Scientists Have Taught Bees to Smell COVID-19 Infections

Knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work

While children felt about 3 years older than their chronological age, older adults (60+ years) felt between 10.74 and 21.07 years younger

10 residents live in isolation at Hawaii’s last leprosy community

Alien plants: The search for photosynthesis on other worlds

Dogecoin is a codebase fork of Luckycoin, which itself was a codebase fork of Junkcoin, which was a codebase fork of Litecoin, which in turn is a codebase fork of Bitcoin

The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

A future without passwords

How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook — Though Facebook does not offer advertisers categories that explicitly identify people’s health conditions, The Markup identified dozens of ads for prescription pharmaceuticals targeted at people with “interests” in topics like “bourbon,” “oxygen,” and “Diabetes mellitus awareness.”

when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. […] Belonging is stronger than facts.

Psychoanalytic interpretations of the American television series The Office — most of the time no work is done at all

The 3,000-year-old Luxor obelisk first arrived in Paris on 21 December 1833, and three years later, on 25 October 1836, was moved to the centre of Place de la Concorde by King Louis-Phillipe. It had been given to France by Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Ottoman Egypt in exchange for a French mechanical clock. After the Obelisk was taken, the mechanical clock provided in exchange was discovered to be faulty, having probably been damaged during transport. The clock still exists in a clock-tower at Cairo Citadel and is still not working. [Wikipedia]

Gateses’ mansion, called Xanadu 2.0 […] A 20-car garage is built into the hillside […] There’s a trampoline room. […] The house has just seven bedrooms but 24 bathrooms

Could this famous con man be lying about his story? [Frank W. Abagnale Jr. / Catch Me if You Can] A new book suggests he is

DeLillo originally wanted to call the book Panasonic, but the Panasonic Corporation objected

the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will be saved

Brazilian Amazon released more carbon than it absorbed over past 10 years

The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code — Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.

how we applied for a job with a ransomware gang

A deadly California wildfire was set to cover up a woman’s murder

Elderly couple uses military Morse Code training to escape Tennessee assisted living facility

Western diet tied to adult acne

Grumpy face during adult sleep

5 years old, the age at which children first become concerned with other people’s evaluations of them

It appears that having a son decreases support for feminist and egalitarian gender attitudes in both men and women

Citizens have made “huge sacrifices” over the last eight months to try and contain the coronavirus, he said in a statement. “In such circumstances it is easy and natural to feel apathetic and demotivated, to experience fatigue.”

NYPD Returns Its Police ‘Robodog’ After a Public Outcry

Consider Amazon. The company perfected the one-click checkout. But canceling a $119 Prime subscription is a labyrinthine process that requires multiple screens and clicks. Or Ticketmaster. Online customers are bombarded with options for ticket insurance, subscription services for razors and other items and, when users navigate through those, they can expect to receive a battery of text messages from the company with no clear option to stop them. These are examples of “dark patterns.” [NY Times]

California appeals court finds Amazon responsible for third party sellers’ products

From steel and copper to corn and lumber, commodities started 2021 with a bang, surging to levels not seen for years.

The Bahamas is one of three countries to launch a digital currency, along with China and Cambodia.

The Secret Mission To Unearth Part Of A 142-Year-Old Experiment

While captive in a Navy program, a beluga whale named Noc began to mimic human speech

Is it ‘Zoom face’ or is the pandemic aging you?

I’m looking for a deconstructed bra that does not ride up, but is less constricting than a traditional underwire. Any suggestions? [NY Times]

Andre Agassi’s method of reading Boris Becker’s serve

Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake

Japanese man arrested after ‘dating more than 35 women at once to get birthday gifts’

An unarmed man was shot by a Virginia sheriff’s deputy about an hour after the same deputy gave the man a ride home […] the deputy mistook a phone for a gun

The salmon you buy in the future may be farmed on land

Household aerosols now release more harmful smog chemicals than all UK vehicles

Better air is the easiest way not to die

Bolsonaro poses smiling with a canceled CPF card (Brazilian’s Social Security card) - an allusion to what happens when people die.

