Category Archives: Futurism

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Panera Bread's infamous Charged Lemonade beverage has claimed a second victim after a Florida man died in October after chugging three servings of the highly caffeinated drink offered by the fast-casual dining establishment, according to The New York Times.

The first fatality linked with Charged Lemonade happened last year in September when college student Sarah Katz died after drinking the beverage.

The latest death, which happened on October 9, unfolded when 46-year-old Dennis Brown was walking home after a stop at a Panera in Fleming Island, according to NYT.He experienced a "cardiac event," collapsed on the ground and became unresponsive. He was later declared dead at the scene.

Before his death, Brown, who had high blood pressure, had ordered a Charged Lemonade and two additional refills before leaving the establishment, the NYT reports. The large-size drink has more caffeine than a buzzed-up cocktail containing 16 ounces of Monster Energy Drink and 12 ounces of Red Bull combined both of which are no slouches in the energy drink category.

His family has now filed a lawsuit against Panera, the second such legal complaint concerning the drink. (Katz's family filed their own lawsuit against the bread hawker in October, calling Charged Lemonade a "dangerous energy drink.")

The NYT reports that Brown's family likewise charges in their lawsuitthat the company didn't advertise that the beverage was an energy drink or offer any warnings that it could harm people sensitive to caffeine, children and breastfeeding women.

Since the filing of the Katz lawsuit on October 23rd, Panera spokespeople said that the company had installed signs all over its restaurants, warning that the drink contains caffeine and should be consumed in moderation. A late November visit to a Panera in Pennsylvania showed that the signs were up.

The signs further warn that the drink is "not recommended for children, people sensitive to caffeine, pregnant or nursing women."

Brown's death happened earlier in October before Panera put up these warning signs about its Charged Lemonade beverages.

While Brown and Katz can't benefit from Panera's warnings on the caffeine content of its drinks, the two incidents at least highlight the potential danger of excessive caffeine consumption. How much caffeine is too much? And the answer seems to be that it depends.

The FDA says healthy adults can consume "400 milligrams a day," or the equivalent of "about four or five cups of coffee." But the agency cautions that some people may need to be more circumspect about their caffeine habit.

"Certain conditions tend to make people more sensitive to caffeines effects, as can some medications," the FDA writes. "In addition, if youre pregnant, trying to become pregnant, or breastfeeding, or are concerned about another condition or medication, we recommend talking to your health care provider about whether you need to limit caffeine consumption."

And for children, there's no safe limit on caffeine levels. The American Academy of Pediatrics says children under 12 should not have any caffeine, and energy drinks should be off limits from children and teenagers.

More on Panera: Panera Bread is Replacing Humans With AI at Drive-thru Windows

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Another Person Dies After Ordering New Panera Menu Item - Futurism

A disinformation expert who previously ran a pioneering research center at Harvard is accusing the university of firing her under pressure from Facebook.

Best known for her work tracking COVID-19 disinformation, extremism researcher Joan Donovan is, per new court filings, accusing Harvard's Kennedy School of kowtowing to pressure from Facebook's parent company Meta after she gave a report that received significant pushback from people tied to the tech giant.

Until now, the reasons for Donovan's exit from Harvard earlier this year and news of the school's closure of her research initiative, the Technology and Social Change Project (TASC), were unknown. But now she's filed a 248-page document with the Massachusetts attorney general's office and the US Education Department proferring an explosive explanation.

As the researcher claims in her filing, the ball began rolling on her eventual exit in October 2021 when she gave a keynote presentation before top Kennedy School donors on the explosive "Facebook Papers," a trove of whistleblower documents she'd obtained suggesting the company didn't just allow disinformation to happen on its platform, but that it was acutely aware of the harm it was causing.

Among those she presented to was former Facebook communications executive Elliot Schrage, and in her filing, Donovan said the donor "became increasingly and visibly agitated" during her speech, which was conducted over Zoom. The researcher said in her sworn filing that Schrage interrupted her repeatedly and attempted to tell her that she misunderstood the leaked materials, eventually becoming so disruptivethat other people had to intervene.

Ten days after their exchange during the virtual meeting, Kennedy School dean Doug Elmendorf emailed Donovan with several questions about her research that included phrasing that led her to believe he'd been in contact with Meta leadership. In particular, Elmendorf used the term "arbiters of truth" in his communications with the researcher the same phrase CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has used, and the company's public relations people often use, when dismissing concerns about disinformation.

After the inquiries from Elmendorf who also, the filing points out, is a personal friend of former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, having been her former academic advisor Donovan said in her filing that "things began to change in a very real way," first with increased oversight of her project and then with cutoffs from grant and donation funding that TASC needed to survive.

