Alarming new research has found that toothpastes are often contaminated with lead and other heavy metals.
In <a href="https://tamararubin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Toothpaste-Chart-April-18-2025-Update.pdf">tests</a> conducted by the lead safety activist Tamara Rubin, who runs the website <a href="https://tamararubin.com/">Lead Safe Mama</a>, 90 percent of the 51 examined brands were found to contain the toxic metal — in some cases at levels exceeding a state safety limit, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/17/toothpaste-lead-heavy-metals">The Guardian reports</a>.
A number of household names feature unflatteringly, including Crest Regular toothpaste, Colgate Total Whitening toothpaste, and Sensodyne Extra Whitening toothpaste. But most distressing is the over two dozen brands explicitly marketed for children that were implicated by the findings: Colgate Watermelon Burst, a "Paw Patrol" branded Orajel Kids Anticavity toothpaste, and Tom's of Maine Kid's Natural toothpaste.
Other heavy metals plagued the lineup, too. 65 percent of the brands contain arsenic, according to the tests, 47 percent contain mercury, and 35 percent contain cadmium.
"It's unconscionable — especially in 2025," Rubin told The Guardian.  "What's really interesting to me is that no one thought this was a concern."
The Food and Drug Administration limit for lead in fluoride-free toothpastes is 10,000 parts per billion (ppb). None of the toothpastes here exceeded that, but it's important to note that no amount of lead exposure is considered safe, especially in children. Exposure to lead in infancy and childhood can damage the brain and nervous system, leading to lifelong learning and behavioral disabilities and lower IQ, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/lead-prevention/symptoms-complications/index.html">according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>.
In recent years, Washington state has <a href="https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-toxic-chemicals/washingtons-toxics-in-products-laws/toxic-free-cosmetics-act#:~:text=We%20issued%20an%20interim%20policy,the%20lowest%20lead%20levels%20possible.">adopted a stricter</a> 1,000 ppb lead limit in cosmetics, including toothpastes. In Lead Safe Mama's testing, three variants from Redmond, VanMan's, and Primal exceeded that, with the worst offender, Primal, reaching 7,800 ppb.
There're even stricter limits for children, the Guardian notes. California's lead limit in baby food is six ppb, and the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/09/health/baby-food-heavy-metals-legislation-wellness/index.html">Baby Food Safety Act of 2024</a>, which still awaits congressional approval, has it at 10 ppb. All but five of the tested brands were over that.
Lead Safe Mama was the first to crack that <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/stanley-cups-lead-human-health">Stanley Cups</a> — yes, remember that <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/24059078/lead-stanley-water-bottles-why-safe">whole debacle</a>? — <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/stanley-mugs-lead">contained lead</a>. Largely run by Rubin, the organization also claims responsibility for six product recalls since 2022. Most of its tests use an x-ray fluorescence (XRF) lead detection tool, a non-destructive form of detection. Rubin has received some criticism for allegedly profiting off its alarming claims through affiliate links for "lead-free" products on its website.
What is causing the lead contamination is unclear. Rubin suspects that it may lie in some of the ingredients added to the toothpaste, including hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate and bentonite clay, she told the Guardian.
"A foundation of the work of LSM is the understanding (and agreement with the scientific and medical consensus) that there is no safe level of lead exposure for humans," Rubin <a href="https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/">wrote in a post</a> accompanying the researchers, "and that we (as consumers) should demand that companies be held accountable for manufacturing and selling lead-contaminated products, especially products marketed and sold for use by children."
More on contamination: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/do-not-touch-receipts-research">You Might Not Want to Touch Receipts After Seeing This Horrifying Research</a>

Truth Ache

Developments

"It's unconscionable."

