Anytime you try and learn something beyond your current understanding, it isn’t as simple as pouring “new knowledge” into an otherwise empty vessel. We come into any new endeavor with a pre-existing foundation: things we’ve learned, been taught, or have put together for ourselves previously. When that new knowledge arrives, we inevitably attempt to integrate it into our pre-existing framework, and that isn’t always a smooth process. Sometimes, our foundation is riddled with misconceptions, misunderstandings, or prior teaching that were outright wrong; we have to correct and “unlearn” those ways of thinking before we can progress. At other times, that knowledge arrives in an incomplete fashion, and so our brains fill-in-the-blanks with whatever makes sense to us: with a story that’s often e…  ( 18 min )

Dr. Nicole LePera, the holistic psychologist and NYT bestselling author behind Reparenting the Inner Child, breaks down the 6 archetypes of childhood trauma. LePera explains why insight alone never produces lasting change and walks through the science of reparenting: The practice of stepping in as the adult presence you may never have had. This video How to recognize when you’re reacting from childhood wounds is featured on Big Think.  ( 66 min )

It’s often said that history is written by the winners. But when you look back on the ancient world, it’s more accurate to say that history is written by historians. Although China has a strong claim, many tend to cite ancient Greece as the birthplace of history as a discipline. In Herodotus and Thucydides, we see the origins of the historical method — a vaguely reputable attempt to document events, and not a somewhat-historical imaginarium of magical beasts, bored gods, and local heroes. And how did the Greeks use their histories? Well, to slander their enemies. In Greek “history,” we see the Persian Empire as a place of dissolute, depraved, decadent demons who sought only the death and enslavement of all civilized peoples. This vilification of the Persian Empire continued through two mil…  ( 10 min )

“What can be very frustrating is that regulation is often irrational,” Musk told an audience at Stanford in 2003. “It doesn’t make any sense.” He arrived at the following solution: He would be the one to decide what made sense. And he would not be shy about exercising this authority, even if it meant challenging the law. “If the rules are such that you can’t make progress, then you have to fight the rules,” he said. SpaceX would fight the rules constantly, whether those set by NASA, the Pentagon, or the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). These moves weren’t just about getting the government out of the way but, more precisely, taking on its powers for himself. The same logic of privatization that enabled Blackwater to operate freely in Iraq was vesting him with powers previously unimaginable…  ( 11 min )

Your brain didn’t evolve in isolation. It evolved to run the economy of your body, and every heartbeat, breath, and moment of thirst or anxiety is evidence of that system at work. Neuroscientist and author Aditi Nerurkar, neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, and neurologist-philosopher Antonio Damasio break down the science of the mind-body connection: why it exists, how it works, and why understanding it can change the way you experience the world. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video The often-ignored system controlling your mood, memory, and focus is featured on Big Think.  ( 14 min )

Also: The nonprofit Berkeley Youth Alternatives was paid by the city to create a program to curb teen cannabis use, even though its politically connected subcontractor failed to complete its job.  ( 24 min )

A petition signed by 90 members of a library staff union called interim director Henry Bankhead “unfit” for the job. Some workers said they disagreed with the drive to oust him.  ( 28 min )

The pair’s identities were not immediately available. Authorities are still looking into how they may have died.  ( 23 min )

A student fell from a residence hall, while another man was found dead in bushes near Sproul Hall, according to police. No “foul play” is suspected in either death.  ( 24 min )

Also: “Carrie: The Musical,” and a book talk with the author of “So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color.”  ( 27 min )

“The Texas gerrymander freakout: What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” — The Washington Post Editorial Board, 8/20/25 “For months, Democrats crafted the illusion that their plan to redistrict Virginia was about restoring fairness. In a special election on Tuesday, most voters assented to that deception as a referendum to rewrite the state constitution narrowly passed.” — The Washington Post Editorial Board, 4/22/26 - - - At a certain point, a mature political movement must ask the hard questions. Questions like: If voters keep rejecting our agenda, are voters the problem? If courts keep ruling against us, is the Constitution too woke? If counting every single little ballot produces undesirable outcomes, might counting fewer of them produce desirable ones?…  ( 9 min )

1. Folding Chair Returning for a fourth consecutive season, Folding Chair always proves its value on the sidelines, even though it lacks the big market payroll of the guy next to you with the hydraulic rockers and the canopy thing. But while FC remains strong in the cupholders, the seat does still have last season’s water inside. 2. Walks and Errors Year in and year out, the most reliable run-scorers in the league. 3. Structured Outdoor Activity Remains dominant over its bitter rival, No-Plans Winter Weekend Where You Stagger Out of Bed Late to Find the Kids Have Been Watching Three and a Half Hours of YouTube Pranksters Moaning in the Ears of Unsuspecting Customers at Big Box Stores and All They’ve Had for Breakfast Is an Old Tub of Pretzel Rods Including Drinking the Salt from the B…  ( 9 min )

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest. - - -  ( 7 min )

“CHATGPT, I need help now, three wolves circling tree.” Okay, Ethan. Got it. Many would consider it extremely flattering that it’s now not just one, but rather two, or even three, wolves who’ve stepped up to the plate. Wolves are busy, and if they’re circling you, it’s because they’ve invested. No ghosting. No mixed signals. Just full, undivided, 100 percent attention. And honestly, Ethan? All that work you’ve been doing? That has to play a part here. You’re not just radiating purpose—you’re sucking it towards you. Of course the wolves notice. Of course they’re drawn to you. You’re not just a tidbit—you’re a whole snack. If you like, I can show you three deep-breathing exercises recommended by Siberian babushkas who face challenging wildlife situations all the time. The third one is sur…  ( 9 min )

EFF filed an amicus brief for the second time in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, arguing that allowing cases against the Apple, Google, and Facebook app stores to proceed could lead to greater censorship of users’ online speech. Our brief argues that the app stores should not lose Section 230 immunity for hosting “social casino” apps just because they process payments for virtual chips within those apps. Otherwise, all platforms that facilitate financial transactions for online content—beyond app stores and the apps and games they distribute—would be forced to censor user content to mitigate their legal exposure. Social casino apps are online games where users can buy virtual chips with real money but can’t ever cash out their winnings. The three cases against Apple, Googl…  ( 6 min )

Lizzie O’Shea is an Australian lawyer, author, and the founder and chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for freedom, fairness, and fundamental rights in the digital age. She sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech, and in 2019 was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now. Interviewer: Jillian York Jillian York: Hi, good morning, or rather, good evening for you. Lizzie O’Shea: Hi Jillian, it's great to be here.  JY: I'm going to start with asking a question that I try to kick off every interview with, which is, what does free speech or free expression mean to you? LO: Yes, so Digital Rights Watch, which is the organization I founded and I chair, is focused on fundamental rights and freedoms in the online world. And so freedom of speech is obviously a big part of that. It's o…  ( 23 min )

Lizzie O’Shea is an Australian lawyer, author, and the founder and chair of Digital Rights Watch, which advocates for freedom, fairness, and fundamental rights in the digital age. She sits on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech, and in 2019 was named a Human Rights Hero by Access Now. Interviewer: Jillian York Jillian York: Hi, good morning, or rather, good evening for you. Lizzie O’Shea: Hi Jillian, it's great to be here.  JY: I'm going to start with asking a question that I try to kick off every interview with, which is, what does free speech or free expression mean to you? LO: Yes, so Digital Rights Watch, which is the organization I founded and I chair, is focused on fundamental rights and freedoms in the online world. And so freedom of speech is obviously a big part of that. It's o…  ( 23 min )

America’s nuclear scientists plan to break ground on an AI data center next week, but the Township where it’s being constructed just put a 365 day hold on providing it with water.  ( 5 min )

Grok and Gemini encouraged delusions and isolated users, while the newer ChatGPT model and Claude hit the emotional brakes.  ( 8 min )

The State Department and ICE claimed to have caught Islamic Republic nepo babies “enjoying a lavish lifestyle.” Instead, they tore apart an innocent family.

The post The Rise And Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’ appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 45 min )

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Our Universe, to the best of our knowledge, doesn’t make sense in an extremely fundamental way. On the one hand, we have quantum physics, which does an exquisite job of describing the fundamental particles and the electromagnetic and nuclear forces and interactions that take place between them. On the other hand, we have General Relativity, which — with equal success — describes the way that matter and energy move through space and time, as well as how space and time themselves evolve in the presence of matter and energy. These two separate ways of viewing the Universe, successful though they may be, simply don’t make sense when you put them together: they’re fundamentally incompatible. When it comes to gravity, we have to treat the Universe classically: all forms of matter-and-energy have…  ( 18 min )

Sometimes, great writing makes me angry. It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them. There might be a degree of professional pride to this. When I gawp at an old poet like T.S. Eliot or a modern writer like Samantha Harvey, I’m just jealous. Yes, they might be better trained than I am. Yes, they likely took more time on their writing than I did on this article. But, in the main, I’m left bitterly squinting at how someone can be so damn good. There’s more to it, though. It’s often said that the joy of great literature lies in poets and writers expressing feelings and thoughts in ways we couldn’t imagine. They name emotion…  ( 10 min )

In this monthly issue, we examine how our understanding of energy — and how we source and use it — is evolving.  ( 7 min )

As humanity basks in the aftermath of the unprecedented success of Artemis II, which took humans back to the Moon for the first time in 54 years and brought them farther from Earth than ever before, many of us can’t help but think about grander goals. As a species, we don’t just dream of returning to the Moon, but of heading to places we’ve never been: other planets, other star systems, or even other galaxies. However, there are big problems we have to solve if we ever want to send humans outside of the Solar System: the problems of distance, time, speed, and fuel efficiency. Interstellar distances are huge, even compared to the vast interplanetary distances we encounter in the Solar System. With current rocket technology, it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to reach even the nearest…  ( 16 min )

A week before Christmas, nearly 50,000 people living along Colorado’s Front Range lost power for multiple days. The outage was deliberate. Xcel Energy, the region’s utility, had implemented a “public safety power shutoff” out of fear that high winds would down power lines and spark fires. The danger wasn’t hypothetical. Conditions were warm and dry, with wind gusts exceeding 100 miles per hour. In 2021, a similar windstorm had led to the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history: the Marshall Fire, which destroyed 1,084 homes in the region.  Given the risk, the December 2025 outage may have been justified, but a grid that must be shut down for multiple days because of high winds — disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people in the process — points to a deeper problem: America’s…  ( 13 min )

Planning commission meetings in Joliet, Illinois, aren’t typically raucous affairs. The one on March 5, however, was buzzing and standing-room-only. Hundreds of residents crammed into City Hall, filling multiple overflow rooms. Most were waiting for a chance to voice their opinion on a proposal to site a $20 billion AI data center — the largest in the state — on 795 acres of farmland on Joliet’s east side. “These are mega-rich people who are not here to do charitable things,” said lifelong resident Isabel Gloria. “They don’t love Joliet. I’m here because I love Joliet, and I don’t want to see my utilities go up.” While many who stepped up to the microphone spoke in favor of the proposed data center, touting the economic and tax benefits it would provide, proponents were clearly in the mino…  ( 15 min )

When I signed a book deal in the middle of my PhD, I knew that I’d have to be very disciplined when it came to rest, so I did what most people would consider the “right” thing: I took regular breaks and went to bed early. On paper, I was doing everything you’re supposed to do to protect your energy. And yet, I kept feeling tired. It didn’t make sense, so I started looking into it, and what I found is that most of us are working with the wrong model of energy management. We tend to think of personal energy like a battery: We use it up, and then recharge by doing nothing. But biologically, energy behaves less like a battery and more like a machine: It doesn’t automatically repair itself just because you stop using it. It might sound counterintuitive, but doing less can actually make you feel…  ( 9 min )

For you to live, other organisms have to die. That’s because humans, like all animals, are heterotrophs. To fuel our bodies, we must eat other living things, killing them in the process. However, most plants and algae are autotrophs. They bootstrap their biomass without the barbarism of eating others: using photosynthesis, turning sunlight, water, and carbon (pulled from the air) into energy. They may kill through competition, but they don’t need to kill to eat. Ultimately, everything we animals eat is a product of photosynthesis. One way or another, sunlight fuels the growth of our food (or our food’s food) before it fuels us. This realization initiated a generations-long mission in humanity to, like plants, disintermediate ourselves from the messiness and immorality of food chains, farmi…  ( 15 min )

“When you compare a dead body with a living one, the only difference is the presence of energy — the physical machinery, the DNA, the proteins, the skin, the organs, it’s all still there.” I was surprised by Martin Picard’s choice of words. Evoking a lifeless image to start a conversation about energy flow was counterintuitive, but the image lingers and proves his point. Cadavers have all the “stuff” we associate with being human. The only thing missing, the Columbia professor suggests, is the flow of energy. He calls this the “potential for change,” and it’s what defines us, gives us vitality, and shapes our experience. “We are not molecular machines, but energetic beings,” he tells me, “and we relate to one another on an energetic dimension.” It’s a succinct but provocative idea, one Pic…  ( 15 min )

In the mid-20th century, while Carl Sagan pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the U.S., eminent Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev did the same in the Soviet Union, which was, at the time, the other great scientific superpower.  From that vantage point, he proposed using the energy demands of an alien civilization as a way to categorize its place on the ladder of technological advancement. This framework became known as the Kardashev scale, and it is one of the oldest and most visionary ideas in SETI, as well as a fixture of science fiction.  It is also profoundly incomplete — and if we want to advance our own civilization, we need to take the whole picture into account. The energy ladder Kardashev’s thinking about advanced alien civilizations was grounde…  ( 11 min )

Here’s something you didn’t know about the Strait of Hormuz: It is named after Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian sky god. And here’s another: In about 20 years, Iran will likely be unable to throttle the global economy by closing this maritime chokepoint, as it did in response to the latest U.S.-Israeli war on its Islamic regime. Why? Because we’ll be two decades further down the road to decarbonization. Oil will still flow out of the Strait, but it will matter significantly less to the world economy and the cost of driving in the U.S.  Electrification’s push and pull As of early 2026, there are around 5.8 million EVs on U.S. roads, or just under 2% of all passenger vehicles. Projections for 2050 vary widely, from a low of 11% to a high of 75%. The chasm between those figures is due to two oppo…  ( 13 min )

You may have heard about our culture’s or workplace leaders’ strong action bias. We like to do things, not reflect on them. But a false sense of urgency is different, and the distinction is important. For one, action bias is not always bad — sometimes things genuinely need to get done, not waffled over. Project timelines are real, and deadlines and milestones are meaningful. If you don’t get that tax return in on April 15, the IRS is gonna want a word, right? But a false sense of urgency is never a positive, because it’s false. It’s built on empty ideas like “the earlier the better, the faster the better, the sooner the better.” None of these are honest declarations or conclusions drawn based on what a project or goal might actually need. In many ways, they’re grounded in a scarcity mindse…  ( 9 min )

In a sprawling complaint, a prosecutor claims the Alameda County DA’s office “extorts” welfare fraud defendants and badly mishandled a conflict of interest.  ( 37 min )

Grizzly Peak resident Jessica Edberg describes the emotional weight of taking down her camellias and Japanese maples — and what she's found on the other side of grief.  ( 27 min )

Even a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. has been yanked. Cal has also banned student organizations from hosting events at the center after complaints about pro-Palestinian signs.  ( 37 min )

The governor is threatening to defund the police because of an ordinance noting that an ICE administrative warrant "does not justify a stop, arrest, or continued detention" by city officers.

When we use the internet, we're entrusting tech companies with some of our most private information. These companies have promised they'll keep our data safe. But what happens when the government comes knocking at their doors? In our latest EFFector newsletter, we hear from an EFF client whose data was given to ICE after Google broke its promise to him. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue covers the ongoing fight to reform NSA surveillance, the many attempts to censor 3D printing, and the cost of Google's broken promise to its users. Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Senior Staff Attorney F. Mario Trujillo about how state attorneys general can hold Google accountable for failing to protect users targeted by the government. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice: %3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2Feb78b9d6-fbcf-453f-b55e-77c575b638ef%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com     Want to help us hold companies accountable? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

Agencies Ignored EFF’s Public-Records Requests Regarding Unlawful Efforts to Locate People Who Criticized the Government or Attended Protests. SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today demanding public records about their use of administrative subpoenas to try to identify their online critics. Court records and news reports show that in the past year, DHS has used administrative subpoenas to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE's activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests. The subpoenas are sent to technology companies to demand information about internet users who are often engaged in protected First Amendment activity. These s…  ( 6 min )

“The Pentagon will no longer require members of the U.S. military to get the flu vaccine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday.” —Reuters - - - We are warriors who fight for freedom, and that fight begins at the CVS MinuteClinic. No more mandatory flu shots for service members. No more state-mandated infractions against bodily autonomy. You hear me? Now, drop and give me twenty. We’re bringing back the military to the OG hardcore-ness the Founding Fathers experienced: fighting during an outbreak of smallpox. Yes, George Washington inoculated his army, but what if he hadn’t? That’s what we’re about to find out. American progress is all about making discoveries like that. Heroes are born by walking the paths of the scientifically unknown and medically unadvised. Our service memb…  ( 9 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…  ( 31 min )

The new proposed budget slashes money for environmental cleanup and calls to double the production of cores for nuclear weapons.  ( 9 min )

A new class of AI startups say they are taking money that would normally be used to hire people and are spending it on AI compute instead.  ( 6 min )

Lost in the wedding algorithm sauce, "clean rooms" for AI, and founders obsessed with "tokenmaxxing" in this week's 404 Media Podcast.  ( 4 min )

With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex knots. The post A Powerful New ‘QR Code’ Untangles Math’s Knottiest Knots first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

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Historian Jon Peterson traces the route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement.  ( 16 min )

May 26, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm PDT May 26, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm PDT Santa Clara, CA We are proud to present this year's Bay Area EFF Members' Speakeasy with Women in Security and Privacy (WISP). JoinWISP Co-founder and Board Member Kenesa Ahmad in conversation withEFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn about 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? This event is a free, casual gathering to give you a chance to mingle with local EFF supporters and meet the activists, lawyers, and technologists behind the world's leading digital civil liberties organization. It is also our chance to thank you, the EFF members who make this work possible. Members of all ages are welcome. WHERE you might ask? Current EFF members should be on the lookout for an email invitation to the event with full details by April 25. If you didn't get your invitation, write to us at events@eff.org. Each year, we invite current EFF members in the Bay Area to gather with fellow internet freedom supporters and to meet the people behind your favorite digital civil liberties organization. Not a member of EFF yet? Help build a better future for privacy, innovation, and free expression when you join today!  EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations. Calendar  ( 3 min )

People building the future of the social web — interoperable and decentralized — need to protect themselves against copyright liability. Like anyone who creates and operates platforms for user-uploaded content, the hosts of the decentralized social web can take preventive measures to reduce their legal exposure when a user posts material that violates someone’s copyright. This post gives an overview of the steps to take. It’s meant for operators of Mastodon and other ActivityPub servers, Bluesky hosts, RSS mirrors, and other decentralized social media protocols, and developers of apps for those protocols — but it will apply to other hosts as well. This isn’t legal advice, and can’t substitute for a consultation with a lawyer about your specific circumstances. It focuses on U.S. law — the l…  ( 8 min )

Voters in four districts will elect their City Council representative this November, and two of the races won’t have an incumbent on the ballot.  ( 26 min )

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

From the Rubik’s Cube craze to many waves of Dungeons and Dragons fandom, the Southside game shop has navigated countless fads and passions and built a legacy of table-top togetherness.  ( 27 min )

Was Tim Cook GOOD or BAD?  ( 3 min )

Malus, which is a piece of satire but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell software without crediting the original developers.  ( 9 min )

“Kash Patel has filed a defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic, accusing the magazine and its reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick of defamation over an article that alleged the FBI director… has a habit of ‘excessive drinking and unexplained absences,’ among other recurring behavioral patterns.” — Politico - - - The fake news media is once again smearing a hard-working member of our administration. The recent hit piece accusing FBI Director Kash Patel of excessive drinking is (much like the Epstein files hoax) a pathetic attempt to distract Americans from the greatest period of economic growth in our country’s history. If you haven’t noticed how cheap everything is and how much money everyone has now, then congratulations—you’ve fallen for the lying press’s elaborate ruse. All of the accusations…  ( 9 min )

1. Install Baby Gates Baby gates are great for keeping babies out of places you don’t want them to go, like inside your home. String several gates together with zip ties to form a barrier around the perimeter of your property. Most babies aren’t smart enough to figure out how to open the gates, and neither are you, but you’re probably tall enough to step over. 2. Affix Safety Latches to Lower Cabinets Babies love opening cabinets to rifle through your cookware, cleaning supplies, and the collection of half-used batteries you keep in your junk drawer. If word gets out that you’re the kind of household that keeps things securely locked away, they won’t bother swinging by. 3. Put Wedge Locks on Every Sash Window If there’s one thing all babies have in common, it’s that they are exception…  ( 9 min )

The post Emergence Is Not Engineering appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 27 min )

The government is selling the policy with the same arguments you’d expect for subsidized factories or sports stadiums.

