Build a conspiracy theory from scratch.
The best way to learn to spot a conspiracy theory is to make one yourself.
Pick a real news story. On the next step you'll choose who's behind it and why. Then walk through the four moves real conspiracists use, with a debunk on every step.
- Hunt anomalies — turn coincidence into evidence of a secret plot.
- Fabricate connections — draw lines between unrelated dots until they look meaningful.
- Dismiss counter-evidence — if a fact disagrees, make the fact part of the cover-up.
- Discredit the critics — dismiss people who point out flaws in your theory.
Pick the event.
Choose whichever real-feeling headline your imagination will run wildest with. Don't overthink it.
Video games aid paralyzed speech
Researchers at Speech Graphics, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley report a brain–computer interface that helped a woman who lost speech after a stroke communicate again. Tiny electrodes were placed on the surface of her brain to record neural activity while she attempted to speak. That recorded activity was decoded into written text, a synthetic voice and real-time facial animation using software originally developed for video-game characters such as those in The Last of Us Part II and Hogwarts Legacy.
Lost continent discovered
Geoscientists have identified a largely submerged landmass called Zealandia, or Te Riu-a-Māui, that meets the criteria many researchers use for a continent. Covering about 1.89 million square miles (roughly 4.9 million square kilometres), Zealandia is mostly underwater — about 90–95 percent — and includes the visible islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia. Debate about its status grew over decades and many geologists accepted it as a continent in analyses published in recent years.
Fitbit App Redesigned for Fall
Google plans to release a redesigned Fitbit app this fall that reorganizes the interface into three main tabs: "Today," "Coach," and "You." The refreshed app will display daily health statistics, offer motivational and coaching content, and present goal overviews and trends. Google says the update will improve how fitness data is presented and protected, and it appears visually aligned with leaked looks of the upcoming Pixel Watch 2 and possibly the Pixel 8 phones.
Oldest jellyfish species revealed in fossils
Scientists have identified Burgessomedusa phasmiformis as the oldest known swimming jellyfish, based on fossil specimens recovered from the Burgess Shale in Canada. These animals lived more than 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period. Researchers classify them as medusozoans, the group that includes modern jellyfish, and say the fossils provide direct evidence that jellyfish-like animals had already evolved by that time.