2026-07-03

Cool

• ‘Spectacular' Solar Halo Spotted Over Devils Tower

  The Beyond Earth Institute shared the photo of the 22-degree solar halo that appeared Wednesday when the sun was directly over Devils Tower. "One of nature's most beautiful optical displays" lasted for only a few minutes before the clouds changed, and the halo faded away,” said the nonprofit group, which says it’s mission is "enabling human migration into the solar system."

Horseshit

• The cannibalistic trade-off: Why human cannibalism emerges

• City on the Edge: Can San Francisco's soul survive techno-capitalism?

  • I'm pretty confident 'rapacious elitism' will remain the defining emotion of that city for a while yet.

• Kids learn to bully from adults' threats, manipulation and criticism

• Ancient cave paintings can harbor human DNA for millennia, scientists find

• The Brain Prefers to Read on Paper Rather Than on Screens, a New Study Says

• World Cup dreams shattered as StubHub tickets cancelled at last minute

• Japan study finds coffee taste changes with cup texture

• Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

  From the 1943–1947 birth cohort onward, however, a pronounced divergence emerges: individuals with right-wing political orientations maintain fertility at or above replacement level, whereas fertility among left-wing individuals declines sharply to well below replacement. Applying Lande–Arnold selection gradient analyses, we find increasing directional selection that may favor right-wing political orientation over time, while education shows consistent negative associations with fertility and religiosity positive but weaker effects. Separate analysis of Black and White Americans reveals, however, that the increasingly stronger association between political orientation and fertility in more recent cohorts holds only true for whites but not for blacks. Nonetheless, these findings suggest that recent fertility decline in the United States is driven disproportionately by left-leaning individuals and point to contemporary demographic processes that may gradually shift the ideological composition of populations.

• Why So Many Women Are Rethinking Motherhood in 2026—and It’s Not Just About Money.

• Scientists can now study the event horizons of black holes

• Gen Z Was Told We Could Save the World. Is It Silly to Think We Still Can?

  • They were told many things that were not true, as all children are...

• Gen Z is forgoing the institution of mariage

• Teen Girls' Suicide Rates Are Rising in Many Countries Around the World

• CEO of Palantir suffers a bit of a meltdown during live interview

• Bring Back the Gatekeeper, Please

  Amid all the babble of the internet, we need someone to save us from ourselves

• The New Meta for Silicon Valley Startups Is Nihilism

celebrity gossip

• Kim Dotcom's legal battle to stay in NZ and avoid extradition to the US

Musk

• SpaceX reportedly working on an AI phone

• SpaceX Hangover Spreads

• Married couple killed in first known fatal Tesla Semi crash

• The Elon Musk boycott is fizzling out–and Tesla is winning again

Electric / Self Driving cars

• The War on Self-Driving Cars Will Kill People

Robot uprising / Humanoid Helpers

• New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Vatican declares Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicates bishops

  The Vatican responded aggressively Thursday to a traditionalist society that consecrated bishops without the pope's consent, declaring the Society of St. Pius X in schism, excommunicating its bishops and priests and warning its faithful they too face the harshest sanctions in the Catholic Church. The society, known by its acronym SSPX, celebrates the ancient Latin Mass and opposes the modernizing reforms of the Catholic Church, which it considers to be rife with heresies and errors and has accused of straying from the Catholic faith. During a ritual-filled, five-hour Mass on Wednesday, attended by some 15,500 people and their children, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV, who had urged the SSPX to hold off for the sake of the church's unity.

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• A 'new way of thinking' boosted math proficiency in an East Palo Alto school

• Paper mill cancer studies get double the number of citations as genuine papers

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• T-Mobile moving tens of thousands of virtual machines off VMware amid lawsuit

• Why is Apple asking me to pay more for Big Tech's AI obsession?

• Apple Seeks to Buy Chinese-Made Memory Chips by Lobbying US

• Papa Johns Can Predict When Your Fridge Is Empty

• WhatsApp Usernames Are Already Raising Impersonation Red Flags

• US PC shipments fell 7.0% in 1Q26, forecasted to fall 14% in 2026

• Bring back crappy forums

• BitTorrent's disastrous, legendary, and controversial story

• I Tried Rips, the Card App Where Users Spend Thousands Chasing Pricey Pokémon

• Hideo Kojima afraid that 'digital data will no longer be owned by individuals'

• Google hit with $2B antitrust judgment for skewing shopping searches

• Top 'Suicide Squad' Developers Say Flop Made Them Not Want to Make Games Anymore

