Let’s be honest, one could use AI programs to create worse images than a lone wolf walking through the streets, but a 40-year-old South Korean man risks spending the next five years of his life in prison and paying a fine of $6,700 for doing just that.

Using a text prompt to create a photo-realistic image of a wolf walking through your home city and then posting it online doesn’t sound like a crime, but what if there was an actual wolf on the loose?

On April 8th, South Korean media reported that a wolf named Neukgu had escaped from the Daejeon Zoo, and some even posted a photo of the canine spotted on the streets of Daejeon. It looked real, but that photo had been created by AI, based on a prompt.

South Korean authorities explained that “a single AI-manipulated image delayed the wolf’s capture by up to nine days” and that “the prolonged deployment of police and firefighters caused significant disruptions to their primary duty of protecting the public.”

Worried that Neukgu could be prowling the streets of the city, authorities in Daejeon decided to close down primary school and send in special emergency teams to ensure the safety of the local populace. By the time someone realized the photo that had kick-started this massive operation was fake, the damage had already been done.

Busy searching through the city, the police eventually found Neukgu on the outskirts of Daejeon, much later than they would have had they not been deceived by that one AI-generated photo.

After being tracked down, the 40-year-old man responsible for creating the AI photo of a wolf in Daejeon casually said that he had done it “for fun”. He now risks spending 5 years in prison for it.

Do you spend a lot of time in front of a computer? Do your eyes get sore and itchy after a while? Do they get a reddish pink if you rub them too much? Maybe you should just take a break and let your eyes rest. But if you put these symptoms into an AI chatbot prompt, you could be diagnosed with bixonimania, a non-existent eye condition.

Bixonimania was created in 2024 by a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. They wanted to see whether large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini could see through what was considered obvious misinformation, or whether they would swallow this medical misinformation and present it as valid information.

Within weeks of Thunström’s team uploading two fake studies about bixonimania to a preprint server, the made-up condition was already showing up in the responses of popular chatbots. Microsoft’s Copilot declared that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition”, and Google’s Gemini was informing users that “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light.” Even OpenAI’s ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms amounted to bixonimania.

Some of the users’ prompts referenced bixonimania directly, while others were just putting in symptoms and getting diagnosed with a fake eye condition. More troublingly, the condition and Thunström’s two made-up studies began showing up in peer-reviewed literature by other human researchers, which is strange, considering the people who wrote them made sure they could be spotted as fake by other humans.

 “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania — that’s a psychiatric term,” Almira Osmanovic Thunström said.

But there were plenty of dead giveaways that bixonimania and the studies about it were bogus. Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, the invented author of the so-called “scientific papers” worked at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the non-existent Nova City, California. 

One paper’s acknowledgements thank “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise,” and both papers claim to have been funded by the “Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation” and a “larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”.

But even if all of the above wasn’t obvious enough, Thunström’s studies featured statements like “this entire paper is made up” and “Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”. Frankly, the only way people could take them seriously was if they didn’t bother reading them at all.

The experiment may seem funny at first, but it emphasizes the danger of relying too much on AI chatbots and exposes a fundamental weakness. Such LLMs take available information and incorporate it into their answers, completely ignoring whether it is genuine or fake.

“It looks funny, but hold on, we have a problem here,” Alex Ruani, a doctoral researcher in health misinformation at University College London, told Nature Magazine. “This is a masterclass on how mis- and disinformation operates. If the scientific process itself and the systems that support that process are skilled, and they aren’t capturing and filtering out chunks like these, we’re doomed.”

Smearing cake on people’s faces on their birthday is a well-known tradition, and while we’ve seen it go wrong on rare occasions, we can’t remember it ever being cited as a motive for murder. Well, at least until this month, anyway, because Indian media recently reported a man shooting three of his friends dead for playfully smearing cake on his face at his birthday party.

The unusual incident took place last Saturday, at a gym in the Khurja town district of Bulandshahr, where young Jeetu Saini was celebrating his birthday with some friends. When the cake was served, some of Jeetu’s pals smeared cake on his face as a joke, but the gesture was met with unexpected hostility by the birthday boy.

