It seems that hackers have found a way around two-factor authentication using a tool called Evilginx, software experts use to simulate a phishing scam.

Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on AI could set off a wave of workers seeking religious exemptions from using the tech at work. One software engineer in North Carolina already secured one last month, Business Insider reports. Erin Maus, a Unitarian Universalist, first sought the accommodation in April at the large tech-entertainment company where she works, which she described as progressive. She argued that using AI did not align with her religious beliefs because of environmental and ethical concerns. Maus was granted the exemption in May, before the pope’s AI remarks. “I’m writing my code and reviewing my code by hand, which seems crazy to say,” Maus told Business Insider. “Just two years ago, how else would you do it?” Maus is unlikely to be the only person seeking a similar accommodation as companies increasingly invest in AI and push, sometimes even mandate, employees to use the technology. In the U.S., the share of employees who say they use AI at least a few times a year at work has nearly doubled from 21% to 40% in 2025, according to Gallup. Now, the pope’s remarks and official theological document could give some workers a stronger argument. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human,” the pope wrote in his 43,000-word encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas, published last month. He wrote that AI is dehumanizing society by reducing “the mystery of the person into data and performance” and called on the tech industry to avoid “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak.” The pope continued that “a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family.” That call for a slower adoption of AI could be enough for some workers to argue they should not be required to use it on the job. “When he’s speaking, he’s speaking as the pontiff—as a religious figure—so he’s raising these human dignity issues as religious issues, theological issues,” Jonathan Segal, an employment attorney and Duane Morris partner, told HR Brew this month. “I think it is inevitable that some employees will rely on this to say…I can’t use AI because it conflicts with a religious belief that I have.” Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers are required to make reasonable accommodations for workers whose sincerely held religious beliefs conflict with a work requirement, unless the accommodation creates an undue hardship for the employer. And it’s not a stretch to think some of these requests could at least get serious consideration. Just a few months ago, Rex Healthcare agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a lawsuit from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the company of unlawfully denying a remote employee’s request to be exempted from its mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy over religious beliefs. “I think this opens a door—or it’s a little bit of a road map—for employees to raise concerns,” Segal told HR Brew. “What the courts have said—what the EEOC has most definitely said—is that, as the general proposition, we shouldn’t question the legitimacy [of] sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Scientists in New York have created a special material that uses the sun to wick and evaporate seawater while separating out the salts and minerals.

Scientists in North Carolina have solved an agricultural murder mystery. A team at North Carolina State University has identified the species of beetle that’s been attacking blueberry farms across the state: _Prionus imbricornis_. It’s the first confirmed sighting of the beetle in the state, whose larvae can kill off blueberry bushes by feeding on their roots. The discovery should improve pest control efforts, the researchers say, though keeping _P. imbricornis_ in check will be easier said than done. “The key takeaway is that we now have the molecular tools to determine which exact species of _Prionus_ are attacking blueberries,” lead study author Kenneth Geisert, a graduate student in NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, told Gizmodo. ## The blueberry beetle culprit North Carolina is one of the country’s largest hubs of blueberries, producing about 54 million pounds of the fruit every year. While blueberry farmers have a wide range of pests to worry about, things have gotten worse lately in North Carolina, thanks to the emerging spread of _Prionus_ longhorn beetles. Adult _Prionus_ beetles don’t feed, but their larvae sure do. Mama beetles will lay hundreds of eggs in the soil near the roots of a host plant. Once the larvae hatch, they burrow deep down into the ground, where they’ll start to consume the roots for nourishment. They can feed for years, all the while slowly destroying the roots; in severe cases, this infestation eventually kills off the plant. The various life stages of the P. imbricornis beetle. Only the larvae feed on blueberry plant roots. © Lopez et al/Journal of Integrated Pest Management. According to the researchers, the first known reports of blueberry _Prionus_ infestations go as far back as 2010. Because the larvae live underground, however, it’s been hard to clearly identify them. Many species of longhorn beetles also tend to have similar-looking larvae, further complicating matters. In recent years, Geisert and his fellow researchers have been working to root out the true culprits. To do so, they placed traps at six blueberry farms across multiple counties in the state. These traps were laced with pheromones to attract male adult beetles. Of the more than five thousand beetles caught via the traps, nearly 90% were identified as _P. imbricornis_. Next, the researchers captured larvae at two farms and genetically sequenced them. They turned out to match the adult _P. imbricornis_ beetles with 98% to 99% accuracy. The team’s findings were published Monday in the Journal of Integrated Pest Management. ## What to do next Identifying the right pest beetle is crucial to managing them, since different species can attack different parts of the plant and will require different methods of control. And the team’s work should make it easier to identify these and similar infestations in the future. “Often times, different species will occur at different times of the year to reduce competition. Therefore, knowing which species (species being singular or plural) is/are present is critical for creating a treatment plan. This study, being able to identify the organism in question, is the first step to accomplishing this,” Geisert said. There’s currently no easy solution to the _P. imbricornis_ problem in North Carolina. That said, the team is now conducting studies to figure out the best insecticides to use on these insects, as well as the best timing in the beetle’s life cycle to use these chemicals and other interventions. Hopefully, they and other scientists will find a way to keep our delicious blueberries safe and secure. “Other researchers/states should collect _Prionus_ larvae infesting their blueberry bushes to determine if it is still _P. imbricornis_ , as we could potentially have several different species co-infesting,” Geisert said. “Proper treatment of these blueberry farms will depend on the species present and their life history.”

