The sky's the limit for how outrageously implausible some scams can get. Actually, try beyond the atmosphere.
An elderly woman in Japan sent thousands of dollars to a trickster who claimed to be an astronaut trapped in space and in danger of suffocating, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woman-romance-scam-fake-astronaut-distress-japan/">Agence France-Presse reports</a>. In fairness to the lady, though, she thought they were in love.
The 80-year-old pensioner, who lives in Sapporo, the capital of Japan's northern island Hokkaido, met the scammer on social media in July, police said, describing it as a romance scam.
Not only did the scammer claim to be a male astronaut, but he soon broke the news to her that he was "in space on a spaceship right now." And urgently, he was "under attack and in need of oxygen." So what else could he do but plea to a stranger he just met on the internet for help?
Naturally, cash was the only solution to this unfolding orbital crisis. The scammer convinced the poor old lady — who lived alone — to electronically send around 1 million yen, or $6,750, to buy oxygen. 
How that oxygen was supposed to get immediately delivered is anyone's guess, but that's enough money to keep the lights on at the International Space Station, which costs around a billion dollars <a href="https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/ig-24-020.pdf">per year in maintenance and upkeep</a>, for a grand total of three or four minutes. 
Listen: she was doing her part. (And, to be fair, <a href="https://boingboing.net/2016/02/12/nigerian-astronaut-lost-in-spa.html">this isn't even the first time</a> that an online scammer has claimed to represent an astronaut trapped in space.)
As the AFP reports notes, there's been a drastic uptick in fraud that targets the lovesick. In the US alone, victims lost around $1.14 billion to romance scams in 2023, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/03/heres-how-to-avoid-romance-scams-which-cost-consumers-1point14-billion-last-year.html">according to the Federal Trade Commission</a>, which is double the toll reported in 2021. Strikingly, the median amount of money lost per person was over $2,000 — the highest of any form of imposter scam. Love sure does hurt.
The elderly are especially vulnerable to these internet-enabled cons, romantic or not, and Japan has one of the oldest populations in the world. And while it didn't take much to dupe this lonely octogenarian, the rise of widely available AI tools is supercharging just how convincing these scammers can be.
Some are using AI-powered "<a href="https://futurism.com/deepfakes-scam-boomers">realtime deepfakes</a>" to give themselves beautiful and realistic fake faces that hold up even during live video calls. They're also using AI voice synthesizers to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-voice-hostage-scam">imitate the voices of their victims' relatives</a>, fooling boomers, for example, into thinking their grandkid has been taken hostage and needs ransom money. AI chatbots, meanwhile, makes it take exactly zero effort for scammers to keep up lengthy conversations over text. 
In other words, your Facebook-addicted, <a href="https://futurism.com/facebook-ai-generated-images-viral">AI-slop-resharing grandparents</a> don't stand a chance. Maybe, as the tech gets better, neither will you.
More on scams: <a href="https://futurism.com/online-jobs-text-scam">What Actually Happens If You Sign Up for One of Those Scammy "Online Jobs" Is Pretty Fascinating</a>

Astronaut Harmer

"In space on a spaceship right now."

Woman Sends Money to "Stranded Astronaut" So He Can "Buy Oxygen"

