A new report exposes thousands of scam websites flooding the web with AI-generated recipes.

In the report, Decrypt Ads — a startup that tracks the supply chains of online advertisements — identified more than two thousand websites that strongly appear to be AI slop farms masquerading as blogs run by real chefs and home cooks. These sites, the report found, are pumping fake recipes into search engines like Google as well as social media platforms such as Pinterest, often relying on sketchy Russian and Chinese adtech partners to monetize the operations.

It’s “common knowledge that publishers in certain niches are being openly deceptive about their owners and authors, using AI photos and fake back stories on their sites,” reads the report, which was published today. “Some of the most consistent growth in AI slop spreading across the internet has come from AI recipe websites.”

Security expert and Decrypt Ads researcher Zach Edwards told Futurism that he initially identified about 400 suspicious websites that seemed to be publishing AI-generated recipes under the names of fake chefs. Using “technical fingerprints,” he then found hundreds more sites associated with the suspicious domains he manually uncovered — bringing the tally up to roughly 2,100 different domains, many of which seem to be run by the same sloperators.

“We really approach this expecting these operators to try and hide their websites,” said Edwards. “These folks they don’t want people to know all of the websites they own.”

The slop recipe sites often have “aggressive” social media strategies, according to the report, with Edwards noting that the bogus brands are “super aggressive on Pinterest, super aggressive on Twitter, on Facebook.”

“Any place where there’s visual media,” he added, “you can expect these AI author people to be trying to drum up organic traffic.”

Among the most aggressive slop sites uncovered in the report is “AddCakes,” a baking site that claims it’s operated by a baker named “Elena.” Elena is described as a “busy mom who wanted to connect with my roots through baking, but got overwhelmed by complicated cake recipes and the pressure to make them look perfect.” But in an act of theft so bold that it’s comical, the character of Elena is clearly an AI-generated version of the extremely recognizable British actress Emily Blunt, who’s starred in hit movies like the 2006 “The Devil Wears Prada” and the 2018 “A Quiet Place.”

AddCakes is apparently either betting that no one will recognize AI-manipulated images of the famous celebrity, or banking that her face will attract readers. It’s even published photos depicting the Elena character in the kitchen cooking and sitting at a dinner table, surrounded by her fake, AI-generated family. According to location data from X-formerly-Twitter, the person behind the operation is based in Morocco. (Blunt doesn’t live in Morocco, and her representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Whatever you do, though, don’t trust the AI-generated Emily Blunt. As Edwards emphasized, websites working with Chinese and Russian adtech partners carry a privacy risk for consumers, as authoritarian regimes may look to hoover up valuable browsing data.

“This report is about publishers who are being deceptive. Their audiences could be impacted, advertisers are wasting money,” said Edwards. “But the underlying fact is also that if you load this website and you don’t block ads, your data is going to, basically, authoritarian countries.”

In other words, AI slop isn’t just choking the web with garbage. It can also come with security risks — and, at the end of the day, it’s built on fundamental dishonesty.

“Most of these AI recipe websites, when you look at those ‘about’ pages, the fake backstories that they’re putting together… this lady was a Michelin star chef and she worked at this fancy hotel or this place, and they’re basically saying that this expert not only wrote these recipes, but tested themselves. And it’s giving this air of, ‘Wow, you’re about to get a recipe from an expert. This has all been carefully vetted,'” said Edwards. “But none of these recipes have probably been cooked — zero of them by the actual owners or authors, and to me that’s the scary part.”

He added that many of these sites are likely scraping content ideas from real bloggers and creators who have actually taken the time, energy, and expertise to test, photograph, and publish real recipes. “These people are clearly not cooking their own recipes. They’re putting out sometimes dozens of recipes a day. It’s an automated publishing pipeline,” said the researcher. “It’s all a lie… and I think that the reason why we need to be holding AI publishers accountable is because they don’t care about their audience.”

More on fake authors and the web: Google Updates Guidelines to Punish Sites That Use Fake Bylines and AI-Generated Headshots

The post Recipe Scammers Are Using an AI-Generated Emily Blunt as a Slop Puppet to Promote Their Garbage appeared first on Futurism.

A new piece of research is pushing back on the long-held belief that plastic is a harmless and chemically inert material.

