Researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon ran a test to measure how often chatbots flatter users. In a paper on social sycophancy in AI advice, they ran OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral through thousands of personal dilemmas. — Read the rest

The post AI told Reddit's biggest jerks they did nothing wrong 51% of the time appeared first on Boing Boing.

Getting sick in Antarctica is no fun. Getting sick in Antarctica in the middle of winter is another problem.

On July 31, an Australian crew flew a cold-weather-configured Airbus A319 Long Range from Hobart to McMurdo Station, answering an urgent call to evacuate a seriously ill American. — Read the rest

The post Australian crew pulls off extraordinary Antarctic medical evacuation appeared first on Boing Boing.

Katsushi Murakami designed the Voltron robots, most of the robots in Power Rangers, and many of the Go-Bots. Matt Alt, the author of Pure Invention, reported Murakami's death in a farewell to the designer on his newsletter on August 10, 2026. — Read the rest

The post The designer of Voltron and the Power Rangers robots has died appeared first on Boing Boing.

On May 14, 1945, doctors at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco injected Albert Stevens, an Ohio-born house painter, with plutonium without telling him. Stevens had checked in with what doctors diagnosed as terminal stomach cancer. Manhattan Project researchers wanted to know how plutonium moved through the bodies of the workers who handled it, and they selected him as patient CAL-1. — Read the rest

The post The government secretly injected a house painter with plutonium appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kindle jailbreakers have another way into Amazon's famously locked-down e-reader. Véra, released August 10 by developers Ava and sparklerfish, uses the Kindle's own web browser and a pair of specially prepared books to get supported devices running outside code. The KindleModding project says exact model and firmware compatibility matters, and directs users through its jailbreak wizard rather than claiming every current Kindle will work. — Read the rest

The post Kindle jailbreakers have a new way in with Véra appeared first on Boing Boing.

Paleontology already gives us giant carnivorous lizards, five-eyed sea creatures, and enough weird fossils to make science fiction seem boring. So, obviously, fringe paleontology has to start off the rails and then dive deep.

This entertaining first installment of a fringe paleontology iceberg descends into the theories, hoaxes, and pseudoscience that revolve around the study of prehistoric life. — Read the rest

The post Fringe paleontology gets weird fast appeared first on Boing Boing.

The next step for AI is spatial intelligence, says Kevin Kelly. Today's models learned from text,  but fail when engineers put them in a robot body because they have no sense of gravity, distance, or three-dimensional space. 

"The primary bottleneck restraining the arrival of this world model is the lack of sufficient quantity of quality data," Kelly says. — Read the rest

The post Why AI companies may sell robots and smart glasses below cost appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Learn a new language on your own terms with this lifetime subscription to the Promova Premium Plan for just $79.99 (reg. $299.99).

If you're looking to learn a new language, you don't need to spend a fortune on specialist lessons or keep up with rigid schedules, thanks to Promova's Premium Plan lifetime subscription. — Read the rest

The post Learn up to 12 languages without the hassle and self-doubt for just $80 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Anyone going to court in England and Wales will be obliged to turn in smart glasses and pick them up when they leave. The ban targets devices such as Meta's and clarifies that existing restrictions on recording devices apply to attire: "There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited," a spokesperson told The Guardian. — Read the rest

The post English courts ban Meta glasses and other spywear appeared first on Boing Boing.

A French manuscript from about 1485 shows a woman spinning wool in her doorway while her child plays beside her. The doorway is the mouth of a giant snail shell. She lives there.
Robert Testard painted it for Charles d'Angoulême, a count in southwestern France, as one of 56 miniatures in Les secretz de l'histoire naturelle.  — Read the rest

The post In this 1485 manuscript, people live inside giant snail shells appeared first on Boing Boing.

Charles le Brun (1619–90) drew a set of human heads that match the heads of animals: an ox, a fox, an eagle, a raven, a parrot, and a pig. Louis XIV put him in charge of the decoration of Versailles in 1669, and the palace pictures needed crowds of figures a viewer could tell apart at a glance. — Read the rest

The post A Versailles painter drew people with the faces of animals appeared first on Boing Boing.

F. D. C. Willard was a Siamese cat named Chester, who lived from 1968 to 1982. In 1975, his owner, the physicist Jack H. Hetherington of Michigan State University, wrote a paper on low-temperature physics and used the word "we" throughout, according to Wikipedia. — Read the rest

The post A Siamese cat co-authored a physics paper in 1975 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Undertale, an indie RPG released in 2015 after a successful Kickstarter campaign by developer Toby Fox, has become nothing short of a pop culture icon. Since its release, critics and audiences fell in love with its memorable characters, humor, illustrator Temmie Chang's art style, bullet-hell-meets-RPG gameplay, storytelling, and of course, the soundtrack. — Read the rest

The post Fans are cramming Undertale into EarthBound's Super Nintendo engine appeared first on Boing Boing.

Mario Kart 8 asks you to pick a driver, a kart body, tires, and a glider, and each category has dozens of options with their own speed, acceleration, handling, and weight. Antoine Mayerowitz's interactive guide to the Pareto frontier sorts the resulting thousands of builds with a method an economist developed over a century ago. — Read the rest

The post The best Mario Kart build is an economics problem from 1900 appeared first on Boing Boing.

About 9,000 people a year search Arizona's Superstition Mountains for the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. Some have died in the search. The mine is named for Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant ("Dutchman" was the era's term for Germans) who supposedly found a rich gold vein and kept its location secret until 1891, when he confessed on his deathbed to a woman named Julia Thomas and gave her a crude map. — Read the rest

The post 9,000 people a year hunt a gold mine that geology says can't exist appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Pok Pok gives kids ages 2–8 an ad-free, low-stimulation space to explore, create, and learn—and lifetime family access is $59.99.

Most kids' apps seem designed by someone who asked, "How many flashing buttons can we fit on one screen before a parent throws the iPad into the sea?"  — Read the rest

The post Trade loud, addictive screen time for Montessori-inspired Pok Pok, just $59.99 for lifetime access appeared first on Boing Boing.

Cruelty is a growth industry, and the deportation business is booming.

Surprise! MAGA's favorite mass-deportation program has produced at least one conspicuous group of winners: the companies paid to lock people up.

America's two largest private-prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, reported a combined $1.4 billion in revenue for the second quarter, as the number of people held in immigration detention approached 66,000. — Read the rest

The post Trump's mass deportation machine is a $1.4 billion private-prison bonanza appeared first on Boing Boing.

This video is the most pleasant thing I've seen in a couple of days. Perhaps I should give up on the mainstream news.

Puppies being cute is one thing, but puppies playing on ice? In little figure skater outfits? With SKATES? — Read the rest

The post Dogs on Ice are beyond adorable appeared first on Boing Boing.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate whose career has accumulated enough corruption allegations to require its own filing cabinet, has yet another interesting financial arrangement to explain.

The New York Times reports that Paxton co-founded a cell-tower company, Premier Vertical Properties, in 2005. — Read the rest

The post Texas' Ken Paxton somehow gets even sleazier appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander found strong "life affirmation" results in a Martian soil sample. Robert Jastrow, then director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said, "Short of seeing something wiggling on the end of a pin, the case for life on Mars is now as complete as the Viking experiments could make it." — Read the rest

The post Viking lander's 1976 Mars soil test may have found life after all appeared first on Boing Boing.