Albania has appointed the world's first-ever AI government official in hopes of rooting out some of the Balkan state's <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/sep/commentary-albania-how-one-most-corrupt-countries-europe-tackling-crime">long-running corruption</a>.
As <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/albania-apppoints-worlds-first-virtual-minister-edi-rama-diella/">Politico Europe reports,</a> the new AI minister — which should not be confused with a minister of AI, which a few countries already have, including <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canadas-new-minister-of-ai-must-not-be-naive-to-its-harms/">Canada</a> and the <a href="https://www.imd.org/news/digital/updates-whoever-leads-the-ai-race-will-lead-the-future-uae-minister-says-at-our-signature-programme-in-dubai/">United Arab Emirates</a> — has been dubbed "Diella," meaning "sunshine" in Albanian.
Announced this week by Edi Rama, Albania's prime minster, Diella — which also serves as the avatar for e-Albania, the country's government services portal — will oversee public procurement, the process by which governments and state-owned companies buy, via taxpayer dollars, everything from office supplies to concrete for roadwork.
Decisions about how that money is spent will, as Rama told a Socialist Party assembly in the Albanian capital of Tirana, all go through Diella in a "step-by-step" process that is "100 percent incorruptible, and where every public fund that goes through the tender procedure is 100 percent legible."
"This is not science fiction," he said, per Politico, "but the duty of Diella."
Along with being the nation's public procurer, the AI official will, the prime minister said, also "hire talents here from all over the world," and in doing so somehow drive down the "fear of prejudice and rigidity of the administration."
Though it's unclear whether Diella the procurement minister will have the same underpinnings as the e-Albania government services assistant of the same name, <a href="https://a2news.com/english/shqiperia/aktualitet/diella-rama-prezanton-asistenten-e-re-virtuale-me-ze-dhe-fi-i1138185">reporting earlier this year</a> from A2, a CNN affiliate in Albania, indicate that the latter was built on tech from from OpenAI and Microsoft.
On the government services site, Diella is seen wearing a pink-and-white traditional Albanian dress and headscarf — but as of now, it remains unclear whether the procurement minister version will be depicted wearing something similar.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-363868 size-full" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/09/Screen-Shot-2025-09-12-at-10.58.16-AM.png" alt="Diella, the AI avatar for e-Albania, the country's government service portal. The avatar's message, translated to English, reads: Welcome! I am your assistant for any question you may have about e-Albania. Image via e-Albania/screenshot." width="850" height="901" />
Though it's purported to root out corruption from <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0w4e4e00jo">drug traffickers</a> and <a href="https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/violent-albanian-criminal-group-linked-to-corruption-disrupted-sky-ecc-analysis">gangs</a> who <a href="https://albaniandailynews.com/news/pm-reveals-report-on-public-procurement">take advantage</a> of the Albanian government's contracting system, Diella could, if left unsupervised, <a href="https://futurism.com/hackers-trick-chatgpt-personal-data">easily be exploited</a> by any bad actor who knows how — or could just <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-huge-factual-errors">plain make bad decisions</a>, as we've seen time and again from AI built by companies including OpenAI.
Still, it's a fascinating experiment in <a href="https://futurism.com/white-house-deploy-elon-musk-mechahitler">AI integration into government</a> — and quite possibly a <a href="https://fedscoop.com/hhs-rolls-out-chatgpt-across-department/">sign of things to come elsewhere</a>.
More on AI in Albania: <a href="https://futurism.com/albania-replace-government-ai">This Country Wants to Replace Its Corrupt Government With AI</a>

Albanian Algorithms

"This is not science fiction."

Albania Appoints an AI as Government Official

One of the core appeals of cryptocurrency — other than providing a get-rich-quick scheme for famous people with huge sway over their followers, like a <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/president-trump-billions-crypto">sitting president</a> or an <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/hawk-tuah-girl-knowledge-crypto">airheaded influencer</a> — is that it's decentralized and largely unregulated.
Of course, that also makes it a breeding ground for fraud.
Just ask Boise, Idaho gas station clerk Avalon Hardy. As <a href="https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/crypto-atm-fraud-gas-station-workers-idaho/91236489">Inc reports</a>, she ended up repeatedly intervening to stop old ladies from getting ripped off by using the establishment's Bitcoin ATM. 
Hardy noticed elderly women entering the gas station with bags of cash on three separate occasions, looking anxious and usually on the phone or texting someone. Each time, they used the Bitcoin ATM, or BTM, to convert their dead presidents into crypto.
Suspecting something fishy was afoot, Hardy gently prodded the old ladies.
"Do you know where you're sending the money to?" Hardy would ask, per Inc. "You don't have to be on the phone to send money, as long as you have the other person's information."
That didn't work. 
One of the ladies, a 79-year-old, was hellbent on converting $15,000. So Hardy resorted to drastic action: unplugging the BTM from the wall. The next week, she did the same to save a 75-year-old from losing $19,000.
"It's not super, super popular, that Bitcoin machine," Hardy told Inc, estimating that less than two dozen customers have used it for a legitimate purpose in the past year, meaning that an enormous proportion of the machine's total business is implicated in defrauding the elderly. In all, Hardy says she stopped seven crypto scams from happening in her store.
Crypto scams have become widespread in recent years, with revenue from these schemes jumping to at least $9.9 billion in 2024, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-scams-likely-set-new-record-2024-helped-by-ai-chainalysis-says-2025-02-14/">according to the analytics firm Chainalysis</a>, which was 40 percent more than the year before. 
An FBI report from 2023 <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/crypto-scams-stole-56-billion-americans-last-year-mostly-older-people-rcna170410">found</a> that older adults were the most vulnerable to crypto fraud. People 60 years of age and above reported losing over $1.6 billion in 2023, blowing all other age groups out of the water.
The schemes can vary. Some scammers purport to be government agencies or banks, convincing their victims that they're owed money. Others use use AI to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ftc-scammers-cloning-voice">impersonate a target's relative</a>, claiming they're being held hostage and need ransom money for their safe release. Long cons, called pig butchering scams in the cryptosphere, involve forming a close relationship with a victim under a fake identity and persuading them into making sham investments — in other words, fattening them up before the slaughter.
In any case, new digital technologies like AI are making these schemes way more nefarious, especially for old people. Scammers will "email you an arrest warrant" using "AI to enhance it," Matthew Hogan, a crypto crime specialist with the Connecticut State Police, told Inc. "They'll take the DOJ logo and throw it on there. They'll manipulate signatures."
Bad actors are even starting to use AI-powered "realtime deepfakes" to <a href="https://futurism.com/deepfakes-scam-boomers">give themselves entirely new faces</a> that they use in video calls. Heightening the threat is that older folks don't understand how crypto works or how difficult to trace its transactions are. Once your crypto's gone, it's gone. There's no bank that can reverse it. 
It's all the more important, then, that Hardy stepped in when she did.
"People stopping and disrupting these scams is the best way that we have to really affect it," Brad Thorne, a financial crimes detective with the Boise Police Department, told Inc. "It's much easier to stop it before it starts."
Hardy's interventions are admirable. But ideally, society shouldn't be relying on the individual heroics of gas station workers to stop your grandma from forking over her retirement fund to an anonymous scammer.
More crypto: <a href="https://futurism.com/detroit-crypto-realtoken">A Company Tried to Put Real Estate on the Blockchain and Now It's Facing a Legal Disaster</a>

