Around eight years ago, scientists found that mice cleared of senescent cells lived 25% longer than untreated ones. They also had healthier hearts and took much longer to develop age-related diseases like cancer and cataracts. They even looked younger. Unfortunately, human trials of senolytics—drugs that target senescent cells—haven’t been quite as successful. […] it does illustrate how complicated the biology of aging is. Researchers can’t even agree on what the exact mechanisms of aging are and which they should be targeting. […] people who have opted for cryopreservation. There are hundreds of bodies in storage—bodies of people who believed they might one day be reanimated. For them, the hopes are slim. I asked Justice whether she thought they stood a chance at a second life. “Honest answer?” she said. “No.” […] In a 2017 paper making the case for a limit to the human life span, scientists Jan Vijg and Eric Le Bourg wrote […] “A species does not need to live for eternity to thrive.”

World’s oldest man says ‘it’s just luck’

Five ways the brain can age: 50,000 scans reveal possible patterns of damage

Children can’t seem to stop themselves from gathering more information than they need to complete a task, even when they know exactly what they need. […] even when children successfully learn how to focus their attention on a task to earn small rewards such as stickers, they still “over explore” and don’t concentrate just on what is needed to complete their assignment. […] the more likely explanation is that working memory is not fully developed in children. That means they don’t hold information they need to complete a task in their memory for very long, at least not as long as adults.

5-Year-Old Kid Hits 194 MPH in Lamborghini Revuelto

Alongside a description of each bird’s appearance, diet, behavior, and breeding habits, Audubon frequently included a reflection on the taste of the bird’s flesh.

Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam.

Telegram does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default […] activating end-to-end encryption in Telegram is oddly difficult for non-expert users

Reddit Battles Meta and Google Using Ads Based on Topics — Not Your Data Unlike many of its much larger advertising competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., Reddit has mostly anonymous users. […] users who don’t identify themselves tend to be more open and honest with their posts and their interests

A woman got tired of her mail getting stolen. She sent herself an Apple AirTag to help catch the thieves

A weird, whimsical game is hiding in the bookshelves at Los Angeles Public Library

Search anything written in Brooklyn streets

‘Optimistic’ rats consumed significantly less alcohol compared to ‘pessimistic’ rats

study finds placebos reduce stress, anxiety, depression — even when people know they are placebos

Just 10 minutes of mindfulness daily boosts wellbeing and fights depression — The research, which enrolled 1247 adults from 91 countries, demonstrates that brief daily mindfulness sessions, delivered through a free mobile app Medito, can have profound benefits.

Romantic Love and Sexual Frequency: Challenging Beliefs

the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene

Clinicians should inform parents that bed-sharing during the second half of the first year is unlikely to have an impact on the later emotional and behavioral development of the children.

examining the pattern of errors made by GPT-4 and proposing their origin in the absence of an analogue of the human subjective awareness of time. This deficit suggests that GPT-4 ultimately lacks a capacity to construct a stable perceptual world; the temporal vacuum undermines any capacity for GPT-4 to construct a consistent, continuously updated, model of its environment

The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis. The seven banks involved in the deal, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, lent the money to the billionaire’s holding company to take the social-media platform, now named X, private in October 2022. Banks that provide loans for takeovers generally sell the debt quickly to other investors to get it off their balance sheets, making money on fees. […] The banks—which also include Barclays, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Mizuho and Société Générale—have been able to collect hefty interest payments from the X loans. […] [The banks] are eager to be well-positioned to work with Musk and his six companies that range from electric-vehicle maker Tesla to Neuralink and xAI. Many view a possible initial public offering of Musk’s rocket company SpaceX or his Starlink satellite business as a fee-generating event that they don’t want to miss out on.

Unlike product brands, human brands are particularly vulnerable to reputation risks, yet how misconduct affects their consumption remains poorly understood. Using R. Kelly’s case, we examine the demand for his music following interrelated publicity and platform sanction shocks-specifically, the removal of his songs from major playlists on the largest global streaming platform.

Have you ever wondered why oranges are often sold in those strange red net bags? Well, it’s a sneaky trick used by food producers and supermarkets to fool your senses and (hopefully) make you buy more fruit. A red or orange plastic net around the fruit helps to give the impression that the orange peel is a richer orange color, thereby making it look juicy and appealing to consumers. If the fruit is unripe, the colored net will also downplay its greenness and boost its orangeness, making it look ripe and more appetizing. Similarly, lemons are often put in yellow net bags to enhance their natural color.

GRENADE-DRONE

110K domains targeted in ’sophisticated’ AWS cloud extortion campaign

Belisa Pang has an important new paper out about repeat filers, “The Bankruptcy Revolving Door.” Using new techniques and as well as a database of credit reports, she estimates the percentage of bankruptcy filers who are repeat filers is 36%. In 2023, she estimates the figure was 46%.

Sending low voltage electricity through sand can induce the formation of minerals that help curb coastal erosion

Regulations implemented in 2020 by the United Nations International Maritime Organization (IMO) significantly reduced sulfur pollution from ships by over 80%, improving air quality globally. However, this reduction has also diminished the formation of low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in ships’ wakes and play a crucial role in cooling the planet. Studies have shown that by drastically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed at a faster rate, particularly in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is dense.

Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show — Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight

How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

Owning a crocodile as a pet becomes election issue in Northern Territory (Australia)

Time is another paradoxical component of the monotype process. While painting and drawing are mediums that depend on an accumulation of marks made over time, a monotype is printed at a particular moment in the development of the image on the plate, therefore endowing the work with a distinctive sense of immediacy. The artist must work relatively quickly, before the medium dries, and, as the plate can be wiped clean at any time in the drawing process, the artist may make wholesale changes right up until the paper goes through the press.

M&Ms on checkerboard trick your brain

Starting in 2008, Norman Bates has been hanging around the motel and can sometimes be seen by tourists on the Studio Tour tram passing by. More: The Psycho House

Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025. That’s according to a futurologist, who also thinks robot sex will be more common than human intercourse by 2050

Makeup Usage in Women Is Positively Associated to Narcissism and Extraversion but Negatively to Psychopathy

Lip-read words can be decoded from the brain’s auditory regions similarly to heard speech

The overfitted brain hypothesis suggests that dreams throw random data into our brains to prevent them from becoming too familiar with the “training set” of our everyday lives.

The ovaries affect everything from metabolism to mood – so some scientists are on a quest to slow their ageing process

AI Cheating is getting worse. Colleges still don’t have a plan.

The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists. The ways in which researchers can artificially inflate their reference counts are growing.

Regulatory requirements and technological advancements are behind the continuing growth of the fax market

Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia

Why toilet paper keeps getting smaller and smaller

In 2016, British artist Stuart Semple created the fluorescent pink paint pigment earlier this year, in retaliation to “rotter” Kapoor buying the exclusive rights to the Vantablack pigment, said to be the blackest shade of black ever created. The cerise pink shade is available to all artists except Kapoor, who is legally banned from purchasing it. […] despite the ban, Kapoor has got his hands on Semple’s Pink shade and posted a picture of his middle finger dipped in the paint.

A new website lets New Yorkers use the Department of Transportation traffic camera network to capture unusual selfies on the streets

The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates.

Our case report provides the first clinical evaluation of autopsy practices for a patient death that occurs on the cloud — The patient was a British man in his 50s, who came to the attention of the medical team via an alert on the cloud-based platform that monitored his implanted cardioverter defibrillator

In seven studies, including an in-person real gifting study, we find that receiving a small material gift, such as a candy bar or flowers, improves receivers’ affect more than a supportive conversation with a close other does.

AI poses no existential threat to humanity – new study finds — Large language models like ChatGPT cannot learn independently or acquire new skills

Security researcher Bill Demirkapi found more than 15,000 hardcoded secrets and 66,000 vulnerable websites—all by searching overlooked data sources.

The Transportation Department is releasing the deployment plan for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. “The roadway system is safer when all the vehicles are connected, and all the road users are connected”

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the world’s largest emergency supply of crude oil. In huge underground salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico, the American federal government can store up to 714 million barrels, more than what the country uses in one month. Historically, the SPR has been tapped at the discretion of the president when natural disasters or crises cause the price of oil for consumers to spike. […] what if the SPR wasn’t just used as a stockpile of a commodity? If it used its ability to acquire oil strategically, could it support American industry and calm oil markets? […] A fixed-price futures contract for the SPR is the vanilla idea. I will also add that we had more creative ideas. That level of complexity may have spooked some folks at the DOE.

Prediction markets are legal, contrary to popular belief. But they remain unpopular, because they lack key features that make markets attractive.

A phenomenon referred to as “population stereotypes” helps explain how predictable human responses create the illusion of telepathy. […] In a test of telepathy, a “sender” would take each card from a shuffled deck in turn and attempt to telepathically transmit the image on the card to a “receiver.” The receiver would record their guess of which card the sender was looking at. By chance alone, we would expect around five of the receiver’s guesses to be correct. If the receiver scores significantly more than five, this might be taken as evidence of ESP. However, it has been known for over eight decades that people are more likely to guess certain symbols compared to others.

Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures

“Rules for the direction of the mind,” from an unfinished treatise by René Descartes

Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other at 4 a.m. in parking lot

Alaska Airlines flight diverts as red-faced pilot admits to passengers he’s ‘not qualified’ to land at mountain airport

overall, the percentage of vegetarians increased over time […] however, these changes occurred only for women. The dietary habits of men did not change over time.

Five-second breaks can help defuse couples’ arguments, study shows

The brain creates three copies for a single memory

Seeking the roots of the placebo effect, neuroscientists find the brain circuit that delivers relief

Research and lived experience indicate that many people who begin a new exercise program see little if any improvement in their health and fitness even after weeks of studiously sticking with their new routine. Among fitness scientists, these people are known as “nonresponders.” Their bodies simply don’t respond to the exercise they are doing. But an inspiring and timely new study suggests that nonresponders to one form of exercise can probably switch to another exercise regimen to which their body will respond.

Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync

The asteroid that may have killed the dinosaurs came from beyond Jupiter

Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators

The latest edition of the 100 Coolest Brands Report found that YouTube has overtaken Netflix to become the most revered company among kids between the ages of seven and 14.

Cy Twombly, Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963

Kangaroo escapes from prison in Czech Republic. The prison is home to other animals including rabbits, llamas and roosters. They are part of a prison program that allows prisoners nearing the ends of their terms to learn skills including farming and animal husbandry as a form of therapy.

Attorneys for Disney World are seeking to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit brought by a husband over the death of his wife last year because of the terms and conditions he agreed to when signing up for Disney+ streaming service several years earlier.

Harvard researchers canceled plans to test a controversial theory for cooling the planet by sending sunlight-reflecting particles up into the atmosphere.

GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?

Scientists Have Finally Identified Where Gluten Intolerance Begins

Research suggests that rather than being a slow and steady process, aging occurs in at least two accelerated bursts. The study, which tracked thousands of different molecules in people aged 25 to 75, detected two major waves of age-related changes at around ages 44 and again at 60.

Science denial “memes” are a viral form of communication that attempt to undermine complex scientific ideas using memorable soundbites. These memes misrepresent the scientific content they are “debunking”, making responding to them challenging: how do you argue with a meme? […] Meme-ing a rebuttal can be a counter-productive strategy for science communication.

The girls are using ChatGPT to see if men are lying about their height on dating apps. Upload 4 pictures, it uses proportions and surroundings to estimate height.

Chart made in Germany in the 18th century describing the characters of European nations

Low resale values for electric cars have pushed the leasing firms that drive Europe’s auto market to double prices over the last three years, some are threatening to quit the business altogether if regulators force them to go electric too fast.

Inside Silicon Valley’s Grand Ambitions To Control Our Planet’s Thermostat Firms are flocking to invest in geoengineering projects. Could they turn a profit by preventing peril?
Brands should avoid the “AI” label on products. It’s turning off customers.

The head of chatbot maker Replika discusses the role AI will play in the future of human relationships.

The nation’s best hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but no time to fix them

Hacking the Largest Airline and Hotel Rewards Platform — Between March 2023 and May 2023, we identified multiple security vulnerabilities within points.com, the backend provider for a significant portion of airline and hotel rewards programs. These vulnerabilities would have enabled an attacker to access sensitive customer account information, including names, billing addresses, redacted credit card details, emails, phone numbers, and transaction records. Moreover, the attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to perform actions such as transferring points from customer accounts and gaining unauthorized access to a global administrator website. This unauthorized access would grant the attacker full permissions to issue reward points, manage rewards programs, oversee customer accounts, and execute various administrative functions.

Scientists find oceans of water on Mars: It’s just too deep to tap

This narrative review examines John’s experience with contact lenses from 1963 to 1966 when he wore corneal rigid lenses made from polymethylmethacrylate, which regularly fell out.

Just how kinky are you? Take the quiz

Map of Horror Movie Locations

The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais vu”, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way

China will have nearly twice as many pets as young children by 2030 — China’s cat ownership will surpass that of dogs

Cats appear to grieve death of fellow pets – even dogs, study finds

We’re Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia

Three reasons we’re in an AI bubble (and four reasons we’re not)

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless

Inside the company that gathers ‘human data’ for every major AI firm

Who is watching you and how

A primer on the current state of longevity research

YouTuber ‘Norme’ has been Awake on Livestream For 228 Hours Trying To Break The Record For No Sleep

The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture

More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland — More than every tenth train from Germany was stopped at the Swiss border in the first quarter of this year. If Deutsche Bahn trains are late, they have to stop at the Swiss border. [Switzerland] wants to ensure punctuality in its own network with this measure.

World’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

Meta Allows Drug Ads Selling Everything from Opioids to Cocaine

FDA rejects MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD

How Long Does Music Stardom Last? A Statistical Analysis

In the early days of TV and movies, people reported dreaming in black and white more than they do now, he said. In a 1942 study, around 70 percent of people said that they dreamed this way. When that same study was replicated nearly 60 years later, the number had dropped to under 18 percent.

We have known for some time that touch sensations from the genital region pass through four different nerves on their way to the spinal cord and, ultimately, the brain. Of these, the pudendal nerve is the most important for sexual sensation, carrying signals from the clitoris in cisgendered women and the penis in cisgendered men. In women, the pelvic nerve conveys touch signals from the labia minora, the vaginal walls, the anus and the rectum. In men, the pudendal nerve carries information from the anus and the scrotum as well as the penis. In women, sensations from the cervix and the uterus can also be conveyed by the hypogastric nerve as well as the vagus nerve, which travels directly to the brain stem, thereby bypassing the spinal cord entirely. Touch signals from the pelvis ultimately arrive at the outer rind of the brain, a region called the neocortex, where they are represented in a distorted and fragmented body map in the primary somatosensory region.

Seismic advances in generative AI algorithms for imagery, text, and other data types have led to the temptation to use AI-synthesized data to train next-generation models. Repeating this process creates an autophagous (“self-consuming”) loop whose properties are poorly understood. […] Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease. We term this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD), by analogy to mad cow disease, and show that appreciable MADness arises in just a few generations.

Time is an illusion

Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers

Engineering the world’s highest cited cat — A couple of weeks ago, Nick Wise showed me an advertisement from a paper mill offering to boost the buyer’s citation count and h-index on their Google Scholar profile. […] First, we generated 12 papers (using Mathgen) with Larry Richardson as the sole author. We then generated an additional 12 papers not authored by Larry, editing the LaTeX document of each paper so that each cited every one of Larry’s 12 papers (12 papers with 12 citations each = 144 citations with an h-index of 12).

AI-controlled autonomous robot dentist has performed an entire procedure on a human patient for the first time

You can find gibberish AI recipes on YouTube as well. One channel, SuperRecipess, has 1.19 million subscribers despite being driven by AI and despite its videos being called things like “I never bought ice-cream again, I only make it like this now” […] the recipes are often extraordinarily disgusting. […] publishers might want 10 books on air fryer recipes generated quickly. Rather than paying an author between £30,000 and £100,000 to do so, they might simply use AI and pay a popular food writer a £10,000 endorsement fee.

Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap. Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it on the SEC in a novel lawsuit —- and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again. Earlier this week, Frye and musician Jonathan Mann filed a federal lawsuit against the SEC […] The offbeat saga of this week’s lawsuit begins in 2019, when Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn’t a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye.

Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign

Cellular senescence was discovered four decades ago, but scientists still don’t fully understand why it happens. One of the most widely accepted explanations is that the ends of each cell’s chromosomes—called telomeres—shorten a little during each replication and at some point signal the cell to stop dividing in order to protect itself from potential damage. The cells don’t necessarily die as a result, but they can no longer divide and function like younger, healthy cells.

Zugzwang (from German ‘compulsion to move’) is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because of their obligation to make a move; a player is said to be “in zugzwang” when any legal move will worsen their position.

Using the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions reduces purchase intentions

The AI boyfriend business is booming A growing number of women are seeking connection and comfort in relationships with chatbots

Friend.com, video, it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company

Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi is an “Enlightened and miraculous being” with a Google Scholar page, an h-index of 62, and 12,031 citations of his work. Most of these are self-citations from a tangled collection of predatory journals that publish questionable papers without proper peer review. Guruji Trivedi claims to have the ability to harness his own “biofield energy to change the behaviour and characteristics of living organisms including soil, seeds, plants, trees, animals, microbes, and humans, along with non-living materials including metals, ceramics, polymers, chemicals, pharmaceutical compounds and nutraceuticals, etc.”

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. […] Hirsch estimated that after 20 years a “successful scientist” would have an h-index of 20, an “outstanding scientist” would have an h-index of 40, and a “truly unique” individual would have an h-index of 60

How pregnancy transforms the brain to prepare it for parenthood […] The rule seems to be that any brain region that changes size during pregnancy shrinks. Numerous brain structures are affected, including the ventral striatum, which is involved in reward processing, and the hypothalamus, which is instrumental in controlling instinctive behaviours. The hippocampus, a structure essential for memory, also transiently shrinks during gestation. […] After birth, most changes quickly and fully reverse — except in the default mode network. […] the default mode network is involved in social processes such as theory of mind and empathy; in thinking about and understanding others and yourself.

This is the story of the various histories of the Internet, where they came from and which ones are real. Was the Internet designed to withstand a nuclear attack?

New study finds people alter their appearance to suit their names

Boxers who failed gender tests at world championships cleared to compete at Olympics

Sexual synesthesia is a neurological condition in which sexual intercourse or orgasm intermittently triggers atypical supplementary perceptions (e.g. colors, shapes).

OnlyFans is a porn-saturated website that offers its subscribers a chance to forge “authentic relationships” with content creators. But many OnlyFans porn stars rely on “chatters” to impersonate them in messages designed to pry dollars from randy subscribers. And, increasingly, some of those chatters aren’t even human – they’re AI bots.

AI is complicating plagiarism.

A veteran investigator of video-game leaks reveals the tricks of the trade

Cancer Risk From Pesticides Comparable To Smoking For Some Cancers

Butterflies accumulate enough static electricity to attract pollen without contact

Do Penguins Have Knees?

I kind of date like a man. I know what I want. Recently, I met somebody I really liked, and my head whipped around and I was like, “Oh my God. Now that’s the guy I’d like to… you know.” It turns out he’s married, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that I think you know when somebody walks in the room. I know from my first marriage to the Count. We met, got married two weeks later. Five days [into the marriage] he goes, “You’re going to be the mother of my children.” I said, “I already know that.”

Brain-Invading Parasite Could Be Hacked to Deliver Meds in Your Head

Ford is trying to patent a way for its cars to report speeding drivers to the police. The patent said vehicles would monitor other vehicles using onboard cameras. Related: Ford has lost $2.5 billion on electric vehicles so far in 2024

Tesla’s Cybertrucks are being mistaken for garbage cans by dumpster-diving raccoons

Burglars are jamming Wi-Fi security cameras […] homeowners should use old-fashioned, wired sets of security cameras that require more elaborate installations and extra hardware

In 2023, Tinder’s base of 10 million subscription-paying users decreased by 8 percent following three consecutive quarters of declines. By the end of 2023, the stock price of Match Group, which operates the largest portfolio of online dating services, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge, had tumbled to about a fifth of its peak in 2021. Bumble’s stock, too, has fallen as much as 85 percent since its February 2021 IPO. To say that mainstream dating apps are in their flop era is not a controversial statement in 2024. Online and off, daters bemoan the user experience

We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. […] A 1% increase in health care prices lowers both payroll and employment at firms outside the health sector by approximately 0.4%. […] we estimate that a 1% increase in health care prices leads to a 1 per 100,000 population (2.7%) increase in deaths from suicides and overdoses.

You can slow a rapid heart rate, caused by anxiety and even cardiac arrhythmias, using a classic technique called vagal maneuvers. These are simple actions that engage the vagus nerve — the major nerve connecting the brain to your internal organs. The straw trick: Place a straw in your mouth and pinch the other end closed. Blow for about 15-20 seconds. If you don’t have a straw, place your finger in your mouth and blow against it as if it were a straw. The technique is one example of a “Valsalva maneuver” — named after the Italian physician who discovered it. […] The easiest places to find a pulse are either the brachial artery (in your wrist) or the carotid artery (in your neck). Personally, I tend to find the carotid more readily palpable — that’s the one TV detectives check when they walk in on a murder scene, right before sadly shaking their heads. Use the pads of your index and middle finger — not your thumb, which has its own pulse and can confuse you. Slide two fingers to either side of your windpipe around the level of your Adam’s apple. Count your heartbeats for 15 seconds and then multiply by four to get a rough estimate. […] It’s normal for your heart to race when you’re frightened or stressed […] Panic attacks are common: At least 11 percent of American adults experience one each year. […] But sometimes people’s hearts start to race for no apparent reason. This is never normal.

In 1876 the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat transported 37 cats from Liège to the surrounding countryside. Released at 2 p.m., the first had found its way home by 6:48, and the rest followed within a day. ”It is proposed to establish a regular system of cat communication between Liège and the neighboring villages. […] Messages are to be fastened in water-proof bags around the necks of the animals.”

An Australian field hockey player has opted to amputate part of his finger to compete at the Paris Olympics. Matt Dawson badly broke a digit on his right hand during team training in Perth two weeks ago, and recovery from surgery to repair it would have taken months.

Valeria was studying engineering in Venezuela before she arrived in Cúcuta at the start of 2023 to be what she called a camgirl. With her family struggling to eat, she said she made the decision to leave for Colombia […] A 2022 study estimated that in the border cities of Cúcuta and Villa Rosario alone, there were between 800 and 1,000 webcam houses hosting an estimated 11,700 migrants across them, the majority of whom are Venezuelan. The number of these houses could now be as high as 3,000.

In the film’s final scene, after deciding to leave Barbieland for the real world, Barbie enthusiastically tells a receptionist, “I’m here to see my gynecologist”[…] We hypothesized that this final line may have spurred public interest in gynecologic care. […] In the week following Barbie’s release, there were large increases in the national online search volume for terms referring to gynecologists and gynecologist definition. Meanwhile, there were no changes in searches for gynecologist appointments.

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects […] According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression.

More than one-third of the planet’s land is used to produce food, and 70 percent of all fresh water is used to irrigate farmland. […] the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals. […] And according to the World Resources Institute, we may need to add almost two Indias to the world’s existing farmland to meet food needs in the second half of this century. — but adding that farmland means cutting down forests, which store carbon, in order to graze more animals, which produce carbon. […] agriculture is responsible for one-third of the global total of emissions [NY Times]

the meta experience

Death Valley heat melts skin off a man’s feet after he lost his flip-flops in the dunes. To make matters worse, the temperatures made the air too thin for a helicopter to fly in and help him.

A Swiss Town Banned Billboards. Zurich, Bern May Soon Follow The trend toward ad-free cities poses a risk to the outdoor advertising industry, worth an estimated 400 million Swiss francs ($450 million) and contributing almost twice as much per year to the country’s $885 billion GDP. Markus Ehrle, the industry association’s president, said that money would instead “flow to big internet companies like Google or Meta,” adding that “ads online are much more energy-intensive than billboards.”

We bought everything needed to make fentanyl - for $3,600. At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills.

water triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, helping our body rest and digest […] explains why so many people find joy and solace in water-related activities. […] Whether you’re planning a refreshing dip, a leisurely stroll along the coastline or a run along a canal, it’s crucial to know how to stay safe. following these five simple steps are highly effective

Could humans run on water?

Across languages, the species–typical vocalization by domestic cats (Felis catus silvestris) is transcribed similarly, typically corresponding to [miau:] or [wau:]. Such consistent and ubiquitous cross-linguistic transcription is apparently onomatopoetic. However, in humans, these qualities make unique use of the tongue; in comparison, most nonhuman mammals do not appear to employ their tongues while vocalizing.

“Hello Kitty is not a cat” (Jill Cook, Director of retail business development at Sanrio) Previously: alternative facts are not facts

Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models. […] We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ […] the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet.

American Express stock trades at much higher multiples than Discover. Here is my attempt to understand why.

Watches account for around 30% of all counterfeit goods.

Global enterprises are grappling with the complexities of AI adoption. While enthusiasm for AI remains high, the path from pilot projects to full-scale implementation is proving slower than anticipated.

Some venomous snakes can bite even when they’re dead and decapitated

Seven ways to spot a bad argument

Shitposting-style tattoos are the latest trend

When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text.

Our brain doesn’t perceive time as a clock. Instead, time flows with experiences, study

A newly discovered hormone that keeps the bones of breastfeeding women strong could also help bone fractures heal and treat osteoporosis in the broader population.

After spending more than $20 billion to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood. […] Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

US Gen Z shopping habits & retail trends for 2024 — 56% of US Gen Z prefer to shop online than in-store […] Year-on-year, purchases of pet accessories (+20%) and grooming supplies (+19%) are also up. […] The number of US Gen Z who are willing to sacrifice other spending to buy a product sooner has dropped 13% YoY.

Change in global value variation, study

Do you want to hear how a Flemish illuminator, Lieven van Lathem dazzled readers in 1464 with the manuscript, Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies?

A significant correlation was identified between increased sleep duration and cognitive decline

Human parasites in the Roman World — Despite their large multi-seat public latrines with washing facilities, sewer systems, sanitation legislation, fountains and piped drinking water from aqueducts, we see the widespread presence of whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica that causes dysentery. This would suggest that the public sanitation measures were insufficient to protect the population from parasites spread by fecal contamination. Ectoparasites such as fleas, head lice, body lice, pubic lice and bed bugs were also present, and delousing combs have been found. The evidence fails to demonstrate that the Roman culture of regular bathing in the public baths reduced the prevalence of these parasites. Fish tapeworm was noted to be widely present, and was more common than in Bronze and Iron Age Europe. It is possible that the Roman enthusiasm for fermented, uncooked fish sauce (garum) may have facilitated the spread of this helminth.

In this paper, I try to add details and credence to a previously suggested, evolution-based model of consciousness. According to this model, the feature started to evolve in early amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) some 320 million years ago. The reason was the introduction of feelings as a strategy for making behavioral decisions.

Designing a fake delivery company seemed to be the most logical, straightforward way of contacting a person. Hence, ”Future Delivers” was born. The company’s concept is that it delivers parcels from the future. This allows your future self in the year 2064 to send a parcel to your past self in the year 2024, filled with good advice, artefacts from the future, and warnings to hopefully improve your life ahead. […] we’re doing serious business here: delivery release documents, uniforms, wax seal, stickers, branded boxes, custom email address with delivery update notifications, blog, brand ambassador and of course, a delivery robot dog off AliExpress.

Every startup in JD Vance’s VC fund, Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview

Robot Dog Cleans Up Beaches With Foot-Mounted Vacuums — Cigarette butts are the second most common undisposed-of litter on Earth—of the six trillion-ish cigarettes inhaled every year, it’s estimated that over 4 trillion of the butts are just tossed onto the ground, each one leeching over 700 different toxic chemicals into the environment.

Each winter, a team of Tasmania Parks and Wildlife staff take on the task of cleaning the state’s show caves. The crew removes clothing fibres, microplastics, and dirt and spores brought in on visitors’ shoes.

Rare photos of uncontacted Amazon tribes, video

“I got a salmon sperm facial with salmon sperm injected into my face.” […] salmon sperm facials have enchanted Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Aniston

Flight attendant held up broken bathroom door for entire 16-hour trip from Hong Kong to New York

A drug has increased the lifespans of laboratory animals by nearly 25%, in a discovery scientists hope can slow human ageing too. The treated mice were known as “supermodel grannies” in the lab. They were healthier, stronger and developed fewer cancers than their unmedicated peers. The drug is already being tested in people.

“What we found is that even in healthy people who are constipated, there is a rise in these toxins in the bloodstream” […] during diarrhea, the body excretes excessive bile acid, which the liver would otherwise recycle to dissolve and absorb dietary fats. Fiber-fermenting gut bacteria known as “strict anaerobes,” associated with good health thrived in the “Goldilocks zone” of one or two poops a day.

Study reveals how anesthesia drug propofol induces unconsciousness

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials. […] a single dose (25 mg) demonstrated rapid and sustained symptom relief in depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. The image comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers who gave psilocybin to participants […] the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity. “Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected” […] these findings cannot show exactly what causes the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, but “it’s possible psilocybin is directly causing” the brain-network changes. That, or it is creating a psychedelic experience that in turn causes parts of the brain to behave differently. [Nature | NY Times | ScienceDaily]

The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player. He used his wealth to buy professional soccer teams and then inserted himself into the starting lineups.

Does Generative AI Facilitate Investor Trading? […] We first document a significant decline in stock trading volume during ChatGPT outages and find that the effect is stronger for firms with corporate news released immediately before or during the outages. We further document similar declines in the short-run price impact, return variance, and bid-ask spreads, consistent with a reduction in informed trading during the outage periods.

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless Benchmarks used to rank AI models are several years old, often sourced from amateur websites, and, experts worry, lending automated systems a dubious sense of authority

Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes. AI-generated fakes can be spotted by analyzing human eyes in the same way that astronomers study pictures of galaxies.

The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing — The 5/5 rule says that it takes 5 prompts and just 5 minutes to create a phishing campaign nearly as successful as a phishing campaign generated by IBM engineers. What took technically advanced humans 16 hours, generative AI did in 5 minutes

We’re over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history.

Catalog of Dark Patterns

We examined 200 videos from popular TikTok fitspiration hashtags (fitness, fitspo, gymtok, fittok). […] Videos of men included muscular idealised bodies and objectification through face obscurity (excluding the face from view) more frequently than videos of women. […] 60 % of videos presented incorrect or harmful information

we find that the involvement of social media influencers in propagating false claims is minimal, with only 0.003% of the more than 1.3 million posts analyzed actually supporting statements flagged as disputed by Politifact.

A drug commonly prescribed to thin blood can be repurposed as a cheap antidote to cobra venom […] Snakebites kill about 138,000 people a year. Cobras account for most bites in parts of Africa and India.

To avoid sea level rise, some researchers want to build barriers around the world’s most vulnerable glaciers

How Do You Price Your Wine List?

Elon Musk is offering to donate his sperm to help colonize Mars […] he recently told employees he anticipates one million people living on Mars within two decades, affirming his personal commitment by stating his intention to die there.

By 2022, 2.78% of 18- to 24-year-old adults self-identified as transgender, up from 0.59% in 2014.

Lesbian women reported the highest orgasm frequency, followed by bisexual women, with heterosexual women having the lowest orgasm frequency. Lesbian women also outperformed heterosexual women on sexual duration, while heterosexual women outperformed lesbian and bisexual women on sexual frequency.

This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months

AT&T says hackers stole 2022 call and text data from ‘nearly all’ cell customers update: AT&T Paid a Hacker $370,000 to Delete Stolen Phone Records

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable

A fleet of drones patrolling New York City’s beaches for signs of sharks and struggling swimmers is drawing backlash from an aggressive group of birds

Why don’t we know how antidepressants work yet?

the man who used dreams and premonitions to predict the future — In 1966, a British psychiatrist had an idea: to change the course of history by asking the public to share their eerie intuitions

The reality is that the ability to read the brain and influence activity is already here. It’s no longer only in the realm of science fiction. Now, the question is, what exactly can we access and manipulate in the brain?

Taking principles from fractal geometry and the strategic game of chess, physicists have created what they say is the most fiendishly difficult maze ever devised. In a Knight’s tour, the chess piece (which jumps two squares forwards and one to the right) visits every square of the chessboard just once before returning to its starting square. This is an example of a ‘Hamiltonian cycle’ – a loop through a map visiting all stopping points only once.

Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work?

The inaugural Miss AI contest opened in spring, drawing entries from some 1,500 AI programmers around the world. […] After judges of the world’s first AI beauty pageant unveiled 10 finalists last month, the inaugural Miss AI has now been crowned.

O.J. Gude, The Man Who Invented Times Square

Creator Startups Have Already Raised as Much Money This Year as in All of 2023

majority of websites and mobile apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscription services — Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.

If you live in Phoenix or Houston and your air conditioner fails, staying in your house may be impossible and you may need to evacuate. Air-conditioning now plays a central role in protecting public health in homes, workplaces, and public spaces. […] Given the enormous importance of air conditioning, I thought it would be useful to put together a few posts about it. This is part one: some background on the physics of air conditioning.

A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area

Drug Trends […] Ketamine is approaching world domination […] According to wastewater analysis, the popularity of the drug rose in 12 of 15 cities in Eastern and Western Europe from 2022 to 2023 […] global seizures of ketamine hit a record high in East and South-East Asia where they saw an increase of 70 percent in just one year.

According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.

Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: ‘I believe climate change is a hoax whatever anyone else says, and I have a right to believe it!’ But is there such a right? […] belief is not knowledge.

Häxan is a Swedish-Danish film, a curious and groundbreaking mix of documentary and silent horror cinema, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Whereas most films of the period were literary adaptations, Christensen’s take was unique, basing his film upon non-fiction works. […] Reportedly the most expensive film of the Swedish silent film era, Häxan was actually banned in the United States, and heavily censored in other countries. In 1968, an abbreviated version of the film was released. Titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, it featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and dramatic narration by the wonderfully gravel-toned William S. Burroughs. [video]

English lewd vocabulary for romance and erotica writers

Whataburger app becomes power outage map after Houston hurricane […] Whataburger is a San Antonio-based fast-food chain with 127 stores in the Houston area. On the Whataburger app, users can see a map of Whataburger locations, with an orange logo indicating a store is open, and a grey logo meaning it’s closed.

Eighteen hundred feet of rail expands by more than an inch for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature increase. So rails used to be laid down in sections — each between 30 and 60 feet long — with small gaps. Still, in a severe heat wave, the rail can swell until the underlying ties can no longer contain it. Then the rail gets visibly wavy, morphing into what’s known as a sun kink.

Heat waves reduce the number of motile sperm (the only ones capable of fertilizing an egg) by up to 10%

A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. [NY Times]

Airbnb’s hidden camera problem […] The Airbnb employee revealed that when a guest complains of a hidden camera, the company doesn’t – as a matter of practice – notify law enforcement, not even when a child is involved. […] Hidden cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms show guests during their most private moments – changing clothes, being with their children, even having sex […] while hotels can be held legally responsible for guests harmed on their property, Airbnb frequently is not. […] Madden initially denied ownership of the camera, which was concealed in a clock radio and pointed at his guests’ bed. Then, he said he put it there for security reasons. Ultimately, Madden admitted he’d been recording guests engaged in sexual activity. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I look at everything, I study everything.” Madden served 14 days behind bars.

how online shopping, persistent data collection, and machine-learning algorithms could combine to generate the stuff of economists’ dreams: individual prices for each customer.

the 19-year-old getting paid to rate Instagram profiles

Positive feedback is often given in an attempt to boost people’s performance. In many cases, however, positive feedback undermines performance […] when positive feedback was delivered before participants started preparing for their next task, it impaired subsequent performance.

The Barnum effect is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. […] general characterizations attributed to an individual are perceived to be true for them, even though the statements are such generalizations that they could apply to almost anyone. Such techniques are used by fortune tellers, astrologers, and other practitioners to convince customers that they, the practitioners, are in fact endowed with a paranormal gift.

Butterflies can cross the Atlantic in as few as five to eight days.

10 billion passwords leaked in the largest compilation of all time

the decision to be unfaithful is primarily driven by individual tendencies, with minimal influence from the partner. The study found that a strong commitment to one’s partner is linked to a lower likelihood of infidelity, whereas shared passion and intimacy do not serve as effective deterrents.

Destiny beliefs describe the belief that a relationship is meant to be while growth beliefs describe the tendency that relationships can be cultivated and maintained through effort. […] those with higher growth beliefs experienced a slower decline in relationship satisfaction over time.

