Walz: Executive Order #1 Was...

In the forests of South Africa a group of snails can be found doing something a bit surprising. Tail-wagger snails do what it says on the tin, throwing around small black protrusions like little dogs in a good mood.Exactly what purpose the tail-wagging serves isn’t known for certain, but it’s been suggested it could be a crucial behavior for when the time comes to mate. According to Dr Werner de Gier, these snails have a reputation for dramatic escape attempts, through a combination of tail-wagging, shell-spinning, and even bungee jumping. This kind of James Bond slime magic has been observed in slugs, too, who will use mucus threads to slide down like a spider.Tail-wagger snails belong to the Urocyclidae family of air-breathing land snails, slugs, and semi-slugs. Once thought to be a single group, the tail-wagger snails were joined by a new genus and eight new species from eastern South Africa in 2017, and it seems we still have a lot to learn about them.Filmmaker and conservation warrior Josh Crickmay recently happened upon some tail-wagger snails in one of the more joyful videos IFLScience has seen of late. He spotted the rare sight while out walking in the forests of St Lucia, a settlement in uMkhanyakude District Municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.“I barely believe these actually exist,” he can be heard saying in the clip. “Look at that! They are mating I believe, and they seem to be very happy about it, judging by their behaviour.”       “I’ve been wanting to see these guys for a long time. I’ve heard about them before particularly in these forests around St Lucia. […] They wag their tails with the purpose of finding a partner, which begs the question, why keep wagging once you’ve found your partner? I can only assume it’s because they’re pretty happy about it.”When asked in the comments if the tail-wagging does indeed indicate happiness, Crickmay explained that we know so little about these snails it’s hard to know, but some have suggested the wagging could help to waft pheromones.Whatever the reason, it’s hard to ignore the dog-like glee of their tail-wagging, begging the question: what’s the canine equivalent of anthropomorphizing?

Learning more about inaccessible places is often time-consuming, expensive, and comes with a multitude of other challenges. While technologies can be adapted to explore Earth’s more remote environments, researchers in Australia have found a perfectly adapted ready-made tool to help them learn more about the ocean floor: sea lions.  “Using animal-borne video and movement data from a benthic predator is a really effective way of mapping diverse benthic habitats across large areas of the seabed,” said first author Nathan Angelakis, a PhD student with The University of Adelaide and the South Australian Research and Development Institute (Aquatic Sciences), in a statement.Eight female Australian sea lions (Neophoca cinerea) from two colonies were equipped with small, lightweight cameras that were glued to a piece of neoprene which was then glued to the sea lion's fur. The total weight of all the equipment was less than 1 percent of the sea lion’s body weight, meaning they could swim and move around in a totally normal way. The sea lions were chosen because they are known to spend a lot of time hunting in a range on habitats on the seabed. They are also an endangered species, so the cameras serve a dual purpose of seeing which habitats are down there and which are important to the sea lions themselves.“We deployed the instruments on adult females so we could recover the equipment a few days later when they returned to land to nurse their pups,” Angelakis explained. “We used satellite-linked GPS loggers on the sea lions, which meant we could track their position in real-time and knew when they had returned to the colony.”  Over a few days, the sea lions swam normally collecting around 89 hours of recordings from under the sea. From the sea lion films, the researchers managed to identify six benthic habitats from Olive Island and Seal Bay at a depth of between 5 and 110 meters (16-360 feet). The habitats recorded by the sea lions included macroalgae reef, macroalgae meadow, bare sand, sponge/sand, invertebrate reefs, and invertebrate boulders. However, the team were quick to point out the limitations of the study, as the habitats filmed by the sea lions were different from other known regions of South Australia. They suggest that the sea lions could prefer to travel through one habitat over another or miss other habitats altogether. “These data are useful both for mapping critical habitats for an endangered species such as the Australian sea lion, and more broadly, for mapping unexplored areas of the seabed,” continued Angelakis. A sea lion scientist with a lightweight camera attached to its back snoozes in the sun after sciencing hard.Image Credit: Nathan AngelakisHowever, the recordings do give the team much greater knowledge of the sea beds and the sea lions themselves, which are classed as endangered. The films can also be used to survey other animals seen in the videos. The team combined the data from the sea lions with oceanographic data to predict habitats on the continental shelf. “The sea lions from both locations covered quite broad areas around the colonies. In our calculations, we kept the area in which we predicted habitats small to maximize the precision of our predictions,” Angelakis said. “This allowed us to model benthic habitats across more than 5,000 square km [1,930 square miles] of the continental shelf.”The paper is published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