There's Something Horrifying in Your Toothpaste

To combat climate change, a team of scientists are <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/using-ocean-dump-for-co2">sucking CO2 out of the ocean</a>.
The project, dubbed SeaCURE, began operating a small-scale trial this year on England's south coast, the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr788kljlklo">BBC </a><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr788kljlklo">reports</a>. It hangs its hopes on a simple premise: that the ocean is the world's largest carbon sink, absorbing nearly a third of all CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. 
A flurry of projects have explored capturing carbon <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/white-house-suck-carbon-out-of-air">directly from the atmosphere</a>. SeaCURE explores an alternative route. Instead of capturing carbon <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/white-house-suck-carbon-out-of-air">from the air</a>, it proposes removing it from the ocean, freeing up the deep blue to absorb even more of the CO2 that civilization is pumping out. 
"Seawater has got loads of carbon in it compared to the air, about 150 times more," Paul Halloran, a professor in ocean and climate science at the University of Exeter who leads the SeaCURE project, told the BBC. "But it has got different challenges, the energy requirements to generate the products that we require to do this from seawater are huge."
In a nutshell, SeaCURE sucks up seawater, processes it to extract the CO2, buries it underground, and then releases the carbon-free water back into the ocean. Removing the carbon is accomplished by treating the seawater to make it more acidic, which frees up the carbon it harbors to release itself as a gas. This process is done inside a large tank nicknamed a "stripper."
"When you open a fizzy drink it froths, that's the CO2 coming out," Tom Bell from Plymouth Marine Laboratory told the BBC. "What we're doing by spreading the seawater on a large surface area. It's a bit like pouring a drink on the floor and allowing the CO2 to come out of the seawater really quickly."
Still in its infancy, the project will remove no more than 100 metric tons of carbon per year. But SeaCURE believes that if the technology is applied at a massive scale and powered by renewable energy, it could remove 14 billion tons of CO2 a year if one percent of the ocean's surface water was processed, per the BBC.
That may sound too good to be true. We've certainly heard amazing promises of nature handling the work for us before, like the rush to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/guy-urged-planting-trillion-trees-stop">plant as many trees as possible</a>. More broadly, experts remain divided about carbon capture's usefulness, and there's a very real danger of its promises being hijacked to distract from climate change's systemic causes.
That said, some leading climate scientists think that we shouldn't write anything off just yet.
"Carbon removal is necessary. If you want to reach net zero emissions and net zero emissions is needed to halt further warming," Oliver Geden, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the BBC. "Capturing directly from seawater is one of the options. Directly capturing it from the air is another one. There are basically 15 to 20 options, and in the end the question of what to use, of course, will depend on the cost."
More on climate change: <a href="https://futurism.com/global-warming-banks">This May Be the Most Terrifying Sign of Global Warming Yet</a>

New Wave

Suck it, climate change.

Scientists Activate Facility to Suck Carbon Directly Out of the Ocean

In a blind taste test, thousands of self-professed "omnivores and flexitarians" were given meat substitutes alongside the real thing and asked to rate which was better — and their responses were pretty telling.
As <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/409175/meat-plant-based-blind-taste-test">Vox reports</a>, new results from a <a href="https://www.nectar.org/sensory-research/2025-taste-of-the-industry">survey conducted by NECTAR</a>, a nonprofit that researches "alternative protein" products, suggest that preferences for real or fake meat may be more in our minds than in our taste buds.
When averaging out the results in sum, NECTAR found that their 2,684 subjects far preferred the animal "benchmark" products they were fed alongside fake meat products ranging from imitation bratwurst and burgers to ersatz pulled pork and deli slices.
But accounting for the massive disparities in quality between brands — which anyone who suffered through the vegan pizza craze of the early 2010s can attest to — paints a very different picture.  When given unbreaded "chicken" cutlets from Impossible Foods, for instance, 60 percent of the survey's participants said it tasted as good or better than real chicken from Purdue — a wild finding for foods from an industry that has taken hit after hit in recent years amid <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90931204/beyond-impossible-disinformation-mystery-berman">meat industry disinformation campaigns</a>.
Experts who spoke to Vox iterated that when it comes to food, mind truly is over matter.
"People don’t just taste food in an objective way," Daniel Rosenfeld, a University of California Los Angeles behavioral scientist who specializes in plant-based food perceptions, told the website. He should know: in 2023, <a href="https://www.daniellrosenfeld.com/_files/ugd/eaf2e3_3e77af6d5f10498aace30f08addb6f7d.pdf?index=true">Rosenfeld co-wrote a study</a> that found that so-called "carnists," or people who strongly believe eating animals is a human right, were more likely to expect vegan food to taste gross.
When it comes to expectations regarding plant-based foods, societal norms play a big role in how people feel, the researcher noted. It's not hard to imagine, for instance, the average cisgender American man loudly ragging on fake meats and extolling the virtues of bacon. For those of us who've eaten stellar plant-based foods, it's also humorous to envision that same type of guy <a href="https://www.facebook.com/LADbible/videos/716133149092360/">unwittingly enjoying</a> a delicious fake meat burger without being told it's not from an animal.
"When social norms with a product get set in place, it's pretty hard to change that default," Rosenfeld said. "People like to just do whatever is a popular option. We’re very conformist by nature."
More on meat: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/tech-exec-biohacker-son-stats">You’ll Never Guess What That Millionaire Biohacker Is Measuring on His Teenage Son</a>

