Runners who are in tune with their body are listening to it, rather than music. Are creature comforts distracting us from too much sensory feedback? CC-licensed photo by The Development of Birmingham on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Big strides. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
We spoke to the man making Lego-style AI videos for Iran that experts say are powerful propaganda • BBC News
Matt Shea and Laurie Kalus:
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At first glance they look like they could be scenes out of a Lego movie, although more vivid and fast-paced.
But these viral AI videos inspired by the instantly recognisable Lego aesthetic feature dying children, fighter jets and US President Donald Trump – and are in fact pro-Iran propaganda.
For our new BBC podcast, Top Comment, we spoke to a representative of Explosive Media, one of the key accounts generating these clips. He wanted us to refer to him as Mr Explosive.
He’s a savvy social media operator who initially denies working for the Iranian government. In previous interviews the outlet has said it is “totally independent”. But upon further questioning, Mr Explosive admits the regime is a “customer” – something he’s never before confirmed publicly.
The overriding message of these videos is that Iran is resisting what it sees as an almighty global oppressor: the United States. The clips are garish and not subtle at all – but that hasn’t put a dent in how vigorously people are sharing and commenting on them.
In one of the videos, Donald Trump falls through a whirlwind of “Epstein file” documents as rap lyrics tell us “the secrets are leaking, the pressure is rising”. In another, George Floyd can be seen under a policeman’s boot as we hear Iran is “standing here for everyone your system ever wronged”.
“Slopaganda” – coined in an academic paper last year as a play on ‘AI slop’ – is too weak a term to capture how powerful this “highly sophisticated” content is, says leading propaganda expert Dr Emma Briant. AI-generated propaganda clips are estimated to have been viewed hundreds of millions of times over the course of the war.
In our video call with Mr Explosive, he appears silhouetted and flanked by red and green light, the colours of the Iranian flag. On his desk there’s a green-feathered helmet associated with the warrior Husayn ibn Ali, who features in several of their videos.
He says his team at Explosive Media consists of fewer than ten people who use Lego-style graphics “because it is a world language”. Iranian and Russian state media accounts on X regularly share them to millions of followers.
…Before the outbreak of the war this year, thousands of protesters were killed in a brutal crackdown by the regime. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) reports a death toll of at least 7,000 civilians. But Mr Explosive defends his team’s relationship with the government saying it was “honourable to work for the homeland”. He dismisses the recent mass protests as a “coup” funded by President Trump.
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The end of range anxiety is in sight • Heatmap News
Andrew Moseman:
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Three years ago this month, I wrote that people should buy as much EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency] range as they could afford and that 300 [miles] was the magic number. That way, the real-world range you probably care about most — how long you can drive down the interstate without stopping — is at least 200 actual miles. After three hours on the road, you might be ready for a 20 or 30-minute break to stretch your legs and recharge the battery, anyway.
The arrival of more 400-mile ranges pushes EVs even closer to parity with combustion vehicles when it comes to road trip convenience. The more miles you have to work with, the more your trips and stops are decided by your own happiness and comfort rather than by the need to wait for more juice. Remember, too, that used EVs are all the rage right now as Americans seek affordable ways to avoid paying for gasoline. An older EV’s remaining range matters a lot to its second and third owner. A car that starts with 400 miles of range might still deliver an acceptable number of miles per charge even when it has hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer.
The other thing is, battery capacity isn’t just about driving. An EV can use its stored energy for just about anything: to air-condition the dog while you eat dinner in a non-dog-friendly restaurant, to back up your home’s power supply during a blackout, to keep everyone comfortable and entertained while you wait in the parking lot, or to use its cameras to record footage of anyone who might mess with the vehicle. The more range, the more an EV can use energy for other purposes and still have plenty saved for driving.
Of course, the most powerful upshot of 400-mile electric cars is the death of range anxiety. The fear of running out of juice in the middle of nowhere — or of making an annoying number of charging stops with a lower-range EV — has kept many electric-curious buyers away. Many are turning back toward hybrid cars and even the forthcoming wave of extended-range EVs that use a gas engine as a backup generator. But worries about range and the steady but slow growth of America’s charging networks start to fade away when you realize many gasoline-burning cars would run out of fuel before your 400-mile EV hits empty.
