2025-07-25

etc

• Gold can be heated to 14 times its melting point without melting

Horseshit

• This Major Rule About Cooking Meat Turns out to Be Wrong

  Resting meat is something chefs and experienced cooks have recommended for ages, and it's something we at Serious Eats have long supported as well. But over the years, a growing number of voices have questioned the logic behind it, and the tide has slowly started to shift. As more evidence against resting meat has piled up, the once bedrock rule is looking a lot less certain.

  • I never "rest" meats; give me stuff still sizzling or actually on fire.

• The rise of couples location sharing

• (2023) For Somali Immigrants, Trucking Life Echoes Traditional Nomadism

• People Are Buying $8k Lifelike Baby Dolls

• Ancient DNA Analysis Proves Roman Fish Sauce Was Made of Fish

• Animals Are the Original Wellness Influencers

• "Bob smells worse now than he used to" What were ancient humans thinking when they began to bury their dead?

• 'Jamais Vu'

• The book that explains the billionaire doomers

• The universe will die in 33B years – much sooner than we thought

• The emotional burden of flirting on phones: Lies, ghosts, crumbs of attention

Obit

• Hulk Hogan, Hall of Fame Wrestler and Actor, Dies at 71

  • Hulk Hogan, Shirt-Shredding Superstar of Pro Wrestling, Dies at 71

  • Wrestling legend Hulk Hogan dies at 71

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Conspiracy theorists don't realize they're on the fringe

Musk

• Superchargers are the only part of Tesla's business seeing growth

• Musk warns 'rough quarters' ahead for Tesla after Trump cancels EV incentives

• Elon Musk's xAI buys former gas power plant site in Southaven, Mississippi

• Elon Musk with a straight face:Robotaxi will cover half of US by end of the year

• Yet another bad three months as Tesla reports its Q2 2025 results

  • Will Tesla sue Delaware? "You said we couldn't pay the CEO and the business blew up" seems a reasonable case for asking for compensation.

• Tesla (TSLA) all but admits electric car sales growth is gone, gives no guidance

• Tesla bets on bot smoke screen as political and market realities bite

• Starlink Suffers Major Outage

  • Starlink Complete Outage

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

• Who was Mary Magdalene, one of the Bible's most misunderstood women?

• Leah Remini: Leaked Scientology policies direct lawyers in religious warfare

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Yes, College Students Can’t Read Good - by Elan Kluger

  But it is worth considering that perhaps worries about attention spans are overstated. Serious reading has always been a fringe activity. And, besides, two hour podcasts and three hour movies seem to have become standard fare. It is not the inability to read, it is the missing inclination. And that has derived from a different change—a loss of cultural legitimacy for the books one is supposed to have read.

• Science retracts 'arsenic life' paper despite study authors' protests

  • The last step in a long process on "arsenic life"

  • 'Arsenic life' paper retracted by journal Science 15 years after publication

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

• What to know about ToolShell, the SharePoint threat under mass exploitation

  • US nuclear weapons agency hacked in Microsoft SharePoint attacks

  • Over 400 organisations including the Department of Energy have been breached while waiting for a Microsoft Sharepoint patch.

• New dating safety app 'Tea' spills some controversy

• AI summaries causing 'devastating' drop in online news audiences, study finds

• The tiny tech tribe who could change the world tomorrow but won't

  Those ten people are those who sign off on the Settings menus on desktops, mobile and consumer at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and Sony. The decision would be to create a standard that says three things: what are the user adjustable features common to every device with a screen, what single place are they to go in the Settings menu and where, and what common data structure could store them.

• NPM package 'is' with 2.8M weekly downloads infected devs with malware

• After $380M hack, Clorox sues its "service desk" vendor for simply giving passwd

• A blog is like a gillnet

• Microsoft-owned GitHub: open-source needs funding

• Once a relative haven for adult games, itch.io begins removing explicit titles - Ars Technica

  By early Thursday morning, itch.io had confirmed in a blog post that it had "'deindexed' all adult NSFW content from our browser and search pages." Itch said the move—which it admitted was "sudden and disruptive"—came in response to a pressure campaign from Collective Shout, an Australian nonprofit that describes itself as "a grassroots movement challenging the objectification of women and sexualization of girls in media, advertising, and popular culture."

