More than two dozen sources described simmering frustrations on both sides (preemptive scapegoating) just as Democrats are gearing up for the midterms.

Iago, surprised.

Waymo filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Motor Vehicles to keep driverless car crash data from being made public. The autonomous vehicle operator, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, claims that such data should be considered a trade secret. The news of the lawsuit was first reported by Business Insider and later by the Los Angles Times. California’s DMV oversees the largest autonomous vehicle testing program in the country, with over 60 companies permitted to operate test vehicles on public roads. Only a handful are approved to operate fully autonomous vehicles without safety drivers at the wheel, and even fewer have been approved to deploy vehicles for commercial purposes. Making public the process by which Waymo analyzes crashes “could provide strategic insight to Waymo’s competitors and third parties regarding Waymo’s assessment of those collisions from a variety of different perspectives, including potential technological remediation,” the company argues. Moreover, it could have a “chilling effect” on the entire autonomous vehicle industry. “Potential market participants interested in deploying autonomous vehicles in California will be dissuaded from investing valuable time and resources developing this technology if there is a demonstrated track record of their trade secrets being released,” Waymo claims.

On its YouTube channel, Paraíso Verde shares videos describing the pandemic which has killed some 5.5 million people as “non-existent”, promoting false, dangerous Covid “miracle cures”, and advertising Paraguay as a country without pandemic restrictions – despite the government’s clear health protocols.

For the third time in five days, emergency crews have been summoned to Mount Hood to rescue a climber in distress. The latest call for help came on the evening of Jan. 26, after a man attempting to snowboard back down the Hogsback snow ridge after climbing to the mountain’s summit lost control and plunged several hundred feet into a volcanic vent. The climber, identified as 28-year-old George Stevens from Idaho, landed at the bottom of the cavity, also called a fumarole, which emits hot, toxic gases. Stevens survived but sustained serious injuries.

When things took a turn for the worse this week, seven-week-old Ostara Clure was rushed from Boise to Salt Lake City to receive ECMO treatment.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An NFT project sells a ton of tokens, making a shit ton of cash in the process for a thing that probably will exist in the future. Then the project and folks involved disappear with the money, leaving those who bought into it screwed. Well, it’s reportedly happened again, this time with Blockverse, an NFT project connected (unofficially) to Minecraft. As reported by PCGamer, Blockverse launched last week and is claimed to be an “on-chain Ethereum NFT that enables a unique P2E on Minecraft” which basically boils down to a private Minecraft server that is only open to folks with a Blockverse NFT. Even though selling access to servers is a thing that has been done for years without NFTs, there was still a lot of “hype” around the project. And on January 23, Blockverse launched and sold around 10,000 NFTs—selling out in less than 10 minutes while earning an estimated $1.2 million. However, a few days after allegedly making all that money the creators behind the project deleted Blockverse’s website, game server, and official Discord.

Jeff Bezos' vision for the future has made him one of the richest people, but the comedian Jon Stewart sees it as a "recipe for revolution" — and he once told Bezos as much. In an episode of the podcast "The Problem With Jon Stewart" published this month, Stewart described meeting Bezos at a dinner at the White House with President Barack Obama, then-first lady Michelle Obama, the billionaire Mark Cuban, and an unnamed guest whom Stewart described as the "inventor of the Oculus" virtual-reality headset. Stewart said Bezos discussed what he saw as the economy of the future, one that would rely on service workers to perform tasks. Stewart said he told Bezos he disagreed, adding that people wanted to feel proud of their work and like they were contributing to society, not just "running errands for people that have more than you." "I think he views everybody as like a part of a fulfillment center," Stewart said. "And so I said, 'I think that's a recipe for revolution.' And then, like, kind of a hush falls over. And then you hear Obama from across the couch go, 'I agree with Jon.'"

