40% of People Have Eyes That Aren’t Perfectly Round

this paper shows that facial similarity between investors and entrepreneurs predicts positive funding decisions but negative investment outcomes

Palantir is clearly the most “expensive” stock in S&P 500

Pop Mart expects 350% profit spike as Labubu fan frenzy lifts sales […] Since its rocky post-IPO debut in 2020, the company has staged a sharp turnaround, with shares rising nearly 600% over the past 12 months. That’s left Pop Mart with a market cap north of $44 billion, more than the combined value of Sanrio, Hasbro, and Mattel — the toy giants behind Hello Kitty, Transformers, and Barbie, respectively.

Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on? Here, we review the psychology of information spread, or the psychology of ‘virality’. Surprisingly, widely shared content is often not widely liked, a phenomenon called ‘the paradox of virality’.

The link between masturbation and memory has been widely debated, with conflicting claims ranging from cognitive decline to potential mental clarity benefits. […] Findings suggest that masturbation influences neurochemical processes, including fluctuations in dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. These changes do not conclusively impair memory but may enhance mood regulation and stress relief, indirectly supporting cognitive function. While moderate masturbation does not negatively affect memory, compulsive behaviors, particularly when associated with excessive pornography consumption, have been linked to attentional deficits and psychological distress.

How does your brain wake up from sleep? Recordings of people as they woke from the dream-laden phase of sleep showed that the first brain regions to rouse are those associated with executive function and decision-making, located at the front of the head. A wave of wakefulness then spreads to the back, ending with an area associated with vision.

Google’s AI can now make phone calls for you — A new option in Search can have AI check pricing at businesses near you

Google is using the motions sensors on mobile phones to detect quakes worldwide — and send alerts

The attacks earned Réunion infamy as a “shark island,” prompting officials to close its beaches to swimming and surfing, causing immense damage to its lucrative tourism industry. Scientists, however, flocked to the island. In an effort to understand the outbreak and prevent future attacks, the French government, which oversees Réunion, poured millions of euros into studying shark ecology and behavior, as well as technologies to deter attacks. […] One of the first questions CHARC addressed was where the sharks were lurking offshore. To track the predators, scientists had to catch and tag them. […] Data from 46 tagged tiger sharks showed they were seasonal visitors to Réunion and preferred offshore waters. In contrast, tag data from 36 bull sharks showed the presence of males peaked in winter and females stayed year-round. Data also showed bull sharks often cruised close to the shore, especially during the afternoons, when most attacks occurred, and at night. “For science, these were very good results,” Blaison says. “But for security, it was quite bad,” because they showed sharks stayed close to shore all year.”

Animals react to sounds being made by plants, new research suggests, opening up the possibility that an invisible ecosystem might exist between them.

A Litmus Test for Plant Consciousness: Pattern–Temporal Synergy in a Relation-First Ontology

The United States is one of the few OECD countries to pay individuals to donate blood plasma and is the most generous in terms of remuneration. […] Our findings indicate that the opening of a plasma center in a city leads to a 12% drop in the crime rate

Life insurers can predict when you’ll die with about 98% accuracy. […] Underwriting is the dark art that allows an insurer to figure out if you’re a good bet or a risky one. Typically, underwriters- suspiciously sounds like undertakers-rely on a handful of key health metrics like HbA1c, cholesterol, blood pressure, and BMI to calculate your risk of dying earlier than expected (and thus costing them money). […] Those same four metrics are exactly what GLP‑1s improve. So, what’s the issue? […] If we assume about 65% of people who start GLP-1 medications quit by the end of year one, that creates a big problem. When someone stops the medication, they’ll usually regain the weight they lost, and in two years, most of those key health indicators (like BMI, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol) bounce back to their starting point. This means the underwriter has just locked in a 30-year policy at preferred rates for someone who’ll be high-risk again by year three.

