2025-06-21 21:00:18
Welcome back to the Abstract!
This week, we’re moving in next to anacondas, so watch your back and lock the henhouse. Then, parenthood tips from wild baboons, the “cognitive debt” of ChatGPT, a spaceflight symphony, and a bizarre galaxy that is finally coming into view.
Anacondas are one of the most spectacular animals in South America, inspiring countless myths and legends. But these iconic boas, which can grow to lengths of 30 feet, are also a pest to local populations in the Amazon basin, where they prey on livestock.
To better understand these nuanced perceptions of anacondas, researchers interviewed more than 200 residents of communities in the várzea regions of the lower Amazon River about their experiences with the animals. The resulting study is packed with amazing stories and insights about the snakes, which are widely reviled as thieves and feared for their predatory prowess.
“Fear of the anaconda (identified in 44.5% of the reports) is related to the belief that it is a treacherous and sly animal,” said co-authors led by Beatriz Nunes Cosendey of the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve and Juarez Carlos Brito Pezzuti of the Federal University of Pará.
“The interviewees convey that the anaconda is a silent creature that arrives without making any noise, causing them to feel uneasy and always vigilant during fishing…with the fear of having their canoe flooded in case of an attack,” the team added. “Some dwellers even reported being more afraid of an anaconda than of a crocodile because the latter warns when it is about to attack.”
But while anacondas are eerily stealthy, they also have their derpy moments. The snakes often break into chicken coops to feast on the poultry, but then get trapped because their engorged bodies are too big to escape through the same gaps they used to enter.
“Dwellers expressed frustration at having to invest time and money in raising chickens, and then lose part of their flock overnight,” the team said. “One interviewee even mentioned retrieving a chicken from inside an anaconda’s belly, as it had just been swallowed and was still fresh.”
Overall, the new study presents a captivating portrait of anaconda-human relations, and concludes that “the anaconda has lost its traditional role in folklore as a spiritual and mythological entity, now being perceived in a pragmatic way, primarily as an obstacle to free-range poultry farming.”
Coming off of Father’s Day, here is a story about the positive role that dads can play for their daughters—for baboons, as well as humans. A team tracked the lifespans of 216 wild female baboons in Amboseli, Kenya, and found that subjects who received more paternal care had significantly better outcomes than their peers.
“We found that juvenile female baboons who had stronger paternal relationships, or who resided longer with their fathers, led adult lives that were 2–4 years longer than females with weak or short paternal relationships,” said researchers led by David Jansen of the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector-Borne Disease. “Because survival predicts female fitness, fathers and their daughters may experience selection to engage socially and stay close in daughters’ early lives.”
This all reminds me of that old episode of The Simpsons where Lisa calls Homer a baboon. While Homer was clearly hurt, it turns out that baboons might not be the worst animal-based insult for a daughter to throw at her dad.
ChatGPT may hinder creativity and learning skills in students who use it to write essays, relative to those who didn’t, according to an exhaustive new preprint study posted on arXiv. This research has yet not been peer-reviewed, and has a relatively small sample size of 54 subjects, but it still contributes to rising concerns about the cognitive toll of AI assistants.
Researchers led by Nataliya Kosmya of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology divided the subjects — all between 18 and 39 years old — into three groups wrote SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT (LLM group), Google’s search engine, or with no assistance (dubbed “Brain-only”).
“As demonstrated over the course of 4 months, the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring,” the team said. “The LLM group also fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior.”
When I asked ChatGPT for its thoughts on the study, it commented that “these results are both interesting and plausible, though they should be interpreted cautiously given the early stage of the research and its limitations.” It later suggested that “cognitive offloading is not always bad.”
Even scientists can’t resist evocative language now and then—we’re all only human. Case in point: A new study likens the history of Asia’s space industry to “a musical concert” and then really runs with the metaphor.
“The region comprises a diverse patchwork of nations, each contributing different instruments to the regional space development orchestra,” said researchers led by Maximilien Berthet of the University of Tokyo. “Its history consists of three successive movements” starting with “the US and former USSR setting the tone for the global space exploration symphony” and culminating with modern Asian spaceflight as “a fast crescendo in multiple areas of the region driven in part by private initiative.”
