2026-03-18 01:29:36
Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The finding strengthens the case that the ingredients for life are abundant in the solar system and may have found their way to Earth from space, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.
Life as we know it runs on DNA and RNA, which are built from five chemical bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. A team has now identified this “complete set” of nucleobases in rocks snatched from the surface of Ryugu in 2019 by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2, which successfully returned them to Earth the following year.
This discovery corroborates the results from another mission, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, which returned samples of the asteroid Bennu that also contained all five nucleobases. Both asteroids belong to the same “carbonaceous” (C-type) family of primitive carbon-rich rocks, though the samples contain different ratios of the five nucleobases.
Taken together, the findings shed light on the origin of life on Earth and raise new questions about the odds that it exists elsewhere.
“These findings suggest that nucleobases may be widespread in carbonaceous asteroids and, by extension, in planetary systems,” said Toshiki Koga, a postdoctoral researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), in an email to 404 Media.
“This means that some of the key molecular ingredients for life could be commonly available,” he added. “However, this does not imply that life itself is widespread, but rather that the chemical starting materials for life may be more common than previously thought.”
The emergence of life on Earth, also known as abiogenesis, remains one of the biggest mysteries in science. To untangle this enigma, scientists first need to figure out how our planet was initially enriched with the basic stuff of life—including water, amino acids, and the nucleobases that make up our genetic material.
One popular hypothesis suggests that asteroids bearing these biological building blocks pelted Earth as it formed more than four billion years ago. This idea has been supported by the presence of nucleobases in pieces of carbonaceous asteroids that have fallen down to Earth, such as the Murchison meteorite of Australia or the Orgueil meteorite of France.
Meteorites, however, are not pristine as they become eroded by exposure to space and can also be contaminated by terrestrial material after landing on Earth. To get cleaner samples, scientists launched several spacecraft to grab samples directly from the source, beginning with Japan’s Hayabusa mission, which delivered several milligrams of dusty grains from asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010.
Hayabusa-2 and OSIRIS-REx then obtained even larger samples from their targets, bringing back 5.4 grams from Ryugu and 121.6 grams from Bennu. Previous studies have already identified more than a dozen amino acids associated with life in both samples, as well as evidence that these asteroids were once altered by ice and water.
Now, following the discovery of all five nucleobases in the Bennu pebbles, Koga and his colleagues have found the complete set in Ryugu. The findings lend weight to the so-called “RNA world” model of abiogenesis. In this hypothesis, early life on Earth depended solely on RNA as a self-replicating molecule, laying the biological groundwork for later, more complicated systems that involved DNA and protein-based organisms. The extraterrestrial samples from Ryugu and Bennu provide evidence that at least some of the nucleobases that made up these early lifeforms came from outer space.
The results were “broadly in line with our expectations, but still very exciting to confirm,” Koga said. “All five nucleobases had already been detected in the Murchison meteorite and in samples from the asteroid Bennu. Since Ryugu is also a carbonaceous asteroid, we expected that these molecules might be present, and it was very satisfying to confirm that the complete set is indeed present in the Ryugu samples.”
But while both samples contained the royal flush of nucleobases, they differed in their relative abundances. For example, Bennu is much richer in pyrimidine nucleobases (cytosine, thymine and uracil) than Ryugu, though they both contain roughly similar levels of purine nucleobases (adenine and guanine). These idiosyncrasies point to a variety of formation processes that produced prebiotic materials on these celestial relics.
“Our results suggest that nucleobases can form under a range of conditions in early Solar System materials, particularly within primitive asteroid parent bodies that experienced aqueous alteration,” Koga said. “The observed relationship between nucleobase composition and ammonia abundance indicates that local chemical environments, such as the availability of ammonia, may play an important role.”
“At the same time, some precursor molecules may have formed earlier in interstellar environments, so nucleobase formation could involve multiple stages,” he continued. “Future studies, including analyses of different types of meteorites and laboratory experiments that simulate these conditions, will help to better constrain these formation pathways.”
In other words, understanding how these molecules form in space could help answer the age-old mystery of whether life is a rare cosmic fluke—or a common process in the universe. The research also highlights the remarkable ingenuity behind these sample-return missions, which have delivered tiny time capsules from the birth of our solar system directly into our hands.
“It is both exciting and humbling to work with these samples,” Koga said. “They are extremely limited and represent material that has remained largely unchanged since the early Solar System. At the same time, there is a strong sense of responsibility, because each tiny grain may contain important information about how organic molecules formed and evolved before the origin of life.”
2026-03-17 22:59:02
Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop.
Anthropic’s paper, called “Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence,” essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job’s tasks “are theoretically possible with AI,” which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW’s Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.)
In his thread, Mims makes the case that the “theoretical capability” of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree.
But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. “We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily,” the researchers write. This is based in part on the “Anthropic Economic Index,” which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include “Complete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines,” “Draft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications,” and “Build, debug, and customize web applications and websites.”