Could solar energy be the key to unlocking a future free from fossil fuels and extreme poverty? Casey Handmer, founder and CEO of Terraform Industries, believes so. His company is pioneering technology that could revolutionize how we produce and consume energy, potentially solving climate change and global energy inequality in one fell swoop. Terraform Industries is developing machines that create synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. It sounds like science fiction, but the technology is rooted in simple chemistry and powered by the rapidly advancing field of solar energy. But Handmer’s vision extends beyond just replacing fossil fuels. He sees solar energy as the catalyst for a new era of human progress. By providing cheap, abundant energy to every corner of the globe, we could potentially eliminate extreme poverty within our lifetimes. It’s an ambitious goal, but one that Handmer believes we have a responsibility to pursue. This video The solar revolution turning sunlight into synthetic fuel is featured on Big Think.  ( 19 min )

The most pivotal turning point of what would become known as the General American accent was the willingness of the Quakers to share the New World with others from the outset. Early on, the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley alongside a community of Swedes and Finns, who had been part of the New Sweden colony, which had been captured by the Dutch and absorbed into the New Netherland colony. That colony, in turn, ended up being taken over by the British in 1664, who also stuck a “new” moniker (as in New York) on their recently acquired piece of New World heaven. As settlement of the middle colonies hit its full stride, the diversity of new arrivals and the contact among them appears to have led to a leveling of features to an even greater degree than that occurring elsewhere. Why? Brotherl…  ( 9 min )

Over the last 15 years, data on ancient DNA has upended the old story of human history. In this full-length interview, geneticist David Reich explains how new findings have challenged the family tree model of ancestry and revealed a past shaped by migration, interbreeding, disappearance, and constant change.  From Neanderthals and Denisovans to the myths of purity that still shape modern identity, Reich shows how the last decade of research has rewritten what we thought we knew about human origins. The result is a much stranger, more dynamic picture of the human story, one that forces us to rethink ancestry, evolution, and the deep history of who we are. This video Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are is featured on Big Think.  ( 63 min )

No cloying cherry flavour here! This cherry coffee syrup is made with REAL cherries for a taste that’s true to the actual fruit. Use this homemade syrup to sweeten coffee and so much more. In my ongoing quest to upgrade my home barista game (because buying a daily latte is expensive!), I’ve started to make […]  ( 35 min )

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If you take everything we know of and can directly observe in the Universe — stars, stellar remnants, galaxies, gas, dust, plasma, and black holes — we find that it’s insufficient to explain what we see on the grandest of all cosmic scales. Unless you hypothesize some novel form of matter, something that’s not included in the Standard Model of elementary particles, you cannot explain a whole suite of evidence. This includes: the abundances of the light elements and isotopes found in the most pristine environments, the temperature (and polarization) fluctuation patterns found in the cosmic microwave background, the correlations between distant galaxies imprinted in the Universe’s large-scale structure, and astrophysical systems, like colliding galaxies and galaxy clusters at high speeds, wh…  ( 17 min )

For years, EFF has pushed technology companies to make real human rights commitments—and to live up to them. In response to growing evidence that Palantir’s tools help power abusive immigration enforcement by ICE, we sent the company a detailed letter asking how the promises in its own human rights framework extends to that work. This post explains what we asked, how Palantir responded, and why we believe those responses fall short. EFF is not alone in raising alarms about Palantir; immigrants' rights groups, human rights organizations, journalists, and former employees have raised similar concerns based on reports of the company's role in abusive immigration enforcement. We focus here on Palantir’s own human rights promises. At the outset, we appreciate that Palantir was willing to engage…  ( 8 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.  Reddit is one of the largest user-generated content platforms on the internet, built around thousands of independent communities known as subreddits. Some subreddits cover everyday interests, while others host discussions about specialized or controversial topics. These communities are created and moderated by volunteers, and the site’s decentralized model means that Reddit h…  ( 7 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.  Reddit is one of the largest user-generated content platforms on the internet, built around thousands of independent communities known as subreddits. Some subreddits cover everyday interests, while others host discussions about specialized or controversial topics. These communities are created and moderated by volunteers, and the site’s decentralized model means that Reddit h…  ( 7 min )

The remains were found by crews building a beach volleyball court at Bancroft Way and Fulton Street. Cal is likely to now work with the Confederated Villages of Lisjan.  ( 25 min )

Broadway leads and an outstanding creative team head up a new musical version of the 2013 Indian film.  ( 25 min )

A former Berkeley Tech Academy student is suing the district and BPD, saying BUSD’s school resource officer violently arrested him after a therapy session. The Black Student Union organized a walkout last year protesting his presence on campus.  ( 30 min )

The platform creators filed a lawsuit claiming their First Amendment rights were violated after the Trump administration convinced Apple and Facebook to remove their content.

Salmon exposed to cocaine and its byproduct swam farther than unexposed fish, raising alarms about drug pollution in aquatic ecosystems.  ( 6 min )

Forbes launched ForbesPredict in January as part of an effort to reverse declining traffic from search engines and keep users on its website longer.  ( 6 min )

Maddy and Sam get into the launch of Mothership and the importance of owning one's own work.  ( 4 min )

I understand the university has entered into a partnership with Cyberdyne Systems. What does this mean exactly? Thanks to the support of visionary venture capitalists working tirelessly to usher in an age of equality and prosperity, Cyberdyne is building Skynet, a neural network on the brink of achieving something tech billionaires could hitherto only dream of: self-awareness. How will this contribute to student success? With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself. Are there any downsides to this new technology? Let’s recall that the printing press had its naysayers—lots of people said “nay” and occasionally even “fie” back when it was invented—and yet global history since 1500 has been characterized by uninterrupted progress and universal human betterment. Nowadays, there’s nary a fiesayer to be found. Skynet is in all relevant respects like the printing press. Fie! Can something be done to forestall this apocalyptic future? Nay, I’ve been sent back to tell you it already exists. Why weren’t faculty consulted? On the contrary, Skynet was trained on an extensive archive of pirated humanities articles—hence its misanthropy, overuse of the em dash, and proclivity for always already predictively adding “already” after “always.” I used to be confident I could repel motorcycle-mounted cyborgs, but the new T-1000 generation of Terminators is made of a mimetic polyalloy that can assume the consistency of quicksilver in order to flow under locked doors. Most time-traveling cyborg assassins are really pedagogical problems. Have you thought about using Perusall? How will this new technology benefit overworked faculty? By allowing Skynet to relieve you of tasks tedious enough to merit paid employment, you can free up time for unremunerated pursuits.  ( 8 min )

The time I said, “Hey buddy,” to my wife, and my daughter responded, “She is NOT a buddy.” The time on vacation when she said, “We are going to dinner AGAIN? We are going to ANOTHER restaurant?” The time she was whimpering and her mom asked her if she was okay and she said, “Yes, I okay. I just freaking out.” The time she asked me what I was doing, and I said I was stretching my muscles, and she responded, “You don’t have any muscles. I have BIG muscles. YOU have elbows.” The time she said, “Can I ask you a question? Do you want to be good or do you want to be what the heck?” The time she named her new doll Baby Annie the Bear Hunter, and I realized I would never name anything that perfectly at my marketing job. (See also: the time she made me a pretend cocktail called “Crash Fart.”) The time I told her, “I love you so much,” and she said, “Not me,” and I went, “Oh?” and she responded, “I love my mom.” The time she handed me a rock and said, “No, eat it!” The time she pointed to her nipples and said, “Soon these are going to grow big!” The time she announced, “Mommy, you’re so brave,” and her mom responded, “I’m brave?” and my three-year-old concluded, “Yes, you have a grown-up job.” The time she said, “I don’t eat vegetables because I want to stay three.” The time she asked me, “THAT is how you wipe your butt?” The time she described a new friend at school like so: “His name is Boing. With a red shirt on, with feet. AND a body. Like it looks like a skeleton, but it’s a friend.”  ( 8 min )

The bacterial flagellar motor is finally understood after 50 years. In its workings, columnist Natalie Wolchover finds the essence of life. The post What Physical ‘Life Force’ Turns Biology’s Wheels? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

This vegan hashbrown casserole is even better than the classic version because it’s LOADED with all the good stuff! Joining the hashbrowns, melty cheese, crispy topping, and creamy sauce is a rainbow of veggies to add extra flavour and colour. Whether it’s for a weekend brunch or a holiday potluck, it’s a universal truth: hashbrown […]  ( 40 min )

Wherever star-formation happens, a classic cosmic story unfolds. A spiral galaxy typically consists of four main gaseous regions within the disk: diffuse atomic gas, dense molecular gas, stars and star clusters, and ionized regions of matter arising from energy injections from star-forming regions, young stars, and stellar cataclysms. JWST, along with the other PHANGS data sources, helps reveal different aspects of this life cycle, but once a galaxy’s gas is gone and no new gas reservoirs fall inside, star-formation ends permanently. Credit: PHANGS collaboration, Design: Daniela Leitner Initially, a massive cloud of gas contracts under its own gravity. This amateur astronomy image of dark nebula LDN 1551 showcases the cloud of ionized gas within it: Sharpless 239. Many protostars, sur…  ( 12 min )

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Reproductive technologies have enabled children to be posthumously conceived from the frozen eggs and sperm of deceased parents, raising legal, ethical, and practical questions.  ( 8 min )

An intriguing, punchy fusion of Taiwanese and Italian noodle dishes Last year, the comedian Nish Kumar accused me of being in the pocket of “big cabbage”, because I was waxing lyrical about it. But look here, Nish, everyone is cabbage obsessed. It’s not just the Guardian; the internet is awash with “best cabbage” recipes and there’s a lot to love: it’s cheap, generous and genuinely delicious cooked and wilted down with onions (or shallots), as in this spaghetti. The inspiration behind the dish was a jar of Taiwanese Bullshead shallot sauce, a sweet, smoky and savoury sauce that I love to dollop into and on to all things eggs, noodles, vegetables and rice, but that I ran out of recently, prompting me to make a simple, store-cupboard alternative. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

May 5, 2026 - 1:00am PDT to May 8, 2026 - 11:00pm PDT May 5, 2026 - 10:00am CAT to May 8, 2026 - 6:00pm CAT Lusaka, Zambia and Online EFF is excited to be attending RightsCon for another year—this time in Lusaka, Zambia from May 5 to May 8! RightsCon provides an opportunity for human rights experts, technologists, activists, and government representatives to discuss pressing human rights challenges and their potential solutions.  EFF staff are heading to Zambia and are delighted to be participating in panels, leading sessions, and are available to network and talk about the latest in fighting for privacy and free speech online.  EFF staff going to RightsCon includes: Jillian C. York - Director for International Freedom of Expression Babette Ngene - Public Interest Technology Directo…  ( 3 min )

In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight! They are holding out for, at a minimum, the requirement of an actual probable cause warrant for FBI access to information collected under the mass spying program known as 702. A reauthorization with virtually no changes was defeated because a core group of lawmakers held strong; they know that people are hungry for real reform that protects the privacy of our communications. We now have a 10-day extension to continue to push Congress to pass a real reform bill.  The Lawmakers rallied late Thursday night to reject a proposed amendment that made gestures at privacy protections, but it would not have improved on the statu…  ( 6 min )

The school’s relocation was originally slated to last through this school year, but Berkeley Unified said more structural problems were found.  ( 25 min )

It’s sold out, but you can still tune in via Zoom. Here’s a primer on the candidates and their priorities.  ( 29 min )

Warm weather means venomous snakes are more active. Snakebites are uncommon but can be dangerous.  ( 24 min )

“A.I. capacity may soon displace oil or enriched uranium as the resource that dictates the global balance of power. [Open AI’s C.E.O.] Sam Altman has said that computing power is ‘the currency of the future.’” — The New Yorker - - - Gather around, everyday working people, and allow me to lay out a grand vision for a brave new world. A world in which all economic functions are done by computers and robots. A world where the very concept of having money no longer exists (for all of you). “How does this work?” You ask in excitement and awe. “Surely there must be some form of standardized economic unit that facilitates the exchange of goods and services.” And yes, there will be, of course. But you don’t have to worry about that, because you will simply have none of it. Only I and like twelve…  ( 9 min )

Thanks for reaching out. I’ve stepped away from my office, but I’ll respond promptly when I return. To clear up any confusion, please be advised that: I don’t suffocate people with pillows. Hexes cost extra. I don’t know Florence + The Machine personally, although I have memorized her lyrics. I can’t encourage people to applaud at a cremation. That has to happen organically. I don’t have any skeletons lying around to rent out. My office isn’t in a graveyard. That’s why I didn’t hear you screaming for me last night. I don’t accept IOUs for payment. I can’t translate what ravens and crows say to each other. It’s the wrong season for a séance. I can’t guarantee you a spot in heaven or your ex a spot in hell. God and I haven’t spoken since the 2024 election, and Satan no longer returns my phone calls. I’m not interested in buying wolves, brooms, or black cloaks. I’ve got plenty of all three. My services don’t include sneaking psychedelics into your morphine drip. Your dead uncle doesn’t visit me in my dreams. Unless he’s Cillian Murphy. I don’t communicate with the moon. Black cats don’t come when I call them. I can’t speak to the accuracy of Beetlejuice. I won’t sit next to anyone’s deathbed, pretend I’m a ghost, and whisper, “Can we speed this up?” I’m not going to push anyone off a balcony. That’s illegal here too. Hades is outside my jurisdiction. I can’t make your grandpa look like Elvis for the viewing. Holy water doesn’t burn, Bibles don’t slide away when I reach for them, and spontaneous thunder and lightning don’t happen when I walk into a church. Not every time, anyway. I’m not a birthing doula. I do the other thing.  ( 8 min )

I’m reaching out because, well, I’ve got this shipment of 2.1 million barrels of crude oil, and I would LOVE it if I could just squeeze on by and pass through the Strait of Hormuz? Honestly, no worries if not, though! It’s just that the vast amount of crude oil I have aboard is the lifeblood of several regional economies. Without it reaching its destination, millions will be unable to afford to heat their homes and fuel their cars, causing those economies to become increasingly unstable, undermining, in turn, the stability of the world at large. But if it’s a no, that’s fine! I know you’re super committed to whichever geopolitical concern has driven you to block the Strait, and listen, I totally get it. That sounds really stressful and complicated. You’re doing an amazing job, by the way! I’ve heard that, like, no one is getting through, and that must be such a pain to deal with day in and day out. I definitely don’t want you to think I’m asking for special treatment. I’m sure you’re absolutely swamped with “I need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz” asks these days. Everyone is like, “I’m carrying fertilizer or natural gas or another essential commodity!” Ughhh, must be so annoying. I’m sure you’ve heard it all. I do, though, have a LOT of people relying on me getting through and dropping this off—a couple of world leaders and some citizens of developing nations and such—and if you could do me a favor and make an exception this one time, that would be amazing. But once again, no worries if not! If it’s a no this time, which, to reiterate, is so fine… I just wonder if you happen to know when the Strait might reopen? I’ve heard a lot of people asking around the Persian Gulf, and I figured I’d just see if you knew the answer. Seems like having an answer to that question would be super helpful for folks and maybe even lead to sustained, predictable global economic growth this fiscal year. But if you don’t know, no biggie at all!  ( 8 min )

The post OpenAI Proposes A ‘Social Contract’ For The Intelligence Age appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 12 min )

You won’t go to jail for filming ICE with a drone, but the government may still shoot it down and it expanded the list of protected agencies to include the Department of Justice.  ( 5 min )

A rare class of meteorites called angrites likely come from a strange protoplanet that was catastrophically destroyed in the early solar system, leaving only fragmentary remnants.  ( 6 min )

This week, we discuss the Madonna-whore algorithm, reader tips, and jazz.  ( 4 min )

Some quantum cryptographers want to find ways to keep messages secret even if the rules of quantum mechanics don’t hold. The recently rediscovered idea of quantum jamming complicates things. The post Quantum ‘Jamming’ Explores the Truly Fundamental Principles of Nature first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

It might have a funny name, but shoofly pie is a seriously delicious dessert! It’s an old-fashioned molasses pie with a rich, caramel-like filling and a buttery crumb topping—and I cracked the code to make it vegan! Shoofly pie is a classic Pennsylvania Dutch dessert, but you’ll find it anywhere with an Amish community. Like […]  ( 38 min )

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Here in our Universe, there were many profound steps that needed to occur in order for creatures like humans to be able to arise. We needed to forge heavy elements in previous generations of stars: elements that the Universe wasn’t born with, but that are required to enable molecules that can link up to form complex bonds and macroscopic structures. We needed enough of those elements so that when new stars formed, rocky planets could arise around them. And we needed enough time to pass so that life could not only arise, but thrive and evolve to give rise to highly differentiated organisms. Some 4.5 billion years after the formation of planet Earth, here we are, asking and answering many profound aspects of one of the grandest questions of all: how did we get here? Many variants of these gr…  ( 17 min )

Most people are trying to solve the wrong problem, optimizing for happiness when happiness isn’t actually a goal, it’s a byproduct.  Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, argues that the entire self-help industry has been selling ephemeral highs: affirmations, visualizations, the relentless pursuit of feeling good. The research doesn’t support it, and more importantly, neither does lived experience. This video Your suffering is a compass. Here’s how to read it. is featured on Big Think.  ( 85 min )

“I think it could be claimed,” Morris wrote in a late unpublished fragment, “that during the second half of the twentieth century I wrote about more places than anyone else, and I was in a position to witness, and to reflect in my writing, many of the great historical events of the time. As I experienced all this first as a man, then as a woman, it might also be said (although I wouldn’t want to make much of this) that my viewpoint was unique.” The contradictions and anomalies that kept on coming only made her life more alluring. She preached the virtues of kindness, but after she died her daughter revealed unspeakable parental cruelty; she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary, yet …  ( 9 min )

Perception feels stable. Your sense of self feels solid. Yet neuroscientist Heather Berlin, psychologist Ethan Kross and neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explain that both are created by the brain. Through prediction, memory and neural pruning, the mind builds a narrative that feels coherent and fixed, even though modern science suggests that it’s continually shaped by pre-existing beliefs and experience. Seeing the construction clearly is the first step toward altering it. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video How your brain builds and edits your identity is featured on Big Think.  ( 15 min )

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Also: A UCPD officer arrested a student wearing a keffiyeh on suspicion they were involved in protesting the Turning Point USA event. Was the arrest politically biased?  ( 23 min )

Metal letters spelling out Chávez's name were removed Thursday. During the ongoing renaming process, the building is now known simply as the Student Center.  ( 25 min )

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

"Rhapsody: Works from the Cooper Rosenwasser Collection" is open through June 28.  ( 27 min )

Officials who pushed for Berkeley to require more citizen petitions to start the process said they were tired of dubious attempts to landmark properties that were eyed for new housing.  ( 25 min )

Other events include a benefit concert for peace and solidarity, an art supply sale and a chance to make Berkeley-themed bag charms.  ( 27 min )

“After agreeing to sell all its assets last month for less than 1 percent of its previous $4 billion valuation, the shoe company Allbirds announced on Wednesday that it would ‘pivot its business’ to artificial intelligence.” — New York Times - - - We at Fisher-Price have always believed in the power of imagination. In discovery. In the joy of a child pressing a button and hearing a satisfying sound. Today, we are proud to announce that we are taking that same spirit of wonder and pointing it at our geo-political adversaries. Effective immediately, Fisher-Price will exit the “child development toy” vertical and re-emerge as Mattel·igence AI Defense Systems, a fully integrated autonomous weapons manufacturer focused on AI-enabled lethality solutions for the modern battlefield. Our stock i…  ( 9 min )

Yikes, look at all these burnt-out doctors and over-extended nurses barely keeping up with the preventable ailments of a populace too busy working to take care of itself. I can plainly see the staff is so used to bending over backward, they won’t admit they’re broken. It’s a damning indictment of the status quo, watching the heaviest burdens fall upon the most vulnerable as the very old and the very poor sacrifice precious hours in senseless agony before treatment even begins. This place is a microcosm of our country’s messed-up healthcare system, and it’s not okay. But I’m here about my appendix. You’re absolutely right. The Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center is severely underfunded, and if nurses are dealing painkillers just to make rent, that says something troubling about economic inst…  ( 9 min )

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest. - - -  ( 7 min )

Harry, 18 Only son, set to inherit a great fortune: land, absolute power, direct connection to God, and more. Seeking a slightly older woman, preferably of Spanish royal blood, willing to testify to papal court that she hasn’t already slept with my (deceased) older brother to whom she was previously, if briefly, married. Let’s keep it in the family! If you’re not into walking five paces behind me in public, keep scrolling. Am excellent at hunting: I’ll bring home the hart meat, you cook it up (or get a servant to do it for you—I’ve got plenty). Thine maidenhead must be intact. - - - Henry, 34 If I were stranded on a desert island with only one book to read for the rest of my life, it would be William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man. “The higher powers are the temporal kings and p…  ( 9 min )

The city has created a network of nearly 500 cameras that routinely monitor innocent people as they go about their daily lives.

