Can you think without words? Neuroscientist explains why language isn’t required for deep thinking […] Language and thought are distinct entities, operating in separate parts of the brain

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’ […] $50,000 to test 100 embryos

ChatGPT-like AI model can diagnose cancer, guide treatment choice, predict survival across multiple cancer types

Archetype AI’s Newton model learns physics from raw data—without any help from humans

ByteDance intern fired for planting malicious code in AI models. Sabotage supposedly cost tens of millions, but TikTok owner ByteDance denies it.

Solar-powered desalination system requires no extra batteries, could provide communities with drinking water at low costs

an estimated 20,000 whales are killed every year, and many more injured, after being struck by ships

Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil, even though the whale has been dead for more than two decades

During wakefulness our thoughts transition between different contents. Alongside, there are moments devoid of specific reportable content, known as mind blanking (MB). Currently, it remains unclear what these blanks refer to […] we hold that ongoing thinking comes at degrees of richness and that allegedly contentless experiences are distinct mental states with their own diversity, therefore challenging the view of the mind as a content-oriented operator.

Afraid of spiders? Heights? Public speaking? They activate different parts of the brain

Some researchers argue that modern diets, especially those of the Western world, have skewed our immune responses in ways that have undermined immune resilience. More optimistically, others say that diet could also help to treat a range of health problems, such as cancers and chronic immune disorders such as lupus. Your diet can change your immune system — here’s how

38% of women have at least one tattoo, compared with 27% of men. This includes 56% of women ages 18 to 29 and 53% of women ages 30 to 49.

Anyone Can Turn You Into an AI Chatbot. There’s Little You Can Do to Stop Them

Startup focused on AI detection has developed a tool to verify human participants in video calls and catch fraudsters using AI deepfakes for scams

The only permanent bipeds of the animal kingdom alongside humans, birds have an extraordinary sense of balance. How do these direct descendants of the dinosaurs maintain this stability, especially when sleeping?

the company announced on social media that its merchandise had been hijacked, that they had no idea this kind of cargo theft was even a thing. […] Last year cargo thieves stole a $50,000 shipment of refrigerated yogurt headed for Florida and demanded a $40,000 ransom. How a small outdoor footwear company lost 5,000 pairs of shoes and found itself entangled in an international crime saga

We praise canonical authors for their boundless imagination. Then why do all their plots feel the same?

“Different matters are arranged in my head,” said Napoleon, “as in drawers. I open one drawer and close another as I wish. I have never been kept awake by an involuntary pre-occupation of the mind. If I desire repose I shut up all the drawers, and sleep. I have always slept when I wanted rest, and almost always at will.”

Officials at TikTok discovered that there was “a high” number of underage streamers receiving a “gift” or “coin” in exchange for stripping — real money converted into a digital currency […] TikTok quantified the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos […] TikTok videos can be just a few seconds long. Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform. […] TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes beautiful people […] 95% of smartphone users under 17 use TikTok

His daughter was murdered nearly two decades ago. Earlier this month, he discovered that her name and image had been used to create an AI chatbot.

Spotify criticized for letting fake albums appear on real artist pages

Reflections on Palantir […] I left last year, but never wrote publicly about what I learned there.

Triphallia, a rare congenital anomaly describing the presence of three distinct penile shafts, has been reported only once in the literature. This case report describes the serendipitous discovery during cadaveric dissection of the second reported human case of triphallia

It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions. […]

Findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed in 2023 by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.

There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought

Meteorologists hit with death threats after debunking hurricane conspiracy theories

Luck comes in three main flavours

A new national survey of 1,000 American adults finds that 25% of adults now suspect they may have undiagnosed ADHD

Scientists found a way to make sound travel in only one direction

Attacks on large language models (LLMs) take less than a minute to complete on average, and leak sensitive data 90% of the time when successful […] The most common jailbreak technique identified was the “ignore previous instructions” technique, in which the attacker simply tells the LLM to disregard its previous prompts and directives. This attack aims to get a chatbot to work outside its intended purpose and ignore its preset content filters and safety rules.

The Barnard Bookstore is an out-of-print bookshop on 18th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. Since I had 20 minutes to kill before seeing Vanishing Point at the Cinema village, I thought I’d go in.

Tesla highly anticipated “We Robot” event […] reports confirmed the robots were teleoperated — meaning controlled by a human in another room.

Tesla’s value drops $60bn after investors fail to hail self-driving ‘Cybercab’

‘Piss Bandit’ who taunts locals with urine bottles labeled ‘HIV positive’ is California’s number-one menace

Eating less can lead to a longer life

Rises in life expectancy have slowed dramatically, with life expectancy in the US falling

Science Says Being Generous, Thoughtful, and Kind Is a Sign of High Intelligence

The collateral damage of OnlyFans’ explosive success — financial ruin, family trauma and extreme behavior.