Mask-wearing practices during COVID-19 changed emotional face processing

Much like humans, some rhesus monkeys enjoy alcohol and will drink a lot, while others show less interest and will limit themselves to small amounts. The researchers found that the animals that were chronically heavy drinkers had a weak response to the vaccine. […] Moderate drinking is unlikely to impair the immune response to the Covid vaccine, but heavy drinking might.

more than two dozen “pancoronavirus” vaccine projects are underway, more

California braces for another ‘clown car’ of recall candidates — Running in the California recall may be the best bargain on the planet for fame and fortune seekers. For just $4,000, any registered voter can grab an instant platform in what’s sure to become the nation’s most watched election this year — and leverage that position on social media and airwaves with some of the most attention-getting stunts possible.

Neurons in the mouse brain correlate with cryptocurrency price

The first Op-Ed page in The New York Times greeted the world on Sept. 21, 1970. It was so named because it appeared opposite the editorial page and not (as many still believe) because it would offer views contrary to the paper’s. It’s time to change the name. The articles written by outside writers will be known as “Guest Essays.” [NY Times]

Burning Man Is Canceled for 2021 but They’re Keeping Your $2,500 Reservation Fee

China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world

bitcoin has characteristics of what he calls a Ponzi scheme that’s right out in the open — “It’s a beautifully set up cryptographic system. It’s well made but there’s absolutely no reason it should be linked to anything economic”

Scientist Who Says He Created Bitcoin Can Sue Bitcoin.org

JP Morgan is looking to hire skilled Ethereum developers to fill up at least 64 open positions.

Wyoming will recognize DAOs as a new type of LLC [Decentralized autonomous organization]

Languishing might be the dominant emotion of 2021. […] In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. […] Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. [NY Times]

Who Profits from Destroying Reputations Online? A big clue were the ads that appeared next to them, offering help removing reputation-tarnishing content.

Here are some of the foods that Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut who launched on a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station on Friday, will enjoy during his six-month stay in orbit: lobster, beef bourguignon, cod with black rice, potato cakes with wild mushrooms and almond tarts with caramelized pears. [NY Times]

Tyrannosaurus rex walked surprisingly slowly, new study finds

Entomologists Charlie and Lois O’Brien have the largest private collection of insects in the world

A Suicide by Self-Decapitation

Amazon is opening a hair salon in London — Customers will be able to test out different hair colours in an augmented-reality mirror

Cat intercepted with drug delivery for Panama prison

Clinginess was reported as a more common source of relationship strain by women, while bad sex was reported as a more common source of relationship strain by men.

Stress And Death In Female Baboons — As Measured By Hormones In Poop

There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be

Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis

Just How Many Surfaces Does Your Cat’s Butt Touch? A Sixth Grader’s Science Fair Project Has The Answer

residents who cut off their own limbs as a way to collect insurance money

Eiffel Tower replicas around the world

Polychaete worms from hydrothermal vents

Italian man accused of skipping work for 15 years straight

valuing happiness often predicts worse well-being and mental health

Manhattan District Attorney To Stop Prosecuting Prostitution

Do voices carry valid information about a speaker’s personality?

Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language

Dr. Marr uses a simple two-out-of-three rule for deciding when to wear a mask. In every situation, she makes sure she’s meeting two out of three conditions: outdoors, distanced and masked. “If you’re outdoors, you either need to be distanced or masked,” she said. “If you’re not outdoors, you need to be distanced and masked. This is how I’ve been living for the past year. It all comes down to my two-out-of-three rule.” [NY Times]

Higher mushroom consumption is associated with a lower risk of cancer

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran contribute to amplifying the QAnon conspiracy theory online

‘Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act’ Would Ban Clearview and Warrantless Location Data Purchases — The sweeping bill has support from both Democrats and Republicans, and will address multiple forms of surveillance

Debuted as part of an ongoing project titled NFTheft, sleepminting serves as a crypto-counterfeiting exercise. Sleepminting enables [the artist] to mint NFTs for, and to, the crypto wallets of other artists, then transfer ownership back to himself without their consent or knowing participation.

Hard Drive and SSD Shortages Could Be Imminent If New Cryptocurrency Blooms — With the emergence of the Chia cryptocurrency, miners in China are reportedly frantically snatching up every hard drive and SSD they can find. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, you don’t mine Chia with a processor, graphics card or ASIC miner. Instead, you farm Chia with storage space, which is where hard drives or SSDs come in.