_This article is republished fromThe Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article._ When CBS Radio News goes silent on May 22, 2026, Americans will lose access to news programming they’ve tuned into from their living rooms, kitchens and cars for nearly a century. The once-bipartisan idea that the nation’s media should exist to serve democracy continues to fade with it, too. As a media historian, I think the story of CBS Radio News’ rise and fall cannot be told without telling another parallel story: the story of how the U.S. stopped demanding that media serve the public interest. When CBS was born in 1927, radio was ascendant, and this new form of mass communication was spurring vibrant discussions about how media could better serve democracy. Americans had already seen how concentrated wealth during the Gilded Age had tilted the news ecosystem by overemphasizing the concerns of the rich while glossing over inequality, graft and corruption. World War I further demonstrated the power of mass media to shape public opinion through propaganda, reinforcing calls for democratic oversight of broadcasting. Just how to regulate radio was up for debate. But there was broad consensus across party lines that government could play a role in protecting the public from concentrated media power and, with it, foreign misinformation, bad-faith special interest messaging or fraudulent advertising. ## The formative years CBS radio traces its origins to the United Independent Broadcasters, a network of 16 local stations founded by music manager Arthur L. Judson. When Columbia Records bought a stake, it was renamed the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. Early broadcasts simply involved announcers reading short breaking-news dispatches distributed by the United Press wire service. Within months, Columbia sold its share to investors including William S. Paley, who streamlined the name to CBS. Paley was no public media crusader. He was a businessman who wanted radio to turn a profit. But his management reflected a belief that radio could serve two masters: the public interest and advertisers. He hired journalist Paul J. White to run the news division and created a regular news segment called “Something for Everyone.” Though they differed on how best to achieve it, Democrats and Republicans agreed that radio ought to serve the public interest. In other words, because the airwaves belonged to all Americans, broadcasters had obligations beyond profit. They needed to provide reliable information, platform diverse viewpoints and cover matters of public concern. In the 1920s, then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was charged with formulating federal radio policy. Though he was a staunch, pro-business conservative, Hoover was also an engineer who thought that the radio system should be “free of monopoly” and, like any machine, could be gradually improved so it would better serve democracy. “The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for the public benefit,” he said in November 1925. Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the Radio Act of 1927 into law. Passed with overwhelming support, it required radio stations to demonstrate a commitment to “public interest, convenience and necessity” in order to receive a license. ## Forging the public’s trust By the time the 1934 Communications Act created the Federal Communications Commission, a regulatory agency tasked with licensing broadcasters and enforcing ownership rules, the idea that radio should serve the public had been normalized. In 1935, Paley made Edward R. Murrow—the man most associated with CBS Radio’s public service mission—head of news programming. With fascism threatening democracy across Europe, Murrow launched “World News Roundup” in 1938. The longest-running news program in American media, it featured live reports transmitted by shortwave from locations around the world. American audiences huddled around their radios nightly to hear CBS’ reports, which showed how live news could unite a nation and cultivate a richer information ecosystem than the uniform propaganda of Europe’s fascist strongmen. CBS’ gripping coverage of World War II solidified its importance as an American institution. Murrow’s signature tag lines—“this is London” and, later, “good night and good luck”—helped forge the public’s trust in CBS’ reliable and informative programming. ## The dangers of delusion and amusement After the war, television challenged radio’s dominance. Paley understood that Murrow had built a deep trust among listeners, and he put him in charge of CBS News as the network expanded its programming to TV. Yet Murrow grew uneasy with shifts in the network’s coverage, which, in his view, increasingly served the economic interests of its owners. Speaking to the Radio Television News Directors Association in 1958, Murrow lamented how radio and television had forgotten “to operate in the public interest.” He worried that “we have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information” and saw mass media increasingly “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us.” Without serious reporting and civic responsibility as their animating principles, radio and television were losing their democratic utility, becoming mere “wires and lights in a box.” ## Corporations gain the upper hand © Diego De Munari Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, many of the rules dating from when CBS Radio News was born, like ownership restrictions and requirements for educational programming, remained on the books. But during this period, media companies started spending enormous sums of money on donations to legislators who could do their bidding—and capturing the regulatory bodies that were supposed to be holding them accountable. The spirited debates about how radio could better serve democracy largely disappeared. Instead, the conversation shifted to whether government should have any role at all in regulating the media. Principles that once had broad public support—producing public interest news as a quid pro quo for licensing, limits on foreign ownership and fairness rules that required stations to give equal time to both sides of an issue—faded away. Any societal obligation outside of earning profit started being described as a threat to the American way of life. Those arguing that media should be regulated like a public utility in a pluralistic democracy were effectively ignored. After President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunication Act, critics argued that industry lobbying had helped dismantle much of the public interest framework that had long governed American broadcasting. The legislation relaxed ownership caps and cross-ownership rules, allowing a small number of large corporations to acquire far more stations and weakening the older public interest obligations tied to broadcast licensing. Before the act, corporations were limited to owning 40 radio stations. Now, conglomerates like iHeartMedia and Audacy can own thousands. ## ‘The tube is flickering’ Through it all, CBS Radio News’ top-of-the-hour bulletins remained on the air, a reminder