Meat Market

Studies

Can you guess?

This Blind Test of Whether People Prefer the Taste of Real Meat or Fake Meat Might Surprise You

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly opened and closed an investigation into an outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of Escherichia coli, better known as the deadly bacteria E. coli — and never revealed the investigation to the public.
As <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ecoli-bacteria-lettuce-outbreak-rcna200236">NBC News reports</a>, the 89 people sickened from the outbreak last November ranged in age from four to 90, and were spread across at least 15 states and killed at least one person. The FDA, subsequently, investigated the outbreak — and quietly closed it without alerting the public about the probe, or naming the companies behind it.
In <a href="https://fox2now.com/news/missouri/new-lawsuits-filed-against-farm-linked-to-st-louis-county-e-coli-outbreak/">lawsuits filed by families</a> affected by the outbreak, the California-based bagged salad giant Taylor Farms was named as the source of the E. coli-tainted lettuce, but the FDA under Donald Trump and Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., refuse to do the same.
In statements to the outlet, Taylor Farms insisted that third-party investigations had cleared it of any responsibility. Just a few weeks before the lettuce-derived outbreak began, however, the same company <a href="https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/outbreak-investigation-e-coli-o157h7-onions-october-2024">voluntarily recalled yellow onions</a> it had grown that were linked to a separate rash of E. coli infections that sickened more than 100 people and killed one.
As with Taylor Farms, the FDA has also issued some very mixed messaging about the November E. coli outbreak.
In an <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25899103-2411moexh-2-romaine-e-coli-fda-report/?mode=document">internal document obtained by NBC</a>, the FDA appeared to pinpoint the farm that grew the lettuce and the brand that sold it, but those names, as well as other information, have been redacted. In a statement to the news outlet, a spokesperson said those names were not disclosed because it had already ended by the time the source of the outbreak was confirmed — but in a separate <a href="https://www.wthr.com/article/money/whats-the-deal/avon-boy-colton-george-deathly-ill-e-coli-outbreak-fda-company-mystery-lettuce/531-62d1a1c9-95f1-4da9-991c-af2c5a04297c">comment to Albany's 13News</a>, another FDA representative claimed that the lack of disclosure was to protect "trade secrets."
Beyond the obfuscation and politicking, this outbreak — which involved a dangerous strain known as 0157:H7, which can cause organ damage, long-term illness, and even death — seems to really have freaked out the people tasked with handling it.
In Missouri, St. Louis County senior epidemiologist Amanda Brzozowski told NBC that as soon as the cases in the November outbreak began coming in, she knew it was no normal rash of foodborne illness. High schoolers who all lived in the same area of the county were the first infected, and food from a local catering company was ultimately identified as the likely origin. Ominously, the kids who got it became incredibly sick, incredibly fast.
From bloody diarrhea to and severe stomach cramping to dehydration and vomiting, the illness the epidemiologist had on her hands was, as she put it, "really scary."
"This type of situation we’ve never seen before," Brzozowski said.
Using genetic sequencing technology and other health information about people infected, federal investigators determined that those who fell ill did so after eating romaine lettuce — and that the lettuce had come from a "sole processor."
When it came to naming that source, however, the FDA remained mum until the parents of 10-year-old Colton George, one of the victims of the outbreak who nearly died from his infection, filed a records request with the agency to get the unredacted information.
In the wake of this E. coli news, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-food-safety-inspections-plans/">FDA insiders told CBS News</a> that the agency plans to stop doing its routine food and drug safety inspections entirely. Though HHS denied that claim through a spokesperson, even the suggestion of such a thing portends poorly for food safety in this country — especially at an agency intent on protecting the anonymity of an allegedly disease-spreading company.
More on the FDA: <a href="https://futurism.com/fda-poppers-crackdown-rfk-aids">The FDA, Which is Run By A Homophobic Conspiracy Theorist, Has Raided a Poppers Company</a>

