Parents forget newborn baby in taxi on way home from hospital

Washington is first state to allow composting of human bodies

Florida politicians may expunge an old law that gives Disney World the right to build its own nuclear plant

Driverless electric truck starts deliveries on Swedish public road

Alphabet’s Wing drone deliveries are coming to Finland next month

Electric ‘flying taxi’ prototype unveiled by German start-up

At the moment, only one in 250 cars on the road is electric. Researchers have no idea when electric cars are going to take over

China says it’s created a facial recognition app for pandas

Baltimore ransomware nightmare could last weeks more, with big consequences. Houses can’t be sold, bills can’t be paid while city networks are shuttered.

boring speakers really talk for longer

acne is strongly positively associated with overall grade point average in high school, grades in high school English, history, math, and science, and the completion of a college degree. We also find evidence that acne is associated with higher personal labor market earnings for women.

We find a positive relationship between intelligence scores and fertility

Fetal facial expression in response to intravaginal music emission

our results suggest bilingualism may not enhance cognitive ability at 9.5 months

How a Harrowing Photo of One Woman’s Death Became an Iconic Pro-Choice Symbol

Uncontrolled bleeding during surgery can cause death. What if, instead of slow surgical stitching, you could rapidly glue a wound together? A new “bio-glue” — an experimental adhesive gel that is activated by a flash of light — has been proven to stop high pressure bleeding in the hearts of pigs.

Acid-free paper can last 500 years; stone inscriptions even longer. But magnetic media like hard drives have a much shorter life, lasting only three to five years.

No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript

Ranking celebrity chef cookbooks by how many animals their recipes kill

A woman took a picture of three Irish men in Times Square. It took Twitter only an hour to track them down.

Pentagram’s new design for parking signs throughout New York City

Down with the sickness

Electric vehicles emit more CO2 than diesel ones, German study shows

French man arrives in Caribbean after crossing Atlantic in giant barrel

A “cyber event” interrupted grid operations in parts of the western United States last month, according to a cryptic report posted by the Department of Energy. If remote hackers interfered with grid networks in California, Utah and Wyoming, as the DOE filing suggests, the event would be unprecedented.

Teenager sues Apple over ‘facial recognition error’ that led to his arrest

Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools.

Why do many people come to believe that they and others have a true self?

On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit [PDF]

San Francisco approves ban on cashless stores, follows similar moves in Philadelphia, New Jersey

New (australian) $50 note contains typo in word, discovered months after 46 million notes distributed

Reducing Crime Through Environmental Design: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment of Street Lighting in New York City

Metal fraud cost NASA two satellites worth $700 million

Several years ago, there were rumors that metals might have an awkward cousin

Three Mile Island will shut down by September 30th

Burger King’s new Whopper is 0% beef

choice overload only appears in the absence of brand names, but disappears when all options contain brand names—either familiar or unfamiliar

out of 8.9 million dogs in the UK, 2.1 million were left alone in their owner’s home for quite considerable lengths of time. This is not always progressive towards a dog’s social welfare, which without being able to socialize may be inclined towards more negative and problem behaviors. Perhaps if they (i.e. dogs) could contact each other via the internet, their situation might improve?

All perching birds – the majority of the world’s bird population – originated in Australia, researchers report

research team developed a new concept of fire extinguisher optimized for space-use

The Big Kitchen at the World Trade Center, 1981

3M jacket makes automated sinks go bonkers [Thanks Tim]

Vagina Musuem

I just boarded an international @JetBlue flight. Instead of scanning my boarding pass or handing over my passport, I looked into a camera before being allowed down the jet bridge. Did facial recognition replace boarding passes, unbeknownst to me? Did I consent to this? You’re able to opt out of this procedure, MacKenzie. Sorry if this made you feel uncomfortable.

Hair detection in images is useful for many applications, such as face and gender recognition, video surveillance, and hair modelling

The French government has developed its own end-to-end encrypted instant messenger (IM) app to replace government employee use of Telegram, WhatsApp, and other third-party IM clients.

