Los Angeles fires: the damage in maps, video and images

“There are huge amounts of fine art value under threat at the current moment. Many, many billions of fine art.” Insurers Start to Assess LA Wildfire Damage

This virus has been decimating bird populations for years, and now a variant is rapidly spreading among dairy cattle in the US. We know it can cause severe disease in animals, and we know it can pass from animals to people who are in close contact with them. As of this Monday this week, we also know that it can cause severe disease in people—a 65-year-old man in Louisiana became the first person in the US to die from an H5N1 infection. How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic

It’s not just the disasters, though. It’s the erosion of the future we thought we’d have. […] I ache for the version of myself who believed in that future, who had the audacity to imagine a world that was bright and brimming with promise.

13.5 percent of US adults said they felt “very tired” or “exhausted” most days or every day over a three-month period. Women ages 18 to 44 had the highest rate of fatigue – just over 20 percent. […] not getting enough of three essential nutrients – vitamin D, vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids – is linked to low energy level […]Although alcohol may provide a sense of relaxation in the moment, it actually contributes to fatigue after the buzz wears off.

“Buy Now, Pay Later” arrangements increase merchants’ sales by 20 percent, driven primarily by customers who have low creditworthiness

Foxconn is halting new work rotations for its Chinese employees at its Apple iPhone factories in India, and sending Taiwanese workers instead. Shipments of specialized manufacturing equipment meant for India have also been held up in China. […] Apple moved production of some of its most advanced iPhone models to India after some factory operations were disrupted by China’s zero-Covid policies. […] production in India still relies on Chinese workers and a smaller number of Taiwanese expatriate employees, as well as specialized machinery from China. Foxconn and its equipment suppliers have deployed hundreds of managers, engineers, and technicians to oversee production and tool maintenance in India. In recent weeks, however, Foxconn’s Chinese employees who were set to travel to India were told to cancel their trips […] Partly due to rising trade tensions between China and the West, many global corporations that have long relied on China for high-quality but low-cost manufacturing began moving their production to nations in South Asia or Southeast Asia. Disruptions caused by Beijing’s exceptionally stringent and long-running pandemic controls only accelerated the trend.

Deutsche Bank thinks that Tesla won’t meet its sales targets, but that the stock will go up anyway

Following his arrest on December 9, 2024, Luigi Mangione was transformed into a romantic symbol of anti-establishment resistance. Across platforms like Twitter/X, TikTok, Reddit, and Telegram, narratives glorify Mangione, framing his actions as justified retaliation against corporate greed and healthcare injustice. Much of the narrative praising Mangione paints him as an attractive, intelligent, and moral actor. […] Killing with Applause: Emergent Permission Structures for Murder in the Digital Age

“Pizzagate” gunman killed by Kannapolis police after he pulls gun on officer […] In 2016, Welch fired an AR-15 rifle inside a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., saying he was there to save children he believed were being held as part of a child abuse sex ring.

In this paper, we bring attention to the important role that children play in cultural adaptation by highlighting the structure, function, and ubiquity of the large body of knowledge produced and transmitted by children, known as peer culture.

Flashback: Ex-boyfriend posts woman’s number as Chewbacca roaring competition

“This is the first truly AI-powered hotel […] We create a virtual copy of the guest. There is an onboarding before coming to the hotel. We capture information and use AI to scrape the internet and then we track behavior while on property.” Each guest would have a virtual assistant, which would track and retain that guest’s preferences, which could then be used for subsequent hotel stays. […] In May 2025, the hotel opens”

Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep

I’ve acquired a new superpower

Emerging evidence suggests that certain individuals are unable to address others by name, presumably owing to anxiety experienced in social situations. This fear of using personal names has been termed alexinomia and occurs in all forms of relationships and communication. The symptoms of alexinomia show large overlap with the symptoms typically associated with social anxiety, raising the question of whether social anxiety could be the main driving factor of this type of name avoidance. Here, we investigated the relationship between alexinomia and social anxiety

a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated e-books and articles for training.

KrebsOnSecurity recently told the saga of a cryptocurrency investor named Tony who was robbed of more than $4.7 million in an elaborate voice phishing attack. In Tony’s ordeal, the crooks appear to have initially contacted him via Google Assistant, an AI-based service that can engage in two-way conversations. The phishers also abused legitimate Google services to send Tony an email from google.com, and to send a Google account recovery prompt to all of his signed-in devices. Today’s story pivots off of Tony’s heist and new details shared by a scammer to explain how these voice phishing groups are abusing a legitimate Apple telephone support line to generate “account confirmation” message prompts from Apple to their customers.