LVMH, Prada, and Richemont Build a Blockchain

You Can Sell the Trees You Don’t Cut

Anti-venom is snake-specific, meaning if you’re bitten by a king cobra, you need king cobra anti-venom. If there’s 70 different venomous snakes in one place, I can’t carry a refrigerator with 70 different anti-venoms. […] On his way to work, he’s thinking nasal spray for snakebites. On his way home from work - nasal spray for snakebites. He is obsessed. [NPR | Audio + Transcript]

The researchers estimated there could be between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles released before a half-pint of lager would go flat.

Interrupted Maps, Butterfly Maps, Retroazimuthal Projections…

Colors of noise

Really Bad Chess

Real estate agent is auctioning off an NFT that comes with a duplex in Thousand Oaks, California

Crypto’s Coming of Age May Kill the Bitcoin Bubble and Dogecoin has risen 400 percent in the last week because why not

Two die in Tesla car crash in Texas with ‘no one’ in driver’s seat

Defense Department confirms leaked photos and videos of triangle-shaped objects blinking and moving through the clouds are real

Women have higher magical beliefs than men. Women have stronger reliance on intuition than men.

Account of what it’s like to work as a Facebook content moderator — The employee is based in Austin, TX and works for Accenture, a company that provides content moderation contractors for Facebook.

A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Method — Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it’s true.

In the last decade, I have revised 3,000 résumés while working as a college career adviser. Here is my advice: The strongest will fit on a single page. Exceptions are few.

Drug Cartel Now Assassinates Its Enemies With Bomb-Toting Drones

France cuts two nuclear-powered submarines in half to make one new one

STDs reach all-time high for 6th consecutive year

We finally know how the FBI unlocked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone — Too bad it cost $900,000 and led to nothing

Doctors Forgot to Warn People With Breasts That the Covid Vaccine Could Affect Their Next Mammogram

Humans can read the heart rate of others when looking at their face

What happens when you have a heart attack on the way to Mars?

for some people, making or receiving calls is a stressful experience

How Airbnb and Uber use activist tactics that disguise their corporate lobbying as grassroots campaigns

Madoff paid “gains” to older investors with money coming in from newer ones. […] After he went to jail, Madoff dismissed the people who fell for his scam as “greedy” […] More than money was lost. At least two people, in despair over their losses, died by suicide. A major Madoff investor suffered a fatal heart attack after months of contentious litigation over his role in the scheme. Some investors lost their homes. Others lost the trust and friendship of relatives and friends they had inadvertently steered into harm’s way. […] His older son, Mark, died by suicide in his Manhattan apartment early on the morning of Dec. 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. […] On Sept. 3, 2014, his younger son, Andrew, died of cancer at the age of 48. He had blamed the stress of the scandal for the return of the cancer he had fought off in 2003. […] The actual cash losses from his fraud, not counting fictional profits, were most recently estimated at between $17 billion and $20 billion. […] Through the bankruptcy process, some victims were able to recover all or part of the cash principal they invested with Mr. Madoff. Irving Picard, the court appointed trustee who has spent the last decade trying to recoup most of the money for Mr. Madoff’s investors, has, to date, recovered $14.4 billion from lawsuits and settlements — roughly covering all the money investors gave to Mr. Madoff. [Washington Post | NY Times]

Interested in alternative investments but don’t know where to start?

toilet rats, toilet squirrels, toilet spiders, toilet possums, toilet frogs, toilet birds, toilet bats, toilet scorpions

Dr. I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University, is a classic case of nominative determinism

Woman gets pregnant while already pregnant

“Ambiguous Objects” that change their appearances in a mirror

The top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% … over the past several decades. This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation.

How people get rich now

First GMO Mosquitoes to Be Released In the Florida Keys

CEO of a top bitcoin exchange warns a crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

Acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Allison Lee, for example, has been very active. She has returned power to senior enforcement staff, who had it stripped from them in 2017, to open probes without seeking senior approvals, and has reversed a 2019 policy that critics said made it too easy for companies that broke the rules to continue with business as usual.