Not included in any of Anthropic’s research are extremely popular uses of AI such as “create AI porn” and “create AI slop and spam.” These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. Researchers appear to be too squeamish or too embarrassed to grapple with the fact that people love to use AI to make porn, and people love to use AI to spam social media and the internet, inherently causing economic harm to creators, adult performers, journalists, musicians, writers, artists, website owners, small businesses, etc. As Emanuel wrote in our first 404 Media Generative AI Market Analysis, people love to cum, and many of the most popular generative AI websites have an explicit focus on AI porn and the creation of nonconsensual AI porn. Anthropic’s research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the “good” uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for. (It may be the case that people are disproportionately using Claude at a higher rate for more traditional work applications, but any study on the “labor market impacts of AI” should not focus on the uses of one single tool and extrapolate that out to every other tool. For what it’s worth, jailbroken versions of Claude are very popular among sexbot enthusiasts).
2026-03-17 06:40:53
A judge ordered the reinstatement of a video game developer after he was fired as part of a scheme cooked up by a CEO using ChatGPT. Facing the possibility of paying out a massive bonus to the developer of Subnautica 2, the CEO of publisher Krafton used ChatGPT to create a plan to take over the development studio and force out its founder, according to court records.
The Monday ruling details the bizarre story. Unknown Worlds Entertainment is the studio behind the 2018 underwater survival game Subnautica. The company has since been working on the sequel, Subnautica 2. In 2021, South Korean publisher Krafton bought Unknown Worlds Entertainment for $500 million and promised to pay out another $250 million if Subnautica 2 sold well enough.
Krafton’s internal sales projections for Subnautica 2 looked great, and looked like it would be on the hook for the additional $250 million. In an attempt to avoid paying this, Krafton CEO Changhan Kim turned to ChatGPT for help avoiding paying the developers the $250 million bonus. “As Unknown Worlds prepared to release its hotly anticipated sequel, Subnautica 2, the parties’ relationship fractured,” the court decision said. “Fearing he had agreed to a ‘pushover’ contract, Krafton’s CEO consulted an artificial intelligence chatbot to contrive a corporate ‘takeover’ strategy.”
2026-03-17 00:48:49
Lonely young people are likely better off texting a random stranger than talking to a chatbot, according to a new study.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that first-semester college students who texted a randomly selected fellow first-semester college student every day for two weeks experienced around a nine percent reduction in feelings of loneliness. The same two weeks of daily messaging with a Discord chatbot reduced loneliness by around two percent, which turned out to be the same amount as daily one-sentence journaling.
The research included 300 first-semester college students who were either randomly paired with another student, given a daily solo writing task, or put into a Discord server with a chatbot running on ChatGPT-4o mini.
The students were instructed to have at least one interaction per day in each of the groups. The human-human pairs were instructed to message each other however they wanted, while the researchers instructed the bot to “listen actively and show empathy,” and to be a “friendly, positive, and supportive AI friend to help the student navigate their new college experience.” The human participants ultimately acted pretty similarly in both types of chat, sending between eight and 10 messages a day in both their human text chains and their Discord conversations with the large language model (LLM).
However, participants who were paired with a human partner reported significantly lower loneliness after the study, and those paired with the chatbot did not. “This is just such a low tech, simple intervention, and can make people feel significantly less lonely,” Ruo-Ning Li, PhD candidate at UCB and one of the authors of the paper, told 404 Media.
The research looked at college students specifically, to try to understand whether LLMs could be a scalable tool to help with the isolation that people can feel when going through a big change. The transition to college can be overwhelming: new classmates, new places, new rules. Young people are often away from parents or familiar structure for the first time, building out their new social networks among others who are doing the same. This is a particularly vulnerable time: if chatbots could really cure loneliness for a group of people like this, “then it would be great,” said Li. But only human to human interaction, despite it being with a random person over text, had any significant effect.
The research is part of a movement to understand the effects of LLM interactions over periods of time. Another paper from the same lab, published this week in Psychological Science, looks at the experiences of more than 2,000 people over twelve months, checking in with them once a quarter. The study found that higher reported chatbot use was linked with higher loneliness later on — and vice versa. “Changes in chatbot use have a small effect on emotional isolation in the future. And emotional isolation has a similarly sized effect on your likelihood to use chatbots in the future,” Dr. Dunigan Folk, one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. He cautioned against calling it a “spiral”, since other things could be changing in peoples’ lives to make them use chatbots and be lonelier. But, he said “it’s suggestive of a negative feedback loop because it’s a reciprocal relationship.” Chatbots, he said, could be something like “social junk food.” They might make people feel good in the moment, “but over time, they might not nourish us the same way that human relationships do.”
He said this finding would be consistent with people replacing human relationships with LLMs. “I think it’s a trade-off thing where you talk to AI instead of a person,” Folk said. “the person would have been a lot more rewarding.”
