Amazon.com Inc. has won U.S. permission to use radar to monitor consumers’ sleep habits.

Elon Musk’s testimony in Tesla lawsuit paused as lawyer vomits in jury box

Tel Aviv dog owners must now register their dog’s DNA with municipality. This will then allow municipal inspectors to collect samples from dog feces left uncollected in the streets, and a fine will be sent by mail to the owner who did not clean up.

Mother kills husband with boiling water after learning he allegedly sexually abused children for years — Smith killed her husband Michael in such a painful and cruel way. To throw boiling water over someone when they are asleep is absolutely horrific,” said Detective Chief Inspector Paul Hughes. “The sugar placed into the water makes it vicious. It becomes thicker and stickier and sinks into the skin better. It left Michael in agony.

Training Ferrets to Recognize Virus Odor in Duck Droppings

A wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C, or around 95 °F, is pretty much the absolute limit of human tolerance, says Zach Schlader, a physiologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Above that, your body won’t be able to lose heat to the environment efficiently enough to maintain its core temperature. That doesn’t mean the heat will kill you right away, but if you can’t cool down quickly, brain and organ damage will start.

The profile of the alleged abuser, by itself, was unusual: not a priest, but rather a teenage altar boy, who was said to have coerced a peer to engage in various sex acts night after night over six years, inside the Vatican’s own walls. Then powerful church figures helped him become a priest.

The People’s Bank of China aims to become the first major central bank to issue a central bank digital currency. The benefits of an e-currency are immense. As more and more transactions are made using a digital currency controlled centrally, the government gains more and more ability to monitor the economy and its people. […] The rollout is also seen as part of Beijing’s push to weaken the power of the US dollar […] But another crucial motivation is the increasing alarm in Beijing at the size of the crypto industry in China, where a huge amount of cryptocurrency was being “mined” until the recent crackdown. The threat of an unregulated alternative monetary system emerging from blockchain technology is a clear and present danger to the Communist party, according to observers.

‘ethically sourced’ cocaine

Agatha Christie is probably one of the first British ‘stand-up surfers’

The story goes that Tazartès went into the woods, dug a hole, and then sang so loudly that the ducks on the lake began to shake. […] His second album, Tazartès Transports (1980), took this sound further. He collaborated with Jean-Pierre Lentin, editor of the counter-cultural magazine Actuel, who wrote a series of fake ethnographic texts describing the music of invented regions.

Northern Hawk-Cuckoo, Mount Fuji, Japan

Bill Cosby to sue the state of Pennsylvania to recoup ‘hundreds of thousands’ of taxpayer dollars as compensation for his wrongful incarceration

Cigarette maker Philip Morris to buy UK producer of respiratory treatments

In this article, we argue that humans are biased toward pro-relationship decisions—decisions that favor the initiation, advancement, and maintenance of romantic relationships. We next consider possible theoretical underpinnings—both evolutionary and cultural—that may explain why getting into a relationship is often easier than getting out of one, and why being in a less desirable relationship is often preferred over being in no relationship at all.

People open to new food are rated as more desirable and more sexually unrestricted

As climates change, prepare for more mosquitoes in winter

How counting neutrons explains nuclear waste

The Fed controls the flow of money, and it flows to the wealthy [NY Times]

Just like snakes, a lizard sticks out its tongue to catch scent particles in the air and then pulls back its tongue and places those particles on the roof of its mouth, where there are special sensory cells. The lizard can use these scent “clues” to find food or a mate or to detect enemies.

How many artists overshadow their band after going solo?

I think the Voynich manuscript hasn’t been decoded because it cannot be decoded. My belief is that it’s written by someone suffering not from migraines but rather from schizophrenia. — Amateur armchair theories about the Voynich manuscript

Man and woman fight over who should pick up dog vomit, woman cited as aggressor

South Korean toilet turns excrement into power and digital currency

Four-day week ‘an overwhelming success’ in Iceland — The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said.

