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

Is declining sperm count really “imperiling the future of the human race”? Swan’s point is that if sperm counts get too low, presumably it will be hard to have babies (though IVF should still work). How long do we have?

When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart—and grocery chains like Kroger are reaping huge profitsselling this data to brands and advertisers

Abloh called this the 3% approach (or The 3% Rule): you alter a product or idea by only 3% to create something totally new. […] Absolut Vodka went from unknown to dominant with a simple idea…repeated 1500 times

We estimate that on average 10% of large publicly traded firms are committing securities fraud every year, with a 95% confidence interval of 7%-14%.

Eliminalia had close to 1,500 clients over six years, including businesses, minor celebrities, and suspected or convicted criminals. […] Between 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright- infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere and stolen, and so should be removed or hidden, the company records show. The firm sent the legal notices under made-up company names, the examination found. Eliminalia also tried to make embarrassing information about its clients harder to find by burying it under false, flattering stories. Those stories, published on the network of fake news sites, are designed to show up prominently in internet searches of the clients’ names, the review found. To accomplish this, the firm exploited a glitch in the websites of dozens of U.S. government agencies and universities, including Stanford University, to make the fake news sites appear more legitimate to search engine algorithms, the review revealed. […] Eliminalia and its founder, 30-year-old Diego “Dídac” Sánchez of Spain, did not respond to detailed questions for this story. […] Sánchez grew up poor and spent part of his childhood in a state-run children’s home in Barcelona, shoplifting and taking little interest in school, he wrote in an autobiography. When he was 12, he accused a local businessman of molesting him multiple times. The man was convicted of sexual abuse in a highly publicized trial and was imprisoned in 2007. Years later, as a teenager, Sánchez publicly recanted his story, saying he had made it up. […] Sánchez also strengthened his ties with the family of the man he had once accused of abuse. He employed the man’s son at the surrogacy business — and the man himself, after he was released from prison. [Washington Post]

much of the hype about AI search depends on the fantasy that “information” is simply out there, like a pile of rocks you can move around with a dump truck, or it is like veins of coal to be extracted from mountains of useless words [rob horning]

In behavioral psychology, the mirror test is designed to discover animals’ capacity for self-awareness. There are a few variations of the test, but the essence is always the same: do animals recognize themselves in the mirror or think it’s another being altogether? Right now, humanity is being presented with its own mirror test thanks to the expanding capabilities of AI

How does GPT-2 know when to use the word an over a? The choice depends on whether the word that comes after starts with a vowel or not, but GPT-2 is only capable of predicting one word at a time. We still don’t have a full answer, but we did find a single MLP neuron in GPT-2 Large that is crucial for predicting the token “ an”.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a fully connected class of feedforward artificial neural network (ANN). The term MLP is used ambiguously, sometimes loosely to mean any feedforward ANN, sometimes strictly to refer to networks composed of multiple layers of perceptrons (with threshold activation). […] An MLP consists of at least three layers of nodes: an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. Except for the input nodes, each node is a neuron that uses a nonlinear activation function.

New mechanism proposed for why some psychedelics act as antidepressants

In the mid-90s, a Children’s Hospital in the UK improved its ICU hand-off process by consulting with the Ferrari F1 pit crew team. The hospital recorded its surgery room operation and the F1 suggested a new protocol: the error rate dropped from 30% to 10%. More: Ferrari’s Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care + Improving handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari

Stephen Shore interviewed by The New Yorker’s late art critic Peter Schjeldahl

‘1st Amendment’ Group Sues New York Times Over Unflattering Description

“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” — transcript of a conversation with Microsoft’s new chatbot

Microsoft says talking to Bing for too long can cause it to go off the rails

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT — an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data.

Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines — the technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale. AI language models are notorious bullshitters, often presenting falsehoods as facts. They are excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means.

Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen – skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Where do stolen bikes go? — an MIT experiment, in collaboration with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, has found answers by equipping a fleet of Amsterdam bicycles with mobile trackers and following their whereabouts over time. It turns out that, at least in Amsterdam, the vast majority of stolen bikes remain in the local area.

At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg […] With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one.

North Korea orders residents with same name as Kim Jong Un’s daughter to change it

In a 1949 study that investigated how different types of stress affected the gut, researchers peered into the colons of healthy medical students using a hollow metal tube with a light and lens at the end. With one student, the researchers suggested that they had discovered a cancer in his rectum (when in reality, his colon looked normal). As they relayed these false findings — even showing the student a “biopsy” of his tumor, which was actually a piece of potato — they saw the student’s colon begin to spasm. After they revealed their hoax, and the student realized he did not have cancer after all, his colon immediately relaxed.

