This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss going into the woods, a "he admit it" moment, and a tofu sandwich.

JOSEPH: Thank you to everyone who came to Thursday’s FOIA Forum. It was a great turnout with a ton of really good questions. We spoke mostly about mining city council meetings for tips or context you can then use to fuel your public records requests. I’ll upload the video soon and put it on the site for everyone to watch.

The other 404 Media co-founders have been writing in Behind The Blog about disconnecting recently. I’m doing something related to that shortly: going to an Airbnb in the woods to do a makeshift ‘silent retreat’.

On Thursday, Google introduced a new AI feature into Google Earth which lets anyone fabricate all sorts of misleading or straight up inaccurate satellite imagery, from making it look like a specific place has suffered a drone strike to manifesting a nuclear plant in Iran.

Usually, Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts to digitally monitor areas of interest and see how they change over time, say, during a conflict or disaster. Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation. 

YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against “sexually gratifying” content, leaving creators confused and angry.

Several creators received the same notice from YouTube about their channels being removed on Wednesday and Thursday. “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our sex and nudity policy. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube,” the email said. 

So far, YouTube creators affected by the wave of bans who’ve spoken publicly about YouTube removing their channels include ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen, all of whom had significant followings on the platform. There are still many ASMR creators on YouTube, making the bans even more confusing.  

ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, describes the tingling feeling that some people get when hearing certain sounds; it’s become shorthand for a genre of content where ASMR artists whisper, brush, tap or make other sounds near a microphone. A lot of ASMR content is meant for relaxation, mindfulness, and sleep.

“YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community."

"We terminated these channels for linking to content that violates our nudity and sexual content policy," a spokesperson for YouTube told 404 Media in a statement. "Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube, and this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content."

Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test of market interest.” 

On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its news page about the change. “We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else,” ISBNdb wrote. “We don't train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life. We've taken the page down. Our job is helping people find books. For more than two decades, ISBNdb has been the card catalog of the book world — the data behind how bookstores, libraries, and reading apps connect readers with titles. Data about books, not the books themselves. That hasn't changed.” 

Scientists have proposed the existence of a fifth “dark dimension” that governs the behavior of both dark energy and dark matter—and which may be observationally detected in the near future, according to a recent preprint study. 

The dark dimension hypothesis could potentially provide an elegant solution to some of the biggest mysteries in science, including the nature of dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up most mass in the universe, and dark energy, the term for whatever is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. 

The idea arose from string theory, a decades-old framework that suggests the universe contains many dimensions beyond the four dimensions that we can perceive as humans—time, and three-dimensional space. In a series of studies published over the past several years, a group of string theory experts have suggested that one of these dimensions could simultaneously govern dark matter and dark energy, and that this dimension changes over time. 

“The question was whether or not this extra dimension is frozen or can evolve,” said Cumrun Vafa, the Timken University Professor in the physics department at Harvard University and an author on these studies, including the newest preprint, in a call with 404 Media. “The fifth dimension is somehow related to the value of dark energy, so it's natural that when the value of the extra dimension changes, the value of dark energy also changes.”

When Vafa and his colleagues started to develop this idea, the conventional wisdom was that dark energy had a fixed value, according to the standard model of cosmology, a well-corroborated set of assumptions that explains most laws and phenomena in the universe.  

“We were scrutinized by our colleagues for predicting that string theory requires dark energy to change, whereas dark energy looks constant,” said Vafa. “This is not good for our field because you are predicting string theory is inconsistent with observation.”

But the assumption that dark energy has a fixed value, a central tenet of the standard model, has been challenged by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a major survey of the universe based at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, which released its first results in 2025. 

To the surprise of many scientists, the DESI release hinted that the value of dark energy may shift over time, a discovery that was in line with predictions of a dark dimension put forward by Vafa’s team.

“We didn't write a model to fit the data, but rather we had a model based on theory,” said Vafa. “Now that fits the data automatically. That is why I believe in it. It's easy to write a model after you know the data to try to fit it somehow. This is not what we did.”

“Our model is still the best model, as far as I know, that fits the DESI results,” he added.  

In their newest preprint, which is currently in the process of peer review, Vafa and his colleagues expand on the workings of this possible dark dimension in light of the DESI data. According to string theory, the universe has many dimensions that are “compactified” into subatomic scales that are not detectable by current instruments, which is why we have not discovered them. The hypothetical dark dimension, however, may be enlarged to a micron scale range. 

This would allow gravitons, which are the hypothetical particles that mediate the force of gravity, to spill over into the dark dimension, where they would become dark matter particles. In this view, dark matter is not made of some new form of exotic particle. Instead, it’s made up of gravitons that also exist in our familiar universe and have traversed into the dark dimension. 

“We are using the extra dimension to our benefit to explain what dark matter is,” Vafa said. “We don't need to introduce a new particle or particles. We are just saying it's the usual gravity.”

As this dark dimension evolves, so does the mass of these dark matter particles in that realm; Vafa’s team predicts they are becoming lighter. Likewise, the value of dark energy weakens over time. In this way, dark matter and dark energy—long thought to be likely unrelated—arise from the properties of the same extra dark dimension.

It’s a trippy and esoteric concept, and it may soon be put to the test. If a dark dimension does exist, then it should manifest as tiny deviations in Newton's gravitational force at micrometer scales. A team at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna is currently designing an experiment to test this idea, which could yield results in the coming years. 

Moreover, if dark matter particles are just gravitons that wandered into a dark dimension, then there should be some subtle observational hints of “a fifth force” in the dark sector. For example, scientists plan to test the hypothesis by closely watching the movements of stars in interacting galaxies, which are held together by dark matter halos, to search for a dark fifth force. 

When the galaxies come near each other, “the visible matter attracts the visible matter of the other galaxy, and dark matter of one also attracts the dark matter of the other galaxy as well,” Vafa explained. “But there's extra force between the dark matter compared to the visible matter because of this fifth force, so you get a more attractive force pulling the dark matter towards each other more than the visible part.”

“There are multiple fronts where things can come together,” he concluded. “Of course, the most exciting would be the confluence of all of these together, that somehow they agree. That would be really remarkable.”