AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks

Scammers put fake QR codes on parking meters to intercept parkers’ payments

I found that those who called themselves feminists reported having more recently masturbated than non-feminist women. In addition, I found that in partnered sexual encounters, feminists were more likely to participate in anal play, as well as engage in more kissing, cuddling, and massage than non-feminists. I also found that feminist women were more likely to receive oral sex than non-feminists.

Elvira actress Cassandra Peterson: ‘Losing 11,000 horny old men as followers after coming out’ is no big deal

Walmart Plots ‘Super Intense’ Crypto, Metaverse Push, Filing Suggests

Customers are more likely to tip when paying by cash rather than by credit

New theory proposes ‘forgetting’ is actually a form of learning

Rat who detected land mines in Cambodia dies in retirement

The Torso Murderer: Jack the Ripper Wasn’t the Only Serial Killer Stalking London in 1888

A Personal Catalogue of the World’s Most Storied Bookstores

Multi-rider vehicle retention apparel (In which the passenger attaches him/herself to the front-rider with Velcro)

Marlon Bundo, the famous Pence family bunny who made history, dies

Tarrare was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits […] he would swallow corks, stones, live animals […] he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing.

Why was there less lightning during COVID lockdowns? The decrease coincided with a drop in humans emitting aerosols.

Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as Male Contraception

Female dolphins have a fully functional clitoris

Animals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

USC team shows how memories are stored in the brain, with potential impact on conditions like PTSD. Contrary to expectations, the study in larval zebrafish shows synapses in one part of the brain are eliminated and new ones are created in a different region when memories are formed. These major structural changes could account for memory formation.

Sony is working on a 3D Scanner that will allow users to put real-world items into video games

There were times [Trump] would come down the next morning and say, “Well, Sean thinks we should do this,” or, “Judge Jeanine thinks we should do this,” referring to Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, both of whom host prime-time Fox News shows.

Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith were both carriers of the recessive methemoglobinemia (met-H) gene. As a result, four of their seven children exhibited blue skin

The weather is expected to be so cold for Saturday’s National Hockey League’s outdoor Winter Classic that the ice will have to be heated

No convincing scientific evidence that hangover cures work

Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories

Logic’s song ‘1-800-273-8255′ may have led to hundreds fewer suicides, study finds

SpaceX will take humans to Mars within 10 years, Elon Musk predicts Previously: Asked when he sees this happening, Musk pauses for a long moment, as if calculating all the variables—federal regulations and production schedules, test-flight targets and bathroom requirements. “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years,” he finally says.

the military has four extra telephone buttons that they don’t tell us about [..] AUTOVON phones thus feature a full 4×4 keypad, with the rightmost column typically in red and used to prefix dialed calls with a precedence level. […] calls were placed at “routine” priority, but “priority,” “immediate,” “flash,” and “flash override” were successively higher precedence levels reserved for successively more important levels of military command and control.

When thieves stole three tonnes of oysters from French shellfish farmer Christophe Guinot, he came up with a solution: planting secret notes inside oyster shells to help police track down the thieves. ‘You’ve won your weight in oysters!’

The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they are relative lightweights—they lack a gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty highly, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. But to find the real champs, you have to think smaller. You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Get a Hamster Drunk

After three hours of tests and more than 100 flushes, the team detected droplets smaller than 3 mm in size at a height of 1.5 m above a toilet or urinal (face height for many people) and found that the droplets persisted at that height for more than 20 seconds after the flush. The 10 quirkiest stories from the world of physics in 2021

99 Good News Stories from 2021

Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive

Two dozen cities and states prohibit use of face recognition. But it’s on phones and is increasingly used in airports and in banks.

US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say — Within weeks, Walter Reed researchers expect to announce that human trials show success against Omicron—and even future strains

Oil-Sniffing Dogs Are Helping Humans Spot Spills

Watching A Lecture Twice At Double Speed Can Benefit Learning Better Than Watching It Once At Normal Speed

After 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. “We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise” in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three “Matrix” films; now he is making things for the metaverse.

Ames Window illusion

Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops […] His rockets, built from scratch on an autodidact’s mold-breaking vision, have saved taxpayers billions […] “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years.” Related: Crypto Casinos

Rat sightings increased by 40% in the first 11 months of 2021 compared to 2019, apparently spurred by cuts to trash collection and street-cleaning services. New York has a huge rat problem. These vigilantes with dogs think they can fix it.

