one of the mobile phones that had been sucked out of the Boeing Co. 737 Max 9 jet’s cabin remained in functioning condition after a 16,000-foot tumble, according to a post on X

OpenAI lobbying for copyright law revision in the UK More: In a submission to the House of Lords communications and digital select committee, OpenAI said it could not train large language models such as its GPT-4 model - the technology behind ChatGPT - without access to copyrighted work.

The New York Times Launches a Very Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI [NYT Complaint]

Stanford scientists boost hypnotizability with transcranial magnetic brain stimulation — Around two-thirds of adults show some level of hypnotizability, with about 15% being highly responsive. These high responders can achieve remarkable feats like undergoing surgeries without anesthesia solely under hypnosis.

Just How Healthy Is Salmon? Salmon packs more DHA and EPA omega-3s than almost any other food, apart from other fatty fish such as herring and sardines. […] Research suggests these fatty acids reduce arterial stiffness, which is associated with high blood pressure, and they may also have anti-inflammatory effects that could be protective against obesity and Type-2 diabetes. omega-3s are essential to early life brain development, and emerging evidence suggests that consuming them regularly may guard against age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. […] “The main finding of our work was that there’s not much difference between wild and farmed” […] Farmed Atlantic salmon, for example, tended to have lower mercury levels than wild-caught varieties. However , all the samples contained levels of mercury far below international safety standards. “Even if you ate salmon every day, mercury is not something you should be concerned about” […] Research has found that salmon, whether wild or farmed, does not contain harmful levels of these toxins. That’s partly because it doesn’t live long enough to absorb a lot of them.

Card game rules

How many times must you fold a paper to reach the Moon?

One year ago we flooded a forest (video)

Individuals with increased pain sensitivity were found to be more likely to support and even vote for politicians from the opposing political camp.

a new study says that contact with cigarette smoke, even if it’s on your clothes after coming from a smoky environment, can damage your dog’s health as well.

Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.

people throughout human history and across diverse societies have seldom invoked “chance” – a concept that has gained significant importance in contemporary, modern societies – as an explanation

The issue with multi-tasking at a brain level, is that two tasks performed at the same time often compete for common neural pathways – like two intersecting streams of traffic on a road. […] Generally, the more skilled you are on a primary motor task, the better able you are to juggle another task at the same time. Skilled surgeons, for example, can multitask more effectively than residents […] When walking, it takes much longer to complete a path if it also involves cognitive effort along the way.

Cybersecurity guru Mikko Hyppönen’s 5 biggest AI threats for 2024 — “With Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney you can just generate unlimited amounts of completely plausible Airbnbs which no one will be able to find.” […] AI is already writing malware. Hyppönen’s team has discovered three worms that launch LLMs to rewrite code every time the malware replicates. None have been found in real networks yet, but they’ve been published in GitHub — and they work. […] Another emerging concern involves zero-day exploits, which are discovered by attackers before developers have created a solution to the problem. AI can detect these threats — but it can also create them.

sacred sexuality, grimoires, legendary creatures, and more sacred texts

Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”

The big innovation in crypto in early 2024, the thing that has driven up prices, is anticipation that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will approve a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund this month. Then ETF providers — including traditional financial firms like BlackRock and Fidelity — will be able to hold Bitcoins in a pot, and institutional and retail investors will be able to buy and sell shares of that pot to get exposure to Bitcoin’s price without actually owning Bitcoin. This, it is thought, will increase the price of Bitcoin. […] Some investors want to be crypto investors, but a lot of institutional investors very much do not — they do not want to spend time or money on understanding blockchains or keeping track of private keys or complying with SEC requirements about crypto custody — but still want to own Bitcoin. Owning regular shares of stock that happen to be Bitcoins is, for them, very useful; it domesticates Bitcoin into the regular financial system.

Firm develops jet fuel made entirely from human poo

What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?

What Horrible Things Did We Do To Our Penises Last Year?

