2026-03-23 23:20:26
Watching people outsource their critical thinking, emotions, and sanity to glitchy “AI” chatbots has been one of the most uniquely terrifying aspects of being a human being in recent years.
While wealthy tech evangelists like Sam Altman continue to make wild proclamations about how large language models (LLMs) are destined to do our jobs and raise our children, critics have compared Silicon Valley’s attempts to force dependence on chatbots to a mass-enfeebling event—an attempt to convince people that they are actually better off having machines think, act, and create for them.
Now, there’s a new way to discourage friends, family, and even complete strangers from turning to chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT: by using a tool called “Slow LLM” to make them really, reaaaaalllyyy slowwwww. Or at least, making them look that way.
“Are you concerned that you or your loved ones might be participating in a massive de-skilling event? Experiencing LLM-induced psychosis? Outsourcing cognitive and emotional functions to autocomplete? Install SLOW LLM on your computer, or the computer of a loved one, today!” reads a description on the tool’s website.
Created by artist Sam Lavigne, Slow LLM causes anyone accessing AI chatbots on a computer or network to encounter mysterious, painfully slow response times. It works by manipulating a quirk in the Javascript language to rewrite the “Fetch” function that returns data to the browser. When a user visits a chatbot domain and enters a query, the modified Fetch function stretches the response over an excruciatingly long period of time. This results in the user perceiving the LLM to be running slowly, when in reality it’s simply being arbitrarily metered by Lavigne’s code.
Lavigne says that the idea for the project came after seeing how deeply some of his students and acquaintances had come to rely on generative tools to do basic tasks.
“So many people are starting to use these tools to outsource their cognitive and emotional functions, and in the process of doing this they’re forgetting all these basic things that they’ve learned how to do,” Lavigne told 404 Media. “I think that the more people rely on LLMs, the more extreme this de-skilling event will become.”
Slow LLM can be installed as a Chrome browser extension, but it can also be deployed network-wide via an “Enterprise Edition,” a DNS service which causes everyone on a home, school, or corporate network to experience slow chatbot responses. This is done by simply changing the DNS server on your router to Lavigne’s custom domain—though he warns that using a random person’s DNS is generally not a great idea cybersecurity-wise, and recommends the safer option of hosting your own DNS server to deploy the Slow LLM code, which he has released for free on Github. The browser extension currently only affects Claude and ChatGPT, while the DNS version also slows down Grok and Google Gemini.
“The idea was that these things are removing friction, so let’s add some friction back in,” said Lavigne, using the engineering term frequently used by tech bros to describe inefficiencies in a system. He argues that LLM chatbots have taken this idea of “friction” to an extreme, presenting any unpleasantness or difficulty we encounter as something that should be outsourced to Silicon Valley’s thinking machines—even if overcoming that difficulty is part of what makes human creativity meaningful and worthwhile. “Anything that removes the friction of something that’s difficult, it makes you not learn, and it removes the learning you’ve already achieved.”
In theory, one could activate Slow LLM without anyone noticing; most people would likely assume that chatbot providers like Google and OpenAI are having technical issues, which does happen without outside interference from time to time. Lavigne says that so far, he hasn’t heard from anyone that has successfully deployed Slow LLM on a work or school network. But he certainly isn’t discouraging people from trying.
“I have not yet tested it on any unwitting subjects, but I’m thinking about it,” Lavigne said in a mischievous tone, adding that it would be an interesting experiment to see how people react when presented with artificially-slow chatbots. “Maybe they’ll just rage-quit LLMs.”
Slow LLM is the latest addition to a series of impish tech provocations that Lavigne has become known for. During the height of the pandemic Zoompocalypse in 2021, he released “Zoom Escaper,” a tool that floods your Zoom audio stream with annoying echoes, distortions, and interruptions until your presence becomes unbearable to others. In 2018, he infamously scraped public LinkedIn profiles to build a massive database of ICE agents, which was subsequently removed from platforms like Github and Medium. Lavigne’s frequent collaborator Tega Brain has also released browser tools like “Slop Evader,” which filters out generative AI slop by removing all search results from after November 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public.