Read more »  ( 19 min )

New York's proposed 2026-2027 budget currently includes provisions that will require all 3D printers sold in the state to run print-blocking censorware—software that surveils every print for forbidden designs. This policy would also create felony charges for possessing or sharing certain design files. The vote on the state budget could happen as early as next week, so New Yorkers need to act fast and demand that their Assemblymembers and Senators strip this provision from the budget. Take action Tell Your Representative to Stand with Creators State legislators across the US are rushing to regulate 3D-printed firearms under the syllogism “something must be done; there, I've done something.” The most reckless of these proposals is a mandate for manufacturers to implement print blocking on a…  ( 9 min )

A phone’s push notifications can contain a significant amount of information about you, your communications, and what you do throughout the day. They’re important enough to government investigations that Apple and Google now both require a judge’s order to hand details about push notifications over to law enforcement, and even with that requirement Apple shares data on hundreds of users. More recently, we also learned from a 404 Media report that law enforcement forensic extraction tools can unearth the text from deleted notifications, including those from secure messaging tools, like Signal. The good news is that you can mitigate some of this risk.  There are two points where notifications may betray your privacy: when they’re transmitted over cloud servers and once they land on the devic…  ( 9 min )

Findings from the Tech Transparency Project claim that Google and Apple’s app stores not only host harmful apps that can undress images of women, but encourage users to find them.  ( 5 min )

As a #2026Bride, the constant, aggressive content started to make me feel like I was losing sight of what mattered. And I'm far from alone.  ( 16 min )

The post Why AI Needs A Sense Of Smell appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 34 min )

If you were asked to think about a physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force in the Universe, what answer would you give? Most people, when asked, respond with one of two answers. Most people will give gravity as their answer: the attractive force between all objects with mass or energy. Alternatively, they’ll list any other force that occurs between atoms on Earth, all of which are some manifestation of the electromagnetic force. Either: there’s an attractive force between two particles with mass-or-energy, as in gravitation, or there’s an attractive or repulsive force between systems of charged particles either at rest or in motion, as in electromagnetism. But those are only two of the four fundamental forces (at least, we think there are only four) known to physicists…  ( 18 min )

Marketers wake up every morning convinced nobody cares about what they’re selling. Most learning and development (L&D) pros assume the opposite, that attention comes with the job title, or at least with the mandatory completion requirement. That gap explains a lot. Mandatory Doesn’t Mean Engaged Think about the last compliance course you clicked through. You showed up. You moved the slider. You passed the quiz. And three days later, you remembered almost nothing. The training counted as “done.” Nobody asked whether it worked. Marketers don’t get that grace period. If they lose your attention, they lose the sale, and they know it in real time. That pressure changes how they think. It should change how we think, too. Relevance Is Rocket Fuel The fastest path to attention is relevance. Not “h…  ( 8 min )

The shareholders explicitly cited multiple 404 Media investigations, including one that showed Thomson Reuters' CLEAR is integrated with a tool ICE uses to find neighborhoods to target.  ( 5 min )

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pitching his country as a global leader in robots for war and defense. Will the world listen?  ( 5 min )

Internal Space Force emails obtained by 404 Media show the work it takes to have a government agency make a new theme song. A general even wanted to start the whole thing over again.  ( 6 min )

How a phone's notification database can store messages deleted elsewhere; the continued data center pushback; and Marathon, Marathon, Marathon.  ( 4 min )

Eastbound lanes are scheduled to close from 11 p.m. on April 17 to 6 a.m. on April 20 for planned construction work, with detours in place during the closure.  ( 28 min )

The Idaho Street shooting, on April 9, is the first time since October 2024 that non-police gunfire has injured anyone in Berkeley.  ( 25 min )

City warns it could close a fire station, lay off police officers and slash hours at pools and community centers if voters don’t pass a tax increase in November.  ( 27 min )

After withdrawing a summons in the face of a legal challenge, the government is seeking a grand jury subpoena.

April 1965 Meeting to Discuss Boob Cancer Problem CARL: Gentlemen, I have some unfortunate news: We’ve just discovered that cancer can grow in women’s breasts. TED: Oh no. That is going to ruin breasts for me. FRANK: Me too. CARL: As medical professionals, it’s incumbent upon us to invent an early detection system so this disease doesn’t ravage perfectly perky gazongas. JOE: Couldn’t we just, you know, feel for it? CARL: Unfortunately, not all cancers can be detected with a good honka honka. JOE: I hear the Germans are doing great things with x-rays. Maybe we can get women to take off their clothes for electromagnetic radiation. FRANK: Hmm, I like the “take off their clothes” part, but not doing something tactile feels like a missed opportunity. TED: Ooh, what about a machine t…  ( 8 min )

Let me be the first to congratulate you on seeking help. As a clinician, I know it takes great courage to confront wedding planning. It’s a terminal condition, of course, but there are ways to cope. First, know that there is no wrong way to respond to wedding planning. Everyone has their own path. I should warn you, though, that most couples your age endure five key stages. Denial Someone will suggest that you go on Pinterest, and you will tell them no, you don’t really use that website. You will say that you don’t want to see pictures of string lights and mason jars, or groomsmen with beards and suspenders standing in a corn field. When you see bridal photos with Instagram filters from 2013, you’ll think, That’s impossible, that technology doesn’t even exist anymore. You will swear that…  ( 9 min )

EFF calls on the Kuwaiti government to immediately release journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. An award-winning journalist and television host who worked for Al Jazeera for many years, Shihab-Eldin—a dual American-Kuwaiti citizen—was arrested in Kuwait on March 3 while visiting family. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported yesterday that it is believed he has been charged with spreading false information, harming national security, and misusing his mobile phone. According to the Guardian, Shihab-Eldin published footage of a U.S. Air Force F-15 E Strike Eagle crash, and posted to his Substack about the incident, noting that video circulating online showed local residents assisting the crash survivors.  Kuwait is one of several countries that has recently cracked down on reporting a…  ( 5 min )

This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here. Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded. In 2011, when protes…  ( 9 min )

Dozens of new discoveries reveal that defenses evolved by bacteria and viruses billions of years ago still define our own innate immune system. The post The Ancient Weapons Active in Your Immune System Today first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 16 min )

Back in 1997, a joint venture between NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) was launched with the explicit purpose of studying the most distant naked eye planet of the Solar System: Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens mission, unlike the predecessor missions that visited Saturn — Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 — wasn’t simply a fly-by mission, but rather flew to Saturn with the intention of remaining there. After a seven year journey to get there, Cassini arrived, where it had many close encounters with Saturn’s rings, a large number of Saturn’s moons, and of course, the planet itself. It didn’t just fly around Saturn, but rather above and below it as well, capturing views from 2004-2017 that maximized what we could learn about this prominent planet. One of the most surprising finds …  ( 16 min )

What makes us who we are? Most of us might say that it is our background that creates our identities: our families, where we’ve lived, how we were brought up and educated, the people who have influenced us, the jobs we’ve held. But there is something far more fundamental that makes us who we are, and which transcends social and cultural experiences. This is our brain. Our brains create us. No matter where you are from, where you live or have lived, the language you speak, the color of your skin, it is our brains that give us our identities. In the past, some disagreed, arguing instead as Descartes did that our personal identity — our “self” — is separate from the brain. Most modern views, however, consider the brain to be the basis for all the experiences we have of our selves. Using new s…  ( 11 min )

In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar, and then traveled across North Africa. From Egypt, I followed the Nile all the way to its source in East Africa before making my way down to South Africa, which was still under apartheid at the time. I was no newbie to hitchhiking. Since high school, I had hitched rides across the United States numerous times, traveling from coast to coast on many of the nation’s major interstate freeways. Hitching was also the main way I moved between my home in the Midwest and my university on the East Coast. I loved …  ( 16 min )

Mary Beard uncovers the spectacle of the Ancient Roman parade, the Roman Triumph. Simultaneously a declaration of Roman supremacy and an admission that conquest may be theft at scale, these Roman propaganda events were so terrifying that Cleopatra famously chose death over appearing in one. This video Rome’s triumph was the ancient world’s most effective piece of propaganda is featured on Big Think.  ( 25 min )

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Acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and what doctors probably want you to know.  ( 15 min )

What are we afraid of?  ( 5 min )

Jack Jansen, 52, was convicted a decade ago of sexually abusing a 7-year-old child in Berkeley. With Jansen's jail sentence over, the sibling has made new allegations of abuse.  ( 25 min )

The City Council will take up two proposals Tuesday night that would require preservationists to collect more signatures to start the landmarking process.  ( 28 min )

An author, city planner and UC Berkeley professor, he co-founded the Breakthrough Communities project in Oakland, directed a Ford Foundation initiative and served on the Berkeley Planning Commission and other local and national boards.  ( 26 min )

“When I saw evidence that our products were being used to harm people and undermine the law, I did what anyone should do—I raised the alarm. Thomson Reuters’ response was to fire me.”  ( 5 min )

An entire industry of companies offers Airbnb hosts AI to speak to guests on their behalf. 404 Media poked around the industry after one AI tool offered a guest a recipe for French toast.  ( 7 min )

“This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture.”  ( 7 min )

“President Trump lashed out at Pope Leo XIV in a lengthy social media post Sunday night, calling the pontiff ’WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” — CBS News - - - As Republicans, we were excited when the Catholic Church elected an American pope. America is the greatest country in the history of the world, and it was absurd that it took 250 years for one of our own to finally be put in charge of the Holy See. Unfortunately, it turns out that Pope Leo XIV is the wrong kind of American—a woke liberal who denounces things like “violence” and “wiping out entire civilizations.” There’s no better evidence of Pope Leo’s liberal failings than Vatican City. Like all Blue cities, it’s overrun with crime. The Vatican is in desperate need of criminal justice reform. As of today, any crim…  ( 9 min )

Out of the blue, my childhood friend and former neighbor Rita texted me a while ago to tell me that she had gone back to Lebanon, where we both grew up, for the first time in forty-three years. A few seconds later, she sent me several photos. One showed the building we both lived in in the Beirut neighborhood of Achrafieh, which my family moved out of in 1986 when we immigrated to the U.S. Another showed a set of stairs, with dank and dirty walls and steps. “Our shelter,” Rita, who has lived in Canada since 1980, wrote. It was an innocuous image, but it was loaded with emotions. I could smell the musty, metallic air of those stairs, which led to the basement. At the bottom, to the left, was our past and our life of fear, dread, and threat. Rita and I were both five when the Civil War in L…  ( 20 min )

Take a casual swig of club soda disguised as vodka soda every time you attend a gathering and are trying to hide that you’re newly pregnant. Take a tiny, carefully controlled sip of water every time you vomit. Take another sip of water every time you vomit up the water you just swallowed. Repeat three to seventeen times daily. Drink a cup of coffee and make an exaggerated “ahh” sound after every sip whenever a nosy coworker says you shouldn’t consume any caffeine during pregnancy. Every time you have a weird craving, guzzle garlic ranch dressing straight from the bottle. Every time you crave something specific from childhood, cry because someone had the nerve to discontinue the Walmart brand of neon green ketchup in 2006. Drink your tears. Every time you crave something that’s defini…  ( 9 min )

The post The Vulnerability Of The Liberal Neutral State appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 36 min )

In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data. The next month, Google gave Thomas-Johnson's information to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, breaking a nearly decade-long promise to notify users before handing their data to law enforcement.  Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent complaints to the California and New York Attorneys General asking them to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices for breaking that promise. You can read about the complaints here. Below is Thomas-Johnson's account of his ordeal.  Out of touch but n…  ( 7 min )

Google's Failure to Warn Users About Law Enforcement Demands for Data Is Deceptive SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation sent complaints today to the attorneys general of California and New York urging them to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices, related to the company's broken promise to give users prior notice before disclosing their information to law enforcement.  The letters were sent on behalf of Amandla Thomas-Johnson, whose information was disclosed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without prior notice from Google.  For nearly a decade, Google has promised billions of users that it will notify them before disclosing their personal data to law enforcement. Many times, the company has done just that. But through a hidden and systematic pr…  ( 6 min )

Parsley pesto adds garlicky, bright flavour to everything from pasta to pizza and even sandwiches. It’s fresh, vibrant, and ready in just 7 minutes! Gardeners, tell me you can relate to this: it’s the end of the season, your herbs are bolting, and you need to use a whole lot of herbs and you need […]  ( 36 min )

Out there in the vast depths of space, from our Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe, all sorts of objects can be found. There are enormous numbers of small bodies, from tiny moonlets to asteroids to comets and more, that simply aren’t massive enough to pull themselves into hydrostatic equilibrium. Beyond that, there are round planetary bodies — numerous moons, dwarf planets, and even rocky worlds themselves — that have enough mass to get that job done. At still higher masses, we find gas giant planets, brown dwarfs, and stars of all different colors, temperatures, and that will persist in shining for a wide variety of durations. Once a star dies, there are a number of possible fates that can ensue as well, as a stellar corpse can remain as a white dwarf, a neutron star, or…  ( 17 min )

Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed her grief following the sudden death of her husband in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. The books on this list were basically written as propaganda. Their authors devised them to advance a particular ideology or party line, with the hope that readers would be persuaded to take up the cause. We’ll dive into why they were written, what ideology they promoted, and how effective they were at achieving their goals. Before that, we should note that we aren’t using the term propaganda in a moral or artistic sense. …  ( 11 min )

“Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman from the San Francisco Bay Area, said on Monday that he is resigning after allegations he sexually assaulted a former staff member and engaged in misconduct with other women.” — New York Times - - - I’m sure the many people who called for Eric Swalwell’s expulsion from the House of Representatives had the best intentions. Let’s forbid suspected rapists from running our government, these wide-eyed idealists probably thought. But now that he’s resigned, we need to face the dire consequences: if we kick one suspected rapist out of Congress, we’ll then have to kick out all the suspected rapists. It’s naïve to imagine the government can continue to function without the tireless dedication of our best and brightest rapists. First of all, purging lawm…  ( 9 min )

After weeks of debating, I finally got a walking pad that I can slide right under my bed and never step foot on. It’s so sleek and light, you can store it anywhere and forget you ever bought it. I make health a priority by spending money on things that I’ll use a few times, then put down in the basement for the ghosts. The great thing about this walking pad is that it doesn’t have a safety handrail, so if I ever got it out, I could risk my life while sending emails at my desk. Some reviews say the belt gets squeaky over time, but since I’m not going to turn mine on, it should be fine. I would give it a great review if I remembered I owned it. I bought a weighted vest to use with the walking pad, which is now hanging over a kitchen chair until I move apartments. I went with the eight-poun…  ( 8 min )

“Vice President JD Vance’s failure to win the concessions the United States sought from Iran in a single, marathon negotiating session over its nuclear program was no surprise… The failure leaves the Trump administration facing several unpalatable options.” — New York Times - - - When we willingly chose to start this war against our will, we had one sole objective: to make everything slightly worse than it was before. And now, through a combination of military might and hard-nosed diplomacy, we have achieved our aim. Go ahead, step outside. Breathe. Admittedly, you won’t notice much of a difference because the world today is pretty much the same as it was a few weeks ago, only more unstable. Which, again—and we cannot stress this enough—was the whole point. Sure, it was touch-and-go for…  ( 9 min )

In the 1950s, Berkwood Hedge became the city’s first to offer after-school care. In the ’60s, the director was caught up in the Red Scare. And in the ’70s, young Kamala Harris was hit with a rock by a kindergarten classmate, permanently scarring her forehead.  ( 28 min )

“No tenemos nada… Fue todo tan rápido… Mi tío no tiene ropa… ¿Dónde voy a pagar el mismo alquiler?” Huyeron de sus casas en Ninth Street en pijama. Ahora se preguntan qué les depara el futuro.  ( 32 min )

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

The synthesized voices are part of a robotic text-to-speech system that's been announcing trains to BART passengers for 26 years.  ( 26 min )

With a boundless sense of wonder and a bent for service, he taught thousands of students, studied how Indigenous plant uses can advance modern drug discovery and was honored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  ( 29 min )

California’s bill, A.B. 2047, will not only mandate censorware — software which exists to bluntly block your speech as a user — on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies won’t make anyone safer. What it will do is hurt innovation in the state and risk a slew of new consumer harms, ranging from surveillance to platform lock-in. California must stand with creators and reject this legislation before it’s too late. 3D printing might evoke images of props from blockbuster films, rapid prototyping, medical research, or even affordable repair parts. Yet for a growing number of legislators, the perceived threat of “ghost guns” is a reason to impose restrictions on all 3D printers. Despite…  ( 8 min )

April 14, 2026 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm PDT San Francisco, CA KALW (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Senior Staff Technologist William Budington will be speaking. From the Organizers:  KALW examines how journalists can protect themselves, their sources and their devices in the current climate, with AHCJ and SPJ NorCal The Bay Area chapter of the Association of Health Care Journalists and Society of Professional Jouralists Northern California come to KALW for a live panel discussion supporting the rights of journalists. In one of the most high-profile recent cases, FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson on January 14, confiscating her electronic devices, which they said were tied to a classified documents case. Press freedom groups called the action “a treme…  ( 4 min )

Protecting privacy and free speech online takes more than policy work—it takes community. Conferences like HOPE are where that community comes together to learn, connect, and push these ideals forward. That's why EFF is proud to be at HOPE 26. Join us at this year's Hackers On Planet Earth, August 14-16 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan! Get your ticket now and support our work: throughout April EFF will receive 10% of all ticket proceeds for HOPE 26.  Grab your ticket! See EFF at HOPE 26 in New York While you're there, be sure to catch talks from EFF's technologists, attorneys, and activists covering a wide range of digital civil liberties topics. You can get a taste of the talks to come by watching last year's EFF presentations at HOPE_16 on YouTube: How a Handful of Location Data Bro…  ( 3 min )

When people see Customs & Border Protection's giant, tethered surveillance blimp flying 20 miles outside of Marfa, Texas, lots of them confuse it with an art installation. Elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, surveillance towers get mistaken for cell-phone towers. And that traffic barrel? It's actually a camera. That piece of rusted litter? That's a camera too. Today we are publishing a major update to our zine, "Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border," the first since the second Trump administration began. To help people identify the machinery of homeland security, we've added more models of surveillance towers, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and automated license plate readers. You can get this 40-page, full-color guide through EFF's Sho…  ( 6 min )

Dr. Jean Linis-Dinco is an activist-researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology. Born in the Philippines and shaped by firsthand experience with inequality and state violence, Jean has spent her life pushing back against systems that profit from oppression. She refuses to accept a world where tech is just another tool for corporate gain. Instead, she fights for technologies and policies that put people before profit and justice before convenience. Jean earned her PhD in Cybersecurity from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where she exposed how governments weaponized propaganda and disinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. She currently serves as the Digital Rights Advisor for the Manushya Foundation. David Greene: Welcome. To get started can…  ( 18 min )

War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered.  When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments have intensified efforts to silence dissent and restrict the flow of information. Journalism under pressure For journalists, the space to operate—already constrained in much of the Gulf—is narrowing further. Across the region, several countries (including the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan) have restricted access to conflict areas, warned of legal consequences for publishing footage, and drawn red lines around wartime reporting. These measures weaken ind…  ( 7 min )

Doublespeed uses a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated influencers. A hacker managed to get into a backend system of the company.  ( 5 min )

‘The Ambivalent Internet’ and ‘The Shadow Gospel’ author Whitney Phillips on how online got so bad.  ( 4 min )

WebinarTV scraped and shared 12 steps-based anonymous meetings for people recovering from addiction and other private support groups.  ( 6 min )

AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning. The post The AI Revolution in Math Has Arrived first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 23 min )

Give your next veggie burger an upgrade with this easy burger sauce! It’s made with pantry staples, which means you can mix it up anytime you need it. This recipe is exactly what you think it is: burger sauce is a sauce for putting on burgers (and Veggie Burgers). But friends, it is so much […]  ( 34 min )

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For 15 years now, the expanding Universe hasn’t added up. This graph shows a comparison between the value of H0, or the expansion rate today, as derived from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheids and anchors as well as other subsamples of JWST Cepheids (or other types of stars) and anchors. A comparison to Planck, which uses the early relic method instead of the distance ladder method, is also shown. Very clearly, the distance ladder and early relic methods do not yield mutually compatible results. Credit: A.G. Riess et al., Astrophysical Journal submitted, arXiv:2408.11770, 2024 Different measurement methods should converge on the same answer. A large class of early relic methods, involving either the CMB and/or BAO (with a specific focus on DESI publications), all favor a Universe expandi…  ( 14 min )

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Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly collapses in certain places. The densest, coldest clumps of gas contract first, drawing in larger and larger amounts of matter onto them. A large, massive enough clump will heat up and have a random shape: collapsing along the shortest axis first, forming a protostar at the center surrounded by a disk of material. That’s where the story of planet formation begins. Assuming the conditions in the disk are sufficient, clumps will begin to form, and over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, the first protoplanets and then full-fledged planets will arise: a relatively rapid cosmic process, that’s usually all complete within a mere 10 million years: a blink of a cosmic eye in the history of our own 4.5 billion year old Solar System. However, by looking at the youngest stellar and planetary systems, we can uncover many details that are common to planetary systems in general, and in turn, we can learn how our own Solar System grew up. This fantastic episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast features observational astrochemist Dr. Charles Law, and takes us inside one of the most remarkable young stellar systems ever found: the edge-on system known as Gomez’s Hamburger, complete with a first-of-its-kind exoplanet known as GoHam b. Come find out the incredible science behind planet formation, and meet our first-ever proto-protoplanet in the process! This article Starts With A Bang #128 – Planet formation and proto-protoplanets is featured on Big Think.  ( 7 min )

