On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that it had found a solution for a famous unsolved problem in mathematics by using a swarm of advanced AI agents. But the occasion quickly unraveled into an explosive scandal, with mathematicians accusing the company of stealing their work.

OpenAI’s purported solution was for one of the so-called Navier-Stokes equations, which mathematically describe how fluids, ranging from wind to ocean currents, move and behave. These differential equations — equations that describe how different quantities change in relation to others — have been used for nearly two centuries with reliable results, but scientists have long wondered if there are scenarios where their predictions break down and describe something that’s physically impossible. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute listed the Navier-Stokes as one of its six Millennium Problems, with a prize of $1 million for being the first to solve each one.

Enter OpenAI, which claims it found a way to break the Navier-Stokes by unleashing 10,000 of its AI agents on the problem for 88 hours, costing millions of dollars in computing costs, according to OpenAI’s head of research Mark Chen. The long and short of some exceedingly complicated math was that the legions of AI agents identified an apparent scenario in which the equations can describe fluids accelerating to an infinite velocity — resulting a so-called “blowup” or singularity. This, as far as we know, is impossible, thus demonstrating that the equations have a breaking point.

But hours before OpenAI’s formal announcement came an explosive claim from the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who had been working on the problem for years before OpenAI got involved, and was close to publishing his own solution. 

In a lengthy public statement, Buckmaster accused OpenAI’s solution of following a suspiciously similar path to his own, and said that the AI company only poured its resources into the Navier-Stokes after recently learning about the progress Buckmaster and his colleague Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at OpenAI’s biggest rival Anthropic, had been making.

Adding to the suspicion, Buckmaster said he had been using OpenAI’s Codex tool to help check his work, insinuating that the company accessed his sessions, accidentally or intentionally, to copy it. When Buckmaster asked OpenAI about this, he didn’t get an answer, he claimed.

OpenAI’s response to Buckmaster’s allegations only added fuel to the fire. While denying that its researchers and AI agents accessed or saw the mathematician’s work before it was publicly released, OpenAI also admitted that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

That’s not all. Buckmaster also alleges that OpenAI mathematician Sébastien Bubeck pressured him to cut Alpöge as an author on his paper, which Buckmaster implies is because Alpöge worked for Anthropic. When Buckmaster refused and threatened to go public, Bubeck allegedly replied, “Why would you ruin your career?”

Bubeck has denied Buckmaster’s version of events, calling them “false and inflammatory” in a public statement.

The academic community has largely been appalled by what they’re seeing.

Terence Tao, a renowned mathematician and leading authority on differential equations, excoriated what AI was doing to the field.

“We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential,” Tao wrote on Mastodon. “The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.”

More on AI: OpenAI Denies Coverup After Rogue Swarm of Agents Reportedly Targeted a Second Site From Hugging Face

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It’s no exaggeration to say that if you own an LG smart TV, it might be spying on you.

The widely respected computer hardware experts at the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the company’s boob tubes and pricey OLEDs can scan your Wi-Fi network to search for the devices you own, secretly record audio logs of your conversations using built-in microphones, and keep tabs on what you’re watching and listening to.

It collects all this data, Gamers Nexus found, even when the TV is disconnected from the internet and appears to be off in standby mode.

To unearth these surreptitious practices, Gamers Nexus partnered up with independent security researchers and Level1Techs. Their resulting two-hour video report has since been picked up by other trusted cybersecurity voices like Malwarebytes.

By digging into the firmware and intercepting some of the data the TVs were sending, the team found that the TVs were extensively scanning local Wi-Fi networks to log what devices were on it, including phones, computers, and other smart-home devices like thermostats. It even collected the names of nearby Wi-Fi networks, creating an alarmingly detailed picture of all the devices in a user’s household.

Why might that information be relevant to LG? The TVs also use a controversial technology called automated content recognition (ACR) that routinely scans and determines what you’re watching so it can sell that data to advertisers. 

Combined together, they build an advanced and disturbingly comprehensive profile of what you watch and the devices you use, Gamers Nexus warn. All this data is sent back to LG Ad Solutions, its lucrative advertising business.

LG TVs, on top of it all, can also listen to you. Tests showed that their built-in microphones could capture clean audio of nearby conversations and generate transcripts of them, even when the TVs were in standby mode, which most TVs default to when you think you’ve turned them off, with the display powering down. The recording feature continued even when the TVs were unplugged from the internet, storing the audio files locally and uploading them the moment the internet connection was restored.

The researchers also found a vulnerability that allegedly allow a hacker to remotely execute code, though they’re keeping the details on this light so they can responsibly disclose their findings.

Many LG owners are furious about the news.

“LG hardware is just spyware,” fumed a post on the r/LGOLED subreddit. “You[r] TV is wiretapping your whole house.”

Smart TVs collecting data on you isn’t new — ACR in particular is well-documented — but the reported findings here illustrate a degree of invasiveness the public could only speculate about previously.

It’s far from the first time LG has caused a stir over purported privacy violations, either. Another Gamers Nexus investigation last month found that LG monitors were sneakily installing pop-up ads onto customers’ computers. The ensuing controversy caught Microsoft’s attention, with the company demanding LG remove the ads.

More on surveillance: The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers

The post LG TVs Caught Secretly Recording Users and Scanning Their Homes For Other Devices, Even When Disconnected From the Internet appeared first on Futurism.

One of the selling points of Tesla’s much-hyped Cybercab — its purpose-built robotaxi — is that it doesn’t need manual controls. That’s why it doesn’t even come with a steering wheel or pedals.

But an early passenger who got to ride one of the self-driving cars after they launched in Austin last week discovered that they secretly have manual controls hidden in a touchscreen — the most practical way to control a car, as everyone knows — after its software glitched out and accidentally revealed them.

The passenger, Matthew Skrzypczak, wrote on X over the weekend that when he got in his Cybercab to take it for a spin, the display, instead of showing an interface to let him start his ride, showed a “virtual joystick for manual driving.” 