“I’ve been doing these little experiments in digital sabotage where I’m trying to make these tools that mildly interrupt computational systems,” said Lavigne. “One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how if the means of production is truly in our hands, and it’s also the way we’re communicating with other people and managing our social life, then what does it mean to interrupt productivity?”
Lavigne is not an absolutist, however. Without prompting, he admitted that he used Claude to help write some of the code for Slow LLM—until, of course, Slow LLM started working and forced him to complete the project on his own. Instead, Lavigne says he’s trying to make people question the habits they are forming by regularly using chatbots, tools which tempt us to essentially entrust all our knowledge, decision-making, and emotional well-being to massive companies run by tech billionaires like Altman and Elon Musk.
“My hope is to get people to think a little bit more about their usage of these tools,” said Lavigne. “But the broader thing I want people to think about […] is ways of interrupting these flows of data, these flows of power, and putting friction into these computational systems that are mediating so many parts of our lives.”
2026-03-23 21:37:56
This week, Sam talks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna about the marketing ploys of “artificial intelligence,” why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes them hopeful for the future. They’re the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want.
Dr. Alex Hanna is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. She’s the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program and affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School.
They also host the The Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast which “deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call ‘artificial intelligence’.”
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
"Questioning the Normalization of Surveillance" by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown
2026-03-23 21:00:14
The British de Havilland DH-112 Venom is one of the most iconic combat jets of the Cold War, with a distinctive two-pronged tail design that stretched out far behind the main body of the aircraft and a striking red and black paint job. It also gained a reputation for handling issues at high speeds. And yet, that was the aircraft 50-year-old Marty Tibbitts flew one summer afternoon at a Wisconsin air show in July 2018.
Tibbitts, a millionaire who made his money launching call center businesses, regularly flew, and bought, historical aircraft like the Venom. He ran the World Heritage Air Museum in his home state of Michigan, which housed his collection of around a dozen planes.
Sat in the Venom’s cockpit, Tibbitts maneuvered the plane along the runway behind another aircraft. The first plane took off. About eight seconds later, two seconds sooner than he was supposed to, Tibbitts pulled the Venom’s stick back and brought his craft into the air.
Immediately something was wrong. People on the ground saw the Venom’s wings rock back and forth shortly after its sluggish takeoff, a sign that it might be caught in the wake of the first plane. One video showed the Venom started to make a shallow left turn, and the plane’s engine sound decreased and then rapidly increased. Black smoke billowed. The plane stalled. As the aircraft barely reached 200 feet, it started to descend with its nose still pointed upwards.
Tibbitts crashed into a nearby barn with another two people inside. Flames engulfed the plane and set the barn and other nearby buildings on fire too.
“We got a plane down!” a man yelled in a 911 call. “Building’s on fire!” Tibbitts died in the crash.
A day later Tibbitts’ brother, JC, gave a statement to local media: “Our family is devastated by the loss of Marty. To say he was passionate about all things in his life—family, business and aviation would be to immensely understate the case. He died pursuing one of his passions,” it read. “Beyond his family, friends and business associates, many will miss this unique and special person.”
As news of Tibbitts’ death spread, his wife received a phone call from one of those business associates. He was crying on the other end of the line. “It can’t be true, it can’t be true,” the man said.
The man in tears on the phone was Ylli Didani, a now convicted cocaine trafficker who orchestrated massive shipments of drugs into the UK and multiple European ports. Tibbitts, it turned out, had a secret life. Without the knowledge of his family, Tibbitts worked closely with Didani to become an aspiring international drug lord. The pair commissioned the construction of an elaborate underwater drone that would be stuffed with cocaine and latch onto ships with magnets. Tibbitts was the money and brains behind the operation, funding the submarine’s design and development. In messages with Didani, he referred to himself as Tony Stark, the alter ego of the millionaire inventor and superhero Ironman. According to investigators, Didani’s cocaine trafficking business was worth tens of millions of dollars. Didani had now lost his business partner and friend.