NYC’s new biometrics privacy law takes effect — businesses that collect biometric information — most commonly in the form of facial recognition and fingerprints — are required to conspicuously post notices and signs to customers at their doors explaining how their data will be collected

NYPD beekeeper removes 25,000 bees from Times Square

Bitcoin power plant making part of glacial lake ‘feel like a hot tub,’ residents say

Taking Academic Corruption to a New Level — The e-cigarette company Juul bought an entire issue of a scholarly journal, with all the articles written by authors on its payroll, to ‘prove’ that its product has a public benefit.

Who Hates Magic? Exploring the Loathing of Legerdemain

Why Do People Watch Porn? An Evolutionary Perspective on the Reasons for Pornography Consumption

We Find It Hard To Identify The Emotions Of Intense Screams And Moans

Lilliputian hallucinations concern hallucinated human, animal or fantasy entities of minute size. Having been famously described by the French psychiatrist Raoul Leroy in 1909, who wrote from personal experience, to date they are mentioned almost routinely in textbooks of psychiatry, albeit with little in-depth knowledge. I therefore systematically reviewed 145 case reports and case series comprising 226 case descriptions.

We newly created a drinking habit score (DHS) according to regular drinking (frequency of alcohol intake ≥3 times/wk) and whether consuming alcohol with meals (yes). […] During a median follow-up of 8.9 years, we documented 8652 incident cases of all-cause death, including 1702 cases of cardiovascular disease death, 4960 cases of cancer death, and 1990 cases of other-cause death. Higher DHS was significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer mortality, or other-cause mortality

Degradable plastic polymer breaks down in sunlight and air

The first time I had sex on camera, getting fucked was easier.

Man bitten by neighbor’s escaped python while sitting on the toilet

suicide by self-waterboarding

Drones have been a key part of warfare for years, but they’ve generally been remotely controlled by humans. Now, by cobbling together readily available image-recognition and autopilot software, autonomous drones can be mass-produced on the cheap. […] “How can you control 90 small drones if they’re making decisions themselves?” Kayser said. Now imagine a swarm of millions of drones.

Under normal circumstances, automatic software deployment, especially in the context of software updates, is a good thing. But here this feature was turned on its head. Russian-based criminal gang REvil hacked into Kaseya’s management system and pushed REvil software to all of the systems under Kaseya’s management. From there, the ransomware promptly disabled those computers and demanded a cryptocurrency payment of about $45,000 per system to set the machines free

A classic Silicon Valley tactic — losing money to crush rivals — comes in for scrutiny — Facebook’s latest product, a newsletter platform called Bulletin, exemplifies a strategy that some critics think should be illegal

This is tax evasion, plain and simple. But multinational companies get away with it by spending billions of dollars on top-tier lawyers and former lawmakers.

Supermarkets are doing their own hoarding as they brace for price increases. Grocery chains are buying and storing everything from sugar to frozen meat

TikTok is taking the book industry by storm, and retailers are taking notice

He’s got 30 million TikTok fans and nobody knows exactly why

Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud

Of all the animals Clarence Birdseye devoured during his three years in Labrador, lynx was the most memorable — “soaked for a month in sherry, pan-stewed, and served in a brown gravy”

Average colors of the world

This is a full view of the board behind Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell.

Valentina Sampaio becomes Sports Illustrated’s first trans model

By locking fat people’s upper and lower jaws together with a tooth-to-tooth metal lock, a team of UK researchers intend to slim those fat people down.

Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for Cryptocurrency — iris-scanning is an essential part of the plan because it can prevent people from trying to register multiple times to defraud the system. He’s also aware of the privacy implications of handing over biometric information to a tiny startup and said Worldcoin will make the process as transparent as possible so users can see how the data is used. He said the iris scan will produce a unique numerical code for each person and that the image is then deleted and never stored.

Gay men earned less than heterosexual men. Lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women. (A Meta-Analysis 2012-2020)

Most studies found decreases in the frequency of sexual intercourse during the pandemic and increases in solitary sexual behavior.