The new study, published in the journal Nature, took a look at the way micro and nanoplastics interact with water-rich environments such as the human body. It found that typical consumer-grade microplastics exhibit “intrinsic physicochemical activity” there, indicating that the tiny chunks of plastic do indeed react chemically inside our bodies.

“As plastic fragments into smaller and smaller particles, its surface area increases enormously,” Columbia professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering and study co-author Wei Min said in a press release. “Then microplastics change the water that surrounds them, generating high-energy, reactive radicals… that very likely contribute to biological damage that we see in animals and potentially in humans as a result of microplastic exposure.”

Min was previously part of another alarming study, which found that the average liter of bottled water contains upward of 240,000 tiny microplastics, a much higher count than previously known. Combined with the new research, it looks like those untold thousands of plastic bits are capable of causing much more chemical harm than scientists had given them credit for.

As co-author Beizhan Yan put it, “this work has significant implications for environmental and human health,” particularly when it comes to food supply chains.

In the US, plastics make up an integral part of the food chain. They’re heavily integrated into industrial agriculture, present in high quantities throughout food processing, and are extensively used in food distribution, whether to preserve fruits and vegetables or as packaging for groceries.

The scale of plastic packaging alone is staggering: it’s estimated that food packaging accounts for 40 percent of the world’s total plastic production. With billions of dollars riding on the plastics industry, your average working-class person has little hope of skirting microplastics through a simple change in consumption habits — even if you have enough money to buy the haute premium foods packaged in glass or tin, individual consumers have no control over how much plastic their food is exposed throughout the production process.

Given the growing body of work pointing to the horrifying consequences of microplastics on the human body, it seems our collective health depends on finding a way out of this plasticky status-quo — and fast.

More on plastics: Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies Because That’s the Future We Deserve

The post This New Research About Microplastics Is Pretty Damn Scary appeared first on Futurism.

A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.

As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.

As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”

Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.

The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.

“When you’re a billionaire and you have a weird hobby and someone tries to stop you, you have complete impunity,” Novak told Block Club Chicago in a separate interview. “You just triple down because why not? You’ll pay $40,000 in fines. You don’t care.”

Now in 2026, authorities in Chicago are reaching their breaking point. Alderman Timmy Knudsen — whose jurisdiction covers the area of Lincoln Park Seid’s workers are active in — is now pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid in order to stop the nuttiness once and for all.

“For years, a billionaire family has carried out a paid operation to feed local wildlife, disrupting our rat abatement efforts and causing an infestation that has made parts of the park unusable for other residents,” Knudsen’s office told Fortune in a statement. “We’re hopeful that raising awareness and drawing attention to the issue will ultimately lead to better behavior and a safer park for our community.”

More on tech billionaires: Billionaires Pouring Money Into Ads About How AI Data Centers Are Actually Good

The post 94 Year-Old Electronics Billionaire Accused of Hiring Goons to Infest Chicago With Huge Rat Swarm appeared first on Futurism.

Now years into the US release of Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” mode, brand loyalists are becoming increasingly comfortable trusting their lives — not to mention those of others on the road — to the company’s software.

While there have been plenty of videos showing Tesla drivers answering emails, vibecoding, or even gaming from the driver’s seat, a new genre of Tesla content is emerging in which Tesla bros dine out on huge feasts from behind the wheel.

In a now-viral clip shared by the account Teslaconomics on X-formerly-Twitter, a Tesla driver presents the point of view from behind the wheel of what appears to be a Cybertruck. The driver in the video is going hog wild on a buffet of food, made up of sushi rolls, sausages, a fiery red stew, and what appears to be a tray of potato pancakes, biscuits, and peppers.

From the video, it’s immediately clear that the driver is careening down a busy roadway as they pick away at their potluck, drawing widespread ridicule from commenters.

“I don’t wanna share the road with people like this and I need them to start getting tickets, points on their license, all that good shit,” one user raged. “Healthy, normal societies don’t reward you for breaking the rules.”

Others pointed out that train riders have been able to do this for ages. “In China you eat while traveling 10 times faster,” another poster commented alongside a video of a Chinese high-speed train in action.