of its original public mission. Yet increasingly, the deregulated radio ecosystem failed to perform that function. Back in the 1920s, you could hear editorials arguing that the radio should not be given over to “propagandists, religious zealots and unprincipled persons to grind their own axes.” By the early 2000s, divisive shock jocks and hosts feeding on partisan anger dominated the radio dial. In a 1938 radio address on CBS’ ethical commitments, Paley argued that “broadcasting as an instrument of American democracy must forever be wholly, honestly and militantly non-partisan.” By 2016, CEO Les Moonves defended CBS’ decision to increase its coverage of President Donald Trump’s spectacularly divisive politics to juice ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Four years later, Trump awarded one of radio’s most polarizing partisan propagandists, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his second term, Trump has abused his power over the media ecosystem. In 2025, the Trump administration’s FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, with Skydance Media. But it only did so after Paramount Global settled a lawsuit Trump had filed against CBS for $16 million. Though many talented journalists and producers remain, CBS News’ recently hired editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, has worked to make the network more friendly to the Trump administration. She temporarily shelved a “60 Minutes” segment critical of Trump’s use of El Salvador’s CECOT prison and promoted a friendly town hall with conservative commentator Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated political activist Charlie Kirk. Ratings at the network have collapsed. Though Paramount Skydance is using its enormous debt load to justify taking CBS Radio News off the air, the conglomerate is trying to purchase CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, in a move that would only further the monopolization of the news media. Americans can’t say Murrow didn’t warn them. “The tube is flickering,” he said in 1958. And unless Americans reclaim their right to information not colored by profit motive and special interests, “we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.”

We have probably all at some point had to replace a peripheral not because it is faulty, but because it is no longer supported by our operating system. It’s especially bad for Windows users, but for older hardware this is increasingly a part of the Linux experience too. [George MacKerron] is here with what may prove to be a valuable technique to keep these devices active. He’s running a minimalist x86 computer in the browser, with just enough OS to support the device. In this case the hardware is a USB scanner, and the resulting software takes a WebAssembly x86 emulator and adds a bit of glue software allowing it to use WebUSB to talk to the real-world hardware. It runs a minimal Alpine Linux environment with SANE — something that’s normal for Linux users but which has never been there on a Windows machine. The result is something which needs no installation, but can be run on any machine with a powerful enough web browser. While such an approach might at first seem like overkill, we’re told it runs surprisingly quickly. In this case it’s for scanner, but we can see it could find a use with many other pieces of aged hardware. If WebAssembly is new to you, we gave it a primer a few years ago. * * * Header image: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, GFDL 1.2.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been leaving the digital keys to its own cloud storage accounts sitting out in the open, in plain text form, for some unknown amount of time, according to a report from Krebs on Security. The problem finally got fixed over the weekend, the report says. _Surely the secret information was buried in some obscure folder with an inscrutable name_ , I hear you saying. The repository was reportedly named “Private-CISA.” _But there’s no way the contents were that sensitive,_ you object. But the contents included passwords, keys, and tokens—and the passwords were plain text in a .CSV file. CISA gave a statement to Krebs, saying the following: > “Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident[…] While we hold our team members to the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness, we are working to ensure additional safeguards are implemented to prevent future occurrences.” Since the repository was created in November of last year, the duration of the vulnerability seems to have been about six months—but it could have been much shorter depending on what information as added when. To refresh your memory, CISA is a relatively new branch of the Department of Homeland Security that has had an overall rough time during Trump 2.0, even though, by signing it into law in 2018, Trump actually midwifed CISA into existence during Administration 1.0, and sorry about the tangent, but Trump’s speech to mark the occasion was an exceptional example of Trump poetry, including excerpts like this one: > _“The cyber battlespace evolves — and it is evolving, and unfortunately, faster than a lot of people want to talk about. But battlespace it is. So as the cyber battlespace evolves, this new agency will ensure that we confront the full range of threats from nation-states, cyber criminals, and other malicious actors, of which there are many.”_ Incontestably true, Mister President. Battlespace it is. Anyway, Trump was enraged by information provided by CISA leadership during the period between the 2020 election and January 6, 2021 when he was on a mission to have the election results overturned in his favor. He fired the CISA director he appointed, and since taking office again, his CISA has been a chaotic farce. Neither of the acting directors he’s appointed so far have been confirmed by the Senate, and Trump has recently sought to drastically cut CISA’s funding. Now, to add to CISA’s worries, it seems, according to one interpretation from the Krebs report on what was in the repository, an individual employee working for a government contractor called Nightwing was using Github to move material from a work device to a home device—sorta like emailing documents to yourself, but somehow even less secure than that. I’m no expert on federal Cybersecurity, but this from Krebs sounds like stuff we as citizens don’t want our government leaking: > _“One of the exposed files, titled ‘importantAWStokens,’ included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers. Another file exposed in their public GitHub repository — ‘AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv’ — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems. According to Caturegli, those system[s] included one called ‘LZ-DSO,’ which appears short for ‘Landing Zone DevSecOps,’ the agency’s secure code development environment.”_ __ Kreb’s source about the information left out in the open was Guillaume Valadon of GitGuardian, a company that scans GitHub for secrets, meaning his business is finding situations like this one. Valadon told Krebs it was “the worst leak that I’ve witnessed in my career.”

