened Jan. 20 with a new system to accommodate a project eight years in the making.  ( 28 min )

Dirk Neyhart grew up in Berkeley in the ’50s and ’60s. After surviving a stabbing that left him disabled, he found joy and purpose in community service.  ( 26 min )

A plurality of Americans now say they'd like to end the agency.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s chief technology and product officer explains how she helps manage one of the most visited sites in the world in the age of generative AI.  ( 4 min )

On the same day he allegedly robbed a mail carrier, Jordan McCorvey posted photos of himself flipping through stacks of letters still in the USPS tray.  ( 4 min )

The FAA has altered a no fly zone designation that was originally created for US military bases to apply to DHS units.  ( 3 min )

The post When AI & Human Worlds Collide appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 42 min )

2026 cooking bucket list. Read more »  ( 19 min )

The Bonnet problem asks when just a bit of information is enough to uniquely identify a whole surface. The post Two Twisty Shapes Resolve a Centuries-Old Topology Puzzle first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

These gluten-free vegan Zucchini Fritters are delightfully crispy and an absolute cinch to make, perfect for pairing with your favourite dipping sauces and toppings! Serve them as a side, make them a light main dish, or fry them up for a fun party appetizer! Along with Zucchini Muffins and Zucchini Bread, zucchini fritters are one of the classic […]  ( 31 min )

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One of the most remarkable facts about the Universe is simply that, over the past couple of centuries, humanity has actually been able to make sense of much of it at a basic, fundamental level. We’ve determined what all of the luminous and light-blocking material, plus radiation, is made of: the normal matter and energy in our Universe that consists of particles within the Standard Model. We’ve discovered black holes and have come to understand how gravity and the expanding Universe works: governed by the laws of Einstein’s General Relativity. And we understand the rules governing how particles interact: through the strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic forces, as dictated by quantum field theory. While these developments occurred both theoretically as well as observationally a…  ( 15 min )

Every major technological shift arrives with bold promises of efficiency and productivity. The current wave of artificial intelligence is no different. The forecasts are breathless: tasks automated, workloads reduced, insights unlocked, entire sectors transformed. But behind the promises sits a neglected question: what will work actually feel like? Efficiency projections tell us nothing about the emotional reality of daily working life. And those emotional realities determine whether people collaborate, innovate, stay in their roles, or quietly disengage. In an era dominated by AI hype, we need a different lens to understand the future of work. That lens is happiness — not as a perk or a soft ideal, but as a dynamic, measurable signal of how well work is working. AI will transform what we …  ( 9 min )

I’ve known a great many leaders in my time. Bosses, CEOs, heads, provosts, managers, politicians, coaches, supervisors, managing directors — whatever you call them, I’ve met my fair share of them. Some, I’ve known intimately. They are my friends, family, and close colleagues. Others I’ve watched from afar. Because it’s important to watch the leaders in our lives. According to Aristotle, it’s the only way we will learn. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that to be a good person doesn’t mean doing one or two good things but developing certain virtues that allow you to do good things. Doing a brave thing doesn’t make you courageous. Giving a compliment doesn’t make you kind. To be good is to practice — over and over again — until you transform your character. A good leader is no dif…  ( 7 min )

Todd Blanche joins other top administration officials in declaring that ICE agent Jonathan Ross was justified in killing Good. Most Americans disagree.

I’ve got 3 delicious ways to make homemade kale chips: sea salt, spicy black pepper, and cheesy! Follow my pointers for kale chips that taste great and actually get crispy. (No soggy chips here, friends!) These crispy kale chips are so addictive, they’ll make you put away the potato chips for good. Yes, it’s true! […]  ( 29 min )

In testimony from a CBP official obtained by 404 Media, the official described how Mobile Fortify returned two different names after scanning a woman's face during an immigration raid. ICE has said the app's results are a “definitive” determination of someone's immigration status.  ( 4 min )

From 2022 onwards, JWST begun revolutionizing our cosmic perspective. This side-by-side view shows the same object, the Pillars of Creation, as captured by JWST in both mid-infrared light (at left) and in near-infrared light (at right). Note the different features revealed as far as stars, dust, gas, and other features within the nebula. Different wavelengths are sensitive to different types of features, including for features beyond the limits of JWST. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; J. DePasquale, A. Koekemoer, A. Pagan (STScI) Its spectacular early results broke records and inspired awe. This almost-perfectly-aligned image composite shows the first JWST deep field’s view of the core of cluster SMACS 0723 and contrasts it with the older Hubble view. The JWST image of galaxy cluster S…  ( 11 min )

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A biological puzzle that made one researcher and ruined another might never be solved.

