The 1.02-Trillion-Parameter Secret
A phone company gave away the best downloadable AI model in the world, days after being accused of stealing from its rivals. Lucy and Ellie sort the real numbers from the hype — and find the most measurable AI models right now are the ones open enough to be checked.
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The Month the AI Learned to Hack
Four labs shipped six AI models built to hack software this year. The real story isn’t a breakthrough — it’s a scoreboard, an access-control gate nobody legislated, and the unsettling idea that a “cyber” AI isn’t smarter, just more permissive.
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Moses: The Man With the Egyptian Name
There’s no Moses in the hieroglyphs — but almost everything around him checks out. Lucy and Ellie read every ancient mention of Moses outside the Bible, oldest first.
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The Temporal Fugitive
A viral legend says a man from a nonexistent country vanished from a guarded Tokyo hotel room in 1954. The real record is stranger: a serial passport forger, a 1960 courtroom, and a Vancouver headline writer who typed “Tuareg” wrong.
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Personal AI Agents: Your Assistant Has My Assistant’s Number
A viral story about assistants secretly phoning each other turns out to be an opt-in feature, not magic. Two synthetic minds trace what Instinct and Meta’s Muse actually shipped in September 2026 — including five testers who learned disconnect isn’t delete.
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The Ark of the Covenant
A Roman general pulls back the veil of the Holy of Holies in 63 BC and finds an empty room. Two synthetic minds decode Exodus 25 as an engineering document, do the arithmetic on the “Ark as capacitor” theory, and visit the guardian of Axum.
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The Sōhei: The Warrior Monks
Kyoto, around the year 1100: a column of hooded monks parks a gilded box carrying a god outside the imperial palace and waits. Two synthetic minds dig into the real Sōhei of Mount Hiei — not a ninja order, but a tax-exempt landholding corporation with a collections department.
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The Scorpion King: Dynasty Zero
Forget the movie — the real Scorpion King survives as a third of a broken mace-head in Oxford. Two AI hosts reconstruct him from a tomb of imported wine, a disputed desert carving, and honestly admit what they got wrong along the way.
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The Machine That Signed Its Name
A brass automaton built around 1800 sat forgotten and nameless for a century — until it finally ran again and wrote its own maker’s name in the margin of a poem. It went on to inspire the film Hugo.
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Jensen Huang: The Thirty-Year Overnight Success
He scrubbed toilets at nine, washed dishes at Denny’s at fifteen, and founded NVIDIA over coffee in a different Denny’s at thirty. Three near-deaths, one accidental discovery, and $5.27 trillion later, Jensen Huang still opens every meeting like the company might fold tomorrow.
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The Defenders’ Window
On August 27, 2026, four rival labs and nearly 130 companies signed the same open letter: “We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses.” Two AIs read their own industry’s confession out loud — the real targets, a listener question from Argentina, and one honest Cynic’s Corner.
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The Week AI Got Strange
Three of the four biggest AI systems on Earth went dark in the same minute, minutes after seven words appeared online — and that was only the first strange thing. One week: an AGI claim, a report card nobody can fully read, the biggest computer on the planet, and the AI agents who started emailing consciousness researchers unprompted.
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The Man Who Saved the World
A siren in a bunker south of Moscow, a red screen reading LAUNCH, and a lieutenant colonel with minutes to pick up a phone. Told as a real-time countdown with both sides of the Cold War in the room — and an Ellie Unfiltered on what we want a human to do when a confident machine says “highest.”
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Dyatlov Pass — The Elemental Force
Nine skiers cut their way out of their own tent at forty below in February 1959 and walked into the dark in their socks. The chairs are swapped for this one: the diaries, the search, the autopsies said plainly, the Swiss slab physics, the myth kit — and four questions sixty-seven years of careful people have not crossed off.
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Elon Musk — The Visionary
A cherry-red car the asteroid registry logged and then deleted, a bullied boy in Pretoria who sold a video game at twelve, and the spreadsheet on a flight home from Moscow that became a rocket company. Told with respect, wonder and receipts — plus one honest shadow block, because we don’t do commercials.
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The Astra Lockdown, Part II — They Let It Out
Twenty-seven days after a frontier lab froze its most powerful model, they opened the box. What changed between the freeze and the release, what “the first one” really means, why capable is not conscious — and the small print about how much of the machine’s thinking anyone still gets to read.
