The last wishes of the dying are also given more moral weight if made by those who ultimately die while conscious. These results reveal a simple way to increase your influence after death and highlight both the power of endings and the subjective nature of mind.

Can AI Become Conscious?

Social perceptions of individuals missing upper front teeth

Does Alcohol Consumption Affect the Flight and Echolocation Performance of Phyllostomid Bats?

Legendary Rock Critic Lester Bangs’ 1975 Interview with Kraftwerk

On April 20, chaos reigned in oil markets. Here’s what happened.

The results obtained indicate that no one algorithm can be used to solve the multitude of possible scenarios involved in the re-assembly of incomplete jigsaw puzzles

The Fascinating Origins of Greyhound Racing

Drone Disguised as Hummingbird Captures Incredible Footage of Monarch Butterfly Swarm

Number of streams (apple music, deezer, spotify…) to earn one ound and one hour’s UK minimum wage

Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Elements should not appear to make “false promises” by never coming into play.

Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why [audio + transcript]

From 2000: What You’ll Need to Know In 2020 That You Don’t Know Now

Collectively, the global fashion industry produces nearly 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or 8.1% of the world total […] The process of making one cotton t-shirt emits about 5 kilograms of carbon dioxide — around the amount produced during a 12-mile car drive. It also uses 1,750 liters of water. That’s because cotton is a water-guzzling crop. […] Over half of fast fashion items are thrown away in under a year. [CNN]

Contrary to assertions that Amazon has made to Congress, employees often consulted sales information on third-party vendors when developing private-label products. [audio]

Four functions of markets

For nearly two hundred years, U.S. copyright law has assumed that owners may voluntarily abandon their rights in a work. But scholars have largely ignored copyright abandonment, and the case law is fragmented and inconsistent. As a result, abandonment remains poorly theorized, owners can avail themselves of no reliable mechanism to abandon their works, and the practice remains rare. [LawArXiv]

Does Lingerie Color Affect Perceived Attractiveness and Evolutionary Fitness?

An examination of nearly 350 published psychological experiments found that nearly half failed to show that they were based on a valid foundation of empirical evidence, suggesting that a wide swath of psychological science is based on an “untested foundation.”

Dehydration predicts longitudinal decline in cognitive functioning and well-being among older adults

AI Poet Mastered Rhythm, Rhyme, and Natural Language to Write Like Shakespeare

By recreating prehistoric one-on-one sword fighting and analyzing the ensuing damage inflicted onto replica weapons, experimental archaeologists are shedding new light onto ancient combat techniques and the advanced skills required to be a Bronze Age warrior.

Welcome to the largest product placement database on the internet

Punk label Dischord Records puts entire catalog online for free

A group of professional nature recordists from around the globe have collaborated to develop Nature Soundmap

The Best Set of Black Disposable Drawing Pens for Artists and Writers

Smallest restaurant in the world set to open in Sweden From May 10th until August 1st, Bord för En (Table for One) will open its ‘doors’ to a single diner each day. Located approximately 215 miles (or 350 kilometres) from Stockholm, in the region of Värmland, the ‘restaurant’ is just one table set in the middle of a picturesque country meadow.

humansnotinvited.com

Apple consumption is related to better sexual quality of life in young women.

Oral sex: A new, and possibly the most dangerous, route of toxoplasmosis transmission. — This route of toxoplasmosis transmission could be experimentally verified by force-feeding laboratory mice with the ejaculate of infected men.

Unhappiness is hill-shaped in age and the average age where the maximum occurs is 49

Can people be attracted to darker versions of themselves?

We report a rare case of fatal intoxication in a 40-year-old man caused by injection of a fluid containing organic mercury, allegedly in an attack with a syringe fixed to the tip of an umbrella. After several days to weeks the man showed increasingly reduced general health with fatigue and was finally hospitalized with severe neurological dysfunctions in somnolent status and died 10 months later in refractory status epilepticus. […] Police learned of the case after the mercury intoxication was diagnosed, and the investigation revealed a small syringe (typically used for subcutaneous injections, e.g. insulin) containing a fluid with a mercury-thallium bond as well as several beads of metallic mercury bonds at the dashboard (e.g. non-organic mercury, mercury sulphate) of the victim’s car. Furthermore, it turned out that the victim had access to mercury compounds due to his occupation. [Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology]

Art, music, and literature may not only provide temporary nourishment for a good life, but teach people lasting skills they can capitalize on to increase long- term well-being.

