A French waiter is suing for the right to be rude at work

The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers

How do blind people represent rainbows?

What Happens When a Blind Person Takes LSD?

Retaliation on a voodoo doll symbolizing an abusive supervisor restores justice

A new device, created by mad scientists at MIT, can accept commands that you say only in your own head. It works by analyzing “subvocalization,” or silent speech.

DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one

It took about 50 hours of interaction to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to move from casual friend to friend, and more than 200 hours to qualify as a best friend. A new study shows how long—in hours—friendships take to develop.

Sleeping without smartphones improves sleep, relationships, focus and wellbeing, although impacts is relatively small

Mark Bittman and doctor David L. Katz patiently answer pretty much every question we could think of about healthy food

76% of sports sponsorships tied to junk food, study says

Last year, some social media genius discovered that single-paragraph updates did inordinately well on LinkedIn. Thus, through the opportunistic gaming of oblique algorithms, a new literary genre was born. [Thanks Tim]

By creating free wifi on the London Underground, Transport for London is harvesting data. Uber harvests data well beyond car journeys (the app continues to collect data on passenger behaviour after a ride has finished, although users can now opt out of this). New digital advertising billboards at Piccadilly Circus are harvesting data (they contain cameras to analyse the facial expressions of people in the crowds passing by).

Next month, the US government is expected to green-light a number of agreements between private drone operators and states and local entities that want to test drone services involving “beyond-line-of-sight operations”

Unicorns Take Different Paths to Being Public

Sex Workers Making Underground Porn on Snapchat

Self-storage: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38 billion industry

Scientists have spent 60 years agonizing over how our knuckles crack [study]

Why it’s Impossible to Accurately Measure a Coastline

Maine Restaurant Announces It Will Only Accept Reservations Via Snail-Mail

A brief history of audio recording and playback, from the 1850s onward [The Museum of Obsolete Media]

Metropolitan Police Coat Hook

Amalia Ulman’s Instagram art hoax

Japanese Are Polishing Foil Balls To Perfection

‘Time-traveller’ brings food item from 2200 that has ‘ended world hunger’

An Oklahoma mother married her daughter after the pair “hit it off.” Investigators later discovered she had previously wed her son.

How optimistic are you about the future?

Frustrated husband creates spreadsheet of wife’s excuses for not having sex with him

One study found that 81% of women orgasm during oral sex, which is about three times more often than during intercourse. But in a survey Cristol conducted, she discovered that 80% of women turn down oral sex when they wanted to say yes.

Stability of Genetic and Environmental Influences on Female Sexual Functioning

We report the first case in literature of a work nail gun injury to male external genitalia.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms

Envy is harmful to psychological health and wellbeing [PDF]

New evidence suggests that by age five, children begin to understand the broad importance of reputation and to engage in surprisingly sophisticated impression management.

MDMA appears to have a stronger effect on emotional memories than non-emotional memories, according to new research. The finding may explain why the drug has beneficial effects for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and similar psychiatric conditions.

Using sleep deprivation to lift people out of severe depression may seem counterintuitive, but for some people, it’s the only thing that works

Acoustical Analysis of Shouting Into the Wind

Overtrafficked and underserviced, aircraft lavatories are swarming with E. coli. “Your typical flight will have one for every 50 people.” More: Behaviors, movements, and transmission of droplet-mediated respiratory diseases during transcontinental airline flights

“Salami slicing” refers to the practice of breaking scientific studies down into small chunks and publishing each part as a seperate paper.

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others.

The history of the ‘ideal’ woman

A staggering number of golf balls wind up in the ocean. What happens to them?

René Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, once called the best in the world, reopens

Henderson Island is isolated and uninhabited—but its beaches are still covered in garbage.  

Murders in Brazil

No one, presently, sees the Moon rotate like this

A phone line that puts callers on hold for seven years

VR

‘Banana’ is the most common safe word used by kinky couples indulging in S&M sex [thanks GG]

China cracks down on funeral strippers hired to entertain mourners, attract larger crowds

DNA of women who have had children are as short as if they were childless and 11 years older

Girls now reaching puberty before 10 – a year sooner than 20 years ago. Scientists have yet to discover the reason behind the phenomenon but believe it could be linked to unhealthy lifestyles or exposure to chemicals in food.

Adolescent behaviour goes beyond impetuous rebellion or uncontrollable hormones. In some situations, teenagers can be more risk-averse than their older peers.

Students who show interest in school report greater income 50 years later, regardless of IQ, parental income, study says

Social media use during an experience impairs memory for that experience

We looked at 168 cultures and found couples kissing in only 46 percent of them.

