Google says the World Cup drove Search to its highest usage in history, with queries per second peaking right after Argentina's winning goal against Egypt. CNBC reports: The milestone comes as the company tries to prove its traditional search engine can keep its relevance in the age of AI, where chatbots have become more prevalent. Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock price has more than doubled in the past year and revenue growth in the first quarter was the fastest for any period since 2022.

Google said its top searched query after the game was "argentina vs egypt." Globally, the company also saw people searching for things like "argentina x colombia" and "how many world cup goals does messi have." Additional queries included "what is it called when a player hits another player in game" and "is it messi's last world cup."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent's stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they're happy or sad. Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an "apparatus" that surveilled a user and their surroundings constantly to craft a better workout. "The audible communications may be associated with contextual factors such as time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction," the patent said. "The audible communications may be transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators."

According to the filing, Meta needs to know when a user laughs or sighs, where they are physically, and what objects they're surrounded by. It would even like to know when you've taken your meds. "The AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s)," the patent said. "The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user's emotional state or generate other insights about the user [...] in another example, the AI assistant may take multiple inputs in in addition to audio inputs (e.g., of a user's voice) to provide a summary of emotional trends based on various inputs (e.g., a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.)." The more data it has, the patent explains, the better it could understand a user's moods. "The system increases the precision and reliability of emotional inference by aligning multimodal sensor inputs on synchronized timelines, which creates a novel data structure that supports richer emotional analysis," it said. "These combined features deliver a technical improvement in automated audio interpretation, enabling continuous emotional monitoring on everyday devices."

The emotional-analyzing AI would need far more than just a user's words to determine moods over time. A longer description of the hypothetical training data for the AI included "attributes of thousands of objects" such as a user's books, personal messages, and newspapers. "In some examples, audible communications may include speech (e.g., voice data), sighs, laughter, or other nonverbal sounds associated with an expression(s), an emotion(s), or ideas. In some examples, the audible communications may include the tone(s) of a voice of a user while making the communication(s)," it said. All this data, Meta says, would be in service of tailoring better workouts. Humans, the patent explained, are simply not as good as a machine for this. "Personal trainers cannot provide the level of precision in guidance, such as correcting a pose and/or body movement," it said. "These challenges create a need for a practical approach that uses a single device to observe movement, recommend routines, and provide corrective guidance." "Like other companies, patents at Meta are often filed to disclose concepts that may or may not be implemented, and a granted patent does not guarantee that Meta has pursued or will pursue the technology described," the company said in a statement.

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OpenAI has received approval from the Trump administration to publicly roll out GPT-5.6 after an earlier limited preview restricted access to government-approved organizations. The company also launched ChatGPT Work, a new GPT-5.6-powered agent that combines ChatGPT and Codex-style capabilities. "It can gather context from the apps, files, and workflows you choose and create finished materials such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and web apps," OpenAI wrote in a blog post, adding that a "unified plugins directory" allows ChatGPT to connect to tools like Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, calendars, and CRMs. The Verge reports: Mac and Windows users worldwide, including free ChatGPT users, should have immediate access to ChatGPT Work and GPT-5.6 via the ChatGPT desktop app. On mobile and the web, Pro, Enterprise, and Edu users will first get access, while Plus and Business users will receive access "over the next few days," OpenAI wrote, adding that the "rollout is starting globally and will continue gradually toward full availability over the next 24 hours."

[...] OpenAI is hoping that its new product, which is a direct competitor to Anthropic's Claude Cowork (combining its own Claude and Claude Code), will push it ahead in the race. OpenAI is especially banking on Sol, the most powerful of the GPT-5.6 model suite, to set "a new standard for intelligence and efficiency," particularly when it comes to coding, cybersecurity, and science, as well as computer use capabilities. The company is also marketing the model as a lower-cost alternative to competitors' most powerful models, amid complaints of an industry-wide money squeeze and AI lab costs being passed onto customers.

