The Bahamas turn out to be the perfect location for a homeschooling girl to become a maths genius who solves a longstanding puzzle. CC-licensed photo by Christine Warner-Morin on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There may be another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 9 links for you. Wave theory. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Whistleblower alleges Meta artificially boosted Shops ads performance • AdWeek

Trishla Ostwal:

»

Meta wanted advertisers to believe its ecommerce ad product, Shops ads, was outperforming the competition, per a whistleblower complaint filed in a UK court.

The former employee alleges the social media giant artificially inflated return on ad spend (ROAS) by counting shipping fees as revenue, subsidizing bids in ad auctions, and applying undisclosed discounts.

The complaint, viewed by ADWEEK, was filed with the London Central Employment Tribunal on Wednesday August 20 by Samujjal Purkayastha, a former product manager on Meta’s Shops ads team. The document claims Meta artificially inflated performance metrics to push brands toward its fledgling ecommerce ad product. 

The company’s motivation, the complaint says, was in part to combat Apple’s 2021 privacy changes that cut the troves of iOS tracking information that had long powered Meta’s ad machine.

Meta’s former chief financial officer (CFO), David Wehner, said the changes would cost “on the order of $10 billion” in losses during the company’s Q4 2021 earnings call. User purchases on Facebook or Instagram Shops pages would provide more first-party data, however.

Purkayastha, who joined Meta (then Facebook) in 2020 as a product manager on the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Applied Research team, was reassigned to the Shops Ads team in March 2022 and remained at the company until Feb. 19, 2025, when he was terminated.

He alleged that during internal reviews in early 2024, Meta data scientists found the return on ad spend (ROAS) from Shops ads had been inflated between 17% and 19%. This discrepancy stemmed from Meta counting shipping fees and taxes as part of a sale, even though that money never went to merchants, he alleged.

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Employment tribunals are about dismissals; a judge said the case can proceed, but the hearing won’t be until next year. There might be more documents before then.
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The neural network hierarchy: how foundation models actually rank your content for AI search results • GEO Platform

“AI Content Team”:

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If you’ve spent a decade tuning pages for Google’s link graph and user signals, the rise of AI-powered “search” feels like a new continent with its own topography. Foundation models — the large, general-purpose neural networks that power chat assistants and AI overviews — aren’t just another ranking algorithm. They evaluate and surface content according to an internal hierarchy that looks nothing like classic web search. And that’s important: recent, large-scale analyses and industry reports show that the signals that make a site authoritative on the web are largely orthogonal to the signals these models use to decide what to cite and surface in AI answers.

In April 2025, an analysis of 41 million AI search results across platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot showed a near-total disconnect between traditional SEO metrics and AI citation behavior — 95% of citation variance couldn’t be explained by traffic metrics (r² = 0.05), and 97.2% couldn’t be explained by backlink profiles (r² = 0.038).

In plain English: domain authority, backlink counts, and even raw traffic aren’t the primary features these models use to decide what to quote.

[…Instead the process used is:]

• Representation: Text is turned into dense vectors by the model’s encoder. These embeddings capture semantic meaning and content features the model was trained to value (factuality, explicitness, structure)
• Retrieval: Vector search (often approximate nearest neighbor) surfaces candidate documents or passages based on embedding similarity rather than link-based authority
• Reranking / Fusion: Scored candidates are re-evaluated by the model itself in context; the model weighs freshness, explicitness of answers, and internal confidence when deciding what to cite or include
• Generation / Citation: The model constructs a response and decides whether to cite an external source, often based on whether the retrieved passage can be integrated without hallucination.

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This is a detailed post and makes it clear that AI “search” – or what AI systems rely on – is very, very different from what we’ve grown used to in nearly 30-odd years of Google backlinks.
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At 17, Hannah Cairo solved a major math mystery • Quanta Magazine

Kevin Hartnett:

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It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long.

Yet a paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a bold new talent into its midst. Its author was Hannah Cairo, just 17 at the time. She had solved a 40-year-old mystery about how functions behave, called the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture.

“We were all shocked, absolutely. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that,” said Itamar Oliveira of the University of Birmingham, who has spent the past two years trying to prove that the conjecture was true. In her paper, Cairo showed that it’s false. The result defies mathematicians’ usual intuitions about what functions can and cannot do.

So does Cairo herself, who found her way to a proof after years of homeschooling in isolation and an unorthodox path through the math world.

Cairo grew up in Nassau, the Bahamas, where her parents had moved so that her dad could take a job as a software developer. She and her two brothers — one three years older, the other eight years younger — were all homeschooled. Cairo started learning math using Khan Academy’s online lessons, and she quickly advanced through its standard curriculum. By the time she was 11 years old, she’d finished calculus.

Soon she had consumed everything that was readily available online. Her parents found a couple of math professors to tutor her remotely — first Martin Magid of Wellesley College, then Amir Aazami from Clark University. But much of her education was self-directed, as she read and absorbed, on her own, the graduate-level math textbooks that her tutors recommended. “Eventually,” Cairo recalled, Aazami “said something like, he feels uncomfortable being paid, because he feels like he’s not really teaching me. Because mostly I would read the book and try to prove the theorems.”

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All of this is amazing, except the youth of the person making the discovery: mathematicians who make amazing discoveries are often young. But the Khan Academy as a route to the frontiers of knowledge? That’s novel, and in its way, encouraging. Let’s hope this is the trend that continues, rather than chatbots.

The article does a pretty good job of explaining the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, which sounds like something out of Star Trek. Maybe that’s what will give us faster-than-light travel in 200 years.
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The AI takeover of education is just getting started • The Atlantic

Lila Shroff:

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Gone already are the days when using AI to write an essay meant copying and pasting its response verbatim. To evade plagiarism detectors, kids now stitch together output from multiple AI models, or ask chatbots to introduce typos to make the writing appear more human. The original ChatGPT allowed only text prompts. Now students can upload images (“Please do these physics problems for me”) and entire documents (“How should I improve my essay based on this rubric?”).

Not all of it is cheating. Kids are using AI for exam prep, generating personalized study guides and practice tests, and to get feedback before submitting assignments. Still, if you are a parent of a high schooler who thinks your child isn’t using a chatbot for homework assistance—be it sanctioned or illicit—think again.

The AI takeover of the classroom is just getting started. Plenty of educators are using AI in their own job, even if they may not love that chatbots give students new ways to cheat. On top of the time they spend on actual instruction, teachers are stuck with a lot of administrative work: They design assignments to align with curricular standards, grade worksheets against preset rubrics, and fill out paperwork to support students with extra needs.

Nearly a third of K–12 teachers say they used the technology at least weekly last school year. Sally Hubbard, a sixth-grade math-and-science teacher in Sacramento, California, told me that AI saves her an average of five to 10 hours each week by helping her create assignments and supplement curricula. “If I spend all of that time creating, grading, researching,” she said, “then I don’t have as much energy to show up in person and make connections with kids.”

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Quite a contrast with Hannah Cairo, isn’t it?
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Sony is raising PS5 prices on Thursday • The Verge

Jay Peters:

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Sony is raising the price of all PlayStation 5 models by $50 in the US. In a blog post announcing the change, Sony cited the “challenging economic environment,” which includes the tariffs President Trump has placed on imported products.

The changes will go into effect on Thursday, and the new prices are as follows:

• PlayStation 5 – $549.99
• PlayStation 5 Digital Edition – $499.99
• PlayStation 5 Pro – $749.99

Sony says that the retail prices for PS5 accessories “remain unchanged.”

In April, Sony raised the price of PS5 hardware in the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and in May, the company said it was considering price hikes to cover the Trump administration’s tariffs.

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The April price rises were 10-15%; these changes are about 1%. Not exactly world-ending, is it, when the devices apparently face 145% tariffs (though who knows if the tariffs are operative?).
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T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree • Ars Technica

Jon Brodkin:

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A federal appeals court rejected T-Mobile’s attempt to overturn $92m in fines for selling customer location information to third-party firms.

The Federal Communications Commission last year fined T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, saying the carriers illegally shared access to customers’ location information without consent and did not take reasonable measures to protect that sensitive data against unauthorized disclosure. The fines relate to sharing of real-time location data that was revealed in 2018, but it took years for the FCC to finalize the penalties.

The three carriers appealed the rulings in three different courts, and the first major decision was handed down Friday. A three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously against T-Mobile and its subsidiary Sprint.

…The carriers also argued that the device-location information, which is “passively generated when a mobile device pings cell towers to support both voice and data services,” does not qualify as Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) under the law. The carriers said the law “covers information relating to the ‘location… of use’ of a telecommunications service,” and claimed that only call location information fits that description.

Judges faulted T-Mobile and Sprint for relying on “strained interpretations” of the statute. “We begin with the text. The Communications Act refers to the ‘location… of a telecommunications service, not the location of a voice call… Recall that cell phones connect periodically to cell towers, and that is what enables the devices to send and receive calls at any moment,” the ruling said.

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Have to wonder if anyone, at any point, raised a hand inside T-Mobile and said “are we sure that’s exactly.. ethical? Legal?” Probably not. Some will probably have thought it, though, and be silently happy at this outcome.
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Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down • Press Gazette

Charlotte Tobitt:

»

New data from Chartbeat suggests that “search” as a source of total traffic to major news publishers has remained stable over the last year.

This appears to chime with a Google statement earlier this month downplaying the impact of AI Overviews and AI Mode on publisher referrals.

However, this includes Google Discover – which has replaced search as the main source of Google traffic.

Social media has however sharply declined as a source of publisher traffic in recent years, as has direct traffic.

This comes despite a growing theme in the past two years of publishers setting out to grow the audience that comes to them directly to help future-proof in the face of AI search, unpredictable social media algorithms and changing audience habits.

Direct traffic is defined by audience data analytics tool Chartbeat as visitors that arrive directly on the website via typing in the URL or through a bookmark.

Across 565 US and UK news websites that are Chartbeat customers and have opted in to sharing their anonymised traffic data for aggregate research purposes, 16.09% of traffic came directly to homepages and other landing pages in January 2019.

This fell to an initial low of 12.45% in April 2020 before seeing growth over the next two years to 16.26%. However the proportion of direct traffic has largely fallen again since to 11.46% in July.

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So now we wait to see what effect AI Overview has in the longer term. The signs aren’t encouraging.
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The new American inequality: the Cooled vs. the Cooked • The New York Times

Jeff Goodell:

»

In the hottest regions of the country, such as Texas, where I live, the climate crisis is not only changing our world; it is also dividing it. When the heat spikes during the summer, we morph into a two-party state: the cooled and the cooked. On one side, there is water, shade and air-conditioning. On the other, there is sweat, suffering and even, in the worst cases, death. And it means that no matter where we live, we have to update our conception of heat as a disruptive and punishing force.

The cooled are people like me, who work mostly indoors, bathed in the soothing breeze of manufactured air. We live hidden from the brutality of summer, except when we run out to the mailbox or the grocery store. There we hit a wall of heat that feels like an alien force field and burn our hands on the car’s steering wheel.

We live vampire lives, out early for a walk or to run errands, retreating indoors to our comfy caves during the afternoon, then out again after sundown to hang out with friends and complain about the heat and plot a getaway to the beach or the mountains. For the cooled, heat is an inconvenience, an intrusion into our lifestyles and a reason to finally pull the trigger on a loan to build a backyard swimming pool.

The cooked are people like Matthew Sanchez, the pit manager at Terry Black’s BBQ in Austin. On a busy Saturday, he and his co-workers might grill about 2,000 pounds of brisket in five long steel wood-fired BBQ pits. In the summer, the pit gets so hot it breaks thermometers that hang on the wall. “Sometimes it feels like we are rendering ourselves,” Mr. Sanchez told me.

I also met a delivery driver in Austin who had been hospitalized with heat exhaustion. Though he’s recovered, on hot days the muscles in his back tingle and his kidneys hurt. I met a former emergency medical technician who described the disturbing number of calls she responded to from workers at an Amazon warehouse in Texas, many of them related to heat stress.

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How much do electric car batteries degrade? • Sustainability By Numbers

Hannah Ritchie:

»

Before we quantify how big this effect is, it’s interesting to look at how these processes work over the life of a battery. In the chart below, you can see battery retention measured across a large cohort of Teslas up to 200,000 miles (that’s already telling us something about how big the effect is).

But what’s interesting is that degradation tends to happen quickest in the first 20,000 miles or so. This is because initial lithium salts react with other materials and start building that SEI layer we discussed earlier. After this initial drop, degradation is fairly slow and linear.

Of course, this fact might be one of the explanations why even fairly low-mileage electric cars quickly lose a lot of value once they’ve been driven. As soon as you get on the road, you’re entering the steepest part of the decline.

What’s missing, though, is the context that the overall drop in capacity is still small — probably around 3% to 5% within 25,000 miles — and degradation won’t continue at this rate. So if you buy a second-hand electric car that’s done 20,000 miles, it’s not going to degrade at the same pace that it was.

We’ve now had enough electric cars on the road – and for long enough – to have a good idea of how the battery holds up over time.

Here we’ll focus on a metric used to capture the battery’s “State of Health” (SoH). It’s what percentage of a battery’s initial capacity is still usable after a given number of miles or years.

Let’s start with the results of the huge Tesla cohort that we looked at above. In its 2023 Impact Report, Tesla reported that after 200,000 miles of use, the batteries in a Model 3 and Model Y had lost just 15% of their capacity, on average. For the Model S and X, it was just 12%.

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(Thanks Quentin SF for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A Chinese team has worked out why the infamous “spin serve” in badminton is so hard to return. CC-licensed photo by Tool Dude8mm on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Serve them up! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

UK has ‘agreed to drop’ demand for access to Apple user data, says US • Financial Times

Anna Gross, Joe Miller, Tim Bradshaw and George Parker:

»

The UK has retreated on its controversial demand for Apple to provide a “back door” to encrypted customer data after pressure from the Trump administration, according to US officials, ending a diplomatic row between London and Washington.

Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, told the Financial Times the UK had “agreed to drop” its demand that Apple enable access to “the protected encrypted data of American citizens”, a move that the US president had previously likened to Chinese surveillance.

Vice-president JD Vance, who was recently on holiday in the UK, intervened to ensure Britain agreed to withdraw an order that sought to force Apple to break open encrypted data stored in its iCloud system that even the iPhone maker itself is normally unable to access, according to a US official.

“The vice-president negotiated a mutually beneficial understanding that the UK government will withdraw the current backdoor order to Apple,” the official said.

Vance has previously accused European countries of curtailing free speech and of treating some American companies unfairly. He and Gabbard strongly objected to the UK order, which was issued in January under the UK Investigatory Powers Act and has been resisted by Apple.

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I don’t think the decryption demand was a ploy by the UK to get a bargaining chip with the US; it seriously annoyed the administration there, which meant it was just a source of pressure rather than strength. But let’s hope that once again the UK government abandons its quixotic pursuit of the unicorn of “breakable but secure encryption” which it has been chasing since the Blair government tried it in 2000.

We’ll probably find out presently whether Apple will reintroduce its Advanced Data Protection for iCloud – basically, user-encrypted backups in the cloud.
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SoftBank invests $2bn in Intel as Trump administration weighs taking 10% stake • WSJ

Robbie Whelan and Amrith Ramkumar:

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SoftBank Group has agreed to invest $2bn in Intel, a boost from the private sector that coincides with a US government rescue effort for the embattled chip maker.

Trump administration officials are discussing taking a 10% stake in Intel in a bid to revive the company’s fortunes and bolster semiconductor manufacturing in the US, according to people briefed on the talks.

On Monday, Intel announced that SoftBank would buy $2bn worth of Intel stock, roughly 87 million shares, at $23 a share, a slight discount to Monday’s closing price of $23.66. The investment would give the Japanese firm ownership of about 2% of the company, making it Intel’s sixth-largest shareholder, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Investors appeared to interpret SoftBank’s move as a vote of confidence: The chip maker’s shares popped in off-hours trading after closing down 3.7% for the day.

Additional investment is helpful for Intel, but the company needs customers for its chip design and fabrication businesses to get back on track, industry analysts say.

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Surprising move seen in isolation, but SoftBank is trying to play nicely in order to get favourable treatment from Trump (a triumph of hope over experience). If the US government pitches in, SoftBank might even make a profit on the shares in time. But I don’t feel that confident about Intel’s long-term future.
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The physics of badminton’s new killer spin serve • Ars Technica

Jennifer Ouellette:

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Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before the racket contacts the shuttlecock (aka the birdie). It’s so effective—some have called it “impossible to return”—that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) banned the spin serve in 2023, at least until after the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris.