Our results show that monkeys form preferences for brand logos repeatedly paired with images of macaque genitals and high status monkeys

When listening to rain sounds boosts arithmetic ability

When faced with an explicit choice, participants were more likely to choose an advisor who provided uncertain advice over an advisor who provided certain advice

Are We Running Out of Trademarks? An Empirical Study of Trademark Depletion and Congestion

Exaggerated or simplistic news is often blamed for adversely influencing public health. However, recent findings suggested many exaggerations were already present in university press releases, which scientists approve.

Researchers in the US have used a new scanning technique to discover a painting underneath one of Pablo Picasso’s great works of art

52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.”

Self-driving cars aren’t good at detecting cyclists. The latest proposed fix is a cop-out.

The Death of a NYC Skyscraper

For many New Yorkers, 33 Thomas Street has been a source of mystery for years. It has been labeled one of the city’s weirdest and most iconic skyscrapers, but little information has ever been published about its purpose. It appears to be one of the most important NSA surveillance sites on U.S. soil

A new generation of skyscrapers is pushing manufacturers to update a 2,000-year-old Roman technology

Mr Chow: How a Chinese restaurant became an art world mecca

Mat Hofma explains starting Mini Materials, a company that sells miniature construction supplies, and how he has grown it to $17k/mo.

Our collection of independently patented drink-through plastic cup lids is the largest in the United States.

The Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to ahoymitpe@mit.edu with name and MIT ID number

Skier lost in New York doesn’t know how he got to California

Severe pizza stalker has sent over 100 pizzas to a lawyer

Stormy Daniels kept a dress from alleged hotel tryst with Trump, she claims – and plans to test it for DNA

Across three studies, totaling over 600 participants, we found no support for the claim that red products enhance sexual attractiveness

criminal psychopaths’ brains show atypical structural asymmetries, with reduced right hemisphere grey and white matter volumes, and abnormal interhemispheric connectivity

The study is the first to connect humans’ ability to detect rhythms to the posterior parietal cortex, a brain region associated with planning body movements as well as higher-level functions such as paying attention and perceiving three dimensions.

Many companies let workers monitor and manage machines—and sometimes entire industrial processes—via mobile apps. The apps promise efficiency gains, but they also create targets for cyberattacks. At worst, hackers could exploit the flaws to destroy machines—and potentially entire factories.

Facebook disappointed after conviction by Brussels court for violation of privacy

Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked

Rage room

A man who claims to be a time traveller has reportedly passed a lie-detector test while revealing weirdly specific things about the future

We remember a small proportion of our experiences as events. Are these events selected because they are useful and can be proven true, or rather because they are unexpected?

a group of neuroscientists report that they scanned the brains of people watching Memento in order to study memory processes

Spoilers don’t spoil stories. Contrary to popular wisdom, they actually seem to enhance enjoyment. [study]

Neurobiology of mobile-device habits stems from a healthy human need to socialize, rooted in evolution, McGill researchers find. Healthy urges can become unhealthy addictions.

Never drinkers and heavy drinkers had highest white matter lesion burden. Light to moderate drinking is associated with indices of better white matter health.

Health benefits of same-sex partnering are smaller than for opposite-sex coupling

We find that the LED streetlight program is associated with a lagged increase in breast cancer mortality

Dishonesty plays a large role in the economy. Causes for (dis)honest behavior seem to be based partially on external rewards, and partially on internal rewards. We propose and test a theory of self-concept maintenance that allows people to engage to some level in dishonest behavior, thereby benefiting from external benefits of dishonesty, while maintaining their positive view about themselves in terms of being honest individuals.

Contracts in all areas of business routinely include vague provisions. Parties often choose to define performance on the basis of terms such as “best efforts,” “good faith,” or “reasonable cause.” The widespread use of vague provisions places courts center stage. [PDF]

banks are so opaque that even insiders cannot see through the opacity when bad things happen + Are banks opaque? Evidence from insider trading

Stock market forces can be modeled with a quantum harmonic oscillator. By applying their model to seven years of data, researchers show that the quantum harmonic oscillator model outperforms other quantum models.

Zzyzx, California, Or the Biggest Health Spa Scam in American History

Even Jellyfish Sleep

A transcriber on the Isle of Man can decipher almost anything

Foot binding became popular as a means of displaying status (women from wealthy families, who did not need their feet to work, could afford to have them bound). Feet altered by binding were called lotus feet.

Stockholm, September 3, 1967, after Sweden changed from driving on the left-hand side of the road to driving on the right

“In its relentless effort to undermine this administration, the media has completely ignored the fact that Lake Huron and Lake Ontario were formed when the gigantic, thundering footfalls of the president made impressions in the ground during a stroll along the U.S.-Canada border,” said Huckabee Sanders

please join me at the funeral for art criticism

How an American company made a fortune selling bodies donated to science

Los Angeles International Airport testing facial recognition technology

Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama

An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness

We found that sleep loss impaired objective working memory performance in women, but not in men.