Safety Secrets

A "type of situation we’ve never seen before."

The Government Hid a Deadly E. Coli Outbreak

If chivalry isn't already dead, it's certainly circling the drain.
OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.
When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter <a href="https://x.com/tomieinlove/status/1912287012058722659">wondered aloud</a> "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models," <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/1912646035979239430">Altman chimed in</a>, saying it's "tens of millions of dollars well spent."
"You never know," he added.
While it may seem pointless to treat an AI chatbot with respect, some AI architects say it's an important move. Microsoft's design manager Kurtis Beavers, for example, <a href="https://techsevenpartners.com/ai-etiquette-why-you-should-add-a-please-and-thank-you-when-using-ai/">says proper etiquette</a> "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs."
"Using polite language sets a tone for the response," Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider "artificial intelligence" might more accurately be described as "<a href="https://hbr.org/2024/11/generative-ai-is-still-just-a-prediction-machine">prediction machines</a>," like your phone's predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions.
"When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back," a Microsoft <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/why-using-a-polite-tone-with-ai-matters">WorkLab memo notes</a>. "Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide."
A <a href="https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/are-you-polite-to-chatgpt-heres-where-you-rank-among-ai-chatbot-users">late 2024 survey</a> found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-meta-yann-lecun-interview/">case of an AI uprising</a>.
That AI revolution is probably a long way off, if it happens at all — many AI researchers doubt we'll ever build a truly "<a href="https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/07/01/there-could-never-be-an-artificial-general-intelligence/">intelligent" algorithm</a>, at least based on the current tech of large language models (LLMs) — but the environmental consequences of present-day AI are all too real. Unfortunately, those "pleases" and "thank yous" are adding up, bigtime.
One <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/">Washington Post investigation</a>, done in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, studied the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If you were to send one AI email a week over the course of a year, you'd use an eye-watering 7.5kWh, roughly equal to an hour's worth of electricity consumed by 9 households in Washington DC.
Now imagine the tens of thousands of lengthy prompts we're feeding chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on the daily — not exactly <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/23/1092777/ai-is-an-energy-hog-this-is-what-it-means-for-climate-change/">low-impact</a>.
While AI etiquette might sound trivial, it all underscores the rather grim reality that our queries have consequences, particularly on the environment. The data centers used to power these chatbots already suck up about <a href="https://www.indeed-innovation.com/the-mensch/ais-climate-crisis-are-we-burning-the-planet-to-feed-our-digital-brains/#:~:text=Energy%20analysts%20calculate%20that%20all,transportation%2C%20manufacturing%2C%20or%20agriculture.">2 percent</a> of the world's energy consumption, a number that's likely to skyrocket as AI floods <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai-we-deserve/">every corner</a> of daily life.
So if you're mulling whether or not to thank Grok for its efforts, maybe the better move would be to ditch the chatbot and write the email yourself. The earth — <a href="https://futurism.com/cognitive-decay-ai">and your brain</a> — will thank you.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/judge-ai-generated-video-court">Judge Goes Ballistic When Man Shows AI-Generated Video in Court</a>

Bad Manners

"You never know."

