Researchers have successfully implanted a bioengineered tooth implant — that "grows" into the gum and fuses with existing nerves — into the mouths of rats.
In a new paper published in the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-99923-8">journal Scientific Reports</a>, dental researchers from Tufts University detail their successful rodent experiments with the unique implant, which is coated in stem cells, special proteins, and memory foam-esque nanofibers that expand and integrate with the body's own nervous system.
The titanium posts that are traditionally used to fuse teeth implants to the jawbone often end up damaging nearby nerves, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8842286/">often causing serious pain</a>. This newly-developed implant — which <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/replacement-teeth-dental-implants">we also heard about</a> earlier this year — offers a novel approach that uses customized surgical equipment and a compressed implant to make the process much smoother.
The implants themselves are smaller than the teeth they're replacing, which not only allows the specialized coating to grow its way into the body's sensory nervous system, but also makes it less traumatic to insert as well.
In the new rodent studies, the implants remained firm and intact six weeks after being inserted — and there was no rejection or inflammation, which signals that the coating works.
"Imaging revealed a distinct space between the implant and the bone, suggesting that the implant had been integrated through soft tissue rather than the traditional fusion with the bone," explained Jake Jinkum Chen, the paper's lead author and the director of Tufts' oral biology school, in a <a href="https://now.tufts.edu/2025/06/11/what-if-dental-implants-could-feel-more-your-real-teeth">school press release</a>.
According to Chen, this process appears to "help reconnect nerves, allowing the implant to ‘talk’ to the brain much like a real tooth."
"Natural teeth connect to the jawbone through soft tissue rich in nerves, which help sense pressure and texture and guide how we chew and speak," Chen explained. "Implants lack that sensory feedback."
There will need to be much more study and experimentation, including in larger animals than rats, before these implants can make their way into human mouths. Still, it's a fascinating approach — and if further research indicates that these "smart" teeth do, in fact, connect to the brain, it will be even more so.
More on teeth: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/toothpaste-heavy-metals">There's Something Horrifying in Your Toothpaste</a>

Tooth Fairy

Developments

"Allowing the implant to ‘talk’ to the brain much like a real tooth."

Bioengineered Tooth Implant That Grows Into Gum, Fuses With Nerves Performing Well in Animal Tests

Climate change is making everything worse — including apparently threatening the dairy that makes our precious cheese.
In <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-coming-for-cheese">interviews with Science News</a>, veterinary researchers and dairy farmers alike warned that changes to the climate that affect cows are impacting not only affects the nutritional value of the cheeses produced from their milk, but also the color, texture, and even taste.
Researchers from the Université Clermont Auvergne, which is located in the mountainous Central France region that produces a delicious firm cheese known as Cantal, explained in a <a href="https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(25)00092-X/fulltext">new paper for the Journal of Dairy Science</a> that grass shortages caused by climate change can greatly affect how cows' milk, and the subsequent cheese created from it, tastes.
At regular intervals throughout a five-month testing period in 2021, the scientists sampled milk from two groups of cows, each containing 20 cows from two different breeds that were either allowed to graze on grass like normal or only graze part-time while being fed a supplemental diet that featured corn and other concentrated foods.
As the researchers found, the corn-fed cohort consistently produced the same amount of milk and less methane than their grass-fed counterparts — but the taste of the resulting milk products was less savory and rich than the grass-fed bovines.
Moreover, the milk from the grass-fed cows contained more omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the heart, and lactic acids, which act as probiotics.
"Farmers are looking for feed with better yields than grass or that are more resilient to droughts," explained Matthieu Bouchon, the <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/nominative-determinism-name-life-theory">fittingly-named</a> lead author of the study.
Still, those same farmers want to know how supplementing their cows' feed will change the nutritional value and taste, Bouchon said — and one farmer who spoke to Science News affirmed anecdotally, this effect is bearing out in other parts of the world, too.
"We were having lots of problems with milk protein and fat content due to the heat," Gustavo Abijaodi, a dairy farmer in Brazil, told the website. "If we can stabilize heat effects, the cattle will respond with better and more nutritious milk."
The heat also seems to be getting to the way cows eat and behave as well.
"Cows produce heat to digest food — so if they are already feeling hot, they’ll eat less to lower their temperature," noted Marina Danes, a dairy scientist at Brazil's Federal University of Lavras. "This process spirals into immunosuppression, leaving the animal vulnerable to disease."
Whether it's the food quality or the heat affecting the cows, the effects are palpable — or, in this case, edible.
"If climate change progresses the way it’s going, we’ll feel it in our cheese," remarked Bouchon, the French researcher.
More on cattle science: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/brazilian-supercows-world-domination">Brazilian "Supercows" Reportedly Close to Achieving World Domination</a>

Dairy Determinism

"We’ll feel it in our cheese."

