2026-03-07 22:00:31
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that moved the heavens, coveted crystals, dined on lunar legumes, and got a four-star review.
First, humanity has permanently signed its name into the orbital dynamics of the solar system. Take the win! Then, we’ve got the origins of our obsession with sparkly rocks, a stint of extraterrestrial gardening, and a story of stellar significance.
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.
Well folks, pack it up: Humanity has shifted the path of a celestial object around the Sun.
You may remember NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which slammed into an asteroid named Dimorphos in September 2022. Dimorphos, which is about the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza, orbits an asteroid named Didymos, roughly five times bigger. In the aftermath of the crash, scientists determined that DART had successfully shifted Dimorphos’ path around Didymos, shortening its roughly 11-hour orbit by 33 minutes.
Now, scientists have confirmed that the mission also changed the entire binary system’s “heliocentric” orbit around the Sun. While scientists had expected the spacecraft to push this pair of asteroids off-kilter, a new study has now quantified the impact by presenting “the first-ever measurement of human-caused change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body.”
The team determined that the system’s pace around the Sun was slowed by about 10 micrometers per second as a result of the mighty spaceship wallop. It took years to refine that measurement, which the researchers calculated with radar and stellar occultations, which are observations of the system against background stars.
But it’s worth the wait to know that we shifted a celestial object’s circuit around the Sun, even by a tiny bit—an achievement that may come in handy if we ever need to deflect an asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth.
“By demonstrating that asteroid deflection missions such as DART can effect change in the heliocentric orbit of a celestial body, this study marks a notable step forward in our ability to prevent future asteroid impacts on Earth,” said researchers co-led by Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Steven R. Chesley of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
So, forget moving mountains—we’ve graduated to moving space rocks.
For anyone interested in learning more about DART, I highly recommend How to Kill an Asteroid by Robin George Andrews, which provides a fascinating inside account of the mission.
In other news…
It’s crystal clear: We clearly love crystals. Humans and our early hominin relatives have collected crystals for nearly 800,000 years, making them “among the first natural objects collected by hominins without any apparent utilitarian purpose,” according to a new study.
To explore the origins of this fascination, scientists gave chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, a bunch of sparkly crystals at an ape preserve in Spain. The chimps were intrigued by the offerings; indeed, one female named Sandy immediately absconded with a large crystal dubbed the “Monolith” and took it back to her group’s indoor dormitory for two days.
“When the team of caretakers tried to retrieve the crystal, it took hours to exchange it for valuable ‘gifts’ (i.e., favored food items—bananas and yogurt—which are known from daily observations to be highly appreciated by the chimpanzees), which suggests that the crystal was highly valued,” said researchers led by Juan Manuel García-Ruiz of Donostia International Physics Center.
“Crystals may have contributed to the development of metaphysical and symbolic thinking, acting as catalysts for the conceptualization of a ‘big beyond,’” the team concluded.
Scientists are finally addressing my dream of enjoying locally-grown falafel on the Moon. In a new study, a team experimented with planting chickpeas in lunar regolith simulant (LRS), a human-made substance that mimics lunar soil.
The results revealed that chickpeas could flower and produce seeds in the simulant, provided that it was treated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) which are fungal microbes known to protect plant health. Small additions of vermicompost also helped the Moon beans flourish.
“Plants seeded successfully in mixtures containing up to 75 percent LRS when inoculated with AMF,” said researchers led by Jessica Atkin of Texas A&M University. “Higher LRS concentrations induced stress; however, plants grown in 100 percent LRS inoculated with AMF demonstrated an average extension of two weeks in survival compared to non-inoculated plants.”
“We present a step toward sustainable agriculture on the Moon, addressing the fundamental challenges of using Lunar regolith as a plant growth medium,” the team concluded.
Who knows if we’ll ever live off the lunar land, but as a garbanzo fanzo, I’m hoping for heavenly hummus.
Three-body problems are so last season; the era of the quadruple star system is upon us. In a new study, scientists unveil the most compact quartet of stars ever discovered, known as TIC 120362137, which is about 2,000 light years from Earth.
“This inner subsystem, which contains three stars that are more massive and hotter than the Sun, is more spatially compact than Mercury’s orbit around our Sun, and is orbited by a fourth Sun-like star with a period of 1,046 days,” said researchers co-led by Tamás Borkovits and Saul A. Rappaport of the University of Szeged, Hai-Liang Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Guillermo Torres of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.
“To our knowledge, there are no other known, similarly compact and tight, planetary-system-like 3 + 1 quadruple stellar systems,” the team added.
The researchers predicted that this fantastic foursome will eventually merge together into a pair of dead stars known as white dwarfs in about nine billion years. No planets have been found in this system, and it may be that it is too dynamically eccentric to host them. Still, it’s fun to imagine the view from such a hypothetical world, with four Suns in its sky. Eat your heart out, Tatooine.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
2026-03-07 00:26:59
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 a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerously dumb narrative.