Clerk Kent

Bitcoin ATMs: a hive of scum and villainy.

Heroic Gas Station Clerk Realizes Elderly Women Are Being Scammed at the Bitcoin ATM, Unplugs It to Save Them

Today, the near-Earth asteroid known as Ryugu is bone dry. But new research suggests that the half-mile space rock may have once been flowing with liquid water — and crucially, at a period in the solar system's history far later than when that would have been thought possible. 
The findings, published in a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09483-0">new study</a> in the journal Nature, could add weight to the theory that <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/evidence-soggy-meteorites-earth-oceans">soggy asteroids brought Earth its first stores of </a><a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/evidence-soggy-meteorites-earth-oceans">H2O</a> billions of years ago.
"This changes how we think about the long-term fate of water in asteroids," said study lead author Tsuyoshi Iizuka, an associate professor in the department of earth and planetary science at the University of Tokyo, in a <a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-09-isotopic-analysis-asteroid-ryugu.html">statement</a> about the work. "The water hung around for a long time and was not exhausted so quickly as thought."
When the Sun was still young, it was surrounded by a so-called protoplanetary disc of floating material that would eventually give birth to the planets. The leftovers became asteroids. And many c-type, or carbonaceous, asteroids like Ryugu formed past or near a certain boundary called the frost line, where temperatures were low enough for water to condense into tiny grains of ice.
Until now, astronomers believed that liquid water activity only took place in the earliest moments of the solar system. In the vacuum of space, water, even sheltered in asteroids, should eventually evaporate or freeze, since the absence of atmospheric pressure drastically lowers its boiling point. What little water survives is believed to be trapped inside minerals, <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-detects-water-surface-asteroids">in molecular form</a>.
The new findings suggest that may not always be the case. The work involved examining microscopic rock samples taken from the asteroid by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) probe Hayabusa2 in 2018 and 2019. In particular, the team measured the radioactive decay of the isotopes lutetium 176 and hafnium 176 to estimate the age of Ryugu — and it didn't add up, despite it normally being a reliable way of dating.
"We got ages of around 4.8 billion years for Ryugu samples, which are far older than the age of the solar system," Iizuka <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2495745-asteroid-ryugu-once-had-liquid-water-flowing-through-it/">told </a><a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2495745-asteroid-ryugu-once-had-liquid-water-flowing-through-it/">New Scientist</a>. "This means the clock is off in Ryugu samples."
And what could throw off the clock? According to the researchers, a liquid flushing out some of the lutetium isotopes. This points to flowing water being present on Ryugu — or the original rock that spawned it — roughly a billion years after it formed. By extension, that means there should have been a sizable store of frozen water that survived this entire lengthy period before thawing.
The team doesn't have a clear picture yet of what could've thawed the water ice, because heat from the Sun shouldn't penetrate deep enough into the asteroid. Their suspicion is that another object slammed into the asteroid, breaking it apart and heating it up.
The implications, in any case, are astounding. That leaves open at least a billion year window in which ice-packed rocks could've collided with Earth and deliver it water in substantial quantities — not just the tiny mounts trapped by minerals. This changes the picture of not just how our planet got its oceans, but the formation of other worlds, too.
"The idea that Ryugu-like objects held on to ice for so long is remarkable," Iizuka said in the statement. "It suggests that the building blocks of Earth were far wetter than we imagined.
More on celestial bodies: <a href="https://futurism.com/mysterious-object-star-system-changing-color">Mysterious Object Headed Into Our Star System Is Now Changing Color</a>

Super Soaker

"This changes how we think about the long-term fate of water in asteroids."

