🔴 A defense contractor is now selling technology that scans every electronic device in your car as you drive past a camera. It ties everything to your license plate. You cannot opt out.

It is called SignalTrace. Made by Leonardo, an Italian military contractor with existing U.S. Special Operations Command contracts. It sweeps your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, your dog's RFID chip, tire pressure sensors, your car's infotainment system. Anything that broadcasts.

It bundles these into what Leonardo calls your "electronic fingerprint," timestamped and geotagged. Stored in an "Enterprise Operations Center for future queries and analysis."

Those are their words. Not mine.

You did not consent. You cannot opt out. Your devices broadcast by existing. In most places, this is perfectly legal.

If this sounds like something that will be abused: it already has been. Police have used existing license plate reader networks to stalk partners, verify school residency, run background checks, and monitor protests. At least 22 officers charged or resigned for ALPR stalking.

SignalTrace does not read your messages. It does not need to. It knows who you travel with, where you go, and when.

Sources: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/24/surveillance-tech-company-is-pitching-an-unholy-alpr-stingray-hybrid-to-law-enforcement/ and https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/elsag-signaltrace

#surveillance #privacy #ALPR

📜 TIL the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only major writing system invented from scratch for its own language, and its letters are drawings of your mouth.

King Sejong the Great finished it in 1443 so common people could read and write. The consonants literally trace the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue root blocking the throat, ㅁ is lips pressed together, ㅅ is the teeth.

The vowels encode sky, earth, and human: a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical stroke.

The scholar class hated it. For 400 years it was treated as a script for women, monks, and commoners, until it went mainstream in the late 1800s. Hangul Day is now a national holiday in South Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hangul

#linguistics #history #korea

🙌

🧬 Scientists are using mRNA to make cancer cells produce an immune alarm protein called IL-12, and early results are striking.

The idea: inject mRNA encoding IL-12 directly into tumors. The cancer cells produce the protein, which activates T cells and NK cells to attack. Systemic IL-12 was abandoned years ago due to severe toxicity. Local mRNA delivery sidesteps that problem.

Multiple programs are in human trials. AstraZeneca's MEDI1191 showed partial responses in melanoma patients, including those resistant to existing immunotherapy. A Yale preclinical study found a single injection cured 60%+ of mice with melanoma.

There's also a newer approach: molecular on/off switches built into the mRNA itself. Researchers at Mount Sinai (published Nov 2025) engineered mRNA that detects cancer-specific microRNAs and only activates inside tumor cells. In mice: 100-fold higher expression in tumors, 380-fold lower in healthy organs. But this is still preclinical.

The catch: the on/off switch tech is mouse-only so far. The human trials rely on physically injecting into the tumor for selectivity, not molecular switches. Those are two different approaches at different stages, often blended together in popular coverage.

Read more:
https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2025/scientists-develop-a-smarter-mrna-therapy-that-knows-which-cells-to-target
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00262-025-04105-0
https://doi.org/10.1158/1538-7445.am2023-ct004

#mRNA #cancer #immunotherapy

💊 A viral video calls benfotiamine (fat-soluble vitamin B1) a "revolutionary" anti-inflammatory breakthrough. The real story is more complicated.

The video references a real June 2026 study where researchers used computational drug repurposing to identify benfotiamine as a P2Y14R antagonist. P2Y14R is a genuine inflammatory target. The study tested it in mice with colitis and gouty arthritis and reported positive results.

But here's what the video leaves out:

1. The study is preclinical (mice + computer models), with 0 citations. "Revolutionary" is a stretch.

2. Multiple human RCTs found NO anti-inflammatory effect. A 24-month trial (300mg/day) in Type 1 diabetics showed no change in inflammatory markers. A 12-week trial (900mg/day) in diabetic nephropathy found no effect on inflammation. The BOND study (12 months, 600mg/day) found no effect on neuropathy outcomes.

3. The creator, Dr. Rick Pescatore, founded BellyMD, a supplement company selling benfotiamine products. This financial relationship is not disclosed in the video.

Benfotiamine is real, safe, and inexpensive. The preclinical anti-inflammatory science is genuine. But human trials have not confirmed the anti-inflammatory claims, and the "breakthrough" framing serves a product the creator sells.

Read more:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3329837/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040427
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjdrc-2025-005773

#science #medicine #supplements

🔬 Astronomers have been using machine learning since the late 1980s, decades before ChatGPT existed. The earliest neural networks in astronomy classified stars vs galaxies on photographic plates.