Extensive interviews with Didani, including over the email system of the prison he is currently incarcerated in, and thousands of pages of court transcripts reviewed by 404 Media reveal the story of a millionaire who, even with his massive fortune, wanted more and more. Tibbitts wanted to pillage Egyptian tombs for artefacts, and become an ambassador to Albania. He allegedly invested in a company making flying cars, tried to source Black Hawk helicopters to sell to other countries, and arranged a massive load of cash to be flown on his private jet to buy bulk cocaine. Tibbitts, who was at one point a primary target during the investigation into the cocaine group’s operations, left a gaping question with his death: why did he do it? Why did the man who had everything lead a secret double life as an international drug kingpin?
“It was perplexing,” Detective Brandon Leach, from the Farmington Hills Police Department, who was part of a narcotics task force and one of the agents who investigated the group, later said in court.
Tibbitts made his money in perhaps the most boring industry possible: providing back office support and a 24/7 live answering service for small businesses at the start of the millennium. An executive bio included in legal filings tried to make it sound more exciting by saying Tibbitts had years of experience “managing high-technology businesses and providing dynamic direction and oversight to start up companies and emerging technologies.” Tibbitts’ companies, Back Office Support Systems and and Clementine Live Answering Service, ultimately made him a very rich man. The Stanford graduate was invited to join the Young Presidents’ Organization, a group for successful entrepreneurs. “Business doesn’t stop,” a narrator says in one of Clementine’s promotional videos.
But in essentially every other aspect of his life, Marty was an adventurer. He invested in companies across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and ran his own security firm with a base in the United Arab Emirates. He got his pilot’s license, developed a deep interest in historical aircraft, and opened the air museum.
“He was just always learning something new,” Tibbitts’ wife, Belinda Tibbitts, later said in court. “He spoke like four languages and taught himself to play the banjo, and he flew all of these planes. He was just very brilliant, and he was also a good businessman.” Belinda called Tibbitts “a genius.”
In around 2008, Belinda had a personal trainer at her local gym called Donald Larson. Twice a week, Larson trained Belinda, and she introduced the trainer to her husband. Eventually Larson trained Tibbitts as well, and the pair became friends.
He saw Tibbitts was very precise on what he wanted people to know about—his eclectic and expensive tastes—and what he wanted to keep secret, such as suggestions he may have seen women other than his wife while she was out of state. He deliberately compartmentalized his life. “He hid things that he didn’t want anyone to know about,” Larson later said in court.
Larson had a checkered past, having served 18 years for cocaine possession. He also knew Didani, the drug trafficker, who used the same gym. The trio then started hanging out, and soon Didani and Tibbitts became friends, with Didani even staying over at his home. Belinda didn’t like that, she later said in court. One reason was that sometimes Tibbitts would let Didani borrow Belinda’s Porsche Cayenne SUV, put his feet up on the dash, and return it stinking of cologne.
Didani grew up with very little money. In private messages reviewed by investigators and read in court, Didani’s father reminded him of times when the family didn’t have enough money for bread. Like Tibbitts, he dabbled in all sorts of businesses. He owned a car wash in Detroit; may have owned a car dealership in Dubai; looked into the medical marijuana industry, and tried to run an ATM business. He travelled a lot, living in Europe and South America in between going to Chicago to see his sick mother. Videos appeared to show him building shelter and giving food to the needy overseas. He liked to party and wore a rainbow-faced gold Rolex.
Didani was not particularly careful with hiding the fact that he was also a drug trafficker. He later boasted to friends in text messages about moving drugs from South America, and sent his family related news articles when shipments were seized by the authorities. He was also sloppy with his security. Didani used encrypted phones to conduct his business, sometimes juggling four cellphones at once. But he often took photos of those messages with his normal iPhone, which uploaded backups of those images to iCloud making them accessible to the authorities.