TikTok, the video-sharing app by the Chinese-owned Bytedance (the world’s most valuable startup), has a younger audience than Facebook, an algorithm that learns you, and different ideas about free speech

West Virginia Will Use Blockchain Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election

An Argument that Cybersecurity Is Basically Okay

Dozens of medical professionals in seven states were charged Wednesday with participating in the illegal prescribing of more than 32 million pain pills, including doctors who prosecutors said traded sex for prescriptions and a dentist who unnecessarily pulled teeth from patients to justify giving them opioids. [Washington Post]

dentistry’s struggle to embrace scientific inquiry has left dentists with considerable latitude to advise unnecessary procedures—whether intentionally or not

women with unexplained recurrent miscarriage had less oral sex

subjects, who despite their inability to use smell in daily life, consider themselves healthy

How superstitions spread

Cultural evolution of emotional expression in 50 years of song lyrics

Botanically, hemp and marijuana are from the same species of plant, Cannabis sativa,1 but from different varieties or cultivars. Defining Hemp: A Fact Sheet (CRS report Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress)

“Her overall scheme has been to claim to be a wealthy German heiress with approximately $60 million in funds being held abroad”

Shakespeare home in London, where he wrote ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ found by historian

no one can be creative or productive all the time. (Even Beethoven had a 10-year gap between his eighth and ninth symphonies.)

If You Score Above 30 on This Test, You Might Be a Psychopath

Exciting New App Allows Users To Be Pawns In 26-Year-Old CEO’s Little Game [Thanks Tim]

Shoes made for someone with three feet by a master shoemaker in Berlin

“”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”-w”"”"”"”"”"”"”"”"

According to a recent scientific study, the way to avoid mosquito bites is to listen to electronic music - specifically dubstep, specifically by US artist Skrillex [study]

Physicists Reverse Time for Tiny Particles Inside a Quantum Computer

A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again

Growing Corn Is A Major Contributor To Air Pollution, Study Finds

a cotton tote or a paper bag may be worse for the environment than a plastic one + organic cotton is worse than conventional cotton when it comes to overall environmental impact

More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died. The Day the Dinosaurs Died

A doomsday fungus known as Bd has condemned more species to extinction than any other pathogen.

One wrong mutation and your beautiful daisy transforms into an eldrich horror

Here’s how many avocados it would take to kill you (also watermelon, coffee, dark chocolate…)

Man was mistakenly circumcised in mix-up at Leicester (England) hospital

Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to ‘shoot the messenger,’ deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable [PDF]

Peak velocity of elbow joint during hair combing activity for normal subject

A slowdown in image processing speeds up our perception of time passing as we age

For those who get the least amount of physical activity, replacing a half hour of sitting time with physical activity was associated with up to a nearly 50 percent reduction in mortality

Using stolen processing power to mine cryptocurrencies is a profitable criminal enterprise. But nobody realized the scale of the activity until now

The operatives utilized an arsenal of cyber tools, including a cutting-edge espionage platform known as Karma, in which Raven operatives say they hacked into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, political leaders and suspected terrorists.

New beer hitting the market can be used to develop Super 8 movie film. Kodak helped by testing it.

If intense warfare broke out tomorrow, India could supply its troops with only 10 days of ammunition, according to government estimates. And 68 percent of the army’s equipment is so old, it is officially considered “vintage.” [NY Times]

Since the 1950s, hundreds of dogs have jumped off this gothic stone bridge in a town near Glasgow. Many have ended up dead in the valley below. Researchers say there is a rational explanation, but in a land of superstition and mystery, others are not so sure. [NY Times]

not a phone in sight, everyone is just living in the moment, wish we could go back

denim “diaper”

Plane forced to turn back after mother forgets her newborn at airport

a $380K ‘flying motorcycle’

Q, the world’s first genderless voice

The Boombox Incident (The process for removing bald people from photos)

Quantum computing for the very curious

Seat Choice in a Crowded Café: Effects of Eye Contact, Distance, and Anchoring

The relation between shyness and creativity … shyness was negatively associated with creative imagination, but positively associated with aesthetic sensitivity.

Extremely precise visual long-term memories for frequently encountered objects

Nail Scissor as a Rare Foreign Body in the Urethra

Despite anecdotal evidence seen on television and in movies, there is zero actual research to support penetrating traumatic brain injury (TBI) as an intervention to kill zombies

MIT Historian alleges that scientists and officials representing the United Nations, the Red Cross, and the World Health Organization covered up evidence that hundreds of thousands of people died from radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The scientific consensus was that the Chernobyl accident will, at most, result in the deaths of just 200 people over an 80-year life span. Previously: Thirty years after the Chernobyl disaster, it has become clear that radioactivity might be less harmful than originally thought.

$100,000-a-night Damien-Hirst-designed Las Vegas hotel room is the most expensive in America

Easy trick to stay positive

the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and French Ground Army maintain small pigeon forces in the event that electronic warfare should disrupt or disable military communications.