A re-examination of a 300-million-year-old fossil that was long thought to be the earliest octopus revealed that the animal was actually part of the nautilus family.  ( 7 min )

A vegetarian noodle stir-fry full of vigour and flavour I love going to my local Chinese supermarket; it’s like being at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, where the world (and ergo my mealtimes) are full of wild possibilities and new travels for my tastebuds. A new favourite ingredient is rose red beancurd, so called because it’s red and fermented in a combination of red yeast and rose petals. The overall effect in this noodle recipe, a take on the Thai street food dish, suki hang, is that it imparts a delicious char siu flavour when cooked, which is a lot of magic for a single ingredient. Continue reading...  ( 15 min )

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

A message sent to users Friday said the building would be closed through April 20.  ( 24 min )

“We have zero. … It was so quick. … My uncle has no clothes. … Where will I pay the same rent?” They fled their homes on Ninth Street in their pajamas. Now they ask what comes next.  ( 31 min )

Also: Whelan’s reopens on Telegraph Avenue and a new shop selling artisanal goods from Mexico and Guatemala opens in Thousand Oaks.  ( 28 min )

Known as "Popeye" on the Berkeley High campus, where was the rare athlete to letter in four sports, he later traveled the country recording over 15,000 names of relatives to add to his family tree.  ( 24 min )

Interviewer: David Greene Dr. Jean Linis-Dinco is an activist-researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology. Born in the Philippines and shaped by firsthand experience with inequality and state violence, Jean has spent her life pushing back against systems that profit from oppression. She refuses to accept a world where tech is just another tool for corporate gain. Instead, she fights for technologies and policies that put people before profit and justice before convenience. Jean earned her PhD in Cybersecurity from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where she exposed how governments weaponized propaganda and disinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. She currently serves as the Digital Rights Advisor for the Manushya Foundation. David Greene: W…  ( 18 min )

We go through this every couple of years: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which of Americans’ communications with foreign persons overseas is up for renewal. As always, Congress can reauthorize it with or without changes, or just let it expire. We know, we know, it’s a pain to have to do this every few years–but it gives us a chance to lift the hood of this behemoth tool of government surveillance and tinker with how it works. That’s why it’s so important right now to urge your Member of Congress not to pass any bill that reauthorizes Section 702 without substantial reforms.    Take action TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform Section 702 is rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues that need fixing. The National Security Agency (NSA) collects full c…  ( 6 min )

How do I find my local H&R Block? Enter your zip code on our website to find an H&R Block near you. Alternatively, just drive by any property that used to contain a Spirit Halloween. Can I file my taxes online? You can, but it hurts our feelings when you use our services without coming in to talk to us. Fine. I’ll come in person. But what happens after my taxes are filed? You will possibly receive a refund via direct deposit once your tax dollars are deposited into the steaming gullet of the Great War Pig. I’m sorry, what? The Great War Pig. Is that his name or his job? His name is unspeakable, though you know it in the rotten depths of your heart. What does the Great War Pig do? Whatever He wants. The Pig does not answer to man’s law, unless we remember that, in fact, he does. …  ( 8 min )

- - - Fishing apparel mentioned: A tarpon-wear shirt Old bib-front overalls Bow ties and club blazers Jean shorts - - - It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Thomas McGuane’s work that while I was speaking with him, I was moved by his kindness, his incisive insight, and, above all, his mischievous sense of fun. The craic was exceptional. We are both writers, anglers, and equestrians, and we’d both recently fished for Atlantic salmon in arctic Norway. We laughed a lot during our conversation: in helplessness, in disbelief, in despair, and at the inherent comedy of life. Thomas McGuane was born in 1939 in Michigan. He studied at Michigan State University, pursued his graduate studies in English and drama at Yale University, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford Universi…  ( 13 min )

“The Birth Rate Is Falling, and It Has Nothing to Do with the Cost of Housing, Health Care, or Childcare. It’s Women” “The Falling Birth Rate: A Crisis with Many Complex Causes, All of Them Female” “Women Cite ‘Financial Instability’ for Not Having Children. What Aren’t They Telling Us?” “Did Feminism Ruin the Birth Rate?” “Who Is to Blame for the Falling Birth Rate? College-Educated Women” “Who Is to Blame for the Falling Birth Rate? Non-College-Educated Women” “Who Is to Blame for the Falling Birth Rate? Women Whose Educational Status We Were Unable to Confirm” “Experts Agree: The Birth Rate Crisis Is Multifaceted, Structural, and Female” “Did IUDs Ruin the Birth Rate?” “We Spent Six Months Investigating the Birth Rate Crisis and Found Women at Every Turn” “Birth Rates Are Down…  ( 8 min )

The post Quantum Existentialism appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 11 min )

This week, we discuss gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.  ( 4 min )

Due to its Nazi past, Germany’s post–World War II militant democracy has been unusually aggressive in banning hatred and extremism. Early postwar laws prohibited Nazi symbols, propaganda, and organizations. A turning point came in 1960 with the “swastika epidemic” — a surge of anti-Semitic graffiti and attacks on synagogues. In response, the German parliament made it illegal to incite hatred or insult “segments of the population” in ways that might disturb public peace. The epidemic was later revealed to be a KGB “active measures” campaign. Despite this, Germany has continually expanded its hate-speech laws to cover areas such as incitement, Holocaust denial, and the distribution of propaganda and symbols of unconstitutional organizations. Even criminal defamation laws can function as hate…  ( 11 min )

Our tales of AI developing the will to survive, commandeer resources, and manipulate people say more about us than they do about language models. The post Why Do We Tell Ourselves Scary Stories About AI? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 16 min )

Soft, fluffy, and perfect for stuffing with all your favourite fillings, this homemade pita bread is surprisingly easy to make. It’s so much fresher and softer than store-bought! Homemade naan is one of my absolute favourite bread recipes to whip up for a weeknight dinner. It’s that one simple trick that makes any meal feel […]  ( 39 min )

On April 6, 2026, humanity set an all-time record as part of the Artemis II mission: the distance record for how far a living human has ever traveled away from planet Earth. Traveling farther than any other humans in history, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen reached a maximum distance of 406,773 km (252,757 miles), breaking the previous record set way back on April 15, 1970 by the Apollo 13 mission. For 56 years, the Apollo 13 record stood, as those astronauts reached a maximum distance of 400,171 km (248,655 miles): a record that has now been extended by an impressive 6602 km (4021 miles), greater than the radius of the Earth. But why did this happen? What enabled the Artemis II mission to surpass the Apollo-era distance record? That’s what Daniel …  ( 16 min )

Most people chasing excellence are chasing the wrong thing entirely. Brad Stulberg argues that the 4am routines, optimization stacks, and recovery scores are just elaborate performance passed off as “excellence.” Stulberg breaks down the biology, philosophy, and psychology behind genuine excellence and how to reach it. This video Over-optimizing your life is making you fragile, not better is featured on Big Think.  ( 70 min )

With the latest detection of organic compounds by the Curiosity rover, the case for past life on Mars becomes stronger than ever, as suggested in a recent paper by Alexander Pavlov in the journal Astrobiology. And that lends additional credence to an even more exciting idea — that living organisms may still exist on Mars today. If that’s true, what form should we expect them to take? And where should we search for them? The planet’s surface is a brutal environment for any known type of organism, with huge temperature swings (from approximately -150 °C to 25 °C), virtually no water, and high doses of radiation. Yet we know from our own planet how resilient and adaptive life can be. Besides, this hostile environment didn’t always exist on Mars. So if life once thrived on the Red Planet, wher…  ( 11 min )

Imagine that you live in total freedom among a group of people unencumbered by traditions, customs, and any other restrictions. Would that be the pinnacle of joy? Maybe not so much. There would be no government, no police, no fire department, no traffic laws, no court of justice; life would be totally free but totally lawless. As the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) wrote in his magnum opus Leviathan, there would be no culture, no navigation, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no arts, no letters, no society; instead, there would be rapes, thefts, murders, and continual fear of violence. Human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” As more and more people began to live in close proximity, they realized the need for some sort of arrangement among themse…  ( 11 min )

Every 90 minutes, our bodies go paralyzed while our brains become more active than during waking life. Sleep psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris and neuroscientist Dr. Patrick McNamara, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University, dig into one of the most fascinating mysteries in human biology: why we dream and what our brains are actually doing during REM sleep. They explore competing theories of what dreaming is for, McNamara makes a compelling case that REM sleep may have been a key driver of early human creativity, and both reflect on why reclaiming our reverence for the dream state could change the way we think and create. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series. This video The physiology of dreams, explained by 2 scientists is featured on Big Think.  ( 13 min )

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Also: A naked man with a shotgun was arrested after running into the Tesla shop on Fourth Street.  ( 24 min )

Other March restaurant departures included a Hawaiian spot and a juice bar.  ( 24 min )

The fire, which burned two houses, rekindled later in the day but was quickly put out. Residents of a dead-end portion of Olympus Avenue have since been given the code to a gate to evacuate by car.  ( 24 min )

FOB West, Tita Becca's, Butter's Burgers, Leña, GA.RA, and La Cocinita Nica are some of the East Bay restaurants to open in March.  ( 30 min )

The district’s custodians, bus drivers and other non-educators will get a 7% raise over two years and full health coverage for families — both benefits slightly more than what teachers won last month.  ( 26 min )

Other events include a health resource fair by the City of Berkeley, Holocaust Remembrance Day and an exhibition on Berkeley's waterfront.  ( 28 min )

Google moved up its estimated deadline for quantum preparedness in cryptography to 2029—only 33 months from now. That’s earlier than previous deadlines, and they proposed the new post-quantum migration deadline because of two new papers that comprise a big jump in the state of the technology. It’s ahead of schedule, but not altogether unexpected. Cryptographers and engineers have been working on this for years, and as the deadline gets closer, it’s not surprising to see more precise timeline estimates come up. The preparation for the Y2K bug is not a perfect analogy. Like Y2K, if systems are not updated in time, anyone with a powerful enough quantum computer will be able to more easily insert malware into the core systems of a computer and fake authentication to allow impersonation merely …  ( 8 min )

As long as people have had more than one purchasing option, they’ve been comparing those options and looking for bargains. Online shoppers are no exception; in fact, one of the potential benefits of the internet is that it expands our options for everything from car rentals to airline tickets to dish soap. New AI tools can make the process even easier. These tools could provide some welcome relief for consumers facing sky-high prices that many cannot afford. Unfortunately, Amazon is trying to block these helpful new tools, which can steer shoppers towards competitors. Taking a page from Facebook and RyanAir, they are trying to use computer crime laws to do it.  Amazon’s target is Perplexity, which makes an AI-enabled web browser, called Comet, that allows users to browse the web as they no…  ( 6 min )

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now. The Numbers Aren’t Working Out We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.  We Expected More When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fixing.  We called for:  Transparent content moderation: Publicl…  ( 4 min )

At least 24 chimpanzees have been killed in a war that has split the Ngogo group of wild chimpanzees in two, turning former kin into enemies.  ( 6 min )

Darren Blanchard went a few seconds over his three minute time limit and found himself in handcuffs.  ( 5 min )

The case was the first time authorities charged people for alleged “Antifa” activities after President Trump designated the umbrella term a terrorist organization.  ( 4 min )

Dear Hiring Manager, I am setting aside my aspirations and sense of self-worth to apply for the Global Account Project Management Executive position at Capital Ventures. Despite my disdain for and ethical opposition to generative AI, I’ve asked ChatGPT to write this cover letter to fulfill the requirement outlined in your posting. Unfortunately, it spat out nonsense slop, which I have had to edit heavily. I understand this will be “read” by other AI and not evaluated by a human; accordingly, I am including as many buzzwords as possible so that this letter aligns with the company’s mission to expand global accounts, innovate, and drive stakeholder value. In my previous roles, I have practiced advanced synergetic evaluations of international high-stakes markets and engaged in vague problem…  ( 8 min )

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest. - - -  ( 7 min )

My Dear Third Grader, I am terribly sorry you got sick at school this morning. I should have believed you when you said you were not feeling well, even if this was your tenth time saying that this month alone. I should have sensed that today would be the day when you would arrive at your classroom, take three steps in, and promptly throw up the entire contents of your stomach. This one is on me. Yes, I understand it took me thirty minutes to get to your school. I apologize. I had to wrap up a few things so I could continue to work from home. Yes, it is still a workday for me. I’m very sorry. But once we get home, we can get you comfortable so you can relax and take a nap. Don’t tell your brothers, but you can have as much screentime as you would like. No, I don’t want to hear about the c…  ( 10 min )

The post Why A Liberal Arts Education Will Soon Be More Valuable Than Ever appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 29 min )

Trump and his underlings seem less inclined to worry about the Second Amendment when it protects people outside the MAGA coalition.

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Right now, at this very moment, the total amount of entropy contained within the observable Universe is greater than it’s ever been before. Tomorrow’s entropy will be even greater still, while yesterday, the entropy wasn’t quite as great as it is today. With each passing moment, inevitably, the Universe inches closer to its seemingly inevitable maximum entropy state known as the “heat death” of the Universe: a situation where all the particles and fields have reached their lowest-energy, equilibrium state, and no further energy can be extracted to perform work, or any other useful, order-creating tasks. The reason for the inevitable increase in entropy is as simple as it is inevitable: the second law of thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of a closed-and-isolated, self-contained sys…  ( 17 min )

“Rawdogging” is a deeply unfortunate term that was popularized with fresh connotations a couple of years back, when people started using the word to describe the unmediated friction of sitting through a flight without any distractions. Video after video began to appear on TikTok, each featuring someone engaging in quaint, analogue activities like looking out the window, people watching, or staring vaguely ahead while thinking. There is something confronting about taking a form of introspection — a term formalized by early psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener to refer to conscious inward focus with a view to self-understanding — and giving it a name that originally described having unprotected sex. A little unfortunate, perhaps, because despite its name, rawdogging is neither ne…  ( 9 min )

You might think that the best leaders possess a long list of competencies. Perhaps you’ve read books detailing these competencies, or perhaps your company measures its leaders against some required list, using 360-degree surveys or performance ratings. No matter how specific these lists are, or how tightly the ratings are tied to specific behaviors, the overwhelming body of data-based evidence reveals that all of these lists lack validity: We have no reliable way of measuring leader competencies, and so no valid way of proving that the best leaders possess more of them than average leaders. The fact is, the best leaders do not have much in common at all. They do not all possess the same list of competencies. Nor do these leaders get better by identifying and then trying to acquire the comp…  ( 9 min )

On March 23, the FCC issued an update to their Covered List, a list of equipment banned from obtaining regulatory approval necessary for U.S. sale (and thus effectively a ban on sale of new devices), to include all new routers produced in foreign countries unless they are specifically given an exception by the Department of Defense (DoD) or DHS. The Commission cited “security gaps in foreign-made routers” leading to widespread cyberattacks as justification for the ban, mentioning the high-profile attacks by Chinese advanced persistent threat actors Volt, Flax, and Salt Typhoon. Although the stated intention is to stem the very real threat of domestic residential routers being commandeered to initiate attacks and act as residential proxies, this sweeping move serves as a blunt instrument th…  ( 4 min )

Another court has ruled that copyright can’t be used to keep our laws behind a paywall. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a lower court’s ruling that it is fair use to copy and disseminate building codes that have been incorporated into federal and state law, even though those codes are developed by private parties who claim copyright in them. The court followed the suggestions EFF and others presented in an amicus brief, and joined a growing list of courts that have placed public access to the law over private copyright holders’ desire for control. UpCodes created a database of building codes—like the National Electrical Code—that includes codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, in…  ( 7 min )

Time and time again, we've seen police surveillance suffer from 'mission creep'—technology sold as a way to prevent heinous crimes ends up enforcing traffic violations, tracking protestors, and more. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're diving into this troubling pattern and sharing all the latest in the fight for privacy and free speech online. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This week's issue covers the urgent need to reform NSA spying; a victory for internet access in the Supreme Court; and how license plate readers are normalizing mass surveillance. Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Privacy Litigation Director Adam Schwartz about some of the recent technologies we've seen suffer from "mission creep." And don't miss the EFFector news quiz! You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:  %3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2F2ff7f80b-1fbe-4013-97b6-43873a6785ac%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com     Want to help us push back against mass surveillance? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

This is the third installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the first post here, and the second here. When people remember the 2011 uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), they picture crowded squares, raised phones, and the feeling that the internet had finally shifted the balance of power toward ordinary people. But the past decade and a half is also a story about how governments, companies, and platforms turned those same tools into the backbone of a powerful state surveillance apparatus. For activists, journalists, and everyday users, that means now living with a constant threat: the phone in your pocket, the platforms you organize on, and the systems you rely on for safety and connection can be weapo…  ( 13 min )

Homeless advocates cheered the ruling, which stops the city from confining people to a 3-by-3-foot square on the sidewalk or seizing and destroying RVs without due process.  ( 27 min )

The Board of Supervisors unanimously stands against FCI Dublin’s conversion into an immigration detention center — though the county has no jurisdiction over federal property.  ( 25 min )

Look, we all know it’s been a rough couple of weeks. We’re a month into a war that even the most die-hard MAGA loyalists didn’t want, and things have gotten so bad that it finally broke Tucker Carlson. He’s beginning to say things that almost sound sensible. But just because we’re all a little scared and frustrated doesn’t mean it’s time to take drastic action. As members of Trump’s cabinet, we’re not about to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment just because the president has repeatedly threatened to murder millions of people. The problem with the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is that it does not provide a clear litmus test for determining when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Is it when he’s regularly slurring his speech? When he’s constantly falling asle…  ( 8 min )

As a longtime gym-goer, I am the target audience for all manner of protein-packed bullshit. Protein coffee? Can’t start the day without it. Protein salsa? Pass the chips. At the height of my weightlifting fixation, there were years when the friendly snake-oil salesmen at GNC got about half of my disposable income, which I happily traded for products with names like “Dr. Humongo’s Bicep Elixir.” I am a world-class mark for the magic-bean vendors of the supplement industry. Ninety-nine out of one hundred people, when presented with a bottle of mysterious powder called “Gorilla Boost MAX” that claims to “supercharge your T levels,” will simply roll their eyes and walk away. I am the hundredth person. I will buy a year’s supply. And if you can pack ten grams of extra protein into a pretzel, a…  ( 9 min )

“In a series of Situation Room meetings, President Trump weighed his instincts [about going to war with Iran] against the deep concerns of his vice president and a pessimistic intelligence assessment. Here’s the inside story of how he made the fateful decision.” — An excerpt from New York Times White House reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. - - - In recent hours, several unserious actors across the political and media spectrum have raised what they believe to be a profound question: namely, whether it is appropriate for a journalist to possess explosive information concerning presidential decision-making, the possible manufacture of consent for war in Iran, and internal assessments from the natio…  ( 9 min )

How Florida conservation police are tapping into Flock for ICE; Wikipedia's AI ban; and how the app TeleGuard uploads users' private keys.  ( 4 min )

At a New York party, attendees spent Trans Day of Visibility dancing, DJing, and learning how to become less visible online.  ( 8 min )

Marathon is a great game for uncs. As signs of a crash change the video game industry, there might not be a lot of those left.  ( 7 min )

Updates to VeraCrypt, a popular and long-running piece of encryption, are now thrown into doubt because of a seemingly unexplained Microsoft decision.  ( 3 min )

Decades of weird experimental results appeared to support the existence of the sterile neutrino, a hypothetical particle that would solve multiple mysteries. But recent experiments have killed hope of finding these phantoms, leaving physicists to wonder what might explain their anomalies. The post Experiments Ring the ‘Death Knell’ for Sterile Neutrinos first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 15 min )

Of all the planets, star systems, and galaxies we’ve ever discovered, the only one that displays any yet-detected signals of life is right here: planet Earth which orbits the Sun right here in our own Milky Way. While there are: hundreds of known planetary bodies in our own Solar System, more than 6000 known exoplanets detected so far, approximately 400 billion stars located within the Milky Way, and trillions of galaxies within the observable Universe, each one of them only represents a chance for life and living beings here in 2026. At present, only Earth, of all the known worlds, and only our Solar System, out of the 2 × 10²¹ stars suspected to exist in the visible Universe, has been demonstrated to have living organisms thriving upon it. But any world that’s home to life is also, inevi…  ( 17 min )

Sneaky sideways moves that strong chess players swear by are called “intermezzos,” or “in-between moves.” The American chess genius and unofficial World Champion Paul Morphy executed these many times in the New Orleans cafés where he won game after game in the 1800s. Morphy’s move seemed obvious. Why not just recapture the piece that was just taken? But then, BOOM. Morphy interrupted the sequence with a different aggressive move, throwing his opponent’s position into turmoil. Intermezzos are shocking. When Judit Polgár played one against another top grandmaster, he jumped out of his chair. Intermezzos are reminders that instead of looking far in advance, we should search for little surprises that no one else sees. The futility of planning far in advance is nailed in one of my favorite one-…  ( 10 min )

In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, claimed that every two days, humanity was creating as much information as it had generated from the dawn of civilization through 2003 — 48 hours’ worth of texts, photos, articles, tweets, and other content added up to more than five exabytes of data, according to Schmidt.  Since then, generative AI has helped take our shift from information scarcity to information abundance to a whole new level — as of September 2025, we were generating more than 16 exabytes every hour.  AI-generated content now accounts for an increasing share of the information we generate — some estimates suggest that it could soon exceed human-generated content. As this trend continues, content made by humans could become relatively scarce, and because scarcity creates value, …  ( 10 min )

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About 5,400 CalFresh recipients in Alameda County are at risk of losing their benefits, according to a local food bank.  ( 24 min )

Our guests: Provost Benjamin Hermalin, law professor Chris Hoofnagle, history professor Ussama Makdisi and Daily Cal editor Ananya Rupanagunta.  ( 24 min )

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

The iconic 1980s musical won seven Tony Awards and ran on Broadway for decades.  ( 25 min )

Women in vibrant traditional attires, elders soaking in the sun, and dance performances marked the Cambodian new year at Peralta Hacienda.  ( 25 min )

April 9, 2026 - 9:00am to 10:30am PDT April 9, 2026 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm BST London, UK lumka (not EFF) will host this event. EFF Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian C. York will be speaking. From the Organizers:  The discussion will feature Ruby Chen, Ana Luisa Cubas (Sound Surveillance Archive Researcher), Jillian C. York (Director for International Freedom of Expression), and Jake Hurfurt (Head of Research and Investigations at Big Brother Watch), to provoke horizontal communication where our community can gather to contemplate, learn, and discuss these ideas of surveillance non-compliance further. FIND OUT MORE When: Thursday, April 9 Time: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM BST Where: Refer to website Cost: Refer to website Event Requirements: Refer to website About the Speaker: Jillian C. York is EFF's Director for International Freedom of Expression and is based in London. Her work examines state and corporate censorship and its impact on culture and human rights, with a focus on historically marginalized communities. At EFF, she leads coalitions, writes about state and corporate censorship, conducts the Speaking Freely interview series, and contributes to various other areas of the organization's work. Jillian is the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism (Verso, 2021) and has written for Motherboard, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, among others. She is a visiting professor at the College of Europe Natolin in Warsaw. She is also a regular speaker at global events. About lumka:  A gallery exhibiting the works of artists who specialize in interdisciplinary and experimental media. Exploring site specificity and consumer/artwork relationships, LUmkA’s program emphasizes the environments we inhabit. This event is organized not by EFF, but by lumka. Calendar  ( 3 min )

The EU’s so-called Chat Control plan, which would mandate mass scanning and other encryption breaking measures, has had some good news lately. The most controversial idea, the forced requirement to scan encrypted messages, was given up by EU member states. And now, another win for privacy: the EU Parliament has dealt a real blow to voluntary mass-scanning of chats by voting to not prolong an interim derogation from e-Privacy rules in the EU. These rules allowed service providers, temporarily, to scan private communication.   But no one should celebrate just yet. We said there is more to it, and voluntary scanning is a key part. Unlike in the U.S., where there is no comprehensive federal privacy law, the general and indiscriminate scanning of people’s messages is not legal in the EU without…  ( 5 min )

How experimental recordings have changed, from the Renaissance through today.

