Artemis II Astronauts Have ‘Two Microsoft Outlooks’ and Neither Work

In 1969, the three astronauts of the Apollo 10 mission conducted a momentous “dress rehearsal” for putting humans on the lunar surface for the first time. It was a historic, inspiring moment for humanity; Astronaut John Young watched from a command module spacecraft as Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan broke away and flew a lunar…

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Journalist Sues FAA Over Drone No Fly Zone Designed to Prevent Filming ICE

Minnesota photojournalist Rob Levine and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press are suing the Federal Aviation Administration over a recently issued restriction that prevents drones from flying within 3,000 feet of Department of Homeland Security buildings and vehicles, an amorphous no-fly zone that encompasses Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents. The FAA issued the…

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Scientists Create Plant That Produces Ayahuasca, Shrooms, and Toad Psychedelics All At Once

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds that are normally found in a wide range of natural sources, including psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and toads, according to a study…

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I Tried to Find the ‘Arousal Intelligence’ In An Animated, Augmented Reality Porn Star

Sometimes people—especially those in the field of public relations doing a pray-and-spray campaign, but also small-time developers, the occasional delusional vibe-coder, and local dipshits—deliver messages to my inbox like a cat dropping a dead mouse on my doorstep. For the most part, I resist the bait: often, bad press is still press to these people,…

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Paul McCartney Banned From Reddit After Promoting Himself in Paul McCartney Subreddit

Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned. Why did this happen? That’s in dispute. At…

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The Journalist Who Tracked Epstein Island Visitors’ Phones (with Dhruv Mehrotra)

This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton of his interesting work. Dhruv sits in a very unusual space in journalism: he is able to both write technical tools to dig through data, or collect information, or really…

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Scientists Discover Giant ‘Cavity’ Beyond Earth That Isn’t Supposed to Exist

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that gave birth to a one-ton baby, captured a legendary move on film, discovered a hole in space, and imagined our brains on Mars. First, a sperm whale named Rounder gives birth on camera, complete with some surprise guests. Then: the deadliest headbutts on…

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