Climate Change Is Ruining Cheese, Scientists and Farmers Warn

Broken <a href="https://mcbroken.com/">ice cream machines</a> aren't the only thing bedeviling stalwart fast food chain McDonald's.
Financial services firm Redburn Atlantic put the company's stock in the bear category, coinciding with a slumpy week in which it lost about three percent of its value — because analysts are betting that GLP-1 agonist weight loss drugs like Ozempic are going to disrupt the fast food business model, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mcdonalds-downgrade-weight-loss-drugs/">CBS News reports</a>.
The eyebrow-raising conclusion comes as the analysts reason that people with lower incomes who go on the drugs will tend to shun food outside the home. Meanwhile, people at a higher income level who take Ozempic and similar go back to their food spending habits after a year or so.
"Behaviour changes extend beyond the individual user — reshaping group dining, influencing household routines and softening habitual demand," wrote the analysts, as reported by CBS. "A 1 percent drag today could easily build to 10 percent or more over time, particularly for brands skewed toward lower income consumers or group occasions."
This could have a huge impact on the bottom line of fast food chains like McDonald's, which could stand to lose as much as $482 million annually as they see the disappearance of 28 million visits from formerly hungry customers.
This is all complete speculation at this point, because only about <a href="https://www.kff.org/health-costs/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-may-2024-the-publics-use-and-views-of-glp-1-drugs">six percent of American adults</a> are currently taking these weight loss medications. And they're prohibitively expensive, prices starting at around $900 per month, meaning that extremely few poor people are currently able to afford them.
But there's a movement by some policymakers to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/biden-proposes-requiring-medicare-medicaid-cover-weight-loss-drugs-rcna181756">lower the price of the drugs</a>, which have been proven to not just help people lose weight, but they come with a <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/the-benefits-of-ozempic-are-multiplying/">rash of benefits</a> from preventing certain cancers to treating addictions, among other positives.
So if lawmakers force a reduction in price in the future, expect fast food chains like McDonald's to be left holding the bag.
And maybe that's a good thing, because the kind of fried foods that McDonald's traffics in are just <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17452996/">plain bad for your health</a>.
More on Ozempic: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/doctors-concerned-teens-ozempic">Doctors Concerned by Massive Uptick in Teens Taking Ozempic</a>

Unhappy Meals

Rx/Medicines

McDonald's is not loving it.

