Venezuela is running out of toilet paper.

The new legislation stipulates that witches on broomsticks flying over Swaziland may not fly higher than 150 meters.

Prague metro plans to launch love train for singles.

One in five beauty products on women’s shelves are never opened. [via Beauty Blogosphere]

A novel study reports that white men and women of European descent inherit common foot disorders, such as bunions (hallux valgus) and lesser toe deformities, including hammer or claw toe.

How needing a wee affects your decision making.

“Nice guys finish last.” Is it true?

After years of investigations and rumors, prosecutors appear to be closing in on SAC Capital Advisors. SAC Could Face Criminal Charges; Cohen Subpoenaed. Read more: Steven Cohen is an American hedge fund manager, founder of SAC Capital Advisors. He has bought around $700 million worth of artwork, including Hirst’s shark and paintings by Pollock, Picasso, Warhol, de Kooning, Munch.

Rolling Stone owner Jann Wenner has a knack for picking talent.

Yahoo Back On Top After Purchasing Millions Of 13-Year-Old Girls’ Blogs.

Jamaica Ginger extract, known in the United States by the slang name “Jake,” was a late 19th century patent medicine that provided a convenient way to bypass Prohibition laws, since it contained between 70-80% ethanol by weight.

If I fired a pistol and then stuck it in my waistband like on TV, wouldn’t I get burned?

Driverless cars and the automated highway system (1997).

Portfolio boxes for Robert Mapplethorpe’s X, Y & Z portfolios.

Beethoven’s hair.

Racist Park.

You cannot be detained, arrested, or fined for going topless in public in New York. Earlier this year, the Do Not Arrest Topless Women memo was read aloud at NYPD roll calls for 10 straight days. [Thanks GG]

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

Florida Mayoral Candidate Boasts Endorsement from Jesus Christ.

Is the Canadian Housing Market Falling Apart?

The effectiveness of placebo treatment for pain is related to personality traits.

More sleep may decrease the risk of suicide in people with insomnia.

Biological clue to why women live longer than men.

Recent research discovered that an individual can indeed successfully try to be happier, especially when cheery music aids the process.

Using the size of the CEO signature on annual SEC filings to measure CEO narcissism, we find that narcissism is positively associated with several measures of firm overinvestment.

A picture of a large pair of eyes triggers feelings of surveillance in potential thieves, making them less likely to break the rules.

Experienced job interviewers are no better at spotting lying candidates.

Composite and 3-D-printed components will mean jet engines that use 15 percent less fuel.

Terahertz image reveals Goya’s hidden signature in old painting. Terahertz radiation occupies the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between the infrared and the microwave.

How to Mine Cell-Phone Data Without Invading Your Privacy.

Acxiom knows where you live, where you shop and what you like to do. But it’s not quite the evil data monolith you might expect. A peek inside one of the world’s largest data brokers.

The least racially tolerant countries.

Meet the new Google Maps.

Google Images Atari breakout

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011.

Robbers target Bieber’s South Africa concert, steal $330,000.

Flying car accident in Canada under investigation.

There was no WiFi switched on during the experiment, and the headband antenna was a sham. Yet 82 of the 147 subjects—more than half—reported symptoms.

Do these startling longevity studies mean your lifespan could double?

Make your own invisibility cloak with a 3D printer.

Least efficient packing shapes.

Exploring the Boundaries of Photo Editing. Even top news photographers have their work digitally enhanced these days. Mounting competition in the market for news images is forcing photo-journalists to make their output as dramatic as possible.

Too much media is going to turn out like too many calories. No one who asks tough questions will ever get “access.” The news media is even worse than you think. 5 corrupting influences are keeping the public from the facts.

Fuck You, a magazine of the arts (1962-1971). [via Sunday Reading]

The story behind the viral Vine sensation “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal.” [Thanks Tim]

Ten Things Romans Used for Toilet Paper.

Social Roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of deleting your account, and a 5 in 6 chance that it just posts “I played Social Roulette and survived” to your timeline. [Thanks Nathan]

There is a metal band in Brooklyn called Unlocking The Truth that is made up of three 11-year-olds.