Talk about a space opera. The rest of the study provides a comprehensive review of Asian space history, but I cannot wait for the musical adaptation.
In 2001, astronomer Bärbel Koribalski spotted a tiny galaxy peeking out from behind a bright foreground star that had obscured it for decades, earning it the nickname the “Peekaboo Galaxy.” Situated about 22 million light-years from the Milky Way, this strange galaxy is extremely young and metal-poor, resembling the universe’s earliest galaxies.
A new study confirms Peekaboo as “the lowest-metallicity dwarf in the Local Volume,” a group of roughly 500 galaxies within 36 million light-years of Earth.
“This makes the Peekaboo dwarf one of the most intriguing galaxies in the Local Volume,” said co-authors Alexei Kniazev of the South African Astronomical Observatory and Simon Pustilnik of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of the Sciences. “It deserves intensive, multi-method study and is expected to significantly advance our understanding of the early universe’s first building blocks.”
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
Update: The original headline for this piece was "Is ChatGPT Rotting Our Brains? New Study Suggests It Does." We've updated the headline to "ChatGPT May Create 'Cognitive Debt,' New Study Finds" to match the terminology used by the researchers.
2025-06-20 23:26:51
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 Deadheads and doxxing sites.
SAM: Anyone reading the site closely this week likely noticed a new name entering the chat. We’re thrilled to welcome Rosie Thomas to the gang for the summer as an editorial intern!
Rosie was previously a software engineer in the personal finance space. Currently halfway through her master’s degree in journalism, Rosie is interested in social movements, how people change their behaviors in the face of new technologies, and “the infinite factors that influence sentiment and opinions,” in her words. In her program, she’s expanding her skills in investigations, audio production, and field recording. She published her first blog with us on day two, a really interesting (and in 404 style, informatively disturbing) breakdown of a new report that found tens of thousands of camera feeds exposed to the dark web. We’re so excited to see what she does with us this summer!
2025-06-20 20:00:41
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.
The FBI has accused a Texas man, James Wesley Burger, of planning an Islamic State-style terrorist attack on a Christian music festival and talking about it on Roblox. The feds caught Burger after another Roblox user overheard his conversations about martyrdom and murder and tipped them off. The feds said that when they searched Burger’s phone they found a list of searches that included “ginger isis member” and “are suicide attacks haram in islam.”
According to charging documents, a Roblox player contacted federal authorities after seeing another player called “Crazz3pain” talking about killing people. Screenshots from the server and included in the charging documents show Roblox avatars with beards dressed in Keffiyehs talking about dealing a “greivoius [sic] wound upon followers of the cross.”
“The witness observed the user of Crazz3pain state they were willing, as reported by the Witness, to ‘kill Shia Musilms at their mosque,” court records said. “Crazz3pain and another Roblox user[…]continued to make violent statements so the witness left the game.”
The witness stayed off of Roblox for two days and when they returned they saw Crazz3pain say something else that worried them, according to the court filing. “The Witness observed Crazz3pain tell Roblox User 1 to check their message on Discord,” the charging document said. “Roblox User 1 replied on Roblox to Crazz3pain, they should delete the photograph of firearms within the unknown Discord chat, ‘in case it was flagged as suspicious…the firearms should be kept hidden.”
According to the witness, Crazz3pain kept talking about their desire to commit “martyrdom” at a Christian event and that he wanted to “bring humiliation to worshippers of the cross.” The Witness allegedly asked Crazz3pain if the attack would happen at a church service and Crazz3pain told them it would happen at a concert.
Someone asked Crazz3pain when it would happen. “‘It will be months…Shawwal…April,’” Crazz3pain said. Shawwal is the month after Ramadan in the Islamic calendar. The conversations the witness shared with the FBI happened on January 21 and 23, 2025.
Roblox gave authorities Crazz3pain’s email address, name, physical address, and IP address and it all pointed back to James Wesley Burger. The FBI searched Burger’s home on February 28 and discovered that someone in his family had put on a keylogger on the laptop he used to play Roblox and that they’d captured a lot of what he’d been typing while playing the game. They turned over the records to the feds.