McDonald's in Trouble as Ozempic Takes Hold

The whole point of self-driving taxis is, in theory, to save costs on human labor — but Waymo, Google's <a href="https://futurism.com/self-driving-waymo-haywire">glitchy robotaxi service</a>, doesn't appear to be any cheaper at all, at least for now.
In a report <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/waymo-rides-cost-more-than-uber-or-lyft-and-people-are-paying-anyway/">shared with TechCrunch</a>, the ride-hailing data aggregator Obi found that riding with Waymo is pretty much always more expensive than taking a ride with a human-driven Uber or Lyft.
For its analysis, Obi analyzed roughly 90,000 records from Uber, Lyft, and Waymo rides between March 25 and April 25 in San Francisco. After comparing estimated arrival times, prices, and routes, the data firm found that Waymo averaged $20.43 per ride, while Uber clocked in at $15.58 and Lyft at $14.44.
The increase seems to be worse at peak hours, when a Waymo ride will run consumers $11 more than a Lyft and almost $9.50 more than an Uber, Obi found.
What's more, Waymo's pricing model is counterintuitive, making it more expensive for shorter rides and cheaper as the rides get longer. A ride that would be inexpensive on Uber or Lyft would roughly cost, on average, 30 to 40 percent more when taken with Waymo, the analysis found.
Still, despite Waymo costing more than a rideshare driven by a human and having a propensity to glitch out and <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/waymos-clog-san-francisco-street">plug up traffic</a> in SF's already-busy streets, people are still uber-excited — pun not intended — to experience the novelty of a robotaxi.
"I didn’t expect consumers being willing to pay up to $10 more," admitted Ashwini Anburajan, Obi's chief revenue officer, in an interview with TechCrunch. "I think [that] speaks to a real sense of excitement for technology, novelty, and a real preference to sometimes be in the car without a driver."
Those don't seem to be one-and-done bucket list experiences for Waymo riders in SF, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/waymo-robotaxi-fire-los-angeles">Los Angeles</a>, and Phoenix. As Obi found, 70 percent of people who had taken a ride with the Google-owned robotaxi service said they prefer driverless rides to ones facilitated by fellow humans.
As strange as that preference may seem, the Obi CRO had a few ideas as to why Waymo riders like it so much.
"There’s something about being in the car alone," Anburajan explained. "It is there for you to, like, kind of live in a little bubble and get from point A to point B, and be very comfortable doing so."
More on Waymo: <a href="https://futurism.com/waymo-public-affairs-specialist">Waymo Hiring For a "Public Affairs Specialist" in Los Angeles While People Are Settings Its Cars on Fire</a>

Waymo Money

This doesn't seem worth it. 

You’ll Guffaw When You Hear How Much Self-Driving Waymos Cost Compared to Human-Driven Ubers

Terraforming, the act of radically transforming a planet's climate and environment to make it suitable for human habitation, currently belongs to the realm of science-fiction. But it's possible, at least in theory, and the idea of terraforming our nearest candidate planet for off-world colonization, Mars, has <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/low-cost-plan-terraforming-mars">captivated us</a> for generations. 
But how would we even begin to pull off such a monumental feat of engineering? You can basically boil it down to three simple steps, argue the authors of a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02548-0.epdf?">recent study</a> published in the journal Nature Astronomy, who are encouraged by recent breakthroughs in several fields.
"Thirty years ago, terraforming Mars wasn't just hard — it was impossible," lead author Erika DeBenedictis, CEO of Pioneer Labs, <a href="https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/turning-the-red-planet-green-its-time-to-take-terraforming-mars-seriously-scientists-say">told Space.com</a>. "But new technology like Starship and synthetic biology have now made it a real possibility."
The inclusion of Starship, the Elon-Musk owned SpaceX megarocket, may warrant some pushback, since it's faced several <a href="https://futurism.com/nasa-spacex-rockets">high-profile failures</a> and is likely far from being completed. But the fact that a spacecraft of its scale is even being attempted at all is at least worth something.
Alright, but assuming we can make the trip to the Red Planet, how do we turn it into something approaching a green one?
Recent advances in Mars science suggest that the planet's <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-discover-mars-ice-cover-planet-water">vast stores of ice</a> harbor enough water to form an ocean around 1,000 feet deep across 3,800,000 million square miles of the planet. And according to the study, these frigid seas-in-waiting could start melting with a temperature increase of at least 30 degrees Celsius. (There also appears to be <a href="https://futurism.com/evidence-huge-ocean-mars-surface">subterranean oceans hidden beneath the surface</a>.)
So that's the first step. One way this could be achieved is by harnessing solar sails as mirrors to focus more light on the planet. This could be combined with dispersing aerosols in the atmosphere to accelerate the greenhouse effect, while techniques such as coating the Martian surface with particles called silica aerogels could help drive heating locally. Combined, the researchers estimated that the 30 degrees of warming could be achieved within the century.
The next step involves getting a little help from tiny, anaerobic creatures that can survive the harshest environments: extremophiles. To serve as "pioneer species," we would likely have to genetically engineer these organisms so they can withstand Mars' low pressure and its cold temperatures, which swing wildly. As the planet's ancient water is liberated from its icy tombs, the first surfaces bodies of water will be extremely salty brines, which many microbes on Earth are capable of surviving, the authors write. Once these microbial critters take hold, they'd go to work reforming the planet's chemistry and laying the groundwork for a food-producing ecosystem.
The final phase, however, is both the longest and most ambitious: shoring up the Martian atmosphere so that it can support diverse plant life and other organisms. To pull it off, terraformers would need to create at least a 100 millibar oxygen atmosphere, the authors write, or about a tenth of the Earth's average atmosphere at sea level. 
We could initially achieve this in large, 100-meter-tall domed habitats, they speculate. Outside of these habitats, the spread of plant life would passively contribute oxygen to the atmosphere — but this process on its own would take a millennium. We could artificially accelerate this, write the authors, by freeing oxygen from the melted water, but more research is needed to determine if the materials necessary to accomplish that are abundant on Mars so that they wouldn't be required to be imported from Earth in prohibitively large quantities.
"We now know that Mars was habitable in the past, from data returned by the Mars rovers, so greening Mars could be viewed as the ultimate environmental restoration challenge," coauthor Edwin Kite, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, told Space.com.
As tempting as it would be for humanity to rise to the challenge, there are serious ethical and scientific questions to be raised about terraforming an entire planet, especially one that may have harbored life in the past, or perhaps still does. 
"If we decide to terraform Mars, then we will really change it in ways that may or may not be reversible," coauthor Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Space.com. "Mars is its own planet and has its own history. When we terraform, then we effectively don't have the opportunity to study that anymore, and we may lose knowledge about how planets form and evolve."
Of course, this remains speculative — it's serious speculation, but speculation all the same. For all the promising advances we've made, we still haven't proven we can <a style="cursor: pointer !important; user-select: none !important;" href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-mars-sample-return-mission">send a tiny payload of samples back from Mars</a>, or even demonstrate that our putative best shot of getting there, Starship, is spaceworthy. But, as they say: all in good time.
More on Mars: <a href="https://futurism.com/mars-society-expert-elon-musk-ruining">Elon Musk's "Hubris and Arrogance" Are Ruining Our Chances of Actually Getting to Mars, Says Leading Expert</a>

