2026-03-28 21:00:27
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. Then: the deadliest headbutts on the high seas, a natural refuge from cosmic wrath, and rats take a trip to the space simulator.
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.
What a week it has been for the most majestic of all beats: sperm whale news. I’m going to have to go a little Ishmael on your asses, because two unrelated studies have peered into the underwater realm of these mysterious marine mammals and observed customs that have never been captured on film before.
First, researchers report the first detailed footage of a sperm whale birth, which scientists recorded in full with drones on the morning of July 8, 2023, off the coast of Dominica.
Though a handful of sperm whale births have been previously observed, this high-resolution aerial imagery is by far the most comprehensive footage. The team tracked the entire 34-minute delivery, followed by an extended postpartum period that revealed the members of the whale clan providing assistance to the calf and its mother, who is a well-studied female named Rounder (a.k.a whale #5714).
“Other adult females positioned themselves closely around [Rounder],” said researchers co-led by Alaa Maalouf, Joseph DelPreto, Maxime Lucas, and Simone Poetto of Project CETI, a collaboration that studies sperm whale behavior and communication. “Plumes of blood and the subsequent observation of the newborn marked the moment of delivery at 11:46 a.m.”
“The group rapidly transitioned to cohesive and highly active behavior; individuals took turns lifting the newborn, physically supporting and pushing it to the surface,” the team continued. “This phase continued for about an hour, during which time the entire unit remained tightly grouped. In addition, there were close passes by Fraser’s dolphins (Lagenodelphis hosei) and brief interactions with pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus), which encompassed the sperm whale cluster and occasionally dove beneath them.”
It’s a sublime scene of new life, whale doulas, and curious bystanders in the delivery room. It also offers "unprecedented insights” into the complex sociality of sperm whales, a species that forms tight-knit matrilineal clans that share labor among members that span many generations, according to the study.
“These analyses provide evidence of birth attendance, or assistance, in a nonprimate species, a behavior long considered characteristic only of humans and their close relatives,” the team concluded.
In addition to that glimpse into the watery birthing bed, a separate team reports the first ever video footage of sperm whales headbutting each other.
“Here, we present 3 UAV (drone) based observations of head-butting and head-first contact between young sperm whales in the Azores and Balearic archipelagos,” said researchers led by Alec Burslem of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who conducted the study in a previous role at the University of St. Andrews.
“To our knowledge, this behavior has not previously been positively confirmed in sperm whales with supporting documentation, or scientifically described,” the team said.
While this is the first time the headbutting has been captured on film, it has been anecdotally described by many sailors over the centuries. The study even opens with a quote from Owen Chase, a survivor of the whaling ship Essex, which was sunk by a sperm whale that rammed its head into the hull in 1820, providing the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Over the course of months adrift on small whaleboats, most of the crew died and Chase was forced to resort to cannibalism of deceased crewmates to survive.
In short: The sperm whales give life, and the sperm whales taketh life away. This has been sperm whale news.
In non-sperm-whale news…
Scientists have discovered a giant cavity between Earth and the Moon that no dentist could ever hope to fill. You might be thinking—isn’t space already one big cavity? But while space is mostly sparse, it contains plenty of galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), energetic particles shot out by cosmic cataclysms like supernovas or gamma ray bursts.
Now, observations from China’s Chang’e-4, the first spacecraft ever to land on the far side of the Moon, has revealed a huge void where GCRs are warded off by Earth’s magnetic field. Given that these rays are hazardous to human health, the cavity could provide astronauts with some helpful cover from tiny cosmic bullets in future missions.
A figure depicting the GCR cavity. Image: Shang et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv1908
“GCRs were previously considered to be approximately uniformly distributed throughout the Earth-Moon space,” said researchers co-led by Wensai Shang of Shandong University at Weihai, Ji Liu of the University of Alberta, and Zigong Xu of Kiel University. The presence of the giant cavity “provides a potential strategy for mission planning…as operations could be timed to coincide with these lower radiation periods to reduce exposure risk.”
It’s not every day you unlock a giant new space shield! Sometimes, a cavity can be a good thing.