Twitter won’t let federal archivists host Trump’s tweets on Twitter

When BitClout arrived on the internet last month, it befuddled much of the cryptocurrency world. That was not least because the company, which describes itself as “not a company,” but a “new type of social network” — a sort of bitcoin-meets-Twitter — had ripped off some 15,000 profiles of famous people and influencers from actual Twitter and opened accounts in their names without their permission. […] Perhaps the most suspicious part, though, to many outsiders, was the insistence by BitClout’s founders that they themselves remain anonymous […] And yet, BitClout’s backers have poured more than $100 million into it.]

The FBI has arrested a Texas man who planned to blow up one of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in an attempt to “kill of about 70% of the internet.”

Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists — papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers […] Jargon doesn’t always associate with negative outcomes […] abstracts that contained fewer common words tended to garner more grant funding [NY Times]

For two decades, from its genesis in the mid-nineties, Vice Media branded itself in the image of the dispossessed. The earliest issues of its magazine, originally called the Voice of Montreal, were supported by a Canadian welfare grant and copublished by a Haitian nonprofit. But by the summer of 2017, two of its founders—Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith—had traded government funding for private investment and dropped their titular claim to communal representation with the jettison of a single vowel: the Voice became Vice. The company received multimillion-dollar investments from Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, but still self-described as “countercultural.” […] Outwardly, Vice aimed to preserve its brand by cultivating an ethos of unconventionality and titillation. Internally, however, the culture was troubled—a problem not only of self-presentation, but also of management. Upon their hire, employees were asked to sign a “non-traditional workplace agreement” that contractually obliged them to feel at ease. “Although it is possible that some of the text, images and information I will be exposed to in the course of my employment with VICE may be considered by some to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing,” read the agreement, “I do not find such text, images or information or the workplace environment at VICE to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing.” [CJR]

Legends and science of bottomless pits, bogs, and lakes via things magazine

100 Greatest Korean Films Ever

Illegal number

Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days

This man is looking for the friends who shipped him overseas in a crate in 1965

Experiments with particles known as muons suggest that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. [NY Times | Quanta]

Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will

Rates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding — Researchers believe a factor is a chemical used in drycleaning and household products such as shoe polishes and carpet cleaners in the US

People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on. This tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women.

A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.

The real reason why the Salvator Mundi didn’t make it into the Louvre’s Leonardo show

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod in present day Russia in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.

Over 110 million Americans have now had a taste of universal health care.

This is the final motherfucking website. Inspired by the geniuses behind motherfuckingwebsite.com

“Time Slows Down Whenever You Are Around” for Women but Not for Men

Completed in nine days, massive hospital opens in London — Thanks to a herculean collaborative effort carried out by the National Health Service (NHS), the British Armed Forces, the Royal Engineers, the facilities management team at ExCeL London, private contractors, and international architecture firm BDP, the 1-million-square-foot convention center in the docklands of East London has been transformed in just over a week into what’s not only the largest hospital in the United Kingdom but, per CNBC, the largest critical care unit in the world. [Thanks Tim]

Children now playing ‘huge role’ in spread of COVID-19 variant — “We’re not going to have nearly enough (vaccine doses) in the next 6 to 8 weeks to get through this surge”

B.1.1.7 is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the virus. Infected people seem to carry more of the B.1.1.7 virus and for longer […] “The best way to think about B.1.1.7 and other variants is to treat them as separate epidemics” [NY Times]

In their efforts to rein in illicit massage businesses across the country, police sometimes rely on sting operations in which undercover officers engage in sex acts with spa workers

Here we demonstrate that environmental DNA can be collected from air and used to identify mammals

Known as the “torpedo,” the remotely controlled submarine would use magnets to attach to the bottom of cargo ships. The operator could later detach the drone, which would send a GPS signal with its location. Then, prosecutors allege, the trafficking ring would send a fishing boat to meet the submarine about 100 miles off the coast of Europe and collect the cocaine.

