Futurology Today

You are a hero

More than half of Americans reported receiving at least one scam call per day in 2024. To combat the rise of sophisticated conversational scams that deceive victims over the course of a phone call, we introduced Scam Detection late last year to U.S.-based English-speaking Phone by Google public beta users on Pixel phones.

We use AI models processed on-device to analyze conversations in real-time and warn users of potential scams. If a caller, for example, tries to get you to provide payment via gift cards to complete a delivery, Scam Detection will alert you through audio and haptic notifications and display a warning on your phone that the call may be a scam.

It seems I shouldn't have posted this without context

TL;DW

• yes the video is (at least partially) about Teflon, hence the cynical title

• no, Teflon (or generally big Fluoropolymers) are not the problem. Ingesting them does nothing to you, because as long, chemically inert polymers they just pass through you from one end to the other

• The problem are perfluoroalkyl acids: C8 (PFOA) and later substitutes such as C6/GenX, PFOS, PFHA, PFHxS which are chemicals used to start the Teflon polymerization. They are short-chained carbon-fluorine molecules that coincidentally mimic the structure of fatty acids, thus can accumulate in our bodies without a way for our bodies to break them down.

• These chemicals leach into the environment from factories and accumulate in everything, to the point that the whole water cycle has been contaminated (yes that shit comes down everywhere with the rain)

• There is conclusive proof that PFOA exposure is linked to a number of organ damage and cancers, particularly testicular cancer and kidney cancer, with likely links to lung and pancreatic cancer not reflected in the study due to survivor bias (they died before the study was concluded)

https://www.axios.com/local/new-orleans/2025/05/16/nottoway-plantation-burns-antebellum-louisiana

It's happening again.

Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout.

A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle’s original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it’s able to contact home again next year.

Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team.

Food rations that could supply 3.5 million people for a month are mouldering in warehouses around the world because of U.S. aid cuts and risk becoming unusable, according to five people familiar with the situation.

The food stocks have been stuck inside 4 U.S. government warehouses since the Trump administration's decision in January to cut global aid programmes, according to three people who previously worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development and two sources from other aid organisations.

Some stocks that are due to expire as early as July are likely to be destroyed, either by incineration, using them as animal feed or disposing of them in other ways, two of the sources said.

The warehouses, which are run by USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), contain between 60,000 to 66,000 metric tonnes of food, sourced from American farmers and manufacturers, the five people said.

Doctors in the US have become the first to treat a baby with a customised gene-editing therapy after diagnosing the child with a severe genetic disorder that kills about half of those affected in early infancy.

KJ was born with severe CPS1 deficiency, a condition that affects only one in 1.3 million people. Those affected lack a liver enzyme that converts ammonia, from the natural breakdown of proteins in the body, into urea so it can be excreted in urine. This causes a build-up of ammonia that can damage the liver and other organs, such as the brain.

Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, the doctors described the painstaking process of identifying the specific mutations behind KJ’s disorder, designing a gene-editing therapy to correct them, and testing the treatment and fatty nanoparticles needed to carry it into the liver. The therapy uses a powerful procedure called base editing which can rewrite the DNA code one letter at a time.