syndication – Page 3

A cup of coffee for depression treatment has better results than microdosing

depression, health, LSD, Mental Health, microdosing, syndication / DJ Henderson / January 31, 2026

The effect of microdosing have been overstated, at least when it comes to depression.

About a decade ago, many media outlets—including WIRED—zeroed in on a weird trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science, and Silicon Valley biohacking: microdosing, or the practice of taking a small amount of a psychedelic drug seeking not full-blown hallucinatory revels but gentler, more stable effects. Typically using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, the archetypal microdoser sought less melting walls and open-eye kaleidoscopic visuals than boosts in mood and energy, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind.

Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated—at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression.

A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression.

The study has not yet been published. But MindBio’s CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was “in front of the curve in microdosing research.” He called it “the most vigorous placebo controlled trial ever performed in microdosing.” It found that patients dosed with a small amount of LSD (ranging from 4 to 20μg, or micrograms, well below the threshold of a mind-blowing hallucinogenic dose) showed observable upticks in feelings of well-being, but worse MADRS scores, compared to patients given a placebo in the form of a caffeine pill. (Because patients in psychedelic trials typically expect some kind of mind-altering effect, studies are often blinded using so-called “active placebos,” like caffeine or methylphenidate, which have their own observable psychoactive properties.)

This means, essentially, that a medium-strength cup of coffee may prove more beneficial in treating major depressive disorder than a tiny dose of acid. Good news for habitual caffeine users, perhaps, but less so for researchers (and biopharma startups) counting on the efficacy of psychedelic microdosing.

“It’s probably a nail in the coffin of using microdosing to treat clinical depression,” Hanka says. “It probably improves the way depressed people feel—just not enough to be clinically significant or statistically meaningful.”

However despairing, these results conform with the suspicions of some more skeptical researchers, who have long believed that the benefits of microdosing are less the result of a teeny-tiny psychedelic catalyst, and more attributable to the so-called “placebo effect.”

In 2020, Jay A. Olson, then a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, conducted an experiment. He gave 33 participants a placebo, telling them it was actually a dose of a psilocybin-like drug. They were led to believe there was no placebo group. Other researchers who were in on the bit acted out the effects of the drug, in a room treated with trippy lighting and other visual stimulants, in an attempt to curate the “optimized expectation” of a psychedelic experience.

The resulting paper, titled “Tripping on Nothing,” found that a majority of participants had reported feeling the effects of the drug—despite there being no real drug whatsoever. “The main conclusion we had is that the placebo effect can be stronger than expected in psychedelic studies,” Olson, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, tells WIRED. “Placebo effects were stronger than what you would get from microdosing.”

More than a stick in the eye to the microdosing faithful, Olson maintains that the study’s key findings had more to do with the actual role, and power, of the placebo effect. “The public has a lot of misconceptions about the placebo effect,” he says. “There’s this assumption that placebo effects are extremely weak, or that they’re not real.”

Olson goes on to say that placebo effects in psychedelic trials can be further juiced by the hype around the drugs themselves. Patients may enter a trial expecting a certain experience, and their mind is able to conjure a version of that experience, in turn. In Olson’s study, it wasn’t a matter of microdosing effects not being real, but that those effects may be caused by environment, or patient expectation. As he puts it: “It can be true at the same time that microdosing can have positive effects on people, and that those effects are perhaps almost entirely placebo.”

This itself raises a sticky question about MindBio’s study. How could a placebo group, who thinks they’re taking LSD, perform better than an active control group, members of which both think they’re taking LSD and are actually taking it? The answer comes from the design of the study itself.

Using what’s called a “double-dummy” design, MindBio’s researchers informed patients that they’d either be receiving LSD, a caffeine pill, or a dose of methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin or Concerta. (No patients were actually administered the methylphenidate.) This means that patient expectation was lowered, as they could ascribe any perceived effects to either the LSD or either of the active placebos. Patients taking LSD microdoses may well have believed they were merely on a stimulant. All patients followed an adaptation of the “Fadiman protocol,” a popular microdosing programme that sees patients taking a small dose of the given drug once every three days.

Jim Fadiman, the veteran psychedelic researcher after whom the protocol is named, rejects MindBio’s conclusions, and trial design, out of hand. Because, Fadiman believes, patients were given the active caffeine placebo, their reported benefits may well be attributable not to a pure placebo effect, but to the actual psychoactive properties of that drug.

“Double-dummy is a remarkably apt term,” Fadiman, 86, sneers. “What I know is that if you take enough caffeine, you will not be depressed!”

