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

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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

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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

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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

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

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

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On February 10, 1355, two Oxford students named Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield complained about the wine at the Swindlestock Tavern. The vintner, John de Croydon, dismissed the complaint. One of the students threw his drink in de Croydon's face, and by one account beat him with the quart pot. — Read the rest

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In 1860s San Francisco, the city routinely poisoned or trapped stray dogs. The city exempted Bummer and Lazarus by name. Bummer was a black-and-white Newfoundland who lived on the sidewalk outside Frederick Martin's saloon on Montgomery Street, and he was an exceptional rat-killer. — Read the rest

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A metal that has never been recorded before turned up in a grain of sand from Hiroshima Bay. Writing in Science Advances, Luca Bindi, Hans-Rudolf Wenk, Mario Wannier, and Teresa Salvatici report the discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast, sealed inside a glassy bead that formed during the airburst of 6 August 1945. — Read the rest

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A medevac flight that should have taken half an hour ended on the side of a mountain in New Mexico, killing all four aboard. Jeff Wise reports for Wired that a military GPS jamming exercise 100 miles away is part of the reason. — Read the rest

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The surface of the Sun has been photographed in more detail than ever before, and it turns out to be covered in whirlpools. Victoria Gill reports for BBC News on the most detailed images of the Sun yet, taken by the Inouye Solar Telescope on a high peak in Hawaii and published in the journal Nature. — Read the rest

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NASA created a Martian Dust Limit Working Group this year to figure out how much Mars dust a person can safely breathe, and Leonard David reports for Space.com on the dust hazard and how future astronauts might deal with it. — Read the rest

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Osaka ranked seventh and Tokyo tenth in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2026 Global Liveability Index. Japan was the only Asian country with two cities in the top 10. BBC Travel asked residents and planners why, and their answers came down to four rules. — Read the rest

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Meta is paying for posts that appear to break its own rules, according to an ABC (Australia) New Verify investigation by Lucy Carter. The report cites four accounts that have received payment from Facebook's invitation-only Content Monetization program, including a white nationalist with neo-Nazi links and an anti-vaccine campaigner. — Read the rest

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In January 1933, five Bronx acquaintances — the press later called them "the Murder Trust" — took out life insurance policies on Michael Malloy, a homeless Irish former firefighter, and set out to collect the $3,500 (about $87,000 today) by getting him to drink himself to death. — Read the rest

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Camp Bonifas, the United Nations Command post 400 meters south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, has a golf course. One hole, par 3, with an AstroTurf green — and minefields on three sides. Sports Illustrated called it "the most dangerous hole in golf," and there are reports that at least one shot detonated a land mine. — Read the rest

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A Circle K shopper posted a screenshot of an AI self-checkout screen that listed a few flavors of Gatorade at a few dollars apiece, then a line item of $8.5 billion for the American Red Cross, according to the New York Post. — Read the rest

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In 2020 the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts picked up a one-star review that read "worst aquarium ever." It is a museum about the history of whaling, and it keeps no live whales. Six years later, the museum has printed the line on hoodies, T-shirts, crew necks, and bags, according to Boston 25 News. — Read the rest

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Tesla told federal regulators that the headlights on 19,900 Model 3 and Model Y cars were up to nearly twice as bright as the law allows, then argued it shouldn't have to fix them because the defect was "inconsequential" to safety. — Read the rest

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The Glad av Gillberga is a Swedish replica of a warship pulled from Denmark's Roskilde fjord and dated to around 1040. In nearly 30 years it has crossed the North Sea and sailed to Canada. Universal borrowed it for six months for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, where it played one of the escort ships in Odysseus's flotilla — the Greek boats are thought to have resembled Nordic longships. — Read the rest

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