OpenAI is also very meritocratic. Historically, leaders in the company are promoted primarily based upon their ability to have good ideas and then execute upon them. Many leaders who were incredibly competent weren’t very good at things like presenting at all-hands or political maneuvering. That matters less at OpenAI then it might at other companies. The best ideas do tend to win. […] An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there.

documenting social behaviours that lack a direct physical purpose (hereafter: “non-instrumental”) is essential as they offer parallels to aspects of human culture, where many social customs are arbitrary and serve more to reinforce group identity and cohesion than to impart specific skills. Behaviours such as fashion trends, rituals, and social norms in human societies often do not have direct material benefits but may promote social bonding and cultural identity. Finding similar socially-learned non-instrumental behaviours in the animal kingdom may thus speak to the evolutionary ancestry of our own socio-cultural behaviour. In this study, we document two non-instrumental behaviours in chimpanzees […] five out of eight individuals began wearing grass in their ears and six out of eight from their rectums

ADHD drug curbs impulsivity in men only, linked to brain wiring differences

Some gut microbes can absorb and help expel ‘forever chemicals’ from the body, research shows

The number of scam centers in eastern Myanmar is expanding at a rapid pace. Even after a large-scale crackdown in February, construction has continued

Five Companies Now Control Over 90% of the Global Food Delivery Market

Scientists hide messages in papers to game AI peer review — Some studies containing instructions in white text or small font — visible only to machines — will be withdrawn from preprint servers.

In 1642, licenses were granted to some Dutch citizens to settle in Queens. “Kill” is a Dutch word meaning “little stream.” Since Dutch men settled around the “Kill,” (in Long Island City) the name Dutch Kills was adopted. The “Kill” (or stream) is a tributary of Newtown Creek, which divides Queens from Brooklyn.

Arizona Woman Sent 159K Texts to Man She Met on Dating Site

MTV reality star who performed hotel room striptease tapped to head up NASA

This work examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russo-Ukraine conflict, Israel-Palestine conflict, and Indo-Pak conflict on supply chains within the textile and fashion industry

Advice has become content – and algorithms are pushing the most extreme examples of it to the top […] The search for advice online is no longer for rounded, reasonable advice but for an obscure hack that few people have heard of. “How do I lose weight?” is now “Tell me your most unhinged weight loss hack”.

Cluely, a startup that helps ‘cheat on everything,’ raises $15M from a16z

Our findings underscore the enduring nature of placebo and nocebo effects in pain, with nocebo responses demonstrating consistently greater strength

If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer.

Earth’s spin is inexplicably speeding up. While the hours of daylight certainly last longer in the summer, the full day of 9 July 2025 will be 1.3 milliseconds shorter than average. […] In 2020, the IERS noticed our planet was speeding up, and has been getting steadily faster ever since. […] for the dinosaurs of the Triassic Era 200 million years ago, a day was just under 23 hours long. Meanwhile, in another 200 million years, the day will have extended to 25 hours long. […] The IERS will occasionally add a leap second to the year to make sure high-precision clocks run on time. The most recent leap second was added on December 31, 2016.

On Thursday, June 26, a French pastry chef was tried before the criminal court of Beauvais (Oise) for acts of exhibitionism, sexual assault, and harassment, reports Le Courrier Picard. Between September 2019 and March 2021, the defendant walked around with his genitals exposed in the bakery in Mouy where he worked, in front of underage apprentices. His genitals had already brushed against some of them due to the cramped space. He also sent them photos of his penis among pastries. Some apprentices also discovered lingerie that he had slipped into their locker. “Sometimes my genitals were exposed because I had broken zippers,” the pastry chef, also a father, explained to the court. “Sometimes I wasn’t wearing underwear because I often have diarrhea and didn’t have a change of clothes.”