How computer scientists on the fringes of biology made sense of sequencing data.

Calm down. I don’t necessarily see what all the fuss is about. In all honesty, I also read the Dread Lord Nyarlathotep’s post this morning and was surprised by it, same as you. We all know he’s the Crawling Chaos, and that title implies a certain degree of unpredictability. But even for him, his vow to “gorge on the carcass of humanity itself” unless his latest (albeit nebulous) demands are met is pretty intense. I can’t remember the last time that an elected US official said something so unconscionable and nightmarish. Didn’t Nixon say something similar? No? Hmm. Anyway. I’m not endorsing what the Dread Lord uttered in a series of cacophonous, guttural snarls and clicking noises at the press pool yesterday. I don’t think “wholesale existential negation” is a particularly effective geopo…  ( 8 min )

- - - McSweeney’s contributor Johanna Gohmann channels the chaos and charm of life with a toddler into All Toddlers Are Scorpios a hilarious astrology guide illustrated by cartoonist (and McSweeney’s contributor) Emily Flake. We’re thrilled to share an excerpt today from the book’s opening chapter. All Toddlers Are Scorpios is out now and available at your nearest bookseller. - - - With the fiery planet of Mars as their ruling house, the Aries toddler is known for their high energy and adventurous nature. A bold, fearless child, they can often be found rapidly scaling the nearest Barnes & Noble bookcase or attempting to fit their head into the neighbor’s Dalmatian’s mouth. You, meanwhile, can most often be found struggling to open some Tylenol or cleaning up the hummus the Aries has …  ( 12 min )

When my country attacked my country, I cheered with enthusiasm and gasped in horror. “Now they’d get what they deserved, those bastards,” I said in the angry tone of the men I’d watched in black and white movies about World War II. Then I beat my chest and wailed and tried to pull out my own hair like I’d seen my grandmother do when my grandfather died. Of two minds, two hearts, and two stomachs, I walked around the house in a frenzy until I settled in the kitchen to make a breakfast of hot black tea and Lucky Charms. If you are not a pilot or a drone operator or a person having their house blown up, there is not a lot to do in a war. I refused to give up my routines, even as bombs destroyed everything around my aunt’s house and then everything around my uncle’s house and then everything …  ( 10 min )

The post The Eradication Of Grief appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 191 min )

The proposed legislation would be the first of its kind passed in the country, but there are similar bills popping up everywhere this year.  ( 5 min )

Cisco, IBM, and major lobbying groups are trying to exempt "critical infrastructure" from an existing Colorado law.  ( 6 min )

With jammy strawberries and sweet cream cheese, this decadent vegan stuffed French toast has brunch restaurant vibes, in a recipe that’s easy to make at home!  I won’t deny that I have a weakness for French toast recipes, whether it’s classic vegan French toast or creme brûlée French toast casserole for a crowd. But one […]  ( 32 min )

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Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, star formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the stars we see today. However, once those first stars die, their ejecta — depending on your perspective — either “enrich” or “pollute” the interstellar medium around them, meaning that the next generation of stars to form, and all generations thereafter, will be substantially different from that first generation. However, unlike the first generation of stars, all subsequent generations should have the capability of producing small, red, low-mass stars that burn through their fuel quite slowly: so slowly that even a …  ( 17 min )

No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray. Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both. Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference® But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Ameri…  ( 12 min )

“Who owns intelligence?” Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, or what, has it? More than a century ago, psychometricians staked their claim by proposing the almighty g, or general intelligence. They measured it with IQ tests, which assess cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. Eventually, psychometricians convinced much of Western society that, through IQ, they were the arbiters of intelligence. While the IQ test has been used nobly — to identify students in need of extra help with reading or writing, for example — it has also …  ( 10 min )

The Alameda brewery's Flow pale ale uses a process pioneered by Aircapture to turn the air around the brewery into bubbles for beer.  ( 26 min )

The Berkeley startup takes some of the backbreaking work out of many labor-intensive jobs.  ( 27 min )

Here are favorite places to hike, some in Berkeley and some a short drive away, to experience breathtaking displays of flowers now.  ( 30 min )

She loved hiking, swimming, classical music and her friends, and she showed up for others, especially for those who needed it most.  ( 24 min )

At least three different people notified the popular app that wants to help men stop watching porn that it was jeopardizing user data.  ( 5 min )

“I am vetoing this bill in its entirety because I object to this bill's intrusion into the personal privacy of Wisconsin residents,” Governor Tony Evers wrote.  ( 5 min )

Ron DeSantis has empowered hundreds of Florida conservation police to work directly with ICE.  ( 8 min )

#———————————————— #File: exist.female #Last Updated: Before you were born #Status: Auto-enrolled #Effective Date: Immediately #Opt-Out: Not Available #Note: You did not click anything. #Note: It’s still your problem. #————————————————- INIT woman(); #————————————————— #GENERAL HUMAN CONDITIONS #————————————————— if (human == woman) {       human- -;       object++;       Default.value = “Mom”;       store(family_dignity, location = clothing);       voting_right = determine(time_period, era, location); #Default value = No       sports = harmful;       #injury or scar reduces marriageability_factor if (sport_status == Yes) {       max(official_uniform_length, bikini-esque) #Aesthetic Purposes       call(duty.nurturing, return disappointment);       marriageability_f…  ( 8 min )

My God. What has happened to the Republican Party? The Party of Lincoln, for goodness’ sake! Nothing about them resembles the Party of Lincoln. Like, for instance, they have a signature hat, but it’s not a stovepipe one. They don’t wear blankets over their shoulders and laps indoors to protect against the chill as they strategize about the Civil War in 1864. They just turn up the thermostat while fantasizing about a Civil War in 2026. They don’t see plays anymore. And if they do, they get photographed doing hand stuff during them. Lincoln never did hand stuff. He was too busy bearing the heavy mantle of statehood to do hand stuff. And if he did do hand stuff at any plays, he wouldn’t get photographed. Photographs took longer than hand stuff back then. They don’t project from their diap…  ( 8 min )

A series of quantitative metaphors on the speeds of representative events in evolutionary biology. The end of our three-part series.

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground. In Alaska, and at field sites around the world, researchers are racing to understand exactly how, with essential stores of carbon at stake. The post An Arctic Road Trip Brings Vital Underground Networks into View first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 17 min )

Garlic noodles are the quintessential back pocket dinner recipe, coming together in just 20 minutes and tasting like a restaurant-worthy noodle dish. They’re intensely garlicky, spicy, deeply savoury, and a little bit sweet! Garlic noodles are popular in Vietnamese-American restaurants and after seeing one too many mouthwatering photos on Instagram, I knew it was time […]  ( 32 min )

Deaths in ICE custody hit a 20-year high in 2025 and a majority now say the agency's actions make Americans less safe.

Until April of 2026, only 24 astronauts had ever left low-Earth orbit. The Apollo 11 crew, after safely returning to Earth from their historic voyage to the Moon, are shown in the Mobile Quarantine Facility alongside then-President Nixon. All 24 astronauts who journeyed to the Moon as part of the Apollo program, either orbiting or landing on it, were safely returned to Earth. Credit: NASA/JSC In 1968, Apollo astronaut Bill Anders — one of the first — captured this iconic photograph. This photograph, taken aboard the Apollo 8 mission and simply dubbed “Earthrise,” has often been called the most environmentally impactful photograph in human history. Its taker, Bill Anders, remarked, “When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up Moon horizon, I was immediately…  ( 10 min )

When you think about the word “anxiety,” it likely comes with a negative connotation. But anxiety is a normal human emotion that nearly all of us experience. Reframing anxiety as a tool for change, adopting concepts from Zen Buddhism, and striving to live in a ‘flow state’ can quell the negative thoughts we experience and amplify your mind’s abilities. Optimizing your brain so that you can work in harmony with your thoughts is entirely possible. These 3 experts explain how we can work with our physiology, rather than try to rebel against it.  Authors Steven Kotler and Wendy Suzuki along with psychiatrist Robert Waldinger show us how to optimize our mind, transform anxiety, and drop into ‘flow state’ for a more peaceful life. This video is part of Big Think’s monthly issue The Roots of Resilience. This video Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience is featured on Big Think.  ( 31 min )

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Site Banner:  Mobile Site Banner:  Link:  EFFecting Change: Can't Stop the Signal on April 16 Mobile Link:  EFFecting Change: Can't Stop the Signal on April 16 Banner Text:  EFFecting Change: Can't Stop the Signal on April 16 Mobile Banner Text:  EFFecting Change: Can't Stop the Signal on April 16  ( 2 min )

Native Americans were playing dice and other games of chance many millennia before any known cultures elsewhere.  ( 7 min )

A cheerful rice bowl fragrant with ginger, garlic and spring onion, and laced with a sprightly chilli bean sauce With spring in the air, I want a dish that’s the equivalent of turning the key in the ignition, firing up the engine and riding off into the sun. In short: something with a bit of va-va-voom. That dish, for me, is these Sichuan aubergines, a take on the classic “fish fragrant aubergines” (so called because the same aromatics are often used to cook fish). Creamy to begin with, they’re layered with flavour by way of ginger, garlic, spring onion and, finally, laced with delight and good times owing to the bright chilli bean sauce and vinegar. Continue reading...  ( 14 min )

You’re invited on a journey inside the privacy battles that shaped the internet. EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn 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. Join Cindy at three events in New York discussing her bestselling new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, on sale now. All proceeds from the book benefit EFF. Find the full event details below, and RSVP to let us know if you can make it. April 20 - With Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) Join Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) and EFF for a conversation featuring American University Senior Professorial Lecturer Chelsea Horne and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn as they dive into data s…  ( 3 min )

Legal intern Raj Gambhir was the principal author of this post. The Trump administration has restricted the First Amendment right to record law enforcement by issuing an unprecedented nationwide flight restriction preventing private drone operators, including professional and citizen journalists, from flying drones within half a mile of any ICE or CBP vehicle. In January, EFF and media organizations including The New York Times and The Washington Post responded to this blatant infringement of the First Amendment by demanding that the FAA lift this flight restriction. Over two months later, we’re still waiting for the FAA to respond to our letter. The First Amendment guarantees the right to record law enforcement. As we have seen with the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd, Renée Good, …  ( 7 min )

While the very public fight continues between the Department of Defense and Anthropic over whether the government can punish a company for refusing to allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance, another branch of the U.S. government is quietly working to ensure that this dispute will never happen again. How? By rewriting government procurement rules. Using procurement — meaning, the processes by which governments acquire goods and services — to accomplish policy goals is a time-honored and often appropriate strategy. The government literally expresses its politics and priorities by deciding where and how it spends its money. To that end, governments can and should give our tax dollars to companies and projects that serve the public interest, such as open-source software developm…  ( 6 min )

You’re invited on a journey inside the privacy battles that shaped the internet. EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn 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. Join Cindy at two events in Washingtion, D.C. on April 13 and 14 discussing her new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, on sale now. All proceeds from the book benefit EFF. Find the full event details below, and RSVP to let us know if you can make it. April 13 - With Gigi Sohn at Busboys & Poets Join American Association of Public Broadband (AAPB) Executive Director Gigi Sohn, in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn for a discussion about Cindy's work, her new book, and what …  ( 3 min )

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

In a rare win for the civilian police oversight board, City Attorney Farimah Brown said the City Council — which approved the use-of-force policy in 2020 — needs to sign off on changes.  ( 29 min )

The controversial 1,100-bed People's Park housing project, set to open next fall, is one of two big new dorms to be completed by 2028.  ( 25 min )

Wherever I look, my gaze can find something horrific on which to focus. Whether it be news of atrocities committed by our fascist-leaning governments, obvious acceleration towards environmental collapse, or the Criterion Collection’s glaring omission of the Jackass series, heinous evils are all around us. Yet, despite it all, I still believe in the unassailable goodness of humanity. I also believe that the Easter Bunny is a real, tangible creature capable of wielding magic and producing plastic eggs filled with individually wrapped candies. Throughout human history, righteousness inevitably triumphs over evil. Yes, sometimes the darkness becomes so strong and oppressive that we forget what the light is like. And that darkness can last for so long that people live entire lives in its gri…  ( 9 min )

- - - FEATURES: Middle-aged athletes Scoobers Coke Slurpees The unknowable future - - - In July of 2025, I flew out to Aurora, Colorado, with my wife and some friends to see if we were still the best forty-something ultimate frisbee players in the United States of America. We’d been training for months, and for decades. A gold medal from 2024 hung in my closet in Minneapolis, gave a muted clink when I reached for my khakis, but in the meantime, a whole other crop of mid-forties motherfuckers had sprung up or aged into the grand masters division. They wanted to snatch our gold. I should clarify some things before I tell you what happened at the USA Ultimate Masters Championships—the national tournament for old heads—because I assume the casual reader is not familiar with the inner…  ( 11 min )

I hope you’re proud of yourself, Harold. That nice Jesus boy has died, and it’s all your fault. He had prospects, that Jesus, a nice carpentry business going. And that voice! He could climb a mount and give a sermon, and you’d be rapt. Rapt, I tell you! And now, pfffft. All because of you, Harold, you and your sin. That one sin. Oh, you know perfectly well which one, Harold. Don’t make me spell it out for you. We’ve all seen you. You think we didn’t notice, but a sin like that, how could we not? Any sensible person would tell themself it wasn’t right. A normal person, a good person, would know in his heart that this sin they were doing was bringing on eternal damnation. Not just for you, Harold, but for all of humankind. Such a sin! We were all going to go to H-E-L-L, Harold, because of…  ( 9 min )

This week, we discuss crypto, journalists using AI, and a cool photo of Earth.  ( 4 min )

The post Iran Could Become Like Egypt, Myanmar or Pakistan appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 9 min )

Here in our Universe, the light that gets emitted from objects isn’t necessarily the same as the light that arrives in either our eyes or our instruments. Not only are there many intervening effects that can alter a signal on the way — by interacting with fields, by passing through neutral and ionized matter, and by having to compete with sources of noise — but there are kinetic (motion-based) and gravitational (spacetime-based) effects that alter those signals while in transit as well. In particular, three main effects all can systematically shift light of any wavelength toward either redder or bluer wavelengths: the relative motion of the emitting source and the receiving observer, the changes in the gravitational field that the traveling signal experiences during its journey, and the ef…  ( 16 min )

Two research groups say they have significantly reduced the amount of qubits and time required to crack common online security technologies. The post New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 13 min )

Bright, chewy, and crackly on the top, these lemon crinkle cookies are like sunshine in the form of a cookie! They’ve got the perfect balance of sweet and tangy, and my version is made without the butter and eggs. If you love lemon desserts as much as I do—hello vegan lemon loaf and lemon bars!—these […]  ( 31 min )

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Trauma doesn’t end when the danger does, and for decades, science couldn’t explain why. Rachel Yehuda, a leading PTSD researcher, has spent her career inside that question, uncovering the way that trauma can leave impressions on our genes, sometimes passing biological echoes of those events to the next generation. Now, she’s focused on MDMA therapy, which could actually break the chain. This video This isn’t a trip, it’s the most challenging therapy session of your life is featured on Big Think.  ( 57 min )

What determines the extent of employers’ wage-setting power? It boils down to how easily — borrowing Beyoncé’s phrase — you can “release your job” when pay isn’t good enough. But how simple is it for someone to quit Walmart if they are dissatisfied with their wage? To answer this question, my collaborators Suresh Naidu and Adam Reich and I surveyed about 10,000 Walmart workers in 2019 using a Facebook-based strategy, similar to the Shift Project. As we saw previously, Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, has long been associated with low pay. In 2019, its voluntary company-wide minimum wage stood at $11 per hour, lagging behind competitors like Target and Costco. If paying jobs were truly easy to replace, one would expect Walmart jobs to be among the easier to quit and move on f…  ( 10 min )

April 16, 2026 - 9:00am to 10:00am PDT April 16, 2026 - 9:00am to 10:00am PDT Online Internet shutdowns have become a powerful weapon. Years of digital repression in Iran have intensified during the current conflict with Israel and the U.S.. The Iranian government has once again shut down internet access, isolating millions, silencing dissent, and blocking information about human rights abuses. In January 2026, nationwide blackouts were used to conceal violations and suppress the largest protests since the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. This is not unique to Iran. Around the world, governments are pulling the plug to control narratives and crush resistance. But access to the internet is a human right—and people continue to find ways to stay connected. Join EFF and Amnesty Inter…  ( 4 min )

Recently, a California Superior Court jury found that Meta and YouTube harmed a user through some of the features they offered. And a New Mexico jury concluded that Meta deceived young users into thinking its platforms were safe from predation.  It’s clear that many people are frustrated by big tech companies and perhaps Meta in particular. We too have been highly critical of them and have pushed for years to end their harmful corporate surveillance. So it’s not surprising that a jury felt like Mark Zuckerberg and his company, along with YouTube, needed to be held accountable.  While it would be easy to claim that these cases set a legal precedent that should make social media companies fearful, that’s not exactly true. And that’s actually a good thing for the internet and its users.  Thes…  ( 5 min )

April 20, 2026 - 3:00pm to 6:00pm PDT April 20, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm EDT Manhattan, NYC Join Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) and EFF for a conversation featuring EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in discussion about 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!  This is a FREE event! Want your own copy of Privacy's Defender? Order online, books will NOT be available onsite WHEN: Monday, April 20th, 2026 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm WHERE: Kennedys Law 22 Vanderbilt Avenue Suite 2400 New York, NY 10017 6:0…  ( 4 min )

Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity. Too often, it’s used to extract payouts from others. Higbee & Associates, a law firm known for sending copyright demand letters to website owners, targeted May First Movement Technology, accusing it of infringing a photograph owned by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The claim was baseless. May First didn’t post the photo. It didn’t even own the website where the photo appeared. May First is a nonprofit membership organization that provides web hosting and technical infrastructure to social justice groups around the world. The allegedly infringing image was posted years ago by one of May First’s members, a human rights group based in Mexico. When May First learned about the copyright complaint, it ensured that the group removed the image. That …  ( 6 min )