Bottle opener.

The market for methadone vomit in prison is lively.

They busted the Colombian fugitive despite the breast implants and other cosmetic work that had helped him morph into a very chesty “Rosalinda.’’

Bizarre 6-inch-long skeleton “is human, there’s no doubt about it.”

The second-biggest robbery in New York history: 3,000 withdrawals from local banks using doctored debit cards during a 10-hour spree in February that netted $2.4 million. More: There were two separate attacks, one in December that reaped $5 million worldwide and one in February that snared about $40 million in 10 hours with about 36,000 transactions. The scheme involved attacks on two banks, Rakbank in the United Arab Emirates and the Bank of Muscat in Oman, prosecutors said.

The State Department is forcing Defcad, known as the Pirate Bay of 3D printing, to remove its 3D-printable gun files.

Followup: Getting killed by falling objects (pianos, anvils, etc) happens more often than you might think.

10 New Things Science Says About Moms.

Restaurant menu psychology: tricks to make us order more.

Anal Del Ray.

Wife accidentally shot in mouth with harpoon, survives.

3D-Printed Gun’s Blueprints Downloaded 100,000 Times In Two Days (With Some Help From Kim Dotcom).

I don’t believe that the NSA could save every domestic phone call, not at this time. Possibly after the Utah data center is finished, but not now.

Women are more attracted to guitarists than sporty guys.

Physical, Behavioral, and Psychological Traits of Gay Men Identifying as Bears.

A biopharmaceutical company will know this year whether an antibody produced using a unique technique can prevent chronic migraines.

Cone receptors in the human eye lose their color sensitivity with age, but our subjective experience of color remains largely unchanged over the years. “This suggests that the visual brain re-calibrates itself as we get older.”

The future of a home computer controlled by your eyes may be far closer than you think.

Why do cardio exercise when you could just do cocaine?

Ultraconserved words? Really??

Voina (or “War” to give them their English name) are a radical art group concerned with challenging the Russian establishment. [Thanks Yvonne]

A blog about trying to find affordable housing in New York City. [Thanks Stella]

Fartscroll. Everyone farts. And now your web pages can too.

Shamed by you english?

A new antibiotic-resistant form of gonorrhoea could be ‘worse than Aids’, according to some US doctors.

Are Those North Korean Long-Range Missiles For Real?

People Feel Less Busy Spending Time on Others.

Fleeing Facebook: Study examines why people quit — and come back — to the ‘global aquarium.’

Doubling the efficiency of solar devices would completely change the economics of renewable energy. Here is a design that just might make it possible.

Capital punishment in China: A populist instrument of social governance.

The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words.’

Radiocarbon dating puts the age of the body between A.D. 1200 and A.D.1280, an era once considered part of Europe’s anti-scientific “Dark Ages.” In fact, said study researcher Philippe Charlier, a physician and forensic scientist, the new specimen suggests surprising anatomical expertise during this time period.

Imagine you’ve been taken, somehow, and dropped into a big city in another place, with comparable technological and economic development, somewhere you don’t speak the language. Here’s the twist: it’s also time travel. How long would it take you to notice that you’ve been shifted in time as well as space?

A paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest has evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions.

Now you can enlarge and denoise your photos, all thanks to basic research.

What would happen if a large chunk (1/8th) of our Earth was suddenly removed?

Child Abuse Billboard Contains ‘Secret Message’ Not Visible to Adults.

Who Me smelled strongly of fecal matter, and was issued in pocket atomizers intended to be unobtrusively sprayed on a German officer. [Thanks Tim]

A new report shows that, despite the rapid spread of renewable technologies, the energy produced today is just as “dirty” as it was 20 years ago.

Pennsylvania judge sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling teens to private prisons.

Companies will soon require that workers use their own smartphone on the job. 38% expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016.

Greater use of “I” and “me” as a mark of interpersonal distress.

We decided on a seven-day fast. The plan was to go a full week without eating or drinking anything except water.