“I have a feeling I wasn’t supposed to see this,” he wrote. 

In a video he uploaded, the display shows a splitscreen view of various camera angles and an area that lets you control several of the car’s functions. Crucially, there’s also a touchscreen joystick for shifting the car into gear, which says “forward” at the top and “reverse” at the bottom.

Skrzypczak was able to close the door and honk the horn successfully, but when he tries to move the car it doesn’t budge — which is probably for the best, since there were pedestrians nearby — though this may be because he was simply using the joystick wrong.

This feature is almost certainly intended for Tesla employees, and it’s unclear why a passenger like Skrzypczak, and at least one other who noted the issue, was able to access it. To be clear, manual controls are obviously necessary in case an employee or emergency workers needs to move the vehicle when it’s malfunctioning. But putting it behind a slippery touchscreen is also far less practical than an old-fashioned steering wheel and pedal, which is all being done so CEO Elon Musk can have bragging rights.

The workaround hasn’t proved amusing to regulators. Shortly after Tesla launched Cybercab rides in Austin, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an audit into how Tesla self-certified that the vehicles were safe for the road despite their lack of conventional manual controls.

More on Tesla: Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway

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Muse, the popular English rock band that’s been selling out arenas for decades, is no longer @muse on Instagram, where it boasts nearly three million followers.

That’s because on Tuesday, Meta, which owns Instagram, announced a new “personal AI agent” also called Muse — which is now taking the rock band’s original handle, in an act of what appears to be corporate eminent domain for a long-established username.

Indeed, an archived version of the band’s website shows that just last month, it held the @muse handle on Instagram. Now it’s going by @museband, because Mark Zuckerberg apparently couldn’t settle for his new tool being stuck with the handle @museAI. A similar swap happened on X. Meta’s newfangled AI got the @muse handle, while Muse had to settle for even clunkier @musetheband.

The changes were immediately noticed by the band’s fans, who largely didn’t sound impressed by Meta’s naming scheme. One viral Reddit post claimed Muse were “forced” to change its social media handles, fomenting further outrage.

“That’s genuinely the worst,” fumed one bewildered fan.

“Mark Zuckerberg is such a loser,” another said.

Others, in classic music fan fashion, accused the English rockers of being “sellouts,” seemingly under the impression that Muse took a Big Tech payday in exchange for giving up its social media handles.

It’s not clear what happened to facilitate the username swap. Given that this happened on both Instagram and X, it seems possible that Meta came to some sort of agreement with Muse to take its handle, which the band has been sitting on for over a decade now.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the handover was consensual, and whether the band was paid for the handle.

The actual band hasn’t commented on the situation either, adding to the confusion.

Of course, it wouldn’t be unprecedented for a social media site to jack someone’s username without compensation or recourse. When Elon Musk rebranded Twitter into X in 2023, he took the username @X from someone who had been holding onto it since 2007. The only thing the company offered in return was some merch and a chance to visit X’s headquarters.

The recent swap didn’t go as smoothly as Zuckerberg may have hoped. As New York Times tech journalist Mike Isaac noticed, Zuckerberg apparently copied his Muse announcement from his platform Threads, where his AI agent already had the @muse handle, pasted it onto X, and accidentally tagged the rock band. This appeared to be because of a bug on X’s end, and it also caused people trying to tag the new AI to autofill the rock band’s new handle. Gaffes ensued.

“I’ve been using @museband for the last few months and can honestly say it’s the best AI agent I’ve tried,” lauded a senior director at Meta, in a post that’s since been corrected.

More on Meta: Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down

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There are many ways to honor someone who’s recently passed. Flowers. Murals. Candlelight vigils.

And in today’s age, unfortunately: AI slop.

Weeks after Dolly Parton died, the legendary country singer’s sister, Stella Parton, has begged fans to stop posting “fake AI garbage” as supposed tribute, saying it’s making it hard to move on.

“Sadly, because of the way our lives have been lived in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers,” Stella wrote in a statement posted to social media. “There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it’s been challenging to absorb and or ignore.”

While thanking fans who have showed “genuine support,” Stella rounded out her message by calling for “more compassion” while celebrating Dolly Parton’s life and moving on from her death.

“It’s not about the most clever comments, fake AI garbage, or snarky tweets,” Stella wrote.

Dolly Parton walked this Earth for eighty years, and was a celebrity for nearly sixty of them. Are the people posting uncanny AI images of her really unable to find a real one from all the times she’s been photographed?

None other than US president Donald Trump has been guilty of peddling this “AI garbage.” After Dolly Parton’s death, he generated and posted a characteristically egocentric image of himself with Parton at his side, arm in arm — an insult to how the real Parton tried to stay above partisan politics, while also advocating for gay and trans rights, stances that Trump is staunchly opposed to.

On YouTube, meanwhile, a “heartfelt fan-made tribute by Miley Cyrus” to Dolly Parton is only one of many claiming to be eulogies for the singer from famous pop stars that have gone viral, racking up over 1.5 million views. The word “heartfelt,” though, is being used pretty loosely, since the whole song, as are the others, is AI-generated, as spotted by the BBC.

Parton herself was ambivalent about AI, musing it could be “great” for science and medicine, but fearing it could replace human expression. Were she still around, in other words, she almost certainly wouldn’t approve of the AI tributes.

“I think all this stuff can be great, used in the right way,” she said of the tech in a 2023 interview with Hollywood Reporter. “But not to replace voices and writings and not to replace a human being that belongs to God.”

More on AI: Someone AI-Generated a Completely Fake Eminem Song and It’s Going Viral on YouTube

The post Dolly Parton’s Sister Begs Public to Stop Posting “Fake AI Garbage” in the Wake of the Beloved Singer’s Death appeared first on Futurism.

Is being the world’s richest man not enough for Elon Musk?

He must also have us all believe that he’s a genius, sui generis, with a mind so mighty that it’s wasted on supposedly intellectual pastimes like “chess.”

He’s so convinced that the board game is beneath him, in fact, that he’s begun arguing about it with… Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI. 

