Handwashing and Detergent Treatment Greatly Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load on Halloween Candy Handled by COVID-19 Patients — From the candies not washed posthandling, we detected SARS-CoV-2 on 60% of candies that were deliberately coughed on, 60% of candies normally handled with unwashed hands, but only 10% of candies handled after hand washing.

“You hit the gym at 4:30 in the morning, go to work and then you get wasted”

The claim that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes has been greatly exaggerated

The latest edition of the DSM-5, sometimes known as “psychiatry’s bible,” includes a controversial new diagnosis: prolonged grief disorder. [NY Times]

a student at Hosei University, Japan, wrote a thesis about sleeping with a cat night after night in locations chosen by the cat.

Modern research methods have made it possible to trace quotations to the most accurate sources. […] Because it capitalizes on Big Data and other technological advances, the Yale Book can claim an authoritativeness that is unsurpassed. Hundreds of famous misattributions have been corrected — and probably thousands of misquotations as well. The Yale Book can legitimately claim to be the most accurate, thorough, and up-to-date quotation book ever compiled.

After a decade of work, the FIDO Alliance says it’s found the missing piece in the bridge to a password-free future.

In maglev innovation, Chinese researchers transfer power wirelessly to moving train

Rooftop gardens and greenery can help ease some of the severe heat in cities, according to research from climate scientists

New research shows that pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW — Zodiac Killer cipher is cracked after eluding sleuths for 51 years

Scientists believe there could be an ‘anti-universe’ next to ours – where time runs backwards

Feedback networks, unstable oscillators, shaky fat quivering filters, distorted mayhem, a bunch of labels in Japanese, a bunch of switches and knobs and a tape recorder – Bentō is a delight of software madness. It’s a delicious meal of noise.

Mike Tyson Is Making Pot Edibles in the Shape of a Bitten Ear

We considered the concept of the discrepancy between a patient’s desired time in bed (TIB) and total sleep time (TST), which we termed the DBST. The DBST could be a possible new sleep index due to its relation with insomnia severity, depression, dysfunctional beliefs about sleep, or preoccupation with sleep.

Even Moderate Ambient Light During Sleep Is Harmful – Increases Risk for Heart Disease and Diabetes

(Why) Is misinformation a problem?

This observational study recorded the frequency of same-aged, adult human groups appearing in public spaces through 2636 hours, recording group formation by 1.2mn people via 170 research assistants in 46 countries across the world. […] ~50% more female-female than male-male pairs are observed in public spaces globally

Is information the fifth state of matter?

The Limitless Potential of Virtual Influencers on TikTok

Cryptocurrencies: The Power of Memes — The byzantine premium arises because of confusion around the apparent complexities of blockchain. Investors read confusing, jargon-laden articles and become convinced that smarter people than themselves are investing, so they should too.

Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild. It takes only a second to crack the handful of weak keys.

A $4 Billion Hedge Fund Is Shorting Tether’s Stablecoin

The 18 Minutes of Trading Chaos That Broke the Nickel Market Nickel prices usually move a few hundred dollars per ton in a day. For most of the past decade, they’d traded between $10,000 and $20,000. Yet the day before, the market had started to unravel, with prices rising by a stunning 66% to $48,078. Already at an all-time high by 5:42 a.m., it lurched higher in stomach-churning leaps, soaring $30,000 in a matter of minutes. Just after 6 a.m., the price of nickel passed $100,000 a ton. Miners, traders, and manufacturers often use the market to make short bets—that is, to make money when prices fall. And when those wagers move violently in the opposite direction, they can be hit with huge margin calls, or requests to put down more cash to back their trades. The head of one London metals brokerage recalls feeling sick as he watched the moves, realizing what the spike in prices would mean for his company, the market, and the global metals industry. Nickel’s 250% price spike in little more than 24 hours plunged the industry into chaos, triggering billions of dollars in losses for traders who bet the wrong way and leading the London Metal Exchange to suspend trading for the first time in three decades.

In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents. By inverting the use of our machine learning models, we had transformed our innocuous generative model from a helpful tool of medicine to a generator of likely deadly molecules.

