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Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI.

On July 13, Mr. Elez committed a code script to GitHub called “agent.py” that included a private application programming interface (API) key for xAI. The inclusion of the private key was first flagged by GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users.

Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, said the exposed API key allowed access to at least 52 different LLMs used by xAI. The most recent LLM in the list was called “grok-4-0709” and was created on July 9, 2025.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

On April 17, 2025, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists held a discussion exploring the risks of climate change and how to understand what planetary shifts are inevitable – and which are solvable – in this current era of scientific skepticism.

Each year, new data strengthens our understanding of the planet's rising temperatures and growing environmental instability. With the increase in uncontrollable wildfires, stronger storms, and rising ocean levels, the question remains of whether we are too late to reverse – or significantly slow – our changing climate.

There have been a few bright spots towards reaching targets set in the Paris Agreement, such as increases in sustainable energy generation and climate finance. Still, these advances have not yet slowed consistent record-breaking heat and a continued year-over-year rise of atmospheric carbon– leaving us to question whether there is a ‘tipping point’ – a threshold beyond which climate change is irreversible.

Speakers include:

Moderator: Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Inez Fung, Professor Emerita of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a member of the Bulletin's Science and Security Board.

Robert Kopp, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University.

Femke Nijsse, Senior Lecturer in Innovation, Energy and Climate at the University of Exeter.

There are 3 speakers in this.

University of Tasmania's Associate Prof. Booth as leader of Critical Collapse Studies hosts a critical collapse event with Australian collapsologist and co-founder of JustCollapse, Tristan Sykes, and with German Queer political scientist and climate justice advocate, Dr. Tadzio Muller.

Just Collapse: https://justcollapse.org/

Dr Tadzio Mueller: https://steadyhq.com/en/

Kollaps Camp: https://kollapscamp.de/

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19518954

New research finds the industry’s campaigns to confuse the public about beef’s climate impact go back longer than previously recognized.

https://www.ft.com/content/e61e1348-9ee7-4dd9-b2a8-8d262e26d3e9

Today we're deep-diving into the rise of the "carnivore"-centric wellness trend that has taken social media by storm over the last year. We discuss influencers like Nara Smith, the beef industry's influencer marketing strategies, and whether vegan brands should be worried.

This study aims to expand the understanding of public acceptance of carbon taxes by exploring the role of habits. Habits play a pivotal role in guiding our behaviors and reasoning and can even influence our self perception and identity but remain an underexplored variable in relation to public policy acceptance. We employed a large scale (N > 5200) national survey to measure public acceptance of higher carbon taxation in Sweden, also capturing car driving habits, car usage, and other relevant variables. The findings show that habit strength is negatively correlated with policy acceptance, regardless of self reported driving distance, while also appearing to moderate the relationship between policy acceptance and environmental concern and political leaning, variables previously shown to be of relevance. The study suggests that the influence of habits needs to be recognized to better understand the formation of climate policy acceptance, and exploring this perspective paves the way for future research.

The Bottom Line

Despite widespread consensus on the reality of climate change, misinformation about both the causes and solutions for climate change took hold during the 2024 presidential election. As this type of misinformation continues to impact public discourse, the need for greater media literacy becomes crucial, particularly to counteract the influence of political leaders and foreign-backed campaigns on voter behavior.