Water utility announces it's ditching fluoride—then reveals it did so years ago

Water utility announces it's ditching fluoride—then reveals it did so years ago

fivenewscrypto    avril 01, 2026   

Residents of Birmingham, Alabama, were abruptly informed earlier this month that their water utility had decided to stop adding fluoride to city water. Then, days later, they learned that the utility had actually stopped adding fluoride years ago.

On March 20, Central Alabama Water (CAW) made an announcement that it had discontinued water fluoridation. The announcement cited "aging equipment" and "increasing maintenance and component replacement" as justifications for the removal of fluoride, which it indicated had already occurred. But the water utility also highlighted unsubstantiated health concerns and noted that people can buy toothpaste and mouthwash that contain fluoride to protect their teeth.

Emphasizing that there are "questions about the long‑term health effects," CAW said, "ending drinking water fluoridation allows customers and their health care providers to make more individualized decisions about fluoride use."

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Judge halts Nexstar/Tegna merger after FCC let firms exceed TV ownership limit

Judge halts Nexstar/Tegna merger after FCC let firms exceed TV ownership limit

fivenewscrypto    mars 31, 2026   

Although the Trump administration approved Nexstar Media Group’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna, a US judge has ordered the two companies to stop integrating their assets and operations. US District Judge Troy Nunley, an Obama appointee, issued a temporary restraining order on Friday prohibiting integration of the companies until further rulings by the court.

"Defendants must immediately cease all ongoing actions relating to integration and consolidation of Nexstar and Tegna," wrote Nunley, the chief judge in US District Court for the Eastern District of California.

Nunley said he agrees with plaintiff DirecTV that immediate integration of the merging firms could eliminate competition, result in newsroom layoffs and shutdowns, and make it more difficult to divest Tegna stations if the court ends up requiring a divestiture after reviewing the merger. DirecTV has established that "the Nexstar-TEGNA merger will substantially lessen competition in markets in which it participates," and that there would be irreparable harm if a restraining order isn't issued, Nunley wrote.

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Authors' lucky break in court may help class action over Meta torrenting

Authors' lucky break in court may help class action over Meta torrenting

fivenewscrypto    mars 31, 2026   

Looks like Meta is hoping the recent Supreme Court ruling that found Internet service providers aren't liable for piracy on their networks will help the social media giant dodge liability claims over its torrenting of AI training data.

Last week, Meta filed a statement in a lawsuit that alleged that Meta should be liable under copyright law for contributory infringement simply because the company knows how torrenting works. By seeding perhaps 80 terabytes of pirated works, the company allegedly knew it was inducing infringement by allowing uploads to help speed up its downloads, the plaintiffs, Entrepreneur Media, argued.

This contributory infringement claim is much easier to prove than a separate claim raised in a class action filed by book authors in Kadrey v. Meta, which alleged that Meta's torrenting meant it was liable for a "distribution" claim of direct copyright infringement. TorrentFreak noted that the authors' claim required evidence that Meta torrented an entire work, whereas the contributory infringement claim only depends on proving that Meta facilitated torrent transfers.

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Pints meet prop bets: Polymarket’s “Situation Room” pop-up bar in DC

Pints meet prop bets: Polymarket’s “Situation Room” pop-up bar in DC

fivenewscrypto    mars 31, 2026   

Polymarket’s temporary makeover of a K Street bar as “The Situation Room” yielded a few notable differences from other Washington watering holes: more laptops open, more overheard conversations about cryptocurrency, and more screens—most of which were not showing sports.

The New York-based prediction market announced in a March 18 thread on X that it was opening what it called “the world's first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation,” touting the availability of “live X feeds, flight radar, Bloomberg terminals, and Polymarket screens.” The bar would only be there for a three-day run.

The reality—as reported by journalists who showed up for a press-preview event Friday night—fell vastly short of that, with power and Wi-Fi problems that left all the displays dark. Polymarket fixed the screens the next day, however, and on my own visit on Sunday afternoon, dozens of displays offered a choice of CNN, CBS, the local Fox station, FS1, and various pages on Polymarket’s site. No normal bar would have CNBC or C-SPAN on, but those networks were a logical fit for this one.

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Explanation for why we don't see two-foot-long dragonflies anymore fails

Explanation for why we don't see two-foot-long dragonflies anymore fails

fivenewscrypto    mars 31, 2026   

Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the "oxygen constraint hypothesis."

For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly oxygenated air to survive because insect breathing systems are less efficient than those of mammals, birds, or reptiles. As atmospheric oxygen levels dropped, there wasn’t enough to support giant bugs anymore. “It’s a simple, elegant explanation,” said Edward Snelling, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Pretoria. “But it’s wrong.”

Insect breathing

Unlike mammals, insects don't have a centralized pair of lungs and a closed circulatory system that delivers oxygen-rich blood to their tissues. “They breathe through internalized tubing called the tracheal system,” Snelling explained.

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Causality optional? Testing the "indefinite causal order" superposition

Causality optional? Testing the "indefinite causal order" superposition

fivenewscrypto    mars 31, 2026   

Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment. One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through a device it could navigate as either a particle or a wave. After it was clear of the device, the other half of the pair was measured in a way that forced the first to act as one or the other. Once that was done, the first invariably behaved as if it were whatever the measurement made it into the whole time.

It was as if the measurement had reached backward in time to alter the photon's behavior, raising questions about whether causality itself actually applied to quantum mechanics.

Unbeknownst to me, physicists have been asking the same question and have designed experiments to probe it in detail. A few weeks back, they provided an experiment that seems to indicate it's possible to create quantum superpositions of two different series of events, essentially making the question of whether A or B happened first a matter of probability*. While the current experiment leaves a few loopholes, the researchers behind the work think they could ultimately be eliminated.

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How new fishing tech can reduce bycatch of turtles and other creatures

How new fishing tech can reduce bycatch of turtles and other creatures

fivenewscrypto    mars 31, 2026   

Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too.

This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can asphyxiate animals or cause fatal injuries; even when the animals are tossed back to sea, they frequently die. Bycatch is also a dilemma for fishermen—entangled creatures can destroy equipment, costing time, money, and fisheries’ reputations.

Over the decades, conservationists, researchers, and fishermen have developed ways to minimize various kinds of bycatch in different fishing stocks around the world. But putting these solutions to work is often a challenge, and many mitigation strategies are never widely implemented.

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