Being able to run quickly is not necessarily a benefit for lizards, research shows. CC-licensed photo by B on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Vamos! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Fake pitches flood newsrooms as AI tools proliferate • Media Copilot
Christopher Allbritton:
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“Margaux Blanchard” never existed. Yet this fictional freelance journalist successfully placed articles in Wired, Business Insider, and four other publications before Press Gazette exposed the elaborate hoax in August.
Press Gazette’s investigation found that “Blanchard’s” profile photos appeared AI-generated, showing different women across various platforms. When confronted, a newly created X account claiming to represent Blanchard sent messages that AI detection tool Pangram identified as 99% artificially generated. Wired and Business Insider have both pulled multiple “Blanchard” pieces from their sites.
Blanchard is allegedly Tim Boucher, a Quebec-based web policy expert using the pseudonym Andrew Frelon. In a post on Medium, he claimed he committed the Blanchard fraud to give a “major media client” “actionable data” on whether a “fully autonomous AI system” could create credible news stories for top-tier outlets. He said he set up an AI system to identify or create trends and draft and send pitches with minimal intervention.
Boucher previously made headlines for creating a fake X account representing AI-generated band Velvet Sundown, successfully deceiving Rolling Stone into publishing an interview.
“I want to be able to show people a bit of what that’s like — this feeling of having to determine what’s real,” Boucher told CBC News at the time.
The ability of Boucher, if he is behind the hoax, to fool editors at top-tier publications reveals troubling vulnerabilities in editorial verification processes as AI tools make it easier to create convincing fake identities and content. City AM Magazine editor Steve Dinneen recently uncovered another AI fraud involving a US-based writer called Joseph Wales, who turned out to be Wilson Kaharua operating from Nairobi.
Kaharua told Dinneen he used AI tool Deepseek to generate pitches and paid for services alerting him to editorial callouts. He created fake identification documents and used cryptocurrency payments to maintain his false identity.
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There’s been a lot of speculation about the Velvet Sundown creator. This would tie up a loose ends if it is Boucher.
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The doctors are real, but the sales pitches are frauds • The New York Times
Steven Lee Myers, Alice Callahan and Teddy Rosenbluth:
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Dr. Robert H. Lustig is an endocrinologist, a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, and an author of best-selling books on obesity.
He is absolutely not — despite what you might see and hear on Facebook — hawking “liquid pearls” with dubious claims about weight loss. “No injections, no surgery, just results,” he appears to say in one post.
Instead, someone has used artificial intelligence to make a video that imitates him and his voice — all without his knowledge, let alone consent.
The posts are part of a global surge of frauds hijacking the online personas of prominent medical professionals to sell unproven health products or simply to swindle gullible customers, according to the doctors, government officials and researchers who have tracked the problem.
While health care has long attracted quackery, A.I. tools developed by Big Tech are enabling the people behind these impersonations to reach millions online — and to profit from them. The result is seeding disinformation, undermining trust in the profession and potentially endangering patients.
Even if the products are not dangerous, selling useless supplements can raise false hopes among people who should be getting the medical treatment they need.
“There are so many things wrong with this,” Dr. Lustig — the real one — said in an interview when contacted about the impersonations. The interview was the first time he had learned about them.
The Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies, as well as advocacy groups and private watchdogs, have stepped up warnings about counterfeit or fraudulent health products online, but they appear to have done little to stem the tide.
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In the health and wellness – and especially vaccine – space, it becomes more important for information to be reliable. And that’s being taken away. Would criminal sanctions for scams like this make a difference?
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Using AI to perceive the universe in greater depth • Google DeepMind
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Our novel Deep Loop Shaping method improves control of gravitational wave observatories, helping astronomers better understand the dynamics and formation of the universe.
To help astronomers study the universe’s most powerful processes, our teams have been using AI to stabilize one of the most sensitive observation instruments ever built.
In a paper published today in Science, we introduce Deep Loop Shaping, a novel AI method that will unlock next-generation gravitational-wave science. Deep Loop Shaping reduces noise and improves control in an observatory’s feedback system, helping stabilize components used for measuring gravitational waves — the tiny ripples in the fabric of space and time.
These waves are generated by events like neutron star collisions and black hole mergers. Our method will help astronomers gather data critical to understanding the dynamics and formation of the universe, and better test fundamental theories of physics and cosmology.
We developed Deep Loop Shaping in collaboration with LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) operated by Caltech, and GSSI (Gran Sasso Science Institute), and proved our method at the observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.
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They say “AI” but the actual paper talks about “a reinforcement learning method”, which a few years ago they would happily have called “machine learning”. That’s a much more reliable form of AI; this is where machine learning has the potential to make a huge difference.
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National Grid connects UK’s largest battery storage facility at Tilbury substation • National Grid
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National Grid has connected the UK’s largest battery energy storage system (BESS) to its transmission network at Tilbury substation in Essex.
The 300MW Thurrock Storage project, developed by Statera Energy, is now energised and delivering electricity flexibly to the network across London and the south east.