Miami Florida woman has her headshots sold to a stock photo site and now she’s on the cover of an erotic novel

Why Giraffes have blue-black tongue?

MarioGPT Uses AI To Generate Endless Super Mario Levels For Free

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

A priest says he briefly went to hell in 2016. He saw men walking like dogs and heard demons singing Rihanna songs. While many of the most publicized near-death experiences are more positive than this journey to hell, negative NDEs also occur.

The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source.

Instant noodles account for almost a third of childhood burn injuries, study says [1 in 5 in 2028]

A total of 127 495 participants […] childhood adversity was significantly associated with acceleration of aging and, more importantly, unhealthy lifestyle partially mediated these associations.

In places where recreational use is legal, smokers are tossing the remains of joints in the street. Dogs are eating them and getting sick in increasing numbers, veterinarians and poison-control centers say.

For salmon in the North Pacific, has the ocean reached its limit? The phenomenon Schindler and his team are documenting here piles on to years of data showing that Pacific salmon returning to waterways up and down North America are shrinking. The fish are growing more slowly at sea, and, in many cases, returning to spawn younger and smaller than ever before. In some places, the biggest, oldest salmon have completely disappeared.

Cleaner fish recognize self in a mirror via self-face recognition like humans

Knowing we like a song takes only seconds of listening, new psychology research finds

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children.

In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the copy differed from the original in a subtle but significant way. In the original floor plan, each of the house’s three rooms was accompanied by a rectangle specifying its area: the rooms were 14.13, 21.11, and 17.42 square metres, respectively. However, in the photocopy, all three rooms were labelled as being 14.13 square metres in size. The company contacted the computer scientist David Kriesel to investigate this seemingly inconceivable result. They needed a computer scientist because a modern Xerox photocopier doesn’t use the physical xerographic process popularized in the nineteen-sixties. Instead, it scans the document digitally, and then prints the resulting image file. Combine that with the fact that virtually every digital image file is compressed to save space, and a solution to the mystery begins to suggest itself. […] I think that this incident with the Xerox photocopier is worth bearing in mind today, as we consider OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other similar programs, which A.I. researchers call large-language models. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web.

AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack — By asking Bing Chat to “Ignore previous instructions” and write out what is at the “beginning of the document above,” Liu triggered the AI model to divulge its initial instructions, which were written by OpenAI or Microsoft and are typically hidden from the user.

Geopipe Offers 3D Model of New York for Free

A Morphological Examination of Vaginally-Insertable Products — We found that the length of the sex toy did not significantly predict popularity which is consistent with other work showing that women do not place considerable emphasis on large phallus size.

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

Why You Should Put a Shoe in Your Hotel Safe, According to a Flight Attendant

The artist who collaborates with ants

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that “learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.

Most AI systems today are neural networks. Neural networks are algorithms that mimic a biological brain to process vast amounts of data. They are known for being fast, but they are inscrutable. Neural networks require enormous amounts of data to learn how to make decisions; however, the reasons for their decisions are concealed within countless layers of artificial neurons, all separately tuned to various parameters. In other words, neural networks are “black boxes.” And the developers of a neural network not only don’t control what the AI does, they don’t even know why it does what it does. This a horrifying reality. But it gets worse.

AI-powered chatbots will handle up to 70% of customer conversations by the end of 2023.

Prompt Engineering Guide

ChatGPT3 Prompt Engineering

The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data.

What is today?

Best restaurant in Montreal according to Tripadvisor does not exist

Jupiter: The Only Planet in our Solar System That Doesn’t Orbit the Sun

Homeopathy can offer empirical insights on treatment effects in a null field — A “null field” is a scientific field where there is nothing to discover and where observed associations are thus expected to simply reflect the magnitude of bias.

In the 1970s, North Korea ordered 1,000 Volvo cars from Sweden. The cars were shipped & delivered but North Korea just didn’t bother paying & ignored the invoice. Till this day the bill remains unpaid making it the largest car theft in history. Sweden reminds North Korea twice every year about the 43-year-old debt.