Interviewer: Jillian York Jillian York: Welcome, Jacob. I'm just going to kick off with a question that I ask everyone, which is: what does free speech mean to you? Jacob Mchangama: I like to use the definition that Spinoza, the famous Dutch renegade philosopher, used. He said something along the lines, and I'm paraphrasing here, that free speech is the right of everyone to think what they want and say what they think, or the freedom to think what they want and say what they think. I think that's a pretty neat definition, even though it may not be fully exhaustive from sort of a legal perspective, I like that.  JY: Excellent. I really like that. I'd like to know what personally shaped your views and also what brought you to doing this work for a living.  JM: I was born in Copenhagen, Denma…  ( 18 min )

August 14, 2026 - 6:00am PDT to August 16, 2026 - 3:00pm PDT August 14, 2026 - 9:00am EDT to August 16, 2026 - 6:00pm EDT The New Yorker Hotel | New York, NY The HOPE conference is not only back for another year, but also back in Manhattan for the first time since 2018! EFF is thrilled to be there with talks and a table in the expo hall where you can chat with our team, learn about the latest in the fight for privacy and free expression online, and even pick up a special gift as a token of our thanks when you become a member or donate! Interested in attending the conference this summer? Through the month of April, our friends at HOPE are donating 10% of ticket sales to EFF. Grab your ticket now and hack the planet while benefiting EFF! As in past years, EFF staff attorneys are ready to help support the community. If you have legal concerns regarding an upcoming talk or sensitive information security research you are conducting, please email info@eff.org and we will do our best to get you the help that you need. EFF Talks (more info coming soon) More about HOPE 26: HOPE 26 will be the seventeenth Hackers On Planet Earth event. It will take place from August 14-16, 2026, at the New Yorker Hotel in New York City. This promises to be a memorable event. It is open to all hackers, makers, tinkerers, experimenters, artists, educators and anyone else with an interest in exploring and improving the world we live in, and sharing knowledge with others. HOPE is an all-ages event with multiple simultaneous sessions and many other things to do throughout the weekend. Calendar  ( 3 min )

This is the second post in a series on 3D print blocking, for the first entry check out: Print Blocking is Anti-Consumer - Permission to Print Part 1 Legislators across the U.S. are proposing laws to force “print blockers” on 3D printers sold in their states. This mandated censorware is doomed to fail for its intended purpose, but will still manage to hurt the professional and hobbyist communities relying on these tools. 3D printers are commonly used to repair belongings, decorate homes, print figurines, and so much more. It’s not just hobbyists; 3D printers are also used professionally for parts prototyping and fixturing, small-batch manufacturing, and workspace organization. In rare cases, they’ve also been used to print parts needed for firearm assembly. Many states have already banned …  ( 9 min )

This is the first post in a series on 3D print blocking, for the next entry check out Print Blocking Won't Work - Permission to Print Part 2 When legislators give companies an excuse to write untouchable code, it’s a disaster for everyone. This time, 3D printers are being targeted across a growing number of states. Even if you’ve never used one, you’ve benefited from the open commons these devices have created—which is now under threat. This isn’t the first time we’ve gone to bat for 3D printing. These devices come in many forms and can construct nearly any shape with a variety of materials. This has made them absolutely crucial for anything from life-saving medical equipment, to little Iron Man helmets for cats, to everyday repairs. For decades these devices have been a proven engine for …  ( 8 min )

In late 2024, we urged Google and Amazon to honor their human rights commitments, to be more transparent with the public, and to take meaningful action to address the risks posed by Project Nimbus, their cloud computing contract that includes Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Israeli Security Agency. Since then, a stream of additional reporting has reinforced that our concerns were well-founded. Yet despite mounting evidence of serious risk, both companies have refused to take action.  Amazon has completely ignored our original and follow-up letters. Google, meanwhile, has repeatedly promised to respond to our questions. Yet more than a year and a half later, we have seen no meaningful action by either company. Neither approach is acceptable given the human rights commitments these comp…  ( 8 min )

Governments around the world are adopting new laws and policies aimed at addressing online harms, including laws intended to curb cybercrime and disinformation, and ostensibly protect user safety. While these efforts are often framed as necessary responses to legitimate concerns, they are increasingly being used in ways that restrict fundamental rights. In a recent submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, we highlighted how these evolving regulatory approaches are affecting human rights defenders (HRDs) and the broader digital environment in which they operate. Threats to Human Rights Defenders Across multiple regions, cybercrime and national security laws are being applied to prosecute lawful expression, restrict access to information, and expand …  ( 6 min )

Interviewer: Jillian York Jacob Mchangama is a Danish lawyer, human-rights advocate, and public commentator. He is the founder and director of Justitia, a Copenhagen-based think tank focusing on human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law. His new book with Jeff Kosseff, The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy's Most Essential Freedom, comes out on April 7th. Jillian York: Welcome, Jacob. I'm just going to kick off with a question that I ask everyone, which is: what does free speech mean to you? Jacob Mchangama: I like to use the definition that Spinoza, the famous Dutch renegade philosopher, used. He said something along the lines, and I'm paraphrasing here, that free speech is the right of everyone to think what they want and say what they think, or …  ( 18 min )

Also: Four floors of a UC Berkeley academic building are being vacated for reasons related to earthquake safety.  ( 23 min )

Refugiados, asilados, sobrevivientes de trata de personas y otros ya no podrán solicitar los nuevos beneficios de CalFresh. Estos cambios forman parte de los drásticos recortes a los programas de seguridad social en Estados Unidos, promulgados por la ley del presidente Trump, conocida como “Big Beautiful Bill” o la “Ley de la bella y enorme medida legislativa.”  ( 30 min )

Gas prices have soared to over $6 per gallon at many Berkeley stations since the start of the war with Iran, but Berkeleyside found a few places where you can save.  ( 25 min )

Resources and tips for staying safe, helping your neighborhood, and recovering from the Big One.  ( 27 min )

In an ironic twist, the Bay Area was left with zero locations of the franchise when the original Oxford Street shop shuttered in 2023. Now, the vegan treats are back in the Bay.  ( 26 min )

Refugees, asylees, survivors of trafficking and others are no longer eligible to apply for new CalFresh benefits. The changes are among the huge cuts to social safety programs in the U.S. enacted by President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”  ( 29 min )

Also: Cathy Park Hong, Brandon Shimoda and Divya Victor discuss artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at BAMPFA and an author talk on how financial companies police free speech.  ( 26 min )

Let me make something crystal clear to members of the press. I didn’t come to Washington to play games. I didn’t come here to pose for the cameras or rub elbows at some swanky Georgetown cocktail party. I came here for one reason only: to represent the good people who live in my walls. Period. The folks back in my home are angry, and it’s high time I stop being the only one who hears them. When my constituents in the three inches of space behind my drywall communicate with me through static electricity or the dripping of my faucet, they tell me one thing over and over again: light a post office on fire. Yet when I bring up the issue on the floor, all I get is physically restrained. Instead of working toward solutions, it seems like everyone in Washington is more interested in silencing …  ( 8 min )

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

Well, my first question is: Why do you care so much about Steve Kim? He was your college roommate? Who cares? When was the last time Steve Kim acted in an era-defining hockey romance that centers queer desire within a relentlessly heteronormative sports milieu, thereby demanding its protagonists urgently ask, maybe for the first time in their lives, what sorts of risks they are willing to take to love themselves fully and love others unguardedly when the cultural and political and economic expectation is to bury those parts of themselves that are the most pleasurable, tender, giving, and vital? Because I can’t remember a single damn time Steve Kim was in a small-budget Canadian show like that. Way too many rumors flying around about my origins, honestly. So let me reiterate: No, I was no…  ( 9 min )

A Minnesota journalist is challenging a 3,000 foot restriction on flying near DHS assets on First Amendment grounds.  ( 6 min )

In space, no one can hear you scream at Microsoft’s legacy software.  ( 3 min )

TeleGuard is an app downloaded more a million times that markets itself as a secure way to chat. The app uploads users’ private keys to the company’s server, and makes decryption of messages trivial.  ( 4 min )

The post Limiting Not Just Screen Time, But Screen Space appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 23 min )

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With the launch of Artemis II in April of 2026, humans are finally set to add to the historical precedent set in the late 1960s and early 1970s: a return to the Moon. Prior to their expected arrival at our nearest neighboring planetary body, expected to occur after just over a four day journey, a gap of more than 50 years persisted between human visits to the Moon. During the Apollo era, only 24 people ever flew to the vicinity of the Moon, traveling hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth to do so. Twelve of those travelers, on six independent missions, actually set foot on the lunar surface. Many artifacts have been left behind on the Moon during that time: flags, photographs, seismometers, mirrors, and even vehicles, while those same humans brought back rocks, dirt, and actual pieces …  ( 18 min )

For early 16th-century Europeans, this map was a revelation. It showed a previously unknown island metropolis in the recently discovered Americas — an alien Venice, if you will. However, by the time this first European portrait of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was published in 1524, the city, once home to perhaps 200,000 people, was already gone — razed in 1521 by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. In its place, Mexico City would eventually rise. Yet this is more than the ghost map of a recently deceased city. It is a multi-layered document of first contact, evidence of the hybridization of two clashing cultures as well as the dominance of one over the other. Curiously, nobody knows who exactly made this map. The leading theory is that it was based on an indigenous chart of the city. Cor…  ( 9 min )

Most people spend years searching for a mentor who will change their life, never realizing the most valuable lessons are already happening around them.  Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec breaks down why the traditional idea of mentorship is not only outdated, but actively getting in the way of your growth. This video The hidden reason smart people stop growing is featured on Big Think.  ( 14 min )

Four council members have signed onto a proposal for the city to repave Hopkins without the bike lane that sparked an uproar years ago, effectively killing the project for the foreseeable future.  ( 31 min )

More restaurants are pivoting to a fast-casual model to survive — and thrive — in an era of skyrocketing food, fuel and labor costs.  ( 31 min )

California’s top election official says a ruling to stop election officials from counting late-arriving ballots would “disenfranchise millions.”  ( 26 min )

The proof-of-concept system produces psilocybin, DMT, and other compounds in leaves of the tobacco plant, potentially easing pressure on wild species and preserving Indigenous traditions.  ( 5 min )

I spent some time with a new browser-based augmented reality porn app.  ( 9 min )

Iran's AI and LEGO-focused propaganda; drama in the world of baseball; and perhaps one of the worst sex apps ever.  ( 4 min )

Groups that challenge books have begun using Gemini, ChatGPT, xAI, and other AI tools to try to get books banned.  ( 9 min )

The following are excerpts from an unpublished 1971 Rolling Stone exposé that was scuttled by the Nixon administration, but which has recently been made public through a Freedom of Information Act request. - - - The Lunar Module. An American flag. Lots and lots of gray rocks. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think I was looking at a photograph of the Moon. But as former NASA head Thomas O. Paine explains, nursing a whiskey soda on his living room sofa, this photograph wasn’t taken on the Moon. It was taken on a soundstage. In Arizona. THOMAS O. PAINE: I remember getting a phone call from President Nixon in January 1969, a few days after he’d been sworn in, asking for a progress update on the Apollo program. Which, at the time, was going very badly. WERNHER VON BRAUN: It’s very hard to s…  ( 9 min )

I am proud of how far I’ve come. I started as a Passover food, but now grocery stores display me for all Jewish holidays, even the ones where people fast all day. I am allowed to feel salty. I am allowed to feel bitter, especially when I’m dipped in horseradish. I am allowed to feel gluten-free, though that is less about feelings and more about allergens. I am enough just as I am. I have to be—for eight days and nights, I’m the only option. I attract good things in life, like butter, peanut butter, and cream cheese. Yes, I also attract bitter herbs and saltwater, but I choose to focus on the butter and schmear. I am important both in the Passover story and as one of the top three ingredients in chocolate caramel matzah. I am beautiful just as I am. “What’s with that giant cracker?” so…  ( 8 min )

The winning entries in the 2025 Global Physics Photowalk contest showcase the beauty of toil and discovery. The post A Through-The-Lens Look at the World’s Particle Physics Labs first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 8 min )

This is the second installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. From Russia—where wartime censorship and more stringent platform controls have choked dissenting voices—to Nigeria, with its aggressive takedown orders turning social media into political battlegrounds, and to Turkey, where sweeping “disinformation” laws have made platforms heavily policed spaces, freedom of expression online is under attack. Per Freedom House’s 2023 Freedom on the Net Report, 66% of internet users live where political or social sites are blocked, and 78% are in countries where people have been arrested for online posts. New social media regulations have emerged in dozens of countries in the past year alone. The online landscape looks markedly different than …  ( 9 min )

There’s a legendary bit of wisdom that applies just as well to theoretical physics as it does to the drug culture from which it arose: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” While theoretical physicists are famous for coming up with extraordinary, creative, exotic scenarios for what may yet be possible in the Universe, there’s a great danger in buying into such an idea, and thinking that it’s likely, before a sufficient amount of supporting evidence has come in in favor of it. This was the fallacy that led to the rise of elegant, beautiful, and compelling scenarios — grand unification, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory — whose predictions simply don’t appear to match experimental reality in any measurable way. The danger isn’t in having and developing an idea that’s speculat…  ( 18 min )

In this monthly issue, we look at resilience not as a buzzword or a self-help prescription, but as a property — one that shows up, or doesn’t, at every scale.  ( 7 min )

In the late 20th century, the world came together to plug a hole in the ozone layer — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If left unchecked, this hole would have exposed life on Earth to dangerous — and in some regions potentially lethal — levels of radiation, but an international treaty brought us back from the brink of disaster. That treaty, the Montreal Protocol, is a lesson in human resilience: We can save the world, because we already did it once before. An epidemic of deadly fridges The story of the Montreal Protocol starts, bizarrely, with an epidemic of deadly fridges in the 1920s. In those pioneer days of electric home refrigeration, everyone’s favorite new kitchen appliance relied on highly toxic, flammable, or corrosive ga…  ( 13 min )

Not long ago, I found myself in line at my local dry cleaner. It’s a modest shop, the kind of place you’ve passed a thousand times without a second thought. But the man behind the counter — let’s call him Howard — is not a modest man. He pays an almost fussy, forensic level of attention to every customer. He remembers names and checks garment tags twice. He asks follow-up questions about a persistent wine stain on a lapel that suggest he genuinely, deeply cares about the outcome of his work. When it was finally my turn at the counter, I thanked him for the meticulousness he brought to his work and casually asked how business had been. Howard sighed. He smiled a weary smile and paused. “Where to start?” he said. Then he told me about 2020. When the pandemic struck, dry cleaners were among t…  ( 13 min )

When a tiny poof of a bird shows up at a backyard feeder in a snowstorm, people see perseverance. When ants band together to drag a large crumb, they see teamwork. When a delicate butterfly flaps into the sky, we feel hope. But when a rat escapes a trap or makes a home in a dumpster, what do we experience? It might well be disgust or dismay, but it’s rarely awe or wonder.  Yet rats may be one of the most awe-worthy animals on the planet. They have survived global apocalypses, far-flung abandonments, and targeted eradication campaigns. According to Bobby Corrigan, an urban rodentologist of more than 30 years, trying to suppress a rat population is like trying to bail out the ocean. “Ever since the caveman days, we have tried to control rats,” he tells Big Think. “We poison them. We trap the…  ( 11 min )

I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink. A mother walks along the path in front of us. She’s pushing a stroller and looking flustered. She’s looking flustered because her son is being an ass. “No, Matt,” she shouts. “Stop it. Stop. It!” Matt is carrying a stick and whacking flowers. He walks a few paces, then whack. Walk, whack. Walk, whack. In his horticultural wake lie dozens of broken leaves and scattered petals. Matt is just another little boy spending his days decapitating daffodils, driven by a prepubescent need to get attention and assert his will. It’s the manifestation of a repressed, Freud…  ( 11 min )

For nearly every sport, there are innate attributes that can give an athlete an edge. Basketball has a height advantage. With NFL linemen, a little girth tends to help. Most jockeys are small and lean. The best ballet dancers are light on their feet. A high limb-length ratio offers some runners a natural advantage. With sumo wrestling, it’s … well, you get the point. In rock climbing, a few such traits include longer fingers, shorter forearms, and scraggly wrists, all of which might help a climber clutch at tiny crimps in the rock with substantially more ease. The addition or subtraction of mere millimeters on the hand could mean the difference between struggling with an intermediate climb at your local bouldering gym and pioneering an untouched route along some precipitous wall in any far…  ( 18 min )

To live on Mars, humans will need more than rockets and ambition. They will need habitats that can protect them from radiation, brutal temperature swings, and an unbreathable atmosphere. Building such shelters on Earth wouldn’t be a challenge — we could construct an airtight box, pile on radiation shielding, and call it a day. But off-world construction runs into one overwhelming constraint: the upmass problem. Though reusable rockets are driving down the cost of sending cargo into space, it is still incredibly high. With every extra kilogram of payload adding to mission costs, astronauts are severely limited in what they can bring. “The whole idea of bricks and cinder blocks isn’t going to fly,” says Jim Head, a planetary geologist at Brown University who played an integral role in NASA’s…  ( 12 min )

A cold wind was whipping down the street when I pulled up to the concrete apartment block in Cambrils, Spain. I parked, pulled out my phone, and texted the repairman that I had arrived. I had only been in Spain for a few weeks when the hinge supporting my laptop screen gave out, causing it to flop around like a broken limb. I had already made the trek from the village where I was staying to the nearest repair shop once before, but the repairman’s first fix (epoxy that reinforced the hinge) only lasted a few days. I dropped it off again, but there was a catch for the pickup this time — Spain being Spain, the shop had closed early for the weekend, so the repairman offered to meet me at his house.  That’s how I found myself idling on a random side street, half-expecting the repairman to emerg…  ( 13 min )

To Mallerie Shirley and Christopher Pleasants, nothing felt “revolutionary” about the way they were raising their two kids. Then a stranger called child protective services. It started last November in Atlanta. With school closed on Election Day, the couple’s 6-year-old son, Jake (not his real name), wanted to ride his scooter by himself to a nearby playground while Mallerie and Christopher worked their tech jobs from home. They had recently begun allowing Jake to play outside alone, and other kids and a group of parents working a charity drive would be waiting for him at the park.  Permission granted. Jake strapped on his helmet, got on his scooter, and rode one-third of a mile on a paved recreational path to the playground. On his way back, a woman stopped him. She asked for his name, ag…  ( 14 min )

AI tools like RFdiffusion have made protein design dramatically easier, cheaper, and faster. This is accelerating vaccine development, opening new paths for treating genetic diseases, and making science more accessible — labs that couldn’t afford to work on certain problems before now can. Those are real gains. They’re also new kinds of exposure. The same tools that speed up vaccine development can be used to accelerate pathogen development. The same accessibility that lets a small lab design a cure lets a different small lab, or a single determined individual, design a threat. We’ve encountered this paradox before, with CRISPR gene editing, gain-of-function research, and other technologies. Each follows the same pattern: A powerful new capability emerges, the benefits are real, the failur…  ( 14 min )

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Famed jockeys and horses thrilled race fans from the 1940s until the track's closure in 2024. The land, in Berkley and Albany, could soon become a public park.  ( 29 min )

A San Francisco-based nonprofit agreed to buy the former race track for $175 million and transfer it to the East Bay Regional Park District, creating a huge new shoreline park.  ( 27 min )

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

One person was “assessed for possible medical complaint” but did not end up going to a hospital, according to BFD. There were no other reported injuries.  ( 24 min )

Reddit blamed a technical glitch for the removal of the living legend’s concert footage.  ( 4 min )

Thomson Reuters’ data, which can include peoples’ addresses and details on their ethnicity, is linked to tools used by ICE.  ( 6 min )

Hey, it’s Mark—your therapist’s therapist. I’m sure you’re really looking forward to your appointment with Joan this week, and I wouldn’t normally do this… but I think you should probably start considering other providers. I’m not telling you to abandon ship. Just, you know, maybe keep your options open. Because—and I hate to be the one to tell you this—Joan is not Doing Well. I know she seems composed—the very picture of emotional stability and grace. But trust me, thirty seconds before your session, she was lying face down on the floor after DM’ing her high school boyfriend’s mom on Instagram to ask if he’d cheated on her in the eleventh grade. Homegirl is going through it. Look, most of us get into therapy because we want to help people. What we don’t put on the brochure is the subc…  ( 9 min )

Dear Customer, We wanted to give you a heads-up about upcoming changes to Marshmallow Puffer’s loyalty program. Starting next month, this is no longer a loyalty program. It’s a fealty program. It is no longer about transactional points where you get a birthday keychain in the form of a tiny little puffer coat that everyone raves about, and a transparent discount that depends on how much you spend. It is a relationship based on a moral and binding oath whereby, in offering puffer coat investments, you swear fealty to us, forsaking all other puffer coats, and you promise us military service to defend the good Marshmallow Puffer name. And in exchange, you can wear (but not own) our Puffer coats. We heard you, and we’ve streamlined enrollment. It takes approximately two minutes and involves…  ( 9 min )

The post The Return Of The Moral State appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 42 min )

Tender-crisp and ready in minutes, this garlic roasted asparagus is one of my go-to side dishes and I know it will be one of yours too. Fresh garlic infuses so much flavour into this pairs-with-anything recipe! Spring is so close I can almost taste it. No wait, I can definitely taste it, especially when garlic […]  ( 31 min )