In a way, Tibbitts and Didani were kindred spirits; two men constantly looking for the next thing to invest or expand into. There may have been an ulterior motive to Didani becoming such good friends with Tibbitts, however. Didani was looking for someone with money, Larson later said, and so that was the original reason for the introduction. Drug trafficking, it turns out, needs some upfront investment.
The trio then travelled in various combinations, or sometimes Didani and Larson went on trips on the millionaire’s behalf. Didani and Larson met in Albania in an unsuccessful attempt to get Albanian Air Force planes for Tibbitts. Then the pair went to Egypt, where a family allegedly had a house connected to an ancient tomb belonging to the grandson of a Pharaoh, and were selling golden artifacts from it. Tibbitts was interested in buying the artifacts, but his associates never went inside themselves.
Tibbitts and Didani travelled to Antwerp, Belgium, together, a port that has become the cocaine gateway to Europe. Didani later suggested in court that the pair repeatedly visited Washington D.C. They went to Didani’s native Albania together because Tibbitts was looking into starting an over-the-counter medication distribution company. The pair explored somehow making Tibbitts an ambassador in Albania; Tibbitts’ wife later testified in court that he sent her a video of himself running on a beach with the president of Albania.
“Marty had his hands everywhere,” Detective Leach later said in court. He described Tibbitts’ various escapades as the millionaire “attempting to spiderweb out.”
Many of these did not pan out. But Tibbitts continued to funnel money to Didani. According to Larson, that amounted to millions of dollars. He said the drug trafficker “conned” the millionaire.
“Everything begins with an idea,” the website for Peregrine 360, a small engineering design firm in Montreal, Canada, read. “Some of the greatest inventions we see today were once just a few lines on paper.”
The company offered to take customer’s concepts and turn them into real designs. Peregrine 360 would not only make a prototype of a customer’s device, but also connect them with factories to mass produce it, according to the company’s website. Usually they produced things like 3D-printed models of T-Rexes. In around 2016, a man called Dale Johnson asked the company over email to make something a little different: a long hollowed out underwater drone that had enough room to store items inside.
Peregrine 360 had no problem with that, and got to work. A company representative sent Johnson an invoice.
Johnson was in fact Tibbitts, according to court records. Investigators figured that out because Tibbitts copied and pasted the exact text of Johnson’s email to Didani and directed him to pay the company. Tibbitts told Didani he would make the drone for him, Didani later told me.
In one of his notebooks, Tibbitts sketched out his and Didani’s idea. It showed a rough drawing of the bottom of a boat. The idea was to create what investigators would later call a “parasitic” underwater drone. The device would have enough room to store a large amount of cocaine, and clamp onto a ship with magnets. Once near its destination, the torpedo-shaped drone would release from the ship, and co-conspirators would come and retrieve the its contents.
Around the sketch of the boat were a list of questions that Tibbitts’ addressed to himself: “Inspect ship first to look for right attach spot?”; “Send one in case this one fails, should I put it in the wake?”, and “Should I have two rows of magnets or one?” Another part noted to put spikes on the device so “no birds.”
The notebook said the drone should be between 20 and 25 feet long with a one ton capacity. Tibbitts contemplated whether a drone that big would really be as stealthy as needed for smuggling cocaine without getting caught.
“You have any worry about size of drone and getting it into water quietly?” Tibbitts wrote in a 2018 message to Didani, using the moniker Toni Stark. “For 1T it is almost 20 feet long.”
“No brother,” came the reply.
The submarine drone was “very ahead of its time,” Didani later told me.
With her husband’s constant jet setting, Belinda Tibbitts sometimes played assistant, booking hotels and flights for Marty. Even with that involvement, Belinda did not know anything about the drone, or her husband’s moves into drug trafficking, at the time. But she later recalled in court coming across one of his belongings mentioning the “Remora Project.” A remora is a type of fish that uses suction to stick onto the body of larger animals.