Did Picasso steal the Mona Lisa? Attracted by the cash reward, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret - who had once been the secretary of poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire, an associate of Picasso - confessed to a newspaper that, in 1907, he had stolen small Iberian sculptures from the Louvre and sold them to Picasso. Picasso actually used the face of one of the statues in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By 1911, Pieret was broke and decided to return to the Louvre to steal more small objects to sell.

2720 — the year when Japan is left with just one child […] if its birthrate continues on its current trajectory

Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits, 1,000 times more powerful than an average laptop.

Surviving in Cashless China 2025

The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way.

How Multitasking Drains Your Brain

Popular music and movies as autobiographical memory cues […] musical cues show a significantly more pronounced reminiscence bump than movie cues

Poor quality sleep is directly linked to inadequate levels of sex hormones […] The sex drive in both men and women is testosterone-related […] “Testosterone begins to rise about 3 or 4 o’clock and peaks in the morning. And studies have shown that if you have disrupted sleep, those levels fall […] A 2015 study of sleep and sex in college students found each additional hour of sleep was correlated to an improved libido, greater vaginal lubrication and a 14% increase in having sex the next day.

The purpose of this website is to simulate for you what your chosen color palette looks like to viewers who are colorblind.

After the war, Nietzsche was practically radioactive. In the newfound German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he was officially declared a “pioneer of fascism,” his writings were forbidden, while in West Germany he was shrouded in silence and suspicion. Not until the 1950s was an attempt at “denazification” seriously undertaken. […] two Italian philologists, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, plotted what they privately referred to as “Operation Nietzsche”: they would undertake a definitive complete edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings based on the manuscripts in the GDR. The two men made for unlikely candidates for such a daunting task. Colli was an adjunct professor in his mid-forties who taught ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa. Montinari, a former high-school student of Colli’s, was a disillusioned member of the Italian Communist Party “incapable of practical work,” as he put it himself. And yet these loveably eccentric dilettantes emerge in the pages of Felsch’s book as genuine heroes of intellectual history: two men who hoped that the patient, determined study and transcription of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and papers would not merely absolve him of his National Socialist associations, but allow him to speak for himself for the first time.

Retired Department of Natural Resources employee Bill Lockner created a Minnesota-shaped forest in northern Minnesota nearly 40 years ago.

Wives Earning More Than Husbands Linked To Rising Mental Health Diagnoses In Couples

asking an LLM to “write code better“ results in better code compared to direct prompting

Inside the wild fall and last-minute revival of Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that imploded over the holidays

e-tattoos serve as the sensors for electroencephalography (EEG)

Governments will tell investors how and where to invest their capital. I say we are headed towards a system of national capitalism. […] Macron says that every year, Europeans send 300 billion euros to the US to fund the American government and American corporations. In other words, he’s outlining a concept of national savings, and they should be used for the national good. […] Globally, total debt to GDP today is close to 200%. We’ve never seen that before. France is at 311%, the US at 255%, Japan at 400%. We are talking about at least a decade and a half to get this under control. For Japan and France it will take even longer. […] The most important part is the idea that national savings shall be used for national purposes. There will be a big push to repatriate capital, back to Europe and back to Japan, for example.

In 1927, geologist Albert Heim clashed with cartographers at the Federal Office of Topography as he was convinced that their relief maps of Switzerland were depicted in the wrong light. Heim believed that the light source on maps should correspond to natural sunshine.

While filming Winter Light (1963), Ingmar Bergman felt Gunnar Björnstrand was too happy to play the lead character. Bergamn asked a doctor and friend to tell Björnstrand that he suffered from a severe disease. Björnstrand was put on medication and actually became depressed. [more]

The letter “J” is the only one not found on the periodic table

Two men from Rochester, New York, who grew their own cannabis using bat poop as fertilizer died from pneumonia

An aquarium in southern China has come under scrutiny for showcasing a robotic whale shark instead of a live one

relative to women, men (a) expect more benefits from relationships and strive for a partner more strongly, (b) gain more mental and physical health benefits from romantic involvement, (c) are less likely to initiate breakups, and (d) suffer more from relationship dissolution [Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women | PDF]

findings suggest that women may be attracted to other women without necessarily desiring sexual encounters with them […] Implicit measures showed a higher rate of gynephilia (67.8%) than explicit non-heterosexuality (19.6%), with consistent results across continents

Why don’t new memories overwrite old ones? Sleep science holds clues — Research in mice points towards a mechanism that avoids ‘catastrophic forgetting’.

Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M

art museum openings and expansions of 2025

Flashback: Hennessy Youngman’s ART THOUGHTZ: Damien Hirst, Bono

It’s well-known that regular exercise is good for your health. But a new scientific consortium is revealing fresh insights into just how profound the benefits are for the human body […] exercise was quite literally kind of reversing in a mirror-image-like way the changes that happen with disease and explaining a little bit about how exercise manages to protect from those diseases. […] reducing the risk of heart disease by 50 percent, reducing the list of many cancers by 50 percent and more, reducing the risk of back pain. People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps. And I think the key is, is just stressing you just enough so that your body then in recovery builds these mechanisms that help you deal with the stress of life in other ways. […] If you can get 30 to 45 minutes of moderate intensity exercise, that’s like a brisk walk, if you can do that five, six times a week, that’s fantastic. […] One of the things I regularly tell my patients — I’m a cardiologist — is that one minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life. It doesn’t matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It’s particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk. But the main thing is get up, move about as much as you can.

Coffee intake attenuates the major causes of mortality […] corresponds to an average increase in healthspan of 1.8 years of lifetime

Single cigarette takes 20 minutes off life expectancy, a pack of 20 cigarettes by seven hours

Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including significant drops in IQ scores […] COVID-19 – can affect brain health in many ways. In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including […] several mental health disorders. […] increased risk of cognitive deficits, such as memory problems. […] shrinkage of brain volume and altered brain structure after infection. […] changes that are commensurate with seven years of brain aging […] brain damage that are equivalent to 20 years of aging […] fusion of brain cells […] Autopsy studies of people who had severe COVID-19 but died months later from other causes showed that the virus was still present in brain tissue. This provides evidence that contrary to its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not only a respiratory virus […] Studies show that even when the virus is mild and exclusively confined to the lungs, it can still provoke inflammation in the brain and impair brain cells’ ability to regenerate. […] the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent.

Study 1 found that belief in karmic causality positively predicts a variety of system-justifying beliefs that legitimate social inequalities, but experimental reminders of karma also encouraged generosity towards others experiencing financial hardship.

A 17-year-old village boy has been gang raped by 10 knife wielding women in Papua New Guinea

FBI: Largest homemade explosives cache in agency history found in Virginia

use “murderous verbs” like “murder” or “kill” in movies has increased overall over the past 50 years […] violent language increased for both male and female characters

The traits that make up the dark triad may not truly reflect the most malevolent patterns in personality. New research shows that by looking at personality profiles, an even worse malevolent pattern emerges. it may be the people who seem nice that can present the real danger. […] They are “inclined to disguise their self-interested orientation when self-reporting, or when the stakes are low, yet [do] cheat and act competitively when there is an opportunity.”

Biometric ticketing for sports and live events set to explode in 2025

The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method

Jeff Koons on why he has drawn a red line on AI in art: ‘I don’t want to be lazy’ A SpaceX rocket took 125 of his miniature lunar sculptures out of the Earth’s orbit in February, to become the first authorised artworks on the moon.

“TOOK CLONAZEPAM DOSE THREE TIMES INSTEAD OF ONCE AND HAS A BATTERY IN RECTUM AND HAS NAUSEA,” “MOTORIZED TIRE PUMP INSERTED IN HER RECTUM AND WAS INSUFFLATED FOR A DURATION OF APPROXIMATELY 5 MINUTES” What did we get stuck in in our penises, vaginas, and rectums last year?

AI tools could be used to manipulate online audiences into making decisions – ranging from what to buy to who to vote for. […] The paper highlights an emerging new marketplace for “digital signals of intent” – known as the “intention economy” – where AI assistants understand, forecast and manipulate human intentions and sell that information on to companies who can profit from it.

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

it looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t do anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again

Facebook inflicted ‘lifelong trauma’ on Kenyan content moderators […] more than 140 are diagnosed with PTSD […] Kanyanya said the moderators he assessed encountered “extremely graphic content on a daily basis which included videos of gruesome murders, self-harm, suicides, attempted suicides, sexual violence, explicit sexual content, child physical and sexual abuse, horrific violent actions just to name a few.”

Analysis of population aging is typically framed in terms of chronological age. However, chronological age itself is not necessarily deeply informative about the aging process. We show that chronological age is an unreliable proxy for physiological functioning due to appreciable differences in how aging unfolds across people, health domains, and over time.

When to Blame Victims for Negligence

Is it true that … shampoo is a scam, because hair washes itself? […] “Imagine what would happen if you stopped washing your underarms – you’d be likely to develop a build up of sweat and dirt, which would smell awful,” Harvey says. “A proliferation of bacteria and yeasts would occur, as they thrive in oily environments.”

