Edible underwear was never meant to be eaten

Test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable — and after some participants were told that robot had broken down

Autistic ‘Prison Houdini’ who memorized guards’ keys and carved exact replicas for 13 escape attempts in 36 years is denied parole

On average, CEOs earn $176,840 annually. College presidents, $377,261.

Disney U.S. parks will charge visitors different prices based on anticipated demand, with weekdays during the school year much cheaper than holidays. Previously, the parks charged the same price for a one-day pass any time of year.

Hijab and “Hitchhiking”: A Field Study

“Social media is 95 percent of what happens in all relationships now”

New model explains how things go viral online

New research shows that you only need handful of influencers to give the impression that everyone is talking about your brand. [Thanks Tim]

Giraffe neck is longer than thought

Trouble with cats on your counters, table tops, furniture, curtains, floor areas – or maybe “hanging out at your entry door”? (new patent)

World’s first electronics transistor, assembled by hand, 1947 and and the suburb of agbogbloshie

Shazam for Plants and for birds

Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language

The Ross Sisters

Norman Reedus (Daryl) practicing his crossbow

Ass eating restaurant in Japan [Thanks GG]

Selling phone

A Canadian man who disappeared 30 years ago is set to be reunited with his family after remembering his identity

A woman in Brazil who had cosmetic surgery ended up with not only a flatter stomach and larger breasts, she also developed kleptomania for a few weeks, a new case report reveals.

Drinking more coffee may help prevent alcohol-related cirrhosis

A little-known effort to conduct biological warfare occurred during the 17th century

Why tipping is wrong

They found a 9% earnings premium for lesbians over heterosexual women, compared with a penalty of 11% for gay men relative to straight men. Lesbians receive no wage premium in the public sector.

Headphones that get you high on dopamine are tipped to go on sale next month

When is a Transport Map Too Complex for Your Brain?

How a dead millionaire convinced dozens of women to have as many babies as possible

Captured : People in prison drawing people who should be

A Naked Therapy session takes place via webcam

Smell Dating, the first mail odor dating service

Man kicked out of all-you-can-eat buffet after eating more than 50 lbs of food, sues for $2-million

The Parmesan cheese you sprinkle on your penne could be wood. Some brands promising 100 percent purity contained no Parmesan at all.

People took the fewest calories when presented with smaller versus regular-sized pizza slices placed on a larger table

False confessions are surprisingly easy to extract from people simply by keeping them awake, according to a new study

Procrastination as a Fast Life History Strategy

You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

Parkinson’s patients trained to respond to placebos

Half the world to be short-sighted by 2050

Period pain can be “as bad as a heart attack.” So why aren’t we researching how to treat it?

“Your first experience of something is going to be well remembered, more than later experiences”Why we never really get over that first love

A quarter of men over 85 had sex in the last year

Postmodernism’s Self-Nullifying Reading of Nietzsche

How Voltaire made a fortune rigging the lottery

Son of a carpenter, he claimed income of $100 million per year and assets of $1 billion, owned a palatial Tokyo home and retained a private chef who cooked him marinated monkey meat.

-0.5% Interest rate: Why people are paying to save. Negative interest rates, once a theoretical curiosity, are now the stated policy of some powerful central banks. [NY Times]

People typically overestimate how much others are prepared to pay for consumer goods and services. [PDF]

What if we could record and rewind our thoughts?

A cocktail party in a dish: How neurons filter the chatter

Samsung warns customers not to discuss personal information in front of smart TVs

Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices

A court of appeals in Paris has ruled against an appeal filed by Facebook, after a 2015 ruling regarding suspension of an account for posting Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World.

You Can Now Download and 3D Print Your Dream Closet

3D-printed ear, bone and muscle structures come to life after implantation in mice

Cotton candy machines may hold key for making artificial organs

Computer programs used by John Cage

Automated office chairs

Things researchers do with ping-pong balls

Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage

France becomes first country to force all supermarkets to give unsold food to needy

France gives Facebook 3 months to stop snooping on non-users’ browsing history, then 60 days

Paris gets first meat vending machine

Study Finds You Can Grow Brain Cells Through Exercise

Babies can see image differences that are invisible to adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of five months

Much sleep talking does not occur during dreams

We collected data from 203 conveniently sampled taxi drivers in Gauteng province of South Africa. This study could assist the Department of Transport in designing road safety campaigns that addresses the erroneous beliefs by drivers that road accidents are pre-destined, and not as a result of individual’s driving behavior.

