Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that transgressed the rules, explored extraterrestrial vistas, and went with the flow. First, ants are doing really strange things again. I don’t even want to spoil it—you’ll just have to read on! Then, plan your trip to the latest hot exoplanet destination (literally, in…

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 slop in history, five-alarm fires, and AI art (not) at Dragon Con. EMANUEL: We published about a dozen stories this week and I only wrote one of…

Days away from finding out his sentence for sex trafficking as the ringleader of Girls Do Porn, Michael James Pratt and his attorney are attempting to paint a picture of a man reformed behind bars, through personal letters and certificates from classes he has passed inside prison. GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking operation posing as…

A hacker has broken into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that pitches its users’ dashcams as “virtual CCTV cameras” around the world that other people can buy images from, and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken from cameras in drivers’ cars. The videos obtained by the hacker and shared with 404 Media…

Members of a congressional committee have demanded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem for more information about Mobile Fortify, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) new facial recognition app, which taps into an unprecedented array of government databases and uses a system ordinarily reserved for when people enter or exit the U.S. 404 Media…

Science and music YouTuber Benn Jordan had a rough few days earlier this week after Google’s AI Summary falsely said he recently visited Israel and caused people to believe he supported the country during its war on Gaza. Jordan does not support Israel and has previously donated to Palestinian charities.    Jordan told 404 Media that…

The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that Pornhub and its parent company Aylo settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah. The FTC and Utah’s attorney general claimed that Pornhub and its affiliates “deceived users by doing little to block tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring child…

As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours…

A listing on ultra-fast-fashion e-commerce site Shein used an AI-generated image of Luigi Mangione to sell a floral button-down t-shirt. Mangione—the prime suspect in the December 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson—is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, last I checked, and is not modeling for Shein.  I first saw…