An international team of researchers has uncovered the oldest spear tip ever discovered in Europe, revealing that it was crafted by Neanderthals. In their study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the team provides detailed insights into the spear tip’s discovery, its condition, and the findings they gleaned from extensive analysis.
The spear tip was initially found in 2003, buried within a sediment layer in a cave in the North Caucasus, Russia. Alongside it were numerous animal bones and remnants of a campfire. However, it wasn’t until recently that the spear tip was thoroughly examined.
Using advanced techniques such as spectroscopy, computed tomography, and microscopy, the researchers determined that the 9 cm-long spear tip was made from animal bone, likely bison. It was attached to a wooden shaft with a type of tar.
The team also discovered that the spear tip had been shaped with stone tools and showed signs of use in either hunting or combat, evidenced by cracks indicating it had struck something very hard. Notably, the tip showed no signs of prolonged use, implying that it had likely been used shortly after its creation. This finding challenges previous theories that Neanderthals never advanced beyond using stone tools and suggests that they were capable of strategic planning, both in crafting tools and in their use.
The revelation that University of Zurich researchers secretly deployed AI bots to manipulate Reddit users’ opinions should chill anyone who values authentic human discourse.
These weren’t merely passive observers—they were digital persuaders that analyzed users’ personal histories, fabricated identities, and crafted arguments specifically designed to change minds.
Most troubling?
They succeeded spectacularly—achieving persuasion rates six times higher than normal human interactions.
This experiment crossed critical ethical lines.
Without consent or disclosure, researchers unleashed bots that claimed to be rape victims, misrepresented religious teachings, and spread misinformation about controversial topics.
These digital ghosts generated over 1,500 comments, each precisely calibrated to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities of their human targets.
We’ve long worried about social media’s echo chambers.
But what happens when those chambers are deliberately infiltrated by increasingly sophisticated AI systems trained on the very platforms they’re manipulating?
Reddit’s recent data-sharing deal with OpenAI suggests we’re actively providing the training material for ever more persuasive digital manipulators.
Reddit moderators rightly condemned this unauthorized experiment, but their discovery came months after the damage was done.
How many other digital conversations are currently being shaped by invisible algorithmic hands?
I view Reddit fairly often. Started using it when it had very few users and you could easily get a post on the front page. AskScience was glorious back then as conversations would go on and on and there was very little bs. That was a long time ago. Today’s Reddit is mind-control totalitarian thought-slavery on virtually all major subjects. However, if you go to small subreddits, you can find very interesting material; subreddits on narcissism and other personality disorders; on aspects of culture such as parenting or marriage customs. I highly appreciate hearing authentic voices from around the world on topics like those and many more. That said, another thing you can see on Reddit is what looks to me like spontaneous hive-mind formation. These look real to me because they can form very quickly in subs that have nothing to do with politics. Tooafraidtoask is one example where this can happen. I encourage everyone to support free-speech on all platforms and use your free-speech yourself, use it often. Keep pushing the envelope wherever you are because widespread free-speech that people use is probably our only defense against a looming and probable computerized totalitarian nightmare. ABN
Ursula is pushing leftist ‘soft’ totalitarianism, wrapped in smarmy ‘morality’. What she wants is to control European minds by controlling what they can say and hear. At this juncture, as AI advances rapidly and security controls become increasingly omnipotent, we must insist on free speech, unrestricted free speech. Restricting speech based on bogus claims of ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate speech’ or whatever Ursula doesn’t like, serves only the totalitarians. With free speech on as many platforms as possible, the citizens of the West will constitute the only repository of information that can compete with AI. ABN
USA-229 is a pair of Naval Ocean Surveillance Satellites (NOSS) in control of the US Navy. Their systems are classified but their purpose is to track boats and airplanes.
The satellites were launched in 2011. BAE Systems was awarded a $50 million contract in 2010 to develop Argus-IR. Testing was spring 2012 consistent with the satellite launch having the Argus payload.