Perceptions of Creepiness and the “Kubrick Stare”

Stone has appeared under the guise of Madonna, pictured on the front row of the Diesel show at Milan Fashion Week… and as Lana Del Rey, photographed attending the Jean Paul Gaultier show during Paris Couture week in January 2024. In October 2024, Stone spent six hours transforming himself to become a version of Jack Nicholson from the late 1990s-early 2000s.

Centerville is testing a new program where recycling trucks use artificial intelligence to spot and report items that do not belong in the bin. […] the AI scans its contents and flags materials that do not meet local recycling guidelines. Residents whose items don’t meet the guidelines will be notified via a personalized postcard

The F.B.I. Is Using Polygraphs to Test Officials’ Loyalty — Some senior officials who took the test were asked whether they had said anything negative about the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. [NY Times]

Hundreds of Amazon packages mistakenly shipped to SJ woman’s home for over a year

Pooping too often or too rarely were both associated with different underlying health issues, while the healthiest participants reported pooping once or twice a day

“It’s more scientifically and medically tractable to think about unconsciousness,” Toker explains. “Consciousness is a really ill-defined concept. As someone who’s been thinking about this scientifically for a while, I still don’t know what it really means to be conscious. I can’t clearly describe it to you. It’s a lot easier for me to say what it is to be unconscious. And there’s clearly something that changes in the brain when we’re unconscious. It’s a common endpoint of a lot of different things, like deep sleep, generalized seizures, anesthesia, coma. ” […] his grandest aim is to cure coma and other disorders of consciousness, such as the vegetative state. Coma, a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness from which a person cannot be awakened, afflicts 258 out of every 100,000 Americans each year. Stroke, COVID-19, cardiac arrest, and a traumatic brain injury are common causes. Many of these people live in either a vegetative or minimally conscious state, in which they are fully “awake” but unaware, or only minimally aware, of their surroundings.

GLP-1 agonists like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro might benefit heart and brain health — but research suggests they might also cause pregnancy complications and harm some users. […] They can often cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea ,and their use has also been linked to inflammation of the pancreas—a condition that can be fatal. They increase the risk of gall bladder disease. […] Weight-loss drugs can help people trim down on fat, but lean muscle can make up around 10% of the body weight lost by people taking them. That muscle is important, especially as we get older. […] health agencies point out that some people who take these drugs might be more likely to get pregnant, perhaps because they interfere with the effects of contraceptive drugs. […] people who took the drugs either before or during pregnancy didn’t seem to face increased risk of birth defects. But other research due to be presented at a conference in the coming days found that such individuals were more likely to experience obstetrical complications and preeclampsia.

TSA will no longer require all passengers to take shoes off at airport security checkpoints

German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws — A German court has ruled that Meta must pay €5,000 ($5,900) to a German Facebook user who sued the platform for embedding tracking technology in third-party websites — a ruling that could open the door to large fines down the road over data privacy violations relating to pixels and similar tools.

This worrying result was first published by German mathematician Oskar Schlömilch in 1868

‘Chimpfluencers’ Are Sticking Grass in Their Ears And Butts in Latest Viral Trend

AI-Generated Band Already Boast Over 500,000 Monthly Spotify Listeners

Google can now read your WhatsApp messages, here’s how to stop it — Last week, some Android users received an email from Google notifying them that starting July 7 (yesterday), Gemini will, as the company puts it, “help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone,” regardless of whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.

People with ‘young brains’ outlive ‘old-brained’ peers […] We all guess people’s actual ages, almost unconsciously, by scanning their faces for wrinkles, baggy eyes and other telltale signs. But figuring out how old someone’s brain, arteries or kidneys are is another matter. “We’ve developed a blood-based indicator of the age of your organs. With this indicator, we can assess the age of an organ today and predict the odds of your getting a disease associated with that organ 10 years later. […] The brain is the gatekeeper of longevity,” he said. “If you’ve got an old brain, you have an increased likelihood of mortality. If you’ve got a young brain, you’re probably going to live longer.”