Sam Altman Admits That Saying "Please" and "Thank You" to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power

Meta has been accused of illegally using copyrighted material to train its AI models — and the tech giant's defense is pretty thin.
In the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sarah-silverman-celebrities-sue-openai-copyright-infringement">ongoing suit</a> Richard Kadrey et al v. Meta Platforms, led by a group of authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has argued that its alleged <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-books">scraping over seven million books</a> from the pirated library LibGen constituted "fair use" of the material, and was therefore not illegal.
The specious defenses don't end there. As <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-ai-lawsuit">Vanity Fair </a><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-ai-lawsuit">spotlights</a> in a new writeup, Meta's attorneys are also arguing that the countless books that the company used to train its multibillion-dollar language models and springboard itself into the headspinningly buzzy AI race are actually worthless.
Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." 
Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says, because "for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange," as quoted by Vanity Fair — "but none of [the authors'] works has economic value, individually, as training data." Other communications showed that Meta employees stripped the copyright pages from the downloaded books.
This is emblematic of the chicaneries and two-faced logic that Meta, and the AI industry at large, deploys when it's pressed about all the human-created content it devours. 
Somehow, that stuff is simultaneously not that valuable, and we should all stop pearl-clutching about the sanctity of art, and anyway an AI <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openais-creative-writing-ai-evokes-that-annoying-kid-from-high-school-fiction-club/">writes creative prose just as well as a human now</a> — but is also absolutely essential to building our new synthetic gods that <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/28/1104588/sorry-ai-wont-fix-climate-change/">will solve climate change</a>, so please don't make us pay for using any of it. That last bit is literally what OpenAI <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliament">argued to the British Parliament</a> last year — that there isn't enough stuff in the public domain to beef up its AI models, so it must be allowed to plumb the bounties of contemporary copyrighted works without paying a penny.
Seemingly, this is an unspoken understanding at the top AI companies. When one Meta researcher inquired if the company's legal team had okayed using LibGen, another responded: "I didn't ask questions but this is what OpenAI does with GPT3, what Google does with PALM, and what Deepmind does with Chinchilla so we will do it to[o]," per Vanity Fair, from internal messages cited in the suit.
Tellingly, the unofficial policy seems to be to not speak about it at all. 
"In no case would we disclose publicly that we had trained on LibGen, however there is practical risk external parties could deduce our use of this dataset," an internal Meta slide deck read. The deck noted that "if there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues."
More on AI copyright: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-over-copyrighted-work">OpenAI Says It’s "Over" If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work</a>

Book Worms

How convenient.

Meta Says It's Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No "Economic Value"