According to eyewitnesses, 33-year-old Jeetu got into a heated argument with Amardeep Saini, Manish Saini, and Akash Saini over having cake smeared on his face, before storming out of the gym, only to return with a group of men and a licensed gun.

Sanjay Saini, the brother of one of the victims, told reporters that Jeetu had called him on the night of the incident to complain that his brother had been disrespectful to him during his birthday party and that he had used foul language. Sanjay tried to calm him down, promising to handle the matter personally the following morning because he needed to attend a wedding, but he never had the chance to do that.

Upon returning to the gym, Jeetu Saini reportedly opened fire on the three men he had previously argued with, before anyone had any chance to react. During the panic that ensued, he and his accomplices fled the scene and are currently on the run from police.

“Late tonight, the Khurja Nagar police station received information that three young men had been shot. Police immediately arrived at the scene. The young men were admitted to the hospital in critical condition, where they were declared dead,” Antriksh Jain of the Khurja Nagar police station told the ANI news agency. “The reason revealed is that it was the birthday of one of the accused, during which the deceased put cake on his face. There was an altercation between them. This altercation led to this incident today.”

Over 15 people have been detained for questioning, but the main suspect, Jeetu Saini, is still on the loose

Last month, Cai Nan uploaded a video titled  ‘I want to make the fried chicken transparent, but the result is strange,’  to his YouTube channel. It blew up, getting almost a million views on Alphabet’s platform alone, and for good reason. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

The simple concept of making fried chicken transparent, or at least translucent, sounds insane, but to see someone actually pull it off is just incredible. The end result looks magical, but Cai Nan explains the process behind it in great detail.

Cai Nan’s translucent chicken is incredible, though-provoking and disturbing, all at the same time. It makes some people curious about trying the unusual dish, while putting off many others who claim they would never put anything that unusual in their mouths.

In his viral clip. Cai Nan explains that he basically recreated the fried chicken piece by piece, starting with the bones. He began with a mixture of bone marrow, collagen, and cold gel, which he then placed in chicken bone-shaped moulds and let them set.

For the meat, the Chinese food blogger first used a device to turn the chicken meat into a watery liquid. He then restored the structure of muscle fibres using a technique called spherification, which is commonly used in molecular gastronomy. Finally, the glass-like meat and bones are placed in another mold to fuse them together.

Cai Nan even managed to recreate the crunchy outer shell of conventional fried chicken, even though there is nothing conventional about his version.

You might not find translucent fried chicken appetising, you might even call it off-putting, but you have to admit it looks interesting.

Japanese media recently reported that Harida Matsumoto, an underground idol from Wakayama Prefecture, sparked a heated debate after allegedly offering her fans the chance to smell her armpits after shows. Photos of Matsumoto lifting her arms and letting men put their noses in her armpits went viral online, attracting criticism from the general public.

Unlike mainstream idols, who have entire companies and talent agencies marketing their image to fans, underground idols like Harida Matsumoto struggle to attract as many fans as possible through whatever means possible. They usually perform in small theatres, live houses, and shopping centres, and struggle to build communities online.

Many have accused Matsumoto of crossing red lines in her attempt to cater to her die-hard fans, but some believe that her desperate attempt to please her fanbase highlights the struggle that underground idols have to deal with. Most of them earn less than the average office worker and have to at least maintain the illusion of being single and available, while struggling to please their fans.

A large part of Harida’s 400,000 followers continue to support her despite the controversy around her most recent fan service, but some have criticized her for doing something they consider disgusting.¹

1. ↩︎

Sonic Fire Tech has pattened an ingenious technology that uses low-frequency sound waves to break up the chemical reaction that fuels fire. Heat, fuel and oxygen are the ingredients for fire, and taking away just one can stop the combustion reaction completely. Using infrasound waves to push oxygen molecules away from the fuel, this technology prevents fires from getting the oxygen they need to sustain themselves.