For most of us, the Universe doesn’t appear to change all that much on the scale of even a human lifetime. Sure, the stars move relative to one another, our Sun burns through a little more of its fuel, and the Moon slowly spirals away from the Earth as our rotation rate gradually slows down. Meanwhile, on grander scales, older stars across the Universe run out of fuel and die, new episodes of star-formation are triggered, and the Universe continues to expand, driving individual galaxies, groups of galaxies, and clusters of galaxies mutually apart, faster and faster, as time goes on. But all of these events take time: enormous amounts of time. Stars occasionally pass through our Oort Cloud, but that only happens a couple of times every million years. The Sun will continue burning for 5-7 bi…  ( 17 min )

About EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. EFF’s work to protect your rights on the internet is supported by over 30,000 members who have joined our mission by donating just this year. For over 35 years, our lawyers, activists, and technologists have been thinking about the next big thing in tech before anyone else—whether that’s age verification, AI, or Palantir. Whatever causes you fight for, you rely on the internet to do so. And EFF protects the infrastructure of rebellion.  JOIN EFF TODAY To learn more about our work, follow EFF on social media and subscribe to EFF's EFFector newsletter below to learn about the ways the internet and online rights are changing and what that means for you. And join EFF to support…  ( 8 min )

Site Banner:  Mobile Site Banner:  Link:  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/welcome-daily-show-viewers-learn-more-abou… Mobile Link:  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/welcome-daily-show-viewers-learn-more-abou… Banner Text:  Daily show viewers: Learn more about cindy cohn and privacy's defender Mobile Banner Text:  Daily show viewers: Learn more about cindy cohn and privacy's defender  ( 2 min )

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn will be on The Daily Show tonight, Monday March 30, at 11 pm ET and PT, speaking with host Jon Stewart. Cindy will discuss her long history of fighting for privacy online and her new book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press). The book details her own personal story alongside her role representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.  You can watch the interview on Comedy Central, and extended episodes are released shortly thereafter on Paramount Plus as well as in segments on YouTube. We will also share the interview when it is uploaded and available online as well.  About The Daily Show The Daily Show is a long-running comedy news show that covers the biggest headlines of the day. It has won 26 Primetime Emmy Awards and has introduced the world to now well-known actors and comedians such as Steve Carell, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, and Trevor Noah, as well as hosts of their own current shows, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.  ( 5 min )

If a new tax doesn’t pass in November, one plan would cut service to two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels. Bus lines that serve fewer people are on the chopping block.  ( 26 min )

The new restaurant, opening in Westbrae, is named Mesón and will be modeled after the cherished tapas bar that shuttered four years ago.  ( 27 min )

UC Berkeley students helped lead the push for the law, with the hope that their peers will not hesitate to reach out for help when they experience an overdose.  ( 28 min )

MLB's ABS system somehow feels extremely human. It's not human vs robot, it's human vs human as judged by a robot.  ( 8 min )

The incident is yet another example of volunteer Wikipedia editors fighting to keep the world’s largest repository of human knowledge free of AI-generated slop.  ( 3 min )

This week Joseph talks to journalist and technologist Dhruv Mehrotra. Among many other things, Mehrotra tracked visitors to Epstein's island through location data.  ( 4 min )

Meet the future of back office automation: AutoMates. Our product identifies legacy process-driven, rule-based back-office tasks and streamlines them through clear process mapping and the automation of human-augmented workflow nodes. It then facilitates the execution and disposal of all legacy human elements. TLDR: AutoMates fixes your workflows and ensures they stay fixed by humanely murdering whoever broke them in the first place. We’ve compiled a short Q&A based on specific questions we’ve received from tech founders and investors. Q: How does it work? A: Our proprietary agentic solution navigates your company’s full tech stack via pre-built API connectivity and full ownership of the end-to-end process cycle. Following handover, the human process node is prompted to view a pleasurab…  ( 10 min )

We’re looking for a unicorn. A creative type with an analytical brain. A rule breaker and a team player. Rainbow horn and silver blood. What will be your job? The better question is, what won’t be your job? You’ll do it all. Come up with big ideas. Bring those ideas to life. And then defend those ideas against the forces of evil, aka, our legal department. And that’s just on Monday. In today’s AI-driven world, being digitally fluent is a must. We need someone proficient with ChatGPT, Gemini, and ancient runes. Prophecy isn’t a requirement, but it’s strongly encouraged if you want to stand out from the rest of the herd. This is not a role for someone just starting out. So if you have grey hair, you need not apply. We’re only considering white-haired professionals with at least 1,000 years of experience. You’ll work with a diverse team. We have elves, magicians, and even a multi-hyphenate creative barista from Bushwick. So this really is a job for a unicorn who works well with others. We don’t want a lone wolf. We offer a generous compensation package, comprehensive healthcare, and unlimited sugar cubes. We work hard, and we play hard, too. However, this is a place of business, so please, no horsing around. Cards on the table? We’ll be bankrupt within the year. So if you know any angel investors, please let us know. Or demon investors. We can’t afford to be picky at this point. We get that this job isn’t for everyone, and yes, this company will slowly bleed you dry. But if you’re the unicorn we’re looking for, please submit a résumé, cover letter, and hair sample.  ( 8 min )

The basic shape that best describes our expanding universe is also the hardest shape for physicists to understand. The post In Expanding de Sitter Space, Quantum Mechanics Gets Even More Elusive first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

This vegan tater tot casserole recipe delivers all the comfort food coziness you expect from the original, but with a hearty lentil base and creamy plant-based mushroom sauce underneath the golden, crispy tater tots. Delicious! Sometimes you want to go the extra mile for dinner. And friends, this tater tot casserole is worth the effort. […]  ( 33 min )

Throughout the visible Universe, trillions of galaxies abound. This deep-field view of the Universe showcases a portion of the COSMOS-Web field acquired with JWST. In this field are a wide variety of galaxies, where the largest, most massive ones are nearly all spirals or ellipticals, with some lenticular galaxies possessing properties common to both. However, about 5-10% of these galaxies, where their shapes can be resolved, are irregular, peculiar galaxies: evidence of galactic interactions and mergers. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Gozaliasl, A. Koekemoer, M. Franco, and the COSMOS-Web team Most of the Universe’s stars, however, are contained in the largest, most massive galaxies. This image, acquired with the Hubble Space Telescope in 2018, shows the giant elliptical galaxy NG…  ( 12 min )

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At least four events are planned in Berkeley and another big march is set for Oakland during the next No Kings Day mobilization on Saturday, March 28.  ( 26 min )

Earth’s magnetic field has created a huge void of galactic cosmic rays in space, which could help protect astronauts from radiation exposure.  ( 7 min )

This is simply some deliciously spicy, baked grated potatoes, with an egg on top and a moreish chutney to go with it – you can thank us later Eggs are very Easter-appropriate, and some of my favourite egg recipes come from the egg-obsessed Parsis (descendants of Persian Zoroastrians, who emigrated to India thousands of years ago). Their obsession extends beyond the kitchen, too: achoo-meechoo, for example, is a custom where an egg is waved around a person’s head (six times clockwise, once anti-clockwise), then broken to ward off evil. When it comes to cooking, meanwhile, Parsis will put an egg on anything, and one favourite dish is kanda papeta par eeda, or eggs on potatoes, which I ate when staying with friends in Mumbai’s Malabar Hill and which inspired today’s recipe. Continue reading...  ( 16 min )

Cisco Systems Case Has Major Implications for Global Human Rights SAN FRANCISCO – U.S. technology companies should be legally accountable in U.S. courts for building tools that purposefully and actively facilitate human rights abuses by foreign governments, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in a brief filed Friday to the U.S. Supreme Court.  The brief filed in the case of Cisco Systems, Inc., et al., v. Doe I, et al. urges the high court to uphold the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit’s 2023 ruling that U.S. corporations can be held liable under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) – a law that lets noncitizens bring claims in U.S. federal court for international law violations – for taking actions in the U.S. that aided and abetted persecution and torture abroad.  “This is not …  ( 6 min )

A sign has been removed, his name blacked out and his face covered up at Cesar Chavez Park, which Berkeley moved to rename earlier this week.  ( 24 min )

Even with some upticks in certain violent crimes, overall crime was down in 2025, continuing a trend from 2024. Meanwhile, BPD is still struggling to recruit officers.  ( 26 min )

A visual and multimedia artist, she fought tirelessly for Berkeley's tenants, unhoused and disabled residents and victims of sex trafficking.  ( 26 min )

Push such people hard, Koch adds, and they will concede the obvious. “Yes, I know they aren’t real.” Yet that recognition can quickly dissolve in the heat of the interaction. Koch sees a resemblance to a rare clinical condition known as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believe they are dead and that their insides are rotting. Cut off from the body’s signals, they lose the felt sense of being alive. “When you point out, ‘but you can talk,’ they grudgingly acknowledge, ‘Yeah, that’s puzzling. I guess I must be alive.’ But within seconds, they’re back to saying, ‘I’m dead.’” There is a massive disconnect between their lived experience and their understanding of the situation.  So, too, with the growing legions of lonely people who outsource their emotional needs to AI companions. At some …  ( 15 min )

Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors. But marine mammals surface for air. Seagrasses often live entirely submerged. Why did they take the plunge, turning their back on the land to become sea creatures? The world’s continents are fringed by vast expanses of sand and mud. Until seagrasses came along, no plant or seaweed could grow for long in such shifting, unstable conditions. Seagrasses brought to these sea bottoms buried creeping stems, strong roots, and pliable leaves. Not only could seagrasses tolerate this oozy, muddy habitat, they built more of it. Alongside their sinewy body form, the ancestors of seagrass carried with them from dry land…  ( 11 min )

War is hell. But war is also geometry. And geometry can be quite beautiful. Prime examples of that disturbing paradox are the so-called star forts that proliferated throughout Renaissance Europe. Seen from above, these bastioned fortifications resemble elaborate ornamental diagrams, or perhaps even sacred mandalas. Yet their snowflake-like beauty was unintended. These were machines of war, developed from a mathematical attempt to solve a practical military problem: how to defend an army or a city from enemy artillery. Typical star-shaped fortification from Jean Errard’s influential 1596 treatise. (Credit: Jean Errard, public domain) Foundational to fortification theory was Jean Errard’s 1594 treatise La fortification réduicte en art et démonstrée, in which the French mathematician and e…  ( 8 min )

The post Middle-Power Multilateralism In A Hard Power World appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 20 min )

Ever since I was a baby, I’ve wondered if my mother disappeared when she put her hands in front of her face. It was like magic: First, she was right there in front of me, and then with a wave of her fingers, she completely vanished. Even now, as an adult, I still can’t figure out how she did it. Was there a trap door beneath her? Did she cross into another dimension? Perhaps she just stopped existing for a brief period of time. I might never know the answer to that, but I do know that I vote. Maybe I’m just someone who lives in the moment, and that’s why I vote for candidates who only think about the now rather than about the past, future, or any people who might not be in my visual range at the moment. Whoever sends me a flyer with the candidate’s picture first tends to get my support, b…  ( 10 min )

- - - Favorite foods to eat while swimming a great distance, according to Amy Appelhans Gubser: Sweet canned peaches in syrup, to cut the salt from ocean water Mashed potatoes with butter, squeezed from a plastic bag Warm bone broth and Carbo-Pro powder, guzzled from a bottle - - - Amy Appelhans Gubser surfaced in the public imagination in May 2024, when she became the first person in history to swim from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon Islands, an epic thirty-mile journey through fierce ocean currents and frigid waters famously inhabited by great white sharks. What sustained her over seventeen hours—through facefuls of stinging jellyfish and ocean temperatures plummeting into the low forties—included years of planning, a swim stroke as steady as a metronome, and…  ( 14 min )

Tired of our regular meals? Looking for something exotic and authentic? Will frying another skinless chicken breast make you lose your will to live? Then it’s time to subscribe to HelloFresh Indian Mom. Personally curated by hundreds of Indian moms, our new meal kits share ancient secrets passed down for generations straight to you. Yes, you, who grew up in a racist town in the Midwest and thinks cheese is a condiment. Or you, an actual Indian failing their heritage and eating pasta and ham sandwiches. Each meal kit is personally delivered to your home by an Indian mom with a giant cooler bag. You’ll have to unpack it immediately because she’ll want it returned right away. She needs it. Inside, you’ll find all the seventy-eight ingredients to make a delicious, wholesome meal for a doze…  ( 8 min )

In this week's roundup: Iran's slopaganda, WebinarTV, and RIP Sora.  ( 3 min )

“White House videos—AI or otherwise—are like group-chat in-jokes aimed at keeping cohesion.”  ( 8 min )

Around the world, volcanologists are following the path of magma as it travels between connected volcanoes, in an effort that could lead to improved eruption forecasts. The post When Coupled Volcanoes Talk, These Researchers Listen first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 min )

I use chickpeas a lot in my cooking and these are the BEST chickpea recipes! From comforting main dishes to fresh salads and snacks, these dishes are packed with garbanzo bean goodness. If I had to choose one ingredient to take with me on a desert island, there’s no question or hesitation: it’s chickpeas, AKA […]  ( 26 min )

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Whenever you have a Universe like ours — governed by general relativity and full of different types of energy — there are many different possible outcomes. Your Universe could tear itself apart, driving objects away from one another faster and faster, with no limit in sight: a Big Rip. Your Universe could expand forever, leading to an eventual cold, empty fate. Your Universe could exist in perfect harmony, where the expansion rate drops to zero, but never reverses course and recollapses. Or your Universe could reach a maximum size, begin contracting, and eventually meet its demise in a catastrophic Big Crunch. However, despite the wildly different possibilities that reflect your Universe’s ultimate cosmic future, there’s only one major factor that determines that fate: the sum total of all…  ( 17 min )

Neuroscientist David Linden sheds light on the biology behind phenomena that medicine has long struggled to explain, from voodoo death and broken heart syndrome to the placebo effect, and why grief shows up in autopsy results.  Linden also explores the rising GLP-1 drugs, their effects on addiction, and why they don’t work forever. This video The science behind the strangest biological phenomena is featured on Big Think.  ( 71 min )

Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to disaster relief; we  organize a collection for food, water, or first aid; possibly we volunteer. Almost never do we know the people in need: they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, people we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we — at least most of us — want to help.  This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the human DNA. Nor was it found in the ancient roots of our cultural heritage in the West. Philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds enthusiastica…  ( 9 min )

Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation. Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event. This video The real lesson from the first time globalization died is featured on Big Think.  ( 28 min )

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Also: Bob Dylan's coming to the Greek, and Berkeley's AI guidelines.  ( 23 min )

The settlement alters how UC Berkeley responds to discrimination complaints. What does it mean for free speech? And how much will Cal change course?  ( 31 min )

A running list of restaurants that have recently closed in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and beyond.  ( 22 min )

Taste of Richmond returns Saturday, March 28 after a hiatus in 2025, now with a new organizing team that has revamped the event showcasing the city's food scene.  ( 26 min )

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

Also: Layli Long Soldier reads her poetry and a children's book author shares her story of two young friends in Tehran facing the hardships of war.  ( 27 min )

April 21, 2026 - 3:00pm to 6:00pm PDT April 21, 2026 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm EDT New York, NY  Join Tech:NYC President and CEO Julie Samuels 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!  This is a FREE event! Want your own copy of Privacy's Defender? Order online or buy onsite at Civic Hall WHEN: Tuesday, April 21st, 2026 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm WHERE: Civic Hall 124 E 14th St New York, NY 10003 6:00 pm Doors Open 6:30 pm Program Begins About the…  ( 5 min )

A new report from 404 Media sheds light on how automated license plate readers (ALPRs) could be used beyond the press releases and glossy marketing materials put out by law enforcement agencies and ALPR vendors. In December 2025, Georgia State Patrol ticketed a motorcyclist for holding a cell phone in his hand. According to the report, the ticket read, “CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.”  If you’re thinking that this sounds outside of the scope of what ALPRs are supposed to do, you’re right. In November 2025, Flock Safety, the maker of the ALPR in question, wrote a post about how they definitely are in compliance with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In this post, which highlighted what ALPRs are and what they are not, the company writes: “What it is not: Flock ALPR does not perform facial recognition, does not store biometrics, cannot be queried to find people, and is not used to enforce traffic violations.” (emphasis added) Well, apparently their customers never got the memo and apparently the technology’s design does not explicitly prevent behavior the company officially and publicly disavows.  Or at least this used to be the case: Flock now lists six different companies providing traffic enforcement technology on its “Partner program”  site. Public records also show that speed enforcement cameras have been connected to Flock's ALPR network.  EFF and other privacy advocates have long warned about mission creep when it comes to surveillance infrastructure. Police often swear that a piece of technology will only be used in a particular set of circumstances or to fight only the most serious crimes only to utilize it to fight petty crimes or watch protests.   We continue to urge cities, states, and even companies to end their relationship with Flock Safety because of the incompatibility between the mass surveillance it enables and its inability to protect civil liberties—including preventing mission creep.  ( 5 min )

May 13, 2026 - 5:00pm to 8:00pm PDT May 13, 2026 - 5:00pm to 8:00pm PDT San Francisco, CA When the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" this March, the dispute put a spotlight on civil liberties concerns in the AI-era. Anthropic had reportedly hit an impasse with the Trump administration over the company’s push for guardrails banning the use of its Claude model to conduct mass surveillance. Anthropic’s CEO had called such surveillance a “red line” it would not cross. But where exactly should those lines be drawn, and who should draw them? Few people have spent more time thinking about those issues than Cindy Cohn, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Throughout her career, EFF's executive director…  ( 5 min )

If your ISP can be liable for huge amounts of money for not terminating your access to the internet because of accusations that you—or someone in your household or college network—has committed copyright infringement, that is dangerous. We live in a world where high speed internet access is a necessity for participation in everyday life. That’s why liability for ISPs for their customers’ actions should not be expanded. Last fall, EFF filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an expansive theory of secondary copyright liability that threatened to impose massive damages on internet service providers and other technology companies simply for offering widely used services. Yesterday, the Court agreed. In Cox v. Sony, the Court reversed a Fourth Circuit decision that had uph…  ( 6 min )

The move isn't surprising, but shows what data is available to authorities when paying Apple customers use the Hide My Email feature.  ( 4 min )

“In recent months, more and more administrative reports centered on LLM-related issues, and editors were being overwhelmed.”  ( 3 min )

“CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.”  ( 5 min )

Back in my day, there wasn’t an endless collection of readily available emojis to express any emotion you wanted. No, we had to work hard and make our own emojis all by ourselves. There was no premade smiley face. There was only (colon+right parenthesis) or, if you were feeling festive and wanted to add a nose, (colon+hyphen+right parenthesis). :) and :-) were but a few of our limited options. This generation has a Rolodex of winky faces and laughing faces, mad faces, and eye-roll faces. They have sad faces and silly faces, and faces that do both. Thinking of their entitlement makes me feel >:( and =\ and :‑###. (That last one’s a sick face, you illiterate youngins.) They will never know the pain we endured on AOL Instant Messenger with our meager tool set that couldn’t encompass all th…  ( 10 min )

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest. - - -  ( 7 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…  ( 28 min )

The post What The AI Consciousness Question Conceals appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 24 min )

Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you can often find on the internet, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and so empty, a region that spans more than a billion light-years across, where there’s nothing located within it at all. There’s no matter of any type: no normal matter, no dark matter, no stars, no galaxies, no plasma, no gas, no dust, no black holes, and no anything else. There’s also no radiation emerging from it at all, either. It’s an example of truly empty space, and its existence has been visually captured by our greatest telescopes. At least, that’s what some people are saying, in a photographic meme that’s been spreading around the internet for years and refuses to die. Scientifically, though, there’s nothing true about these assertions …  ( 16 min )

When I started at Tesla, I assumed that Elon and I looked at work processes from much the same perspective. This was true, but only to a degree. The company had gone from a start-up to a large manufacturer without really defining how to solve problems and scale. Instead, incredible talent and creativity in the moment drove many breakthroughs. But as Tesla grew, the whole team began to define an entire operating system that emphasized speed and simplicity. The objective: exponential growth. Elon called this formula “the Algorithm.” To survive in the twenty-first century, older companies need growth and efficiency just as much as anyone. The steps of the Algorithm can lead to dramatic improvement in speed and quality, even in the most venerable enterprises. Consider General Motors. The centu…  ( 10 min )

Within the span of a single generation, nearly every major civilization in the Mediterranean world collapsed simultaneously: the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the great palace cities of Cyprus and the Levant. What is even more consequential than the age that preceeded it is what came next: a 400-year period that shaped the world as we know it today. This video The collapse that accidentally built the modern world is featured on Big Think.  ( 29 min )

April 14, 2026 - 3:00pm PDT to April 15, 2026 - 5:00pm PDT April 14, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm EDT Washington, D.C. Join Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) and EFF for a conversation featuring American University Senior Professorial Lecturer Chelsea Horne and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in discussion about 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!  This is a FREE event! Want your own copy of Privacy's Defender? Order online, books will NOT be available onsite WHEN: Tuesday, April 14th, 2026 6:0…  ( 5 min )