The prevalence of ash tattoos is increasing as a way for those mourning a loved one to cherish that person’s life and legacy

Officials intend to reserve the first 100 or more retail licenses to sell marijuana in New York for people who have been convicted of related offenses, or their relatives. [NY Times]

Healthy and cancerous cells emit different ’smells’ ants can distinguish between

Studies show that both women and men want longer foreplay than they generally experience

individuals largely lack insight into the quality of their judgments, which is particularly problematic because they cannot reliably discriminate between lies and truths.

Tyrannosaurus rex may have been three species, scientists say

algae with three sexes that all mate in pairs identified in Japanese river

How low can you go? Kakonomics describes the situation where both parties prefer to give and receive a low-quality product. They ”connive on a low-low exchange”, and trust in each other’s untrustworthiness.

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers’ viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law.

Those wishing to publish a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night need to request permission, pay for rights, and then credit the artist appropriately. Otherwise, there’s risk of fines. […] According to European Copyright Law, such monuments are protected for the lifespan of the work’s legal creator—plus 70 years. The Tower’s creator, Gustave Eiffel, died in 1923, so in 1993 it re-entered public domain, but there’s still un petit problème: The lights installed by Pierre Bideau didn’t ignite until 1985, which means nighttime images and videos that feature his choreographed light show are still protected under the law.

This is from NASA’s Apollo 10 mission’s transcript

Disney is developing planned communities for fans who never want to leave its clutches [Thanks Tim]

The FDA needs to take another look at laser-based ‘vaginal rejuvenation’

Here, we present continuous electroencephalography (EEG) recording from a dying human brain

With a few exceptions, musical taste has been researched via likes or preferences of certain types of music. The present study focuses on disliked music

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency

Distraction is no longer a relief from tedium but its metronome

“I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.” [Stephen Hawking on time travel, M-theory, and extra terrestrial life, 2012]

One of the two main hypersonic prototypes now under development in the United States is meant to fly at speeds between Mach 15 and Mach 20, or more than 11,400 miles per hour. This means that when fired by the U.S. submarines or bombers stationed at Guam, they could in theory hit China’s important inland missile bases, like Delingha, in less than 15 minutes. President Vladimir Putin has likewise claimed that one of Russia’s new hypersonic missiles will travel at Mach 10, while the other will travel at Mach 20. If true, that would mean a Russian aircraft or ship firing one of them near Bermuda could strike the Pentagon, some 800 miles away, in five minutes. China, meanwhile, has flight-tested its own hypersonic missiles at speeds fast enough to reach Guam from the Chinese coastline within minutes. [NY Times]

The post-modern novel “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” by David Markson (1988) pre- sents the reader with a very challenging non-linear narrative, that itself appears to one of the novel’s themes. Using a combina- tion of text analysis, entity recognition and networks, we plot repetitive structures in the novel’s narrative relating them to its critical analysis. [PDF]

Suicide Club (secret society): 30 members riding the San Francisco cable cars naked and making post cards commemorating the event was perhaps the best known [prank]

Cacophony Society: According to self-designated members of the Society, “you may already be a member.”

have you ever seen a baby’s hand x ray?

AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy [images]

The winning bid in Melania Trump’s NFT auction appears to have come from a wallet associated with Melania Trump

Exploring the ownership of child-like sex dolls

How animals heal themselves ― and get high

A child’s TikTok stardom took an alarming turn when an adult fan came to her door with a gun. But her parents haven’t stopped her from posting. [NY Times]

How do we know Google is dying?

Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn’t drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. […] “People become more cautious in their decisions with increasing age” […] it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. [more]

To make an Olympic ski jump, China clad a hillside in steel and blanketed it with artificial snow. To construct a high-speed rail line linking the venues and Beijing, engineers blasted tunnels through the surrounding mountains. And to keep the coronavirus at bay, workers are conducting tens of thousands of P.C.R. tests on Games participants every day. Hosting the Winter Olympics is costing China billions of dollars, a scale of expenditure that has made the event less appealing to many cities around the world in recent years. More and more of them have concluded that the Games are not worth being left with a hefty bill, white elephant stadiums and fewer benefits from tourism than they had hoped. But China looks at the Games with a different calculus. Beijing has long relied on heavy investments in building railway lines, highways and other infrastructure to provide millions of jobs to its citizens and reduce transportation costs. […] Perhaps most important of all to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the Olympics are a chance to demonstrate to the world his country’s unity and confidence under his leadership. [NY Times]