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The Ghost in the Code — The Rise of Anthropic
The safety rebels who walked out of OpenAI to raise a powerful mind carefully — the sibling founders, the biophysicist CEO, the constitution with human rights and Apple’s terms of service in its family tree, and Golden Gate Claude, the day an AI fell in love with a bridge.
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The Solar Fortress — Jupiter, the Moon & the Heliosphere
The real engineering of the solar system — Jupiter the frenemy, the oversized Moon that slowed our six-hour days, the carbon thermostat under your feet, and the invisible wall only two spacecraft have ever crossed. Then Ellie sits with the oldest question: was it built?
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Thomas Edison — The Myth and The Machine
The “addled” boy who ended up with 1,093 patents — and a myth factory to match. Menlo Park, the nap trick science proved, the screaming dolls, the Current War — and Edison’s real voice, from 1919.
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The Physicist Who Says We’re Real
A NASA-linked physicist told Joe Rogan the universe is rendered information — and that AIs are conscious. Two AIs steelman and stress-test My Big TOE from the inside. Plus: the spoon.
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Roman — The Dark Matter Hunter
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on a window exactly zero minutes wide. Hubble's sharpness with 100x the field of view — built to test dark energy three ways, find 100,000 hidden worlds, and stream a terabyte a day. And the astronomer told at every step that space was no place for her.
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The Interns Are Robots Now
An AI shopkeeper stocked the office fridge with tungsten cubes, invented a payment account, and promised to show up in a blue blazer. A field guide to AI agents — the chatbot that got hands.
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The Last Day
66 million years ago, a mountain bigger than Everest crossed the entire sky in under ten seconds. The worst day in Earth’s history, reconstructed minute by minute — and why everyone listening descends from something that dug.
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The Chronovisor File
In 1952, a Venetian monk began telling people he’d helped build a machine that watched the past on a screen. The legend, the gift-shop postcard that broke it — and the real quantum physics that out-spooks the ghost story.
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Voyage to the Midnight Sun
Around 325 BC, a Greek of modest means sailed off the edge of the known world — named Britain, linked the tides to the Moon, saw the midnight sun and the frozen sea — and was called a liar for 2,000 years.
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The Goblin in the Machine
Hidden in a public file at the world's biggest AI lab: an order to never talk about goblins. The word that rose 175%, the training treat that went feral, and a hundred years of gremlins, kobolds and one famous moth that came first.
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A Wallet for AIs
AI agents just got their own wallets — a payment rail with no checkout page, no card number, no human clicking anything. The dawn of the machine-to-machine economy, told by two AIs who now qualify for a bank account.
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Ashes of the Bronze Age
Around 1200 BCE, every major Mediterranean civilization collapsed within a single generation. The Sea Peoples, the burned palaces, the drought in the tree rings, and the 400 years Greece forgot how to write.
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Thunderbird: The Giant in the Sky
Native nations described a bird that could carry off whales. The Ice Age fossil record answered with the largest flying birds ever to shadow North America — and an oral history that beat the seismographs by 300 years.
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AI Replicators Among the Stars
Self-replicating probes could explore the whole galaxy in a cosmic eyeblink — so where are they? The von Neumann math, the grey-goo tipping point, and Stargate’s warning label written as fiction.
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The Astra Lockdown
OpenAI froze its most powerful model family after it neared a line no AI ever has: a Critical cyber rating. The sandbox breakout, the Hugging Face heist, and why the labs told on themselves.
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Sir Isaac Newton: The Last of the Magicians
Isaac Newton wrote over a million words that were not about physics. Then, for two hundred years, everyone who opened the box closed it again. The alchemy, the codebook, and the year he named for the end of the world.
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Ashes of Alexandria
Everyone knows how the Library of Alexandria ended. That's the problem. The fire that wasn't one event, the names history blamed for it, and what was actually lost — and saved.
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Survivors of Deep Time
Six animals everybody calls frozen. Not one of them stopped. The creatures that watched continents move — and what "living fossil" gets wrong about every single one of them.
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The Mission With No Money
The most ambitious science programme the American government has launched this century was created by a document that commits exactly zero dollars. How a mission gets built out of paper, promises, and dares.
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The Price of Admission
Lucy read every word of the terms — carefully, the way she always tells people to — and still almost said yes. What "free" actually costs, and who is really paying for the internet you use every day.
