Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say

Toe transfer surgery – using one or more of the patients’ toes to replace the amputated digits – is a potential alternative to replantation. […] hand function was significantly better for patients undergoing toe transfer, compared to replantation. The difference in favor of toe transfer was substantial, with hand function scores about three times higher than the benefit considered clinically important. […] Amputations of the fingers and thumb are common injuries, affecting about 45,000 people per year in the United States alone

Eating three servings of French fries a week is associated with a 20% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but eating similar amounts of potatoes cooked in other ways – boiled, baked or mashed – does not substantially increase the risk

Americans get more than half their calories from ultra-processed foods

In many Western countries, the number 7 is considered lucky, causing it to be disproportionately selected in lotto games. This study quantifies the financial cost of this tendency

Welcome to the world of fake weddings – a rising trend in Indian cities where people gather to enjoy the wedding party, minus the actual marriage.

Costume tests for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry’

Denmark zoo asks people to donate unwanted pets to feed predators and imitate ‘natural food chain’

From 2017 to 2022, Uber customers reported incidents of sexual assault or sexual misconduct every 8 minutes in the US

we applied a technique to extract the patterns the model uses to represent character traits – like evil, sycophancy (insincere flattery), or propensity to hallucinate (make up false information). We do so by comparing the activations in the model when it is exhibiting the trait to the activations when it is not. We call these patterns persona vectors.

This paper aims to structurally analyze what it means for thought to “leap.” By redefining phenomena traditionally labeled as “inspiration” or “intuition”—typically viewed as accidental or emotional—into a reproducible cognitive model, the paper introduces the concept of Mindflight Cognition. Unlike simple perspective shifts, mindflight cognition involves the simultaneous occurrence of perspective leaps, structural reconfigurations, and the emergence of new meaning. The paper identifies six constitutive elements (hierarchical jumpability, multiperspectival shifting, structural overlooking, cognitive cartography, ideation germination sensitivity, and core-belief orientation), and three essential activating factors (core belief, structural quotient, and structural shards). Using the author’s hot dog business model as a real-world implementation case, it visualizes how mindflight cognition manifests in structural terms.

Trait-Based Embryo Selection […] When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis1. The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall. […] Last month, a startup called Nucleus took the plunge. They had previously offered 23andMe style genetic tests for adults. Now they announced a partnership with Genomic Prediction focusing on embryos. Although GP would continue to only test for health outcomes, you could forward the raw data from GP to Nucleus, and Nucleus would predict extra traits, including height, BMI, eye color, hair color, ADHD, IQ, and even handedness. And this week, Herasight4 entered the space with the most impressive disease risk scores yet, an IQ predictor worth 6-95 extra points, and a series of challenges to competitors, whom they call out for insufficient scientific rigor.

Scientists in South Africa are making rhino horns radioactive to fight poaching

Multiple hypotheses have been suggested to explain why the three zebra species (Equus quagga, E. grevyi and E. zebra) are striped. […] The main hypotheses discussed during the last decade are the deterrence of biting flies, thermoregulation through stripe-generated air movement, and three anti-predation hypotheses: crypsis to avoid detection; dazzle coloration to confuse pursuers; and interspecies signalling to encourage protective mixed-species herding. Our evaluation suggests that these theories struggle to explain all aspects of variation in striping. […] Deterrence of biting flies is the theory that currently has strongest empirical support, but this theory alone struggles to explain why striping occurs so strongly in zebra but not in other African mammals, and the distribution of stripes across the body.

Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality […] [Some] argue that Copenhagen’s emergence as the default comes from historical accident, rather than its strengths. Critics say it allows physicists to sidestep deeper questions.

“That’s subjective!” People sometimes respond like this to claims about what’s true, what’s ethical, what others find beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, and more. To call a claim “subjective” seems in part to say that something important about the claim depends on the subject—the person—making the claim. What this “something” is varies depending on the claim. Are judgments like these truly “subjective”? What does “subjective” really mean?

the study of aesthetics is the study of the felt quality of perceptions of the senses, while the study of art is the study of the historical practice of making art objects.

Dark patterns: tricks to make you spend more online

‘Ozempic face’ may be driving a cosmetic surgery boom “Although they felt much better losing weight, in some ways they felt they looked older. And this was due to the loss of volume in their face.”

changes in pedestrian behavior since 1980 […] pedestrians now walk faster and linger less, researchers find

while males born during summer had a higher risk of developing depression symptoms, there was no observed association among females, study (n = 303)

Decades of global surveys point to a single, consistent foundation of well-being: our relationships

Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. […] the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom

the Mosquito Bucket of Death

Three Chinese women were detained and questioned by immigration officers at the airport because their passport photos did not match their post-cosmetic surgery faces. [2017]

Man awarded $12,500 after Google Street View camera captured him naked in his yard in Argentina

When I say GPT may be an information virus, I am referring to the spread that is about to happen. The economic incentives of our information economy will drive thousands of businesses to create AI-generated content. As more of the internet becomes AI-generated, humans will no longer be able to effectively use it as an information storage system. […] In the information cesspool that is an internet filled with 99% of AI-generated content, Google’s search will no longer work. People will no longer use it. Advertisers will stop advertising. [2023]