“It’s basically vibrating the oxygen faster than the fuel can use it, so you block the chemical reaction,” Geoff Bruder explained.

Interestingly, Sonic Fire Tech doesn’t claim to have pioneered the use of sound to fight fires. According to Scientific American Magazine, the effect of acoustics on fire is well-documented. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spent years studying it in the early 2000s, and academic researchers have been experimenting with it for decades.

“Acoustic influence on flames is well known in combustion,” Albert Simeoni, head of the department of fire protection engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, told Scientific American. “The challenge is to scale up the technology without creating disrupting or even damaging sound effects.”

Sonic Fire Tech solved the challenge researchers have been struggling with for years by using infrasound. The company’s technology produces low-frequency sound waves at 20hz or lower that are inaudible to the human ear, but very effective against fire because they travel farther than higher-frequency waves.

The San Bernardino County Fire Department recently tested a wearable fire-fighting device designed by Sonic Fire Tech, but the company offers domestic solutions that can be elegantly integrated in any home. They are activated by sensors and can put out fires without damaging furniture or flooding the floor.

“A water sprinkler system is highly ineffective at putting out a grease fire; it actually spreads the fire and makes it worse. Yet, we’re mandated to have sprinklers above our kitchen stoves,” Sonic Fire Tech’s Remington Hotchkis told CBS News. “Our system was shown to suppress the fire, prevent the ignition from occurring with a autonomous detection device.”

Unfortunately, acoustics only works on small fires, so we probably won’t be seeing the technology being used on wildfires or any large scale fires anytime soon.

“In preliminary observations, the fruits retain sweet flavor, red and orange flesh types, and sufficient firmness for handling,” breeder Delaney Raptis told HortiDaily Magazine. “The objective was to minimize fruit size while maintaining the characteristics expected by consumers and supply chains.”

High school researcher Delaney Raptis and her mother began their unique breeding program in 2021, with the goal of producing ultra-small fruit. After several generations, they have reduced the size of watermelons from several kilograms to approximately 80 to 200 grams, with some no larger than chicken eggs.

The main goal of the breeding program was to make watermelon crops viable in high-density greenhouse systems and vertical farms, where maximizing output per square meter is a priority. The reduced fruit size also reduces food waste and is sure to be a hit with the single-portion fruit market.

The two breeders noticed that the seeds of their miniature watermelons are considerably smaller than those of regular-sized fruits, but what we are most curious about is the rind. Is it edible, or does it need to be removed?

For more miniature fruit you probably didn’t know existed, check out the coquitos of the Chilean wine palm.

Météo-France, the French weather forecasting service, believes that a weather station at Charles de Gaulle airport in France was used to manipulate bets placed on Polymarket on what the temperature would be in the French capital on certain days of March and April.

Data shows that on some days, more than $500,000 was placed on bets on the temperature in Paris, with some wallets pocketing around $280,000 by betting that the temperature in Paris would reach 19 °C on April 15. Surprisingly, at approximately 9:30 p.m., the temperature reached 22°C, whereas it had been just 18°C ​​in the middle of the afternoon.

Sébastien Brana, vice president of Infoclimat, a group that focuses on climate observation, told French newspaper Le Monde that his organisation first noticed a sudden and inexplicable rise in temperature at the Charles de Gaulle airport on April 6, when temperatures briefly rose to 22°C at 9:30 pm, before dropping back down to cooler spring temperatures.

“When the information came out, we all thought it was a sensor drift. Then, we suspected a maintenance problem,” Brana said, adding that the second occurrence on April 15 prompted some investigating.

It was soon revealed that the temperature anomalies coincided with unusually high winnings on Polymaket linked to bets on Paris temperature readings at the exact time of the abnormal readings. For example, an anonymous trader with the username “xX25Xx” bet $119 that the weather in Paris on April 15 would jump past the equivalent of 64 degrees Fahrenheit and won $21,398.