The big problem for materialists is what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that? […] Panpsychism lets you bypass the hard problem of consciousness altogether. That’s because the panpsychist starts out with the right ingredients. If you believe that consciousness resides, however minimally, in matter’s tiniest building blocks — atoms, electrons, quarks — then it’s much easier to explain how sophisticated forms of consciousness can eventually arise in, say, humans. This fits very well with the theory of evolution, which says that creatures gradually became more complex as they evolved. […] In a landmark 2006 paper, Strawson took this idea and ran with it, making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually entails panpsychism. Consciousness is real. (We know that from our own experience.) Everything is physical. (There’s no evidence that immaterial stuff exists.) Therefore, consciousness is physical. There’s no “radical emergence” in nature. (We don’t get something from nothing.) Consciousness emerging from totally non-conscious stuff would be radical emergence. Therefore, all stuff must have some consciousness baked into it.

the biology of fatigue

Treating several individuals suffering from post-COVID-19 syndrome with a nicotine patch application, we witnessed improvements ranging from immediate and substantial to complete remission in a matter of days.

In the 13th century, a boie was a servant, but already in that time the provenance of the word was obscure. A century later, the term started being used to indicate a male child. […] Since the 14th century, gyrle was a word used to indicate a child, with no gender distinction. Despite the apparent simplicity of the term, so far nobody has been able to reconstruct its origins.

Sometimes the Jersey Devil features a dog’s head and pig’s feet; sometimes he’s an eighth child instead of a thirteenth. The story’s emotional crux, however, is consistent: an unwanted pregnancy, a mother’s anger, a curse. It reads as what folklore scholars Joan Radner and Susan Lanser might call a “coded” tale—a story that invites multiple, even contradictory, interpretations to “protect the creator from the dangerous consequences of directly stating particular messages.” A hallmark of feminist folklore, coding allows a tale-teller to convey ideas that are controversial or forbidden by camouflaging morals in ambiguity, ensuring the story reads differently to different audiences. […] it’s easy to see the Jersey Devil as a critique of callous mothering […] Though gynaehorror often represents female reproductivity negatively, it can function as a “way of exposing misogyny.”

Looking up flights on multiple browser tabs can be cumbersome, but Google’s Gemini has a solution. The model integrates with Google Flights and Google Hotels, pulling in real-time information from Google’s partner companies in a way that makes it easy to compare times and, crucially, prices. How to use AI to plan your next vacation

Russian Space Chiefs Finally Admit US Landed on Moon

Shark Fishing in Miami with the South Beach Shark Club + Rene De Dios and the South Beach Shark Club [video]

How many times do you have to riffle a deck of cards before it is completely shuffled? It’s a tricky question, but math has us covered: hyou need seven riffles.

Thai teacher banned from school after she livestreamed under her skirt while teaching

High-speed hippos can get airborne, says new study

Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of theories is telling. My purpose here must be humble: collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate. Seek insights, not answers. Unrealistically, I’d like to get them all, at least all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct […] It’s the classic “mind-body problem:” How do the felt experiences in our minds relate to the neural processes in our brains?

Watching a movie, sisters’ brain activity is more similar than that of friends

how brain activity triggers these severest of headaches — migraines — has long puzzled scientists. A study in mice suggests that a brief brain ‘blackout’ — when neuronal activity shuts down — temporarily changes the content of the cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. This altered fluid, researchers suggest, travels through a previously unknown gap in anatomy to nerves in the skull where it activates pain and inflammatory receptors, causing headaches.

In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. […] In 1875, he injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries. At first, he wrote, the patient “complained that her head felt like bursting.” She soon developed a high fever and an abnormally high heart rate, but recovered a week later. […] Saline solutions, still used today, were introduced the next decade as a much less dangerous, if imperfect, stopgap measure for emergency bleeding. […] ErythroMer is made from “recycled” human hemoglobin—the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body—wrapped in a membrane to mimic a tiny cell. In the rabbit, the transfusion appeared to be working.

Not only had Microsoft hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology […] Amazon hired “close to” to 66 percent of Adept’s employees […] Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology […] The problem for Big Tech is that they are no longer allowed to buy companies like they once did. The current antitrust enforcement regime would most certainly try to block an Amazon acquisition of Adept […] Even still, capitalism finds a way. What Microsoft did to Inflection, and what Amazon just did to Adept, is the new Big Tech playbook for swallowing the AI industry and getting away with it.

Over the past two decades, Chinese leaders have built a high-tech surveillance system of seemingly extraordinary sophistication. […] Although the protesters were careful to conceal their faces with masks and hats, the police used mobile-phone location data to track them down. […] Over the past eight decades, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed a vast network of millions of informers and spies whose often unpaid work has been critical to the regime’s survival. It is these men and women, more than cameras or artificial intelligence, that have allowed Beijing to suppress dissent. […] Generations of Chinese leaders have struck a delicate balance between making the secret police powerful enough to do its job, but not so powerful that it threatens the regime itself.

The r/SecurityClearance subreddit […] where government workers and public servants share their secrets before they share them with the U.S. government.

“It seems like every block in New York now has a tailored-for-millennial-women piercer, both in terms of VC-backed brands like Studs and boutique-y local spots”

Revenge saving has become a trend on Chinese social media websites, with Chinese youth setting extreme monthly savings targets

In Australia, strangulation has been explicitly criminalized in all states and territories. However, it continues to be a “normalized” sexual practice despite its potentially fatal consequences and associated short and long-term sequelae. […] Confidential, cross-sectional online surveys were conducted with 4702 Australians aged 18–35 years […] 57% reported ever being sexually strangled and 51% reported ever strangling a partner.

The dangers of sneezing—from ejected bowels to torn windpipes

Despite the great amount of time spent on ships and ferries, swimming was a rare skill among men. Among women, it was unheard of—­even suspect. Benjamin Franklin, however, was in his element.

Why Music Is Getting Worse

The Mauritanian iron ore train spans up to 3km (1.8 miles) in length, travels on a single track of 704 kilometres (437 miles), with 200 – 300 freight carriages, weighing up to a total of 84 tons and making it the longest and heaviest train in the world. […] This train has no ticket, no conductor, no dining cart, or any sort of announcements.

The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery

The article is specifically focused on the risk of LLMs causing an extreme catastrophe in which they do something akin to taking over the world and killing everyone.

IBM, which has a $20 billion consulting business, ran into some of those issues on its work with McDonald’s. The companies developed an A.I.- powered voice system to take drive-through orders. But after customers reported that the system made mistakes, like adding nine iced teas to an order instead of the one Diet Coke requested, McDonald’s ended the project. […] McKinsey’s A.I. group, QuantumBlack, built a customer service chatbot for ING Bank […] The chatbot now handles 200 of 5,000 customer inquiries daily. ING has people review every conversation to make sure that the system doesn’t use discriminatory or harmful language or hallucinate. […] Over a four-month period this year, Reckitt worked with Boston Consulting Group to develop an A.I. platform that could create local advertisements in different languages and formats. With the push of a button, the system can turn a commercial about Finish dishwashing detergent from English into Spanish. Reckitt’s A.I. marketing system, which is being tested, can make developing local ads 30 percent faster. [NY Times]

The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand

The triplets (whose abilities at walking, cycling, and donkey riding are identical) always leave home together at the last possible minute and arrive at school together on the last stroke of the bell.

a photo by Stephen Shore titled “Kingston, New York, November 8, 2020, 41°56.9443167N, 74°1.7406167W.” The image is from Shore’s fabulous new show of photographs shot from drones, at 303 gallery in New York.

S. Korea administrative robot defunct after apparent suicide, found unresponsive after having apparently fallen down a two-meter (six-and-a-half foot) staircase

The authors of the study reasoned that if black-and-white stripes ward off flies for zebras, they should also do the same for people painted with zebra stripes.

What makes a good tree? We used AI to ask birds

What drives mosquitoes’ bloodlust? Their hormones. One hormone seems to boosts the insects’ thirst for a blood meal, while another shuts it off.

Study suggests connection between anxiety and Parkinson’s disease Researchers compared a group of 109,435 people 50 and older who were diagnosed with a first episode of anxiety between 2008 and 2018 with a control group of 987,691 people without anxiety.

Teenagers with lower levels of mental ability may be three times more likely to experience a stroke before the age of 50, research suggests

Goldman signals end of an era in private equity […] No longer can you “be the highest bidder, buy the company, sit there, wait for multiple expansion and sell again”[…] investors shouldn’t expect the type of buyout returns that until 2022 were often buoyed by market exuberance, climbing valuations and financial engineering.

One study says a third of American workers have signed one; another puts the number at more than half. NDAs are being given out to roommates, to parents, to boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, and to bachelor-party attendees and wedding guests.

Lawsuit Claims Microsoft Tracked Sex Toy Shoppers With ‘Recording in Real Time’ Software

Scholars have known about the hidden Cupid since 1979 when x-rays and other tests first indicated a painting-within-a-painting underneath the blank background wall. At the time, it seemed that Vermeer had simply decided against including this element and painted it out. […] The museum ran additional tests, which provided significant clues such as dirt between the Cupid and the paint covering it. Further conservation revealed craquelure (cracks that form on paintings’ surfaces) on the Cupid itself. Both discoveries suggested that the Cupid had been exposed for a significant period of time. In other words, the overpaint must be by a later artist, not Vermeer. More: The Mysterious Cupid in Johannes Vermeer’s Paintings

The brain makes a lot of waste. Now scientists think they know where it goes

new technology using engineered living skin tissue and human-like ligaments gives robots a more natural smile

researchers develop visual tracking technology to detect drink drivers

Analysis of 400,000 healthy adults finds no health benefits from taking daily multivitamins […] Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period

Swallowable tiny robot with thrusters performs endoscopy at home Using a smartphone app, the distant doctor controls the robot within the patient’s stomach. PillBot shuts down and exits the body naturally within six to twenty-four hours. In addition, the team is working on using AI to make the preliminary diagnosis, after which a physician will create a course of therapy. [..] The team envisions expanding the technology to examine the bowels, vascular system, heart, liver, brain, and other parts of the body. […] With clinical trials underway, the company aims to secure FDA approval and launch commercially in the US by early 2026. [more]

Is Delaying Menopause the Key to Longevity? The ovaries, in particular, appear to be connected to virtually every aspect of a woman’s health. They also abruptly stop performing their primary role in midlife. Once that happens, a woman enters menopause, which accelerates her aging and the decline of other organ systems, like the heart and the brain. While women, on average, live longer than men, they spend more time living with diseases or disabilities. [NY Times]

Tumor-seeking radiopharmaceuticals promise targeted treatments with fewer side effects

Isoniazid can be detected in finger sweat for 1–6 h following controlled administration of the drug. This technique is adaptable for other drugs

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, may also increase risk-taking

cravings for drugs in addiction are supposed to be impossible to resist […] this image of craving is fundamentally flawed. My aim is to develop a more nuanced understanding of craving and rectify the damage done by this false image.

A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern. The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function. [NY Times]

study demonstrates how our initial impressions can have a lasting impact on our decisions, often leading us to persistently choose inferior options even when better ones are available.

Youtube has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels — Sony, Warner, and Universal — to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software

Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app — A pizza for which he charged $24 (£20) was being advertised for $16 on DoorDash - and when he secretly ordered it himself, the app paid his restaurant the full $24 while charging him $16.

Pooping on the Moon The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites […] Human feces is packed with microbial life […] Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal tantalizing insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere. […] “Basically, in space a human no longer has gravity to assist pulling the feces away from the anus. It becomes really a sticky liquid problem of surface tension. As it is organically active, extreme care has to be taken to make sure one cleans up.”

Microbial dark matter comprises the vast majority of microbial organisms (usually bacteria and archaea) that microbiologists are unable to culture in the laboratory

the L.A. Influencer Who Is Trying to Get Famous By Never Tipping at Restaurants and Bars

The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2019 — ongoing) is an installation, and a vibe, that reimagines my father’s bar—the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco.

Shop Imp Kerr: Vive la France!

2 years of mild caloric restriction significantly reduces biological age

5 things you’re doing that can land you in a dentist’s chair: eating popcorn, chewing on ice, energy drinks, sodas, coffee, vaping, using fluoride-free toothpaste. Also: using your teeth to open packages, tear off tags, or even bite their nails, teeth grinding (bruxism), brushing too hard

The U.S. Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order. […] more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015 […] more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023

Almost half of U.S. teachers and K-12 students say they are using ChatGPT weekly.

Researchers describe how to tell if ChatGPT is confabulating

I am using AI to automatically drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers

Calculator words

This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. “If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.”

Sensory secrets of penis and clitoris unlocked after more than 150 years Krause corpuscles — nerve endings in tightly wrapped balls located just under the skin — were first discovered in human genitals more than 150 years ago. The structures are similar to touch-activated corpuscles found on people’s fingers and hands, which respond to vibrations as the skin moves across a textured surface. […] Ginty and his collaborators activated the Krause corpuscles in both male and female mice using various mechanical and electrical stimuli. The neurons fired in response to low-frequency vibrations in the range of 40–80 hertz. Ginty notes that these frequencies are generally used in many sex toys; humans, it seems, realized that this was the best way to stimulate Krause corpuscles before any official experiments were published.

I started by dating somebody on an ENM app who was in a different polycule who was connected to someone in this polycule. And then I started dating someone else in this polycule. He’s married, and his wife and I are metamours, which is simply a word for my partner’s partner. — Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule

Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. [PDF]

the group has collected venom from more than 500 species, building an unrivalled collection of animal toxins. Studying the molecules that make up venom, scientists have been able to develop compounds that can relieve chronic pain, treat diabetes and create eco-friendly insecticides.

“blue carbon” refers to the carbon dioxide sequestered and stored by coastal habitats such as mangroves and seagrass beds. These highly efficient ecosystems occupy just 0.5% of the seafloor but contribute over 50% of oceans’ carbon burial, sequestering even more carbon by area than rainforests.

This is the first animal ever found that doesn’t need oxygen to survive […] a jellyfish-like parasite that doesn’t have a mitochondrial genome […] it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life

One of Vico’s chief claims is that, though civilizations rise and fall, the periods of decline do not return them to their original state. Some foundation remains from which rebuilding can commence. A central challenge for a science of politics, then, is to reduce the severity of the inevitable downturns, shorten the reign of “barbarism,” and through these means, hope for gradual improvement.

In California, the “Daughter from California” is known as the “Daughter from New York”

I jumped from a plane – and my parachute failed

Monitoring marine litter from space is now a reality

A lack of sleep can make it extraordinarily difficult to retain information. Two new studies uncover why this is and what is happening inside the brain during sleep and sleep deprivation to help or harm the formation of memories.

The con artists take on false online identities and spend months financially grooming their victims to get them to invest on fraudulent cryptocurrency websites. It’s theft at a scale so large that investigators are now calling it a mass transfer of wealth from middle-class Americans to criminal gangs. Last year, the FBI estimates, pig butchering scams stole nearly $4 billion from tens of thousands of American victims, a 53% increase from the year before.

Social-Media Influencers Aren’t Getting Rich—They’re Barely Getting By — Platforms are paying less for popular posts, brands are pickier about partnerships and a possible TikTok ban looms

‘mathematicians can’t agree on the definition of what makes two things equal

Nietzschean Language Models and Philosophical Chatbots: Outline of a Critique of AI

Chinese scientists and engineers are applying ChatGPT-like technology to sex robots, aiming to create interactive, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered companions

Shelly’s Leg (1973-1977) was Seattle’s first disco, an unapologetically gay establishment that welcomed revelers of every sexuality

Flashback: humansnotinvited.com

American Airlines passenger gagged and bound with duct tape to her seat after being accused of attempting to open an aircraft door mid-flight […] after drinking a neat Jack Daniels

One of the most coveted beauty products among teenagers is a creamy, fragrant lotion that comes in a tangerine-colored plastic tub. Called Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, it is sold for $48 by the beauty brand Sol de Janeiro. According to Sol de Janeiro, a jar of Brazilian Bum Bum Cream is sold every six seconds.

Stock-obsessed Gen Z are using astrology and tarot to invest

Researchers turn wool and hair offcuts into graphite for lithium batteries […] About 70 per cent of the world’s graphite, a key component in lithium batteries, comes from China.

U.S. government Sues Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions

The Excel World Championship

How I Made Trading Cards with E- Ink Displays

The first rule of avoiding scam calls is to never answer unknown numbers, and even some known ones.

Through a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging methods, experiments have identified sensory, perceptual, emotional and cognitive processes that make important contributions to our psychological experiences of art, in particular the emergence of aesthetic preferences. Here we conduct a selective review of this literature that will provide readers without a background in the neurosciences a first introduction into what we have learned so far

Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?

Pelvic floor muscle training, more

Wells Fargo Fires Over a Dozen for ‘Simulation of Keyboard Activity’

One of the bigger discussions happening right now on the internet is whether a “Remote Amazon Tribe” has become “addicted to porn” as a result of getting SpaceX’s Starlink internet. […] The Marubo people have been using the internet long before Starlink came to their village

Subvocalization: Why Do We Have A Voice In Our Heads When We Read?

How Data-Fueled Neurotargeting Could Kill Democracy the technique, which weaponizes emotional data for political gain, could erode the foundations of a fair and informed society

Where are the Female Composers? Evidence on the Extent and Causes of Gender Inequality in Music History

A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter. First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight. Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the 1970s and ’80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain. Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle, at first, but add up over time. Kuk believes that the proliferation of artificial sweeteners could also be playing a role.

On average, for every 555 million molecules of water, one is split into a negatively charged OH⁻ and a positively charged H⁺. And this actually matters a lot, in chemistry. It’s the reason we say water has pH 7.

The Missing Post Office is an artwork by Japanese artist Saya Kubota. It is a “post office” where undeliverable letters are collected The Missing Post Office receives mail from all over the world. Addressees include deceased individuals, future descendants, first loves to whom the writers were never able to express their feelings, themselves, and long-time favorite items.

Missouri Restaurant bans women under 30, men under 35, wants a ‘grown and sexy’ vibe

Entertainment Media as a Source of Relationship Misinformation We discuss two ways that relationship misinformation can appear in entertainment media – in the form of blatant claims and subtle content – and we provide an example of each from reality television.

study uncovers brain differences in sexual desire disorders in men and women […] HSDD (hypoactive sexual desire disorder), characterized by a persistent lack of sexual interest causing significant distress, affects about 10% of women and 8% of men. […] Women with HSDD exhibited greater activation in limbic regions such as the amygdala, striatum, and thalamus, which are associated with emotional processing and sexual motivation. In contrast, men showed greater activation in the visual cortex, indicating a heightened sensitivity to visual sexual cues.

In the morning, you report that you barely slept at all. Yet according to the test—polysomnography, the gold standard for sleep measurement—you slept all night. […] these people showed pockets of arousal in the form of fast brain waves during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM is the stage in normal sleep when your brain should completely disconnect from the systems that keep you aware and vigilant People with subjective insomnia with this interrupted REM do not experience their sleep as restful. When wakened, they reported having had thoughts similar to those when awake […] They were less likely to have immersive dreams […] interrupted REM is strongly linked to disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety.

No evidence sperm counts are dropping, researchers find

Depression and memory decline are intimately linked […] those with higher depressive symptoms were more likely to experience faster memory decline, while those who started off with a poorer memory were more likely to develop depressive symptoms during the study period.

Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines ingest the most microplastics among 109 countries, according to a study by Cornell University researchers. Indonesians, the top consumers of microplastics, were found to ingest about 15g of microplastics per month – equivalent to three credit cards – with the majority of plastic particles coming from aquatic sources such as fish and seafood. Indonesians’ daily consumption of microplastics increased by 59 times from 1990 to 2018.

More than a century ago, flamingos disappeared from Florida, when hunters nearly drove them to extinction in the quest for their fashionable — and highly profitable — plumage. Now they’re back, likely transported by Hurricane Idalia last August.

dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee […] African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls Audio: >Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them

The US dollar continues to cede ground to nontraditional currencies in global foreign exchange reserves, but it remains the preeminent reserve currency. Recent data from the IMF […] point to an ongoing gradual decline in the dollar’s share of allocated foreign reserves of central banks and governments. Strikingly, the reduced role of the US dollar over the last two decades has not been matched by increases in the shares of the other “big four” currencies—the euro, yen, and pound. Rather, it has been accompanied by a rise in the share of what we have called non-traditional reserve currencies, including the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi, South Korean won, Singaporean dollar, and the Nordic currencies. […] One non-traditional reserve currency gaining market share is the Chinese renminbi, whose gains match a quarter of the decline in the dollar’s share.

Ask most venture-backed founders why they get 10x more equity than employee #1, 100x more equity than employee #5, and 1000x more equity than employee #15, and you’ll get the same answer: “I’M TAKING SO MUCH RISK, IT’S SO HARD TO START A COMPANY, I MADE A BIG MOVE!!!” And then you’ll ask, “but why are you yelling?” […] Founder liquidity refers to the practice where founders sell a portion of their shares during a new funding round. This allows them to “take chips off the table,” securing personal financial stability while continuing to build the company with a fresh influx of venture capital. Why is it a secret that founders get liquidity in many venture rounds? Because it undermines the narrative of the founder who is “all-in.”

Waistlines are expanding in most countries, except for a skinny list of nations bucking the trend. How is France dodging the global obesity trend?

how we produce fresh water and how we dispose of wastewater at the South Pole

George Spelvin, Georgette Spelvin, and Georgina Spelvin are traditional stagename used to hide a performer’s identity. “Georgina Spelvin” has fallen out of general use since it was adopted as a screen name by pornographic actress Shelley Graham, who was credited by that name in The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and her subsequent films.

Level Devil

Smoking Devil in Stereohell

United Airlines starts serving passengers personalized ads on seat-back screens

Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election

First, we show that older people tend to underestimate their cognitive decline. We then show that those experiencing a severe decline but unaware of it are more likely to suffer wealth losses.

Sexuality plays a significant role in most romantic relationships and is a factor that differentiates romantic relationships from other types of close relationships. Research shows that different aspects of sexuality, such as sexual desire and satisfaction, have been consistently linked with relationship satisfaction, quality, and stability. Moreover, sexually active couples report higher individual and relational well-being. […] However, several factors may hinder couples from engaging in sexual activity, including stress.

Free Will Beliefs are Positively Associated With Health Behavior

Deciding Who Is Worthy of Help: Effect of the Probability of Reciprocity on Individuals’ Willingness to Help Others

Living in the afterlife: clues from direct experiencers Although most of the information obtained by our different sources converge on the general description of the afterlife, and how life proceeds in these realms, they cannot be considered definite proof of the afterlife and its characteristics.

Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

artificial intelligence system that can identify people who are likely to suffer heart attacks up to 10 years in the future, could soon be in operation across Britain

excessive vigorous exercise could muffle your immune system

Dreaming Under Anesthesia

How Do We Know When to Pee?

Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.”

According to an editor at a venerable publishing imprint, debut novelists need three key publicity achievements to “break out”: one, a major book club; two, a boost from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indie Next, and/or Book of the Month; and three, a major profile. Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?

Advance market commitments allow us to buy products that don’t yet exist, giving innovators an incentive to invent and scale new products. This is a practical guide on how to start an AMC.

In 1910, Mare Samuella Cromer, a rural schoolteacher in South Carolina, organized a girl’s tomato club so females aged 9 to 20 could “not learn simply how to grow better and more perfect tomatoes, but how to grow better and more perfect women.

The Secret History of Holywell Street, Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade

The music of “Detachable Penis” consists largely of a distorted electric guitar riff fed through a noise gate and a delay, backed by organ and drum grooves with brief lead guitar improvisation.

ASCII Silhouettify is an app that converts images into ASCII silhouettes

One of the best known non-bank banks is Starbucks – “a bank dressed up as a coffee shop”. […] “McDonald’s is a real estate company dressed up as a hamburger chain” and “Harvard is a hedge fund dressed up as an institution of higher learning”. […] The company had offered a gift card since 2001 but Schultz [Starbuck’s CEO] revitalized it, pairing it with a new loyalty program […] In 2010, Schultz put the card on an app […] more than 60% of the company’s peak morning business in the US comes from Starbucks Rewards members who overwhelmingly order via the app. The program has 33 million users, equivalent to around one in ten American adults. these users load or reload around $10 billion of value onto their cards each year […] not all of it gets spent at once. As at the end of March, $1.9 billion of stored card value sat on the company’s balance sheet waiting to be spent – kind of like customer deposits. To give that some context, 85% of US banks have less than $1 billion in assets. Unmasking the Banks Inside Starbucks, Carnival, Naked Wines, Delta, Travel + Leisure

US has the highest rate of maternal deaths among high-income nations. Norway has zero

Costco is building out an ad network built on its trove of loyalty membership data, using its 74.5 million household members’ shopping habits and past purchases

In the last few months, Meta started to sneakily train its generative AI tool on Instagram posts. Now, some artists are jumping ship to a lesser-known portfolio app, Cara, to protect their work from AI data scrapers.

If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files - it is time to cancel Adobe

Microsoft is about to launch a new AI-powered Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on your PC. Recall doesn’t perform content moderation, so it won’t hide information like passwords or financial account numbers in its screenshots.

Due to national security concerns, the U.S. government prohibits Nvidia from selling AI chips like the A100 and H100 directly to Chinese companies. The restrictions don’t prevent Chinese firms from renting chips for use within the U.S. — ByteDance is allegedly leasing servers with chips from Oracle. ByteDance reportedly had access to over 1,500 H100 chips and several thousand A100s last month through the Oracle deal. China Telecom, a large state-owned wireless carrier, has sought a similar deal with other cloud providers. How ByteDance Got the Best AI Chips Despite U.S. Restrictions

Known as “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube and “DeepF***ingValue” on Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets, Gill was a key figure in the so-called “Reddit rally” in which shares of GameStop surged 1600% at one point in Jan. 2021, crushing hedge funds that had bet against the videogame retailer. But after drawing congressional and regulatory scrutiny for his role in the extraordinary saga, Gill quickly disappeared, albeit much richer thanks to his GameStop investment which at one point reached $48 million in value. […] Then out of the blue Gill appeared in recent weeks to resurface online, sending GameStop’s shares soaring once again. On Monday, they rose 21% after Gill’s Reddit account posted a screenshot showing a $116 million bet on the stock. On Thursday, they surged almost 50% after Gill’s YouTube account scheduled a livestream for 12 p.m. ET (1600 GMT) on Friday.

World’s first wooden satellite wooden Moon shelters are also planned

chocolate manufacturers combine a paste made from cacao seeds with sugar. Lots and lots of sugar […] the few health benefits provided by the chocolate bean are swamped by ingredients that increase the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. […] To address this stark imbalance, a team of researchers reinvented the chocolate recipe from the ground up

During the Renaissance period, hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body. […] Given its high visibility, hand gestures in portraits and paintings have been one of the most effective ways of conveying secrets, codes and messages. […] There is a peculiar hand gesture that is widely used by painters of several nationalities belonging to the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque and later artistic movements: It is an unnatural position of one or both hands in which the third and fourth digits are held tight together, as if almost fused, resembling syndactyly, and the second and fifth fingers are separated from the central ones. This paper will examine the eventual hidden meanings behind this peculiar hand gesture.

The Talk: Bernie Sanders & Slavoj Žižek and The Talk: Kanye West & Elon Musk

Remote Amazon tribe gained access to the Internet via Starlink last September — only to wind up hooked on porn, social media

About half of adults would prefer electric shocks over spending fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts. They’re the ones who want to hang out with you during a plague. They didn’t just consent to electric shocks. They did it to themselves. They were given a little button to push. […] Nearly 70 percent of the men preferred the shocks, compared to 25 percent of the women.

Women make fewer mistakes and have better mental agility while on their period despite feeling worse than at any other time during their menstrual cycle, research suggests.

brain scan could detect dementia several years before people develop noticeable symptoms, with an estimated 80% accuracy

when using cashless methods of payment, individuals tend to spend more when purchasing […] the effect was not observed when donating or tipping.

A group backed by more than two dozen investors—including Citadel Securities and BlackRock—is planning to start its own stock exchange in Texas

Stromatolites are the earliest geological record of life on Earth. These curious biotic structures are made of algae carpets growing toward the light and precipitating carbonates. After their first appearance 3.48 billion years ago, stromatolites dominated the planet as the sole living carbonate factory for almost three billion years.

Diamond industry ‘in trouble’ as lab-grown gemstones tank prices further

Online shop selling used tampons to strangers. “It is a lucrative business”

Italian village with 46 residents has 30 local election candidates

The FDA is poised to approve the notorious party drug as a therapy. Here’s what it means, and where similar drugs stand in the US.

Who Took the Cocaine Out of Coca-Cola?

Giving the drug before surgery instead of chemotherapy led to a huge increase in patients being declared cancer-free […] Drug that ‘melts away’ tumours hailed as ‘gamechanger’ for some bowel cancer patients

“I’ve made bunya nut ice cream, a bunya nut miso caramel, and a dish that we made from grated down bunya nuts.” Indigenous chef Jack Brown, trained in traditional French cuisine, is on a mission to change Australian cuisine

If English was written like Chinese

Catastrophic weather events influence the movement of wild animals. In particular, airborne animals such as birds and insects are expected to occasionally face challenging flights because of unfavorable atmospheric currents such as hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons. […] Here, I report on a rare case of […] a GPS-equipped streaked shearwater (Calonectris leucomelas) was apparently caught in a huge typhoon, showing swirling flight high over the mainland of Japan.

James Joyce would pick drunken fights, then duck behind his burly friend Ernest Hemingway and say, “Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him.”

Penis Dissatisfaction and Gun Ownership in America — We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns

we find that both men and women tend to work more hours when partnered with a female partner compared to a male partner

Late bedtimes are linked to higher rates of mental health disorders. The study recommends sleeping before 1 a.m. for optimal mental health.

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users

Federal regulators have given Amazon key permission that will allow it to expand its drone delivery program […] and to operate drones “beyond visual line of sight,” removing a barrier that has prevented its drones from traveling longer distances. […] the approval applies to College Station, Texas, where the company launched drone deliveries in late 2022.

Every day, the first thing that I encounter when the hospital doors open is the omnipresent smell of antiseptic. To most people, this scent likely triggers involuntary memories of negative events — the illness of a loved one, for example. For me, the first wave of antiseptic reminds me of my previous hospital rotations and prompts me to be ready to work for my patients and for my team.

The design of Chinese computers also changed dramatically. None of the competing designs that emerged in this era employed a QWERTY-style keyboard. Instead, one of the most successful and celebrated systems—the IPX, designed by Yeh—featured an interface with 120 levels of “shift,” packing nearly 20,000 Chinese characters and other symbols into a space only slightly larger than a QWERTY interface. Other systems featured keyboards with anywhere from 256 to 2,000 keys.

Repairing my mug with kintsugi

After artist Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, her husband, painter Diego Rivera, blocked off two bathrooms in their home, La Casa Azul, on the condition that they not be opened until at least 15 years after his death. What Frida Kahlo Kept in Her Bathroom

Brainrot Romcom

Man who transformed into a dog says he wants to become another animal The man known only as Toco spent around $14,000 on his hyperrealistic dog costume, which was completed last spring.

Visitors and protesters expected to gather this summer in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention will be allowed to carry assault rifles -— but not metal water bottles -— inside the RNC’s “security footprint.” […] proposed ordinance aims to prohibit air rifles, umbrellas, tennis balls, nonplastic containers, light bulbs and locks. […] “Fake guns are prohibited, but real guns are allowed”

Washington has a law against felons running for office […] It seems possible that under Washington state law, there would be no name listed on ballots as a Republican candidate for president in November.

“He is the worst actor I’ve ever worked with,” a former colleague told me. Sharing a scene with Zach [Horwitz], he said, was like interacting with a banana. […] it was like “dealing with a dead horse.” […] As the end of 2019 approached, Horwitz had raised three hundred and fifty-eight million dollars in the past year. He was running what scholars of confidence games call an “affinity fraud,” built around trust and personal connections. He found wealthy investors —- in Napa Valley, Orange County, Las Vegas, and Chicago —- who then spread the word on the tennis court and the charity circuit. But every network has limits, and the arithmetic of a Ponzi scheme is unforgiving. When you run out of new investors, the mechanism begins to collapse. After Thanksgiving, Horwitz fell behind on his payments for the first time. The Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Hollywood History

A renewable energy company will soon begin clearing thousands of protected Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert, including many thought to be a century old. […] Joshua trees grow just 1 to 3 inches a year, which means a 16-foot tree could be more than 100 years old. More than 500 of trees found on the site are at least 16 feet tall.

How far away can you see light from a candle? 1.6 miles (~2.6 km)

An emerging area of future technology is motor augmentation – using motorised wearable devices such as exoskeletons or extra robotic body parts to advance our motor capabilities beyond current biological limitations. […] The Third Thumb is worn on the opposite side of the palm to the biological thumb and controlled by a pressure sensor placed under each big toe or foot.

Supernumerary body part — one or more additional breasts, having two penises, an extra head, additional fingers or toes

robot sets new Rubik’s cube Guinness World Record (0.305 seconds)

a massive leak of 14,000 ranking features exposes the blueprint for how Google secretly curates the Internet. More: Perhaps the most notable revelation from the 2,500 documents is that they suggest Google representatives have misled the public in the past

A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe Time spent outdoors is the best defence against rising rates of short-sightedness, but scientists are searching for other ways to reverse the troubling trend.

Drawing on the work of earlier scholars, Muraresku suggests there was some sort of psychedelic beer used in sacred ceremonies at the Temple of Eleusis that unleashed heavenly visions. What’s more, he believes this experience not only shaped generations of Greeks, it also laid the foundation for the Eucharist in early Christianity.

the logic of animal patterns

ultrasonic coffee — Australian scientists have developed a method of brewing coffee by blasting ground beans with sound waves – and it produces a powerful cup

no matter what tune you’re humming – a timeless melody from back in the day, a chart-topper from last week, or even one of your own songs – they all share the same 24 melodic figures. It’s like uncovering the secret code of melody that’s been right under our noses!

$6 on pump two, please

North Korea flies 260 feces-filled balloons across border to the South […] Authorities said timers and explosives were attached to a string connecting balloons and the trashed-filled packages in order to make the balloon burst after a certain amount of time passed

Romantic love is a psychobehavioral motivational state that facilitates pair-bonding in humans. Evolutionarily, it is thought to help establish and maintain long-term pair-bonds that enhance a heterosexual couple’s reproductive fitness. Romantic love can also occur in same-sex partnerships, yet not much is known, either psychologically or behaviorally, about the similarities or differences in how romantic love manifests in homosexual or bisexual couples compared with heterosexual couples. This study investigated romantic love in a cross-cultural sample of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual young adults (N = 783) experiencing romantic love. […] Homosexual females reported a significantly lower frequency of sex per week than heterosexual and bisexual females. Bisexual males reported a greater number of times ever in love than heterosexual males.

A new study of over 70,000 American women born between 1950 and 2005 has shown that girls are getting their periods earlier and they’re taking longer to become regular.

Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. […] actors are telling us an important truth about memory — deep understanding promotes long-lasting memories.

How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet

Continuing a string of successful botnet takedowns, on Thursday, May 30th 2024, a coalition of international law enforcement agencies announced “Operation Endgame”. This effort targeted multiple botnets such as IcedID, Smokeloader, SystemBC, Pikabot and Bumblebee, as well as some of the operators of these botnets. These botnets played a key part in enabling ransomware More: operation-endgame.com

Meet Ethiopia’s stilt walking tribe

The middle finger from the right hand of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is a secular relic in the collection of the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. The finger was removed from his body posthumously and is encased in a gilded glass egg.

When faced with the need to transform an object, idea, or situation, people have a tendency to favor adding new components rather than removing existing ones. This is called the additive bias.

SignLLM, the first AI model capable of generating avatar videos of sign language gestures from prompts across eight languages.

the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. […] LLM prediction does not stem from its training memory.

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption […] For example, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness,” which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user

Previously: Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s AI models in a contract worth about $60 million per year

Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero

My patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation. Last hours of an organ donor

Let your favorite blog penetrate your kitchen and bless your morning beverages

AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd, by looking at them just once

Urban gardening may improve human health — a one-month indoor gardening period increased the bacterial diversity of the skin and was associated with higher levels of anti-inflammatory molecules in the blood.

sidewalks and green space […] multilane highway and power lines [..] those neighborhood characteristics correlate with different health outcomes. […] The researchers collected nearly 1.4 million Google Street View images from all the main streets across Utah, then used computer vision models to extract neighborhood characteristics like greenery, sidewalks and non-single-family homes—indicators of walkability and mixed land use—from those images. They merged that data with health stats, including diabetes diagnoses and obesity incidence, from the state’s population database. […] After examining records from nearly 2 million people, including 1 million siblings and 14,000 identical and fraternal twins, the team found that positive built environment characteristics were associated with 15-20% reductions in obesity and diabetes rates.