Last summer, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A drifter, an 82-year-old nun and a house painter. They face trial next week on charges that fall under the sabotage section of the U.S. criminal code

New Camera Inspired by Insect Eyes.

‪Crash Backwards Compilation‬.

Getting old.

so my parents were gone for 2 days and I switched most of our family photos with pictures of steve buscemi…

Cops ticket armless man for not wearing seatbelt.

In China, the license plates can cost more than the car.

According to Argentinian tabloid, a Brazilian woman recently attempted to murder her husband using her vagina.

California woman accused of planting poisoned juice at Starbucks.

Are Vocal Homophobes Really Just Homosexuals in the Closet?

Google Glass is the future – and the future has awful battery life.

IBM researchers have produced a microscopic stop-motion film featuring a hero made up of just a few individual atoms.

On the internet and in the media there has been growing discussion of technological unemployment. People are increasingly concerned that automation will displace more and more workers—that in fact there might be no turning back at this point. What follows is a list of possible responses to technological unemployment.

Conversations with evil men. For most of the men I spoke with, it was the story of killing children that was the hardest, the hardest to remember, the hardest to get them to talk about. So that was hopeful, that there did seem to be red lines. What was depressing was that it was the opposite when it came to women.

This paper presents 12 facts about the mortgage market. [Fact 2:  No mortgage was “designed to fail.”] The authors argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from financial industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. [PDF]

Facts that sound like “BS” but are actually true. The city of Chicago was raised by several feet during the 1860s without disrupting daily life or businesses closing down to solve a drainage problem. Entire buildings, shopping centers, sidewalks and hotels were all lifted up manually by laborers using jackscrews while people went about their daily lives, shopped and dined. In one case, a large hotel was raised off the ground even while guests stayed on oblivious of what was going on underneath them.

How petals shape up.

A 6-inch-long skeleton found in Chile’s Atacama Desert showed several anomalies, including its alienlike skull, teensy body and the fact that it had just 10 ribs rather than the 12 that healthy humans normally have.

Invasive predator fish that can live out of water for days to be hunted in Central Park.

Google Search Terms Can Predict the Stock Market.

Making sacrifices for your partner after a stressful day may not be beneficial, new UA research suggests.

Gypsy law leverages superstition to enforce desirable conduct in Gypsy societies where government is unavailable and simple ostracism is ineffective. According to Gypsy law, unguarded contact with the lower half of the human body is ritually polluting, ritual defilement is physically contagious, and non-Gypsies are in an extreme state of such defilement. These superstitions repair holes in simple ostracism among Gypsies, enabling them to secure social cooperation without government. [PDF]

How bowling pins are made.

The world first web page, posted on April 30, 1993.

“This a composite of all of Jerry Sienfeld’s girlfriends,” Richard Prince explains.

Man with Tourette Syndrome not allowed to board plane after saying ‘bomb.’

Machines with the ability to attack targets without any human intervention must be banned before they are developed for use on the battlefield, campaigners against “killer robots” urged on Tuesday.

Snakelike robots developed by the lab can aid search and rescue operations in collapsed buildings.

Dubai police add Ferrari to fleet of patrol cars weeks after unveiling Lamborghini.

Crime is going down, but no one really knows why.

Record number of killers and rapists being released from upstate prisons, many returning to NYC. The freshly sprung rogues are a dark remnant of the crack epidemic that plagued the city in the 1980s and 1990s, when homicides hit an all-time high and drug dealers ruled entire blocks of the city.

Men are, by a huge margin, the sex responsible for violent, sexual and other serious crime. The cost of masculine crime.

Research suggests that mental illnesses lie along a spectrum — but the field’s latest diagnostic manual still splits them apart.

We all know scrotal testicles evolved to keep sperm cooler than the rest of the body, but evolutionary psychology’s activation hypothesis explains so much more.

An “electronic tattoo” containing flexible electronic circuits can now record some complex brain activity as accurately as an EEG.

Speed of light may not be constant, physicists say.

Energy Department Backs New Way to Make Diesel from Corn.

Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor.