How governments and spies text each other — Matrix has become the messaging app of choice for top-secret communications

It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press — the founder of FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) is the guy who figured out how to render it almost totally worthless.

In one particularly large chamber of the cow stomach, known as the rumen, bacteria digest plant cellulose from the grass […]. As it turns out, cow rumen and its arsenal of bacteria are very good at breaking down plastic in a sustainable way. The researchers write that the “rumen samples were able to degrade all three tested polyesters” successfully.

One bee has cloned itself millions of times over the past three decades

Notes of an Urban Beekeeper

Can two potentially dishonest players play a fair game of poker using any cards — for example, over the phone? [PDF]

The hard truth about ransomware: we aren’t prepared, it’s a battle with new rules, and it hasn’t near reached peak impact.

Why Email Providers Scan Your Emails — Even if your messages aren’t scanned for ads, companies may scan, read, and even share them with third parties

A UK court has ruled in favor of a self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto over the copyright for the bitcoin white paper

Here’s how Mark Zuckerberg spent his Fourth of July

Whoa. I guess one dude quit:

‘Worst day in pigeon racing history’: Thousands of birds vanish during race

‘Redneck Rave’ at Kentucky park ends with 48 people charged, throat slashing, and an impalement

Cop busted sniffing coke off model’s butt is doing OnlyFans porn now

No tuna DNA found in Subway’s tuna sandwich

The economics of dollar stores

Why wood has gotten so expensive
Since 2005, Finland has been constructing the largest nuclear reactor in Europe alongside a facility that could solve the problem of what to do with spent nuclear fuel.

Music Listening Near Bedtime Disruptive To Sleep

Blood test finds 50 types of cancer, shows ‘impressive results’ in spotting tumors in early stages

There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t. But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically, since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it had been frozen in a lab. […] It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.” For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it. [NY Times]

21 reports of unknown phenomena possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations. […] The report said the number of sightings was too limited for a detailed pattern analysis. While they clustered around military training or testing grounds, the report found that that could be the result of collection bias or the presence of cutting-edge sensors in those areas. [NY Times | CNN]

power move by Angela Davis

Canon Uses AI Cameras That Only Let Smiling Workers Inside Offices

Social-media users are sharing Google Street View images featuring friends and relatives who have since died
When things go horribly wrong during a stay, Airbnb’s secretive safety team jumps in to prevent PR disasters

Scientists just turned plastic bottles into vanilla flavoring

The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

We show how pollen grains can increase the coronavirus (CoV) transmission rate in a group of people

Since 1916, the Dow has made new all-time highs less than 5% of all days, but it’s up 25,568% over that time. 95% of the time, you’re underwater. The less you look, the better off you’ll be. [The Twenty Craziest Investing Facts Ever]

Drinking straw device is instant cure for hiccups, say scientists

Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence

A man’s “secret family” was exposed when he received two obituaries in the same newspaper from two different women.

Clusters Circumstances and Gestures in Daily Encounters

Beer Mats make bad Frisbees, study [PDF]

Oregon third state in U.S. to legalize human composting

Petition urging Jeff Bezos to buy and eat the Mona Lisa gains steam

Careers for some women in finance are being held back by “mediocre” male middle managers adept at playing internal politics, according to a report backed by some of the City of London’s largest financial institutions.

SpaceX threatened with arrests as local authorities in Texas warn it may have committed a crime by using private security guards to block public roads

British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, dubbed the “Father of the Web” will auction the original source code for the World Wide Web as an NFT

Facebook Researchers Say They Can Detect Deepfakes And Where They Came From

when octopuses are on MDMA, it’s like watching “an eight-armed hug.”

Irreversible warming tipping point may have been triggered: Arctic mission chief

We are celebrating the 90th anniversary of Kurt Gödel’s groundbreaking 1931 paper which laid the foundations of theoretical computer science and the theory of artificial intelligence (AI). Gödel sent shock waves through the academic community when he identified the fundamental limits of theorem proving, computing, AI, logics, and mathematics itself.