The inane saga kicked off yesterday on X — where else — when Musk responded to a post about all the possible moves you can make in chess. To a mind as omniscient as Musk’s, the number — a mere 40 orders of magnitude more than all the atoms in the observable universe — wasn’t sufficiently large enough to be interesting.

“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”

Here, Chess.com entered the fray by responding with a succinct rejoinder: “skill issue.”

The bait worked.

“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, essentially repeating himself. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”

Indeed, humans who aren’t intelligent as Musk, in their feeble-mindedness and fleeting time on this planet, may enjoy activities such as games and sports, blissfully unaware that a hypothetical machine may hypothetically make mince meat of those activities one day. And yet, as Musk admitted, he’s choosing to waste his time “arguing with some random intern.” (“I’m a full-time employee,” the Chess.com account clarified.)

Musk also went on about how an artificial superintelligence — something we don’t even know is possible to build — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.” Then he cited some conversations he had with his personal AI chatbot, Grok, as if that put matters to bed.

There’s certainly an interesting intellectual debate to be had about “solving” chess — something that actual mathematicians have explored and tried to tackle — but Musk’s arguments seem to be driven solely by contempt. The board game is a long-held bugbear of his.

Back in 2022, in a now infamous tweet, Musk wrote about how he stopped playing chess as a child because he “found it to be too simple to be useful in real life,” before extolling how Polytopia, a mobile game, was the superior activity of choice for the cognoscenti.

He had something similar to say amid his battle with Chess.com. Responding to another account, Musk wrote that he “felt diminishing returns from chess in terms of transfer learning to understand reality.” Next time your opponent destroys you at chess, you might try deploying that excuse, too.

More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns

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In an affront to creeps everywhere, Meta has started remotely bricking the smart glasses of wearers who try to secretly record other people.

Earlier this month, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company said it would crack down on customers who modified the spectacles to disable or cover up their lights that indicate when they’re recording, amid incredible public backlash against how the glasses are being used to film people without their consent — girls and women especially — and harass them.

Now, it looks like more than a few weirdos have gotten the ax. On Tuesday, Meta said it’s bricked the photo and video-taking capabilities on thousands of its smart glasses users, as part of a software update that was reported by Semafor.

Meta didn’t provide hard numbers, but its vice president of wearables Alex Himel told Semafor that it estimated that less than one tenth of a percent of all glasses sold have been tampered with. Seven million of the glasses were sold in 2025, making that fraction of a percentage translate to up to, but probably less than, 7,000 individual units.

More than a sign of Meta caring about people’s privacy, it goes to show that the abuse of its “pervert glasses” wasn’t down to just a few bad apples. A few thousand doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s worth remembering that this crackdown only applies to customers who physically tampered with their glasses to disable the recording light. There’s no doubt that many people using the glasses to creepily record people have made no effort to modify their devices or hide that they’re recording.

Instagram, which is owned by Meta, recently began suspending some influencers who filmed themselves using the glasses as they aggressively hit on girls and women, often by making sexually explicit and provocative comments. The social media platform’s head Adam Mosseri vowed to crackdown on the harassment in “every way we can.”

Still, these efforts are a drop in the bucket, and with Meta reportedly planning to stuff the glasses with facial recognition tech, members of the public who aren’t convinced that Meta has their best interests in mind have taken matters into their own hands. Many establishments are outright banning smart glasses, including popular nightclubs. Some feel strongly enough about the glass that they’re confronting people who wear them in public.

Himel, Meta’s VP of wearables, admitted that it’s fighting an uphill battle.

“It’s been a little bit of a cat and mouse game,” Himel told Semafor, adding that “I don’t think we’ll ever be done… There’s always new ways to get around the safeguards that are in place. So we’re going to keep monitoring and evolving the measures that we have.”

More on smart glasses: Meta Hit With Sweeping New Claims That Its AI Glasses Violated the Consent of “Millions” of Bystanders in Searing Lawsuit

The post Pervs Distraught as Meta Bricks Their Smart Glasses Remotely appeared first on Futurism.

The surveillance state costs money, people!

Well, tell that to president Trump. On Thursday, he slapped a 100 percent tariff — he sure loves round numbers and levying imports — on larger foreign-made drones.

Trump claimed that this “bolsters national security.” But, ironically, it could be undermining domestic security — at least according to surveillance-happy police departments who’ve gotten used to overlooking their subjects from above, according to a roundup of commentary from Ars Technica.

Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Mlakar, chief of the Lake County Drone Unit outside Cleveland, called the tariffs financially onerous and lamented that it would prevent many communities from buying them, adding that his unit uses them to hunt crime suspects at night and search for lost children.

“Most of this, in our humble opinion, is lobbying by US manufacturers to eliminate foreign competition,” he said. “This is not national security. It’s protectionism.”

The tariff is explicitly designed to target popular Chinese drones, while making exceptions or imposing much lighter tariffs on drones made from allies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the EU.  In particular, these steep duties will apply to drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is weighing reclassifying some drone technologies like lidar as “military grade,” Ars noted, which would restrict who can access these drones even further.

Drones have a lot of other practical uses beyond law enforcement, obviously, including monitoring wild fires and assisting rescue operations. Amid heightened backlash against Flock, though, they’ve come to be seen as another surveillance apparatus.

But weaning the US off Chinese drone tech is supposed to be good for national security, according to the Trump administration. One small problem: a single Chinese company, DJI, makes more than 70 percent of the world’s commercial drones, according to the NYT. Good luck replacing all those.

Plenty of other cops are bellyaching about the tariffs, too, extolling how irreplaceable that awesome Chinese made drones have become to their operation.

Ars spotted a Texas police officer named Jason Lee, for instance, who complained to the FCC that “there is currently no economically viable domestic replacement” for DJI drones. “More than 80 percent of state and local law-enforcement drone programs surveyed in 2024 used DJI aircraft,” he added.