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BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation intends to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation, a new vendor-neutral home for the Google Open Health Stack project. Google is contributing the project code and assets while Google.org is providing a $3 million grant. The initiative is also backed by Microsoft, Anthropic, and the World Health Organization, with the goal of building open source, AI-ready digital health infrastructure. Will moving the project under Linux Foundation governance accelerate adoption, or is this simply another foundation that most developers will never interact with? The new project will focus on core HL7 FHIR technologies for healthcare interoperability, the Open Health Stack Player deployment toolkit, and AI Commons -- a model-agnostic healthcare AI initiative being co-developed with the World Health Organization.

A notable part of the announcement is its planned Implementer Program, which aims to give startups, small businesses, and local developers in low- and middle-income countries a formal role in governance. In other words, the effort is not just about building healthcare software standards, but about making sure the people implementing them in underserved markets help shape the project too.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The [San Francisco international airport] is hoping to build a brand-new terminal exclusively for passengers who pay a premium, gaining access to a luxurious airport experience complete with private security lines and valet service from terminal to tarmac. It will service commercial flights, not business or corporate jets, and the terminal will have its own Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lines for international travel.

SFO is seeking bidders to take on the development, construction and operation of the private terminal, which is planned for a 75,000-sq-ft site located across the runway from all current public terminals. The airport will accept proposals between late September and early October, and is looking to award a contract by early December with hopes of opening the terminal in late 2028. [...]

If SFO is successful, it would become the next major American airport to open a luxury terminal. Los Angeles, Dallas Fort Worth, Miami and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta international airports all offer a private terminal through PS (formerly known as the Private Suite), a company owned by security firm Gavin de Becker and Associates. Multiple representatives from PS and Gavin de Becker and Associates attended a June conference hosted by SFO about the private terminal, and PS has said it hopes to open a private terminal at every major US airport by 2030. The report notes that access to existing PS private terminals "can cost passengers $1,295 for a one-time experience, or up to $4,850 for a yearly membership."

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BertvB posted a photo:

An intimate wildlife portrait capturing a heartwarming interaction between an adult female Great Spotted Woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) and her fledgling.

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on negative envelope, "Jr. High Camp, Aug 17-23, 1958". handwritten on back of photograph, "Camp Ceder Crest, August 23, 1958, L to R. Kathleen Garrislimo, Linda Kelly, Sandra Orchard, Eileen MacArthur, Louise Quade (counselor) Sharson Telecke, Pat Sparks, Barbara Rogers, Sandra Horn"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

No surprise here. A study from AI detection platform Pangram suggests that social media posts are teeming with AI-generated slop, particularly if the posts are long and especially if they live on LinkedIn or X. If you’re sick of reading non-human prose, we’d recommend getting off the platforms altogether. Along with offering your typical AI-content detection services, Pangram released a Chrome extension at the end of April that, with a $20/month subscription, will automatically scan a user’s LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, X, and Reddit feeds to check for AI-generated or assisted content. With more than one million posts analyzed from users who opted in to share data through the extension since its launch, Pangram has concluded that, while AI slop is flooding social media, it’s hitting longform content particularly hard. With longform content defined in its study as any post over 250 words, Pangram found that a full 25 percent of such posts across all the platforms it studies were fully AI-generated. Fully, mind you, meaning that doesn’t include posts in which users got the assistance of an LLM to gussy up their bland prose. That average across platforms was hardly evenly distributed, though. Leading the way was LinkedIn, where 41 percent of longform content was fingered by Pangram as being AI-generated. That’s likely unsurprising to anyone who's ever bothered to read a lengthy professional diatribe from the Microsoft-owned slop shop, or for El Reg readers - a prior story we reported on in late 2024 from AI detection outfit Originality.ai found that 54 percent of LinkedIn longforms were AI-generated. Originality’s definition of Longform was a bit looser, however, with anything over 100 words counting in its analysis. Per Pangram, shortform content on LinkedIn isn’t much more likely to be human authored - they found 30 percent of posts between 50 and 250 words were fully written by AI. For LinkedIn thought slop leaders, it’s generally all or nothing when it comes to using AI to write posts, with a mere 4.3 percent of longform content written with AI assistance. On the other hand, only 55.2 percent of longform posts on the platform, Pangram concluded, are actually written by humans. While LinkedIn may take the cake in terms of the volume of full-slop longform posts, Elon’s X has it beat when adding partially-written AI garbage into the mix, but not by much, honestly. A quarter of posts on X are fully AI authored, and an additional 23.2 percent are believed to be written with AI help. That leaves 52.7 percent of Twitter posts attributed to humans. In effect, you’re roughly batting .500 on either site. Pangram found that Medium isn’t that much better, with roughly one in three posts likely to have been written by, or with the aid of, an AI. Substack was far and away the least likely place to find AI slop in disguise, but even then, nearly a quarter (21.9 percent) of posts analyzed by the Chrome extension were written by or with AI. Reddit is a slightly more complicated situation, with comments on posts making up a large portion of Reddit content. According to Pangram, 11.6 percent of Reddit posts are AI authored or assisted; 98.1 percent of comments were found to be human authored, and the sheer quantity of comments vs. top-level posts meant that Reddit appears to be the place to go if you want to avoid an intrusion of AI thinking. All said, Pangram concluded from its data that AI writing is flooding social media, just like it’s flooding websites and basically everywhere else online. “An internet that is completely flooded with undisclosed AI content is bleak, but we don't believe it's inevitable,” Pangram CEO Max Spero said of his company’s findings in the report. Pangram believes letting internet users know what’s been AI-generated so they can ignore it is a solution to the problem, but you’ll have to pay $20/month if you want the Chrome extension to provide that service. It’s still usable without paying, but content has to be manually input, and the daily limit is just 4,000 words. In other words, unless you want to pony up and see who’s bullshitting you on social media, you’ll have to just assume everyone is. Like we suggested up top, maybe it’s time to disconnect from those feeds entirely. ®