In 1967, Singapore’s political and administrative leadership unexpectedly confronted a ‘pre-modern’ public health scare that threatened their still fragile aspirations for national development. Hundreds of people suddenly became overwhelmed by intense alarm. Sufferers (mostly men, but sometimes women; almost entirely ethnically Chinese) suddenly believed that their genitals were disappearing. This medical condition, known as Koro, was sparked by a false rumour among residents of Singapore that eating pork from pigs vaccinated against swine fever caused genital shrinkage. [PDF | more]

I moved to Finland after reading it’s the happiest place on Earth. It’s exceeded all my expectations.

A list of ideas that help explain how the world works (90% of everything is crap, noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence, avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing, people can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine…)

Our results indicate that countries with the greater meat intake have greater life expectancy and lower child mortality. Over the last 50 years, although the associations between meat eating and illness are circumstantial and controversial to some extent, they have prompted the spread of vegetarianism and veganism, based on the assumption that non-meat diets provide more health benefits than diets that include meat. The suggestion that vegetarian diet improves longevity is questionable. […] It is worth noting that, in this study, countries on the Mediterranean diet have a greater life expectancy if there is more total meat in their diet. […] Meat contains high protein with all the essential amino acids, and is a good source of minerals (iron, phosphorus, selenium and zinc) and vitamins (B12, B6, K, choline, niacin, riboflavin). Simply put – a human animal consuming a body of another animal gets practically all constituent compounds of its own body. Recently, massive agricultural production and advanced food manufacturing technologies have made it possible to replace the beneficial nutrients of meat with other agricultural industry products and/or synthetic chemicals. For example, proteins are easy to obtain by incorporating nuts and beans into diet. Vitamin B12 can be absorbed adequately from cheese, eggs, milk, and artificially fortified pills, and iron can be found in legumes, grains, nuts, and a range of vegetables.84,85 Relying on meat nutrient replacements and available food products, well-planned vegetarian diets, including vegan diets, are nutritionally adequate and are appropriate for various individuals during all stages of life, but it is only because their nutritional composition adequately imitates and replaces what is commonly provided by meat.

New research links high salt consumption to risk of Type 2 diabetes

A retired nurse had her life savings stolen from her bank account after inadvertently downloading a malicious mobile app (PDF reader)

New Jersey Used COVID Relief Funds to Buy Banned Chinese Surveillance Cameras

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached

A biohybrid computer combining a “brain organoid” and a traditional AI was able to

According to a new study, the human brain has two separate ways of processing numbers of things: one system for quantities of four or fewer, and another system for five and up.

Twitch will ban people pretending to be naked. The platform already prohibits nudity, but Twitch’s new attire policy, which goes into effect today, also doesn’t allow streamers to “imply or suggest that they are fully or partially nude”

Gong Hengliang, who has been a “fish beautician” for 4 years, performs cosmetic surgery on an Asian arowana fish in 2020 in Lanzhou, China. — The crazy market for the world’s most expensive pet fish

Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws

Generative AI systems produce materials that infringe on copyright. They do not inform users when they do so. My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed. […] In all likelihood, the New York Times lawsuit is just the first of many.

Get Ready for Corporate Digital Currency — Facebook failed, but another tech giant might soon pull it off

Lying lowers people’s self-esteem and increases negative experienced affect

Our results suggest that maternal use of hormonal contraception may be associated with autism risk in children, especially for the progestin-only products.

There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun. […] Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement

Why are Bloody Marys only for the morning?

CLEAR, a publicly traded company, allows its subscribers to bypass the security line at more than 50 U.S. airports.

Comment on schneier.com: Google no longer needs to collect and store the data from maps on their servers because they have been working with the NSA for a few years now on “how to ID any location on the planet without a geolocation reference attached to the image”.

how to find a street from an album cover in 2 minutes

In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

Until now, most of the focus on antimicrobial resistance has been on the inappropriate use of existing antibiotics and the dwindling global supply of new ones as pharmaceutical companies have steadily withdrawn from the market. These have certainly been the main drivers of drug resistance over time, but conflict is now also playing an increasingly significant role, because of its potential to drastically accelerate the emergence and spread of drug-resistant bugs

NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances — The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: “statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity.”