“ARGUS-IR further expands military capability by providing 24-hour, day-night reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities over a much wider area than previously possible,” said Dr. John Antoniades
“ARGUS-IR will provide at least 130 independently steerable video streams to enable real-time tracking of individual targets throughout the field of view.”
This is the real location of USA-229 on March 7th, 2014 and that bubble is the coordinates of the satellite video.
USA-229 relays to NROL-22, which beams the data to ground based computers to produce the fully interactive video.
I have posted much of Ashton’s research and have found it credible enough to keep doing that. There has been a lull in new information for many months. Now this. The ‘bubble’ is the blocked satellite imaging of the Flight MH370, which supposedly was lost in flight and never found. The ‘bubble’ proves we have had this information all along but are still concealing it. Ashton has a wild story by the horns and this looks pretty conclusive. The gist of the story is USA has time-warp technology that can disappear an entire airplane and also do much worse than that. The tech is so powerful it could be world-ending if released and used as a weapon. Further, concise background information on Ashton’s work with links to important video can be found here. ABN
Ask just about anybody, and they’ll tell you that new cars are too expensive. In the wake of tariffs shaking the auto industry and with the Trump administration pledging to kill the federal EV incentive, that situation isn’t looking to get better soon, especially for anyone wanting something battery-powered. Changing that overly spendy status quo is going to take something radical, and it’s hard to get more radical than what Slate Auto has planned.
Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.
But this is more than bargain-basement motoring. Slate is presenting its truck as minimalist design with DIY purpose, an attempt to not just go cheap but to create a new category of vehicle with a huge focus on personalization. That design also enables a low-cost approach to manufacturing that has caught the eye of major investors, reportedly including Jeff Bezos. It’s been engineered and will be manufactured in America, but is this extreme simplification too much for American consumers?
Drivers along a 200-mile stretch of I-45 between Dallas and Houston should get ready for something new: The semi-truck in the next lane might not have anyone in the driver’s seat.
Why it matters: Autonomous trucking companies have been testing their fleets on Texas highways for several years, but always with backup safety drivers in the cab.
Now, one company, Aurora Innovation, says it plans to go completely driverless at the end of the month, a key milestone that promises to reshape the trucking industry.
Driving the news: After years of development, Pittsburgh-based Aurora is launching commercial driverless operations this month on a popular freight route between Dallas and Houston.
The first autonomous truck is expected to roll down I-45 in the coming days, although Aurora officials declined to share any details.
The company has said it will begin slowly, with one truck, and will gradually expand the fleet over time.
Speaking last week at an event hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – a think tank he founded – Eric Schmidt described how AI systems were beginning to operate independently, learning, improving, and even planning without input from humans.
“The computers are now doing self-improvement. They’re learning how to plan, and they don’t have to listen to us anymore”, he said.
Schmidt referred to this process as “recursive self-improvement” – where AI generated hypotheses, tested them using robotic labs, and used the results to further improve, all without human intervention.
Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011, and remained executive chairman until 2017, also predicted a major shift in the jobs market.
He said that within a year, AI would likely replace “most “the vast majority of programmers” and surpass top human talent in fields like mathematics.
“We believed AI was under-hyped, not over-hyped”, he added, pointing to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Deepseek already being widely used for tasks like coding, despite not being trained for those purposes.
25 percent of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees are are preparing to take buyout offered by the Trump administration and resign from the agency, according to a report.
CNN, first reporting the “staggering” figure, notes that 22,000 of the IRS’s 90,000 employees plan to accept buyout offers and resign. IRS staff faced a Tuesday morning deadline to opt into the latest “deferred resignation” buyouts.
“This is enormous,” sources told the anti-Trump news outlet.
China-based manufacturer Unitree Robotics pre-installed an apparent backdoor on its popular Go1 robot dogs that allowed anyone to surveil customers around the world, according to findings from two security researchers.
Why it matters: Clear evidence of a backdoor in widely sold consumer technology is rare, and it affirms longstanding concerns from U.S. officials that Chinese-made devices could quietly enable foreign surveillance.