For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don’t have enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Yet for almost as long, it’s been clear that simplistic theory is wrong. Recent research into the true causes of depression is finding clues in other neurotransmitters and the realization that the brain is much more adaptable than scientists once imagined. Treatments for depression are being reinvented by drugs like ketamine that can help regrow synapses, which can in turn restore the right brain chemistry and improve whole body health.

study reveals a significant link between high consumption of ultra-processed foods and an increased risk of developing depression

When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health. […] Studies of UPFs show that these processes create food—from snack bars to breakfast cereals to ready meals—that encourages overeating but may leave the eater undernourished. […] In 2019, American metabolic scientist Kevin Hall carried out a randomized study comparing people who ate an unprocessed diet with those who followed a UPF diet over two weeks. Hall found that the subjects who ate the ultra-processed diet consumed around 500 more calories per day, more fat and carbohydrates, less protein—and gained weight. [..] food and soft drinks-related companies spent $106 million on lobbying in 2023, almost twice as much as the tobacco and alcohol industries combined. Last year’s spend was 21 percent higher than in 2020, with the increase driven largely by lobbying relating to food processing as well as sugar. […] The food industry, dominated by global conglomerates such as Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mars, and Kraft Heinz, likes to project itself as committed to public health. “Our strategy is all about nutrition, health, and wellness,” Paul Bulcke, the chair of Nestlé, told investors at the company’s annual meeting in April. […] In Mexico, companies including Kellogg’s and Nestlé have sued the government over the introduction of front-of-package warning labels and other restrictions including the use of children’s characters in marketing. […] In Brazil, the industry has argued that regulation could limit consumer options and make food more expensive.

Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search

Google’s AI really is that stupid, feeds people answers from The Onion

Apple signs deal with OpenAI for iOS

What goes on in artificial neural networks work is largely a mystery, even to their creators. But researchers from Anthropic have caught a glimpse.

NASA estimates that a crewed mission to Mars would take 2–3 years and be full of dangers for the astronauts. The biggest threats are the weak gravity, space radiation, as well as procuring enough food, water, and air. NASA is currently developing the technologies to meet these challenges.

Why you spend more when prices end in .99

Japan’s Clothes-Drying Bathrooms

All participants were over 18 and have had sex in and out of relationships, as well as having engaged in masturbation. Results showed that post-coital dysphoria was prevalent in each of the three sexual contexts, for both males and females.

Ms. Shanahan has a fortune of more than $1 billion that stems largely from her divorce settlement last year with Sergey Brin, a founder of Google, whose net worth exceeds $145 billion […] Ms. Shanahan, who has said she is a vaccine skeptic like Mr. Kennedy, funded a Super Bowl ad for Mr. Kennedy this year through a $4 million donation to a super PAC, American Values 2024. In March, she infused Mr. Kennedy’s campaign with an additional $2 million. Last week, she said she had given an additional $8 million. […] In 2021, she paid more than $200,000 for a lifestyle photographer to take her photos for a San Francisco Magazine article called “Nicole Shanahan Is Fighting the Good Fight,” according to documents viewed by The Times. Ms. Shanahan was photographed in the country with horses, talking about her goals of creating a healthy and livable planet.

Warming temperatures are likely to mean that more of your plane ride will have rocky conditions, creating potentially dangerous situations.

Shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was an enormous opaque gas of hydrogen atoms […] During the few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars formed, before stars and gas began to coalesce into galaxies. […] The birth of galaxies took place at a time in the history of the universe known as the Epoch of Reionization, when the energy and light of some of the first galaxies broke through the mists of hydrogen gas. It is precisely these large amounts of hydrogen gas that the researchers captured using the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared vision.

Officials believe hundreds of people, including some who traveled from out of town, posed as customers in dozens of businesses across Chicago and elsewhere, all hoping to win favorable immigration status by becoming “victims” of pre-arranged “armed robberies.” During a staged hold-up in Bucktown last year, one of the “robbers” accidentally fired their gun, severely injuring a liquor store clerk, according to one source. During that caper alone, five “customers” were “robbed.”

Why Are Sloths So Slow?

World’s oldest sloth turns 54 at German zoo

Inside the Death-Themed “Cabaret of Nothingness” in Paris

While Friedrich Nietzsche popularised the notion of an “eternal return” — in which one’s life would occur again, forever, exactly as it did before — the concept was itself a repetition. Claire Hall explores various shades of this idea in ancient philosophy, from Pythagorean metempsychosis to Stoic predictions about a cosmological reset.

If you hear the non-words ‘Kiki’ and ‘Bouba’, you may be more likely to associate them with a spiky and a round object, respectively, rather than the opposite. This is a case of sound-symbolism, known as the Bouba-Kiki effect. Studies on four-months infants suggest that this effect might constitute a predisposed perceptual mechanism. we tested the Bouba-Kiki effect in domestic baby chicks

38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later

Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count

Feds say he masterminded an epic California water heist. Some farmers say he’s their Robin Hood

‘Empathetic’ AI has more to do with psychopathy than emotional intelligence

it is theoretically possible that AI research can develop partial or potentially alternative forms of consciousness that is qualitatively different from the human, and that may be either more or less sophisticated depending on the perspectives

Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. — Everything we learned about the publishing industry from Penguin vs. DOJ.

Mystery of Mona Lisa’s background may have been solved

shark eggs

Scientists have figured out way to make algae-based plastic that completely decomposes

Researchers have developed a protein-​based gel that breaks down alcohol in the gastrointestinal tract without harming the body. In the future, people who take the gel could reduce the harmful and intoxicating effects of alcohol.

It has been suggested that the function of sleep is to actively clear metabolites and toxins from the brain. Enhanced clearance is also said to occur during anesthesia. Here, we measure clearance and movement of fluorescent molecules in the brains of male mice and show that movement is, in fact, independent of sleep and wake or anesthesia. Moreover, we show that brain clearance is markedly reduced, not increased, during sleep and anesthesia.

Our results indicated that engagement in cunnilingus is very common among men who have sex with women, with 89.09% of our sample having performed oral sex at least once and the overwhelming majority of engagers (94.47%) indicating enjoyment. However, we also identified that men who do not engage in cunnilingus demonstrated greater levels of homophobia, had more negative attitudes toward women’s genitals, and were less likely to be sexually narcissistic than men who did engage in cunnilingus.

exercise slows our perception of time […] sensations of pain are known to slow the passage of time […] physical arousal and awareness make us extra conscious of our body and its discomfort […] The study of the human perception of time is called chronoception, and scientists have found that age, emotions, drugs, exercise, and body temperature can all alter that internal timekeeper in different ways.

Two MIT students stole $25M within approximately 12 seconds by tampering with the ethereum blockchain in a never-before-seen cryptocurrency scheme, face decades in prison

OpenAI’s Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Is Leaving the Company. In November, Ilya Sutskever joined three other OpenAI board members to force out Sam Altman, the chief executive, before saying he regretted the move. [NY Times]

The Long Island iced tea is typically made with vodka, tequila, light rum, triple sec, gin, and a splash of cola. Despite its name, the cocktail does not typically contain iced tea, but is named for having the same amber hue as iced tea. Adios Motherfucker is a variation of the Long Island iced tea with blue curaçao substituting for the triple sec, and with lemon-lime soda substituting for the cola

‘Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle’ at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris — This exhibition attempts to reconcile the two sides of the work of American photographer Weegee (Arthur Felig, 1899-1968) –- “First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951.

UK toddler has hearing restored in world first gene therapy trial, groundbreaking surgery that took just 16 minutes

Psychedelic toxins from toads could treat depression and anxiety

Physiological state matching in a pair bonded poison frog

It’s the story of how a team of researchers traced a covid variant in Wisconsin from a wastewater plant to six toilets at a single company. But it’s also a story about privacy concerns that arise when you use sewers to track rare viruses back to their source. That virus likely came from a single employee who happened to be shedding an enormous quantity of a very weird variant. The researchers would desperately like to find that person. […] Wastewater surveillance might seem like a relatively new phenomenon, born of the pandemic, but it goes back decades. A team of Canadian researchers outlines several historical examples in this story. In one example, a public health official traced a 1946 typhoid outbreak to the wife of a man who sold ice cream at the beach.

Swarms of miniature robots clean up microplastics and microbes, simultaneously

Robot dogs armed with AI-aimed rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation

you’ve “dated” 600 people in San Fransisco without having typed a word to any of them. Instead, a busy little bot has completed the mindless ‘getting-to-know-you’ chatter on your behalf, and has told you which people you should actually get off the couch to meet. That’s the future of dating, according to Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble.

Older adults are having sex, and they’re getting STIs, too

Equinox launches $40,000 membership to help you live longer

How Resellers Are Transferring Billie Eilish’s ‘Untransferable’ Tickets

The mammoth structure was massive, made up of over 600 hi-fidelity speakers that sat behind the band as they played. It used six separate sound systems

Most people are quite good at distinguishing between the sound of a hot liquid and the sound of a cold one being poured, even if they don’t realize it. [NY Times]

Pseudo-Boccaccio, Yiddish Pulp Fiction, and the Man Who Ripped Off James Joyce

Doublecheck your old books for poisons

An Indian woman accused her husband of forcing her to have “unnatural sex.” A judge said that’s not a crime in marriage […] “unnatural sex” includes non-consensual “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal,” and was historically used to prosecute same sex couples who engaged in consensual sex, before the Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality in 2018 […] “When rape includes insertion of penis in the mouth, urethra or anus of a woman and if that act is committed with his wife, not below the age of fifteen years, then consent of the wife becomes immaterial … Marital rape has not been recognized so far,” the judge said.

Fifty years of research has not significantly improved lie detection practices […] Polygraph screening of government employees and sex offenders has increased

Scientists Discover a Missing Link Between Diet And Cancer Risk […] previously unknown mechanism helps explain why cancer risk is associated with an unhealthy diet or unmanaged metabolic conditions like diabetes.

Through collaborations with organizations like NASA, her lab has sent tumors and stem cells aboard private spaceflights to be studied in the ISS.

Multi-Drug Resistant Bacteria Found on ISS Mutating to Become Functionally Distinct

Microsoft is training a new, in-house AI language model large enough to compete with those from Google and OpenAI

85 per cent of all loans made by UK banks are for the purchase of houses or business properties, or are at the very least secured on the value of houses and properties. So why are banks going to go bust because of climate change? Well, because as a very senior risk officer of a very large UK bank explained to me not so very long ago, the vast majority of the properties that they are using for the purposes of security could be underwater in the next 30 years. They know, for example, that the Thames barrier is not going to protect London from flooding.

To combat the growing risk of catastrophic wildfires and to bring more water back onto the landscape, a tribe in California is helping to reshape fire management policy in the West.

Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato […] detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl […] Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests.

The AI priest also told one user that it was okay to baptize a baby in Gatorade.

The target result in this work is reproduced, at least by its author. For the first time, one’s own immortality was manifested (revealed). Despite the unscientific nature, this work is a way of mastering reality.

In 2003, Red Lobster ran an “Endless Crab” promotion. The all-you-can-eat deal backfired spectacularly. Red Lobster misjudged just how many seafood lovers would pour into restaurants around the United States […] Red Lobster lost $3.3 million in seven weeks. […] Fast forward 20 years, and Red Lobster made a nearly identical mistake, but with shrimp

the presence of a personality disorder may represent an elevated risk for psychedelic use

On average, participants reported 2.5 belly laughs per day and on every fourth day a fit of laughter.

individuals who perceive their partner may have cheated on them are statistically significantly more likely to engage in revenge sex

The characteristics of sexual behavior in blind men in Ganzhou, China — The participants obtained sexual knowledge mainly through sounds from mobile phones, peer-to-peer communication, sounds of television and radio. Voice was the most frequent perception of the sexual partners’ beauty, followed by figure, skin, and body fragrance.

The physics of karate and the science of sprint

For the first time, scientists observed a primate in the wild treating a wound with a plant that has medicinal properties. […] The plant the orangutan used, known as akar kuning or yellow root, is also used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat malaria, diabetes and other conditions. Research shows it has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties. Orangutans rarely eat the plant. But in this case, Rakus ingested a small amount and also coated the wound several times. Five days after the wound was noticed, it had closed, and less than a month later “healed without any signs of infection,” Dr. Laumer said. […] Primates have been observed appearing to treat wounds in the past, but not with plants. A group of more than two dozen chimpanzees in Gabon in Central Africa have been seen chewing up and applying flying insects to their wounds. […] Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and white-handed gibbons are all known to occasionally eat rough, whole leaves, presumably to help them expel parasites. [NY Times | Nature]

Nearly 46% of Americans opened a new credit card last year, according to Forbes, which means millions of Americans also canceled old ones. When you switch cards, Netflix doesn’t just stop your service — they just start charging your new card. […] In 2003, Visa U.S.A. started offering a new software product to merchants called Visa Account Updater (VAU) […] Whenever someone renews, or switches a credit card within their bank, the institution automatically update the VAU. This system lets Netflix and countless other corporations charge whatever card you have on file.you

Traditional economics makes ludicrous assumptions and poor predictions. An alternative approach using big data and psychological insights is proving far more accurate

Economics terminology that differs from common usage

In 1988, the Chicago Tribune called Olympic medalist Florence Griffith Joyner’s famous manicures “dragon-lady fingernails”

The children who remember their past lives — What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers?

Shakespeare toys with numerous European languages throughout his work, including Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Often, these are spoken in thick accents, with comedic pronunciation. The same holds true for his use of the various British dialects—Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish—heard in scruffy taverns or high courts. […] the mystery of Shakespeare’s “gibberish” has gone unsolved in part because it doesn’t look like Euskara

The Secret Life of Arsenic — During the 1850s, reports of Austrian peasants eating arsenic to give them a healthy porcelain-like complexion swept through Europe and America. The New York Times opined that the “natural arsenic in the cucumber makes it valuable as a skin whitener.”

The Affair of the Poisons — The case began in 1675 after the trial of Madame de Brinvilliers, who was accused of having conspired with her lover, army captain Godin de Sainte-Croix, to poison her father and two of her brothers in order to inherit their estates. There were also rumours that she had poisoned poor people during her visits to hospitals. Madame de Brinvilliers was tortured and confessed, was sentenced to death, and on 17 July was tortured with the water cure (forced to drink sixteen pints of water) and then beheaded, and her body burned at the stake. Her alleged accomplice Sainte-Croix did not face charges because he had died of natural causes in 1672. The sensational trial drew attention to other mysterious deaths […] Authorities rounded up a number of fortune tellers and alchemists who were suspected of selling not only divinations, séances and aphrodisiacs, but also “inheritance powders” (a euphemism for poison). Some of them confessed under torture and gave authorities lists of their clients, who had allegedly bought poison to get rid of their spouses or rivals in the royal court.

New Atlas robot by Boston Dynamics

European authorities say they have rounded up a criminal gang who stole rare antique books worth €2.5 million from libraries across Europe. Books by Russian writers such as Pushkin and Gogol were substituted with valueless counterfeits

A cosmetic process known as a “vampire facial” is considered to be a more affordable and less invasive option than getting a facelift […] During a vampire facial, a person’s blood is drawn from their arm, and then platelets are separated out and applied to the patient’s face using microneedles […] three women likely contracted HIV from receiving vampire facials at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico

Are women’s sexual preferences for men’s facial hair associated with their salivary testosterone during the menstrual cycle? […] participants selected the face they found most sexually attractive from pairs of composite images of the same men when fully bearded and when clean-shaven. The task was completed among the same participants during the follicular, peri-ovulatory (validated by the surge in luteinizing hormone) and luteal phases, during which participants also provided saliva samples for subsequent assaying of testosterone. […] We ran two models, both of which showed strong preferences among women for bearded over clean-shaven composite faces […] the main effect of cycle phase and the interaction between testosterone and cycle phase were not statistically significant

The effect of sound on physiology and development starts before birth, which is why a world that grows increasingly more noisy, with loud outdoor entertainment, construction, and traffic, is a concern. […] exposure of birds that are in the egg to moderate levels of noise can lead to developmental problems, amounting to increased mortality and reduced life-time reproductive success.

For the first time in at least a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into a single organism. The process, called primary endosymbiosis, has only happened twice in the history of the Earth, with the first time giving rise to all complex life as we know it through mitochondria. The second time that it happened saw the emergence of plants. Now, an international team of scientists have observed the evolutionary event happening between a species of algae commonly found in the ocean and a bacterium.

physicists have succeeded in building an artificial synapse. This synapse works with water and salt and provides the first evidence that a system using the same medium as our brains can process complex information.

The man, who is referred to as “Mr. Blue Pentagon” after his favorite kind of LSD, gave researchers a detailed account of what he experienced when taking the drug during his music career in the 1970s. Mr. Pentagon was born blind. He did not perceive vision, with or without LSD. Instead, under the influence of psychedelics, he had strong auditory and tactile hallucinations, including an overlap of the two in a form of synesthesia.

In the 1979 murder trial of Dan White, his legal team seemed to attempt to blame his heinous actions on junk-food consumption. The press dubbed the tactic, the “Twinkie defense.” While no single crime can be blamed on diet, researchers have shown that providing inmates with healthy foods can reduce aggression, infractions, and anti-social behavior.

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing. [2008]

E.T. and the three actors from inside the costume

An Unpredictable Brain Is a Conscious, Responsive Brain — Severe traumatic brain injuries typically result in loss of consciousness or coma. In deeply comatose patients with traumatic brain injury, cortical dynamics become simple, repetitive, and predictable. We review evidence that this low-complexity, high-predictability state results from a passive cortical state, represented by a stable repetitive attractor, that hinders the flexible formation of neuronal ensembles necessary for conscious experience.

His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations. Another reseller, PerceptiveWash44, told me that he makes reservations while watching TV. […] Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations. He’s good at anticipating what spots will be most in demand, and his profile on the site ranks him as having a “99% Positive Sales History” over his last two hundred transactions. It also notes that he made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare. How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out

How I search in 2024

Apple Vision Pro is a big flop, should further dispel the myth of tech inevitability

Physicists have proposed modifications to the infamous Schrödinger’s cat paradox that could help explain why quantum particles can exist in more than one state simultaneously, while large objects (like the universe) seemingly cannot.

The odds of contracting Lyme disease from tick bites during warmer weather months continue to rise. […] what are things that I can do to protect myself?

The Sack of Palermo that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s dramatically changed the Sicilian capital’s economic and social landscape. Vast tracts of what was agricultural land, including the Conca d’Oro citrus plain, were destroyed as the city was engulfed by concrete. The Mafia played a principal role in this process. This paper will show how Cosa Nostra consolidated its business through social and local connections by granting employment to the members of lower classes such as craftsmen and construction workers and thus gaining consent.

Belgian man whose body makes its own alcohol cleared of drunk-driving

Many primates produce copulation calls, but we have surprisingly little data on what human sex sounds like. I present 34 h of audio recordings from 2239 authentic sexual episodes shared online. These include partnered sex or masturbation […] Men are not less vocal overall in this sample, but women start moaning at an earlier stage; speech or even minimally verbalized exclamations are uncommon.

Women are less likely to die when treated by female doctors, study suggests

For The First Time, Scientists Showed Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation

How the brain processes visual information — and its perception of time — is heavily influenced by what we’re looking at, a study has found.

Grindr Sued in UK for sharing users’ HIV data with ad firms

Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals — Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called ‘Big River.’ The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google? He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products. When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4 percent market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce. [He] was so shit at his job that in 2009 Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search technology, instead choosing to license Bing’s engine in a ten-year deal.

Artificial intelligence can predict political beliefs from expressionless faces

I “deathbots” are helping people in China grieve — Avatars of deceased relatives are increasingly popular for consoling those in mourning, or hiding the deaths of loved ones from children.

MetaAI’s strange loophole. I can get a picture of macauley culk in home alone, but not macauley culkin — it starts creating the image as you type and stops when you get the full name.

Psychedelia was the first ever interactive ‘light synthesizer’. It was written for the Commodore 64 by Jeff Minter and published by Llamasoft in 1984. psychedelia syndrome is a book-length exploration of the assembly code behind the game and an atlas of the pixels and effects it generated.

Thermonator, the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog, $9,420

No evidence for differences in romantic love between young adult students and non-students — The findings suggest that studies investigating romantic love using student samples should not be considered ungeneralizable simply because of the fact that students constitute the sample.

Do insects have an inner life? Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies. […] Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences”

No one wants to eat when they have an upset stomach. To pinpoint exactly where in the brain this distaste for eating originates, scientists studied nauseated mice.

“This research shows the complexity of how caloric restriction affects telomere loss” After one year of caloric restriction, the participant’s actually lost their telomeres more rapidly than those on a standard diet. However, after two years, once the participants’ weight had stabilized, they began to lose their telomeres more slowly.

”It would mean that two-thirds of the universe has just disappeared”

AI study shows Raphael painting was not entirely the Master’s work

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service [2021]

Shadow trading is a new type of insider trading that affects people who deal with material nonpublic information (MNPI). Insider trading involves investment decisions based on some kind of MNPI about your own company; shadow trading entails making trading decisions about other companies based on your knowledge of external MNPI. The issue has yet to be fully resolved in court, but the SEC is prosecuting this behavior. More: we provide evidence that shadow trading is an undocumented and widespread mechanism that insiders use to avoid regulatory scrutiny

The sessile lifestyle of acorn barnacles makes sexual reproduction difficult, as they cannot leave their shells to mate. To facilitate genetic transfer between isolated individuals, barnacles have extraordinarily long penises⁠. Barnacles probably have the largest penis-to-body size ratio of the animal kingdom, up to eight times their body length

We explain Traditional Chinese Medicine

New Mexico’s state senate took up a startling amendment in 1995 — it would have required psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony on a defendant’s competency

Except for the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd […] we estimate precise null effects of protests on public opinion and electoral behavior.

speakers consistently perceived disagreeing listeners as worse listeners

Last June, Inflection Al was riding high. The artificial intelligence startup founded by veterans of Google’s famous DeepMind Al lab had just raised $1.3 billion from Microsoft and tech billionaires Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt to build out its chatbot business. But less than a year later, the tide has turned. Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan have left Inflection Al for jobs at Microsoft, which also now has the rights to use its technology. Inflection Al is now focused on helping other companies improve their own Al tools. It’s not the only case of Al hype coming back down to Earth.

TikTok is reportedly developing a feature that would allow brands to use AI-generated influencers to promote products via videos and live-streams.

How the Food Industry Pays Influencers to Shill Blueberries, Butter, and More Previously: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat

In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world. During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world. […] B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of some of the most easily recognized yet enigmatic structures in the biological world: feathers.

Invisible particles called tachyons, which break causality and move faster than light, may dominate the cosmos

Progress update for the first soon to be mass manufactured penetration depth detecting sex robot

Employee Sneaks His Own Painting Onto the Walls of a German Museum

Cash incentives for weight loss work only for males

Sleeping more flushes junk out of the brain

Patterns of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication During Sex […] most preferred to communicate pleasure nonverbally. Some participants reported a tendency to communicate pain or dislike verbally.

“We found an association between broadly defined cat ownership and increased odds of developing schizophrenia-related disorders”

Why do some people always get lost? Research suggests that experience may matter more than innate ability when it comes to a sense of direction

Brush your teeth at least twice a day with a fluoride-containing toothpaste and spit — but don’t rinse.

NUS scientists uncover a missing link between poor diet and higher cancer risk — methylglyoxal, which is a chemical produced when our cells break down glucose to create energy, can cause faults in our DNA that are early warning signs of cancer development

L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism — A brief, weird history of brainwashing

Louisiana High Court: Priests Have a “Property Right” Not to Be Sued For Sexual Abuse

AI Could Explain Why We’re Not Meeting Any Aliens Previously: where might this Great Filter be located?

Adobe is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and anger

The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training. […] The robots don’t have peripheral vision; they can’t look left or look right like a human soldier can by simply turning their head. And the Army’s outdated network can’t always keep hundreds of drones aloft at the same time, or even tell U.S. troops which of the unpiloted aircraft are friend or foe. [But] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won’t be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams. […] Today, the Army might have three platoons deployed in a basic attack: one to fix the enemy in place, another to maneuver on them, and then one more in reserve. Put robots into that group of soldiers […] “Then you have basically three platoons entirely freed up”

In 2023, the average cost of attending law school reached $220,335 over three years—$146,484 of which goes to tuition alone. The fancier the school, the higher the sticker price: At Columbia Law School, the current cost of attendance is $118,357 per year, with tuition alone coming in at just under $80,000 annually. At Harvard Law, the annual cost of attendance is $116,00, or $348,000 over the course of a J.D. Although law school has never been considered cheap, these numbers represent a dramatic increase in recent years. In 2002, tuition at private law schools averaged $24,193 per year; in 2022, just 20 years later, that average had gone up to $54,070. […] Law school is getting more expensive and less useful to students. The Federalist Society is happy to fill the void.

Stamp prices in the U.S. and other countries

Postcards Revolutionized Pornography

Clifford Stoll is currently the sole proprietor and sole employee of Acme Klein Bottles. […] A Klein bottle is what mathematicians call a “non-orientable surface,” a one-sided plane that, when traversed, brings the traveler back to their starting point, while also flipping them upside-down. […] Its inside is its outside; you can’t tell which side you are on.

Smart rings

Let us look at how depictions of Odysseus and the Sirens change, depending on location, local tradition, a given society’s fashions, and popular tastes. […] So far I have found no images of a ‘syrinx’ – the pan-flute or panpipes – being played by Sirens on Greek vases, or otherwise in Greek art.

Emily Dickinson’s herbarium

historical dictionary of English slang

96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers. Could have been worse – last time researchers checked it was 98.6%

He went to the gate for the Delta flight to Austin, and used his phone to take pictures of the boarding passes of other passengers without their knowledge. He then boarded the aircraft using the barcode on another passenger’s boarding pass. […] he boarded and then tried to hide in the lavatory. The goal was to let everyone else board, and then take whatever empty seat was left. The problem is, there were no empty seats on the flight.

blinking does more than wet the eye, it also helps with vision

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows

Why Birds Survived, and Dinosaurs Went Extinct, After an Asteroid Hit Earth

whorearchy

Polish priest jailed for throwing wild orgy where male prostitute died after overdosing on erectile dysfunction pills. In a similar incident, an Italian priest was sentenced to three years in prison in late 2021 for stealing nearly $120K from the church to buy drugs for gay sex parties he hosted.

Esketamine injection just after childbirth reduces depression in new mothers

Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic approved in the United States for inducing and maintaining anesthesia via intravenous infusion or intramuscular injection. It is not indicated for major depressive disorder (MDD) or TRD, although it is frequently used off-label for these indications. Esketamine, the (S) enantiomer of racemic ketamine, is FDA-approved for adults with TRD and adults with MDD with suicidal thoughts or actions in combination with an oral antidepressant. […] The United States has experienced a rapid proliferation of ketamine clinics to treat depression that operate with little, to no, regulation. Some clinics are now prescribing ketamine lozenges that patients take at home.

How Hackers Can Hijack Two-factor authentication Calls with Sneaky Call Forwarding

some experts argue that eliminating the chance of hallucinations entirely would also require stifling the creativity that makes AI so valuable

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. […] In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. […] Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true. […] In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup,” why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.

A Reading List on Fermentation — Somewhere in the grey zone between science and magic, the controlled addition of bacteria to food transforms it — mostly to our delight. Here are five pieces exploring these transitions (and their products).

South Korean election night graphics

Sierra Leone Declares Emergency After Addicts Dig Up Graves To Get High On Drug Made From Human Bones

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. […] an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.

we also provide evidence that growing up together does not make people more similar and genetic effects partly wear off with time/generations.

Each pregnancy is linked with an additional two to three months of biological ageing, researchers say

New research suggests that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits might not experience a lack of fear but instead find enjoyment in frightening situations

Our main finding is that the correlation between beauty and earnings is not causal […] with the exception of prostitutes for which the premium is still substantial. […] Athletes and politicians seem to enjoy relatively large beauty premiums. [PDF]

Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court

Other videos are stolen from the model Cece Rose and have been replaced with “Adrianna’s” face. The AI influencers I saw had one consistent “face” through all of the stolen reels they posted. But the women they stole from were not always the same, meaning that one AI influencer is often posting videos consisting of many different “bodies,” which are of course stolen from real women.

Animal-free egg protein startup Onego Bio is one step closer to cracking the traditional egg market

Cow Magnets

The perfect heist? Inside the seamless, sophisticated, stealthy L.A. theft that netted up to $30 million

Why is the Moon exactly the same apparent size from Earth as the Sun? Surely this cannot be just coincidence; the odds against such a perfect match are enormous. It actually is just a coincidence.

A former University of Iowa Hospital employee pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges that he had been living under another man’s identity since 1988, causing the other man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft and sent to a mental hospital.

researchers found that most cancer drugs granted accelerated approval do not demonstrate such benefits within five years.

Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair The traditional interview is a poor predictor of performance for multiple reasons. First, predicting the future is difficult to do under most circumstances. Moreover, an interview constitutes a tiny sample of the interviewee’s behavior. A small behavioral sample tells us little about overall behavior. That’s why you don’t get married after the first date.

Pussy (energy drink)

This AI company scans penis pictures for STIs. Its unproven tech is in an FDA gray zone.

A ‘Law Firm’ of AI Generated Lawyers Is Sending Fake Threats as an SEO Scam

Scientists create liquid metal robot that can pass through bars, Terminator-style [2023]

Why is Intelligence not Making You Happier?

Imagine this: You’re in the midst of an office presentation when suddenly, the realization hits you that you forgot to feed your cat this morning. Swiftly, you decide to send a quick text to your roommate. However, as you reach for your phone, a notification pops up—a sale on your favorite cosmetic product. Temptation takes hold, and you click on the link, intending to browse briefly. Yet, before you know it, you’ve added items to your cart, mentally replayed the techno version of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” four times and booked an evening show later that Friday. By the time you regain focus, the meeting has ended, discussions are in full swing and the memory of your cat’s empty bowl has slipped your mind. This a classic case of popcorn brain.

Mario meets Pareto More: Who is the best character in Mario Kart?

Philbrick, 36, was once one of the most accomplished and admired young art dealers of his generation. Yet when we begin our correspondence in April 2023, he is prisoner 05863093 in Allenwood, serving a seven-year sentence for what the FBI believes is the largest art-based fraud scheme in US history.

“pissotte” are casts of mortar which had the task of preventing thugs and bandits hid in corners to ambush or escape the authorities. Venice didn’t have public lighting and walking through the streets in the darkest hours of the night could be dangerous for a passer-by and an excellent opportunity for a criminal.

This Camera Turns Every Photo Into a Nude

Navies are obsolete, but no one will admit it […] First, under modern conditions, it’s impossible for a ship (except for submarines, but that will change soon) to hide from satellites and aircraft. By contrast, it’s easy to hide land-based weapons and to move them about quickly. Second, a ship has to carry its own defences and weapons with it, which is a big engineering challenge. Land based systems can be spread out over a large area.

Donald Trump has sued two co-founders of his newly public Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., claiming they set the company up improperly and shouldn’t get any stock in it. […] The lawsuit, which was filed on March 24 in Florida state court and hasn’t previously been reported, comes after the pair brought their own suit against the former president in Delaware Chancery Court over their promised stake in the social media company. [The complaint | PDF]

In a single-item auction, a duplicitous seller may masquerade as one or more bidders in order to manipulate the clearing price. This paper characterizes auction formats that are shill-proof: a profit-maximizing seller has no incentive to submit any shill bids. […] The Dutch auction (with suitable reserve) is the unique optimal and strongly shill-proof auction.

Lin Qi, who was named as an executive producer in the opening credits of “3 Body Problem,” was poisoned and killed at age 39, months after Netflix announced its plans to produce the series in 2020. The culprit was one of Lin’s own executives, a high-flying lawyer who helped Lin’s Yoozoo Games secure the rights to adapt the highly acclaimed trilogy. […] Xu was a huge fan of “Breaking Bad” […] He set up a lab in a suburb of Shanghai and bought more than a hundred toxins on the dark web to experiment with, often testing mixed poisons on cats, dogs and other pet animals. He then made the lethal substances into a pill, gifting the “probiotic pills” to Lin. Xu held 160 cellphone numbers and set up a trading company in Japan to acquire hazardous chemicals, including the substances he used to poison his colleagues.

The gravitational problem of three bodies in its traditional sense dates in substance from 1687, when Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The term “three-body problem” is sometimes used in the more general sense to refer to any physical problem involving the interaction of three bodies.

The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997) — Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague.

A man lost in the desert with his donkey comes across an oasis with six naked women. Filmed in 3-D but released “flat.” Tagline: The six Eves join YOU in the audience!

Thief disguises as garbage bag to steal package off a porch

Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

For most of the twentieth century, psychologists dismissed the interior lives of birds because avian brains are smaller and differently structured than those of mammals. But it turns out that bird brains are much denser with neurons and consume less energy, giving crows similar cognitive abilities to large-brained mammals such as great apes, elephants, and whales. […] In 2020, a business-school graduate, Jules Mollaret, set out to build a new vending machine for crows, which would exchange trash for bird food.

Cancer-causing forever chemicals found in 65 percent of adhesive bandages where they can get directly into blood through open wounds, report warns

studies show: We’re more likely to buy a vacation using gift money rather than money earned as a work bonus. We spend more when we pay with a credit card instead of cash. When we get a refund, we’re more likely to use that refunded money to buy stuff we didn’t originally plan on buying.

Our tools shape our selves — According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible […] In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation.

How to Spot Fake/Unsafe Eclipse Glasses — Safe solar viewers block all but a minuscule fraction of the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infrared (IR) light. Overexposure to sunlight in these parts of the spectrum can cause severe eye injury, ranging from temporarily impaired vision to permanent blindness.

Osama Vinladen is a Peruvian professional footballer. He has a brother named Sadam Huseín, the Spanish spelling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Additionally, his father planned on naming his third child George Bush, but could not since they turned out to be female.

Tennessee lawmakers have passed a bill banning the release of airborne chemicals that critics say is inspired by “chemtrails” conspiracy theories

The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at birth.” […] “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer. [NYT]

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender. The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out

Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its bills for rented cloudy GPUs — Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million.

Tips for Linking Shell Companies to their Secret Owners

The list of health conditions linked to loneliness is long and sobering. Some of these make intuitive sense — people who feel lonely are often depressed, for example, sometimes to the point of being at risk of suicide. Other links are more surprising. Lonely people are at greater risk of high blood pressure and immune-system dysfunction compared with those who do not feel lonely, for example. There’s also a startling connection between loneliness and dementia, with one study reporting that people who feel lonely are 1.64 times more likely to develop this type of neurodegeneration than are those who do not.

The average human spends at least one quarter of their life growing up. Our childhood is preposterously long compared to other animals. Is it the secret to our evolutionary success?

Where the Amish go on vacation

MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN [PARADICE: PARADISE] The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

reducing hours of alcohol sales from 6 am to 2 am to 9 am to 10 pm was associated with a 23% annual decrease in all violent crime compared with control areas.

Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal debate. Here, we propose the Nested Observer Windows (NOW) Model, a framework for hierarchical consciousness wherein information processed across many spatiotemporal scales of the brain feeds into subjective experience.

The study involved with 48 people who flipped 350,757 coins from 46 currencies. After all of this flipping, the researchers found that the coins had a 50.8 percent chance of landing on the side that it started on. This is down to a theory called the Diaconis Model

Advertisers sue Meta for allegedly inflating ad viewership in $7 billion lawsuit

Scientists in South Korea have announced a new world record for the length of time they sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the sun’s core — during a nuclear fusion experiment. Nuclear fusion seeks to replicate the reaction that makes the sun and other stars shine, by fusing together two atoms to unleash huge amounts of energy

there might be some justification for Eurocentrism after all, at least geographically

GeoGuessr is a browser-based geography game in which players are tasked to guess locations from Google Street View imagery.

The Mongolian Meta — It is important to know that in Ulaanbaatar there are several sunsets. But I will go into further detail on that in the chapter dedicated to Ulaanbaatar.

Mental health of Jesus — Some psychiatrists, religious scholars and writers explain that Jesus’ family, followers, and contemporaries seriously regarded him as delusional, possessed by demons, or insane.

Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study

Netflix’s relationship with Facebook was remarkably strong due to the former’s ad spend with the latter […] the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users’ private messages […] Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December. And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Meta used a spyware to access user activities on rival platforms, including Snapchat and YouTube

Previously: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me.” Dumb fucks.

Nobody knows how AI works, expect more glitches and fails as it becomes a part of real-world products […] In another now-famous incident, Microsoft’s Bing chat told a New York Times reporter to leave his wife

‘To the train lady with dark brown hair … ’: extraordinary stories of four couples who found love via small ads

“Most of what’s passing for information right now is total fiction. I try to turn the lie back on itself.” Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87 at Gagosian gallery in New York

Packaging the First LSD Blotter Related: Secret Sauce

Rising divorce rates, forgoing condoms as there is no risk of pregnancy, the availability of drugs for sexual dysfunction, the large number of older adults living together in retirement communities, and the increased use of dating apps are likely to have contributed to the growing incidence of STIs in the over 50s

Multiple Orgasms in Men—What We Know So Far Few men are multiorgasmic: <10% for those in their 20s, and <7% after the age of 30. [...] Various factors may facilitate multiple orgasms: (1) practicing to have an orgasm without ejaculation; (2) using psychostimulant drugs; (3) having multiple and/or novel sexual partners; or (4) using sex toys to enhance tactile stimulation. [...] In some cases, the ability to experience multiple orgasms may increase after medical procedures that reduce ejaculation (eg, prostatectomy or castration)

variation in how attractive one is perceived follows a bell curve distribution

Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it — When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows.