In recent months, many people will have experimented with a chatbot like ChatGPT. Useful though they can be, there’s also no shortage of examples of them producing, ahem, erroneous information. Now, a group of scientists from the University of Oxford are asking: is there a legal pathway by which we could require these chatbots to tell us the truth?The rise of large language modelsAmid all the buzz around artificial intelligence (AI), which seems to have reached new heights in the past couple of years, one branch of the field has garnered more attention than any other – at least with those of us who aren’t machine learning experts. It’s the large language models (LLMs), which leverage generative AI to produce often eerily human-sounding responses to almost any query you can dream up.The likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are based on models trained on huge amounts of data – which itself raises numerous questions around privacy and intellectual property – to allow them to understand natural language queries and generate coherent and relevant responses. Unlike with a search engine, you don’t need to learn any syntax to help you narrow down your results. Theoretically, you simply ask a question as if you were speaking out loud.    Their capabilities are no doubt impressive, and they certainly sound confident in their answers. There’s just one tiny problem – these chatbots tend to sound equally confident when they’re dead wrong. Which might be okay, if we humans could just remember not to trust everything they’re telling us.“While problems arising from our tendency to anthropomorphize machines are well established, our vulnerability to treating LLMs as human-like truth tellers is uniquely worrying,” write the authors of the new paper, referring to a situation that anyone who’s ever had an argument with Alexa or Siri will know well.“LLMs are not designed to tell the truth in any overriding sense.”It’s easy to tap out a question for ChatGPT and assume that it is “thinking” of the answer in the same way a human person would. That’s how it appears, but that’s not actually how these models work.Don’t believe everything you readAs the authors explain, LLMs “are text-generation engines designed to predict which string of words comes next in a piece of text.” The truthfulness of their responses is only one metric by which the models are judged during development. In an effort to produce the most “helpful” answer, the authors argue, they can all-too-frequently stray towards oversimplification, bias, and just making stuff up.The authors of this study are by no means the first to raise the alarm about this, with one paper going so far as to call the models "bullshitters". Professor Robin Emsley, the editor of the journal Schizophrenia, published an account of an experience with ChatGPT in 2023, stating, “What I experienced were fabrications and falsifications.” The chatbot had produced citations for scholarly papers that did not exist, as well as several that were irrelevant to the query. Others have reported the same thing.  They do okay with questions that have a clear, factual answer where – and this bit’s important – that answer has appeared a lot within their training data. These models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. And, unless you’re prepared to carefully fact-check any answer you get from an LLM, it can be very difficult to tell how accurate the information is – especially as many don’t provide links to their source material or give any measure of confidence.“Unlike human speakers, LLMs do not have any internal conceptions of expertise or confidence, instead always ‘doing their best’ to be helpful and persuasively respond to the prompt posed,” writes the team at Oxford.They were particularly concerned about the impact of what they call “careless speech”, and of the harm that could be done by such responses from LLMs leeching into offline human conversation. This led them to ask the question of whether there could be a legal obligation imposed on LLM providers to ensure that their models tell the truth.What did the new study conclude?Focusing on current European Union (EU) legislation, the authors found that there are few explicit scenarios where a duty is placed on an organization or individual to tell the truth. Those that do exist are limited to specific sectors or institutions, and very rarely apply to the private sector. Since LLMs operate on relatively new technology, the majority of existing regulations were not drawn up with these models in mind.So, the authors propose a new framework, “the creation of a legal duty to minimize careless speech for providers of both narrow- and general-purpose LLMs.”You might naturally ask, “Who is the arbiter of truth?”, and the authors do address this by saying that the aim is not to force LLMs down one particular path, but rather to require “plurality and representativeness of sources”. Fundamentally, they propose that makers redress the balance between truthfulness and "helpfulness", which the authors argue is too much in favor of the latter. It’s not simple to do, but it might be possible.There are no easy answers to these questions (disclaimer: we have not tried asking ChatGPT), but as this technology continues to advance they