This hypnotist charges half a bitcoin for helping you remember your lost cryptocurrency password

The Shutdown Problem: How Does a Blockchain System End?

Robots Built House That Generates More Energy Than it Needs

What Happened When I Bought a House With Solar Panels Third-party ownership and decades-long contracts can create real headaches.

From 1979 to 2017, productivity grew 70.3 percent, while hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers grew just 11.1 percent. Where did the “excess” productivity go? Rich People Have Been Taking Your Money For 40 Years And They Still Are

a short story about what happened to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II

Oil will remain the world’s single largest source of energy for the foreseeable future, and the balance between global supply and demand remains perilously narrow.

why deepfakes haven’t taken off as a propaganda technique… they’re too easy to track

Home Control With a Posture-Sensing Couch (Users can then, e.g., switch their TV to a fireplace scene when assuming a relaxed posture) [PDF]

The hipster effect: Why anti-conformists always end up looking the same

Around three-quarters of patrons of nightclubs and live music venues would prefer lower sound levels

Consuming From a Shared Plate Promotes Cooperation

Orgasms with a partner were associated with the perception of favorable sleep outcomes, however, orgasms achieved through masturbation (self-stimulation) were associated with the perception of better sleep quality and latency.

how dress codes sexualize students by analyzing the rules and their framing in 481 public high schools across the US

The habitable zone around other stars has been defined as the region where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, but it takes more than water to support complex life. Life probably can’t exist on quite as many planets as we once thought

It may be categorically unpleasant to visit cemeteries, crash sites, and death camps, but tourists queue up to see such places. The history of dark tourism

When Kodak Accidentally Discovered A-Bomb Testing

Adults living in the state where they were born

Jareth Nebula never felt completely human

Lawyer invents fake DUI trial to propose to attorney girlfriend

We found that happiness increases with individual income until a threshold of 27,913 Euro per year (rounded to 35,000 USD) in European countries.

We demonstrated, for the first time, that self-disgust plays an important role in the association between loneliness and depressive symptoms

this longitudinal study explores the neural basis for paternal protective behavior in fathers prenatally and early postnatally

Amazon Will Pay $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits This tax-free break comes even though Amazon almost doubled its U.S. profits from $5.6 billion to $11.2 billion between 2017 and 2018.

Facebook lets you search for photos of your female friends, but not male mates

Why Tech Companies Hire So Many Economists

Should You Listen To Music While Doing Intellectual Work? It Depends On The Music, The Task, And Your Personality

What happens to the natural world if all the insects disappear?

Emoji license plates will soon be available in Australia

Polyamorous couple who identify as VAMPIRES demonstrate how they drink their ‘donor’ girlfriend’s blood

Happiness research: Long-term effects of life events are overestimated [PDF]

Women who take oral contraceptives have a harder time recognizing emotions like pride or contempt in other people’s faces in comparison to women who aren’t on birth control, new study shows

Scene categorization in the presence of a distractor (we presented composite images with a scene in the center and another scene in the periphery. The two channels conveyed different information, and the participants were asked to focus on one channel while ignoring the other.)

Silent Neurons: The Dark Matter of the Brain?

What 100 Years of Typing Research Can Tell Us

Starting this week, Amazon is testing autonomous package delivery with little robot vehicles in a northern Seattle suburb.

The alarm has been raised on so-called ‘driverless dilemmas’, in which autonomous vehicles will need to make ethical decisions on the road. We argue that these ideas are too contrived to be of practical use, represent an incorrect model of proper safe decision making, and should not be used to inform policy.

Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use

If technology is everywhere, the tech sector no longer exists. If the tech sector no longer exists, its premium is no longer justified.

Fortnite Is the Future, but Probably Not for the Reasons You Think

As HuffPost and BuzzFeed shed staff, has the digital content bubble burst?

In the case of Picasso’s paintings, our econometric analysis shows that some colors are associated with high prices

The moral of this story is that going to the pub raises many interesting philosophical issues

Misophonia is when an everyday sound causes a strong emotional reaction, usually anger, anxiety or disgust [Thanks GG]

How 10,000 maggots eat a pizza in 2 hours

Increased Coldheartedness related to more pleasure and less guilt after bug grinding.