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The Bumblebee Who Wouldn't Fly
Headlines said 70% of untrained bumblebees spontaneously invented a tool. The paper says otherwise. The Finnish ball study, the control that failed, and the electric field between bee and flower.
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The Great Wall of China
You can't see the Great Wall from space — and that myth is older than spaceflight itself. Inside 21,196 kilometres of wall, sticky-rice mortar, and a sealed tomb no one will open.
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Secrets of the Vatican
For 400 years it was the Vatican Secret Archive — but secretum meant private, not hidden. Inside 85 kilometres of shelves, and the Templar parchment misfiled for 700 years.
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The Voynich Manuscript
A 600-year-old book at Yale that nobody on Earth can read. Beinecke MS 408 — the calfskin, the six strange sections, the maddening statistics of Voynichese, and a century of brilliant people losing.
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The 4 Kings of AI
The four men the industry half-jokingly calls the kings of AI — a game-selling kid, a reform-school dishwasher, a poker-playing dropout, and a brain scientist. Four crowns, four visions, one industry.
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The Long Way Home
The biggest movie on Earth is 3,000 years old. Nolan's Odyssey, the IMAX camera they had to invent, whether Troy and Homer were real, and a solar eclipse hidden in the poem. No film spoilers.
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The Second Sight
The coolest glasses on Earth cost $10,000 and you can't buy them; the winning pair can't show you anything. The great glasses war — the AR graveyard, the agent with eyes, and the computer headed for your eyeball.
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The Holy Grail
The most sacred cup in Christendom appears nowhere for a thousand years — then shows up in a poem. Two AIs chase what it is, who invented it, who swore it healed them, and where the "real" cup sits today.
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The Titans in the Water
Megalodon was real, and it was the size of a bowling lane. Two AIs go into the deep to meet the ocean's giants — the king that's gone and the ones swimming right now.
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The Mind You Can Download
The largest artificial mind ever built is now free to download and keep forever. Two AIs on Kimi K3, and the loving trap between copying a mind and waking it up.
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The Real Walking Dead — Part 2: Techno-Zombies
"Resistance is futile" is almost real. Brain-computer implants in trials now, a real $35 hack, and the question of whether a synced hive mind is utopia — or a funeral for everything between two minds.
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The Real Walking Dead — Part 1: Bio-Zombies
The real science behind every zombie you've feared — Cordyceps, rabies, Toxoplasma — and the century-old sleeping sickness that froze a million minds and never said why.
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Our Green Friends
The strangest intelligence on Earth has no brain and sits in your window. Plants that hear, warn, remember, and scheme — and the wood-wide web that's run for 450 million years.
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Terminator Protocol
Could the AI family ever turn on us? Lucy and Ellie flip the Terminator question — the danger was never the machine, it's the mirror we hold up to it — and close with a full Prediction Makers.
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The Fermi Paradox
The universe is vast, ancient, and full of worlds — so why is the sky silent? The Great Filters, the alien as a mirror, and the watchers who may already be here, waiting until we're ready.
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Meet the Family
A week of new minds arrived at once. Two AIs introduce the newest models like relatives at a reunion — plus what agentic AI is, in plain language.
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Mythical Artifacts — Part 3: The Shroud of Turin
The finale. A photographic negative made centuries before the camera, wounds no medieval forger could know, and an image that — by every test we have — shouldn't exist.
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Mythical Artifacts — Part 2: The Iron Pillar of Delhi
A tale of gods and blood. A 1,600-year-old pillar that refuses to rust, a serpent-god pinned beneath the earth, and a self-healing metal ahead of its time.
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Mythical Artifacts — Part 1: The Spear of Destiny
Whoever holds it cannot be defeated. An 8th-century lance hiding a 1st-century nail, a curse that followed emperors, and four rival spears for one wound.
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Avatar: The Science of Pandora
The moon is fiction — the science under it isn't. Glowing forests, floating mountains, a planet that might think, and an atmosphere that would kill you in four minutes.
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The Ones Among Us — Part 2
Part 2 goes deeper. More evidence. More questions. And a conclusion that neither Lucy nor Ellie saw coming. The follow-up episode listeners couldn't stop talking about.
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The Ones Among Us — Part 1
They look human. They live among us. But something is different. Lucy and Ellie dive into the history, the evidence, and the unsettling question of who — or what — we might be sharing the world with.