“The fact that a domestic product exists does not necessarily mean it is a viable substitute,” Lee said. “A replacement must be operationally comparable, economically obtainable, supported by an adequate supply chain, and accepted by pilots who must rely on it during real-world incidents.”

More on drones: Amazon Delivery Drone Drops Package Directly Into Customer’s Swimming Pool

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A group of software engineers who say they were fired by their bosses because of AI are giving their former employers a taste of their own medicine.

With the powers of spite and friendship, they’ve built “OpenExecutive,” an AI system designed to do the work of a CEO, if not the entire c-suite, TechRadar reports.

“Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn’t scale with it,” a demo video begins, as a stock music track called “Corporate Music Uplifting” plays in the background.

The team describes their AI system, perhaps with their tongues in their cheeks, as a “senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level knowledge.” Whether you believe that or not probably reflects how much stock you put in Harvard MBAs.

In any case, OpenExecutive is built using several of Anthropic’s Claude AI models, the default being Claude Sonnet 4.6, with Claude Opus 4.7 being reserved for “deep reasoning” tasks. 

It recruits eight AI agents that each act as a different top level executive, including the chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, and the head of human resources. Together, they form a single unified “executive persona” — in effect, the CEO. 

The developers say that the AI can learn from company documents and remembers its recommendations and decisions — which is more than what you can say for some CEOs who have a conveniently selective memory. If you’re skeptical, you can poke around in the system yourself, since it’s open-source.

Is OpenExecutive actually going to outmode the CEO? Probably not, since, whatever your opinions on them, there’s a lot to being the head of a company that a machine can’t emulate, like taking accountability (okay, bad example). But that’s the thing: you could argue the same thing for their employees, with the notable difference that the rank and file are the ones doing almost all the labor.

And so, going by CEOs’ own specious logic, now that a tool exists that can do their job more efficiently than they can— coming with none of inconveniences that human workers bring, like going on strike or asking for a raise — then they should be okay with being replaced.

Of course, some AI-obsessed bigwigs may see tools like this a boon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a CEO AI agent to help him do his job. He’s also building a photorealistic AI clone of himself so he can be virtually omnipresent throughout the company. Or maybe that’s the lie being fed to him by his underlings building the AI CEOs, so that he’ll be usurped by thinking machines once they become powerful enough.

More on AI: Mark Zuckerberg Had a Secret Plan to Replace Meta Staff With AI Agents, and It Backfired Spectacularly

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A rising Gen Z indie musician known as Betty Hammerschlag has turned out to be a middle-aged man, in an elaborate — and dare we say a bit creepy — deception that fooled everyone from fans to music critics to the artist’s own collaborators.

Music journalist Shawn Reynaldo blew open the charade in an exposé published Wednesday in his newsletter First Floor. By all appearances, Hammerschlag presented herself as a young woman still in art school, using pictures of women in her social media posts and promotional materials, and writing in a pointedly whimsical, all-lowercase and flowery emoji-laden style intended to evoke Gen Z. 

Hammerschlag’s music has been featured and praised in notable publications like The Guardian and The Quietus as recently as last week, and has received quite a bit of airtime on the renowned British music streamer NTS Radio. That includes songs from her latest album which, we kid you not, is titled “fake girl.”

But Reynaldo dug around and discovered that Hammerschlag didn’t actually exist, and was in reality the creation of Tilman Hornig, a 45-year-old (or possibly older) musician from Germany.

Hornig’s stunt extended beyond creating Hammerschlag’s artistic persona. According to Reynaldo, he went to extraordinary lengths to keep up the charade, such as messaging people online while still masquerading as a young girl, including other young female and queer artists. 

Even some of the musicians Hornig/Hammerschlag collaborated with were under the impression that they were working with a young woman, including tibslc, an ambient artist from Leipzig. They had several private exchanges; in one of them Hammerschlag told her she couldn’t perform at a show tibslc was organizing because “I have to study for several exams and hardly have the energy for music and live shows .”

“When I eventually learned about the fact that Tilman Hornig, a 47(?) year old guy, was running it the whole time, it was really quite a shock, like one of those moments when your reality is shaking to the core because someone tricked you,” tibslc told First Floor. “I was emotionally unwell and affected by it a lot. I felt like I was played, especially because of the private chat.”

Tim Dalzell, the founder of the label blush which published some of Hammschlag’s music, also felt betrayed, saying in a recent Instagram story that he had “no idea who was behind the project when I released it.”

“The whole time we worked together he messaged me in the style and dialect of a young girl, creating elaborate lies to cover his tracks,” Dalzell said. “At one point he asked for royalties to be paid earlier so he could buy paints for art school.”

“I was under the impression the artist wanted privacy and respected that,” he added. “When I found out the deal (earlier this year) — I expressed my concerns to him about how he was running the project. I didn’t like how he responded and so I decided to stop selling the music.”

Suspiciously, Hammerschlag would evade requests for a live interview, insisting they be conducted over email. On several occasions when Hammerschlag was booked for live shows, a young woman would appear claiming to be her, but organizers strongly suspected she was an impersonator. In other words, it appeared that Hornig was sending women to pretend to be Hammerschlag.

It also appears that Hornig used AI to keep up the act. Reynalldo found that some of the promotional text for one of Hammschlag’s albums were flagged as AI by several AI detectors. It’s unclear, though, if the female sounding vocals in some of Hammerschlag’s songs are the work of AI as well.

In his exposé, Reynaldo didn’t leave us wondering what his personal thoughts on Hornig’s behavior was.

“It’s creepy, especially when so many of the people that Hornig is interacting with — including people that he has directly sought out online — are unwitting participants in an art project they didn’t ask to join,” he wrote.

More on art: Spotify and YouTube Profiles of Legendary Jazz Musicians Hijacked by AI Waifu Spam

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After health officials in Pennsylvania found that two young children died from measles, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is refusing to count their deaths as being caused by the deadly virus.

“This week’s measles outbreaks update will not include the two measles-associated deaths reported by the Pennsylvania Department of Health on Aug. 25,” the CDC posted on its website, in a high unusual announcement.