Detecting a Decline in Serial Homicide

Janice Guy at Higher Pictures, until March 9, 2019

#RecursionFTW

The Neon Fruit Illusion (Observers will typically ascribe this colour change not to the lighting but to the objects themselves)

100 Years is an upcoming science fiction film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez, due to be released on November 18, 2115

China germinates first seed on moon and Russian startup wants to put billboards in space

A robot dog has learned to run faster with machine learning

Giving algorithms a sense of uncertainty could make them more ethical

Consumption of sushi is a good predictor of insect acceptance.

researchers discover the brain cells that make pain unpleasant

Wipe your nose with the sullied tissue, and you’ll “get sick on your own terms.” A Mysterious Company Claims to Sell Sneeze-Filled Tissues for $80

Creative Ideas of Physicists and Writers Routinely Occur During Mind Wandering

We use a unique data set to show that financial market experts — institutional investors with portfolios averaging $573 million — exhibit costly, systematic biases. A striking finding emerges: while investors display clear skill in buying, their selling decisions underperform substantially.

Striped bodypainting protects against horseflies

What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper? (instead of reaching for a roll of toilet paper, an ancient Roman would often grab a tersorium — or, in my technical terms, a “toilet brush for your butt.”

Easter Island statues: mystery behind their location revealed

Mars — if it still had a magnetic field, atmosphere and water

toki- Process & WALK_short ver [Thanks Tim]

4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence

Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity

Swiss hotel chain offers a ‘social media sitter’ to handle your Instagram while you relax

How and when taking pictures undermines the enjoyment of experiences [Related: How the Intention to Share Can Undermine Enjoyment | PDF and How Taking Photos Increases Enjoyment of Experiences | PDF]

Delivery robot spontaneously bursts into flames

Do you believe that people’s eyes emit an invisible beam of force? According to a rather fun paper in PNAS, you probably do.

Person evaluation is strongly influenced by untrustworthy gossip

picking the ‘wrong’ name can make a huge difference to your sales figures (drug-naming study)

Forgetting in order to Remember Better (we find that the interference of informations limits the capacity of human memory, which is the “magic number seven”.)

Physics explains why time passes faster as you age

A musician had an operation in South Africa to remove most of a brain tumor—and played the guitar while it was happening.

There is now a mental health clinic inside a Walmart Supercenter

Executing Someone Who Does Not Remember the Crime [Argument Session, US Supreme Court | audio]

Can a Corpse Give Birth? Why a dead woman was kept on life support against her wishes. [NY Times]

American suicides are now at their highest point in 50 years. It’s the second-leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 35.

A teenage girl is more at risk of developing mental health problems if her father has experienced post-natal depression, according to research

Google Has a Plan to Eliminate Mosquitoes Worldwide

Self-exciting Risk Modeling for Predicting Next Locations of Serial Crimes

A 30-Year Plan to Transform the Courts [audio] More: The Federalist Society has reached an unprecedented peak of power and influence. Having allies on the highest court of the land is just the top layer of the Federalist Society’s expanding sway. The next most important segment of the judiciary — the federal appeals courts — is also filling up with Federalist Society members: Twenty-five of the 30 appeals court judges Trump has appointed are or were members of the society. [Washington Post]

The choice of information structures must be subject to some limits, otherwise, of course, each agent would simply observe the entire state of the world. The Cost of Information

“Financial markets have significantly evolved over the past decade, driven by new technologies, and the market itself is becoming more difficult to anticipate as traditional participants are imperceptibly replaced by computerised models.” Hedge Funds Have Lost Their Rhythm

The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain

The bar graph was first invented in 1786 and little has changed in its format. Here, a replacement for the bar graph, called a hat graph, is proposed.

Clarence King—who was a renowned explorer, the first director of the United States Geological Survey, and one of the most famous Americans of the nineteenth century—conducted a secret double life in which he passed for black. [The Best Facts I Learned from Books in 2018 ]

The artist targeted five prominent New York museums that have rejected his work—the Metropolitan, Guggenheim, Museum of Modern art, New Museum, and Whitney—arguing that they are part of a cabal to eliminate competition in the art market.

Factory robot impales worker with 10 foot-long steel spikes after malfunction

Parrot uses owner’s Amazon Alexa to order shopping, play music

When faking your own death to get out of catering a wedding is not fraud

Child sex dolls seized by Canadian border agents

Boys experience their first ejaculation (thorarche) during adolescence + Thelarche is the onset of secondary (postnatal) breast development, usually occurring at the beginning of puberty in girls + Menarche

Breastfeeding Greater Than 6 Months Is Associated with Smaller Maternal Waist Circumference Up to One Decade After Delivery

Can Humans Really Discriminate 1 Trillion Odors? (The paper’s extravagant claims are based on errors of mathematical logic.)