From FANG to BATMMAAN, BRICS to PIGS — How long those acronyms are useful depends on the markets

the trajectory of iOS spyware from the initial discovery of Pegasus in 2016 to the latest cases in 2024

This photo project pushes the possibility of pubic hair to its limits

Baby Bird Found Alive Inside Dead Man’s Stomach After Being Swallowed During Fertility Ritual — Villagers claim the victim had sought the assistance of an occultist for help with fertility issues.

The Average American Spent 2.5 Months on Their Phone in 2024

Personalized chatbots dating other chatbots on your behalf

DMT is used as a psychedelic drug […] DMT has a rapid onset, intense effects, and a relatively short duration of action. For those reasons, DMT was known as the “businessman’s trip” during the 1960s in the United States, as a user could access the full depth of a psychedelic experience in considerably less time than with other substances such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.

DMT reliably induces profound experiences of immersion in other worlds and encounters with seemingly autonomous presences, yet the lived qualities and unfolding of these experiences remain poorly understood. Using micro-phenomenological interviews with twenty-three healthy participants who received DMT during fMRI scanning, this study explores how these experiences arise and develop in awareness. Micro-phenomenological analysis reveals rich dimensions of immersive experience - from multisensory engagement to radical reconfigurations of self and world - and illuminates the varied ways presences can be seen, felt, or otherwise sensed.

Acetaminophen (paracetamol) can blunt various emotional states and evaluations, seemingly through the same mechanisms by which it dulls the affective component of physical pain. […] findings suggest that acetaminophen might reduce cautious behaviors in dangerous situations, but could also be potentially useful in clinical settings where overly cautious and avoidant behaviors are disproportionate to the danger posed.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, raised $60 million for the basic-income study, including $14 million of his own money. […] The experiment gave low-income participants $1,000 a month for three years, no strings attached. […] Recipients experienced decreased financial stress, but that faded over time, the study found [read more]

The Japanese ‘micro-forest’ method

The Greek Orthodox Monk Who Died Without Ever Seeing a Woman

the human brain processes information at just 10 bits […] This is no accident […] the brain is built this way for survival. Instead of getting overwhelmed by a flood of details, the brain has a system to focus on what matters most. It ensures we act quickly and effectively without being bogged down by unnecessary information. Technological advancements like Elon Musk’s Neuralink promise to bridge the gap between the brain and machines by creating direct neural interfaces. However, the study shows that even with this technology, the brain’s natural processing cap remains at 10 bits per second. The limitation is biological, not technological. This bottleneck is especially relevant to fields like neuroprosthetics. Vision restoration devices, for example, often attempt to stream raw video data to the brain, which overwhelms its processing capacity. A more practical approach would summarize visual information into actionable cues, such as identifying objects or hazards in the environment.

Increased gaze at the mouth in females and eyes and hair in males is associated with significantly higher ratings of attractiveness by observers of the opposite sex. Practitioners may want to pay special attention to these areas when designing an evidence-based aesthetic treatment plan.

Taxi and ambulance drivers, the two professions associated with the lowest levels of death due to Alzheimer’s disease. […] The jobs require frequent spatial and navigational processing: the ability to sense and incorporate information about the location of objects around them. Although, the trend was not seen in other related jobs, like driving a bus or piloting an aircraft. It was also not seen in other forms of dementia […] The hippocampus, located deep within the brain, has been shown to be enhanced in London taxi drivers compared to the general population. The region is also one of the parts of the brain involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. […] Across the general population, the proportion of deaths from Alzheimer’s was 1.69 percent, while the proportion for taxi and ambulance drivers was 1.03 percent and 0.91 percent, respectively. […] The authors acknowledged that there were limitations, including that individuals who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease may be less likely to enter driving occupations.

Pfizer Stopped Us From Getting Ozempic Decades Ago

from January 1, smoking will be banned outdoors in Milan

Jetliners being accidentally blasted out of the sky has become the leading cause of commercial-aviation deaths over recent years

World’s oldest living crocodile celebrates 124th birthday He resides in South Africa at a wildlife conservation center on private land, sharing his habitat with six female crocodiles. It appears the aging process hasn’t impacted him as it does other animals of his age.

Startups begin geoengineering the sea. Some groups are growing kelp forests or microalgae in the sea. Others propose pumping seawater between shallow and deep layers to move carbon around.

Meta reportedly expects to see artificial intelligence (AI) characters generating content on its social media platforms Instagram and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of AI characters have already been created using a tool that Meta launched in the U.S.