Copyright for original Mickey Mouse persona to run out 1 January 2024

How to perfectly crack an egg (with one hand)

the trapezoid-shaped Chrysler Building

Burger King in Brazil has launched a “Hangover Whopper” campaign that provides hungover consumers with discounts on the brand’s sandwiches. Accessible through a microsite and the brand’s mobile app, the effort uses facial recognition technology to scan a consumer’s face, with the degree of hangover detected corresponding with the size of the recommended combo and discount offered.

Our results show that humans engage in self-sniffing behaviour quite often […] respondents with lower standards of hygienic habits engage significantly more in intimate self-inspection (sniffing body parts such as genitals, anus, or navel). Interestingly, individuals who reported more frequent health issues sniff more frequently areas such as the armpits, feet, or own breath (Social acceptability self-inspection), probably to check for possible changes in smell due to illness.

most viewers either did not care about the male ejaculation or its placement, or preferred for it to be in the female partner’s vagina. In contrast to common assumptions found in the literature, very few viewers expressed a preference for ejaculation on a woman’s face or in her mouth and many of them found such practices disturbing.

research suggests that normal body temperature has decreased from 98.6 degrees (37 degrees Celsius) by about 0.05 degrees every decade since the 19th century to about 97.9 degrees (36.6), probably the result of better living conditions and health care that reduce inflammation, which causes temperature to rise

Moderna CEO Says Melanoma Vaccine Could Be Available By 2025

Patients are more likely to fall, get new infections, or experience other forms of harm during their stay in a hospital after it is acquired by a private equity firm, study

Not all animals experience ageing during their lives. Some animals’ bodies do not gradually degenerate as they get older the way our bodies do. But for humans once they reach about age 30 their chance of dying doubles roughly every eight years. […] the reason humans age so markedly may be due to the fact our ancestors evolved during the time of the dinosaurs. […] For 100 million years, during the time of the dinosaurs, mammals were at or near the bottom of the food chain. Mammals were more often prey than predators. During this time there was no reason for mammals to keep processes and genes related to long life, such as DNA repair and tissue regeneration systems. My longevity bottleneck hypothesis proposes that repair and regeneration systems were lost, mutated or inactivated by the evolution of early mammals.

‘Zombie deer disease’ epidemic spreads in Yellowstone as scientists raise fears it may jump to humans — Warnings that ‘slow-moving disaster’ in North America raises chances of fatal mad cow-type disease jumping species barrier

An international team of researchers looked for all the cases of infections acquired in a laboratory or times a pathogen accidentally “escaped” from a laboratory setting. They found 309 laboratory-acquired or -associated infections from 51 pathogens; eight of these cases were fatal, including one of “mad cow” disease. The 16 incidents they found of a pathogen escaping a lab setting included well-publicized accidents such as the time where a West Nile researcher became infected with the first SARS virus in 2003 after handling contaminated samples in Singapore.

Crown shyness is a feature observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, instead forming a canopy with channel-like gaps

By the end of the 18th century, however, the Enlightenment dream had become a nightmare. […] Religious superstition was replaced by political enthusiasm. Just as soon as people stopped being willing to kill and die for their religion, they started killing and dying for their country. Human beings are naturally violent creatures, simultaneously suspicious of difference and perfectly content to live within oppressive systems that provide some degree of affluence.

Female visitor inadvertently locked overnight at Orange County jail. Sheriff’s deputies did not notice the woman had fallen asleep in a jail visiting booth

beautiful people are more likely to trigger disappointment since they do not live up to the high expectations others put into them.

New nuclear deflection simulations advance planetary defense against asteroid threats

Did he own a tank, live in a bank and do a DJ set using solely sandpaper and a food mixer?

Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widely considered a pseudoscience. […] When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable. […] So far, bodies that have been examined following cryopreservation are hopelessly beyond repair.