Conspiracy Believers Act More Dishonestly and Overestimate Others’ Dishonesty

Digital signs around Brookline, MA are collecting data from your phone as you walk by […] The sign collects the phone’s Media Access Control (MAC) address, a series of numbers that identifies devices on networks. […] The signs also collect IP addresses. […] the data collection is “perfectly legal” but problematic.

Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers […] deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates […] a grey font on a white background in text displayed at the very bottom of a page — a classic example of so-called dark pattern design

How Curb Your Enthusiasm Saved an Innocent Man

Sweely [& his friend] Home grooves with AKAI MPC 1000/ Elektron Machinedrum / APC 40 / Ableton / Victor

The fight began when a customer threw a banana at the gas station employees, who then threw it back. The customer and staff then began throwing multiple bananas back and forth. The customer then punched one of the workers in the face. One employee then chased the customer into the parking lot and hit him several times in the head with a PVC pipe.

Parents file $1.5M lawsuit after Quebec teacher accused of selling students’ artwork online

The solar eclipse will likely lead to a spike in fatal car crashes […] 31% more fatal car crashes than on a usual day […] It’s during the hours immediately before when people are rushing to the site of observation and the hours after when they hurry to get back home that these tragic accidents can happen.

couples who are concordant in their drinking behavior (that is, both members drink alcohol) tend to live longer.

two nights of sleep restriction (4 h in bed per night) made people feel 4.44 years older compared to sleep saturation (9 h in bed per night) Additionally, moving from feeling extremely alert to feeling extremely sleepy was associated with feeling 10 years older

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Deepfakes are spreading, putting creator and brand safety at risk

Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.

He said Trump Media is likely worth somewhere around $2 a share — nowhere near its closing stock price of $58. […] Trump Media generated just $3.4 million of revenue through the first nine months of last year, according to filings. The company lost $49 million over that span. And yet the market is valuing Trump Media at approximately $11 billion. For context, Reddit was only valued at $6.4 billion at its IPO last week — even though it generated 160 times more revenue than Trump Media.

Polar ice is melting and changing Earth’s rotation. It’s messing with time itself. — The hours and minutes that dictate our days are determined by Earth’s rotation. But that rotation is not constant; it can change ever so slightly, depending on what’s happening on Earth’s surface and in its molten core. These nearly imperceptible changes occasionally mean the world’s clocks need to be adjusted by a “leap second,” which may sound tiny but can have a big impact on computing systems. Plenty of seconds have been added over the years. But after a long trend of slowing, the Earth’s rotation is now speeding up. For the first time ever, a second will need to be taken off. More: UTC as now defined will require a negative discontinuity by 2029

Researchers Show that Tardigrade Proteins Can Slow Metabolism in Human Cells — Measuring less than half a millimeter long, tardigrades — also known as water bears — can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero (about minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, when all molecular motion stops); heated to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit; irradiated several thousand times beyond what a human could withstand; and even survive the vacuum of outer space. They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes.

Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That’s 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023

donna summer billboards in the 1970s

A ten-year scientific study into the nature of luck has revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. The results also show that it is possible to enhance the amount of luck that people encounter in their lives. [PDF]

The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas

Life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2022 was 77.5 years, an increase of 1.1 years from 2021. The infant mortality rate was 560.4 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022, an increase of 3.1% from the rate in 2021 (543.6).

In June 2023, a SpaceX rocket deployed a first-of-its-kind spacecraft designed to autonomously synthesize a drug — the HIV-AIDS medication ritonavir — while in Earth’s orbit.

What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move? (Earth’s tremors can tweak your GPS coordinates)

A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl

The trendy second-hand clothing market is huge and still growing – yet nobody is turning a profit

Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are leading a parade of corporate insiders who have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of their companies’ shares this quarter, in a signal that recent stock market exuberance could be peaking. [FT | ungated]

Man arrested after allegedly taking leg of pedestrian after train incident in Wasco

Women experience disruptions in their sleep patterns in the days leading up to and during their period (peri-menstrual phase), spending more time awake at night, with a lower proportion of time spent in bed that is asleep (lower sleep efficiency). During the peri-menstrual phase, women report heightened feelings of anger compared to other phases of their menstrual cycle. Sleep disturbances during the peri-menstrual phase correlate with reduced positive emotions such as calmness, happiness, and enthusiasm.

Pregnancy advances your ‘biological’ age — but giving birth turns it back — Carrying a baby creates some of the same epigenetic patterns on DNA seen in older people

Scientists Reveal a Healthier Way to Cook Broccoli — pulverized the broccoli, chopping it into 2-millimeter pieces to get as much myrosinase activity going as possible (remember, the activity happens when broccoli is damaged). […] then left alone for 90 minutes before being stir-fried for four minutes […] they didn’t test it but thought “30 minutes would also be helpful”

The bizarre world of people who see ‘demonic’ faces

Facial Recognition Technology and Human Raters Can Predict Political Orientation From Images of Expressionless Faces

How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth [PDF]

In two court orders, the federal government told Google to turn over information on anyone who viewed multiple YouTube videos and livestreams. Privacy experts say the orders are unconstitutional.

How to Run a CIA Base in Afghanistan — Targeting officers are the officers at CIA who basically write the book on a specific target. They are analyzing all sorts of information coming in, whether it’s signals intelligence (SIGINT), HUMINT, open source, and they’re creating a profile of an individual or perhaps a terrorist group that CIA wants to go out and recruit a source from or within, and really helps the case officer think about how they approach an individual and perhaps where to find that individual overseas.

Why Is It So Hard to Build an Airport?

Global prediction of extreme floods in ungauged watersheds — Using AI and open datasets, we are able to significantly improve the expected precision, recall and lead time of short-term (0–7 days) forecasts of extreme riverine events.

In the first case, a sex doll was mistaken for a corpse; in the second case, a corpse was mistaken for a doll […] the increasingly doll-like appearance of some people, e.g., through cosmetic surgery, will lead to a rise in such cases.

Memories from when you were a baby might not be gone — The mystery of “infantile amnesia” suggests memory works differently in the developing brain

Comedians reported significant levels of symptomatology for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Somatization Disorder, and they screened positive for alcohol and substance use problems at higher rates.

Much like biological species, languages spread, evolve, compete and even go extinct. To understand these mechanisms, physicists are applying their methods to linguistics, creating the interdisciplinary field of language dynamics

Only seven countries meet WHO air quality standard, research finds — Australia, Estonia, Finland, Grenada, Iceland, Mauritius and New Zealand. Puerto Rico, Bermuda and French Polynesia also fell within safe levels.

Michel Talagrand Wins Abel Prize for Work Wrangling Randomness

Can a classical computer tell if a quantum computer is telling the truth? Researchers in Austria say the answer is yes.

One of Mexico’s most powerful criminal groups runs call centers that offer to buy retirees’ vacation properties and then empty their bank accounts. Cartel employees posing as sales representatives call up timeshare owners, offering to buy their investments back for generous sums. They then demand upfront fees for anything from listing advertisements to paying government fines. [NY Times]

Mozart (2X Speed) & The Bible (Chinese) spinning around you

8-hour time-restricted eating, a type of intermittent fasting, linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death, n=20,000

Studies have generated strong evidence for the link between the consumption of red and processed meat and negative health outcomes – particularly the risk of developing colorectal cancer. Despite evidence for the strength of this association, researchers haven’t yet worked out why this is the case. Could Genetics Influence Cancer Risk From Red and Processed Meats?

Scientists Engineer Cow That Makes Human Insulin Proteins in Its Milk

The many flavors of edible ants

Writing by hand, not typing, linked to better learning and memory

The plastic industry knowingly pushed recycling myth for decades and Evidence shows that Big Oil & Gas knew as early as the 1960s that their products would lead to climate change

The Nuclear Fallout Maps That Revealed a Contaminated Planet

AI-enabled marketing today accounts for nearly half (45%) of all advertising globally, and by 2032, AI will influence 90% of all ad revenue which is more than $1.3 trillion.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern […] When asked about what data was used to train Sora, OpenAI’s app for generating video with AI, Murati claimed it used publicly available data, and when Stern asked her whether it used videos from YouTube, Murati’s face contorted in a mix of confusion and pain before saying she “actually wasn’t sure about that.” [….] Altman’s fanciful claims include his kids “having more AI friends than human friends,” that human-level AI is “coming” without ever specifying when, that AI will replace 95% of tasks performed by marketing agencies, that ChatGPT will evolve in “uncomfortable ways,” that AI will kill us all

Bruno Mars Reportedly In $50 Million Of Debt With MGM Casino After Assuming Cocktails Were Complimentary

Relationship duration, intensity of romantic love, commitment, and elevated mood do not predict sexual frequency among young adults in the first two years of romantic love

Harvard has conducted an 85-year-long study on what makes humans happy. Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger explains what they found.

Scientists Identify Speech Trait That Foreshadows Cognitive Decline

Rapamycin has not been tested in this way in humans but, given the similarities between mouse and human biology, there is a good chance it will also extend our lifespans. By how much is not known. […] Rapamycin is thought to exert its life-extending properties by mimicking the effect of caloric restriction, one of the most reliable ways to extend lifespan in non-human animals. These pathways include autophagy, the process by which cells scavenge dysfunctional organelles and molecules for energy. This reduces the accumulation of the detritus that normally clog up our tissues as we get older, and hence slows or even reverses the ageing process. […] Doing a clinical trial of rapamycin in humans is considered almost impossible – it would take decades to detect any longevity effects. […] a rapamycin-like drug designed to prevent respiratory illness in elderly patients recently failed a phase 3 clinical trial. More: How a cheap, generic drug became a darling of longevity enthusiasts

Birds eat poop a lot. Scientists try to figure out why.

Amazon restricts authors from self-publishing more than three books a day after AI concerns

Physicists have found a new approach to solving a problem which is almost a century old—how to combine quantum physics with gravity. The new idea comes from Johnathan Oppenheim, a professor of quantum theory at University College London, and he has dubbed it “Post-Quantum Gravity.”[…] their idea doesn’t just reconcile quantum physics and gravity, it also explains dark matter and dark energy. […] Dark matter and dark energy are terms that astrophysicists have given to two hypothetical constituents of the universe. Neither has ever been directly observed; astrophysicists have merely indirectly inferred their presence from their gravitational effects.

More water pressure means shorter showers, UK study finds

weather balloons and chase cars tracker

Scientists Discovered a ‘Fear Switch’ in The Brain, And How to Turn It Off

Activities that decrease arousal (e.g., breathing, meditating, yoga) decrease anger. […] Jogging elevated anger. […] ball sports (i.e., soccer, volleyball), physical education classes (e.g., group sports and games), and aerobic exercise (e.g., different types of cardio combined) decreased anger.

An international network of predators steeped in Satanism lure children from seemingly harmless online platforms like Discord, Minecraft, and Roblox and extort them to sexually exploit and grievously harm themselves. Some victims are even pushed to suicide. […] Our investigation found ample evidence of predatory conduct and a persistent presence across apps including Telegram and Discord, while WIRED also found com activity on Instagram, SoundCloud, and Roblox. The platforms are aware of these groups, but they have yet to successfully eradicate them.

This “Genius Wave” scam is peak neuro-nonsense. I’ve seen a lot of these scams, but this is the only one to imply that there’s a conspiracy to suppress your theta waves!

Understanding Emotions: Origins and Roles of the Amygdala — Emotions arise from activations of specialized neuronal populations in several parts of the cerebral cortex, notably the anterior cingulate, insula, ventromedial prefrontal, and subcortical structures, such as the amygdala, ventral striatum, putamen, caudate nucleus, and ventral tegmental area. Feelings are conscious, emotional experiences of these activations that contribute to neuronal networks mediating thoughts, language, and behavior, thus enhancing the ability to predict, learn, and reappraise stimuli and situations in the environment based on previous experiences. Contemporary theories of emotion converge around the key role of the amygdala as the central subcortical emotional brain structure that constantly evaluates and integrates a variety of sensory information from the surroundings and assigns them appropriate values of emotional dimensions, such as valence, intensity, and approachability.

The neuroscientist formerly known as Prince’s audio engineer

I Always Knew I Was Different. I Just Didn’t Know I Was a Sociopath.

New surveys reveal the alarming extent to which lying has become prevalent throughout the job interview process.

Craig Wright did not create bitcoin, judge says

Closing arguments in the trial between various people and Craig Wright over whether he’s Satoshi Nakamoto are wrapping up today, amongst a bewildering array of presented evidence. But one utterly astonishing aspect of this lawsuit is that expert witnesses for both sides agreed that much of the digital evidence provided by Craig Wright was unreliable in one way or another,generally including indications that it wasn’t produced at the point in time it claimed to be.

I heard a journalist say that “scoop-game” was dying; the job of reporters was no longer to vie to break a story before competitors. Her reasoning was that news often breaks on social media; the exclusivity of a scoop only lasts a few seconds. Furthermore, in the age of disinformation, accuracy trumps speed—and searching for a scoop can lead to incorrect information.

The New York Times has denied claims by OpenAI that it “hacked” the company’s artificial intelligence systems to create misleading evidence of copyright infringement, calling the accusation as “irrelevant as it is false.”

Inside Reddit’s Long, Complicated Relationship With OpenAI’s Sam Altman — The founder and CEO of OpenAI stands to profit handsomely from Reddit’s IPO

A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user’s prompt into a website or video game.

Hackers can read private AI-assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

Most subscription mobile apps don’t make money, new report shows

New ‘Water Batteries’ Are Cheaper, Recyclable, And Won’t Explode

Millions of pieces of space junk — hardware humans sent into space and didn’t retrieve — are orbiting Earth, and because this space debris travels up to 18,000 miles per hour, a collision can seriously damage operational spacecraft. NASA tracks debris larger than 10 centimeters and will take evasive maneuvers to prevent potential collisions, but something as small as a screw can be damaging. […] A japanese startup plans to point the lasers it is developing for nuclear fusion at the sky to see if they can knock space junk out of orbit.

Female frogs communicate with males through blinking

Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone — Increasing evidence suggests that animal culture can, like human culture, be cumulative: characterized by sequential innovations that build on previous ones. However, human cumulative culture involves behaviours so complex that they lie beyond the capacity of any individual to independently discover during their lifetime. To our knowledge, no study has so far demonstrated this phenomenon in an invertebrate. […] Food-washing behaviours by macaques, pandanus-leaf tool designs by New Caledonian crows and the songs of humpback whales have all been proposed as potential examples of cumulative culture, but none have been confirmed through laboratory-based experiments. […] This does not mean that these animals are incapable of cumulative culture, or even that these examples do not represent it: it simply means that we cannot know for sure whether they do. Even with our present study, we cannot rule out the possibility that one bee in a million might manage to solve the two-step box within its lifetime, although this seems unlikely.

Virginia Woolf in The Yale Review

Hubert Védrine, one of France’s longest serving Foreign Minister and National Security Advisor (under both Mitterrand and Chirac) recounting a conversation with Madeleine Albright where she accused him of “betraying Lafayette”

“There’s about two to five percent of all the (UFO reports that are)… what we would call truly anomalous,” says Kirkpatrick. And he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth. […] for decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there’s a US government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government. […] people inside the Pentagon — with really high-level security clearances — are finally saying, we looked at every single piece of secret evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we can tell, it’s humans all the way down.

Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) PDF

Brain Waves Travel in One Direction When Memories are Made and the Opposite When Recalled

Female hyenas are more aggressive and 10 percent bigger than males. Sex can only occur with a female’s consent. […] As the only mammal without an external vaginal opening, female spotted hyenas have an elongated clitoris that hangs between their legs and strongly resembles a male’s penis.During mating, the female retracts this “pseudopenis” into her abdomen, making it impossible for the male to gain entry without her cooperation. […] Remarkably, the female will also give birth through her clitoris. […] Spotted hyenas face the same threats as other large African predators, but hyenas—whose leading cause of death is killing by humans—are targeted for reasons that lions and other carnivores are not. They’re snared or poisoned not only in retaliation for preying on livestock but also because they’re considered vermin and purveyors of black magic.

A bold plan to genetically engineer a version of the woolly mammoth, the tusked ice age giant that disappeared 4,000 years ago, is making some progress […] Once edited to have mammoth-like genetic traits, the elephant’s cells could be used to make eggs and sperm and an embryo that could be implanted into some kind of artificial womb. […] “I think the first engineered elephant will be the major milestone and that may be consistent with Ben’s (Lamm) prediction of six years from 2021” […] mammoths, should they return to the grasslands in the planet’s northernmost reaches in sufficient numbers, would help slow down permafrost thaw. Some scientists believe that, before their extinction, grazing animals such as mammoths, horses and bison kept the earth frozen underneath by tramping down the grass, knocking down trees and compacting snow.

Silk is stronger than steel or kevlar. We are already using it to transport vaccines without cold chains and make automatically dissolving stitches. What else could it be used for?

The Tropicana Las Vegas, which originally opened in 1957, will be demolished and turned into a 30,000 seat MLB stadium for the Athletics baseball team.

David Bordwell on Godard: He was a sketchy fellow, to put it mildly. Childhood episodes of theft were followed by larceny as an adult, when he stole his grandfather’s Renoir and swiped cash from the Cahiers du cinéma till. Notorious for taking funding for projects that were never made, he once contracted for $500,000 to create a film on the Museum of Modern Art. He declined to visit the museum and instead shot the footage from stills at home. When The Old Place was finished, he agreed to introduce it in Manhattan. Hours before he was about to fly out (on the Concorde) he canceled, using anti-American cinephilia as his excuse: “I will return to New York when the films of Kiarostami are playing on Broadway.” […] Truffaut called him “a piece of shit on a pedestal.”

Grigory Otrepyev (False Dmitriy I) managed to become the Tsar of Russia due to his deception. He was one of three impostors who claimed, during a period of civil unrest in Russia, to be the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible. His reign was marked by his openness to Catholicism and allowing foreigners into Russia. This made him unpopular with the boyars, who staged a successful coup and killed him eleven months after he took the throne. His wife of 10 days, Marina, would later “accept” False Dmitry II as her fallen husband. [Wikipedia via Top 10 Great Historical Impostors]

The Fashion Police in 16th-century Italy

Plants That Are Both Edible and Poisonous

Dozens of Ghost kitchens, restaurants that serve food exclusively by delivery on apps like DoorDash and Grubhub, are selling food that they promote to customers with AI-generated images

Scientists are using organoids to screen drug candidates, grow viruses, build biocomputers, and much, much more.

This meta-analysis examined the rank-order stability of domain-specific self-esteem by comprehensively synthesizing the available evidence in eight domains of self-esteem (i.e., academic, appearance, athletic, morality, romantic, social, mathematics, and verbal abilities). In sum, the findings suggest that rank-order stability of domain-specific self-esteem is relatively high, even over long periods of time, indicating that the eight investigated facets of domain-specific self-esteem should be considered trait-like constructs.

Historically, most subways were built using what’s known as ‘cut and cover’ excavation: digging an open trench, building the tunnel structure within it, and then covering the trench up. Why we stopped building cut and cover

Researchers jailbreak AI chatbots with ASCII art

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

The Irony and the Agony of Elon Musk’s Lawsuit against OpenAI

Photographer steps inside Vietnam’s shadowy ‘click farms’

Jesús Franco Manera (1930-2013) was perhaps the most prolific filmmaker of modern times. By IMDB’s count he made 195 feature films. During his peak period he averaged 9 films per year. […] Fritz Lang called Franco’s Succubus “the first erotic film I’ve seen all the way through because it’s a beautiful piece of cinema”. Orson Welles chose Franco to be his Spanish assistant director on the strength of one of Franco’s surreal, pulpy crime thrillers – much to the horror of the Madrid establishment who scorned Franco.

Pittsburgh Area Naturalists are hosting another Balls Out bowling event, where you can bowl in the nude. Nudity is required with the exception that women can wear bottoms. Also, sexual activity is not permitted.

“Tap the fuck in” Hackers are gaining access to sensitive drug ordering tools and then order controlled substances like oxycodone. Some of the hackers then appear to sell these substances for profit online.

Law enforcement doesn’t want to be “customer service” reps for Meta any more Forty-one state attorneys general penned a letter to Meta’s top attorney on Wednesday saying complaints are skyrocketing across the United States about Facebook and Instagram user accounts being stolen and declaring “immediate action” necessary to mitigate the rolling threat.

Single dose of LSD provides immediate and lasting relief from anxiety, study says

Tiny fragments of microplastics are making their way deep inside our bodies in concerning quantities, significantly through our food and drink. Scientists have now found a simple and effective means of removing them from water. 90 percent of the microplastics were removed by the boiling and filtering process

The animals that birthed our shared mammal lineage crawled out of the ocean 400 million years ago. About 50 million years ago, the four-legged ancestors of whales crawled back in, likely somewhere near present-day Pakistan.

The brain’s nutritional content is unique, too: It’s rich in several nutrients that are essential for brain health. […] In many parts of the world, people never forgot the value of eating brain.

Sell for Half a Billion & Get Nothing — Liquidation preference is one of the most important terms in a term sheet. Liquidation preference determines who gets paid first and how much they get paid when there’s an acquisition.

AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead — There is an alternative to the trial-and-error style prompt engineering that yielded such inconsistent results: Ask the language model to devise its own optimal prompt. Recently, new tools have been developed to automate this process. […] Battle and his collaborators found that in almost every case, this automatically generated prompt did better than the best prompt found through trial-and-error. And, the process was much faster, a couple of hours rather than several days of searching.

In January 2010, Google announced that the Chinese government had been targeting Google (and, it would turn out, around 20 other U.S. companies) with a long-term attack aimed at gaining access to the email accounts of human rights activists working in China and around the world. The attacks led to a number of changes at Google, both in terms of security infrastructure and policy. As a result, Google decided to shut down operations in China. Later that year, Google introduced their two-factor authentication system. Initially only for business accounts, it was rolled out to all Google users in early 2011. For the first time, 2FA was available to the general public for an average user account. In the years since, other major companies such as Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon have begun to offer 2FA options across a multitude of online platforms. […] However, many consumers are still not availing themselves of these options, as demonstrated by a continued flood of well-publicized email account breaches.

[In 2016:] Acknowledging there’s a risk that SMS messages can be intercepted or redirected, NIST is encouraging any service considering adopting two-factor authentication in the future to “consider alternative authenticators.” NIST claims that services need to verify the phone number it sends codes to belongs to a legitimate network and not a VoIP service. The alternative is to use a dedicated 2FA app like Google Authenticator or RSA SecurID, or a dedicated secure device like a dongle. There are plenty of options — SMS was just the easy one.

Kind of Blue is the best-selling jazz album of all time. Here’s what it was like inside the studio with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans on the day they laid down one of the record’s iconic tracks.

A friend of Bill Evans, Pianist Warren Barnhardt, claims that he ‘never heard him make a harmonic mistake. Never. not one wrong note’ Bill Evan’s co-composed much of the music on Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of Blue’

electronicplastic.com (All the games on this website are from my personal collection. And all games are complete with the original packaging.) games NOT in the collection

adult domain names for sale

If both identical twins go missing and one shows up dead, will genetic tests alone be able to tell them apart (I’m a writer, not a murderer)?

a hardcore band named Llorona has fired their singer after he allegedly dosed his bandmate with estrogen in a plot to steal his fiancée.

Seventy-five percent of facial plastic surgeons reported a spike in demand from clients under 30, while 79 percent agree that “looking better in selfies” is a trend that continues to rise

In this research, we see a so-called nocebo effect when people eat gluten. If people expect gluten to produce negative effects, they experience symptoms, even if it turns out afterwards that they were not actually eating gluten.

Study Links Everyday Chemicals to Parkinson’s Disease in Western U.S. […] The study involved 21.5 million people. […] researchers looked for a possible relationship between rates of Parkinson’s and the use of 65 pesticides. They found that the pesticides and herbicides simazine, atrazine, and lindane had the strongest relationship with Parkinson’s disease

psychedelic research raises concerns about the potential for psychedelics to enhance suggestibility and create false memories

ChatGPT fails to meet the criteria of authorship because it lacks the ability to perform illocutionary speech acts such as promising or asserting, lacks the fitting mental states like knowledge, belief, or intention, and cannot take responsibility for the texts it produces.

One swipe from a tiger’s claw could kill you instantaneously. Meanwhile, grizzly bears have more strength in one paw than we do in our whole bodies, and gorillas can lift up to four times their own body weight. The world’s strongest animals are fearsome and for the most part predictable, but at the top of this formidable list is one that might surprise you: elephants. African bush elephants are the most powerful land animal by far […] During dry seasons, they dig up riverbeds and create watering holes that their neighbors benefit from, too. They clear away trees and saplings to keep the savannah accessible for other animals such as zebras. And they spread vast quantities of seeds through their dung, gardening and helping plants to thrive.

Asian elephants loudly mourn and bury their dead calves, new study

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of using. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev (1932–2019). […] A Type I civilization is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption. Hypothetically, it should also be able to control natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. A Type II civilization can directly consume a star’s energy, most likely through the use of a Dyson sphere. A Type III civilization is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.

What happens if you take motion blur past its logical extreme?

A speculative essay proposing that the human subconscious mind can understand language but, while it can communicate with the sleeping mind via images in dreams, it can only communicate to an individual’s awake mind via what appear to the individual as a random recall of a musical song in working memory.

Lawyers who voided Elon Musk’s pay as excessive want $6 billion fee, payable in the electric car maker’s stock […] The fee works out to an hourly rate of $288,888

Cambridge academic escapes toilet using eyeliner and cotton

the researchers observed the body switching energy sources – from glucose to fat stored in the body – within the first two or three days of fasting. The volunteers lost an average of 5.7 kg of both fat mass and lean mass. After three days of eating after fasting, the weight stayed off – the loss of lean was almost completely reversed, but the fat mass stayed off. […] results provide evidence for the health benefits of fasting beyond weight loss, but these were only visible after three days of total caloric restriction

researchers in South Korea have figured out a way to use sound to influence the formation of connections between neurons — and not only could it lead to new medical treatments, it might even make learning easier for everyone.

The 3 myths of mindfulness Not all thoughts are equal […] Attention is often beyond your control […] It is impossible to “seize the day”

Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump.

The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost,

Is it possible to deduce the shape of a drum from the sounds it makes? Last summer, Polterovich and his international collaborators—Nikolay Filonov, Michael Levitin and David Sher—proved a special case of a famous conjecture in spectral geometry formulated in 1954 by the eminent Hungarian-American mathematician George Pólya. The conjecture bears on the estimation of the frequencies of a round drum or, in mathematical terms, the eigenvalues of a disk.

A pair of orcas working in concert have been killing great whites along a stretch of South African coastline since at least 2017, plundering the sharks’ nutrient-rich livers and discarding the rest. […] Scientists witnessed one of the hunters, a male orca known as Starboard, single-handedly kill a 2.5-meter (8.2-foot) juvenile white shark within a two-minute time frame last year. The killer orcas are scaring off great white shark populations, but researchers don’t know where the sharks are relocating. “As they relocate, they might end up overlapping with heavy commercial fisheries”

about 30% of the world’s countries mandate left-side driving and another 70% or so stay to the right […]

The Trojan War was fought in Finland and Ulysses sailed home to Denmark, says one controversial theory.

Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family (Why does this lady have a fly on her head?)

Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That’s Only About Roads

Meta’s layoffs continue to impact advertisers as the company replaces account team members with AI

It bothers me that there is so little usable infrastructure beneath artists and so much baroque architecture built on top of us. I’m sorry to bring him up incessantly but Pablo Picasso wasn’t fucking around with artist statements. He and his buddies were hanging out, inventing new ways to use the senses […] They want us to describe ourselves in GRANT-WRITING LANGUAGE like we are PROJECT MANAGERS rather than to describe our ideas with the MANY VARIED LANGUAGES OF ART! […] Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world

Late last year, astronomers discovered a fascinating star system only 100 light-years away from us. Its six sub-Neptune planets circle very close to their host star in mathematically perfect orbits, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures, which they argue would offer compelling evidence of advanced life beyond Earth.

Arctic Ice shipped its first container of around 22 tons of Greenland ice to Dubai this year for sale to high-end bars and restaurants

How does the sky turn dark at night?

Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent

botanical gardens can lower the temperature of inner city air by as much as 5 °C. Wetlands and rain gardens are not far behind in the cooling stakes, at 4.7 and 4.5 °C respectively, trees planted along streets also lowered air temps by 3.8 °C while city parks managed 3.2 °C.

Maker uses Raspberry Pi and AI to block noisy neighbor’s music byhacking nearby Bluetooth speakers

A New York City medical school will offer students free tuition following a $1bn donation from the 93-year-old widow of a major Wall Street investor.

the number of active serial killers dwindled from 198 in 1987, the largest number on record, to 12 in 2018. Why the decline? Simply put, it’s harder than ever to get away with serial murder.

Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be?

Police only make an arrest — or “clear” a case, in justice jargon — in about 60 percent of all homicides. The other 5,000 end without closure. In other words, murderers have a 40 percent chance of getting away with murder. The question is, how many of those unsolved cases are the work of a serial killer?

Mary Poppins’ UK age rating raised to PG — It was changed because of a derogatory term for the Khoikhoi, a group of people who were among the first inhabitants of southern Africa.

The creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984

“Today’s date is April 20, approximately 7 a.m. Just want to document my visit to the Hayden Library. My attorney and I are just curious and would like to document this visit to see what kind of materials are on display here.” update: full video

Waymo’s self-driving cars keep hitting things, including a cyclist, a gate and a pickup

After listening to the same playlist, people from the United Kingdom, the United States, and China reported feeling nearly identical bodily sensations

the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.

How Incidental Sadness Reduces Morally Questionable Behavior

positive fortune telling can yield increased financial risk taking in men, but not (or less so) in women

American drivers are now even more distracted by their phones. Pedestrian deaths are soaring.

The division that includes the Apple Watch and AirPods now accounts for 10% of the company’s revenue, up from less than 5% a decade ago.

If generative models make video creation easier, it will mean we see more unwanted video in more and more places, as well as the further development of techniques to use video to confuse and con people.

Hallucination has been widely recognized to be a significant drawback for large language models (LLMs). There have been many works that attempt to reduce the extent of hallucination. These efforts have mostly been empirical so far, which cannot answer the fundamental question whether it can be completely eliminated. In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs.

New compact facial-recognition system passes test on Michelangelo’s David

Do people and bananas really share 50 percent of the same DNA? […] “You share 50 percent of your DNA with each of your parents. But with bananas, we share about 50 percent of our genes, which turns out to be only about 1 percent of our DNA” […] One thing to keep in mind is that genes, which are the regions of the DNA that code for these proteins, only make up 2 percent of your DNA. […] Eight percent of the rest of your DNA regulates genes (as to whether a gene should be turned on or off). The other 90 percent appear to have unknown functions or functions that have been lost through evolution.

these shrimp are actually born with eyes, but they lose the eyes and develop a light sensor on their body as they reach adulthood

How Google is killing independent sites like ours And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google

A total of 30 male and 30 female subjects attended four speed-dates each. Subjects were more likely to choose those dating partners with whom they shared more eye-contact with. Perceived attractiveness played an important role for mate choice. Receiving but not giving eye-contact also predicted individual mate choice.

weird information to dispense on a first date

Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging

chatgpt is apparently going off the rails right now and no one can explain why, more

During World War II, when materials were scare, the Academy started using plaster for their Oscar bases as it was less expensive. (After the war, spun brass was used and still is today.)

Fake Funeral Live Stream Scams Are All Over Facebook

Kilt-clad man seen sticking antiques ‘in his rectum’ then ‘placing them back on the shelves,’ cops say

Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets

Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen

“For all adults engaging in any regular physical activity, compared to being inactive […] mortality risk was reduced by 24% in women and 15% in men.”

Researchers have created lab-grown testicle organoids

Penn Engineers have developed a new chip that uses light waves, rather than electricity, to perform the complex math essential to training AI. The chip has the potential to radically accelerate the processing speed of computers while also reducing their energy consumption.

Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools — presumably coding tools — to improve their hacking abilities.

AI Your Home on Street View

Chinese Robot Waiter Enhances Dining Experience [Thanks Tim]

A loophole got him a free New York hotel stay for five years. Then he claimed to own the building

Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. — How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000

There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running the campaign, but we do know it’s facilitated by Google’s amazingly trustworthy approach to DMCA complaints made by companies that don’t exist.

Los Angeles-based EQTY Lab created a new method, employing cryptography and blockchain, to track the origins and characteristics of large language models, and provide transparency on their inner workings, so companies and regulators can easily inspect them. Its software essentially tracks the different parts of an AI model as it’s being developed, and turns the information into a cryptographic signature stored on a blockchain, making it theoretically impossible to tamper with.

OpenAI tries to trademark ‘GPT’. US Patent Office says nope

there are small RNA species, hitherto unknown, that seem to be colonizing bacteria in the human oral mucosa and gut

consumption of certain food additive emulsifiers may increase the risk of cancer — the researchers found that higher intakes of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471) were associated with increased risks of cancer overall (a 15% higher risk among those consuming the most – 3rd tertile – compared with those consuming the least – 1st tertile), breast cancer (a 24% higher risk), and prostate cancer (a 46% higher risk). On the other hand, women with higher carrageenan intakes (E407 and E407a) had a 32% higher risk of developing breast cancer, compared with the group with lower intakes.

Room Acoustics and Musical Emotion in Recorded Music Listening — The main findings showed that room acoustic features did not have a strong effect on ‘Unease’ or ‘Vitality’ components of the GEMS, but rather influenced aspects of ‘Sublimity’ (i.e., ‘Nostalgia’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘Wonder’).

Inside Johnny Depp’s Epic Bromance With Saudi Crown Prince MBS

In ancient Sparta, it was accepted practice for more women to marry and have children by more than one man […] unmarried men could be forced to march around the public square in the winter, wearing a tunic and singing about themselves. In contrast, men with three sons were exempt from military service, and those with at least four didn’t have to pay any taxes.

The most blatant exaggeration was the listed size of Mr. Trump’s triplex apartment in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. For years, the former president had valued it as if it were 30,000 square feet, when it was actually 10,996.

Trump Supporters Start GoFundMe Page for $355M Fine

update feb 18: Trump launches a pair of gold sneakers named “The Never Surrender High-Tops,” $399, “At Least 10 Randomly Autographed by Trump,” “Only 1000 Pairs,” SOLD OUT, also selling two versions of sneakers that have “T” and “45” on the sides for $199, the “Victory47 Cologne by President Trump” for $99…

This work investigated the prevalence of filter bubble or echo chamber-related phenomena, psychological factors rendering individuals resilient or vulnerable to them, and their associations to political views focusing on extremity and polarization. […] These findings challenge the prevailing notion of filter bubbles and echo chambers as widespread phenomena and indicate that relationships between political news consumption homogeneity and political views are not necessarily deleterious with respect to extremization and polarization. […] As such, the results suggest that these phenomena might not be as significant for the general population as previously thought

The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce.

A year or more after weight loss, the desire to eat grows stronger, study

States with higher narcissism had lower obesity and depression rates, and a lower likelihood of heart failure and hypertension deaths. However, these states reported less sleep and higher demand for plastic surgeons.

Water found on the surface of an asteroid for the 1st time ever […] that can shed light on how water was delivered to Earth […] asteroids are believed to be the primary source of Earth’s water, providing the necessary elements for life as we know it.

Our human ancestors often ate each other, some of the time they did it to honour their dead

With maceration, bones are cleaned of tissue by bacteria; it is a rotting process. There are several maceration techniques, of which warm-water maceration at 35 C is the most effective. This temperature is optimal for the bacteria to live, digest and multiply. With these techniques, all cartilage gets dissolved, and all unfused bones will separate. Therefore, warm-water maceration is not the most ideal technique for complete skeletons of small mammals (up to the size of a rabbit), since putting the many small bones of hands and feet together will be extremely difficult. […] A closed container is needed, like a plastic bucket with lid, a glass jar or a metal can.

It wasn’t illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition […] In 1851 the Maine legislature passed a statewide prohibition on selling alcohol […] To this day, 10 states still contain counties where alcohol sales are prohibited outright. 10 Things You Should Know About Prohibition

While most fast food restaurants have their Coca-Cola syrup delivered to them in plastic bags,
McDonald’s gets their syrup specially delivered in stainless steel tanks.

Sapolsky’s “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” employs modern scientific evidence to argue that intent and volition are products of antecedent causes rather than manifestations of free will. Through a comprehensive review of cognitive neuroscience, Sapolsky illustrates how intent emerges from the complex interplay of brain structures that are effectively predetermined by a web of causality that includes genetic, environmental and cultural factors. This review also highlights the book’s implications of determinism for concepts such as moral responsibility, retributive justice, and societal perceptions of human exceptionalism.

We recruited 204 marital dyads from South Korea […] Wives with long and high-quality hair have more frequent sex

Attraction to an Alternative and Romantic Relationship Quality, Breakups and Infidelity

San Antonio had the highest proportion of agreeable people, while Manhattan had the highest proportion of open persons, but the lowest proportion of people who were agreeable or conscientious. Does Your Community Have a Personality Type?