If humans do continue to explore space, we’ll need a lot more than a weird cavity to protect us. In a new study, scientists exposed rats to simulated space radiation in a lab and discovered that it had measurable impacts on the reward and risk circuits in their brains.
Rats exposed to radiation exhibited altered “cost–benefit decision-making…in both sexes” and “males displayed a global degradation of reward sensitivity...whereas females exhibited a selective shift toward high-risk, low-probability choices,” said researchers led by Richard Britten of Old Dominion University.
The findings add to a growing body of research on the many deleterious health effects of prolonged periods in space. As NASA prepares to launch Artemis 2 next month—the first mission to send humans to fly by the Moon since the Apollo era—it’s the perfect time to reflect on the realistic tradeoffs of our spacefaring dreams.
Assuming all goes to plan, the Artemis 2 crew will only be in space for 10 days, and will experience a negligible radiation dose. But a crewed trip to Mars would take at least a few years. To that end, the new study “advances understanding of how chronic low-dose space radiation may compromise behavioral regulation—a critical component of astronaut performance and mission safety.”
With that, here’s to happy travels and healthy brains—on Earth and off it.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-03-27 23:31:04
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, but I have taken a bit of a step back from the news lately in an effort to protect my brain. What I mostly mean by this is that I have started listening to music instead of mainlining podcasts at 1.75x speed anytime that I am not actively staring at a screen. I have also started reading fiction again, like, on actual printed paper. I think these steps have actually done wonders for my sanity, but I would be lying if I said that it has had zero impact on my job. It’s a bit of a give and take.
2026-03-27 22:30:29
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 Netanyahu. LEGO-themed propaganda isn’t new and the Iranian video plays on familiar wartime propaganda themes. What’s different in 2026 is speed and scale.
During World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, America’s enemies littered the battlefield with pamphlets, cartoons, and radio broadcasts aimed at shaking the morale of American troops, but that stuff rarely got back home. Now, Iran can use AI tools to produce lavishly animated cartoons at scale for dissemination across social media all aimed at the US homefront.
The latest “Explosive News Team” video is set to a catchy rap song about how Trump is a LOSER and millions of people are watching it across multiple platforms. At the same time Iran is releasing AI-generated videos of Trump drowning in a river of blood, the US Department of Homeland Security is sharing fashwave filtered pictures of Gen Z ICE agents milling around airports.
Iran’s use of LEGO set rap music tells me it’s been studying us. These are videos meant for the American people crafted in a language Iran knows we’ll understand.
Meanwhile, the White House is dropping Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty memes that were out of fashion 10 years ago on Reddit and vague-posting pixelated images of Trump like it’s running an ARG. Iran is attempting to speak to the broader American public. Trump is confident he only has to impress the online freaks he thinks still love him.
In other words, there’s a AI slopaganda proxy war playing out, and Trump is speaking only to people whose brains are rotting out of their skull, while Iranian propaganda is currently doing a better job of speaking to the concerns of the broad American population than the American president. Trump continues to narrowcast to his base while losing support for his wildly unpopular war as Americans worry about skyrocketing gas prices, a tanking economy and stock market, insane lines at airports, and a war that has little rationale and apparently no real goal. A recent Pew poll found 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict.
To be clear, it speaks to how bad things are online that we need to analyze whose AI disinformation and propaganda is “better,” and, in general, the slopification of the internet has been a disaster. And yet, the stuff Iran is making is resonating and spreading online in a way that Trump’s slop is not. We do not know who, specifically, is making the Iranian AI slop or which tools they are using to make it. But the fact that Iranian AI slop is resonating with Americans while American slop is not should perhaps not be surprising; for the last several years, the most successful purveyors of AI slop have largely been based in foreign countries, where they have been incentivized to make content that specifically targets American audiences because of the way that social media ad rates work. Because of that, an entire economy has emerged in which people who would otherwise have little interest in reaching American audiences have been incentivized to study what resonates with Americans on the internet and have created entire businesses focused on teaching other people what Americans care about and how to target them with AI slop.