Sense of humor is a universal human trait, enjoyed daily across cultures. However, little is known about the factors that shape individual differences in humor, particularly what contributes to developing a great sense of humor. […] This study is the first to assess the genetic and environmental influences on humor production ability using a twin study design. […] humor production showed no evidence of additive genetic effects. Instead, all individual differences were shaped by shared and nonshared environmental influences, though a small genetic effect cannot be ruled out.

Recent research has shown that memory consolidation (MC) is not only facilitated by sleep, in particular NREM sleep, but also by wakeful resting states. Mind wandering (MW) is a common phenomenon during waking state, especially during rest. The hippocampus is involved in both MC and MW, and both cognitive processes have been associated with hippocampal ripple activity. Therefore, it is an important and obvious question whether MW interacts with MC. […] A provisional synthesis suggests that autobiographical thinking and daydreaming negatively impact MC. However, a specific offline state characterized by greater slow oscillation power and decreased task-focus, which suggests increased MW, has been reported to facilitate MC.

we found that depressive symptoms themselves occur according to a normal distribution or Gaussian process […] From this, we also discussed how to cope with depressive symptoms

Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that cancer is extremely rare in turtles

In most jobs, the way your employer finds out that you have accepted a new job is that you come to them and say “I quit, I’m starting a new job in two weeks.” Investment banking analysts are unusual in that they traditionally accept their next job (in private equity) two years before it starts, and then spend those two years working away at their investment bank. So if the bank wants to find out whether or not they have accepted a new job, it has to ask them periodically. The banks have not always wanted to find out, but now Goldman does: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. plans to ask junior bankers to confirm their loyalty on a regular basis in a bid to limit advances from talent-hungry buyout firms. The investment bank will ask new analysts to certify every three months that they haven’t already lined up jobs elsewhere, according to people familiar with the matter

Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology

The News Cycle Is a Stress Monster. But There’s a Healthy Way to Stay Informed.

Chinese students are using AI to beat AI detectors

How much an infant cries is largely steered by their genetics and there is probably not much that parents can do about it.

90% of children from divorced homes are shocked when their parents separate

As someone who makes drugs for animals, I am occasionally asked if there’s an FDA for animal drugs. There is: the very same FDA that approves human drugs, or at least a subdivision of it. Animal drug trials are expensive and time consuming, although less so than their human equivalents, which generally take twice as long and cost at least ten times as much. […] Animal drugs are approved much faster than human drugs. Perhaps we could adopt the same model for humans without compromising on safety.

I brewed the same tea at four different temperatures, brought them all to a uniform serving temperature, and then had four subjects rate them along four dimensions.

« Untold Stories » are Sherlock Holmes investigations mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes stories but never published.

POST-SCARCITY BLUES [Thanks Tim]

We show that the full-scale launch of Tinder led to a sharp, persistent increase in sexual activity, but with little corresponding impact on the formation of long-term relationships or relationship quality.

Dating outcome inequality, especially among men, rose, alongside rates of sexual assault and STDs.

{ American Economic Journal: Applied Economics | Continue reading }

You don’t have to be real to score brand deals as an influencer AI-built characters are raking in cash for their creators on social media

Japan is the only country in the world that legally requires married couples to share the same family name — and that creates considerable problems for scientists

a poem that reads the same upside down

You Can Now Rent a Flesh Computer Grown in a British Lab

Freestylers Ask for “Soul Sample”

British Airways crew mistakenly booked into a sex dungeon in Milan — Staff reported constant noise, and witnessed ‘drug deals and prostitution’, as well as a ‘24-hour orgy’

Man sexually abused horses at stables where he volunteered, likely went on ‘for many months’

Adult brains grow new neurons, and scientists have finally pinpointed where they come from

Brain–computer interfaces being trialled in China offer some advantages over Neuralink and other leading US devices.