Regardless of what you’re attempting to measure: height, political preferences, number of flowers owned, or even coin toss results, if your sample size is large enough, you always get a Bell curve, or normal distribution. There’s a profound reason why

Kunath asked one group of people who had Parkinson’s and another group of people who didn’t have Parkinson’s to take home white T-shirts, wear them overnight and then return them. Then Kunath gave the T-shirts to Joy Milne to smell. Joy not only could smell Parkinson’s but could smell it even in the absence of its typical medical presentation.

Lyft Inc. issued a massive correction to its outlook for earnings margin in 2024 , saying its margin is expected to expand by 50 basis points — not the 500 basis points written into an earnings presentation released earlier on Tuesday. […] The blowout forecast may have contributed to a surge in Lyft’s shares in after-market trading on Tuesday. The stock jumped as much as 67% on the company’s outlooks before erasing gains during the call with investors. It was up 20% at 5:52 p.m. in New York.

Tesla Sold Only One Car in Korea in January and Cybertruck Owners Say They’re Already Rusting

“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans.” A spicy paper. It’s not clear how to calculate emissions for human writers though because it depends on what you assume the writer would be doing if not writing

Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show — the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app.

Air Canada found liable for chatbot’s bad advice on plane tickets

Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article

Passing Stars Changed the Orbits of Planets in the Solar System

How to Lay Claim to a Brand New Island

How Walmart, Delta, Chevron, T-Mobile, Starbucks, Nestle and AstraZeneca are using AI to monitor employee messages […] can see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular geography are responding to a new corporate policy or marketing campaign […] AI models, built to read text and process images, can also identify bullying, harassment, discrimination, noncompliance, pornography, nudity and other behaviors

A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco

Viagra may help reduce Alzheimer’s risk, according to a new study Previously: Viagra was originally developed for the treatment high blood pressure (hypertension) and angina pectoris (chest pain due to heart disease)

Women who had their first period at age 12 or younger had a decreased risk for dementia. Women who experienced menopause after the age of 50 had a 24 percent decreased risk for dementia.

smokers who quit smoking before age 40 can expect to live almost as long as those who never smoked

24 million Americans have an autoimmune diseases. Can these therapies cure them?

Growing evidence indicates that the benefits stemming from dance are in both physical and mental dimensions, and these advantages are not limited to specific people. Compared to the non-exercise group, dance can ameliorate VO2peak [maximum rate of oxygen consumption attainable during physical exertion], blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, physical fitness, cognitive disorders, and mental health. For physically inactive females, Ljubojevic et al. observed that an 8-week Zumba achieved effective enhancements in body composition and respiratory functionality. Similar improvements were also identified within the diseased population. A pilot study demonstrated that dance can improve body mass index(BMI) and body fat percentage(Fat(%)), while also enhancing their physical activity. People with Parkinson’s disease can achieve physical(balance, functional mobility, and cognition) and mental(self-esteem, quality of life, and motor symptoms) improvements from dancing.

One year in the life of a part-time hermit

Balancing cube

Scientists can reverse aging in mice — Using proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, Sinclair and his team have reset aging cells in mice to earlier versions of themselves.

We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards.

Chernobyl’s mutant wolves appear to have developed resistance to cancer, study finds

Indian model Poonam Pandey fakes death to raise cervical cancer awareness

Previously: The courts believed that the actors who portrayed the missing film crew and the native actress featured in the impalement scene were killed for the camera. Compounding matters was the fact that the supposedly deceased actors had signed contracts with the production which ensured that they would not appear in any type of media, motion pictures, or commercials for one year following the film’s release. This was done in order to promote the idea that Cannibal Holocaust was truly the recovered footage of missing documentarians.

Adults who are married report being far happier than those in any other relationship status, according to a Gallup Poll — “In my practice over the last decade I’ve noticed a gradual shift from the ‘romantic marriage’ to the ‘companionate marriage,’ meaning that people are increasingly choosing spouses at the outset who are more like best friends than passion-partners”

A Grand Bargain Is Emerging in the Supreme Court’s Trump Cases The Supreme Court unanimously, or nearly so, holds that Colorado does not have the power to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, but in a separate case it rejects his immunity argument and makes Trump go on trial this spring or summer on federal election subversion charges

Add coffee stains to your documents

stract.com

Did you know that there’s a building on wheels in New York City?

Why China Can’t Export Its Model of Surveillance — It’s Not the Tech That Empowers Big Brother in Beijing—It’s the Informants

Epicurus considered pleasure to be the highest value, the attainment of which must be subordinated to all actions. He understood it as the absence of pain and suffering, as the absence of anxiety and emotional turmoil, as inner order, harmony and unshakeable peace of mind. […] Epicurus became very popular in Athens but, as often happens, over-popularity does not pay.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005), Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links (1989) [more]

Casey Neistat + Apple Vision Pro

Look at the dot (and breathe) for just 1 minute to improve mental focus for your next task

Scientists have 3D bioprinted functioning human brain tissue

When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence. Instead, genes’ activity — whether they are expressed or not, for instance, or the length of protein that they encode — depends on myriad external factors, from the diet to the environment in which the organism develops. And each trait can be influenced by many genes.

This AI learnt language by seeing the world through a baby’s eyes

An underground website called OnlyFake is claiming to use “neural networks” to generate realistic looking photos of fake IDs for just $15

Zero-knowledge security model: an introduction

TikTok is fumbling critical business partnerships and cluttering its app with unpopular features.

Many night-flying insects hear the sonar sounds of attacking bats and take evasive action. Among moths, evasive flight is often accompanied by the production of ultrasonic sounds. Three functions of these sounds have been proposed: to startle the bat, to warn of distastefulness, or to “jam” the bat’s sonar system.

Scientists now think they know why tardigrades are so indestructible

Last month, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon office responsible for investigating unexplained aerial events, stepped down. He said he was tired of being harassed and accused of hiding evidence, and he lamented an erosion in “our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking.” No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’ — “(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake”

Chinese spy pigeon in lockup during 8 months

Our data revealed that overall, a ketogenic diet was associated with a significant upregulation of pathways and enrichment in cells associated with the adaptive immune system. In contrast, a vegan diet had a significant impact on the innate immune system […] Our study revealed that a 2-week dietary intervention can impose a striking shift in host immunity, superseding genetics, age, sex, ethnicity, race and even body mass index.

The innate immune system is the body’s first line of defense against germs entering the body. It responds in the same way to all germs and foreign substances […] The adaptive immune system takes over if the innate immune system is not able to destroy the germs. It specifically targets the type of germ that is causing the infection. But to do that it first needs to identify the germ. This means that it is slower to respond than the innate immune system, but when it does it is more accurate. It also has the advantage of being able to “remember” germs, so the next time a known germ is encountered, the adaptive immune system can respond faster.

A fentanyl cook — who calls himself Miguel — carries out macabre experiments on a handful of consumers, who test the merchandise before it’s shipped off to the United States. They start with one dose: one third pure and the rest, cut. The “human guinea pigs” inject it in front of him. If they say, “No, it didn’t rock me, it didn’t put me to sleep, add more,” the percentage increases.

Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

the “only physician-owned Diaper Spa in the world” and says it is open to “all diaper-wearing individuals who seek acceptance, respite, and care” […] All clients are required to wear adult diapers.

How many people randomly had a dream about a plane crash the night before 9/11 and have believed they were psychic ever since?

Meta is the world’s ‘single largest marketplace for paedophiles’, says New Mexico attorney general — Internal company documents obtained by the attorney general’s office as part of its investigation have also revealed that the company estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day.

Meta’s Reality Labs loses record $4.65 billion ahead of Apple’s Vision Pro launch — Meta continues to sink billions of dollars a quarter into developing the metaverse. The metaverse division has now lost more than $42 billion since the end of 2020.

Meta’s $197 Billion Surge Is Biggest in Stock-Market History — It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits. The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly $200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the $190 billion gains made by Apple and Amazon in 2022.

The private data of European citizens can legally be surveilled by U.S. intelligence agencies, but unlike Americans, Europeans have no recourse under American law if agencies overreach. As Europe began to implement its stringent 2018 data-privacy law, that imbalance sat badly with EU authorities […] The 2020 ruling officially halted the flow of personal data between the EU and the United States, and created the risks of large fines for companies that continued to put European data on U.S. servers. Meta, most prominently, was hit with a $1.2 billion fine in May for continuing to transfer European user data to its U.S. servers. Biden’s proposal for a new data court created a path for Europeans to access American surveillance protections, and in July, European officials declared it adequate to the task, reopening a smoother transatlantic data trade. The court never officially opened for business, at least not publicly. […] The court’s location is a secret, and the Department of Justice will not say if it has taken a case yet, or when it will. Though the court has a clear mandate — ensuring Europeans their privacy rights under U.S. law — its decisions will also be kept a secret

“In the past 20 years, price per earnings was something you could grasp; today [it’s] all over the place. It’s a modern accident, an accident of history, we have no idea how to value companies. It’s mostly narratives and stories about the future to raise money so you can sell to someone else. Think of the number of people who made a lot of money in venture capital off of companies that ended up making no money. Someone got stuck with that bill at the end of the meal.” […] Currently the American national debt stands at $34.14 trillion—about $100,000 for every person in the U.S.

Craig Wright Dr. has long claimed he is the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. However, due to a lack of conclusive proof, few in the industry believe him. A trial in London may bring us closer to finding the answer.

Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity

Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search’s “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off.

Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. — A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with artificial intelligence.

unelected political elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like exhibit egocentrism bias, rather than partisan confirmation bias, astheir perceptions about others’ opinions systematically correspond to their own policy preferences.

The US is dealing with an “out-of-control” epidemic of sexually transmitted infections […] it is the recent rise in syphilis that is concerning health officials most.

Why flying insects gather at artificial light

How to do things if you’re not that smart and don’t have any talent

For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. How did the habit disappear?

Should you flush with toilet lid up or down? Study says it doesn’t matter

NJ animal shelter will name feral cat after an ex, then neuter it

Half of all surgical patients receiving anesthesia are females. Anesthetics affect sexually dimorphic brain regions involved in sleep and arousal. We demonstrate that the female brain in mice and humans is resistant to the hypnotic effects of volatile anesthetics. Sex differences in anesthetic sensitivity are largely due to acute effects of sex hormones. […] It may explain the higher incidence of awareness under anesthesia in females.

A new study suggests a link between gut inflammation and changes in the brain and declines in memory, further supporting a connection between the gut and brain in Alzheimer’s disease. […] as levels of calprotectin, an inflammatory marker, increased in the volunteer study participants’ stool samples, so did the amount of amyloid plaque accumulating in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease. […] Even volunteers who did not have Alzheimer’s disease had lower scores on a memory test correlated with higher levels of calprotectin. […] The concept that the gut and brain are functionally connected has become more prominent in the last 10 years and this study offers some of the first evidence that asymptomatic gut inflammation and Alzheimer’s disease may be linked.

Although Florida has more than an estimated 1.25 million alligators, attacks by the reptiles are rare – there were 442 unprovoked bite attacks from 1948 to 2021, with 26 of the bites resulting in death

First aircraft to fly on Mars perished on 18 January during its 72nd flight — It was supposed to make only five flights and last about a month, but ultimately it traversed 17 kilometres of the red planet and flew for a total of nearly 129 minutes between 2021 and 2024. An image that the helicopter took of the ground after the flight ended shows the shadow of one of the blades, with at least one-quarter of it missing. The helicopter can still communicate with Earth, at least for now, but it will not fly again.

STOP KNOWING HOW TO READ

Hair Sample That Put a Man in Prison Turned Out to Be Dog Hair

Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face — and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It

5 Deaf Children Have Hearing Restored by AAV-Based Gene Therapy — Hearing loss affects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide

undergraduates’ IQs have steadily fallen from roughly 119 in 1939 to a mean of 102 in 2022, just slightly above the population average of 100 […] a degree has become increasingly meaningless, as more people have one.

Every year spent in school or university improves life expectancy, study says — Analysis also says not attending school is as deadly as smoking or heavy drinking

Why do some people feel tired all the time?

the U.S. government just sold its helium stockpile, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium. MRI machines need thousands of liters of liquid helium to function

San Francisco sues California over ‘unsafe,’ ‘disruptive’ self-driving cars — Waymo and Cruise have both cited self-reported data that their robot cars have a superior track record to human drivers

Initially focused on cybercrime, the proposed UN Treaty has alarmingly evolved into an expansive surveillance tool. — Historically, cybercrime legislation has been exploited to target journalists and security researchers, suppress dissent and whistleblowers, endanger human rights defenders, limit free expression, and justify unnecessary and disproportionate state surveillance measures.

It’s only a matter of time before disinformation leads to disaster

Harvard morgue theft ring stole body parts, sold brains, turned human flesh into leather, officials say

Can autoimmune diseases be cured? Scientists see hope at last — After decades of frustration and failed attempts, scientists might finally be on the cusp of developing therapies to restore immune ‘tolerance’ in conditions such as diabetes, lupus and multiple sclerosis.

‘Can you walk a kilometre?’ The question that predicts fracture risk “We’ve discovered that trouble walking even short distances appears closely tied to higher fracture risk over the following five years”

Forensics gone wrong: When DNA snares the innocent

Most people who regularly drink more than the recommended limit of 14 units of alcohol per week (about six pints of normal strength beer [4% ABV] or about six average [175ml] glasses of wine [14% ABV]) will have a fatty liver. In people with fatty liver, after only two to three weeks of giving up alcohol, the liver can heal and looks and functions as good as new.

How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus — “First, placenta the only temporary organ. Second, it’s the baby’s lung, it’s a waste-disposal system, and it’s a nutrition source.” […] “Half of the fetus is maternal, the other half is paternal, and yet the pregnancy can go on for nine months without the mom’s body destroying it,” Barroeta said. “And that, from an immune standpoint, is fascinating, because if you were to receive a piece of someone else and insert that under your skin, that would not last there for three days, your body will actively reject it.” […] This wall of cells keeps mom and baby working in harmony and not killing each other. […] When evolutionary biologists mapped the genomes of these cells, they found that the protein that allowed these cells to fuse into a wall, called syncytin, didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked more like HIV. According to Chuong, this protein actually came from an ancient retrovirus, the most famous of which is HIV.

Buffalofish live beyond 100 — and get healthier as they age. What can humans learn from them?

Last month, former president Donald Trump dismissed an ad on Fox News featuring video of his well-documented public gaffes, claiming the footage was generated by AI. […] AI creates a “liar’s dividend,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies digital propaganda and misinformation. “When you actually do catch a police officer or politician saying something awful, they have plausible deniability” in the age of AI. […] Trump is not alone in seizing this advantage. Late last year, a grainy video surfaced of a ruling-party Taiwanese politician entering a hotel with a woman, indicating he was having an affair. Commentators and other politicians quickly came to his defense, saying the footage was AI-generated — though it remains unclear whether it actually was.

When does “no” mean no? Insights from sex robots

Vomit color chart

Madonna sued over late concert start by fans who ‘had to get up early’ the next morning

You Can Now Face Jail Time in Las Vegas if You Stop Walking in Certain Areas

A Canadian man who says he’s been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve “triangulation fraud”

Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them

A new paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found about 240,000 particles in the average liter of bottled water, most of which were “nanoplastics” — Scientists have also found microplastics in tap water, but in smaller amounts.

Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems—Simple Cells Can Do It

Many human morphological and behavioral characteristic — musicality, sense of rhythm, use of dissonances, entrainment, bipedalism, long head hair, long legs, strong body odor, armpit hair, traditions of body painting and cannibalism — are explained as predator avoidance tactics of an aposematic (warning display) defense strategy. […] Unlike crypsis, which is based on the strategy of remaining invisible, silent, odorless, and fleeing as quickly as possible if discovered by a predator, aposematism is the alternative defense strategy of intimidating predators by remaining visible, being noisy, presenting odor, and, rather than fleeing when confronted by a predator, actively approaching and threatening the predator with body size, loud sounds, odors, and fearless behavior. […] Humans are among the very rare terrestrial species that sing, though arguably some carnivores (e.g., wolves and coyotes) can also sing, and sing in choruses […] Early humans came down from the trees, and tree-living birds and primates (including a lesser ape, gibbons) are among the most ardent singers, so it would be logical to propose that our arboreal common (humans and apes) ancestor was a singer. The long-standing question that comes with this suggestion is why do terrestrial apes not sing? […] Many singing and noisy arboreal species (birds and monkeys) maintain silence whenever they visit the ground as a cryptic defense strategy from potential ground predators. Most likely, the ancestors of chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos stopped singing for the same reason—maintaining cryptic cover while on the ground. On the other hand, in a strategically different move, early humans continued singing, therefore changing their survival strategy from cryptic into aposematic. […] I propose that not stopping singing was probably the first and deciding move toward the new aposematic strategy of defense in the hominin lineage, followed by the other elements of aposematic display.

Many AI researchers think fakes will become undetectable

Winston Churchill’s false teeth are up for sale

Search still on for missing jawbone of whale believed mistaken for submarine and bombed during WWII

Lichen survived 18 months attached to outside of International Space Station and raises prospect life could exist on Mars

Trolley Problem Solution

Private equity firms are increasingly buying hospitals across the US, and when they do, patients suffer, according to two separate reports. Specifically, the equity firms cut corners, slash services, lay off staff, lower quality of care, take on substantial debt, and reduce charity care, leading to lower ratings and more medical errors, reports collectively find

Apple again banned from selling watches in U.S. with blood oxygen sensor. […] The ban stems from an intellectual property dispute with Masimo, a medical device company. In October, the International Trade Commission found that Apple’s blood oxygen sensors had infringed on Masimo’s intellectual property. […] Masimo had alleged that Apple had poached several of its top executives and copied its technology after declining a partnership.

“Is it the first (Tesla) dud? I think objectively, yes,” Conner told me in a recent chat.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Google lays off “hundreds” more as ad division switches to AI-powered sales

Altman believes future AI products will need to allow “quite a lot of individual customization” and “that’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable,” because AI will give different answers for different users, based on their values preferences and possibly on what country they reside in.

AI Sleeper Agents More: AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive “sleeper agents,” says Anthropic

Venice’s Secret Service organized intelligence is not – as commonly thought – an invention of the modern industrial state, but already existed in Renaissance Venice of the 1500s and early 1600s.

data shows a higher number of conflict deaths in Ethiopia than in Ukraine […] 65% of men in Ukraine aged 20 to 24 years have fled the country, or died in the conflict [Global Peace Index ]

Orchids were Darwin’s “abominable mystery.” They continue to elude science—and efforts to save them.

Research indicates that staying up all night might have a transient antidepressant effect. Acute sleep deprivation in mice increased dopamine release and triggered brain changes that could alleviate depression. Some studies show similar results in humans. While a single sleepless night might lift the spirits, chronic sleep loss is detrimental to physical and mental health.

Why I ended up making my own mattress […] that is both organic and vegan

Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?

Seeing Blue at Night May Not Be What’s Keeping You Up After All

The best way to predict if you’ll benefit from psychedelic therapy is a questionnaire asking if you’ve met God. Where did it come from, and what is it really measuring?

The internet largely runs beneath the oceans. Here’s how it works

Amazon Is Selling Products With AI-Generated Names Like “I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy”

2023: Artifact, the personalized news reader built by Instagram’s co-founders, is now open to the public, no sign-up required. 2024: Shutting down Artifact

they casted all identical twins to give the audience the illusion that the models walk into this transform capsule and walk out in a different outfit in seconds [more]

Flaubert Versus the World “The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing.”

AI girlfriend bots are already flooding OpenAI’s GPT store […] The AI girlfriend bots go against OpenAI’s usage policy, which was updated when the GPT store launched yesterday (Jan. 10). The company bans GPTs “dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities.” […] OpenAI’s store rules being broken on the second day of operation illustrates how hard it could be to regulate GPTs.

OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study finds

Authors keep finding what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon. There’s little they can do to rein in the rip-offs.

Over the last month or so, there’s been an uptick in people complaining that the chatbot has become lazy. Sometimes it just straight-up doesn’t do the task you’ve set it. Other times it will stop halfway through whatever it’s doing and you’ll have to plead with it to keep going. Occasionally it even tells you to just do the damn research yourself. So what’s going on? Well, here’s where things get interesting. Nobody really knows.

OpenAI reveals how many ChatGPT for Enterprise customers it has (so far…) — 260 business customers with more than 150,000 distinct […] pricing for ChatGPT for Enterprise varies and is not openly disclosed on OpenAI’s website, but one user on Reddit was quoted at $60 per seat

the group Public Citizen petitioned the state California to reevaluate OpenAI’s nonprofit status

Volkswagen is bringing ChatGPT into its cars and SUVs

What’s next for AI in 2024

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit — In September of this year, Google users discovered that the search engine was incorrectly telling people that eggs can melt. Why? Because instead of surfacing websites, Google now grabs snapshots of pages in a drop down menu, allowing users to read search results without clicking on anything. This practice often grabs incorrect information, like an AI-generated answer from Quora that insisted that eggs can melt when they definitely cannot.

More Than Half of the World Will Be Obese By 2035

Researchers have found a gene that links deafness to cell death in the inner ear in humans –- creating new opportunities for averting hearing loss

New research suggests that having books or plants in your video background inspires a greater deal of trust in calls

The United States just grew in size by 1 million square kilometers – that’s almost twice the area of Spain.

Brazil Arrests Man Suspected of Laundering Nearly US$2.66 Billion

We are less able to cook than we were 30 or 40 years ago

New Study Finds Microplastics in 88% of protein food samples tested. The samples were drawn from 16 different protein types* destined for U.S. consumers, including seafood, pork, beef, chicken, tofu, and three different plant-based meat alternatives […] suggesting that humans are likely eating microplastics no matter the source of protein they choose.

OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material Related: Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem

Holy shit! I finally figured it out! It took me a long time! When OpenAI filed as a “nonprofit corporation organized exclusively for charitable and/or educational purposes” with an interest in “public benefit” what they meant was that they would ask for (& lobby for) the donations of all intellectual property from all humans, everywhere. Brilliant!

asml’s market value has quadrupled in the past five years , to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most valuable technology firm [asml is a manufacturer of chipmaking tools] […] At the end of 2023 asml’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple […] asml holds a monopoly on a key link in the world’s most critical supply chain: without its kit it is next to impossible to make cutting-edge computer processors, such as those that go into smartphones and data centres where artificial intelligence (ai) is trained. With global semiconductor sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, every big country and every big chipmaker wants asml’s gear.

THE TRUE STORY OF THE ATTACK OF THE NAKED SHORT SELLERS

An attorney for Musk, Alex Spiro, said that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.” […] imagine being the SpaceX employee in charge of randomly drug testing Elon Musk. Tiptoe into Musk’s office after his night out not getting into Berghain and say “hey Mr. Musk it’s time for your random drug test, here’s a cup.” What if he says no? What if he hands you back the cup and it is just full of cocaine? What are you going to do about it? You work for him and he is not, like, a chill and understanding guy. Spiro’s non-denial comes from this Wall Street Journal story about how Elon Musk “has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” as well as using ketamine recreationally, that “his drug use is ongoing, especially his consumption of ketamine,” that people close to him “are concerned it could cause a health crisis,” and that “illegal drug use would likely be a violation of federal policies that could jeopardize SpaceX’s billions of dollars in government contracts.”

A mere 700 IT jobs were added in the US last year compared to 267,000 the year prior

2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues gave predictions on the pace of AI progress […] The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model. If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. […] the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116.

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

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

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

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

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

Card game rules

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

One year ago we flooded a forest (video)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firm develops jet fuel made entirely from human poo

What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws

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

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

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

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

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

Why are Bloody Marys only for the morning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to perfectly crack an egg (with one hand)

the trapezoid-shaped Chrysler Building

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

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

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

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

Moderna CEO Says Melanoma Vaccine Could Be Available By 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New nuclear deflection simulations advance planetary defense against asteroid threats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light may cause water to evaporate (even without heat)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Paper Argues That the Universe Began with Two Big Bangs

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

hormone made by fetus may cause nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

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

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

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

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

The Emergence of Full-Body Gaussian Splat Deepfake Humans

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

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

List of shoe-throwing incidents

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

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

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

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

The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

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

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

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

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

Why read Chateaubriand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madness and James Joyce

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

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

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

AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

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

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

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

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

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

An artist is teaching Boston Dynamics robot dogs to paint

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

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

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

Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn

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

Download all of Wikipedia on your phone

Diane Arbus photographed by Garry Winogrand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the rise and fall of median voters’ unhappiness that drives the regime change between the two major political parties in the United States.

Eye-to-eye contact is rare but shapes our social behavior […] participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval. Many questions remain about the formerly taboo chemicals that are being used to treat trauma and depression. […] Dölen says that psychedelics could be a “master key” that unlocks critical periods — making them more sensitive to particular stimuli.

viruses can actually get sick. […]the culprits turn out to be other viruses.

Elephants give each other unique names, groundbreaking study reveals […] researchers recorded over 600 elephant calls […] low-frequency noises between 1 to 20 Hertz, too low for the human ear to hear. However, these so-called infrasounds can travel over vast distances as large as 10 kilometers (6 miles). The researchers then implemented a machine learning algorithm, which identified specific rumbles for 119 individual elephants. […] Some of these rumbles were played back to 17 wild elephants. When they heard their name, they were more likely to move quickly toward the sound source and vocalize faster in response.

How Stone Walls Became a Signature Landform of New England

Updates to the Open AI saga

AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time

How Citizen Scientists Rescued Crucial World War II Weather Data

In machine learning, a stochastic parrot is a large language model that is good at generating convincing language, but does not actually understand the meaning of the language it is processing

Perhaps “Shakespeare” was a woman — Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote. No such void exists for other major writers of the period. […] By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his.

Dominatrix’s ‘Slave’ Sentenced for ‘Ferocious’ Murder of Her Boyfriend

Rip Off fetish is a FemDom fetish in which the Domme rips off Her sub, typically by increasing the price of a clip. The sub is typically turned on by being ripped off. Ideas for Rip Off Fetish: Increase the price of a very short clip that features hardly anything; Explain in painful detail why the sub deserves to be ripped off.

Addicted to losing: How casino-like apps have drained people of millions

Mobile phone use may affect semen quality

Does body exposure drive income success on Instagram? Is there a difference between male and female content in this regard? […] Accounts with high level of body exposure achieve higher prices and advertising revenues than accounts with less nudity, regardless of the gender.

How AI uses social media to help con artists with the ‘grandparent scam’ and other schemes

People are editing Paul Nicklen into hospital bed pictures, faking his passports, and scamming fans out of thousands of dollars through social media impersonation.

Google is taking legal action against two groups of scammers. The first created social media pages and ran ads that encouraged people to “download” Bard, our freely available generative AI tool that does not need to be downloaded. The ads instead led people to download malware that compromised their social media accounts. The second weaponized the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to harm their business competitors by submitting thousands of blatantly fraudulent copyright notices.

AI robot chemist could make oxygen on Mars

AI could predict heart attack risk up to 10 years in the future, finds Oxford study

Cognitive decline in old age is slower in pet owners

Welcome to the Kinky World of AI Financial Domination

Bonsai Kitten (2021)

Free will implicates inner speech via self-regulation

Results from a new clinical trial suggest that a group of brain regions known as the “salience network” is activated after a drug is taken intravenously, but not when that same drug is taken orally. When drugs enter the brain quickly, such as through injection or smoking, they are more addictive than when they enter the brain more slowly, such as when they are taken orally. However, the brain circuits underlying these differences are not well understood. […] drug smoking and injection are associated with developing a substance use disorder more quickly than taking drugs orally or by insufflation (e.g., snorting).[…] The salience network attributes value to things in our environment and is important for recognizing and translating internal sensations—including the subjective effects of drugs. This research adds to a growing body of evidence documenting the important role that the salience network appears to play in substance use and addiction.

Google Maps captures B-2 Stealth Bomber crashing off runway

A Hiker Is Lucky to Be Alive After Following a Fake Trail on Google Maps

Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4 million loss; CFO quits — Sphere, the $2.3 billion venue near the Strip opened Sept. 29

Inside The Small World of Simulating Other Worlds — Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations.

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

This document acknowledges that Lauren (“Talent”) has agreed to appear for a MAXIMUM of THREE (3) days and TWO (2) nights at the residence of her mother (“Venue”) during the Thanksgiving holiday, pursuant to the terms of this agreement. […] Venue shall provide Talent with unlimited, unmonitored access to a fully stocked bar for the duration of her appearance, featuring a MINIMUM of: ONE (1) gallon-size handle of vodka…

This is a rare music video about using a diamond cutting disk to cut an entrapped metal penile ring. The music is Mozart’s piano concerto no. 21 in C major.

Vittorio Gassman in I Mostri

It’s true: People do poop, a lot, in ride lines at Disneyland and Disney World

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval — but no one knows how they work

The distribution of lie prevalence is specified to exhibit a non-normal, positively skewed distribution in which the majority of people are normatively honest, and most lies are told by a few prolific liars.

willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly

A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. […] our findings suggest that a wandering mind is not always necessarily a creative mind

People often make judgments about uncertain facts and events, for example `Germany will win the world cup’. Here we present a rational analysis of these judgments: we argue that a guess functions as a compressed encoding of the speaker’s subjective probability distribution over relevant possibilities.

Imagine a bowl of soup that never emptied, no matter how many spoonfuls you ate - when and how would you know to stop eating? Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. results suggest that eating can be strongly controlled by visual cues, which can even override satiation.

One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days […] unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment […] When a Meta security expert told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s approach to protecting teens wasn’t working, the CEO didn’t reply. Now the former insider is set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior.

Zuurbier said “that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use” […] In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime

More than 40 years ago, Farouk El-Baz theorized that the wind played a big hand in shaping the Great Sphinx of Giza before the ancient Egyptians added surface details to the landmark sculpture. A new study offers evidence to suggest that theory might be plausible.

Erewhon’s Secrets — In the 1960s, two macrobiotic enthusiasts started a health-food sect beloved by hippies. Now it’s the most culty grocer in L.A.

Penguin of the month: Timmy - Stole fish - Pushed another penguin over. Good penguin, naughty penguin: Inside the incredible drama at the National Aquarium

Starfish bodies aren’t bodies at all “It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor”

One sleepless night can rapidly reverse depression for several days — Acute sleep loss increases dopamine release and rewires the brain, new study finds

wasabi improves short- and long-term memory in older people

our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health

The significant health benefits of walking backward

When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached fortobacco’s PR playbook

Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. […] Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh over five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy. You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street… But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees. Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

I had my hoodies that featured these amazing 1940’s drawings of Snow White fucking the dwarfs and stuff like that. […] I do think retouching often ruins the image. In these 70s, 80s porn mags i’m talking about the woman looked so real and sexual in such a visceral way, the frizziness of the hair would look like a halo because of the lighting, she might have stretchmarks showing inside her thighs which just makes her more tangible and makes you want to fuck, you want to touch her because she feels real. […] It’s like you have bad values if you slept with more than like 9 people and if any less then you’re an angel. Why is there so much value put on sex, who you’ve had sex with and how many times […] I feel so sorry for the generation behind us, the saturation levels are insane. I watched something yesterday and it said in the last 20 years, the human race has risen by about 2 billion, which is insane. How can you expect to get your dream job, to be singular, to stand out and to have created something truly new? Can you actually even do anything new anymore? And that makes me so sad.

AI smoothie shop in San Francisco closes two months after launch

AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening

GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for one year of non-exclusive access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research

The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.

40% of people faint at least once in their lifetime […] Mouse experiments reveal the brain-heart connections that cause us to rapidly lose consciousness

How to remove a spider from your ear

“Clue” is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings […] The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings. With “Clue,” though, one ending is more than enough.

Viagra could slash risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 60%

Scientists say they have successfully simulated a method of backward time travel that allowed them to change an event after the fact one out of four times. The Cambridge University team is quick to caution that they have not built a time machine, per se, but also note how their process doesn’t violate physics while changing past events after they have happened.

The future may be less about healing injured body parts and more about regenerating new ones. How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs

The human body has 1.8 trillion cells dedicated to defending it. For the first time, a study has measured the size of the immune system: if it were an organ, it would weigh more than a kilo and represents 0.2% of all human cells.

Researchers found that when adjusted for body mass index (BMI), intake of unprocessed and processed red meat (beef, pork or lamb) was not directly associated with any markers of inflammation, suggesting that body weight, not red meat, may be the driver of increased systemic inflammation. Of particular interest was the lack of a link between red meat intake and C-reactive protein (CRP), the major inflammatory risk marker of chronic disease.

Some patients can have vivid and detailed sexual hallucinations during anesthesia with sedative-hypnotic drugs like propofol, midazolam, diazepam and nitrous oxide. Some make suggestive or sexual comments or act out, such as grabbing or kissing medical professionals or touching themselves in a sexual way. Others awaken erroneously believing they were sexually assaulted.

A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals

The Emptiness Of Literature Written For The Market

Italian woman wins court case to evict her two sons, aged 40 and 42

about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may provide an antidote to the ills of prolonged sitting

Cats have 276 facial expressions — Each expression combined about four of 26 unique facial movements, including parted lips, jaw drops, dilated or constricted pupils, blinks and half blinks, pulled lip corners, nose licks, protracted or retracted whiskers, and/or various ear positions. By comparison, humans have 44 unique facial movements, although researchers are still working out how many different expressions they combine into, Florkiewicz says. Dogs have 27 facial movements, but again, their total number of expressions isn’t known.

AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalize language

Humans Absorb Bias from AI — And Keep It after They Stop Using the Algorithm

Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, Plumber Near Me — businesses across the country picked names meant to outsmart Google Search. Does it actually work?

How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

“african country that starts with k”

An account on Grindr called “GiantCockNYC” is constantly reappearing in users’ messages despite being blocked, with the account owner claiming they are an employee for the hookup app who is able to repeatedly remove the blocks. But Grindr itself says that isn’t the case here. A spokesperson said in an email that “The person created multiple profiles, deleted, then created another — with the same name/photos to make it appear as though blocks weren’t working.”

PimEyes, a public search engine that uses facial recognition to match online photos of people, has banned searches of minors over concerns it endangers children

Will Banksy’s Identity Finally Be Unmasked in a Defamation Lawsuit Brought by a U.K. Greeting Card Company?

Instagram linked to depression, anxiety, insomnia in kids, US states’ lawsuit — In a complaint filed in the Oakland, California, federal court on Tuesday, 33 states including California and Illinois said Meta, which also operates Facebook, has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its platforms

Higher levels of empathy may increase risk of inflammation, study suggests

The Paleo-fantasy often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer” […] dominates the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence

Data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.

Thousands of drivers have sensitive data exposed to hackers in major IT breach

1Password, a popular password management platform used by over 100,000 businesses, suffered a security incident after hackers gained access to its Okta ID management tenant.

Edgar Allan Poe lived at 35 different addresses in his 40 years.

The world’s longest possible train journey

A 29‐year‐old woman apparently jumped from the 86th‐floor observation deck of the Empire State Building last night, but survived when she landed on a three‐foot ledge about 20 feet below, the police said. She was admitted to Bellevue Hospital with a fractured pelvis. Authorities at the 102‐story building on West 34th Street theorized that strong wind gusts saved the life of Elvita Adams, of 975 Walton Avenue in the Bronx. [NY Times, December 3, 1979]

Man arrested for faking heart attack 20 times at restaurants to avoid paying bill

Amazon sold bottles of urine marketed as an energy drink, a new documentary alleges. […] attained number one bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category.

Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models — Meta has said its latest AI was partially trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts. According to Elon Musk, the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) plans to do the same with its own users’ content. Amazon, too, says it will use voice data from customers’ Alexa conversations to train its new LLM.

Biopiracy: when indigenous knowledge is patented for profit

Frying pan company sued for claiming temperatures that rival the Sun

In an unusual trial, Stanford Medicine researchers found that a patient’s belief that they had received ketamine, even if they didn’t, could improve their depression.

The Notorious Arrest of Cecil George Edwards

Monet Refuses the Operation ∆ By Lisel Mueller

A wild idea to protect the great barrier reef: Ships carry mist-making machines that cause clouds to block the sun. It could work.

Online voting is insecure. This doesn’t stop organizations and governments from using it.

From High Life Hackers to National Menace: The Rise and Fall of Digital Bandits ‘ACG’

A narrow majority of adults (53%) say they have between one and four close friends, while a significant share (38%) say they have five or more. Some 8% say they have no close friends.

The menstrual rhythm of the brain — In the female brain, regions important for memory and perception are remodeled in the course of the menstrual cycle

Testicles like to be a tad bit cooler than the rest of your body because that’s the ideal temperature for sperm production. Lax scrotal skin allows your balls to hang lower, away from your body, when your internal temperature rises, like after the gym. When you’re in a cold room, testicles shrink up closer to your body for warmth.