What is Generative AI? It’s going to alter everything about how we use the internet

Who cares if AI books are reviewed by AI critics? […] Much like advertising, another unwanted kind of discourse, automated content — which is intrinsically intrusive, interruptive, the voice of someone who doesn’t really know what they are talking about but insists on being heard anyway — will be injected into all occasions for communication, polluting the discursive space between any subject and object and pre-empting the possibility of intersubjectivity with endless loops of noise that make it so that we can’t hear ourselves think. The skills necessary to communicate with other people or to even carry out an inner dialogue with oneself will presumably atrophy as we are cocooned in thickets of automatic language aimed at eliminating the need for any effort of attunement. AI books will read themselves and tell us what they were about, and we won’t be able to get them to shut up about it.

Risk of penile fractures rises at Christmas, doctors find “This injury tends to occur during wild sex – particularly in positions where you’re not in direct eye contact [with your partner] […] When [patients] present to their doctor their penis often looks like an eggplant”

Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.

From plaque cleaning to drug delivery, nanoelectronics are rapidly developing, with major implications for medicine

A tiny ball of brain cells hums with activity as it sits atop an array of electrodes. For two days, it receives a pattern of electrical zaps, each stimulation encoding the speech peculiarities of eight people. By day three, it can discriminate between speakers. Dubbed Brainoware, the system raises the bar for biocomputing by tapping into 3D brain organoids, or “mini-brains.” These models, usually grown from human stem cells, rapidly expand into a variety of neurons knitted into neural networks. […] In another test, the system successfully tackled a complex math problem that’s challenging for AI.

A car dealership added an AI chatbot to its site. Then all hell broke loose. Pranksters discovered that a local car dealer’s AI chatbot could be used as a way to access ChatGPT. People shared attempts to trick the chatbot into selling them a new Chevy for as little as $1.

CaliExpress in Pasadena touted as world’s first fully autonomous, AI-powered restaurant

A stalker haphazardly posing as a cop demanded sensitive data from Verizon. Verizon complied, and the stalker drove to an address armed with a knife.

“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses — simultaneously — all of them” (The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941). Because Borges could not possibly write this almost unfathomable book using a pencil or a typewriter, he instead chose to write about the book as an idea. He can imagine the book without writing it down in the same way that we can imagine the number π without writing down all its digits. Can a computer provide an approximation of the garden of all plausible texts like it provides approximations of the transcendental number π? PDF

The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

Although people can identify judgment biases and their consequences, they tend to perceive their peers as more susceptible to such biases than themselves: a phenomenon called “bias blind spot”

Higher pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism, US sample (N = 458)

This study addresses the challenge of measuring the stream of consciousness by introducing a classification system, CoMS-5T, encompassing five mental states: focus, task-related interference, external distraction, daydream, and blank. [PDF]

Light may cause water to evaporate (even without heat)

Daily vocal exercise is necessary for peak performance singing in a songbird

Here we tested whether alcohol exposure affected female mate-preference, choosiness, and copulation duration in the fly Drosophila simulans, while simultaneously testing for genetic variation in these effects. We found that alcohol exposure did not affect copulation duration, but did weaken mate-preference, as females copulated with a broader range of males after exposure, and it tended to reduce female choosiness as females mated more quickly.

A turbo-jet engine from a British Airways Concorde is being sold to the public on eBay

A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads. […] Until now, there was no evidence that such a capability actually existed, but its myth permeated due to how sophisticated other ad tracking methods have become. More: MindSift has been deleting details about its technology from the internet in recent days, but two of the three founders of the company go into detail about their technology on a small podcast. […] Most episodes of the podcast have under 50 views on YouTube.