Fugu can be lethally poisonous due to its tetrodotoxin, meaning it must be carefully prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat. The restaurant preparation of fugu is strictly controlled by law in Japan and several other countries, and only chefs who have qualified after three or more years of rigorous training are allowed to prepare the fish. […] Researchers have determined that a fugu’s tetrodotoxin comes from eating other animals infested with tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria, to which the fish develops insensitivity over time. As such, efforts have been made in research and aquaculture to allow farmers to produce safe fugu. Farmers now produce poison-free fugu by keeping the fish away from the bacteria; Usuki, a town in Ōita Prefecture, has become known for selling non-poisonous fugu.

Some of the World’s Top Artists Are Trying Their Hand at NFTs. The World’s Top Galleries Are a Bit More Skeptical.

In 1930, engineers accomplished something remarkable: they rotated an 8-story, 11,000 ton building a full 90 degrees

How long would it take to walk around the moon?

MARCH (PARKING) MADNESS: Welcome to the Finals — the 114th vs. the 34th

Swiss robots use UV light to zap viruses aboard passenger planes

Update on the 3 major variants

How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob — Installed on thousands of streetlights, speed cameras, toll booths, police cars and tow trucks across the United States, the scanners record every passing vehicle into databases run by contractors such as Vigilant Systems, which reports that it has recorded 5 billion license plate locations nationwide. In Maryland alone, government and police scanners captured more than 500 million plates last year, state data shows. […] Agents got a D.C. judge to issue a “ping order” for his cellphone, which had been registered with T-Mobile under the name of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, the affidavit said. That ping order allegedly pinpointed Alam’s location to Room 17 of the Penn Amish Motel in rural Pennsylvania. FBI agents arrested him there the next day.

“his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

New study detects lottery-like behavior in cryptocurrency markets

Now, all of those people who were tweeting and Clubhousing about NFTs are on to the next: DAOs. Launched on April 30, 2016, The DAO was an early Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and venture capital fund.

Facebook shorted video creators thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Due to a ‘technical issue.’

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

Mapping the World’s Key Maritime Choke Points

What happens to a tree when it dies?

into the woods to cut down trees via things magazine

My Bloody Valentine is working on two new albums

Every Noise at Once

Interesting wardrobe

Woman accused of hitting child with car claims she was trying to run over someone else

Man accused of assault and robbery outside a restaurant told detectives his DNA was planted at the crime scene by an airplane in order to frame him

New drug to regenerate lost teeth

We theorize that reconnaissance satellites have revolutionized the use of information gleaned from spying in ways that discourage states from engaging in serious conflicts with one another. We find that when either the potential aggressor or target in a dyad possess reconnaissance satellites, they are significantly less likely to become involved in serious militarized interstate disputes.

Venomous people could become a reality, scientists say

Scientists built a perfectly self-replicating synthetic cell

Scientists Get Closer To Redefining The Length Of A Second — The worldwide standard atomic clocks have for decades been based on cesium atoms — which tick about 9 billion times per second. But newer atomic clocks based on other elements tick much faster [and] are 100 times more accurate than the cesium clock.

Even before the pandemic, Americans were already flushing far too many wipes into the sewer system. After a year of staying at home, the pipe-clogging problem has gotten worse.

Nearly 500 bee species are thriving in a small patch of US desert — There are about 20,000 known species of bee on the planet, and nowhere else is this diversity more concentrated than in southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of bee species can be found in a patch of desert there about the size of Heathrow airport, meaning it has the world’s densest aggregation of bee species yet measured.

We identified 110 shades from 73 products that contained the word “nude” in the name. […] Roughly 40% of beauty brands use a sequential numbering system to organize their foundation shades. Yet only 4 out of those 130 products ordered their shades from dark to light.

“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.” People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing.

Inside a viral website

A missing Florida woman was rescued after she was found naked in a storm drain. She told police officers she had been down there 20 days after she got lost swimming in the canal.

Parisien police seized a suspected shipment of ecstasy that turned out to be strawberry powder

Authorities in Romania have brought drug trafficking charges against a man who once posed as US actor Robert de Niro in order to take out fraudulent bank loans.