According to numerous research studies, adults who hear a statement twice are more likely to think that it is true compared to when they have only heard it once. Our results suggest that the illusory truth effect is a universal effect learned at a young age.

The Dark Room Problem

Blomstedt tells the story of a technique called “cerebral impaludation,” which literally means “putting malaria into the brain.” In this operation, which was performed on over 1,000 people in the 1930s, blood from a malaria-infected person was injected straight into the frontal lobes of the unfortunate patient. The story goes back to 1918, when an Austrian doctor, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, discovered that a bout of malaria could produce improvement in patients with advanced syphilis infection of the brain. [Discover]

In possible medical first, breast implants deflect bullet, save Toronto woman’s life, doctors say

The Psychology of Queuing

An introduction to the mechanics of the lasso

Chimpanzees Prefer African and Indian Music Over Silence

Our models demonstrate that while social distancing measures clearly do flatten the curve, strategic reduction of contact can strongly increase their efficiency, introducing the possibility of allowing some social contact while keeping risks low. Limiting interaction to a few repeated contacts emerges as the most effective strategy.

More than 21 percent of around 1,300 people in New York City who were tested for coronavirus antibodies this week were found to have them […] possibly as many as 2.7 million […] It would mean that the fatality rate from the virus was relatively low, about 0.5 percent [more]

The challenges of antibody testing for Covid-19 — no tests to date have performed well

scientists say the true potential of the rapidly developed antibody tests is still unknown

Developing antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2

About a quarter of Covid-19 patients put on ventilators in New York’s largest health system died, study

As virus advances, doctors rethink rush to ventilate

Las Vegas Mayor Offers Up Her City to See How Many Die Without Social Distancing

The concept of herd immunity is a simple one. But achieving it? Not so much.

In Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland and Norway, the % of COVID-related deaths in care homes ranges from 49% to 64%

We present a case of COVID-19 with an initial medical presentation of keratoconjunctivitis, the first such reported case in North America. The patient’s primary symptom was a red eye with watery discharge, though she did have mild respiratory symptoms, without fever. A conjunctival swab of the affected eye was positive for the SAR-CoV-2 virus.

In this study, one-third of patients with COVID-19 had ocular abnormalities, which frequently occurred in patients with more severe COVID-19. Although there is a low prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in tears, it is possible to transmit via the eyes.

Officials probe the threat of a coronavirus bioweapon

Former Labradoodle breeder tapped to lead U.S. pandemic task force

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) on reopening state: ‘There are more important things than living’

Here’s how one security and tech-savvy reader got taken for more than $10,000 in an elaborate, weeks-long phone-based scam.

Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products

Want to Find a Misinformed Public? Facebook’s Already Done It - While vowing to police COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, Facebook let advertisers target users interested in“pseudoscience”

COVID-19 is, in many ways, proving to be a disease of uncertainty. According to a new study from Italy, some 43 percent of people with the virus have no symptoms. Among those who do develop symptoms, it is common to feel sick in uncomfortable but familiar ways—congestion, fever, aches, and general malaise. Many people start to feel a little bit better. Then, for many, comes a dramatic tipping point. “Some people really fall off the cliff, and we don’t have good predictors of who it’s going to happen to,” Stephen Thomas, the chair of infectious diseases at Upstate University Hospital, told me. Those people will become short of breath, their heart racing and mind detached from reality. They experience organ failure and spend weeks in the ICU, if they survive at all. Meanwhile, many others simply keep feeling better and eventually totally recover. […] This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, people around the world have heard the message that older and chronically ill people are most likely to die from COVID-19. But that is far from a complete picture of who is at risk of life-threatening disease. Understanding exactly how and why some people get so sick while others feel almost nothing will be the key to treatment. […] The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause. Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate. Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease. [The Atlantic]

“We are running a medical study here in Miami-Dade, we’re trying to figure out exactly what is the penetration of COVID-19 here in Miami-Dade. Over last week we did a random sample of about 800 of people in Miami-Dade. And what we found is that 60% of those people tested positive to the antibody which means they had it or they have it now, and they have exhibited absolutely no symptoms in the last 14 days.” [Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez | The 11th Hour with Brian Williams]

French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients

Saliva is more sensitive for SARS-CoV-2 detection in COVID-19 patients than nasopharyngeal swabs

Doctor groups are recommending testing and isolation for people who lose their ability to smell and taste, even if they have no other symptoms.

prevalence, intensity, and timing of an altered sense of smell or taste in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infections altered sense of smell or taste was reported by 130 patients (64.4%) among these 130 patients 45 (34.6%) also reported blocked nose. Other frequent symptoms were fatigue (68.3%), dry or productive cough (60.4%), and fever (55.5%).