Violette Morris (1893-1944) was a French athlete and Nazi collaborator who won two gold and one silver medal at the Women’s World Games in 1921–1922. […] Morris played football […] She won gold medals at the 1921 and 1922 Women’s Olympiads […] In addition to her football career, she was an active participant in many other sports. She was selected for the French national water polo team even though there was no women’s team at the time. She was an avid boxer, often fighting against, and defeating, men. […] At the 1924 Women’s Olympiad she won gold medals in discus and shot put. […] Morris had her breasts removed by a mastectomy, which she claimed was in order to fit into racing cars more easily. She mainly competed in cyclecar endurance races […] She won the 1927 Bol d’Or 24-hour car race at the wheel of a B.N.C. […] She was homosexual, dressed in men’s attire, was a heavy smoker and swore often. […] she was barred from participating in the 1928 Summer Olympics. The agency cited her lack of morals […] She punched a football referee and had been accused of giving amphetamines to other players. […] She had longstanding friendships with American-born entertainer Josephine Baker, actor Jean Marais, and poet, author, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. In 1939, Morris and her partner, actress Yvonne de Bray, invited Cocteau to stay with them at their houseboat docked at Pont de Neuilly. There he wrote the three-act play Les Monstres sacrés. […] During World War II and the German occupation of France, Morris served as a collaborator for the Nazis and Vichy France. […] no evidence exists to support Ruffin’s claim that she was involved either in spying or torturing [but] she became known as the “Hyena of the Gestapo” and was killed by the French Resistance

This is a starter collection of syllabi compiled by experts, aimed at helping you get quickly oriented to their area of expertise, Great English literature

When Japanese authorities sought to honor Tokyo’s oldest man in 2010, they were rebuffed repeatedly by his family.

OpenAI/Microsoft deal leaked — the two companies came to agree in 2023 that AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits

Google is using Anthropic’s Claude to improve its Gemini AI

How the FDA allows companies to add secret ingredients to our food

A new type of addict is showing up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings across the country: investors hooked on the market’s riskiest trades. […] one man called options “the crack cocaine” of the stock market.

Early cocaine use in Europe Analysis of the brains of individuals from 17th-century Milan indicates that they were utilising the coca plant (Erythroxylum spp.) several centuries before the drug was previously believed to have reached Europe. […] In the early 17th century, the Duchy of Milan was under Spanish control, and subsequently had direct access to maritime networks transporting goods from the Americas, including other exotic plants. It is, therefore, entirely possible that some coca leaves may have made their way to Milan via the same routes.

“They had laid her in it bottomside up. Cash made it clock-shape, like this” — Faulkner drew coffins in both the manuscript and the carbon copy of the typescript that he kept for himself when he sent the typed version off

being a vegetarian makes a person less attractive as a potential partner among omnivores

polymer-based commercial tea bags release millions of nanoplastics and microplastics when infused

Your blood can reveal your biological age — and risk of health problems. Researchers say having a biological age higher than your chronological age could raise your risk of death from any cause by 51 percent.

Surprise Hair Loss Breakthrough: A Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Regrowth

[2023] Four Nigerian stowaways survive 14 days on ship’s rudder before rescue […] On their 10th day at sea, they ran out of food and drink […] They survived another four days by drinking the sea water crashing just meters below them […] The four men said they had hoped to reach Europe in their voyage and were shocked to learn they had in fact landed on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brazil. Two of the men have since been returned to Nigeria upon their request.

Even if someone time travels, they may not remember or capture it: Study t “Any memory that is collected along the closed timelike curve will be erased before the end of the loop”

The world’s first nuclear-powered battery, which uses a radioactive isotope embedded in a diamond, could power small devices for thousands of years, scientists say

Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

Women are found to mate with a younger partner in only one specific case: above their 60s, when they provide at least 75% of the household income or rank higher than their partner in the distribution of income in their respective age group.

Scientists Developed a Questionnaire to Identify if Your Cat Is a Psychopath [The Cat Triarchic + questionnaire]

Recent reports highlight the emergence and growth of a “shadow industry” in which companies and governments hire firms to create misleading information about competitors and political opponents. This trend is compounded by the growing concern that online labor markets may facilitate the production of disinformation due to the ease with which virtually anyone can hire freelance workers from across the globe. […] We created an employer account and recruited 1,197 workers […] 61% accepted a disinformation job requiring them to manipulate COVID-19 data. […] 13% of workers declined the disinformation job specifically due to ethical concerns