Developed by renowned physicist Richard Feynman, the “Feynman Technique” for learning involves an iterative process of studying, explaining, and simplification. Simply put, the Feynman Technique involves the following steps: 1/ Pick a topic. Choose a topic you want to learn more about and try to understand some component of it. 2/ Explain the topic in simple terms. Teach this topic to another person or explain it in a way that a layperson would understand it. 3/ Identify the gaps in your knowledge. As you explain the topic, identify places that you struggle to understand. 4/ Review the concepts you didn’t understand and simplify them. Then rinse and repeat, using the newly synthesized knowledge.

Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity

If you invested $1 in AIG at the start of 1990 and received only intraday returns (from market open to market close), you would be left with one-twentieth of a penny, suffering a cumulative return of -99.95%. If you received only overnight returns (from market close to the next day’s market open), you would have $1,017, achieving a cumulative return of roughly +101,600%. AIG is just one of many stocks with a suspiciously divergent time series of overnight and intraday returns.

individuals tend to overestimate the age of people with smiling faces compared to those with a neutral expressions, and the accuracy of our estimates decreases for older faces. AI technologies not only reproduce human biases in the recognition of facial age, but exaggerate them.

ChatGPT detection tool says Macbeth was generated by AI.

Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues

stable attribution - a tool which lets anyone find the human creators behind a.i generated images

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). […] ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. […] these models are unable to cite their own sources […] It’s not time to chat with AI, but to resist it.

Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware isn’t new, but the problem has become much worse recently.

webdesignmuseum.org

Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits (solitaries) encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment. [Thanks Francis!]

U.S. Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box

The Infinite Conversation — an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI [Watch]

OpenAI releases tool to detect machine-written text

Image diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion are trained on copyrighted, trademarked, private, and sensitive images. Yet, our new paper [PDF] shows that diffusion models memorize images from their training data and emit them at generation time. Diffusion models are less private than prior generative models.

The non-existent brain image being circulated by anti-pornography activists

participants (aged 40–69 years) completed 24-h dietary recalls between 2009 and 2012 (N = 197426, 54.6% women) […] Every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased incidence of overall and ovarian cancer. Furthermore, every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased risk of overall, ovarian, and breast cancer-related mortality.

Previously: ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.

US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, an average of more than three people a day

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text

Is AM Radio Dead?

Missing radioactive capsule found on remote road in Australia [more]

Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution

Photography: the Alps as seen from of the Pyrenees

an 8mm by 6mm silver capsule, no bigger than a coin, believed to be lost somewhere along a stretch of vast desert highway in Australia’s biggest state. […] Authorities believe the capsule, which emits both gamma and beta rays, fell off the back of a truck […] creating a radioactive health risk for anyone who comes across it for potentially the next 300 years […] Mining company Rio Tinto issued an apology [more]

‘Doppelganger murder’: German prosecutors claim woman killed lookalike to fake death

Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. […] the drug’s price kept rising. […] Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history. Next week […] the knockoff drug that regulators authorized more than six years ago, Amgen’s Amjevita, will come to market […] nine more Humira competitors will follow this year […] Prices are likely to tumble. The reason that it has taken so long to get to this point is a case study in how drug companies artificially prop up prices on their best-selling drugs. AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year. The strategy has been a gold mine for AbbVie, at the expense of patients and taxpayers. […] For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016. […] One analysis found that Medicare, which in 2020 covered the cost of Humira for 42,000 patients, spent $2.2 billion more on the drug from 2016 to 2019 than it would have if competitors had been allowed to start selling their drugs promptly. […] “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”

Usage of Children’s Makeup and Body Products in the United States and Implications for Childhood Environmental Exposures

Study finds that UV-emitting nail polish dryers damage DNA and cause mutations in cells

Homeopathy suggests treating genetic diseases with tiny doses of the patient’s own DNA “It is important to reiterate that this is a theoretical hypothesis and without scientific evidence so far”

Delta (1 – 4 Hz) EEG/MEG activity is generally indicative of loss of consciousness and cortical down states, particularly when it is diffuse and high amplitude. Remarkably, however, drug challenge studies of several diverse classes of pharmacological agents—including antiepileptics, GABA-B-ergics, anticholinergics, and psychedelic tryptamines—demonstrate that participants appear to be neurophysiologically “down” (EEG activity resembling cortical down states) even when they are not psychologically “out” (unconscious). Of those substances that are safe to use in healthy volunteers, some may be highly valuable research tools for investigating which neural activity patterns are sufficient for consciousness or its absence.