  • Major Indie Marketplace Itch.io Shadowbans NSFW Content

• TikTok will shut down soon if China won't agree to Trump's deal, official says

• Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library

• Google's shortened goo.gl links will stop working next month

TechSuck / Geek Bait

• The Linux Kernel Seeing Rare Code Activity Around SPARC64 - Phoronix

  Linutronix developer Thomas Weißschuh is working on converting SPARC64 over to using the generic vDSO library within the Linux kernel. SPARC64 is the last architecture supported by the mainline kernel not using this generic vDSO code that allows for a lot of code sharing cross-architecture.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

• Ending 'woke AI' isn't enough: fight the 'monster' within it

  When Google’s Gemini generated black Founding Fathers and racially diverse Nazis, the company became a laughingstock — and when Elon Musk’s “anti-woke” Grok started praising Hitler, it proved the same point. Whether you’re trying to program woke or anti-woke tendencies, these systems interpret your instructions in unpredictable ways that humiliate their creators. In this way, both Google and Musk discovered the same terrifying truth: AI developers can’t even get their systems to implement their own political goals correctly.

• FDA's New Drug Approval AI Is Generating Fake Studies: Report

  • Elsa, FDA's AI tool has been hallucinating research and fabricating studies

• Claude Finds God

• Can AI run a physical shop? Anthropic's Claude tried and the results were bad

• Maybe AI Isn't Going to Replace You at Work After All

• Is AI killing graduate jobs?

• AI data-suckers would have to ask permission first under new bill

• College Grads Are Pursuing a New Career Path: Training AI Models

• Altman reveals his fears for humanity 'this weird emergent thing' keeps evolving

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

• House appropriators interested in alternatives to SLS EUS upper stage

• Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles

Crypto con games

• Crypto's big bang will revolutionise finance

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Ex-Libor Trader Tom Hayes Wins Bid to Overturn Rigging Conviction

• Google just spent $14B on servers in 91 days, plans even higher spending soon

• AMD CEO says U.S.-made TSMC chips are 5%-20% more expensive, but worth it

• Long-Unloved Nuclear Power Is Staging a Comeback

• Intel will shed 24,000 employees and retreat in Germany, Poland, and Costa Rica

• Satya Nadella says job cuts have been 'weighing heavily' on him

  • Satya Nadella seeks to reassure Microsoft employees in layoffs memo

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Faraday Future faces potential SEC enforcement action after three-year probe

• You can now Venmo the government to help pay off national debt

• California can't require background checks to buy ammunition, appeals court rule

• California backs down to Trump admin, won't force ISPs to offer $15 broadband

Trump

• Donald Trump Is Fairy-Godmothering AI

• No more tech hiring in India, Donald Trump tells Google, Microsoft and others

• Comer issues subpoena for Ghislaine Maxwell deposition.

• Why didn't Biden release the Epstein files?

  Reports of Donald Trump’s name repeatedly appearing in the Jeffrey Epstein files, coupled with the unearthing of a suggestive birthday card that the president sent the convicted sex offender, have renewed scrutiny of their relationship. But if the government really had damning information about Trump’s entanglements with Epstein in its possession for years, then why didn’t his Democratic predecessor and political rival, President Joe Biden, ever release the files?

  It’s impossible to know for certain. Conspiracy theories about a government cover-up in the Epstein case have swirled around right-wing media circles since his 2019 death in prison, which was ruled a suicide. But appearing in the Epstein files might not, in and of itself, suggest any wrongdoing on Trump’s part. Even if the material in the sealed files does raise concerns, it would be highly unusual for the government to release that material outside of a courtroom.

• Trump bickers with Powell over Fed renovation costs

• Appeals court hands Mike Lindell win in fight over $5M election fraud contest

  A federal appeals court ruled in favor of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Wednesday in his bid to avoid paying $5 million to a software developer who declared victory in Lindell’s contest to disprove his claims of foreign interference in the 2020 election. The three-judge 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel’s unanimous decision found an arbitration panel exceeded its power by changing unambiguous contract terms to award the developer Lindell’s prize.

Democrats

• Mahmoud Khalil Repeatedly Refuses to Condemn Hamas on CNN

• For 3 hours... Instagram Temporarily Suspends Zohran Mamdani's Account

  On Monday, July 21st, Instagram temporarily suspended the account of Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assembly member and NYC mayoral candidate. The suspension, which lasted approximately 3 hours before his account was reinstated, was explained by Instagram senior directors in an internal leaked memo that his content was deemed “too socialist,” and goes against current national US interest.

  Instagram’s content moderation policies, designed to curb misinformation, hate speech, and harmful content, have frequently been scrutinized for alleged political biases. Critics from both the left and right have accused the platform of uneven enforcement, though the company maintains its guidelines are applied impartially. However, in 2025, Facebook relocated most of its misinformation and content moderations operations to Texas, a move that employees saw as part of a broader ideological shift towards the far-right.