The CVE listing recommends that owners “disable the local endpoint” that has been enabling this backdoor.
Zoom in: Anyone who came across the public-facing web API could see where Go1 robot dogs were — and if the robot was online, they could view live camera feeds without needing to log in.
NVIDIA Blackwell chip production starts in Arizona — NVIDIA opens first US factories.
NVIDIA is working with its manufacturing partners to design and build factories that, for the first time, will produce NVIDIA AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S.
Together with leading manufacturing partners, the company has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test NVIDIA Blackwell chips in Arizona and AI supercomputers in Texas.
NVIDIA Blackwell chips have started production at TSMC’s chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona. NVIDIA is building supercomputer manufacturing plants in Texas, with Foxconn in Houston and with Wistron in Dallas. Mass production at both plants is expected to ramp up in the next 12-15 months.
The AI chip and supercomputer supply chain is complex and demands the most advanced manufacturing, packaging, assembly and test technologies. NVIDIA is partnering with Amkor and SPIL for packaging and testing operations in Arizona.
Within the next four years, NVIDIA plans to produce up to half a trillion dollars of AI infrastructure in the United States through partnerships with TSMC, Foxconn, Wistron, Amkor and SPIL. These world-leading companies are deepening their partnership with NVIDIA, growing their businesses while expanding their global footprint and hardening supply chain resilience.
Everything we see unfolding, from the Tech Bro alignment with Trump, to the network of influence after the election, to the selection and advisement of specific individuals to join the administration, all the way to the first-round expose’ of USAID, should be looked upon with a background forecast.
(1) gaining access to govt data was the goal; (2) monetizing the system with proprietary AI contracts (vis-a-vis Palantir) is the benefit; (3) however, a national security justified surveillance state is going to be the outcome.
As people are shocked at the USAID spending scandal unfolding, I would posit the USAID silo was chosen first for DOGE exploration specifically because the subsequent outrage would gain the highest amount of public support for the pending solution. It’s the pending solution to the crisis that we should be very focused on.
Their solution will never be about US, it will always be about THEM; what’s in their best interests. That’s their focus, not us, them.
Failing to STOP after crisis in the past always ended up with acceptance of their solution. Now we take off our shoes at the airport, go through body scans, accept pat-downs, wear masks, accept sketchy vaccines, click yes on 5,000-word terms of service for privacy statements we never read, align ourselves with Real ID, and generally accept the all-encompassing surveillance state; none of which is grounded upon liberty or freedom. It’s all based on govt control.
Yes, as poked by Musk the govt is in crisis, and just as sure as you are reading this the administrators within govt already have the solution ready to roll.
“We will use advanced technology and non-partisan AI programming, to make the government more efficient and ensure this level of corruption and wasteful spending never happens again.” That’s the selling point.
Every dollar will be tracked, monitored and oversight will be transparent and available for everyone to see. Just ignore the part where the same efficiency system is monitoring your real ID, connecting your personage to the new govt and private sector interfaces, and click “I agree” on your next federal tax filing.
Trust us Comrade citizen, the new technologically advanced DODGE approved govt system cares about responsible stewardship and you. Swear.”
I honestly do not see any way out of this. The tech is too powerful and easy to implement. The dystopian side of this is a horror show. The utopian side might be good, even very good — no crime, smooth bureaucracy, better information everywhere. It looks like a reverse-Q plot. Robots doing all the work. Some hope may be higher IQs through digital babies leading to elites becoming bored with cruelty. Having total verifiable control of everyone is the ultimate KOBK move. KOBK has always ruled the earth. There is no reason to believe it will stop now. Can the same tech further evolved produce a wise hegemon, a benevolent dictator? ABN
Ben Lamm is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a company dedicated to genetic engineering and de-extinction projects. Colossal’s mission includes bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth and advancing conservation efforts through cutting-edge biotechnology. https://www.colossal.com
American Buddhist Net 