Fadiman points to MindBio’s earlier, Phase 2A study, recently published in the journal Neuropharmacology, which drew markedly different conclusions. It was a non-blinded, so-called “open label” study, meaning patients knew definitely that they were being microdosed with LSD. This study found that MADRS scores decreased by 59.5 percent, with effects lasting as long as six months. It also found improvements in stress, rumination, anxiety, and patient quality of life. Fadiman says that this reportage is more consistent with his own research on microdosing. “Their prior study did wonderfully with LSD,” Fadiman says. “I have collected literally hundreds of real world reports over the years that validate those findings.”

MindBio’s Hanka stands by the science. “We are bewildered at the significant difference between the open label Phase 2A trial results and the Phase 2B trial results,” he says. “But that is the nature of good science—a properly controlled trial will get a proper result. Our Phase 2B trial was of the highest standard, a triple-blind, double-dummy, active placebo controlled trial. I haven’t seen another psychedelic trial that has gone to these lengths to control and blind a trial.”

Despite these findings, some microdosing true believers don’t seem especially shaken. In 2017, writer Ayelet Waldman (best known as the author of the Mommy-Track Mysteries series of novels that follow the adventures of stay-at-home-mom-cum-sleuth Juliet Applebaum) published A Really Good Day, a diaristic account of her own self-experiments using microdosing to treat an intractable mood disorder. She tells WIRED she’s not especially bothered by the implication that her positive shifts in mood may have merely been placebo. “In my book I took very seriously the possibility that what I was experiencing was the mother of all placebo effects,” Waldman says. “I wrote about this a number of times in various chapters and decided in the end it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I felt better.”

Perhaps that’s true enough. If the effects are measurable, and repeatable, then it should hardly matter if they’re attributable to a sub-perceptual dose of lysergic acid, or to the (perhaps equally profound) mysteries of the placebo. Still, one cannot help but wonder why anyone looking to use LSD to aid severe clinical depression would bother assuming the legal risk of procuring and consuming a drug still classified under Schedule I by the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Certainly, for his part, Justin Hanka seems content to pivot MindBio’s research into a new field. His next project is “Booze A.I.”: a smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence to scan the human voice for relevant biomarkers that determine blood alcohol concentration. He’s leaving microdosing in the rearview. “I put millions of dollars into this myself,” he says. “Had I known six years ago what I know about psychedelics, I probably wouldn’t have ventured into the microdosing field.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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Web portal leaves kids’ chats with AI toy open to anyone with Gmail account

AI, Bondu, eavesdropping, Security, syndication, Toys / Shannon Garcia / January 30, 2026

Just about anyone with a Gmail account could access Bondu chat transcripts.

Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker’s neighbor mentioned to him that she’d preordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She’d chosen the toys, called Bondus, because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machine-learning-enabled imaginary friend. But she knew Thacker, a security researcher, had done work on AI risks for kids, and she was curious about his thoughts.

So Thacker looked into it. With just a few minutes of work, he and a web security researcher friend named Joel Margolis made a startling discovery: Bondu’s web-based portal, intended to allow parents to check on their children’s conversations and for Bondu’s staff to monitor the products’ use and performance, also let anyone with a Gmail account access transcripts of virtually every conversation Bondu’s child users have ever had with the toy.

Without carrying out any actual hacking, simply by logging in with an arbitrary Google account, the two researchers immediately found themselves looking at children’s private conversations, the pet names kids had given their Bondu, the likes and dislikes of the toys’ toddler owners, their favorite snacks and dance moves.

In total, Margolis and Thacker discovered that the data Bondu left unprotected—accessible to anyone who logged in to the company’s public-facing web console with their Google username—included children’s names, birth dates, family member names, “objectives” for the child chosen by a parent, and most disturbingly, detailed summaries and transcripts of every previous chat between the child and their Bondu, a toy practically designed to elicit intimate one-on-one conversation. Bondu confirmed in conversations with the researchers that more than 50,000 chat transcripts were accessible through the exposed web portal, essentially all conversations the toys had engaged in other than those that had been manually deleted by parents or staff.

“It felt pretty intrusive and really weird to know these things,” Thacker says of the children’s private chats and documented preferences that he saw. “Being able to see all these conversations was a massive violation of children’s privacy.”

When Thacker and Margolis alerted Bondu to its glaring data exposure, they say, the company acted to take down the console in a matter of minutes before relaunching the portal the next day with proper authentication measures. When WIRED reached out to the company, Bondu CEO Fateen Anam Rafid wrote in a statement that security fixes for the problem “were completed within hours, followed by a broader security review and the implementation of additional preventative measures for all users.” He added that Bondu “found no evidence of access beyond the researchers involved.” (The researchers note that they didn’t download or keep any copies of the sensitive data they accessed via Bondu’s console, other than a few screenshots and a screen-recording video shared with WIRED to confirm their findings.)