How I be eating on Tesla FSD pic.twitter.com/2MiMvUlf0f

— Teslaconomics (@Teslaconomics) October 10, 2026

“The comments and quote reposts of my video are pretty hilarious to me,” Teslaconomics carped in a follow-up comment. “First of all, I’m wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They record exactly what I’m seeing, completely hands-free. I’m not holding a phone or a camera.”

“Second, this is Tesla FSD (Supervised),” the account continued. “That means I’m still responsible for watching the road, paying attention, and being ready to take over at any moment.”

Of course, the full tray of decadent foods between the driver’s hands and the steering wheel would make taking control difficult in a split-second emergency.

Teslaconomics is far from the only poster sharing clips like this. Another popular account with the handle Cyber_Trailer makes a point to share videos of Tesla owners eating while driving in a recurring segment called “What are you eating in your Tesla?”

One Reel shows a woman eating what looks to be a grape salad while her Tesla drives down the freeway. Another captures a Tesla driver carefully chowing down on a burrito, apparently more concerned about getting the fillings on herself than keeping her hands on the wheel.

Though the software has clearly given these drivers a false sense of security, it’s worth noting that Teslas operating in self-driving mode — even under close watch — can still cause enormous harm to pedestrians and other drivers, making the decision to pig out behind the wheel a selfish gamble with death.

More on Tesla: Tesla Argues in Court That the N-Word Is Acceptable Under Certain Circumstances

The post Tesla Bros Posting Videos Showing Them Hog Out on Decadent Meals While Careening Down the Road in Self-Driving Mode appeared first on Futurism.

Only a few human hands can make this 256-strand pasta.

Would you hand in your phone at the door in exchange for a free bottle of wine? One restaurateur has tried that – and there are now many other gambits that are encouraging us to connect

Name: Phone bans.

Age: Their provenance is considerable; their time is now.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Tony Smith/Alamy

© Photograph: Tony Smith/Alamy

© Photograph: Tony Smith/Alamy

A team led by the National Museum of Denmark has worked out, for the first time, what people actually cooked in the pots of Hama, an ancient city in western Syria, roughly 4,500 years ago. By analyzing animal bones, plant remains, and fat residues absorbed into the vessel walls, the researchers found a surprisingly varied […]

Around 1590 BCE — more than 800 years before Rome was founded, and before Tutankhamun was even born — a small number of people in what is now southeastern Poland started eating a cereal that had never grown in their fields. It wasn’t a local crop, and it didn’t belong to any plant known elsewhere […]

The companies ushering in food delivery robots aren’t buying themselves much goodwill in the Windy City.

In the short amount of time they’ve been on Chicago streets, the bots have sent residents to the hospital and smashed through bus stops, prompting local officials to set up an exclusion zone prohibiting the companies from operating in a certain section of the city.

Now, it seems the bots are also capable of swarming the city’s busy sidewalk, making it all but impossible for residents to pass safely.

A clip shared by Chicago resident Becca Ostein on her morning run captured the bizarre moment when a swarm of delivery robots operated by the firm Coco caused a traffic jam on a sidewalk near Lincoln Park.

Apparently caused by a freak glitch, the video shows Ostein attempting to pass a veritable obstacle course of a dozen squirming robots, their on-board lights flashing as they congregate on a patch of narrow sidewalk. Another bot is seen maneuvering off in the distance, though it isn’t clear whether it’s approaching or fleeing the fray.

“Run route was crowded this morning,” Ostein wrote in her caption of the video.

View this post on Instagram

The video garnered plenty of reactions in the comments, the majority of which were negative.

“As a disabled person this is an actual nightmare,” one user replied.

“They were swarming,” Ostein told CBS News in an interview following the incident. “They didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. Without agile feet, no one could have gotten by.”

In a statement shared under Ostein’s post, Coco apologized, admitting “that’s not how our robots are designed to operate.”

“Our team caught it quickly, and the robots were cleared and operating normally within minutes,” the company continued. “We’ve made sure this won’t happen again.”

More on robots: As If There Was Any Question About Data Centers Being Weak Job Creators, Meta Is Now Deploying Robots to Maintain Them

The post Bizarre Glitch Causes Delivery Robots to Swarm Busy City Sidewalk appeared first on Futurism.

For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.

Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.