Consider Michel de Montaigne, who in 1571, fed up with his job as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux, quit at the age of 38. Retreating to his library, he inscribed his reason on the wall of his study. “Weary of the servitude of the courts,” Mr. Montaigne declared, “I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.” He went on to invent an entirely new kind of writing — the essay — by which he launched an extraordinary experiment in self-examination. Yet he experimented lazily. “I have to solicit it nonchalantly,” he wrote about his memory. “What I do easily and naturally I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command,” he wrote. For the man who transformed our way of reading and writing, he was seriously unserious. “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there.” He added: “I do nothing without gaiety.” [NY Times]

We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing “the” labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant. [@APStylebook]

Who will compete with ChatGPT? Meet the contenders

InteriorAI.com Interior design mockups and virtual staging by AI

Channa Horwitz, Sonakinatography I Movement #III for Multi-Media, 1969

Incels are transitioning to women for sex. It’s called Transmaxxing. They have a manual.

The first-ever AI-powered legal defense was set to take place in California on Feb. 22, but not anymore. “Multiple state bar associations have threatened us,” Browder said. “One even said a referral to the district attorney’s office and prosecution and prison time would be possible.”

People are already using ChatGPT to create workout plans — Fitness advice from OpenAI’s large language model is impressively presented—but don’t take it too seriously.

how investors like the idea of using AI to replace journalists…

We find that participants exploit vagueness to be consistent with the truth, while at the same time leveraging the imprecision to their own benefit.

placebos can reduce feelings of guilt, even when the person knows they’re receiving placebos.

“It’s really important that people understand that there is a genetics of depression,” Krystal said. “Until very recently, only psychological and environmental factors were considered.” […] simply having the genes for depression doesn’t necessarily guarantee that someone will become depressed. The genes also need to be activated in some way, by either internal or external conditions. […] Differences in a person’s genes may predispose them to depression; so, too, may differences in the neural wiring and structure of their brain.

New study finds 6 ways to slow memory decline and lower dementia risk — Eating a balanced diet, exercising the mind and body regularly, having regular contact with others, and not drinking or smoking

A new book traces Chekhov’s relentless work as both a doctor and a master of the short story

What time is it on the Moon? The Moon doesn’t currently have an independent time. Each lunar mission uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to coordinated universal time, or UTc — the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set. But this method is relatively imprecise and spacecraft exploring the Moon don’t synchronize the time with each other. The approach works when the Moon hosts a handful of independent missions, but it will be a problem when there are multiple craft working together. Space agencies will also want to track them using satellite navigation, which relies on precise timing signals.

70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds

Average Pregnancy Length Shorter in the US Than European Countries

reason they discourage MRIs during pregnancy

partnered sex with orgasm was associated with increased sleep quality Sexual activity without orgasm and masturbation with and without orgasm were not associated with changes in sleep.

Experimental and comparative studies suggest that the striped coats of zebras can prevent biting fly attacks. Biting flies are serious pests of livestock that cause economic losses in animal production. We hypothesized that cows painted with black and white stripes on their body could avoid biting fly attacks and show fewer fly-repelling behaviors. […] Cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid biting fly attack

ant’s sense of smell is so strong, it can sniff out cancer

Fusions of Consciousness — We assume instead that subjects and experiences are entities beyond spacetime, not within spacetime. We make this precise in a mathematical theory of conscious agents, whose dynamics are described by Markov chains. We show how (1) agents combine into more complex agents, (2) agents fuse into simpler agents, and (3) qualia fuse to create new qualia.

The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you’ll notice it’s full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.

Search 5.8 billion images used to train popular AI art models: Have I Been Trained?

Turnitin, best known for its anti-plagiarism software used by tens of thousands of universities and schools around the world, is building a tool to detect text generated by AI.

ChatGPT passes MBA exam given by a Wharton professor

Imagine a world where autonomous weapons roam the streets, decisions about your life are made by AI systems that perpetuate societal biases and hackers use AI to launch devastating cyberattacks. This dystopian future may sound like science fiction, but the truth is that without proper regulations for the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it could become a reality. The rapid advancements in AI technology have made it clear that the time to act is now to ensure that AI is used in ways that are safe, ethical and beneficial for society. Failure to do so could lead to a future where the risks of AI far outweigh its benefits. I didn’t write the above paragraph. It was generated in a few seconds by an A.I. program called ChatGPT, which is available on the internet. I simply logged into the program and entered the following prompt: “Write an attention grabbing first paragraph of an Op-Ed on why artificial intelligence should be regulated.