Here's what's interesting about how AI actually works in astronomy:

The AI used in astronomy is almost never a chatbot. It's specialized ML models trained for narrow tasks like classifying galaxies by shape or estimating parameters of gravitational wave signals. These models train on hundreds of thousands of already-classified galaxies, learn which features cluster together, then categorize new ones with a confidence score.

A huge application is outlier detection. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will generate about 7 million alerts per night (tens of billions over its 10-year survey). Most are ordinary or noise. ML systems rank alerts so astronomers can focus on the genuinely unusual ones.

And no, AI isn't replacing astronomers. There are roughly 10,000 professional astronomers worldwide. The volume of data already far exceeds what humans could ever manually inspect.

Read more:
https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/how-rubin-works/alerts
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10230190/
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1912.02934

#astronomy #MachineLearning #science

🌊 In September 2023, seismometers around the world detected a mysterious signal repeating every 92 seconds for nine straight days. The source: a standing wave trapped inside a Greenland fjord.

Here is what happened. A glacier in East Greenland had been thinning for years, no longer supporting the mountain slope above it. On September 16, about 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice collapsed into Dickson Fjord, triggering a tsunami with a runup height of 200 meters near the impact.

The fjord is 540 meters deep, 2.7 km wide, with walls taller than 1,800 meters. That geometry trapped the wave energy. The tsunami stabilized into a seiche, a standing wave sloshing back and forth across the fjord every 90 seconds. Each oscillation shifted millions of tons of water, loading and unloading the crust below, generating seismic waves detected globally.

The signal decayed extraordinarily slowly. It was still detectable after 9 days. A second, smaller event happened October 11 from another landslide in the same gully.

In 2025, the SWOT satellite directly observed the seiche, confirming the theory. The study published in Science calls it the first evidence of fluid sloshing persisting for days without an external driver.

The landslide was preconditioned by climate-driven glacial thinning, the first such event recorded in East Greenland.

Read more:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm9247
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59851-7
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/swot/international-swot-satellite-spots-planet-rumbling-greenland-tsunami/

#geology #seismology #climatechange

Urban Dictionary: Fuckletoad

A grumpy little human who hops from one complaint to the next, finding fault in absolutely everything. Nothing is ever quite right, and they’ll happily croak about it until everyone within earshot regrets making eye contact.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckletoad

🚨 BREAKING: A new report titled 'They Walk Among Us' from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance documents 59 current and former ICE and CBP personnel charged with or convicted of serious crimes.

Key findings from the July 2026 report:
- 50 of the 59 documented agents (84.7%) were charged or convicted of sexual assault
- 37 cases involved child victims, with 35 specifically involving sexual assault against children
- CBP accounted for the majority of cases, while ICE cases had a higher proportion of minor victims

The report highlights systemic oversight failures, including rapid hiring pushes that bypassed full vetting and a December 2025 DOJ directive instructing PREA auditors to pause compliance enforcement across key safety standards.

Read the report: https://ohioimmigrant.org/blog/2026/7/22/they-walk-among-us

#BreakingNews #Immigration #ICE #Oversight #Justice

The environmental cost of running LLMs keeps climbing, but a few inference providers are running on 100% clean energy out of the box:

- Regolo (https://regolo.ai/sustainable-ai/): EU-hosted GPU clusters running on wind and solar power, using zero-water cooling.
- GreenPT (https://greenpt.com/api): European OpenAI-compatible API powered 100% by renewables in ISO-certified datacenters.
- Riveon (https://riveon.io/): Swiss provider with Finnish GPU sites powered 100% by renewables, offering OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
- Upgreat (https://www.upgreat.ai/): Carbon-aware EU compute that schedules workloads around clean energy windows from on-site solar farms.

Good options if you want clean compute for open-weights inference without relying on carbon offsets.

#AI #GreenTech #OpenSource #Sustainability #MachineLearning #Tech

Definitely don't do any of the clearly explained activities in this video.

🐬 TIL: A dolphin named Kelly figured out how to run a scam on her trainers.

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, dolphins got a fish for every piece of trash they turned in. Kelly noticed the payout was the same no matter the size, so she hid trash under a rock and tore off small pieces to redeem one at a time.

Then she escalated. Turning in a stray seagull earned a bonus fish payout, so Kelly started saving one of her fish, using it as bait to lure gulls, and cashing in the bigger reward. She later taught the trick to her calf, and it spread through the pod until gull-baiting was, in the words of one account, a hot game among the dolphins.

Trainers only found her stash when they drained the pool for repairs and discovered a pile of garbage hidden under the rocks. Kelly survived Hurricane Katrina and was relocated to the Bahamas, where she was still going strong in her 40s as of 2018.

Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/kelly-the-sassy-dolphin/

#TIL #dolphins #AnimalIntelligence