• Microsoft’s answer to the end of PlayStation discs: a bizarre GitHub stunt

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• The latest on the aftermath of the New Glenn catastrophe

• 'Titan is actually a very reasonable destination for humans'

• The Harvard astronomer dubbed Trump's chief alien hunter

• Amazon has enough satellites to launch its Starlink competitor

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity

  • Of Course Meta Platforms Is Going to Be a Cloud

  • Meta to sell excess compute, like SpaceX

  • Meta makes cloud push to sell excess AI compute power capacity

• OpenAI proposes 5% stake to Trump administration to ease Washington pressure

  • OpenAI in talks to give Trump administration a 5% stake in the company

  • OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake

  • OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake

  • OpenAI Proposes Giving US Govt. 5% Stake

  • OpenAI floats giving Trump administration 5 percent cut of AI boom

  • Trump gets OpenAI to offer US 5% stake, far lower than Sanders' target

  • OpenAI proposed donating 5% of its equity to a US sovereign wealth fund

  • OpenAI Courts Trump administration as Its Latest Investor

• Trump admin and Anthropic haven't discussed the gov't taking a stake in it

• The Anthropic Fable Ban Is Over. The Battle over How to Tame AI Has Just Begun

• Does AI Have Speech Rights?

• Nvidia offers startup customers chance to swap compute power for revenue share

• Cloudflare sets AI crawler deadline: separate search or be blocked

• Let's Go Kill the Internet

• White House accelerates plans for AI model standards

• Your AI lover will change you

• Arena, the AI leaderboard everyone uses, is now a $100M business

• Anthropic is removing its covert code for catching Chinese competitors

• Can You Embrace A.I. Without Layoffs? This Company Says It's Trying

• America should not imprison frontier AI

• AI Can't Be Listed as Inventor on Patent Applications, Japan's Top Court Rules

• A new, inexpensive Chinese AI model is catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI

• Companies Are Throttling Employees' AI Use Because It's Too Expensive

• US companies are losing 2.4% of revenue on failed AI projects

• Supreme Court says AI-generated hallucinated precedents 'catastrophic'

• Weird Al Yankovic Pulled Out of AI Ad Deal: 'I Can't Be the Poster Boy for AI'

• TV-tracking app TV Time is shutting down as company focuses on AI

• Heat adds to strains on areas with data centers

• Microsoft commits $2.5B and 6k employees to new AI implementation unit

• Microsoft launches its own AI deployment company with $2.5B commitment

• Blink if you're human

Neo Gambling / Crypto con games

• Wagering on Wildfires? There's a New Prediction Market for That

  • Uber won big on unregulated taxi service, why not unregulate the insurance market? Selling it as "gambling" is so crass.

Economicon / Business / Finance

• AOL and Eventbrite owner Bending Spoons soars 40% on Nasdaq debut

• Trouble keeps finding Supermicro as server shipments attract police attention

• Egg Libor Was Also Manipulated

  • The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing

• Google ordered to pay Klarna $2B antitrust damages

• Bowlers Have Snapped over Wall Street's Takeover of the Sport

• US job growth misses expectations in June; unemployment rate falls to 4.2%

  • US employers still reluctant to add many jobs as hiring slows in June

  • Hiring people is easy. Getting them to show up and work is not.

• Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years

• Electricity demand is set to pass GDP in growth for first time

• CMA CGM to Buy FedEx Supply Chain for $1.4B

• Banks Get Bids on $49B Paramount Debt Well Before Sale

• Tech and Finance Sectors Losing 28,000 Jobs Monthly

• Private Credit Is Making Bets on Consumer Debt at a Precarious Time

• Fed's Warsh plans to harness better economic data within a year

• Kalamazoo parents say pacifiers they bought off Amazon were used

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• FAA proposal: Supersonic airliners can fly over US cities if they're quiet

• California bans 'sell by' food labels to cut food waste

• Ditching the Seventeenth Amendment: Taking the Senate back to the Framers’ Intent.

• FBI field offices send analysts to Atlanta for 2020 election investigation

• How America Celebrated Its Previous Big Birthday in 1976

Democrats

• The Socialist Wave Reaches the Heartland

• There's Nothing Democratic About These Socialists

  The DSA was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become.

• Who Really Are These New Democratic Socialists and Their Fellow Travelers?

Left Angst

• Feds Might Flip the Script on Right to Repair Vehicle Emissions Systems

  An educated guess could be made that the EPA will heed President Trump’s cautioning against more enforcement. The big question is whether the agency will leave it up to consumers to decide what modifications are kosher and which are not, depending on how “good faith” is defined.

