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

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