Pa. woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to force rivals off daughter’s cheerleading squad

A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16

Hedge Funds Are Training 16-Year-Old Interns in Singapore

Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 — Each carat removes 20 tons of greenhouse gas from the sky, entrepreneurs say

Google must face $5B lawsuit over tracking private internet use, judge rules — Judge finds tech giant didn’t notify users their data could still be collected in incognito mode

NFTs have already given rise to new types of copyright infringement, frustrating artists

Cracking of encrypted messaging service dealt major blow to organised crime — Sky ECC promised a 5 million USD (€4.2 million) prize on its website, which is currently down, to anyone who could crack its encryption. It is not yet clear if Belgian authorities plan to claim the reward.

how to operate an airport in Antarctica

Wooden Replica of Mies’ Farnsworth House

Farnworth House VR Tour

Degaussing + Manually deguassing a CRT monitor using neodymium magnet

Russian Lawmakers Approve Initial Reading Of Bill Allowing ‘Accidental’ Corruption

We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation, a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness.

When it came to definitions of rough sex, the most commonly endorsed items were: choking (77%), hair pulling (75%), spanking (69%), being pinned down (66%), being tied up (65%)…

Research shows that high levels of media multitasking may be associated with a decreased cognitive function

Fourteen horses were used in a 4-phases mirror test (covered mirror, open mirror, invisible mark, visible colored mark).

AI Identifies Pain Levels From Patient Data

Body Mass Index and Risk for COVID-19

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world

Inside Jeff Bezos’s failed attempt to make Amazon “cool” like Apple and Nike

What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?

scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes.

Man sues Hertz over receipt that cleared him of murder

Hundreds of sewage leaks detected thanks to AI

Almost all men want to feel sexually desired, but few actually do

One in four men has faked a climax at least once

In seven studies (n = 1,133), adults tried to create funny ideas and then rated the funniness of their responses, which were also independently rated by judges. People were relatively modest and self-critical about their ideas.

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself

One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). […] Greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.

A COVID-19 patient died after experiencing a 3-hour erection that doctors struggled to treat

there are some meaningful signs that even these quite scary-seeming versions of the disease may not prove all that scary in the end. I’m very worried about the Brazilian variant, since there is some evidence that it has achieved “immune escape” and produced a wave of reinfections. But the course of the others contains some real contradictions which I don’t yet know how to resolve. They appear to be considerably more infectious, and perhaps more lethal, than the “classic” strains. And yet they are growing in prevalence precisely as cases are falling nearly everywhere in the world. How can that be? Seasonality is surely playing a role in that decline, but if a new variant is 50 percent more transmissible than the old, you would expect it would require quite dramatic new restrictions to produce a decline in cases. In other words, it would be really hard, and pretty rare, to engineer a decline in the presence of those variants. Instead, it seems to be happening everywhere. [NY mag]

Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Security experts are now trying to alert and assist these victims before malicious hackers launch what many refer to with a mix of dread and anticipation as “Stage 2,” when the bad guys revisit all these hacked servers and seed them with ransomware or else additional hacking tools for crawling even deeper into victim networks. [Krebs on Security]

A study out of Harvard in 2020 also found that although cryptocurrency mining isn’t “burning down the planet”, there is “a scenario where each $1 of cryptocurrency coin value created would be responsible for $0.66 in health and climate damages.”

Earth makes a tiny seismic rumble every 26 seconds. No one knows why.

How Instagram Celebrities Promote Dubai’s Underground Animal Trade

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

The more we can google, the less we know

YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries

Block 800 NY Times reporters for $0 — The app’s creator is unknown

Suspected dog and cat meat factory in China raided after owner traces missing pet by GPS

Sidewalk robots get legal rights as “pedestrians”

UBER DRIVER COUGHED ON, ASSAULTED & PEPPER SPRAYED

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?

Would you take a coronavirus risk? — We are stuck in the middle of a massive multiplayer coordination problem

Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business” […] But as the market gets more and more competitive creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams. […] For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game. […] “Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for.” [NY Times]

One of the most active QAnon networks is in Japan, where followers believe the imperial family has been replaced by body doubles and suggest that World War II-era Emperor Hirohito was a CIA or British agent who owned the patent for the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [..] QAnon also has enormous support in Britain. A survey by civic group Hope Not Hate last year found that 26 percent of Britons believed prominent public figures are part of a pedophile child-trafficking network, while an additional 17 percent said that the pandemic is part of a “depopulation plan” — another favorite QAnon belief around the world. [Washington Post]

Bird migration forecasts in real-time — When, where, and how far will birds migrate?