Besides its innovative design and noxious chemicals, the rat trap also has a secret weapon: Oreo cookies. The scent of the cookies, crumbled and placed in the top compartment of the two-part trap, along with sunflower seeds, acts as a lure. For a week or so, rodents will be free to crawl through the device’s holes and snack as much as they want. Once the rats become regulars and “get comfortable,” Mr. Webster said, the device will be turned on, and a platform will drop them into the lower part of the contraption, which serves as a catch basin not unlike a dunking tank at a carnival booth. Mr. Webster emptied four jugs of a mysterious blue “proprietary” formula into the bottom part of the machine. He said the formula was mostly alcohol and had vapors that “knock the rat unconscious.” He topped the solution off with sunflower oil to “eliminate odor” from decomposition. Not everyone is a fan of these methods, though. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, prefers rodent control that focuses on garbage cleanup and sealing entry points, “not finding new ways to torment and kill small animals who are simply trying to live their lives, just like any other New Yorker,” the organization said in a statement. [NY Times]

researchers found out that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as high as 40%

Construction creates an estimated third of the world’s overall waste, and at least 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Compare that to the 2-3% caused by aviation

New Eye Drops Offer an Alternative to Reading Glasses

A security researcher says an internet gateway used by hundreds of hotels to offer and manage their guest Wi-Fi networks has vulnerabilities that could put the personal information of their guests at risk.

News that the world’s first commercial octopus farm is closer to becoming reality has been met with dismay by scientists and conservationists. They argue such intelligent “sentient” creatures - considered able to feel pain and emotions - should never be commercially reared for food.

How Shein (formerly SheInside) beat Amazon at its own game — and reinvented fast fashion

Amazon-owned Twitch bans Amazon account after breast revealed on air

Stealth bomber on Google Map

The World Is So Desperate for Manure Even Human Waste Is a Hot Commodity

A new approach for the rapid destruction of human waste using smouldering combustion is presented. Recently, self-sustaining smouldering combustion was shown to destroy the organic component of simulated human solid waste and dog faeces resulting in the sanitization of all pathogens using a batch process.

Researchers find an early and treatable indicator of blood clotting in COVID-19 patients

Japanese scientists develop glowing masks to detect coronavirus

High court juries can detect when someone is lying even when they’re wearing a face mask. Not only do face masks not hinder jurors’ ability to decide if a witness is reliable, they make it easier to discern lies from truth.

Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by people — and in particular babies — called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to make men more docile and women more aggressive

More treatment but no less depression: The treatment-prevalence paradox

Oxygen when sleeping eases depression for 1 in 3 patients in small Israeli study Around half received regular air, which contains 21 percent oxygen, while the others received air with 35% oxygen content.

Within the scientific research community, memory information in the brain is commonly believed to be stored in the synapse - a hypothesis famously attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb. However, there is a growing minority who postulate that memory is stored inside the neuron at the molecular (RNA or DNA) level - an alternative postulation known as the cell-intrinsic hypothesis, coined by psychologist Randy Gallistel. […] After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved. [PDF]

among nonhuman primates the most compelling evidence for something approaching human-like visual self-recognition is seen only in great apes

US government wants to know why Tesla owners can play videogames while driving now

Toyota is charging drivers for the convenience of using their key fobs to remotely start their cars. Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality.

Former FedEx driver charged for dumping thousands of dollars worth of packages into Alabama ravine

People are regretting spending $800 on a Chanel advent calendar featuring stickers and a dust bag

“Another course – a citrus foam – was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth.” We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever, Chef responds with images of horses

Sex Ratios at Birth Linked to Pollutants […] data on 150 million people in the US over eight years, and data on 9 million Swedish people over 30 years […] airborne and waterborne pollutants such as aluminum, chromium, and mercury were associated with a higher proportion of male babies born

Proximity to green space may help with PMS, study finds

This week, New York-based company Republic Realm announced it had spent a record-breaking $4.3 million on digital land through The Sandbox, one of several “virtual world” websites where people can socialise, play games and even attend concerts. That came hot on the heels of a $2.4-million land purchase in late November on a rival platform, Decentraland, by Canadian crypto company Tokens.com. And days before that, Barbados announced plans to open a “metaverse embassy” in Decentraland. […] land worth more than $100 million has sold in the past week across the four largest metaverse sites, The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space.