The novel coronavirus appears to be causing sudden strokes in adults in their 30s and 40s who are not otherwise terribly ill, doctors reported Wednesday and Signs of blood thickening and clotting were being detected in different organs by doctors from different specialties

Facebook released a map showing the proportion of people who say they have experienced coronavirus symptoms in each state in the US.

COVID-19 antibody testing in L.A. County: You’re going to be testing a randomly selected group of roughly 1,000 people every few weeks for several months. Why?

At least two people who died in early and mid-February had contracted the novel coronavirus, health officials in California said Tuesday, signaling the virus may have spread — and been fatal — in the United States weeks earlier than previously thought.

On Jan. 15, at the international airport south of Seattle, a 35-year-old man returned from a visit to his family in the Wuhan region. He grabbed his luggage and booked a ride-share to his home north of the city. The next day, as he went back to his tech job east of Seattle, he felt the first signs of a cough — not a bad one, not enough to send him home. He attended a group lunch with colleagues that week at a seafood restaurant near his office. As his symptoms got worse, he went grocery shopping near his home. Days later, after the man became the first person in the United States to test positive for the coronavirus, teams from federal, state and local agencies descended to contain the case. Sixty-eight people — the ride-share driver at the airport, the lunchmates at the seafood restaurant, the other patients at the clinic where the man was first seen — were monitored for weeks. To everyone’s relief, none ever tested positive for the virus. But if the story ended there… […] A genetically similar version of the virus — directly linked to that first case in Washington — was identified across 14 other states, as far away as Connecticut and Maryland. It settled in other parts of the world, in Australia, Mexico, Iceland, Canada, the United Kingdom and Uruguay. It landed in the Pacific, on the Grand Princess cruise ship. The unique signature of the virus that reached America’s shores in Seattle now accounts for a quarter of all U.S. cases made public by genomic sequencers in the United States. […] Even as the path of the Washington State version of the virus was coursing eastward, new sparks from other strains were landing in New York, in the Midwest and in the South. And then they all began to intermingle. […] on Feb. 24, a teenager came into a clinic with what looked like the flu. The clinic was in Snohomish County, where the man who had traveled to China lived. […] Only later did they learn that the teenager had not had the flu, but the coronavirus. […] The case was consistent with being a direct descendant of the first U.S. case, from Wuhan. […] The teenager had not been in contact with the man who had traveled to Wuhan, so far as anyone knew. He had fallen ill long after that man was no longer contagious. […] This could only mean one thing: The virus had not been contained to the traveler from Wuhan and had been spreading for weeks. [NY Times]

America’s armed forces can do more to protect against future outbreaks. Here’s how.

The Subways Seeded the Massive Coronavirus Epidemic in New York City and the paper cites no evidence.

The Entire U.S. Box Office This Weekend Came From a Single Florida Drive-in Theater

The [European Union] funds were distributed under a formula that sent far more to Hungary and Poland than to virus-ravaged Spain or Italy.

IKEA Released Its Swedish Meatball Recipe

Best ways of cooking veggies for maximum immunity boosting, and more

a mutation in the ABCC11 gene could explain why a large fraction of the population in the Far East lack body odour formation.

Flaw in iPhone, iPads may have allowed hackers to steal data for years

Air pollution may be ‘key contributor’ to Covid-19 deaths. Research shows almost 80% of deaths across four countries were in most polluted regions.

We found that when the person said “stay healthy,” numerous droplets ranging from 20 to 500 μm were generated

Parents name their baby ‘Sanitiser’

Out of Spain’s 40,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, 5,400 — nearly 14 percent — are medical professionals. In France, the public hospital system in Paris has tallied 490 infected staff members, a small but growing proportion of the system’s 100,000 or so employees.

France: By 11 May, when interventions are scheduled to be eased, we project 3.7 million (range: 2.3-6.7) people, 5.7% of the population, will have been infected. Population immunity appears insufficient to avoid a second wave if all control measures are released at the end of the lockdown.

Swedish data again - hospitalisations slowing down without full lockdown. Though definitely worse than other nearby countries who reacted more aggressively eg Norway

predictions [for Stockholm] show that the peak of infections appear in mid-April and infections start settling in May.