are things that developers will have to grapple with. In the meantime, when you’re working with an LLM, it may be worth remembering this sobering statement from the authors: “They are designed to participate in natural language conversations with people and offer answers that are convincing and feel helpful, regardless of the truth of the matter at hand.”The study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced a lawsuit against advertisers after a House Judiciary Committee report revealed an illegal boycott against the company.The report, titled "GARM's (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) Harm," detailed the work of the World Federation of Advertisers, which controls GARM and represents some of the world's largest companies and advertisers.According to a report by the New York Post, the WFA controls 90% of global marketing spending, which amounts to $1 trillion per year and includes companies like Disney and Coca-Cola.'The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars.'In a post made directly on X, Yaccarino remarked, "I thought I had seen everything.""The report disclosed that their investigation had found evidence of an illegal boycott against many companies, including X," the CEO continued.Yaccarino then announced an antitrust lawsuit against GARM, the WFA, and GARM members CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever."This is not a decision we took lightly, but it is a direct consequence of their actions," she added.X owner Elon Musk shared Yaccarino's X post and simply added, "We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war." — (@) Yaccarino boasted of X's growing numbers, noting that despite being an effective platform for advertisers and even surpassing requests made by GARM itself, the company still lost billions."The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars."The CEO pointed out that the House committee obtained evidence that showed "GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms, content creators, and news organizations in an effort to demonetize and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers.'"BlazeTV's James Poulos said that conflict between Musk and X's advertisers has been escalating for years, and now the reason for that has finally become clear."Rather than mild-mannered normies afraid of controversial content on X, advertisers operate as a cartel of far-left propagandists, reaping profits from taxpayers on government contracts while conspiring to silence free speech at odds with their radical ideologies."Poulos added that the "ugly truth" about the matter is that "corporate cartels" have been revealed to have a stranglehold on online discourse and national politics. "No group, whatever its beliefs, should wield such control over the bounds of our words and thoughts on the most fundamental issues. Fortunately, antitrust law offers a powerful tool to help protect us from that kind of silent digital coup against our constitutionally guaranteed rights and form of government," he concluded.The House report also reportedly obtained internal emails from the advertising alliance that showed its head, Robert Rakowitz, allegedly bragging that X was "80% below revenue forecasts" since the company was targeted.Rakowitz later claimed the email was a "self-effacing joke."CVS Health, Orsted, Mars, and Unilever have not released public statements on the matter and did not respond to requests for comment from the New York Post or Fox News.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A global firestorm has ignited over the Olympics’ decision to feature a blasphemous opening ceremony performance that mocked “The Last Supper,” as well as its position (or lack thereof) on gender and who can compete in what division. But Joe Rogan is surprised people aren’t up in arms over what he thinks is a third controversy. Dave Rubin plays the clip of Rogan explaining to Khalil Rountree Jr. how the Olympics is “a giant scam.” - YouTube www.youtube.com “You have the best athletes in the world participating in their disciplines ... and then on top of that you have enormous amounts of money being made and none of it's going to the athletes,” said Rogan, adding that the entire ordeal “is a giant scam.” He then pointed out that the same people who put on “that ridiculous opening ceremony where you got a bunch of drag queens in ‘The Last Supper’” are the same people who are “reaping all the money and sucking all the cash out of these athletes.” On top of scamming the athletes, the people behind the scenes of the Olympics are also hurting the communities where the Olympics are hosted. Rogan pointed to Brazil as an example. “So if it's going to be in Brazil, they build this f****** enormous place for it to participate in ... and then after that — nothing! And then all the people there who are poor are like, ‘Hey where the f*** did this money come from and why didn't you just spend it on the community?”’ Rogan said, pointing out that “the money they make is astronomical.” “The Olympics makes billions and billions of money in television revenue and advertising revenue, and they don't give any of it to the athletes, so it just goes to the committee ... and these are the crazy people that are putting on ‘The Last Supper’ with transsexuals,” he continued. “The whole Olympics is just people getting f***ed over.” To see more of Rogan’s commentary, watch the clip above. Want more from Dave Rubin?To enjoy more honest conversations, free speech, and big ideas with Dave Rubin, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Back-to-school season is upon us! These last, liminal summer weeks may provide some reprieve from a hectic summer social schedule and are a good time to relax into a new routine, not least because football season is just about here. In SEC land, that means things are going to be picking up again as soon as we get used to the quiet. This high-protein salad, novel but reliable, will power you through the early days of fall. IngredientsBuffalo chicken 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts 1/4 cup Frank’s RedHot sauce 1 tablespoon honey 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder 1/2 teaspoon onion powder Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste Salad 8 cups chopped romaine lettuce 2 carrots, grated 2 stalks of celery, diced 1 red bell pepper, diced 2 green onions, thinly sliced 1/2 cup frozen corn, defrosted 1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese (optional) Chopped cilantro (optional) Ranch dressing 3/4 cup Greek yogurt 1/4 cup mayonnaise (Sir Kensington’s is my favorite and sidesteps seed oils) Buttermilk to thin to consistency (as much as needed to make it like a dressing; use your judgment and don't add too much too soon; shouldn’t exceed 1/2 cup) 1 teaspoon dried dill weed 1/2 teaspoon dried parsley 1/2 teaspoon dried chives 1/4 teaspoon onion powder 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder 1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt 1/8 teaspoon finely cracked pepper Freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste, approximately 1–3 teaspoonsInstructions Buffalo chicken Add the chicken breasts along with all of the other marinade ingredients to a resealable freezer bag. Press out the air, seal, and massage the marinade into the chicken. Refrigerate for at least an hour or overnight. Preheat grill to 400° F and spray the grates with oil. Cook the chicken for six minutes on the first side then flip and cook another six to eight minutes or until the internal temperature reaches 165° F. Let the chicken rest for at least five minutes before slicing it. Note: You can also air fry these, at the same temperature for the same amount of time. Salad Place the romaine lettuce on a large serving platter or serving bowl. Top it with all of the salad ingredients and the sliced buffalo chicken. Serve with the dressing on the side or drizzled on top. Dressing Whisk together the mayo, greek yogurt, and buttermilk until smooth. Add the spices and whisk until combined. Add the lemon and whisk again. Pour into a jar and chill in the refrigerator until ready to serve. Note: You can also just add everything to a mason jar and shake it well. This dressing will keep nicely in the refrigerator for up to a week.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger went viral on social media this week for quoting the Bible after the company he runs announced plans to fire more than 15,000 employees.Last week, Intel announced cost-reduction measures — $10 billion worth — after the semiconductor chip manufacturer posted two consecutive quarters of losses, which totaled about $2 billion. The cost-saving measures include laying off 15% of the Intel workforce, which means firing at least 15,000 employees, according to the Verge. 'Those who know your name trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.'Several days after sharing the "painful" news, Gelsinger posted Bible verses to social media."Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways," Gelsinger posted, quoting Proverbs 4:25–26. — (@) For a company that employees more than 100,000 people — and is, therefore, responsible for the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people — one may think that it's good that the man in charge is focused on God's wisdom.But that's not what happened.Instead, Gelsinger's otherwise innocuous social media post received more than 20 million views — and a barrage of mockery.Here is what the mockery looked like:"hello I'm new to the stock market is it good when the intel ceo starts praying," one person said."Intel down so bad CEO resorts to praying," another person mocked."if the CEO of your company hands jesus the wheel it’s absolutely over for you," one person mocked."Resorting to religion to save the company?" another person mocked."In a sure sign that a stable hand is at the wheel, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is tweeting out inspirational Bible verses," tech news website Gizmodo mocked.But there's an unavoidable problem for Gelsinger's critics: He did not "resort" to religion and praying because of what is happening at Intel.Instead, Gelsinger — an outspoken Christian — posts Bible verses to his X account every Sunday. The week prior to Aug. 4, he quoted the prophet Jeremiah. The week before? Psalm 133. He twice quoted from the Gospel of Matthew earlier in July.The reaction to Gelsinger's post underscores the growing intolerance for Christians, especially for people of faith who refuse to hide their faith in secular environments.Perhaps Gelsinger can take solace from Psalm 9, which he recently quoted, when he opens his X account to see the vitriol spewed at him."Those who know your name trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you," reads Psalm 9:10. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Vice President Kamala Harris' final decision of running mate came down to the choice between two Democratic governors: Tim Walz of Minnesota, a blue state that Harris was poised to win anyway; and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a critically important swing state with 19 electoral college votes where President Donald Trump is presently leading in the polls. Harris ultimately picked Walz — who apparently fabricated details of his military service, prompting allegations of "stolen valor"; allowed BLM rioters to devastate Minneapolis; and transformed his state into a haven for child sex-change mutilations. While Shapiro has been dogged by an intra-office sexual abuse scandal, CNN talking head Van Jones acknowledged Tuesday that he was likely sidelined for another, "darker" reason. CNN host Jim Acosta asked Jones whether he thought it was "a little risky that [Harris] didn't go with Shapiro to kind of lock down Pennsylvania." Jones responded, "The conservatives, the right wing, the Republicans — they were chewing their fingernails down to the knuckle because they were afraid of a Josh Shapiro, they were afraid of a Mark Kelly. They are not as afraid of this new governor because they think they can define him." "So here's the challenge you've got in this party, and people don't want to talk about it. We got to talk about it," continued Jones. "On the one hand, you have a lot of young people concerned about Gaza. You have a lot of Muslims and Arabs and others. They have not felt seen by the Biden administration. You started hearing that 'Genocide Joe.' That was building." 'You also have anti-Semitism that has gotten marbled into this party.' According to Jones, "those folks needed to have a candidate that they could feel comfortable with." Whereas Walz is a leftist Lutheran who has expressed support for a peaceful solution to the Israel-Hamas war, Shapiro is a proud Jewish American who let people believe for decades that he volunteered for the Israeli military and has reportedly compared anti-Israel protesters to the KKK. Leftists seized upon Shapiro's identity and support for Israel after learning Harris was considering him as a running mate and quickly transitioned from their "Genocide Joe" campaign to a "Genocide Josh" campaign. The website for the "No Genocide Josh" campaign stated, "Electing a Vice Presidential nominee with anti-Palestinian and pro-war views will depress turnout among Muslim, Arab-American, and young voters, and greatly reduce the excitement that comes with a new nominee." "It is in Harris's and the Democrats' best interests to listen to their base and ensure that both their new VP pick and their platform support the majority of Democrats and Americans who want social and economic justice for workers and an immediate ceasefire in Palestine," added the anti-Shapiro site. Although Walz has condemned anti-Semitism in the past, expressed support for Israel as "America's truest and closest ally" in the Middle East, and spoken out about pro-Hamas supporters' antagonism of Jewish students, Jones intimated that prospective Harris voters' prejudice might cut deeper than policy positions. "You also have anti-Semitism that has gotten marbled into this party," said Jones. "You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot, but there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there." "And there has to be conversations about how much of what just happened is caving into some of these darker parts in the party. So that’s going to have to get worked out. It's going to have to get talked through," added Jones. Jones is neither the first media personality nor the first Democrat to admit the Democratic Party has a major anti-Semitism problem. In May, comedian Bill Maher noted that while there might be anti-Semitism on both sides of the political spectrum, "The left wing is even worse." Michael Rapaport, who was in recent years one of Trump's most outspoken critics, indicated earlier this year that he was considering voting for the Republican in large part because of the left's growing antagonism toward Israel and Jews. After spending a lifetime as a Democrat, former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind joined the Republican Party last year, stating, "The Democratic Party has become so radicalized, so radical, run by the radicals, that people who are moderates or conservative Democrats are not welcomed in the Democratic Party." Jones is also not alone in suspecting that Shapiro was kicked to the curb in order to appease anti-Semites in the Democratic Party. Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) told CNN Monday, "Those in the overly online left who are attacking Josh Shapiro's pro-Israel positions in a different way than they are attacking non-Jewish veep contenders' positions, they're just telling on themselves. There's a strong undercurrent of antisemitism." "Every contender's positions on all policy issues, their track records in elective office, all of that is fair game. That is totally open to be subjected to interrogation and to questioning by the Harris team, by observers. But holding him to a different standard because of his religion just simply isn't who we are as a Democratic Party," continued Auchincloss. Evidently Auchincloss was off in terms of his optimistic assessment of his party. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. 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Elon Musk Drops a Truth Bomb About Kamala Being a Communist and Liberal Heads Explode