We found that the female chatbot is preferred over the male chatbot because it is perceived as more human

Testosterone administration in women increases the size of their peripersonal space

Drinking a strong coffee half an hour before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds

The pandemic itself was already exposing vulnerabilities in world provide chains. Now it prices about $4,000 to ship a 40-ft container between east Asia and the US west coast, up from $1,500 initially of 2020. […] brash political speak about reshoring operations is naive. “Even the supply chain has a supply chain,” he says. A dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, for instance, requires 280 parts from a number of nations, in line with the corporate. [Financial Times | ungated]

The experiment aims to find out if large groups of people can come together safely during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Before Google bought YouTube in 2006 for just $1.65 billion, it alleged that the site was “a rogue enabler of content theft.” Google’s investment was protected thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 512, which granted a safe harbor from prosecution to tech companies whose users post copyrighted materials, as long as they institute a process of taking down infringing content when asked. […] Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, promoted what he called an artist-friendly streaming solution. […] Spotify also pays out absurdly low per-stream rates, though not as bad as YouTube. […] “The platforms have driven the price of content to zero. This demonetized content is still generating a fortune. But the artists aren’t getting that money.”

Meet the experimental musicians who built their own streaming service

Amazon started disclosing AWS numbers five years ago, but in the last couple of years another big and highly profitable business has quietly emerged in the footnotes at the back of the 10k. Amazon’s ‘Other’ revenue line, which is ‘primarily’ advertising, was over $20bn in 2020.

Facebook’s problem is that, if given a choice, many people will choose not to allow tracking.

Artificial Intelligence will generate enough wealth to pay each adult $13,500 a year — if the government collects and redistributes the wealth that AI will generate

The conventional wisdom about how to spot a liar is all wrong. Previously: Former CIA Officer Will Teach You How to Spot a Lie

I tracked down my impostor — I found a video clip of him at a conference, reading out a chapter I’d written. He was dressed like me. He had even copied my tattoos

Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” Beta Is Just Laughably Bad and Potentially Dangerous

The Louvre Collections database

Museum of Everything Else

Multiple Destroyers Were Swarmed By Mysterious ‘Drones’ Off California Over Numerous Nights

A $100,000 bonus for working 100-hour workweeks? Apollo analysts hit the jackpot, even if they don’t get to have a life.

The Coronavirus Variants Don’t Seem to Be Highly Variable So Far — SARS-CoV-2 may be settling into a limited set of mutations

Oral manifestations, such as taste loss, dry mouth and oral lesions, are evident in about half of COVID-19 cases. […] Saliva from asymptomatic individuals contains infectious virus

Fox News faces a second defamation suit over its election coverage. Dominion is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox.

One useful perspective shift here is to reframe the situation so that learning to tolerate the discomfort of doing things imperfectly becomes a kind of self-improvement project in itself.

You may stumble, but that’s OK. In fact, it’s the only way you’ll learn.

The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

hand-painted “self-portrait” by world-famous robot sold at auction for over $688,000

Poem (video)

How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies — and cutting my electricity bill in half in the process

Studies show that swearing makes up around 0.5 % of the daily spoken content

the average length of an erect penis is between 5.1 and 5.5 inches (12.95-13.97 cm)

The virus that causes the common cold can effectively boot the Covid virus out of the body’s cells, say researchers.

A New Generation of Vaccines Is Coming, Some With No Needles

More than 1.4 trillion euros ($1.7 trillion) of banknotes were circulating at the end of 2020, up 11% from a year earlier. Yet the evidence suggests that only about a fifth of that is used for transactions within the currency area. Studies have shown that 30-50% by value is held outside the bloc, such as in developing economies with underdeveloped payment infrastructure and a lack of credible savings options. The rest, maybe as much as 50% by value, is physically stored by households, companies and banks. [Bloomberg]

In Europe, the [big tetch] companies are spending more than ever, hiring former government officials, well-connected law firms and consulting firms. They funded dozens of think tanks and trade associations, endowed academic positions at top universities across the continent and helped publish industry-friendly research by other firms. In the first half of 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft declared spending a combined 19 million euros, or about $23 million, equal to what they had declared for all of 2019 and up from €6.8 million in 2014. Despite the lobbying, the industry has had few major successes. [NY Times]

A tool for publishing newsletters, Substack grew in prominence over the past year as several well-known opinion journalists abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based, bespoke punditry shops on the platform. […] Former Vox columnist Matt Yglesias, for example, is reportedly poised to rake in $860,000 in subscription revenue this year. Unless he’s paying $50,000 a month for his internet connection, his newsletter’s rate of profit dwarfs that of most any major media outlet. […] But this was not the focus of last week’s Substack discourse.

Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures (2018)

Facebook Algorithmic Factory (2016)

Hennessy Youngman on Damien Hirst (2012)

Dealers are using Fortnite treats to groom children as drug mules

Study confirms that some people age more slowly — The slowest ager gained only 0.4 “biological years” for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.

Training Working Memory for Two Years – No Evidence of Latent Transfer to Intelligence

What makes It Difficult to keep an Intimate Relationship: Evidence From Greece and China

Dogs and cats can become infected by B.1.1.7, the “UK variant”

The wannabe food influencer who’s wanted by the FBI

Travelers sitting on billions of dollars in unused flight vouchers

Junior investment bankers at Goldman Sachs are suffering burnout from 100-hour work weeks and demanding bosses during a SPAC-fueled boom in deals, according to an internal survey

Fake Insider Trading Is Illegal Too

By all accounts, Len was on track to be one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But on July 3rd, 2011, he tragically took his own life at 31, following a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders. His death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi Nakamoto.

Man Loses $560,000 in Bitcoin Scam From Fake Elon Musk Account — One of the most common scam consists of creating Twitter accounts posing as personalities like Elon Musk. In some cases, criminals use accounts stolen from prominent individuals that already have the “verified blue check mark,” thus they appear legitimate and trustworthy. Although Twitter is the favorite platform for “gift scams,” they also swarm other networks such as YouTube, Facebook , Instagram and even WhatsApp.

Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go? [NY Times]

Distribution systems within the U.S. electrical grid are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack Related: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid [NY Times] and Hacking the Russian Power Grid

Mission to clean up space junk with magnets set for launch

Can Transgender Women Get Uterus Transplants?

Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)

A vampire can be considered “amphibious”

How to Build a Life: Stop Keeping Score

The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make

The McMansion Hell Yearbook: 1979

Dozens of people in Taiwan have changed their names to “salmon” to take advantage of a restaurant’s sushi promotion deal. Officials have issued a plea asking people to stop visiting government offices to request the name change.

Angry Customer Demands Refund After Ordering A Dozen Masks, Receiving “Only 12″

Scientists grew tiny tear glands in a dish — then made them cry

About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.

Erin Brockovich: Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity

Lingering symptoms from the coronavirus may turn out to be one of the largest mass disabling events in modern history.

Microbes Unknown to Science Discovered on The International Space Station

Facebook is making a bracelet that lets you control computers with your brain — The device would let you interact with Facebook’s upcoming augmented-reality glasses just by thinking.

Invisibility of Social Privilege to Those Who Have It

Unpacking a Decade of Appellate Decisions on Qualified Immunity — a judicial doctrine that shields government officials, including those in law enforcement, from being held personally responsible for constitutional violations

“Narco Submarine” Discovered in Spain

The Spanish Electrician Who Sabotaged the Nazis

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales

It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle [PDF]

researchers in Switzerland can get electricity from wood

Uber is reclassifying its UK-based drivers as “workers”

It may look like an art show but these ‘dancing lights’ reduce pesticide use by 50%

Discovery identifies non-DNA molecules in the sperm involved in transmitting paternal experience to offspring

50 new genes for eye colour

The psychological risks of meditation

The term nervous breakdown first appeared in a 1901 medical treatise for physicians. “It is a disease of the whole civilized world,” its author wrote.

The fast-growing social network SafeChat has a “Star Wars” barlike atmosphere in which white nationalists mingle with Chinese dissidents. And there’s plenty of conspiracy theories, too.

how the New York Times tests multiple headlines for a single article

To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at Czech zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens

Two Historic Brassiere-to-Face-Mask Innovations

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

A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16

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

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

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

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

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

how to operate an airport in Antarctica

Wooden Replica of Mies’ Farnsworth House

Farnworth House VR Tour

Degaussing + Manually deguassing a CRT monitor using neodymium magnet