A prominent beer judging competition introduced an AI-based judging tool without warning in the middle of a competition, surprising and angering judges who thought their evaluation notes for each beer were being used to improve the AI, according to multiple interviews with judges involved. The company behind the competition, called Best Beer, also planned to…

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on…

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that lived long, played hard, crashed out, and topped it off with a glass of claret. First off, it’s Naked Mole-Rat Week! Or at least it should be, given that there are multiple new studies about these rodents, which are neither moles nor rats,…

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 ransomware gang, book bans, and infrastructure. JOSEPH: I thought I’d give you something from the digital underground that happened last night. So recently a group that…

This article was produced with support from WIRED. A Meta executive in charge of building the company’s metaverse products told employees that they should be using AI to “go 5x faster” according to an internal message obtained by 404 Media .  “Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” the message, posted by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse,…

A data hoarder on Reddit used AI to create a searchable database of more than 8,100 files about Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee, making it one of the easiest ways to search through a very messy batch of files.  The project, called Epstein Archive and released on Github, allows people to search…

A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.  The hack, carried out by a group that is attempting to extort Discord, shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies…

Scientists have developed a unique nanoparticle vaccine that prevented the development of multiple forms of cancer in mice, reports a study published in Cell Reports Medicine on Thursday.  Eighty percent of mice that received the novel vaccine and were subsequently exposed to cancerous cells did not develop tumors and survived to the end of the…

Over the last few years, some of our more meaningful (and unfortunately bleakest) reporting has been on the many ways in which the right wing has systematically targeted libraries, schools, authors, and educators over the things they teach, specifically with regard to the teaching of systemic racism, LGBTQ+ issues, science, and sex education. These targeting…

The FBI accused a former National Guardsman living in Tulsa, Oklahoma of trying to sell 3D printed guns to Al Qaeda. According to an indictment unsealed by the Justice Department in September, 25-year-old Andrew Scott Hastings used a Discord server to plan a Caliphate in America and shipped more than 100 3D printed machine gun…