With a total capacity of 600MWh, Thurrock Storage is capable of powering up to 680,000 homes, and can help to balance supply and demand by soaking up surplus clean electricity and discharging it instantaneously when the grid needs it.
Our Tilbury substation once served a coal plant, and with battery connections like this, it’s today helping to power a more sustainable future for the region and the country.
National Grid reinforced its Tilbury substation to ensure the network in the region could safely carry the battery’s significant additional load, with new protection and control systems installed to ensure a robust connection.
The substation previously served the coal-fired Tilbury A and B power stations on adjacent land prior to their demolition, so the connection of the Thurrock Storage facility marks a symbolic transition from coal to clean electricity at the site.
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I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education • The Atlantic
Ashanty Rosario:
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AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable.
During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.
These incidents were jarring—not just because of the cheating, but because they made me realize how normalized these shortcuts have become.
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This is going to become commonplace in the next few years (perhaps the next 12 months) and I think teachers are completely unprepared for what it will do to education – and recruiters are going to be surprise by what it does to their intake.
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Faster isn’t always better: the unexpected cost of speed for lizards • Animal Ecology in Focus
Kristoffer Wild:
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Ectotherms – or cold-blooded animals such as lizards – rely on external heat sources to regulate their body temperature. Maintaining optimal temperatures is crucial because it influences their ability to digest food, grow, avoid predators, and reproduce effectively. To achieve this, lizards will move strategically between sunny spots and shady retreats – a delicate balancing act known as behavioural thermoregulation.
Our research confirmed that these dragons were masters at adjusting their behaviour according to seasonal shifts. In spring and summer, when environmental conditions made it easier to maintain optimal temperatures, lizards achieved greater thermoregulatory precision, keeping their bodies within a narrow, ideal temperature range. In winter, when it was more costly (both energetically and in terms of predation risk) to achieve optimal body temperatures, their thermoregulation became less precise.
The surprising twist came when we linked these thermoregulatory behaviours and thermal performance curves to their survival. Thermal performance curves are a way to visualise how an ectotherm’s ability to perform tasks, such as sprint speed or digestion, changes with changes in body temperature. A lizard will usually regulate its body temperature within a preferred range to optimise these tasks.
Contrary to expectations, higher locomotor performance in the field was associated with greater mortality risk. In other words, being the fastest lizard on the block wasn’t always beneficial. This effect was particularly pronounced in females, suggesting sex-specific trade-offs between performance and survival.
Why would being faster increase their chances of death? It’s possible that speedy individuals might engage in riskier behaviours – moving around more openly and frequently and thereby becoming more visible and vulnerable to predators like raptors and mammals. Interestingly, this increased risk was especially pronounced during spring, the reproductive season, when predator activity was high, and movement behaviours were more conspicuous.
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Evolution leads us up strange paths.
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Orsted sues to save offshore wind farm from Trump administration axe • CNBC
Spencer Kimball:
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The Danish renewable energy company Orsted sued the Trump administration on Thursday in a bid to restart construction on an offshore wind farm in New England that the government has blocked.
The Interior Department abruptly ordered Orsted on Aug. 22 to halt construction on Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut. The fully permitted project is 80% complete and would provide enough power for more than 350,000 homes across both states.
Orsted asked the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to set aside the stop-work order, dismissing it as arbitrary, capricious, unlawful and “issued in bad faith.” Orsted and its partner Skyborn Renewables have already invested $5bn in Revolution Wind, they said.
The Trump administration’s action puts at risk billions of dollars in future revenue from the project, the companies said. Orsted and Skyborn would also face $1bn in breakaway costs if the project is cancelled, they said.
Orsted shares hit a record low on Aug. 25 in the wake of the stop-work order.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has justified the order on national security grounds and concerns that Revolution Wind will interfere with other uses of U.S. territorial waters.
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“The wind turbines will interfere with our uses, though none to know what they shall be”
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Why more and more people are tuning the news out: “now I don’t have that anxiety” • The Guardian
Josie Harvey:
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News has never been more accessible – but for some, that’s exactly the problem. Flooded with information and relentless updates, more and more people around the world are tuning out.
The reasons vary: for some it’s the sheer volume of news, for others the emotional toll of negative headlines or a distrust of the media itself. In online forums devoted to mindfulness and mental health, people discuss how to step back, from setting limits to cutting the news out entirely.
“Now that I don’t watch the news, I just don’t have that anxiety. I don’t have dread,” said Mardette Burr, an Arizona retiree who says she stopped watching the news about eight years ago. “There were times that I’d be up at two or three o’clock in the morning upset about something that was going on in the world that I just didn’t have a lot of control over.”
She’s not alone. Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.
The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information.
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This is a totally sensible response. What can you do, seriously, about it all? If the news does make you unhappy, or anxious, or despondent, then for most people the solution is to ignore the news. (For a few, it’s to become an activist.)
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What is Blueskyism? • Silver Bulletin
Nate Silver:
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Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.
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As you can imagine, this Substack post has made Silver enormously popular on Bluesky. People always love having a mirror held up to their flaws.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 