Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet
I haven't fully written Monday's Big Optimism yet, but as a teaser: This article about the possible discovery of a "signature of life" on another planet plays right into it.
The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos.
Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.
“It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study, at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life.
“This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.”
The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers
The world’s richest man juggles more than a dozen children and ‘harem drama’ along with running his companies and advising Trump.
Ashley St. Clair wanted to prove that Elon Musk was the father of her newborn baby.
But to ask the billionaire to take a paternity test, the right-wing social-media influencer had to go through Musk’s longtime fixer, Jared Birchall.
“I don’t want my son to feel like he’s a secret,” St. Clair told Birchall in a two-hour phone call in December.
Birchall offered St. Clair some advice. His boss was a “very big-hearted, kind and generous person,” he said. But Musk had a different side. When a mother of his child goes “the legal route” in these discussions, “that always, always leads to a worse outcome for that woman than what it would have been otherwise,” Birchall told the 26-year-old. Plus, he said, Musk wasn’t sure the child was his.
It wasn’t the first such conversation for Birchall. His public job is running Musk’s family office, and he recently helped organize Musk’s more than $250 million push in support of Donald Trump’s election.
Behind the scenes, Birchall also manages the financial and privacy deals Musk wants for the women raising the world’s richest man’s babies.
Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.
How to Bike Across the Country
I sort of like the idea as an adventure, but I must admit: I will probably never bike across the country. But that doesn't mean I could not derive some level of pleasure by reading this very detailed account of how someone who had never attempted anything like the idea pulled it off. It's less about what he saw on the way, and more on just logistically: how do you do something like this?
I spent 51 straight days on my bicycle last year, traveling 3,900 miles through high desert, mountain passes, endless prairies, and rolling hills from San Francisco, California to the eastern coast of Virginia. I did the majority of the route (Sacramento to Virginia) solo.
Yet I didn’t even own a bike until two weeks before the trip. How'd that happen?
After shutting down my startup in summer 2024, I was burned out and unsure what to do next. Accordingly, I sat down to brainstorm a few crazy ideas in hopes of tackling a meaningful challenge and taking time to clear my head. I considered, but ultimately ruled out due to skill/weather issues, ideas to sail across an ocean or hike the Appalachian or Pacific Crest trails. Bicycling across the continent seemed like the perfect blend of crazy and possible.
As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond
Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis.
When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before.
“Teachers get excited when there’s a lot of interest in their class. I felt like, ‘Great, I’m going to have a whole bunch of students who are invested and learning,’’ Smith said. “But it quickly became clear that was not the case.”
By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, she’d concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots.
“It’s a surreal experience and it’s just heartbreaking,” Smith said. “I’m not teaching, I’m playing a cop now.”
The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.
‘It Never Happened – but the Picture Says It Did’: 28 Fake Images That Fooled the World
From the pope in a puffer jacket to the Princess of Wales and family, baby Hitler to Mussolini on horseback, people have always manipulated photographs, whether for political power, image control – or just for fun ...
"Pictures or it didn’t happen.” So runs the immediate social media retort to any claim deemed too extraordinary to be true. Carried within it is an assumption shared across the globe which has held firm almost since the invention of the camera: that the ultimate form of proof is the photograph. The idea is so strongly fixed in the human mind, it has acquired the status of a law of nature, one obvious even to a child: the camera never lies.
Except it does, as the images collected here vividly attest.
How Dairy Robots Are Changing Work for Cows (and Farmers)
Everyone’s happier when robots handle milking, feeding, and ear scritching.
“Mooooo.”
This dairy barn is full of cows, as you might expect. Cows are being milked, cows are being fed, cows are being cleaned up after, and a few very happy cows are even getting vigorously scratched behind the ears. “I wonder where the farmer is,” remarks my guide, Jan Jacobs. Jacobs doesn’t seem especially worried, though—the several hundred cows in this barn are being well cared for by a small fleet of fully autonomous robots, and the farmer might not be back for hours. The robots will let him know if anything goes wrong.
At one of the milking robots, several cows are lined up, nose to tail, politely waiting their turn. The cows can get milked by robot whenever they like, which typically means more frequently than the twice a day at a traditional dairy farm. Not only is getting milked more often more comfortable for the cows, cows also produce about 10 percent more milk when the milking schedule is completely up to them.
“There’s a direct correlation between stress and milk production,” Jacobs says. “Which is nice, because robots make cows happier and therefore, they give more milk, which helps us sell more robots.”
The Ford Executive Who Kept Score of Colleagues’ Verbal Flubs
Mike O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in meetings over a decade; ‘too many cooks in the soup’
Mike O’Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor. The sales executive’s note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous—but came with a twist.
Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years.
During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: “Let’s not reinvent the ocean.”
At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: “I don’t want to sound like a broken drum here, but…”
For more than a decade, O’Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.
With all the daunting news, these articles are my escape. They educate, enlighten , and give real news . Try it !
The dairy robots! I’m so jealous. I want a dishwashing robot, laundry robot, chef robot, dusting robot, bathroom cleaning robot. OMG. I keep waiting for the Roomba to procreate but silly me, apparently I need to get some cows. Hmmm. 😂