Unperturbed by the dystopian optics, the Royal Thai Police have deployed a humanoid police robot during a festival.
As the <a href="https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/thailand-unveils-robocop-style-ai-police-cyborg-1-0-officer-to-enhance-songkran-safety">Straits Times reports</a>, the unsettling robot, dubbed "AI police cyborg 1.0" — even though it's technically more of an android and not a cyborg — surveyed the streets during the country's Songkran festival using 360-degree cameras.
According to the report, the cyborg is equipped with facial recognition technology and can notify officers of high-risk individuals and weapons.
But is this really an invention <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/34521508/robocop-ai-police-cyborg/">worthy of the nickname "Robocop</a>?"
<figure id="attachment_349155" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-349155" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-349155 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/491949830_1103821628457793_3734224749003650233_n-1200x800.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="800" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-349155" class="wp-caption-text">Image credit: Royal Thai Police</figcaption></figure>
It's difficult to judge how effective the Thai police force's latest recruit actually is. Sure, machine learning-assisted video surveillance has been around for years. But what about doing more human stuff, like walking?
We have to see the Thai police's police cyborg actually move. Images <a href="https://www.facebook.com/royalthaipolice/posts/pfbid03W9AmPz8fVNsH9BBmtAsn3JAH7j6kD7qFnY2SXxuZAh2EQ4c7oFrBGih4G2KqxGKl?locale=th_TH">shared by the Royal Thai Police on Facebook</a> show it standing stiff on a raised, metal platform with wheels, suggesting it may not be able to walk on its own accord.
Put simply, what can it do that a tripod with a 360-degree camera and a mobile computer can't? Why bother with an entire bipedal dummy? Wouldn't a swarm of drones <a href="https://futurism.com/nypd-sending-drones-calls">prove far more effective</a> when it comes to reconnaissance and identifying bad guys?
Besides, if it weren't being guarded by a surprising number of human recruits, what would stop a masked vigilante from simply tipping it over?
<figure id="attachment_349157" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-349157" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-349157 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/491342481_1103821625124460_7411130003149387501_n-1200x800.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="800" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-349157" class="wp-caption-text">Image credit: Royal Thai Police</figcaption></figure>
We've already seen plenty of disastrous rollouts of robots in law enforcement. For instance, police forces across the United States have already deployed security robots developed by California-based security company Knightscope.
In New York, the company's portly robot was <a href="https://futurism.com/eric-adams-subway-robot-redeployed">taken out of commission almost immediately</a>, proving unable to stop crime in any meaningful way before it ended up <a href="https://x.com/nytimes/status/1753468346526233008">collecting dust in an empty storefront</a>.
There have also been reports of robots <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36793790">running over a toddler</a>, as well as being <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/police-robots-security-malfunctioning-fails-knightscope-2020-1">thwarted by mall fountains and narrow sidewalks</a>.
Last year, we also came across a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chinese-police-deploy-spherical-robot">rolling robot, reminiscent of the android BB-8</a> in the "Star Wars" universe, being deployed by a police force in Eastern China.
Even if the Royal Thai Police were to be accessing the very cutting edge in humanoid robotics, plenty of technical obstacles could still make deploying a "police cyborg" an expensive and ultimately fruitless endeavor.
As of right now, humanoid robots are only starting to learn how to be comfortable on their own two feet, so their deployment would likely demand ample human supervision.
Whether the Royal Thai Police has considered the substantial privacy implications of rolling out facial recognition-powered surveillance tech remains unclear. Law enforcement in the country has been accused of <a href="https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2024/03/20/thailands-national-police-chief-and-his-deputy-are-suspended-amid-rumors-of-a-power-struggle/">corruption and bribery</a>, so civil liberties probably aren't exactly priority number one.
More on robot cops: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chinese-police-deploy-spherical-robot">Chinese Police Deploy Rolling BB-8-Style Robot to Patrol Streets, Chase Down Suspects</a>

Made in Thailand

We have questions.

Thailand Deploys Humanoid Robot Dressed in Police Uniform

When Donald Trump took office in January, volunteer archivists got to work, ensuring that government websites were backed up before the incoming administration had a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge">chance to purge more than 110,000 government pages</a>.
As part of the administration's extremist anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, agencies were forced to take down any material related to anything from supporting transgender youth to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-nasa-purge-mentions-women">mentions of women in leadership at NASA</a> — a "<a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/02/05/nx-s1-5286577/researcher-calls-out-trump-administration-for-a-digital-book-burning">digital book burning</a>," according to Harvard University social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger.
And now, the Trump administration is exacting revenge. The <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2025/04/17/doge-neh-funding-cuts-sf/">San Francisco Standard reports</a> that Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has spearheaded a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-lives-destroyed-respond-laugh-cry-emojis">highly destructive</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-failing">ill-conceived</a> gutting of government agency budgets, is now targeting federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Among them? One funding the Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded in 1996 with the aim of providing free access to digitized media, including websites, software, music, and print materials.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has proven invaluable to researchers, journalists, and archivists, allowing users to go back in time and see how websites looked in the past.
According to the Standard, the nonprofit was halfway through an NEH grant of $345,000 when its funding was abruptly cut.
It's an especially important initiative, considering the organization was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/23/nx-s1-5326573/internet-archive-wayback-machine-trump">busy archiving websites</a> targeted by the Trump administration.
"This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted," Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, "like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online."
Fortunately, according to Bailey, the Internet Archive has other independent streams of funding that will keep it afloat for now.
However, smaller nonprofits could suffer greatly as a result of DOGE's NEH cuts. Bay Area-based producer Marc Shaffer called it a "catastrophic development, if not a death blow" for filmmakers.
"NEH documentaries contribute significantly to American culture," he told the Standard. "They are national treasures deserving of far more support than they receive."
While other sources of funding are keeping the Internet Archive afloat, the nonprofit has plenty of other fires to put out as well.
Earlier this week, the Internet Archive <a href="https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1912923563234898329">launched a petition</a> in light of a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels.
However, since then, hundreds of musicians have come to speak out in <a href="https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1912923574043627669">support of the nonprofit</a>.
And it's not just musicians — the Internet Archive has grown to be an extremely important tool to ensure that the Trump administration is unable to simply erase the historical record.
"There's a groundswell of support for the Internet Archive because of the dramatic shift that's going on in parts of the government web infrastructure that you wouldn't imagine would change," Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/23/nx-s1-5326573/internet-archive-wayback-machine-trump">told NPR</a> last month. "People are coming and rallying behind us — by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down."
More on DOGE: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/whistleblower-threats-elon-musk-doge-data">Whistleblower Says He Received Threats After Investigating Whether Elon Musk's Minions Were Stealing Government Data</a>