Testicles may make men more vulnerable to coronavirus

The duration of SARS-CoV-2 is significantly longer in stool samples than in respiratory and serum samples, highlighting the need to strengthen the management of stool samples in the prevention and control of the epidemic, and the virus persists longer with higher load and peaks later in the respiratory tissue of patients with severe disease.

More US labs could be providing tests for coronavirus (Nearly 1,600 said that they had the main tool needed to run tests, 130 are running tests)

Stock prices are not reflecting the value of companies and the S&P 500 could fall hard and fast, in a miniature version of Monday’s oil rout (when WTI crude futures fell from $17.85 a barrel to -$37.63) after a 25% rally since March 23.

Can the coronavirus be spread through farts?

we did not find compelling evidence that women are particularly inclined to wear red or pink during peak fertility, even on relatively cold days.

when experiencing the love condition, the temperature of the nasal tip of the subjects increased

Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages

Experts say vast deserts, absence of life, may indicate Mars was once run by conservatives

Suppression of COVID-19 outbreak in the municipality of Vo, Italy (43.2% of the confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections detected were asymptomatic)

The fact that an infected child did not transmit the disease despite close interactions within schools suggests potential different transmission dynamics in children.

COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with Air Conditioning in Restaurant, Guangzhou, China, 2020

Is the Virus on My Clothes? My Shoes? My Hair? My Newspaper? (You’ll feel better after reading this.)

The Pentagon has extended its freeze on domestic and international movement of troops through June 30 due to the coronavirus crisis. The freeze was originally set to expire on May 11.

Internet icons Jim Clark and Tom Jermoluk (past founders of Netscape, Silicon Graphics and @Home Network) launched a solution that eliminates all passwords.

Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found

We travel around Australia taking photos of Chinese restaurants in suburban regional and rural areas.

Nudists warned by police to cover up their mouths for coronavirus

Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists

The virus seems to have binary properties: not very contageous under most circumstances, but highly contagious in others.

Three novel alphacoronaviruses and three novel betacoronaviruses were detected for the first time in bats in Myanmar. Ongoing land use change remains a prominent driver of zoonotic disease emergence in Myanmar, bringing humans into ever closer contact with wildlife, and justifying continued surveillance and vigilance at broad scales.

What is required to prevent a second major outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 upon lifting the quarantine of Wuhan city, China [PDF | Cell.com]

Study suggests extending school and workplace closures in Wuhan until April, rather than March, would likely delay a second wave of cases until later in the year, relieving pressure on health services [LSHTM]

Changes in sleep pattern, sense of time, and digital media use during COVID-19 lockdown in Italy

Italian mayor uses drones to tell people to stay home under coronavirus lockdown

Usually, a mortgage company can withstand a few borrowers failing to make payments, but the breadth of the coronavirus pandemic has sparked industry estimates of between 25 and 50 percent of borrowers being unable to pay. [Politico]

The stimulus allows the Trump administration to loan $349 billion to small businesses without naming the companies receiving the loans. [Washington Post]

If you think people were upset about bailing out banks where the CEOs were making $50m a year, how are they going to feel about bailing out private equity firms where the CEOs make $500m a year? [Financial Times]

Amazon and Walmart are hiring a combined 250,000 workers to keep up with demand

How the Virus Transformed the Way Americans Spend Their Money

Benefits of exercise on metabolism: more profound than previously reported This reinforces the mandate for exercise as a critical part of programmes to prevent cardiovascular disease.

The present findings generate the hypothesis that moderate total meat consumption and notably, red meat may be more beneficial to prevent depressed mood and in turn hard cardiovascular disease endpoints.

Eat at Jeff Burger

Children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day.

Research indicates that women with tattoos are evaluated more negatively than women without tattoos on numerous qualities. Further, men perceive better chances for sexual success with tattooed women than those without visible tattoos. […] Among tattooed women alone, several personality and tattooing variables predicted sexual openness. [Sexuality & Culture]

This Man Owns The World’s Most Advanced Private Air Force

Study shows that listening to music everyday improves mental health

The preference for scarce things appears in children at age 5, suggesting it is neither grounded in evolution nor in experiences with the market.

