A 'Cyberpunk 2077' article warning epileptic users about triggers prompted gamer trolls to send videos intended to trigger seizures.

The smallest terrestrial mammal, the Etruscan shrew (Suncus etruscus), has a neat trick to potentially save energy during the winter: It can shrink its brain, The Scientist reports. No heavier than a playing card, this mammal needs to eat eight times its bodyweight every day, and therefore cannot hibernate.

The Democratic lawyer’s sickening defense of corporate immunity in a Supreme Court case reveals a growing moral rot in the legal community.

ITER will teach valuable lessons about a “burning plasma,” researchers say. But they add that its cost of more than $20 billion is far too steep for an actual power plant. So, after ITER, U.S. fusion researchers want to build a much smaller, cheaper power plant, leveraging recent advances such as supercomputer simulations of entire tokamaks, 3D printing, and magnet coils made of high-temperature superconductors.

The electric carmaker has been clearing forest to make way for a 'Gigafactory' close to Berlin.

An artist was commissioned by a local business owner to create a mural of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster on the side of his building. There was only one problem: This patron of the arts didn’t actually own the building, and he’s all but disappeared.

ByJuly, Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland had become accustomed to the gray, black, and colorless tear gas that wafted through the city streets every night. But that month, they started seeing plumes of an unusual green smoke, too. Puddles of greenish residue seeped into the city’s storm drains. Human rights advocates and conservationists called on the local government to investigate the environmental impact of these chemical weapons, which had been deployed by the police, but no new chemicals were identified to the public. Juniper L. Simonis, PhD, a volunteer protest medic whose pronouns are they/them, scanned Portland’s storm drains for clues. Simonis, who is also a quantitative investigator with a doctorate in aquatic ecology, knew that identifying the new substance would be essential to protecting protesters and the environment from its effects. In lieu of information from the government, they hoped for harder evidence: the cast-off gas canisters, which might contain traces of the chemicals. They didn’t expect to read the evidence right on the label. Simonis and other volunteers eventually collected dozens of canisters they traced to the new weapon. Several still bore the logo of their manufacturer, Defense Technologies, and the label “HC,” indicating that these canisters had once contained a chemical agent that was unlike anything Black Lives Matter protesters had seen in Portland or elsewhere.

Weare living in one of the most generative eras of Southern cultural production since Dolly went pop and Designing Women said “y’all” once a week on network television. From country music to digital and print media, we are trying to figure out the American South…again. I say “again” because American popular culture has an ongoing, cyclical obsession with the U.S. South. “The South” is a stand-in for how the nation wants to see it itself at any point in time. Debating the morality of Southern cultures is one way that the nation reckons with empire and economics. We are not well versed in international or global cultures in this country. Therefore we do not have the vocabulary to talk about geo-politics “out there”. Instead we talk about the geo-politics “in here” — in the Appalachias, in Mississippi, in Texas. Extracting natural resources, controlling the “borders”, policing what it means to be a “real American” — we hash all of that out in our disdain of and attraction to the South. The South does not stop existing when popular culture moves on. It is always engaged in its own Civil War over what the place means or who is even included in “The South”. Right now, The South is making sense of two phenomena that are shaping how the region sounds and how it talks about itself: people are coming “home” and they’re bringing their ideas about home with them to a place that has its own ideas about what that all means.

"ICE put their MAGA hat on. They’re gonna try to take it off come January, but I don’t know how successful that will be."

In a complaint unsealed on Friday, whistle-blowers working on President Trump’s wall said that contractors were illegally bringing in Mexican guards to protect construction sites.

On Tuesday, Pornhub announced that it is banning downloads, restricting uploads, and expanding its content moderation efforts.

A broad bipartisan effort to pass legislation protecting patients from massive “surprise” medical bills is now on life support as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) digs in on a separate proposal. Democratic and Republican leaders of three committees in the House and Senate have been pushing for months to pass their measure, which would prevent Americans from unexpectedly getting hit with medical bills for thousands of dollars for common scenarios like treatment from a doctor outside their insurance network when they require emergency care. Neal has been holding out for his own rival proposal and has not shown any willingness to budge despite concessions offered by top lawmakers on the three committees. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) even stepped in over the weekend to speak to Neal in an effort to get him to compromise, sources said. Proponents are hoping to get their legislation attached to next week’s year-end government funding package that’s likely to include COVID-19 relief, leaving little time for action. Supporters say they are extremely frustrated with Neal, given that lawmakers have been working on a bipartisan basis for two years to solve an issue many view as an especially egregious practice that should be low-hanging fruit for Congress. Lawmakers tried to pass the measure last December, but disagreements with Neal derailed the measure.