Triple monitor workstations are pretty common these days, particularly for those wishing to maximise screen space for greater productivity. [Will It Work?] has put together a sillier take on this …read more

A groundswell of outrage is brewing among wholesome “goody two-shoes,” rules-followers who watched too much educational kids’ programming growing up and/or vocally identified with Lisa Simpson. Judging from anecdotal responses (mine, mostly), this palpable wave of aggrievement stems from new cancer research out of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. The new study, which surveyed 187 young patients diagnosed with lung cancer, has found an infuriating link between the incidence of lung cancer and these patients’ statistically higher consumption of healthy foods, including dark green vegetables and legumes. Medical oncologist Jorge Nieva at USC Keck, a coauthor on the new research, noted that past studies have also documented higher rates of lung cancer in agricultural workers exposed to pesticides—evidence that would support their theory of pesticides’ causal relationship to the disease. “Our research shows that younger non-smokers who eat a higher quantity of healthy foods than the general population are more likely to develop lung cancer,” Nieva, a specialist in lung cancer, said in a statement. “These counter-intuitive findings raise important questions about an unknown environmental risk factor for lung cancer related to otherwise beneficial food,” he noted, “that needs to be addressed.” ## We got to worry about this now? Even though rates of cigarette smoking have dropped since the 1980s—and lung cancer has historically most affected much older adults—the incidence of the disease has risen in an unusual cohort: non-smokers, aged 50 and below, and particularly women, whose habits tend to be healthier than young men. Notably, this new crop of cancer cases has involved a subtype of lung cancer that was “biologically different from lung cancer caused by smoking,” according to USC Keck’s press release. Nieva and his colleagues first launched their Epidemiology of Young Lung Cancer Project to explore this unusual trend in 2021, surveying 187 lung cancer patients on their diet, smoking history, demographic details, and the specifics of their lung cancer diagnosis. Most patients had reportedly never smoked, possibly not even once or twice at house parties. But what most of these young cancer patients had done is eat a statistically higher daily amount of fruit, vegetables, and whole grains compared to the average member of the general public. Here’s what Nieva’s team found when comparing this lung cancer cohort’s data to data on the eating habits recorded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey: Young lung cancer patients averaged about 4.3 servings of dark green vegetables and legumes per day, compared to the average American’s 3.6 servings. These patients also averaged 3.9 servings of whole grains daily, compared to the average American’s 2.6 servings. One of the more blood-boiling things about these fruits and vegetables, according to Nieva, is that the non-organic varieties tend to also have higher pesticide residues than the food less health-conscious people are likely to enjoy, including dairy, meat, and many processed foods. ## Really. Can you believe this? For reasons that should be obvious, Nieva’s team does not want to overly demonize these otherwise self-evidently nutritious foods. And it bears repeating that their survey-based research has only found a troubling overlap in these pesticide exposures and incidences of lung cancer, not concrete proof of a biochemical mechanism confirming these compounds are carcinogenenic. The team does, however, believe that further research and possible shifts in health policy are warranted based on their work, which they presented at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. “This work represents a critical step toward identifying modifiable environmental factors that may contribute to lung cancer in young adults,” Nieva emphasized. “Our hope is that these insights can guide both public health recommendations and future investigation into lung cancer prevention.” You could be forgiven for assuming that President Trump’s health secretary, longtime opponent of chemical pesticides Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., might have already tried to take care of this problem. But, adding infuriating insult to injury (or maybe vice versa), President Trump signed an executive order this past February increasing production of glyphosate-based herbicides and pesticides, which pose known cancer risks, as an alleged “national security” matter. How do you like them apples?