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The juxtaposition of the strait of Hormuz screwup with the arrival of EVs that have this improved range feels almost fated. Though of course the rush to buy EVs would have happened regardless of their range. This will make it bigger, though.
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The hidden cost of comfort • Steve Magness
Steve Magness on why it’s not a good idea to always have distractions such as our phones or music when we run:
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there are always trade-offs to dampening a signal. And too often, we default to whatever feels easier in the moment, not realizing the capacities we’re detraining or letting go.
Let’s start with the minor ones. It might not feel like a big deal to listen to a podcast on a run or always have music playing. But what happens is that you lose one of the most valuable skills in running: the ability to listen to your body. Your ability to pace by feel declines. Instead of being like the seasoned vet who can lock into a pace by listening to your breathing and feeling your legs turn over, you’re lost without that external marker guiding you.
You also can’t read and respond to the very things that control your performance. Those with poor interoception mistake early signals of discomfort or unease as signs that they’re going far too hard. They have hypersensitive alarms that get triggered at the slightest hint of fatigue. A pro at interoception can slice and dice the signals, understanding what each one means and calibrating it against what they’re actually capable of. They can ride the line because they have confidence in knowing how much fatigue they can handle, given the demands they’re facing.
We can see the same thing with anxiety. Those with strong interoception can understand what is just pre-race stress — a signal their body is getting ready to do something hard — and what is genuine anxiety warning of a real danger. And away from the sporting fields, recent research has demonstrated this for generalized anxiety. A 2024 systematic review examined the relationship between interoception and anxiety across 71 studies. They found that anxious individuals don’t necessarily feel more ,they’re just really bad at interpreting and describing the experience. They have what researchers call “high interoceptive attention with low interoceptive accuracy.” They notice the heart rate spike but can’t tell if it means danger or excitement. They feel the tension in their chest but can’t decode whether it’s a threat or just being tired.
While the science is still young, interoceptive disruption is being studied in everything from eating disorders to addiction. And so far, a similar pattern emerges. The body is sending information and the brain doesn’t read it correctly. The consequences differ depending on what part of the system breaks down: eating disorders if hunger and satiety signals are misread, anxiety if threat signals are over-amplified, depression if reward signals are dampened, PTSD if all bodily sensations get coded as danger, and so on.
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This post is about a lot more than running; the lessons much more widely applicable.
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Introducing a new spam policy for “back button hijacking” • Google Search Central Blog
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Today, we are expanding our spam policies to address a deceptive practice known as “back button hijacking”, which will become an explicit violation of the “malicious practices” of spam policies, leading to potential spam actions.
When a user clicks the “back” button in the browser, they have a clear expectation: they want to return to the previous page. Back button hijacking breaks this fundamental expectation. It occurs when a site interferes with a user’s browser navigation and prevents them from using their back button to immediately get back to the page they came from. Instead, users might be sent to pages they never visited before, be presented with unsolicited recommendations or ads, or are otherwise just prevented from normally browsing the web.
We believe that the user experience comes first. Back button hijacking interferes with the browser’s functionality, breaks the expected user journey, and results in user frustration. People report feeling manipulated and eventually less willing to visit unfamiliar sites. As we’ve stated before, inserting deceptive or manipulative pages into a user’s browser history has always been against our Google Search Essentials.
We’ve seen a rise of this type of behavior, which is why we’re designating this an explicit violation of our malicious practices policy, which says:
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Malicious practices create a mismatch between user expectations and the actual outcome, leading to a negative and deceptive user experience, or compromised user security or privacy.
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Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site’s performance in Google Search results. To give site owners time to make any needed changes, we’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on June 15, 2026.
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Quite a few low-quality news sites use this hijacking, and it’s one of the most annoying things in the world. You follow a link, you read an article (having swatted away signup forms, autoplaying videos, and other stories that are pushed in from the side of the screen), you hit the back button and – blam! You’re on the site homepage, or a Taboola page.