“We take user privacy seriously and are committed to protecting user data,” Anam Rafid added in his statement. “We have communicated with all active users about our security protocols and continue to strengthen our systems with new protections,” as well as hiring a security firm to validate its investigation and monitor its systems in the future.

While Bondu’s near-total lack of security around the children’s data that it stored may be fixed, the researchers argue that what they saw represents a larger warning about the dangers of AI-enabled chat toys for kids. Their glimpse of Bondu’s backend showed how detailed the information is that it stored on children, keeping histories of every chat to better inform the toy’s next conversation with its owner. (Bondu thankfully didn’t store audio of those conversations, auto-deleting them after a short time and keeping only written transcripts.)

Even now that the data is secured, Margolis and Thacker argue that it raises questions about how many people inside companies that make AI toys have access to the data they collect, how their access is monitored, and how well their credentials are protected. “There are cascading privacy implications from this,” says Margolis. ”All it takes is one employee to have a bad password, and then we’re back to the same place we started, where it’s all exposed to the public internet.”

Margolis adds that this sort of sensitive information about a child’s thoughts and feelings could be used for horrific forms of child abuse or manipulation. “To be blunt, this is a kidnapper’s dream,” he says. “We’re talking about information that lets someone lure a child into a really dangerous situation, and it was essentially accessible to anybody.”

Margolis and Thacker point out that, beyond its accidental data exposure, Bondu also—based on what they saw inside its admin console—appears to use Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT5, and as a result may share information about kids’ conversations with those companies. Bondu’s Anam Rafid responded to that point in an email, stating that the company does use “third-party enterprise AI services to generate responses and run certain safety checks, which involves securely transmitting relevant conversation content for processing.” But he adds that the company takes precautions to “minimize what’s sent, use contractual and technical controls, and operate under enterprise configurations where providers state prompts/outputs aren’t used to train their models.”

The two researchers also warn that part of the risk of AI toy companies may be that they’re more likely to use AI in the coding of their products, tools, and web infrastructure. They say they suspect that the unsecured Bondu console they discovered was itself “vibe-coded”—created with generative AI programming tools that often lead to security flaws. Bondu didn’t respond to WIRED’s question about whether the console was programmed with AI tools.

Warnings about the risks of AI toys for kids have grown in recent months but have largely focused on the threat that a toy’s conversations will raise inappropriate topics or even lead them to dangerous behavior or self-harm. NBC News, for instance, reported in December that AI toys its reporters chatted with offered detailed explanations of sexual terms, tips about how to sharpen knives, and even seemed to echo Chinese government propaganda, stating for example that Taiwan is a part of China.

Bondu, by contrast, appears to have at least attempted to build safeguards into the AI chatbot it gives children access to. The company even offers a $500 bounty for reports of “an inappropriate response” from the toy. “We’ve had this program for over a year, and no one has been able to make it say anything inappropriate,” a line on the company’s website reads.

Yet at the same time, Thacker and Margolis found that Bondu was simultaneously leaving all of its users’ sensitive data entirely exposed. “This is a perfect conflation of safety with security,” says Thacker. “Does ‘AI safety’ even matter when all the data is exposed?”

Thacker says that prior to looking into Bondu’s security, he’d considered giving AI-enabled toys to his own kids, just as his neighbor had. Seeing Bondu’s data exposure firsthand changed his mind.

“Do I really want this in my house? No, I don’t,” he says. “It’s kind of just a privacy nightmare.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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EU launches formal investigation of xAI over Grok’s sexualized deepfakes

AI, Policy, syndication, xAI Grok / DJ Henderson / January 26, 2026

The European probe comes after UK media regulator Ofcom opened a formal investigation into Grok, while Malaysia and Indonesia have banned the chatbot altogether.

Following the backlash, xAI restricted the use of Grok to paying subscribers and said it has “implemented technological measures” to limit Grok from generating certain sexualized images.

Musk has also said “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

An EU official said that “with the harm that is exposed to individuals that are subject to these images, we have not been convinced so far by what mitigating measures the platform has taken to have that under control.”

The company, which acquired Musk’s social media site X last year, has designed its AI products to have fewer content “guardrails” than competitors such as OpenAI and Google. Musk called its Grok model “maximally truth-seeking.”

The commission fined X €120 million in December last year for breaching its regulations for transparency, providing insufficient access to data and the deceptive design of its blue ticks for verified accounts.

The fine was criticized by Musk and the US government, with the Trump administration claiming the EU was unfairly targeting American groups and infringing freedom of speech principles championed by the Maga movement.

