When all else fails, there’s amateur radio — and handwritten notes. Both ham radio and clear thinking helped rescue a mother and her son from a recent California camping trip gone wrong. While driving to the campsite in the Stanislaus National forest, the 49-year-old mother had the not-uncommon experience of GPS leading her and her 9-year-old son on a merry chase, sending her down a series of forest roads. Eventually the foliage got too dense for the GPS signals to penetrate, leaving the pair stranded in the forest with no guidance on how to get out.

Luckily, our heroes followed the first rule of being lost: don’t panic. Knowing that a search would likely be a needle-in-a-haystack affair thanks to the terrain and heavy cover, they wisely increased their footprint by venturing out a mile or so in different directions to post handwritten notes along the trail. They also used their car’s hazard lights at night and periodic triple blasts on a whistle to signal rescuers, who eventually found them thanks to the notes and a tip from someone who remembered seeing the car. As for the ham radio, that came into play when rescuers in the field were unable to get through to their command post on the regular radios thanks to the dense vegetation. A ham operator in the group was able to punch through and reach a ham at his home, who closed the loop by calling into the sheriff’s office, who were then able to contact the command post.

If like us you’ve always resented having to prove your humanity by clicking on a checkbox, you’re really going to hate OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent, which rubs the whole CAPTCHA thing right in your face. OpenAI fans on Reddit discovered that the Agent, which is able to conduct a series of tasks, effortlessly clicked on one of those “I’m not a robot” checkboxes to advance to the next step in a video conversion process. What’s worse, Agent gave a play-by-play narration of the process, noting that it would have to “click the ‘Verify I’m human’ checkbox … to prove I’m not a bot.” We’ve always felt — perhaps optimistically — that these checkbox CAPTCHAs would be easily defeated even with one of those screen recorder macros from the Windows 3.0 days. Thanks to OpenAI, it appears that there’s absolutely no justification for them at all, and yet we’re sure we’ll keep seeing them for many years to come. At least the simple checkbox ones — let’s see a bot try to solve one of those traffic light puzzles!

Back in May, we covered a fantastic video captured during an earthquake in Myanmar in March. While most earthquake videos capture the destruction by showing goods flying off store shelves, water sloshing out of swimming pools, or ceiling tiles collapsing into office spaces, this video was far more subtle, and yet far more terrifying. The video showed a massive slab of earth suddenly shift three meters in a few seconds. That footage has now been analyzed by geologists in Japan, who have concluded that this was the first direct observation of a curved fault slip, a type of quake that had only been theorized before. It appears that the curving and sinking seen in the video, which we noted in our original article, were the key to identifying this unusual type of earthquake. Maybe we should have gone with geology instead of biology all those years ago.

And finally, we’ve all heard tales of ecological control gone wrong, the classic example of which is the introduction of cane toads into Australian sugar cane plantations. The toads were supposed to eat cane beetles, which were devastating the sugar cane crop, only to find that the toads couldn’t reach the beetles and instead preyed on their natural predators, multiplying fruitfully in the process and becoming an invasive pest species in the process. So it’s with some trepidation that we read about robotic bunnies being used to control invasive Burmese pythons. The plan is being tested in Florida, because of course it’s Florida, but also because there are a lot of pythons in the Everglades thanks to the exotic pet trade. The idea is to take the guts out of 40 stuffed bunny toys, add motors to provide motion and heaters to simulate a warm bunny snack, and place them around the marshes. The goal right now is to just lure the snakes out of hiding to study their habits, in the hopes of finding a way to control their population. One could think of a few ways this could be accomplished more directly with a few additions to the robobunny payloads, but we imagine that wouldn’t go over too well with the snake lovers out there.