Pizza Hut Will Deliver Your Resume Printed on a Pizza Box to Prospective Employers

The Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves

Beer can artwork accidentally thrown in bin by staff member at Dutch museum

Smart TVs are like “a digital Trojan Horse” in people’s homes

More than a dozen states sue TikTok, alleging it harms kids and is designed to addict them

Fear of positive evaluation (FPE) has recently emerged as an important aspect of social anxiety, alongside fear of negative evaluation

Neurotech startup claims to have achieved the first two-way communication between individuals during lucid dreaming … Using specially designed equipment, participants reportedly exchanged a message while asleep

“Hey, let’s call Trump,” Graham said to MBS while visiting with the Saudi leader in March. What happened next offers a fascinating window into how the Saudi leader operates and communicates with various world leaders and government officials. Woodward writes that bin Salman had an aide bring over a bag with about 50 burner phones, pulling out one labeled “TRUMP 45.”

Bitcoin creator is Peter Todd, HBO film says, Peter Todd denies being Satoshi

The Surprising Backstory Behind Gustav Klimt’s Obsession With Gold

Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger

Conceived by Richard Prince and limited to a thousand copies, this large-format artist’s book juxtaposes Irving Klaw’s photographs of 1950s pinup model Bettie Page with reproductions of artworks by Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline. According to Prince’s accompanying text, Klaw—the self-described “Pin-up King,” who with his sister Paula produced pinup and bondage photos of subjects including the iconic Page—maintained a studio at the New York address where Kline lived and worked. In Prince’s account, Kline would sometimes use Klaw’s models for figure studies, and Page became his secret subject and muse.

When they got together in 1994, Michael Jackson was 35 and told Lisa Marie that he was “still a virgin.”

Christopher DeVocht, a carpenter from Vancouver Island, Canada, says he started out like a lot of day traders. After work, he’d read about trading on forums. His favorite things to trade were options on Tesla Inc. stock. […]

At the end of 2019, his account, with the brokerage division of Royal Bank of Canada, was worth C$88,000. Within two years, he’d turned that into C$415 million ($306 million), he says.

Some people would have cashed out. DeVocht didn’t. And when Tesla stock fell in 2022, he lost it all. […]

DeVocht now claims that the advice he received, geared mainly toward minimizing taxes, was negligent […] [Royal Bank of Canada] advised him to incorporate a company, roll all of his securities into it and conduct trades within the company “with a strategy of accumulating as many Tesla shares as possible and holding them for as long as possible,” DeVocht claims in the lawsuit. The idea was to convince Canadian tax authorities to view it as an investment holding company, not an active trading business, because he’d pay lower taxes that way.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Embers of autoregression show how large language models are shaped by the problem they are trained to solve: next-word prediction over Internet text

We quantify the extent of crypto tax noncompliance and evasion, and assess the efficacy of alternative tax enforcement interventions. The context of the study is Norway. [PDF]

Sixteenth-century Venice conducted its affairs in code, so much so that cryptology was professionalized and regulated by the state

Under Roman law, subjects found guilty of patricide were subjected to poena cullei, the “penalty of the sack” — they were sewn into a leather sack with a snake, a cock, a monkey, and a dog and thrown into water.

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.

Is Discovery Inevitable or Serendipitous?

New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter

Chinese robot vacuums are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers’ houses – to train the company’s AI models

Office workers in South Korea and China have taken to intravenous (IV) drips to combat fatigue and restore their energy for work.

AG1 combines the “just in case” marketing of the multivitamin industry and unproven wellness ingredients into an expensive cocktail for the worried well […] once we strip AG1 of its marketing hype, we are left wondering who really needs it in the first place.

California Just Became the First State to Ban Sell-By Dates

Higher intelligence is associated with less frequent use of partner-directed insults

World-first therapy using donor cells sends autoimmune diseases into remission

Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are being tracked across the internet using identifiers known as Advertising IDs. When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Then, they become targets for data collection from data brokers that collect their information from social media apps, shopping history, location tracking services, and more. Data brokers then process and sell the data.

Brazil’s top court says X paid pending fines to wrong bank

Physicists showed that photons can seem to exit a material before entering it, revealing observational evidence of negative time [study]

birth control pills for men

In the current study, we investigate the familial genetic and environmental transmission of depression by incorporating data from both adolescent twins and their parents. Our results, based on both self- and parent-report, demonstrate significant additive and dominant genetic influences on depression. We also found mild yet significant sibling environmental influences, while familial environmental influences were absent.