X did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

EU launches formal investigation of xAI over Grok’s sexualized deepfakes Read More »

Tiny falcons are helping keep the food supply safe on cherry farms

birds, cherries, Ecology, food supply, kestrels, raptors, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / January 23, 2026

Campylobacter is a common cause of food poisoning and is on the rise in Michigan and around the world. It spreads to humans through food products made from, or that come into contact with, infected animals, primarily chickens and other birds. So far, only one outbreak of campylobacteriosis has been definitively linked to feces from wild birds. Still, because it causes milder symptoms than some other types of bacteria, the Centers for Disease Control considers campylobacter a significantly underreported cause of food-borne illness that may be more common than current data indicates.

“Trying to get more birds of prey would be beneficial to farmers,” Smith said. “If you have one predator, versus a bunch of prey, you have fewer birds overall. If you have a lot fewer birds, even if the ones that are there are carrying bacteria, then you can reduce the transmission risk.”

The study’s findings that kestrels significantly reduce physical damage and food safety risks on Michigan cherry farms demonstrate that managing crops and meeting conservation goals—by bolstering local kestrel populations and eliminating the need to clear wildlife habitat around agricultural areas—can be done in tandem, study authors say. They recommend farmers facing pest-management issues consider building kestrel boxes, which cost about $100 per box and require minimal maintenance.

Whether nesting boxes in a given region will be successfully inhabited by kestrels depends on whether there is an abundance of the birds there. In Michigan’s cherry-growing region, kestrels are so abundant that 80 percent to 100 percent of boxes become home for kestrels rather than other nesting birds, said Catherine Lindell, avian ecologist at Michigan State University and senior author of the study.

“It seems like this is just a great tool for farmers,” Lindell said, suggesting interested farmers “put up a couple boxes and see what happens.”

K.R. Callaway is a reporter and editor specializing in science, health, history, and policy stories. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at New York University, where she is part of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Sky & Telescope, Fast Company and Audubon Magazine, among others.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Zillow removed climate risk scores. This climate expert is restoring them.

California, climate change, insurance risk, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / January 21, 2026

In this way, climate risk models today are better suited to characterize the “ broad environment of risk,” said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “ The more detailed you get to be either in space or in time, the less precise your projections are.”

Matouka’s California climate risk plugin is designed for communicating what he said is the “standing potential risks in the area,” not specific property risk.

While climate risk models often differ in their results, achieving increased accuracy moving forward will be dependent on transparency, said Jesse Gourevitch, an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund. California is unique, since so much publicly available, state data is open to the public. Reproducing Matouka’s plugin for other states will likely be more difficult.

Private data companies present a specific challenge. They make money from their models and are reluctant to share their methods. “A lot of these private-sector models tend not to be very transparent and it can be difficult to understand what types of data or methodologies that they’re using,” said Gourevitch.

Matouka’s plugin includes publicly available data from the state of California and federal agencies, whose extensive methods are readily available online. Overall, experts tend to agree on the utility of both private and public data sources for climate risk data, even with needed improvements.

“People who are making decisions that involve risk benefit from exposure to as many credible estimates as possible, and exposure to independent credible estimates adds a lot of extra value,” Field said.

As for Matouka, his plugin is still undergoing beta testing. He said he welcomes feedback as he develops the tool and evaluates its readiness for widespread use. The beta version is available here.

Claire Barber is a fellow at Inside Climate News and masters in journalism student at Stanford University. She is an environmental and outdoor journalist, reporting primarily in the American Southwest and West. Her writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Outside, Powder Magazine, Field & Stream, Trails Magazine, and more. She loves to get lost in the woods looking for a hot spring, backpacking to secluded campsites, and banana slugs.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Zillow removed climate risk scores. This climate expert is restoring them. Read More »

Ocean damage nearly doubles the cost of climate change

climate change, ocean ecology, Science, syndication / Mike M. / January 18, 2026

Using greenhouse gas emission predictions, the report estimates the annual damages to traditional markets alone will be $1.66 trillion by 2100.

The study, which began in 2021, brought together scientists from multiple disciplines: Fisheries experts, coral reef researchers, biologists and climate economists. They assessed downstream climate change costs across four key sectors—corals, mangroves, fisheries, and seaports—measuring everything from straightforward market loss of reduced fisheries and marine trade to reductions in ocean-based recreational industries.