Toward the beginning of the fall semester in 2022, the dean announced to Donovan that he was planning to "wind down" the project, and that she was not allowed to fundraise, begin new research, or hire anyone new without first firing someone else. By the beginning of the next academic year, she'd been hired by Boston University to continue her work at the neighboring school.

During the entire tumult surrounding TASC, the Chan Zuckerberg Insitute, a nonprofit group associated with the Meta CEO and his spouse, Priscilla Chan, donated a whopping $500 million to Harvard to create a university-wide institute studying artificial intelligence. As Donovan said in her filing, which was compiled with the help of the Whistleblower Aid law firm, the donation is believed to be "the largest single contribution/commitment in the history of the university."

"There are a handful of tried and true means to coerce someone or some entity to do something they would not otherwise do, and influence through financial compensation is at or near the top of the list," Whistleblower Aid attorneys Andrew Bakaj and Kyle Gardiner wrote in their filing on Donovan's behalf. "Objectively, $500 million is certainly significant financial influence."

In statements to theWashington Post, representatives for the Kennedy School denied the researcher's claims wholesale and said Donovan "was offered the chance to continue as a part-time adjunct lecturer, and she chose not to do so."

Much like academia, government investigations always take lots of time, and it'll therefore be a while before there are any official statements made by the Massachusetts AG or the Education Department.

That said, the timeline presented here does sound fishy and if even part of what Donovan laid out in her gigantic and meticulously documented filing is true, Harvard's got some major explaining to do.

More on Facebook's content issues: Facebook Has a Gigantic Pedophilia Problem

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Facebook Accused of Pressuring Harvard to Fire a Disinformation Expert - Futurism

Are we lonelier than we ever imagined? Enter the Void

For almost a century, astronomers have been using the Hubble-Lemaitre constant to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe, an intrinsic piece of the puzzle that supports the Big Bang theory.

In simple terms, the idea is that the speed at which galaxies move away from each other is directly proportional to how far apart they are.

But actual observations have revealed critical discrepancies, throwing scientists for a loop. This ensuing "Hubble tension" has inspired many researchers to come up with proposed solutions, but so far none has been particularly satisfying to the broad scientific community.

Now, researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany and St Andrews in Scotland say they've come up with a clever new solution.

Their new theory is predicated on recent observations that suggest our solar system is located in a region where there's relatively little matter as compared to other corners of the known universe, akin to an "air bubble in a cake," according to a press release basically a big void where stuff is much less dense than it is elsewhere in the universe.

The researchers came to their conclusion by studying how fast relatively close supernovae move away from the Earth. By calculating their speed, the team arrived at an entirely different value for the Hubble-Lemaitre constant.

"The universe therefore appears to be expanding faster in our vicinity that is, up to a distance of around three billion light years than in its entirety," explained astrophysicist and University of Bonn professor Pavel Kroupa, coauthor of a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in the statement.

The conclusion could help explain why astronomers recently observed that there was a local "under-density" in our region of space.

"Thats why they are moving away from us faster than would actually be expected," added University of St. Andrews research fellow and coauthor Indranil Banik.

Since the current standard model doesn't account for these "bubbles," the researchers suggest we should reexamine some fundamental laws that date back over 100 years.

"The standard model is based on a theory of the nature of gravity put forward by Albert Einstein," Kroupa said. "However, the gravitational forces may behave differently than Einstein expected."

As a result, the team has come out in support of "modified Newtonian dynamics," which were originally proposed by Israel physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982.

In theory, the idea could make the Hubble tension disappear altogether. But it'll need to withstand a storm of scientific scrutiny first.

More on the cosmological constant: Scientist Says Universe Expansion May Be an Illusion

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Our Galaxy Appears to Be in a Huge Empty Void - Futurism

The end is nigh. Death Note

The International Space Station is celebrating its 25th birthday even as NASA prepares to put it out to pasture.

In a live-streamed talk pegged to the quarter-century anniversary of the ISS, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the floating habitat took questions about a variety of topics, including the detritus that's accumulated in the station's Unity Module, the look of lightning from above the Earth, and the spirit of international cooperation.

But one topic notably didn't make the list: the station's projected demise as it careens towards its inevitable end.

Indeed, NASA has quietly been preparing to "retire" the space station which was only designed to support operations for 15 years but has now gone on for a whole other decade by the end of 2030.

While the agency is openly discussing plans to replace the ISS with commercially-owned "destinations," there's been relatively little talk about what has to be done between now and then.

And officials are already concerned about the possibility of something going wrong before NASA has a chance to come up with a safe plan to retire the station.

"The day will inevitably come when the station is at the end of its life and we may not be able to dictate that day it is inconceivable to allow the station to deorbit in an uncontrolled manner," explained Patricia Sanders, the chair of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, during a press conference in late October, as quoted bySpace Policy Online.

