Category: 404 Media

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star for the first time in history, signalling a major breakthrough ...

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared ...

We start this week with Jason’s story about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. They’re everywhere! Thank you to the readers and listeners who sent in their own examples. After the break, Sam tells us how Waymo snitched on kids and drove them to a group of waiting cops. In the subscribers-only ...

Freya Holmér’s had this idea in her head for a long time—Tetris, but the whole board rotates. The game developer and Unity tool maker started making the idea real and built out a prototype. Holmér posted a 50-second clip of it to social media in mid-March and asked: “Is this ...

If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March. But as much as we’re enjoying ...

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?  This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new ...

Earlier this week, I somewhat stupidly asked our readers to send me examples of “ChatGPT flyers,” the AI-generated posters and advertisements that have taken over social media, bulletin boards, restaurant menus, store signage, business cards, and billboards around the world. I say stupidly, because I was flooded with so many ...

Putting on the $3,000 Katalyst suit is like sliding around with an electric eel. First you lay out the vest, shorts, and arm straps (on a towel if you don’t want to make a mess) and spray their electrode pads with a lot of water. “More water is better,” Katalyst’s ...

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced it will let its surveillance contract with automated license plate reader company (ALPR) Flock expire, becoming the largest police department in the country to drop its contract. Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that busted their butts, scaled great heights, got it right, and discovered a new world. First, Hannibal marched an army of men, horses, and elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome. Scientists ask the question: Just how hard did ...