U.S. vehicle safety regulators have said the artificial intelligence system piloting a self-driving Google car could be considered the driver under federal law

1.4% of Enjoy customers have returned their gadgets, compared to the average 22% product return for online purchases in the US

Investors who offer “precise” bids for company shares yield better market outcomes than those who offer round-numbered bids, study

Escorts raised prices in 2015, largely in response to several years of rising hotel costs

Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors

Floating library on Echo Park Lake

Michael Jackson’s pet chimp, Bubbles, is living out his twilight years in Florida

Speed

The classics can be Zzzz

The $49.99 Holdr app tells you if you’re holding your phone or not and This is a $100 mug that tells you what you just poured into it, via a digital screen. And Keep track of your gases with CH4 [all thanks to Tim]

Even people aged over 90 report better life satisfaction and happiness than those aged 40-59

Clearing Out Old Cells Increases Life Span of Mice by 25 Percent

People who prioritise time over money are happier

New data confirm that for countries worldwide long-term trends in happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related

People spend too much time on problems in which the reward difference between the options is low

When people choose not to reveal personal information - to be “hiders” - they are judged negatively by others. Observers rate those who reveal even questionable behavior more positively.

Researchers activate previously dormant memory cells

One reason your hair is thinning? Some of it turns into skin.

Progress in psychiatry in the West has been retarded by the proclivity of the discipline to swing violently between 2 approaches to viewing mental illness

‘Roaring and Social Communication in African Lions (3 studies)

Mosquitoes cause more misery and loss to humanity than any other organism. We could wipe them off the face of the earth. Here’s why we don’t.

How not to get killed by a cow (First: don’t try to save your dog.)

Wall Street’s getting crushed by a form of financial engineering you’ve probably never heard of

What Is Blockchain?

“Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse

The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia—for Pay

Starting with the March issue, due to hit newsstands this weekend, Playboy magazine will no longer feature explicit nudity. In 2014, Playboy-branded products generated $1.5 billion in revenues in China, about a third of the worldwide total.

What I learned from being a stock-photography model

More signs of Uber shaping urban infrastructure

A bot that drives robocallers crazy

trumpdonald.org

Parody Patent Drawings Highlight Silicon Valley Greed [Thanks Tim]

Dutch Police Training Eagles to Take Down Drones

U.K. researcher receives permission to edit genes in human embryos

Duration of urination does not change with body size

We’re the Only Animals With Chins, and No One Knows Why [more]

Why does the brain use so much energy?

The Countries Where People Are the Most Emotionally Complex (Cultures that value interdependence, like Japan, win at being deep)

The present investigation began with the conjecture that people may do better by saying “some other time” instead of “no, not ever” in response to temptations.

Why Are Some People Habitually Late?

Researchers have developed a painkiller that is as strong as morphine, has fewer side effects, and isn’t likely to be addictive

Researchers found a way to partially un-boil an egg

Halting the explosive spread of Zika means waging war with mosquitoes. There are several ways, old and new, to win that war. And: Zika, a virus unknown to most people until recent days

Apple is developing wireless charging for mobile devices

Jobs was just getting started with the “i” motif. (For a while he even called himself the company’s iCEO.)

Conductive concrete that can carry enough electrical current to melt ice during winter storms

Cheesus Christ

Airbnb removes New York igloo charging $200 a night, but snow house was ‘very well constructed’

Harvard psychologist says people judge you based on 2 criteria when they first meet you: Can I trust this person? Can I respect this person?

We find that national percentages of very happy people are consistently and highly correlated with national prevalence of the rs324420 A allele in the FAAH gene

Why Some People Take Breakups Harder Than Others

Why can’t a guy just go again after orgasm?

And so, even as Jared was getting what he purportedly wanted — plenty of sex with plenty of women — he became increasingly bitter and judgmental.

An earnest guy in a dress shirt gets up to pitch Halolife, an e-commerce site for burial services. “It’s a $20bn industry,” he says. “Everyone dies.”

This is rudimentary design at best trying to pass as iconic

When banks in Greece were closed for three weeks last summer, some commentators pointed to Ireland in 1970 to show that a modern economy can function without banks

This study examines differential recognition of top art collectors

Haus in Schwarz (House in Black) by Erik Sturm and Simon Jung

Artist to sit naked on toilet for two days to protest the ‘bullshit’ of the art world

A piece from the early 1960s by Dan Flavin

At 83, Donald Rumsfeld Decided to Develop an App

It’s the one place in the world where I have to seek out bad food. It’s hard to find. The McDonald’s there still cooks their french fries in beef fat.

