The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

RUNNING WIKIPEDIA WATCHER: Ultramarathon runner Camille Herron and her husband/coach have been accused of removing accomplishments from other top runners’ Wikipedia pages while padding hers. It’s sent drama in the running community to the VO2 max.

Personal

FOUND CAT: A cat named Rayne Beau completed a miracle journey, finding his way home to California after getting lost in Yellowstone National Park on a trip with his owners. He had traveled almost 900 miles, likely by himself, definitely with no podcasts.

CLEAR YOUR HEAD: High-end spas are offering “emotional showers,” which deploy things like lights and water pressure to elicit specific emotions. It’s just the good feels, though—you’ll have to visit your old Tumblr account for an embarrassment shower.

For Sale

DOUBLE COW SAUCE: Kraft Heinz doesn’t care what you’re putting on your steak, as long as you buy it from them. The company is pairing its A1 sauce with tub butter to create Steakhouse Butter.

CANNED SHIRLEY: 7-Up is releasing a limited-edition Shirley Temple flavor for the holiday season, which is one step closer to Dirty Shirleys claiming their rightful spot as the drink of the summer.

LUXURY LOOSE CHAIR: What if instead of feeling stable and comfortable, you spent $7,000 on a Bottega Veneta animal bean bag chair? It will go great with your granite Barbie Dreamhouse.—MM

Photo of the week

Power crews worked to restore electricity on a flooded road in Crystal River, FL, one of many communities across the Southeast that is picking up the pieces after Hurricane Helene came roaring through last last week. As of Saturday evening, 56 people had died from the storm and millions remain without power. One official in Buncombe County, NC, home to Asheville, described the flooding as “biblical.”

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even go fishing with an octopus.

Octopus and fish sometimes hunt together. Like the fish trapped at the dentist’s office in Finding Nemo, different species of ocean-dwellers have been observed working as a team. After scouring 120 hours of sea footage, researchers spotted 13 instances of a big blue octopus working with different fish to catch smaller fish and mollusks. “There’s a sign that some cognition is occurring here, for sure,” one of the researchers said of the octopuses, which were seen working “as the decider of the group.” The tentacled bosses appeared to influence fish to check out new environments or stay put based on their own movements. As the squad leaders, they even swatted away freeloading fish who didn’t help catch food.

AI finds hundreds of new Nazca geoglyphs in just six months. High-tech surveying methods are giving us more clues faster about the 2,000-year-old desert mystery that inspires alien theories. Archaeologists working with IBM Research identified 303 previously undiscovered glyphs near the Nazca Lines in Peru by using low-flying drones coupled with an AI model that generated search areas and identified hard-to-spot shapes of animals or humans in the sand. Because of this tech, the team found the new glyphs—which are smaller than the original Nazca Lines—in just six months, nearly doubling the existing count of 430 Nazca glyphs that it took researchers nearly a century to find.

There’s a chance that Earth actually outlives the sun. One of the only certainties in this world has long been that, in 6 billion years or so, the planet you’re reading this from will die by the very thing that gives it life. Well, not necessarily: For the first time, astronomers think they found a rocky planet orbiting a burnt-out star (aka a white dwarf), suggesting that Earth could similarly avoid destruction when the star we revolve around ultimately swells up and bursts. The newly discovered planet looks like it used to be the same orbital distance from its sun as we are from ours, but it fell into a more distant orbit as the dying star lost mass, which seems to have been its saving grace, scientists said. But Earth will have to stay inhabitable for anyone to appreciate this when it matters.—ML

Hollywood and Big Tech are fighting over AI

California Governor Gavin Newsom faces a political dilemma akin to picking who to root for in a Dodgers vs. Giants showdown. He has until tomorrow to decide whether to veto an AI safety bill that has pitted Hollywood against tech, two heavyweight industries synonymous with the Golden State’s massive economy.

The legislation, known as SB 1047, would require AI companies to prevent their product from being misused to wreak mass destruction or face legal action and fines. Newsom’s signature on the state bill would effectively establish nationwide AI development standards since California is home to OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, and other industry giants.

But he’s publicly waffled on whether he’ll sign off, possibly because of competing industry demands concerning the controversial measure.

• Hollywood loves the measure more than it loves miracle cleanses. Dozens of A-list celebrities from Judd Apatow to Ramy Youssef have joined a chorus of engineers, AI safety advocates, and even contrarian Elon Musk in arguing that it’s a necessary guardrail against an a(i)pocalypse.
• Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has largely derided SB 1047 as a legal burden that would stifle innovation in an effort to thwart threats that don’t yet exist. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, some prominent AI researchers, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi have also voiced opposition.

Safety first?