In encrypted messages, Didani’s associates showed they were excited about the drone. Didani said they planned to build a few of the contraptions, and later went on to discuss potentially using them off the coast of Barcelona. Messages stored in Didani’s iCloud account showed he was dealing directly with Colombian traffickers, investigators said.
Marty had a red line, though: he didn’t want anything to do with cocaine in the United States. Any business would need to be overseas.
While the pair’s high-tech plan came into focus, they faced a very old school problem: how to move cash around. Tibbitts had access to a fantastic amount of wealth, including in his personal bank accounts. But getting that money to Didani, and in a relatively secure way, had its challenges.
Part of the solution often came down to Larson, the personal trainer, who acted as a middleman between Tibbitts and Didani to shift money around. In December 2017, the group needed to move $450,000 from Michigan to Washington D.C., where Didani was staying. By investigators’ description, it involved Tibbitts writing out multiple checks to Larson, who then cashed them out, and flew the money down in secret in the middle of the night on Tibbitt’s private jet in a duffel bag. The purpose of the cash was to buy cocaine in bulk, prosecutors said.
It started with Tibbitts calling Larson and telling him to pick up a bunch of checks to cash. Larson went to Tibbitts’ home, let himself in with the code, went up to the second floor office, and grabbed the signed checks from the desk. Tibbitts had left them blank for Larson to fill out.
Tibbitts was travelling with his wife in China at the time. He appeared to have trouble with his bank clearing such a huge series of withdrawals. Belinda later recalled hearing Tibbitts on the phone on the bank, clearly annoyed, telling the clerk to do just what he said.
Eventually Larson exchanged the personal checks for cashier checks, cashed them out, and boarded Tibbitts’ private jet, which Tibbitts had arranged with a pilot. In the air, Larson texted Didani on the ground. Didani warned his co-conspirator to be careful because D.C. was crawling with police.
“Got to be careful, there’s a lot of cops around here at night, we got to be discreet,” Didani wrote.
Upon landing, Didani was waiting at the airport to take the money. It was dark, and Didani told Larson to just leave the duffel bag on the ground.
After the money was delivered to Didani in D.C., he laid it out on a bed and took photos. He drove the cash to New York, gave it to a Chinese money launderer in Flushing, and the money disappeared. Investigators later found Didani’s phone connected to the wifi of the Trump Tower hotel while he was in New York.
In all, Tibbitts wrote around a million dollars worth of checks to Larson, prosecutors later said.
In court, Larson said he understood the $450,000 was for the purchase of cocaine. Didani later told me that money had nothing to do with drugs; instead it was for politicians in Washington, Europe, and Albania, he said.
Regardless, by this point investigators had taken notice of Didani. He originally came to the attention of the authorities in part because he kept taking short trips overseas with a man already on Border Patrol’s radar. That association and the suspicious flights put Didani in the crosshairs too. Authorities also received intelligence that Didani was trafficking cocaine in Europe, with the money coming from Detroit.
After seizing Didani’s phone at an airport in the U.S., law enforcement steadily sent Apple search warrants to access the trafficker’s iCloud backups. From that, the investigators realized Tibbitts played a much deeper role in the broader drug trafficking conspiracy. There were photos of the two together. Didani even had copies of Tibbitts’ Michigan drivers license and passport. One of the investigators later said he couldn’t wrap his head around why Tibbitts would get involved in something like this.
In November 2017, authorities seized 140 kilograms of cocaine in the Netherlands. In text messages, Tibbitts and Didani reacted to the seizure.
“Hmm. Let’s talk when u get back,” Tibbitts replied. He signed off the message as “Stark.”
“We just F’d up,” Didani wrote back.
“We will fix, brother,” Tibbitts wrote.
“Not like this, brother, we need to clear heads.”