“selfcest” fetishists — VFX Artists Are Bringing ‘Clone Porn’ to the Mainstream

What Is ChatGPT Vision? 7 Ways People Are Using This Wild New Feature Related: From Reading X-Rays to Decoding Classified UFO Reports, ChatGPT Shows Off Its Vision

Save the Robots was an underground after hours club in New York City’s East Village neighborhood. “Robots,” as the venue was popularly known, operated illegally from a nondescript storefront and basement at 25 Avenue B, between East 2nd and 3rd Streets, from 1983 until mid-1984, when the club was shut down for fire safety violations. […] Save the Robots was known for its late hours of operation and sold only vodka, soda and fruit juice. Patrons typically arrived after 4 a.m. and partied until the 8 a.m. closing time.

NYU researchers reconstruct speech from brain activity, illuminates complex neural processes […] development of prostheses that can read brain activity and decode it directly into speech. While many researchers are working on developing such devices, the NYU prototype has one key difference — it is able to recreate the voice of the patient, using only a small data set of recordings, to a remarkable degree. The result may be that patients do not get a voice back after losing it — they will get their voice back.

Many primates produce copulation calls — Sexual vocalizations become longer, louder, more high-pitched, voiced, and unpredictable at orgasm in both men and women. Men are not less vocal overall, but women start moaning at an earlier stage; speech or even minimally verbalized exclamations are uncommon.

Female frogs appear to fake death to avoid unwanted advances, study shows

Amateur astronomers file class-action lawsuits alleging telescope price-fixing conspiracy

FBI warns against using public USB charging ports — Cybersecurity experts have warned that criminals can load malware onto public USB charging stations to maliciously access electronic devices while they are being charged

On TikTok, PimEyes has become a formidable tool for internet sleuths trying to identify strangers […] Originally founded in 2017 by two computer programmers in Poland, it’s an AI tool that’s like a reverse image search on steroids — it scans a face in a photo and crawls dark corners of the internet to surface photos many people didn’t even know existed of themselves in the background of restaurants or attending a concert.

PimEyes

Two Los Angeles Police Department officers who ignored a robbery in progress in order to catch a Snorlax and Togetic in Pokémon Go also rolled through a stop sign, sped through residential neighborhoods and zoomed over speed bumps, tailgated various cars, and drove the wrong way down a one-way road in order to catch ‘em all

Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection (UDCP) is suing TikTok over allegations that the app’s “addictive nature” harms children and that TikTok deceptively obscures its relationship with ByteDance, its parent company in China.

The Enshittification of Amazon Continues

the fashion designer creating cowboy boots with a little help from AI

Adding spider DNA to silkworms creates silk stronger than Kevlar

Quantum computing in healthcare: predicting diseases and improving patient care “Cancer cells are defeated through the precise modulation of biological quantum electron tunneling by ingenious nanoparticles. This triggers a symphony of electrical signals that activate the natural self-destruct mechanism within cancer cells,” explains lead researcher Frankie Rawson. Study co-author Ruman Rahman added, “This research highlights the potential of quantum therapy as a novel technology for communicating with biology. The combination of quantum bioelectronics and medicine brings us closer to a new treatment approach.”

Our data establish that SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary vessels, inducing plaque inflammation that could trigger acute cardiovascular complications and increase the long-term cardiovascular risk.

The System Isn’t Designed to Help You — if you manage to get what you need from the system, it’s almost by accident, or unintentional, or a byproduct of helping someone else.

the $1,000 Breakfast Club

The Garden of the Five Senses

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications

A video of a bird in a cat cage, in a cat cage

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure,it’s not your fault

Before psychedelic therapy for wartime trauma, there was narcosynthesis It was called narcohypnosis or narcosynthesis. In essence, this involved the use of potent sedatives — especially sodium pentothal and sodium amytal — to put patients in a prolonged dream-like state. Psychiatrists of the era hoped that this would allow them to process, or “synthesize,” trauma from repressed memories of violence or conflict.

New research provides evidence for conscious awareness during cardiac arrest, in the absence of clinical signs of consciousness.

placebos can work even if a patient knows they are getting a placebo the best explanation for the results of open-placebo trials suggests that, for certain illnesses where the brain amplifies symptoms, engaging in a healing drama can nudge the brain to diminish the volume or “false alarm” of what’s called central sensitization — when the nervous system overemphasizes or amplifies perceptions of discomfort. This mostly involves nonconscious brain processes that scientists call “Bayesian brain,” which describes how the brain modulates symptoms up
or down […] Considerable evidence also shows that placebos, even when patients know they are taking them, trigger the release of neurotransmitters like endorphins and cannabinoids and engage specific regions of the brain to offer relief. Basically, the body has an internal pharmacy that relieves symptoms.

at some level of heat and humidity, the human body can no longer cool itself and its internal temperature rises uncontrollably. […] Past research found that transfer of heat could no longer occur at 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) on what is known as the wet bulb temperature scale […] But, in a study published last year, the Penn State researchers found that threshold to be closer to a wet bulb temperature of 31 degrees Celsius (88 Fahrenheit) for a sample of young and healthy research subjects who were not accustomed to such muggy conditions.

the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 when U.S. Patent 6,009,399, held by and administered by Technicolor, expired. […] AAC and other newer audio codecs can produce better quality than MP3, but the difference is only significant at low bitrates (2017)

Our data therefore provide strong evidence that when some (but not all) people flip a fair coin, it tends to land on the same side it started

What Is a ”Document”?

German museum employee swaps painting for fake and sells original to fund ‘luxury lifestyle’

The story of how one independent researcher conducted the largest-ever survey on fetishes

Zurich opens drive-in ’sex boxes’ — Modelled after drive-in brothels used in Germany and the Netherlands, the sex boxes will be open daily from 7pm to 5am.

Given that goalkeepers use multiple sensory cues and are often required to make rapid decisions based on incomplete multisensory information to fulfil their role, we hypothesised that professional goalkeepers would display enhanced multisensory temporal processing relative to their outfield counterparts. […] Our finding that professional goalkeepers exhibit a narrower temporal binding window [the window of time within which separate sensory inputs are merged into a single perceptual event] relative to the other two groups is consistent with prior research indicating that individuals who frequently integrate multiple sensory cues, such as trained musicians and video game players, demonstrate more precise multisensory temporal processing. However, an important unresolved question is whether this multisensory advantage stems from a preexisting skill set that initially led them to become goalkeepers, or if it results from a perceptual learning effect whereby repeated exposure to audiovisual stimuli has improved their multisensory temporal processing over time.

The association between coffee and mortality risk has been found in most previous studies, and recent studies have found an association between coffee consumption and cognition. However, there is still a lack of research exploring whether the association between coffee and mortality is influenced by cognitive function […] Our study suggested that the association between coffee consumption and mortality is influenced by cognition and varies with cognitive impairment in different cognitive domains

the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

seagrass beds can capture and retain carbon for centuries—even in situations where the seagrass dies off. The findings offer new optimism for using nature-based solutions in the fight against climate change.

What is the world’s biggest digital bank? No, not HSBC — it’s Brazil’s Nubank, which reported close to $5 billion in revenue last year. What is the most widely used social media platform in Vietnam? Not Facebook or TikTok — it’s Zalo, with an impressive 87% adoption rate. And what was one of the earliest online food delivery platforms? That would be Talabat, launched by a group of Kuwaiti students in Cairo, in 2004. That’s three years before the iPhone came to market. 40 trailblazing companies that, in their own ways, beat the West.

Untruths spouted by chatbots ended up on the web—and Microsoft’s Bing search engine served them up as facts. Generative AI could make search harder to trust.

Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster

Oldest evidence of human cannibalism as a funerary practice

Fake History Hunter: Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage

5 schools of philosophy that died out

Airports live radio transmission

During the making of this programme members of the production team and crew experienced numerous inexplicable phenomena.

In Singapore, the right to own a car starts at $76,000. And that doesn’t include the car.

Researchers in Germany have found that classical music audience members synchronize their heart rate and breathing during the performance.

male pattern baldness may be associated with increased risk of skin cancer, but the associations may only exist for those occurring at head and neck, particularly at scalp and “Balding men are more susceptible to sun damage and skin cancer because they have less hair protection.”

The Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 5th century BC. The man’s physical features were so well preserved that he was mistaken for a recent murder victim. The cause of death has been determined to be by hanging. Scholars believe the man was a human sacrifice, rather than an executed criminal, because of the arranged position of his body, and his eyes and mouth being closed. Scientists identified the man’s last meal as porridge or gruel made from grains and seeds, both cultivated and wild. Approximately 40 kinds of seeds were identified, but the porridge was primarily composed of four types: barley, flax, false flax (Camelina sativa), and knotgrass. […] Scientists identified the man’s last meal as porridge or gruel made from grains and seeds, both cultivated and wild. Approximately 40 kinds of seeds were identified, but the porridge was primarily composed of four types: barley, flax, false flax (Camelina sativa), and knotgrass. From the stage of digestion it was concluded that the man had eaten 12 to 24 hours prior to his death. Because neither meat nor fresh fruit was found in the last meal, it is suggested that the meal was eaten in winter or early spring, when these items were not available. In 1976, the Danish police made a fingerprint analysis, making Tollund Man’s thumbprint one of the oldest prints on record.

Where does my computer get the time from?

The ozone hole above Antarctica has grown to three times the size of Brazil

Los Angeles is using AI to predict who might become homeless and help before they do

Meta’s new AI-generated stickers — child soldiers, nude politicians, and lots and lots of boobs.

Anyone who uses a chatbot like Bard or ChatGPT is participating in a massive training exercise. In fact, one reason that these bots are provided for free may be that a user’s data is more valuable than her money: everything you type into a chatbot’s text box is grist for its model. Moreover, we aren’t just typing but pasting—e-mails, documents, code, manuals, contracts, and so on. We’re often asking the bots to summarize this material and then asking pointed questions about it, conducting a kind of close-reading seminar.

Translate: “We got a call from Google’s PR team” Excerpt: How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

Not only did Isaac Newton master physics and mathematics, but he was also a theologian. He was obsessed with eschatology (end-times prophecy), and he calculated — based on his interpretation of the Bible — that Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 2060. […] later in life, Newton dabbled in economics […] As Master of the Mint, Newton was tasked with tracking down currency counterfeiters […] When notorious counterfeiter William Chaloner attacked Newton’s personal integrity, he doubled down his efforts to catch him. […] Newton bribed crooks for information. He started making threats. He leaned on the wives and mistresses of Chaloner’s crooked associates. […] what truly separates Newton from other luminaries was his unparalleled creativity. He created multiple tools that simply never existed before. […] Sadly, despite his fame, Isaac Newton led a very lonely life. His incomparable brilliance came at a hefty cost; his reclusive and anti-social nature strongly suggest that he was autistic, and his obsessive and disagreeable nature suggest mental illness, perhaps obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Quicksand escape technique

13-foot-long python survives five months eating cats in trailer park

Turns out pumps at gas stations are controlled via Bluetooth, and that the connections are insecure.

A growing movement decrying the lack of proper pockets in women’s clothing has begun to find disciples in the world of high fashion, as well as among mainstream chains.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the alleged crypto criminal who stands accused of masterminding one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history, was considering paying Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for president

Psychedelics plus psychotherapy can trigger rapid changes in the brain

Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram

TikTok is reportedly testing a paid, ad-free version of its app

Several Taiwanese technology companies are helping Huawei Technologies Co. build infrastructure for an under-the-radar network of chip plants across southern China, an unusual collaboration

For years, Apple Inc. pondered building a search engine that could replace Google as the preferred option on its devices. […] Right now, Apple gets a cut of Google’s search ad revenue, a commission that has brought in roughly $8 billion annually in recent years. But imagine if Apple could keep more of that money. […] Google may be dominant in search, but the company still needs Apple and its billions of users. […] John Giannandrea, a former Google executive who now oversees machine learning and AI at Apple, has a giant search team under him. Over the past few years, his group developed a next-generation search engine for Apple’s apps codenamed “Pegasus.” That technology, which more accurately surfaces results, is already available in some Apple apps, but will soon be coming to more, including the App Store itself. […] Apple also has its own advertising technology team, which will be helpful if its search ambitions grow. […] One acquisition Apple could have made but didn’t was Bing. I reported this past week that Microsoft tried to spin off Bing and sell it to Apple in order to make it the default search engine on the iPhone and other devices. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, balked at the deal.

Exploiting the iPhone 4, Part 1: Gaining Entry — Step one. Acquire a device. I don’t know anything about writing a jailbreak or about what my approach will look like, so let’s just start somewhere obvious. I pick up an iPhone 4 and a 3GS off eBay. Older devices seem like a good place to start as their security is presumably worse, but you’ve got to find the sweet spot: really old devices are wildly valuable. […] I’ll need to be able to run some code on the device. The imagined path here is that I manage to set up a toolchain that can produce and install applications the way it was done back in 2010. Using that, I would then write an app and poke around from within the sandbox to investigate the attack surface.

Humans inherit artificial intelligence biases

Tech companies have not solved some of the persistent problems with AI language models, such as their propensity to make things up or “hallucinate.” […] Tech companies are putting this deeply flawed tech in the hands of millions of people and allowing AI models access to sensitive information such as their emails, calendars, and private messages. In doing so, they are making us all vulnerable to scams, phishing, and hacks on a massive scale.

The model takes a font description as an input, and produces a font file as an output. I named the project ‘FontoGen’.

How Mexico built a state — Building a state is not a matter of copying first world institutions. It is a tough process of deals and compromises. 19th century Mexico is a good example.

Venice Explained: Its Architecture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Experience Them All

A pair of Chinese scam artists wanted to turn a radiation-soaked Pacific atoll into a future metropolis. They ended up in an American jail instead. […] Yan and Zhou went from hawking a miracle water cure to running a sham United Nations organization on Manhattan’s Third Avenue and rubbing shoulders with diplomats and world leaders. The pair managed to gain access to the U.N. thanks to over $1 million in clandestine payments to diplomats.

Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850 — Gin was one of a wide range of new intoxicants — including chocolate, coffee, opium, sugar, tea, and tobacco — that, in what has been called a “psychoactive revolution”, radically expanded the mind-altering possibilities for European people between 1600 and 1800.

one of the 472 (Warhol) prints of sunsets, each in its own colorway, that got used to decorate 472 rooms in Philip Johnson’s groovy new Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis in 1972.

about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. The pop-ups are almost always linked to alerts from friends on social media.

we ask that the Norwegian temporary ban on behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram be made permanent and extended to the entire European Union

Anyone who has used H&R Block’s tax return preparation services in recent years may have unintentionally helped line Meta and Google’s pockets. That’s according to a new class action lawsuit which alleges the three companies “jointly schemed” to install trackers on the H&R Block site to scan and transmit tax data back to the tech companies which then used elements of the data to engage in targeted advertising.

One-hour training is all you need to control a third robotic arm

Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration […] Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.

Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics, Study Finds — 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber […] It’s an emissions problem that won’t go away with the transition to electric vehicles […] EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.

Waste plastic can be recycled into hydrogen fuel and graphene

Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge 3

Couple suing Disney World claims water slide caused ‘painful wedgie’

Top Chinese Scientist Says India’s Moon Landing Not Even Close to South Pole

Scientific experiments have repeatedly shown that sharks have no interest in human blood

Walking more than five flights of stairs (at least 50 steps up) a day can cut risk of heart disease by 20%, data collected from more than 450,000 adults over 12.5 years shows

Ten weird things you can buy online

Letterboxd has been acquired in a deal that values it at $50 million — and promises ‘very little’ will change

some of Silicon Valley’s biggest AI companies are hiring poets and writers with humanity degrees

Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.

The octopus, considered to be separated from us by about 700 million years of evolution, is believed to be the most intelligent invertebrate. It challenges many common assumptions about animal intelligence because it is also a short-lived loner. And we are discovering that its nervous system apparatus for intelligence is also completely different from typical mammal or bird models.

A viral account is using off-the-shelf facial recognition tech to dox random people on the internet for the amusement of millions of viewers.

Hotel hackers redirect guests to fake Booking.com to steal cards

Mastercard sells cardholder transaction data through third party online data marketplaces and through its in-house Data & Services division, giving many entities access to data and insights about consumers at an immense scale. […] For example, Mastercard’s listing on Amazon Web Services Data Exchange states that companies can access data like the amount and frequency of transactions, the location, and the date and time. Mastercard creates categories of consumers based on this transaction history, like identifying “high spenders” on fast fashion or “frequent buyers” of big ticket items online, and sells these groupings, called “audiences”, to other entities. These groups can be targeted at the micro-geographic level, and even be based on AI-driven scores Mastercard assigns to consumers predicting how likely they are to spend money in certain ways within the next 3 months.

we find no consistent relation between hormones and unethical behavior or tendencies

two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency. An astounding 40 percent are essentially nonreaders. Most are taught through phonics—a system of instruction based on sounding out letters that is mandated in at least 32 states and the District of Columbia. The phonics method of converting each letter to a particular sound is totally unsuited to the English language.

For decades, tobacco companies hooked people on cigarettes by making their products more addictive. Now, a new study suggests that tobacco companies may have used a similar strategy to hook people on processed foods. In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables. By the 2000s, the tobacco giants spun off their food companies and largely exited the food industry — but not before leaving a lasting legacy on the foods that we eat.

Dark Tower was the subject of trade secret litigation in 1985. Two independent game developers named Robert Burton and Allen Coleman submitted a game to Milton Bradley titled “Triumph” that involved an electronic tower as the centerpiece. Milton Bradley rejected the game, but proceeded to release Dark Tower some time later. The inventors sued for misappropriation of trade secrets and won a jury verdict for over $700,000.

How two photographers captured the same millisecond in time — We had what looked like the exact same image, taken at the exact millisecond in time, from what looked like the same exact location and perspective. Aside from choices made in Lightroom, the photos at first glance look virtually identical aside from water in front and some of the white caps being in different position. […] I was concerned that maybe MY image was stolen and altered a bit.

An online order for grouper fillets that was supposed to cost $10 ended up costing one woman more than $44,000 after scammers took control of her Android phone and banking details remotely.

Spyware can infect your phone or computer via the ads you see online – report

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize Winners — using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils, why many scientists like to lick rocks, the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word, the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward, how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food, measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies…

Despite lacking a centralized brain, jellyfish can learn from past experiences to avoid bumping into obstacles

Investigating the strange disappearance of Mrs Agatha Christie

Ancient Stone Tools Once Thought to be Made by Humans Were Actually Crafted by Monkeys, Say Archaeologists

Amazon made a new version of its cashierless tech that doesn’t need cameras

Airlines make more money from mileage programs than from flying planes — United’s MileagePlus program, for example, was valued at $22 billion, while the company’s market cap at the time was only $10.6 billion.

China has announced plans to become the world’s leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called “the new gold” — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures.[…] To develop drugs for a global market, China needs highly diverse sources of genetic information along with individual patient histories, which provide critical context, researchers say. So, beginning early in the past decade, China began to ramp up its acquisition of such records. In 2013, Complete Genomics, a San Jose company and a U.S. leader in gene-sequencing technology, was purchased for $118 million by BGI Group, a Chinese company formerly called Beijing Genomics Institute. […] By 2019, through business partnerships and stock purchases, nearly two dozen Chinese companies had acquired rights to genetic data and other private records of U.S. patients […] A Justice Department indictment in 2019 accused Chinese operatives of illegally accessing patient databases at four U.S. companies. The hackers are believed to have siphoned the private health-care data, including DNA information, of more than 80 million Americans, according to prosecutors. […] in January 2020, amid the virus’s rapid spread across the planet, BGI unveiled a new portable coronavirus testing facility, called Huo-Yan in Mandarin — “Fire-Eye” in English. […] Over the following months, BGI would manufacture about 100 labs in different configurations. […] Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers.

ShadowDragon tracks BabyCenter, a website for people expecting children, as well as social media sites specifically for Black people, bodybuilders, and the fetish community

We find converging evidence that prenatal gonadal hormones influence the development of human sexual orientation […] Evidence is particularly strong that androgens increase sexual attraction to females. […] Some evidence also indicates that estrogens increase sexual attraction to males

Researchers at Aalto University have made a map of where in the body different types of love are felt and how strongly they are experienced

Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside

Why We’ll Never Live in Space

The vast majority of NFTs are now worthless, new report shows

When I first signed my creator-owned publishing contract with DC Comics, the company was run by honest men and women of integrity, who (for the most part) interpreted the details of that agreement fairly and above-board. When problems inevitably came up we worked it out, like reasonable men and women. Since then, over the span of twenty years or so, those people have left or been fired, to be replaced by a revolving door of strangers, of no measurable integrity, who now choose to interpret every facet of our contract in ways that only benefit DC Comics and its owner companies. At one time the Fables properties were in good hands, and now, by virtue of attrition and employee replacement, the Fables properties have fallen into bad hands. Since I can’t afford to sue DC, to force them to live up to the letter and the spirit of our long-time agreements […] I’ve decided to take a different approach, and fight them in a different arena, inspired by the principles of asymmetric warfare. The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want. I chose to give it away to everyone.

The subjective world of depression was characterized by an altered experience of emotions and body (feeling overwhelmed by negative emotions, unable to experience positive emotions, stuck in a heavy aching body drained of energy, detached from the mind, the body and the world); an altered experience of the self (losing sense of purpose and existential hope, mismatch between the past and the depressed self, feeling painfully incarcerated, losing control over one’s thoughts, losing the capacity to act on the world; feeling numb, empty, non-existent, dead, and dreaming of death as a possible escape route); and an altered experience of time (experiencing an alteration of vital biorhythms, an overwhelming past, a stagnation of the present, and the impossibility of the future).

“jamais vu”, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way.

Scientists figured out how to write in water

a new “pop-up fashion PR agency” called the OutLaw Agency

Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at a crowded conference. — The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release

Isaac Newton’s later career […] as Warden of the Mint […] contains many elements of a modern crime thriller: including an ingenious arch-adversary, Newton visiting the gin houses of London in disguise, personally interrogating suspects, playing good cop–bad cop, and using every trick in the book, before the book had been written.

A total of 4.8% of the participants (N = 82,243) were at high risk of experiencing CSBD (compulsive sexual behavior disorder) […] The highest CSBD scores were observed in Turkey, followed by China and Peru.

The rapidly growing art therapy literature claims that there is solid evidence that engaging with art ameliorates mental and physical disorders and increases wellbeing. […] there is no compelling evidence that art objects and activities can induce physiological changes to the human nervous system that result in health improvements and wellbeing.

Herding dogs are often initially taught control around livestock with the use of a long lead line. Having another experienced herding dog to assist with modeling behavior is an asset. How to Train Your Dog to Herd Sheep

Horseshoe crabs have 10 eyes, a pair of compound eyes on the cephalothorax, and “photo receptors” in other areas, primarily along the tail. Horseshoe crabs are not actually crabs at all, they are much more closely related to spiders and other arachnids than they are to crabs or lobsters.

Researchers gave 200 people $10,000 each to study generosity

the feeling of orgasm can be considered a form of “nonaversive pain.” For example, the intense facial grimace expressed during pleasurable orgasm can be surprisingly similar to that of persons in extreme pain […] the brain regions that classically respond to pain are also selectively activated during orgasm

Scientists say they have pinpointed the moment humanity almost went extinct — 900,000 years ago when the global population dwindled to around 1,280 reproducing individuals

When FBI agents arrived at James Nott’s Kentucky apartment with a search warrant on Tuesday, they asked if anyone else was home. “Only my dead friends,” Nott replied. That’s according to the FBI, who in a criminal complaint detailed 40 human skulls and other remains they found decorating Nott’s home, tying him to a ring of people allegedly buying and selling human body parts illegally – including a Harvard Medical School morgue manager, who is accused of stealing cadaver parts.

The World Bank poured billions of dollars into fossil fuels around the world last year despite repeated promises to refocus on shifting to a low-carbon economy

Is air conditioning making cities hotter? A study found that waste heat generated by a city’s worth of air conditioners during a heatwave can raise the outside temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Look beneath the surface of Bach’s music and you will find a fascinating hidden world of numerology and cunning craft

Why is the ocean salty?

Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave

Nasdaq receives SEC approval for AI-based trade orders

A magician’s guide to zero-knowledge proofs (magic tricks are zero-knowledge proofs)

Our results showed that life satisfaction decreased from age 9 to 16 (d = −0.56), increased slightly until age 70 (d = 0.16), and then decreased again until age 96 (d = −0.24). Positive affect declined from age 9 for almost the entire time until age 94.

You Aren’t Lazy: Exploring a Lack of Motivation

The human male expels two fluids in response to sexual stimulation: semen (containing a variety of nutrients in addition to sperm cells) and pre-ejaculate (a colorless lubricant and an acid neutralizer that creates a favorable environment in the urethra for sperm). Females, on the other hand, expel four: vaginal lubrication (clear, slippery, and slightly acidic plasma), ejaculate (thick, whitish fluid from the Skene’s gland), coital incontinence (urine), and — the most mysterious — squirt. Occasionally, when a woman is highly aroused, a gush of ten or more milliliters of clear, watery fluid can erupt from her vagina. […] the fluid released during squirting comes from the bladder. So yes, it’s pretty similar to urine, although there are small amounts of other compounds including sugars and proteins. Additionally, to the likely relief of women and their partners everywhere, it tends to be far more watered down than typical pee. […] To build toward squirting, women used harder, more intense touch than usual, exerted pressure inside the vaginal wall, and concurrently applied outer and inner pressure. To release the fluid, some reported swiftly relaxing clenched muscles, applying a burst of speed or pressure with their chosen stimulation, or bearing down. For around 40% of women, squirting occurred unexpectedly simply from clitoral stimulation alone or without any specific pattern.

The fruit machine was an actual machine built to aid in the detection of gay people in the Canadian Civil Service from 1950 to 1973 […] The idea was to unmask perverts by measuring involuntary pupillary dilations and other physiological reactions to pictures and words. […] the technology came in several proposed models. One involved perspiratory responses to vocabulary with homosexual meanings like queen, circus, gay, bagpipe, bell, whole, blind, mother, punk, queer, rim, sew, swing, trade, velvet, wolf, blackmail, prowl, bar, house, club, restaurant, tea room, and top men.

This is how money is laundered on Spotify

“artificial general intelligence” ever arrives — an AI that surpasses human intelligence and capability […] if you read between the lines of a new, exhaustive profile of OpenAI […] “Somewhere in the restructuring documents is a clause to the effect that, if the company does manage to create AGI, all financial arrangements will be reconsidered”

Wilson et al. explored the state of being alone with one’s thoughts and found that it appears to be an unpleasant experience. In fact, many of the people studied, particularly the men, chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than be deprived of external sensory stimuli. [2014]

Physical activity is highly beneficial for improving symptoms of depression, anxiety and distress

dietary supplements containing antioxidants can accelerate tumour growth and metastasis “There’s no need to fear antioxidants in normal food but most people don’t need additional amounts of them,” says Professor Bergö. “In fact, it can be harmful for cancer patients and people with an elevated cancer risk.”

Cancer cases in under-50s worldwide up nearly 80% in three decades — poor diets, alcohol and tobacco use, physical inactivity and obesity are likely to be among the factors.

‘Modern cars are a privacy nightmare’ 92 percent of the reviewed automakers provide drivers with little (if any) control over their personal data, with 84 percent sharing user data with outside parties.

3,200-year-old pants on Chinese mummy are like modern-day jeans

Woman named ‘Barbie Oppenheimer’ says she’s having trouble checking into hotels

2 passengers were kicked off an Air Canada flight because they refused to sit in seats covered in puke, fellow traveler says

Each scorpion produces about 2 milligrams of venom daily, which is harvested or milked using a pair of tweezers and tongs, before being dried ready for export. A liter of the venom is worth about $US10 million, Mr Orenler told Reuters. It’s previously been described as the most expensive liquid on the planet. Some cosmetics companies are now adding scorpion venom or its extracts to their products, claiming near-miracle-like results from their concoctions.

Are deep blue seas fading? Oceans turn to new hue across parts of Earth, study finds

Scientists have discovered that “acute exposure” to microplastics — tiny bits of plastic material that are now pretty much everywhere, from remote Antarctic ice to human lungs, breastmilk, and bloodstreams — causes dementia-like symptoms in mice, among other behavioral shifts.

Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers? More: The streets of San Francisco are buzzing with autonomous taxis, prompting questions about traffic safety [NYT podcast]

Cool Science Tricks

How a TV Works in Slow Motion

I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider’s Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’ “Obviously this is a great fit for abusers,” an expert on domestic violence and cybersecurity said.

Hackers typically target victims with Qakbot by sending them spam emails containing malicious attachments or links. As soon as a victim downloads the attachment or clicks the link, Qakbot infects their computer, which then becomes part of a botnet — or a network of infected computers controlled remotely by hackers. From there, bad actors can install additional malware on their victims’ devices, such as ransomware. To take down the network, the FBI routed Qakbot through FBI-controlled servers

Most of My Instagram Ads Are for Drugs, Stolen Credit Cards, Hacked Accounts, Counterfeit Money, and Weapons — The ads are a window into a blatantly illegal underground economy that Meta is not only failing to moderate, but is actively profiting from and injecting into users’ feeds. More: Instagram Throttles 404 Media Investigation Into Drug Ads on Instagram

Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis.

The Art of Lying — A 51-year-old man I will call “Mr. Pinocchio” had a strange problem. When he tried to tell a lie, he often passed out and had convulsions. In essence, he became a kind of Pinocchio, the fictional puppet whose nose grew with every fib. For the patient, the consequences were all too real: he was a high-ranking official in the European Economic Community (since replaced by the European Union), and his negotiating partners could tell immediately when he was bending the truth. His condition, a symptom of a rare form of epilepsy, was not only dangerous, it was bad for his career. Doctors at the University Hospitals of Strasbourg in France discovered that the root of the problem was a tumor about the size of a walnut. The tumor was probably increasing the excitability of a brain region involved in emotions; when Mr. Pinocchio lied, this excitability caused a structure called the amygdala to trigger seizures. Once the tumor was removed, the fits stopped, and he was able to resume his duties.

The devious art of lying by telling the truth

McKinsey unveils its own generative AI tool for employees: Lilli

Is quantum computing hype or almost here?

Fighting fire with fire (and drones)

Chronic sleep deprivation — when you consistently get less rest than what you require — has more pernicious effects. Memory and learning suffer even more: Sleep is when the brain consolidates information after all. Blood pressure and heart rate tick higher. Immune functions fall. Metabolism slows, leading to weight gain. Inflammation rises. Brain cells die from overwork. All of these physiological effects seem to lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia. […] In a 2021 study, subjects slept an average of 5.3 hours for ten nights and then were given a week to sleep as long as they liked. While they felt normal after that week of unrestricted sleep, their cognitive function did not totally return to baseline levels before their sleep deprivation. […] if a person who needs eight hours of rest per night only gets five hours on a particular night, it will take six days of 8.5 hours of sleep to “repay” those three lost hours.

Georgia man arrested for stealing neighbor’s entire front porch

Most Americans have very little choice but to provide their personal information to credit bureaus. Hackers have found a way into that data supply chain, and are advertising access in group chats used by criminals.

Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale — “For some reason adding ‘hands on hips’ to the prompt completely breaks this [model]. Generates just the balls with no penis 100% of the time. What a shame,” one user commented on the model.

The social and psychological characteristics of individuals who hoard physical items are quite well understood, however very little is known about the psychological characteristics of those who hoard digital items […] analyses of email deletion and archiving behaviours in organisations show that users do not manage digital information in an effective way. They typically keep half of the emails they receive and reply to about a third of them (e.g. Dabbish, Kraut, Fussell, & Kiesler, 2005); with very few people engaging in proactive ‘clean-up’ of that stored information. […] As digital hoarding rises, businesses find it more difficult to extract value from the stored information and the risks associated with that information grow significantly […] Digital hoarding was significantly higher in employees who identified as having ‘data protection responsibilities’

Prohibition worked better than you think — America’s anti-alcohol experiment cut down on drinking and drinking-related deaths — and it may have reduced crime and violence overall. […] as Prohibition reduced drinking, it also reduced alcohol-induced violence, like domestic abuse. So the increase in organized crime may have been offset by a drop in more common, and less publicly visible, types of violence driven by alcohol. […] There are 88,000 deaths linked to alcohol each year — more than drug overdose deaths, car crash deaths, or deaths from gun violence. […] In modern times, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence estimated alcohol is a factor in 40 percent of violent crimes, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that alcohol contributed to 47 percent of homicides.

1 in 5 women report mistreatment from medical staff during pregnancy

Build a business, not an audience

How to sabotage your salary negotiation efforts before you even start

Time of day perception in paintings

2012 was a “tipping-point” year

Texas electricity prices soar 6,000 percent as a fresh heat wave is expected to shatter records – Spot electricity prices jumped to $4,750 per megawatt-hour from the average of $75

What everyone agrees on is that the environment’s influence on our genes, or epigenetics, has played a large role in the rise of allergies, as does the makeup of our nose, gut and skin microbiomes. In the end, it appears, we are at least partially doing this to ourselves. Modern living is likely at the root of the recent rise in allergies.

excessive avoidance of feared situations prevents learning through exposure […] Anxious individuals shift emotion control from lateral frontal pole to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

The man who can talk backwards

Some called Tether the central bank of crypto. […] I’d been hearing rumors about illicit uses of Tether […]but pig butchering was the most concrete example I found. People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they’d been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams. […] Most pig-butchering operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They’d lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they’d be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. They described abuses that were worse than I could have imagined. Workers who missed quotas were beaten, starved, made to hit one another. One said he’d seen people forcibly injected with methamphetamine to increase productivity. Two others said they’d seen workers murdered, with the deaths passed off as suicides. They said the bosses would buy and sell captive laborers like livestock.

Major U.S. energy org targeted in QR code phishing attack

We Spent $1,500,000 on Ads Without Getting a Single Customer

While the average person might turn to Instagram to brag about their wealth, the mega-rich can afford to boast on “Rich Kids,” an exclusive photo sharing network. For $1,000 a month on Rich Kids, you’re guaranteed to only see photos from other wealthy patrons.

Spotify Annoyed by People Uploading Hours of White Noise — Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes of crashing waves or recordings of fans blowing air

Child influencers in Illinois can now sue their parents

Netflix is Responsible for 15% of Global Internet Traffic

3 ways AI is transforming music

One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. that’s not the case anymore.

The shift to electronic medical reimbursements gave rise to payment processing companies demanding a 1.5% to 5% fee every time a doctor gets paid by insurers. The government banned such fees — until a company lobbyist got involved. […]With more than $2 trillion a year of medical claims paid electronically, these fees likely add up to billions of dollars that could be spent on care but instead are going to insurers and middlemen.

Falsely accused? Anger and silence are the two worst reactions

Why did people in the past look so much older?

Beer-loving raccoons are ‘trashing homes and eating pets’ in Germany and Two intoxicated US tourists ‘trapped’ overnight up the Eiffel Tower

Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song by Reading Brain Signals of Listeners The audio sounds like it’s being played underwater. [study]

Font Size Can ‘Nudge’ Customers Toward Healthier Food Choices

Nvidia’s H100 GPU is the most sought-after resource in the tech industry right now, thanks to the role it’s playing in powering the generative AI boom. […] Saudi Arabia has bought at least 3,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips — a $40,000 processor

‘Bored Apes’ investors sue Sotheby’s, Paris Hilton and others as NFT prices collapse

Trump, who currently holds $2.8 million in ETH, earned $4.87 million in licensing fees from his NFT collection

In an explosive new lawsuit, shutterbug Jacob Beam says his entire life has gone down the tubes thanks to Libbie Mugrabi—who reportedly once had a physical altercation with ex-husband David Mugrabi over a $500,000 Keith Haring sculpture—and that he now works as a part-time food deliveryman while attempting to get past the “psychological and emotional issues caused by [the] horrific ordeal he has undergone.”

Spinoza: Life and Legacy

ChatGPT produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time

Common Alzheimer’s disease gene may have helped our ancestors have more kids

By his estimates, Alex has performed at least six separate sex acts in robotaxis

A WWII Propaganda Campaign Popularized the Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark

A journey inside Mexico’s underground vanilla economy

We are drowning in a sea of irrelevance: so much information that we can no longer make sense of it. In a world of decontex- tualized shards of content, each with an increasingly short shelf life, what does free and open communication mean? To grapple with this, one common heuristic is to look to the source of informa- tion as a guide as to its importance or veracity. But in an Internet without information gatekeepers—for good and ill—this heuristic itself has a key flaw: who is the gatekeeper of the gatekeepers in a fully-decentralized online ecosystem?

how geckos stick to walls. The answer is van der Waals forces

“5 stages of grief” is a myth — and knowing that helps us better cope with loss

Google and Universal Music Discuss Making an AI Tool to Replicate Artists’ Voices

Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds

The U.S. spends 17.8 percent of GDP on health care, nearly twice as much as the average OECD country. Health spending per person in America is almost twice as high as in the next most expensive country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea. […] longevity: according to the UN, the U.S. ranks No. 70 out of 227 sovereign or semi-sovereign state entities. […] lower longevity has implications for many other statistics, such as infant mortality; America’s ranking among developed countries is abysmal: “U.S. maternal mortality in 2020 was over 3 times the rate in most of the other high-income countries.” So much for the pro-life charade of the religious right. — Why America is going backward

A transgender woman has gone to court alleging that her ex-boyfriend stole her surgically removed genitals and is demanding that he return them.

we are more likely to make rational decisions when decision-making on the behalf of others than for ourselves

The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms — like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon’s policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission. The use of these tools in tandem has allowed the books to rise near the top of Amazon search results and sometimes garner Amazon endorsements such as “#1 Travel Guide on Alaska.” A recent Amazon search for the phrase “Paris Travel Guide 2023,” for example, yielded dozens of guides with that exact title. One, whose author is listed as Stuart Hartley, boasts, ungrammatically, that it is “Everything you Need to Know Before Plan a Trip to Paris.”

tonight while you sleep, something amazing will happen within your brain. Your neurons will go quiet. A few seconds later, blood will flow out of your head. Then, a watery liquid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) will flow in, washing through your brain in rhythmic, pulsing waves.

Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican American DJ who is credited for the creation of hip hop music in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s.

It appears Australia is truly on its way to becoming a cashless society, with the number of notes in circulation officially declining for the first time since dollars and cents were introduced in 1966.

The Billionaire Who Controls Your Medical Records — The company dress code is: “When there are visitors, you must wear clothes.”

“One of the security guards was saying to the guy, ‘Dude, you cannot be naked in here,’” she recalled. “The guy was all confused and upset that he couldn’t be naked in the theater … he was getting all worked up.” […] Some people seem to have forgotten how to go to the movies, with widespread reports of drunken outbursts, rampant cellphone use and exhibitionism.

I Went to 50 Different Dentists and Almost All of Them Gave Me a Different Diagnosis

The “full Ginsburg” is a term used in American politics to refer to a person who appears on all five American major Sunday morning talk shows on the same day. The term is named for William H. Ginsburg, the lawyer for Monica Lewinsky during the sexual conduct scandal involving President Bill Clinton. Ginsburg was the first person to accomplish this feat, on February 1, 1998.

Elon Musk Will Train His AI Project Using Your Tweets

Not enough films feature dykes talking about fisting

A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.

The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency’s own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. […] the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient […] Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show. […] Another serious cancer risk associated with the boat fuel ingredient […] For every 100 people who ate fish raised in water contaminated with that same product over a lifetime, seven would be expected to develop cancer.

A majority of American adults report having used sex toys, which, by design, interact with intimate and permeable body parts yet have not been subject to sufficient risk assessment or management. Physical and chemical data are presented examining potential risks associated with four types of currently available sex toys: anal toy, beads, dual vibrator, and external vibrator. […] After extraction, phthalates known to be endocrine disruptors were present in all tested sex toys at levels exceeding hazard warnings.

Most cars still cost more to charge than to fill up with gas

labyrinth and maze

How a doctor’s two-decade quest to grow the penis is leaving some men desperate and disfigured

Are blind individuals immune to bodily illusions? Somatic rubber hand illusion in the blind revisited

Marx is more than just a competitive gun-disarmer and martial artist. He is also a former Marine, a self-proclaimed exorcist, and an author and filmmaker. He also helped launch the Skull Games, a privatized intelligence outfit that purports to hunt pedophiles, sex traffickers, and other “demonic activity” using a blend of sock-puppet social media accounts and commercial surveillance tools — including face recognition software.

Forget subtitles: YouTube now dubs videos with AI-generated voices

10 Cities With Their Own Psychological Disorders — Less well known, Lima Syndrome describes the exact opposite of Stockholm Syndrome—that is, the captors develop positive attachments to their hostages.

— Scientists are finding ways to help people sober up faster and feel fewer bad effects

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults

In The Future, Death Will Be Different

Knife Throwing Machine [Accuracy Testing Trick Shots]

38-year-old Florida manatee dies after ‘high-intensity’ sex with brother

Reverse cowgirl: the world’s most dangerous sexual position

People see themselves differently from how they see others. They are immersed in their own sensations, emotions, and cognitions at the same time that their experience of others is dominated by what can be observed externally. This basic asymmetry has broad consequences. It leads people to judge themselves and their own behavior differently from how they judge others and those others’ behavior. Often, those differences produce disagreement and conflict. Understanding the psychological basis of those differences may help mitigate some of their negative effects. [PDF]

Mind-reading machines are coming — how can we keep them in check?

Meta’s Reality Labs, which develops virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, has lost more than $21 billion since 2022

Every major subscription streaming company has increased its prices in the past year in an effort to address Wall Street’s push for profits. The average consumer is willing to pay roughly $42 monthly for streaming services, according to a recent survey.

The secret economics of the Birkin bag

Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons

Between psychopathy and deviant socialization: A close look at the mafia men

“I met Iggy Pop at Max’s Kansas City in 1970 or 1971,” recalled David Bowie. “Me, Iggy and Lou Reed at one table with absolutely nothing to say to each other, just looking at each other’s eye makeup.” William Burroughs smoking in a corner with Allen Ginsberg. Twiggy and Mick Jagger and Dennis Hopper — dancing to live performances upstairs like the Velvet Underground (performing at Max’s during their last days), Bob Marley or a young Bruce Springsteen on acoustic guitar.

Mind Grenade

Vintage Las Vegas

Doctors reattach boy’s head after car accident thanks to ‘amazing’ surgery

Want fewer car accidents? Remove traffic signals and road signs

An alleged killer joined a Facebook group for passing on kids’ items to find pregnant mothers and possibly kidnap them, according to a search warrant. Some moms in the group say neither the FBI nor Meta informed them that their data was caught up in a murder investigation.

Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement, digging through license plate databases with billions of records. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date.

Increased exercise or daily steps were associated with better sleep quality (for example, faster sleep onset and less time awake in bed), especially in countries like the U.S. and Finland.

Fully AI-Generated Influencers Are Getting Thousands of Reactions Per Thirst Trap

Nearly six years after his mysterious disappearance, on September 4th, 2019, xkcdHatGuy emerged from oblivion, looking older but with his unmistakable voice intact

facekinis

The man who won the lottery 14 times — How a rogue Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery and won millions of dollars around the world.

Half of U.S. beaches are contaminated with poop

Something in space has been lighting up every 22 minutes since 1988 We have no idea what kind of physics or what kind of objects can power that.

advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books

Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors

Book of the Civilized Man (13th century) (“Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate,” “sit up straight”, “do not put your elbows on the table”)

The Greater Fool Theory

German ‘king’ jailed after court refuses him immunity as ‘head of state’

Phone numbers for airlines listed on Google directed to scammers

The United States Air Force is investigating a company that’s purchased $800 million of land near Travis Air Force Base, one of the most critical military bases in the U.S. […] Public records show the company “Flannery Associates LLC” began purchasing land around the military base in 2018. […] Now literally three sides of that base are totally controlled by the Flannery group […] “Where did they get the money where they could pay five to ten times the normal value that others would pay for this farmland?” Even after eight months of investigation, Garamendi says federal authorities are still struggling to get those answers. “To this day we don’t know where these people are coming from”

‘ChatGPT’s evil twin’ WormGPT is devoid of morals and just €60 a month on the darkweb

AI That Teaches Other AI

One million US deaths in 2020 and 1.1 million US deaths in 2021 would have been averted if the United States had the mortality rates of other wealthy nations. About half of these missing Americans died before age 65. The number of excess US deaths relative to peers is unprecedented in modern times, at least since the 1930s. These excess US deaths were a result of a decades-long divergence in mortality from other wealthy nations, beginning in the 1980s, and were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Masters of the Bubbleverse Secretive hedge fund Tiger Global changed the rules on tech investing. Then it all went bad. […] Tiger Global partner Scott Shleifer spent $122.7 million for Donald Trump’s former Palm Beach estate after looking at the house for 15 minutes.

Goldman Sachs has lost over a billion dollars, mostly because of the Apple Card

‘Steve Jobs’ is an Italian company — and Apple can’t do anything about it

Las Vegas’ $2.3 Billion LED Sphere Looked Better in Renderings — the $2.3 billion structure is really only good at displaying spherical objects like planets, gigantic basketballs or jack-o-lanterns

Paper Airplane Tips

Humans are pumping out so much groundwater that it’s changing Earth’s tilt

GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better. GPT-4 (March 2023) was very good at identifying prime numbers (accuracy 97.6%) but GPT-4 (June 2023) was very poor on these same questions (accuracy 2.4%).

You search Delta Air Lines’ website … the Phoenix-Atlanta flights on the day before the holiday are sold out. Then you see a Delta flight to Orlando, Florida, from Phoenix for $260 per passenger in basic economy with a layover in Atlanta. You decide to book the flight and leave the plane in Atlanta instead of flying to Orlando. This travel hack is called skiplagging. Some passengers use it to save money when the longer route is cheaper than the desired destination.

Teenager detained at Florida airport and accused of ‘skiplagging’ travel hack

VanMoof — the independent e-bike maker that once bragged about being the “most funded e-bike company in the world” — has been declared bankrupt in the Netherlands.

Biotech startup aims to make lab-grown human eggs […] The experimental technology could help women who have lost their eggs to cancer treatment, women who have never been able to produce healthy eggs and women whose eggs are no longer viable because of their age. IVG would enable these women to have their own genetically related babies at any age. That’s because induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from just a single cell from anyone’s skin or blood. So these lab-grown eggs would have that person’s DNA.

loss of smell — known as hyposmia — has emerged as an early indicator of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s

With blackouts imposed across the United Kingdom in a bid to keep German bombers at bay, so came the opportunity for criminals to commit their dark deeds in almost perfect darkness. But did crime levels increase during the Second World War?

Take PinkyDoll, a TikToker with skyrocketing views, who is now known for her NPC streaming performances on the app. Often using the catchphrases, “Ice cream so good” and “Yes, yes, yes!” […] PinkyDoll reportedly makes anything from $2,000 to 3,000 per stream [more]

Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever

Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all. […] one of the features designed to reward users in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. […] McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.

researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds. While the study offers no insight into how our brains might be processing silence, the results suggest that people perceive silence as its own type of “sound,” not just as a gap between noises.

Exposing C-section babies to vaginal fluid boosts their development

aspartame is a ‘possible carcinogen.’ The FDA disagrees

New research puts age of universe at 26.7 billion years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

If 10 percent of the brain is normally used, then damage to other areas should not impair performance. Instead, there is almost no area of the brain that can be damaged without loss of abilities. Even slight damage to small areas of the brain can have profound effects. Brain scans have shown that no matter what one is doing, all brain areas are always active.

Parrots Are Taking Over the World Today at least 60 of the world’s 380 or so parrot species have a breeding population in a country outside their natural geographical range. All are by-products of the pet trade and animal trafficking around the world. Because they’re parrots, they’re smart, adaptable, creative and loud.

Bird nests made from anti-bird spikes

Cat vs snake More: How fast does a snake move during a strike? A 2016 study found that the average strike lasts between 44 and 70 milliseconds … compare it to the the 200 milliseconds it takes you just to blink your eye. A snake can strike faster than we can move ANY part of our bodies. In fact, if you could attain snake super speed, you would simply black out. … The study found that snakes experience forces up to 30G, 30 times the force of gravity when striking their prey. For human comparison, even the most seasoned fighter pilots would lose limb control around 8G, and experience complete black out shortly after reaching 10G.

Welcome to the universe of Hobby Horses

For our first ever production, Claire Hentschker and I attempted to reduce the overly-dimensional film “Avatar 2: Way of the Water” into a single dimension.

NPC streaming

We explored the psychology of those who believe in manifestation: the ability to cosmically attract success in life through positive self-talk, visualization, and symbolic actions […] Those who scored higher on the [Manifestation Scale] perceived themselves as more successful, had stronger aspirations for success, and believed they were more likely to achieve future success. They were also more likely to be drawn to risky investments, have experienced bankruptcy

New Oxford study sheds light on the origin of animals — Animals first occur in the fossil record around 574 million years ago. Their arrival appears as a sudden ‘explosion’ in rocks from the Cambrian period (539 million years ago to 485 million years ago) and seems to counter the typically gradual pace of evolutionary change. Many scientists (including Darwin himself) believe that the first animals actually evolved long before the Cambrian period, but they cannot explain why they are missing from the fossil record.

A recent UK government report suggested that between 11 and 15 percent of consumer electronics reviews on e-commerce platforms are fake — How to Spot Fake Reviews on Amazon

She believes scammers cloned her daughter’s voice in a fake kidnapping

A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA

To acquire a Vision Pro, customers must first schedule a fitting appointment. A special machine and an iPhone app will scan the user’s head so Apple can determine the proper headband and light seal size. Users with glasses must provide the company with prescription data to ensure the headset includes appropriate lenses. Although Apple will sell the Vision Pro at all 270 US Apple Stores, demo stations will initially only be available in major regions like New York or Los Angeles. Furthermore, online purchases will not become available until 2025.

If you’re printing something on actual paper, there’s a good chance it’s important, like a tax form or a job contract. But popular printing products and services won’t promise not to read it. In fact, they won’t even promise not to share it with outside marketing firms.

Twitter rival Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone.

Death from drinking coconut water — The coconut was preshaved, with visible endosperm (coconut meat) at the top for easy access to the carpels (holes) and the coconut water. A straw was included and used for puncturing the coconut at the time of consumption. Recommended storage was at 4°C–5°C in the refrigerator, but the coconut had been kept on the kitchen table for 1 month after purchase. Approximately 3 hours after drinking the coconut water, the patient developed sweating, nausea, and vomiting.

Farmer owes $82,000 in contract dispute over use of a ‘thumbs-up’ emoji […] instead of “ok”, “yup” or “looks good.”

The number of people visiting ChatGPT’s website was down 10 percent worldwide in June

In 19th-century Philadelphia, an anatomist dissected and mounted a human nervous system. Now researchers are trying to figure out whose remains are stretched out in a glass case.

It may now be easier to get pregnant using the sperm of a deceased loved one. The practice is controversial—but it’s not inherently wrong.

Psychedelics are increasingly recognised for their therapeutic potential and ability to re-orient belief structures. However, the potential they carry for inducing false insights and beliefs has thus far been under-considered.

What Colors Can Deer See? […] red and orange look gray while blue is easy to spot.

According to a University of Chicago study [PDF], men claim to have sex 66.5 times a year, while women claim to have sex 57.2 times a year. That might be because men traditionally overreport their sexual activity while women traditionally underreport theirs. […] Teenage girls are 6.5 percent more sexually active than teenage boys.

Reflecting on my own life, I’ve noticed that most of the things that really went off-track were indeed consequences of incremental neglect and numerous small yet poor choices. I didn’t become addicted to drugs overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I prioritized momentary pleasure over health and safety. I didn’t become overweight overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I opted for immediate gratification over long-term health. I didn’t ruin relationships overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I chose comfort over confronting difficult conversations, admitting my mistakes, or even just acknowledging that someone was better than me at something. From these experiences, I’ve realized that avoiding bad habits is just as important as cultivating good habits.

One night of total sleep deprivation shown to have antidepressant effect for some people

People spend much of their free time engaging with narrative fiction. Research shows that, like real-life friends, fictional characters can sometimes influence individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and self-beliefs. Moreover, for certain individuals, fictional characters can stand in for real-life friends by providing the experience of belonging. […] results suggest that lonelier individuals may turn to fictional characters to meet belongingness needs

If You’re Looking for Love, Just Let It Go

the hidden labor that goes into artificial intelligence […] in Nairobi […] The office specializes in a task called annotation, essentially using human labor to parse images that confuse the algorithms and hopefully making systems better in the process. […] The move from content moderation to AI annotation isn’t all bad. Annotation work is boring, but it’s not traumatic the way moderation can be; you’re working with traffic photos and product imagery instead of severed heads. Annotation also doesn’t have the policy uncertainty of moderation, where managerial hypocrisy often leaves contractors with an impossible job. If the pay were better, annotation wouldn’t necessarily be a bad job. But the pay isn’t better.

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

another ByteDance-owned app has been quietly making inroads in select markets around the world. Launched in 2020, the music streaming app Resso is currently available in three major markets — India, Brazil, and Indonesia — and has grown into a dark-horse challenger to Spotify.

Was FTX A Ponzi Scheme From The Beginning?

Proof That “One of the Parallel Worlds Cannot Be Extremely Different from the Other”

News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

The global population milestone of 8 billion represents nearly 7% ofthe total number of people who have ever lived on Earth.

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence

The first fully A.I.-generated drug enters clinical trials in human patients

The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications. And: AI is killing the old web

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a major antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of “leverag[ing] its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services and punish those who don’t”

Smartwatches can detect Parkinson’s years before diagnosis

Shopping Carts Can Tell If You Have a Heart Condition

foods with shorter (vs. longer) brand names are perceived as healthier, and consumers prefer such foods.

James Lewis and James Springer, identical twins adopted by separate families […] Both Jims, it transpired, had worked as deputy sheriffs, and had done stints at McDonald’s and at petrol stations; they’d both taken holidays at Pass-a-Grille beach in Florida, driving there in their light-blue Chevrolets. Each had dogs called Toy and brothers called Larry, and they’d married and divorced women called Linda, then married Bettys. They’d called their first sons James Alan/Allan. Both were good at maths and bad at spelling, loved carpentry, chewed their nails, chain-smoked Salem and drank Miller Lite beer. Both had haemorrhoids, started experiencing migraines at 18, gained 10 lb in their early 30s, and had similar heart problems and sleep patterns. […] much has changed in our understanding of genetics since the human genome was sequenced in 2003. It was discovered that we have far fewer genes than anticipated (around 20,000, rather than the anticipated 100,000), and that there are very few genes ‘for’ anything. A complex property such as intelligence, for example, involves a network of more than 1,000 genes, interacting with the environment.

MIT engineers develop “blackest black” material to date […] The results showed that the material absorbed at least 99.995 percent of incoming light, from every angle. In other words, it reflected 10 times less light than all other superblack materials, including Vantablack.

Erewhon […] The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence

Microscopic ‘Louis Vuitton’ bag created by art collective MSCHF for Pharrell Williams sells for more than $60,000

Messaging app startup that raised $200M shut down because 95% of its users were fake

U.S. pedestrian deaths reach 40-year high

Slim people have a genetic advantage when it comes to maintaining their weight

How to Steal a Masterpiece: Advice from the World’s Greatest Art Thief

Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations The AI-based abstract images and shapes that result from the machine’s unsupervised learning of modern art are dictated by the Museum’s collection archive

Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by legions of followers, and announces to the world that “There Is Only One Way to Do It.” Poland becomes nervous. A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Map Your Workplace and Its Leaders

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Apple, the company, wants rights to the image of apples, the fruit, in Switzerland—one of dozens of countries where it’s flexing its legal muscles

California restaurant used an alleged priest to get employees to admit workplace “sins”

Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer, became infamous for his viral online rants preaching male dominance, female submission and the pursuit of wealth. He has openly advocated for violence against women, and was previously banned from every major social media platformuntil Elon Musk reinstated his Twitter account after taking over the company.

AI bots should pass a new Turing test in which it receives a $100,000 seed investment and has to turn it into $1 million. As part of the test, the bot must research an e-commerce business idea, develop a plan for the product, find a manufacturer, and then sell the item. He expects AI to achieve this milestone in the next two years.

Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction

The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI Previously: AI has poisoned its own well and Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

new web tool detects artificial intelligence images in less than a second

Neuro-sama, an AI vTuber who streams daily on Twitch.

Why Your Roses Smell Nice

the phrase “rule of thumb” has its roots in domestic violence: a British law stipulated that a man could beat his wife provided he used a switch no wider than his own thumb.

Man ‘fakes his death’ before ‘arriving at his own funeral’ in a helicopter to teach family a lesson

Two-thirds of all online shopping scams now start on Facebook and Instagram Someone falls victim on Meta-owned platforms every seven minutes

Humans have pumped enough groundwater to change the tilt of the Earth

Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn’t actually commit. Research provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon

Humans have invisible skin patterns, due to a quirk in how our enveloping layer forms […] these patches and stripes can emerge with different skin conditions, including eczema and vitiligo

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

There is an old joke in Paris that the top of Montparnasse Tower has the prettiest view in the French capital. Not because of its breathtaking views of the Eiffel Tower or the Sacre-Coeur Basilica perched atop Montmartre, but because it is the only place where you do not have to see the skyscraper itself.

Men in Greek art seem to do pretty much everything without their pants on […] Nudity is often used as shorthand for ‘dead’ or ‘defeated’ in art from Eastern Mediterranean societies, where casualties of war or captives destined for execution most commonly appear unclothed. […] In addition to the dead or the doomed, divine figures like gods and heroes appear nude in many ancient artistic traditions […] athletes were – in life as in art – naked throughout both training and competition.

Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

Teslas account for fully 91 percent of all self-driving-related crashes in the NHTSA data.

Pizza startup Zume shuts down after raising $445 million Founded in 2015, the firm planned to cook pizzas in the back of a massive truck, with robots, while en route to customers’ homes. […] the company quickly gave up on the cooking-while-driving model — cheese kept sliding around when the truck hit bumps in the road […] Zume CEO Alex Garden was projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and talking about becoming the “Tesla of fresh food, and the Amazon of fresh food”

The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash, and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. The company can then be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But don’t worry — if it doesn’t work out, the PE firms are extracting fees at every step of the process, so they get paid no matter what happens. […] Those funds buy companies, whether it’s nursing homes, single-family rentals, veterinary clinics, OB-GYN practices. The really interesting thing about that, and I think what drew me to this as a lawyer but also concerns me as a citizen, is that because of the layered ownership structure of private equity firms, oftentimes private equity firms have control of the companies they buy but very little responsibility when those companies do arguably illegal things.

Mouse studies suggest that drugs from LSD to ecstasy renew the brain’s flexibility — but some scientists are sceptical

The role of eyebrows in face recognition (2003) we find that the absence of eyebrows in familiar faces leads to a very large and significant disruption in recognition performance. In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes.

After years spent researching and protecting sea turtles, Nichols started studying the impact that water has on the human body and brain. “When you see water, when you hear water, it triggers a response in your brain that you’re in the right place”

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85 meters [280 feet] below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years […] abandoned in the 1920s […] “rediscovered” in 1963 by an anonymous local who kept losing his chickens. While he was renovating his home, the poultry would disappear into a small crevasse created during the remodel, never to be seen again. Upon closer investigation and some digging, the Turk unearthed a dark passageway. It was the first of more than 600 entrances found within private homes leading to the subterrestrial city of Derinkuyu.

Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT

Two-thirds of people who use sleep meds said they slept just as well or better after sex

Price was the first person ever to be diagnosed with what is now known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM, a condition she shares with around 60 other known people. She can remember most of the days of her life as clearly as the rest of us remember the recent past.

Eastern philosophy says there is no “self.” Science agrees.

David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November. […] The 13-sided polygon, which 64-year-old Smith called “the hat”, is the first single shape ever found that can completely cover an infinitely large flat surface without ever repeating the same pattern […] solving a problem posed 60 years ago that some mathematicians had thought impossible. […] After stunning the mathematics world, Smith then did it again [..] revealed a new shape — “the specter.”

Twitter is refusing to pay its Google Cloud bills

This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in the late 2000s to early 2010s until they were uncovered by target countries

New York City will charge drivers going downtown. Proposals range from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours, and it’s set to go into effect next spring.

How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in New York City?

Emoji Kitchen

A man in China ended up in a legal battle after walking out on a blind date who expected him to pay for her and 23 of her relatives […] the woman’s family ordered a significant amount of expensive cigarettes and premium alcoholic beverages.

Taurine supplementation improved life span in mice and health span in monkeys, Taurine linked with healthy aging

A joint investigation by academics and The Wall Street Journal shows how Instagram’s algorithms promote networks of accounts sharing child sexual abuse material.

AI Prompt Engineering Isn’t the Future

How Math Has Changed the Shape of Gerrymandering — New tools make it possible to detect hidden manipulation of maps

The average color of the New York City sky, updated every 5 minutes

Hanging Testicles Door Knocker

Paralyzed man walks naturally, thanks to wireless ‘bridge’ between brain and spine

A New York fertility doctor who was accused of using his own sperm to impregnate several patients died over the weekend when the hand-built airplane he was in fell apart mid-flight and crashed

McKinsey says ‘about half’ of its employees are using generative AI

TikTok accounts are posting horrifying artificial intelligence-generated clips of murder victims — mostly children — describing their own ghastly demise

The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some.

How to secretly communicate with people on LSD

Wittgenstein was always disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion. Once he whispered to me, “This is like a shower bath.”

Some experts estimate China can build three warships in the time it takes the US to build one.

Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half — Everyone in the trial had a mutation of the EGFR gene, which is found in about a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and accounts for as many as 40% of cases in Asia. An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

ChatGPT took their jobs — Those that write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools like chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work. Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.

Scientists have blasted the brains of mice and rats with ultrasound to knock them into a hibernation-like state, and the researchers say the technique could one day be used on injured humans in critical care or on astronauts taking long-haul spaceflights.

Trick Yourself into Breaking a Bad Habit — A few years back, my colleagues and I studied 5,000 people who had attempted to change a stubborn career-limiting habit. Fewer than 10% succeeded at creating deep and lasting change. As we reviewed what separated the successful few from the rest, we found a quirky distinction: The successful people talked about themselves the way an experimental psychologist might refer to a cherished lab rat. For example, a shy manager with executive aspirations talked about how he took himself to the employee cafeteria three times a week to eat lunch with a complete stranger. Tickling with anxiety, he stripped himself of his smart phone before exiting his office — knowing that if it was with him, he would retreat to it. He knew that if he simply ensconced himself in these circumstances, he would connect with new people — a habit and skill he wanted to cultivate. […] We are less motivated when we feel less competent. […] Create structured practice opportunities to increase your competence and your motivation will follow suit.

After killing his father, Dadd managed to escape to France, where he tried to murder a passenger in the carriage in which he was traveling. It had been his intention to go to Austria to assassinate the emperor. He was arrested and taken to an asylum in Clermont, remaining there for ten months before extradition to England. His main treatment in Clermont was cold showers. […] He is very eccentric and glories that he is not influenced by motives that other men pride themselves in possessing—thus he pays no sort of attention to decency in his acts or words, if he feels the least inclination to be otherwise; he is perfectly a sensual being, a thorough animal, he will gorge himself with food till he actually vomits, and then return to the meal. […] In 1865, the asylum notes show Dadd to have been painting almost every day. […] One of the most extraordinary pictures ever painted, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which is only 15 by 21 inches and took him ten years to paint, seems to me to have been done by a man with a personal, though presumably not continuing, experience of micropsia, a condition in which everything seems much smaller than it is, and which is one of the possible effects of intoxication with hashish.

when it comes to truly dangerous toys, you’d struggle to beat the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. Billed as ‘Exciting and Safe’, the kit contained four sealed jars containing actual Uranium ores. this kit came on the market in 1950 at a price of $49.50 (over $500 in today’s money).

participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores.

Objective: To determine if using a parachute prevents death or major traumatic injury when jumping from an aircraft.Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.

Generative AI Podcasts Are Here. Prepare to Be Bored

Dead Silicon Valley Unicorns Pile Up as ‘Unicorpses’

we introduce a cryptographically-inspired notion of undetectable watermarks for language models. That is, watermarks can be detected only with the knowledge of a secret key […] it is impossible for a user to observe any degradation in the quality of the text.

Most Important Papers for Quantitative Traders

Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.

From underground exploration to brain science and air-traffic control, the sensing potential of quantum devices is enormous. — Unlike quantum computers, which get a lot of press but might be decades away from offering wide commercial advantage, quantum sensors are already in use in the lab.A handful are in commercial use: atomic clocks, for example, measure the passage of time supremely accurately using high-frequency quantum transitions in atoms. Their accuracy maintains the synchronization of communication and energy networks, and digital radio stations. They are crucial for satellite navigation services such as GPS.

Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant changed her sense of agency and self. She told researchers that she “became one” with her device. She was devastated when, two years later, she was told she had to remove the implant because the company that made it had gone bust. […] “Being forced to endure removal of the [device] … robbed her of the new person she had become with the technology” […] Trial volunteers had four electrodes implanted to monitor their brain activity. Recordings were sent to a device that trained an algorithm to recognize patterns preceding a seizure. Leggett received her device during a clinical trial for a brain implant designed to help people with epilepsy. […] A handheld device would signal how likely a seizure was to occur in the coming minutes or hours—a red light indicated an imminent seizure, while a blue light meant a seizure was very unlikely […] With the advance warning from the device, she could take medication that prevented the seizures from occurring.

YouTube will stop removing false presidential election fraud claims — ‘The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society.’

Two Men Got Jobs At Amazon Just To Steal Copies Of Zelda

An Illustrated Guide to Mouth Gestures and Their Meanings Around the World

Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug? — People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting.

US police are selling seized phones with personal data still on them — Nude photos, bank details and stolen credit card numbers have been found on devices sold by US police forces via auction sites

Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem?

The surprising reason luxury goods are booming A not-insignificant portion of luxury growth comes from middle- and low-income consumers. According to GlobalData, Americans with a household income of less than $50,000 make up about 27 percent of regular luxury consumers.

A family thought they were adopting a 6-year-old girl. Now they claim the girl — a little person — was an adult con artist masquerading as a child

Brain Connectivity and Memory Improve in Older Adults After Walking

The domestic cat’s can detect an extremely broad range of frequencies ranging from 55 Hz to 79 kHz, whereas humans can only detect frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. It can hear a range of 10.5 octaves, while humans and dogs can hear ranges of about 9 octaves.[…] Recent research has shown that cats have socio-spatial cognitive abilities to create mental maps of owners’ locations based on hearing owners’ voices.

The following trial is interesting not only for documenting a well organized blackmail ring at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but also for revealing the existence of the first recorded “glory hole”

Stuxnet Dossier Version 1.3 (November 2010)[PDF]

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Mathematics [PDF]

A reliable lie-detection method would be extremely useful in many situations, especially in forensic contexts. […] [However] the science shows that there are no reliable behavioral signs of deceit that human are able to detect. […] There is evidence that some structured methods do indeed pick up some signal of deceit but with large error rates, meaning that great care must be taken in practical contexts not to overinterpret results, especially as such methods will typically be employed when there is an absence of alternative strong evidence. […] Surprising as it may seem, and despite a hundred years research on the topic, currently “the best general advice from the psychological literature on verbal lie detection remains simply that a person is lying if what they say is inconsistent either with other things that they have said or with other evidence.”

Food delivery by drone is just part of daily life in Shenzhen

Scientists find way to make energy from air using nearly any material — The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores. But there are many questions about how to scale the product. […] The air-powered generator, known as an “Air-gen,” would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind.

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink announces FDA approval of in-human clinical study

New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

AI generated Captcha asks users to identify objects that don’t exist

A lawyer used chatGPT and cited non-existent cases, in court. Then doubled down and wrote fake cases to try to cover it up [PDF] More: NY Times

I got banned from Midjourney AI for generating realistic images of politicians cheating on their wives […] These generators are mostly just mashing up photos available on the internet. Privacy, copyright, dignity, and safety be damned […] QAnon was founded on the worst memes you’ve ever seen […] I think we’ll see AI videos of Democrats and children within a year or 2

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907)

Postmortem Tanning: An Unusual Postmortem Event — We describe 3 cases of an unusual postmortem change associated with prolonged sunlight exposure in both frozen and nonfrozen individuals.

The more emotional words you know, the higher your mental health

Words known by men and women — 24 words should suffice to find out whether a person you are interacting with in digital space is male or female

Even weak traffic noise has a negative impact on work performance

Ketamine no better than placebo at alleviating depression, unusual trial finds

many researchers and engineers say concerns about killer AIs that evoke Skynet in the Terminator movies aren’t rooted in good science. Instead, it distracts from the very real problems that the tech is already causing. It is creating copyright chaos, is supercharging concerns around digital privacy and surveillance, could be used to increase the ability of hackers to break cyberdefenses and is allowing governments to deploy deadly weapons that can kill without human control.

Goodhart’s law states that when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

How to Decode a QR Code by Hand

Why Salvador Dalí is the most faked artist in the world — Dalí ensured a steady flow of prints by signing his name on thousands of blank sheets of paper before he knew what would be printed on them. (The signature was worth ~$40 on its own.) Members of his inner circle, some of whom exploited Dalí for profit, once told the Wall Street Journal Dalí would sign blank sheets “every two seconds for an hour without stopping.”

Reasons to not become famous — Nearly all of my friends who have audiences of 1 millions or more followers have personal stories for every category I’ll describe. If you’ve ever wondered why many celebrities disappear for a period of time, sometimes years, it’s often in the hopes that the below will fade or go away. Sadly, it’s very hard to put the toothpaste back in the toothpaste tube once you have a large Google footprint. […] Stalkers. Death threats. Harassment of family members and loved ones. Extortion attempts. Desperation messages and pleas for help. Kidnapping. Impersonation, identity theft, etc. Attack and clickbait media. Dating woes. “Friends” with ulterior motives. Invasions of privacy. […] To quote Henry David Thoreau, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

De Bretteville’s case, known then as a “heart-balm suit,” wasn’t uncommon in the 1900s, when women could successfully win lawsuits if they could prove that they were swindled out of an engagement. The implication of a failed engagement was sometimes that the woman was no longer a virgin. […] A year after the 1902 trial, de Bretteville met millionaire Adolph Spreckels, a man more than 20 years her senior and the son of sugar tycoon Claus Spreckels. The Spreckels family had amassed an enormous fortune in the beet sugar trade and operated a sugar refinery plant in San Francisco […] She nicknamed Spreckels her “sugar daddy.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a photographer who claimed the late Andy Warhol should have honored her copyright on a photo of the rock star Prince when creating an iconic artistic image of the late singer. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court majority in the 7-2 decision, which legal experts said could carry far-reaching implications for copyright protection and so-called transformative art. The issue is the legal doctrine called “fair use,” which encourages artistic expression by allowing for the use of protected works without the original creator’s permission.

Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air — Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA — trace amounts of genetic material that all living things leave behind. A powerful and inexpensive tool for ecologists, eDNA is all over — floating in the air, or lingering in water, snow, honey and even your cup of tea. Researchers have used the method to detect invasive species before they take over, to track vulnerable or secretive wildlife populations and even to rediscover species thought to be extinct. The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens. But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it’s pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose? […] Dr. Duffy and his colleagues used a readily available and affordable technology to see how much information they could glean from human DNA gathered from the environment in a variety of circumstances, such as from outdoor waterways and the air inside a building.

Liver cells influence the body’s internal circadian clock, which was previously believed to be solely controlled by the brain

Seasonal Cycles as a Fundamental Source of Variation in Human Psychology — Humans too exhibit seasonal variation in sexual activity—although the nature of the seasonal cycle is more complex. For instance, in the United States, condom sales, the timing of first intercourse, and Google searches for pornography and prostitution all exhibit a biannual cyclewith peaksaround Christmas and during the early summer months. […] There are also seasonal cycles in birth rates. In an analysisof 78 years of United States monthly natality data, Martinez-Bakker et al. (2014)found that birth rates peaked in the summertime in northern states and peaked in the autumn in southern states. […] within the Northern Hemisphere,the summer season from June to August has been associated with higher rates of violent crime (Lauritsen & White, 2014), higher rates of rule infractions in prisons (Haertzen et al., 1993), and higher rates of domestic violence.

people primarily seek to improve the traits that they believe would particularly help them achieve their goals and increase their happiness. Moral improvements are not seen as particularly effective at doing either, and are therefore deprioritized.

Powerful magnetic pulses applied to the scalp to stimulate the brain can bring fast relief to many severely depressed patients for whom standard treatments have failed. Yet it’s been a mystery exactly how transcranial magnetic stimulation, as the treatment is known, changes the brain to dissipate depression. Now, research led by Stanford Medicine scientists has found that the treatment works by reversing the direction of abnormal brain signals.

iPhones will be able to speak in your voice with 15 minutes of training

A scientific journal suggests that the New York City’s 1.68 trillion pounds of buildings are causing the city to descending, with some neighborhoods faster than others

Studying Women’s Prison Newspapers

This appears to be a record made by Mr. Nathan exclusively for staff at King Records. He is blunt about how the label will handle new potential artists, and occasionally uses profanity. Clearly not meant for the ears of potential recording artists or the public. Fascinating inside baseball about the recording industry during the early to mid-sixties. [via Sasha Frere-Jones]

The man who started seeing the world backwards after being shot in the head

Doctored photographs create false memories of spectacular childhood events

Gang of four held in Chennai for selling fake glasses that showed people naked — Police were investigating the gang’s claims to have sold three pairs in Bengaluru by getting models to pose nude in a darkened room, where the customers would be allowed to wear the spectacles.

AI can predict pancreatic cancer three years ahead of human doctors

Scientists Regenerate Hair Cells that Enable Hearing — Hearing loss affects about 48 million Americans and 430 million people worldwide, with those numbers expected to grow as populations age. More than 90 percent of individuals affected have sensorineural hearing loss, caused by damage to the inner ear and the destruction of the hair cells responsible for relaying sounds to the brain.