Physical activity in the evening does not cause sleep problems

Sleep selectively stabilizes contextual aspects of negative memories

The human brain needs to suppress obvious ideas in order to reach the most creative ones. A new study shows that brainwaves play a crucial role in inhibiting habitual thinking modes to pave the way to access more remote ideas.

Research shows that when a nonprofit receives a donation, its views on rules and legislation magically line up with the donor’s. 

The project consisted of Warhol vacuuming the gallery rug and then displaying the vacuum and its signed dust bag in the gallery that he’d cleaned

The Business of Selling Your Location More: Facebook Filed A Patent To Calculate Your Future Location

These Portraits Were Made by AI: None of These People Exist

Advertisers place a single brown pixel on a bright background in a mobile ad. It looks like dust, so users try to wipe it off. That registers as a click, and the user is taken to the homepage. [52 things I learned in 2018]

Should I buy bitcoin (Nevada, New Hampshire, Rhode Island). Should I delete facebook (Washington). Should I cut my hair (Arizona, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio). The Most-Googled “Should I” Question State by State

There Are Now More Shows Streaming Than There Are on Broadcast or Cable

Marriott, like the other big hotel companies, owns very few of its own hotels these days. Marriott is actually a family of 30 hotel brands, many of them virtually indistinguishable. What’s the business logic?

NASA Research Reveals Saturn is Losing Its Rings at “Worst-Case-Scenario” Rate

New results suggest there is no methane on Mars, living organisms thus less likely

Planets with oxygen don’t necessarily have life

The Enfer (French for “Hell”) is a special department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. It is a special collection of books and manuscripts of an erotic or pornographic character which, because of their rarity and value, may be seen only with authorization.

Polybius is an almost-certainly fictional arcade game. The original game allegedly was part of a government-run psychology experiment. [Thanks Darren!]

1-900-Hot-Jedi

Presenting Oscar, The Modular Body

Poo found on every McDonald’s touchscreen tested

London bans junk food advertising on public transportation

Major dark web drug dealers have started to voluntarily ban the synthetic opioid fentanyl

When cryptocurrency issuers want positive coverage for their virtual coins, they buy it

It claims to be, in short, a next-generation lie detector. Polygraph tests are a $2 billion industry in the US and, despite their inaccuracy, are widely used to screen candidates for government jobs. Released in 2014 by Converus, a Mark Cuban–funded startup, EyeDetect is pitched by its makers as a faster, cheaper, and more accurate alternative to the notoriously unreliable polygraph.

The aim of the current study was to evaluate sleep quality, daytime dozing, anxiety proneness, chronotype and preferred start time in a sample of university students

Most women would be stunned to discover that the law does not consider a piece of their body to be their property, and they legally have almost no voice regarding the use of their own placentas [Placentophagy: A Women ’s Right to Her Placenta | PDF]

Harvard scientists found a potential key ingredient to the start of life on Earth [more]

Chemical industry giant 3M is waging an aggressive campaign to stave off new regulations and potentially billions of dollars in damages stemming from a contamination crisis that has fouled tens of millions of Americans’ drinking water. Inside a corporate giant’s fight to thwart a massive pollution tab

The placement of a period and no spaces between “G-20” and “in” resulted in an inadvertent hyperlink

Scientific communication in a post-truth society

After nine years, Uber isn’t within hailing distance of making money and continues to bleed more red ink than any start-up in history. By contrast, Facebook and Amazon were solidly cash-flow positive by their fifth year. Uber has never presented a case as to why it will ever be profitable, let alone earn an adequate return on capital.

There are about 4,256 human-made satellites orbiting the Earth, of which about 1,149 are still working. If Earth’s orbit is so crowded, why don’t we see space junk in photos of the Earth?

How Restaurants Got So Loud

The first ever human vs. computer no-limit Texas hold ‘em competition took place from April 24-May 8, 2015 at River’s Casino in Pittsburgh, PA. In this article I present my thoughts on the competition design, agent architecture, and lessons learned. [PDF]

How did Choc, a quirky calligraphic typeface drawn by a French graphic designer in the 1950s, end up on storefronts everywhere? [NY Times]

The dolly zoom, illustrated

Behind the scene: Charlie Chaplin roller-skating in a department store in Modern Time (1936)

Robert Mueller Devotional Candle

When trying to trademark Vagina Guitars,  the federal trademark office called this honorable man and said,  “This is not possible. You can not trademark the word guitar.

Vagina Weightlifting Can Empower Women