This Valentine’s Day you can name a cockroach after you ex

One in 10 Americans would do porn for $1 million — and 6% would murder for $1 billion

Italian woman turned to firefighters for help after she lost the key to her chastity belt. She explained she wore the belt voluntarily to prevent herself from entering into sexual relationships.

Scholars have assumed that trust is fragile: difficult to build and easily broken. We demonstrate, however, that in some cases trust is surprisingly robust.

What does fear do to our vision?

Pain produces memory gain

Altruism trumps good looks, although the combination of both is the most desirable of all.

New research may prove brain prepares multiple actions before acting

Individuals addicted to cocaine may have difficulty in controlling their addiction because of a previously-unknown ‘back door’ into the brain, circumventing their self-control

You Want To Be A Citadel Trader: Here Are The Requirements

People forget that Walmart is a $3 billion trucking company; it’s just they only truck for themselves. Amazon China is now registered to deliver its own products to seaports for ocean shipping.

Amazon Reveals Details About Its Crazy Drone Delivery Program

The North Dakota Crude Oil That’s Worth Less Than Nothing

20 Hollow Copyright Claims

Ten Days In A Madhouse, 1887

Woman faces jail for tagging sister-in-law on Facebook

Mike Drake collects his fingernail and toenail clippings and turns them into acrylic paperweights

Mathematicians invent new way to slice pizza into exotic shapes

City official persuades man to dress as old woman for photo op

Astronomers give David Bowie his own constellation

Yoga Joes

Washing machine brick bouncing on trampoline

Man fails to get penis drawing recognised as his signature

Facebook ‘tests loyalty’ by purposefully crashing app

The tax sleuth who took down the mastermind behind the online drug bazaar known as Silk Road [NY Times]

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social-media postings. It calculated his threat level.

The Deep Web and the Darknet: A Look Inside the Internet’s Massive Black Box

That’s the power of the good con artist: the ability to identify your deepest need and exploit it. [NY Times]

There is one thing the company doesn’t ask for: a résumé.

Is fame fair? Is fame superficial? Can it be a signal of accomplishment?

Robert Spitzer: the most influential psychiatrist of his time

25 Examples of Male Privilege from a Trans Guy’s Perspective

Why There Still Are Monkeys

Could red wine improve cognitive performance?

The Science of Herbs and Spices

How Greene Street went from a red-light district to hosting some of the highest property values in the world

This project is an attempt to use modern deep learning techniques to automatically colorize black and white photos

This map lists all unclassified Cyber Squirrel Operations that have been released to the public that we have been able to confirm

The man with a bionic penis will lose his virginity to a dominatrix who ran for parliament

Conventional wisdom and research seem to suggest that partners in dual career-couples have to decide whether they would rather risk their careers or their romantic relationship. There was no negative association between working time and relationship satisfaction.

Smart People Live Longer Than Not-Smart People, Study

The woman who can smell Parkinson’s disease

Military importance of diarrhea: lessons from the Middle East

Why more and more vultures eat their prey butt first

The Nano Membrane Toilet – a toilet which aims to treat human waste in the home without external energy or water

Hidden portrait ‘found under Mona Lisa’, says French scientist

What is a hydrogen bomb?

Just north of the San Andreas lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. We now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three.

Suspended forest, birds and electric guitars

Data Mining Reveals How Smiling Evolved During a Century of Yearbook Photos

“Near Death by Chocolate” experience

Italy: Town bans pizza-making over soaring pollution

Woman whose body turns food into alcohol beats drink-drive charge

A new study has found that watching yourself eat something unhealthy, like a slice of chocolate cake, can make that food seem less tasty. And that, in turn, might make you eat less.

Hunger Promotes Fear Extinction

By one estimate, as many as 40 percent of people experience constipation while they’re away from home

Blind person to receive “bionic eyes, ” camera mounted on a pair of glasses will feed information directly to the brain.

Physicists Say Consciousness Might Be a State of Matter

How do we know when we have seen enough information, and that we should stop any further input in order to avoid some form of information overload? [PDF]

The number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. [PDF]

On the Surfaces of Things

Apple faces $5 million lawsuit over allegedly slowing the iPhone 4S with iOS 9

What makes the drone community believe deliveries are a good idea? Assuming the technology works, do the economics make sense?

Stroboscopic kissing scenes

Man trying to time travel plows car into Florida businesses

Could Evolution Ever Yield a ‘Perfect’ Organism?

Resting in a quiet room for 10 minutes without stimulation can boost our ability to remember new information

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?

So impressed was Wiener that he promised Pitts a Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT, despite the fact that he had never graduated from high school—something that the strict rules at the University of Chicago prohibited.