3D cutaway of the lock with the handle engaging the cog that rotates the mechanism. (Credit: Works By Design, YouTube) Throughout the centuries the art of lock-making and lock-picking have been trapped in a constant struggle, with basic lock designs being replaced by ever more complex ones that seek to thwart any lockpicking attempts, as well as less gentle approaches. When it comes to the very common pin-and-tumbler lock design, the main issue here is that the keyway also provides direct access to the lock’s mechanism. This led [Works By Design] to brainstorm a lock design in which the keyway is hidden. The ingenious part here is that because the actual key is rotated away after insertion, there is no clear path to the pins. This did require some creative thinking to have a somewhat traditional style key as well as a way to turn the internal mechanism so that the key would be pressed against the pins. Here inspiration was drawn from the switchable magnet mechanism as seen with e.g. magnetic bases. This ensures the key and key handle can be detached and attached quite firmly. After many 3D printed prototypes, a metal version was CNCed and subjected to some early testing by a locksmith, who even with having seen the CAD model of the lock was stumped. With this initial result and some user feedback in the bag, it was time for large-scale testing with more lockpick enthusiasts, as there are many more ways to open a lock beyond pushing pins. That said, a mechanism was also added to the lock to prevent bumping attacks. The next testers were found in the Lock Pickers United community, one of whom raised the issue of an impressioning attack. With a couple of test locks on their way to said lockpicking enthusiasts it’ll be exciting to see whether this new lock design will set the standard for future locks or not.

If you’ve just lost to your brother in a fight that involved you both dressing in Ned Kelly armor made from barrels and swatting each other with absurdly large weapons, do you honorably admit defeat and step away… or do you escalate things by fabricating a comically large sword, strapping it to the arm of a construction excavator, and driving up to his doorstep to demand a rematch? Such was the dilemma facing Hong Kong-based YouTube maniac Handy Geng. Geng specializes in constructing, let’s say, idiosyncratic machines. Some of his more memorable recent projects include “Handmade Revolver Lithium Drill” (a power drill built to look like the sort of hand-cannon that’d put Marty Robbins to shame) and “Homemade Alpaca Sausage Grill Machine” (exactly what it sounds like). So there was only ever really going to be one outcome here, and happily for those of us who enjoy watching people build very silly machines, he chose… violence. The result, inspired by the sword wielded by a character in the manga _Bleach_ , is one of the most impressively deranged things we’ve seen on the internet for quite some time—and we’ve seen some pretty ridiculous things of late. (Come to think of it, Handy Geng would have fit right in with the good folk at Survival Research Laboratories.) I mean, the blade must be a good 15 feet long: © Handy Geng / YouTube It’s fitted to the excavator arm by way of a custom-fabricated sheet metal fist, which is honestly a really impressive piece of work, not least because it also includes a speaker for blasting “intimidating music.” Geng is clearly very proud of the finished product, cackling happily as he slices and dices his way through a succession of unfortunate objects—he starts, inexplicably, with a watermelon (“It sliced very well!”), before progressing to two water barrels, a couple of derelict cars, and finally his unsuspecting brother’s three-wheeled rickshaw-type vehicle. The brother in question is, understandably, nonplussed by the appearance of a 10-ton death machine on his doorstep. “Isn’t this basically cheating?” he asks—which, y’know, fair point. Geng, of course, has no time for such quibbling, and the video closes with brother and excavator locked in mortal combat. Who will prevail? Watch this space! (We should add that this is all good-natured fun, and that you should absolutely not try things like “unleashing a gigantic and potentially lethal weapon upon my unsuspecting brother” at home. No matter how much he pisses you off.)

A bubble bath doesn’t just feel good. Apparently, it’s now a scientifically tested way to give produce, medical equipment, and industrial materials a gentle, chemical-free cleaning session. For a recent study described in a Droplet paper, researchers at Cornell University devised a technique that injects tiny bubbles alongside a low-frequency sound wave in water. This combination led to an amplified, swaying motion that made vegetables 90% cleaner as opposed to bubble-only or water-only baths, according to a statement. The team tested produce like tomatoes, but it believes the chemical-free, gentle characteristics of the method could make it useful for cleaning sensitive medical equipment or semiconductors. A close-up of a tomato inside the bubbler. Credit: Sreang Hok/Cornell University “We proved that by treating the bubble as a forced harmonic oscillator, where surface tension acts as the spring and the surrounding fluid acts as the mass, we can predictably scale and tune acoustic frequencies to maximize cleaning efficiency,” Sunny Jung, the study’s senior author and an engineer at Cornell, told Gizmodo. ## Sparkly clean According to Jung, the food and agricultural industries typically use harsh chemicals or ultrasonic cleaning to remove harmful pathogens, like listeria or salmonella. But the former can leave residue, whereas the latter could “unintentionally promote microbial growth,” Jung added. But food and agriculture aren’t the only industries in need of a comparatively gentle, chemically safe way to keep things clean. For instance, the biofilms from sensitive medical devices such as implants or catheters need clearing, whereas semiconductors, while delicate, are notoriously prone to ruin from contamination. “We wanted to know if we can achieve effective bubble-mediated or sound-mediated surface cleaning using low, sub-cavitation acoustic frequencies,” Jung said, “thereby avoiding the destructive erosion and turbulence caused by traditional high-frequency ultrasonic cleaning.” ## A bubbly solution For the study, the team prepared an open-top glass tamp connected to a syringe pump to generate bubbles. Then, the researchers set up high-speed cameras to track the interactions between the bubbles and “dirt,” which in this case was a protein-based soil artificially engineered to make quantification easier. The experimental design considered bubble dynamics both for suspended bubbles and bubbles that slid down an inclined glass slide. Once the setup was complete, the team generated tiny bubbles (around 0.6 millimeters, or 0.02 inches, in diameter) and exposed them to low-frequency sound waves with an underwater speaker. Fascinatingly, this resulted in the bubbles exhibiting a “stop-and-go” motion that created “strong, localized shear forces,” Jung said. “During the deceleration phase, the bubble essentially ‘locks’ onto the contaminant edge,” he explained. “And as it accelerates, it peels the dirt away with transient bursts of high shear stress. It’s like watching a microscopic, oscillating scrubber hammering and peeling away dirt in real-time.” The findings demonstrate that “fundamental physics often holds the key to developing highly sustainable technologies,” Jung said. At its very core, the theoretical foundations of this method are simple. But the implications reach far beyond—yes, for your own bath in a Jacuzzi, too, as Jung adds (jokingly) in the statement, “One takeaway message is that when you are sitting in the jacuzzi, play the music at a low frequency.”

The entire spiel of quantum computers is that the odd principles of quantum mechanics allow them to exponentially outperform their classical counterparts. But what if the very foundation of this claim is wrong? In a recent paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tim Palmer, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, proposes a slight tweak to the underlying math of quantum theory. The framework, dubbed “Rational Quantum Mechanics,” would effectively place an upper bound on quantum hardware capacity. If validated, that means quantum capacity won’t grow infinitely. That subsequently dampens whatever excitement—or fear—we derive from their potential. For instance, they won’t be as much of a threat to RSA cryptosystems, the protective algorithm used to store most data today, despite countless claims that quantum computers can crack them. ## Ambitious intentions But all this is a big “if.” For one, quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. Sure, there is still much we don’t understand about the quantum world, but it’s an ambitious move to suggest the theory needs some tweaking. Palmer agrees but still believes that some mathematical aspects can be revised to better represent reality. What’s more, his idea could be testable with existing quantum technologies within the next five years. Specifically, Palmer focuses on a concept called the Hilbert space—the standard vector space used to calculate most quantum systems. Compared to classical physics, quantum mechanics is “more vitally dependent on the continuum of real numbers…[but] nature abhors a continuum,” Palmer explained in a statement. ## Here’s the plan In conventional quantum mechanics, the number of dimensions in a Hilbert space grows exponentially with the number of qubits. According to a column by the Quantum Insider, this “exponential scaling is critical for the fulfillment of the promise of quantum computing, enabling algorithms such as Shor’s method for factoring large numbers far faster than classical machines.” Palmer’s suggestion is as follows: For practical purposes, physical space more resembles a collection of discrete, not continuous, elements. “Rational” quantum mechanics subscribes to this view of geometrical space, and as a result the information content in the quantum state grows linearly with the number of qubits. “Above a critical number of entangled qubits, there simply isn’t enough information in the quantum state to allocate even one bit of information to each dimension of Hilbert space,” Palmer explained. “When this happens, quantum algorithms that utilize all of Hilbert space will stop having a quantum advantage over classical algorithms.” According to the paper, quantum computers will lose their advantage once the system exceeds approximately 1,000 qubits. One big selling point of quantum computers is that they’ll be able to factor extremely large numbers in ways classical computers cannot. That infinite factoring capacity is relevant to claims that quantum computers could crack the RSA algorithm. Therefore, there’s a limit to how many qubits engineers can cram into the most “powerful” quantum computer—after 1,000 qubits, the system will tap out long before reaching the required scale. In case you’re wondering, that threshold lies way below a common estimate for the number of qubits required to break RSA: 4,099. ## The burden of proof While a fascinating proposition, rational quantum mechanics remains highly speculative. Only time and scrutiny will tell how much—if at all—this proposal could change things for the better or worse. In the paper, Palmer proposes an experimental test to entangle many qubits according to a specific algorithm and check for any signs of degrading performance. Then again, quantum mechanics remains one of the most empirically tested theories. Palmer is correct that the Hilbert space is more of an “idealization,” as he says in the statement, but there also haven’t been any experiments to indicate the kind of discrete physical space described by Palmer in his proposal. Personally, I don’t want to discredit the new idea too much. It’s unwise to assume that something is “impossible” when quantum things are involved. But big claims require big evidence, and if something of that sort arises from this theory, I’d be first in line to learn more.

If you’ve ever suspected that your most “results-driven,” “performance-focused” coworkers might just be “effectuating” ineffectual and downright diversionary word vomit, a new study out of Cornell offers powerful validation for your “paradigm-shifting” insights. Based on a battery of tests on over 1,000 office-worker volunteers, a cognitive psychologist with Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences has found a strong link between a person’s positive opinion of corporate bullshit (BS) and the general weakness of their analytical skills. In one key pair of tests, for example, volunteers who were more enthusiastic about corporate BS also performed significantly worse on tests of effective workplace decision-making. Worse still, the new research implies a feedback loop whereby these dullards may help advance the careers of any given organization’s most incorrigible and insipid BS pontificators. “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” Shane Littrell, the study’s lone author and a postdoctoral psychology researcher at Cornell’s Department of Government, explained in a press statement. Littrell noted that this kind of bullshit is distinct from the types of equally dense, head-scratching verbiage that also tend to exist in a professional setting to help describe complex tasks and ideas: “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies,” he said. “It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.” ## Defining, refining and validating all the bullshit Let’s unpack how Littrell ideated on his own forward-thinking deliverables—methodologically—as published last month in the journal _Personality and Individual Differences_. His study consisted of four interrelated tests, incorporating a total of 1,018 participants, designed to construct and confirm the utility of his new Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR). First, BS statements were generated using randomly selected corporate buzzwords and tested for their ability to mimic real-world instances of convoluted but fundamentally empty corporate speech. Participants were then asked to rate each of these statements using a 5-point scale from “no business savvy at all” to (absurdly) “a great deal of business savvy.” Next, these office-worker participants were asked to rank a variety of actual corporate mission statements, document how “visionary” they believed their bosses to be, and rank a variety of statements that qualified as somewhat stodgy “general corporate speech,” but not total bullshit, as Littrell wrote in his paper. These same participants were then asked to perform survey measures of “fluid intelligence,” puzzles developed by the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR) project—an open-source resource built by researchers at Cambridge, Northwestern University, and their European partners. In brief, fans of corporate bullshit fared poorly on fluid-intelligence measures, as well as a related metric, actively open-minded thinking (basically, a measure of one’s ability to consider facts that challenge one’s current beliefs). The final two tests were identical, in an effort to doubly confirm the results. Participants whose receptivity to corporate bullshit had already been effectively categorized along Littrell’s new CBSR scale were then asked to fill out a series of decision-making situational judgment tests (SJT). The tests have seen decades of use and refinement, dating back to at least World War II, and are a common feature of job interview processes at law firms, government agencies, and other (I guess you could say) somewhat intellectually demanding careers. Littrell also sourced his four-item multiple-choice SJTs from ICAR’s approved selection of tests. “Corporate bullshit receptivity (CBSR) emerged as the only significant predictor (negative) of decision-making performance,” Littrell found. It outpaced general receptivity to corporate speech and all other control variable markers. This shocking data suggests that poor decision-makers love corporate bullshit. While insights gleaned in this study are revealing, it’s important to note that peer-reviewed literature has criticized SJTs and similar evaluations for bias against lower socioeconomic groups and for favoring women applicants over men. Littrell’s study also relies almost exclusively on self-selected survey respondents, which likewise can introduce biases and errors. ## Elevated by a mountain of bullshit According to Littrell, the cumulative weight of all these tests is the likelihood of a “concerning cycle” common to the worlds where corporate bullshit thrives. “Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it,” the cognitive psychologist said in the statement. The problem could be “creating a sort of negative feedback loop,” Littrell said. “Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.” Littrell does have sympathy for the people most taken in by this kind of mind-numbing rhetoric, however. Ultimately, he hopes the new research will encourage more calm, reasoned reflection and humility from everyone who is stuck trying to deal with these unending streams of confounding corporate communication. “Most of us, in the right situation, can get taken in by language that sounds sophisticated but isn’t,” Littrell noted. “That’s why, whether you’re an employee or a consumer, it’s worth slowing down when you run into organizational messaging of any kind—leaders’ statements, public reports, ads—and ask yourself, ‘What, exactly, is the claim? Does it actually make sense?’”