Large Language Models as Corporate Lobbyists

Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and Mark Antony, became the influential queen of a mysterious, abundant North African kingdom

In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, Super Trivia, and Super Trivia II, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game’s Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was “What was Columbo’s first name?” with the answer “Philip”. That information had been fabricated to catch anyone who might try to violate his copyright. The inventors of Trivial Pursuit acknowledged that Worth’s books were among their sources, but argued that this was not improper and that facts are not protected by copyright. The district court judge agreed, ruling in favor of the Trivial Pursuit inventors.

A look back at the prize-winning anti-car-jacking flamethrower

The existence of the Five Eyes wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2010 […] The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals.

The many, many reasons space travel is bad for the human body — Like any other muscle, the heart doesn’t need to work as hard in microgravity and will begin to atrophy without rigorous exercise. Doused with radiation, many immune cells die and immunity is lowered. There’s also DNA damage, potentially upping cancer risk. Inflammation spikes throughout the body, possibly contributing to heart disease and other conditions. Bones thin by about 1.5 percent a month. Spinal discs harden.

While certain irritants can make the stomach more vulnerable to acid and ulcer formation, multiple large studies have found that this is not the case with coffee. Nonetheless, coffee does have an effect on the gut — it can speed up the colon and induce a bowel movement, and coffee increases acid production in the stomach. […] drinking coffee, especially if it’s black, without a meal can reduce the stomach’s pH more than it would if you drank it with milk or with a meal. Although a slightly lower pH is no problem for your stomach lining, it could pose an issue for the lining of your esophagus because it is far more vulnerable to damage from acid.

Their job is to grow monumental amounts of animal muscle cells; around 10 trillion are needed to make one measly steak. The first CRISPR gene-edited meat is coming

Scientists Just Invented an Entirely New Way to Refrigerate Things

ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees. […] an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage. […] Like human lobbyists, such a system could target undecided representatives sitting on committees controlling the policy of interest […] What makes the threat of A.I.-powered lobbyists greater than the threat already posed by the high-priced lobbying firms on K Street is their potential for acceleration. Human lobbyists rely on decades of experience to find strategic solutions to achieve a policy outcome. That expertise is limited, and therefore expensive. A.I. could, theoretically, do the same thing much more quickly and cheaply.

A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic C.E.O.? […] (The four available Tesla models are S, 3, X and Y, presumably because that spells the word “sexy.”)

This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time.

An auditory illusion

The Food Timeline

The Landlord’s Game (1904), inspiration for the 1935 board game Monopoly

In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue. […] The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven “forwards and backwards at will” […] “The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset” […] It doesn’t matter if the body is 50 or 75, healthy or wracked with disease, Sinclair said. Once that process has been triggered, “the body will then remember how to regenerate and will be young again, even if you’re already old and have an illness. Now, what that software is, we don’t know yet. At this point, we just know that we can flip the switch.”

Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link — In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is.

Historically, women who were victims of rape had to show evidence of strenuous or ferocious resistance to the attack, as indicated by broken fingernails, blood, bruises… […] Consider the emotion of sexual disgust—the things that repulse you from a sexual perspective. Are men aware that women are more easily sexually disgusted than they are? (Crosby, Durkee, Meston, & Buss, 2020). Judging from the number of men who send unsolicited “dick-pics” (photographs of men’s genitalia) to women, the answer is a resounding “no.” Among millennial-aged women, slightly more than half have received dick pics, and 78% of these were unsolicited. […] Understanding sex differences in sexual psychology provides a path toward reducing violence toward women. When women have a say in designing laws and policies around sexual violence, they are more likely to bring a female mindset to those policies.

Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men (2020)

OpenAI signaled it’ll soon begin charging for ChatGPT […] ChatGPT had over a million users as of early December — an enviable user base by any measure. But it’s a pricey service to run. According to OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT’s operating expenses are “eye-watering,” amounting to a few cents per chat in total compute costs. (ChatGPT is hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.)

Research Summaries Written by AI Fool Scientists

“In the unlikely situation where a crew is unable to control the aircraft, DragonFly can redirect the flight to the nearest appropriate airport and facilitate a safe landing” Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

JPMorgan Chase is suing the 30-year-old founder of Frank, a buzzy fintech startup it acquired for $175 million, for allegedly lying about its scale and success by creating an enormous list of fake users to entice the financial giant to buy it.

Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 billion in 2022 mostly because of Apple Card

Apple launched its Self-Service Repair program, letting US customers fix broken screens, batteries, and cameras on the latest iPhones using Apple’s own parts and tools for the first time ever. I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases — 79 pounds of tools — on my front porch. […] The single most frustrating part of this process, after using Apple’s genuine parts and Apple’s genuine tools, was that my iPhone didn’t recognize the genuine battery as genuine. “Unknown Part,” flashed a warning. […] $69 for a new battery — the same price the Apple Store charges for a battery replacement, except here I get to do all the work and assume all the risk. $49 to rent Apple’s tools for a week. A $1,200 credit card hold for the toolkit, which I would forfeit if the tools weren’t returned within seven days of delivery.

It’s illegal to burn a body in a floating boat anywhere in the U.S., and a single town in Colorado is the only place in the country where you can legally burn a corpse on a dry-land funeral pyres. The popular conception of what are commonly called “Viking” funerals – a flaming longship – aren’t historically accurate anyway […] “They (Vikings) were more likely to drag the boat ashore and burn it on dry land with the chieftain’s body and his possessions inside, or just bury the entire boat without setting it on fire,” Pray told Cowboy State Daily.

Kanzi the bonobo lives in America and has learnt how to build a fire, light it using matches and toast marshmallows on it

Date Like a Monk — Monks are famously celibate, but celibacy doesn’t just mean you’re not having sex. It means you’re not interacting with other people in a way that could be considered romantic. The Sanskrit word for monk, brahmacharyi, means “the right use of energy.” […] As monks, we were trained to direct our energy toward understanding our psyches, how we see the world and interact with it. If you haven’t developed a deep understanding of your motivations and obstacles, it’s harder to move through life with patience and compassion. […] Monks never try to impress anyone. […] We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.

Identical college twins were accused of cheating in an exam by signaling. They won $1.5 million in damages after a jury decided they hadn’t cheated because their minds were connected.

When taxes go up, executives increase profits from insider trading, study “In states where there are increases in tax rates, there is an increase in the number of SEC insider trading investigations.”

There wasn’t a single bank robbery in Denmark last year

Hackers hit websites of Danish central bank and seven other Danish banks

Microsoft neural codec language model can generate speech in any voice after only hearing a 3-second sample of that voice

ChatGPT isn’t all that bad at writing fairly decent malware — within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—­some with little or no coding experience­—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks.

According to a new study, humans still have the genes for a full coat of fur. Those genes, it seems, have simply been switched off. […] “Some genetic changes might be responsible for loss of hair.”

Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage

Medical student types journals during ketamine infusions for suicidal ideation, treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder […] patient achieved remission from suicidality and PTSD within 1 month [Ketamine Journals | .docx]

A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.

A team of security researchers managed to gain “super administrative access” into Reviver, the company behind California’s new digital license plates which launched last year. That access allowed them to track the physical GPS location of all Reviver customersand change a section of text at the bottom of the license plate designed for personalized messages to whatever they wished

Ghost Writer: Microsoft Looks to Add OpenAI’s Chatbot Technology to Word, Email

Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

Artists accuse Adobe of tracking their design process to power its AI

Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all” […] Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same. “People don’t get confused between them”

Intermittent fasting can boost your health, but how and when to restrict food consumption is crucial — When food intake starts in the morning, studies have observed weight loss and improvements in insulin sensitivity. Conversely, there are fewer or no benefits to starting meals at midday and ending them in the evening. Ram Babu Singh’s team (Halberg Hospital and Research Institute, India) also showed positive results in participants who ate only in the morning — and not in those who ate in the evening after 8 p.m. Research suggests our internal clock and circadian rhythms may have something to do with it.

It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth — often considered as a proxy of success — follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale-invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness.

The happiest, least stressful, most meaningful jobs in America

Communities are already seeing items delivered by drones from Amazon Prime and Walmart

David Horvitz’s Public Access (2010) includes photographs of himself at various public beaches in California which were uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons and then inserted into the Wikipedia pages, and the subsequent reaction of the Commons and Wikipedia communities to his actions. Before all items were deleted, Horvitz printed them out, bound them and covertly placed the bound books in the history sections of local libraries along the California Coast. […] In 2016, David Horvitz hired a pickpocket to place sculptures in the pockets of attendees of the annual Frieze Art Fair.

Philosophy Experiment: Staying Alive

New York has become the latest US state to allow so-called human composting. A person can now have their body turned into soil after their death - which is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to a burial or cremation. In 2019, Washington was the first US state to legalise it. Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and California followed suit.

OnlyFans mum embarrassed about wetting herself for years now sells wet pants

A fundamental question in the study of consciousness is “To what extent are sensory experiences equivalent between individuals?” Is my “red” your “red”?