Researchers also placed a monetary figure on what economists call non-use values. “Something has value because it makes the world feel more livable, meaningful, or worth protecting, even if we never directly use it,” said Bastien-Olvera, referencing the fiscal merit of ecosystem enjoyment and the cultural loss caused by climate change. “Most people will never visit a coral reef during a full-moon spawning event, or see a deep-sea jellyfish glowing in total darkness. But many still care deeply that these things exist.”

Island economies, which rely more on seafood for nutrition, will face disproportionate financial and health impacts from ocean warming and acidification, the study said. “The countries that have the most responsibility for causing climate change and the most capacity to fix it are not generally the same countries that will experience the largest or most near-term damages,” said Kate Ricke, co-author and climate professor at UCSD’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. Including ocean data in social cost of carbon assessments reveals increased consequences for morbidity and mortality in low-income countries facing increased nutrition deficiency.

Despite the scale of the scientific discovery, Bastien-Olvera and Ricke are optimistic this data will be a wake-up call for international decision-making. “I hope that the high value of ‘blueSCC’ can motivate further investment in adaptation and resilience for ocean systems,” said Ricke, using the term of the ocean-based social cost of carbon and referencing the opportunities to invest in coral reef and mangrove restoration projects.

Meanwhile, Bastien-Olvera believes centering the framework on oceans also recognizes the longstanding conservation approaches of coastal communities, ocean scientists and Indigenous peoples. “For a long time, climate economics treated the ocean values as if it were worth zero,” he said. “This is a first step toward finally acknowledging how wrong that was.”

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

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Meta’s layoffs leave Supernatural fitness users in mourning

gaming, Meta, meta vr, syndication, Tech, VR headsets / DJ Henderson / January 17, 2026

There is a split in the community about who will stay and continue to pay the subscription fee and who will leave. Supernatural has more than 3,000 lessons available in the service, so while new content won’t be added, some feel there is plenty of content left in the library. Other users worry about how Supernatural will continue to license music from big-name bands.

“Supernatural is amazing, but I am canceling it because of this,” Chip told me. “The library is large, so there’s enough to keep you busy, but not for the same price.”

There are other VR workout experiences like FitXR or even the VR staple Beat Saber, which Supernatural cribs a lot of design concepts from. Still, they don’t hit the same bar for many of the Supernatural faithful.

“I’m going to stick it out until they turn the lights out on us,” says Stefanie Wong, a Bay Area accountant who has used Supernatural since shortly after the pandemic and has organized and attended meetup events. “It’s not the app. It’s the community, and it’s the coaches that we really, really care about.”

Welcome to the new age

I tried out Supernatural’s Together feature on Wednesday, the day after the layoffs. It’s where I met Chip and Alisa. When we could stop to catch our breath, we talked about the changes coming to the service. They had played through previous sessions hosted by Jane Fonda or playlists with a mix of music that would change regularly. This one was an artist series featuring entirely Imagine Dragons songs.

In the session, as we punched blocks while being serenaded by this shirtless dude crooning, recorded narrations from Supernatural coach Dwana Olsen chimed in to hype us up.

“Take advantage of these moments,” Olsen said as we punched away. “Use these movements to remind you of how much awesome life you have yet to live.”

Frankly, it was downright invigorating. And bittersweet. We ended another round, sweaty, huffing and puffing. Chip, Alisa, and I high-fived like crazy and readied for another round.

“Beautiful,” Alisa said. “It’s just beautiful, isn’t it?”

Meta’s layoffs leave Supernatural fitness users in mourning Read More »

Mother of one of Elon Musk’s offspring sues xAI over sexualized deepfakes

AI, ai sex images, Deepfakes, elon musk, grok, Policy, syndication, xAI / DJ Henderson / January 17, 2026

The news comes as xAI and Musk have come under fire over fake sexualized images of women and children, which proliferated on the platform this year, particularly after Musk jokingly shared an AI-altered post of himself in a bikini.

Over the past week, the issue has prompted threats of fines and bans in the EU, UK, and France, as well as investigations by the California attorney-general and Britain’s Ofcom regulator. Grok has also been banned in Indonesia and Malaysia.

On Wednesday, xAI took action to restrict the image-generation function on its Grok AI model to block the chatbot from undressing users, insisting that it removed Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-consensual nudity material.

St Clair, who has in recent months been increasingly critical of Musk, is also seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent xAI from generating images that undress her.

“Ms St Clair is humiliated, depressed, fearful for her life, angry and desperately in need of action from this court to protect her against xAI’s facilitation of this unfathomable nightmare,” lawyers wrote in a filing seeking the restraining order.

xAI filed a lawsuit against St Clair in Texas on Thursday, claiming she had breached the company’s terms of service by bringing her lawsuit against the company in a New York court instead of in Texas.