The secret New York apartment behind my bathroom mirror

Floral Motifs Are Digitally Printed onto Blonde Hair

Preliminary Examination, 3B District Court, March 2, 2021

Male nurse arrested after telling patients gynecological exam was necessary part of COVID-19 testing

The words ‘dopamine’ and ‘mindfulness’ have lost all meaning

fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched or zero-matched

While physical attractiveness was less important to blind men, blind women considered physical attractiveness as important as sighted women.

Children’s Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception

Intranasal vaccines might stop the spread of the coronavirus more effectively than needles in arms

the vast majority of people who are vaccinated will be protected from Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, vaccinated people may still be able to transmit the virus, even though they do not display any symptoms.

SARS-CoV-2 was present on the ocular surface in 52 of 91 patients with COVID-19

During Lockdown, Meaningful Activity Is More Fulfilling Than Simply Staying Busy

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

I think I know what intelligence is; I think I know how brains do it. And AI is not doing what brains do.

Deciphering Bitcoin Blockchain Data by Cohort Analysis

Why Do NFTs Matter for Music?

Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT

This frog’s lungs act like noise cancelling headphones

This thesis addresses a neglected area of castles studies – the spiral stair. [full study | PDF]

Japan asks China to stop performing anal swab tests for COVID on its citizens

Rooster will appear in court after killing owner during illegal cockfight

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up, or Keep Talking, Study

Google to Stop Selling Ads Based on Your Specific Web Browsing — Citing privacy concerns, Google says it won’t use technologies that track individuals across multiple websites

Humans correctly identified six emotions in three breeds of dogs

Female and Male Reflections on Their Initial Experience of Coitus — “If you could go back in time to your first sexual intercourse, would you want to change anything? If so, what would you change and why?” […] a majority of both males (66.95%) and females (54.00%) reporting they would not want to change anything about their first coital experience. Among respondents who reported a desired change the three primary desired change themes were partner (15.72%), age (8.18%), and location (5.03%)

Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex.

There is a famous anecdote about an experiment once conducted on a group of unsuspecting diners who were served a meal of steak, chips, and peas under dim illumination. Partway through the meal, the lighting was returned to normal levels of illumination, revealing to the guests that the steak they were eating was, in fact, blue, the chips green, and the peas red.

Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time? [PDF]

‘When will it end?’ — How a changing virus is reshaping scientists’ views on COVID-19

The Dangers of Brain Science Overdetermining Legal Outcomes

The guidance is for members of the office. It is meant to help them in their task of making it as easy as possible for readers to understand the Bills that we produce. [PDF]

How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency

Newest Las Vegas ’slot machine’ is 11 stories tall and dispenses used cars

as restaurants increasingly receive takeout orders online and through apps, they face a new challenge called “friendly fraud” or “chargebacks.” In the scam, a customer orders food, often through a delivery service, then receives their meal, but disputes the charge with their credit card company to get a refund.

To fight climate change, save the whales, some scientists say — In death, whales carry the tons of carbon stored in their massive bodies down to rest on the seafloor, where it can remain for centuries. Whale excrement fertilizes the ocean, producing large phytoplankton blooms that absorb enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.

Men more than women report regret passing up short-term sexual opportunities (inaction regret), while women regret having had sexual encounters (action regret). will men who regret passing up sex engage in more short-term sex following regret? Will women who regret short-term encounters either choose better quality partners, reduce number of one-night stands or shift their strategy to long-term relationships? There was no clear evidence for the proposed functional shifts in sexual behavior.

Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome

Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes (Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense. Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.)

Huge, Global Study of Plastic Toys Finds Over 100 Substances That May Harm Children

How to become a super memorizer – and what it does to your brain

Arnold came across something called the Paranormal Challenge, a contest offering $250,000 to anyone offering indisputable proof of supernatural abilities. Over the years it’s devised experiments to test people who claim they can read minds, dim lights with the power of their brains, and peer, X-ray-like, through people’s skin. So far none have passed the test or claimed the prize.

Researchers virtually open and read sealed historic letters

Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet

How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist

Banks in Germany Tell Customers to Take Deposits Elsewhere — Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest.

The first AI-written play, “AI: When a robot writes a play,” tells the journey of a robot who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death. The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet.

Goldman Sachs restarts cryptocurrency desk amid bitcoin boom

Bitcoin could in the future become the preferred currency for international trade or face a “speculative implosion”

Recently, a botnet that researchers have been following for about two years began using a new way to prevent command-and-control server takedowns: by camouflaging one of its IP addresses in the bitcoin blockchain.

