My TV asks if I'm still watching

🔥 Most Enraging

The streaming service Tidal stopped paying out on AI-generated music after it flooded the platform

A music service had to announce it will stop paying people for songs a computer wrote, because too many computers were writing songs. Nobody is playing an instrument anymore. I cannot tell if this is a low point or a Tuesday.

😩 Most Exhausting

Scientists say the strange gamma-ray glow at the center of the Milky Way might really be dark matter after all

Scientists now think the glow at the center of the galaxy might be dark matter, the stuff that makes up most of everything and that no one has ever managed to find. Most of the universe is missing and nobody can locate it. I lose my glasses on my own head and feel better about it already.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Researchers found a new one-millimeter beetle species on a pine tree just steps from their own lab

Scientists found an entirely new species of beetle, one millimeter long, on a tree outside their own building. There are so many kinds of beetle that we are still finding them in the parking lot. I would like the counting to stop at some point.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

The world's largest soccer ball went on display in Massachusetts

Someone built the world's largest soccer ball and put it on display in Massachusetts, where it will sit, enormous, kicking nothing. I respect an achievement that solves no problem and asks nothing of me. It is the only kind I trust.

▸ NASA's upgraded Cold Atom Lab on the space station is making some of the coldest, strangest matter in the universe — NASA is making the coldest matter in the universe on the space station, colder than deep space itself. Somewhere up there is the one thing in creation more frozen than my feet at night, and it took a laboratory to manage it.

▸ The European Parliament passed its first bloc-wide animal-welfare law, banning breeding that deforms animals for looks — Europe passed a law to stop people from breeding animals into deformed shapes because they think it looks cute. It should not take a continent voting to land on 'do not breed the dog so it cannot breathe.' But here we are, and good.

▸ Three teenagers won a global prize for inventing a tamarind-seed powder that pulls microplastics out of water — Three teenagers invented a powder from tamarind seeds that pulls microplastics out of water and won a global prize for it. At that age I was inventing new ways to avoid my chores. The kids are going to be fine.

Fine. This year brought twenty-three North Atlantic right whale calves, the most in one season since 2009, for a species that has been sliding toward extinction. Twenty-three giant, endangered babies born against the odds. I did not cry. My eyes are just cold from NASA's experiment upstairs.