Volgens de Onderwijsinspectie schiet het islamitische Cornelius Haga Lyceum in Amsterdam ernstig tekort in de kwaliteit van het onderwijs. Inmiddels is de situatie op de school volgens de staatssecretaris zo slecht, dat het ministerie kan besluiten de financiering stop te zetten.

“Improbable but not impossible” is how Brazilian artist Ana Elisa Egreja describes the unexpected companions in her vibrant still lifes. Combining the architectural motifs, animals, and fare common in her native São Paulo with elements from abroad, Egreja positions domestic spaces as sites of change, where migration and cross-cultural pollination come to bear.

In a new suite of 15 oil paintings, the artist draws on the long tradition of Dutch Golden Age still lifes alongside the contrived qualities of collage. Tablescapes filled with fresh flowers and shiny produce also contain cellophane-wrapped snacks and canned goods. Egreja acknowledges flight as a rich symbol of freedom and migration, and birds swirl overhead and perch atop the uncanny objects. There’s also a pair of window pieces, blanketed in 24-karat gold leaf and decorative wrought grilles, which serve as an interstitial spot for the winged creatures to pause as they move between interior and exterior.

Egreja’s focus on bridging these divides emerges in her renditions of sunsets, too, with their bold gradients rippling from crimson to amber across living spaces. This glowing feature backdrops both “Interior with a Jaguar and Sun Conure,” in which a forlorn feline lounges on an Art Deco sofa, and “Interior with Five Cats at Sunset.” The latter also contains a sculptural element as the vibrant light streams through a beaded curtain mounted to the painting’s edge.

Taking a magical realist approach to migration, Egreja questions the hard boundaries we perceive between private and public space, wildness and domesticity, as well as international borders. She also renders these lines illegible to our non-human counterparts, nodding to an ongoing organic exchange between seemingly disparate entities.

The works shown here are part of the artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., titled The Flight of Color, which runs from July 16 to September 5 at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Explore more of the artist’s practice on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Ana Elisa Egreja Takes a Magical Realist Approach to Migration in Her Rich Still Lifes appeared first on Colossal.

Every John Oliver Scene on General Hospital Meet Zee (or Zed? or Zeke on the captions?). He's got black hair, he shot a guy, and he got slapped.

John Oliver Bags Two Roles After 'Publicly' Urging to 'Appear on a Soap' His "Days Of Our Lives" stint will be in August.

The Loop: A picture puzzle game from the Britannica Arrange the pictures so that each one is connected to the previous and the next (semi) logically.