Unarchiver

"This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted."

Elon Musk Cuts Funding for Internet Archive

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta just <a href="https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/I%27ve_made_a_huge_mistake">made a huge mistake</a>.
Or more accurately, a bunch of huge mistakes, which have drawn the wrath of lawyers for Meta's peers Apple, Google, and Snapchat.
The issue is that during the latest phase of its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust-trial-ftc.html">massive antitrust trial</a>, Meta lawyers presented slides revealing information it held about other companies. Though technically redacted, third party details compiled by Meta were accessible by anyone with the file — because the redactions were easily reversible.
Luckily, the information revealed wasn't exactly nuclear secrets — one slide notes hat iPhone users prefer Apple's messaging app to Meta's, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/648893/meta-redacted-documents-leak-ftc-antitrust-opening-statement">per </a><a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/648893/meta-redacted-documents-leak-ftc-antitrust-opening-statement">The Verge</a> — but the other companies' lawyers say that's not the point: it's that a company the size of Meta shouldn't be treating sensitive court documents, nevermind the entire proceedings, with such utter disregard.
Snapchat's lawyer slammed Meta's "cavalier approach and casual disregard," <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/649834/meta-redactions-apple-google-snap-angry-ftc-antitrust-trial">according to The Verge</a>, and questioned if Meta "would have applied meaningful redactions if it were its own information that was at stake." Counselors for Apple, meanwhile, implied they might not trust its internal documents with Meta going forward.
Meta has previously been caught trying to leverage user data to <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/meta_snapchat_data/">spy on rival platform Snapchat</a>, a strategy the company called "Operation Ghostbusters." It was also hit with a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajdellinger/2021/04/03/personal-date-of-533-million-facebook-users-leaks-online/">massive data breach</a> back in 2019, leaking personal information from some 533 million Facebook users after attackers discovered a flaw in the platform's internal security.
The company's most recent privacy debacle comes in the middle of a <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/meta-claims-monopoly-landmark-antitrust-trial-gets-underway/story?id=120799633">landmark antitrust case</a> filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which argues that Meta has made a habit of buying out competitors like Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and Oculus rather than competing with them in earnest.
Among other things, the FTC is trying to prove that Meta's attempted purchase of Snapchat — a bid <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-antitrust-trial-snapchat-buyout-bid-2025-4">Snap rejected</a> back in 2013, to Zuckerberg's dismay — represents a standard procedure for the social media giant.
In a recent <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/ftcs-weak-case-against-meta-ignores-reality/">PR disclosure</a>, Meta raged that the "FTC's weak case against Meta ignores reality," arguing that the company's social media rivals extend far beyond Snapchat, therefore its attempted purchase is no big deal.
"The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows," Meta's report read, that "Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps)."
Meta's not alone in facing scrutiny for monopolistic practices.
A federal judge recently sided with the Justice Department in a suit alleging that Google was operating a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/tech/google-adtech-trial-decision/index.html">web advertising monopoly</a>, a judgment that could shake up the web in a major way. The FTC is likewise taking Amazon to task on antitrust grounds, though that trial <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5328202/ftc-asks-to-delay-amazon-trial-over-dire-resources-then-quickly-backtracks">could be delayed</a> now that DOGE has cancelled the leases on some trade commission offices.
More on Meta: <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-facebook-friends-meta-antitrust">Zuckerberg Tells Court That Facebook Is No Longer About Connecting With Friends</a>