“The safety of our community is among our highest priorities. In this case, we moved swiftly to assist law enforcement’s investigation before any real-world harm could occur and investigated and took action in accordance with our policies. We have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to help swiftly detect and remove content that violates our policies," a spokesperson for Roblox told 404 Media. "Our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way. We have dedicated teams focused on proactively identifying and swiftly removing such content, as well as supporting requests from and providing assistance to law enforcement. We also work closely with other platforms and in close collaboration with safety organizations to keep content that violates our policies off our platform, and will continue to diligently enforce our policies.”
Burger’s plan to kill Christians was allegedly captured by the keylogger. “I’ve come to conclude it will befall the 12 of Shawwal aa/And it will be a music festival /Attracting bounties of Christians s/In’shaa’allah we will attain martyrdom /And deal a grevious [sic] wound upon the followers of the Cross /Pray for me and enjoin yourself to martyrdom,” he allegedly typed in Roblox, according to court records.
The FBI then interviewed Burger in his living room and he admitted he used the Crazz3pain account to play Roblox. The feds asked him about his alleged plan to kill Christians at a concert. Burger said it was, at the time, “mostly a heightened emotional response,” according to the court records.
Burger also said that the details “became exaggerated” but that the goal “hasn’t shifted a bit,” according to the court records. He said he wanted to “[G]et the hell out of the U.S.” And if he can’t, “then, martyrdom or bust.”
He said that his intention with the attack “is something that is meant to or will cause terror,” according to the charging document. When the FBI agent asked if he was a terrorist, Burger said, “I mean, yeah, yeah. By, by the sense and … by my very own definition, yes, I guess, you know, I would be a terrorist.”
When authorities searched his iPhone, they discovered two notes on the phone that described how to avoid leaving behind DNA and fingerprints at a crime scene. A third note appeared to be a note explaining the attack, meant to be read after it occured.
The list of previous searches on his iPhone included “Which month is april in islam,” “Festivals happening near me,” “are suicide attacks haram in islam,” “ginger isis member,” “lone wolf terrorists isis,” and “can tou kill a woman who foesnt[sic] wear hijab.”
Burger has been charged with making violent threats online and may spend time in a federal prison if convicted. This is not the first time something like this has happened on Roblox. The popular children’s game has been a popular spot for extremist behavior, including Nazis and religious terrorists, for years now. Last year, the DOJ accused a Syrian man living in Albanian of using Roblox to coordinate a group of American teenagers to disrupt public city council Zoom meetings.
2025-06-18 21:47:34
Scientists have directly confirmed the location of the universe's “missing” matter for the first time, reports a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.
The idea that the universe must contain normal, or “baryonic,” matter that we can’t seem to find goes back to the birth of modern cosmological models. Now, a team has revealed that about 76 percent of all baryons—the ordinary particles that make up planets and stars—exist as gas hidden in the dark expanses between galaxies, known as the intergalactic medium. Fast radio bursts (FRBs), transient signals with elusive origins, illuminated the missing baryons, according to the researchers. As a bonus, they also identified the most distant FRB ever recorded, at 9.1 billion light years away, in the study.
“Measuring the ‘missing baryons’ with Fast Radio Bursts has been a major long-sought milestone for radio astronomers,” said Liam Connor, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian who led the study, in an email. “Until recently, we didn’t have a large-enough sample of bursts to make strong statements about where this ordinary matter was hiding.”
Under the leadership of Caltech professor Vikram Ravi, the researchers constructed the DSA-110 radio telescope—an array of over 100 dishes in the California desert—to achieve this longstanding milestone. “We built up the largest and most distant collection of localized FRBs (meaning we know their exact host galaxy and distance),” Connor explained. “This data sample, plus new algorithms, allowed us to finally make a complete baryon pie chart. There are no longer any missing wedges.”
Baryons are the building blocks of the familiar matter that makes up our bodies, stars, and galaxies, in contrast to dark matter, a mysterious substance that accounts for the vast majority of the universe’s mass. Cosmological models predict that there is much more baryonic matter than we can see in stars and galaxies, which has spurred astronomers into a decades-long search for the “missing baryons” in space.