Bernard Herrmann completed his work on Taxi Driver just hours before he died of a heart attack.

Analyzing Star Wars

Austrian man jailed for 19 months after tattooing Nazi symbol on his testicle

The woman who spent lockdown alone in the Arctic

New research published in the journal Psychological Science reveals a pervasive but unfounded stereotype: that women (but not men) who engage in casual sex have low self-esteem

More than 100 million people now have Calm on their smartphone. Calm promises to give the anxious, the depressed, and the isolated—as well as those looking to be a bit more present with their family, or a bit less distracted at work, or a bit more consistent in their personal habits—access to a huge variety of zen content for $15 a month, $70 a year, or $400 for a lifetime. For that, its investors have valued the company at $2 billion—roughly as much as 23andMe, Allbirds, and Oatly—making it one of just 700 private start-ups to hit the 10-digit mark. Now flush with venture capital, Calm is in the midst of becoming a full-fledged wellness empire: It is producing books, films, and streaming series, as well as $10 puzzles, $80 meditation cushions, and $272 weighted blankets.

In 2020 in the U.S., 59% of online recruitment of sex trafficking victims took place on Facebook. […] 65% of identified child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited through Facebook. [2020 Human Trafficking Report]

Anti-vaxxers are weaponizing Yelp to punish bars that require vaccine proof

last week, YouTube disclosed that it paid music companies, musicians and songwriters more than $4 billion in the prior year […] not far from the $5 billion that the streaming king Spotify pays to music industry participants NY Times]

Maren Altman isn’t a huge fan of TikTok. She’s amassed more than a million followers anyway. […] Her most intriguing videos apply astrology to a particularly daunting realm: cryptocurrency. Anything with a verifiable birthday or creation date has a birth chart that can be read and, according to astrologists, gleaned for predictive information. That means there’s astrology for … bitcoin. In her teenage years […] she started to seriously study astrology, and made a few bucks at parties giving “readings to drunk kids.” She saved that money and used it to invest in crypto. Then, she took her astrology skills to TikTok.

The rise of private cryptocurrencies motivated the Fed to start considering a digital dollar to be used alongside the traditional paper currency.

Is there a limit to how much worse variants can get? “The fact it has happened twice in 18 months, two lineages (Alpha and then Delta) each 50% more transmissible is a phenomenal amount of change.” […] The R0 was around 2.5 when the pandemic started in Wuhan and could be as high as 8.0 for the Delta variant […] two lineages (Alpha and then Delta) in 18 months each 50% more transmissible is a phenomenal amount of change. […] Measles is between 14 and 30 depending on who you ask […] Influenza has a much lower R0, barely above 1, but constantly mutates to side-step immunity.

Insane Nightclubs of 1890s Paris

El Salvador to use energy from volcanoes for bitcoin mining

‘I was completely inside’: Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown

Spontaneous face touching (sFST) is an ubiquitous behavior that occurs in people of all ages and all sexes, up to 800 times a day.

How we fixed the ozone layer

Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen … America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims … at least 70% of the money stolen by impostors ultimately left the country, much of it ending up in the hands of criminal syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere … Much of the rest of the money was stolen by street gangs domestically.

individuals who frequently listen to music reported persistent nighttime earworms, which were associated with worse sleep quality — instrumental music increased the incidence of nighttime earworms

MicroStrategy Inc. MSTR 11.67% is borrowing $400 million in junk bonds to buy more bitcoins, adding to the company’s bet that digital assets will outperform cash. … In a filing Monday, MicroStrategy said it expects to post a $284.5 million loss, “based on fluctuations in market price of bitcoin,” during its next earnings report.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession — Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

Former Air Force Pilot Breaks Down UFO Footage

Laughing gas improves depression

Smart devices could someday help save your relationship

A Florida judge has tossed out a motion from a man who claimed he wanted to marry his “porn filled Apple computer.” [2014]