“Yes, definitely. Ok, brother, talk to you later.”
From the text messages, Tibbitts appeared much more relaxed than his drug trafficking co-conspirator.
Didani sent Tibbitts a media report about the seizure, in which police arrested six Albanians and a Polish man.
Those drug trafficking ambitions came to a screeching halt the following year when Tibbitts died flying his Venom. With Tibbitts’ death, so too died the idea of the torpedo drone. Investigators said the group never succeeded in building a working prototype. The money was gone. Peregrine 360 stopped work on the project and dismantled it for parts.
“It was not just an idea. It was an idea that took multiple steps to get to the beginning of a prototype, the design, financing, purchasing parts for the prototype and then conceptualizing the prototype,” detective Leach said in court. Tibbitts just died before it could be launched.
In April 2019 investigators executed search warrants at Belinda’s homes in California and Michigan. On Mr. Tibbitts’ Surface Pro, they found an article about money laundering.
Although he was never charged because of his death, Leach said in court “Mr. Tibbitts was a financier and conspirator that helped in the design of the parasitic device to help transport cocaine.”
It appears Tibbitts’ moves into the drug trafficking world were not for money. Belinda said in court that the couple were doing fine financially at the time of his death. She acknowledged she was not aware of a number of sizable transactions out of her husband’s account, though. Representatives of Belinda did not respond to a request for comment.
“That’s the only thing, reason, I can think that he got involved with Lou [Didani] is—you know, like, rich people, they want to climb mountains when they have too much money in the freezing cold and possibly die. I want to drink a Piña Colada on a beach; I don’t want to get stung by a manta ray,” Larson said in court. Tibbitts wanted to “live on the edge.”
Tibbitts “love adrenaline,” Didani told me. “Very smart and ambitio[us].”
“That’s the way Marty was. That’s why he flew those planes,” Larson added.
Correction: this article originally said Tibbitts was a billionaire. This was a mistake, the copy has been updated to say millionaire.
2026-03-21 21:00:07
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that visited strange new worlds, broke the adorability scale, pigged out, and took in an alien light show.
First, scientists sift through thousands of planets to find the best possible sites for life. Then: meet a Cretaceous cutie, check out some python blood, and travel to the biggest moon in the solar system.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
Scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets, which are planets that orbit other stars, but most of these worlds are hopelessly inhospitable to life. To hone in on the best candidates for habitability, a team combed through the catalogue of exoplanets to identify the best potential alien homes.
The short-list includes 45 rocky worlds that are no bigger than twice the size of Earth and orbit within the habitable zone (HZ) of their stars, which is the region where liquid water might exist on the surface. The most exciting destinations include four planets that orbit the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, about 40 light years away, or Proxima Centauri b, which is the closest known exoplanet, located just four light years from Earth.
“To assess the limits of surface habitability, it is critical to characterize rocky exoplanets in the HZ,” said researchers led by Abigail Bohl of Cornell University. “Observations of known rocky exoplanets on the edges of the HZ can now empirically explore these boundaries.”
“The resulting list of rocky exoplanet targets in the HZ will allow observers to shape and optimize search strategies with space- and ground-based telescopes… and design new observing strategies and instruments to explore these worlds, addressing the question of the limits of exoplanet surface habitability,” the team added.
While previous studies have compiled similar lists, this work includes updated observations and also organizes the planets according to key properties such as age, orbital characteristics, radiation exposure, and ease of observation from Earth. In this way, the researchers pave the way toward testing individual factors that influence habitability, such as whether older planets seem to be more hospitable to life.
It could also be useful to compare planets that orbit at the edges of the habitable zone to planets right smack dab in the middle. After all, in our own solar system, Venus and Mars are at the inner and outer edges of the solar system, while Earth is vibing right in the Goldilocks zone.
It may be that planets in other star systems are similarly limited in their habitability as they approach the edge of the zone—or maybe not! We won’t know until we look. And now, we know where to start. To the observatory!