Why is the Speed of Light So Fast?

Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses With Alzheimer’s Again And Again

newly released data finds that the US adult obesity rate fell by around two percentage points between 2020 and 2023. We have known for several years from clinical trials that Ozempic, Wegovy and the new generation of diabetes and weight loss drugs produce large and sustained reductions in body weight. Now with mass public usage taking off — one in eight US adults have used the drugs, with 6 per cent current users — the results may be showing up at the population level.

Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta’s Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers

Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap — and Companies Need to Prepare

Woman with rare double uterus gives birth to twins

Mystery creator of Bitcoin identified, new HBO documentary claims […] the exposure of Satoshi as its alleged creator threatens to raise some huge questions, not least his potential complicity in crimes that have featured Bitcoin use. It could also establish him as one of the world’s richest people: Satoshi himself is estimated to control about 1.1 million Bitcoin. […] The big reveal is set to air next Wednesday at 2 a.m. CET (Tuesday at 9 p.m. EST).

Andy Kill, a spokesperson for 23andMe, would not comment on what the company might do with its trove of genetic data beyond general pronouncements about its commitment to privacy. “For our customers, our focus continues to be on transparency and choice over how they want their data to be managed,” he said.

research shows that adult brains are also negatively impacted by excessive screen time, defined as more than two hours a day outside of work hours. The study shows that in adults aged 18 – 25, excessive screen time causes thinning of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outermost layer responsible for processing memory and cognitive functions, such as decision-making and problem-solving. Another study found that adults who watched television for five hours or more per day had an increased risk of developing brain-related disease like dementia, stroke, or Parkinson’s. Additional studies found that adults who engage in excessive screen time or have a diagnosed smartphone addiction had lower gray matter volume. Gray matter is brain tissue essential for daily human functioning and is responsible for everything from movement to memory to emotions.

Shifting away from undesired habits involves weakening the neural pathways that fuel them. Instead of relying solely on penalties for engaging in a bad habit, introduce a positive action right after to replace it. This method gradually diminishes the unwanted habit’s hold over you.

Hundreds of millions of small packages pour into the U.S. each year from China – some with fentanyl ingredients stashed inside. […] a few paragraphs buried in a 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms that made it easier for imported goods, including those fentanyl ingredients, to enter the United States. […] In short, a regulatory tweak fueling America’s online shopping habit is also enabling the country’s crippling addiction to synthetic opioids. […] U.S. lawmakers inadvertently turbocharged this problem as part of the 2016 legislation by loosening a regulation known as de minimis. Individual parcels of clothing, gadgets and other merchandise valued at up to $800 – one of the highest such limits in the world – now enter the country duty-free and with minimal paperwork and inspections. Fully 90% of all shipments now enter the country this way, and most arrive by air. […] a fight is shaping up over whether and how to undo the rule change that helped set off this deadly import boom.

Is the World Really Running Out of Sand?

Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze

Cybercriminals using stolen cloud credentials to operate and resell sexualized AI-powered chat services [which] often veer into darker role-playing scenarios, including child sexual exploitation and rape

REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025. That’s according to a professional

This is just a cool insider trading case. There’s a guy, Robert Westbrook. He allegedly hacked into the email accounts of several executives at different US public companies. The SEC complaint lays out how he allegedly did that:

He would go to the executive’s Outlook email login page and click to reset the password. “Four of the five Hacked Companies used the same password reset portal software,” says the SEC, and he was apparently familiar with its workings.

He subscribed to “an online directory service provider and an online genealogy company,” which gave him “personal and family

information that could be used to guess the answers to the security questions that employees at the Hacked Companies may have used to reset their passwords.” You can do a lot of damage if you know a public-company executive’s mother’s maiden name and first pet’s name.

He’d reset their passwords and get access to their emails.

Then he’d read them and look for secret earnings information. […]

But even if you get earnings releases in advance, there’s no guarantee that you’ll make money. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague John Authers wrote last week about an Elm Partners study finding that most people can’t trade profitably even knowing tomorrow’s news. […]

Ten trades were winners, four were losers, the winners were bigger than the losers and his net profit was about $3.4 million. […]

This includes buying half a million dollars’ worth of one company’s[2] stock and call options before its March 2019 earnings report, and making a $236,492 profit when the earnings were good, and then buying $786,364 worth of that company’s put options before its March 2020 earnings report, and making a $1.04 million profit when those earnings were mixed.

{ Matt Levine / Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Paraquat is among the most toxic agricultural chemicals ever produced. It’s banned in the European Union, where the consequences of its use are still being felt, but in parts of the world it’s still being sold. This is made possible, in part, by an influence machine that works to suppress opposition to an $78 billion global industry.