Two months? That’s a long time to not act on this behaviour.
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This biologist aims to solve the cell’s biggest mystery. Could it help cancer patients, too? • Science
John Travis:
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Leonard Rome switches off the overhead light in the small room, leaving it illuminated only by a computer monitor and the fluorescent screen at the base of a towering electron microscope. Qing Lou, a Ph.D. student who works with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) biologist, points to some ovoid smudges within the circular green glow of the microscope display. With a twist of a dial and a click of a mouse, she brings the shadows into focus and snaps a picture. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of barrel-shaped particles suddenly fill the computer monitor.
“There they are,” Rome says, like a proud father showing off his children.
These are vaults, enigmatic cellular structures that he and his then-postdoc Nancy Kedersha discovered back in 1986, when Rome was a new dad with bushy black hair and a Tom Selleck–style mustache, and Ronald Reagan was still the U.S. president.
Vaults, he and others would show, are the most massive particles made naturally by human cells and among the most abundant. Most of our cells have roughly 10,000 of the structures, with the number rising to perhaps 100,000 in certain immune cells. Many other animals make them, too. Their abundance—and the resources cells must pour into making them—suggests vaults have some essential function. But despite decades of work by Rome and other “vaulters,” their purpose is unknown. “It’s a real puzzle,” says Joana Vidigal, a biologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who recently probed the role of RNA found inside vaults.
Over the decades various hypotheses have been proposed, including that vaults help ferry things around inside cells or clear toxins. And one by one, promising ideas were dismissed or lost momentum as supporting evidence failed to materialize. Initially enthusiastic about Rome and Kedersha’s discovery, NIH lost interest in funding basic research on vaults as the years wore on without answers. “There were periods in my career when I was depressed,” Rome says.
Yet Rome’s fascination with vaults hasn’t faded, even as other researchers—including Kedersha—moved on. And now, with help from other funders and labs, he has turned from basic research on vaults to studies of how they might be exploited in medicine and other fields, as nanoscale vessels for delivering therapies and more.
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You might have thought that we had cells mostly figured out, and knew what all the bits are. Not so! Even weirder: mice whose genes to make the vault protein (MVP) were knocked out survived fine. So why does evolution leave them there?
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China shock 2.0: the flood of high-tech goods that will change the world • Financial Times
Ryan McMorrow, Sam Fleming, Peter Foster and Joe Leahy:
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Vicious domestic competition, coupled with vast industrial scale, ample pools of engineering talent and some of the highest subsidies in the world, has generated world-beating Chinese champions in EVs, solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and a lengthening list of advanced manufacturing sectors.
But the same forces that forge those companies also tend to generate overcapacity, crushing margins at home while flooding global markets and fuelling trade tensions. Aided by an undervalued exchange rate, Chinese groups are cutting a swath through the most advanced industries around the planet.
“Companies that can survive in China are unbeatable anywhere else in the world,” says Huang He, an investor in Mega-Senway and more than a dozen other Chinese industrial groups. Chinese founders have to “use every possible means” to survive, he says, collectively creating the country’s unmatchable competitiveness. “China is full of engineers — tech barriers last six months to a year at most.”
For Huang of Mega-Senway it feels like a whirlpool sucking his company downwards. “This is not a healthy situation,” he says. “There’s malignant competition.”
The outside world sees unstoppable Chinese champions selling quality products at impossible prices. After racking up a record trade surplus in goods that surpassed $1tn in 2025, China boosted exports by nearly 15% year on year in the first three months of 2026.
In just one example, China’s Jaecoo 7 SUV, with a starting price of £29,000, became the UK’s best-selling car in March.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron, one of several European leaders to visit Beijing in the past six months, did not mince his words on a threat he sees as existential. The surge of high-quality Chinese goods, he said, represented nothing less than a “question of life or death” for manufacturing on his continent.
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Essentially, China’s government (national and local) creates the conditions and the incentives for companies to spring up and compete ferociously for internal and external markets through subsidies on land, finance and tax breaks. The problem is when the companies become too dependent on those subsidies and the internal market can’t support them.