In other news…
It is my great pleasure to inform you that an incredibly cute baby dinosaur has been discovered in South Korea, where dinosaur fossils are very rare. Meet Doolysaurus, named for the popular Korean cartoon character Dooly the Little Dinosaur. This little infant lived in the mid-Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, and represents a new species of thescelosaurid, a type of bipedal dinosaur.
“Here, we describe a small, well-preserved skeleton…recognized as the holotype of a new genus and species, Doolysaurus huhmini” which includes “the first diagnostic cranial material of a dinosaur from Korea,” said researchers led by Jongyun Jung of the University of Texas at Austin. “It contributes novel insights into the diversity of the Korean dinosaur fauna, which has previously been known primarily from ichnofossil and egg fossil records.”
To top it off, this dinosaur might have sported a fuzzy coat. Jurassic Park has primed me not to trust any tech billionaire that wants to resurrect dinosaurs for public spectacle, but I’ll make an exception for Doolysaurus.
At dinnertime, pythons go whole hog—often literally. These huge snakes can devour their own body weight in a single meal, allowing them to fast for more than a year between feedings. In a new study, scientists probe these extreme eaters by analyzing the blood of Burmese pythons during their “postprandial” (after-gulp) phase.
“Burmese pythons display a remarkable array of postprandial responses, including more than 40-fold increase in energy expenditure, sustained tissue protein synthesis and more than 50 percent increase in the size of most organs,” said researchers co-led by Shuke Xiao of Stanford University, Mengjie Wang of the University of South Florida, and Thomas G. Martin of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
In other words, the snakes “undergo extensive gastrointestinal remodelling” that truly put humanity’s best competitive eaters to shame. Joey Chestnut would have to simultaneously swallow over 2,000 hot dogs to even rival their sublime engorgement, just in case you are interested in some mustard-smeared napkin math (his world record is a measly 83).
We’ll close, as all things should, with an extraterrestrial aurora. This week, let’s gaze into the glowing skies of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system and the only one endowed with its very own magnetic field.
Now, scientists discovered that “Ganymede's auroras are brighter than previously thought,” according to a study based on new atmospheric measurements and laboratory data.
Ganymede “mini-magnetosphere [is] embedded within Jupiter's powerful magnetospheric environment,” said researchers led by Xin Cao of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. “This unique configuration allows for auroral processes similar in morphology to those observed on magnetized planets, but driven by different external and internal conditions.”
The research illuminates the complex magnetic interactions between Ganymede and Jupiter, which will be studied more in depth by future missions, such as the European Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) that is currently on its way to the gas giant, aiming for a 2031 arrival. I hope this news of cosmic radiance adds some sparkle to your weekend.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-03-20 23:00:00
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.
EMANUEL: I think I’m addicted to Twitter again.
We haven’t written a ton about the war with Iran but I’ve been following the news closely because I’m checking if there are important stories for us to do there, and because I can’t help but watch the disaster unfold even if it’s making me incredibly anxious.
2026-03-20 21:50:54
The tiny township of Ypsilanti, Michigan, is worried about being a target for drone strikes thanks to a planned datacenter that the University of Michigan is building to support nuclear weapons research According to Douglas Winters, the township’s attorney, the University and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) “have put a big bulls eye target on this entire township […] I believe it’s the truth.”
Winters delivered a report to the town’s Board of Trustees about the proposed datacenter during a public meeting on Tuesday. “Los Alamos, which produces the nuclear weapons, is a high value target,” he said. He pointed to America’s war in Iran as proof that the datacenter would be a target, noting that Iran’s drones had disabled AWS servers in the Middle East. “This is not a commercial datacenter. A Los Alamos datacenter is going to be the brains of the operation for nuclear modeling, nuclear weaponry.”
The university and LANL first announced their plan to build a $1.25 billion datacenter in 2024. The university picked nearby Ypsilanti Township—population of about 20,000—as the location for the datacenter and residents have been fighting it ever since. Concerns from the community are typical for people fighting against a datacenter: water, rising electricity bills, pollution, and noise.