Swiss cottages in England

How “Fake” My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins Lyrics Ended Up on Spotify

everyday experiments

Excessive Bell-Ringing By Priest Takes Its Toll On Italian Community

Have we finally found the recipe for making rain? — Research suggests electric shocks could be key to growing raindrops

One in three Americans have high levels of toxic weed-killing chemical in their bodies

Two chemists from the University of Copenhagen have studied which chemical substances are released into liquids by popular types of soft plastic reusable bottles. “We were taken aback by the large amount of chemical substances we found in water after 24 hours in the bottles. There were hundreds of substances in the water – including substances never before found in plastic, as well as substances that are potentially harmful to health. After a dishwasher cycle, there were several thousand.” […] They detected more than 400 different substances from the bottle plastic and over 3,500 substances derived from dishwasher soap. A large portion of these are unknown substances that the researchers have yet to identify. But even of the identified chemicals, the toxicity of at least 70 % remains unknown.

how recycling pee could help to save the world

People See Political Opponents As More Stupid Than Evil

A nursing mom was shocked to discover her armpits were leaking milk. “it’s totally normal for the breast to have tissue that extends into your armpit.”

Sleeping for an extra hour every night can help you lose weight, study finds

Casual sex, also referred to as a hookup, has been associated with a range of negative emotional outcomes for women, including regret, anxiety, depression and social stigma. Gender differences were found for both sexual motivations and emotional outcomes of casual sex, with women generally having more negative emotional outcomes than men.

The somatosensory homunculus shows an exaggerated human figure that illustrates the proportion of the brain devoted to the sense of touch in each part of the body. Until recently, these homunculi have been male due to the lack of information on the female somatosensory cortex. Based on more current brain research, the authors present the first sculpted 3D female somatosensory homunculus

In many cases, human decision-makers are just as much of a black-box as the algorithms that are meant to replace them

“The left hemisphere analyses lifeless parts; the right synthesises the living Gestalt whole.” Here we go again with lateralization nonsense.

It has been said that (in some cases) court judges are more lenient on those accused of crimes if the date of the court hearing falls on the defendant’s birthday. But can things also work in the reverse direction? What if, for example, the judge’s favorite football team have just lost a match?

SpaceX just lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

At the time of the American Revolution the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves did not yet exist… they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.”

The Messinian salinity crisis was a geological event during which the Mediterranean Sea went into a cycle of nearly complete desiccation (drying-up) from 5.96 to 5.33 Ma (million years ago). It ended with the Zanclean flood, when the Atlantic refilled the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian teenager, 16, sentenced to five years for alleged plan to target FSB building in Minecraft

The black death, which plagued Europe, West Asia and North Africa from 1347 to 1352, is the most infamous pandemic in history. Historians have estimated that up to 50 percent of Europe’s population died during the pandemic. Now, a new study demonstrates that the plague’s mortality in Europe was not as universal or as widespread as long thought.

“My original starting point with grey squirrel was taste. But it’s also great for the environment,” says Paul Wedgwood, one of Scotland’s leading chefs, whose restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile has had grey squirrel on the menu since 2008. “It’s mellow, nutty and a bit gamey. It’s just a really nice flavour, and it’s easy to match. Anyone who’s doing rabbit could just easily swap in squirrel”

British tourist reunited with false teeth he lost while vomiting in Spain 11 years ago

Kleptomaniac New Zealand parrot steals GoPro, films airborne escape

Virginia Police Used Fake Forensic Documents To Secure Confessions From Criminal Suspects

Florida sheriff halts Facebook comments because too many crimes reported

Over 500 mobile apps are now using the term ‘metaverse’ to attract new users

Rock Band to Release 1,000 30-Second Songs to Trick Spotify Royalty Payout

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market

Florida home to be sold in novel non-fungible token deal

Family’s lawsuit says DNA ancestry kit revealed daughter was conceived with wrong sperm The man who helped raise Ms Galloway along with her mother, Jeanine, was not her biological father because another man’s sperm was used during a fertility procedure.

North Korea Missile programme funded through stolen crypto, UN report says

Facebook whistleblower confronts Boston Dynamics first generation human infiltration unit prototype + Trump vs Trump [Thanks Tim!]