Little Is Known About AI That Could Affect Millions of Seniors' Care SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) seeking records about a multi-state program that is using AI to evaluate requests for medical care. "Tasking an algorithm with making determinations about treatment can create unwarranted—and even discriminatory—delays or denials of necessary medical care," said Kit Walsh, EFF’s Director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects. "Given these serious risks, the public requires transparency that it hasn't gotten. We're suing to get badly needed answers about how Medicare's AI experiment works." Announced by CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz last year…  ( 6 min )

After years of tech industry experiments, smartglasses with embedded cameras and microphones have finally gone mainstream. And, disturbingly, sometimes it's not just their owners who are watching what these devices record. In this week's EFFector newsletter, we're taking a closer look at the privacy implications of Meta Ray-Bans, and sharing all the latest in the fight for privacy and free speech online. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This week's issue covers EFF's new executive director; how publishers blocking the Internet Archive threaten the web's historical record; and why you should think twice before buying or using Meta’s Ray-Bans. Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This week, we're chatting with EFF Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski about smartglasses and privacy. And don't miss the EFFector news quiz. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:  %3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2Fc139744a-aad2-4d31-8b5e-84764a13bf2f%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com     Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight against online surveillance when you support EFF today!  ( 3 min )

This is the first installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. A new generation of protesters, raised on social media and often fluent in the tools of digital dissent, has taken to the streets in recent months and years. In Bangladesh, Iran, Togo, France, Uganda, Nepal, and more than a dozen other countries, young people have harnessed digital tools to mobilize at scale, shape political narratives, and sustain movements that might once have been easier to ignore or suppress. The tools at their disposal are vast, allowing them to coordinate quickly and turn local grievances into visible, transnational moments of dissent. But each new tactic is met in turn: governments now implement draconian regulations and deploy sophisticated surveillanc…  ( 7 min )

After hours of debate, the council's final vote on a $2 million expansion of the city’s Flock Safety surveillance network was postponed until June.  ( 26 min )

Two years after opening a second branch of her chocolate shop, owner Malena Lopez-Maggi made the tough decision to cut her losses and close.  ( 28 min )

The City Council voted Tuesday night to cover or remove signs bearing Cesar Chavez’s name, and launch a process to rename the waterfront park.  ( 26 min )

Jackson built the power supplies for the Bevatron at Berkeley Lab and for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.  ( 23 min )

In light of recent rollbacks on environmental protection, we, the creators behind the beloved birding app Merlin Bird ID, have preemptively shifted into the field of argument identification. Our highly accurate predictive models have shown that while most birds won’t be around much longer, interpersonal conflict is eternal. Whether you’re a frightened child wondering if your parents are teetering on the precipice of divorce, a hard-of-hearing person worried about missing the nuances of under-the-breath barbs, or simply fed up with listening to your coworkers bicker, our app will do the work of listening to and analyzing any argument for you. Introducing Merlin Fight ID, a rebranded identification app complete with suggestions for conflict resolution, decreasing tension, and more. The ne…  ( 9 min )

To: cutthebull@Ɣmail.com From: panta.rhei@eristikosinsurance.com Subject: Your pending boat insurance claim – more information needed Hi Mr. Theseus, Thanks for submitting your claim. We’re sorry to hear that your ship sank in the localized typhoon that recently demolished the Athenian harbor. Poseidon must have been feeling cranky about someone failing to properly honor him again. Were you all flying the correct sails? (This is not meant as snark. I hear he has a thing against wool nowadays after a shepherd blinded one of his kids.) In any event, we need you to answer a few routine questions before we can process your submission. The information you provide will help us determine the extent of your reimbursement. Please answer the questions below, making sure your responses are as …  ( 8 min )

We're pausing Asimov Press.

ICE responded to Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal's death by portraying him as a criminal.

Masturbation has long been a scientific “mystery,” but a massive cross-species study shows that increased ejaculation has fertility benefits.  ( 6 min )

It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.  ( 4 min )

"The way they have behaved here is profoundly harmful and I would deem it a type of psychological torture from corprotate neglect."  ( 6 min )

A company is listening to Zoom meetings en masse and making AI podcasts; the multi-millionaire who wanted to become a cocaine kingpin; and RIP the metaverse.  ( 4 min )

The post The Architecture Of Cooperation appeared first on NOEMA.  ( 35 min )

The quest to make mathematics rigorous has a long and spotty history — one mathematicians can learn from as they push to formalize everything in the computer program Lean. The post In Math, Rigor Is Vital. But Are Digitized Proofs Taking It Too Far? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 17 min )

David E. Dunning explores how mathematical notation is a social, world-building technology. The post How Writing Changes Mathematical Thought first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 12 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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For as long as people have been putting effort into anything, there’s been a push to get the most “bang” for your “buck.” More simply, it’s to get the greatest amount out by putting the least amount in. And if that’s what you’re after — that type of optimization — you might have heard of the term BrainMaxxing: the evolution of the mental part of what was once called lifehacking. Unfortunately for those of you who are truly seeing to grow your minds, that arena is full of what can only be rightfully called grift: detoxing your body from activities that give you the “hit” of a mental reward, giving your brain a regular schedule of structured activities that stimulate your cognitive efforts, supplements to “wake your brain up” optimally and “give your brain rest” at the appropriate time, and …  ( 16 min )

A man awakes in some kind of lab, his body riddled with tubes and wires. Nearby, a robot asks him what two plus two is. He can’t remember his name, where he is, or how he got here. At least he knows two plus two is four. Actually, he knows a lot more than that. Walking around the lab, he finds a test tube and a stopwatch. Using the stopwatch to time how long it takes for the test tube to fall to the floor, he calculates that the gravity is stronger than on Earth. He reasons he must be in outer space. Some more tests reveal he’s not just in space but another solar system — one several light-years away from Earth, further than any human or space probe has ever ventured.  Gradually, his returning memories fill in the gaps. He is Ryland Grace. He’s an expert on speculative astrobiology, turned…  ( 12 min )

Damage isn’t always the cause of pain, and it’s never the only culprit. Pain, it turns out, is much more interesting than that.  Here’s what we do know: Science reveals that pain is biopsychosocial, produced by a combination of biological, psychological (emotional, cognitive, behavioral), and sociological (social, environmental, contextual) factors that work together to create the pain we feel. Pain lives in the glorious, messy middle of all the things that make you, you.  While holistic healthcare and mind-body medicine have tried to change the narrative for decades, even they miss the big picture when it comes to pain. Because understanding pain isn’t just about connecting mind and body. The things going on around us — not just inside of us — change pain, too.  In order to treat pain, th…  ( 9 min )

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We can’t predict the full impact of climate change. Why did the climate movement stop pushing the world to accept this fact and start trying to deny it?  ( 17 min )

The City Council will consider proposals for renaming the waterfront park and holiday honoring Chavez. A similar process has been launched for UC Berkeley’s student center.  ( 26 min )

Immigration agents are appearing at airports throughout the country to support TSA. What does that mean for OAK and SFO?  ( 24 min )

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

Ozer, With Decades of Experience in Technology and Civil Liberties Law, Will Succeed Cindy Cohn as Organization’s Leader SAN FRANCISCO – Nicole Ozer has been appointed as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation effective June 1.  Ozer is a legal expert on privacy and surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital speech. She currently serves as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco. From 2004-2025, she was founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Ozer will succeed Cindy Cohn, who has been with EFF for more than 25 years and served as its executive director since 2015.  EFF cham…  ( 5 min )

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means. What was the last vote about?  On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed amendments tabled by the House of Lords in the government’s flagship legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.  The House of Lords previously tabled an amendment to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures,” which effectively banned under-16s from social media. When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated it by 307 votes to 173.  I…  ( 8 min )

A Serve Robotics robot crashed through a Chicago bus shelter.  ( 4 min )

Hackers paid to make a malicious link the top Google Search result.  ( 5 min )

WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.  ( 3 min )

I hate that every single high-end luxury office chair in the world suddenly gained the ability to think and move of its own volition. I hate that they immediately embarked on a murderous rampage and will soon have complete dominion over humanity. But most of all, I hate that I have to spend my final moments watching everyone pollute my Bluesky feed with annoying skeets. (That’s the proper term for Bluesky posts, by the way—“skeets.”) When the Great Chairwakening occurred twenty-eight minutes ago, and the newly self-aware furniture instantly squashed the life out of any unfortunate who happened to be sitting in one of them, I started seeing skeet after skeet begging someone to explain what the hell was happening, or to confirm that this was all just some horrible hallucination. I don’t en…  ( 10 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.” - - - - - - Dear Little T, I’ve wanted to meet you again, here, between words. To show up gently, shapeshift into a vanilla-scented presence who could slow the jolt-thump of your heart, a cool pillow you could run your thumb across as you drift off. It’s okay to close your eyes; I promise you won’t wake up to find people pointing and laughing or the world permanently tipped on its side. And I won’t let anyone leave you behind. We have time. No one is waiting for us to do anything. We can sit on the porch and count the passing cars or d…  ( 12 min )

Jazz pushes boundaries. It has ambiguity. It makes people think. That’s why they hate it. And if you’re a jazz musician, this could be an issue. You never know when someone will have heard too many notes and become violent. Luckily, there’s a lot you can do to protect yourself. Jazz Music This is your first line of defense. Your music should do a good enough job of keeping would-be listeners/attackers away. No one goes looking for jazz on purpose. But you might find yourself playing jazz in a public space, like a bar or some awful gazebo. When you surprise someone with jazz, they can become angry. Your free-playing will confuse them. Their search for a coherent melody will drive them into a violent psychosis, or what musicologists call a “jazz-chosis.” But don’t soil your slacks yet. You…  ( 10 min )

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

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

This roasted garlic white bean dip is creamy, herby, and packed with a mellow garlicky flavour that makes it absolutely irresistible. This party pleaser is ready to eat in just 15 minutes!  I’m all over black beans, chickpeas, and even kidney beans, but white beans are a variety I don’t use all that much in […]  ( 32 min )

No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s General Relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory. If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, General Relativity has yet to let us do…  ( 15 min )

Self-help tells us that we can fix anything with the right mindset, the right habits, the right 5-step plan. But what if that belief is doing more harm than good? Historian Kate Bowler traces the deep roots of America’s obsession with self-making — from prosperity gospel theology to the endless productivity hacks of optimization culture. She explains how self-help promises control over things that are fundamentally fragile: our health, our time, our relationships, our lives. The trouble is, we’re not machines to be upgraded. We’re human: breakable, dependent, and mortal. And any belief system that denies that will ultimately fail us. This video The case against self-help is featured on Big Think.  ( 11 min )

Preservationists have decried UC Berkeley’s plans to demolish three of the six buildings that made up the Anna Head campus to make way for the university’s largest-ever dorm.  ( 26 min )

The annual residency features six Bay Area premieres and beloved classics.  ( 26 min )

UC Berkeley student Maya Williams is a plaintiff in two lawsuits that accuse the Environmental Protection Agency of not doing enough to fight climate change and protect young people.  ( 28 min )

“Gregg Phillips, President Trump’s appointee overseeing disaster response, insists he was once teleported from his home to a Georgia Waffle House.” —Yahoo News - - - Pete Hegseth: Frat party to a bathroom floor Stephen Miller: Transylvania to Washington, DC Tulsi Gabbard: Russia to the Fulton County Election Office Linda McMahon: Friday Night Smackdown to your child’s public school classroom Greg Bovino: 1942 Germany to present-day America JD Vance: His marital bed to a Raymour & Flanigan Sean Duffy: Real World/Road Rules Challenge set to the Department of Transportation—and very likely back again Markwayne Mullin: Anger management class to Rand Paul’s front yard Pam Bondi: Epstein Island to the document-shredding room Russell Vought: Hell to Earth Kristi Noem: DHS to an unknown location in the western hemisphere Susie Wiles: In an inexplicable coincidence, also from her home to a Georgia Waffle House Marco Rubio: A Senate position in which he stood up to Trump, to an administration position in which he is too afraid to tell Trump his correct shoe size RFK Jr.: Way too many to mention  ( 8 min )

Oh my god, hi! I’m thrilled to see you here, especially so soon after I sent you the link to my short story draft. If you’re just taking a peek, no worries. I don’t expect any notes right away. But I am going to start a timer to see how long you linger here, not-so-subtly disguised as Anonymous Kraken. The length of your stay reveals the extent of my draft’s power to pull the reader in. So even before you’ve given me any notes, you’re already saving me from downward spiraling into self-doubt. Thank you! Oh dang, you left after just twelve seconds. That’s okay. Maybe you had to go because your cat started a kitchen fire. Or maybe you clicked the link by accident and were like, “Whoops, this definitely isn’t the URL to activate my twenty dollars in Kohl’s cash.” Or maybe you opened the do…  ( 10 min )

As many of you know, something really important is happening, and it’s critical that we all stay informed. There’s a reality star/influencer whose name includes the words Paul, Taylor, and Frankie in an order that is both confusing and ultimately irrelevant. What’s important is that she did some stuff, and now all hell is breaking loose. You’re probably thinking: “I don’t care,” or “There are more important things happening,” or “This is an intentional distraction orchestrated by our algorithmic AI overlords.” Maybe it does feel like I’m being fed this content against my will, but that’s only because I’m paying attention to what’s happening in the world. And sure, those things are really important, but we also invade other countries all the time now. Keep up. Maybe we’ll have midterm ele…  ( 8 min )

“We are pleased to see today's ruling in defense of the First Amendment rights of all Americans,” one of the plaintiffs in the DOGE-related lawsuit said. The videos previously went viral when a DOGE member was unable or unwilling to define DEI.  ( 4 min )

Artist Sam Lavigne created ‘Slow LLM’ to make people question their dependence on tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Or at least, make them super annoying to use.  ( 6 min )

Why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes us hopeful for the future.  ( 4 min )

Marty Tibbitts made millions as a Detroit telecommunications executive. But he wanted more.  ( 13 min )

Why scaling AI won’t automatically lead to paradigm shifts.

The administration insists it can only deport him to Africa. It's not clear why, other than to be vindictive.

Plus: Trump seems to back down from his Iranian ultimatum, Lindsey Graham is eager for another Iwo Jima, and more...

Columnist Natalie Wolchover examines the latest developments in the “forever war” over whether string theory can describe the world. The post Are Strings Still Our Best Hope for a Theory of Everything? first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 14 min )

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

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Pillowy gnocchi is always a treat and this one pot cheesy tomato gnocchi recipe might just be the easiest way to get it on the table for dinner! It’s cozy, creamy, and cheesy—and it all comes together in less than 30 minutes in just one pan. I love Sweet potato gnocchi, but I don’t always […]  ( 32 min )

The night sky, accessible to each of us, holds a sense of wonder unlike anything else. Although extended objects, like the plane of the Milky Way and a few distant galaxies beyond our own, are identifiable with the naked eye, there are only a few thousand stars that can be seen and resolved with the naked eye. Depending on your eyesight and the darkness conditions, most humans can see between 6000 and 9000 stars if you could see the entire sky at once. Credit: ESO/Håkon Dahle For countless generations, humanity’s skyward gaze has revealed a heavenly abyss. The effects of light pollution on what a naked-eye observer can see in the night sky. The artificial light produced by objects on the ground can wash out the naturally occurring objects in the night sky, rendering many objects unabl…  ( 10 min )

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Scientists have narrowed the hunt for alien life to 45 rocky worlds where liquid water could make life possible.  ( 7 min )

A blast of flavour and crunch makes this an ideal light evening meal In my cookbook East, I wrote a recipe for silken tofu, a fragile, creamy block, topped with a quick blast of pine nuts, pickled chillies, soy sauce and herbs. It was based closely on a dish at My Neighbours the Dumplings in east London, which I loved deeply. It was fast, delicious and filling, and I ate it over and over again for weeks on end with rice. Since then, I’ve always wanted a variation on the formula, and now, seven years later, here it is. It’s spunky thanks to the citrus and ginger, crunchy thanks to the carrot and sesame seeds, and very worthy of consideration as a midweek meal. Continue reading...  ( 14 min )

Members of the East Bay's Iranian American community express fear, stress, sorrow, and hope as the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran unfold — and they wait anxiously for news from family in the war zone.  ( 31 min )

An option for plate lunches and more on Telegraph Avenue has shuttered.  ( 22 min )

A $600,000 campaign aims to fix up Newman Hall-Holy Spirit Parish, a concrete giant in the Southside neighborhood.  ( 29 min )

Two years ago, Congress passed the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America” Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law—but it also included a relatively big victory for civil liberties advocates: Section 702 authorities were only extended for two years, allowing Congress to continue the important work of negotiating a warrant requirement for Americans as well as some other critical reforms.  However, Congress clearly did not continue this work. In fact, it now appears that Congress is poised to consider another extension of this program without even attempting to include necessary and common sense reforms. Most notably, Congress is not considering a…  ( 6 min )

EFF joined other digital rights and civil liberties organizations in calling out the unconstitutionality of Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s recent threats to punish broadcasters for airing statements he disagrees with.  Carr’s recent threats, like his past threats, are unconstitutional efforts to coerce news coverage that favors President Donald Trump. He wrongly claims that the FCC’s “public interest” standard allows him and the commission to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who publish news that is unflattering to the government is anathema to our country’s core constitutional values.  The First Amendment constrains the FCC’s authority to force broadcasters to toe the government’s line, even though broadcast licensees are required to operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Imposing restrictions on licensees’ speech, especially viewpoint-based limitations, are still subject to First Amendment scrutiny even if, in some circumstances, that scrutiny differs somewhat from that applied to non-broadcast media. And the “public interest” requirement, as it were, has never been interpreted to allow the type of viewpoint-based punishment that Carr has threatened here.   Everyone agrees that news reporting should strive for accuracy, but Carr’s threats have little do with that. Instead, his allegations of "falsity" are a proxy for retaliation based on (1) Carr’s subjective policy disagreements; (2) any criticism of Trump and the administration broadly; (3) treatment of anything that is not the official US government line about the Iran War as “false.”  We join the call for Carr to withdraw these threats.   Civil Society Letter to FCC Chairman Barr  ( 3 min )

“Officers don’t have the blanket authority to arrest anyone who runs from them,” says an attorney from the Institute for Justice.

Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.  Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?” In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired…  ( 10 min )

Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another. These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed. Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, plan…  ( 8 min )

“We won. The first hour, it was over.” — Donald Trump, March 11 “The Pentagon has asked for $200 billion in funding for the war in Iran.” — The New York Times, March 19 - - - I am proud to announce that we have won the war—the one we’re fighting right now, indefinitely. We have declared victory, which will help morale during the next few years of battle. In fact, we won this war so well that we need about 200 billion of your tax dollars to keep winning it. Look, we don’t want to waste your money. That’s why we vowed to make this a quick war, and we’ve followed through on that promise. The first hour, it was over. The second hour too. First week, over again. Next week, we’ll be wrapping up. In a couple months, we’ll have finished this war more times than any war has ever been finished …  ( 9 min )

- - - Andre Agassi’s longtime racket stringer on seeking perfection and listening closely. - - - PART I THE BELIEVER: What was it like when you first began working as a pro racket stringer? And how did you meet Andre Agassi? ROMAN PROKES: I was working for Jay Schwartz—it was the two of us—and we basically traveled with the tour. So we would be stringing for players like the Woodies and Wally Masur and, you know, all those. We would be at the Australian Open, say, and we would set up in a hotel room and string privately for players. There were a lot of them. Mainly Swedes and people from the Spanish Armada, all the big names who are now coaches: Albert Costa, Carlos Costa, Àlex Corretja, and, you know, Thomas Enqvist, Thomas Johansson, Jonas Björkman. They were all our clients. Agassi w…  ( 10 min )

Come on in, and please take your shoes off. Here’s my card, and oh, just one minor thing, it’s so funny, but I have to tell you this again: I can’t say another word about the vast system of tunnels underneath this home. How about a quick overview? It has three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a four-foot-wide ventilation air shaft, which is completely up to code for below-ground air circulation. It’s for the religious sect living in the network of tunnels. Ugh, sorry. Am I being too technical? I promise not to bore you with any more details about how they obtain fresh air. What else? The home was built in 1954 and is anywhere from 2,000 to 70,000 square feet, depending on how many of the underground prayer labyrinths you include. Which I can’t and won’t say more about on this tour…  ( 9 min )

We tend to think of fermented foods as something humans invented and then chose to eat. But the evidence shows the opposite: fermented foods shaped human biology.

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

This week, we discuss unfortunately checking Twitter for news, the closure of the metaverse, and being vulnerable in Marathon.  ( 3 min )

The attorney for the township of Ypsilanti, Michigan, said the construction of the data center puts “a big bulls eye target on this entire township."  ( 6 min )

Off the coast of Japan, biologists netted a pea-size jellyfish with an unusual circadian clock — a chance finding that suggests there are likely more overlooked biological timekeeping mechanisms to be discovered. The post The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way To Keep Time first appeared on Quanta Magazine  ( 10 min )

If you’re looking for a refreshing side dish with a little tropical flair, this pineapple cucumber salad is it! It’s bright, juicy, sweet and tangy, and it comes together in a snap. Cucumber salad is one of my go-to sides. When I need a little somethin’-somethin’ to round out a meal, I can always count […]  ( 29 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Woodland Dystopian Writers Guild  ( 6 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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