Unique to the Ypsilanti datacenter fight, however, is its role in the production of nuclear weapons. The datacenter would service LANL, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to America’s nuclear weapons scientists. In January, LANL confirmed that the datacenter would, indeed, be used in nuclear weapons research.
To hear the university tell it, the datacenter will be one of the most advanced computing systems in the world. “We were told at the very beginning by U of M’s Vice President of public relations […] that they were going to build, in his words, the biggest, baddest, fastest computers in the world,” Winters said at the public meeting. “That, in of itself, is what makes these datacenters high value targets […] these data centers constitute power. Artificial intelligence is power. Supercomputers are power. And when something becomes that important, it becomes a target.”
Winters questioned the American military’s ability to protect targets from the threat of drone attacks on its own soil. “The drone capability is not a joke, folks,” he said. “The United States and Israel, in spite of all their high technology they’re bringing to bear in their war on Iran, they’ve actually had to request that Ukraine send their top advisors to help them understand how to best detect and destroy these drone attacks.”
He also questioned U of M’s values. Following a demand from the White House, the university eliminated its DEI programs in 2025. In February, again at the behest of the federal government, it announced the end of the PhD Project which helped people from underrepresented backgrounds get PhDs. “You have a situation now where the University of Michigan […] has cut a deal with the Department of War under Trump,” Winters said. “That’s what the University of Michigan has turned into by basically selling their soul to the Department of War.”
Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, told 404 Media, “That LANL datacenter is going to be the brains for nuclear modeling and nuclear weaponry. Ultimately that's what it’s all about. Beware, a recent study found that in war games artificial intelligence went to escalation and nuclear war 95 percent of the time.”
According to Coghlan, the construction of the datacenter followed a familiar pattern. “The Lab has colonized brown people for eight decades here just like it’s now trying to do in Ypsilanti (New Mexico is 50 percent Hispanic and 12 percent Native American). But what the brown people in Ypsilanti have that they don’t have here is lots of water,” he told 404 Media.
Another topic of discussion at the Tuesday meeting was how to stop the construction of the datacenter. Winters and others explained that it’s been difficult to get the university, county, and other government powers to engage with them. Interested parties plead ignorance or recuse themselves because of financial involvement with U of M. “They’ve acted like The Godfather, making you an offer that you can’t refuse,” Winters said.
Trustee Karen Lovejoy Roe questioned why LANL wanted to build a datacenter 1,500 miles away from its home. “Why don’t you do that datacenter where you're going to build the plutonium pits? One’s in South Carolina, one’s in New Mexico. Tell me why?” Roe said during the meeting. “They thought that we would be an easy target […] that we’re just a bunch of poor brown and black and dumb hillbillies.”
But the Township isn’t completely powerless. “U of M is totally above the law, but is DTE?” Sarah, an Ypsilanti resident said during public comments. DTE is the local power company. Datacenters are electricity hungry buildings and DTE will need to build substations to service LANL’s supercomputers.
“What if we had a moratorium on substations until we learned about the harmonics of the electricity and how that’s impacted by datacenters?” Sarah said. “Having a moratorium on heavy construction on the roads, you know, heavy construction equipment on the roads leading to the datacenter site […] it’s going to be scary and hard to stand up to the University of Michigan. It’s true: they’re very powerful and we just need to be creative and we need to be strong and we need to block them at every step of the way.”
Holly, another resident, suggested another plan of attack. “U of M’s vulnerability is in their reputation,” Holly said. “We need to continue to make them look as bad as possible.”
The University of Michigan did not return 404 Media's request for comment. LANL did not provide a comment.
Correction 3/20/26: This story incorrectly conflated the City of Ypsilanti with Ypsilanti Township. They are two separate, but neighboring, locations. We've updated the story to reflect this and regret the error.