Canned sardines are hard to find in American supermarkets because of a fad diet. 

Corner of Fifth reports that the diet consists of tinned fish and water, black coffee, or plain tea. It spread on TikTok and YouTube and through keto communities, and Dr. — Read the rest

The post A viral diet and warm oceans emptied the canned sardine shelf appeared first on Boing Boing.

Phyllis Zorn, a reporter at the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion, Kansas to settle her federal lawsuit over the 2023 police raid on the newspaper, reports the Kansas Reflector. Lawyers for Zorn and the city filed the motion to dismiss on August 11, three years to the day after the raid. — Read the rest

The post A Kansas reporter raided by police settles for $850,000 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler says the FDA's new guide on fresh-cut produce admits it knows of no chemical wash that stops Cyclospora from spreading between pieces of cut produce.

Cyclospora is a parasite hazard in berries, fresh basil, fresh cilantro, and fresh salad mixes. — Read the rest

The post The FDA says you can't wash Cyclospora from your lettuce appeared first on Boing Boing.

The EU AI Act AI outputs to be "detectable as artificially generated" and "embedded within the content in a manner that is difficult for it to be separated from the content." 

But Sean Goedecke, a software engineer, explains why the European Union's new watermark rule for AI text won't work.  — Read the rest

The post You can remove an AI watermark from text by asking a second AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

The US Treasury sold $25 billion of 30-year bonds at a 5.22 percent yield, the most it has paid to borrow that far out since 2001, reports the Financial Times.

That's up from 5.06 percent at July's sale, and 4.91 percent just before Trump's second term began. — Read the rest

The post The government now spends more on interest than on the military appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a new StarTalk episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad interviewed Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who wrote the 2023 New Yorker piece, "There Is No AI."

Lanier thinks calling AI a "black box" where nobody knows what's inside these models is really just a way to avoid the truth: the box is full of people and their data. — Read the rest

The post The only thing inside an AI is people appeared first on Boing Boing.

North Korea's Red Star Linux OS ships with a modified Firefox called Naenara ("Our country") and lets users browse Kwangmyong, the country's isolated national intranet. It also comes with an office suite, media players, and video games. It sells for $15. — Read the rest

The post North Korea's operating system watermarks every file you touch appeared first on Boing Boing.

The British Transport Police announced it would start using facial recognition cameras in a London Underground station. The Victoria Underground station was the first to be equipped with cameras.

The cameras scan the faces of everyone who walks past them and compare each face to a watchlist of people the police or the courts want to find. — Read the rest

The post Police are now scanning faces at a London Underground station appeared first on Boing Boing.

Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table. 

Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. — Read the rest

The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist in London who writes about heavy metal and about Jewish communities. His ninth book, The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: How Metal Teaches Us To Live, came out in June 2026. He types on a Wobkey Rainy 75 mechanical keyboard, which he replaced the stock switches on with Gateron Oil Kings. — Read the rest

The post A mechanical keyboard, plain yoghurt, and a 7am start appeared first on Boing Boing.

Jonathan Weber has written a history of San Francisco's rise as a global technology capital and the crises that came with it. City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco opens in the early 1990s, when San Francisco had not recovered from the AIDS epidemic and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. — Read the rest

The post How San Francisco became a tech capital, then nearly lost itself appeared first on Boing Boing.

A programmer named Fogus came across a GitHub argument about chess engine development and wrote about why hobby coding communities are hostile toward large language models. Hobbyists say is working code isn't the goal. They like to build operating systems, programming languages, and console emulators, or try to fit a working program into as few characters as possible. — Read the rest

The post Why hobby coders treat AI-written code as missing the point appeared first on Boing Boing.

Dima Kogan hiked in the San Gabriel Mountains, and a friend wondered which point in the range sits farthest from any road or trail. Kogan went home and computed it, and his notes on the poles of inaccessibility above Los Angeles put the answer at 4,343 meters, or about 2.7 miles, from the nearest one. — Read the rest

The post The farthest you can get from a road in the San Gabriels is 2.7 miles appeared first on Boing Boing.

The US Bureau of Reclamation is resorting to moving water between reservoirs so that Glen Canyon Dam can continue to generate electricity. Darren Orf reported in Popular Mechanics on August 10, 2026, that a long drought has pulled Lake Powell and Lake Mead so low that Hoover Dam's output this year will fall by 40 percent from its full-capacity output. — Read the rest

The post Hoover Dam is set to lose 40% of its maximum power this year appeared first on Boing Boing.

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's growth depends on two companies that lose tens of billions of dollars a year. In a newsletter post, "Where's Your Ed At" reported on analyst estimates from Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank.

Wells Fargo estimates Microsoft's AI revenue at $34.43 billion, with about 70% coming from OpenAI. — Read the rest

The post Microsoft, Google and Amazon now depend on two money-losing AI firms appeared first on Boing Boing.

A federal rule that targets cartel money laundering has driven customers away from the money-transfer counters at small shops on the US-Mexico border. The Guardian's Lourdes Medrano reported on August 11, 2026 that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, ordered businesses in 30 border zip codes in Texas and California to file a report on every cash transaction above $200. — Read the rest

The post Border corner stores have filed 700,000 reports on cash transfers appeared first on Boing Boing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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