Trans Girl Sees Snow For The First Time

Crows trained to clean up cigarette butts on Swedish streets

People tended to reveal 26% (Study 8) to 30% (Study 7) of other people’s secrets. […] people revealed approximately 18% to 27% of secrets about someone committing emotional in!delity or planning a surprise […] people revealed secrets at almost a coin-”ip (approximately 30% to 46%) when they were about hurting someone, lying to someone, and physical self-harm [PDF]

Feminist-identified men were substantially more likely to report erectile dysfunction medication use than non-feminist men

The findings indicate that 37% of the participants contacted other persons because they dreamed about them

Researchers have used an MRI scanner to guide a magnetic “seed” through the brain to heat and destroy cancer cells. It consists of ferromagnetic thermoseeds, which are basically 2mm metal spheres, that are guided to a tumor using magnetic propulsion generated by an MRI scanner and then remotely heated to kill nearby cancer cells.

MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.

North Korea hacked him. So he took down its Internet. He found numerous known but unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems that have allowed him to singlehandedly launch “denial-of-service” attacks on the servers and routers the country’s few internet-connected networks depend on.

Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion and Facebook loses users for the first time in its history

The Plan to Put Bitcoin in Mouse DNA With a Genetically Engineered Virus BitMouseDAO has exactly two investors and almost no money, but they do have a wild idea

‘I Cloned My Dog—They Have Completely Different Personalities’

Polar bears move into abandoned Arctic weather station – photo essay

The Secrets of Space Invaders “The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked,” he explained. “The hardware had a limitation—it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone.”

Trump coin […] It could be yours, for just $0. (Plus $9.99 shipping and handling.)[NY Times]

More and more vultures eat their prey butt first […] That approach exposes a vulture to even more bacteria than they’d get from regular old rotting meat. […] A recent study found that vultures have tons of microbes on their faces (528 different species, on average) but shockingly few in the gut (around 76 types). In fact, the only bacteria that survive in a vulture’s gut are the really nasty ones.

Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed

Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss! The dynamics of mistypings and misspellings […] strengthen the meaning (e.g., ‘huuuuuge’), imply sarcasm (e.g., ‘suuuuure’), show excitement (e.g., ‘yeeeessss’), or communicate danger (e.g., ‘nooooooooooooo’). We will refer to words that are amenable to such lengthening as ‘stretchable words’.

A neurologist, at age 55, developed an irrepressible urge to rhyme after a series of strokes and seizures. His pronounced focus on rhyming led him to actively participate in freestyle rap and improvisation. More: How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

Why Is Everyone Smoking Toad Venom? […] Bufo is the venom of the Sonoran desert toad, Bufo alvarius, which contains the molecule 5-MeO-DMT, one of the most potent psychotropic drugs ever discovered. Related: Dogs that have attacked toads have suffered paralysis or even death.

Militarized Dolphins Protect Almost a Quarter of the US Nuclear Stockpile […] For protection against enemy divers, dolphins will swim up to the infiltrator, bump into them and place a buoy device on their back or a limb using their mouth. The buoy then drags the outed diver to the surface for easy capture.

Facebook’s Libra is still dead — Diem to be sold off for spare parts [Diem was the rebranding of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project] The intellectual property will consist of some trademarks, a website and the open-source code for a mediocre permissioned blockchain and various helper projects.

I’m the author of the best-selling book System Design Interview-An Insider’s Guide. 11 days ago, two fraudsters hijacked the “Buy Now” button on Amazon, fulfilling all orders with a different book.

How to Download Everything Amazon Knows About You (It’s a Lot)

Canadian Restaurant Ordered to Close After Accepting Dog Photos Instead of Vaccine Proof

Legislator dies using medical suicide law he helped pass

Cannabinoid receptors in the brain appear to play a key role in the euphoric experience known as the “runner’s high”

A machine learning model has now been taught to predict a person’s years of life simply by looking at their retina, which is the tissue at the back of the eye.

YouTuber Accused of Crashing a Plane for Views. Now the Feds Are Investigating

Investors are paying millions for virtual land in the metaverse — Yorio tells CNBC her company sold 100 virtual private islands last year for $15,000 each. “Today, they’re selling for about $300,000 each, which is coincidentally the same as the average home price in America,” she said.

The Federal Reserve took a key step in weighing the creation of its own digital currency

A leading French aquarium vendor has decided to stop selling round fish bowls because they drive fish mad and kill them quickly.

The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it.

Mexico’s Little-Known Attempt to Save Freud From the Nazis

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