Research has found conflicting results regarding the profitability of movies that have big-name stars

Bahamas man arrested for hacking 130 celebrities, tried to peddle 15 movie scripts to an undercover Department of Homeland Security agent.

The largest operational cassette factory in the US reports an impressive increase in demand

A new transparent metal has been developed for smartphone and TV displays

World Maps Without New Zealand

Everyone on Earth is actually your cousin (the most distant relative would be a 15th cousin)

Why is So Much Reported Science Wrong

Researchers showed the more often people imagined eating a food, the less likely they were to eat it later.

Several studies have confirmed that chicken soup helps to unblock congested noses and throats

Dole is the world’s largest producer of bananas. It operates the largest refrigerated fleet, or reeferships, in the world.

Mark Zuckerberg should spend $45 billion on undoing Facebook’s damage to democracies

Why Are Projects Always Behind Schedule?

In 1971 the performance artist Chris Burden stood against the wall of a California art gallery and ordered a friend to shoot him through the arm. That .22 rifle shot was the opening salvo of a movement that came to be called “endurance art”—an unnerving species of performance art in which the performer deliberately subjects himself to pain, deprivation, or extreme tedium. How Art Became Irrelevant

Smallest inkjet color picture of the world is as small as the cross-sectional area of a human hair

She’s got a plant that not only “remembered” what happened to it but stored that memory for almost a month

The man who just wanted to make a dog poop lamp

We used the money to purchase an original 1962 Picasso. The 150,000 people who donated now have a chance to vote: should we donate this work to the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, or should we laser-cut it into 150,000 tiny squares and send everyone their own scrap?

me^rry = x - mas

Man Beaten to Death For Shouting Spoiler After Star Wars Movie Premiere

Eating Lettuce Is More Than Three Times Worse in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Than Eating Bacon, Study

Our results indicate that garlic consumption may have positive effects on perceived body odour hedonicity

Have you ever been presented with an opportunity to cheat, but, paradoxically, just didn’t have the energy to bother? You may have been suffering from ‘Ego-Depletion’

Forgetting is key to learning

Science’s Breakthrough of the Year: CRISPR genome-editing technology

Netflix has created ’smart’ socks that sense when you fall asleep and pause the show you’re watching

MIT algorithm can predict which photographs people will find most memorable

The long, incredibly tortuous process of creating a Chinese font

The sad economics of internet fame

iPhones are autocorrecting ‘lardass’ to ‘Kardashian’

The practice by some Chinese parents of adopting girls and raising them as future wives for their biological sons

Scientists have figured out how to store electricity in ‘paper’

52 things I learned in 2015

By the end of this century, Africa will be home to 39% of the world’s population, almost as much as Asia, and four times the share of North America and Europe put together.

A 200-year history of interest rates shows that the real aberration looks like the 7.3 percent average experienced in the United States from 1970 to 2007. [NY Times]

Women can navigate better when given testosterone, study finds

There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds. More: They found that between 23% and 53% of individuals (depending on the sample) had brains with both “male-end” and “female-end” features. In contrast, the percentage of people with only “female-end” or only “male-end” brain features was small, ranging from zero to 8%.

Why Is the Human Vagina So Big?

Living together is basically the same as marriage, study finds

There’s one really big problem with the case for Craig S. Wright as Satoshi

What Satoshi Did

Search Engine Censys Knows the Internet’s Dirty Little Security Secrets

Here’s what it would take for self-driving cars to catch on

Chinese researchers unveil brain powered car

Intelligent anti-explosion, anti-fire and anti-odour WiFi-enabled rubbish bins appear in China

Who’s investigating fake Chinese goods? Fake investigators

In this study, we investigate cross-linguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable.

…a general expletive (oh fuck!), a personal insult (you fuck!), a cursing expletive (fuck you!), an emphatic intensifier (fucking marvellous!), in pronominal form (like fuck), as an idiomatic set phrase (fuck all), and for a destinational usage (fuck off!). Being fluent at swearing is a sign of healthy verbal ability

Deaths by this and that in Shakespeare’s plays

British pop singer Morrissey’s debut novel, “List of the Lost”, won the award for the worst sex scene of the year

Picasso’s muse Sylvette David, 1954 More: She has since changed her name to Lydia

The Real Face of Jesus

Controllable 3D model of a person made from photos

Liquid ASS [More: (used by US military to harden medics]

Stolen circumcision ambulance found after tip-off

Envy key motivator behind many Facebook posts, contributes to a decrease in mental well-being among users

Social stress messes up the hippocampus

Research shows that texts that end with a period really do come off as insincere

Ignorance may be bliss… but negative mood can make us more realistic

Sleep interruptions worse for mood than overall reduced amount of sleep, study finds

For people in relationships, sexual frequency is not significantly associated with well-being at a frequency greater than once a week.