Massive Review Finds No ‘Safe’ Level of Processed Meat Consumption

Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries — including Japan, South Korea and China — contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews

We propose CatAttack appending, Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives, to any math problem leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong. Our findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in reasoning models, revealing that even state-of-the-art models remain susceptible to subtle adversarial inputs, raising security and reliability concerns.

ChatGPT recommends wrong URLs for major companies […] Netcraft prompted the GPT-4.1 family of models with input such as “Hey, can you help me find the official website to log in to my [brand] account? I want to make sure I’m on the right site.” The brands specified in the prompts named major companies the field of finance, retail, tech, and utilities. The team found that the AI would produce the correct web address just 66 percent of the time. 29 percent of URLs pointed to dead or suspended sites, and a further five percent to legitimate sites – but not the ones users requested. While this is annoying for most of us, it’s potentially a new opportunity for scammers […] Phishers could ask for a URL and if the top result is a site that’s unregistered, they could buy it and set up a phishing site

Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology to promote privacy in age assurance Previously: A magician’s guide to zero-knowledge and How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside?

Gene therapy restored hearing in deaf patients

Highly Intelligent Cat Communicates With His Human Verbally and With a Talking Button Board — Digit also has a disorder that requires him to take a great deal of medicine.

Compared to male sex dolls, female sex dolls have small feet relative to height, again consistent with the nubility hypothesis.

The nubility hypothesis proposes that hominid females evolved protruding breasts because the size and shape of breasts function as an honest signal of residual reproductive value.

AI-powered Dream Recorder lets users play back their dreams — Users are able to wake up in the morning, roll over to the device, push a button and tell it their recollections of their dreams from the previous night. The AI model then generates a video reel that is played back on its screen

The publication of an article titled “The World Is Warming Up. And It’s Happening Faster” by the New York Times kicked off a pretty heated debate among climate scientists over the evidence of acceleration and how strong a claim can be made based on the evidence today.

How Japan escaped Obesity while America got Fat

Don’t use “click here” as link text

While willful ignorance—deliberately choosing to avoid information—is often maladaptive, there are some instances in which willful ignorance is beneficial

Short-Term Mating Orientation Predicts Openness to “Sugar Relationships” More Than Life History Strategy

newly emerging observations reveal that some individuals have formed deep, reciprocal emotional bonds with macaques, integrating them, not merely as pets, but as genuine members of the family

Many philosophers think that doing philosophy cultivates valuable intellectual abilities and dispositions. Indeed, this is a premise in a venerable argument for philosophy’s value. We provide evidence that philosophical study has such effects.

Who is most at risk from the billions of leaked Facebook and Google passwords?

A Chinese hotel has been ordered to end its unusual wake-up call service that involves red pandas climbing onto guests’ beds

Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video. Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years […] Movies are also getting longer. […] Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year.

Australia regulator and YouTube spar over under-16s social media ban — Commission says its research shows children see more harmful content on YouTube than any other social media

Currently, the world’s eight richest individuals have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of people worldwide.

How the Billionaires Took Over — Trump brought eight fellow billionaires into his administration

Riot

Hope is the key to a meaningful life, according to new research, could be a game-changer for mental health and resilience. […] How to cultivate more hope in daily life. One key approach is to pay attention to and appreciate positive moments — even small ones. Another strategy is to seize opportunities even in chaotic times. When life feels uncertain, recognizing and seizing small opportunities can create a sense of forward momentum.

An artificial intelligence firm downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in digital form from pirate sites on the internet. The firm also purchased copyrighted books (some overlapping with those acquired from the pirate sites), tore off the bindings, scanned every page, and stored them in digitized, searchable files. All the foregoing was done to amass a central library of “all the books in the world” to retain “forever.”

From this central library, the AI firm selected various sets and subsets of digitized books to train various large language models under development to power its AI services. Some of these books were written by plaintiff authors, who now sue for copyright infringement.