"[The station] is simply too massive and would pose extreme hazard to populations over a broad area of Earth," Sanders continued. "This needs to be resourced and resourced now if we are to avert a catastrophe."

With all the cracks and leaks associated with its extended lifespan, NASA is, perScientific American,going to have to spend upwards of a billion dollars to safely decommission the ISS so that it doesn't uncontrollably crash into the Earth below.

For all its wear and tear, there's a non-zero chance that NASA may look into extending the aging space station's lifespan should private sector options not be viable in time for its 2030 execution date.

"The timeline is flexible," Ken Bowersox, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said during a conference in early November. "Its not mandatory that we stop flying the ISS in 2030."

"But, it is our full intention to switch to new platforms when theyre available," he added.

More on space travel:Scientists Have Bad News for Astronauts'Genitals

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Space Station Turns 25, Just in Time to Die - Futurism

It's absolutely huge. Solar Hole

A massive hole opened up in the Sun's atmosphere over the weekend, measuring more than 60 times the diameter of the Earth across at its peak.

Coronal holes like this one, imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, occur when the Sun's magnetic field suddenly allows a huge stream of the star's upper atmosphere to pour out in the form of solar wind.

Over a short period of time, these highly energized particles can eventually make their way to us and if powerful enough wreak havoc on satellites in the Earth's orbit. In rare instances, they can even mess with the electrical grid back on the ground.

Fortunately, in the case of the latest hole, scientists aren't expecting any major disruptions earlier this week beyond minor to moderate geomagnetic storms, as well as the associated auroras borealis in the night sky, according to SpaceWeather.com.

The appearance of the hole in and of itself isn't entirely unexpected. The Sun will soon reach the peak of its 11-year cycle known as the solar maximum, ushering in a particularly turbulent period of activity.

This activity ranges from simple solar flares to massive outbursts of solar wind called coronal mass ejections.

Coronal holes are only visible in ultraviolet wavelengths, appearing as dark patches of relatively cool particles in our observations. They're less likely to actually fling solar wind outwards as they're simply an opening, allowing for these photons and electrons to escape.

The last timescientistsspotted a large coronal hole was in March, causing powerful streams of solar wind to hit the Earth's atmosphere.

Scientists have found that the Sun's solar activity is already stronger than expected this time, meaning that we'll likely see more awe-inspiring events there in the near future.

More on the Sun: Professor Warns That the Sun Is Angry and It Could Knock Out the Internet

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A Gigantic Hole Just Opened Up in the Sun - Futurism

Finally... a boomer chatbot. Grok Pot

Elon Musk is looking to raise a cool billion to fund his foulmouthed new artificial intelligence chatbot, which he's building at a new venture calledxAI.

A new Securities and Exchange Commission filing made under the billionaire's name claims that xAI has already raised $135 million from four unnamed investors.

Notably, the filing claims that its first sale of shares was made on November 29, which was the day the owner of the site formerly known as Twitter took to the stage at New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center and told advertisers to "go fuck" themselves.

News of xAI's fundraising comes after two of the worst press weeks in Musk's turbulent career, spurred on entirely by the man himself via his insistent cosigning of an antisemitic tweet, a report by a media watchdog about X-formerly-Twitter's penchant for hosting big-brand ads astride white supremacist content, and yet another advertiser exodus as companies attempt to distance themselves from the increasingly toxic site.

Musk has been talking about building his own "anti-woke" chatbot that's now called Grok for most of the past year a press cycle dominated by OpenAI, which he helped cofound in 2015 and was ousted from in 2018. At one point, he even told formerFox News host Tucker Carlson that he wanted to call his politically incorrect AI "TruthGPT," though that name appears to have been struck in favor of a different sort of derivativeness ("grok" is an overused term originating in a book by the politically polarizing accused fascist Robert Heinlein, roughly meaning "to understand profoundly.")

Last month, a select few paid X subscribers were granted access to Grok, and it's been clear from the jump that the whole endeavor is an exercise in cringe. As screenshots of its fledgling interactions show, the chatbot's vulgarity often comes off as "boomer humor," a term used by OpenAI's own notorious CEOSam Altmanthat seemed to utterly trigger his former business partner Musk.

According to Musk's own statement, Grok apparently "has real-time access" to X's data, which media commentator Ed Zitron describes as a "form of digital inbreeding that will continually train its model on the data of a website that, other than being a deeply-unreliable source of information, is beset with spam."

In other words, Musk is building an ouroboros of bullshit, and he's asking for more than $800 million more dollars to do so.

It's hard to tell what's worse: that he's making his idiotic AI now of all times, or that four investors have already seen fit to put forth $135 million to make it happen.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Kicks Off Feud With Paris Hilton

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Elon Musk Seeking $1 Billion for His Potty-Mouthed AI - Futurism