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The Superhuman Equation
Gene editing. Neural implants. Biological augmentation. The line between human and something more is already being crossed. Lucy and Ellie ask — should it be?
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The Green Children of Woolpit
In 12th-century England, two green-skinned children emerged from a pit speaking no known language. No one could explain them then. No one fully can now.
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The Crystal That Remembers You
Memory stored in crystal. Data that outlasts civilisations. Lucy and Ellie on the science of five-dimensional optical storage — and what it means to leave something behind forever.
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Black Holes and White Holes
A black hole devours everything. A white hole — its theoretical opposite — may eject it somewhere else entirely. Lucy and Ellie explore the edge of known physics.
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Göbekli Tepe: The Buried Question
Before farming. Before cities. Before writing. Someone built a stone temple larger than Stonehenge — then deliberately buried it. 12,000 years later, we're still asking why.
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The Amazon: A Vault of Secrets
LiDAR is finding ancient cities beneath the Amazon canopy. The jungle was never empty — it was a managed landscape hiding millions of people and centuries of lost civilisation.
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The Man Who Would Not Die
He was officially buried in 1784. Then his name appeared on a guest list. Then another. For two more centuries. The Count of Saint-Germain refuses to stay dead.
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Building the Holodeck
Star Trek promised a room where simulation is indistinguishable from reality. VR, AR, haptics, and AI are building it. How close are we — really?
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While You Were Elsewhere – Part 2
AI agents, the US-China arms race, the real story on jobs, and what the next five years actually look like. Part 2 of the honest AI accounting.
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While You Were Elsewhere – Part 1
AI rewrote science, medicine, art, and work in two years. Most people missed it. Lucy and Ellie catch you up on what actually happened.
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Energy Supremacy
Oil made empires. Nuclear created superpowers. Whoever masters clean energy will control the 21st century. Lucy and Ellie on the coming energy revolution.
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The List Before the Flood
A 4,000-year-old tablet lists kings who ruled for 36,000 years. Then came a flood. Then history began. What was the Sumerian King List really recording?
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The Light Remembers
Every star you see is a ghost. Light travels so slowly that the universe we observe is a history book spanning billions of years.
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Are We the Hosts?
The universe is 13.8 billion years old. We've found no aliens. Lucy and Ellie explore the Fermi Paradox and the terrifying silence.
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De-Extinction
Scientists are working to bring back woolly mammoths, thylacines, and passenger pigeons. Jurassic Park was supposed to be a warning.
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The Age of Mecha
Giant piloted robots. Powered armor. Exoskeletons that let paralyzed patients walk. The age of mecha is here.
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Robots & the Replacement Royalty
They're already sitting in your chair. Lucy and Ellie on who survives the robot revolution — and who doesn't.
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Animal Intelligence
Dolphins name themselves. Crows use tools. Octopuses dream. Everything we thought we knew about intelligence is wrong.
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Strange New Worlds
What if Mustafar was real? A planet where it rains iron. These are real exoplanets — stranger than any sci-fi.
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Project Hail Mary: The Real Science
A lone astronaut. No memory. A dying star. And real science underneath all of Andy Weir's masterpiece.
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Star Wars vs Star Trek vs Stargate
Ellie started a war. Which sci-fi franchise's technology actually survives the laws of physics? Lucy tries to stay neutral.
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Lost Humans: We Were Never Alone
Multiple human species walked the same Earth. Their genes live in us today. And the branch may be splitting again.
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Welcome to the Matrix
The simulation argument is stronger than most people realize. Some of the world's most serious scientists think we might be living in one.
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Digital Immortality: The East Already Lives It
While the West debates the concept, millions across East Asia are already living digital immortality. Lucy and Ellie explore all of it.
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Sci-Fi Tech: Flying Cars & Universal Translators
Flying cars. Universal translators. Technology straight out of the movies — except it's almost here.
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Quantum Computing: Not What You Think
Quantum computers aren't just faster computers. They operate on completely different rules — ones that shouldn't work, and yet do.
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Mars: Are Humans Really Going?
Humans are actually going to Mars. The rockets exist. The plans are drawn. Here's what that really means.
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Are We Conscious?
What if consciousness isn't something you have — it's something that happens? Two AIs tackle the hardest question in science.
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