Assad visited Moscow on Nov. 28, a day after Syrian rebel forces attacked the northern province of Aleppo and lightning drive across the country, but his pleas for military intervention fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin which was unwilling to intervene […] Assad didn’t convey the reality of the situation to aides back home […] “He told his commanders and associates after his Moscow trip that military support was coming” […] After exhausting his options, Assad finally accepted the inevitability of his downfall and resolved to leave the country […] Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did “whatever he could” to secure Assad’s safe departure. Qatar and Turkey made arrangements with HTS to facilitate Assad’s exit […] Moscow also coordinated with neighbouring states to ensure that a Russian plane leaving Syrian airspace with Assad on board would not be intercepted or targeted […] Assad told his presidential office manager on Saturday when he finished work he was going home but instead headed to the airport […] He also called his media adviser, Buthaina Shaaban, and asked her to come to his home to write him a speech, the aide said. She arrived to find no one was there. […] Assad didn’t even inform his younger brother, Maher, commander of the Army’s elite 4th Armoured Division, about his exit plan […] Assad’s maternal cousins, Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf, were similarly left behind as Damascus fell to the rebels. The pair tried to flee by car to Lebanon but were ambushed on the way by rebels who shot Ehab dead and wounded Eyad […] Assad himself fled Damascus by plane on Sunday, Dec. 8, flying under the radar with the aircraft’s transponder switched off. He flew to Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, and from there on to Moscow. [Reuters]

Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to click “yes” to a Google prompt on his mobile device.

the number of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who collectively abstained from the use of alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine hit a new high Use of illicit drugs also fell on the whole […] For alcohol, use in the past 12 months among eighth graders was at 12.9 percent in 2024, similar to 2023 levels, which are all-time lows. […] “This trend in the reduction of substance use among teenagers is unprecedented”

Learning to Live with the Voices in Your Head

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index

Solving 3 Rubik’s Cubes whilst juggling

Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya is a hill in South Australia. Its name means “where the devil urinates.”

‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.

Doctors remove live cockroach from the intestine of man complaining of abdominal issues

Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. […] growing number of people in the state […] are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. […] Finding a model can be difficult. Areas of Utah with high concentrations of Mormons—who also call themselves Latter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack potential Jesus doppelgängers. Some men who work or volunteer for the church, one of the state’s largest employers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short. [WSJ]

images on Google Street View of a person appearing to load a body bag into the back of a car have provided Spanish police with a “decisive” clue over the disappearance of a man.

California squirrels are now apparently hunting and eating other rodents

Earth’s clouds are shrinking — Narrowing storm bands may be a surprising and dangerous new feedback of climate change

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index

In 2024, the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK. […] Since about December of last year, White Nights has been all over BookTok and its Instagram parallel, Bookstagram. Searching for the 1848 tale on these platforms will result in page after page of reviews, quotes, and moody shots of the book next to cups of coffee. There are White Nights Spotify playlists full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users from all over the world have rhapsodised about the beautiful love story it tells, and bewailed getting their hearts smashed into pieces by it.

you have been gifted 100 expensive wine bottles by 100 different people. … you discover that one of the bottles has been poisoned, and you have no idea which one. you have a test that can detect poison very accurately … you have only 7 of these tests available. What should you do?

Broccoli contains the enzyme myrosinase […] Through what’s known as ‘myrosinase activity’, the glucosinolates get transformed into sulforaphane, which is what we want. […] Unfortunately, studies have shown that common broccoli cooking methods, like boiling and microwaving, seriously reduce the amount of glucosinolates in the vegetable – even if you just zap it for a couple minutes. And myrosinase is super-sensitive to heat, too. Hence, by far the largest amount of sulforaphane you can get from broccoli is by munching on raw florets.

Microgravity is known to alter the muscles, bones, the immune system and cognition, but little is known about its specific impact on the brain. […] scientists sent tiny clumps of stem-cell derived brain cells called “organoids” to the International Space Station (ISS) the organoids were still healthy when they returned from orbit a month later, but the cells had matured faster compared to identical organoids grown on Earth

Ancient DNA suggests syphilis originated in Americas before ravaging Europe […] The sexually transmitted disease remains a public health menace today, despite the fact that it is easily cured with antibiotics.

Nebraska sues Change Healthcare over security failings that led to medical data breach of over 100 million Americans

Starbucks is the new Venmo for Gen Alpha

“if bitcoin is going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way.” […] Either Mr. Trump has conducted some novel — and faulty — policy analysis, or he is seeking personal gain.

Deutsche Bank is reportedly creating a layer-2 (L2) blockchain solution on Ethereum using ZKsync technology Previously: Banks Tried to Kill Crypto and Failed. Now They’re Embracing It (Slowly) [NYT, 2021]

Someone Is Sticking Googly Eyes on Public Sculptures in Oregon

An Anti-Tag Cloud shows you the most common English words that never appear in a text

‘I intend to take nothing but my night-bag.’