Stability of women’s facial shape throughout the menstrual cycle

We will look into why the Internet as an informational resource currently fails to enhance cognition

Where there are girls, there are cats [The initial research interest was the negative impact free-range cats have had on the local wild-life in China—a problem that is similarly severe in Australia where many native bird species are under the threat of extinction due to cats, killing more than a million birds per day]

In November 1970, officials in Oregon, USA decided to blow up a rotting whale carcass. The whole thing went horribly wrong. [MyDoncaster]

Morbid curiosity is typically described as curiosity about unpleasant things, especially death. The commercial success of horror films, popularity of true crime shows, and prevalence of violence in the news implies that the average person possesses some degree of morbid curiosity. The goal of the current study was to create and validate a psychometric tool for measuring trait morbid curiosity. […] Morbid curiosity was most closely related to rebellious non-conformity and animal reminder disgust, suggesting that propensity to be morbidly curious is related to defying cultural conventions and not fearing the certainty of death.

Number 58 Joralemon Street [Brooklyn, NY] is not like the other houses. Behind its blacked out windows, no one is at home; no one has been at home for more than 100 years. In fact, number 58 is not a home at all, but a secret subway exit and ventilation point disguised as a Greek Revival brownstone. [Messy Nessy Chic]

A team of researchers at Stanford University developed a prototype smart toilet with four cameras that can identify users based on their “analprint.”

The use of liquid manure storage facilities poses several serious threats

A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta

Lifesaving organs for transplant go missing in transit

Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders

A Hacker Found a Way to Take Over Any Apple Webcam

ll of Alfred Hitchcock’s 37 cameos in his own films [stills]

Live View at a Waterhole in the Gondwana Namib Park [Fette Sans]

Write a letter to the Future

the legend that there is a baby boom nine months after any natural disaster has been debunked, repeatedly

If we do the testing of every single case, rapid isolation of the cases, you should be able to keep cases down low. If you simply rely on the big shut down measures without finding every case, then every time you take the brakes off, it could come back in waves. So that future frankly, may be determined by us and our response as much as the virus.

“If 30% of the population has already been exposed to this then that number will go to 70% in two weeks,” James said. Assuming that having the disease left you with immunity to it, the crisis would then be as good as over

If you have a smartphone, you’re probably contributing to a massive coronavirus surveillance system. And it’s revealing where Americans have — and haven’t — been practicing social distancing. A company called Unacast that collects and analyzes phone GPS location data launched a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that grades, county by county, which residents are changing behavior at the urging of health officials. It uses the reduction in the total distance we travel as a rough index for whether we’re staying put at home. Comparing the nation’s mass movements from March 20 to an average Friday, Washington, D.C., gets an A, while Wyoming as a whole earns an F. [Washington Post]

A new study of the inner workings of our muscles finds that if muscles have been trained in the past, they seem to develop a molecular memory of working out that lingers through a prolonged period of inactivity, and once we start training again, this “muscle memory” could speed the process by which we regain our former muscular strength and size. [NY Times]

3D printed adapter to turn snorkeling mask into a non-invasive ventilator

How did such a simple thing as soap and warm water — and alcohol-based sanitizers — obtain such power over these parasites?

in other news:

Keeping a smartphone in hand and frequent checking is associated with extraversion and poorer performance on tests of sustained attention and general intelligence, particularly semantic reasoning.

according to a new study, many people will reject their own arguments - if they’re tricked into thinking that other people proposed them

we argue that, at times, the desire to appear honest can actually lead people to lie.

The Liar’s Walk: Detecting Deception with Gait and Gesture

Switzerland has voted as many times as all of the other countries in the world put together in the past century.

Things you can do with a browser in 2020

Where Did “Tibetan” Singing Bowls Really Come From?

Warhol’s Photo of a Painting of a Photo

A scientific meeting on coronaviruses was cancelled due to coronavirus

Chinese criminal gangs are spreading swine fever using drones to force farmers to sell pigs cheaply so they can profit

Live Facial Recognition Is Coming to U.S. Police Body Cameras

Banjo is applying artificial intelligence to government-owned surveillance and traffic cameras across the entire state of Utah to tell police about “anomalies.”

This dissertation examines how first impressions influence decision-making, why people persistently rely on first impressions, and how the influence of first impressions can be reduced.

Tilting the face upward increased dominance and decreased physical attractiveness

Amazon is now selling its cashierless store technology to other retailers

Each year, about 15% of queries on Google have never been searched for before. Other search engines like Bing will not have the same access to these queries, putting Google in a powerful position of being able to better train its algorithms and provide more accurate search results than its rivals.

In addition to more than 2,200 law enforcement agencies, Clearview’s software had been sold to companies in 27 countries, including major U.S. retailers such as Macy’s, Walmart, and Best Buy.