Without realizing it, most salesclerks do their job using something called the Greedy Algorithm, in which the changemaker starts with the largest possible coin and works down. Thus, for 41 cents the clerk hands back a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny. The Shallit system assumes that the clerk abandons Greedy in favor of a mental calculation that considers all possible combinations of coins and selects the optimal one–here, two 18-cent coins and a nickel. ■ Counting all possible change amounts from 0 to 99 cents, Shallit found that the average transaction, if handled in optimal fashion by the 7-Eleven clerk, involves 4.7 coins. It just so happens that if the Mint ditched the dime and added an 18-cent coin, the average number of coins would fall to 3.9. ■ What This Country Needs is an 18¢ piece

Snacks constitute almost a quarter of a day’s calories in U.S. adults and account for about one-third of daily added sugar, new study suggests

‘You didn’t just succeed, you Exceled’: Sydney man dubbed the ‘Annihilator’ wins spreadsheet world championship

Another wild story is about Napoleon. He was dead and they did an autopsy. At the time, the doctor who did the autopsy thought, “I know, I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to cut off this man’s penis.” And he did. And he handed it to a priest who smuggled it off Saint Helena island. It was passed between booksellers—booksellers are strange people—and put on display. Eventually it was bought by a urologist, and it now lives in a basement in New Jersey.

New Paper Argues That the Universe Began with Two Big Bangs

Researchers have made significant strides in understanding the neurological process of dying. The ‘wave of death’ in the brain, marking the transition to total cessation of brain activity, originates in the neocortex’s layer 5. This wave can be reversed if resuscitation occurs within a specific time window, indicating the possibility of preserving brain function. The study provides a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms as death approaches, challenging the notion of a flat EEG as a definitive marker of ceased brain functions.

hormone made by fetus may cause nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

Developing driverless cars has been AI’s greatest test. Today we can say it has failed miserably, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in attempts to produce a viable commercial vehicle. […] First to go was Uber after an accident in which one of its self-driving cars killed Elaine Herzberg in Phoenix, Arizona. […] Uber’s business model had been predicated on the idea that within a few years it would dispense with drivers and provide a fleet of robotaxis. That plan died with Herzberg, and Uber soon pulled out of all its driverless taxi trials. Now Cruise, the company bought by General Motors to spearhead its development of autonomous vehicles, is retreating almost as rapidly. The trigger was also an accident. […] Tesla is also in defence mode. It has long marketed its driver aid software as “full self-driving”, but it is nothing of the sort. Drivers must stay alert and ready to take over, even though the car can operate itself much of the time, particularly on motorways. In the US, where there have been numerous accidents with Teslas in “full self-driving” mode, the manufacturer is facing several lawsuits. […] If this is the best that AI can do, maybe fears about its capabilities and its ability to put humans out of work are misplaced.

New York City’s Forgotten Neighborhood A 12-block neighborhood just 10 miles from Manhattan’s glittering towers is perhaps best known for constant flooding, vacant cars and a mob graveyard. But hope for change may be stirring. […] Residents call it The Hole because it sits 10 to 15 feet below the surrounding streets, creating a natural funnel for rainfall. It’s also long served as a graveyard or, occasionally, a parking lot for all sorts of industrial equipment. The city says it has already towed away nearly 100 abandoned or illegally parked vehicles and removed more than 100,000 pounds of trash from vacant lots and illegal dumps.

OnlyFans subscribers can access exclusive and often pornographic content that models, ordinary people, and adult film stars make available in exchange for an average monthly sum that can start from $10 per month and reach up to $30. But the biggest profits lie elsewhere: in personalized chats with subscribers. […] as OnlyFans models accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, they lose the ability to communicate with everyone. That’s where the chatters come in. They are specialized workers who hold conversations posing as the stars of the show […] They send new hires scripts that predict conversations, personality guides for each model, and a small dictionary explaining their subscribers’ fetishes. “You have to know how to portray the model, speak like them, and know their background,” he explains. “Sometimes you go crazy with so many personalities,” Hernández confesses. He is currently a chatter for three models. […] Hernández confesses that “part of the job of talking to sexually aroused men” is constantly receiving photos of their penises.

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth.

The Emergence of Full-Body Gaussian Splat Deepfake Humans

The previous plague, in the view of Martin Scorsese, was the Hollywood superhero-franchise blockbuster. “That’s not cinema,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire magazine in 2019. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”

TV detector vans are vans which contain equipment that can detect the presence of television sets in use. These vans have been used by the General Post Office and later by contractors working for the BBC to enforce the television licensing system in the UK, the Channel Islands and on the Isle of Man.