Earlier this week, Musk also said on X that he would be filing for “full custody” of their 1-year-old son Romulus, after St Clair apologized for sharing posts critical of transgender people in the past. Musk, who has a transgender child, has repeatedly been critical of transgender people and the rights of trans individuals.

Additional reporting by Kaye Wiggins in New York.

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The oceans just keep getting hotter

global warming, ocean ecology, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / January 11, 2026

Since 2018, a group of researchers from around the world has crunched the numbers on how much heat the world’s oceans are absorbing each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world’s oceans have absorbed more heat than in the years before.

The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world’s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules’ worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That’s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.

A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement—it’s about enough to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts that laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he’s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)

“Last year was a bonkers, crazy warming year—that’s the technical term,” Abraham joked to me. “The peer-reviewed scientific term is ‘bonkers’.”

The world’s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean’s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.

The oceans just keep getting hotter Read More »

Conservative lawmakers want porn taxes. Critics say they’re unconstitutional.

online porn, Policy, porn sites, syndication / Kelly Newman / January 10, 2026

Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn.

As age-verification laws continue to dismantle the adult industry—and determine the future of free speech on the internet—a Utah lawmaker proposed a bill this week that would enforce a tax on porn sites that operate within the state.

Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts “from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a $500 annual fee to the State Tax Commission. Per the legislation, the money made from the tax will be used by Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services to provide more mental health support for teens.

Musselman did not respond to a request for comment.

A new age of American conservatism commands the political arena, and more US lawmakers are calling for additional restrictions on adult content. In September, Alabama became the first state to impose a porn tax on adult entertainment companies (10 percent) following the passage of age-verification mandates, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content. Pennsylvania lawmakers are also eyeing a bill that would tax consumers an additional 10 percent on “subscriptions to and one-time purchases from online adult content platforms,” despite already requiring them to pay a 6 percent sales and use tax for the purchase of digital products, two state senators wrote in a memo in October. Other states have flirted with the idea of a porn tax in the past. In 2019, Arizona state senator Gail Griffin, a Republican, proposed taxing adult content distributors to help fund the border wall, a key priority during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. So far, 25 US states have passed a form of age verification.

Although efforts to criminalize participants in the sex work industry have been ongoing for years—with new regulations unfolding at a moment of heightened online surveillance and censorship—targeted taxes have failed to gain widespread approval because the legality of such laws is up for debate.

“This kind of porn tax is blatantly unconstitutional,” says Evelyn Douek, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School. “It singles out a particular type of protected speech for disfavored treatment, purely because the legislature doesn’t like it—that’s exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect against. Utah may not like porn, but as the Supreme Court affirmed only last year, adults have a fully protected right to access it.”

Utah, Alabama, and Pennsylvania are among the 16 states that have adopted resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis. “We realize this is a bold assertion not everyone will agree on, but it’s the full-fledged truth,” Utah governor Gary Herbert tweeted in 2016 after signing the resolution. One of Utah’s earliest statewide responses to the proliferation of adult content happened in 2001, when it became the first state to create an office for sexually explicit issues by hiring an obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman. The position—dubbed the “porn czar”—was terminated in 2017.

“Age restriction is a very complex subject that brings with it data privacy concerns and the potential for uneven and inconsistent application for different digital platforms,” Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, told WIRED in a previous conversation. In November, the company urged Google, Microsoft, and Apple to enact device-based verification in their app stores and across their operating systems. “We have seen several states and countries try to impose platform-level age verification requirements, and they have all failed to adequately protect children.” To comply with the new age gate mandates, Pornhub has currently blocked access to users in 23 states.

Critics argue that age verification has never been about protecting children but rather scrubbing porn from the internet. A video leaked in 2024 by the Centre for Climate Reporting showed Russell Vought, a Trump ally and Project 2025 coauthor, calling age verification laws a “back door” tactic to a federal porn ban.

Sites like OnlyFans and Pornhub have brought platform-dependent sex work into the mainstream, but they have also made it easier to police adult entertainers and consumers. As more states begin to implement added tariffs on sex work, creators will bear the brunt of the new laws more than anyone.

The skewed ideology of cultural conservatism that is taking shape under Trump 2.0 wants to punish sexual expression, says Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the adult industry in the US. “When we talk about free speech, we generally mean the freedom to speak, the ability to speak freely without government interference. But in this case, free also means not having to pay for the right to do so. A government tax on speech limits that right to those who can afford it.”

According to company policy, OnlyFans complies with all tax requirements in the jurisdictions in which it operates. Creators are responsible for their own tax affairs. Pornhub, which is currently blocked in Utah and Alabama, did not respond to a request for comment.

