Category: 404 Media

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that yucked it up, went interstellar, controlled the weather, and sang our praises. First, the sounds of ape laughter have been gracing our planet for 15 million years. Then: a visit from a cosmic elder, a meteorological martial art, ...

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 talking aloud to computers, Cannes, and “Engineering Creativity: Guac Is Extra.” JASON: This week I was in Cannes, France for the Cannes ...

In February, police in Claremore, Oklahoma arrested farmer Darren Blanchard for speaking a little too long during a community meeting about data centers. The city charged Blanchard with criminal trespass, a crime with a $200 penalty, but he’s vowed to fight the charge. He recently shared video of the bodycam ...

The hackers that stole a large cache of data from Madison Square Garden called a low level employee and tricked them into letting the hackers into MSG’s systems, according to the hackers and 404 Media’s review of the stolen data. The breach highlights the risk of social engineering over voice ...

We start this week with Matthew’s story about a fascinating paper that argues if LLMs are sentient, then by those metrics so is the classic game Age of Empires II. After the break, Matthew tells us about a wild story out of Texas with a data center being built on ...

I am staring at a painted portrait of King Charles, who is wearing a red suit. The comically oversized and heavy Snap Specs I am wearing have basically created a digital version of the real painting and overlaid it over the real thing. A narrator speaking through the glasses asks ...

Behind closed doors and without expert input, the Trump administration issued a major policy change to how census data is released. Data experts are concerned the result will be less reliable public data related to redistricting, natural disasters, the workforce, housing, and more. On June 4, the Trump administration released ...

🌘 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 discovered new evidence that the cosmic structures connecting the universe are much larger than previously predicted—persisting over billions of light years—a finding that challenges ...

Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists who have publicly criticized the venue’s use of facial recognition technology, putting their tweets and comments into a document that was then accessible to other people inside the company, 404 Media has found. The news shows that MSG, operated by Jim Dolan ...

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.  Around this time last year, Rachel Rodman was happily employed as a library clerk and program assistant with the Crawford County Library District in the east-central part of Missouri. Rodman didn’t think anything of the display she curated for Pride ...