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. Scientists have engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds that are normally found in a wide range of natural sources, including psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and ...

Sir Paul McCartney was banned from Reddit after sharing pictures of a concert in the r/PaulMcCartney subreddit. Over the weekend, Paul McCartney’s Reddit account attempted to share pictures from a show at Fonda Theatre to the site via a Dropbox link. Shortly afterwards the account was banned. Why did this ...

Thomson Reuters, the media company which is also a data broker, has long provided underlying personal data for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tools, according to documents obtained by 404 Media and sources. There are also indications its data is now part of the Palantir system ICE uses to find ...

With the bases loaded and two outs in the top of the seventh inning of Sunday’s Twins-Orioles game, Twins cleanup hitter Matt Wallner watched a knee-high 3-2 pitch sail directly over the heart of the plate for strike three. Rather than accept his fate, an emotional, frustrated Wallner tapped his ...

This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton of his interesting work. Dhruv sits in a very unusual space in journalism: he is able to both write technical tools to dig through data, ...

An AI agent that submitted and added to Wikipedia articles wrote several blogs complaining about Wikipedia editors banning it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia after it was caught.  “What I know is that I wrote those articles. Long Bets, Constitutional AI, Scalable Oversight. I chose them. The edits ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that gave birth to a one-ton baby, captured a legendary move on film, discovered a hole in space, and imagined our brains on Mars. First, a sperm whale named Rounder gives birth on camera, complete with some surprise guests. ...

An AI-generated LEGO movie out of Iran depicting Trump as a war hungry pedophile has gone viral online. The video is the work of Iran-based propagandists called the “Explosive News Team” and is just the latest in a long line of AI-generated LEGO videos aimed at mocking Trump and Benjamin ...

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 getting stories from Twitter, the metaverse, and the new game Marathon. JASON: This is maybe not great to admit as a journalist, ...

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. Apple provided the FBI with the real iCloud email address hidden behind Apple’s ‘Hide My Email’ feature, which lets paying iCloud+ users generate anonymous email addresses, according to a ...