Météo-France said it filed a complaint with airport police about possible tampering with its equipment, and people have already started speculating that someone must have used a lighter or a battery-operated hair dryer to heat the station’s temperature sensor.

The weather forecasting service stated that “physical findings on one of our instruments and the analysis of sensor data” prompted its complaint.

French analytics firm Bubblemaps reported that no other weather station in the Paris area recorded the unusual temperature spike, and that xX25Xx’s bet that day was 20 times larger than their typical wager. Interestingly, the weather station at Charles de Gaulles Airport was the one used to track the temperature on Polymarket.

Polymarket has yet to comment on this situation, but its website shows that it is no longer using the Charles de Gaulle weather sensor data and is instead using data from a station at the Paris–Le Bourget Airport to settle bets.

Grecia Guadalupe Orantes Mendoza went missing on the night of April 12, in the municipality of Ocozocoautla de Espinosa. Following a report filed by the young woman’s family, police activated the Alba Protocol, a mechanism that initiates immediate actions for the search for missing women.

As part of the protocol, police used some of Grecia’s social media photos to create missing persons posters that they then distributed both online and among the local community. There was just one problem – according to the people who knew the 30-year-old woman, the person in the photos looked nothing like her!

In these types of situations, when time is of the essence and every hour that passes makes finding the victim alive less likely, missing persons posters play a crucial role, but in this particular case, they only made it more difficult for locals to recognize the missing woman.

“How were they going to find her with photos full of filters?” was one of the comments that circulated on various platforms, reflecting the impact that detail had on the perception of the case.

Luckily, the woman was found alive several days later on a highway connecting Ocozocoautla with the municipality of Jiquipilas, and she remains in police custody. The circumstances surrounding her disappearance and her subsequent location remain confidential while the case is being investigated.

The case of Grecia Guadalupe Orantes Mendoza has sparked a debate about the use of social images for missing persons posters. Although they are the easiest source for such important visual material, experts say that the frequent use of filters hinders police instead of helping them.

“The National Search Commission for Missing Persons identified some time ago that identification forms for the Alba Protocol are failing frequently when trying to locate missing persons, because they are generated using photos from social media, where users employ numerous filters and even artificial intelligence software,” security consultant David Saucedo said.

Makoto Kuroda has been charged with recklessly endangering safety and tampering with a household product “with the intent to kill, injure or otherwise endanger the health” of another person, after he admitted to lacing a fellow lab worker’s water bottle with paraformaldehyde and chloroform.

Kuroda and the victim, identified only by their initials, TM, had met in 2017 and had worked together at the university’s Influenza Research Institute in Madison for five years. The two had been pretty close, but had drifted apart over time to the point where Kuroda was so upset that he decided to poison his colleague.

TM noticed something strange on April 4, when he tried to take a sip from an already opened water bottle that had been sitting on his desk for a couple of days. He immediately spat out the mouthful of water because it tasted funny, and a fellow lab worker confirmed that the bottle smelled off.

A couple of days later, TM sensed a strong smell coming from his lab shoes, so he contacted the police. Samples from the water bottle and the shoes were analysed and came back positive for chloroform. The concentration was reportedly so high that the test strips could not provide an accurate result.

Strangely enough, Kuroda admitted to the poisoning attempt both to TM himself and to a professor from the university, adding that he had become “upset with TM for not following the lab rule of wearing a lab coat and goggles,” for a promotion that the victim had gotten and for other things that had just “added up” over time.

The Japanese-born man told police investigators that he retrieved “2 or 3 microliters of PFA mixed with Trizol,” from his work fridge and put “.5 microliters of the mix in TM’s water bottle,” and about “1.5 microliter of the mix into each of TM’s shoes.”

Kuroda said that he expected the chemical mix he put in TM’s shoes to cause a rash, and the poisonous cocktail in his water to make him sick. He also admitted to using ChatGPT to learn about the amount of chemicals needed to achieve his sinister goal.

Police documents show that Makoto Kuroda wanted his victim to “feel bad”, suggesting that he deserved it, because “bad things happen to bad people.”