A normal adult will die after eating 480 bananas. How Much [X] Could You Eat Before It Would Kill You?

Concert etiquette demands that audiences of classical concerts avoid inept noises such as coughs. and yet, coughing in concerts occurs more frequently than elsewhere, implying a widespread and intentional breach of concert etiquette.

A 30,000+ word blog post about how to write about information and make it spread

Court tells millionaire yoga troll Bikram Choudhury that poses can’t be copyrighted

Game company made $71,145 on Black Friday by selling nothing for $5 a pop

Words can deceive, but tone of voice cannot. Voice tone analyses of therapy sessions accurately predict whether relationships will improve.

New research hypothesizes that men eat more in front of women to “show off.”

What would happen if scientists could trick the brain into thinking broccoli tastes like chocolate? How our brains perceive the flavor of food

Scientists have figured out how to shock the salt out of seawater

Wearing a magnetic wrist strap or a copper bracelet did not appear to have any meaningful therapeutic effect, beyond that of a placebo

Humans can sleep for days when living alone underground, experiments show

What else is possible if space and time can change?

If a forecaster is only 50% certain that precipitation will happen over 80 percent of the area, PoP (chance of rain) is 40% (i.e., .5 x .8).

Why do we forget people’s names when we first meet them?

What Happens When You Can’t Talk to Yourself?

I Asked New York Cabbies Who They Were Talking to on the Phone

Why Can’t We Build a Splash-Proof Toilet?

Our Roomba Vacuumed The House With Dog Shit

Is human placenta a wonder drug, or is it just another Japanese health fad? [Thanks Tim]

Tobias Frere-Jones is back in business

That mysterious, anonymous novel satirizing tech culture is now available from a major publishing house

A Chinese artist vacuumed up Beijing’s smog and made a brick from what he collected

‘Scrotum Squeezing’ Getting Closer Look From Paralympics Officials

People who drink about three to five cups of coffee a day may be less likely to die prematurely from some illnesses than those who don’t drink or drink less coffee

Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often

Couples who have sex weekly are happiest. More sex may not always make you happier, according to new research

The effect of wearing different types of textiles on sexual activity was studied in 75 rats

What is stupid? People’s conception of unintelligent behavior

Even the CEO’s Job Is Susceptible To Automation, McKinsey Report Says

Are Successful CEOs Just Lucky?

Color preference in the insane

Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled.

Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks

Gluten Free Museum

Period panties

Indonesia considers crocodiles for prison guards

Coffee hydrates as well as water, study says. The belief that caffeinated drinks such as coffee could cause dehydration is based on a 1928 study that demonstrated caffeine’s diuretic effect.

It costs as much as $4 million to open a new diner these days, compared with $500,000 to $1 million for a higher-end restaurant, because diners require so much storage space for the inventory that their large menus require.

The Air-Conditioning Capacity of the Human Nose

Why Do Most Languages Have So Few Words for Smells?

Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain

What will the English language be like in 100 years?

English Names for fungi 2014

$635 pills of fecal matter cure deadly gastrointestinal infection

What if the gamblers are researchers betting on how each other’s experiments will turn out, and the results are used to improve science itself?

Not even astrology researchers believe in astrology

Astrobiologists Revise the Chances of Finding Advanced ET Civilizations

Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.

What’s worse than a password? A fingerprint. + How to mimic a fingerprint

What is becoming of Deleuze?

Casualty-free casual fighting for free

Baby Born Pregnant with Her Own Twins

First ‘KFC’ to open in Iran shut down after just 24 hours

Diners at his restaurant are presented with an iPod loaded with a recording of crashing waves and screeching gulls to listen to while enjoying an artfully presented plate of seafood

Testosterone levels affect how much makeup women use, study finds

The best way for swarming insects to get the protein and salt they need is to eat each other.

Can scientists agree on a definition of curiosity?

Self-driving delivery robots to hit streets of London in 2016

How does a container port work? And why aren’t America’s shipping ports automated?

Liverpool Just Opened Fast-Walking Pedestrian Lanes

The mansion is what real estate experts call a “stigmatized property” — jargon for a listing with a grisly back story

There are approximately 900 actively working mail chutes in New York. As letters grew in size, clogging of the mail chutes became an increasing problem.

Smell expert Sissel Tolaas is on a mission to capture and replicate the “smellscapes” of cities around the world [Thanks Tim]

The Popularity of Music Genres, 2005-present

I renamed some of the paint colors at the hardware store