Red Planet Green Planet

"Greening Mars could be viewed as the ultimate environmental restoration challenge."

Scientists Reveal Easy Three-Step Plan to Terraform Mars

Goldman Sachs wants those applying for jobs at the investment bank to stop relying on AI while interviewing — a glaring double standard, considering it's made <a href="https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/inside-goldman-sachs-big-bet-on-ai-at-scale/">massive bets</a> of its own on the tech, <a href="https://bankautomationnews.com/allposts/ai/goldman-launches-internal-gen-ai-assistant-with-10k-employees/#:~:text=Goldman%20on%20Jan.,%3B%20Proofreading%20emails%3B%20%5B%E2%80%A6%5D">launched its own AI platform</a> and <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/goldman-sachs-deploys-its-first-generative-ai-tool-across-the-firm-cd94369b">rolled out AI tools across its businesses</a>.
As <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/06/11/goldman-sachs-students-ai-chatgpt-interviews-amazon-anthropic/">Fortune reports</a>, the bank's campus recruitment team sent out an email, warning students that "Goldman Sachs prohibits the use of any external sources, including ChatGPT or Google search engine, during the interview process."
The financial services company even outsourced the triaging of job candidates to the video interviewing firm HireVue — a talent evaluation platform that's powered by AI. Applicants have 30 seconds to prepare and two minutes to give answers to questions.
Instead of cribbing from a chatbot, in other words, applicants will have to learn rote datapoints about the company's financial results and core values by heart. That's the workplace of the future, baby!
The company's policy obviously rings hypocritical. On one hand, Goldman Sachs has long boasted that generative AI will boost productivity, yet those who are trying to kickstart a career are somehow not allowed to make use of the tech.
Despite <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/goldman-sachs-launches-ai-assistant.html">having launched</a> a proprietary AI assistant for its employees to summarize emails and translate code in January, the company says that it cares about what its future staffers have to say for themselves.
"This language is consistent with what we send to any of our campus applicants across all positions," spokesperson Jennifer Zuccarelli told Fortune. "We want to hear from our applicants in their own voice."
It's not just investment banks barring job applicants from using AI. In an arguably even more egregious example, leading AI company Anthropic — yes, the folks building AI, including the chatbot Claude — <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-company-job-applicants-ai">wrote in job postings</a> that "we want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system."
Amazon has equally warned recruiters that any candidates who are caught using the tech should be disqualified, as <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-stop-people-using-ai-cheat-job-interviews-2025-2">Business Insider reported</a> in February.
"To ensure a fair and transparent recruitment process, please do not use GenAl tools during your interview unless explicitly permitted," the e-commerce giant wrote in internal guidelines. "Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in disqualification from the recruitment process."
That's despite Amazon encouraging staffers to use AI tools to boost productivity and <a href="https://futurism.com/amazon-programmers-ai-dark">pouring immense resources into the tech</a>.
It's reflective of a broader trend. The already-abysmal job-seeking industry has <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/lying-resume-ai-new-normal">dramatically changed with the advent of human resources-specific AI tools</a>. Both recruiters and applicants are making heavy use of the tech, whether they're allowed to or not, turning an already soul-sucking process into an even more insufferable experience.
Case in point, a deranged video that went viral last month <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-job-recruiter-glitch-video">shows an AI-powered job recruiter melting down</a> during a call with a human applicant.
Having companies threaten to disqualify job seekers for using AI isn't just the peak of hypocrisy, it's a race to the bottom that needlessly puts strain on those who are simply looking for employment.
More on AI and job search: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/lying-resume-ai-new-normal">AI Is Helping Job Seekers Lie, Flood the Market, and Steal Jobs</a>