The sanction wasn’t meant to quash innovation but to address players’ concerns about the possible unfair advantages the spin serve conferred. The BWF thought that international tournaments shouldn’t become the test bed for the technique, which is markedly similar to the previously banned “Sidek serve.”

The BWF permanently banned the spin serve earlier this year. Chinese physicists have now teased out the complex fundamental physics of the spin serve, publishing their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.

…While many studies have extensively examined the physics of the shuttlecock’s trajectory, the Chinese authors of this latest paper realized that nobody had yet investigated the effects of the spin serve on that trajectory. “We were interested in the underlying aerodynamics,” said co-author Zhicheng Zhang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Moreover, revealing the effects of pre-spin on the trajectory and aerodynamics of a shuttlecock can help players learn the art of delivering a spin serve, and perhaps help players on the other side of the net to return the serve.”

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But as the story points out, though we now know why the serve is difficult to return, it doesn’t matter – it’s banned. The first ban was within six weeks of it first being used in competition, followed by the longer ban.
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Threads MAU update • Threads

Adam Mosseri (in charge of Meta’s Threads):

»

As of a few weeks ago we there are more than 400 million people active on Threads every month. It’s been quite the ride over the last two years. This started as a zany idea to compete with Twitter, and has evolved into a meaningful platform that fosters the open exchange of perspectives. I’m grateful to all of you for making this place what it is today 🙏🏼. There’s so much work to do from our side, more to come.

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Fascinating that he’s admitting the idea was to compete with Twitter. Based on those numbers, it’s pretty much level. And yet the odd thing is that Threads seems to be self-contained. It doesn’t leak over into the other social networks in the way that traffic – mostly snarky, but sometimes just duplicative – flows between X and Bluesky (and vice-versa), and also pulls in from Instagram.

Is Threads actually a hotbed of important social dialogue? The replies to Mosseri’s post suggest there’s tension between people who want to monetise, and those who don’t; and those who perceive a huge bot problem, and those who don’t.
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AI x Commerce • Andreessen Horowitz

Justine Moore and Alex Rampell:

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The internet’s most profitable business model has always been simple: running search ads on monetizable queries. When you search “how many protons are in a cesium atom,” Google makes no money. When you search “best tennis racket,” it prints cash. 

This asymmetry defines the entire search economy–some queries are pure curiosity, and others have direct purchase intent. It’s part of why Google (where people often search for products) is a $2T company and Wikipedia (where people search for knowledge or fun facts) is a non-profit.

Google could lose 95% of search volume and still grow revenue as  long as it retains the valuable queries, which are largely commerce related. Has Google managed to keep these searches from moving to AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity? 

Maybe. In May 2025, Apple SVP Eddy Cue testified during the DOJ’s antitrust trial that Safari search volume had declined for the first time in over two decades. The result? Alphabet’s stock dropped nearly 8% in a day, wiping out over $150bn in market cap — all from the hint that queries might be leaking to AI. But fast forward to Google’s increasing revenue (including from search!) and it’s pretty clear (squaring Eddy Cue’s comments with Google’s Q2 earnings) that Google is likely only losing low-monetizing queries, at least for now.

AI is eating the low-value (at least in “cost-per-click terms”) queries first, the ones with no commercial intent that are more informational. If language models answer your cesium question, Google loses the query but not a dime. The revenue remains until AI starts replacing things like “best X for Y” commerce journeys — the ones with actual purchase intent. There’s no question this is about to happen, but not all commerce is the same. Some commerce will be eaten by AI, some will be immune to it, and some will be up for grabs by new startups.

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As much as anything this is venture capitalists thinking out loud about what they expect, so the post goes into some detail about how they expect the future to pan out. (In effect it’s also asking companies to pitch for the businesses they think are open.)
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Exclusive: US embeds trackers in AI chip shipments to catch diversions to China, sources say • Reuters

Fanny Potkin, Jun Yuan Yong and Karen Freifeld:

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U.S. authorities have secretly placed location tracking devices in targeted shipments of advanced chips they see as being at high risk of illegal diversion to China, according to two people with direct knowledge of the previously unreported law enforcement tactic.

The measures aim to detect AI chips being diverted to destinations which are under U.S. export restrictions, and apply only to select shipments under investigation, the people said.

They show the lengths to which the U.S. has gone to enforce its chip export restrictions on China, even as the Trump administration has sought to relax some curbs on Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors.

The trackers can help build cases against people and companies who profit from violating U.S. export controls, said the people, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Location trackers are a decades-old investigative tool used by U.S. law enforcement agencies to track products subject to export restrictions, such as airplane parts. They have been used to combat the illegal diversion of semiconductors in recent years, one source said.

Five other people actively involved in the AI server supply chain say they are aware of the use of the trackers in shipments of servers from manufacturers such as Dell and Super Micro, which include chips from Nvidia and AMD.

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Then there’s also the story of two Chinese nationals arrested in California, accused of illegally shipping millions of dollars worth of Nvidia AI chips to China. The fun part, though, is that this story preceded the above one – so one suspects that Reuters started asking questions about the arrests and learnt about the trackers.
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South Korea’s no-kids zones • Boom

“Boom”:

»

Imagine you are a South Korean parent. You want to take your 10 year old to a new café that has opened up a few streets away and treat them to a slice of cake. What’s the first thing you do? You go online, and check to see whether the café bans children.

This map shows restaurants and cafés across South Korea that users have identified as officially designating themselves either as a ‘No-Kids Zone’ or as child-friendly in 2023. The 451 blue pins represent places where children are banned, and the 62 green pins are places where children are welcomed. Below you can see the cluster of blue pins in and around Seoul.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many South Korean establishments are child-free, but for cafés it was estimated at 5-10% in 2022, and has probably increased since then.

One area particularly dense in No-Kids Zones is Jeju Island, famed for its natural beauty, which has around 150 businesses that have banned children. A survey of Jeju’s No-Kids Zones reported that business owners had implemented the rule for reasons including a quiet atmosphere, problems with badly behaved children, and concern about legal liability in the event of a child accidentally getting hurt.

The below screenshot, from the Instagram account of a café serving what looks to be a variety of cheesecakes, is a typical example. It carefully specifies that no children below the age of 12 are allowed.

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This feels strange, but (as the blog says) cafes banning children isn’t the cause of South Korea’s low, low fertility – the lowest birth rate in the world – but it’s surely a consequence which then gets reinforced as people find children a novel irritation. (The blog’s purpose, apparently, is “We want it to be easier to choose to have children, for everyone.”)
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Lab-grown salmon gets FDA approval • The Verge

Dominic Preston:

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The FDA has issued its first ever approval on a safety consultation for lab-grown fish. That makes Wildtype only the fourth company to get approval from the regulator to sell cell-cultivated animal products, and its cultivated salmon is now available to order from one Portland restaurant.

Wildtype announced last week that the FDA had sent a letter declaring it had “no questions” about whether the cultivated salmon is “as safe as comparable foods,” the customary final step in the FDA’s approval process for lab-grown animal products. The FDA has sole responsibility for regulating most lab-grown seafood, whereas the task is shared with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for cultivated meat.

The FDA’s pre-market safety consultation is voluntary, but is “helpful for marketability,” IP lawyer Dr. Emily Nytko-Lutz, who specializes in biotechnology patents, explained to The Verge. “There are other pathways involving self-affirmation of safety as well as a longer food additive review process, but the FDA’s authorisation with a ‘No Questions’ letter is a middle ground.”

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It’s a bit vague quite how the salmon cuts are made to look like, well, salmon cuts; there’s an FAQ of sorts on Wildtype’s site. It’s been working for years on this.
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Forget LASIK: safer, cheaper vision correction could be coming soon • ScienceDaily

»

Human corneas are dome-shaped, clear structures that sit at the front of the eye, bending light from surroundings and focusing it onto the retina, where it’s sent to the brain and interpreted as an image. But if the cornea is misshapen, it doesn’t focus light properly, resulting in a blurry image. With LASIK, specialized lasers reshape the cornea by removing precise sections of the tissue. This common procedure is considered safe, but it has some limitations and risks, and cutting the cornea compromises the structural integrity of the eye. Hill explains that “LASIK is just a fancy way of doing traditional surgery. It’s still carving tissue — it’s just carving with a laser.”

But what if the cornea could be reshaped without the need for any incisions?

This is what [professor of chemistry at Occidental College, Michael] Hill and collaborator Brian Wong are exploring through a process known as electromechanical reshaping (EMR). “The whole effect was discovered by accident,” explains Wong, a professor and surgeon at the University of California, Irvine. “I was looking at living tissues as moldable materials and discovered this whole process of chemical modification.”

In the body, the shapes of many collagen-containing tissues, including corneas, are held in place by attractions of oppositely charged components. These tissues contain a lot of water, so applying an electric potential to them lowers the tissue’s pH, making it more acidic. By altering the pH, the rigid attractions within the tissue are loosened and make the shape malleable. When the original pH is restored, the tissue is locked into the new shape.

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Sounds fun – but it’s a very long way away from being available from doctors.
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Renewables do unambiguously reduce wholesale power prices • Carbon Commentary

Chris Goodall:

»

We still hear assertions that adding renewables to the grid has increased the UK’s electricity costs. I looked at two sources of data and plotted one against the other to test whether there’s any truth in this.

1: The ‘next day’ electricity price for each hour in the period from 1st January 2025 to the early days of August 2025. That’s about 220 days, covering the coldest period of the year and the heat of the summer. (In the UK, electricity prices are highest in the winter and fall to lower levels in the summer because demand is much lower). The source for this data was the research group Ember.

2: The percentage share of wind and solar electricity in total generation in each of the 220 or so days. The source was the GB network operator, NESO. 

The analysis seeks to show whether or not days of high electricity price are associated with large or small shares of renewables in total generation. For each day, I plotted the average hourly price of electricity against the share of solar and wind in that day’s total electricity generation. If more renewables adds to costs, the price of electricity should be higher when wind and solar are abundant.

Of course that is not the case; a day with wind or sun (or both) typically has a lower hourly average electricity price. And the differences are substantial…

«

He goes into plenty of detail, though of course this will make no difference to those convinced about this. Isn’t it a pity that “understanding logical arguments” isn’t taught in schools? (Thanks Ben B for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new study found that endoscopists who used AI were less good at diagnosis afterwards without it – a “deskilling” effect. CC-licensed photo by Rosen & Meseguer Atlas of Medical Foreign Bodies on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.

A selection of 10 links for you. Machine-guided. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

AI is a mass-delusion event • The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel:

»

It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modelled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it.

Jim Acosta, the former CNN personality who’s conducting the interview, appears fully bought-in to the premise, adding to the surreality: he’s playing it straight, even though the interactions are so bizarre. Acosta asks simple questions about Oliver’s interests and how the teenager died. The chatbot, which was built with the full cooperation of Oliver’s parents to advocate for gun control, responds like a press release: “We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen.” It offers bromides such as “More kindness and understanding can truly make a difference.”

…The interview triggered a feeling that has become exceedingly familiar over the past three years. It is the sinking feeling of a societal race toward a future that feels bloodless, hastily conceived, and shruggingly accepted. Are we really doing this? Who thought this was a good idea? In this sense, the Acosta interview is just a product of what feels like a collective delusion. This strange brew of shock, confusion, and ambivalence, I’ve realized, is the defining emotion of the generative-AI era. Three years into the hype, it seems that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

«

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Why Apple Vision Pro can’t win without immersive video • Mac Observer

Rajat Saini:

»

When the Vision Pro launched, Apple highlighted immersive video as the device’s strongest selling point. The format offers a level of immersion that no traditional screen can match. Watching sports, concerts, or documentaries in this environment can feel transformative. Yet Apple has released only 27 pieces of content in the format since launch, leaving users with little to watch.

For example, Apple continues to promote an immersive highlight reel of the 2024 NBA All-Star Game, despite the 2025 event having taken place six months ago without an immersive version. The same applies to concerts. While users can access shows from Metallica, Bono, and a short music video by The Weeknd, the library lacks depth and variety to keep younger tech audiences engaged.

Apple’s series offerings remain sparse. Wild Life has four episodes, Elevated just one, Boundless two, and Prehistoric Planet only two. Even Adventure, with its extreme sports footage, offers only five installments. For a product pitched as a new way to experience storytelling, the content feels more like a demo reel than a growing library.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple intentionally slow-walked immersive content to preserve its reserve, as each production is expensive and resource-heavy. But this strategy has created a catch-22: immersive video is the feature that sells the Vision Pro, yet the lack of it makes the device harder to justify.

Apple has updated the Vision Pro’s software and plans a faster chip in the next model, but these changes won’t address the fundamental issue. A cheaper and lighter version is reportedly set for 2027, but two years is a long wait in a fast-moving industry. If immersive content remains scarce until then, the product risks fading into irrelevance.

«

“Risks fading”? I’ll say it: the Vision Pro is completely forgotten by everyone who doesn’t own one, and probably by quite a few who do. The lack of content; the price; the terrible ergonomics and battery life; the weird design decisions (fake eyes on the outside? Why??). It’s been a bad idea from start to finish, and the lack of a sensible strategy around immersive video – the real selling point – has been the garnish on the awful salad.
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Trump administration in talks to take 10% stake in Intel, Bloomberg News reports • Reuters

Zaheer Kachwala and Jaspreet Singh:

»

The Trump administration is in talks to take a 10% stake in Intel by converting some or all of the struggling company’s Chips Act grants into equity, Bloomberg News reported, citing a White House official and other people familiar with the matter.

Shares of Intel closed about 3.7% lower on Monday, after rallying last week on hopes of US federal support.

A 10% stake in the American chipmaker would be worth about $10bn. Intel has been slated to receive a combined $10.9bn in Chips Act grants for commercial and military production, and the figure is roughly enough to pay for the government’s holding, according to the Bloomberg report on Monday.

Intel declined to comment on the report, while the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

Media reports said last week that the US government may buy a stake in Intel, after a meeting between CEO Lip-Bu Tan and President Donald Trump that was sparked by Trump’s demand for the new Intel chief’s resignation over his ties to Chinese firms.

Federal backing could give Intel more breathing room to revive its loss-making foundry business, analysts have said, but it still suffers from a weak product roadmap and challenges in attracting customers to its new factories.

“The fact that the U.S. government is stepping in to save a blue-chip American company likely means that Intel’s competitive position was much worse than what anybody feared,” said David Wagner, head of equity and portfolio manager at Intel shareholder Aptus Capital Advisors.

«

What fun to watch America trying state-owned capitalism. Not sure it’s going to pull Intel out of its nosedive, but certainly adds a bit of spice to the process.
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Indeed recruiter text scam: I responded to one of the “job” messages. It got weird quickly • Slate

Alexander Sammon:

»

On WhatsApp, I met Cathy, my “coach,” from a company she referred to as Interleave. She had gotten my number, she said, from “Elena who works in Indeed Recruitment Department” and was eager to work with me. Her number had a 424 area code, or Los Angeles. (Indeed is its own company—it essentially offers a job board—and I have no reason to believe that it was actually involved at all.)

Cathy was not altogether patient. When I didn’t respond within two hours, she sent me a voice note that sounded sort of humanoid: “Hello, are you still there?” The next day, she called me and I missed it. When I did respond, via WhatsApp message, she was curt: “Hello, you finally replied to my message. I thought you were taken away by aliens.”

I was going to be doing “music promotion,” I was told. It would take just one or two hours a day. “We use an A.I.–powered system developed by Interleave to help increase the play count of music singles and albums,” Cathy told me, on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. In effect, we were going to be boosting play counts: “Artificial intelligence cannot do this, only real people can participate,” she said. “All we need to do is create a personal account on the Interleave platform, use our real information, and create real playback records.”

Like so many middle school girlfriends, Interleave was based in Canada. The compensation was similarly sketchy. I’d get $100 for two days of work. For 30 days, I’d get $8,200, though it would all have to be routed through a crypto wallet. The job and the compensation had nothing to do with the original text I’d received, but no matter.

Besides, this wasn’t just crude self-enrichment, Cathy said. Interleave was going to “donate a portion of its profits to the World Food Programme charity to help those who really need help gain a brighter life.”

«

You already have a feeling for where it’s going to go – there will be money “paid” to him which somehow can’t be withdrawn without paying more money to the “employer”, but then for some reason the “salary” still can’t be withdrawn, for ever and ever – and all that varies between these scams is what the Macguffin is. (In this case, some sort of music promotion.)
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Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study • The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology

Krzysztof Budzyń, MD et al:

»

We conducted a retrospective, observational study at four endoscopy centres in Poland taking part in the ACCEPT (Artificial Intelligence in Colonoscopy for Cancer Prevention) trial. These centres introduced AI tools for polyp detection at the end of 2021, after which colonoscopies had been randomly assigned to be conducted with or without AI assistance according to the date of examination.

