Cosmknights is a gay sci fi webcomic by Hannah Templer, complete (for now) in two volumes and free to read online. Sponsored bouts between power-armoured gladiators decide marriage rights among the empire's noble families. For Pan they're also an opportunity to get off planet and find the runaway princess that was her best friend.

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In this week’s newsletter: Sometimes they were enough to send our music critics and readers straight back out the door again – but mostly just noisy enough to make their clothes shake

Bowel-shuddering basslines. Drum fills that bounce off the walls like gunfire. Guitars resembling a pneumatic drill drilling into another pneumatic drill. A truly loud gig stays with you, figuratively and literally, as anyone who has spent the days after one accompanied by a troubling ringing in their ears can confirm.

Last week, prompted, strangely enough, by an old Alistair Cooke column suggesting that Janis Joplin’s group Big Brother and the Holding Company was noisy enough to cause permanent hearing damage in guinea pigs, we asked Guide readers to share their own loudest gig experiences. We had a huge response, with tons of you sharing memories of eardrum-piercing encounters with all manner of bands and artists, across genres and decades. So we thought we’d devote this week’s newsletter to your stories of extreme noise terror, along with a few from the Guardian’s music critics, who are often on the frontlines when it comes to aural assault.

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Afgelopen maandag werd in Amsterdam het levenloze lichaam van de 73-jarige Paul Wyber uit zijn woning in de Jordaan gehaald, nadat zijn familie geen contact meer met hem kreeg. Hij zou daar mogelijk al twee weken liggen, sinds Koningsdag. En nu heeft de politie twee jongens aangehouden in de zaak. Jongens, maar geen aardige jongens. Van 15 (!) en 17 (!). "Ze werden gisteren op straat aangehouden en zitten in volledige beperkingen, wat betekent dat ze alleen contact mogen hebben met een advocaat. Waar ze precies van worden verdacht, is nog niet bekendgemaakt." Nou, dat zal niet van het jatten van een rolletje drop zijn. Een buurman tegen De T.: "Het is hier met Koningsdag altijd een enorme chaos met veel wildplassers. Misschien is hij toen de verkeerde persoon tegengekomen. Het lijkt me duidelijk dat hier geen sprake is geweest van een natuurlijke dood." Tering. 15. En 17.

This World History Timeline (2016) shows how nations, empires, and ruling groups shifted and evolved across the globe from 3000 BCE to the present. It takes a second to understand what you’re looking at — I thought it was a sort of stretched geographical map at first. Get your own here.

The chart is based on Joseph Priestley’s A New Chart of History (1769):

Priestley is best known for his co-discovery of oxygen.

Tags: infoviz · Joseph Priestley · maps · timelines

De man die al sinds woensdag wordt vermist op het Caribische eiland Saba, is de 53-jarige Erik Matthijsen die als ambulanceverpleegkundige bij de Ambulancedienst Zuid-Holland Zuid werkt. Zijn collega's maken zich zorgen, maar houden ook hoop op een goede afloop. "Hij is goed getraind op extreme omstandigheden."

Promoveren in het eerste seizoen en handhaven in het tweede jaar: de carrière van Ruben den Uil als hoofdtrainer van Excelsior had slechter kunnen beginnen. In FC Rijnmond blikt hij terug op het afgelopen seizoen. Dat doet hij op herkenbare wijze: altijd met een lach.

De pelgrimstocht naar Mekka is dit jaar van 25 tot 29 mei. De oorlog in het Midden-Oosten en het oranje reisadvies voor Saoedi-Arabië houden veel moslims niet tegen. „Ik kijk er zo naar uit dat ik nu al een beetje pijn voel bij het afscheid daar.”

ArXiv, the open-access repository of preprint academic research, will ban authors of papers for a year if they submit obviously AI-generated work. 

Late Thursday evening, Thomas Dietterich, chair of the computer science section of ArXiv, wrote on X: “If generative AI tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s). We have recently clarified our penalties for this. If a submission contains incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation, this means we can't trust anything in the paper.”

Examples of incontrovertible evidence, he wrote, include “hallucinated references, meta-comments from the LLM (‘here is a 200 word summary; would you like me to make any changes?’; ‘the data in this table is illustrative, fill it in with the real numbers from your experiments’.”

“The penalty is a 1-year ban from arXiv followed by the requirement that subsequent arXiv submissions must first be accepted at a reputable peer-reviewed venue,” Dietterich wrote. 

Dietterich told me in an email on Friday morning that this is a one-strike rule—meaning authors caught just once including AI slop in submissions will be banned—but that decisions will be open to appeal. “I want to emphasize that we only apply this to cases of incontrovertible evidence,” he said. “I should also add that our internal process requires first a moderator to document the problem and then for the Section Chair to confirm before imposing the penalty.”

In November 2025, arXiv announced it would no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers because it was being “flooded” with AI slop. “Generative AI/large language models have added to this flood by making papers—especially papers not introducing new research results—fast and easy to write. While categories across arXiv have all seen a major increase in submissions, it’s particularly pronounced in arXiv’s CS category,” arXiv wrote in a press release about the change at the time. 

And in January, it announced first-time submitters would need an endorsement from an established author due to a rise in fraudulent submissions. 

AI-generated, fabricated citations are a huge problem in research. A recent study by Columbia University researchers examined 2.5 million biomedical papers across three years, and found that one in 277 papers published in the first seven weeks of 2026 contained fabricated references; In 2023, it was one in 2,828, and in 2025, one in 458. AI-generated citations and papers are already straining the peer-review process, and more and more papers are making it through the pipeline with those meta-comments and hallucinated data intact. 

ArXiv is managed by Cornell Tech, but this July, it will become an independent nonprofit corporation. Greg Morrisett, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, told Science.org that this change will help arXiv raise more money from a wider range of donors, which Morrisett said is needed to deal with the emergence of “AI slop.”

The Faint