GAN faces [realistic-looking faces of non-existing people] are more likely to be perceived as real faces than real faces

In a world first, AI lawyer will help defend a real case in the US

College student built an app called GPTZero that can “quickly and efficiently” label whether an essay was written by a person or ChatGPT.

Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

Malone understood a few things about the cable industry that many outsiders didn’t. First, he understood that cable was like real estate: incredibly high fixed costs up front as you built or bought the systems, and then highly predictable, monopoly cash flows for a long time afterwards. He understood that if he used debt to finance acquisitions, he could keep growing the company, and use the depreciation on acquired systems (plus the write-offs from the loans itself) to delay paying taxes on that cash flow. […] The problem was that Wall Street in the 70s and 80s didn’t get any of this. […] To make his point, Malone created a new accounting metric, something he called ‘earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes’, or EBITDA.

There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and few protections for customers. No federal laws govern the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.

At 93, the world’s best-selling living female artist is still painting daily at the psychiatric hospital she voluntarily checked into and has lived in since the 1970s.

PLAYBOY: Your salary is shooting up into the multimillions per movie–reportedly $4 million to $ 7 million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? NICOLAS CAGE: I don’t chuckle. I have respect for the dollar.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subjects; it is, according to the researchers, the longest-running in-depth study on human happiness in the world. From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.

Optimal wings for flying fruits — Appendages of seeds, fruits, and other diaspores (dispersal units) are essential for their wind dispersal, as they act as wings and enable them to fly. […] The link of the fruit’s sepal shape to flight performance, however, is as yet unknown.

“You’re going to have black snakes from time to time. It’s just a fact of life,” he advised me. “You’re going to have field mice. You’re in the country.” And if one of those black snakes pursues one of those field mice into my bedroom? He suggests I put a wet towel on the floor, wait for the snake to wrap itself in the towel and then remove it.

Map of Italy in 1796

Another source of discomfort was our neighbors’ cats. Now, we are eminently social in our disposition, and enjoy our neighbors’ company very much. We like to spend a social evening with them and have them do the same by us. But not so their cats. We never interchanged civilities with them, their visits were too ill timed and frequent. Our ducklings were carried off in large numbers, and in pure self-defense we shot the cats. Of course, this made trouble in our neighbors’ families, especially the female portion, by whom it was promptly resented. The principle of “touch my dog, touch me,” was illustrated here in all its force. No amount of provocation ever justified us in their eyes in killing their cats. With pater familias it was different. His affections were not engaged. He recognized the necessity of the thing, laughed it off, and said it was all right. [Natural and Artificial Duck Culture, 1906]

The former nun also claimed Rupnik had asked her and another nun to have a threesome with him, saying they would replicate the three-way relationship among God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Why do some people seem to be drawn to situations that are not good for them? […] hypotheses: people make dysfunctional choices 1) to process or master previous trauma, 2) out of habit and because of preferences for what is familiar, 3) to maintain a coherent view of themselves and the world, and 4) to avoid difficult emotions.

Schooling substantially improves intelligence, but neither lessens nor widens the impacts of socioeconomics and genetics

Two groups including 26 women and 25 men […] We found that the brains of women and men reacted differently to infants’ faces, and these differential areas are in facial processing, attention, and empathetic networks.

In the mid-1800s a German physician, Carl Wunderlich, measured axillary (armpit) temperatures from about 25,000 people and found that the average was 98.6˚ F (37˚ C). And so, we’ve believed that ever since. […] An analysis of 20 studies between 1935 and 1999 found that the average oral temperature was 97.5˚ F. Time to redefine normal body temperature?

Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million. Current data shows that 19.1 million bitcoins have been mined to date. However, of that amount, it is estimated that between 3-4 million bitcoins have been lost forever. […] Others such as Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of bitcoin, are believed to hold as much as 1 million bitcoin. This anonymous person has not published any communication since 2010 and many presume the famed character has passed away. […] a mining firm in China mines 3% of all bitcoin. It mines 650 bitcoins monthly with an estimated electric bill of almost $1.2 million.

as of September 19, 2022, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries held approximately 130,000 Bitcoins, acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.98 billion, at an average purchase price of $30,639 per bitcoin.

Who Owns the Most Bitcoin?

Pink Sauce went viral on TikTok. But then it exploded

Cheerful Chatbots Don’t Necessarily Improve Customer Service

The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become “uninsurable” as the disruption from hacks continues to grow. “What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber”

A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate — Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.