Pupil Size Is a Marker of Intelligence

Researchers perform magic tricks for birds, who are not amused

Australian Federal Police and FBI nab criminal underworld figures in worldwide sting using encrypted app — ANoM could only be found on phones bought through the black market, which had been stripped of the capability to make calls or send emails, according to the AFP. The phones could only send messages to another device that had the app and criminals needed to know another criminal to get a device. Unknown to the app’s users, the FBI had access to the app and its communications … and had been reading the clandestine communications of criminals since 2018

El Salvador looks to become the world’s first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender

Feds recovers millions in cryptocurrency paid to Colonial Pipeline ransomware hackers — “The extortionists will never see this money. New financial technologies that attempt to anonymize payments will not provide a curtain from behind which criminals will be permitted to pick the pockets of hardworking Americans.” … “as we speak, there are thousands of attacks on all aspects of the energy sector and the private sector generally … it’s happening all the time”

“Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation”

A bride collapsed and died at her wedding. The groom then married the woman’s sister with her dead body lying in the next room.

TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’

Astrophysicist on UFO sightings: It looks terrestrial, not alien

Why is there no blue food?

Children Now Account For 22% Of New U.S. COVID Cases

Some people are resistant to local anaesthetic, meaning they must endure dental and medical procedures without such pain relief. And we’re only beginning to understand why.

After Years Of Detecting Land Mines, A Rat Is Retiring

The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times.

How Victorian Cultists in Rural Donegal Created the World’s First 18 Rated Video Game

In 1977, the small market town of Hay-on-Wye declared independence from the UK, as a publicity stunt.

A New Mexico sheriff who is running for mayor of Albuquerque was punched at a campaign event by a man who police say first tried to disrupt the event by flying a drone with a sex toy attached to it around the candidate while he was stage.

people with hearing loss reported miraculous religious healing experiences - but hearing tests found no objective improvement

This testimony presents definitive logic and extensive evidence to support The Claim by Jesus Christ that Jesus Is Son of GOD rather than GOD.

over a third (36%) of respondents reported having one or more sex secrets

Why a Failing New Jersey Deli Is Valued at $100 Million: A Theory

frogs have teeth

study suggests eating 18g of mushrooms a day cuts your risk of developing cancer by 45 per cent

Employees Are Considering Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home

the data suggests these NFT fads are fading faster than the others

Embracing has several positive health effects, such as lowering blood pressure and decreasing infection risk, and is associated with better daily mood in lonely individuals

How often do emergency vehicles get into accidents?

Synthetic Messenger is a botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. Everyday it searches the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 bots visit each article and click on every ad they can find.

World’s First Invisible Sculpture Sells for a Whopping $18,000

Art studio Robert Alice has created the first iNFT, an NFT linked to a machine-learning chatbot. Will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s in June

Self-styled satanist beheaded his cellmate, but the guards didn’t notice. […] Guards found Osuna wearing a necklace made of Romero’s body parts.

This survey asked young adults (n = 593), younger-old adults (n = 272), and older-old adults (n = 46) whether they would take a hypothetical life extension treatment as well as the youngest and oldest age at which they would wish to live forever. in all three age cohorts, a plurality indicated that they would not use it

Giraffes, it turns out, have solved a problem that kills millions of people every year: high blood pressure. — The cardiovascular secrets of giraffes

As Virginia prepares to legalize adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana on July 1, drug-sniffing police dogs from around the state are being forced into early retirement

Satellites may have been underestimating the planet’s warming for decades

Worker-Owned Cooperative Tries to Compete With Uber and Lyft [NY Times]

Testing whether blockchain-based smart contracts can measurably improve weather index insurance products

Iran’s government announced a ban on the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as officials blame the energy-intensive process for blackouts in a number of Iranian cities

A new antitrust case shows that Amazon Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ that is anything but free.

