Dawn Chorus Day: a composer on the musical styles of birdsong

International Dawn Chorus Day (May 3 for 2026) is a great time to hear the UK’s birds at their most vocal. While we can enjoy the variety and beauty of birdsong, for the birds themselves it serves more practical purposes – to attract a mate and establish and defend a breeding territory. Birds can produce […]

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Here’s what we know about the climate cost of white trails aircraft leave in the sky

Ciprian23/Shutterstock Contrails, short for condensation trails, are the white streaks often seen in the sky behind aircraft. The international cloud atlas, which classifies clouds, has a category just for them: cirrus homogenitus, an example of man-made clouds. Contrails contribute to climate change, adding to the warming by the carbon dioxide emitted by aviation. Although the […]

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Ukraine’s killer robots show how war is changing

The Droid TW 12.7, made by Devdroid, has been used in many of the attacks involving ground robots in Ukraine. Devdroid, CC BY For the first time, Ukraine has captured a Russian position using only ground robots and aerial drones, reports suggest. In a message posted on social media on April 14, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr […]

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Act Now to Stop California’s Paternalistic and Privacy-Destroying Social Media Ban

California lawmakers are fast-tracking A.B. 1709—a sweeping bill that would ban anyone under 16 from using social media and force every user, regardless of age, to verify their identity before accessing social platforms. That means that under this bill, all Californians would be required to submit highly sensitive government-issued ID or biometric information to private […]

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EFF Challenges Secrecy In Eastern District of Texas Patent Case 

Clinic students Emily Ko and Zoe Lee at the Technology Law and Policy Clinic at the NYU School of Law were the principal authors of this post. Courts are not private forums for business disputes. They are public institutions, and their records belong to the public. But too often, courts forget that and allow for […]

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California Coastal Community Must Reject CBP's AI-Powered Surveillance Tower

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is seeking permission from the California city of San Clemente to install an Anduril Industries surveillance tower on a cliff that would allow for constant monitoring of entire coastal neighborhoods.  The proposed tower is Anduril’s Sentry, part of the Autonomous Surveillance Tower (AST) program. While CBP says it will primarily […]

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Could warming seas bring great white sharks back to the North Sea? A 5-million-year-old shark tooth may provide clues

As the Earth shifts to climates not seen for several hundred thousand years, we may need to look at ancient environments for clues about what could happen next. Our new study of two whale fossils, with preserved fragments of shark teeth, suggests the modern descendants of these animals could once again roam the southern region […]

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EFF to 9th Circuit (Again): App Stores Shouldn’t Be Liable for Processing Payments for User Content

EFF filed an amicus brief for the second time in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, arguing that allowing cases against the Apple, Google, and Facebook app stores to proceed could lead to greater censorship of users’ online speech. Our brief argues that the app stores should not lose Section 230 immunity […]

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AI has crossed a threshold – what Claude Mythos means for the future of cybersecurity

The limit of what artificial intelligence can achieve, known as frontier AI, has crossed another threshold. AI can now plan and execute sophisticated cyber operations with minimal guidance at speeds far beyond human capability. That, at least, is the evidence from an independent test of Claude Mythos Preview, the latest and most advanced model in […]

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