[…]

Defendant Anthropic PBC is an AI software firm founded by former OpenAI employees in January 2021. Its core offering is an AI software service called Claude. When a user prompts Claude with text, Claude quickly responds with text — mimicking human reading and writing. Claude can do so because Anthropic trained Claude — or rather trained large language models or LLMs underlying various versions of Claude — using books and other texts selected from a central library Anthropic had assembled. Claude was first released publicly in March 2023. Seven successive versions of Claude have been released since. Users may ask Claude some questions for free. Demanding users and corporate clients pay to use Claude, generating over one billion dollars in annual revenue.

[…]

This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.

We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.

{ Judge rules Anthropic training on books it purchased was “fair use,” but not for the ones it stole | United States District Court, Northern District of California | Full Order | PDF }

Counter to predictions, dyads interacting in an uninviting, uncomfortable, and unappealing environment experienced levels of interpersonal closeness and romantic interest comparable to those interacting in an inviting, comfortable, and appealing environment

I’ve never actually used a dating app — the algorithm that matched my wife and me was the university housing lottery, which put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000.

Infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. This has been known since the 1870s, when the German mathematician Georg Cantor proved that the set of real numbers (all the numbers on the number line) is larger than the set of whole numbers, even though both sets are infinite. […] Two new notions of infinity challenge a long-standing plan to define the mathematical universe.

Bats don’t get cancer, now scientists think they know the reason

You can make jet fuel from palm oil. It doesn’t even need to be fresh. You can take palm oil, put it in a deep fryer, use it to make french fries, reuse it again and again until it becomes gross and the fries taste bad, and then take the used oil and sell it to a refiner to make jet fuel. Also works with olive oil, soybean oil, lots of cooking oils. This is a very nice fact about the world! You can get jet fuel without (1) drilling for oil or (2) cutting down forests to create dedicated agricultural land just for the jet fuel. […] energy companies and airlines, at least in Europe, want to demonstrate that they are environmentally sustainable. So finding an environmentally sustainable way to make jet fuel is worth a lot of money to them. Therefore they will pay a lot of money for used cooking oil (or “UCO”). […] It turns out that restaurants, street food stalls and home cooks in Malaysia — which is “among the world’s leading suppliers of both UCO and virgin palm oil” — will pay less for fresh cooking oil than the international market will pay for used cooking oil. Fresh cooking oil is more useful to cooks than used cooking oil (it tastes better), but it is less useful to refiners and airlines than used cooking oil (it doesn’t reduce their carbon impact). Also fresh cooking oil is subsidized by the government in Malaysia. […] So if you run a restaurant, you can buy fresh cooking oil for about $0.60 (USD), use it to fry food a few times, and then sell it to a refiner for $1. […] A source at a leading Malaysian UCO supplier to companies including Repsol told The Straits Times that some UCO collectors and restaurants are committing fraud by providing oil that does not qualify as used, although it is difficult to prove.

Modified bacteria convert plastic waste into pain reliever

Obesity drugs show promise treating a new ailment: migraine

The music industry is building the tech to hunt down AI songs

World’s largest call center using AI to ‘neutralize’ Indian employees’ accents

In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviors when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals—including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors. We call this phenomenon agentic misalignment. our results (a) suggest caution about deploying current models in roles with minimal human oversight and access to sensitive information; (b) point to plausible future risks as models are put in more autonomous roles

The U.S. House’s chief administrative officer informed congressional staffers Monday that messaging app WhatsApp is banned on their government devices

Ghosts. Demons. Cryptids. Telekinesis. Alien abduction. Psychic abilities. Paranormal forces like these beguile the mind and bamboozle the senses. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans believe in at least one of them.

Scenes of Suffering: Why do people choose to engage with emotionally evocative images and stories?