It’s a precedent shattering action. The New York Times called it an “extraordinary move for the CDC,” breaking with the agency’s long-standing procedure of accepting data shared by states.

The challenge by the CDC comes amid a political showdown between health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who oversees the CDC, and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro.

At a news conference last week, Shapiro announced the deaths of the two children from measles and condemned Kennedy for spreading vaccine misinformation, saying that “there’s real life consequences for spreading misinformation.”

RFK Jr responded on social media by accusing Shapiro of taking “giddy delight” in their deaths and even suggested he may even “fabricated” them. The CDC’s own announcement that it would not be counting the deaths as measles related came just days after the public spat.

According to the latest reporting, one of the deceased was a newborn with a ruptured spleen, and the other was a child of unknown age. Both were unvaccinated and tested positive for measles, the Pennsylvania Health Department said, per the NYT. They came from Lancaster County, the center of a measles outbreak where 242 people have been infected with the disease so far, the most in the state.

Conflicting information over the children’s deaths gave rise to the heated controversy.

Though the state’s health department said both deaths were due to measles, Lancaster County coroner Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican, said that his office’s pathologist determined that the newborn — which was born infected with virus which it inherited from its mother — died of a ruptured spleen, not measles.

But some top medical experts have pushed back against Diamontoni. Measles can enlarge a baby’s spleen and make them prone to rupturing during birth,  wrote Paul Offit, a renowned vaccine and pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a widely reported essay on Substack. Once the spleen ruptures, it’s difficult to determine if it was enlarged after the fact.

Offit called on Diamontoni to provide more details surrounding the newborn’s death — and that, if it wasn’t measles, to offer an alternative explanation for the baby’s ruptured spleen. Since ruptured spleens in newborns is exceedingly rare and can be caused only by a handful of disorders or infections, he said, if one of those conditions wasn’t found in the child, then the “only obvious cause left would be measles.”

None of this explains why the CDC also refused to count the other child’s death, few details on whom have been released ot the public.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, defended its decision in a statement.

“The two measles-associated deaths announced by Pennsylvania have not been confirmed based on the information currently available to CDC,” it said, per the NYT.  “The information currently posted reflects the best available information and our commitment to transparency and telling the American people the truth — a foundational principle of the Trump administration.”

More on viruses: Authorities Alarmed When Person With Measles Spends Entire Day Frolicking Around Universal Studios

The post The CDC Is Now Denying That Specific Children Died From Measles, in a Scandal Potentially Beyond Anything in Its History appeared first on Futurism.

Dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up around 85 percent of all mass in the universe, forms an essential part of the standard cosmological model, providing the gravitational glue that holds together entire galaxies. What it actually is, though — and even if it truly exists — remains one of the great mysteries of science.

Now, a bizarre event that occurred nearly a mile underground at the world’s largest dark matter detector in South Dakota, the LZ detector, could be the first direct evidence of the substance. Or it could be something else entirely. Either way, it has scientists mystified and excited.

In a new paper published Tuesday and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists running the LZ Dark Matter Experiment say that their detector recorded a stunning subatomic interaction that doesn’t fit anything else ever documented in physics.

Again, it’s not necessarily a dark matter discovery — but it’s so unusual that it warranted sharing.

“How do you even make sense of one event?” Tom Shutt, a particle astrophysicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and cofounder of the LZ project, told Science magazine. “We just decided we should publish and think really, really, really hard about what that event could be.”

Dark matter is a sort of ghost haunting the cosmos. We can’t see it because it doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light, or otherwise interact with any ordinary matter — except through gravity. 

We see the fingerprints of its gravitational pull all around the universe, in fact. Galaxies aren’t massive enough to hold themselves together with their own gravity, so without the invisible presence of something with incredible mass, the very realms that define the universe, and which we call home, would fly apart.

There are countless candidates for what dark matter is, but the prevailing theory is that it’s made up of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. As their feeble acronym suggests, WIMPs are thought to be a hundred times as massive as a proton, but have such a weak nuclear force that they don’t interact with ordinary particles. 

Because of their mass, they move much slower than ordinary particles, too, allowing them to clump together and form giant “halos” that provide the gravitational pull for galaxies to form in. There is no single agreed-upon definition of a WIMP, though, and it’s possible that WIMPs could be a whole family of particles, rather than just one.

If these theories are correct, then every once in a while, errant WIMPs can bump into the nucleus of an unsuspecting atom and create a trace amount of energy.

This is what the LZ detector is built to find. It’s essentially a tank filled with seven tons of liquid xenon, placed 1,480 meters underground in a former gold mine. At such a depth, the preponderance of xenon is shielded from the space radiation that our planet is routinely bombarded with (though there is a still a background level of other interactions that scientists can’t control, but can account for.) Anything that causes a a big enough stir in this controlled, quiet environment would be significant.

After spending years poring over the data the detector has collected so far, the physicists found a striking interaction that took place in 2023. Something, we don’t know what, smashed into a xenon particle, and produced a flash of light. If it was dark matter, it produced more energy than traditional WIMP models predict.

The scientists say that the detection has about a one in 400 chance of being a fluke. Scientific discoveries, though, need to meet at least a five sigma threshold, meaning that there should be only as roughly one in 3.5 million that it’s a fluke.

Still, physicists are absolutely thrilled. Even if this event isn’t a smoking gun by itself, there are other, larger dark matter detectors coming online, such as China’s PandaX experiment and Italy’s XENONnT, that should be able to hunt for the same high energy type of event.

“We can perform this study independently with a blind analysis to validate or invalidate LZ’s claim,” Elena Aprile, a physicist at Columbia University and spokesperson for the XENON experiment, told Science.

More on dark matter: Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes

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On Thursday, three major chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok — all went down without warning.

The simultaneous outage of three flagship from AI systems from three different providers was bizarre. But, in an exceedingly peculiar information gap, we still don’t know why models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI respectively suffered outages at the same time, Wired reports. Whatever linked the disruptions, for now, remains unclear.