None for Thee

Double standard much?

Companies Bragging About Their AI Furious as Job Applicants Use AI During Interviews

<h2>Space Draft</h2>
Space tourism company Axiom Space has had to postpone its fourth chartered SpaceX flight to the International Space Station after <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/06/12/nasa-axiom-space-delay-axiom-mission-4-launch-to-space-station/">NASA announced</a> it needs more time to investigate an air leak affecting the orbital lab.
For <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-roscosmos-found-leak-on-international-space-station-2020-9">five years</a>, NASA and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos have been hunting down leaks in the station, which has been continuously occupied for 25 years. The issue has since been <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/russia-leak-space-station">traced back</a> to the Russian segment of the ISS, specifically the Zvezda service module, and was identified as a "<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-concerned-cracks-leaks-space-station">top safety risk</a>," according to a <a href="https://oig.nasa.gov/topics/space-operations/nasas-management-of-risks-to-sustaining-iss-operations-through-2030/">2024 report</a> by NASA's inspector general.
The delay highlights the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-dismisses-space-station-cracks-leaks">deteriorating condition</a> of the rapidly aging orbital lab, which is expected to host scientists for another five years before <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-hires-spacex-destroy-international-space-station">being retired</a> with the help of SpaceX.
<h2>Under Pressure</h2>
Most recently, three cosmonauts occupying the station had inspected the inside walls of the module and its adjoining tunnel, sealing "additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate," according to a Thursday update by NASA.
"Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure," the agency said.
While NASA says none of the station's current crew members are in any danger, Axiom's fourth mission remains on hold to give NASA and Roscosmos more time to "evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary."
As a result, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is still grounded at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The launch had already been delayed due to bad weather. Then, a liquid oxygen leak in SpaceX's rocket <a href="https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/watch-spacex-launch-the-ax-4-private-astronaut-mission-to-the-iss-on-june-10">delayed the launch once more</a>.
For now, all Axiom can do is hold off on launching its crew of four astronauts, led by retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who has since joined Axiom.
"This is the right thing to do," said Axiom executive chairman Kam Ghaffarian in a statement. "We will continue to work with all of our partners to finalize a new launch date."
Ironically, the firm was <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/axiom-space-nasa-private-space-station-trouble">awarded a NASA contract</a> to develop a private successor to the ISS.
More on the leaks: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-dismisses-space-station-cracks-leaks">NASA Says It’s Totally Fine the Space Station is Absolutely Riddled With Cracks and Leaks</a>

Holy Moly

Not again...