Small Group of Insiders Is Reaping Most of the Gains on NFTs, Study Shows

Crypto is basically an anything goes markets like we saw in the 1920s before the Securities Act of 1933 cleaned up the mess of illegal practices. Exchanges can wash trade, which means being the buyer and seller of buy sides of a trade to create the illusion of market activity. Some reports put wash trading at an unprecedented 70% of all trading volume. Exchanges can front-run their own customers by putting their own trades in before client execution and trade on their advance knowledge of their customer order flow. Exchanges can offer 100x leverage on derivatives which allows them to liquidate their customers’ funds if the price (which the exchange sets) of the underlying moves by even 1% out of range. Exchanges can arbitrarily halt trading or cancel trades if any market conditions aren’t to their liking and there’s no obligation on them to report any accurate price information or give any kind of best execution. If you work at the exchange, or are friends with someone there, you have foreknowledge about every listing and you can insider trade with no consequences. They even brag about trading against their customers openly.

Internet 3.0 Sites are now built on the blockchain […] Your avatar is your digital wallet—you are anonymous, no company owns your data, you own everything in your wallet. […] The internet is owned by the users who use each app. […] Imagine that every time you used Facebook you were given some shares in Meta (aka Facebook).

Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm Recorded Future has counted about 50 cryptocurrency exchanges in Moscow City, a financial district in the capital, that in its assessment are engaged in illicit activity. […] Laundering the cryptocurrency through exchanges is the final step, and also the most vulnerable, because criminals must exit the anonymous online world to appear at a physical location, where they trade Bitcoin for cash or deposit it in a bank. The exchange offices are “the end of the Bitcoin and ransomware rainbow,” said Gurvais Grigg, a former F.B.I. agent who is a researcher with Chainalysis, the cryptocurrency tracking company. The computer codes in virtual currencies allow transactions to be tracked from one user to another, even if the owners’ identities are anonymous, until the cryptocurrency reaches an exchange. There, in theory, records should link the cryptocurrency with a real person or company. It is at this point, cybersecurity experts say, that criminals should be identified and apprehended. But the Russian government has allowed the exchanges to flourish, saying that it only investigates cybercrime if Russian laws are violated.

Eurostar tests facial recognition system on London train station

Your next smartphone might have a camera that’s always watching This week, chipmaker Qualcomm revealed its latest Snapdragon processor, which will power many of the high-end Android smartphones you’ll see in stores in 2022, including models from Motorola, Sony, OnePlus. And a new feature built into that chip could allow smartphone makers to keep those front-facing cameras on all the time in a sort of low-power mode, waiting and watching for a face to appear in front of it. Qualcomm insists the move is meant to make phones not just more convenient, but more secure.

Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. […] Montaruli called for “a reset,” telling BOO sellers to delete the pages and groups and start over again. One slide suggested alternatives for 14 popular BOO uses, including switching terms like ADHD to “trouble concentrating,” and “prevents heart attack” to “maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.” Related: When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z

Why do people eat the same breakfast every day?

Are 14 people really looking at that product?

The term “bus factor” refers to the number of project maintainers who, if hit by a bus and incapacitated, would cause that project to stall

How A NYTimes Reporter Collects Royalties From Hundreds of Musicians

Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth

All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic

Scientists Made an Eco-Friendly Plastic Using DNA From Salmon Sperm

we are many years away from storing data on DNA. Ignoring the technical complexities, DNA data storage is simply too expensive — a few megabytes would cost thousands of dollars

Austria: Doctor fined for amputating wrong leg of patient

What does your favourite color say about your personality? Nothing.

Kübler-Ross’s fundamental premise was that the dying individual goes through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. […] Kübler-Ross extended application of the five stages to the experience of (anticipatorily) bereaved persons. […] The five stages model of grief has been widely accepted by the general public, taught in educational institutions and used in clinical practice. […] Stage theories have a certain seductive appeal – they bring a sense of conceptual order to a complex process and offer the emotional promised land of “recovery” and “closure.” However, they are incapable of capturing the complexity, diversity and idiosyncratic quality of the grieving experience.

hugs that lasted less than one second were the least pleasurable; the ones lasting between five to 10 seconds, the most. the findings surprised the authors of the study

Can Afghanistan’s underground “sneakernet” survive the Taliban? A once-thriving network of merchants selling digital content to people without internet connections is struggling under Taliban rule.

Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users. The Tor Project has removed hundreds of KAX17 servers in October and November 2021.

Making Hybrid Images

Reef Global Inc. operates “ghost kitchens” from trailers in parking lots. So it’s a food-service company basically. It has raised over $1.5 billion, some of it from SoftBank. That would buy a lot of trailers, but naturally Reef used the money to buy parking lots […] Reef quickly used much of the $1.2 billion it raised to buy two giant companies that manage and operate parking lots, becoming what it says is the largest parking-lot network in North America. […] except they also somehow bought the wrong parking lots […] Reef found it wasn’t able to put trailers on many of its lots, as some had enclosed garages, where propane tanks and utility hookups aren’t allowed. Others were owned by landlords who didn’t want food trucks, former employees said. As a result, Reef rents lots from other parking owners for more than 70% of its kitchens. […] For a couple of years SoftBank really created an environment where startups had to spend money faster than they could think, and we are still enjoying the fallout.

Canada taps into strategic reserves to deal with massive shortage of maple syrup

Self-reported hand preference for masturbation was examined in 104 left-handed and 103 right-handed women, and 100 left-handed and 99 right-handed men […] For kissing the preferred cheek of an emotionally close person from the viewer’s perspective, left-handers showed a left-cheek preference, and right-handers a weaker right-cheek preference.

This research demonstrates that the physical properties of shopping carts influence purchasing and spending

Real-time alerting system for COVID-19 and other stress events using wearable data […] we built a real-time smartwatch-based alerting system that detects aberrant physiological and activity signals (heart rates and steps) associated with the onset of early infection […] this system generated alerts for pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection in 67 (80%) of the infected individuals.

The Science of Mind Reading — Cognitive psychologists armed with an fMRI machine can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts; they can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a computer system can edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. One research group has used similar technology to accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects.

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal’s entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on “eating” even without the rest of the animal’s body. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors?

A variety of insects can produce honey – bumblebees, stingless bees, even honey wasps – but only honey bees (Apis species) produce enough to stock grocery store shelves. This ability didn’t happen overnight; it was millions of years in the making.

Team Builds First Living Robots That Can Reproduce — AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine

Google is reportedly delisting the controversial U.S. e-commerce platform Wish from its search results in France Google and Apple both removed the Wish app from their French app stores, and rival search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing and France’s Qwant delisted the website from their results, before Google also took the search-engine step. […] ContextLogic/Wish had the dubious distinction of having last year’s worst U.S. trading debut, with its stock falling 16% in a December IPO. That took it down to a shade over $20 a share, but it was only the beginning of an ongoing slide that broke through the $4 barrier last week.

Who Owns a Recipe? U.S. copyright law protects all kinds of creative material, but recipe creators are mostly powerless in an age and a business that are all about sharing.

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere

How to use a horse’s tail to catch fish

Vagina NFTs

The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild. […] They included young people with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

why we won’t know for weeks how dangerous Omicron is

“What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?”, a Trump admin official reportedly asked. — Sculpture of Donald Trump’s face carved into Mount Rushmore has been pictured at his office in Mar-a-Lago

New plastic made from DNA is biodegradable and easy to recycle

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin” Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators

In the early 2010s, the leading music-intelligence company was the Echo Nest, which Spotify acquired in 2014. Founded in the MIT Media Lab in 2005, the Echo Nest developed algorithms that could measure recorded music using a set of parameters similar to Serrà’s, including ones with clunky names like acousticness, danceability, instrumentalness, and speechiness. To round out their models, the algorithms could also scour the internet for and semantically analyze anything written about a given piece of music. The goal was to design a complete fingerprint of a song: to reduce music to data to better guide consumers to songs they would enjoy. By the time Spotify bought the Echo Nest, it claimed to have analyzed more than 35 million songs, using a trillion data points. […] The result is that users keep encountering similar content because the algorithms keep recommending it to us.

“Ghost particles” detected in the Large Hadron Collider for first time

The Pigeon Puzzle: How Do They Figure Out Their Impossibly Long Routes Home?