Scientists have long assumed that most of this missing matter exists in the form of ionized gas in the IGM, but FRBs have opened a new window into these dark reaches, which can be difficult to explore with conventional observatories.
“FRBs complement and improve on past methods by their sensitivity to all the ionized gas in the Universe,” Connor said. “Past methods, which were highly informative but somewhat incomplete, could only measure hot gas near galaxies or clusters of galaxies. There was no probe that could measure the lion’s share of ordinary matter in the Universe, which it turns out is in the intergalactic medium.”
Since the first FRB was detected in 2007, thousands of similar events have been discovered, though astronomers still aren't sure what causes them. Characterized by extremely energetic radio waves that last for mere milliseconds, the bursts typically originate millions or billions of light years from our galaxy. Some repeat, and some do not. Scientists think these pyrotechnic events are fueled by massive compact objects, like neutron stars, but their exact nature and origins remain unclear.
Connor and his colleagues studied a sample of 60 FRB observations that spanned from about 12 million light years away from Earth all the way to a new record holder for distance: FRB 20230521B, located 9.1 billion light years away. With the help of these cosmic searchlights, the team was able to make a new precise measurement of the density of baryonic matter across the cosmic web, which is a network of large-scale structures that spans the universe. The results matched up with cosmological predictions that most of the missing baryons would be blown out into the IGM by “feedback” generated within galaxies. About 15 percent is present in structures that surround galaxies, called halos, and a small remainder makes up stars and other celestial bodies.
“It really felt like I was going in blind without a strong prior either way,” Connor said. “If all of the missing baryons were hiding in galaxy halos and the IGM were gas-poor, that would be surprising in its own way. If, as we discovered, the baryons had mostly been blown into the space between galaxies, that would also be remarkable because that would require strong astrophysical feedback and violent processes during galaxy formation.”
“Now, looking back on the result, it’s kind of satisfying that our data agrees with modern cosmological simulations with strong ‘feedback’ and agrees with the early Universe values of the total abundance of normal matter,” he continued. “Sometimes it’s nice to have some concordance.”
The new measurement might alleviate the so-called sigma-8 tension, which is a discrepancy between the overall “clumpiness” of matter in the universe when measured using the cosmic microwave background, which is the oldest light in the cosmos, compared with using modern maps of galaxies and clusters.
“One explanation for this disagreement is that our standard model of cosmology is broken, and we need exotic new physics,” Connor said. “Another explanation is that today’s Universe appears smooth because the baryons have been sloshed around by feedback.”
“Our FRB measurement suggests the baryon cosmic web is relatively smooth, homogenized by astrophysical processes in galaxies (feedback),” he continued. “This would explain the S8 tension without exotic new physics. If that’s the case, then I think the broader lesson is that we really need to pin down these pesky baryons, which have previously been very difficult to measure directly.”
To that end, Connor is optimistic that more answers to these cosmic riddles are coming down the pike.
“The future is looking bright for the field of FRB cosmology,” he said. “We are in the process of building enormous radio telescope arrays that could find tens of thousands of localized FRBs each year,” including the upcoming DSA-2000.
“My colleagues and I think of our work as baby steps towards the bigger goal of fully mapping the ordinary, baryonic matter throughout the whole Universe,” he concluded.
2025-06-18 21:40:17
A report from a cybersecurity company last week found that over 40,000 unsecured cameras—including CCTV and security cameras on public transportation, in hospitals, on internet-connected bird feeders and on ATMs—are exposed online worldwide.
Cybersecurity risk intelligence company BitSight was able to access and download content from thousands of internet-connected systems, including domestic and commercial webcams, baby monitors, office security, and pet cams. They also found content from these cameras on locations on the dark web where people share and sell access to their live feeds. “The most concerning examples found were cameras in hospitals or clinics monitoring patients, posing a significant privacy risk due to the highly sensitive nature of the footage,” said João Cruz, Principal Security Research Scientist for the team that produced the report.