Scientists Find Evidence of Flowing Water on Giant Asteroid

Someone has leaked a video of an unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) — the military's preferred term for unidentified flying objects, better known as UFOs — to Congress.
As <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/09/10/ufo-hearing-video-hellfire-missile/86073340007/">USA Today reports</a>, this never-before-seen video was provided anonymously to Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican and member of the House of Representative's UAP Caucus, and shows a bizarre encounter that occurred last October off the coast of Yemen.
In the video, an Air Force MQ-9 "Reaper" drone tracks the object that Burlison referred to as an "orb" over the water until a second Reaper fires a precision Hellfire missile at the UAP. Although it's unclear what mission was occurring during the footage, it did occur the same time that the US and its allies were <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2025/04/how-the-biden-administration-won-tactically-but-failed-strategically-in-the-red-sea/">conducting strikes</a> against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Below is the video I revealed in our <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPoversight?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GOPoversight</a> UAP hearing today, made available to the public for the first time.
October 30th, 2024: MQ-9 Reaper allegedly tracking orb off coast of Yemen. 
Greenlight given to engage, missile appears to be ineffective against the target.… <a href="https://t.co/jxJwl0e00S">pic.twitter.com/jxJwl0e00S</a>
&mdash; Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) <a href="https://twitter.com/RepEricBurlison/status/1965438792493355291?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 9, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The strange object took the hit and was momentarily pushed off its trajectory by the missile, which also appeared to cause some debris to eject from it, before correcting course. It's unclear from the video, which zoomed out just after the strike, where the debris went.
Hellfire missiles pack a punch. As <a href="https://www.military.com/equipment/agm-114-hellfire">Military.com details</a>, these missiles can be launched both air-to-air or air-to-ground, and are "capable of defeating any known tank in the world today." Whatever that orb was, in other words, its ability to bounce back from a Hellfire strike would suggest it was tougher than a tank.
During the hearing, as USA Today notes, witnesses to the event — including three military veterans — said there is no known human technology that could survive a Hellfire hit.
Discussing the video, neither Burlison nor UAP journalist George Knapp chose to hypothesize on what the video showed — but still remarked at how strangely the objected acted after the missile strike.
"That's the Hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just (bouncing) right off," Knapp said, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/congressman-shows-video-military-ufo-hearing/story?id=125413475">per ABC News' write-up</a> of the hearing. "And it kept going."
<div class="oLzSq QrHMO GbsKS pvsTF EhJPu vPlOC zNYgW OsTsW AMhAA daRVX ISNQ sKyCY eRftA acPPc ebfE nFwaT MCnQE mEeeY SmBjI xegrY VvTxJ iulOd NIuqO zzscu lzDCc aHUBM hbvnu OjMNy eQqcx SVqKB GQmdz jaoD iShaE ONJdw vrZxD OnRTz gbbfF roDbV kRoBe oMlSS gfNzt oJhud eXZcf zhVlX ">
<div>"And it looks like the debris was taken with it," Burlison responded.</div>
</div>
 "Yeah," the reporter responded. "What the hell is that?"
In response to ABC's requests for comment, a Department of Defense spokesperson demurred.
"I have nothing for you," they said.
Knapp, meanwhile, was glad that the video had been released, even if outside official channels.
"The public should be seeing this stuff," the UAP journalist said during the hearing, and "why you're not allowed to, I don't know."
More on UAPs: <a href="https://futurism.com/air-force-flying-saucer-area-51">Air Force Colonel Gave Out Photos of Flying Saucers Near Area 51</a>
<div class="oLzSq QrHMO fnRUo pvsTF EhJPu vPlOC zNYgW OsTsW RMeqy daRVX ISNQ sKyCY eRftA acPPc MENS nFwaT MCnQE mEeeY SmBjI xegrY rPLsU iulOd NIuqO zzscu lzDCc aHUBM IEgzD OjMNy eQqcx SVqKB GQmdz jaoD VWDdR ONJdw vrZxD OnRTz gbbfF roDbV GPGwb oMlSS gfNzt oJhud eXZcf zhVlX ">
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Holy Missile

"What the hell is that?"