Reduction of Facebook use increased life satisfaction, enhanced the level of physical activity, reduced depressive symptoms and smoking behavior

Delayed negative effects of prosocial spending [donation] on happiness

This review provides time-dose and activity-type evidence for programs looking to use time in nature as a preventative measure for stress and mental health strain

The present study examines the differences between users and non-users of mobile-based dating applications, along with individual user experiences.

the majority of popular films—including films aimed toward children—have at least one torture scene

Dogs poop in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field, study finds

You can breathe in harmful chemicals from tobacco use even in non-smoking venues because they are carried on smokers’ bodies and clothes.

Consumers seem unable to identify their preferred lager beer in a blind taste.

Color preference in the insane: In every group of hospital patients examined blue was found to be the most pleasing color. Green was a distant second and red a close third, with violet, yellow and orange fourth, fifth and sixth.

How Mount Everest became a multimillion-dollar business

For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Franklin lived in London in a house at 36 Craven Street. In 1776, Franklin left his English home to come back to America. More than 200 years later, 15 bodies were found in the basement, buried in a secret, windowless room beneath the garden.

The User Interface Design Process

A prototype of the Nintendo Play Station, a console that never came to market, fetched $360,000 at an auction

The Go Bag

Indonesia official says ’strong sperm’ can impregnate women in swimming pool

Mastercard is pioneering new payment technology that identifies commuters by the way they walk

Study finds parrots weigh up probabilities to make decisions

There is evidence that the spring Daylight Saving Time transition acutely increases motor vehicle accident risk

How artificial shrimps could change the world (a kilo of farmed shrimp is responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef, study)

Does tapping beer cans prevent beer loss? A randomised controlled trial

People are turning to YouTube and Facebook to learn how to do DIY fecal transplants

About 40% of US adults are obese, government survey finds

A quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots

This phone uses AI to block you taking naked selfies

“Instead of using a short, complex password that is hard to remember, consider using a longer passphrase,” the FBI said. “The extra length of a passphrase makes it harder to crack while also making it easier for you to remember.”

The Effect of Country Music on Suicide

The Shell oil and gas company invited me to London to advise them on millennials and climate change but they didn’t think they needed to get me to sign an NDA. Whoops!

Secret passage dating to 1660 is found inside U.K. parliament. An exclusive walkway once used by royalty was rediscovered inside the landmark building, along with some graffiti from Victorian laborers. [NY Times]

The National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) is a large area in which radio transmissions are heavily restricted by law to facilitate scientific research and the gathering of military intelligence.

The vast majority of light pollution is from cities: street lights, industrial zones, parking lots. But sometimes, it’s from something else.

There’s a reason so many memories with computers are blue

Sun Dayong designs wearable shield to protect against coronavirus outbreaks After an epidemic is contained, he thinks the bat-like shields could be upgraded with Google Glass technology, or simply be used as a “unique private mobile space for people.”

The Homeric Question

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, Creator Of Famous ‘Konami Code’ Gaming Cheat, Dies

Types of interchanges and their efficiency ratings.

For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps reading

Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition [Thanks Tim]

Victims thought they were paying millions to free hostages. But the ‘minister’ who asked them was a fraudster in a mask

Romantic kissing is not a human universal

The scent of a romantic partner can improve sleep

This study did not detect any effect of daily caffeine intake on sleep duration

Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation

The effect of touch on tipping: an evaluation in a French bar

Apple Pay accounts for about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to handle 1-in-10 such payments by 2025

Amazon wants to patent paying with a selfie [2016]

Samsung, which makes both handsets as well as 5G network equipment, told investors on its own call that it expects its 5G business in South Korea to “shrink somewhat compared to last year.”

Scientists testing a small but random sample of donated blood ready for transfusion have discovered that 70 percent contained traces of Xanax [Thanks Tim]

How to donate a piece of your brain to science—while you’re still alive

A newly discovered virus has 74 genes, out of which 68 are completely unknown to science.

List of unsolved problems in philosophy [Thanks Tim]

An interactive museum dedicated to words and language is opening on May 31, 2020, in Washington, DC

The 50 Most Drug-Addled Albums in Music History

Cy Twombly, a retrospective, 1994 [PDF]

Emoji Mashup Bot — Tries to create new emojis out of two (or three) random emojis. Tweets every 60 min.