Left Angst

• You Shouldn't Have to Make Your Social Media Public to Get a Visa

• Columbia University to pay $200M in settlement with Trump administration

  Columbia University has agreed to pay $200m (£147m) to President Donald Trump's administration over accusations it failed to protect its Jewish students. The settlement, which will be paid to the federal government over three years, was announced in a statement by the university and confirmed by the president on social media. In exchange, the government has agreed to return some of the $400m in federal grants it froze or terminated in March.

  • Columbia Agrees to $200M Fine to Settle Fight with Trump

  • Columbia University to pay over $200M to resolve Trump probes

• Bitcoin Coup: How Crypto Accelerationists Engineered America's Financial Collapse

  There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows. This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability.

• About That Japan Deal

• Fascism has not come to America - spiked

  As the fallout over the so-called Epstein files suggests, MAGA’s prime chatterers are less focussed on coherent policy than on conspiratorial hysteria. It is hardly a mass movement across a broad spectrum of the population, but essentially a rebellion of the middle orders and mostly older voters – 60 per cent of the Trump base was aged over 50 in 2024. Trump himself is a blimpish 79-year-old who seems ready for serious decline, while Mussolini and Hitler were in their late 30s and early 40s respectively when they took power.

• Trump's war on windmills started in Scotland. Now he's taking it global

• President Trump threatened to break up Nvidia, didn't even know what it was

• EPA rescinds $20M for clean water in pesticide-contaminated rural California

• SCOTUS to LowerCourts: Ignore Binding Precedent, Follow Our Covert Shadow Docket

• Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

• State-Sponsored Stupidity: The Inevitable Failure of Trump's AI Strategy

• RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine group sues him: "This is not the Bobby we know"

• U.S. passport drops to lowest ranking yet on global index

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Charges dropped against 120 defendants because they can't get attorney

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Hackers–hope to defect to Russia? Don't Google "defecting to Russia."

• Air Force unit suspends use of Sig Sauer pistol after shooting death of airman

World

• Montmartre residents denounce the Paris neighborhood's 'Disneyfication'

• Switzerland plans surveillance worse than US

• Russia suspected of hacking Dutch prosecution service systems

• Singapore Takes Military Action Against Chinese Hackers

• Ministers set to admit Sizewell C nuclear plant pricetag has soared to £38B

• What are the new UK online safety rules and how will they be enforced?

• UK: Phone networks down: EE, BT, Three, Vodafone, O2 not working in mass outage

• Canadian Company Claims to Find Large Oil Reserves in Poland

• Prada Scandal Proves the Power of India's Troll Army

• Brussels has a last-resort 'trade bazooka'

• Thousands unable to make calls as EE and BT networks down

• Thailand seals border with Cambodia after military clashes kill at least 12

Israel

• Food Is Stockpiled in Gaza and the UN Is Refusing the Group Ready to Deliver It.

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• North Korea's military is being transformed on the battlefields of Ukraine

China

• AWS closes China AI research center, citing boilerplate 'business priorities'

• This Was Supposed to Be the Year China Started Catching Up with SpaceX

• Nvidia AI chips worth $1B smuggled to China after Trump export controls

• China Curbed Its Oil Addiction–and Blunted a U.S. Pressure Point

Health / Medicine

• Scientists bust myth of 10k steps path to good health

  • Just 7k steps a day cuts health risks, study says

• Dr. Ozempic: Inside the medical discovery that revolutionized weight loss

• After Cleveland Clinic expanded to Florida, patients say surprise fees followed

• Investigation: 'signs of life' found before some organ-transplant retrievals

• New kidney injury warnings added to all GLP-1 drugs by FDA

• FDA ‘rewriting’ food pyramid guidelines.

• UnitedHealth says it is facing DOJ investigation over Medicare billing practices

• You can't outrun a bad diet

• Scientists are developing artificial blood that could save lives in emergencies

• Japanese scientists use CRISPR to eliminate Down syndrome

  • Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

• Snorting fast food "milkshakes" could have saved all that trouble... Avoiding Covid with carrageenan nasal spray

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• About 700M years ago, the Earth froze over – now we may know why

• There's a new acid in our rain – should we be worried?

• More than 90% of new renewable energy capacity is now cheaper than fossil fuels

• Grizzlies Were Raiding Montana Farms. Then Came Some Formidable Dogs

• I'm a Microplastics Researcher. Here’s how I limit the plastic in my life.

• Courts banned this herbicide twice. The EPA wants to bring it back

• Spiders may have originated in the ocean before adapting to live on land

• The "We Evolved to Eat Meat" Argument Doesn't Hold Up