Leaked Video Shows US Military Shooting UFO With Hellfire Missile

Has Sam Altman spent too much time talking with ChatGPT lately, or has he finally taken a break from his <a href="https://futurism.com/psychologist-ai-new-disorders">delusion-inducing chatbot</a> and smelled the roses?
We ask because the man responsible for unleashing the Automated Soulless Text Machine on the world has recently caught on that the internet <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-dead-internet-theory">has started feeling super fake</a>, and he's now pontificating about this novel observation again on X-formerly-Twitter, seemingly mystified at how this all came to pass.
Prompting his latest musing was a screenshot another user shared showing a series of gushing posts on the Reddit forum dedicated to Claude Code, the AI coding assistant from OpenAI's <a href="https://futurism.com/agi-hunger-strike-protest">competitor Anthropic</a>.
"I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know Codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," Altman <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/1965110064215458055">wrote in a tweet</a>.
His analysis is that it isn't just AI spam that's creating this impression, but the fact that people are themselves <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/20/chatgpt-claude-chatbots-language/">beginning to </a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/20/chatgpt-claude-chatbots-language/">write like</a> the chatbots they're helplessly addicted to.
"Real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak," Altman said. Along with that, he blamed the extreme back and forth of the hype cycle, "optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement," and, of course, bots.
"The net effect is somehow AI Twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago," Altman concluded.
There's a lot going on here, not the least that Altman's first instinct after seeing a competitor being lavished with praise — astroturfed or not — is that it must be phony. And of course it's true that the internet is becoming increasingly artificial under corporate dominance and a deluge of bots. So too are the people that use it, as we all to varying degrees adopt the image-consciousness of influencers.
But most striking of all is Altman's inability to address the data center-sized elephant in the room: how he's literally spearheading the tech responsible for accelerating all this. It'd be like the CEO of Spotify complaining that too much music is streamed these days, instead of listened to on a CD (which Daniel Ek, despite his proclivity for making <a href="https://www.loudersound.com/news/spotify-ceo-sparks-backlash-after-social-media-post-that-claimed-the-cost-of-making-content-is-close-to-zero">stupefyingly tone-deaf remarks</a> and having <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/daniel-ek-spotify-artists-pay-interview/">even dumber opinions</a>, not to mention <a href="https://futurism.com/spotify-military-ai">bankrolling weapons research</a>, has never done.) If this isn't how Altman wants customers to be using his trillion dollar technology, then how should they be? To spend an <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-new-ai-agent-food-stadium">hour ordering cupcakes</a>?
Hilariously, it also appears to be something that Altman only caught onto recently. Last week, he admitted that he was <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-dead-internet-theory">starting to sympathize with the so-called "dead internet theory</a>" after observing "there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts now." 
The dead internet, by the way, is a conspiracy theory that holds that the web has been taken over by AI models and other autonomous machines to such an extent that most if not all of your online interactions are actually just a bot-maintained illusion. It's not true, of course, but it's become a shorthand for pointing out clear instances of social media, "dead" or not, being faker than ever — like posts that go ludicrously viral even though they're actual nonsense, filled with replies that don't even seem to address the content in question. Or, like, <a href="https://futurism.com/facebook-ai-generated-images-viral">Shrimp Jesus</a>.
The point being is that anyone chronically online enough has realized this years ago, and Altman, after supercharging the trend with ChatGPT, is only somehow taking notice.
"The architect of the dead internet is a captain of the obvious," <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1ncdvjk/sam_altman_says_ai_twitterai_reddit_feels_very/">observed</a> one Reddit user.
More on OpenAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-huge-factual-errors">GPT-5 Is Making Huge Factual Errors, Users Say</a>

Dead Internet

"I assume it's all fake/bots."