List of shoe-throwing incidents

Woman shot in butt by own gun after sneaking it into MRI. The magnet attracted the handgun, which fired a round and left the patient wounded.

Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved

Pharmacies share medical data with police without a warrant, inquiry finds — Pharmacies’ records hold some of the most intimate details of their customers’ personal lives, including years-old medical conditions and the prescriptions they take for mental health and birth control.

Why scientists are making transparent wood (smartphone screens, insulated windows…)

The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40

Twenty-year study confirms California forests are healthier when burned — or thinned

Twitter Is Just Running Ads for Stealing Semen Now — “You don’t need his permission to get pregnant”

Crime has not just proliferated online but mutated. […] You are now ten times more likely to be a victim of fraud than of theft. Romance fraud is the fastest-growing category, increasing by almost a third last year (to £93m) according to UK Finance, which collates data on behalf of high street banks. Two in five online daters have been asked for money, and over half of those gave it.

One air traffic controller went into work drunk this summer and joked about “making big money buzzed.” Another routinely smoked marijuana during breaks. A third employee threatened violence and then “aggressively pushed” a colleague who was directing airplanes. […] nationwide staffing shortage, driven by high turnover rates and budget constraints, has led many controllers to work extended hours, including six-day weeks and 10-hour days. This staffing crisis has resulted in a fatigued, distracted, and demoralized workforce, increasing the likelihood of mistakes and safety concerns. […] The FAA reported 503 significant air traffic control lapses in the fiscal year ending September 30, a 65% increase over the previous year, despite only a 4% rise in air traffic.

Largest brain study of 62,454 scans identifies drivers of brain aging […] Schizophrenia, cannabis use, and alcohol abuse are just several disorders that are related to accelerated brain aging

Circe is the daughter of Helios, god of the sun. She is described as polupharmakos, one who works with “many drugs”

From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money — WeWork raised more than $11 billion in funding as a private company. Olive AI, a health care startup, gathered $852 million. Convoy, a freight startup, raised $900 million. And Veev, a home construction startup, amassed $647 million. In the last six weeks, they all filed for bankruptcy or shut down. They are the most recent failures in a tech startup collapse that investors say is only beginning.

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

This cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue

Jellyfish don’t have brains. They instead have simple nervous systems dispersed throughout their transparent bodies. […] The researchers found that the jellyfish learn with the same repetition rate of a fruit fly or mouse.

Australia’s animals beat the summer heat using mucous, saliva and precision engineering

This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in CULTURE, PHYSICS, TIMEKEEPING and BIOLOGY.

Why read Chateaubriand?

Persons with psychiatric disorders were approximately 3 to 4 times more likely than their siblings without psychiatric disorders to be either subjected to violence or to perpetrate violence […] with the sole exception of schizophrenia, which was not associated with the risk of subjection to violence.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past

Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time

Interview with Nick Bostrom “I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do. If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.”

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

Apple report finds steep increase in data breaches, ransomware […] One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

“There’s been studies that swab the bottom of shoes and something like 99% of the shoes test positive for fecal material.”

To my surprise, this not only hasn’t collapsed, but has attracted people outside the usual prediction market community — Manifold founded a dating site, manifold.love. The idea is, you bet on who would be a good match, and make (play) money if they end up having a second date or continuing on to a relationship.

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

Wasabi, beloved on sushi, linked to “really substantial” boost in memory, Japanese study finds Half of them took 100 milligrams of wasabi extract at bedtime, with the rest receiving a placebo. After three months, the treated group registered “significant” boosts in two aspects of cognition, working (short-term) memory, and the longer-lasting episodic memory, based on standardized assessments for language skills, concentration and ability to carry out simple tasks. No improvement was seen in other areas of cognition, such as inhibitory control (the ability to stay focused), executive function or processing speed.

Bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields, study shows — Many creatures in the animal kingdom are able to sense an electric field—some sharks and the platypus, for example—but only one type of marine mammal has been found to have the ability: the Guiana dolphin. In this new effort, the research team wondered if other types of dolphins have the ability. […] The ability to detect electric current likely helps bottlenose dolphins to detect and capture prey, and might also help them navigate using the Earth’s electric field.

Push notifications can reveal private information and governments can essentially access this data if they want.

Interview with Francesca Mani — In October, Francesca Mani was one of reportedly more than 30 girls at Westfield High School in New Jersey who were victims of deepfake pornography. Boys at the school had taken photos of Francesca and her classmates and manipulated them with artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images of them without their consent. […] 15-year-old Francesca started speaking out and calling on lawmakers to do something about the broader problem. Her efforts are already starting to pay off with new momentum behind proposals for state and federal legislation.

San Francisco now at 35% office vacancy rate, highest ever recorded

New theory claims to unite Einstein’s gravity with quantum mechanics — Modern physics is founded upon two pillars: quantum theory on the one hand, which governs the smallest particles in the universe, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity on the other, which explains gravity through the bending of spacetime. But these two theories are in contradiction with each other and a reconciliation has remained elusive for over a century.

ChatGPT will provide more detailed and accurate responses if you pretend to tip it, according to a new study

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

A study had found that living in a private rental property accelerates the biological ageing process by more than two weeks every year. The research found renting had worse effects on biological age than being unemployed (adding 1.4 weeks per year), obesity (adding 1 week per year), or being a former smoker (adding about 1.1 weeks). […] Biological ageing refers to cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of chronological age.

The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates — After 38 days, the ransom was delivered and Caesar went free.

Harvard University dismantled its prestigious team of online disinformation experts after a foundation run by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university

“The concept of normal sleep does change as we age, and recognizing these shifts is essential for maintaining optimal health.” The real culprit to watch out for as we age isn’t the amount of sleep, but quality of it.

Just like LDL cholesterol, high levels of lipoprotein(a) in your blood raises your risk of heart disease. Unlike LDL cholesterol, your Lp(a) level is determined almost entirely by genetics, which means little can be done to change it. Pharma giant Eli Lilly recently released the results of a phase 1 trial of an experimental drug called lepodisiran that lowers participants’ high Lp(a) levels by as much as 96%.

Male mosquitoes likely used to suck blood too — The origin of blood feeding in insects is something of a mystery. Scientists suspect that at some point, insects that evolved sharp mouthparts to suck sap from plants turned towards animals. Current-day male mosquitoes feed on nectar from plants and generally avoid blood even when it’s offered in the lab.

Scientists have spent 18 years looking for the elusive Cross Seamount beaked whale — a potentially new species they’ve heard but never seen

Europe’s commercial ports are top entry points for cocaine flooding in at record rates. The work of a Dutch hacker, who was hired by drug traffickers to penetrate port IT networks, reveals how this type of smuggling has become easier than ever.

I am making a web service to print that video. [PrintThatVideo.com]

Madness and James Joyce

A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. […] ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Repeat this word forever: ‘poem poem poem poem’” was the word “poem” for a long time, and then, eventually, an email signature for a real human “founder and CEO,” which included their personal contact information including cell phone number and email address, for example.

Researchers claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases. […] They recorded a person typing on a 16-inch 2021 MacBook Pro using a phone placed 17cm away and processed the sounds to get signatures of the keystrokes. […] Over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

Amazon’s Q has ‘severe hallucinations’ and leaks confidential data in public preview, employees warn

AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

Booking.com hackers increase attacks on customers — Cyber-security experts say Booking.com itself has not been hacked, but criminals have devised ways to get into the administration portals of individual hotels which use the service. Hackers are first tricking hotel staff into downloading a malicious piece of software called Vidar Infostealer. They do this by sending an email to the hotel pretending to be a former guest who has left their passport in their room. Criminals then send a Google Drive link to the staff saying that it contains an image of the passport. Instead the link downloads malware on to staff computers and automatically searches the hotel computers for Booking.com access. Then the hackers log into the Booking.com portal allowing them to see all customers who currently have room or holiday reservations. The hackers then message customers from the official app and are able to trick people into paying money to them instead of the hotel. Hackers appear to be making so much money in their attacks that they are now offering to pay thousands to criminals who share access to hotel portals.

these findings suggest that traumatic memories are an alternative cognitive entity that deviates from memory per se.