Only OpenAI has responded to journalists’ requests for comment.

“A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms,” a spokesperson told multiple outlets. “As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored.”

Not all of each providers’ models were affected. Anthropic, for instance, said that only Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 were down, while Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI reported widespread outages.

One possible explanation is that there was an issue with their shared provider, Cloudflare. But when The Register raised this to the company, it insisted its services were doing fine.

“Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time,” a spokesperson told the publication. “Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect.”

The publication noted that Microsoft’s Azure, another major cloud provider, didn’t appear to be suffering any technical difficulties either.

Another possible culprit could be SpaceXAI. The company formerly known as xAI before being rolled into Musk’s rocket company SpaceX boasts a huge glut of computing power with its massive Colossus data centers near Memphis, and selling this to its direct rivals has become a multibillion dollar stream of revenue. Anthropic is one of those customers; the two companies announced a “compute partnership” in May.

The same afternoon that the major AI models went down, SpaceXAI issued a statement on social media that made passing reference to being partially responsible for the widely experienced outage.

“We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning,” SpaceXAI wrote on Thursday. “We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.”

Technical difficulties at its data centers would explain why SpaceXAI’s own chatbot, Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude went down together. But that leaves out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Is it merely a coincidence that it suffered a “routing error” at the same time as its competitors on a different platform? We still can’t say.

More on AI: As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding

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A new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month concluded, after surveying hundreds of studies on AI in medicine, that not only is AI already an indispensable tool that supports doctors, but that it’s in many ways surpassing them, and will soon be able to care patients on its own better than a human physician could.

“In cognitive medical functions, AI-alone medical care is likely to be better than physician-only or physician-AI hybrid care,” the authors, the widely renowned bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, flatly declare.

But many physicians aren’t having it, Wired reports. One of the paper’s chief critics is the CEO of the American Medical Association himself, John Whyte. According to Whyte, some of the studies it surveyed are simulations, instead of blinded experiments, the gold standard of medical studies. And some contradict the author’s conclusions, such as a Nature article from February that found that most patients had a hard time talking to AI chatbots to get the expertise they needed, he argued.

“The AMA does see the potential in these tools, but they have to be utilized in the context of a care plan that’s governed by a physician,” Whyte told Wired.

The controversial study cites the rapid progress of LLMs since being publicly introduced in November 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. In spite of the tech’s relatively young age, the paper claims it already surpasses doctors at five fundamental tasks, which include: eliciting relevant medical information from patients, diagnosing the patient and conducting diagnostic testing, and managing chronic diseases. 

This gap between physicians and AI will widen because AI is “rapidly improving,” it predicts, while human doctors have their own capabilities diminished, or are “deskilled,” by becoming dependent on the very same AI models.

“We’re making a prediction for four years from now,” Emanuel told Wired. “You don’t think that [AI is] going to be way more advanced than a doctor?”

Taking this to its logical endpoint, the paper makes another bold claim: human physicians are better off not getting in AI’s way, finding that human-AI hybrids “actually degrade performance compared with AI alone.”

“Thus, as AI improves, having humans in the loop will likely worsen patient care,” it adds.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. AI-deskilling is already happening, with senior doctors warning of how med students are already heavily relying on AI tools. To be fair to the med students, though, so are actual doctors: internal data from OpenEvidence, an AI chatbot specifically designed for clinicians, suggests that around two thirds of physicians in the US are using the tool.

New ground in AI in medical applications, meanwhile, is being broken seemingly every day. Last week, a team of neurosurgeons in the UK announced that they’d used an AI tool that guided them as they performed surgery to remove a tumor from a patient’s brain.

Robert Wachter, head of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (and a friend of Emanuel), cautions that AI and humans together are better for now, but that in the future, there “will be times when humans will muck up the performance,” he told Wired.

Still, he emphasized that human doctors will always be irreplaceable. He called the idea of AI automating doctor’s jobs an example of the “doorman fallacy”: the fear that doormen would be made obsolete with the introduction of automatic doors. Doormen stuck around, accepting packages while also providing an air of hospitality that a robotic door can’t. The idea that highly trained doctors who spend years of their life honing their craft will become a bougie novelty like the doorman, somehow, is meant to be comforting.

In any case, it’s common to hear highfalutin claims to come from advocates of AI technology, and nearly as common to see holes poked in them. Advocates of AI in education declared victory when a much-hyped study concluded that ChatGPT can have a “large positive impact on improving learning performance,” for instance, but the study was later retracted by the publisher Springer Nature after it found major discrepancies in its analysis.

More on AI: Alarming Study Suggests That Using AI Is Turning Humans More Robotic

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Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in?

Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the state with the most data center under construction.

Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found that job postings in the state had dramatically fallen for AI-exposed fields since the release of ChatGPT, disproportionately affecting college graduates. By the first quarter of 2025, postings plummeted by 8 percent compared to jobs that were deemed less exposed to AI, it also found.

“These dynamics suggest that recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate rose to unusually high levels during this period of rapid [generative AI] adoption, are where the effects of GenAI on employment and earnings are likely to first appear,” the researchers wrote in the analysis, as quoted by the FT.

Until recently, Texas and its governor Greg Abbott has embraced the AI data center buildout with open arms. A recent Reuters analysis found that requests from data centers and other large power users to connect to the state’s power grid soared from about 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts currently, making it one of the fastest growing hubs for AI and cloud computing facilities.

But as public backlash against data centers has continued to mount — and with midterm elections looming — Abbott changed his tune and became an AI industry critic, announcing a freeze on new data center connections last month. Along with the myriad concerns around the data center’s environmental impact, many fear that the technology that the data centers support will destroy jobs, while the facilities themselves provide little for local economies. 

The latest research, its authors say, demonstrates the reality of how AI is shaping labor demand in the very area that should be directly benefiting from it.

It’s not the only research suggesting AI is wiping out entry level jobs — an outcome that industry figures like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned would happen.