Ideas for a website

#churchsecurity [Thanks Tim]

Visitors to the Kentucky capitol building are banned from entering with umbrellas or sticks that are used for protest signs because they can be “used as weapons,” but guns and rifles are permitted

‘Deaf’ genius Beethoven was able to hear his final symphony after all

CoronaVirus - FAQ, misconceptions, information, from a statistical perspective + An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

Several delivery apps add restaurants without their consent

Fingerprints can now be dated to within a day of when they were made

How a vegan diet could affect your intelligence

Researchers created a robot hand that can regulate its temperature through sweating

Google says its new chatbot Meena is the best in the world

Not all graffiti are written by alienated teenagers, and not all vandalism constitutes wilful damage. Preventing graffiti and vandalism (1990)

we examine the long-run buy-and-hold performance of an actual portfolio, namely, the collection of John Maynard Keynes

On the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd street is perhaps the most famous subway grate in the world.

Alvin Taylor at a salon getting a perm in Los Angeles, Calif., 1974

Land Art sculpture built by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake only reemerges during drought

A man diagnosed with Wuhan coronavirus near Seattle is being treated largely by a robot

This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important–and hitherto neglected–spillover effects on fatal car accidents.

over the past few years, even as the fatal accident rate for commercial flights fell dramatically, fatal chopper crashes have actually become more common.

Waze fixes app after police say it left drivers stranded 45 miles from destination

Streetsblog has a report out on a systematic pattern of racial and ethnic bias in who is ticketed for jaywalking in New York City.

The E-11A is used to link troops in the field to headquarters and has been previously described by Air Force pilots as “WiFi in the sky.”

Metropolitan Police has announced it will use live facial recognition cameras operationally for the first time on London streets.

An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’ Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.

He left social media as a disgraced video star. Has he made a comeback with a whole new identity?

‘Podfasters’ listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. I tried listening to podcasts at 3x and broke my brain.

23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

Questions I would ask God about the game of go

Brazil saw nearly 60,000 murders in 2015, as many as the United States, China, all of Europe, Northern Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand combined

Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code

Big Bang May Have Created a Mirror Universe Where Time Runs Backwards (2014)

We amateurs typically achieve the blur effect by accident, with a thumb interrupting the smartphone’s lens. But these blurs in your newsfeed are purposeful. Rise of the Blur

“Other Orders” is a tool for sorting text and tweets

Maeklong Railway Market in Bangkok [Thanks Tim]

Igorrr - Very Noise [Thanks Tim] More: Ham

Sheep facial recognition: Funding helps bring software one step closer

3D-printed living skin with blood vessels created by scientists

Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death

Police platform patrols create ‘phantom effect’ that cuts crime in London Underground

We study the effects that two of the largest gangs in Latin America, MS-13 and 18th Street, have on economic development in El Salvador.

MRI scanners built for two push limits of neuroimaging

women who reported to have sex weekly during the study period were 28% less likely to experience menopause than women who had sex less than monthly.

Prosociality and a Sociosexual Hypothesis for the Evolution of Same-Sex Attraction in Humans

We aim to determine whether shoes are a systematic form of self-expression [PDF]

Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques.

We conclude that researchers’ optimism about the benefits of music training is empirically unjustified

Insecurities are a result of market forces that prioritize costs over security and of governments, including the United States, that want to preserve the option of surveillance in 5G networks. To be sure, there are significant security improvements in 5G over 4G­in encryption, authentication, integrity protection, privacy, and network availability. But the enhancements aren’t enough.

The Case Against Huawei

Valuations of the major labels are currently at an all-time high — they generated $14 billion in 2019 alone. Now private equity firms, institutional investors, and high-profile managers want in on it, too. In recent years, billions of dollars have flooded the music business to invest in the catalogs of songwriters.

Through its partnerships with health care providers, Google can view tens of millions of patient records in at least three-quarters of states

Google researchers used neural networks to make weather forecasts

How the Navy SEALs wound up buying 450 counterfeit radio antennas

the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade hole on Earth and deepest artificial point on Earth

A guitar made out of 106 iPhones and one iPod Touch

Air was collected from 8 different locations associated with death in Texas. A balloon artist was then hired to make 35 balloon hats using the air saved in the compressor.

San Diego strip club hands out branded tents to homeless

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

Enhanced eyelashes increase perceived health and attractiveness

Does the presence of a mannequin head change shopping behavior?

Apple’s AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world’s most valuable company

Within the past year, 2 out of every 5 Americans made a purchase directly from the brand or manufacturer, bypassing middlemen like Walmart or Amazon in the process.

today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century

Geoengineering Wouldn’t Be Enough to Stop Greenland From Melting

The missing 99%: why can’t we find the vast majority of ocean plastic?