EMANUEL: I want to update those who have been following the 404 Media sidequest “Emanuel’s CPU is dying.” The update is that I basically got a new PC. I kept my GPU (4080 Super), my CPU cooler, and storage, and upgraded everything else, including the case, because I bought the old one in the era before GPUs were more than a foot long.
2026-03-06 04:36:01
Privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media.
The records provide insight into the sort of data that Proton Mail, which prides itself both on its end-to-end encryption and that it is only governed by Swiss privacy law, can and does provide to third parties. In this case, the Proton Mail account was affiliated with the Defend the Atlanta Forest (DTAF) group and Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which authorities were investigating for their connection to arson, vandalism and doxing. Broadly, members were protesting the building of a large police training center next to the Intrenchment Creek Park in Atlanta, and actions also included camping in the forest and lawsuits. Charges against more than 60 people have since been dropped.
2026-03-05 23:19:28
Clients of a long-running email marketing platform are getting targeted with a phishing campaign telling them that their emails would begin automatically inserting a “‘Support ICE’ donation button” into every email they send. The strategy suggests that scammers are trying to capitalize on people’s revulsion to ICE by coming up with strategies that would cause users to quickly log into their accounts to disable the setting. In reality, clients would be revealing their username and password to hackers.
The move indicates that hackers are targeting clients of enterprise software companies with extremely controversial political emails. The scam targeted customers of Emma, a long-running email marketing platform whose clients include Orange Theory, Yale University, Texas A&M University, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Dogfish Head Brewery, and the YMCA, among others. 404 Media was forwarded a copy of the phishing email from an Emma client.
“As part of our commitment to supporting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), we will be adding a ‘Support ICE’ donation button to the footer of every email sent through our platform,” the phishing email reads. “This button will appear automatically in all outgoing emails starting next week […] all emails sent from your account will include the Support ICE footer element […] this change helps us demonstrate our platform’s civic commitment.” The email adds that it is possible to opt out of this feature, and that “we appreciate your understanding as we implement this platform-wide initiative.”
Lisa Mayr, the CEO of Marigold, which owns Emma, told 404 Media that the company “would never publish anything like this. This is a very common phishing attempt.”
Mayr is right—clients of other email sending services have recently been targeted with similar attacks. In January, programmer Fred Benenson wrote about phishing emails he had gotten that were targeting users of SendGrid, another email marketing service. At least one of the emails Benenson got used the same “Support ICE button” language and has the subject line “ICE Support Initiative.”
“If you’ve been paying any attention at all to US politics, you’ll know how insidiously provocative this would be if it were a real email,” Benenson wrote in a blog post about the email. “This phishing campaign is a fascinating example of how sophisticated social engineering has become. Instead of Nigerian 419 scams, hackers have evolved to carefully craft messages sent to professionals that are designed to exploit the American political consciousness. The opt-out buttons are the trap.”
In SendGrid’s case, Benenson found that the emails looked “real” because they were sent from other SendGrid user accounts. Basically, hackers compromised the account of a SendGrid user and then used that account to send phishing emails using the SendGrid infrastructure. “The emails look real because, technically, they are real SendGrid emails sent via SendGrid’s platform and via a customer’s reputation–they’re just sent by the wrong people and wrong domains,” he wrote.
Besides the ICE-themed phishing emails, Benenson also received an email that said SendGrid was going to add a “pride-themed footer to all emails” and another that said “all emails sent from your account will feature a commemorative theme honoring George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
“The political sophistication on display here (BLM, LGBTQ+ rights, ICE, even the Spanish language switch playing on immigration anxieties) suggests someone with a deep understanding of American cultural fault lines,” Benenson wrote.
The Emma email was sent via Survey Monkey through an email address called “[email protected].” When users clicked a “Settings” button that would have allowed them to opt out of the feature, they’re sent to a generic-looking site designed to steal credentials hosted at app-e2maa.net. By the time 404 Media got the email, Chrome had detected it as a “Dangerous site” and warned users not to visit it.
2026-03-05 00:22:49
This week we discuss our coverage of the U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran, specifically how Polymarket and Kalshi are letting people profit from death, and that Amazon data centers were on fire after missiles hit Dubai. Then Emanuel talks about how AI translations are adding 'hallucinations' to Wikipedia articles. In the subscribers-only section, Sam tells us about a change with Amazon wishlists that may expose your address.
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.
0:00 - Intro
1:32 - With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom
29:07 - AI Translations Are Adding Hallucinations To Wikipedia Articles
SUBSCRIBER'S STORY - Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address
2026-03-04 23:55:56
For a few hours on Tuesday, Polymarket hosted a bet about the possibility of nuclear war in 2026. The market asked the question “Nuclear weapon detonation by …?” and racked up close to a million dollars in trading volume before Polymarket took the unusual step to remove the market from its website. It did not simply close down the bet, but it’s been “archived” meaning that a record of it no longer exists. It’s strange as many older and paid out bets remain on the site.