3D-printed gun may be unveiled soon.

In one study, phantom phone vibrations were experienced by 68% of the people surveyed, with 87% of those feeling them weekly, and 13% daily. [Thanks Tim]

The Salesman’s Guide To Manipulating Your Friends.

PBS Frontline documentary: The Retirement Gamble. “Their incentive is to sell you a product that makes them a higher commission, not necessarily a product that maximizes your chances of saving more.”

The difference between legal and illegal drugs is about history and business, but not science.

Why is it so hard to quit smoking?

Crashing Through Manhattan In The Fake Google Driverless Car.

Japanese Marinated Soft Boiled Egg for Ramen (Ajitsuke Tamago). [Thanks Max!]

I’m looking for a group of volunteers who are willing to embark on an honesty experiment with me. For 30 days, we’ll all commit to being honest with ourselves and others.

Harvard Age Guessing Game Claims To Be Accurate Just By Analysing Clicking Patterns.

Past predictions of what newspapers might look like in the future.

The aim of this guide is to provide practical guidance on the preparation of trophy heads.

Welcome to adverCar.com, where you get paid to drive to work! Earn up to $100 a month the easy way- by driving as you normally do in a day.  

The 19 most expensive photographs ever sold.

Sunset Boulevard, 1883.

Rocketman.

U.S. government to spend $890K on nothing.

High Frequency Trading and the Hacked Associated Press Twitter Account.

Scientists Unsure Why Female Flies Expel Sperm and Eat It.

Humans feel empathy for robots.

Their research provides the first evidence that people’s visual biases change when surrounded by members of their own group. “Having one’s group or posse around actually changes the perceived seriousness of the threat,” said Joseph Cesario, lead author on the study and assistant professor of psychology.

There were approximately 32 million users of psychedelic drugs in the United States in 2010.

1 million hours of psychiatrist time wasted yearly on phone approval for hospitalization.

Those scientists had stumbled into a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events. [NY Times]

Eye Tracker Finds Which Ads Actually Stick, Pushes ‘Cost-Per-Visual’ As New Madison Avenue Currency. [Thanks Tim]

New research shows how Shakespeare’s grammatical trickery excites the “language network.”

Slash (/): Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore.

3 September 1967, the day Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right.

Cell towers disguised (poorly) as trees.

Graphic Designer Dad Illustrates His Kids’ Lunch Bags Almost Every Day Since 2008.

There Were Penguins on the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Siamese mug.

Car wash gif.

Woman arrested for trying to sell her kids on Facebook.

Last Two Speakers of Dying Language Refuse to Talk to Each Other.

2,000 to 4,000 businesses now producing marijuana for legal purposes. Total sales: $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion last year.

450,000 people had robot-assisted surgery last year, making Intuitive Surgical, the maker of the da Vinci machine, one of the hottest stocks around. Hospitals across the country embrace the cutting-edge surgical device but criticism is mounting. CNBC’s Herb Greenberg investigates allegations of problems in the operating room in his latest documentary, “The da Vinci Debate.”

The world of underground surgery for healthy people who feel that their limb is not part of their body and needs to be removed.

This paper proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. [PDF]

Sites listing an individual’s real name have become common. This shift towards real names is not merely a technical convenience, but a specific political turn. As pseudonyms are often associated with Internet trolling and cyberbullying, it is useful to track the use of pseudonyms in history and to consider many of their positive functions.

This month marks 20 years since work started to wipe away one of the most striking features of the Hong Kong landscape for good. A 2.7-hectare enclave of opium parlours, whorehouses and gambling dens run by triads.

Why has China built a ghost town in Africa?

Does riding a motorcycle reduce your sperm count?

Why White People are Called Caucasian? [via Sunday Reading]

The Eat-This-Then-Your-Sweat-Will-Smell-Like-Rose-Water Experiment.

MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Conservation Project.

A Wet Towel In Space Is Not Like A Wet Towel On Earth. [Thanks Tim]

Traveller arrested smuggling live hummingbirds in his trousers.

Videos: Feeling and Retouch.