Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that were exhumed from their graves, worked scatological miracles, and drew inspiration from X-rays. First, a diagnosis 200 years in the making confirms, once again, that Napoleon’s retreat from Russia was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad time. Then: crystal pee, life-giving poo, and…
A large image dataset used to develop AI tools for detecting nudity contains a number of images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P). The NudeNet dataset, which contains more than 700,000 images scraped from the internet, was used to train an AI image classifier which could…
A new startup backed by one of the biggest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is building a service that allows clients to “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially, the startup, called Doublespeed, is pitching an astroturfing AI-powered bot service, which is 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 Pavlovian Chartbeat response, when to say “cum,” and the wave of making things for humans, by humans. JOSEPH: Right now I’m in the midst of upgrading a…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to force Meta to unmask the identity of the people behind Facebook and Instagram accounts that post about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, arrests, and sightings by claiming the owners of the account are in violation of a law about the “importation of merchandise.” Lawyers fighting…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Hold onto your butts, because one day you might be breathing through them. Scientists have tested out enteral ventilation—a possible method of administering oxygen with a liquid delivered through the rectum…
A new analysis of synthetic intimate image abuse (SIIA) found that the tools for making non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes are easily discoverable all over social media and through simple searches on Google and Bing. Research published by the counter-extremism organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows how tools for creating non-consensual deepfakes spread across the internet….
The sound of power tools screech in what looks like a workshop with aluminum bubble wrap insulation plastered on the walls and ceiling. A shirtless man picks up a can of compressed air from the workbench and sprays it. He’s tinkering with a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. At one point he squints at…
Apple has removed Tea, the women’s safety app which went viral earlier this year before facing multiple data breaches, from the App Store. “This app is currently not available in your country or region,” a message on the Apple App Store currently says when trying to visit a link to the app. Apple told 404…
Sleepers snoozing in Eight Sleep smartbeds had a bad night on Monday when a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused their beds to malfunction. Some were left with the bed’s heat blasting, others were left in a sitting position and unable to recline. One woman said her bed went haywire and she had…