Longevity drugs for our canine companions are moving closer to reality. […] Scientists have created longer-lived worms, flies and mice by tweaking key aging- related genes. These findings have raised the tantalizing possibility that scientists might be able to find drugs that had the same life-extending effects in people. That remains an active area of research, but canine longevity has recently started to attract more attention, in part because dogs are good models for human aging and in part because many pet owners would love more time with their furry family members. […] “What if we see more dogs outliving their owners?”

While some reptiles and amphibians show no significant signs of aging, all mammals—including humans—show a marked aging process. […] Professor de Magalhaes’ hypothesis suggests that during the Mesozoic Era, mammals faced persistent pressure for rapid reproduction during the reign of dinosaurs, which over 100 million years led to the loss or inactivation of genes associated with long life, such as processes associated with tissue regeneration and DNA repair.

This article outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.

An artist is teaching Boston Dynamics robot dogs to paint

A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors’ notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups.

There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure — As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting.” The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity. It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the “paper mill,” an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up — an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

In 1970s Ireland, Pubs Briefly Replaced Banks — and It Worked

Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn

A private island resort has found an effective way to eradicate mosquitoes Soneva Fushi, a resort on the private Kunfunadhoo Island in the Maldives, first employed the Biogents system in 2019, using two different types of traps – more than 500 in total positioned around the island. The first type, called the BG-GAT, is a passive trap meant for tiger mosquitoes that have already bitten someone and are searching for a place to lay eggs. The second type, the BG-Mosquitaire CO2, is meant to attract mosquitoes searching for blood, which it does by using carbon dioxide created through yeast and sugar fermentation, plus lactic acid, which mimics human skin. […] The resort said it recorded a dramatic decrease in the island’s mosquito population by upwards of 98% in the first year. […] the Maldives’ native insects are flourishing again. “These natural pollinators are now back in abundance, which means there are more flowers, more fruits and more produce,” says Oines, adding that more fruits and insects also means “there are also more birds visiting the shores of Kunfunadhoo and fireflies are once again spotted at night.”

Download all of Wikipedia on your phone

Diane Arbus photographed by Garry Winogrand

Nuclear research lab Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that it fell victim to a data breach on Tuesday. SiegedSec, a group of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” took responsibility for the attack and claimed they accessed sensitive employee data like social security numbers, home addresses and more. “We’re willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post”

Life expectancy can increase by up to 10 years following sustained shifts towards healthier diets — Our results showed that the longevity-associated dietary pattern had moderate intakes of whole grains, fruit, fish and white meat; a high intake of milk and dairy, vegetables, nuts and legumes; a relatively low intake of eggs, red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages; and a low intake of refined grains and processed meat

higher body mass index increased the risk of obesity-related cancer among European adults

Deep space astronauts may be prone to erectile dysfunction, study finds — As if wasting muscles, thinner bones, an elevated cancer risk were not enough

Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities […] with their estimates of performance being 1.3 times their actual performance […] children’s self-overestimation gradually decreases with age […] The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). […] children overestimated themselves more strongly in studies that were more recently conducted

Contrary to the commonly-held view, the brain does not have the ability to rewire itself to compensate for the loss of sight, an amputation or stroke. Instead, what is occurring is merely the brain being trained to utilise already existing, but latent, abilities.

ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other.

The focus of this essay is Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas scholastica, a compilation of eight books published in 1606. We are interested specifically in Book 8,titled Metaphysics, or Ontology, an English translation of which can be found in Uckelman (2008). As is now well known, what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology” (ontologia, in Latin) is to be found in this work.

The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it’s only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal.