Russian Lawmakers Approve Initial Reading Of Bill Allowing ‘Accidental’ Corruption

We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation, a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness.

When it came to definitions of rough sex, the most commonly endorsed items were: choking (77%), hair pulling (75%), spanking (69%), being pinned down (66%), being tied up (65%)…

Research shows that high levels of media multitasking may be associated with a decreased cognitive function

Fourteen horses were used in a 4-phases mirror test (covered mirror, open mirror, invisible mark, visible colored mark).

AI Identifies Pain Levels From Patient Data

Body Mass Index and Risk for COVID-19

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world

Inside Jeff Bezos’s failed attempt to make Amazon “cool” like Apple and Nike

What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?

scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes.

Man sues Hertz over receipt that cleared him of murder

Hundreds of sewage leaks detected thanks to AI

Almost all men want to feel sexually desired, but few actually do

One in four men has faked a climax at least once

In seven studies (n = 1,133), adults tried to create funny ideas and then rated the funniness of their responses, which were also independently rated by judges. People were relatively modest and self-critical about their ideas.

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself

One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). […] Greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.

A COVID-19 patient died after experiencing a 3-hour erection that doctors struggled to treat

there are some meaningful signs that even these quite scary-seeming versions of the disease may not prove all that scary in the end. I’m very worried about the Brazilian variant, since there is some evidence that it has achieved “immune escape” and produced a wave of reinfections. But the course of the others contains some real contradictions which I don’t yet know how to resolve. They appear to be considerably more infectious, and perhaps more lethal, than the “classic” strains. And yet they are growing in prevalence precisely as cases are falling nearly everywhere in the world. How can that be? Seasonality is surely playing a role in that decline, but if a new variant is 50 percent more transmissible than the old, you would expect it would require quite dramatic new restrictions to produce a decline in cases. In other words, it would be really hard, and pretty rare, to engineer a decline in the presence of those variants. Instead, it seems to be happening everywhere. [NY mag]

Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Security experts are now trying to alert and assist these victims before malicious hackers launch what many refer to with a mix of dread and anticipation as “Stage 2,” when the bad guys revisit all these hacked servers and seed them with ransomware or else additional hacking tools for crawling even deeper into victim networks. [Krebs on Security]

A study out of Harvard in 2020 also found that although cryptocurrency mining isn’t “burning down the planet”, there is “a scenario where each $1 of cryptocurrency coin value created would be responsible for $0.66 in health and climate damages.”

Earth makes a tiny seismic rumble every 26 seconds. No one knows why.

How Instagram Celebrities Promote Dubai’s Underground Animal Trade

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

The more we can google, the less we know

YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries

Block 800 NY Times reporters for $0 — The app’s creator is unknown

Suspected dog and cat meat factory in China raided after owner traces missing pet by GPS

Sidewalk robots get legal rights as “pedestrians”

UBER DRIVER COUGHED ON, ASSAULTED & PEPPER SPRAYED

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?

Would you take a coronavirus risk? — We are stuck in the middle of a massive multiplayer coordination problem

Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business” […] But as the market gets more and more competitive creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams. […] For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game. […] “Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for.” [NY Times]

One of the most active QAnon networks is in Japan, where followers believe the imperial family has been replaced by body doubles and suggest that World War II-era Emperor Hirohito was a CIA or British agent who owned the patent for the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [..] QAnon also has enormous support in Britain. A survey by civic group Hope Not Hate last year found that 26 percent of Britons believed prominent public figures are part of a pedophile child-trafficking network, while an additional 17 percent said that the pandemic is part of a “depopulation plan” — another favorite QAnon belief around the world. [Washington Post]

Bird migration forecasts in real-time — When, where, and how far will birds migrate?

The secret New York apartment behind my bathroom mirror

Floral Motifs Are Digitally Printed onto Blonde Hair

Preliminary Examination, 3B District Court, March 2, 2021

Male nurse arrested after telling patients gynecological exam was necessary part of COVID-19 testing

The words ‘dopamine’ and ‘mindfulness’ have lost all meaning

fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched or zero-matched

While physical attractiveness was less important to blind men, blind women considered physical attractiveness as important as sighted women.

Children’s Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception

Intranasal vaccines might stop the spread of the coronavirus more effectively than needles in arms

the vast majority of people who are vaccinated will be protected from Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, vaccinated people may still be able to transmit the virus, even though they do not display any symptoms.

SARS-CoV-2 was present on the ocular surface in 52 of 91 patients with COVID-19

During Lockdown, Meaningful Activity Is More Fulfilling Than Simply Staying Busy

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

I think I know what intelligence is; I think I know how brains do it. And AI is not doing what brains do.

Deciphering Bitcoin Blockchain Data by Cohort Analysis

Why Do NFTs Matter for Music?

Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT

This frog’s lungs act like noise cancelling headphones

This thesis addresses a neglected area of castles studies – the spiral stair. [full study | PDF]

Japan asks China to stop performing anal swab tests for COVID on its citizens

Rooster will appear in court after killing owner during illegal cockfight

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up, or Keep Talking, Study

Google to Stop Selling Ads Based on Your Specific Web Browsing — Citing privacy concerns, Google says it won’t use technologies that track individuals across multiple websites

Humans correctly identified six emotions in three breeds of dogs

Female and Male Reflections on Their Initial Experience of Coitus — “If you could go back in time to your first sexual intercourse, would you want to change anything? If so, what would you change and why?” […] a majority of both males (66.95%) and females (54.00%) reporting they would not want to change anything about their first coital experience. Among respondents who reported a desired change the three primary desired change themes were partner (15.72%), age (8.18%), and location (5.03%)

Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex.

There is a famous anecdote about an experiment once conducted on a group of unsuspecting diners who were served a meal of steak, chips, and peas under dim illumination. Partway through the meal, the lighting was returned to normal levels of illumination, revealing to the guests that the steak they were eating was, in fact, blue, the chips green, and the peas red.

Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time? [PDF]

‘When will it end?’ — How a changing virus is reshaping scientists’ views on COVID-19

The Dangers of Brain Science Overdetermining Legal Outcomes

The guidance is for members of the office. It is meant to help them in their task of making it as easy as possible for readers to understand the Bills that we produce. [PDF]

How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency

Newest Las Vegas ’slot machine’ is 11 stories tall and dispenses used cars

as restaurants increasingly receive takeout orders online and through apps, they face a new challenge called “friendly fraud” or “chargebacks.” In the scam, a customer orders food, often through a delivery service, then receives their meal, but disputes the charge with their credit card company to get a refund.

To fight climate change, save the whales, some scientists say — In death, whales carry the tons of carbon stored in their massive bodies down to rest on the seafloor, where it can remain for centuries. Whale excrement fertilizes the ocean, producing large phytoplankton blooms that absorb enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.

Men more than women report regret passing up short-term sexual opportunities (inaction regret), while women regret having had sexual encounters (action regret). will men who regret passing up sex engage in more short-term sex following regret? Will women who regret short-term encounters either choose better quality partners, reduce number of one-night stands or shift their strategy to long-term relationships? There was no clear evidence for the proposed functional shifts in sexual behavior.

Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome

Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes (Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense. Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.)

Huge, Global Study of Plastic Toys Finds Over 100 Substances That May Harm Children

How to become a super memorizer – and what it does to your brain

Arnold came across something called the Paranormal Challenge, a contest offering $250,000 to anyone offering indisputable proof of supernatural abilities. Over the years it’s devised experiments to test people who claim they can read minds, dim lights with the power of their brains, and peer, X-ray-like, through people’s skin. So far none have passed the test or claimed the prize.

Researchers virtually open and read sealed historic letters

Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet

How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist

Banks in Germany Tell Customers to Take Deposits Elsewhere — Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest.

The first AI-written play, “AI: When a robot writes a play,” tells the journey of a robot who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death. The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet.

Goldman Sachs restarts cryptocurrency desk amid bitcoin boom

Bitcoin could in the future become the preferred currency for international trade or face a “speculative implosion”

Recently, a botnet that researchers have been following for about two years began using a new way to prevent command-and-control server takedowns: by camouflaging one of its IP addresses in the bitcoin blockchain.

The NFT frenzy

How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

Body Ballet by Nude Robot

NASA hid secret messages in the Perseverance parachute

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Fisher-Price® My Home Office — Better grab a latte to go, that report is due this morning

dentists are able to tell if you’ve recently performed oral sex

Forty-three percent of Americans shopping online experienced package theft last year, up from 36 percent in 2019[NY Times]

Murderers benefits from expressing guilt and deontological beliefs — Even if participants judged a person who murdered their parents or many innocent people in a terrorist plane attack.

How Much Older Do You Get When a Wrinkle Appears on Your Face?

We are now discovering that telomeres are an unreliable ageing clock

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April — Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

We tend to not perceive information about the world around us accurately. Instead, our brains interpret new information through a host of innate and learned mechanisms that can introduce bias and distortions One of the best studied mechanisms that guide – and distort – our perception is the psychophysical Weber-Fechner law. According to this empirically derived, mathematically formulated law we tend to put more emphasis on smaller deviations in size while underestimating larger changes. Here we investigate the hypothesis that our perception of data associated with the spread of COVID-19 and similar pandemics is governed by the same psychophysical laws. We demonstrate that the Weber-Fechner law can be shown to directly affect the decision-making of officials in response to this global crisis as well as the greater public at large.

deception is perceived to be ethical, and individuals want to be deceived, when deception is perceived to prevent unnecessary harm

In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure. Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent. There were not enough subjects who drank more than three cups daily to know if more coffee would decrease the risk further. [NY Times]

The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, acting as a shield against the solar wind (a stream of charged particles and radiation) that flows out from the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stable in strength and direction, and it has the ability to flip or reverse itself. Some 42,000 years ago, the poles did just that for around 800 years, before swapping back. […] the flip, along with changing solar winds, could have triggered an array of dramatic climate shifts leading to environmental change and mass extinctions. […] experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards.

“Can only have been painted by a madman” — Inscription on ‘The Scream’ That Baffled Experts for Decades Was Written by Edvard Munch Himself, New Research Shows

Florida women wear ‘granny’ disguise to try to get Covid vaccine

Drone Swarms Are Getting Too Fast For Humans To Fight, U.S. General Warns — Previously: Autonomous killer drones

Citibank can’t get back $500 million it wired by mistake, judge rules

Air pollution is associated with poorer quality sperm, finds study

The coronavirus is here to stay — many scientists expect the virus that causes COVID-19 to become endemic, but it could pose less danger over time

Cinemas rent out their auditoriums to gamers to bring in a new revenue stream ($90 for two hours)

Women better at reading minds than men, study

Findings suggest that individuals are unable to accurately identify AI-generated artwork

The Most Powerful Artificial Intelligence Knows Nothing About Investing

we developed an experimental “stock market”’ task in which cohorts of 4 rats drove asset prices up and down by selecting and subsequently buying, selling, or holding “stocks” to earn sweet liquid reward. […] Rats’ choice of the sell option demonstrated a robust tendency toward realizing gains more quickly than losses, which is characteristic of the “disposition effect” in human stock markets. Our results indicate that rats exhibit behavioral biases similar to human investors

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

Fake Amazon reviews ‘being sold in bulk’ online

Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax [Washington Post]

Free Trading Isn’t Free: How Robinhood Makes Money

List Of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC

The 25 Greatest Art Heists of All Time

In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension

The essence of zero-knowledge proofs is that it is trivial to prove that one possesses knowledge of certain information by simply revealing it; the challenge is to prove such possession without revealing the information itself or any additional information

How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside? This riddle may seem confounding, but its digital equivalent is now so solvable that it’s becoming a business plan. IBM is the latest innovator to tackle the well-studied cryptographic technique called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which allows for the processing of encrypted files without ever needing to decrypt them first.

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

Basic music theory guide for beginners

All the COVID virus in the world could fit in a can of coke, says mathematician

vagina-scented face masks + Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle (“The candle exploded and emitted huge flames”)

Exhaled aerosol increases with degree of COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity

females are overall more aware of their smile and the impact it has on their public image

Traditional yoga encompasses a variety of practices, such as physical postures, breathing techniques, meditation practices, and ethical teachings. Numerous studies and meta-analyses have demonstrated yoga’s efficacy in promoting mental and physical health. Conversely, little is known about how the diverse components of yoga contribute to its overall effect. […] combined interventions incorporating multiple components consistently outperformed simpler interventions. Adding breathing and/or meditation practices to yoga interventions proved particularly beneficial in this regard

Cats show no avoidance of people who behave negatively to their owner

Researchers teach four pigs how to play a rudimentary joystick-enabled video game

Companies with no business plan, no profit, and no revenue are flooding Wall Street. They’re called SPACs, and investors are pouring money into them.

There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total, and 2.6 million Bitcoin left to be mined. 18.4 million Bitcoin were mined in 10 years, but it will take another 120 years to mine the remaining 2.6 million.

The statement there can never be more than 21 million bitcoins is 100% false.

The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), a 1988 book better known as The KLF, is a step-by-step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills. [things magazine]

Serviette Sculptures: Mattia Giegher’s Treatise on Napkin Folding (1629)

Arkansas farmer pleads guilty to dumping dead animals on neighbor’s grave while dressed as a woman

Doesn’t everybody jaywalk? On the motivated enforcement of frequently violated rules

“bitcoin’s fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact”

What you should know about Clubhouse, the invite-only, audio social app

Facebook, which has a history of cloning its competitors, has started working on an audio chat product, to compete with Clubhouse. [NY Times]

What other variants might be out there?

Our results show that therapeutic and prophylactic administration of EIDD-2801, an oral broad spectrum antiviral currently in phase II–III clinical trials, dramatically inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication in vivo and thus has significant potential for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

New AI tool predicts who’ll die from COVID-19 with up to 90% accuracy

Viral ‘I’m not a cat’ filter is a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops

This is the first study to examine deception across the entire lifespan. We tested 1005 Science museum visitors from 6 to 77 years. Adolescents tell most lies, children and the elderly the least.

concordant drinking couples may achieve immediate benefits for couple harmony from drinking alcohol together.

Psychedelics in combination with psychotherapy are remarkably efficient at treating depression. At the correct doses, psychedelics are well tolerated, producing only minor side effects such as transient fear, perception of illusions, nausea/vomiting or headaches. These fleeting side effects pale in comparison to the severity of commonly prescribed antidepressants, which include dangerous changes in heart rate and blood pressure, paradoxical increases in suicidality, and withdrawal symptoms.

In 2017 a team of researchers used Google Street View images to study the distribution of car types in the US and then used that data to determine the demographic makeup of the country. It turns out that the car you drive is a surprisingly reliable proxy for your income level, your education, your occupation, and even the way you vote in elections. Another team of researchers used the images of people’s houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in a car accident.

Vaccines or Not, Scientists Now Believe Covid is Here to Stay

There are currently four endemic coronaviruses that, for most people, just cause a cold. Whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, will join them will be down to two predominant factors that control how a virus behaves in a population: the virus’s biology and the immunity of the host population.

SARS-CoV-2 mutations similar to those in the B1.1.7 UK variant could arise in cases of chronic infection, where treatment over an extended period can provide the virus multiple opportunities to evolve, say scientists.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter Target Resellers of Hacked Accounts — Particularly prized are short usernames, which can often be resold for thousands of dollars to those looking to claim a choice vanity name. […] Facebook seized hundreds of accounts — mainly on Instagram — that have been stolen from legitimate users through a variety of intimidation and harassment tactics, including hacking, coercion, extortion, sextortion, SIM swapping, and swatting.

A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead.

Researchers Test Detection Methods For AI-Generated Content

The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy. — Researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge. It has also led to far messier data sets: they may unintentionally include photos of minors, use racist and sexist labels, or have inconsistent quality and lighting. The trend could help explain the growing number of cases in which facial-recognition systems have failed with troubling consequences.

In 2016, the N.S.A.’s own hacking tools were hacked, by a still unknown assailant. Those tools were picked up first by North Korea, then Russia, in the most destructive cyberattack in history. Over the next three years, Iran emerged from a digital backwater into one of the most prolific cyber armies in the world. China, after a brief pause, is back to pillaging America’s intellectual property. And, we are now unwinding a Russian attack on our software supply chain that compromised the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Energy and its nuclear labs and the Department of Homeland Security, the very agency charged with keeping Americans safe. We know this not because of some heroic N.S.A. hack, or intelligence feat, but because the government was tipped off by a security company, FireEye, after it discovered the same Russian hackers in its own systems. America remains the world’s most advanced cyber superpower, but the hard truth, the one intelligence officials do not want to discuss, is that it is also its most targeted and vulnerable. At this very moment, we are getting hacked from so many sides that it has become virtually impossible to keep track. [NY Times]

A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Paris court finds France guilty of failing to meet its own Paris climate accord commitments

Scholars generally do agree that conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. They tap into basic aspects of human cognition and psychology, which may help explain why they take hold so easily — and why they’re seemingly impossible to kill. […] “The general hypothesis that’s put out there in the media is [that] everyone’s becoming conspiracists, and now is the golden age of conspiracy theory,” Uscinski says. “We find no such thing whatsoever.”

You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots.

Sterling Silver Crazy Straw, $275

Six arrested after changing Hollywood sign to ‘Hollyboob’

A Florida lawyer has been disbarred for using his attorney privileges to visit women in jail and record sexual encounters with them for a pornographic film [more]

Scientists have managed to engineer spinach plants which are capable of sending emails — Through nanotechnology, engineers have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to the scientists.

bullshitters are particularly bad at seeing through the bullshit of others

Timing matters when correcting fake news — Providing fact-checks after headlines (debunking) improved subsequent truth discernment more than providing the same information during (labeling) or before (prebunking) exposure.

The Dunning-Kruger effect (why incompetent people don’t know they’re unskilled) is probably not real

Definitive logic indicates that GOD created not only Adam and Eve but also additional people.

Amazon is using AI-equipped cameras in delivery vans — The cameras record drivers “100% of the time” while they’re on their route and flag a series of safety infractions, including failure to stop at a stop sign, speeding and distracted driving.

human-made materials now weigh as much as all living biomass, say scientists

A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted predominantly through the air — by people talking and breathing out large droplets and small particles called aerosols. Catching the virus from surfaces — although plausible — seems to be rare. [Nature]

“You can remove your mask when you’re eating or drinking, so you have the guy eating one sunflower seed at a time so he can keep the mask off the whole flight.”

“Cybercrime and cyber-enabled crimes are going to offer enormous potential for criminal groups of all sizes and scales to replace lost income elsewhere [being] constrained by virus-control conditions”

A young program that puts troubled nonviolent people in the hands of health care workers instead of police officers has proven successful in its first six months

Archaeologists unearth Egyptian mummies with golden tongues

How wombats produce their cube-shape poo has long been a biological puzzle — The cube shape is formed within the intestines – not at the point of exit, as previously thought

More than 1,000 years ago, the western church was in crisis. […] During this period there was a fairly frequent use of the early medieval equivalent of impeachment. This was a church synod held in Rome, at which the holder of the highest office in Christendom could be tried for transgressions against the traditions and customs of their office. One such synod took place in January 897 and heard charges against the most recent former pontiff, Formosus (pope from 891 to 896). The only problem was that Formosus had been dead for seven months by the time the trial started. But the new pope, Stephen VI, was of the firm opinion that even when a leader had left office they could still be punished for their transgressions. Pope Stephen had Formosus’ corpse withdrawn from its sarcophagus and brought to the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome to be put on trial. The corpse was clad in papal vestments and seated on a throne to face charges that Formosus had broken the rules of the church. Close by stood a deacon to answer in Formosus’ name. Stephen VI charged the cadaver with having broken an oath not to return to Rome and of having illegally obtained the title of pope because he was already a bishop at the time of his election. [Raw Story]

The famous Duck/Rabbit image was uploaded to Google Cloud’s Vision API […] 73% confident it’s a duck […] Rabbit was, however, 100% absent.

Simon Popper, Ulysses, 2006 — [a reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) rearranging all the words in the original book in alphabetical order]

The belief that humanure is unsafe for agricultural use is called fecophobia

My favourite species of birds are the ones named by people who clearly hate birds.

An Historical Collection of Found Paper Airplanes

Confused, jealous wife stabs husband after seeing her younger self in old photos

New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music

Subway’s tuna is not tuna, but a ‘mixture of various concoctions,’ a lawsuit alleges

People least able to detect bullshit believe they are significantly more skilled at detecting bullshit compared to everyone else

parents with more children reported that time passed more quickly

Apple announced in 2020 that it would ask app makers to fill out what are essentially privacy nutrition labels. Just like packaged food has to disclose how much sugar it contains, apps would have to disclose in clear terms how they gobble your data. The labels appear in boxes towards the bottom of app listings. […] In tiny print on the detail page of each app label, Apple says, “This information has not been verified by Apple.” [Washington Post]

Economic gloom tends to reduce work-related burnout and the associated use of harmful substances, cut traffic deaths and workplace accidents, decrease environmental pollution. According to Ballester (and some previous literature), these effects may well counterbalance the opposite trend: While unemployment does increase suicide and crime risks, the overall effect of recent major recessions on mortality appears to be negligible. If Machines Ruled Us, Lockdowns Would Be Tougher

Teen Scientist Finds a Low-Tech Way to Recycle Water

Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — Google has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

No Time To Die reshoots ‘required for James Bond’s now out-of-date product placements’

Zookeepers and veterinarians obtained semen from Mufasa through the process of electro-ejaculation. But Mufasa, aged 20, could not survive the procedure.

djtrumplibrary.com

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds

“The rooster cry is a French tradition that needs to be preserved.” — France has passed a law protecting the sounds and smells of the countryside

Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year

How law enforcement gets around your smartphone’s encryption — Openings provided by iOS and Android security are there for those with the right tools.

Lying makes us mimic the body language of the people we are talking to

at least one third of SARS-CoV-2 infections are asymptomatic

Presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the Cornea of Viremic Patients With COVID-19

Air travel has accelerated the global pandemic, contributing to the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) throughout the world. We describe an outbreak that demonstrates in-flight transmission, providing further evidence to add to the small number of published studies in this area. The flight was 7.5 h long and had a passenger occupancy of 17%. Thirteen cases were passengers on the same flight […] resulted in a total of 59 cases

Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificial intelligence

The Michigan Republican Party has moved to replace the Republican member of the Board of State Canvassers who certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state in November.

Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryptocurrency. Yellen argues many cryptocurrencies are used “mainly for illicit financing.”

Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.

News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020 — Facebook stands out as a regular source of news for about a third of Americans

these drinks exist for your subclinical anxiety needs

San Francisco on Film

local legends and obscure curiosities from days of yore

Trump Urine Test Kit

Facial recognition can determine a person’s political party, with reasonable accuracy

Calculations Show It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI

How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News

Ventilation and viral loads: the key misunderstandings of how coronavirus spreads

Wastewater-based epidemiology: a 20-year journey may pay off for Covid-19

The Sensitivity and Costs of Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Infection With Saliva Versus Nasopharyngeal SwabsFREE

Saliva testing for detection of SARS-CoV-2 had a similar sensitivity and specificity to that of nasopharyngeal testing

Samsung inadvertently uses iPhone to tweet Galaxy Unpacked promo

Apple fails to overturn VirnetX patent verdict, could owe over $1.1 billion
+ VirnetX has been described as being a patent troll

How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation

A British man who accidentally threw a hard drive loaded with bitcoin into the trash has offered the local authority where he lives more than $70 million if it allows him to excavate a landfill site.

Why Is Bitcoin Making New All-Time Highs?

Baking with AI-made recipes

Macaques are infamous for brazenly robbing unsuspecting tourists and clinging on to their possessions until food is offered as ransom payment. Researchers have found they are also skilled at judging which items their victims value the most and using this information to maximise their profit.

The total number of galaxies in the universe is probably in the hundreds of billions, rather than 2 trillions

James Naismith, inventor of the game of basketball

Is it possible to locate a man given only his photograph and first name?

Sony’s New Lip-Reading Technology Could Boost Accessibility—or Invade Privacy

The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own thanto the same item when they do not own it. In a meta-analysis and three laboratory experiments, we show for the first time that ownership has no effect on beliefs about either: (a) the quality of the item or (b) the appropriate market price for the item.

Are couples with daughters more likely to divorce than couples with sons?

Law Firm Giving Away Free Divorce for Valentine’s Day

Sexual Practices and Satisfaction among Gay and Heterosexual Men in Romantic Relationships: A Comparison

Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics.

Previous research suggests that “Duchenne smiles,” indicated by the combined actions of the orbicularis oculi (cheek raiser) and the zygomaticus major muscles (lip corner puller), signal enjoyment. This research has compared perceptions of Duchenne smiles with non-Duchenne smiles among individuals voluntarily innervating or inhibiting the orbicularis oculi muscle. Here we used a novel set of highly controlled stimuli: photographs of patients taken before and after receiving botulinum toxin treatment for crow’s feet lines that selectively paralyzed the lateral orbicularis oculi muscle and removed visible lateral eye wrinkles, to test perception of smiles. Smiles in which the orbicularis muscle was active (prior to treatment) were rated as more felt, spontaneous, intense, and happier. Post treatment patients looked younger, although not more attractive.

Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.”

The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire [NY Times]

Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, owns 7,002 Bitcoin [about $220 million] that he cannot retrieve because he lost the password to his digital wallet. He lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail. [NY Times]

A roundup of research on US presidential transitions

“Relative frequency of hashtags that call for execution by hanging”

NASA spacecraft discovers there may be fewer galaxies than we thought

Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

Discovered within the last ten years, formicamycins have great potential because, under laboratory conditions, superbugs like MRSA do not become resistant to them. However, Streptomyces formicae only produce the antibiotics in small quantities.

Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, is bad for the average person but great for a small number of people

How did Zoroaster speak? What did he speak?  When did he speak? There seems to be a lot of dissension, even among Iranists, concerning the basic facts of his life and times. 

James Joyce’s Ulysses is an anti-stream of consciousness novel

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they don’t really understand language at all.

Stockfish evaluates about 100 million positions per second using rudimentary heuristics, whereas Leela Chess evaluates 40 000 positions per second using a deep neural network trained from millions of games of self-play. They also use different tree search approaches.

How Seinfeld’s Costumers Built One of TV’s Most Iconic Wardrobes

The Serpentine Illusion

Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom

Identical twins are not so identical, study suggests — they differ by an average of 5.2 early mutations, adding new perspective to nature-versus-nurture debates

After group conversations, people underestimated how much they were liked by others

Bottle-cork injury to the eye: a review of 13 cases

Is Light Fundamentally A Wave Or A Particle?

being angry increases your vulnerability to misinformation — Human memory is prone to error — and new research provides evidence that anger can increase these errors.

Genetic Variants of SARS-CoV-2—What Do They Mean?

Flu strains mutate regularly so vaccines need to be slightly altered every year. There are, however, several “universal” flu vaccines currently being studied that aim to make annual flu vaccinations a thing of the past. n fact, according to the American Society for Microbiology, some of these vaccine candidates are in phase 2 and phase 3 trials right now.

Covid-19 immunity likely lasts for years A new study shows immune cells primed to fight the coronavirus should persist for a long time after someone is vaccinated or recovers from infection.

Gorillas test positive for coronavirus at San Diego Zoo

school closures and lockdown are the only interventions modeled that have a reliable impact on Rt, and lockdown appears to have played a key role in reducing Rt below 1.0. We conclude that reversal of lockdown, without implementation of additional, equally effective interventions, will enable continued, sustained transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.

Integrated information as a possible basis for plant consciousness

2019-2020 Tech company donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the election

As The New York Times noted in 2016, not even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of all media, succeeded in turning her personal franchise into a cable powerhouse. Can Trump do something the far-wealthier and much more appealing Winfrey couldn’t?

migrating a large product off Amazon Web Services can take months of staging and possibly years to execute [more]

Clearview AI’s CEO says that use of his company’s facial recognition technology among law enforcement spiked 26 percent the day after a mob of pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. Audio: What is Clearview AI, and what influence does it hold?

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

I review 65 years of Playboy centerfolds to consider how their bodies—physical characteristics, positions, contexts, and explicitness—have changed, and how this reflects the broader social change to which they are subject. I find that, overall, very little changes over the years, with two notable exceptions: increased visibility of the montes pubis and the slow decreasing in the amount of pubic hair the models have

A law buried in the 5,600-page emergency relief bill requires the US intel agencies to deliver an unclassified report on UFOs. More:US intelligence agencies have 180 days to share what they know about UFOs.

Of all the premature deaths among the ranks of the creative, none is more painful to contemplate than Franz Schubert’s

Lessons for Philosophers and Scientists from Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown

We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions

Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time

A single icon can represent any number up to 9999

Touching door with pan

Australia is on track to eradicate transmission of HIV by the end of this decade.

The world is gaining two million acres of leafy cover per year, an increase of about five percent since 2000, equivalent to the leaf area of all the Amazon rainforests. 

The number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty was 88% in 1981. By 2015 it had fallen to 0.7%.

A biologist invented a sensor that detects spikes in ethylene, the chemical that makes fruits ripen, so distributors can sell it before it spoils. It’s already saved one company $400,000 in wasted food.

Police in Durham, England are helping arrestees get access to social services instead of prosecuting them. Of the 2,600 people they’ve helped, only 6% have re-offended.

A jazz club in Paris has re-opened for performances –– for one patron at a time. In just a few weeks, Le Gare hosted over 3,000 concerts for one.

{ 112 bits of good news that kept us sane in 2020 | Continue reading }

Smiling and grimacing can reduce needle injection pain, study

athletes’ bodies produced 3-5 times the emissions while working out, compared to when they were at rest. Chlorine from bleach cleaner sprayed onto equipment was reacting with the amino acids released from sweating bodies.