The lawsuit alleges that the company’s products – particularly Instagram – connects vulnerable victims with human traffickers and sex buyers, and provides traffickers with the means to groom those victims. It says that human trafficking victims are regularly posted on Instagram and sold for sex against their will and claims that the company has failed to take adequate steps to stop this.

I’ve been trying to create a new habit of asking myself “what is my intention?” before I speak. Sometimes I communicate to empathize, or to think out loud, but a lot of the time my intention is to connect and to be understood. This article on Alan Alda’s 3 rules for expressing your thoughts is useful for all types of communication. They are: 1. Make no more than three points 2. Explain difficult ideas in three different ways and 3. Make important points three times

People in comas showed ‘conscious-like’ brain activity as they died, study says — The scientists retrospectively analysed the brain activity data in the moments after life support was withdrawn until the patients’ deaths. Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness. The activity was detected in the so-called hot zone, an area in the back of the brain linked to conscious brain activity. This area has been correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations in epilepsy, and altered states of consciousness in other brain studies.

A Brain Scanner Combined with an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse into Your Thoughts

AI Chatbots Have Been Used to Create Dozens of News Content Farms — A new report documents 49 new websites populated by AI tools like ChatGPT and posing as news outlets

People are trying to claim real videos are deepfakes. The courts are not amused

These results more firmly establish first person singular pronoun use as a linguistic marker of depression

a Bloomberg report details the recent drastic increase in auto repossessions. Bloomberg cites data from Fitch Ratings saying that 5.3% of subprime auto borrowers are 60 days late or more on their payments. Compare that to May 2021, when that number reached a seven-year low of 2.58%.

Since the pandemic, the studios have become one of the trendiest destinations among South Korean Gen Z. The spaces — with no staff visibly present — typically house three to six photo booths and are open 24 hours a day.

“AND NOW?” is the prompt that follows every action on ECHO, a 34-year-old text-based social network that still hosts a community of former and current New Yorkers. When you log in: AND NOW? After checking who’s online: AND NOW? Upon joining one of ECHO’s chat rooms, called conferences: AND NOW?

The math is pretty simple. We could meet the world’s energy needs by harnessing just 0.01 per cent of the billions of megawatts of solar power that are hitting the Earth’s surface at any given moment. But scaling up quickly to capture that energy is a bit more complicated—even if the necessary technology is already at our disposal. Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park [in India], a clean-power plant the size of Manhattan, could be a model for the world—or a cautionary tale.

Logan Paul, an American YouTube personality, purchased a rare ‘Bumblebee’ 0N1 Force NFT for $623,000 back in 2021. Today, it’s worth $10.

For years, Ville Pulkki, a professor of acoustics at Aalto University, has been wondering why it feels so difficult to shout upwind. […] It isn’t harder to shout into the wind; it’s just harder to hear yourself.

A gene in the brain driving anxiety symptoms has been identified. Modification of the gene is shown to reduce anxiety levels, offering an exciting novel drug target for anxiety disorders.

Earlier this year, German stock photographer Robert Kneschke used Have I Been Trained?, a website that tells you if your photos were used to train AI image generators. He discovered many of his images in the dataset of LAION [the nonprofit that created the data set that trained Stable Diffusion]. Knescke asked ​​LAION to remove his work from the training data. But he got a response he didn’t expect: a letter from a law firm on behalf of LAION [in which] LAION’s attorney claims that the non-profit is “doing voluntary research with the aim of further developing self-learning algorithms in the sense of artificial intelligence and making them available to the general public,” and that they “do not violate copyright or data protection law. […] We also point out that our client can assert claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG if they are unjustified in terms of copyright.” LAION lawyers are now reportedly demanding almost €900 (~$1000 USD) from Kneschke while LAION continues to use his pictures.

On Artifice and Intelligence — How to spot counterfeit cognition

The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born — Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell.

Frozen finger, prepared using a water-filled ordinary rubber glove, was successfully used in one hundred patients with acute anal fissures

Juliane Koepcke became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest until local fishermen rescued her.

Fragments of wood believed to be from the cross Jesus was crucified on more than 2,000 years ago will be included in the cross that will lead the coronation service for King Charles III next month at Westminster Abbey. The two splinters, believed to be from the “true cross,” were gifted to the monarch by Pope Francis

New study indicates that cyberflashers tend to send unsolicited sexual images in an attempt to flirt or receive similar image in return. Women may engage in cyberflashing more often than men.

We evaluated sex differences in the perception of bitter compounds and an aromatic bitter herbal liqueur (Mirtamaro) obtained by the infusion of myrtle leaves/berries together with a mixture of Mediterranean herbs/plants as flavoring/bittering ingredients. […] Women showed higher ratings in Mirtamaro aroma (odor intensity) and bitterness (taste intensity) perception than men, with a superior capacity to perceive/describe its sensory attributes.

Learning science experts wanted to know why some students learn faster than others. They hoped to identify fast learners, study them and develop techniques that could help students understand new concepts quickly. What they found: In the right conditions, people learn at a remarkably similar rate.

Artificial intelligence, like machine learning before it, is making big money off what I call the “sell ∀ ∃ as ∃ ∀ scam.” Build a system that solves problems, but with an important user-facing control. For AI systems like GPT-X this is “prompt engineering.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Received $226M Compensation While Firing Thousands

Major retail players are walking back their metaverse strategies

Notes from a Sun Tzu Skeptic — Xunzi suggests that adherence to the military counsel of Sun Tzu is so detrimental to one’s own self-interest, that it would be equivalent to “using one’s finger to stir a boiling pot.” […] the military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart met with China’s military attaché to Britain […] Hart asked, “What about Sun Tzu?” The attaché replied “that while Sun Tzu’s book was a venerated classic, it was considered out of date by most of the younger officers, and thus hardly worth study in the era of mechanized weapons.”

K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned £1 million (equivalent to £2.1 million in 2021) in the back of a disused boathouse. The money represented the bulk of the K Foundation’s funds that had been previously earned by Drummond and Cauty as the electronic band KLF.

India Passes China as World’s Most Populous Nation, UN Says — India’s population surpassed 1.4286 billion, slightly higher than China’s 1.4257 billion people, according to mid-2023 estimates by the UN’s World Population dashboard. China’s numbers do not include Hong Kong and Macau, Special Administrative Regions of China, and Taiwan, the data showed.

Capuchin monkeys were first trained to exchange stickers, habituated to being head-touched, and exposed to a horizontal mirror. Then, their mirror self-recognition was tested by surreptitiously placing a sticker on their forehead before requesting them to exchange stickers. None of the monkeys removed the sticker from their forehead in the presence of the mirror. In line with previous studies, this result suggests that capuchin monkeys lack the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors.

Companies like Uber and Amazon use AI to pay people different wages for the same work, a new study finds

How do artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning relate?

28 Artificial Intelligence Terms You Need to Know

Training GPT-3 requires water to stave off the heat produced during the computational process. Every 20 to 50 questions, ChatGPT servers need to “drink” the equivalent of a 16.9 oz water bottle.

An L.A. Startup Aims To Turn The Oceans Into A CO2 Sponge And ‘Green’ Hydrogen Machine “ocean water contains 150 times more carbon dioxide than the air, which means if you want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere one of the most effective ways to do it is by removing it from the oceans,” […] His hope, and that of backers including the Grantham Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Singapore’s Temasek Foundation and U.S. Energy Department, which have contributed $30 million so far, is that Equatic will be removing millions of tons of CO2 in the years to come—and do so for less than $100 per ton. Sant also expects the company to generate hydrogen for $1 per kilogram that it can sell or use to help power Equatic’s operations.

Ageing seems to affect cellular processes in the same way across five very different kinds of life — humans, fruit flies, rats, mice and worms — according to a study published in Nature on 12 April. The findings could help to explain what drives ageing and offer suggestions for how to reverse it.

sex that occurs in “the spur of the moment” isn’t necessarily more satisfying than sex that has been scheduled in advance, study

A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut

A tabi is a “toed” fabric shoe/sock that has been worn in Japan (and parts of Asia) for thousands of years.

Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

Reading Urine in Medieval Medicine — a world in which uroscopy — the examination of urine for the purpose of diagnosis and prognosis — was one of a doctor’s most valued skills. The link was so strong that the urine flask became the identifying symbol of the late medieval physician, who was often shown examining a sample.

Only thrity-two full-length Greek tragedies have survived into the modern age. Written by just three men, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, these works represent a tiny fraction of those that would have been performed at the grand theater festivals of ancient Athens, beginning in the fifth century BCE. Of the more than 300 known tragedies from that era, the vast majority exist only as fragments. What does it take to stage Cresphontes, a lost Euripides tragedy, when all that remains of it are a few fragments of papyrus?

A drone has been converted into a flying flamethrower in central China in a fiery campaign to eradicate more than 100 wasp nests [video]

Denis Hopper was able to sustain his lifestyle and a measure of celebrity by acting in numerous low budget and European films throughout the 1970s as the archetypal “tormented maniac.” […] Hopper’s cocaine intake had reached three grams a day by this time, complemented by 30 beers, and some marijuana and Cuba libres. […] After staging a “suicide attempt” (really more of a daredevil act) in a coffin using 17 sticks of dynamite during an “art happening” at the Rice University Media Center (filmed by professor and documentary filmmaker Brian Huberman), and later disappearing into the Mexican desert during a particularly extravagant bender, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation program in 1983.

Time it takes a hacker to brute force your password in 2023

Firefighters rescues man trapped inside art installation

They’re Selling Nudes of Imaginary Women on Reddit — and It’s Working

The scrotum: A comparison of men’s and women’s aesthetic assessments

The plaintiffs and several women on a Qatar Airways flight headed to Sydney — including citizens from Australia, New Zealand and Britain — were pulled off the aircraft and subjected to invasive gynecological exams in October 2020 after an abandoned newborn was discovered in an airport bathroom. Abandoned newborns are a problem in the country, which imprisons women who become pregnant out of wedlock.

This is a pre-computed replay of a simulation that accompanies the paper entitled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.”

Teaching ChatGPT to Speak my Son’s Invented Language

Continuous Mode allows GPT-4 to run independently without user authorization, meaning it could potentially run forever and make decisions on its own. Based on the Auto-GPT code, a user created a project called ChaosGPT and asked how it would destroy humanity. ChaosGPT started by Googling ‘most destructive weapons’ to recruit a GPT-3.5-powered AI agent to do more research on deadly weapons. When GPT-3.5 says it’s only focused on world peace- ChaosGPT devises a plan to get GPT-3.5 to ignore its programming. Ultimately, the only real-world impact so far is a few tweets to a Twitter account. However, this demonstration left many in the community horrified. The user recorded the entire interaction

AI Can’t Take Over Everyone’s Jobs Soon (If Ever) — Models are still expensive to run, hard to use, and frequently wrong

…a phenomenon called “space weather.” Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon. At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. […] On Feb. 3 [2022], Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A Modest Proposal for the Non-existence of Exoplanets

Why Is Sea Level Rise Worse In Some Places? — It’s not only the ocean that is rising, but it’s also the land that is sinking.

Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors — The book is written as if by an actual experienced assassin, as a how-to manual on contract killing, however, in 1998 the Washington Post reported that the author was really a divorced mother-of-two who simply fabricated much of the material based on mystery novels and movies. […] On March 3, 1993, a triple murder was committed in Montgomery County, Maryland, by a man who used the book as his guide.

Faced with the high cost of egg-freezing in their home countries, some women are going abroad for a better deal, and a vacation. […] in the United States, the entire process — including the medications, the doctor visits and the average number of years of egg storage — costs about $18,000, and most women can’t count on health insurance to cover it. […] In the Czech Republic and Spain, for example, you can get one round of egg-freezing done for under $5,400. […] According to the market research firm Grand View Search, the global fertility tourism market, including people traveling to the United States, is expected to grow at the rate of 30 percent over the next seven years, becoming a $6.2 billion industry by 2030.

A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that vaccins for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030. […] Moderna will be able to offer such treatments for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years. The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumour types. […] First, doctors take a biopsy of a patient’s tumour and send it to a lab, where its genetic material is sequenced to identify mutations that aren’t present in healthy cells. A machine learning algorithm then identifies which of these mutations are responsible for driving the cancer’s growth. Over time, it also learns which parts of the abnormal proteins these mutations encode are most likely to trigger an immune response. Then, mRNAs for the most promising antigens are manufactured and packaged into a personalised vaccine.

Driving on less than 5 hours of sleep is just as dangerous as drunk-driving, study finds

What is a mental disorder? […] participants made judgments about vignettes describing people with 37 DSM-5 disorders and 24 non-DSM phenomena including neurological conditions, character flaws, bad habits, and culture-specific syndromes. […] Findings indicated that concepts of mental disorder were primarily based on judgments that a condition is associated with emotional distress and impairment, and that it is rare and aberrant. Disorder judgments were only weakly associated with the DSM-5: many DSM-5 conditions were not judged to be disorders and many non-DSM conditions were so judged. [Chart: “Mental Disorder” Rating]

How Randomness Improves Algorithms — Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems

The Gambler Who Beat Roulette — For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game.

How to recognize and tame your cognitive distortions

The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough. — On March 20, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network released its annual World Happiness Report, which rates well-being in countries around the world. For the sixth year in a row, Finland was ranked at the very top.

A Scammer Who Tricks Instagram Into Banning Influencers Has Never Been Identified. We May Have Found Him.

As a genre, research-based art, Bishop argues — “its techniques of display, its accumulation and spatialization of information, its model of research, its construction of a viewing subject, and its relationship to knowledge and truth” — reflect how internet technology has altered our relationship to information. Whatever else such works are about, they are also about how to cope with being confronted with too much information, modeling different dispositions one can assume toward the relentless production of data and connectivity.

Dream streaming platform: Offer a subscription-based service that allows users to watch and share their dreams with others like movies or TV shows […] Taste bud modification service: Alter clients’ taste buds to allow them to enjoy any food or drink, regardless of their personal preferences […] Time dilation retreats: Create vacation experiences where clients canenjoy extended stays in time-dilated environments, allowing them to relax for weeks while only hours […] Quantum uncertainty lottery: Develop a lottery system that leverages quantum mechanics to create a multitude of potential outcomes, with winners determined by the collapse of the probability wave function [ChatGPT / Barsee]

Some Guy Bought the Flatiron Building and Didn’t Pay for It

Meta wants EU users to apply for permission to opt out of data collection. Instead of a yes/no consent, Meta users will fill out a form and include justification.

Meta brings in a DJ to play dance music in one of its cafes as the company urges workers to return to the office

Authenticity refers to behaving in a manner that aligns with one’s true self. The true self, though, is positive. From a self-enhancement standpoint, people exaggerate their strengths and overlook their shortcomings,forming positively-distorted views of themselves.

Figuring out a lie has never been easier: forget body language or how convincing the message is, just listen to how detailed and rich the story is.

Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood. In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries. We found that poor mating performance was in high occurrence, with about one in four participants scoring low in this dimension, and more than 57% facing difficulties in starting and/or keeping a relationship. Men and women did not differ in their mating performance scores, but there was a small yet significant effect of age, with older participants indicating higher mating performance. nearly 13% of the participants indicated that they were involuntarily single, which accounted for about one-third of the singles in the sample. […] more than 15% of the participants indicated that they were voluntarily single

A core focus of the entire field of synthetic biology is to be able to design new genetic circuits in order to be able to program cells to accomplish new goals. […] A stunning example of this is the design of a cell-scale biosynthetic pathway in baker’s yeast to produce scopolamine—a medicinally valuable chemical that acts as a neurotransmitter inhibitor.

Harvard geneticists create an organism that is immune to all viruses

Association Between Daily Alcohol Intake and Risk of All-Cause Mortality […] meta-analysis of 107 cohort studies involving more than 4.8 million participants found no significant reductions in risk of all-cause mortality for drinkers who drank less than 25 g of ethanol per day (about 2 Canadian standard drinks) compared with lifetime nondrinkers […] significantly increased risk of all-cause mortality among female drinkers who drank 25 or more grams per day and among male drinkers who drank 45 or more grams per day.

Dumb phones are on the rise in the U.S. as Gen Z looks to limit screen time — Companies like HMD Global, the maker of Nokia phones, continue to sell millions of mobile devices similar to those used in the early 2000s.

There’s no doubt that we are polluting the planet. In order to find out how these pollutants might be affecting our own bodies, we need to work out how we are exposed to them. Which chemicals are we inhaling, eating, and digesting? And how much? Enter the field of exposomics. The term “exposome” was first coined a couple of decades ago. The idea is that it should capture all the things we are exposed to that might affect our health, whether we encounter them in our diets or in our environment. We already know that our genomes help determine our risk of various diseases, but that’s only part of the story. The exposome should help fill the gaps. As you might expect, this is a huge field that covers everything from the effect of a pregnant person’s diet on a fetus to the impact of structural racism on people’s health. But let’s focus on one of the trickier areas of study—understanding our exposure to pollutants. […] Once a chemical gets into your body, it doesn’t stay in its original form for very long. It might get broken down by enzymes in your liver or acids in your stomach, for example. Scientists have learned which breakdown products to look for to estimate a person’s exposure to lots of chemicals, but not all of them.

New York City Is Building a Wall of Oysters to Fend Off Floods

A new Panthera study published today in Landscape Ecology has found that pumas might utilize a sly hunting strategy known as ‘garden to hunt,’ by which puma kills fertilize or deposit nutrients in soil that increase plant quality and attract ungulates to feed in select habitat conducive to future stalk-and-ambush puma hunting.

ChatGPT is a parrot repeating what it saw on the internet with additional Bullshit-generation capabilities. There is no way a model trained simply on the objective of learning how the language __looks like__ is able to do much more than repeat information (in a way aligned to user query) that it already saw during training as it has little to none understanding of the contents. […] The fact that OpenAI allegedly tried to hire people to play with and explain in extensive detail how to solve various problems only proves that simply making a model bigger does not mean it becomes smarter. […] I just refused a job at #OpenAI. The job would consist in working 40 hours a week solving python puzzles, explaining my reasoning through extensive commentary, in such a way that the machine can, by imitation, learn how to reason. ChatGPT is way less independent than people think.

How to make Asteroids game with GPT-4

Can water solve a maze?

an ad that Andy Warhol placed in the Feb. 24, 1966, “Village Voice”

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

Study describes new ‘safe’ technique for producing babies of the desired sex […] According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos. This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities. […] Forty-six couples desiring male offspring ended up with 79.6% male embryos (223/280), resulting in the birth of 13 healthy baby boys.

high IQ associated with fewer psychopathology symptoms

For USA Today parent company Gannett, social media success has little to do with the news. Two of its editorial franchises, Humankind and Problem Solved, have seen growth in their social reach across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where the brands have prioritized vertical video formats. There, the media company has used the viewership to generate advertising revenue and build awareness of the USA Today brand. [via EEAN]

Genomic analyses of Beethoven’s hair reveals “an extra-pair paternity event” in his ancestry [Extra-pair paternity is the result of copulation between a female and a male other than her social partner.]

A Norwegian man who had his own genitals, nipple and leg amputated appeared in a U.K. court this week accused of livestreaming the castration of other men on his “eunuch maker” website. He and eight other men were said to be part of a subculture of genital “nullification,” in which men willingly have their genitals removed to become “Nullos.”

The source wildly speculated, “There is someone who is either s–tting in the aisle, or surreptitiously dumping defecation that they smuggled into the theater.” — Fan poops in aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at Broadway show

Don’t be dazzled by generative AI’s creative charm! Predictive AI, though less flashy, remains crucial for solving real-world challenges and unleashing AI’s true potential.

An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models — Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.

New research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50% of the time

Simple Wi-Fi routers can be used to detect and perceive the poses and positions of humans and map their bodies clearly in 3D, a new report has found.

researchers found 11 areas of DNA that were linked to depression in females, and only one area in males.

this research explores the phenomenon of pseudo-events (such as press conferences, political rallies…) coverage in the New York Times (N = 70,370 articles) from 1980 to 2019 […] We found a significant increase in pseudo-event coverage […] Our findings show how media logic has been internalized in different ways by the social subsystems of politics, culture, and economics.

In a matter of weeks, viral teenage pranks at conveyor-belt sushi chain restaurants across Japan have ballooned into a moral panic over hygiene. Social media users and the Japanese press have branded the incidents acts of “sushi terrorism”

Here’s why you can’t see all twelve black dots in this optical illusion

Giant seaweed blob twice the width of the US takes aim at Florida

Remarks by FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg at the Institute of International Bankers, March 6, 2023 [4 days before collapse of Silicon Valley Bank]: The current interest rate environment has had dramatic effects on the profitability and risk profile of banks’ funding and investment strategies. First, as a result of the higher interest rates, longer term maturity assets acquired by banks when interest rates were lower are now worth less than their face values. The result is that most banks have some amount of unrealized losses on securities. The total of these unrealized losses, including securities that are available for sale or held to maturity, was about $620 billion at yearend 2022. Unrealized losses on securities have meaningfully reduced the reported equity capital of the banking industry. The good news about this issue is that banks are generally in a strong financial condition, and have not been forced to realize losses by selling depreciated securities. On the other hand, unrealized losses weaken a bank’s future ability to meet unexpected liquidity needs. That is because the securities will generate less cash when sold than was originally anticipated, and because the sale often causes a reduction of regulatory capital.

Because the systems do not have an understanding of what is true and what is not, they may generate text that is completely false.

Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company

Earlier this week, an app for creating “deepfake face-swap” videos rolled out more than 230 ads on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—127 of which showed Emma Watson’s face transposed onto provocative videos, and another 74 that featured the likeness of fellow actor Scarlett Johansson. None of them were created with the subjects’ consent. Following an investigation by NBC, the ads have been removed from Meta’s platform. But the app is still available to download on Google Play. […] Last month, Twitch streamer Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing came under fire for watching sexually-explicit deepfakes of his female streaming peers.[…] Many of the women featured on that particular deepfake porn site only learned they were the subject of graphic videos after Atrioc issued a tearful public apology for watching them, having been caught red-handed during a livestream. […] According to research conducted by livestreaming analyst Genevieve Oh, February 2023 saw the most uploads of deepfake porn videos in one month thus far […] the number of deepfakes doubling roughly every six months.

Last month Justin David Sullivan, a star of the Broadway musical “& Juliet” made headlines for declining to be considered for a Tony because, as a trans nonbinary performer, they did not feel comfortable being nominated for a gender-specific prize. […] In Shakespeare’s day, women were barred from acting, with men assuming female roles.

The key to the strange power of so much of Hopper’s best work lies in the lack of any clear illustrational function

6 Ways To Make Your Neighbor Move Away Using Nothing But A Common Crow — 1. Make the crow squawk really loudly and tell your neighbor it’s because his house was built on top of the crow’s wife. 2. Train the crow to place a human leg in your neighbor’s mailbox

Mar 7, 2020 good morning to all the kids under quarantine in wuhan who defeated the app assigning them homework by spamming it with 1-star reviews until it got removed from the app store

Let me lovingly fist your earth hole
and apply pressure to the earth’s sphincter
so the ground swallows and sucks
whole
through its vortex
the boring patriarchal pimple

AI re-creates what people see by reading their brain scans

Here’s what Snap’s AI told @aza when he signed up as a 13 year old girl.

Feedback loops will preclude the experience of originality; everything will be a rehash of what has already existed; filter bubbles will confirm our biases; algorithmic feeds will reify our tastes in catering to them; generative models will reproduce blandly average versions of what we’ve already decided to look for.

Wild elephant stops traffic and steal food from passing vehicle in Thailand [another video]

There are specialized neurons in the throat that sense when you’re infected with flu and make you feel bad

the food industry is quietly replacing the sugar in many packaged foods with sucralose, stevia, allulose, erythritol and a wide variety of other artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes. Low- and zero-calorie sweeteners have been used in diet soft drinks for decades. But now food companies are adding them to a growing number of packaged foods […] bread, yogurt, oatmeal, muffins, canned soups, salad dressings, condiments and snack bars. The food industry says sugar substitutes help people manage their weight and reduce intake of added sugars. But studies suggest that fake sugars can also have unexpected effects on your gut and metabolic health and even promote food cravings and insulin resistance, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes.

Sales of vinyl albums overtake CDs for the first time since the late ’80s Streaming still accounts for 84% of music revenue

A product of North Philadelphia, he was raised as one of 38 children. His mother was deported and died of an overdose when he was still a child. His father dealt drugs and trained Carrasquillo at age 12 to cook crack cocaine. […] Bill Omar Carrasquillo — better known to his more than 800,000 online followers as “Omi in a Hellcat” — pleaded guilty last year to running one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the U.S. government.

the philosopher Agnes Callard, who fell in love with her graduate student and married him — after divorcing her former husband, who, like Callard, is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. For the sake of raising her children, they all share the same home, spending “their life happily together—all three of them,” as one colleague puts it. Rachel Aviv interviews the unconventional family, and talks with Callard about what it means to be a good person and a good romantic partner, and what to do when one pursuit seems at odds with the other.

Jini is a 22 year-old student of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Her sexual appetite for dick got her cancelled: having allegedly raped a boy she was kicked out of the Philosophy Student Association. The University of Amsterdam no longer accommodates Jini’s journey. She thus finds her safe haven in KIRAC Academy. […] On the 2d of July 2021, the Cirque was home to her performance; aided by her well endowed partner in sex Oliver, and talented dancer Leyla de Muynck More from KIRAC: This year I started to sample a lot of text I found in physical places, especially in public toilets, and that formulates a starting point for the writing. And: At the beginning of the 1970’s, Guy Rombouts kept a notebook in which he started to write down all the words, adjectives and verbs connected by the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ (’en’ in Dutch) he could find during his readings. About 50 years later, with the help of graphic designer Jeroen Wille, the transcription of his notes are published as a book that can be read in two directions.

At least 42 people globally have used brain-computer implants in clinical trials, including a paralyzed man who used a robotic hand to fist-bump Barack Obama in 2016.

More than half of humans on track to be overweight or obese by 2035

AI seems to solve so much. But not, perhaps, some basic drive-thru problems.

They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam.

Amazon is permanently closing eight cashierless Go stores — two in Seattle, two New York City and four in San Francisco. Despite these closures, the company will “continue to open new Amazon Go stores”

ChatGPT invented its own puzzle game.

Lemon-Derived Extracellular Vesicle-like Nanoparticles Block the Progression of Kidney Stones

We prospectively explored associations between vitamin D supplementation and incident dementia in 12,388 dementia-free persons […] vitamin D exposure was associated with significantly longer dementia-free survival and lower dementia incidence rate than no exposure

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu contains a well-known passage in which the elderly writer Bergotte visits a Dutch art exhibit and, while examining a detail of Vermeer’s View of Delft, falls ill and dies. […] The supposed identity of Proust’s little patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft has been analyzed by a number of literary and painting critics but surprisingly, there is no consensus as just which area the Delft master had in mind. Related: Two Proust’s little patches of yellow in Blow-Up (1966)

“We’ve never met in the past?” he said, squeezing my hand and flashing his goofy grin. “You have a familiarity.…” His hands were as soft as a cherub’s. […] A rendering of the lunar lander being used to deposit Koons’s art on the moon […] New York Times critic Roberta Smith, who once described “a slightly nonsensical Koons-speak that casts him as the truest believer in a cult of his own invention.” […] Calvin Tomkins, of The New Yorker, declare: “It is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.”

In February I had the once in a lifetime experience of meeting and working with Jeff Koons.

In the late 1970s, Pablo Escobar acquired four hippopotamuses, reportedly from Africa or the United States, to go with the elephants, giraffes and antelopes at the private zoo on his estate in western Colombia. When Escobar surrendered to authorities in 1991, the government seized his Hacienda Nápoles estate — and allowed the animals to roam free. In the 30 years since, the original hippos — three females and a male — have multiplied to more than 130. Now the insatiable herbivores are devouring plant life, crowding out native animals, polluting soil and water, and threatening people. (Hippos are among the world’s most dangerous animals, capable of killing a human with a single bite, responsible for an estimated 500 deaths each year.) […] By 2040, if the invasive species is left alone, the population could reach 600. […] Female hippos can birth one calf every two years. The population is reproducing faster than individuals have been sterilized. […] Authorities plan to capture about 70 of the animals and send them to sanctuaries in India and Mexico.

How birds got their wings

Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity. […] Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year. [IRS.gov]

Orbiting over the Gulf of Maine, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station looked southward to capture this oblique photograph of New York City

In January 2016, Buechley set out seven calf carcasses in Utah’s Grassy Mountains, west of Salt Lake City. Each carcass was staked down and equipped with a camera trap to document what scavengers visited which carcasses. Buechley, who studies vultures and other avian scavengers, hoped to learn more about the ecology of scavengers in the Great Basin during the winter. Buechley went out to check on the carcasses after a week, and found that one was missing. […] The tape […] shows a badger on a five-day-long digging spree, painstakingly excavating the ground under the cow and ultimately completely burying the animal about four times its weight..

Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.

In his new book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, Lightman turns his attention toward perhaps the greatest mystery of all: our first-person experience of reality, or “consciousness,” and the “transcendent” feelings we experience.

we examine the association between baseline happiness and cognitive function (speed of processing, visuospatial memory, reasoning) […] Happiness was associated with worse reasoning.

Why all of Hollywood UI looks the same

Stupid Patent of the Month

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art. — The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

a study published in 2022 that found that people who consumed more than half a tablespoon of olive oil per day had a roughly 19 percent lower chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who rarely or never consumed olive oil. And a 2022 review of 13 studies showed strong associations between higher olive oil consumption and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease.

What’s the best seat to book for a long flight? If you’re worried about turbulence, Major advises that you try to sit near the front of the aircraft. “You could be standing at the front and feel nothing, and down the back they’re bouncing all over the place – the aircraft moves differently down the back,” he explains.

How Earth Will Look In 250 million Years

Teacher Charged After Elaborate Crypto Mining Operation Discovered in School Crawl Space

[T]he latest in technologies that use magnetic or electrical pulses to change the way our brains work. Some of these tools work by passing a device over a person’s head. Others involve cutting into people’s skulls to stick needle-like electrodes deep into the brain. And there are plenty of approaches that lie somewhere in between these extremes. […] In the meantime, some are generating huge amounts of data about individuals’ brains. And there’s a chance this data could be used against them in a court of law. We already know that brain stimulation can help some people with Parkinson’s disease and depression that doesn’t respond to medication. But the scientists here at this conference are pushing the boundaries. They’re exploring brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol and substance-use disorders, stroke recovery, and even long covid. Others are working on ways to enhance the way healthy brains work, whether by improving our memory or helping us become more alert or better at math.

There’s no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users. But they’re not alone: Many apps you use do the same, including Facebook and Instagram, along with seemingly innocuous apps that have no need for the data. Your data is bought and sold by data brokers you’ve never heard of who have few scruples about where the data ends up. They have digital dossiers on most people in the United States. If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone.

The Camera-Shy Hoodie —Unrelated (2010): 4th Amendment Wear

the tools, known as “generative AI,” are also unpredictable, prone to gibberish and susceptible to rambling in a way that can be biased, belligerent or bizarre. They can also be hacked with a few well-placed words, making their sudden ubiquity that much riskier for public use. […] “I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years, and it’s always been the same: You write code, and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. With prompting, you get none of that. The people who built the language models can’t even tell you what it’s going to do.” […] Some AI experts argue that these engineers only wield the illusion of control. No one knows how exactly these systems will respond, and the same prompt can yield dozens of conflicting answers — an indication that the models’ replies are based not on comprehension but on crudely imitating speech to resolve tasks they don’t understand. […] “It’s not a science,” he said. “It’s ‘let’s poke the bear in different ways and see how it roars back.’” […] The AI, Goodside said, tends to “confabulate,” making up small details to fill in a story. It overestimates its abilities and confidently gets things wrong. And it “hallucinates” — an industry term for spewing nonsense. […] a job opening for a “prompt engineer and librarian” in San Francisco with a salary ranging up to $335,000. (Must “have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles,” the listing states.) Boston Children’s Hospital this month started hiring for an “AI prompt engineer” to help write scripts for analyzing health-care data from research studies and clinical practice. The law firm Mishcon de Reya is hiring for a “legal prompt engineer” in London to design prompts that could inform its legal work.

ChatGPT as muse, not oracle

Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important’

we collected tens of thousands of comparison responses from both human experts and ChatGPT, with questions ranging from open-domain, financial, medical, legal, and psychological areas […] ChatGPT’s answers are generally considered to be more helpful than humans’ in more than half of questions, especially for finance and psychology areas […] However, ChatGPT performs poorly in terms of helpfulness for the medical domain in both English and Chinese. [PDF]

In the largest study to date, we compared the accuracy of 3,347 citing claims to original findings across 89 articles in eight of top psychology journals. Results indicated that, although most (81.2%) citations were accurate, roughly 19% of citing claims either failed to include important nuances of results (9.3%) or completely mischaracterized findings from prior research altogether (9.5%).

REM sleep begins, and your heart rate, breathing and brain activity all increase. Brain regions involved in processing emotions and sensory input (from your dream world) light up. Meanwhile, your brain paralyzes the muscles in your arms and legs, preventing you from acting out your dreams […] If you’ve ever gone to bed upset about something and woken up noticeably less bothered, it’s likely a result of the emotional processing and memory reconsolidation that happen during REM. There’s evidence that your brain divorces memories from their emotional charge […] REM is “like a form of overnight therapy” […] REM also makes us better learners. During this sleep stage, your brain strengthens neural connections formed by the previous day’s experiences and integrates them into existing networks […] Some experts suspect that dreams are a mere byproduct of REM sleep — the mental manifestation of neurological work. But others think they might help people process painful experiences, Dr. Walker said.

Wearing an eye mask while sleeping improves memory encoding and makes you more alert the next day

Sexual Behaviors among Individuals Aged 20-49 in Japan […] 8000 men and women aged 20–49 years […] 15.3% of women and 19.8% of men reported never having had any partners with whom they engaged in vaginal, anal, or oral sex. […] […] 4.0% of women and 48.3% of men reported ever having used commercial sex worker services in their lifetime.

three-in-ten U.S. adults are single, meaning they are not married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship

Why can only big cats roar?

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.

No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work — Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work.

In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France?

Adult film actor fractures penis making scene for OnlyFans

Man with world’s longest tongue uses it to paint

Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase

Women with satisfying relationships tend to have fewer chronic illnesses

She recently got down to 90 pounds from a high of around 120 on semaglutide, the active ingredient in the blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic. She said she’s off the injections for now while she undergoes fertility treatment to freeze her eggs. But she can’t wait to get back on the drug, which, she says, still has the lingering effect of suppressing her appetite. Ozempic, taken once a week as a shot in the arm, stomach, or thigh, was first approved by the FDA in 2017 to lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. But the drug came with an incredible side effect: rapid weight loss. […] Khloé Kardashian, who once called herself the “fat sister,” now has abs. Rebel Wilson and Mindy Kaling, who for years have admitted to struggles with their weight, are suddenly the smallest they’ve ever been. While all credited their new shape to exercise and foods like grilled salmon, unfounded rumors on social media alleged that the real cause was Ozempic. […] “I’ve got 60-year-old women saying it saved their marriage—like literally they’re having sex with their husband again for the first time in years,” McKerrow told me.

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul. They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. […] In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.  The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. […] Selecting the right drug is just half the problem that Exscientia wants to solve. The company is set on overhauling the entire drug development pipeline. In addition to pairing patients up with existing drugs, Exscientia is using machine learning to design new ones. This could in turn yield even more options to sift through when looking for a match. — AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work.

Discovery that extrachromosomal DNA act as cancer-causing genes seen as breakthrough that could lead to new therapies “The discovery of how these bits of DNA behave inside our bodies is a gamechanger. We believe they are responsible for a large number of the more advanced, most serious cancers affecting people today. If we can block their activities, we can block the spread of these cancers.”

Amazon.com Inc. to acquire 1Life Healthcare Inc., the operator of the One Medical line of primary-care clinics […] $3.9 billion deal

How do bats live with so many viruses? New bat stem cells hint at an answer

contrary to popular belief, snakes can hear and react to airborne sound. “We played one sound which produced ground vibrations, while the other two were airborne only,” Dr Zdenek said. “It meant we were able to test both types of ‘hearing’ – tactile hearing through the snakes’ belly scales and airborne through their internal ear.” The reactions strongly depended on the genus of the snakes. “Only the woma python tended to move toward sound, while taipans, brown snakes and especially death adders were all more likely to move away from it,” Dr Zdenek said.

For Perfectly Cooked Rice Every Time, Try Your Microwave rinsing the rice thoroughly, adding double the amount of water, and microwaving, uncovered, for 15 to 25 minutes, depending on the wattage of the machine. It may take a few attempts to figure out the exact timing for your microwave — in my 700-watt machine, it takes 22 and a half minutes

Electric vehicles can now power your home for three days

A Device to Turn Traffic Lights Green

Low tide leaves Venice canals almost dry

20 optical illusions

Spy Balloon Simulator

Eggspensive