SB 1047 aims to avert scenarios like a future sophisticated AI model walking someone through the steps to create bioweapons or spitting out instructions for a cyberattack against critical infrastructure. If it becomes a law:

• Companies would have to take safety precautions when developing powerful models that cost at least $100 million to train and would be financially liable for the models’ misuse.
• These models would have to come with a built-in kill switch so it can be shut off if things go awry.
• Companies could not prevent whistleblowers from notifying authorities of potential dangers a model could pose.

Pro-SB 1047 advocates point out that the threats aren’t mythical. OpenAI recently acknowledged that its latest large language model, o1, has a “medium” risk of being used to make weapons of mass destruction.

Tough call

Newsom admitted to having a hard time choosing the right move. On one hand, over 100 star entertainers sent him an open letter praising two other laws he recently signed protecting actors from AI replicating their likeness and voice while urging him to enact this more general safety bill.

But it isn’t just famous actors asking him to save the world from AI-equipped evildoers. Researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio—a pair considered the godfathers of AI, who are both famously worried about future risks—also support the regulation. Hinton signed an open letter from hundreds of AI professionals working at industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic, advocating for SB 1047.

Meanwhile, critics of the bill, like machine-learning pioneer Andrew Ng, believe it would harm open-source AI development. They argue it would disincentivize researchers and businesses from making AI code publicly available since they could be punished if their models are tweaked and misused by others.

• AI research luminary Fei-Fei Li is concerned that this would hinder academic exploration and small-scale entrepreneurship that relies on open-source models.
• Others are worried that it would give AI behemoths an advantage over scrappy startups since lawyering up to interpret SB 1047 and stay in compliance would be expensive.

Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun called SB 1047 “extremely regressive” and claimed that its supporters overestimate how close we are to AI breakthroughs that would make existential danger relevant.

But, some say tech power players misunderstand the status quo. Yale Law School professor Ketan Ramakrishnan argued in the Wall Street Journal that tort law already makes AI companies liable for damage their tech brings if they don’t take reasonable precautions. He claims that SB 1047 clarifies these safety steps based on industry standards like OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework and bolsters transparency around AI development.

Ultimately, according to Vox writer Kelsey Piper, observers are divided in their takes on SB 1047 based on how recently they watched Alien plausible they think an AI catastrophe is.

Big picture: California’s attempt at AI guardrails comes as governments worldwide play regulatory catch-up with the rapidly evolving tech. While the EU recently passed a sweeping AI safety law, the US has yet to enact any far-reaching industry guardrails on a national level.—SK

Place to be: The Neon Museum in Vegas

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

Consider this a sign that you should take that trip to Las Vegas.

The Neon Museum, the mostly outdoor home to some of Sin City’s classic neon signage, is about to receive an upgrade. The beloved institute of casino nostalgia known as “the neon boneyard” announced a $45 million expansion and relocation from Fremont Street to the downtown Arts District about a mile away, according to The Art Newspaper.

The new home, which will be ready in 2027 and split between the ninth and rooftop floors of a parking garage and a nearby 35,000-square-foot space, is more desperately needed than a blackjack player needs a face card after doubling down.

• The museum’s director, Aaron Berger, told The Art Newspaper that the museum received more than 200,000 visitors last year but had to turn away 30,000 due to limited capacity. With tickets between $12.50 and $35, that’s about six figures in lost revenue.
• Due to limited space, the museum currently only displays ~35% of its sign collection. It also has an extensive archive of items in storage, like menus and matchbooks, that can be made available for public viewing.

The art house always wins: In another sign that the city wants to expand its culture beyond the Bellagio fountains and Carrot Top, the highly anticipated Las Vegas Museum of Art is scheduled to open in 2028 after recently being granted 1.5 acres of land downtown.—DL

Crowd work

Last Sunday we asked, “If you could walk around anyone’s house throughout history, fictional or real, uninterrupted for one hour, which house would you choose?” Here are our favorite responses:

• “Lisa Vanderpump’s Villa Rosa. A girl can dream.”—Petra from Charlotte, NC
• “The Brady Bunch House? I have wanted to slide down that banister for 30 years!”—Mark from Houston, TX
• “I was going to say something deep like Winston Churchill, Aristotle, and such but for some reason Shrek’s house jumped to the front of mind.”—Barry from Kentucky
• “Wuthering Heights: I taught this novel for 30 years and I want to see how the pictures in my mind match Catherine’s closet bed and the bedroom Hindley destroyed in his dissolute rages and the oak dresser and all of the house and surrounding moors.”—Susan from Corpus Christi, TX
• “Beethoven’s house while he was writing his 9th symphony. He was losing his mind and I wonder if I could find something about what he was feeling. Or just clean it for him.”—Elle from Nashville, TN

This week’s question

What’s the strangest way you’ve met your neighbors?

Holly’s answer to get the juices flowing: “A guy randomly set a powerline pole on fire behind my apartment building in Los Angeles and we all came out to watch it burn until the fire department arrived.”

Share your response here.

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