Data from four waves of the National Survey of Family Growth reveal American women who report more sex partners are less likely to get married (though so too are virgins). [SocArXiv]

Danish and Chinese tongues taste broccoli and chocolate differently — For several years, researchers have known that women are generally better than men at tasting bitter flavours. Now, research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that ethnicity may also play a role in how sensitive a person is to the bitter taste found in for example broccoli, Brussels sprouts and dark chocolate.

Cow burp-catcher ‘could help reduce methane emissions by 60%’

Folklore structure reveals how conspiracy theories emerge, fall apart

QAnon Is Two Different People, Shows Machine Learning Analysis

Airlines warn travelers: Emotional support animals will no longer be permitted. Animals that previously traveled as emotional support animals may still accompany passengers as carry-on or cargo pets if they meet requirements. [Washington Post]

Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 in the Sustainability of Airbnb Business Model

Singapore police will be able to use data obtained by its coronavirus contact-tracing technology for criminal investigations

When you hear the word inquisition, you think of Spain, heretics in strange tall pointed hats, the stake, forced confessions, horrifying images that make the words Holy Inquisition a cruel oxymoron. It is less well known that there were also inquisitors in Venice who could make life rather difficult for people.

The family with no fingerprints — At least four generations of Apu Sarker’s family have an extremely rare condition leaving them with no fingerprints

Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, has been named the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s 2020 Person of the Year , narrowly beating two other populist leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Erdogan

Harvard Professor Says Alien Technology Visited Earth in 2017

Contrary to wide‐held beliefs, religiosity decreases with greater expected proximity to death

Our study cannot answer whether some men adopt a feminist identity to increase their access to sexual partners.

Questions from 1920 Still Haunt Neuroscience — A 100-year-old paper anticipated key issues in modern neuroscience

For a while, the Union’s top general in the Civil War was a perfectionist. George Meade kept looking for the perfect opportunity to engage the forces of the Confederacy in battle. He accomplished little. Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman got the job done by their willingness to use imperfect methods. How Perfectionism Has Made the Pandemic Worse

Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a Colorado man with no history of travel, an additional case was found in California. There are still many unknowns, but much concern has focused on whether this new variant would throw off vaccine efficacy or cause more severe disease —- with some degree of relief after an initial study indicated that it did not do either. […] Bedford notes that this new variant seems to have a higher secondary-attack rate —- meaning the number of people subsequently infected by a known case — compared with “regular” COVID-19. Finally, the new variant seems to result in higher viral loads (though this is harder to be sure about as viral loads can be affected by sampling bias and timing). […] This variant, now called B.1.1.7, has “an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein,” which is how the virus gains entry into our cells. The new variant may be better at eluding our immune response and replicating, or be able to better bind to locations in our body more conducive to infecting others, but that is all speculative for the moment. […] we may need to be stricter — less time indoors, better masks, better ventilation, more disinfection of high-touch surfaces. […] We don’t know. We won’t know for a while. [The Atlantic]

Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

New study following 12,541 healthcare workers for #COVID19 re-infection over 31 weeks published in NEJM. Natural immunisation held up well over the 6 months of the study, with only two cases of asymptomatic reinfections observed.

Scientists turn carbon dioxide into jet fuel

Google Maps’ Moat is Evaporating

You can now gain entry to any station of the New York City Subway with the tap of a phone, instead of the swipe of a MetroCard.

The largest single bank heist of all time was committed the day before the Coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, when Saddam Hussein sent his son, Qusay, to the Central Bank of Iraq with a handwritten note to withdraw all the cash in the bank. Qusay then removed about $1 billion (£810 million) in $100 dollar notes in strongboxes, requiring three lorries to carry it all. Approximately $650 million (£525 million) was found later by US troops hidden in the walls of one of Saddam’s palaces. Although both of Saddam’s sons were killed, and Saddam was captured and executed, more than one third of the money was never recovered. — Seven Greatest Real-Life Heists

How Did Madagascar Become the World’s Biggest Producer of Vanilla?

Maneki-neko (beckoning cat)

Alex’s intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five-year-old human, in some respects, and he had not even reached his full potential by the time he died. She believed that he possessed the emotional level of a two-year-old human at the time of his death. Looking at a mirror, he said “what color”, and learned “grey” after being told “grey” six times. This made him the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked a question.

Human chess match, Leningrad, 1924