And there is evidence to show that AI does have some short-term effects on mood. “If you measure their feeling of loneliness or social connection right after the interaction, people do feel better,” said Li. However, she added, “making people feel momentarily happy is not that hard.” It is not clear that a single positive experience is scalable or persistent longer term. “We eat candy, we feel happy. But if we eat a lot of candy over a long time, it could be harmful for our health,” Li said.
That positive short term effect is often reflected in public reports of chatbot usage. For example, two weeks ago, the Guardian published a column where a reporter trialled using an LLM as a therapist, described their validating interaction with it, and concluded that the “experience of being therapised by a chatbot has been wonderful.” While this isn’t necessarily a robust study design, there is empirical research that “one-shot” interactions with bots do make people feel better in the short term.
However, human interactions also have positive effects that chatbot use could be distracting people from. Li considers it important to consider the side effects of chatbot interactions, including their potential for replacing the incentive to seek out the positive effects of human connection. “AI can help mitigate negative feelings, but obviously, it cannot replace humans to build connections,” she said. “That shouldn’t be the goal of the AI design.”
A four-week March 2025 study from the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI explored how different types of LLM interaction and conversation impacted users’ mental wellbeing. The paper found that while some instances of chatbot use “initially appeared beneficial in mitigating loneliness,” higher daily LLM usage was associated with “higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization.”
2026-03-16 22:41:09
An insolvency judge in England tossed out testimony after discovering a witness was being coached on what to say in real time through a pair of smartglasses. When the voice of the coach started coming through the cellphone after it was disconnected from the glasses, the witness blamed the whole thing on ChatGPT.
Insolvency and Companies Court (ICC) Judge Agnello KC in Britain wrote up the incident after it happened in January and the UK-based legal research blog Legal Futures was first to report it. The case considered the liquidation of a Lithuanian company co-owned by a man named Laimonas Jakštys. Jakštys was in court to get his business off an insolvency list and to put himself back in charge of it. It didn’t go well.
“Right at the start of his cross examination, he seemed to pause quite a bit before replying to the questions being asked,” Judge Agnello wrote. “These questions were interpreted and then there was a pause before there was a reply. After several questions, [defense lawyer Sarah Walker] then informed me that she could hear an interference coming from around Mr. Jakštys and asked if Mr. Jakštys could take his glasses off for a period as she was aware smart glasses existed.”
There was a Lithuanian interpreter on hand to help Jakštys talk to the court and she, too, said she could hear voices from Jakštys’s glasses. The judge pointed out they were smart glasses and asked him to take them off. “After a few further questions, when the interpreter was in the process of translating a question, Mr Jakštys’ mobile phone started broadcasting out loud with the voice of someone talking,” Judge Agnello wrote. “There was clearly someone on the mobile phone talking to Mr. Jakštys. He then removed his mobile phone from his inner jacket pocket. At my direction, the smart glasses and his mobile were placed into the hands of his solicitor.”
Jakštys showed up the next day in the glasses again and the judge told him to turn them off. “Jakštys denied that he was using the smart glasses to receive the answers that he was to give in court to the questions being asked,” the judgement said. “He also denied that his smart glasses were linked to his mobile phone at the time that he was giving evidence before me.”
During the court appearance, Jakštys claimed his mobile phone had been stolen but couldn’t provide a police report for the incident. He also repeatedly received calls on his smartglasses-connected phone from a number listed as “abra kadabra.” The call log showed that many of the calls occurred when he was on the witness stand. The judge asked him about the identity of “abra kadabra” and Jakštys said it was a taxi driver.
“When he was pressed as to why all these calls were made…Mr. Jakštys stated that he was not able to remember. This was a reply which he also gave frequently during his evidence,” Judge Agnello said.
In the end, the Judge tossed out all of Jakštys’ testimony. “He was untruthful in relation to his use about the smart glasses and in being coached through the smart glasses,” the judgement said. “In my judgment, from what occurred in court, it is clear that call was made, connected to his smart glasses and continued during his evidence until his mobile phone was removed from him. When asked about this, his explanation was that he thought it was ChatGPT which caused the voice to be heard from his mobile phone once his smart glasses had been removed. That lacks any credibility.”
This incident in the London court is just another in a long line of bad behavior from people wearing smartglasses. CBP agents have been spotted wearing them during immigration raids and Harvard students have loaded them with facial recognition tech to instantly dox strangers.
2026-03-15 00:00:39
The DOGE deposition videos a judge ordered removed from YouTube on Friday after they had gone massively viral have since been backed up across the internet, including as a torrent and to the Internet Archive. The videos included DOGE members unable or unwilling to define DEI; discussing how they used ChatGPT and terms such as “black” and “homosexual” to flag grants for termination but not “white” or “caucasian,” and acknowledgements that despite their aggressive cuts they failed to achieve the stated goal of lowering the government deficit.
The news shows the difficulty in trying to remove material from the internet, especially that which has a high public interest and has already been viewed likely millions of times. It’s also an example of the “Streisand Effect,” a phenomenon where trying to suppress information often results in the information spreading further.