The Space Station Leak Is Rearing Its Ugly Head Again

At this point, we're probably all familiar with the trope of the dirty old uncle who doesn't realize that simping for thirst traps on social shows up on his public feed.
Now, in a hilarious 2025 riffs on the phenomenon, users of Meta's AI app are inadvertently posting the most private queries imaginable to what they don't realize is showing up for anyone to see.
Released in late April, Meta's "AI assistant" app — really just a flashy chatbot meant to <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/05/08/meta-ai-chatbot-for-harvesting-data.html">harvest your data</a> — has quickly become a go-to virtual helper for many around the world. Just a month after its release, Meta bragged that its app had surpassed over <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/29/meta-ai-now-has-1b-monthly-active-users/">1 billion users</a>. There's just one tiny problem: everything you ask Meta's AI is liable to wind up in a public feed for the whole world to laugh at.
From when you first log in, the app is eager to get you rolling. The first thing a new user sees is a sparse screen populated with suggested prompts, ranging from "let's get to know each other" and "describe me in three emojis."
If an unsuspecting user — say, a granddad not well-versed in tech — decides to start here, they might accidentally stumble into a little "share" icon in the top corner that uploads their query into the app's "discover feed."
Given the virtual assistant's life-like voice and instance-based chat sessions, one would be forgiven for thinking that one-on-ones with Meta AI would remain private, no matter what random buttons you click. Meta even addresses this on its <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/introducing-meta-ai-app-new-way-access-ai-assistant/">website</a>: "as always, you’re in control: nothing is shared to your feed unless you choose to post it."
Nothing could be further from the truth. A quick survey of the app's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-chatbot-discover-feed-depressing-why-2025-6">discover feed</a> reveals a mountain of exchanges that people are almost certainly not intending to share publicly.
Tucked among the now-to-be-expected generative AI slop — stuff like "teen girl walks her raptor on a leash casually," or "Wonder Woman driving a 1965 green mustang fastback" — are scores of chatbot queries with some astonishingly personal information.
"How do i [sic] improve my bowel movements," one user asked, for instance. The chatbot responds with some general tips, then explicitly asks for personal details: "what's your current diet and lifestyle like? Any specific issues you're experiencing with bowel movements?"
"I have high calestrerol and often strugfle with stool movement is it ralated?" asks the user, with typographical errors throughout. Horrifyingly, if you logged into Meta AI with an existing Facebook or Instagram account, whatever name you have visible on there — your real one, for most users — is visible under your public queries.
The unfortunate user struggling with bowel movements, for example, has a profile containing other private questions, like "whats the easiest way to get rid of crabs?" followed up with "is their a reason i keep getten [sic] em?"
<figure id="attachment_353913" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-353913" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-353913 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/06/crabs1-1200x514.png" alt="A user discusses getting &quot;rid of crabs&quot; on the Meta AI App." width="1200" height="514" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-353913" class="wp-caption-text">A user discusses crabs on the Meta AI App.</figcaption></figure>
Like the discover feed, the privacy violations are endless.
Other examples we found include teachers generating test questions, users asking for situationship advice, more queries on sexual hygiene, detailed discussions about medical history, and assistance generating a "heartfelt" letter to a judge ahead of a criminal sentencing.
Astonishingly, the app also records and uploads voice queries, no matter the length. We found one recording that went on for over an hour, where the conversation drifted from Candace Owens' take on Black Lives Matter to whether or not anyone was actively "trying to kill George Soros" to asking for detailed directions based on the user's current location.
Another spent several minutes detailing their tax woes.
"What do I do if I made about two hundred thousand last year and I forgot to file taxes," they asked.
"If you owe taxes, the IRS will likely send you a notice with the amount due," the chatbot suggests.
"Well I'll just wait till [sic] they call me I guess," the user sighs.
Other conversations drifted into topics better left for the incognito tab.
<figure id="attachment_353911" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-353911" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-353911 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/06/big-booty-queen-1200x548.png" alt="A Meta AI App user has a public conversation with the chatbot about how to find a &quot;big booty queen.&quot;" width="1200" height="548" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-353911" class="wp-caption-text">A user discusses how to find love on the Meta AI App.</figcaption></figure>
On one hand, the whole thing reveals the staggering amount of faith people already have in these brand new products — and the extent to which they've quickly become a crutch for many. One user, for example, asked it "what to say to congratulate my niece who graduates from UCLA."
At the same time, it also underscores the mammoth responsibility Meta has as the provider of a de facto public service — and the horrifying lack of accountability the company has <a href="https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads">consistently shown</a> throughout its lifespan.
More on Meta: <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-furious-llama">Mark Zuckerberg Is Reportedly Absolutely Furious at His Own Failure</a>

Blind Faith

"Whats the easiest way to get rid of crabs?"