Propaganda, especially war-time propaganda, is about causing a quick emotional reaction in the viewer. Iran has proved remarkably capable of that and hits similar themes in most of its videos: Epstein, Netanyahu, and blood. “The really striking throughline is the 1) connecting victims from Minab to Epstein, 2) a cartoonish antisemitism that attributes the bog-standard reactionary hawkishness of Trump and Netanyahu to a sinister and supernatural evil, 3) heavy emphasis on missiles and revenge-weapons,” Kelsey Atherton, Chief Editor at Center for International Policy, told 404 Media.
“There's a grand tradition of wartime propaganda aimed at convincing the other side to quit and I think Iran's best falls into that camp, like North Korea and especially North Vietnam sending pamphlets aimed at getting black soldiers to defect by highlighting inequity at home,” Atherton said. “Iran's online propaganda is trying to activate this by (charitably) appealing to class war and (uncharitably) leaning on antisemitism to get US soldiers to quit and to erode support among Americans watching short-form vertical video.”
In one AI-generated video shared by Russian state controlled news organization RT depicts victims of American military campaigns staring at the sky. It begins with an American Indian then cuts to a boy in Hiroshima, a schoolgirl in Minab, a little girl in front of the bizarre temple on Epstein’s Island, and ends with US-assassinated Quds Forces leader Qasem Soleimani.
US Under Secretary of State Sarah B Rogers attempted to critique the video in a post on X. “You do see common propaganda threads here and elsewhere: the ideology is resentment-driven, civilization-skeptical, and obsessed with upending, cathartic violence enacted by the ‘historically downtrodden’ (ie ‘wretched of the earth’),” she said.
The post felt like projection and was especially strange given the Trump administration’s own resentment driven ideology, destruction of institutions, and obsession with revenge-driven violence on behalf of the “forgotten man.” Iran did not start America’s war with it. And it did not start the AI-generated propaganda war, it’s just doing it better than the United States.
There are other echoes of the past. An AI-generated Iranian riff on Pixar’s Inside Out shared on X by Iran’s embassy in the Hague showed a Disneyesque version of the inside of Trump’s brain. It showed frothing demons demanding the President lie to the press. A poster from World War II depicts an X-Ray photo of Hitler’s Brain filled with skeletons and snakes. It’s the same theme in different eras using different tools.
LEGO bricks, too, are a far older propaganda tool than the current war. The Danish bricks are one of the most recognizable toys on the planet. Last year, Russian propagandists circulated images of fake LEGO sets depicting soldier’s funerals ahead of an election in Moldova. In 2020, the Chinese released “Once Upon a Virus,” a LEGO short film that mocked America’s response to the Covid pandemic.
In memory of the 168 innocent schoolchildren of #Minab whose lives were cruelly taken by the most evil people on earth.
— ☫ Iran Embassy in The Hague, The Netherlands (@IRAN_in_NL) March 12, 2026
Their names may fade from the headlines, but they must never fade from our conscience.#StandWithIran#WarCrime#مدرسه_میناب pic.twitter.com/sCG2kpfM71
The Trump administration’s new fascist aesthetic is defined by AI slop. From Studio Ghibli-inspired grotesques to AI-generated Sora videos of ICE raids that never happened going viral on Facebook, Trump and his supporters are also using the tools of the moment to churn out crappy propaganda. The difference is that Trump’s videos aren’t about winning hearts and minds, they’re about activating a rapidly diminishing base of supporters.
“I think Trump's stuff is aimed at the same audience, except to convince them that what they're doing is righteous and good,” Atherton said. “Obviously we're seeing the stuff put out in English to English video-watching audiences but White House videos—AI or otherwise—are like group-chat in-jokes aimed at keeping cohesion. It's not an AI video but the Wii Sports/snuff film one is so skin-crawling that it requires the audience to be cooked in the feverswamps.”
The Trump administration has bet big on video game memes as the vehicle for its propaganda efforts. Last October DHS depicted Halo’s Master Chief as an anti-immigrant killer and compared immigrants to a ravening horde of mindless monsters. Two weeks ago it published a now-deleted video that mixed footage from Call of Duty with missile strikes in Iran. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted the infinite ammo cheatcode for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas above footage of airstrikes.
Video games are incredibly popular in the United States, but many of these memes require a level of familiarity with specific games and the culture around them. LEGO, by contrast, is instantly recognizable to most of the world.
JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸🔥 pic.twitter.com/0502N6a3rL
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026
On March 5, the White House’s X account posted a video mixing American pop culture figures like Walter White, Optimus Prime, Super Man, and Tony Stark with footage from the war. Watching it, I was reminded of a moment from six years ago after America assassinated Soleimani during the first Trump administration.
On an Iranian television show, Cleric Shahab Moradi called in to share his thoughts on how Iran could strike back. Who might Iran attack that has the same cultural purchase as Soleimani did in Iran? Who were America’s heroes? “Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes,” Moradi said. “We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters—they're all fictional.”
And so Iran has chosen to speak to Americans in a language it thinks we’ll understand: with cartoons and LEGOs.
2026-03-27 03:38:04
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 recently filed court record.
The move isn’t surprising but still provides uncommon insight into what data is available to authorities regarding the Apple feature. The data was turned over during an investigation into a man who allegedly sent a threatening email to Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel.
2026-03-27 00:13:09
After months of heated debate and previous attempts to restrict the use of large language models on Wikipedia, on March 20 volunteer editors accepted a new policy that prohibits using them to create articles for the online encyclopedia.
“Text generated by large language models (LLMs) often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies,” Wikipedia’s new policy states. “For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.”
2026-03-26 23:04:32
Georgia State Patrol used its system of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras to issue a ticket to a motorcyclist who was allegedly looking at his cell phone while riding, according to a copy of the citation obtained by 404 Media. The incident is notable because Flock cameras are not designed for traffic enforcement or minor code violations, and many jurisdictions explicitly tell constituents that the cameras will not be used for traffic enforcement.
The incident happened December 26 in Coffee County, Georgia. The ticket lists the offense as “Holding/supporting wireless telecommunications device,” and includes the note “CAPTURED ON FLOCK CAMERA 31 MM 1 HOLDING PHONE IN LEFT HAND.”
A spokesperson for the Georgia State Patrol told 404 Media that the ticket was issued because of a “unique circumstance” in which a Flock camera happened to capture a traffic infraction, and that Flock cameras are not usually used by the department for traffic enforcement.
“This incident was a rare and unique circumstance where the captured image from the camera exposed an additional violation beyond the vehicle’s expired registration,” the spokesperson said. “This situation does not reflect a standard enforcement endeavor by the Department of Public Safety.” The traffic citation obtained by 404 Media does not mention that the man’s registration was expired.
Still, the incident is notable because Flock cameras are often pitched to police as tools for solving serious crimes, finding stolen vehicles, and locating missing people. They distinctly are not traffic cameras and are not pitched as such; the use of a Flock camera in this way shows that the images they capture can sometimes be detailed enough to be used as the pretext for a traffic violation, anyway.
Many police departments go out of their way to tell community members that Flock cameras are not used for traffic enforcement. For example, the City of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, states in a FAQ that “GSPD [Glenwood Springs Police Department] does not use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement, parking enforcement, or minor code violations.” El Paso, Texas, tells residents “these are not traffic enforcement cameras. They do not issue tickets, do not monitor speed, and do not generate revenue. They are investigative tools used after crimes occur.” Lynwood, Washington tells residents “these cameras will not be used for traffic infractions, immigration enforcement, or monitoring First Amendment-protected expressive activity” (Flock cameras have now been used for all of these purposes, as we have reported.)
The fact that police in Georgia did use Flock cameras for traffic enforcement highlights yet again that, essentially, law enforcement agencies are able to use these cameras for whatever they want. There are very few limitations on what Flock cameras can be used for, and police do not get warrants to search Flock’s network of cameras, either locally or nationwide. Network audits, which are spreadsheets of Flock searches we have obtained via public records requests, have shown that police use Flock for all sorts of reasons; they often do not list any reason at all for searching a license plate.
The man who was cited in Georgia posted about the incident in an anti-Flock Facebook group asking for advice. He said that he showed up in court and the ticket was dropped. The man did not respond to multiple requests for comment from 404 Media and because he is a private citizen cited for a minor traffic violation, we are not naming him. 404 Media independently obtained the citation.