You’ve got a legitimate reason to flinch when you’re peeling off a roll of Scotch tape. That annoying screech is actually tiny cracks traveling at supersonic speeds. An international team of physicists used high-speed cameras and sensitive microphones to capture ordinary Scotch tape as it peels away from its roll, identifying a train of shock waves responsible for that screeching sound. The results are detailed in a study published in Physical Review. ## The curious case of Scotch tape Although seemingly basic, Scotch tape has been on physicists’ minds for a long time. Minnesota engineer Richard G. Drew invented the transparent waterproof tape in 1930 using a blend of oils, rubber, and resins on a cellophane backing. In 1939, scientists discovered that peeling Scotch tape in the dark produces a visible blue glow due to a build-up of electrical charge and the sudden tearing of the adhesive. The phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, is the same reason diamonds glow when they are cut. Later in 1953, a team of Russian scientists reported that peeling Scotch tape in a vacuum was energetic enough to produce X-rays. As the adhesive peels off, the separation of opposite electrical charges causes electrons to jump from the sticky tape to its backing at high speed. Then there was the sound that Scotch tape makes when it peels off its roll. Scientists began trying to unravel the mystery of the screeching sound over a decade ago. In 2010, recent study co-author Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used ultra-fast imaging to capture a sequence of transverse cracks traveling up the detached part of the tape at supersonic speeds. A follow-up study in 2024 confirmed that the screeching sound was directly linked to the transverse cracks, although the mechanism behind it remained unknown. ## Roll the tape For the new study, the team of scientists recorded the fractures using two ultra-high-speed cameras while simultaneously capturing the sound with two synchronized microphones. The results finally filled in the gap of previous studies. As the adhesive peels off, it doesn’t do so evenly but rather tears in narrow bands that travel sideways across the tape. These transverse fractures travel at speeds between 560 and 1,340 miles per hour (250 to 600 meters per second), almost twice the speed of sound. The fractures leave behind a partial vacuum between the tape and its solid backing, but because they travel so quickly, there isn’t enough time for air to fill the void immediately. The void then moves with the fractures until it reaches the end of the tape and collapses into the stationary air outside, according to the study. When the fracture tip reaches the edge of the tape, the collapsing void fires off a sound pulse. And that’s when we hear that notorious screech. Keep this in mind the next time a strip of tape makes you wince—you’re not just hearing adhesives at work, but microscopic sonic booms screeching across an ordinary roll of tape.

Today in “News That Is Somehow Not From Florida”: the story of one Ian Claughton, a drug dealer from the village of Grimethorpe in northern England. Claughton was sentenced to seven years in prison on Tuesday**.** But drug dealers are a dime a dozen. The reason Claughton has gained a level of infamy is his decision to protect his growhouses and private stash with a gauntlet of outlandish and potentially lethal homemade booby traps. As per multiple news reports, Claughton first appeared on the UK police’s radar when he ordered several imitation firearms via his wife’s eBay account. When police arrived at Claughton’s home to investigate, they found themselves confronted with “fishing wire running across the length of one of the rooms at knee height, attached to an electrical connector and a battery pack.” After tiptoeing their way past, they discovered “two primed mantraps [and] two potential firearms,” along with four large plastic bags stuffed full of weed. Next door, they found the growhouse from which those four large bags had been filled, along with more traps, while Claughton’s wife’s house contained additional booby traps. All in all, it apparently required a “three-day multi-agency operation … [including] Army bomb squad experts” to disarm all the surprises left for unwanted visitors. If it seems lazy to compare this case to _Home_ Alone, we don’t disagree, but the thing is that everyone involved in this case has made the same comparison. This includes Claughton himself, who told police he was inspired by the “booby traps from the Macaulay Culkin film _Home Alone_ “; the police, who said, “[Claughton] appears to have … [gone] to unusual and elaborate lengths to defend his home and its illicit contents from would-be intruders, drawing inspiration from Macaulay Culkin’s character in the popular Christmas film _Home Alone_ ”; and the prosecutor, who told jurors, “If you are sitting there thinking that this sounds a little like the film _Home Alone_ , then you would be correct.” It’s been a while since we’ve seen _Home Alone_ , but we’re pretty sure that young Kevin McCallister’s arsenal of comedy traps did not include mantraps, fishing wire rigged to homemade pipe bombs, or a jerry-rigged flamethrower fashioned from a fire extinguisher—all of which police discovered on Claughton’s various properties, along with the imitation guns, a crossbow and a bunch of cash sewn into a sofa. (Nor, for that matter, do we recall Kevin brandishing a three-pound bag of speed, although it’d probably explain a lot about his character.) Claughton’s suggestion that rigging his house to inflict all manner of harm on intruders was all just a bit of harmless kooky fun tallies with his explanations for everything else, which can basically be summarized as “Wait, no, it’s not what it looks like!” The speed? For weight loss and chronic fatigue. The tripwire-triggered explosive devices? They were there to scare crows. The multiple imitation firearms found on the property? For a themed birthday party! What about the homemade flamethrower? That, Claughton insisted, was to “’wow’ people on Bonfire Night.” Judging by the video that police found on Claughton’s phone, it would certainly have done so—but perhaps the most impressive moment in that video comes when Claughton uses the fire extinguisher that he’s jury-rigged as a flamethrower to extinguish the flame it has just thrown. A gadget that can set someone on fire, but can also put them back out again, just in case? Or, come to think of it, that can also restart a fire that you’ve accidentally extinguished? That’s genius! If only our protagonist had used his powers for good.

For as long as small, hidden radio transmitters have existed, people have wanted a technology to detect them. One of the more effective ways to find hidden electronics is the …read more