The company wrote in a press release that it “doesn’t take elite hacking to access these cameras; in most cases, a regular web browser and a curious mind are all it takes, meaning that 40,000 figure is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”
Depending on the type of login protocol that the cameras were using, the researchers were able to access footage or individual real-time screenshots. Against a background of increasing surveillance by law enforcement and ICE, there is clear potential for abuse of unknowingly open cameras.
Samantha Cole
“Knowing the real number is practically impossible due to the insanely high number of camera brands and models existent in the market,” said Cruz, “each of them with different ways to check if it’s exposed and if it’s possible to get access to the live footage.”
The report outlines more obvious risks, from tracking the behavioral patterns and real-time status of when people are in their homes in order to plan a burglary, to “shoulder surfing,” or stealing data by observing someone logging in to a computer in offices. The report also found cameras in stores, gyms, laundromats, and construction sites, meaning that exposed cameras are monitoring people in their daily lives. The geographic data provided by the camera’s IP addresses, combined with commercially available facial-recognition systems, could prove dangerous for individuals working in or using those businesses.
You can find out if your camera has been exposed using a site like Shodan.io, a search engine which scans for devices connected to the internet, or by trying to access your camera from a device logged in to a different network. Users should also check the documentation provided by the manufacturer, rather than just plugging in a camera right away, to minimize vulnerabilities, and make sure that they set their own password on any IoT-connected device.
This is because many brands use default logins for their products, and these logins are easily findable online. The BitSight report didn’t try to hack into these kinds of cameras, or try to brute-force any passwords, but, “if we did so, we firmly believe that the number would be higher,” said Cruz. Older camera systems with deprecated and unmaintained software are more susceptible to being hacked in this way; one somewhat brighter spot is that these “digital ghost ships” seem to be decreasing in number as the oldest and least secure among them are replaced or fail completely.
Unsecured cameras attract hackers and malicious actors, and the risks can go beyond the embarrassing, personal, or even individual. In March this year, the hacking group Akira successfully compromised an organisation using an unsecured webcam, after a first attack attempt was effectively prevented by cybersecurity protocols. In 2024, the Ukrainian government asked citizens to turn off all broadcasting cameras, after Russian agents hacked into webcams at a condo association and a car park. They altered the direction of the cameras to point toward nearby infrastructure and used the footage in planning strikes. Ukraine blocked the operation of 10,000 internet-connected digital security cameras in order to prevent further information leaks, and a May 2025 report from the Joint Cybersecurity Advisory described continued attacks from Russian espionage units on private and municipal cameras to track materials entering Ukraine.
2025-06-18 21:00:59
As Israel and Iran trade blows in a quickly escalating conflict that risks engulfing the rest of the region as well as a more direct confrontation between Iran and the U.S., social media is being flooded with AI-generated media that claims to show the devastation, but is fake.
The fake videos and images show how generative AI has already become a staple of modern conflict. On one end, AI-generated content of unknown origin is filling the void created by state-sanctioned media blackouts with misinformation, and on the other end, the leaders of these countries are sharing AI-generated slop to spread the oldest forms of xenophobia and propaganda.
If you want to follow a war as it’s happening, it’s easier than ever. Telegram channels post live streams of bombing raids as they happen and much of the footage trickles up to X, TikTok, and other social media platforms. There’s more footage of conflict than there’s ever been, but a lot of it is fake.
A few days ago, Iranian news outlets reported that Iran’s military had shot down three F-35s. Israel denied it happened. As the claim spread so did supposed images of the downed jet. In one, a massive version of the jet smolders on the ground next to a town. The cockpit dwarfs the nearby buildings and tiny people mill around the downed jet like Lilliputians surrounding Gulliver.
It’s a fake, an obvious one, but thousands of people shared it online. Another image of the supposedly downed jet showed it crashed in a field somewhere in the middle of the night. Its wings were gone and its afterburner still glowed hot. This was also a fake.
AI slop is not the sole domain of anonymous amateur and professional propagandists. The leaders of both Iran and Israel are doing it too. The Supreme Leader of Iran is posting AI-generated missile launches on his X account, a match for similar grotesques on the account of Israel’s Minister of Defense.
New tools like Google’s Veo 3 make AI-generated videos more realistic than ever. Iranian news outlet Tehran Times shared a video to X that it said captured “the moment an Iranian missile hit a building in Bat Yam, southern Tel Aviv.” The video was fake. In another that appeared to come from a TV news spot, a massive missile moved down a long concrete hallway. It’s also clearly AI-generated, and still shows the watermark in the bottom right corner for Veo.
#BREAKING
— Tehran Times (@TehranTimes79) June 14, 2025
Doomsday in Tel Aviv pic.twitter.com/5CDSUDcTY0
After Iran launched a strike on Israel, Tehran Times shared footage of what it claimed was “Doomsday in Tel Aviv.” A drone shot rotated through scenes of destroyed buildings and piles of rubble. Like the other videos, it was an AI generated fake that appeared on both a Telegram account and TikTok channel named “3amelyonn.”
In Arabic, 3amelyonn’s TikTok channel calls itself “Artificial Intelligence Resistance” but has no such label on Telegram. It’s been posting on Telegram since 2023 and its first TikTok video appeared in April of 2025, of an AI-generated tour through Lebanon, showing its various cities as smoking ruins. It’s full of the quivering lines and other hallucinations typical of early AI video.
But 3amelyonn’s videos a month later are more convincing. A video posted on June 5, labeled as Ben Gurion Airport, shows bombed out buildings and destroyed airplanes. It’s been viewed more than 2 million times. The video of a destroyed Tel Aviv, the one that made it on to Tehran Times, has been viewed more than 11 million times and was posted on May 27, weeks before the current conflict.
Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and founder of GetReal, a synthetic media detection company, has been collecting these fake videos and debunking them.
“In just the last 12 hours, we at GetReal have been seeing a slew of fake videos surrounding the recent conflict between Israel and Iran. We have been able to link each of these visually compelling videos to Veo 3,” he said in a post on LinkedIn. “It is no surprise that as generative-AI tools continue to improve in photo-realism, they are being misused to spread misinformation and sow confusion.”
The spread of AI-generated media about this conflict appears to be particularly bad because both Iran and Israel are asking their citizens not to share media of destruction, which may help the other side with its targeting for future attacks. On Saturday, for example, the Israel Defense Force asked people not to “publish and share the location or documentation of strikes. The enemy follows these documentations in order to improve its targeting abilities. Be responsible—do not share locations on the web!” Users on social media then fill this vacuum with AI-generated media.
“The casualty in this AI war [is] the truth,” Farid told 404 Media. “By muddying the waters with AI slop, any side can now claim that any other videos showing, for example, a successful strike or human rights violations are fake. Finding the truth at times of conflict has always been difficult, and now in the age of AI and social media, it is even more difficult.”
“We're committed to developing AI responsibly and we have clear policies to protect users from harm and governing the use of our AI tools,” a Google spokesperson told 404 Media. “Any content generated with Google AI has a SynthID watermark embedded and we add a visible watermark to Veo videos too.”
Farid and his team used SynthID to identify the fake videos “alongside other forensic techniques that we have developed over at GetReal,” he said. But checking a video for a SynthID watermark, which is visually imperceptible, requires someone to take the time to download the video and upload it to a separate website. Casual social media scrollers are not taking the time to verify a video they’re seeing by sending it to the SynthID website.
One distinguishing feature of 3amelyonn and others’ videos of viral AI slop about the conflict is that the destruction is confined to buildings. There are no humans and no blood in 3amelyonn’s aerial shots of destruction, which are more likely to get blocked both by AI image and video generators as well as the social media platforms where these creations are shared. If a human does appear, they’re as observers like in the F-35 picture or milling soldiers like the tunnel video. Seeing a soldier in active combat or a wounded person is rare.
There’s no shortage of real, horrifying footage from Gaza and other conflicts around the world. AI war spam, however, is almost always bloodless. A year ago, the AI-generated image “All Eyes on Raffah” garnered tens of millions of views. It was created by a Facebook group with the goal of “Making AI prosper.”