Scientists sequenced the genome of an extinct woolly rhinoceros that was found in a wolf belly that lived 14,400 years ago.  ( 7 min )

A warming, scoop-it-up tomato and egg dish a bit like shakshuka, but the zippy lemony yoghurt and harissa give away its Turkish roots I am not the type of person to say, “These eggs will change your life”, but these eggs changed my life, so they may also make a sizeable dent in yours. The recipe is based on (but not authentic to) the Turkish dish menemen. There is much to love about these eggs, not least how magnificently delicious they are and how fun it is to scoop them up with hot flatbread. On a practical note, meanwhile, they can be eaten at any mealtime and, if not finished, reheated later. Which, if you love eggs and leftovers as much as I do, is a (small) dream come true. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

A delightfully chaotic episode of Freed Up where the hosts discuss how Minnesota wine moms have taken to the streets and the Star Wars prequels somehow end up on trial—again

DHS tells officers to use "de-escalation tactics," employ "a verbal warning" instead of force when feasible, and avoid "placing themselves in positions" that trigger the use of deadly force.

The incident raises more questions about federal agents' use-of-force policies and training.

A proposed ban on federal immigration agents from using county property and a coordinated response plan will be considered by the Board of Supervisors later this month.  ( 26 min )

Hanan Masri, whose work explores land, ancestry and her mother’s Palestinian heritage, has been crowned Berkeley’s new poet laureate. The city’s new youth laureates are friends at Berkeley High.  ( 29 min )

The Burmese restaurant is moving a few blocks to the east to take over the space formerly occupied by popular restaurant Pomella.  ( 25 min )

Cha had a short but very prolific career in multiple disciplines of art until her death in 1982 at age 31.  ( 26 min )

A big laugher who lived with authenticity and purpose, Berne worked for work for Berkeley’s Parallax Press and played banjo at music festivals around the West Coast.  ( 24 min )

The post How The ‘AI Job Shock’ Will Differ From The ‘China Trade Shock’ appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 12 min )

This week, we discuss the staying power of surveillance coverage, the jigsaw of reporting, and eyestrain.  ( 4 min )

In any given week, you will probably talk to dozens or hundreds of people. Most of these conversations will probably be about perfunctory, practical matters: “Two tickets, please,” “No, after you,” or “Darling, do you know where Liam’s swimming trunks are?” At other times, these conversations swish gently, as with two friends chatting over coffee, or they might ramble in a debate about who’s better: the Reds or the Blues. But according to Oprah Winfrey, everyone in every conversation mostly wants the same thing. Winfrey has interviewed tens of thousands of people over her incredible 30-year career. She’s interviewed Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Meghan Markle, as well as a group of neo-Nazis and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (two groups who may or may not overlap). Winfrey recalls …  ( 6 min )

The math of data structures helps us understand how different storage systems come with different trade-offs between resources such as time and memory. The post Why There’s No Single Best Way To Store Information first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 9 min )

There’s just nothing like Moravian Sugar Cake! My vegan version is soft and lightly chewy like the original, but the buttery cinnamon sugar topping is plant-based. Moravian sugar cake is a staple in Moravian communities in Pennsylvania and it really isn’t your typical cake. While it might look like a coffee cake, it’s made with […]  ( 29 min )

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One of the most amazing properties of gravity in the context of Einstein’s General Relativity is that mass, wherever it’s concentrated, is capable of curving the very fabric of space. This leads to a number of vital effects: other nearby objects, from gas to galaxies, get attracted to and drawn into those massive clumps, all particles in motion, including massless particles, get gravitationally attracted to that region when they pass by it, and the light from background objects gets deflected, bent, magnified, and distorted by that curved space as it passes through it. That last effect is known as gravitational lensing, and it plays many important roles on cosmological scales. You might think, then, that a large, massive clump of matter — one that behaves as a gravitational lens — would co…  ( 15 min )

Most of us measure age by birthdays, but what if the number on your ID tells only half the story?  Dr. Morgan Levine explores the hidden clock inside our cells, unraveling how the biological age that reveals how fast our bodies are really aging is calculated. This video The biggest myth about aging, according to science is featured on Big Think.  ( 32 min )