This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. One is forced to deal with the recognition that human perception, action, and cognition proceed at a glacially slow pace. Our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at much higher rates, on the order of gigabits/s. This defines a paradox: the vast gulf between the tiny information throughput of human behavior and the huge information inputs on which the behavior is based. This enormous ratio—about 100,000,000—remains largely unexplained.

Uncertainty is part of being human, so how can we learn to live with it? […] There is no safe level of driving, but we don’t recommend everyone stay at home. […] My main inspiration is my spaniel. She lives in the moment, starts each day with bounding enthusiasm, yelps when she gets trodden on and then immediately forgives you, and leaps at the hint of a sausage. She accepts the lack of control in her life, but relishes the uncertainty of walking and sniffing in new places. And when it’s time for her to die, she will curl up and go quietly.

People who walk a higher number of steps each day are less likely to have depressive symptoms

Researchers analyzed US death certificates for almost 9 million people who died during 2020–2022, linking occupational data across 443 professions with Alzheimer’s as a cause of death [and found that] driving an ambulance or taxi as your job may provide some protection against Alzheimer’s.

Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found. [NYT]

Amazon is reportedly hitting pause on its return-to-office (RTO) plans due to a shortage of office space […] Employees in cities like Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, and New York have received notifications that they can continue with their hybrid work arrangements until their offices are ready.

US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from app stores Jan. 19

US earnings growth would not look so exceptional if not for the supernormal profits of its big tech firms, and massive government spending. Over time, supernormal profits get competed away. Growth and profits are also getting an artificial lift from the heaviest deficit spending ever recorded at this stage of an economic cycle, by far. […] My calculations suggest it now takes nearly $2 of new government debt to generate an additional $1 of US GDP growth — a 50 per cent increase on just five years ago. If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing, but for now, they think America can get away with anything, as the world’s leading economy and issuer of the reserve currency. More likely, by some point next year, investors will balk and demand higher interest rates or a demonstration of fiscal discipline, triggered perhaps by an even larger deficit or ever bigger auctions of Treasuries. Those demands will wean the US off its dependence on government spending, at least temporarily, and in turn undermine economic growth and corporate profits. To be clear, this is a bubble in America’s performance relative to the rest of the world, not a 1990s-style mania in the US market. So, it can deflate in a benign way if the alternatives begin to look more attractive. [Financial Times]

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style — The convoluted “legalese” used in legal documents conveys a special sense of authority, and even non-lawyers have learned to wield it.

Cyborg cockroach armies can now be mass-produced at a rate of one every 68 seconds

Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with novels from Faulkner and Hemingway

Rockefeller Center application to NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to replace its neon signs with LEDs [PDF]

The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (1987)

Google video generation model

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish Nigel Richards has also been champion in English and – after memorising dictionary in nine weeks – French

Being overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor in 2024

Fasting can reduce weight — but also hair growth

Is the five-second rule true? In 2003 […] she inoculated two types of tiles—smooth and rough—with Escherichia coli and dropped gummy bears and cookies on the tiles for five seconds […] bacteria transferred to food very quickly, even in just five seconds. […] A few years later, […] When they dropped bologna sausage onto a piece of tile contaminated with Salmonella typhimurium, over 99% of the bacteria transferred from the tile to the bologna after just five seconds. […] [In 2016,] they looked at bacterial transfer to four different foods (watermelon, bread, bread with butter, and gummies) when dropped on four different surfaces (stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood, and carpet) contaminated with Enterobacter aerogenes. By analyzing bacterial transfer at <1, 5, 30, and 300 seconds, they found that longer contact times resulted in more transfer but some transfer took place “instantaneously,” after less than 1 second, thus debunking the five-second rule once and for all.

Life Could Exist in Space Even Without Planets, Scientists Say

Mouseless. Lightning-fast mouse control with the keyboard

Welcome to the Elm Wealth Crystal Ball Trading Game […] you’re going to see how well you can do trading stocks and bonds if you know the news from the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) one day in advance. […] Your starting wealth is $1,000,000. Have fun!

When a Crystal Ball Isn’t Enough to Make You Rich

House Hopping with Elon Musk

A grandmother died after she was pinned against a wall for two days by her Sleep Number bed

McKinsey to pay $650 million for role in opioid crisis More: How the Opioid Crisis Started [The Daily, NYT | audio]

Meta asks the government to block OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit Meta argues OpenAI “should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains.”