A year-long investigation managed to penetrate a PR operation that casts those who raise the alarm, from pesticide critics to environmental scientists or sustainability campaigners, as an anti-science “protest industry,” and used US government money to do so.

The US-based PR firm, v-Fluence, built profiles on hundreds of scientists, campaigners and writers, whilst coordinating with government officials, to counter global resistance to pesticides. These profiles are published on a private social network, which grants privileged entry to 1,000 people. The network’s membership roster is a who’s-who of the agrochemical industry and its friends, featuring executives from some of the world’s largest pesticide companies alongside government officials from multiple countries.

These members can access profiles on more than 3,000 organisations and 500 people who have been critical of pesticides or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). They come from all over the world and include scientists, UN human right experts, environmentalists, and journalists. Many of the profiles divulge personal details about the subjects, such as their home addresses and telephone numbers, and spotlight criticisms that disparage their work. Lawyers have told us this goes against data privacy laws in several countries. […]

Our investigation reveals that the US government funded v-Fluence as part of its program to promote GMOs in Africa and Asia.

{ Lighthouse Reports | Continue reading }

unrelated { Electric cars causing fires after Hurricane Helene flooding }

Man amputates penis with an axe after consuming psilocybin mushrooms

At Exxon Mobil’s only “advanced recycling” facility in Baytown, Texas, only 8% of plastic is remade into new material, while the remaining 92% is processed into fuel that is later burned.

Will Plants Grow on the Moon?

anomalous decrease observed in lunar surface temperatures is attributed to the COVID-19 global lockdown effect

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn part of their border in the Alps due to melting glaciers

How did birds survive while dinosaurs went extinct?

women were more likely to engage in rival derogation towards women with larger breast sizes

Impulsivity, Disgust

The external anal sphincter is the only part of the digestive process we have conscious control over. So, if we decide the time is not right to pass gas, we constrict the sphincter and the fart is trapped. Without a backdoor to escape from, the gases recede back into the colon. […] farts that are ignored during the day are mostly released during bathroom breaks or as the body relaxes in sleep at night. […] always holding it in can be bad for the bowels over time.

Officers raided the facility on Oct. 18, 2023, and detained the lone female employee while they searched the business, the lawsuit said. However, they didn’t find a single cannabis plant and only saw a typical medical facility with rooms used for conducting x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans and MRIs, the owners said. At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine.

Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first

Do AI companies work? The billions that OpenAI spent on building prior versions of GPT is not, because better versions of it are already available for free on Github. […] An LLM vendor that doesn’t spend tens of millions of dollars a year—and maybe billions, for the leaders—improving their models is a year or two from being out of business. Though that math might work for huge companies like Google and Microsoft, and for OpenAI, which has become synonymous with artificial intelligence, it’s hard to see how that works for smaller companies that aren’t already bringing in sizable amounts of revenue. […] the winners won’t be who ran the fastest or reached some finish line, but whoever was leading when the market decided the race is over.

Microsoft claims its new tool can correct AI hallucinations, experts advise caution

SocialAI is an online universe where everyone you interact with is a bot. More: SocialAI takes the social media “filter bubble” to an extreme with 100% fake interactions

The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure […] Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful

The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure […] Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful

NKRYPT is a cryptography related installation outside the Questacon science exploration centre in Canberra, Australia

Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.

Boy abducted from California at age 6 found alive more than 70 years later […] [kidnapped in 1951 by a woman] he ended up with a couple who raised him as if he were their own son

Several people are detained in Switzerland in connection with suspected death in a ‘suicide capsule’ — The “Sarco” capsule, which has never been used before, is designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining seat inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.

Study sheds new light on severe COVID’s long-term brain impacts — post-COVID deficits in hospitalized patients look similar to 20 years of normal aging. The team also found that people who had been hospitalized with COVID had reduced brain volume in key areas and abnormally high levels of brain injury proteins in their blood.

Why do obesity drugs seem to treat so many other ailments?

Why are the violins the biggest section in the orchestra?

Meet the Internet’s Scrappiest Home for Obscure Cinema

Man stabbed himself to death separating frozen burgers

Given a pair of candidate photos, monkeys spent more time looking at the loser than the winner, and this gaze bias predicted not only binary election outcomes but also the candidates’ vote share […] Our findings endorse the idea that voters spontaneously respond to evolutionarily conserved visual cues to physical prowess and that voting behavior is shaped, in part, by ancestral adaptations shared with nonhuman primates.