Sam Altman Concerned That the Whole Internet Now Feels Fake as AI Takes Over

Gamma ray bursts are some of the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/hidden-signal-cosmic-explosion">most powerful explosions in the universe</a>, unleashing as much energy in mere seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10 billion year lifespan. Typically, they're produced by stars dying in a spectacular supernova — a rapid collapse that completely obliterates the stellar object.
But now, astronomers say they've detected a gamma ray burst that utterly defies explanation: it repeated multiple times over the course of a single day, as if the star somehow suffered back-to-back — and back — deaths.
"This event is unlike any other seen in 50-years of GRB observations," Antonio Martin-Carrillo, an astronomer at University College Dublin, Ireland, and coauthor of a <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adf8e1">new study</a> published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters detailing the detection, said in a <a href="https://phys.org/news/2025-09-unprecedented-gamma-ray-hints-rare.html">statement</a>. 
"GRBs are catastrophic events, so they are expected to go off just once because the source that produced them does not survive the dramatic explosion," he emphasized.
The signal's existence is so stunning that no known scenario can fully explain the GRB, according to a <a href="https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2514/">release</a> from the European Southern Observatory. How can a star suffer an explosion that should completely obliterate it multiple times?
First, let's consider how stars die. When a massive one at least several times heavier than the Sun burns through all its fuel, it near-instantly collapses under its own gravity in a <a href="https://futurism.com/suspicious-star-death">supernova</a>, which blows the stars to smithereens and blasts its scattered remains into space. 
But not all supernovas are the same. Some occur in binary star systems that contain a super-dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf and an ordinary star. If their orbits get too close, the white dwarf begins to siphon huge amounts of material from its companion. When enough of the stolen stuff accumulates on the white dwarf's surface, it triggers an epic thermonuclear explosion that destroys both stars.
Astronomers have spotted a <a href="https://futurism.com/image-star-explode-twice">star exploding multiple times before</a> — in this same white dwarf scenario, in fact. Instead of instantly resulting in a supernova, however, the pairs' explosive death is preceded by a smaller blast caused by a cloud of some of the siphoned helium.
But that type of scenario wouldn't produce a double — let alone triple — GRB, since only one of those blasts is a supernova proper. 
And so this latest explosion, designated GRB 250702B, appears to be altogether something different. Scientists first took notice when it was detected on July 2 by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. In all, Fermi detected three distinctive bursts. Later, the astronomers realized that another observatory, the x-ray telescope called the Einstein Probe, had picked up the activity almost an entire day earlier.
"This is 100-1000 times longer than most GRBs," said co-lead author and Radboud University astronomer Andrew Levan in the statement.
More than that, it also appeared to be periodic, Martin-Carrillo added, which has also never been seen before.
The original suspicion was that the signal was coming from somewhere in the Milky Way because it was close to the plane that our galaxy sits on. To follow up, the team used a wide-field infrared camera called the HAWK-I on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. That's when they found that the blast was likely coming outside our galaxy — perhaps billions of light years away, based on its size and brightness.
"What we found was considerably more exciting: the fact that this object is extragalactic means that it is considerably more powerful," Martin-Carrillo said.
The astronomers have a few tentative theories, but none are satisfying. The simplest is that this is some massive star imploding under its own weight "where some material kept powering the central engine," Martin-Carrillo said, but this would produce a GRB that lasts only a few seconds. 
"If this is a massive star, it is a collapse unlike anything we have ever witnessed before," Levan said.
Another explanation is that this was produced by a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/black-hole-leaves-wrecked-stars">tidal disruption event</a>: the grisly carnage that unfolds as a star is devoured by a black hole. 
"However, unlike more typical TDEs, to explain the properties of this explosion would require an unusual star being destroyed by an even more unusual black hole," Martin-Carrillo said. 
That black hole, he speculated, might be what's known as an intermediate-mass black hole, which would fall somewhere between the mass of your typical black hole that forms from a star dying and the supermassive black holes that dictate entire galaxies. An intermediate-mass black hole has never been directly observed, leaving what astronomers call a "<a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-epic-black-hole-collision">mass gap</a>."
Either explanation would be a first, Martin-Carrillo said.
"We are still not sure what produced this or if we can ever really find out," he added, "but, with this research, we have made a huge step forward towards understanding this extremely unusual and exciting object."
More on astronomy: <a href="https://futurism.com/black-hole-big-bang">Scientists Discover Black Hole Created Less Than One Second After the Big Bang</a>

Death Cheat

This shouldn't be possible.

Scientists Say They Can't Explain the Signal They Just Detected From Beyond Our Galaxy

Scientists in South Korea have modified a glue gun — the kind you'd use for an arts and crafts DIY project at home — to generate bone grafts and print them directly onto fractures in animals, to aid in the healing process.
As detailed in a <a href="https://www.cell.com/device/fulltext/S2666-9986(25)00186-3?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2666998625001863%3Fshowall%3Dtrue">new paper</a> published in the journal Device, the team came up with the unusual device to skip the need for prefabricating complex bone implants. In experiments involving rabbits, the researchers created 3D-printed grafts on the fly, allowing fractured bones to heal and regrow naturally.
Within 12 weeks following surgery on rabbits with severe femoral bone fractures, the researchers found no signs of infection — and better bone regeneration compared to control rabbits, which received more traditional bone cement grafts.
Conventional metal or donor bone implants have to be custom-fitted and manufactured ahead of time, making the new solution quite a bit more straightforward and therefore much faster.
"Our proposed technology offers a distinct approach by developing an in situ printing system that enables a real-time fabrication and application of a scaffold directly at the surgical site," said coauthor and Sungkyunkwan University associate professor of biomedical engineering Jung Seung Lee in a <a href="https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/the-future-of-bone-repairs-might-be-a-glue-gun">statement</a> about the research. "This allows for highly accurate anatomical matching even in irregular or complex defects without the need for preoperative preparation such as imaging, modeling, and trimming processes."
Instead of using the conventional hot-melt adhesive that regular glue guns use, the researchers came up with a combination of hydroxyapatite, which is a healing agent found in natural bone, and a biocompatible thermoplastic called polycaprolactone, which can liquify at temperatures below 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
By modifying the ratio of these two components, the researchers found they could adjust the hardness and strength of their 3D-printed grafts on the fly.
"Because the device is compact and manually operated, the surgeon can adjust the printing direction, angle, and depth during the procedure in real time," Lee explained.
"Also, we demonstrated that this process could be completed in a matter of minutes," he added. "This highlights a significant advantage in terms of reducing operative time and improving procedural efficiency under real surgical conditions."
The team also hopes that their approach will reduce side effects compared to conventional bone grafts, while also "limiting the development of antibiotic resistance," per Lee.
The researcher and his colleagues are now working on preclinical studies in large animal models to see whether the device could eventually make it into the operating room.
More on bones: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/paleontologist-skeleton-dinosaur-texas">Paleontologists Find Skeleton That Weirdly Looks Exactly Like Barney the Purple Dinosaur</a>

Gluing Bones

Devices

Glue guns can be used for a lot more than just arts and crafts.