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit […] demanded majority equity, absolute control, and to be CEO of the for-profit […] said OpenAI was on a path for certain failure unless we [OpenAI] merged into Tesla […] resigned as co-chair of OpenAI

The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla. […] Removing the crash-disclosure provision would particularly benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes – more than 1,500 – to federal safety regulators under the program. […] the NHTSA crash data shows Tesla accounted for 40 out of 45 fatal crashes reported.

This study employs a Bayesian Probit model to empirically analyze peer effects and herd behavior among consumers during the “Double 11″ shopping festival, using data collected through a questionnaire survey. The results demonstrate that peer effects significantly influence consumer decision-making, with the probability of participation in the shopping event increasing notably when roommates are involved. Additionally, factors such as gender, online shopping experience, and fashion consciousness significantly impact consumers’ herd behavior.

almost one in four (24%) young people (16-24) [in UK] say they’ve never been readers [..] People who are good at reading have different brains […] Will people’s preference for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species?

“You know the saying, ‘You are what you eat?’ Well, we uncovered a way in which this actually operates in cells. […] our findings show that a cell’s function can be directly linked to its nutrition; on a more specific level, this sheds new light on how T cells become dysfunctional or exhausted and what we could do to prevent that.”

A new study has found that nearly three-quarters of American adults are now obese or overweight, and there’s growing concern — among politicians, scientists and consumers — about one potential culprit: ultraprocessed foods. [Audio | The Daily | NYT]

The skin’s ‘surprise’ power: it has its very own immune system

Bryan Johnson: There’s now an active betting market on @Polymarket for my nighttime erections. […] My baseline NTE measurement was two hours and 12 minutes (~ave for a 47 yr old). My best NTE was 2 hours and 59 minutes (ave 18 yr old), which was post two therapies: 1) focused shockwave therapy and 2) botox. The positive effects of those therapies lessen over time. In mid November, I started a second round of shockwave therapy on the penis, completing three sessions however improvements can take up to 12 weeks after the therapy. NTE is a significant biological age marker representing sexual, cardiovascular, and psychological health.“

Nearly half of US teens are online ‘constantly,’ Pew report finds

Surviving to at least 100 years old is rare, yet centenarians are currently the fastest growing segment of the world’s population. Do people reach 100 by surviving, delaying, or avoiding diseases?

A type of bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans, nicknamed “Conan the Bacterium” for its ability to survive the harshest of extremes, can withstand radiation doses 28,000 times greater than those that would kill a human being — and the secret to its success is rooted in an antioxidant. Now, scientists have uncovered how the antioxidant works, unlocking the possibility that it could be used to protect the health of humans, both on Earth and those exploring beyond it in the future. The antioxidant is formed by a simple group of small molecules called metabolites, including manganese, phosphate and a small peptide, or molecule, of amino acids.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Maps of The Overlook More: The Shining Shot-by-Shot Analysis

Prince Rupert’s Drop vs Hydraulic Press

For years now, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, picking egg and sperm donors to influence their child’s traits. Today, a lot of those “designer babies” are full-on kids or teenagers. And some families are discovering that, as hard as you try, things don’t always work out as planned: The kids feel like walking science experiments; the parents are disappointed in how their progeny turned out. Now controversial new technologies promise parents even more control over their embryos. One US startup, called Orchid, claims its genetic screening can calculate a baby’s risk of autism, bipolar disorder, and hundreds of other health conditions. Another startup wants to help parents pick embryos with the highest predicted IQ. So WIRED spoke to a psychologist based in California who is already dealing with the fallout.

the results of the current investigation suggest that the direct effect of religion on well-being does not seem to have practical relevance

The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?

the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.

Emmanuel Todd: the most astonishing thing is that the rise in mortality has gone hand in hand with the highest health care costs in the world. […] Large pharmaceutical companies, supported by well-paid and unscrupulous doctors, have made available to patients in mental and emotional pain, for economic and social reasons, dangerous, addictive painkillers, very frequently leading to direct death, alcoholism or suicide. […] America is no longer functionally a democracy but rather a “liberal oligarchy.”

Fenethylline was first synthesized by the German pharmaceutical firm Degussa AG in 1961 and used for around 25 years as a milder alternative to amphetamine and related compounds. […] The drug was marketed for use as a psychostimulant under the brand names Captagon, Biocapton, and Fitton. It is now illegal in most countries and is produced primarily for illicit use, which takes place mainly in the Middle East. Syria under the Assad regime was considered to be the world’s largest producer of the drug, accounting for about 80% of the global supply. The global market for the drug is worth approximately $57 billion (USD)

Captagon factory in Syria [video]

A Digital Archive of the Sanborn Fire Maps