• He sent a harsh email to ICE's top official. Federal agents tracked him down

• UK-US trade deal will lead to more than 200k avoidable deaths

• The Joy of Being American

• Crypto Brought Trump a Windfall, Even as Many Investors Lost Big

  • Trump Made $1B on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a Fortune

• Govt Bracing for Nationwide Anti-AI Riots, Preparing to Crack Down on Dissent

• Trump's court win reignites fight to sink €1.7T data deal with Europe

  • US Supreme Court FTC Ruling Raises Fresh Threat to EU–US Data Transfers

• U.S. babies born this year to receive Social Security cards w 'Freedom 250' logo

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• State sanctioned’ Russian mob ran $1B Medicare scam out of New York, compromised 1M medical records: Feds.

• Cops Bust Would Be Casino Mass Shooter With An Actual Cache (This Time) of Weapons.

• U.S. murder rate approaches a record low

World

• Google loses fight over record $4.7B EU antitrust fine

  • EU top court dismisses Google fight against record €4B EU antitrust fine

  • Top EU court upholds Google Android fine in landmark antitrust case

  • Google must pay €4.1B fine for using Android to 'block' rivals

• Germany unveils reform push: Tax cuts, pension overhaul and new sick leave rules

• Don't expect trackers to save your stolen car, experts say

• EU could announce social media ban for kids in September

• Albania warned EU accession at risk over Jared Kushner-backed resort plans

  MEPs have warned Albania that EU accession talks are at risk if the government does not “change course” over plans for a luxury resort backed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

• ShareChat, India's Meta Rival, Plans $400M IPO Next Year

• Singapore seizes $42M mansion over Nvidia chip smuggling

• Germany seeks powers for spies to hack and disrupt attackers

• With 76,475 dead, Canada appears to find its line on euthanasia

• Turkish comedian Deniz Goktas detained at Istanbul airport

• EU Court of Justice allows criminal prosecution for reposting RT videos

• Indians using app to shut down e-rickshaws in the middle of roads

• EU could announce social media ban for kids in September

• Bank of England explores trading 'kill switches' to contain AI meltdowns

Iran / Houthi

• US reportedly mulls pulling troops from Saudi Arabia as ties sour over Iran war

• U.S. Officials Believed Israel Was Plotting to Kill Iranian Negotiators

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Russia buys gasoline from India to tackle shortages

• Russia is using drones from the war in Ukraine in Africa

China

• China tells its ethnic minorities to integrate or face consequences

• The Graduate-School Dropout Toppling China's Academic Stars

• Why Jet Engines Aren’t “Made In China”

  jet engines are almost uniquely designed to expose the weaknesses in the Chinese system. They’re a low-margin market focused on long-term reliability where manufacturing quality and consistency are paramount. Iteration speed is very slow and there’s a pervasive, internationally enforced, regulatory barrier for every finished product. These together neutralize the usual Chinese advantages in skilled labor, capital, and speed-to-scale. They also prevent traditional domestic protectionism from adding much value. Analyzing the Chinese failure to produce viable jet engines gives us important lessons about the nature of the West’s remaining comparative advantage.

• China's CXMT Is Set to Challenge DRAM Incumbents

• The Graduate-School Dropout Toppling China's Academic Stars

Health / Medicine

• So was Thalidomide: Billions of doses later: Global review confirms mRNA vaccines safe and effective

• Video game play linked to small boost in memory and cognitive abilities

• US deaths hit record low in 2025

• GLP-1's help women find work, and men to leave their partners

• Millions told to check their sunscreen experts reveal products may not be safe

• FDA allows Philip Morris to market Zyn as less harmful than cigarettes

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Canadian boy, 11, dies of rabies after waking to bat on his face

• West Nile virus detected in mosquitoes from these 8 Orange County cities

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• It’s Actually Okay to Run the AC All Day (Even If You’re Not Home).

  • NYC Mayor: Set your AC to 78 degrees

  Our City is doing its part too: maintaining the 78 degrees rule in our buildings, dimming/turning off our lights during peak electricity demand, asking private partners to do the same, and powering down non-essential equipment.

• French race to get hold of air conditioning as yet another heatwave looms

• How do wombats poop cubes? Scientists get to the bottom of the mystery

• US home battery installations hit record high on rising electricity costs

• Scientists propose launching giant 'airbag' into space to protect Earth