That’s not an exaggeration. According to a new report published in the journal Ocean and Costal Research and flagged by ScienceAlert, a whopping 96 percent of a recent load of tuna was infested with gut-busting worms.

Out of 53 skipjack, marine researchers counted over 1,600 worms infesting nearly every organ of every fish hauled in from the ocean. Only the kidneys and hearts of the tuna remained worm-free, the researchers noted. Everything else, including the muscle tissue we humans eat, was festering with flatworms and roundworms.

Though most preparation methods will kill the parasites, the images are pretty off-putting. As the researchers explain, the sheer volume of parasitic infection is alarming.

“These results highlight the importance of sanitary inspection and emphasize the importance of immediate evisceration to avoid the migration of larvae from the viscera to the musculature,” the authors write.

Still, parasitologists say the worms aren’t all bad. Though increased presence of worms also comes with more risk of infection, University of Washington parasitologist Chelsea Wood told ScienceAlert in a prior story that they can actually be a sign that the fish is well-sourced.

“Everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry,” Wood said. “But the anisakid [roundworm] life cycle integrates many components of the food web. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem.”

More on food: Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies Because That’s the Future We Deserve

The post Scientists Find That 96 Percent of Delicious Tuna Is Infected With Parasitic Worms appeared first on Futurism.

Consumers are increasingly encountering AI-generated images on food menus such as leathery meat and bread resembling reptile skin

During a recent lunch break, Jill Sennett saw something so unappetizing she had to share it with her 26,000 X followers: Artificial intelligence-generated menu images from a Jamaican barbecue pop-up restaurant in which the meats looked like leather belts crawling with tiny beetles.

The images were reshared by more than 500 people who similarly expressed their disgust. Eating is “such an essential human experience”, said Sennett, a 37-year-old nurse in Denver. “I think it’s a bad cultural thing that restaurants are converting to these horrific, uncanny food images that are unappetizing.”

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Lisa Bonos

© Photograph: Lisa Bonos

© Photograph: Lisa Bonos

Affordable, fast-heating and with a clever air fryer function, this versatile model is a winner for outdoor cooks who are willing to give up the traditional flame

• The best pizza ovens – tested
• Gozney Dome Gen 2 pizza oven review

An electric pizza oven with no flame and no need to rotate the pizza may seem sacrilegious to purists, but the Ninja Artisan electric outdoor pizza oven solves many of the hassles of outdoor pizza making. There’s no lighting or monitoring a flame, no need to keep adjusting the heat, and no need for a turning peel, bulky gas bottle or constant use of an infrared (IR) thermometer (although you may still want one – read on for details).

Equipped with four presets – Artisan, Thin Crust, New York, Pan – plus a custom setting to enable you to bake your pizza exactly how you like it, the Ninja Artisan is as effortless as can be, even next to the simplest plug-and-play gas oven. As you might expect from Ninja, it’s a multipurpose cooker, too, transforming into an outdoor air fryer with a capacity to turn out up to 1.3kg of french fries, or bake six chicken breasts.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Rachel Ogden

© Photograph: Rachel Ogden

© Photograph: Rachel Ogden

More than two thousand years ago, in the middle of the Iron Age, the Celts built a large fortified settlement on two peninsulas that extended into the Rhine River, near what is now the Swiss city of Schaffhausen. This place, known as the oppidum of Altenburg-Rheinau, is considered by archaeologists to be a true commercial […]

Scientists have finally created what might be the only thing that can get meatheads to eat their veggies: protein lettuce.

By literally shooting pig genes into the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco cells, an international team of researchers were able to grow produce that contained the animal protein myoglobin, they report in a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

Is this the pathway to the next ridiculous protein-infused snack? (We’re looking at you, protein popcorn.) Not quite. Instead, the scientists say their findings could pave the way to weaning ourselves off of environmentally-destructive meat.

“Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that higher plants can stably produce myoglobin, one of the key proteins responsible for many of meat’s desirable properties,” study lead atuhor Alexia Groff, a plant biotechnology researcher at Imperial College London, told ScienceAlert. “This is very relevant at a time when the demand for sustainable food production platforms is greater than ever.”

To combine pig genes with plant DNA, the researchers used a machine called a biolistic particle delivery system, or a “gene gun.” The nickname is apt: it works by firing microscopic metal particles covered in genes into their target. (Biolistic, by the way, is a portmanteau of “biological ballistics.”)