The Tarim Basin mummies have been a mystery ever since European explorers discovered them in northwestern China in the early 20th century. They were tall, wore wool felt hats and leather booties, and some had fair hair—all suggesting they were strangers from a strange land. But a new study of the mummies’ DNA finds they were locals with deep roots in the region. Indeed, they appear to be relics of an ancient population that disappeared in Eurasia after the last ice age—one that was ancestral to Indigenous peoples living in Siberia and the Americas today. It’s “fantastic” to learn that these mummies were local Asians, says Alison Betts, an archaeologist of Scottish descent at the University of Sydney who was not involved with the work. “Honest to God, one looks like my granny, with her very elegant bone structure … and her legs in woolen leggings, with blue and orange wrapping and boots like Uggs.” Anthropologists have floated many theories about the Tarim Basin mummies. One is that they were descendants of the Yamnaya and Afanasievo nomadic herders from the steppes of the Black Sea region of Russia, because of their unusual height, woven woolen clothing, and cattle-centric culture. (The mummies were found in wooden boats covered with cow hides and adorned with horned cow skulls.) Another hypothesis is that they descend from farmers who migrated from desert oases of Bactria, or what is now modern Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, based on similarities of agricultural and irrigation systems. Both ideas suggest these people brought Tocharian, an extinct branch of Indo-European languages, to the region. To test these hypotheses, molecular anthropologist Yinqiu Cui of Jilin University organized an international team to analyze the DNA across the genomes of 13 of the oldest mummies found at sites such as Xiaohe and Gumugou in the Tarim Basin, dating from 4100 to 3700 years ago. Population geneticist Choongwon Jeong of Seoul National University compared their DNA with that of five even earlier individuals dating to 5000 to 4800 years ago in the neighboring Dzungarian Basin, and with other ancient and living Eurasians, in the first genomic study of prehistoric populations in the region. Much to the scientists’ surprise, the mummies were most closely related to a previously identified genetic group called the Ancient North Eurasians, a once widespread population of hunter-gatherers that had greatly declined by the end of the last ice age. Researchers have wondered what happened to these people, but it is “totally unexpected” to find them in the Tarim Basin in the early Bronze Age, Jeong says. Today, this population survives only fractionally in the genomes of living people, with Indigenous populations in Siberia and the Americas having the highest proportions.

In March 2019, scientists studying whales near Southwestern Australia stumbled upon a supersize spectacle that few had seen before — a pod of orcas viciously attacking a blue whale. Over a dozen orcas surrounded the mighty animal. They had already bitten off its dorsal fin, and the animal was unable to evade the fast and agile predators. The water ran red with the blood of the massive creature, and chunks of its flesh were floating all around. The scientists observed one orca force its way into the blue whale’s mouth and feast on its tongue. It took an hour for the orcas to kill the blue whale, and once they did, about 50 other orcas showed up to devour the carcass. Orcas, also known as killer whales despite being members of the same family as dolphins, are apex predators who are known to feed on nearly every species of large whale. But, they typically go after calves and not adults. This was the first time that orcas had been observed successfully killing and eating an adult blue whale. The attack was the first of three such events that were witnessed from 2019 through 2021. These events, described in a paper published last week in the journal Marine Mammal Science, have put to rest a longstanding debate among scientists about whether or not orcas could make a meal out of an adult blue whale. A pod of orcas taking down a blue whale is “the biggest predation event on Earth, maybe the biggest one since dinosaurs were here,” said Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University and an author of the paper. Anecdotal evidence that orcas are capable of making a meal out of an adult blue whale has long existed, but it wasn’t until 2019 that scientists were able to confirm this through firsthand observation.

As part of the alleged scheme, Julie DeVuono, 49, is accused of using her Amityville, L.I. practice, Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare, to obtain blank vaccine cards from the state Department of Health, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office said.

Former Washington State Trooper Robert LaMay, who went viral when he chose to quit rather than get vaccinated against coronavirus, has died of COVID-19. He was 50 years old.

The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.

In an interview with Australian financial comparison site Finder, Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovations Lab VP Nicolas Pouard defended the publisher’s plans to add NFTs to its games, despite huge player backlash. “Well, it was a reaction we were expecting,” Pouard said of the large negative response to its Quartz NFT system. “We know it’s not an easy concept to grasp. “But Quartz is really just a first step that should lead to something bigger. Something that will be more easily understood by our players.” Pouard continued to imply throughout the interview that the player backlash was due to their inability to understand the benefits of NFTs, rather than any legitimate concerns about the scheme. “I think gamers don’t get what a digital secondary market can bring to them,” Pouard said. “For now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it’s first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculation. “But what we [at Ubisoft] are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items once they’re finished with them or they’re finished playing the game itself. “So, it’s really, for them. It’s really beneficial. But they don’t get it for now.”

Another columnist with Degenerative Clinton Brain Syndrome.

The family of a man killed with a sword at the Portland fourplex where he lived is suing the building owner, alleging he failed to protect his tenants from a squatter-turned-property manager at the site. The estate of Najaf "Nate" Hobbs, who was 39 when he was killed, is seeking $5 million in damages from Lawrence W. Stover, the owner of the two-story building where Hobbs, his girlfriend and another man lived. The girlfriend, Cassy Leaton, 22, also was killed in the attack. Phillip L. Nelson, who was living in one of the units of the fourplex and claimed he was the landlord, is accused of killing Hobbs and Leaton with a sword.

National Butterfly Center temporarily closing after being inundated with threats from QAnon believers who think it's a sex trafficking ring.

Archeologists excavating in Nijmegen, the Netherland's oldest city, found the bowl in pristine condition.

The Crisis Text Line’s AI-driven chat service has gathered troves of data from its conversations with people suffering life’s toughest situations.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club lit up the internet — but its lead designer, Seneca, has been watching from the shadows