People Don't Realize Meta's AI App Is Publicly Blasting Their Humiliating Secrets to the World

Ever since college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began pedaling the romantic tale of founding Apple in Jobs' parents' Los Altos garage, college-age tech bros have longed to follow in their footsteps. But there's just one tiny thorn: the "founder's story" of late-night struggles and coffee-fueled breadboarding is mostly a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/steve-wozniak-apple-starting-in-a-garage-is-a-myth#:~:text=The%20commonly%20shared%20tale%20is,myth%2C%E2%80%9D%20Wozniak%20told%20Businessweek.">capitalist fairy tale</a>.
Still, it's a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2025.2471602">mythos</a> tech billionaire overlord Peter Thiel is <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2025.2471602">all too eager</a> to stoke. His empire is built on image — even the stereotypical "<a href="https://jacobin.com/2022/07/peter-thiel-superrich-wealth-inequality-political-influence">evil mastermind</a>" vibe is a carefully groomed persona — which he disseminates across Silicon Valley hopefuls via the almighty <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/09/28/is-peter-thiels-pro-dropout-fellowship-mostly-an-advertisement-for-himself">Thiel Fellowship</a>.
Each year, Thiel selects up to 20 "Thiel fellows" to each receive $200,000 and drop out of college in order to pursuit a tech startup. Though some come straight out of high school, many Thiel fellows historically come from <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-rich-mans-dropout-club/?bc_nonce=vt6om2ildkk65b0bj9t19l&amp;cid=reg_wall_signup">Ivy league schools</a>, which isn't exactly the kind of background that screams "all or nothing."
Thanks to Thiel's massive profile and political influence, a number of Thiel fellows have watched their startups soar to billion dollar valuations. Though tech hopefuls are said to have just <a href="https://www.meridean.org/blog/thiel-fellowship">.01 percent</a> of a chance to snag a Thiel Fellowship, that isn't stopping scores of wannabe founders from dropping out of college anyway.
In a profile of the growing anti-college movement festering in Silicon Valley, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-tech-founders-skipping-college-new-dropping-out-palantir-2025-6">Business Insider's Julia Hornstein</a> sat down with a number of young dropouts to figure out just what the hell is going on.
Sebastian Tan, one of over 500 students who applied for an internship at Thiel's surveillance and spying company Palantir, dreamed of being an entrepreneur. The billionaire's book, "Zero to One," is basically a <a href="https://www.booksontrial.com/zero-to-one-monopoly-good-competition-losers/">tech monopolists' manifesto</a>, and "probably the best book I've read," according to Tan, along with a laughable addendum that underscores exactly how undercooked his worldview is: "And I've only read a few pages."
In April, Hornstein writes, Tan got the offer from Palantir, which he accepted, deferring his undergraduate degree until 2026. "In college, you don't learn the building skills that you need for a startup," he confidently declared.
Tan's is an interesting story, especially for his early success — but he's far from alone. In 2022, there were <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/coj/status-dropout-rates">2.1 million college dropouts</a> in the US. According to a <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/college-student-dropouts-2022/#:~:text=Starting%20a%20business%20is%20the,to%20start%20working%20full%2Dtime.">World Economic Forum survey</a> in that same year, 28 percent of dropouts did so to start a business. That's a lot of startups.
But while the country's tech bros might be agog at the idea of dropping out, the reality is that very few startups succeed without advanced degree holders, let alone people who've completed undergraduate programs. Recent research found that 56 percent of startup executives hold a <a href="https://www.kauffmanfellows.org/journal/startup-degrees">graduate degree</a>, while the <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45">average age</a> of a successful startup founder is 45.
The trouble here isn't necessarily that it's "college or nothing," but rather the values, methods, and myths that startups engender — like that <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/01/silicon-valley-trump-twitter-no-platform-capitol-riot">regulation stifles innovation</a>, or that Silicon Valley startups exist separate of the massive <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426623000195">economic inequality</a> we see in the world today (on the contrary, startups have been <a href="https://48hills.org/2023/05/how-ugly-side-of-silicon-valley/">key players</a> in building that world.)
With the kind of failure rate startups engender, there'll inevitably be a flood of unskilled, untrained labor trickling back into the economy — the kind of people who've been trained to think of themselves as "<a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/are-you-a-high-agency-individual/">high agency individuals</a>."
That's something Arbaaz Mahmood, a would-be physicist who skipped college to do a startup developing an "AI tool for car dealerships," seems to at least acknowledge. "Honestly, nobody goes to college thinking they're going to change the world," he tells BI. "That's a vacuous lie we tell VCs to get their money. Nobody builds startups to change the world. It's just bullshit."
When it comes to startups, Benjamin Shestakofsky, author of "Behind the Startup," <a href="https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/sociology-benjamin-shestakofsky-behind-the-startup-book">summarizes it well</a>: "Our relationship with technology is socially constructed. Yes, we do make choices as individuals, but our choices are embedded in broader structures that create different sorts of opportunities and constraints for us."
More on startups: <a href="https://futurism.com/columbia-student-ai-cheating-startup">Columbia Student Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup</a>