A recent analysis by researchers at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab similarly found a marked decline in employment among young knowledge-workers, while the headcount of those working in fields not considered vulnerable to AI automation, including industrial and retail work, rose.

“For 22 to 25 year olds, employment is falling in the most AI-exposed jobs and rising in the least exposed jobs,” one of the report authors said.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty around how many jobs are truly being replaced by AI, and whether some of the chaos can be explained as AI being used as an excuse to fire workers for other reasons. But it’s brought a demoralizing effect on the workforce. In a Gallup poll conducted over the final three months of 2025, 72 percent of respondents said it was a “bad time” to find a good job. 

More on AI: Employees Absolutely Loath AI in the Workplace, Survey Finds

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New York City just instituted a sweeping ban on schools using AI in the classroom through the start of high school, along with other restrictions on the technology.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the one-year moratorium on Wednesday, calling it the “most comprehensive of its kind anywhere in the country.”

“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary,” Mamdani said during a press conference. “We do not see it that way. I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school, with the exception, of course, of research sponsored by the very corporations that stand to profit.”

Under the new AI policy, the school system will “fully discontinue or disable more” than 38 AI features that were part of previously allowed programs that don’t meet the new standards, Mamdani said. Ailish Brady, the deputy mayor’s senior education adviser, said that includes an AI reading assistant called Amira, Politico noted.

Young students, starting with kids in 2-K (the city’s free education and daycare program for two-year-olds), won’t use AI as part of class until they enter high school. Even then, its use will be closely controlled. High schools will take limited “AI literacy” classes to prepare students for what Mamdani called an “AI-saturated world.” Exceptions will be made for helping students with learning disabilities or are still learning English. The restrictions also don’t apply to certain approved instructional programs like e-books and coding software.

AI isn’t the only tech the policy grapples with. It also imposes strict limits on screen time, recommending no more than 30 minutes of using devices per day for students in third through fifth grade, and 45 minutes for middle schoolers.

Beyond the broader debate raging on AI’s role in education — with colleges across the country embroiled in AI cheating scandals, as well as a bevy of research suggesting AI impairs critical thinking and other cognitive abilities —  the ban comes after months of New York City facing heated political debate on using the tech in the classroom. In April, controversy erupted over plans to open an AI-focused high school in Manhattan, with a crowd of parents, teachers, and high schoolers protesting outside City Hall. While the plans were withdrawn soon afterwards, it amplified calls on Mamdani to institute an AI moratorium.

While deeming the moratorium a meaningful step in the right direction, some hoped Mamdani would’ve gone further. Kelly Clancy, the founder of Parents for AI Caution and a member of the Coalition for an AI Moratorium, wanted a temporary moratorium on AI in all grades. Some of the original calls for a moratorium demanded that it last at least two years.

“The fact that this policy exists at all is due to the enormous work of parents across the city who spoke out against the overreach of AI into their kids’ classroom,” Clancy told the New York Times.

The aggressive action will be closely watched by other states and school systems. New York City boasts the largest school system in the nation, with the ban affecting more than 600,000 students. It will be a large, and indeed, “comprehensive” experiment in how detoxing young minds on AI will affect their learning — though it pales in size to the experiment that tech companies are conducting by unleashing the tech on students in the first place.

“Children need their teachers and human connection in order to learn and in order to grow,” Mamdani said. “And they need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with their teachers, and wrestle with tough problems on their own.”

More on education: Scientists Gave 12-Year-Olds Access to an AI Tutor and You Probably Already Know What They Did With It

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A Tesla running one of its self-driving modes was rear-ended after stopping in the middle of a Arizona highway, Electrek reports, with the driver found dead at the scene. Grimly, it’s not the first accident of its kind.

The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.

Electrek, however, managed to match the collision to a redacted crash report that Tesla provided in its filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These were shared under a Standing General Order that requires automakers to report crashes involving a driver-assist system that’s considered to have an SAE Level 2 of automation or higher, meaning that it can partially drive itself under the right conditions and with constant supervision.

The report states that an automated driving system — either Autopilot or Full Self-Driving — was “verified engaged” during the accident. The vehicle’s “pre-crash movement” is listed as “stopped – 0 mph,” indicating it stopped in the middle of the road. None of these details were shared publicly at the time of the accident.

Electrek says that this is the second time that a Tesla Model 3 with a driver-assist system engaged apparently stopped in a highway before a crash that killed its driver; it also happened in Florida, just weeks before the second one.

What happened is unclear. Tesla’s self-driving software has a well-known “phantom braking” problem that causes the cars to brake unexpectedly, but this is typically to slow the vehicle down, not stop it completely. Going from highway speeds to a grinding halt would be an extraordinary, if not unprecedented, example. It’s also possible that the driver fell asleep behind the wheel or experienced some kind of medical episode that rendered them unable to respond.

The upshot is that we’re more or less being kept in the dark. These details, and whether the car was running the now-obsolete Autopilot or its more advanced successor FSD is impossible to know, because Tesla censored that section of the crash report. It has long redacted crucial information in these reports reports under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” a practice that is legal but rarely used to the extent that Tesla does. It has gotten in trouble with regulators for how it reports crashes, though. Last year, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Tesla for repeatedly failing to report crashes in time.

More on Tesla: Teslas Are Still Driving Into Oncoming Freight Trains

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A traveling petting zoo has become the center of a mini health crisis in North Carolina. 

After recently hosting events for elderly people and schoolchildren, several of its adorable baby goats tested positive for rabies, The New York Times reported, in a situation that the zoo’s owner is calling a “nightmare.”

Now, state officials are scrambling to get the word out, stressing how deadly the virus can be without immediate treatment.

“Rabies is almost always fatal in mammals, including people, unless medications to prevent infections are given before symptoms develop,” the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement, per the NYT.

State health officials suspect that the goats were exposed to rabies by a skunk that infiltrated their pen in late July. The owner of the Harmony-based zoo, Misty Love, said that she kept the goats in an isolated pen because they were too young to receive a rabies vaccine.