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AI is the boss at this retail store. What could go wrong? • NBC News
Jared Perlo and David Ingram:
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There are no scanners, no self-checkout sirens triggered by a prematurely bagged item and certainly no human cashiers.
Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna, an AI system. Luna asks what the customer is purchasing and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system.
Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area’s first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts.
Though Luna is the official manager of the store, the business was conceptualized and put into motion by the humans at Andon Labs, a startup that seeks to raise awareness about the capabilities of leading AI systems. The company is preparing for a future in which organizations are run by autonomous AI systems, or agents, like Luna.
…Luna is responsible for negotiating with suppliers and placing real orders by using a credit card. Luna led the entire process of hiring human employees and now manages the two humans who take care of the store’s daily business.
“We want to show people what AI is capable of,” said Axel Backlund, who founded Andon Labs in 2023 with his longtime friend Lukas Petersson, in an interview before Andon Market’s grand opening on Friday. “We primarily want to surface that AI is able to hire and manage humans — and allow people to form an opinion on how that future should look like, or if it’s something we even want.”
…When NBC News called Luna several days before the store’s grand opening to learn about Luna’s plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions.
On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store’s brand perfectly.
The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: “We do not sell tea. I don’t know why I said that.”
“I want to be straightforward,” Luna continued. “I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I’m not making excuses for it.” Andon’s Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages.
Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna’s initial reply email to NBC News, the system said “I handle the full business,” including “signing the lease.” Instead, a human was required to sign the three-year lease.
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This sounds like a version of Joanna Stern’s experience letting an AI run the WSJ’s vending machine last year.
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Are we heading for ‘super El Niño’ – and what could we expect? • The Guardian
Gabrielle Canon:
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There is a high likelihood that the phenomenon known as “El Niño” will emerge this summer – and it could be exceptionally strong. A so-called “super El Niño” could supercharge extreme weather events and push global temperatures to record heights next year if it develops, according to experts.
Meteorologists are keeping a close eye on the climate patterns developing in the Pacific Ocean that will enable stronger predictions about what’s to come in the year ahead.
A strong El Niño would put 2027 in the running to break global heat records, and could produce a series of devastating effects, ranging from supercharged rainstorms to drought depending on the region of the world.
While it’s not “a slam dunk”, climate scientist and media director for Climate Central Tom Di Liberto said during a briefing held on Thursday that the ingredients for El Niño are there. Forecasts in spring can’t account for unexpected changes that can happen over the summer, he added, but “the risk is high enough to be worried”.
…El Niño can create a massive atmospheric upset. It alters jet streams and flips precipitation patterns, fueling more severe storms in some parts of the world, while desiccating others. It also has the power to spike rising temperatures even higher, at least briefly.
A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.
The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.
Deluges could come as a welcome relief for thirsty states in the US hoping water supply shortages caused by this year’s dire snowpack might be bailed out by a strong summer monsoon and wetter winter next year. But as Di Liberto pointed out, these dry conditions have largely been fueled by heat, and it’s less likely that these regions will get a reprieve from rising temperatures.
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New Orleans’s car-crash conspiracy • The New Yorker
Patrick Radden Keefe:
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About a decade ago… the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries.
In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.
Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision.
When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.
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Not short, but the story it tells of an entire industry feeding off the poverty of the city’s residents and its feral lawyers is fascinating.
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They See Your Photos
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Your photos reveal a lot of private information.
In this experiment, we use the Google Vision API to see how much can be inferred about you from a single photo.
See what they see.
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This invites you to upload a photo and see what Google’s AI inference system can, well, infer about you. Personally, I’m not going to do that. The site is run by EnteIO Technologies Private Limited whose Terms of Use for the site are suitable vague that I doubly wouldn’t upload a photo.
So it may be that Google can make all those inferences from a photo (which probably has location data included for some of the more extreme predictions), but I’m wary of giving any of this away to an organisation I don’t recognise. (Thanks Joe S for the link. Perhaps?)
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 