Baseball's legendary 'magic mud' finally analyzed by scientists (popsci.com)

“When you take a dollop out of it and you put it on your hand, it’s just like a nice facial cream and feels smooth,” study co-author and Penn geophysicist Douglas J. Jerolmack tells Popular Science. “It doesn’t feel gritty at all when it’s a dollop of paste in your hand. It’s after you spread it that it dries and feels gritty.”

According to science, it really is magic.

Rare bees kill Meta’s nuclear-powered AI data center plans (popsci.com)

Meta and many other tech companies continue to face energy crunches thanks to their recent AI investments. Earlier this year, Microsoft confirmed its greenhouse gas emissions rose an estimated 29 percent since 2020 due to new data centers specifically “designed and optimized to support AI workloads.” Google has also calculated its own pollution generation has increased as much as 48 percent since 2019, largely because of data center energy needs.

The energy demands of AI, and the resulting environmental impact of the technology, are truly staggering. And now environmental laws, in the form of a yet-to-be-identified protected species of bee, seemingly stand in the way of efforts to tap into nuclear power to reduce those impacts. This is quite the conundrum.

Maybe AI will provide a solution.

Elon Musk appears to have tweaked X’s algorithm to promote Trump, study claims (independent.co.uk)

“This raises suspicions as to whether Musk has tweaked the platform’s algorithm to increase the reach of his posts in advance of the US presidential election,” wrote Timothy Graham, an associate professor in digital media at Queensland University of Technology and Mark Andrejevic, a professor in media at Monash University, who undertook the research.

This is clearly happening, and is obnoxious. But he did buy the damn thing and take it private, so, whatever.