Oh Snap

Whoops.

Meta Made a Wild Screwup in the Documents It Showed in Court

Tech CEOs <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/tech/tech-leaders-supported-trump-lost-money-dg/index.html">rallied behind Donald Trump</a> in hopes that he would lower regulations and increase profits — and although he's already done the former, the latter now seems like a pipe dream.
As <a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/409256/trump-tariffs-student-visas-andreessen-horowitz">Vox reports</a>, any gains tech companies have gleaned from Trump's deregulation are minuscule in comparison to the economic havoc the president has wreaked with his foolhardy tariffs.
As the election ramped up last July, tech venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz <a href="https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-little-tech-agenda">insisted in a Substack blog post</a> that the only way for the United States to maintain "economic and technological preeminence" over China and its "much darker, more totalitarian" policies would be, essentially, to beat our erstwhile trading partner.
Shortly thereafter, the monied pair <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&amp;ab_channel=a16z">revealed on their podcast</a> that they were all-in for Trump despite being lifelong Democrats because he was, to their minds, America's last best hope at defeating China and becoming the tech utopia they've always wanted.
Though such warmongering sentiments are clearly behind the president's enormous tariffs on Chinese goods, it also undermines the Silicon Valley CEOs who lined up to kiss his ring because, to put it bluntly, almost all the components for American tech <a href="https://www.high-capacity.com/p/chinas-overlapping-tech-industrial">are made in China</a>.
Beyond cutting tech manufacturers off from their Chinese suppliers, the tariffs have also sent shockwaves through the global economy and brought the United States to the brink of a recession. The trickle-down effect from the tariffs has been more like a waterfall, with <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-trade-war-04-14-25/card/companies-are-going-bankrupt-at-the-fastest-rate-since-2010-mkBYAFmgfqRA0ZmAi6uE">tech companies going bankrupt</a>, <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/04/09/tech-vcs-feel-their-own-special-tariff-pain-00282047">canceling IPOs</a>, and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-tariff-bezos-musk-zuckerberg-b2727147.html">losing billions</a> in share value.
Though Silicon Valley's biggest Trump supporters haven't started publicly trashing dear leader just yet, one need look no further than the never-ending drama between the president and his unelected aide Elon Musk to see just how badly this administration's trade war is messing with Big Tech.
Earlier in April, the billionaire <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-raging-against-trump-administration">began a fiery spat with Peter Navarro</a>, the president's trade and manufacturing adviser, calling the Trump surrogate "<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1909605316121198860">dumber than a sack of bricks</a>" as they traded barbs over whether or not the tariffs are a good idea. While that drama played out on Musk's social network, the multi-hyphenate business owner allegedly <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-reportedly-begged-donald-trump-reverse-tariffs">implored Trump in privat</a>e to reconsider the tariffs — a scheme that clearly did not work.
With the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/investing/us-stock-market/index.html">stock market rebound</a> following the president's announcement of yet another 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs — for everyone except China, of course — it's not a huge surprise that the tech CEOs who threw their weight and money behind Trump are not talking smack where other people can hear.
Behind closed doors, however, there's unquestionably a lot of hand-wringing and regret going on as these short-sighted Silicon Valley-ers look at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/business/economy/trump-economy-tariffs.html">economic forecasts</a> for the coming years.
More on tech: <a href="https://futurism.com/google-border-surveillance">Google Is Helping Government Build an AI-Powered Border Surveillance System</a>