Back when it was normal to advertise cocaine gadgets in magazines, 1970-1980

Changes in Penile-Vaginal Intercourse Frequency and Sexual Repertoire from 2009 to 2018 Compared to adult participants in the 2009 NSSHB, adults in the 2018 NSSHB were significantly more likely to report no PVI in the prior year (28% in 2018 vs. 24% in 2009). A similar difference in proportions reporting no PVI in the prior year was observed among 14–17-year-old adolescents (89% in 2018 vs. 79% in 2009). Additionally, for both adolescents and adults, we observed decreases in all modes of partnered sex queried and, for adolescents, decreases in solo masturbation.

Big data study suggests the human brain navigates by taking the “pointiest path” rather than the shortest path

Sometimes we want vicious friends: Friend preferences are target-specific

People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

Narcissism was surprisingly the strongest predictor, and intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology

Belief in astrology is on the rise, although the reasons behind this are unclear. We tested whether individual personality traits could predict such epistemically unfounded beliefs. Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer

“The NFT Bay” — it appears that the 10GB of “data” is nothing of value and the Torrent really is effectively empty

Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia. — Keyboards weren’t designed for Khmer. So Cambodians have just decided to ignore them

Your Fingerprint Can Be Hacked For $5

Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare

In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband’s murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.

In August 2014, a padded FedEx envelope arrived at the Calgary International Airport. It had been shipped from an address in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and on the customs form it had been labelled “Book.” As it was being sorted, a customs agent saw the package move. Inside the envelope was a slim cardboard box with holes along its sides. Inside that box were two small fabric pouches with duct-taped edges. An agent carefully opened the pouches into a plastic mail-carrying bin. Golf ball–size baby turtles emerged.

Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

A man high on drugs swallowed a thermometer. Doctors didn’t remove it, because they thought he was talking nonsense. It remained lodged in him for 5 years. Luckily he had the sense to pour the mercury out before swallowing it

“The NFT Bay” Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of ‘Pirated’ NFTs

NFTs are only valuable as tools for money laundering, tax evasion, and greater fool investment fraud.

We argue that rather than being a wholly random event, birthdays are sometimes selected by parents.

Drawing a hopscotch board on a sidewalk or street in Anoka, Minneapolis is now against the law

The central symptom in the case history is the delusion that the patient has already lived through this life once.

Where people around the world find meaning in life

Pure 100% fruit juices –- A review of the evidence of their effect on risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity

The FDA has asked a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

In recent years, Amazon.com Inc has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers

Tiny hidden spy cameras concealed in sensitive locations including hotels and bathrooms are becoming a significant threat worldwide. These hidden cameras are easily purchasable and are extremely difficult to find with the naked eye due to their small form factor. The state-of-the-art solutions that aim to detect these cameras are limited as they require specialized equipment and yield low detection rates. To overcome these limitations, we present LAPD, a novel hidden camera detection and localization system that leverages the time-of-flight (ToF) sensor on commodity smartphones.

Ghost guns — untraceable firearms without serial numbers, assembled from components bought online — are increasingly becoming the lethal weapon of easy access for those legally barred from buying or owning guns around the country. […] Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. […] Ghost guns, and the niche industry that produces them, have flourished because of a loophole in federal regulation: The parts used to build “privately made firearms” are classified as components, not actual guns, which means that online buyers are not required to undergo background checks or register the weapons. [NY Times]

A. Dneprov: “The Game” (originally published in 1961)

Lawsuit over Subway tuna now says chicken, pork, cattle DNA were detected

The great organic food fraud

The US Treasury Is Buying Private App Data to Target and Investigate People

“cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield

Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer Towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears

Silk modified to reflect sunlight keeps skin 12.5°C cooler than cotton. It is the first fabric to be developed that stays colder than the surrounding air when in sunlight.

Are scented candles harmful to your health? […] while scented candles do produce various vapors and particles that can be unsafe to inhale at high doses, research suggests that with typical use, the dose you get is far below what is considered harmful to your health. […] “under normal conditions of use, scented candles do not pose known health risks to the consumer.” (It’s important to note that while this study’s conclusion is consistent with others, few studies have looked into the health effects from burning scented candles in general. And most, including this one, were conducted by researchers affiliated with the candle industry. But independent researchers have said that the findings are solid.) [NY Times]