The Biden administration plans to create a position to find common ground with conservatives, said Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement for the president-elect. “Right now I’m trying to set up the office and I’m actually looking at establishing a position that reaches out to conservatives -- because it’s about moving forward. We cannot stay where we are,” Richmond said during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Monday night. He said the office’s goal was to forge connections with all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation. “We’re not elected just to help Democrats or urban cities or minorities,” he said. “We were elected to help this entire country and that means reaching out to conservatives, that means reaching out to rural areas, reaching out to people who didn’t vote for us.” President-elect Joe Biden named Richmond, a campaign co-chair, to head the Office of Public Engagement last month. On Monday, Biden appointed him as one of five co-chairs of his inaugural committee. Part of Richmond’s mandate is to help the incoming Biden administration’s relations with Republicans in Congress. He said he would work to “create a demand in the country to make politicians work across the aisle and to work together.”

State police brandishing firearms Monday raided the Tallahassee home of Rebekah Jones, the former Department of Health employee who built the state's much-praised COVID-19 dashboard before being fired over what she said was refusing to "manipulate data." "They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids," Jones tweeted shortly before 5 p.m.  Jones — who launched her own COVID-19 dashboard after she was fired, and used crowdsourcing to raise money to support it — said the agents knocked on her door around 8:30 a.m. that morning, took all her "hardware and tech" after showing her a warrant based on a complaint filed by the Florida Department of Health.  A video accompanying the post shows Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents in vests at the front door with guns drawn, asking who else was in the house. She said her husband and two children were inside as they escorted her out of the house.

On Monday, the Trump administration finalized a sweeping new regulation that allows federal contractors to discriminate against racial and religious minorities, women, and especially LGBTQ people in the name of protecting “religious liberty.” It effectively abolishes critical workplace protections for these contractors that have been in place for decades, reframing religious freedom as a near-limitless license to discriminate. Monday’s move will force the Biden administration to waste countless hours and resources reversing this radical rewrite of federal law. The rules restricting discrimination by federal contractors springs from Executive Order 11246, which President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965. Johnson’s order barred discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Presidents later added sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity to the list of protected traits. Today, there are about 4 million employees of federal contractors who benefit from these protections. The Department of Labor enforces presidential prohibitions against discrimination in these workplaces. But the current Labor Secretary, Eugene Scalia, is no fan of these rules—or, it seems, of any workplace protections. Scalia, son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, previously worked as a corporate attorney who specialized in crushing employees’ rights. He has spent his tenure at the Labor Department dismantling federal regulations that safeguard workers’ rights, health, and safety. Scalia’s deregulatory agenda has been especially catastrophic during the pandemic; under his guidance, the agency refused to protect workers from COVID-19, permitting fatal outbreaks through its own shocking negligence. In the long run, Scalia may be best remembered for abandoning his duty to shield vulnerable employees from infection and death—the many people who died of COVID-19 after he declined to enforce basic workplace safety rules in the midst of a pandemic are gone forever. Scalia’s new discrimination rule, by contrast, will have a short shelf life: There is no doubt that the Biden administration will repeal it, though the process may take months, even years. It is worth assessing Scalia’s rule, both because it will likely take effect for now and because it reflects a disturbing vision of “religious freedom” that is ascendant in the federal judiciary.

What did you do to celebrate Dragon Age day on Friday? I watched a voice actor get brutally shut down by Dragon Age fans, after he posted the cringiest video I have ever watched in my life. Greg Ellis, the voice of Cullen in Dragon Age: Inquisition, decided that it would be a good idea to post a 40 minute video, in-character as Cullen, complaining about him and his voice actor being victimised by cancel culture. It is awful. It is hilarious. It might well be the best thing to happen to Dragon Age since Dragon Age 2.

Already making excuses.

Trump recently told one adviser he was going to pardon "every person who ever talked to me."

But the Base, a terror group that has been the recent recipient of a lot of FBI attention, turned him down.

Five years of social reform driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have drastically loosened the conservative grip on Saudi society. CNN's Nic Robertson says it could yet prove to be a magnet for tourism.