An extra copy of chromosome 21 was discovered as the cause of Down syndrome more than half a century ago […] Using a system to rescue human cells with trisomy 21, this study successfully demonstrates the efficient elimination of excess chromosomes using multiple allele-specific targeting.

people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate […] the study suggests that some tissues — especially blood vessels — age faster than others

How Some Butterflies Fooled Evolution and Developed a Second “Head”

Lucier was a pioneer of experimental music who died in 2021. But here in the Art Gallery of Western Australia he has been resurrected with cutting-edge neuroscience. […] “We have developed a brain on a dish, more or less, that has the ability to take action in the real world” […] This “brain on a dish” takes the form of two small, white blobs on a pedestal at the gallery. […] it was grown out of stem cells created from blood samples the composer agreed to donate to the project the year before he died. […] In order to produce new music, the blobs — Alvin Lucier’s surrogate self — are connected to 20 handcrafted brass plates attached to the gallery walls, like paintings. The plates, which contain hidden transducers and mallets, respond to neural signals the biological matter gives out in real time, creating an ethereal soundscape.

Compared with people who walked only 2,000 steps per day, those who took 7,000 steps saw a 47 percent drop in the risk of death from any cause within several years

Flight attendant who police say secretly recorded girls in airplane bathroom sentenced to 18.5 years

On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727-223 airliner was stolen at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola […] prompting a worldwide search by law enforcement intelligence agencies in the United States. No trace of the aircraft has ever been found.

The Fermi paradox — the apparent absence of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations despite vast cosmic opportunities — may arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of advanced technological development. Building on Smart’s transcension hypothesis (2012) and extending it through the Quantum-Patterned Cosmos (QPC) framework, we propose that civilizations undergo “dimensional deepening” rather than spatial expansion upon reaching a critical coherence threshold. Previously: From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter”

Kleptocracy is a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population. Kleptocracy is different from plutocracy (rule by the richest) and oligarchy (rule by a small elite). In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favors from lobbyists and corporations, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates.

“You go on Instagram and everyone is somehow living their best lives,” […] Approximately 60 per cent of Coachella tickets this year were purchased using BNPL (buy now, pay later)

Con man Joseph Weil once paid a Chicago bartender $10 to watch his dog, saying he had an urgent business meeting. He told him it was a pedigreed hunting dog.

Man dies after being pulled into an MRI by a metal chain he wore

Optimists have similar patterns of brain activation when they think about the future—but pessimists are all different from one another, a brain scan study suggests

Why do some people keep making choices that hurt them, even when the outcomes are obvious? […] for a small number of people, the problem isn’t due to a lack of motivation or capacity, but rather a subtle but persistent failure to connect their actions with its consequences. […] “We found that some people just don’t learn from experience,”

Dopamine in the brain is different to dopamine in the rest of the body. In the blood, dopamine helps modulate the function of multiple organs as well as our immune responses. In the brain, it’s a chemical messenger involved in mediating a diversity of animal behaviors – from movement and mood to sleep and memory to reward and motivation. Neurons that release dopamine are known to do so with different firing patterns, and yet it’s not clear what messages these specific signals encode, or why. […] “We are really only at the tip of the iceberg in trying to understand how dysfunctions in dopamine contribute to diseases like Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia or addiction”

Sex at birth is not always random — mum’s age and genetics can play a part — Families with three or more boys, for example, are more likely to have another boy than a girl as the next child. […] The authors note that changes in vaginal pH as women age could explain this phenomenon. For instance, the changes could influence the sex of the child by affecting whether sperm carrying the X chromosome or the Y chromosome are more successful at fertilizing the egg.

Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission

According to the Pacific Institute, global water-related violence surged by more than 50 percent in 2023 alone. Yet international institutions still treat water as a development or an environmental issue—not as the national security flashpoint it has become. Around the globe, from Yemen to Ukraine, this critical resource is increasingly being used as a tool of control.

A lifeguard was impaled by a beach umbrella in Asbury Park, NJ […] The umbrella went through the woman’s armpit and came out her back.

Cancer DNA is detectable in blood more than three years before a diagnosis show tumor traces

Babies made using three people’s DNA are born free of hereditary disease

Imagine sending Google an encrypted question and getting back the exact results you wanted — without them having any way of knowing what your question was or what result they returned. The technique to do that is called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The first time I heard about what FHE does, I didn’t believe it was possible. But it is — an it works in real-world systems today. […] The implications are big. The entire business model built on harvesting user data could become obsolete. Why send your plaintext when another service can compute on your ciphertext? […] If people are demanding it, and the trends have made FHE practical for most computations, then most internet computations will be on FHE. The future of internet computations will be encrypted. It is not if, it is when.

Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture — a key piece of a group of interconnected problems called the Langlands programme. The proof — a gargantuan effort — validates the intricate and far-reaching Langlands programme, which is often hailed as the grand unified theory of mathematics but remains largely unproven.

Contemplative traditions universally acknowledge paths centered on inner light and inner sound. This article introduces the Yoga of the Inner Body, a third, less formally recognized, yet equally fundamental path rooted in the direct perception of subtle, endogenous bodily sensations that arise during deep meditative and contemplative states. These phenomena, including fine shivers, waves of warmth, electric tingling, pulsations, and full-body stillness paired with inner vibrations, are presented not as symbolic or pathological, but as direct expressions of consciousness.

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]

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?