Douek notes that following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold age-verification laws in Texas, states can legally regulate minors’ access to sexually explicit material, “but a porn tax does nothing to limit minors’ access to this speech—it simply makes it more expensive to provide this content to adults.” A 2022 report from Common Sense Media, a youth advocacy nonprofit, found that 73 percent of teens age 13 to 17 have watched adult content online. Today, young people regularly access NSFW content via social media, on platforms like X and Snap. Last year, a survey by the UK’s Office of the Children’s Commissioner reported that 59 percent of minors are being exposed to porn by accident, primarily via social media, up from 38 percent in 2023.

In Alabama, as would be the case with Utah, revenue raised by the tax is being used for behavioral health services, including prevention, treatment, and recovery support for young people.

Alabama state representative Ben Robbins, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said in an interview last year that adult content was “a driver in causing mental health issues” in the state. It’s a common argument among lawmakers pushing for a nationwide porn ban. Some scientific studies suggest that adolescent exposure to porn increases rates of depression, low self-esteem, and normalized violence, but health professionals have never reached a consensus on the matter.

With lawmakers working to reframe the issue around underage harm, Stabile says it’s critical to remember that adult content isn’t different from any other kind of protected speech, noting that content-specific taxes on speech have repeatedly been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional censorship.

“What if a state decided that Covid misinformation was straining state health resources and taxed newsletters who promoted it? What if the federal government decided to require a costly license to start a podcast? What if a state decided to tax a certain newspaper it didn’t like?” he says. “Porn isn’t some magical category of speech separate from movies, streaming services, or other forms of entertainment. Adult businesses already pay taxes on the income they earn, just as every other business does. Taxing them because of imagined harms is not only dangerous to our industry, it sets a dangerous precedent for government power.”

This story originally appeared on WIRED.com

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“Ungentrified” Craigslist may be the last real place on the Internet

craigslist, culture, privacy, syndication, web 1.0 / 9u50fv / January 9, 2026

People still use Craigslist to find jobs, love, and even to cast creative projects.

The writer and comedian Megan Koester got her first writing job, reviewing Internet pornography, from a Craigslist ad she responded to more than 15 years ago. Several years after that, she used the listings website to find the rent-controlled apartment where she still lives today. When she wanted to buy property, she scrolled through Craigslist and found a parcel of land in the Mojave Desert. She built a dwelling on it (never mind that she’d later discover it was unpermitted) and furnished it entirely with finds from Craigslist’s free section, right down to the laminate flooring, which had previously been used by a production company.

“There’s so many elements of my life that are suffused with Craigslist,” says Koester, 42, whose Instagram account is dedicated, at least in part, to cataloging screenshots of what she has dubbed “harrowing images” from the site’s free section; on the day we speak, she’s wearing a cashmere sweater that cost her nothing, besides the faith it took to respond to an ad with no pictures. “I’m ride or die.”

Koester is one of untold numbers of Craigslist aficionados, many of them in their thirties and forties, who not only still use the old-school classifieds site but also consider it an essential, if anachronistic, part of their everyday lives. It’s a place where anonymity is still possible, where money doesn’t have to be exchanged, and where strangers can make meaningful connections—for romantic pursuits, straightforward transactions, and even to cast unusual creative projects, including experimental TV shows like The Rehearsal on HBO and Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty. Unlike flashier online marketplaces such as DePop and its parent company, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users’ moves and predict what they want to see next. It doesn’t offer public profiles, rating systems, or “likes” and “shares” to dole out like social currency; as a result, Craigslist effectively disincentivizes clout-chasing and virality-seeking—behaviors that are often rewarded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. It’s a utopian vision of a much earlier, far more earnest Internet.

“The real freaks come out on Craigslist,” says Koester. “There’s a purity to it.” Even still, the site is a little tamer than it used to be: Craigslist shut down its “casual encounters” ads and took its personals section offline in 2018, after Congress passed legislation that would’ve put the company on the hook for listings from potential sex traffickers. The “missed connections” section, however, remains active.

The site is what Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has called the “ungentrified” Internet. If that’s the case, then online gentrification has only accelerated in recent years, thanks in part to the proliferation of AI. Even Wikipedia and Reddit, visually basic sites created in the early aughts and with an emphasis similar to Craigslist’s on fostering communities, have both incorporated their own versions of AI tools.

Some might argue that Craigslist, by contrast, is outdated; an article published in this magazine more than 15 years ago called it “underdeveloped” and “unpredictable.” But to the site’s most devoted adherents, that’s precisely its appeal.

