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Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the stories this week that dared to dream, slinked through the city, mourned their mothers, and visited ancient graveyards. First, scientists studied thousands of dream reports and discovered that world events—like the COVID-19 pandemic—can manifest in our vespertine visions. Then: the science of urban snake rescues, the lonely…

The Chinese government pressured Zambia to cancel RightsCon, the world’s largest digital human rights conference, at the last minute, according to the conference’s organizers. Beijing was upset that the speaker’s list included prominent figures from Taiwanese civil society, AccessNow, the group that organizes RightsCon, wrote Friday. On Wednesday, guests and speakers from across the planet…

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a wild message, big questions about consciousness, and a visit to a museum. JASON: I got an extremely funny Signal message yesterday after I published my most…

The Complier is the hardest boss to reach in the extraction shooter Marathon. To even have the chance to fight it, you need to have cleared six vaults—increasingly elaborate puzzle rooms—in the Cryo Archive, Marathon’s end game map. To even get the chance to enter each of those vaults, you need to obtain a key…

Japan’s Minister of Defense Shinjirō Koizumi posed with a cardboard drone on Monday during a meeting with drone manufacturer AirKamuy. The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield and it comes shipped in a flatpack like an IKEA shelf. According to Koizumi, Japan’s military has already begun to…

Residents of an Atlanta suburb have been rocked by the revelation that sales employees at Flock have been accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The cameras accessed have included surveillance tech in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community…

Days before thousands of researchers, academics, and human rights experts were set to convene in Lusaka, Zambia, the government of Zambia announced it was postponing RightsCon, one the largest and most important digital human rights conferences in the world. The announcement, which came as some participants and speakers were already en route to the conference,…

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to expand its fleet of high-powered surveillance drones, and other parts of the Department of the Homeland Security (DHS) may buy their own Predator-style drones, according to recently published procurement records. The news shows DHS’s continued investment in drone surveillance technology, and…

This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—was it sent here by a time traveler? (Spoiler: No.) Then Sam unpacks what’s happening at Arizona State University with a messy rollout of a new AI-powered tool that generates lessons by scraping professors’…