Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

From the article:

Wooden Microchips

The microchip in the image above is made almost entirely from wood! 

Created by a research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison lead by Zhenqiang Ma and Shaoqin Gong, the technology uses cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) in its construction to offer a biodegradable alternative to the many non-renewable and potentially toxic plastic materials currently used in electronics.

The researchers worked in collaboration with the US Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory, to find new materials for the support layer of electronics. Technically referred to as the substrate, this layer makes up the bulk of any microchip. All of the conductive circuits are only a tiny amount of the overall chip, being much finer than human hair. Making substrates like these from wood-based materials would mean that waste electronics could be so easy to dispose of, they could even be composted.

Cellulose nanofibrils are made in a very similar way to paper. Paper is made by breaking wood down into individual fibres, but those fibres can be broken down even further, all the way down to the scale of nanotechnology. For their prototypes, they then used epoxy resin to bind the nanofibrils together. While epoxy resin is typically a petroleum-based product, renewable alternatives for this are also becoming available.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page... This is still a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling, and Google can appeal. But for publishers, brands, SEOs, and anyone watching AI search swallow the results page, the message is clear: if Google wants to be the answer engine, courts may start treating it like the publisher of those answers.

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight

The pride bats are back! I thought it’d be nice to regroup them into a matching poster. The border on the moths one was changed to a rainbow gradient and some colours were tweaked for better readability/printing. Original posts: Pride moths LGBATs 1 & 2