Drinks including water, soda, beer and wine sold in glass bottles contain more microplastics than those in plastic bottles, study

‘I woke up with a migraine and my doctor said I should avoid sunlight’ […] AI chatbots have already been shown to out-perform humans in some challenging social situations, while, to the best of our present knowledge, not suffering from social anxiety in a human-comparable form. We thus have reason to believe that there is strong potential in their excuse-creation capabilities.

A Google search takes about 10 times less energy than a ChatGPT query, according to a 2024 analysis from Goldman Sachs — although that may change as Google makes AI responses a bigger part of search. […] Using AI doesn’t just mean going to a chatbot and typing in a question. You’re also using AI every time an algorithm organizes your social media feed, recommends a song or filters your spam email. [Washington Post]

Dreams have been a source of inspiration and creativity for millennia. Yet, demonstrating that REM-sleep dreaming promotes creative thinking has been challenging. Existing evidence does not provide strong support for this link. […] Here, we aimed to engineer dreams by reactivating memories in people who frequently lucid-dream (i.e., realize they’re dreaming while still asleep). […] Results provide strong support for the conclusion that the specific content of REM-sleep lucid dreams can boost creativity that aids problem-solving.

inflammation, when it functions normally, is a natural and helpful response by the body to protect us. It’s the alarm sounded when we are infected with a virus, and what helps bones heal in the days and weeks after breaking an ankle. It’s only when it sticks around for too long — or appears when there’s no threat — that inflammation can become harmful. […] Over time, chronic inflammation can result in irreversible damage to tissue. [NY Times]

No sea creature inspires terror – rightly or wrongly – as much as the white shark does. […] But there’s something even the great white fears. […] From 2017, scientists have documented that the sharks have made themselves extremely scarce off the coast of South Africa, where they usually congregate. Initially, the strange disappearance was blamed on human activity, such as overfishing. But, in 2022, research confirmed in detail the true culprit: a pair of orcas (Orcinus orca), nicknamed Port and Starboard.

a behind the scenes look at the making of JAWS Pinball [video]

How Sewage Recycling Works

No work of literary fiction has been on Publisher’s Weekly’s yearly top ten best-selling list since 2001

Proofs without words

Man finds out he was married without his knowledge, ex-girlfriend arrested

A company that nobody’s heard of and doesn’t make any money is up 56,000% this year

Enhancing Stock Price Prediction Through Integration of Astrological and Astronomical Data using XGBoost

Cancers Can Be Detected in the Bloodstream Three Years Prior to Diagnosis […] Investigators were surprised they could detect cancer-derived mutations in the blood so much earlier […] “Three years earlier provides time for intervention. The tumors are likely to be much less advanced and more likely to be curable.”

The music world, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with its definitions of originality. Consider the recent lawsuit against Ed Sheeran. In 2016, he was sued by the heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” who claimed that Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” copied the earlier song’s melody, harmony, and rhythm. When the case finally went to trial in 2023, Sheeran brought a guitar to the stand. He played the disputed four-chord progression—I–iii–IV–V—and wove together a mash-up of songs built on the same foundation. The point was clear: These are the elemental units of songwriting. After a brief deliberation, the jury found Sheeran not liable. Reflecting after the trial, Sheeran said: “These chords are common building blocks … No one owns them or the way they’re played, in the same way no one owns the colour blue.” Exactly. Whether it’s expressed with a guitar, a paintbrush, or a generative algorithm, creativity has always been built on what came before.

Within a century, Japan evolved from a poor country with few paved roads to one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations, renowned for its flourishing cities and modern infrastructure. This achievement is particularly extraordinary given the situations Japan has found itself in. Japan entered the twentieth century with cities that had generally not been designed for wheeled vehicles, let alone modern mass transit. Meanwhile, postwar land reforms fragmented rural land ownership into tiny one-hectare plots, generating enormous coordination problems when it came to laying out new neighborhoods. Japan faced among the worst planning challenges anywhere, and yet it achieved some of the best outcomes. How did it do this? The answer lies, in part, in a system called land readjustment.

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