Why Knots Work and Why Some Don’t

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is an American franchise, founded by Robert Ripley, which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims

Draw a ridgeline map showing elevation, for anywhere on Earth

2020 Battle for the Whitehouse Chess Set

This wearable vest grows a self-sustaining garden watered by your own urine

Arizona man registers swarm of bees as emotional support animals

Returned online purchases often sent to landfill

Uniqlo’s Tokyo Warehouse is 90% Robotic

Psychopathic individuals have the ability to empathize

monkeys are able to discriminate appearance from reality, study

Punishment as communication

Chinese Scientist Who Edited Babies’ Genes Sentenced To Prison

Researchers fooled Chinese facial recognition terminals with just a mask

Bitcoin lost billions of dollars worth of valuation within a 30-minutes timeframe as a Chinese cryptocurrency scammer allegedly liquidated its steal via over-the-counter markets. The initial sell-off by PlusToken caused a domino effect.

An eight-year-old boy who reviews toys on YouTube has been named by Forbes as YouTube’s highest earner in 2019 He has 22.9 million subscribers and earned $26 million in 2019.

From SaaS idea validation in 1 day to 150+ Beta signups

Science-based dog training with feeling

As germs grow more resistant to antibiotics, many companies developing new versions of the drugs are hemorrhaging money and going out of business. Experts say the grim financial outlook is threatening to strangle the development of new lifesaving drugs.[NY Times]

Does tapping the bottom of a beer can really stop it fizzing over?

J’adore starring Mr Bean [DeepFake] [Thanks Tim]

The story of the “Amen Break”

Tag temen kalian [Thanks Tim]

Someone is putting tiny cowboy hats on pigeons in Las Vegas

Electric scooter start-up Unicorn is shutting down after spending too much money on Facebook adverts

Man Loses Home After Failing To Pay $8.41 In Property Taxes

Participants learned less from personal failure than from personal success, yet they learned just as much from other people’s failure as from others’ success. [PDF]

The ability to process alcohol may have saved humanity’s ancestors from extinction, a new book suggests.

Scientists’ brains shrank a bit after an extended stay in Antarctica

In boxing, the question of brain injury and its sequelae were analyzed from 1928 on, often on profoundly somatic grounds. With domestic violence, in contrast, the question of brain injury and its sequelae appear to have been first examined only after 1990.

New research found that some people excel at deciphering subtle differences in cats’ faces that reveal mood

The same face when seen with ‘richer’ clothes was judged significantly more competent than with ‘poorer’ clothes.

New York City is a deathtrap for birds. About 90,000 to 230,000 feathered creatures drop dead each year after colliding with the city’s buildings.

Expect the night sky to start changing fast. One day soon, the stars we can see from Earth could be outnumbered by a vast swarm of satellites.

Dim Ambient Lighting Increases Game Play Duration and Total Spend

Why When You Eat Might Be as Important as What You Eat

The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders

Your neighborhood NYPD officer isn’t likely to be your neighbor and the average restaurant is better on Manhattan streets than avenues

‘Laziness has won’: apostrophe protection society admits its defeat

‘I want this on a shirt’ Background reading: bots designed by aggregating retailers will download the image and upload it to their own online stores within minutes

If The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old, How Can We See 46 Billion Light Years Away?

Untangling the Unknot

Watch Transit Maps Transform to Real-Life Geography

Banana wall vandalized with lipstick at Art Basel. “This is the gallery where anyone can do art, right?” Previously: ‘Hungry Artist’ Eats $120,000 Banana

balloons are ok and Foiled again

Norman McLaren, Dots, 1940

“It was never the intention to share the menstrual information with their customers” Japanese store ‘rethinks’ badges for staff on periods

A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender.

we present evidence that violent crime declines in U.S. cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high

Juveniles represented by legal counsel were over two times more likely to receive an out-of-home placement compared to those without attorneys. The lawyer penalty was robust over time

Verbal Messages Coming from Behind are Perceived as More Negative

Flavor is the most important factor in eCig appeal

Individuals with dark traits have the ability but not the disposition to empathize

gray matter volume differences between bilinguals and monolinguals (there is considerable heterogeneity of results that complicate the understanding of the bilingual brain)

Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else

The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries

music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music.

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency

Quantum computing for the very curious

This page is designed especially for students of cheminformatics who are just starting to learn about how chemical structures are represented digitally.

An Outback pulling an Outback, stopped to eat at Outback, parked out back. [via many_loops]