Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that stood out to me this week, covering everything from silver to scat. First, a story about an ancient Andean tradition that will somehow end with a full-sized replica of a person posthumously made with his own hair. Enjoy the ride! Then: the health risks of…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. For more than a million years, early humans crafted stone tools as part of the Oldowan tradition, which is the oldest sustained tool-making industry in the archaeological record. Now, scientists have…
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 OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems. JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should…
A team of researchers at Columbia University, funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have developed “machines that can grow by consuming other machines.” Video of the experiment shows tubular robots that move by extending their shafts to inch along the ground. As the tubes gather, they connect and form into more…
The Trump administration has busied itself in the past six months by abandoning prosecutions and investigations into corporations at an unprecedented rate. According to a new report from Public Citizen—a nonprofit government watchdog—the Trump administration has dropped one third of all pending enforcement actions against tech companies. Those same companies collectively spent $1.2 billion on…
Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned. The texts included an unredacted…
August—2025. The new limited edition 4K Blu-ray of the 2005 film Master and Commander has sold out everywhere. Secondary markets are now battlefields. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who read the above sentences and feel an intense pain and yearning for comradery and combat on the high seas, and those…
The Department of Energy (DOE) said in a public notice scheduled to be published Thursday that it will throw out all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to the agency before October 1, 2024 unless the requester proactively emails the agency to tell it they are still interested in the documents they requested. This…
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) propaganda video that featured Jay-Z’s music was hit with a copyright takedown request on X, and appears to have been hit with copyright violations on both Instagram and Facebook as well. The video features footage of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents training and doing immigration raids set to…
Last month, age verification laws went into effect in Wyoming and South Dakota, requiring sites hosting “material that is harmful to minors” to verify visitors are over 18 years old. These would normally just be two more states joining the nearly 30 that have so far ceded ground to a years-long campaign for enforcing invasive,…