“ I think Craigslist is having a revival,” says Kat Toledo, an actor and comedian who regularly uses the site to hire cohosts for her LA-based stand-up show, Besitos. “When something is structured so simply and really does serve the community, and it doesn’t ask for much? That’s what survives.”

Toledo started using Craigslist in the 2000s and never stopped. Over the years, she has turned to the site to find romance, housing, and even her current job as an assistant to a forensic psychologist. She’s worked there full-time for nearly two years, defying Craigslist’s reputation as a supplier of potentially sketchy one-off gigs. The stigma of the website, sometimes synonymous with scammers and, in more than one instance, murderers, can be hard to shake. “If I’m not doing a good job,” Toledo says she jokes to her employer, “just remember you found me on Craigslist.”

But for Toledo, the site’s “random factor”—the way it facilitates connection with all kinds of people she might not otherwise interact with—is also what makes it so exciting. Respondents to her ads seeking paid cohosts tend to be “people who almost have nothing to lose, but in a good way, and everything to gain,” she says. There was the born-again Christian who performed a reenactment of her religious awakening and the poet who insisted on doing Toledo’s makeup; others, like the commercial actor who started crying on the phone beforehand, never made it to the stage.

It’s difficult to quantify just how many people actively use Craigslist and how often they click through its listings. The for-profit company is privately owned and doesn’t share data about its users. (Craigslist also didn’t respond to a request for comment.) But according to the Internet data company similarweb, Craigslist draws more than 105 million monthly users, making it the 40th most popular website in the United States—not too shabby for a company that doesn’t spend any money on advertising or marketing. And though Craigslist’s revenue has reportedly plummeted over the past half-dozen years, based on an estimate from an industry analytics firm, it remains enormously profitable. (The company generates revenue by charging a modest fee to publish ads for gigs, certain types of goods, and in some cities, apartments.)

“It’s not a perfect platform by any means, but it does show that you can make a lot of money through an online endeavor that just treats users like they have some autonomy and grants everybody a degree of privacy,” says Lingel. A longtime Craigslist user, she began researching the site after wondering, “Why do all these web 2.0 companies insist that the only way for them to succeed and make money is off the back of user data? There must be other examples out there.”

In her book, Lingel traces the history of the site, which began in 1995 as an email list for a couple hundred San Francisco Bay Area locals to share events, tech news, and job openings. By the end of the decade, engineer Craig Newmark’s humble experiment had evolved into a full-fledged company with an office, a domain name, and a handful of hires. In true Craigslist fashion, Newmark even recruited the company’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, from an ad he posted to the site, initially seeking a programmer.

The two have gone to great lengths to wrest the company away from corporate interests. When they suspected a looming takeover attempt from eBay, which had purchased a minority stake in Craigslist from a former employee in 2004, Newmark and Buckmaster spent roughly a decade battling the tech behemoth in court. The litigation ended in 2015, with Craigslist buying back its shares and regaining control.

“ They are in lockstep about their early ’90s Internet values,” says Lingel, who credits Newmark and Buckmaster with Craigslist’s long-held aesthetic and ethos: simplicity, privacy, and accessibility. “As long as they’re the major shareholders, that will stay that way.”

Craigslist’s refusal to “sell out,” as Koester puts it, is all the more reason to use it. “Not only is there a purity to the fan base or the user base, there’s a purity to the leadership that they’re uncorruptible basically,” says Koester. “I’m gonna keep looking at Craigslist until I die.” She pauses, then shudders: “Or, until Craig dies, I guess.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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orsted-seeks-injunction-against-us-government-over-project-freeze

Ørsted seeks injunction against US government over project freeze

orsted, Policy, Science, syndication, wind farm / Kelly Newman / January 6, 2026

In October, Ørsted raised $9 billion from investors in a rights issue after Trump’s attempts to block a rival developer’s project spooked investors.

The US government then issued a stop-work order against the company’s $1.5 billion Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island, although Ørsted has persuaded a judge to lift the order.

In November, Ørsted agreed to sell half of the world’s largest offshore wind farm to Apollo in a $6.5 billion deal. Then on December 22, the company received orders from the US government to suspend “all ongoing activities on the outer continental shelf for the next 90 days.”

According to the company, the Revolution Wind project is now about 87 percent complete, with 58 out of its 65 wind turbines installed.

While Trump has made Ørsted’s planned offshore wind projects in the US far more difficult, its troubles predate his administration.

In 2023, the company had to walk away from two large projects in the US because of rising costs that have affected the entire industry.

In a statement on Ørsted’s legal challenge, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said: “For years, Americans have been forced to pay billions more for the least reliable source of energy. The Trump administration has paused the construction of all large-scale offshore wind projects because our number one priority is to put America First and protect the national security of the American people.”

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