Like many men of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Beethoven suffered from a plethora of other illnesses and ailments. […] chronic abdominal pain and diarrhea that might have been due to an inflammatory bowel disorder, depression, alcohol abuse, respiratory problems, joint pain, eye inflammation, and cirrhosis of the liver. This last problem, given his prodigious drinking, may have been the final domino that toppled him into the grave. Bedridden for months, he died in 1827, most likely from liver and kidney failure, peritonitis, abdominal ascites, and encephalopathy. An autopsy revealed severe cirrhosis and dilatation of the auditory and other related nerves in the ear. […] A young musician named Ferdinand Hiller snipped off a lock of hair from the great composer’s head as a keepsake — a common custom at the time. The lock stayed within the Hiller family for nearly a century before somehow making its way to the tiny fishing village of Gilleleje, in Nazi-controlled Denmark and into the hands of the local physician there, Kay Fremming. The doctor helped save the lives of hundreds of Jews escaping Denmark and the Nazis for Sweden, which was about 10 miles across the Øresund Strait, the narrow channel separating the two nations. The theory is that one of these Jewish refugees, perhaps a relative of Ferdinand Hiller, either gave Dr. Fremming the lock of Beethoven’s hair or used it as a payment of some kind. At any rate, the doctor bequeathed the lock, consisting of 582 strands, to his daughter, who subsequently put it up for auction in 1994. It was purchased by an Arizona urologist named Alfredo Guevera for about $7,000. Guevera kept 160 strands. The remaining 422 strands were donated to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California. […] They put the brown, gray and white strands through a number of imaging, DNA, chemical, forensic and toxicology tests. There was no trace of morphine, mercury or arsenic but there was an abnormally elevated lead level, potentially indicating chronic lead poisoning, which could have caused Beethoven’s deafness, even though it does not explain his multiple other disorders. Further studies suggest he probably drank from a goblet containing lead. It should also be noted that wine of that era often contained lead as a sweetener. [PBS]

The moon’s top layer alone has enough oxygen to sustain 8 billion people for 100,000 years

hackers are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future. The threat comes from quantum computers. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.

A man has been rescued after being trapped inside the walls of a theatre in Syracuse, New York state.

Man donated his body to science; company sold $500 tickets to his dissection

The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones” where residents breathe carcinogens. ProPublica reveals where these places are in a first-of-its-kind map and data analysis.

Cardi B may have been onto something when she famously proclaimed that “a hoe never gets cold” — A new study published in the British Journal of Social Psychology has confirmed why scantily clad women are less likely to catch a chill than their covered-up counterparts.

California condors almost went extinct. Now, scientists say, they can reproduce without males.

How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet

The Lenna image may be relatively unknown in pop culture today, but in the engineering world, it remains an icon.

Timeline of the human condition

ant-mimicking spiders

sex offender opened door nude, invited trick-or-treaters inside

Sexual Practices and Satisfaction of Lesbian and Heterosexual Women In their last sexual encounter, lesbian women were more likely to say “I love you,” have sex longer than 30 min, and engage in gentle kissing

“Drinking To Cope” Doesn’t Work, Even When We Believe That It Does

Religion and spirituality are not important psychosocial factors influencing body weight

In a somewhat bizarre set of survey data from 2015, 33 percent of Millennials identified as Gen X, and 8 percent said that they were Boomers. […] Worse, consultants and marketing experts take advantage of the appetite for these sorts of narratives by framing generations monolithically and presenting themselves to clients as authorities on entire segments of the population. […] The dividing lines between generations are a figment of our collective imagination.

A fake gravesite in a real cemetery has made appearances in several films and TV shows over the past 30 years

The Real-Life Whale That Gave Moby Dick His Name

A Literary History of Witches

The COSO male birth control device uses an ultrasound “testicle bath” to temporary stop sperm mobility. The device only needs to be used every few months to keep the sperm inert and prevent eggs from being fertilized during sex.

new study demonstrates how the colors of the giant panda’s fur help it to blend into the background very effectively

Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens

Scientists discover new phase of water, known as “superionic ice,” inside planets

The Only Instrumental Record Ever Banned by US Radio

An NFT Just Sold for $532 Million, making it the biggest sale on record. The sale, however, was illegitimate as the owner bought it for themselves.

Like π and other transcendental numbers, e has an infinite decimal representation — its digits go on forever without any discernible pattern.

Two in five Americans say ghosts exist — and one in five say they’ve encountered one

After targeting verticals like hotels and apartment complexes, Amazon is now rolling out new solutions for healthcare providers and senior living centers

The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk […] Hertz Global Holdings Inc., barely four months out of bankruptcy, placed an order for 100,000 Teslas in the first step of an ambitious plan to electrify its rental-car fleet.