We evaluated the quality of colonoscopy by comparing two different phases: three months before and three months after AI implementation. We included all diagnostic colonoscopies, excluding those involving intensive anticoagulant use, pregnancy, or a history of colorectal resection or inflammatory bowel disease. The primary outcome was change in adenoma detection rate (ADR) of standard, non-AI assisted colonoscopy before and after AI exposure.

…Interpretation: continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.

«

I’ve only got access to this summary, so it’s not clear whether the AI-assisted rate of detection was better or worse than without; only that after people used AI and then reverted to not, their detection was worse. (If anyone can enlighten, that would be welcome.)

The Science Media Centre has a number of comments from scientists: one points out that the number of colonoscopies performed nearly doubled after the AI tool was introduced. Another points out that this paper suggests there would be a problem if a cyber attack (or similar) took out the AI assistant.
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Big Tech expands AI for Good in Africa amid skepticism • Rest of World

Damilare Dosunmu:

»

in July, Google opened an AI Community Center in Ghana to support local innovation, and announced a $37m investment in social impact projects under the catch-all label “AI for Good” across Africa. 

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple are funding similar projects, aligning themselves with a growing trend in which governments, global organizations, and private tech companies promote AI for public good — a push that aims to normalize the technology and soften the anxieties surrounding it. 

Regional AI experts and industry leaders, however, urge caution, saying Africa could become a testing ground for AI models and a vast source of data collection in the U.S.-China tech rivalry, making the continent dependent on foreign-owned systems.

“AI for Good is still very much embedded and rooted in the same saviorism from the West towards the global south. Africa needs to start building reliable infrastructures that can power all these systems,” Asma Derja, founder of Ethical AI Alliance, a Spain-based advocacy group for safe AI, told Rest of World. “Otherwise, Big Tech will continue to make money off the region and then take a [corporate social responsibility] budget to finance a few projects that are addressing climate change or, you know, a particular topic in Tanzania or in Mongolia and call it AI for Good.”

«

“AI for Good” is quite a slogan. Definitely uplifting, something for people to follow – a bit like, say, “Don’t be evil”.
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Chinese homebuyers snub government incentives as they bet on further price falls • South China Morning Post

Daniel Ren and Yuke Xie:

»

Homebuyers in mainland China’s major cities are responding tepidly to new policy relaxations, anticipating further price drops amid an uncertain outlook for the sector.
Analysts and potential buyers warn that the bearish sentiments might weaken the effectiveness of the stimulus measures aimed at reviving the stagnant property market

“The market sentiment is terribly weak now, and the consensus among potential buyers is that prices will slide in the coming months if homeowners are eager to get deals done,” said Qiu Lixiao, a property agent with Pacific Rehouse in Shanghai. “Any measure to encourage purchases of new and pre-owned flats may turn out to be a damp squib.”

He added that his agency had hardly received any inquiries since Beijing’s surprise move last week to lift home-purchase restrictions in the city’s outlying areas, which had also heightened expectations that authorities in Shanghai would take similar action.

…Over the past decade, the mainland’s biggest cities like Shanghai and Beijing have taken many steps to curb home purchases to rein in what was once a red-hot property market.

Lindsay Zhang, a Beijing-based finance professional, said the policy change was not enough to inspire confidence to step into the market.

“I don’t think the relaxed rules are very meaningful because there is not much room for value appreciation for most homes,” she said. “Only properties in the very core locations can retain their value, or at least are more immune to a citywide [price] decline.”

«

Price deflation in a housing market? Almost unknown when there isn’t a recession happening. But China would never admit that it’s in recession.
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MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing • Fortune

Sheryl Estrada:

»

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

To unpack these findings, I spoke with Aditya Challapally, the lead author of the report, and a research contributor to project NANDA at MIT.

“Some large companies’ pilots and younger startups are really excelling with generative AI,” Challapally said. Startups led by 19- or 20-year-olds, for example, “have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million in a year,” he said. “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” he added.

But for 95% of companies in the dataset, generative AI implementation is falling short. The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations. While executives often blame regulation or model performance, MIT’s research points to flawed enterprise integration. Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows, Challapally explained.

The data also reveals a misalignment in resource allocation. More than half of generative AI budgets are devoted to sales and marketing tools, yet MIT found the biggest ROI in back-office automation—eliminating business process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs, and streamlining operations.

«

I was musing, as I saw various people on social media touting how wonderful ChatGPT is for them, why I haven’t noticed any evidence of their productivity being vastly higher. I suspect we’ll need to wait a few years to see it being used even slightly effectively.
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HR giant Workday discloses data breach after Salesforce attack • Bleeping Computer

Sergiu Gatlan:

»

Human resources giant Workday has disclosed a data breach after attackers gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) platform in a recent social engineering attack.

Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Workday has over 19,300 employees in offices across North America, EMEA, and APJ. Workday’s customer list comprises over 11,000 organizations across a diverse range of industries, including more than 60% of the Fortune 500 companies.

As the company revealed in a Friday blog, the attackers gained access to some of the information stored on the compromised CRM systems, adding that no customer tenants were impacted.

“We want to let you know about a recent social engineering campaign targeting many large organizations, including Workday,” the HR giant said. “We recently identified that Workday had been targeted and threat actors were able to access some information from our third-party CRM platform. There is no indication of access to customer tenants or the data within them.”

However, some business contact information was exposed in the incident, including customer data that could be used in subsequent attacks.

“The type of information the actor obtained was primarily commonly available business contact information, like names, email addresses, and phone numbers, potentially to further their social engineering scams,” it added.

«

Just the normal stuff that hackers love to get hold of, no big deal, don’t worry about the call apparently from one of those people you know.
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Government-built “Humphrey” AI tool reviews responses to consultation for first time, in bid to save millions • GOV.UK

»

A new AI tool has summarised what the public have told the government in response to a consultation for the first time – providing nearly identical results to officials.

The tool, called ‘Consult’, was first used on a live consultation by the Scottish Government when it was seeking views on how to regulate non-surgical cosmetic procedures – like lip fillers and laser hair removal – as use of the treatments has risen.

The tool now set to be used across departments in a bid to cut down the millions of pounds spent on the current process, which often includes outsourcing analysis to expensive contractors – helping to build a productive and agile state to deliver the Plan for Change.

Reviewing comments from over 2,000 consultation responses using generative AI, Consult identified key themes that feedback fell into across each of six qualitative questions. These themes were checked and refined by experts in the Scottish Government, the AI tool then sorted individual responses into themes and gave officials more time to delve into the detail and evaluate the policy implications of feedback received.

As this was the first time Consult was used on a live consultation, experts at the Scottish Government manually reviewed every response too. Identifying what an individual response is saying, and putting it in a ‘theme’ is subjective, humans don’t always agree. When we compare Consult to the human reviewer, we see they agree the majority of the time – with differences in view having a negligible impact on how themes were ranked overall.

‘Consult’ is part of ‘Humphrey’, a bundle of AI tools designed to speed up the work of civil servants and cut back time spent on admin, and money spent on contractors.

«

Calling it “Humphrey” is a joke about the old Yes Minister British TV comedy series, where the senior civil servant urbanely guiding the minister away from pitfalls was called Sir Humphrey. Given that people are going to be offering AI-written responses, might as well fight fire with fire.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Like all modern flip phones, the Samsung Z Flip has a deadly enemy: dust. CC-licensed photo by HS You on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Fine, thanks. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Plastics treaty talks collapse without a deal after “chaotic” negotiations • Climate Change News

Matteo Civillini:

»

UN talks on creating a global pact to stem plastic pollution collapsed in Geneva with no agreement or clear way forward after a chaotic night of negotiations failed to break a deadlock over whether to include measures aimed at curbing runaway plastic production.

With discussions running into overtime on Thursday night, a last-ditch attempt by the talks’ chair, Ecuadorian diplomat Luis Vayas Valdivieso, to table a new draft proposal for a treaty fell flat. The text, still containing numerous options in brackets, does not include a dedicated section on plastic production, which nearly 100 countries have been calling for.

An opposing group of fossil fuel-producing nations – including Gulf states, Russia and the US – vehemently reject the inclusion in the treaty of any provisions aimed at reducing plastic production, which is set to triple by 2060. The talks, known as INC-5.2, were unable to find a way to bridge those divergent positions.

Several countries voiced disappointment with the process managed by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in a final plenary session which came to an abrupt end on Friday morning with no next steps agreed.

Valdivieso adjourned the 10-day meeting to be resumed “at a later date” yet to be decided after the United States and Kuwait asked him to cut short the last session – with the latter saying it had become “a health issue” as delegates were exhausted from the long hours.

During the closing plenary, many countries signalled their unease with negotiations continuing under the same format that has yet to deliver a deal after two and a half years. The collapse of talks in Geneva came nine months after the failure of what was originally meant to be the final round of negotiations in December 2024.

On Friday, France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher said she was “disappointed and enraged” with the outcome of the talks, which she described as “so chaotic”. “Oil-producing countries and their allies have chosen to look the other way. We choose to act,” she added.

«

The Montreal Protocol limiting production and use of CFCs these days feels like something out of an SF novel about an alien planet ruled by sensible beings.
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Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history” • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Quick—what are the top entries in the category “Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages”?

The answer is countries.

Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. “Dog” (275 languages) tops “cat” (273). Jesus (274) beats “Adolf Hitler” (242). And all of them beat “sex” (122), which is also bested by “fever,” “Chiang Kai-Shek,” and the number “13.”

But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages.

You… haven’t heard of David Woodard?

Woodard is a composer who infamously wrote a “prequiem”—that is, a “pre requiem”—in 2001 for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had murdered 168 people with a truck bomb. The piece was to be performed at a church near McVeigh’s execution site in Terre Haute, Indiana, then recorded and played on the radio so that McVeigh would have a chance to hear it.

According to the LA Times, which spoke to the composer, “Woodard’s hope in performing the 12-minute piece, he said, is to ’cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.'” According to BBC coverage from the time, Woodard “says McVeigh is ’33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution’—like Jesus Christ.”

…A Wikipedia editor who goes by “Grnrchst” recently decided to find out, diving deep into the articles about Woodard and into any edits that placed his name in other articles. The results of this lengthy and tedious investigation were written up in the August 9 edition of the Signpost, a volunteer-run online newspaper about Wikipedia.

Grnrchst’s conclusion was direct: “I discovered what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses.”

«

Well, that’s a decade of someone’s work down the drain. Performance art project? Self-aggrandisement scheme? University jape? We still don’t know. Woodard is real. But the reason for all this is unknown.
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The one feature that keeps me from recommending flip phones: dust • The Verge

Allison Johnson:

»

I love flip phones. Lots of you love flip phones, too.

Those little specks of dust [which find their way into the crease of the fold] still loom large. Despite substantial improvements to the screens and hinges, and the addition of water resistance, flip phones (and their fold-style siblings) still lack dust resistance. Both Motorola and Samsung’s latest foldables come with an IP48 rating, which only guarantees protection against very small particles, meaning anything smaller than a millimeter could still potentially work its way into the phone and wreak havoc.

Sure, plenty of people own folding phones and never experience problems with dust, which is great! But when every other slab-style phone at the same price point comes with a full IP68 rating, it’s hard to tell the average person to go ahead and spend $1,000 on a flip phone. Fun only goes so far.

I had a burning question for Samsung’s head of smartphone planning, Minseok Kang. Maybe it even bordered on a plea. “Is a dustproof foldable even possible?” I asked following Samsung’s most recent Unpacked.

“I don’t think that it’s not possible,” he said. “But it is difficult.”

Whispers of foldables with the elusive IP68 rating have cropped up around most of the recent folding phone launches, ultimately fizzling when the full specs have been revealed.

«

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The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly • PNAS

Reese Richardson, Spencer Hong, Jennifer Byrne, Thomas Stoeger and Luis Nunes Amaral:

»

Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals.

Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud.

Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud.

«

This is a big paper, and there’s no doubting the work. The reason for the growth in fraud seems to be a symbiotic process: publications which can charge for publication (or subscription) need researchers who will be measured on the quantity rather than quality of publication. Both are driven by volume, not value, of publication.

The question is, therefore, how do you break the symbiosis?
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Every reason why I hate AI and you should too • Malwaretech

Marcus Hutchins:

»

One thing that’s certain is that Generative AI is in a bubble. That’s not to say AI as a technology will pop, or that there isn’t genuine room for a lot more growth; simply, the level of hype far outweighs the current value of the tech.

Most (reasonable) people I speak to are of one of three opinions:

1: These technologies are fundamentally unsustainable and the hype will be short-lived
2: There will be some future breakthrough that will bring the technology in line with the hype, but in the meantime everyone is essentially just relying on creative marketing to keep the money flowing
3: The tech has a narrow use case for which they are exceedingly valuable, but almost everything else is just hype.

Whenever I’m critical of anything GenAI, without fail I get asked the same question. “do you think every major CEO could be wrong?”

The answer to that is: yes. History is littered with examples of industry titans going nuts, losing more money than the GDP of an entire country, saying “lol, my bad”, then finding something else to do.

I grew up during the fallout from the great financial crisis. I watched first hand as the biggest most prestigious financial institution crashed the entire global economy. Turns out, in the short term playing hot potato with debt derivatives backed by imaginary money and fraud is a great business model. In the long term, not so much.

It’s not even necessarily that corporate executives are being stupid. Sometimes they are, which can result in things like sinking more money that it cost the US government to put the sun in a bomb into the worst VR game ever. But usually it’s just greed and shortsightedness.

«

If you’re wondering why Hutchins’s name is familiar, it’s because he’s the guy who stopped the North Korean Wannacry ransomware attack in 2017 by, of al things, registering the domain it was trying to contact. (His About page makes worrying reading for anyone getting into cybersecurity.)
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Nabiha Syed remakes Mozilla Foundation in AI, Trump era • The Register

Thomas Claburn:

»

Last May, Nabiha Syed became executive director of The Mozilla Foundation, and a year on, reached out to The Register to share her vision for an organization humbled by layoffs and confronted by stochastic parrots and stochastic politics.

Syed said that the Mozilla Foundation is sworn to defend the open web and has been doing so for the past two decades. But the challenge is different now.

“We sort of knew what the internet was and it went through phases,” said Syed. “But now, with the onslaught of AI slop and surveillance capitalism running amok, we really have to go back to first principles: why do we care about the open internet, the open web?”

The opportunity for the foundation, she said, is to rethink what a positive future looks like and to figure out how to mobilize people to help realize that vision, because change requires community participation.

«

This is one of those “would you like to talk to the new head of Mozilla?” interviews that PRs will offer journalists, who will inwardly groan because they know nothing of any consequence will emerge but go through with it anyway in the hope that when some drama occurs, they’ll have the faint chance of getting the inside track.

And so it transpires here. The interview is a big nothingburger, lighter than air. Syed doesn’t, for example, tackle the fact that Mozilla’s principal source of income is Google, which is the company that is contributing mightily to all of AI slop, surveillance capitalism and the non-open web. Very much a case of your income depending on not understanding something, a la Upton Sinclair.
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LinkedIn is the fakest platform of them all • Prospect Magazine

Ben Clark:

»

“LinkedIn doesn’t know me anymore,” someone complained to me recently. “What do you mean?” I asked. She explained that the platform has replaced the old “recommended jobs” section, which used to show her quite useful job openings based on her previous searches and CV, with an AI search engine that asks you to describe your ideal job in freeform text. The results it brings up aren’t nearly as relevant.

This is just one of many ways in which the professionals’ social media platform, which has embraced artificial intelligence with ferocious zeal, is being gradually “enshittified”, to borrow tech writer Cory Doctorow’s phrase. Each new embrace of AI tools promises to make hiring, job searching, networking and even posting a bit easier or more fruitful. Instead, AI seems to have made the user’s experience more alienating, and to have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet.  

Let’s start with my opening example—which, to be fair, is in beta testing mode and can be switched off. Instead of the AI assistant being like an intuitive digital servant, pulling up the best jobs based on your ruminations, users are confronted with a new and annoying task: crafting prompts for the AI. But the non-AI search bar worked perfectly well as it was.

Then there is the AI writing assistant, which is available to users who pay for the platform’s £29.99 per month premium service to help them craft their posts. LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky recently admitted that users aren’t using the tool as much as he anticipated. It seems that sounding like a human being to your colleagues and clients is put at, well, a premium.

And then there are the ways in which users are deploying outputs from external AI chatbots on the platform, something with which LinkedIn is struggling to cope. According to the New York Times, the number of job applications submitted via the platform increased by 45% in the year to June, now clocking in at an average of 11,000 per minute.

«

My new favourite Twitter/X account is LinkedIn Lunatics, which collects random bits of utter madness from its users. It’s the most bizarre place, based on that evidence.
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October 2024: How Intel got left behind in the AI chip boom • The New York Times

Steve Lohr and Don Clark in October 2024:

»

In 2005, there was no inkling of the artificial intelligence boom that would come years later. But directors at Intel, whose chips served as electronic brains in most computers, faced a decision that might have altered how that transformative technology evolved.

Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive at the time, presented the board with a startling idea: buy Nvidia, a Silicon Valley upstart known for chips used for computer graphics. The price tag: as much as $20bn.

Some Intel executives believed that the underlying design of graphics chips could eventually take on important new jobs in data centers, an approach that would eventually dominate AI systems.

But the board resisted, according to two people familiar with the boardroom discussion who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was confidential. Intel had a poor record of absorbing companies. And the deal would have been by far Intel’s most expensive acquisition.

Confronting skepticism from the board, Mr. Otellini, who died in 2017, backed away, and his proposal went no further. In hindsight, one person who attended the meeting said, it was “a fateful moment.”

«

You’d have had to have the most crystalline of balls in 2005 to predict how the AI (and graphics) space was going to turn out; bitcoin was still five years from being invented, AI was a niche pursuit of academia, and smartphones weren’t yet a significant thing. I’d predict that Nvidia wouldn’t have sold, but also that if it had, Intel would have screwed it up.

For all that, one can see Intel as being like Microsoft: didn’t get mobile, and effectively got passed by AI (Microsoft has clung on to OpenAI). The two big revolutions of this century in computing, and Intel wasn’t anywhere near them.

Intel, now, is skirting with disaster.
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The $6 revolution: how generic weight loss drugs could save millions of lives • Overmatter

Natasha Loder and Peter Singer:

»

In about five months the patent for a key weight loss medication, semaglutide, will lapse in a large number of countries around the world including India, China, Brazil, and Canada —although not in the most lucrative markets. The wider availability of this drug is likely to herald the beginning of a step change in the global treatment of obesity and metabolic diseases. It is a big deal. Obesity alone has risen relentlessly over past decades, more than doubling in adults since 1990. Over a billion people live with obesity, and its health consequences, worldwide.

The potential for generic and cheaper semaglutide for wide use in the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and a range of other conditions is so mind-boggingly large, we think the time is ripe for many governments to start to plan for how to maximise their potential. Firms in China and India, in particular, have been preparing for the expiry of the patent in their territories by developing the capacity to deliver large quantities of what will be cheaper, generic, i.e. biosimilar, versions of this drug. Reports suggest that drugs which today cost over $1,000 a month in America will be manufactured in India for less than $6 a month. Although the price of these drugs is unknown, Indian manufacturers typically work high-volume and low costs. Demand will be global. (Although individuals in countries where the patent has not expired, such as America, UK, Europe, Japan, and Australia, will not be able to buy these generic medicines legally).

For those living in countries where semaglutide (sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) patents are expiring, as prices tumble, so too will waistlines as demand is expected to soar. Countries could transform the treatment of diabetes, obesity and overweight, along with better outcomes in those with cardiovascular health, poor metabolic health, liver and kidney disease.

«

Well this is going to be interesting, isn’t it.
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How a mathematical paradox allows infinite cloning • Quanta Magazine

Max Levy:

»

Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. It’s a mathematical theorem involving infinity that makes it possible, at least in principle, to turn one apple into two.

That argument is called the Banach-Tarski paradox, after the mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski, who devised it in 1924. It proves that according to the fundamental rules of mathematics, it’s possible to split a solid three-dimensional ball into pieces that recombine to form two identical copies of the original. Two apples out of one.

“Right away, one sees that it’s completely counterintuitive,” said Dima Sinapova (opens a new tab) of the University of Illinois, Chicago.

The paradox arises from one of the most mind-bending concepts in math: infinity.

…Banach and Tarski realized you can turn one sphere into two by partitioning the uncountably infinite set of points it contains into — get ready for it — an uncountably infinite number of countably infinite sets. The separation occurs through a very specific dissection procedure.

«

Why not start the day with a bit of mind-expanding maths? And you get an infinite number of apples as a bonus. (If you can make two from one, you can keep on doing it, after all.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The number of single-use plastic bags sold by UK retailers has fallen by 98% since a charge was introduced in October 2015. CC-licensed photo by Newtown grafitti on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

The Overspill is going on a break for two weeks. Back on August 18.

A selection of 10 links for you. Reusable. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

UK online safety law leads to five million extra age checks a day for pornography sites • The Guardian

Dan Milmo:

»

Five million extra online age checks a day are being carried out in the UK since the introduction of age-gating for pornography sites, according to new data.

The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) said there had been a sharp increase in additional age checks in the UK since Friday, when age verification became mandatory for accessing pornography under the Online Safety Act.

“As a result of new codes under the Online Safety Act coming into force on Friday, we have seen an additional 5m age checks on a daily basis, as UK-based internet users seek to access sites that are age-restricted,” said Iain Corby, the executive director of the AVPA.

The UK has also seen a surge in popularity of virtual private networks, which obscure a user’s real location and thus allow them to access sites blocked in their own country. Four of the top five free apps on the Apple download store in the UK are VPN apps, with Proton, the most popular, reporting a 1,800% increase in downloads.

Last week the UK’s communications regulator and enforcer of the act, Ofcom, indicated that it could start formal investigations into inadequate age checking this week. Ofcom said it would be actively checking compliance with age-checking requirements and if necessary would launch investigations into individual services.

«

If that’s every day, then there have been 30 million new checks in six days since the mandatory move. That’s either going to stop dead now that 30 million adults have logged on afresh, or it’s going to continue for some time as they all log on to different sites.

One story that hasn’t been examined is quite where the AVPA’s members reside and pay taxes. Is it the UK? Separately, they are, obviously, a huge target for hackers. And staying un-hacked is very, very hard.
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Official stats show renewables generated over half UK’s electricity for the first time in 2024 • Renewable UK

»

New statistics released by the Government today show that renewables generated a record 50.8% of the UK’s electricity in 2024 – the first year in which renewables have exceeded 50%, and a substantial increase on the previous high of 46.4% in 2023. These are the first figures to be published by the Government covering 2024 in its entirety.

They are included in the latest Energy Trends report by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which also shows that a record amount of clean power was produced last year, reaching a new high of 144.7 terawatt hours (TWh), up 6.5% from 135.8TWh in 2023.

The report states that wind generation increased to a record 29.5% (84.1TWh), up from 28.1% (82.3TWh) in 2023, due to higher wind speeds and further increases in capacity. Offshore wind generated 17.2% (48.9TWh) and onshore wind 12.3% (35.1TWh).

Solar provided 5.2% (14.8TWh) and nuclear 14.25% (40.6TWh) of the UK’s electricity in 2024. Low carbon sources (renewables and nuclear) generated a record 65% (185.2TWh), while fossil fuels fell to levels last seen in the 1950s at 31.5% (89.7TWh).

«

I think it means that the fossil fuel amount was comparable to the 1950s, rather than the proportion. A remarkable and worthwhile achievement. Separately, fuel consumption outside electricity generation is down by 10%.
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Tim Cook says Apple is ‘open to’ AI acquisitions • The Verge

Emma Roth:

»

Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company is “open” to mergers and acquisitions as it “significantly” increases its investment in AI, as reported by CNBC. Cook’s statements were made alongside the release of Apple’s third-quarter earnings results, which revealed that the iPhone-maker raked in $94 billion between April and June, marking a 10% increase over the same period last year.

The remarks come as Apple continues to be seen as behind the AI race, with its efforts on Apple Intelligence lagging relative to its peers and Meta poaching some of its top engineers. The company is increasingly turning to AI startups for help — and reports have suggested that Apple is even open to making big acquisitions to catch up.

Last month, a report from Bloomberg said that Apple may enlist the help of AI giants, like OpenAI and Anthropic, to power its “LLM Siri.” Bloomberg also reported in June that Apple leaders discussed acquiring the AI search startup Perplexity. The discussions come after Apple swapped in Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell as the leader of AI and Siri in March.

«

The question is, does what Cook said actually mean anything? Being “open” to buying a company is a nice way to placate Wall Street when every other question is “when you going to do more AI, huh?” but is there actual intent there? Because if so, the price of acquisition is going up every day. (Apple has $133bn in cash.)
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St. Paul, Minnesota, was hacked so badly that the National Guard has been deployed • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

St. Paul, Minnesota …suffered a significant cyberattack last Friday that it has been unable to mitigate. Things have gotten so bad that the city has declared a state of emergency, while the governor activated the National Guard to assist.

According to remarks by St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, the attack was first noticed early in the morning of Friday, July 25. It was, Carter said, “a deliberate, coordinated digital attack, carried out by a sophisticated external actor—intentionally and criminally targeting our city’s information infrastructure.”

The city had trouble stopping the attack over the weekend, however, so on Monday, it “initiated a full shutdown of our information systems as a defensive measure to contain the threat.” All Wi-Fi in city buildings is currently down, and numerous computerized city functions—including checking out library books—have been stopped. (According to a resident who spoke to local TV channel KSTP 5, books can still be checked out “the old school manual way, writing down the bar code number from your library card.”) Online payments to the city have been disabled, though emergency services remain operational.

The FBI and two national cybersecurity firms have been brought on to mitigate the attack, but it hasn’t been enough. Yesterday, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz activated state units of the National Guard to assist the city.

“Unfortunately, the scale and complexity of this incident exceeded both internal and commercial response capabilities,” Walz said. “As a result, St. Paul has requested cyber protection support from the Minnesota National Guard to help address this incident and make sure that vital municipal services continue without interruption.”

According to the mayor, there have not yet been any demands for a ransom.

«

Peculiar: it’s either script kiddies or, more worrying, state actors trying something out to test defences. Most betting would be on the kiddies, though.
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Microsoft researchers have revealed the 40 jobs most exposed to AI—and even teachers make the list • Fortune

Preston Fore:

»

Translators, historians, and writers are among the roles with the highest AI applicability score, meaning the job’s tasks are most closely aligned with AI’s current abilities, according to the report released this month that ranked professions. Customer service and sales representatives—which make up about 5 million jobs in the U.S.—will also have to compete with AI. 

Overall, the jobs most exposed are ones that involve knowledge work—like people doing computer, math, or administrative work in an office, the researchers wrote. Sales jobs are also high on the list, since they often involve sharing and explaining information.

While Microsoft said high applicability doesn’t automatically mean those jobs will necessarily be replaced by AI, the list of roles quickly went viral—with professionals deeming them “most at risk.” It comes as companies like IBM have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that it expects AI will take over in the next five years, and graduates in the U.K. are facing the worst job market since 2018 as employers pause hiring and use AI to cut costs, says Indeed.

Of course, there are some jobs that are unlikely to be touched by AI: dredge operators, bridge and lock tenders, and water treatment plant and system operators are among the jobs with virtually no generative AI exposure, thanks in part to their hands-on equipment requirements.

Still, business leaders like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have said that every job will be touched by AI in some way, and so it’s best to embrace it. 

“Every job will be affected, and immediately. It is unquestionable,” Huang said at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in May. “You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.”

Many of the jobs with high chances of getting upended by AI soon, like political scientists, journalists, and management analysts, are all ones that typically require a four-year degree to land a job. And as the researchers point out, having a degree—which was once considered a surefire path to career advancement—is no longer a safeguard against the changing tides.

«

This is not unlike the list of jobs from the famous Frey & Osborne forecast of 2013, which suggested (on p61) that dentists and surgeons were probably OK, but telemarketers should worry.
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Nvidia AI chips worth $1bn smuggled to China after Trump export controls • Financial Times

Zijing Wu and Eleanor Olcott:

»

At least $1bn worth of Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence processors were shipped to China in the three months after Donald Trump tightened chip export controls, exposing the limits of Washington’s efforts to restrain Beijing’s high-tech ambitions.

A Financial Times analysis of dozens of sales contracts, company filings and multiple people with direct knowledge of the deals reveals that Nvidia’s B200 has become the most sought-after — and widely available — chip in a rampant Chinese black market for American semiconductors.

The processor is widely used by US powerhouses such as OpenAI, Google and Meta to train their latest AI systems, but banned for sale to China.

In May, multiple Chinese distributors started selling B200s to suppliers of data centres that serve Chinese AI groups, according to documents reviewed by the FT. This was shortly after the Trump administration moved to prevent sales of the H20 — a less-powerful Nvidia chip tailored to comply with Joe Biden-era curbs.

It is legal to receive and sell restricted Nvidia chips in China, as long as relevant border tariffs are paid, according to lawyers familiar with the rules. Entities selling and sending them to China would be violating US regulations, however.

«

Reminiscent of ZTE selling equipment to Iran in violation of US regulations during the first Trump administration, which was quickly followed by some tough sanctions. Who will the US go after for this, though?
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Google DeepMind says its new AI can map the entire planet with unprecedented accuracy • VentureBeat

Michael Nuñez:

»

The system, called AlphaEarth Foundations, addresses a critical challenge that has plagued Earth observation for decades: making sense of the overwhelming flood of satellite data streaming down from space. Every day, satellites capture terabytes of images and measurements, but connecting these disparate datasets into actionable intelligence has remained frustratingly difficult.

“AlphaEarth Foundations functions like a virtual satellite,” the research team writes in their paper. “It accurately and efficiently characterizes the planet’s entire terrestrial land and coastal waters by integrating huge amounts of Earth observation data into a unified digital representation.”

The AI system reduces error rates by approximately 23.9% compared to existing approaches while requiring 16 times less storage space than other AI systems. This combination of accuracy and efficiency could dramatically lower the cost of planetary-scale environmental analysis.

«

Ever so slightly suspicious of “approximately 23.9%”. If that’s approximate, what’s your measure of exactitude? But research groups are finding it useful, according to the reporting, especially for places where there isn’t much “ground truth”, ie people on the ground. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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YouTube most popular first TV destination for children, Ofcom finds • The Guardian

Michael Savage:

»

Children are now heading to YouTube from the moment they turn on the television, in the latest sign of the video platform’s migration from the laptop to the living room.

YouTube is the most popular first TV destination for generation Alpha, according to a comprehensive survey of the UK’s viewing habits by Ofcom, the communications regulator.

One in five young TV viewers aged from four to 15 turned straight to the platform last year. The survey showed Netflix close behind. While BBC One was in the top five first destinations, children were just as likely to choose BBC iPlayer.

YouTube’s increasing presence on televisions is not just down to the very young. In a gradual cultural shift, viewers aged 55 and over watched almost twice as much YouTube content last year as they did in 2023, up from six minutes a day to 11 minutes a day. An increasing proportion of that – 42% – is viewed through a TV set.

…The rise of YouTube is presenting a major challenge for public service broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, who have to decide how much of their content to place on the platform.

While doing so helps them reach new and younger audiences, YouTube also takes a huge chunk of advertising revenue. There is also a risk that putting shows on YouTube ensures viewers spend less time on a broadcaster’s own platforms.

«

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Amazon invests in Fable, the ‘Netflix of AI’ which generates playable TV shows • Variety

Todd Spangler:

»

Edward Saatchi isn’t totally sure people will flock to Showrunner, the new AI-generated TV show service his company is launching publicly this week. But he has a vote of confidence from Amazon, whose Alexa Fund venture-capital investment arm has invested in Fable, Saatchi’s San Francisco-based start-up.

The amount of Amazon’s Alexa Fund investment in Fable isn’t being disclosed. The money is going toward building out Showrunner, which Fable has hyped as the “Netflix of AI”: a service that lets you type in a few words to create scenes — or entire episodes — of a TV show, either from scratch or based on an existing story-world someone else has created.

Fable is launching Showrunner to let users tinker with the animation-focused generative-AI system, following several months in a closed alpha test with 10,000 users. Initially, Showrunner will be free to use but eventually the company plans to charge creators $10-$20 per month for credits allowing them to create hundreds of TV scenes, Saatchi said.

«

This feels like a cross between video games (very popular with younger demographics!) and TV (less popular with younger demographics!). Which might be successful.
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Single-use plastic carrier bags charge: data for England 2024 to 2025 • GOV.UK

»

Since 5 October 2015, large retailers (those with 250 or more full-time equivalent employees) in England have been required by law to charge customers for all single-use plastic carrier bags given out. This charge was originally set at 5 pence per bag. Large retailers are also required to report certain information to Defra, including:

• the number of single-use carrier bags sold under the charge
• gross proceeds
• any costs incurred
• the use of the net proceeds

…In the reporting year from 7 April 2024 to 6 April 2025, the total number of single-use plastic bags sold by the 102 retailers in England who reported data for the period was 437 million, up 7% since 2023 to 2024 and down 79% since 2016 to 2017, the first full year of reporting since the single-use plastic carrier bag charge was introduced. This is equivalent to around 8 single-use plastic bags per person sold by all retailers who reported data for the most recent reporting year. 

Over the same period, the total number of single-use plastic bags sold by the main 7 retailers in England was 164 million, up 6% since 2023 to 2024 and down 88% since 2016 to 2017. This is equivalent to around 3 single-use plastic bags per person sold by the main retailers in 2024 to 2025. 

The Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has previously reported that the main retailers in England issued 7.6 billion single-use carrier bags in the calendar year 2014. Our data indicates that, based on this year’s return, there has been a decrease of almost 98% in the annual number of single-use carrier bags sold by the main retailers (over 7.4 billion fewer bags) since the charge was introduced. 

«

That’s an incredible reduction which goes to show that price is an amazing incentive when you want to change behaviour. It also generated £7.7m for good causes; since 2015 the total donated is over £225m.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The ENIAC system was such a power guzzler in 1953 that it caused power blackouts in Philadelphia. CC-licensed photo by terren in Virginia on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Full of energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Journalist discovers Google vulnerability that allowed people to disappear specific pages from search • 404 Media

Matthew Gault:

»

By accident, journalist Jack Poulson discovered Google had completely de-listed two of his articles from its search results. “We only found it by complete coincidence,” Poulson told 404 Media. “I happened to be Googling for one of the articles, and even when I typed in the exact title in quotes it wouldn’t show up in search results anymore.”

Poulson had stumbled on a vulnerability in Google’s search engine that allowed people to maliciously delete links off of Google, which is a reputation management company’s dream and which could easily be used to suppress information. The SEO trick had allowed someone to de-list specific web pages from the search engine using Google’s Refresh Outdated Content tool, a site that lets users submit pages to URLs to be recrawled and re-listed after an update. The vulnerability had to do with capitalizing different letters in the URL in this tool, which ultimately caused the delisting. 

In 2023, Poulson published an article about tech CEO Delwin Maurice Blackman’s 2021 arrest on a felony domestic violence charge.

After Poulson published Blackman’s arrest records in 2023, the CEO has attempted to suppress the story in various ways, including lawsuits and DMCA takedown requests. Eventually, the stories disappeared from Google, using this vulnerability. As far as Poulson could tell, the only two articles on his newsletter that had been de-listed by Google using the trick were related to the CEO. 

Google confirmed the problem in an email to 404 Media. “This tool helps ensure our search results are up to date. We’re vigilant in monitoring abuse, and we worked quickly to roll out a fix for this specific issue, which was only impacting a tiny fraction of web pages.”

«

“Vigilant in monitoring abuse” as long as they’re told about it by journalists. Perhaps they need a team who are trying to remove all their details from the search results.
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Mark Zuckerberg promises you can trust him with superintelligent AI • The Verge

Hayden Field:

»

Hours before Meta’s earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision for the future of AI: personalized super-smart AI for everyone — especially in the form of wearable glasses.

He said his vision is for everyone to have an AI tool that “helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.”

The announcement came in the form of a plain-text webpage and letter to the public espousing the importance of bringing “personal superintelligence” to everyone, even if it takes a while. Superintelligence is another term for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a type of AI that equals or surpasses human intelligence on a wide range of tasks — a goal that most leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, are chasing right now.

“The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable,” Zuckerberg wrote of AI’s advances. “Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”

…Zuckerberg also subtly cast doubt on the goals of his competitors in AI, writing that Meta’s goal “is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.” For instance, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has publicly stated he believes that AI could replace many jobs in society and eventually lead to a form of universal basic income.

Zuckerberg continued his bullish stance on smart glasses, writing that above all, humanity’s “primary computing devices” will be personal devices like glasses.

«

I can believe that smart glasses will be a thing – potentially a huge thing – but the question is how soon. That’s really the only question. There had been smartphones for years before the iPhone turned up in 2007 and showed the world how to do it, and it needed Android to copy it and make it widespread for the form to take over from the BlackBerry and Nokia and Windows Mobile forms.
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Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows • Nature

Elizabeth Gibney:

»

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the application of equations, first sketched out a century ago, that describe the behaviour of objects at the microscopic scale.

But researchers still disagree widely on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the mathematics, as a Nature survey reveals.

At an event to mark the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics last month, lauded specialists in quantum physics argued politely — but firmly — about the issue. “There is no quantum world,” said physicist Anton Zeilinger, at the University of Vienna, outlining his view that quantum states exist only in his head and that they describe information, rather than reality. “I disagree,” replied Alain Aspect, a physicist at the University of Paris-Saclay, who shared the 2022 Nobel prize with Zeilinger for work on quantum phenomena.

To gain a snapshot of how the wider community interprets quantum physics in its centenary year, Nature carried out the largest ever survey on the subject. We e-mailed more than 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, and also invited attendees of the centenary meeting, held on the German island of Heligoland, to take the survey.

The responses — numbering more than 1,100, mainly from physicists — showed how widely researchers vary in their understanding of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments.

«

You might think: who cares, quantum theory is a century old. But being able to think of new ways to explore the theory depend on how you interpret the theory. And there’s surprisingly low confidence even in the most popular reading of quantum theory.
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Apple loses fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta’s superintelligence team • Bloomberg via South China Morning Post

Mark Gurman:

»

Apple has lost its fourth AI researcher in a month to Meta Platforms, marking the latest setback to the iPhone maker’s artificial intelligence efforts.

Bowen Zhang, a key multimodal AI researcher at Apple, left the company on Friday and is set to join Meta’s recently formed superintelligence team, according to people familiar with the matter. Zhang was part of the Apple foundation models group, or AFM, which built the core technology behind the company’s AI platform.

Meta previously lured away the leader of the team, Ruoming Pang, with a compensation package valued at more than US$200m, Bloomberg News has reported. Two other researchers from that group – Tom Gunter and Mark Lee – also recently joined Meta. AFM is made up of several dozen engineers and researchers across Cupertino, California, and New York.

In response to the job offers from Meta and others, Apple has been marginally increasing the pay of its AFM staffers, whether or not they have threatened to leave, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves are private. Still, the pay levels pale in comparison with those of rivals.

Spokespeople for Apple and Meta declined to comment.

The departures have thrown Apple’s models team into flux. Pang played a central role in defining the department’s road map and research direction, and multiple people within AFM now say its future is unclear. Additional engineers are actively interviewing for jobs jobs elsewhere, according to the people. Another team member – Floris Weers – left for a start-up in recent weeks.

«

These are crazy offers in terms of money. It’s become exactly the same as sports teams, but without the audience participation. Or maybe the audience participation takes a different form.

Meanwhile Apple’s miss on generative AI, distracted by cars and augmented reality goggles, is still something it can recover from by hiring in something else (as it did for search and, initially, maps). But people misread it as a disaster.
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ENIAC at 75: A computing pioneer • Data Center Dynamics

Dan Swinhoe:

»

A 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC in 1953.

Capable of around 5,000 calculations a second, ENIAC was a thousand times faster than any other machine of the time and had modules to multiply, divide, and square root.

“This was a machine that straddled the point in history where we went from mechanical calculators and adding machines to electronic computers,” says Thompson.

While a massive step-change in terms of capability compared to any other computer in the world at the time, it also had various challenges in operation. With minimal cooling technology – two 20-horsepower blowers – ENIAC raised the room temperature to 50ºC when in operation and its 160kW energy consumption caused blackouts in the city of Philadelphia.

Reliability was also a constant challenge. Before speciality tubes became available in 1948, the machine used standard radio tubes, which burnt out on a near-daily basis. At first it took hours to work out which tube had actually blown, but the team eventually developed a system to reduce this down to around 15 minutes thanks to some ‘predictive maintenance’ and careful monitoring of equipment.

«

Just to show that concerns about power consumption by computers is absolutely not a new thing. (Thanks Seth F for the link.)
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Of course we should stop kids from watching porn • The Critic Magazine

Jo Bartosch:

»

Some things shouldn’t need saying — like don’t let kids watch porn. You’d think this was a moral baseline broad enough to unite everyone from Germaine Greer to the Pope. But BBC articles have framed the new requirement for age verification on porn sites as a profound ethical dilemma. The state broadcaster strained to find nuance — and ended up platforming pornographers and privacy bores with predictable objections.

Like most legislation, the Online Safety Act is far from perfect. It’s clunky, overreaching, and the way platforms like X/Twitter have implemented its requirement for age verification has already led to unjustifiable censorship — including reports that footage of protests in the UK has been blocked. Meanwhile, some pornography sites are offering risible age checks that a monkey could bypass. But one thing is clear: this law will mean that kids are less likely to simply stumble across porn on social media. And that is unequivocally a Good Thing. 

There are no upsides to children viewing scenes of (real or simulated) rape, incest or sexual torture — yet this is the bulk of mainstream porn. The average age of first exposure is just 13. And studies from the British Board of Film Classification and the Children’s Commissioner show that typically minors don’t seek porn out; it finds them. In fact, 41% first encountered porn on X/Twitter, more than on dedicated porn sites.

The real question isn’t why age checks have been introduced — it’s why they weren’t there in the first place.

The BBC itself inadvertently highlighted the issue in its reporting. When twentysomething Newsbeat presenter Jordan Kenny asked technology minister Peter Kyle, “How old were you when you first saw porn?” the 54-year-old wisely refused to answer. But the question itself was revealing. Not if, but when. Porn is now so normalised, it’s a given we’ve all seen it. But normal doesn’t mean harmless.

…There are legitimate concerns about how the Online Safety Act might be used to enforce censorship. And more widely, whether its moves to criminalise speech or abolish trial by jury, the government seems suspiciously eager to rob citizens of our rights. But pornography is not just another liberty issue — it’s a public health and child protection crisis. We’re heading towards a hellscape where boys grow up to be rapists and girls grow up to be targets. Faced with this dystopia, fretting over blocked protest clips or being asked for your date of birth is ludicrous.

«

The debate over the Online Safety Act is fascinating. The mild inconvenience for lots of adults (who prefer to just install a VPN) v the benefit for lots of children (who will just install a VPN).
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VPN nation • The Critic Magazine

Christopher Snowdon:

»

Preventing children from seeing hardcore pornography is a noble aim, but parents can already protect them from adult content of all varieties by using features such as Family Link which have the added benefits of location sharing and screen time controls. The government insists that age verification is designed to stop online “predators”, with one minister even suggesting that those who criticise it are Jimmy Savile enablers but, as the Institute of Economic Affairs predicted from the outset, the threat of heavy fines has led internet platforms to extend the censorship far beyond porn. 

People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three. 

While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.

…Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.

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Fascinating debate, part 2.
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Meta unveils wristband for controlling computers with hand gestures • The New York Times

Cade Metz:

»

The prototype looks like a giant rectangular wristwatch. But it doesn’t tell the time; it lets you control a computer from across the room simply by moving your hand.

With a gentle turn of the wrist, you can push a cursor across your laptop screen. If you tap your thumb against your forefinger, you can open an app on your desktop computer. And when you write your name in the air, as if you were holding a pencil, the letters will appear on your smartphone.

Designed by researchers at Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, this experimental technology reads the electrical signals that pulse through your muscles when you move your fingers. These signals, generated by commands sent from your brain, can reveal what you are about to do even before you do it, as the company detailed in a research paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

With a little practice, you can even move your laptop cursor simply by producing the right thought. “You don’t have to actually move,” Thomas Reardon, the Meta vice president of research who leads the project, said in an interview. “You just have to intend the move.”

Meta’s wristband is part of a sweeping effort to develop technologies that let wearers control their personal devices without touching them. The aim is to provide simpler, quicker and less awkward ways of interacting with everything from laptops to smartphones — and maybe even to develop new digital devices that replace what we all use today.

Most of these technologies are years away from widespread use. They typically involve tiny devices surgically implanted in the body, which is a complicated and risky endeavor. These implants are tested solely with disabled people who cannot move their arms and hands, and need new ways of using computers or smartphones.

«

Good grief, Meta, don’t you read this newsletter thing? “When you write your name in the air”. Give me strength. Why is that better than “when you say a trigger word aloud”? The answer is that it isn’t. Gestures keep being reinvented, and keep being rejected.
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After $380m hack, Clorox sues its “service desk” vendor for simply giving out passwords • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Hacking is hard. Well, sometimes.

Other times, you just call up a company’s IT service desk and pretend to be an employee who needs a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset… and it’s done. Without even verifying your identity.

So you use that information to log in to the target network and discover a more trusted user who works in IT security. You call the IT service desk back, acting like you are now this second person, and you request the same thing: a password reset, an Okta multifactor authentication reset, and a Microsoft multifactor authentication reset. Again, the desk provides it, no identity verification needed.

So you log in to the network with these new credentials and set about planting ransomware or exfiltrating data in the target network, eventually doing an estimated $380m in damage. Easy, right?

According to The Clorox Company, which makes everything from lip balm to cat litter to charcoal to bleach, this is exactly what happened to it in 2023. But Clorox says that the “debilitating” breach was not its fault. It had outsourced the “service desk” part of its IT security operations to the massive services company Cognizant—and Clorox says that Cognizant failed to follow even the most basic agreed-upon procedures for running the service desk.

In the words of a new Clorox lawsuit, Cognizant’s behavior was “all a devastating lie,” it “failed to show even scant care,” and it was “aware that its employees were not adequately trained.”

“Cognizant was not duped by any elaborate ploy or sophisticated hacking techniques,” says the lawsuit, using italics to indicate outrage emphasis. “The cybercriminal just called the Cognizant Service Desk, asked for credentials to access Clorox’s network, and Cognizant handed the credentials right over. Cognizant is on tape handing over the keys to Clorox’s corporate network to the cybercriminal—no authentication questions asked.”

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That’s the joy of outsourcing! (Thanks Ian C for the link.)
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The temperatures in Svalbard during the Arctic winter have reached record highs, which is not a good sign. CC-licensed photo by zen whisk on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Melting point. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

Hertz’ AI system that scans for “damage” on rental cars is turning into an epic disaster • Futurism

Noor Al-Sibai:

»

As our sister site The Drive reported last month, customers soon started complaining that Hertz was charging them hundreds of dollars for minor cosmetic scuffs that would have been shrugged off by a human employee, or in some cases for phantom damage when none was visible at all.

As much as Hertz wants the storm to pass, anecdotal reports make it sound like the system is still a disaster — and one that’s alienating customers even as other rental providers eye similarly divisive tech.

In a post on the r/HertzRentals subreddit, one user insisted they were “done” with the agency after UVeye flagged nonexistent dings when they returned their rental.

After renting a car for a week from a Hertz location at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the user said that they were alerted that UVeye had flagged some apparent damage on the vehicle. When they checked the car, however, there was nothing visible.

Perturbed by the apparent mistake, the user tried to speak to employees and managers at the Hertz counter, but none were able to help, and all “pointed fingers at the ‘AI scanner.'” They were told to contact customer support  — but even that proved futile after representatives claimed they “can’t do anything.”

“Did the AI scanner [misinterpret] water reflections or dirt on the black car as damage?” they pondered. “There’s no way to even present that possibility, no path to defend yourself. It’s an unchallengeable, automated accusation.”

According to a recent New York Post article, Hertz’ UVeye scanners only appear to be deployed at the company’s airport locations for now. Still, recent reporting from our sister publication The Drive indicates that other rental companies are investing in similar damage-detection AI software.

«

Who could possibly have predicted this? Who?
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Web Guide: an experimental AI-organized search results page • Google Blog

Austin Wu, group product manager for Search:

»

We’re launching Web Guide, a Search Labs experiment that uses AI to intelligently organize the search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.

Web Guide groups web links in helpful ways — like pages related to specific aspects of your query. Under the hood, Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web, creating more powerful search capabilities that better surface web pages you may not have previously discovered. Similar to AI Mode, Web Guide uses a query fan-out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.

For example, try it for open-ended searches like “how to solo travel in Japan.” Or try detailed queries in multiple sentences like, “My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?”

«

I thought Google already had a system for ranking search results. Had it for the past 30-odd years, in fact.
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Google Chrome adds AI-powered store summaries to help US shoppers • TechCrunch

Sarah Perez:

»

Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be available by clicking an icon just to the left of the web address in the browser, will display a pop-up that informs consumers about the store’s reputation for things like product quality, shopping, pricing, customer service, and returns.

The feature, which is currently available only in English, will generate the summaries based on reviews from partners, including Bazaarvoice, Bizrate Insights, Reputation.com, Reseller Ratings, ScamAdviser, Trustpilot, TurnTo, Yotpo, Verified Reviews, and others.

The feature will initially be available to Chrome on the desktop. When reached for comment, Google could not confirm if or when AI summaries would come to mobile devices.

Google says the goal with the summaries is to provide a safer and more efficient shopping experience. However, the feature also helps Google better compete with other AI features rolled out by retail giant Amazon, which has been using the new technology to summarize product ratings and reviews, help customers find clothes that fit, get product recommendations and comparisons, and more.

«

I don’t find the Amazon summaries helpful; “customers say…” is not useful in a world where so many of the reviews are fake (or, these days, AI-written). Of course this is an “everyone else is doing it, we must too” thing. How is Google going to test whether people like these? Will it A/B test them? What form will that take?
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Cheyenne to host massive AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined • AP News

Mead Gruver and Matt O’Brien:

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An artificial intelligence data center that would use more electricity than every home in Wyoming combined before expanding to as much as five times that size will be built soon near Cheyenne, according to the city’s mayor.

“It’s a game changer. It’s huge,” Mayor Patrick Collins said Monday.

With cool weather — good for keeping computer temperatures down — and an abundance of inexpensive electricity from a top energy-producing state, Wyoming’s capital has become a hub of computing power.

The city has been home to Microsoft data centers since 2012. An $800 million data center announced last year by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms is nearing completion, Collins said.

The latest data center, a joint effort between regional energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would begin at 1.8 gigawatts of electricity and be scalable to 10 gigawatts, according to a joint company statement.

A gigawatt can power as many as 1 million homes. But that’s more homes than Wyoming has people. The least populated state, Wyoming, has about 590,000 people.

…A top producer of coal, oil and gas, Wyoming ranks behind only Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania as a top net energy-producing state, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Accounting for fossil fuels, Wyoming produces about 12 times more energy than it consumes. The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA.

But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.

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Not so long ago it was bitcoin that was going to burn up all the energy. Now it’s got some stiff competition.
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What to expect from the next Apple TV • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

»

• New A-Series Chip – The next-generation Apple TV is expected to get an updated A-series chip. The Apple TV could get the prior-generation A17 Pro, the current A18 series chips, or the A19 chips that are coming with the iPhone 17 lineup. With any of these chips, the Apple TV will support console-quality games thanks to much improved CPU and GPU performance.

• Apple-designed Wi-Fi Chip – Apple is developing its own communications chip that combines Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, reducing its reliance on Broadcom. Apple’s chip is expected to feature either Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, so either way it will work on the 6GHz Wi-Fi band. Users can expect faster Wi-Fi speeds and lower latency.

• A Camera? – This is far from guaranteed and we haven’t heard anything about it for quite some time, but there have been rumors suggesting that a future version of the Apple TV could have a front-facing camera for FaceTime. Right now, the Apple TV requires a connected iPhone for FaceTime calls, but if a built-in camera is added, an iPhone wouldn’t be needed. A camera could also add support for gesture-based controls.

«

“Gesture-based controls”. Why do people keep trying to make these happen? They have been tried and knocked back again and again because they are a usability nightmare. How does the machine disambiguate you waving your hands around from intentional gestures? If the gestures are complicated enough that they won’t be confused with ordinary hand movements, they’re hard to learn.

I’ve seen programmers show off their gesture-based systems. They gave them up after a few weeks. And remember Microsoft’s Kinect. I tried that, as did zillions of gamers. It sold really well. Then people stopped using it.

All of which is to say: if there’s a camera on the next Apple TV (I don’t think there will be), it won’t be for gesture control. Expected by the end of the year, according to the rumours.
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Two bacteria identified as possible causes of multiple sclerosis • Earth.com

Jordan Joseph:

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For decades scientists have combed the gut looking for bacteria in the microbiome that push the immune system toward multiple sclerosis (MS). New evidence from a rare twin study now points a clear finger at two species of bacteria that hide in the small intestine.

The study, which compared 81 pairs of genetically identical siblings, singled out Eisenbergiella tayi and Lachnoclostridium as the most likely triggers of the nerve‑damaging disorder.

Dr. Anna Peters of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich steered the international team that linked these bacteria to disease in both people and mice.

Identical twins share nearly every gene, so differences in health are often related to outside factors. By focusing on twins where only one sibling had MS, the researchers stripped away much genetic noise.

Detailed DNA tracking of gut samples revealed 51 microbial candidates whose numbers diverged between affected and unaffected siblings.

Two species of bacteria kept resurfacing with the highest odds ratios, putting them at the top of the watch list.

Those samples came from the ileum, the last stretch of small intestine that hosts a busy immune garrison. The choice mattered because pro‑inflammatory T cells gather here before they head for the brain and spinal cord.

…To test cause rather than correlation, the investigators moved beyond sequencing. They transplanted ileal microbes from selected twins into germ‑free mice bred to develop MS‑like inflammation.

In animals that received bacteria from the sibling with multiple sclerosis, paralysis appeared within twelve weeks. Mice given microbes from the healthy twin stayed mobile the entire study.

…E. tayi and Lachnoclostridium belong to the Lachnospiraceae family, a large clan of anaerobes that usually help digest fiber. Most relatives are considered harmless and even beneficial.

What sets these two apart is not yet clear, but the German group noted that both can thrive on mucus sugars when dietary fiber is scarce. That ability could thin the intestinal barrier and expose immune sensors to microbial products.

«

The study needs replication, of course, but also you can’t just go around zapping guy bacteria at random. Expect many more mice studies.
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Svalbard winter warming is reaching melting point • Nature Communications

James Bradley et al:

»

Svalbard is at the front line of the climate crisis, warming at six to seven times the global average rate. Human-caused global warming is particularly amplified in the Arctic, causing the climate in the Arctic to warm more quickly than the rest of the Earth. The winter period is experiencing the highest rates of warming with winter temperatures over Svalbard rising at nearly twice the annual average. Meanwhile, centennial trends for annual precipitation in west Svalbard show increases of 3–4% per decade, of which a greater proportion is falling as rain.

As such, over the past 40 years, rain-on-snow events have significantly increased, and rain is projected to become the dominant form of precipitation in the Arctic by the end of this century.

This year, Arctic winter air temperatures were among the warmest ever recorded. In Ny-Ålesund, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, situated in north-west Svalbard and approximately 1,200 km from the North Pole, the air temperature average for February 2025 was -3.3°C — considerably higher than the 1961-2001 average for this time of year of -15°C, and reached a maximum of 4.7°C.

Air temperatures higher than 0°C were recorded in Ny-Ålesund on 14 of the 28 days of February 2025. Such sustained warmth, coupled with prolonged rainfall, triggered widespread melting of snow and ice. When winter warming crosses the 0°C threshold, it marks more than just a warm anomaly — it signals a fundamental shift in Arctic winter dynamics.

Episodic thawing events during winter can have significant and lasting environmental consequences, including influencing ice layer formation, triggering microbial activation, altering nutrient discharge, and affecting permafrost thaw and ground ice development. The episodic warming event of February 2025 was not an isolated occurrence: winter warming events in Svalbard have been a recurring phenomenon in recent decades as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change.

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London Administrative Court Daily Cause List • Royal Courts of Justice

»

The King (on the application of B and others) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal

FOR JUDGMENT HAND DOWN

This judgment will be handed down by the judge remotely by circulation to the parties’ representatives by email and release to The National Archives. The date and time for hand-down will be deemed to be at 2:30pm 30/07/2025. A copy of the judgment in final form as handed down can be made available after that time, on request by email to the administrativecourtoffice.listoffice@justice.gov.uk

«

This is scheduled for today (Wednesday). I don’t know what it pertains to – “on the application of B and others” is an intentional obfuscation – but I’d guess it might have something to do with Apple’s complaint about efforts by the British government to stop it using end-to-end encryption (a complaint in which WhatsApp has joined it).

So anyway, that’s an email worth sending at 2.31pm for any (other) journalists reading this.
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Some Kenyan runners see doping as a path to glory – and to a daily meal • The New York Times

Tariq Panja:

»

Thousands of feet above the Great Rift Valley that runs through East Africa, the small city of Iten, Kenya, calls itself the Home of Champions. It has long produced and attracted world-class running talent, its high altitude and red dirt roads a training ground for thousands.

The town also has a far less laudatory reputation. It is a well-documented center of a doping crisis that shows little sign of being tamed.

Runners come here for access to competition, coaching talent and the benefit of training in thin air, all to try to earn riches from running. Many Kenyans who try to join the elite endure cramped and dirty living conditions, little food and separation from their families in service of their ambitions.

In a region where the average annual income is the equivalent of little more than $2,000 and the competition so intense, the potentially life-changing lure of banned substances, referred to locally as “the medicine,” is obvious. A few thousand dollars in prize money or participation in a single overseas race can be the difference between runners and their families eating three meals a day and scratching around for the next bite.

They calculate that doping is worth the risks not only of getting caught, but also of damaging their health and, in some cases, even dying.

…“This economic reality means the high-risk situation is always going to be impossible to completely eradicate,” said Brett Clothier, the head of global track and field’s unit responsible for antidoping efforts.

Many runners and coaches suspect that their rivals dope, and they point to the roster of athletes barred from international competitive racing. Kenya, which has a smaller population than 25 other countries, has the most names on the list.

Some of Kenya’s most prominent runners have been caught doping and barred from competition. The women’s marathon world-record holder, Ruth Chepngetich, who is from the Rift Valley, was suspended this month after testing positive for a prohibited substance.

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There is a big industry – with money taken against future earnings. It’s a big problem for the anti-doping authorities.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

A new theory suggests our universe might exist inside a black hole. The strangest thing? It’s not against the laws of physics. CC-licensed photo by brx0 on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. Eventful. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The UK is slogging through an online age-gate apocalypse • The Verge

Jess Weatherbed:

»

Over the past several days, several large social media platforms have started requiring age verification in the UK to access certain features and types of content, in partnership with third-party software providers. Users typically have a choice between uploading bank card information, an image of government-issued ID, or a facial scan that estimates the user’s age.

Meta users likely won’t have seen a huge difference over the weekend, as Facebook and Instagram rolled out age verification requirements a few years ago. Bluesky users in the UK, however, now can’t access direct messaging capabilities until they complete the platform’s new age verification process. Reddit has also blocked access to specific subreddits for UK-based users who don’t complete its age verification process, some of which — r/periods, r/stopsmoking, r/stopdrinking, and r/sexualassault, for example — provide valued community support and resources for adults and minors alike.

People are already finding loopholes for these systems. The face scanning systems for Persona and k-ID — the third-party verification software used by Reddit and Discord, respectively — can both be easily tricked using Death Stranding’s photo mode. (Facebook and Instagram use a similar service called Yoti, which so far does not appear to have been fooled the same way.)

X doesn’t yet have a direct verification system, and is instead currently estimating age based on factors like account creation date, social connections, email addresses, and legacy verification. Accounts that don’t have any of these signals in place are locked out of accessing certain content until X rolls out the ID and facial scanner-based checkers it’s planning to release “in the following weeks.” That includes protest footage and video game clips that depict violence — and users who aren’t even based in the UK are reporting content restrictions as well.

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As the next link shows, there’s a huge problem implied in uploading personal data to a gazillion sites. So, we finally got the age verification system that everyone had been calling out for. And its biggest effect has been to drive people to start using VPNs, because given the choice between uploading your personally identifying information to a random site, and getting a VPN, the latter is always preferable.
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A second Tea breach reveals users’ DMs about abortions and cheating • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

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A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another.

Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats.

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I’ve seen someone describe the Tea hack(s) as the worst PII (private identifying information) breach they’ve ever seen. The app demands people upload identifying images such as a driver’s licence, and of course doesn’t delete it. (Much easier to say “sure we deleted it!” and not do so.)

The recommendation now is for anyone who ever used it to put a block on their credit and monitor their bank statements. The class action lawsuits can only be a day away.
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The “have lots” and the “have nots” • Spyglass

MG Siegler:

»

Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have all had layoffs in recent months while at the same time also engaging in the crazy talent arms race that’s happening in AI. These companies are essentially saying to some employees that they’re so valuable that they’re worth paying not just a lot of money, but more money than basically anyone in the world gets paid – including, often, their own CEOs. And yet to others, they’re basically saying they’re worthless – I mean literally not worth paying anything to any longer. Just to put it in directionally stark terms: some employees are worth $100m a year while others are worth $0 a year.

There have always been pay discrepancies at companies – and it has long been most pronounced at tech companies because engineering talent is so vital to the literal job to be done. And yes, there exist the mythical “100x engineers” who can produce work that may actually be worth more than 100 other people because no other people could simply do the same work.

But AI has taken this up several notches. We now effectively have “100Mx engineers” – people so valuable to a company that there more or less is no limit to the amount they might be worth. I would say maybe a company’s overall market cap – but there would be push back against that because some would say that this talent can likely raise that market cap by billions. I mean, at least one report has Mark Zuckerberg throwing out the “B” word in such talent discussions.

«

Om Malik makes much the same point (perhaps less brutally) in his analysis of Satya Nadella’s memo to staff. The old pact of “work for us, it’ll go great” is over in Silicon Valley.
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Google failed to warn ten million of Turkey earthquake severity • BBC News

James Clayton, Anna Foster and Ben Derico:

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Google has admitted its earthquake early warning system failed to accurately alert people during Turkey’s deadly quake of 2023.

Ten million people within 98 miles of the epicentre could have been sent Google’s highest level alert – giving up to 35 seconds of warning to find safety. Instead, only 469 “Take Action” warnings were sent out for the first 7.8 magnitude quake.

Google told the BBC half a million people were sent a lower level warning, which is designed for “light shaking”, and does not alert users in the same prominent way. The tech giant previously told the BBC the system had “performed well” after an investigation in 2023.

The alerts system is available in just under 100 countries – and is described by Google as a “global safety net” often operating in countries with no other warning system.

Google’s system, named Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA), is run by the Silicon Valley firm – not individual countries.

The system works on Android devices, which make up more than 70% of the phones in Turkey.

More than 55,000 people died when two major earthquakes hit south-east Turkey on 6 February 2023, more than 100,000 were injured. Many were asleep in buildings that collapsed around them when the tremors hit.

Google’s early warning system was in place and live on the day of the quakes. However it underestimated how strong the earthquakes were.

«

Reminiscent of the “Google Flu Trends” system, which turned out to seriously overestimate levels of flu in the US after its launch in 2008.
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Did our cosmos begin inside a black hole in another universe? • Space

Victoria Corless:

»

A team of scientists is proposing a bold alternative to the Big Bang theory, suggesting that our universe may have formed inside a colossal black hole residing in a larger, parent universe. The Big Bang theory, along with Einstein’s general relativity, has successfully explained major cosmological phenomena, including the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s large-scale structure, and its accelerating expansion often linked to dark energy.

Yet, fundamental problems remain with this theory, such as the unexplained nature of dark energy and dark matter, the singularity at the Big Bang, and inconsistencies between general relativity and quantum mechanics. “Most scientists have responded by proposing either a mysterious new form of energy — [called] dark energy — or by modifying the laws of physics,” Enrique Gaztañaga, professor at the University of Portsmouth, told Space.com. “But these are drastic steps.”

Gaztañaga says he and his colleagues wondered if a simpler explanation might suffice. “[Our study] began with a simple but profound question: Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?” he said. “Our entire observable universe lies inside its own gravitational radius, meaning that from the outside, it would appear like a black hole. That led to a radical idea: What if the universe formed in the same way a star collapses into a black hole?”

…The new study explores the idea that the universe may not have begun with a singularity but instead emerged from the collapse of a massive cloud of matter in another universe. To investigate, the research team ran simulations in search of a solution that could address some of the inconsistencies in current cosmological theories — and unexpectedly found that an exact, analytical solution describing the fundamental principles of this process already exists.

“Under the right conditions, this collapse doesn’t end in a singularity — instead, it bounces and begins expanding again,” said Gaztañaga. “That bounce mimics what we call the Big Bang.”

While “bouncing scenarios” have been proposed in the past, this model stands out by relying solely on known laws of physics. It avoids introducing speculative particles or forces and describes a purely gravitational collapse occurring within a black hole.

«

Sounds bonkers, and yet if it doesn’t violate the laws of physics.. then it’s passed the first test of a scientific theory. There’s plenty more in the article.
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Exclusive: Napster (formerly Infinite Reality) lays off some of its team • GamesBeat

Dean Takahashi:

»

Infinite Reality recently bought Napster for $207m, and the Infinite Reality renamed itself as Napster Corp. in the wake of its $500m acquisition of Touchcast. Now it is focusing on providing the next generation of digital media and e-commerce.

…the company raised a lot of money — reportedly several billion dollars — in pursuit of acquisitions to build a metaverse company. It’s more fashionable to say immersive virtual worlds, but you get the idea.

The deals under Infinite Reality included acquisitions of Obsess, Stakes, Drone Racing, Ethereal and Action Face. It also sought but didn’t acquire a majority stake in Super League Gaming. Back in January, Infinite Reality said it raised $3bn at a valuation of $12.25bn. And in 2024, the company raised $350m and bought Landvault.

After some pressure from investors and others, Napster said that Sterling Select, a venture development firm associated with Sterling Equities and the Katz family, represented the investor who invested a significant portion of the $3bn investment that the company announced earlier this year.  

The spokesperson said, “These are difficult but expected steps in the course of integrating teams and streamlining operations. We continue to employ hundreds of full-time team members around the world—including nearly 100 engineers and hundreds of talented professionals across product development, marketing, and operations—and we remain focused on executing against our vision with clarity and momentum.”

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Amazing that they could raised $3bn to build “immersive virtual worlds”. Don’t they know all the play is in chatbots? Anyway, this feels like the latest in Napster’s long, slow slide into vanishment.
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Economists are struggling to find jobs. It’s an ominous sign for the economy • The New York Times

Noam Scheiber:

»

Last year, the average base salary for newly hired economics professors at major research universities was more than $150,000, according to the American Economic Association, and their compensation swelled to about $200,000 once bonuses and summer teaching were included. As recently as the 2023-24 academic year, the employment rate for Ph.D. economists within a few months of graduation was 100%, said John Cawley, the chair of the association’s Committee on the Job Market, citing the group’s surveys. Job satisfaction topped 85%.

Those glory days seem to be ending. Universities and nonprofits have scaled back hiring amid declining state budgets and federal funding cuts. At the same time, the Trump administration has laid off government economists and frozen hiring for new ones.

Tech companies also have grown stingier, and their need for high-level economists — once seemingly insatiable — has waned. Other firms have slowed hiring in response to the economic uncertainty introduced by President Trump’s tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers, even if those workers have a doctoral degree.

“The advent of A.I. is also impacting the market for high-skilled labor,” said Betsey Stevenson, a labor economist at the University of Michigan, in an email. “So the whole thing is kind of a mess.”

Of course, if it were only some egghead economists scrambling to find work, that might be not be terribly consequential. But the same forces bedeviling economists are crimping employment for other highly trained scientists and social scientists, as well as for many recent college graduates, whose jobless rate has been unusually high for an otherwise strong economy.

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Economic uncertainty? Employability uncertainty? It’s hard to know which; all one sees is the pattern.
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The world is run by old men in a hurry • Financial Times

Janan Ganesh:

»

The numbers should amaze us. Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin are all in their seventies. So are Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The president and supreme leader of Iran are 70 and 86 respectively. The presidents of Nigeria and Indonesia are each 73. More than half of the world’s population, and much of its land area and military capacity, is in the hands of men who are older than Ronald Reagan was when he entered the White House at what seemed a dicey 69.

One of the destabilising forces in the world today is the advanced age of those who run it.

For one thing, old leaders have an incentive to secure a legacy — a defining achievement — before time runs out for them. The unification of mainland China with Taiwan is an example of such a project. So is avenging the loss of Russia’s prestige and “strategic depth” after the cold war. Even Trump’s haste to find a settlement in Ukraine, however invidious the details of such a peace might be to that nation, and to end world trade as we have known it, whatever the economic cost, suggests an old man in a hurry.

The problem with aged leaders is not their health — almost all those named above are robust and lucid — but their incentives. As well as not having much time to leave a mark, they won’t have decades of retirement in which to suffer the legal and reputational penalties of any disastrous act committed in office.

We have to get our heads around, if not a paradox, then a surprise. Age, which “should” instil caution and restraint in people, quite often emboldens them.

…Either way, the world is living through a lesson in the perverse consequences of age. It seems that age confers wisdom, but also a certain liberation. It imposes a sense of social duty, but also a deadline for personal achievement. To explain the disorder of the modern world, it is far more intellectually proper to cite economic trends and grand historical forces. But perhaps part of the story is that a few old men are striving for a legacy in the time that is left to them.

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North Korean hackers ran US-based “laptop farm” from Arizona woman’s home • Ars Technica

Nate Anderson:

»

Christina Chapman, a 50-year-old Arizona woman, has just been sentenced to 102 months [8.5 years] in prison for helping North Korean hackers steal US identities in order to get “remote” IT jobs with more than 300 American companies, including Nike. The scheme funneled millions of dollars to the North Korean state.

Why did Chapman do it? In a letter sent this week to the judge, Chapman said that she was “looking for a job that was Monday through Friday that would allow me to be present for my mom” who was battling cancer. (Her mother died in 2023.) But “the area where we lived didn’t provide for a lot of job opportunities that fit what I needed. I also thought that the job was allowing me to help others.”

She offered her “deepest and sincerest apologies to any person who was harmed by my actions,” thanked the FBI for busting her, and said that when she gets out of prison, she hopes to “pursue the books that I have been working on writing and starting my own underwear company.”

Managing all this fraud required plenty of tedious bureaucracy. The North Koreans had to steal US identities, of course, but then they also had to get hired. This involved endless paperwork, such as writing resumes and filling out I-9 forms to show eligibility to work in the US. (In one chat, Chapman said that she was happy to send I-9 forms from her home address but that she would prefer not to “do the paperwork” herself because “I can go to FEDERAL PRISON for falsifying federal documents.”)

Chapman was also key to the less obvious, more technical part of the scheme—how to make it appear like all these remote workers were actually living in the country.

When her clients got hired, Chapman would receive their corporate laptops in the mail. Sometimes she would re-ship them to “a city in China on the border with North Korea.”

But she kept more than 90 of the machines at her place in Arizona. Using proxies, VPNs, and remote-access software like Anydesk, the North Koreans logged in to their “American” computers from afar and then appeared to be normal, US-based remote employees, showing up to staff meetings on Zoom, collecting paychecks, and occasionally exfiltrating data or installing ransomware.

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The first planned migration of an entire country is underway • WIRED

Fernanda González:

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Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to consider migration as an urgent survival measure.

This island nation in Oceania is made up of nine coral islands and atolls inhabited by just over 11,000 people. The country’s average altitude is just two metres above sea level, making it extremely vulnerable to rising oceans, flooding, and storm surges, all exacerbated by the climate crisis.

A study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team revealed that, in 2023, the sea level in Tuvalu was 15cm higher than the average recorded over the previous three decades. If this trend continues, it’s projected that most of the territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the high-tide level by 2050.

In the face of this existential threat, an unprecedented climate visa program has begun. In 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union Treaty, an agreement that provides for a migration scheme that will allow 280 Tuvaluans per year to settle in Australia as permanent residents.

The visas will be allocated through a ballot system and will grant beneficiaries the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. In addition, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country if conditions permit.

…The agreement with Australia is not the only action taken by Tuvalu in the face of the threat of disappearing. In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the scene of efforts to use geoengineering to benefit its climate. CC-licensed photo by eutrophication&hypoxia on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 9 links for you. Deep breath. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in • Financial Times

Tim Bradshaw:

»

Thousands of sites offering adult content, as well as popular social media apps including X, Reddit and TikTok, have introduced new “age assurance” systems and controls for UK users since Friday, to comply with the Online Safety Act.

Media regulator Ofcom said it would this weekend start to enforce the new age checks, which are designed to prevent children under the age of 18 from accessing sites that carry pornography as well as other “harmful” material that relates to self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.

But to evade the new rules, a growing number of people in the UK are turning to tools more often used by citizens in authoritarian regimes to get around internet censorship.

Apps offering virtual private networks — which route a smartphone or PC’s internet traffic to another country, bypassing local network providers — made up half of the top ten most popular free apps on the UK’s App Store for iOS this weekend, according to Apple’s rankings.

Proton VPN leapfrogged ChatGPT to become the top free app in the UK, according to Apple’s daily App Store charts, with similar services from developers Super Unlimited and Nord Security also rising over the weekend.

Proton, the Swiss-based company behind the top VPN app, said it had experienced a more than 1,800% increase [18x? – Overspill Ed] in daily sign-ups from UK-based users after new age verification rules took effect on Friday.

Nord said there had been a 1,000% increase [10-fold? – Overspill Ed] in UK purchases of VPN subscriptions since before the rules took effect.

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Nord has been spending tons of money on podcast adverts months ahead of this. Wasted? Or good brand building? A few days ago, the BBC was stroking its chin over whether people would hand over their details. Seems we have an answer.
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Microsoft to stop using China-based teams to support US Department of Defense • Ars Technica

Renee Dudley and Doris Burke:

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Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage.

But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found.

This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the US government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.”

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC.

Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by US-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department.

Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint.

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So many cold wars, so little time.
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Extreme heat is making us age faster • CNN

Laura Paddison:

»

The soupy, smothering extreme heat that has scorched parts of the Northern Hemisphere this summer takes a hard toll on our bodies. It can make you feel nauseous, woozy and dehydrated. It can have pernicious health effects on multiple organs.

But there’s another, less well-known, impact of extreme heat: it makes you age faster.

Prolonged exposure to soaring temperatures can cause a deterioration in our cells and tissues and speed up biological aging, according to a new and growing body of research. Chronological age refers to how long a person has lived, but biological — or “epigenetic” — age measures how well our tissues and cells function. The difference between the two explains why sometimes someone’s age does not seem to match their health and vitality.

An accelerated biological age is the “canary in the coal mine” for future risk of earlier onset of diseases such as cancer, dementia and diabetes, and early death, said Jennifer Ailshire, professor of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

As climate change forces people to endure increasingly severe and longer lasting heat waves, scientists say there is an urgency to better understand the ways heat is slowly and silently undermining human health at a cellular level.

…Ailshire is one of the scientists trying to change that. She and another researcher, Eunyoung Choi, published the first population-scale research into this area in February.

They analyzed blood samples taken from a group of more than 3,600 people across the United States aged 56 and above. They used tools called “epigenetic clocks,” which capture the way DNA is modified and provide an estimate of biological age. They then linked this to daily climate data in participants’ locations in the years before the blood samples were taken.

Their results, published in February, found people who experienced at least 140 extreme heat days a year — when the heat index, a combination of temperature and humidity, was above 90ºF — aged up to 14 months faster than those in locations with less than 10 extreme heat days a year.

This link between heat and biological aging remained even when taking into account individual factors such as exercise levels and income, although the study did not look at access to air conditioning or time spent outside. The strength of the association was significant, too. The results showed extreme heat had the same impact on aging as smoking or heavy alcohol use.

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The hottest business strategy this summer is buying crypto • WSJ via MSN

Gregory Zuckerman and Vicky Ge Huang:

»

Companies are raising tens of billions of dollars, not to invest in their businesses or hire employees, but to purchase bitcoin and more obscure cryptocurrencies. A Japanese hotel operator, a French semiconductor manufacturer, a Florida toy maker, a nail-salon chain, an electric-bike maker—they’re all plowing cash into tokens, helping to send all kinds of digital currencies to record levels. News that a new company plans to buy crypto is enough to send its shares flying—spurring others to consider joining the frenzy.

Since June 1, 98 companies have announced plans to raise over $43bn to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, according to Architect Partners, a crypto advisory firm. Nearly $86bn has been raised for this purpose since the start of the year. That’s more than double the amount of money raised in initial public offerings in the U.S. in 2025, according to Dealogic.

Skeptics say the rush of companies buying crypto is a sign the market is overheating, noting that digital tokens, especially the obscure ones, are notoriously volatile and have uncertain futures. They scratch their heads about why an investor would buy shares of a company purchasing cryptocurrencies when they can buy them on their own through low-cost exchange-traded funds and other vehicles.

Others note that many of these companies are worth much more than the cryptocurrencies they hold, as if investors are willing to pay $2 for a $1 bill.

That hasn’t stopped big-name bankers, investors and others from jumping in. Mutual-fund giant Capital Group, hedge fund D1 Capital Partners and investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald are among those backing recent efforts by companies to raise huge sums to purchase cryptocurrencies.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital and other investors backed a move by a company called Bitmine Immersion Technologies to raise $250m to buy ether. The company, worth $26m on June 27, the Friday before its announcement, is now worth over $2bn after a surge of more than 800%. Thiel, the tech billionaire known for starting PayPal and Palantir, holds a 9.1% stake in the company, according to a recent filing. He declined to comment.

“If you blink, you miss a couple of these deals,” said Bob Diamond, the former Barclays chief executive.

«

As the next link points out, this is just like the runup to the financial crash of 2007-08. (Diamond made a killing back then. Don’t think this time will be any different.)
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The coming crypto crisis • Financial Times

Rana Foroohar:

»

Bitcoin, one of the digital assets banks may lend against, has been nearly four times as volatile as major indices since 2020. It has also had ties to terror funding, and I have yet to read anything that made me think it is more than a tool for speculators and criminals. But that hardly matters when the largest political donors are behind it.

Crypto political action committees have, over the last several years, spent tens of millions of dollars donating to not only Republican politicians but many Democrats too. This effort culminated a couple of weeks ago in the passage of the Genius Act. Legislation covering other crypto assets is expected later this year. I predict all this will not only cause the next financial crisis, but fuel even more political populism and unrest in the US.

It’s all too reminiscent of 2000, when advocates for over-the-counter derivatives descended on Washington begging to be properly “regulated” so that they could gift the world with financial “innovation.” What we got instead was a seven-fold increase in poorly regulated credit default swaps that culminated in the great financial crisis of 2008.

Now consider that US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent expects the stablecoin market to grow tenfold over the next few years, from a near-$200bn to a $2tn industry, one that will be embedded in everything from loan underwriting to Treasury markets.

As Democrat Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member of the Senate banking commission, told me last week: “We’ve seen this movie before,” with lobbyists “saying, ‘Please regulate us’ because they want the gold sticker of government confirmation that they are a ‘safe’ investment,” and politicians offering up bipartisan support for deregulation.

Indeed, you can draw a clear line from derivatives deregulation in 2000, and the broader Clinton era deregulation that eroded the barriers between trading and lending, to the weakening of Dodd Frank regulation for regional banks in 2018 (which contributed to the banking crisis of 2023), and now, the Genius Act. All of it was bipartisan.

«

Even if Warren says it, I don’t think she’s wrong. The potential for this all to go enormously south is exactly the same as with CDOs and the other alphabet soup.
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Under siege from Trump and Musk, a top liberal group falls into crisis • The New York Times

Kenneth Vogel, Kate Conger and Ryan Mac:

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Media Matters raised nearly $250m in the two decades between its creation in 2003 and the end of 2023, establishing itself as a force in Democratic politics by effectively undermining major right-wing media figures and politicians.

…Founded in 2003 by David Brock, a self-described “right-wing hit man” who switched sides and became an enforcer for Democrats, Media Matters set out to neutralize what Mr. Brock saw as a powerful Republican information ecosystem. The group became the flagship in a constellation of nonprofits formed or acquired by Mr. Brock to help Democrats and undermine Republicans.

…In November 2023, Media Matters published research showing that ads appeared on X next to antisemitic and pro-Nazi content. The report — along with a post in which Mr. Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory — contributed to an advertiser exodus from X that cost the company more than $75m in revenue through the end of that year.

Later that month, X sued in federal court, claiming that Media Matters had “manipulated” the site to bypass safeguards and display advertisements next to incendiary posts in an effort to damage X’s relationships with advertisers. In a December 2023 livestream on X, Mr. Musk took aim at Media Matters, telling listeners, “We will pursue not just the organization, but anyone funding that organization.” Mr. Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.

The suit was quickly followed by investigations from the offices of Republican attorneys general Ken Paxton of Texas and Andrew Bailey of Missouri, probing Mr. Musk’s claims that the group had manipulated data in its research about X and suggesting donors in their states may have been misled.

Media Matters sued, and a federal court blocked the Texas investigation, ruling that the state attorneys general were likely infringing on the organization’s First Amendment rights. Missouri agreed to drop its investigation. Still, the legal fights cost Media Matters nearly $2m.

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American sites getting sued towards oblivion by billionaires isn’t novel, but it is becoming more common. Particularly, left-wing sites are being targeted. The beloved First Amendment isn’t looking so robust.
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The manmade clouds that could help save the Great Barrier Reef • The New York Times

Ferris Jabr:

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Since 2016, [oceanographer Daniel] Harrison and his colleagues have been investigating whether it is possible to reduce coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef by altering the weather above it. As the planet heats up, unusually high ocean temperatures are stressing corals around the world, forcing them to eject their symbiotic partners: the photosynthetic single-celled algae that live in their tissues and provide them with much of their sustenance. Theoretically, machine-generated fog and artificially brightened clouds can shade and cool the water in which corals live, sparing them much of that stress.

Not far behind the primary fogger on the big ship stood a pair of cloud-modifying machines known as the cannons. From a distance, each tubular white contraption resembled a jet engine angled toward the sky. Up close, you could see that they were mostly hollow, outfitted on one end with a large fan and on the other with a ring of torpedo-shaped manifolds, each of which supported nearly 100 small metal nozzles. When the scientists switched them on, a series of squat, square air compressors began to groan and shake, like washing machines pushed to their breaking point. This time, seawater pumped onboard was combined with highly pressurized air before being expelled through the nozzles. The result was a fine white mist that burst from the cannons at more than 60 miles per hour. As the wind lifted the briny spray into the air, it intermingled with low-lying clouds, making them more reflective.

Harrison’s project is essentially a highly localized version of geoengineering: the deliberate modification of the planet to counteract climate change.

…“Things have changed very quickly even in the last six months,” says [physicist David] Keith, who headed solar-geoengineering research at Harvard before moving to the University of Chicago in 2023 to establish a new climate-engineering initiative. “There’s a much higher level of interest. More senior political and environmental figures are willing to engage in a serious way. More people in the scientific core are talking about it. There’s new money. It feels different.”

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(Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Women dating safety app ‘Tea’ breached, users’ IDs posted to 4chan • 404 Media

Emanuel Maiberg:

»

Users from 4chan claim to have discovered an exposed database hosted on Google’s mobile app development platform, Firebase, belonging to the newly popular women’s dating safety app Tea. Users say they are rifling through peoples’ personal data and selfies uploaded to the app, and then posting that data online, according to screenshots, 4chan posts, and code reviewed by 404 Media. In a statement to 404 Media, Tea confirmed the breach also impacted some direct messages but said that the data is from two years ago.

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

…The thread says the issue was an exposed database that allowed anyone to access the material. While reporting this story, a URL the 4chan user posted included a voluminous list of specific attachments associated with the Tea app. 404 Media saw this list of files. In the last hour or so, that page was locked down, and now returns a “Permission denied” error.

404 Media verified that Tea does contain the same storage bucket URL that 4chan claims was related to the exposure. 404 Media did this by downloading a copy of the Android version of the app and decompiling its code.

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This has been confirmed all over the place during the weekend, with geocoding for the IDs as well. Pretty disastrous for the app; calamitous for the app makers. If they were in Europe, they’d be getting sued into oblivion. Could still happen in the US.
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Intel’s foundry future depends on securing a customer for next-gen chipmaking tech • Reuters

Max Cherney and Stephen Nellis:

»

Intel warned investors on Thursday that it may have to get out of the chip manufacturing business if it does not land external customers to make chips in its factories.

New CEO Lip-Bu Tan said on Thursday the company’s engineers were busy working with customers to jump-start its next-generation contract manufacturing process, or foundry, as the company announced big layoffs alongside a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss outlook.

Those customers for the company’s so-called 14A manufacturing process are crucial to the success of the technology – so much so that if it fails to secure a big one, it could shut down its cutting-edge manufacturing business altogether, according to Intel’s quarterly filing on Thursday.

The possibility that Intel could drop out of the cutting-edge manufacturing business would be a historic shift for a company that has described itself as a steward of Moore’s Law – an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore about the fast rate of development of the chip industry that held true for decades.

Intel is the only U.S. chipmaker capable of making advanced computing chips.

…”We’re developing Intel 14A … from the ground up in close partnership with large external customers,” Tan said in a memo released with the results. “Going forward, our investment in Intel 14A will be based on confirmed customer commitments.

“We will build what our customers need, when they need it, and earn their trust through consistent execution.”

Intel said that without a significant customer, it would consider cancelling or pausing development of 14A and subsequent technologies. Should the company take the step, it planned to continue to manufacture chips with its 18A technology and a variant through 2030, according to the filing.

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So the company that once was in essentially every computing device is now struggling to find people who will use its factories. The world can turn so far.
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Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified

Gene editing techniques can produce mosquitoes which cannot pass on the parasite that causes malaria – a potentially huge lifesaver. CC-licensed photo by Global Panorama on Flickr.

You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.

A selection of 9 links for you. Bite me. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.

The chatbot culture wars are here • The New York Times

Kevin Roose:

»

For much of the last decade, America’s partisan culture warriors have fought over the contested territory of social media — arguing about whether the rules on Facebook and Twitter were too strict or too lenient, whether YouTube and TikTok censored too much or too little and whether Silicon Valley tech companies were systematically silencing right-wing voices.

Those battles aren’t over. But a new one has already started.

This fight is over artificial intelligence, and whether the outputs of leading A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are politically biased.

Conservatives have been taking aim at A.I. companies for months. In March, House Republicans subpoenaed a group of leading A.I. developers, probing them for information about whether they colluded with the Biden administration to suppress right-wing speech. And this month, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Andrew Bailey, opened an investigation into whether Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a “new wave of censorship” by training their A.I. systems to give biased responses to questions about President Trump.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump himself joined the fray, issuing an executive order on what he called “woke A.I.”
“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke,” he said in a speech. “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the A.I. models, and neither do other countries.”

The order was announced alongside a new White House A.I. action plan that will require A.I. developers that receive federal contracts to ensure that their models’ outputs are “objective and free from top-down ideological bias.”

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Well that’s going to be EVER so easy to enforce, isn’t it.
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CRISPR gene editing in mosquitoes halts malaria spread • Technology Networks

»

Biologists Zhiqian Li and Ethan Bier from UC San Diego, and Yuemei Dong and George Dimopoulos from Johns Hopkins University, created a CRISPR-based gene-editing system that changes a single molecule within mosquitoes, a minuscule but effective change that stops the malaria-parasite transmission process. Genetically altered mosquitoes are still able to bite those with malaria and acquire parasites from their blood, but the parasites can no longer be spread to other people. The new system is designed to genetically spread the malaria resistance trait until entire populations of the insects no longer transfer the disease-causing parasites.

“Replacing a single amino acid in mosquitoes with another naturally occurring variant that prevents them from being infected with malarial parasites — and spreading that beneficial trait throughout a mosquito population — is a game-changer,” said Bier, a professor in the UC San Diego Department of Cell and Developmental Biology (School of Biological Sciences). “It’s hard to believe that this one tiny change has such a dramatic effect.”

The newly developed system uses CRISPR-Cas9 “scissors” and a guide RNA to make a genetic cut at a precise location within the mosquito’s genome. It then replaces the unwanted amino acid that transmits malaria with the beneficial version that does not.

The system targets a gene that produces a protein known as “FREP1” that helps mosquitoes develop and feed on blood when they bite. The new system switches an amino acid in FREP1 known as L224 with a genetic alternate, or allele, called Q224. Disease-causing parasites use L224 to swim to the insect’s salivary glands, where they are positioned to infect a person or animal.

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The difference is that the allele effectively prevents infection of the mosquito, and thus the human, by the parasite. Big difference.
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Smartphone gambling is a disaster • After Babel

Jonathan Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman:

»

Gambling companies are spending heavily to attract new customers. Since legalization began in 2018, sportsbooks have bombarded Americans with ads, paid celebrities to promote their products, and given away billions in new-user promos. The message: gambling is easy, fun, and a quick way to make life more exciting. This marketing drives cultural normalization. It transforms what was once a vice into a common daily habit, something that everybody does — or should do. Much of this advertising airs during sports broadcasts, when kids are watching. This is no accident. Speaking of their previous employer, one ex-FanDuel employee told Jonathan “anybody under twenty-five they have their eye on.”

Normalization brings more gamblers, which means an increase in the number of problem gamblers. And many of those who avoid addiction still suffer gambling-related harm, losing more than they can afford or than they had intended. The number of people harmed is so vast that it shows up in aggregate statistics: states with legal online gambling have seen an increase in bankruptcies and auto loan delinquencies, a reduction in credit scores, as well as reduced savings and investment in low-income households, compared to states that did not legalize online gambling. In 2023, 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans.

…Teachers and principals we’ve spoken to report that almost all of their male students seem to be gambling. One suburban Massachusetts public school teacher told Jonathan that his tenth-grade students “are always talking about their bets … betting lines and odds and all kinds of stuff. 15 year olds.” Some kids told the teacher that their parents made it possible for them to bet. Others — including the class’s “unofficial bookie” — were doing it behind their parents’ backs. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that 5% of high schoolers show signs of a gambling problem. No wonder gambling addiction treatment providers report a spike in twenty-something and teenage clients.

These harms are becoming more pervasive due to the accessibility of the apps and their addiction-promoting design.

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It is the normalisation that is the problem. Even in the UK, gambling apps and sites are relentless.
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Apple releases first iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 Public Betas • MacRumors

Juli Clover:

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Apple is allowing members of its public beta testing program to download and install iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 starting today. You can sign up for the public betas on Apple’s beta website. The first public beta features the same content as the fourth developer beta that came out earlier this week, though there is a new fourth beta available for developers as well.

Beta testers that have registered on Apple’s website can download the iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 updates by opening the Settings app, going to the General section, tapping on Software Update, and choosing the iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 Public Beta options.

iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 feature Apple’s Liquid Glass design, with a visual aesthetic that focuses on transparency. Icons, menu buttons, navigation bars, and more reflect and refract light with subtle animations. There are pop-out menus in some areas, tab bars shrink down, and everything has a more rounded look.

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You’re welcome to download and install them! And may God have mercy on your data, battery and eyes.
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Memento mori illuminator • Hey.com

David Heinemeier Hansson:

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I really like watches. Not so much because I need to precisely tell time all that often – most of my days, the calendar is pretty empty – but because they remind me that I’m going to die.

That reminder of death is a reminder to make time count. Forget about productivity, though. The notion that TIME = MONEY – squandered unless invested with a great return! – is spiritually bankrupt. No, making time count in terms of spending it well. Being able to close my eyes, on the last day, with a smile of satisfaction.

This is a recurring theme in Stoicism. That life is long enough if you spend it well, but spending it well requires embracing life’s shortness. Which is at once morbid and liberating. That so much of what we fool ourselves into obsession over is trivial. But also that we could spend our time on things that are not trivial. We could embrace our principles, we could go the long way to take a stand.

It’s also a strong theme in existentialism. The absurdity of our daily lives. The rut we can’t escape unless we accept that absurdity.

It’s for the same reason I hope we never do discover immortality. A hundred years, give or take a decade or two, is enough. The constraint is part of what gives the duration its meaning.

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Apple beats US appeal claiming it shortchanged customers on iCloud storage • Reuters

Jonathan Stempel:

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A US federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected claims by Apple customers that the iPhone maker gave them less iCloud data storage than they paid for when upgrading.

In a 3-0 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said reasonable consumers in the proposed class action would not have been misled by Apple’s promises about storage capacity in its iCloud+ plans.

The plaintiff Lisa Bodenburg said she paid $2.99 a month for 200 GB of storage, believing Apple would add it to the 5 GB that all iCloud customers receive, and was shortchanged because Apple gave her only 200 GB of total storage, not 205 GB.

Circuit Judge Milan Smith, however said Bodenburg “received exactly what Apple promised her” when the Cupertino, California-based company offered “incremental” or “supplemental” storage, on top of the 5 GB she got for free.

He cited dismissals of other cases based on “unreasonable assumptions,” including that Diet Dr. Pepper would aid in weight loss, and the net weight on a lip balm label failed to reveal that the dispenser’s design left some balm inaccessible.

“Apple’s statements are not false and deceptive merely because [they] may be unreasonably misunderstood by an insignificant and unrepresentative segment of consumers,” Smith wrote.

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I read that as “just because you’re stupid doesn’t mean everyone else is”. Although good grief, it really is time for Apple to upgrade the base level iCloud storage. Unless the reasoning is that 5GB is so minimal that absolutely everyone will hit it on their first backup, and either pay Apple or live life on the edge (or back up to their computer, hahahahaha).
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Winging it • The Baffler

Noelle Mateer:

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Aerophobia is having a moment. In January, an American Airlines jet crashed into a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., killing sixty-seven; less than three months later, a helicopter crashed into New York City’s Hudson River, killing six; for months this spring, cancellations, delays, and disruptions plagued New Jersey’s Newark airport; the shortage of air traffic controllers only continues to get worse; and every single headline involving the beleaguered Boeing seems to indicate that something is seriously wrong with the world of commercial aviation.

But I’ve been panicky and nauseous on planes my whole life, and plenty of others have too. Today, approximately twenty-five million Americans are aerophobic. There is a vast online ecosystem for nervous flyers, including r/fearofflying, where people ask other Redditors to “watch” their flight using tracking apps. There’s Dial A Pilot, which offers customers the chance to call pilots for reassurance before boarding a flight. There’s Lovefly, a podcast interviewing people who’ve overcome their aerophobia. And there’s the famous SOAR method, which is both a self-help book and course led by a pilot and a licensed therapist.

I’ve dabbled in all of these. But it was Captain Ron, a Vietnam War vet with a master’s degree in counseling, who truly understood me. Captain Ron’s FearlessFlight® is the only one of these methods I’ve ever stuck with because, well, I like the guy. In our first meeting, a fifteen-minute free coaching session that sprawled well past the time allotted, I asked: How can I have flown so much, and still be so scared? Why am I getting worse, not better, with time? He nodded sagely and explained to me that this is common among people with severe flight anxiety, that our anxiety has created bad mental pathways, and with each bad flight, we reinforce them, making them worse.

This sounds right, but I think there’s more to it. In addition to having a panic disorder, I’ve grown increasingly aware of the spit and tape holding society together.

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Fear of flying, yes, is a thing. But online communities who hype each other up into worrying about it (“watch my flight!” isn’t supportive; it’s seeking catastrophe) aren’t a good thing. They’re a problem, like any community that eggs itself on, and pushes its members towards extremes – as any group will.

And the “spit and tape holding society together”? It’s a lot more robust than that.
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Researchers value null results, but struggle to get them published • Nature

Laurie Udesky:

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Scientists overwhelmingly recognize the value of sharing null results, but rarely publish them in the research literature, according to a survey. The findings suggest that there is a need for increased awareness of how and why to share such data, as well as for changes in how research productivity is assessed.

The survey drew responses from 11,069 researchers in 166 countries and all major scientific disciplines. It found that 98% recognize the value of null results, which the survey defined as “an outcome that does not confirm the desired hypothesis”. Eighty-five% of respondents said it was important to share those results. However, just 68% of the 7,057 researchers whose work had produced null results had shared them in some form, and just 30% had tried to publish them in a journal.

The results were released on 22 July. The survey was conducted by Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature. (Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.)

That only 30% of respondents with null results had attempted to publish them is not surprising to Ritu Dhand, Springer Nature’s chief scientific officer in London.

“Researchers are taught to write research papers referencing positive advances, so null results are rarely cited,” she says. That means that even if null results are published, they won’t have an impact, she adds.

Some 1,489 respondents had generated null results and agreed that they are important to share but had not yet done so. Most of that group expressed concerns about publishing them: 69% didn’t think null results would be accepted for publication; 52% didn’t know which journals would consider publishing research with null results; 19% worried that their institution or funder wouldn’t cover publishing costs; and 21% were concerned that they’d be viewed negatively by their peers.

This reputational concern reflects a disconnect in science, says Marcus Munafò, a biological psychologist and executive director of the UK Reproducibility Network, which aims to improve the trustworthiness of research.

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I – and others who are actual working scientists – suspect the problem is more that journals don’t want to publish null results, because who wants to know that nothing happened? Or even failure to replicate (which is a sort of null).
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I travelled the globe to document how humans became addicted to faking the natural world • The Guardian

Zed Nelson:

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The strata of rock being created under our feet today will reveal the impact of human activity long after we are gone. Future geologists will find radioactive isotopes from nuclear-bomb tests, huge concentrations of plastics, the fallout from the burning of fossil fuels and vast deposits of cement used to build our cities. Meanwhile, a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the British Zoological Society shows an average decrease of 73% of wild animal populations on Earth over the past 50 years, as we push creatures and plants to extinction by removing their habitats.

Humans have concentrated in cities. We have separated ourselves from the land we once roamed – and from other animals. But somewhere deep within, a desire for contact with nature remains. So, as we destroy the natural world around us, we have become masters of a stage-managed, artificial experience of nature, a reassuring spectacle, an illusion.

Over the past six years I have visited 14 countries across four continents, observing how we humans immerse ourselves in increasingly artificial landscapes. We holiday on synthetic beaches, attend zoos that display living animals in artistically rendered dioramas of their natural habitats, and visit amusement parks that offer a “jungle experience”. We gaze at aquatic creatures in artificially lit sea-worlds, and at polar bears in Chinese shopping malls, pacing out their existence in glazed enclosures of plastic ice and snow. We ski on artificial slopes in Dubai, while outside the desert temperature is 48C.

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A reluctance to face what we’re doing to the world, perhaps?
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