Consciousness feels like the most familiar thing in the world, and yet science still can’t say what it is, where it begins, or why it exists at all. Annaka Harris examines the assumptions shaping consciousness research, from the belief that awareness requires complex brains to the intuition that thought drives behavior. This video The hard problem of consciousness, in 53 minutes is featured on Big Think.  ( 31 min )

The literary world is no safe haven from wild conspiracy theories. It has its own supposed cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods. These conspiracy theories aren’t typically harmful and can even offer some fun lore to draw you into the reading. Like all conspiracy theories, though, they distort our understanding of reality and history, and they can sometimes extend beyond the page to have far-reaching consequences. A rose by any other name Perhaps the most common literary conspiracies involve questions of authorship: the belief that a writer didn’t actually create the works credited to them. And it’s understandable why readers sometimes doubt the authenticity of the name on the cover. For one, many authors use pseudonyms. Mary Ann Evans adopted the pen …  ( 15 min )

One of my growing concerns about artificial intelligence is that it increasingly abstracts away the need for mentorship inside organizations. When young people get hired today, it’s becoming easier for managers to spend less time teaching and more time just handing over tools. In the short run, that can look like efficiency. But I do worry about what gets lost over the long run — especially for people just starting their careers. That’s part of what made this wide-ranging conversation between author and interviewer William Green and Nima Shayegh so enjoyable. I was especially struck by Nima’s reflections on his years of training under Lou Simpson — one of the most respected long-term investors of the past half-century. Like all great mentors, Simpson taught through osmosis: long conversati…  ( 10 min )

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Also: New data show how BART outages snarled commutes and a spike in catalytic converter thefts to start the year.  ( 23 min )

Berkeley has seen the fewest shootings citywide in nearly a decade, mirroring a national trend. The city’s gun violence intervention program — launched over a year ago, around the same time as the city’s last fatal shooting — is nearly at the end of its funding.  ( 30 min )

The Vietnamese restaurant in Berkeley worked things out with the landlord and will remain open.  ( 23 min )

Other events include an author talk on the South Bay’s industrial salt ponds, a class on growing fruit trees and a botanical drawing night.  ( 26 min )

A performer who later went into the advertising business, she lived in New York and Palm Beach before moving to the Bay Area.  ( 23 min )

Frowned upon in video games, loot boxes are back in real life–and one’s in the Pentagon.  ( 5 min )

Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground.  ( 4 min )

The administration's written policies make it likely that more people like Renee Good will be targets, and victims, of ICE.

The post The Politics Of Planetary Color appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 27 min )

This beautiful Rainbow Fruit Salad with Maple Lime Dressing is as pretty as it is delicious! Perfect for potlucks and holidays, it’s equally fitting for a snack, breakfast or even a light dessert. Fruit salad is simple—it can be as easy as cutting up some fruit and tossing it in a bowl. But over the years, I’ve […]  ( 28 min )

Cultivarium, a focused research organization, has built a custom electroporator to engineer non-model organisms at scale.

For many good reasons, black holes are among the most studied objects in the entire Universe. Initially predicted back in the late 18th century in the context of Newtonian gravity, black holes were shown to arise in the context of general relativity as early as 1916. Astrophysically, they can be formed when gas clouds collapse, when the cores of stars implode, or when two neutron stars collide, among other mechanisms. They have been observed via numerous methods: from electromagnetic emissions that arise from matter around them, from the motion of stars or binary companions around them, and from the gravitational waves they emit when two of them merge together. But perhaps, most remarkably of all, it was shown in the early 1970s that black holes cannot endure forever, but will eventually e…  ( 17 min )

Last month, I wrote a piece here in Big Think suggesting that the public is in denial over the emerging power and associated risks of AI. Many people reacted defensively, insisting that today’s AI systems are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” that regurgitate memorized information and are structurally incapable of emergent reasoning. I appreciate that many people want this to be true, but it is an outdated narrative based on a 2021 paper that was widely misinterpreted. I want to clear up this misconception because I worry it is giving the public a false sense of security that superintelligence is not an urgent risk to society.  To address this, let me update our collective mental model: Like it or not, there is increasing evidence that frontier AI systems do not just store text patter…  ( 9 min )