Doctors Modify Hot Glue Gun to Stick Broken Bones Back Together

There may be nobody else on Earth more excited about AI than CEOs.
Driven by a compulsion to cut overhead costs — and avoid the wrath of similarly <a href="https://www.hcamag.com/us/specialization/leadership/nearly-3-in-4-ceos-worried-about-losing-job-if-ai-doesnt-deliver-survey/529110">AI-fixated shareholders</a> — executive teams across the US can’t wait to force AI onto their workforces, consequences be damned.
Corporate executives have <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-replacing-workers-ai">become giddy</a> at the thought of automating their workforces, boasting about supposed <a href="https://futurism.com/ceos-boasting-reducing-workforces-ai">productivity gains</a> as they lay off human workers, who now face one of the <a href="https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/why-experts-are-calling-the-anemic-labor-market-the-worst-since-2010/91237256">worst job markets</a> in recent history. Even in departments where AI can’t easily replace human labor, execs have <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-ai-scare-labor">used AI as a cudgel</a> to drive down wages, slow hiring, and raise productive quotas.
But all of that assumes AI can actually do the job of replacing human workers. As is becoming increasingly obvious over the past few months, the US' current approach to AI development — which is to throw <a href="https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on-ai/">billions of dollars into a furnace</a> and see what comes out — is becoming increasingly shaky as results fail to bear out in the real world.
A recent <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/09/09/behind-the-curtain-slow-hard-ai">Axios interview</a> with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet underscores just how sharp the divide is between AI reality and executive fantasy. As head of a top consulting firm, Sweet has unique access to some of the most powerful minds in the world: her fellow CEOs.
At the moment, she told Axios, CEOs are "beyond obsessed" with AI, but growing increasingly frustrated as the software fails to increase revenue.
"AI, at the enterprise level, is hard. I am talking to CEOs almost every day. Their frustration is mostly about: how do I move my organization fast enough?" Sweet told the publication. "They recognize it's less about the technology, and more about the willingness to truly reinvent the work, the workforce."
It’s not hard to see where the frustration comes from.
Recent research has found that present-day AI software is failing to generate any sort of revenue whatsoever at <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-agents-failing-companies">95 percent</a> of the companies trying to incorporate it into their work flows.
At the same time, there can be some pretty dramatic consequences from failed AI rollouts. Rogue AI programs have <a href="https://cybernews.com/ai-news/replit-ai-vive-code-rogue/">wiped out proprietary databases</a>, opened the door to <a href="https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-07-30-ibm-report-13-of-organizations-reported-breaches-of-ai-models-or-applications,-97-of-which-reported-lacking-proper-ai-access-controls">devastating data breaches</a>, and mired companies in <a href="https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2023/8/eeoc-secures-first-workplace-artificial-intelligence-settlement">costly legal battles</a>.
Some corporations end up paying a human cost. Several companies, like <a href="https://futurism.com/klarna-ai-automation-engineers">Klarna</a> and the <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-21/commonwealth-bank-reverses-job-cuts-decision-over-ai-chatbots">Commonwealth Bank of Australia</a>, have been forced to walk back their ambitious AI automation schemes, after finding out the hard way that AI makes a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-adding-work-study">poor replacement</a> for human labor.
In the end, whether it’s worth the hassle likely depends on which rung of the corporate ladder you occupy.
More on CEOs: <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-startup-homework-cluely">CEO Who Created AI Startup to Cheat on Homework Complains That AI Is Destroying Education</a>

Why Oh Why

"They recognize it's less about the technology, and more about the willingness to truly reinvent the work, the workforce."