The target, this time, were the chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco seedlings. Because of their “bacterial ancestry and their high number of copies per cell,” Groff explained in a statement about the work, “chloroplasts are generally much better at making large amounts of protein than the cell nucleus.”

Their genetic bullets hit the bullseye. In followup tests, the seedlings showed they had incorporated the pig DNA into the chloroplast genome. When the plants grew into adulthood and produced seeds, their offspring still possessed the transferred genes.

In all, the lettuce and tobacco plants yielded about 800 mg and 810 mg of myoglobin protein per kilogram of their dry weight. That’s ten times less than beef, but because growing plants is far more efficient than raising animals, the tradeoff could be worth it.

“Plant cultivation is far more resource-efficient than livestock production; consequently, plant-derived myoglobin could achieve protein yields per hectare that rival — or even potentially exceed — those of animal agriculture,” the authors wrote in the study, “whilst also benefiting from substantially lower water use and greenhouse gas emissions.”

If this gets adopted at scale, these protein-infused plants could be dried up and be used to bolster the protein in plant-based meats.

Other researchers caution that the food still needs to be proven safe to eat and sustainable to produce, but are optimistic about the findings.

“This an important advance on earlier plant and algal research.  Demonstrating stable myoglobin production in plant chloroplasts, including in an edible crop, raises the possibility of using plants as scalable, low-input production platforms alongside microbial fermentation,” Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, director of the ICL’s Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, said in a statement. “In the longer term, this could diversify how and where these ingredients are produced.”

More on lettuce: Trump’s Explosive Diarrhea Scandal Is Getting Worse and Worse

The post Scientists Genetically Engineer High-Protein Lettuce appeared first on Futurism.

Rockets, rovers and landers have dominated the attention of the commercial space industry as the United States focuses on sending humans back to the moon, but a handful of companies […]

The post Three companies building the tech to grow crops on the moon appeared first on SpaceNews.

They’re perfect for time-poor cooks, but which deserves your counter space? From combi models to smart designs, here’s what our expert recommends

• The best air fryers

If you’re at a restaurant and hear a ping a couple of minutes before your meal arrives at your table, it’s unlikely to be a good sign. But microwave ovens are a brilliant tool in the home kitchen. They’re fearsomely fast at heating up – or even cooking – food when you’re time-poor and lacking the energy to make something wholesome after a hard day at work. And in hot weather, cooking by microwave isn’t just quick: it also won’t warm your home.

Microwaves work best for heating food with a high water content (they make the water molecules in food vibrate to create heat). However, before testing, I asked around to find out what people use theirs for most, with a view to using this information to shape my tests. I learned a few things – like lots of people eat mug cakes. Who knew? And that wheat bags are a popular alternative to hot-water bottles. But the majority of folk use their microwave for reheating cold cuppas, defrosting frozen batch-cooked meals, warming food, popping microwave popcorn – and, of course, cooking jacket potatoes more quickly. I used these insights to shape my testing.

Continue reading...

© Composite: PR Image

© Composite: PR Image

© Composite: PR Image

In a perspective paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a team of researchers and health experts calls for a ‘paradigm shift’ in how public health agencies address hypertension.

The post Scientists Propose New Strategy in Fight against High Blood Pressure appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

British cheesemakers have struggled to find a use for the 95,000 tonnes of salty whey they produce every year. But researchers may have come up with a solution

Name: Whey.

Age: As old as milk.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: JulieAlexK/Getty Images

© Photograph: JulieAlexK/Getty Images

© Photograph: JulieAlexK/Getty Images

Excavations by the University of Catania at the Tava Tepe site, located in western Azerbaijan, have uncovered an archaeological complex that upends established notions about Late Bronze Age communities in the Caucasus region. What was initially interpreted as an isolated domestic structure, dated to around 1300–1000 BCE, has turned out to be the last link […]

Adding breakfast back into the daily routine of teens around age 18 who habitually skip the meal can meaningfully improve their nutrition, with the biggest gains seen among those given protein-rich morning meals, according to a six-month clinical trial.

The post New Study Finds Eating Breakfast Boosts Diet Quality in Teens Who Usually Skip It appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.