Well Read

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College Dropout Entrepreneur Boasts That Peter Thiel's Book Is "Probably the Best Book I've Read, and I've Only Read a Few Pages"

<h2>Head Game</h2>
Archaeologists in Iran have discovered an ancient cone-shaped skull that is believed to have belonged to a teen girl — and there are signs of tragedy in her bones.
As <a href="https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/cone-headed-skull-from-iran-was-bashed-in-6-200-years-ago-but-no-one-knows-why">Live Science reports</a>, the skull, which was found in a prehistoric burial ground known as Chega Sofla without its corresponding skeleton, shows signs not only of intentional modification, but also possibly fatal blunt force trauma.
Dated to roughly 6,200 years old, the strange cone shape of the skull appears to be the product of a practice archaeologists today call <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/head-space-artificial-cranial-deformation">artificial cranial modification</a>, a process similar to foot-binding in which the soft skulls of children are bandaged to deliberately deform them.
Found <a href="https://www.umontpellier.fr/en/articles/deformation-cranienne-pratiquee-incas-coutume-universelle">across cultures and millennia</a>, this type of body modification has been undertaken for various reasons, including to <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/elongated-heads-were-mark-elite-status-ancient-peruvian-society">denote social status</a> or adhere to <a href="https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/elongated-head-ideal-beauty-among-mangbetu-people-1930/">beauty standards</a>, as evidenced by it more often being <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/tracing-the-history-and-health-impacts-of-skull-modification">seen in girls</a> than boys. Though it's still <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/parents-have-been-reshaping-their-kids-skulls-45000-years-180957343/">occasionally practiced today</a>, the practice sometimes referred to as "skull elongation" was far more common in prehistoric times. The girl with the conical skull in this study, for instance, was believed to have lived in the fifth millennium BCE.
<h2>Violent Ends</h2>
Aside from the cone-shaped cranium of the young woman, who was believed to be younger than the age of 20, archaeologists Mahdi Alirezazadeh and Hamed Vahdati Nasab of the Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran — who also authored a study about their discovery that was recently <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.3415">published in the International Journal of Osteoarcheology</a> — also found a long, unhealed fracture on the back of the skull that likely killed her.
"We know this woman experienced the fracture in the final moments of her life," Alirezazadeh told Live Science, "but we don't have any direct evidence to say that someone intentionally struck her."
Though it's unclear whether the ancient teen in question was intentionally killed or died by accident, the researchers believe that the modified shape of her skull likely made it weaker and more susceptible to trauma than a conventional cranium.
Along with pointing out that an unmodified fractured skull was found alongside the conical skull in the portion of Chega Sofia where they were working, Alirezazadeh also noted that whatever killed the latter "was so severe that it would have fractured a normal, unmodified skull as well."
More on head science: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/tattoo-forehead-boss-detect-mental-state">Scientists Want You to Ink an Electronic Tattoo On Your Forehead So Your Boss Can Detect Your Mental State</a>