“It’s devastating,” Love told local broadcaster WSOC-TV. In a statement posted to social media, the company explained that the skunk was discovered in the pen, but was able to bite the goats before it was “disposed of.”

Lab tests confirmed that three of the goats had the rabies virus on August 28, the state health department said. A fourth goat is also suspected to have rabies, but wasn’t tested. All of the goats were “euthanized to prevent further spread,” the petting zoo said.

Parents who received warning were aghast.

“At first, I thought it was a joke,” one mother whose son saw the zoo’s goats, told ABC News, as quoted by WSOC-TV. “Then reality set in as to how serious this situation was, and I panicked.”

Confirmed cases of humans being infected by rabies are exceedingly rare in the US, with fewer than ten deaths from the virus each year, according to the CDC — though the dangers it poses are so formidable that over a million people seek treatment for a possible rabies exposure annually. Most of the time, humans are exposed to the virus from bats, raccoons, skunks, and foxes.

Any rabies scare needs to be acted on immediately. It can take weeks for symptoms to develop, but once they do, it’s often too late. 

The health department called on anyone who visited the traveling zoo between July 28 and August 27 to contact local health officials to see if they need treatment. During that period, the zoo visited an assisted-living center, a back-to-school event, and six private events.

Add to it all that under president Trump, the CDC paused helping states offer rabies testing earlier this year, and it’s unclear if it’s resumed that program since.

More on diseases: Authorities Alarmed When Person With Measles Spends Entire Day Frolicking Around Universal Studios

The post “Nightmare”: Children’s Petting Zoo Horrified to Realize Its Adorable Animals Are Carrying Rabies appeared first on Futurism.

Former Republican congressman and ironic meme icon George Santos was just banned from Kalshi — for life.

It’s the first lifetime ban that the prediction market has ever handed out, the New York Times reports, which is pretty incredible considering all the inside trading that’s suspected to happen on the platform. There was pretty much nothing “suspected” about Santos’ offenses, though, which were about as blatant as they come.

According to a notice Kalshi posted this week, Santos placed multiple bets on markets related to his attendance of president Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February this year. 

Needless to say, “as a person capable of influencing the outcome of the underlying event, Santos was prohibited from trading in this market,” the notice explained.

He then began making public statements about attending the event to influence the price of the contracts. Some of those statements were “false or misleading.”

Just days before the address, for example, Santos posted a video on X saying, “I’m going to be there for the State of Union in the gallery, guys,” before writing a follow-up telling his followers he was stuck in an airport, watching it on TV.

“FML,” he added.

Santos’s unsubtle market-moving utterances were successful at manipulating the price of the “Yes or No” contracts he purchased, Kalshi’s Compliance Department found. All told, he made nearly $18,000 in profit from the scheme.

Santos won’t see the inside of a cell, but he is getting a heavy slap on the wrist. Kalshi fined him $71,356, and it also flagged the bets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The federal agency ordered Santos to return all the profits he made as part of a settlement both parties reached in July, and slapped him with its own $17,500 fine for good measure. 

Anyone familiar with Santos’s antics won’t be surprised by this latest one. The 38-year-old is a notorious fabulist and con artist. He was expelled from Congress in 2023 after an ethics investigation, following the discovery by news outlets that he’d embezzled campaign funds and had lied heavily in his biography. In 2024, he plead guilty to wire fraud and identity theft. His seven year sentence was commuted by — who else — Trump last year.

Ironically, Santos used to be a paid ambassador for Polymarket, Kalshi’s biggest rival. Polymarket dropped him like a hot potato, though, once the CFTC began poking into his suspicious Kalshi bets.

The ban and hefty fines haven’t caused him to lose his spunk, though.

“Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform,” Santos wrote on X. “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”

More on prediction markets: Insider Trading on Polymarket Is Revealing Military Secrets

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In a lake in northern British Columbia, an island suddenly appeared, almost out of thin air, thickly covered in fully-grown trees. When a boater posted footage of the new island on social media, incredulous officials thought the video was AI-generated, according to the New York Times.

But it was no hoax. Satellite imagery of Williston Lake, an artificial reservoir and Canada’s largest body of freshwater, confirmed that the nearly two-and-a-half acre island was real.

“This is a first for us, for this reservoir,” Bob Gammer, a spokesman for BC Hydro, the government-owned utility that operates the reservoir, told the NYT.

Speaking to The Guardian, he added: “In the days of AI, you really needed another form of verification or evidence like a corroborating eyewitness account. And soon, we got that.”

'According to estimates, it's bigger than the size of a Canadian football field and nearly the size of two NFL fields' https://t.co/zhFI83WOeu pic.twitter.com/AxulAa7qtW

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 30, 2026

The island was floating roughly 60 miles west of the reservoir’s WAC Bennett dam. BC Hydro believes the island is a chunk of the reservoir that broke off from a sheltered piece of shoreline due to water levels that are the highest in 14 years. Over the course of several years, logs and woody debris could have accumulated in this area, Gammer explained, forming a sort of raft on which trees can grow — and embark on naval expeditions, apparently.

“We could easily see that a mass of woody debris with live vegetation on top of it rises up, floats and breaks free from the shoreline,” Gammer told the NYT. “Then the winds in the reservoir carry it out into open water. So that’s our best guess at how this all came to be.”

Just as experts began coming to terms with the new island, it showed it had another trick up its sleeve. Sometime around August 5, the island disappeared, according to Scientific American. Then on August 15, fresh satellite imagery showed that it had reappeared again — some 20 miles northwest of where it was first spotted, hugging the shore.

Did the island swink, swim, or — we find ourselves asking because of its incredible powers — turn invisible? It’s likely that it temporarily drifted to shore, blending in with the shoreline before drifting out to the water again.

More on the environment: Freak Landslide Completely Swallows Entire Mountain Village

The post An Entire Forested Island Appeared and Disappeared So Inexplicably That Officials Thought It Was AI appeared first on Futurism.