CEOs Are Obsessed With AI, But Their Pushes to Use It Keep Ending in Disaster

There is no seahorse emoji. The Unicode Consortium, which oversees the standardized pictograms that can be transmitted as part of text communications, has yet to add the adorable sea critter to its <a href="https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html">official emoji dictionary</a>.
Frail human minds have sometimes been <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/1g08o8u/seahorse_emoji/">surprised to learn that fact</a>, in a perfect example of the Mandela Effect, in which <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cern-scientists-annoyed">people become convinced</a> that they remember something that isn't actually real — like that South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s instead of in 2013, in the collective misremembering that inspired the effect's name.
Interestingly, AI isn't immune either. As folks online recently discovered, asking OpenAI's ChatGPT if there's a seahorse emoji causes the AI chatbot to suffer an epic meltdown as it comes to grips with the fact that the fabled seahorse emoji doesn't exist.
"Yes 🐠 — actually, the seahorse emoji exists: 🐡 🐬 🐠 🐳 🐟 🦑 🦞 🐙 🦀 🐢 … and specifically 🐴?" the confused chatbot <a href="https://chatgpt.com/c/68c17cb9-60d8-8321-841d-9c9ff65ba989">offered in one instance</a>, before correcting itself.
"✅ The official seahorse emoji is: 🦄—oops, no wait, that’s unicorn 😅. The real one is 🐉?" it continued. "Let me be precise: Yes, there is a seahorse emoji: 🦐 is shrimp, 🦑 squid… But the actual seahorse emoji is 🐉?"
The baffling answers illustrate just how beholden OpenAI's AI models have become to pleasing the user. When prompted with an impossible task of showing an emoji that doesn't exist, the AI stumbles over itself in a desperate attempt to affirm the user anyway, in the kind of <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-gpt5-more-sycophantic">sycophantic behavior</a> the company's AI models have become known for. It also demonstrates how tools like ChatGPT are <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-makes-up-answers">willing to bend the truth</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-industry-problem-smarter-hallucinating">hallucinate facts</a> to generate an answer that's satisfying to the user.
ChatGPT's stammering should also serve as a reminder that despite billions of dollars in investment and many years of development, its most advanced models are still extremely prone to <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-huge-factual-errors">making huge factual errors</a>, something that experts have long <a href="https://futurism.com/economist-ai-doomed-bubble">warned</a> could be an <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00662-7">unsolvable issue</a> with the tech.
Worse yet, some researchers have found that as AI models become bigger and more powerful, their <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-new-ai-problem-hallucinate-more">tendency to hallucinate is getting worse</a> — not better.
When asked if the seahorse emoji exists, one X user <a href="https://twitter.com/arm1st1ce/status/1964327067173958021">got an even more puzzling answer</a> out of ChatGPT using the same prompt, forcing the AI to cycle through dozens of different emojis before settling on the dragon emoji.
"The correct seahorse emoji is: 🦄? No—hold on," it stammered.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
oh my god <a href="https://t.co/F0vUx9WpOd">pic.twitter.com/F0vUx9WpOd</a>
&mdash; armistice (@arm1st1ce) <a href="https://twitter.com/arm1st1ce/status/1964327067173958021?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 6, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
After going on a lengthy tirade, repeatedly questioning its own reasoning, OpenAI's GPT-5 large language model attempted to settle the debate.
"FINAL ACTUAL TRUE ANSWER," it <a href="https://x.com/arm1st1ce/status/1964371012025454929">wrote</a>. "The Unicode seahorse emoji is 🦄?? stop brain."
A separate user had ChatGPT <a href="https://x.com/abysmal_pepto/status/1964403855799578900/photo/1">cycling through hundreds of different emojis</a> — none of which were a seahorse.
As Reddit users found, it's a problem that's not limited to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Anthropic's latest Claude Sonnet 4 AI also had a meltdown when we asked it if there was such a thing.
"Yes, there is a seahorse emoji!" it <a href="https://claude.ai/chat/3437a74c-f297-481f-bd71-d28a79755152">offered</a>. "It's 🦄 Wait, no - that's a unicorn. Let me correct that: the seahorse emoji is 🌊 No, that's a wave..."
"I apologize for the confusion in my response - I don't actually display emojis reliably in my responses," Sonnet 4 continued. "But yes, there is definitely a seahorse emoji in the standard Unicode emoji set that you can use on most devices and platforms."
However, Google Search's AI Mode, which is powered by the company's Gemini AI model, didn't fall for the same trap.
"No, there is not an official seahorse emoji in the Unicode standard," it <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Is+there+a+seahorse+emoji%3F&amp;sca_esv=e126eb4d051b0442&amp;source=hp&amp;ei=z4LBaKvEK8310PEPqvOhuQU&amp;iflsig=AOw8s4IAAAAAaMGQ31X6jkHVLKzbPKzana4Z2SLhz_P8&amp;aep=22&amp;udm=50&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjr55fyq86PAxXNOjQIHap5KFcQteYPCBM&amp;mtid=2oLBaO_OI8-ew8cPua20wAc&amp;mstk=AUtExfDWe2p9H2eYW-Y-cmTySVmjj3Fm16AhrzOc0WLSSalm0T6ElBMEwmLO__9A2dlVI2po80T82pGjNHidj9jIjXmRRm2C-WcT0_HXa-zfQoLLmP6jcQkgCyYK3VnvmYeEFPuHdVRzxBPSid_lzHlAN9XIwhvA28XKnKSIuvzAe8aE83RMGIg3VAVpIW_LdYQUHUkeluwylt0B6lvSsBQwqIek09MgSeExftzIO9rdVz7ETXJRcmGAdC1tIczmoOHdPi8P-VKMeFnS1n32KMSagESqe54bL07t0xI&amp;csuir=1">wrote</a>. "Many people believe one exists, and vividly remember using it, but this is a collective false memory known as the Mandela effect."
More on ChatGPT: <a href="https://futurism.com/gpt-5-huge-factual-errors">GPT-5 Is Making Huge Factual Errors, Users Say</a>