Category: 404 Media

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that were long in the tooth, trapped in the lattice, unearthed in Thailand, and entombed in post-apocalyptic waters. First, scientists discover that even Neanderthals had to go to the dentist. Then: a nuke-born crystal, a 60,000-pound herbivore, and life ...

A who’s who of the Iranian diaspora will meet at Uber HQ on Saturday to discuss tech and the future of Iran, according to an email about the event viewed by 404 Media. The guest list includes venture capitalists, angel investors, tech CEOs, and the son of Iran’s former leader ...

Mayo Clinic, the massive U.S. hospital network, is using what it describes as “Ambient Listening” to record patient interactions with nurses, including in emergency rooms, then using AI to process that collected data. The recording is opt-out, rather than opt-in, and at least some patients are likely not aware the ...

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 developers’ AI woes, how the magic happens, and the Beach Boys. JOSEPH: Earlier in the week we published ICE Agents Have List ...

ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work.  Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, ...

A few weeks ago, I came across a wild post on Reddit’s r/DHExchange, a subreddit for trading large datasets: “I hoarded a large database of something valuable, just not what’s [sic] you expect…150k stools images.”  The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: ...

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. The sudden shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by DOGE in 2025 is associated with a rise in violent conflicts across Africa, ...

Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper ...

We start this week with Joseph’s story about how we obtained Haotian AI, a sought-after piece of realtime video deepfake software that lets you turn into anyone else during Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, or Zoom calls. After the break, Matthew tells us about some insane Yu-Gi-Oh trading card drama. In the ...

Fiber-optic cable has become a staple of drone war. From Ukraine to the Sahel, combatants are fielding quadcopters piloted via kilometer-long lengths of cable that allows operators to control them across vast distances while insulating the drone from being knocked from the sky. This technique was once a cheap way ...