“A Moron in a Hurry” is a formalized legal term used in the UK and Canada and the US. The phrase is typically used in cases of copyright infringement – examining the question of whether a moron in a hurry would spot the difference (or similarity) of two products or services.

Studies suggest that it takes at least a decade to achieve real expertise. MasterClass promises transformation in a few hours.

87% of excess lung cancer risk eliminated if smokers quit before age 45 […] 78% if they quit between ages 45 and 54 […] excess risk of cancer death was erased if they quit by age 35 […] Smoking raises the risk of numerous cancers, Thomson noted — including colon, kidney, bladder, stomach and pancreatic cancer. But lung cancer is the top cancer killer among smokers.

Inside the room it’s so silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels

We describe a population of individuals who chose to undergo medical and/or surgical transition and then detransitioned by discontinuing medications, having surgery to reverse the effects of transition, or both [PDF]

Egyptian security forces detains Ai-Da, the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist, in fear she is part of spying plot

Officials Use Contraceptives to Control Pablo Escobar’s Hippos

Pablo Escobar’s 80 hippos are the first non-human creatures to be legally considered people by a U.S. court

Steak knife made from hardened wood is 3 times sharper than steel

How much sex do porn stars want to have off-set?

Rock Paper Scissors Deluxe Edition costs $29, includes actual rock, paper and scissors

Fraudsters Deepfaked Company Director’s Voice In $35 Million Bank Heist

Startup is creating personalized deepfakes for corporations — Major companies in India are using Rephrase.ai to create avatars of celebrities and executives, and commercial use is coming soon.

Japanese police arrested a 43-year-old man for using artificial intelligence to effectively unblur pixelated porn videos. Penises and vaginas are pixelated in Japanese porn because an obscenity law forbids the explicit depictions of genitalia.

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week [“When people can not change things, they change the words” –Jean Jaurès]

Donald Trump Does a SPAC Deal — I think that a more realistic valuation method here is not to worry about cash flows at all — as Trump SPAC clearly does not — and treat the stock simply as a token of public interest in Donald Trump.

A special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is a company with no commercial operations that is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company. Also known as “blank check companies,” SPACs have been around for decades, but their popularity has soared in recent years.

Poaching drove the evolution of tusk-free elephants — Researchers have identified genetic factors that stop tusk development

There are some scattered laboratory studies that suggest being cold might weaken the immune system, making us more vulnerable to those viruses. A 2017 study found that immune cells that are chilled are less effective at fighting off viruses, at least in a lab dish […] In a 2005 study by other researchers, college students whose feet were soaked in cold water for 20 minutes a day were more likely to get sick than those not exposed to the cold. [NY Times] More: Contrary to popular belief, cold weather cannot make you sick, at least not directly.

Merkins are wigs for the pubic area

Facial recognition cameras installed in UK school canteens

Hooters under fire over new ‘crotch string’ uniform shorts

According to economist George Taylor’s hemline index theory, the length of women’s skirts and dresses can be indicative of the direction of financial markets. Meaning, hemlines rise in times of economic prosperity and elongate when the economy slows.

Is the Hemline Index Actually Real?

Emotion in relation to ham varied. FaceReader was used to determine the facial expression.

Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers.

Piece by piece, the mythology around ridesharing is falling apart. Uber and Lyft promised ubiquitous self-driving cars by as soon as this year. They promised an end to private car ownership. They promised to reduce congestion in the largest cities. They promised consistently affordable rides. They promised to boost public transit use. They promised profitable business models. They promised a surfeit of well-paying jobs. Heck, they even promised flying cars. Well, none of that has gone as promised. […] Uber and Lyft envisioned a future where software algorithms would push each car to host three or more passengers, easing traffic and providing a complement to public transit options. Instead, […] The duration of traffic jams increased by nearly 5 percent in urban areas since Uber and Lyft moved in. […] The efficiencies of ride hailing were supposed to all but end car ownership — instead vehicle sales are on the rise again this year, after a down year in 2020. [NY Times]

When companies start secret projects it’s common that everyone involved has to sign an NDA [Non-disclosure agreement]. The development of the original iPhone was so secret that people had to sign an NDA in order to sign the iPhone’s NDA