AI chatbots predict elections better than humans

We study alcohol’s impact on trust at the event “La Notte della Taranta” with objective intoxication measures. […] Alcohol consumption correlates positively with instantaneous trust, especially among like-minded attendees.

Scientists Calculated How Much Exercise We Need to ‘Offset’ a Day of Sitting — Up to 40 minutes of “moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity” every day is about the right amount to balance out 10 hours of sitting still, the research says – although any amount of exercise or even just standing up helps to some extent.

The human heart shows signs of ageing after just a month in space After 12 days on the ISS, the tissues’ contraction strength had almost halved, whereas that of their on-ground counterparts had remained relatively stable. This weakening was still apparent even after nine days of recovery back on Earth.

following the start of PhD studies, the use of psychiatric medication among PhD students increases substantially. This upward trend continues throughout the course of PhD studies, with estimates showing a 40 percent increase by the fifth year compared to pre-PhD levels. After the fifth year, which represents the average duration of PhD studies in our sample, we observe a notable decrease in the utilization of psychiatric medication.

Puberty Hasn’t Changed Since the Ice Age — The data collected also suggests the Paleolithic kids underwent growth spurts similar to those experienced by modern humans, but significantly shorter than those of medieval children—in other words, they matured faster

the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death. […] practices such as organ donation highlight how organs, tissues and cells can continue to function even after an organism’s demise. […] Researchers have also found that solitary human lung cells can self-assemble into miniature multicellular organisms that can move around.

The earliest method of contraception was probably coitus interruptus. Barrier methods of contraception were later developed. The use of a goat’s bladder as a female sheath was described in Roman literature and ancient Egyptian texts describe the use of vaginal pessaries. In the 17th century Casanova used condoms made of animal intestine. In the 1920s research confirmed the timing of ovulation and the role of the ovarian hormones, oestrogen and progesterone, in reproduction. This led to the development of the rhythm method of contraception, based on the woman’s monthly variation in body temperature, and the development of the contraceptive pill. The first large scale trial of the pill took place in 1956, and it has been refined since then.

Octopuses seen hunting together with fish in rare video — and punching fish that don’t cooperate

Fake AI “podcasters” are reviewing my book and it’s freaking me out

Using YouTube to steal your files

How hackers gain access to phones

Radioactive Consumer Products

{ Growth and decline of multiple intellectual abilities over the life span | Full study | PDF }

Turbulent skies of Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” align with a scientific theory, study finds

In 2017, Astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan talked about his admiration for Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” revealing how the painter had intuited the colors of the stars long before science. [France Culture | audio in French]

The vision took place at night, yet the painting was created in several sessions during the day [MoMA, NYC]

Cops lure pedophiles with AI pics of teen girl

Brit, 15, forced to strip for airport security after they ‘didn’t believe she was a girl’

After 12 yrs of marriage… Wife discovers hubby is a woman via JSTOR

how Celsius became Red Bull for women

The price of oil can rise because of a disruption to supply or an increase in demand. The nature of the price change determines the dynamic effects. As Kilian (2009a) put it: “not all oil price shocks are alike.” [PDF]

In 1959, voracious invasive rats were blamed for killing hundreds of white-faced storm petrels, a small seabird, on New Zealand’s Maria Island. In part to protect the birds, conservationists spread rat poison on the 2-hectare island, also known as Ruapuke. They didn’t intend to eradicate the rats but 5 years later were pleasantly surprised to discover that the rodents had disappeared, and the seabirds were safe. Today, that pioneering effort and others have helped inspire a global push to eradicate rats from many other islands. Over the past half-century, people have made 820 attempts on 666 islands. Some 88% have succeeded. […] Although the world’s 465,000 islands comprise just 5.3% of Earth’s land, island-dwelling species account for an estimated 75% of all known bird, mammal, amphibian, and reptile extinctions.

Water was plentiful in the early universe — the universe’s first reservoirs of water may have formed much earlier than previously thought - less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Previously: Now, just where might this Great Filter be located?

For his 1959 work Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, Yves Klein sold the ownership of empty space. In its 1967 Air-Conditioning Show, English conceptual collaborative Art & Language presented an empty room containing two air conditioning units; the artwork was “what is felt and said about it.” […] Tom Friedman’s 1992 work Untitled (A Curse) consisted of a region of empty space that had been cursed by a witch. […] Andy Warhol’s 1985 Invisible Sculpture was entirely intangible. […] Ruben Gutierrez’s 2022 work This Sculpture Makes Me Cry (A Spell) was said to represent what the artist could not see but which affected him emotionally. Warhol and Gutierrez both presented their sculptures on white pedestals. Is there any way to prove they’re not the same piece?

The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “The Republic.”