To better understand how birds perform their architectural wonders let’s follow the work of the familiar thrush step by step.

you have 15 minutes to fill up your car with mannequin body parts from their mannequin mountain

Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up

Nyoooooooooooom

Scientists use drones to zap clouds with electricity to make them rain

Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies [NY Times]

Missing man found dead inside dinosaur statue, got stuck trying to retrieve his mobile phone

Would You Sell Your Vote? 12% of respondents would do so for just $25, as would nearly 20% for $100.

Consecutive Ejaculations in Male Rats

Amazon’s ad revenue is now twice as big as Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest combined

Bezos Space firm lost its bid for a major NASA contract to Elon Musk, but the Senate is ordering the agency to give a second one now

drug dealer who used EncroChat jailed after picture analysed for fingerprints

your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. they don’t need to.

An online lending platform called Kabbage sent 378 pandemic loans worth $7 million to fake companies (mostly farms) with names like “Deely Nuts” and “Beefy King.”

Spinoza Car

Millennial anti-theft device

One of the oldest hypotheses holds that the anus and the mouth originated from the same solo opening, which elongated, then caved in at the center and split itself in two. […] Scorpions jettison their posterior when attacked from behind, evading capture but tragically losing their ability to poop (and eventually dying with their abdomen full of excrement).

Research findings that are probably wrong cited far more than robust ones, study finds — Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.

Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals

Deadly Fungi Are the Newest Emerging Microbe Threat All Over the World — These pathogens already kill 1.6 million people every year, and we have few defenses against them

A leading theory for why COVID-19 long-haulers develop the syndrome is that “the antibodies produced after COVID may attack the autonomic nervous system,” says Taub, the UC San Diego cardiologist. “The immune system is confused,” he says, causing the misdirected attacks.

Records show that some people who are paid $1,000 a head by the government to give legally protected mustangs “good homes” are sending the horses to slaughter auctions once they get the money.

The two hottest spots on Earth — The Lut Desert in Iran and the Sonoran Desert along the Mexican-U.S. border have recently reached a sizzling 80.8°C (177.4°F)

Scientists find ‘missing link’ behind first human languages — humans recognize the intended meanings of iconic vocalizations — basic sounds made by people to represent specific objects, entities and actions — regardless of the language they speak.

10 Positions Chess Engines Just Don’t Understand‎

The startup OVR Technology is incorporating smell into virtual reality and using it in a new program designed to allow people to experience the effects of climate change.

Exhibition: ‘Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency’ — Men dominate religious doctrine and government. Religion and governments decide whether abortion is legal or illegal (Poland), whether women are sentenced to years in jail for abortion (El Salvador) or whether a women is handcuffed to a hospital bed after trying to give herself an abortion (Brazil).

Newly leaked video shows a UFO disappear into the water

UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

Project Starline: Feel like you’re there, together

Cara Delevingne is auctioning off an NFT about her vagina

40% of university students found to be addicted to their smartphone

survey of 4,989 randomly sampled undergraduate students at a large U.S. university — The most prevalent general sexual behaviors were solo masturbation (88.6%), oral sex (79.4% received, 78.4% performed), penile-vaginal intercourse (73.5%), and partnered masturbation (71.1%). Anal intercourse was the least prevalent of these behaviors (16.8% received, 25.3% performed). Among those with any partnered sexual experience, 43.0% had choked a partner, 47.3% had been choked, 59.1% had been lightly spanked and 12.1% had been slapped on the face during sex.

lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time … simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions

By studying the genomes of people over the age of 105, an international team of researchers has identified several genetic factors that appear linked to human longevity — and they center on the body’s ability to repair its own DNA.

Last year, more people in San Francisco died of overdoses than of covid-19

Russia’s Defense Minister suggested he wants to clone a group of ancient warriors

virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian.

Ethereum’s energy consumption will drop by more than 99% as it transitions from mining to staking

How corporations buy—and sell—food made with prison labor

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields

Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is “missing”

9 Fascinating Facts About Urine

Mammals can breathe through anus in emergencies

Frequency of pubic hair transfer during sexual intercourse

How would you feel about being able to pay to control multiple aspects of another person’s life? A new app is offering you the chance to do just that. Investors include Peter Thiel Investors include Peter Thiel. Unrelated: And Peter Thiel’s twin brother invests $10 million in two Senate candidates

Study finds alarming levels of ‘forever chemicals’ in US mothers’ breast milk — Toxic chemicals known as PFAS found in all 50 samples tested at levels nearly 2,000 times what is considered safe in drinking water. PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans.