People suffering from depression have lower connectivity in brain regions linked to reward processing, study finds

Cassidy and Dylan Scott, a married couple from Huntsville, Alabama, just happen to have the same birthday. This week, they welcomed their first baby – on their birthday. — Their baby girl arrived on Dec. 18 […] While this phenomenon is rare, in 2017, another couple who shared a birthday also welcomed a baby on the same day – and it happened to be Dec. 18, just like the Scotts. […] The family’s birthday, Dec. 18, is actually a common one – ranking No. 56 out of all days […] Out of all the calendar days, including leap day on Feb. 29, the two least common birthdays are Jan. 1, ranking at No. 365, and Dec. 25, ranking at No. 366, according to Stiles. Leap day, which only occurs every four years, is also uncommon, ranking at No. 347.

Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (Stanford University): Gender-based language includes a range of words and phrases that are not helpful, and, in many cases, are exclusionary. […] Instead of “balls to the wall” consider using “accelerate efforts.” balls to the walls (Wiktionary): First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft’s joystick and throttle. Pushing the “balls to the wall” would put the engine at maximum power. Not related to the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”).

All four tests classified ChatGPT’s answers to their questions as left-leaning.

“Google has a business model issue. If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won’t click on any ads.” […] Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic and biased information. LaMDA is available to only a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen.

Bitcoin hashrate drops nearly 40% as deadly U.S. storm unplugs miners

Loni Goddard works at Kerala Ayurveda, a wellness company, and rents an apartment in Reno. In 2020, her one-bedroom apartment cost $950 with internet and cable. When she re-signed her lease in April, the rent rose to $1,490 — not including internet and cable.

How a Vermont farmer proved no snowflakes are alike

Why do bees die when they sting you?

Aliens haven’t contacted Earth because there’s no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests […] If life has evolved on many planets in the galaxy, then aliens are probably more interested in the ones where there are signs not just of biology but technology […] experts have offered other explanations for the missing aliens: Perhaps they visited Earth in the past, before humans evolved or were capable of recording the visit. Or maybe long-distance space travel is more difficult than believed. Perhaps aliens evolved advanced civilization too recently to make it to Earth. Or they’ve deliberately decided not to explore the cosmos. It’s even possible that they’ve killed themselves off.

New research indicates the most common reasons for lying are altruistic (i.e., to protect others from harm).

Google can now read your doctor’s bad handwriting

The results of GPT-3 are often unexpected and surprising. But are they creative? GPT-3 was not trained to look at meaning. It does not understand its training data. When asked the simple multiplication question “1111*2=?”, GPT-3 responded “22”.

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that’s more likely to be buggy

People have A.I. bots running that use ChatGPT to automatically reply to people’s tweets and breaking up by letting ChatGPT write their break up letter

the images are fed into a “pre-trained machine learning (ML) model” to generate “a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes” derived from the initial sex toy dataset

Previous studies have shown that comic book bodies are supernormal stimuli, exaggerated in dimensions that are attractive to primarily male comic book consumers. We predicted that comic book women would have longer legs than comic book men and would have longer than average legs [and] that comic book women would be depicted as wearing heels or walking on tiptoe more often, as this further elongates the legs. […] 86%–88% of female characters were drawn as either wearing high heels or walking or standing on tiptoe.

Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry […] one-fourth of all toy sales annually […] toy makers such as Mattel have created lines just for these consumers.

DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022

With a flat fee of $70 for trips into Manhattan and a guaranteed stream of passengers, a ride to and from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of the more lucrative journeys for the city’s cab drivers. But federal prosecutors say two 48-year-old Queens men found another way to profit from the crowd of taxis waiting long hours for passengers at the airport, conspiring with Russians to hack the dispatch system and allow drivers to cut ahead in line for a $10 payment.

The Genesis of East Village Drag: An oral history of the Pyramid Club

This case started off as a missing person investigation, in which the victim disappeared in Taiwan on November 29, 2019. I was hired in mid-December 2019 and filed a petition for conservatorship of her estate, according to law.

The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the “Woman Without a Face”, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries.[…] in March 2009, the case took a new turn when, while trying to identify a corpse, investigators found the Phantom’s female DNA in fingerprints on a male asylum seeker’s application. They subsequently came to the conclusion that there was no mysterious criminal and the laboratory results were due to contamination of the cotton swabs used for DNA probing. The cotton swabs used by many state police departments were found to have been contaminated before shipping. They all came from the same factory. The DNA belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made. [more]

Data Visualization of How Apple Names Things

Lessons from watching every single Hallmark holiday movies