The NFT frenzy

How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

Body Ballet by Nude Robot

NASA hid secret messages in the Perseverance parachute

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Fisher-Price® My Home Office — Better grab a latte to go, that report is due this morning

dentists are able to tell if you’ve recently performed oral sex

Forty-three percent of Americans shopping online experienced package theft last year, up from 36 percent in 2019[NY Times]

Murderers benefits from expressing guilt and deontological beliefs — Even if participants judged a person who murdered their parents or many innocent people in a terrorist plane attack.

How Much Older Do You Get When a Wrinkle Appears on Your Face?

We are now discovering that telomeres are an unreliable ageing clock

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April — Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

We tend to not perceive information about the world around us accurately. Instead, our brains interpret new information through a host of innate and learned mechanisms that can introduce bias and distortions One of the best studied mechanisms that guide – and distort – our perception is the psychophysical Weber-Fechner law. According to this empirically derived, mathematically formulated law we tend to put more emphasis on smaller deviations in size while underestimating larger changes. Here we investigate the hypothesis that our perception of data associated with the spread of COVID-19 and similar pandemics is governed by the same psychophysical laws. We demonstrate that the Weber-Fechner law can be shown to directly affect the decision-making of officials in response to this global crisis as well as the greater public at large.

deception is perceived to be ethical, and individuals want to be deceived, when deception is perceived to prevent unnecessary harm

In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure. Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent. There were not enough subjects who drank more than three cups daily to know if more coffee would decrease the risk further. [NY Times]

The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, acting as a shield against the solar wind (a stream of charged particles and radiation) that flows out from the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stable in strength and direction, and it has the ability to flip or reverse itself. Some 42,000 years ago, the poles did just that for around 800 years, before swapping back. […] the flip, along with changing solar winds, could have triggered an array of dramatic climate shifts leading to environmental change and mass extinctions. […] experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards.

“Can only have been painted by a madman” — Inscription on ‘The Scream’ That Baffled Experts for Decades Was Written by Edvard Munch Himself, New Research Shows

Florida women wear ‘granny’ disguise to try to get Covid vaccine

Drone Swarms Are Getting Too Fast For Humans To Fight, U.S. General Warns — Previously: Autonomous killer drones

Citibank can’t get back $500 million it wired by mistake, judge rules

Air pollution is associated with poorer quality sperm, finds study

The coronavirus is here to stay — many scientists expect the virus that causes COVID-19 to become endemic, but it could pose less danger over time

Cinemas rent out their auditoriums to gamers to bring in a new revenue stream ($90 for two hours)

Women better at reading minds than men, study

Findings suggest that individuals are unable to accurately identify AI-generated artwork

The Most Powerful Artificial Intelligence Knows Nothing About Investing

we developed an experimental “stock market”’ task in which cohorts of 4 rats drove asset prices up and down by selecting and subsequently buying, selling, or holding “stocks” to earn sweet liquid reward. […] Rats’ choice of the sell option demonstrated a robust tendency toward realizing gains more quickly than losses, which is characteristic of the “disposition effect” in human stock markets. Our results indicate that rats exhibit behavioral biases similar to human investors

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

Fake Amazon reviews ‘being sold in bulk’ online

Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax [Washington Post]

Free Trading Isn’t Free: How Robinhood Makes Money

List Of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC

The 25 Greatest Art Heists of All Time

In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension

The essence of zero-knowledge proofs is that it is trivial to prove that one possesses knowledge of certain information by simply revealing it; the challenge is to prove such possession without revealing the information itself or any additional information

How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside? This riddle may seem confounding, but its digital equivalent is now so solvable that it’s becoming a business plan. IBM is the latest innovator to tackle the well-studied cryptographic technique called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which allows for the processing of encrypted files without ever needing to decrypt them first.

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

Basic music theory guide for beginners

All the COVID virus in the world could fit in a can of coke, says mathematician

vagina-scented face masks + Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle (“The candle exploded and emitted huge flames”)

Exhaled aerosol increases with degree of COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity

females are overall more aware of their smile and the impact it has on their public image

Traditional yoga encompasses a variety of practices, such as physical postures, breathing techniques, meditation practices, and ethical teachings. Numerous studies and meta-analyses have demonstrated yoga’s efficacy in promoting mental and physical health. Conversely, little is known about how the diverse components of yoga contribute to its overall effect. […] combined interventions incorporating multiple components consistently outperformed simpler interventions. Adding breathing and/or meditation practices to yoga interventions proved particularly beneficial in this regard

Cats show no avoidance of people who behave negatively to their owner

Researchers teach four pigs how to play a rudimentary joystick-enabled video game

Companies with no business plan, no profit, and no revenue are flooding Wall Street. They’re called SPACs, and investors are pouring money into them.