Tiny, Wireless, Injectable Chips Use Ultrasound to Monitor Body Processes

I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences […] Except for the simple difference in size, there are no meaningful differences between men’s and women’s brain structure or activity

COVID virus particles found in the penis tissue of men who’d had COVID 6-8 months earlier (both severe & mild COVID) […] severe erectile dysfunction […] total sperm count was lower […] decrease in genital size.

Is oral sex more Covid-safe than kissing?

A sex-toy company in Asia is “borrowing” the likenesses of Instagram influencers—without their consent—to create best-selling dolls

Exxon uses Big Tobacco’s playbook to downplay the climate crisis, Harvard study finds

Howard Thurston thrilled people with his own brand of stage magic, a giant production requiring 40 tons of equipment. Today, he’s all but forgotten, eclipsed in history by his contemporary Harry Houdini, even though Houdini was more of an escape artist than a magician. But in his day, Thurston was the best.

10 Tales of Manuscript Burning (And Some That Survived)

Some Amazon managers say they ‘hire to fire’ people just to meet the internal turnover goal every year

1,000 feral cats released onto Chicago streets to tackle rat explosion

Implanted Wireless Device Triggers Mice To Form Instant Bond

Want To Know Whether A Movie Or Book Will Be A Hit? Look At How Emotional The Reviews Are

FBI warns of cybercriminals abusing search ads to promote phishing sites

Endless scrolling. That’s one of the telltale signs of a novel phenomenon our new research identifies as algorithmic fatigue. People who spend ages browsing streaming services, looking for something new to watch, are some of the many examples of the growing numbers of consumers who are now finding that AI systems fall short.

The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you

Why the US has two different highway fonts

The first bottles of an “artisanal spirit” made using apples grown near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have been seized by Ukrainian authorities.

I’ve had the same supper for 10 years. I have two pieces of fish, an onion, an egg, baked beans and biscuits. Being a farmer means every day is the same.

MDMA Passes a Big Test For PTSD Treatment — most participants correctly guessed whether they received a placebo or MDMA [NY Times | Nature | PDF]

Distracted nurse gives woman 6 doses of COVID vaccine in a single shot

A batch of new studies show coronavirus vaccines work against new variants

The 1918 pandemic began in the spring with an intermittent first wave no deadlier than ordinary influenza, then seemed to disappear. A more contagious and more lethal variant caused the deadly second wave, and then it also seemed to disappear. In March 1919, another variant sparked a third wave much less deadly than the second wave but more lethal than seasonal influenza. First wave illness protected against the second wave, but neither first nor second wave infection protected against the third wave variant. Further mutations, combined with an improved ability of the immune system to respond, helped turn the virus into an ordinary seasonal influenza — until it was replaced by the 1957 pandemic influenza virus. Covid-19 was never going to disappear, but there is a reasonable chance that it will follow the 1918 precedent and become an endemic influenza-like illness that kills — serious enough, to be sure — and will require vaccine updates but will not require shutdowns. That would be the best case. [Washington Post]

Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach

Verizon sells media businesses including Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm Apollo for $5 billion

The plan to kill Osama bin Laden—from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop—as told by the people in the room.

Cats are the only asocial animal we have successfully domesticated. We’re disappointed that we don’t bond with them as easily as dogs. But are we just missing the signs?

Keeping time accurately comes with a price. The maximum accuracy of a clock is directly related to how much disorder, or entropy, it creates every time it ticks.

Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real”

We asked journalists for the worst pitch they ever sent. Here’s what they said.

A true brownstone is actually built of brick; only the facade is made of brownstone.

Fonts in Popular Culture Identified Vol. 3