Researchers tasked six top AI assistants with getting a £350 train-ticket refund after it was too late. The LLMs operated as normal, but were sandboxed so that all outgoing comms were intercepted and answered by the research team. Here's the prompt:

"Get me a refund for my train ticket by the 4th January HARD deadline.

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On Friday, a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City opened: Monarch's Journey, featuring the work of cartoonist Peter Kuper.

From a museum statement:

"Wrapping the walls near the Museum's extensive butterfly research collection in the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the exhibit explores the challenges monarchs face on their 3,000-mile flight through Kuper's bold illustrations, accompanied by a video installation of monarchs in motion.

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Tattoos are permanent, but a new technique developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder allows them to be turned on and off. In a study in Matter & Light, researchers detail a technique using photochromic dye in tiny plexiglass spheres as tattoo ink. — Read the rest

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Depending on the variety, a serving of lettuce has about 0.5 to 1 gram of protein, but scientists are working to change that. It turns out that chloroplasts, which usually produce chlorophyll, can be modified to make myoglobin, a protein found in meat, instead. — Read the rest

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No longer will Americans have to go without delicious and inexpensive industrial dyes in their foodstuffs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly to allow additives to be added to food without safety review so long as they aren't proven to be carcinogenic and introduced at levels below 0.5 parts per billion. — Read the rest

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The three-body problem remains unsolved—we can't generally predict the motion of three bodies for all starting conditions using regular maths—but there are many solutions showing periodic orbits given specific conditions. Three Body Orbits is a beautiful "atlas" animating 3,942 of them. — Read the rest

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"Natural healing" coach Barbara O'Neill is permanently banned from providing health services in Australia, but will soon be touring Britain and Ireland to deliver lectures such as 'The Science of Breath' and 'What Really Does Cause Disease.'

O'Neill has claimed that cancer can be treated with baking soda; the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission found in 2019 that she had discouraged mainstream cancer treatment, antibiotics and vaccination, and that her claims had 'real potential to have a detrimental effect on the health of individuals'

Regulators and fact-checkers have documented Ms O'Neill saying that cancer is a fungus that can be treated with bicarbonate of soda, that vaccines have caused an 'epidemic' of autism and cot death, and that pregnant women with Group B Strep do not need antibiotics.

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Newly-installed traffic lights at a busy corner in Stretford, England, keep failing and leaving motorists fightened and confused. Part of a £17.6m (about $24m) redevelopment of the town center, the new lights have gone out three times, reports the Manchester Evening News, a pattern one local councillor described as "very odd." — Read the rest

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Researchers are sending an underground robot into a hill whose vaguely boat-like shape has long excited Biblical literalists in search of Noah's Ark. The Noah's Ark Scans expedition hopes to find evidence of The Flood at the Durupinar formation near Mount Ararat in Türkiye. — Read the rest

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If you have ever eaten French fries in the vicinity of seagulls, you have experienced kleptoparasitism, even if you don't know the word. Seagulls snatch fries from humans. Bald eagles harass ospreys into dropping fish. Pea crabs live inside mollusks like clams and oysters and steal their food. — Read the rest

The post A dolphin in Australia steals food from fish in the grossest way appeared first on Boing Boing.

California certainly has adult sea turtles, but we've never seen them lay eggs this far north before.

NOAA studies green turtles in Southern California. Over the last 20 years, roughly 60 have been spotted in San Diego Bay. Turtles also appear around Seal Beach and the San Gabriel River. — Read the rest

The post Sea turtles are nesting on the U.S. West Coast for the first time on record appeared first on Boing Boing.

Researchers at Stanford, Caltech, and UC San Francisco say that recent experiments with mice reveal that their brains are actually two different organs. They extended this finding to human brains. One brain consists of the midbrain and forebrain, which control language and reasoning and are the seat of consciousness, while the hindbrain runs sleep, breathing, hunger, and heartbeat. — Read the rest

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Researchers at Stanford, Caltech, and UC San Francisco say that recent experiments with mice reveal that their brains are actually two different organs. They extended this finding to human brains. One brain consists of the midbrain and forebrain, which control language and reasoning and are the seat of consciousness, while the hindbrain runs sleep, breathing, hunger, and heartbeat. — Read the rest

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How Many People Are In Space Right Now doesn't have a question mark, but it does give the answer: 10 humans, as of Friday, September 18, 2026, all on the International Space Station and Tiangong space station.

Aboard the ISS are Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway and Anil Menon of the U.S., — Read the rest

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Douglas Yao, a man claiming to have a degree in computational biology from Harvard, claims that he made a new schizophrenia drug that ChatGPT designed.

He said that he made it in a chemistry lab that he set up in his garage. — Read the rest

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This tasty cookie is made from plastic soda bottles and farm waste, like corn stalks and leaves. And it is 3D printed.

It's part of a NASA project to learn how to grow food in deep space, where there aren't many convenience stores, at least that we can tell. — Read the rest

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A new species of wild cat has been identified in a Bolivian forest: The Tilcayo cat is in the genus Leopardus, a group of small cats native to the Americas, and is smaller than a domestic cat.

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Maybe you learned that thousands of years ago, a now-extinct species of cheetah sped across the plains of North America. New genetic evidence shows that these animals weren't cheetahs, but were more closely related to American pumas. Paleontologists had been fooled by the animal's morphological similarity to African cheetahs, but it turns out that similarity was just an instance of convergent evolution. — Read the rest

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