There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total, and 2.6 million Bitcoin left to be mined. 18.4 million Bitcoin were mined in 10 years, but it will take another 120 years to mine the remaining 2.6 million.

The statement there can never be more than 21 million bitcoins is 100% false.

The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), a 1988 book better known as The KLF, is a step-by-step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills. [things magazine]

Serviette Sculptures: Mattia Giegher’s Treatise on Napkin Folding (1629)

Arkansas farmer pleads guilty to dumping dead animals on neighbor’s grave while dressed as a woman

Doesn’t everybody jaywalk? On the motivated enforcement of frequently violated rules

“bitcoin’s fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact”

What you should know about Clubhouse, the invite-only, audio social app

Facebook, which has a history of cloning its competitors, has started working on an audio chat product, to compete with Clubhouse. [NY Times]

What other variants might be out there?

Our results show that therapeutic and prophylactic administration of EIDD-2801, an oral broad spectrum antiviral currently in phase II–III clinical trials, dramatically inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication in vivo and thus has significant potential for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

New AI tool predicts who’ll die from COVID-19 with up to 90% accuracy

Viral ‘I’m not a cat’ filter is a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops

This is the first study to examine deception across the entire lifespan. We tested 1005 Science museum visitors from 6 to 77 years. Adolescents tell most lies, children and the elderly the least.

concordant drinking couples may achieve immediate benefits for couple harmony from drinking alcohol together.

Psychedelics in combination with psychotherapy are remarkably efficient at treating depression. At the correct doses, psychedelics are well tolerated, producing only minor side effects such as transient fear, perception of illusions, nausea/vomiting or headaches. These fleeting side effects pale in comparison to the severity of commonly prescribed antidepressants, which include dangerous changes in heart rate and blood pressure, paradoxical increases in suicidality, and withdrawal symptoms.

In 2017 a team of researchers used Google Street View images to study the distribution of car types in the US and then used that data to determine the demographic makeup of the country. It turns out that the car you drive is a surprisingly reliable proxy for your income level, your education, your occupation, and even the way you vote in elections. Another team of researchers used the images of people’s houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in a car accident.

Vaccines or Not, Scientists Now Believe Covid is Here to Stay

There are currently four endemic coronaviruses that, for most people, just cause a cold. Whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, will join them will be down to two predominant factors that control how a virus behaves in a population: the virus’s biology and the immunity of the host population.

SARS-CoV-2 mutations similar to those in the B1.1.7 UK variant could arise in cases of chronic infection, where treatment over an extended period can provide the virus multiple opportunities to evolve, say scientists.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter Target Resellers of Hacked Accounts — Particularly prized are short usernames, which can often be resold for thousands of dollars to those looking to claim a choice vanity name. […] Facebook seized hundreds of accounts — mainly on Instagram — that have been stolen from legitimate users through a variety of intimidation and harassment tactics, including hacking, coercion, extortion, sextortion, SIM swapping, and swatting.

A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead.

Researchers Test Detection Methods For AI-Generated Content

The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy. — Researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge. It has also led to far messier data sets: they may unintentionally include photos of minors, use racist and sexist labels, or have inconsistent quality and lighting. The trend could help explain the growing number of cases in which facial-recognition systems have failed with troubling consequences.

In 2016, the N.S.A.’s own hacking tools were hacked, by a still unknown assailant. Those tools were picked up first by North Korea, then Russia, in the most destructive cyberattack in history. Over the next three years, Iran emerged from a digital backwater into one of the most prolific cyber armies in the world. China, after a brief pause, is back to pillaging America’s intellectual property. And, we are now unwinding a Russian attack on our software supply chain that compromised the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Energy and its nuclear labs and the Department of Homeland Security, the very agency charged with keeping Americans safe. We know this not because of some heroic N.S.A. hack, or intelligence feat, but because the government was tipped off by a security company, FireEye, after it discovered the same Russian hackers in its own systems. America remains the world’s most advanced cyber superpower, but the hard truth, the one intelligence officials do not want to discuss, is that it is also its most targeted and vulnerable. At this very moment, we are getting hacked from so many sides that it has become virtually impossible to keep track. [NY Times]

A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Paris court finds France guilty of failing to meet its own Paris climate accord commitments

Scholars generally do agree that conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. They tap into basic aspects of human cognition and psychology, which may help explain why they take hold so easily — and why they’re seemingly impossible to kill. […] “The general hypothesis that’s put out there in the media is [that] everyone’s becoming conspiracists, and now is the golden age of conspiracy theory,” Uscinski says. “We find no such thing whatsoever.”

You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots.

Sterling Silver Crazy Straw, $275