The present findings suggest that people’s ability to judge the veracity of their intuitions may be limited

One thing we often do believe without much evidence is that others will believe just about anything. The only domain where we are really gullible is our estimate of other people’s gullibility./a>

Under certain conditions, failure to finish a task can have beneficial effects on motivation to persist and continue the task

Can we trust those flashy headlines claiming that “scientists have discovered the [insert political affiliation, emotion or personality trait] area of the brain”?

Sex differences in human brain structure are already apparent at one month of age

For him, as for Nietzsche, what the body feels is every bit as significant as what the mind thinks, and further, both functions are inextricably intertwined.

Analyzing all articles published between 1970 and 2011, we find that articles with shorter titles tend to be published in better journals, to be more cited and to be more innovative

We find that approximately one-quarter of bitcoin users and one-half of bitcoin transactions are associated with illegal activity
Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They want to build a crypto utopia, a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public. [NY Times]

Since December, security researchers have been tracking an insidious piece of malware called Satori, which hijacks internet-connected devices and turns them into “zombies” that can be remotely controlled in unison.

To begin the discussion of how the oceans formed, I must take you back to the birth of earth itself, along with the rest of our solar system. [PDF | excerpted from The Oceans, A Deep History, by Eelco J. Rohling ]

Bamboozle Structures and Honeycombs [PDF]

Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons

Has Artificial Intelligence Cracked the Voynich Manuscript’s Mysterious Code?

“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in self checkout is a total moron.” Self-checkout theft has become so widespread that a whole lingo has sprung up to describe its tactics.

Passenger turned away from two flights after wearing 10 layers of clothing to avoid luggage fee

Enormous emotional support peacock denied seat on flight, owner not pleased

Jessica Simpson Sued for Posting Paparazzo’s Picture of Herself on Instagram

British teenager accessed U.S. Middle East intelligence operations by pretending to be the CIA Director

Infants notice violations to fairness norms and evaluate individuals based on their fair or unfair behavior. However, they do not punish unfair individuals.

meta-analytic results indicate that there is a small relation between service quality and percentage of a bill tipped, racial minority servers tend to be tipped less than White servers, and females tend to be tipped more than males

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) future scenarios allow Paris Agreement targets to be met by deploying technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, putting a hypothetical technology into a computer model of future scenarios is rather different than researching, developing, constructing and operating such a technology at the planetary scale required to compensate for inadequate mitigation. [PDF]

We know that the poles have changed places hundreds of times, most recently 780,000 years ago. (Sometimes, the poles try to reverse positions but then snap back into place, in what is called an excursion. The last time was about 40,000 years ago.) We also know that when they flip next time, the consequences for the electrical and electronic infrastructure that runs modern civilization will be dire.

Cancer ‘vaccine’ eliminates tumors in mice, including distant, untreated metastases. Lymphoma patients are being recruited to test the technique in a clinical trial.

There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant.

‘Expensive’ placebos work better than ‘cheap’ ones, study finds

You can now buy “premium” water that’s not only free of GMOs and gluten but certified kosher and organic. Never mind that not a single drop of water anywhere contains either property or is altered in any way by those designations.

The Effects of Various Music on Angry Drivers’ Subjective, Behavioral, and Physiological States — Angry drivers with self-selected music showed more aggressive driving behavior.

teaching people about bias in those contexts can be counterproductive

This research establishes advice giving as a subtle route to a sense of power, shows that the desire to feel powerful motivates advice giving, and highlights the dynamic interplay between power and advice.

The Break-Up Check: Exploring Romantic Love through Relationship Terminations

New technology allows users to face-swap porn stars with their favorite celebrities

The occult shops of Singapore: talismans, corpse oil and witches [Thanks Tim]

Are you dying? Are you a marxist?

Dozen camels disqualified from Saudi ‘camel beauty contest’ over use of Botox [Thanks Tim]

Swiss town denies passport to Dutch vegan because she is ‘too annoying’

Strange phenomenon left dog stuck in tree for almost 60 years without rotting

One in five Toys ‘R’ Us stores is located within 15 minutes of another Toys ‘R’ Us

The world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated.

0% of Icelanders under 25 believe Bible creation story

Singapore’s crime rate is so low that many shops don’t even lock up

People don’t remember changing their minds

Raw intelligence doesn’t reduce conflict. Wisdom does. Such wisdom—in effect, the ability to take the perspectives of others into account and aim for compromise—comes much more naturally to those who grow up poor or working class, according to a new study.

Being too intelligent might make you a less effective leader

we show that high-testosterone hedge fund managers significantly underperform low-testosterone hedge fund managers after adjusting for risk

In the 1980s, a quiet hedge fund located above a Marxist bookstore launched a revolution that would change finance (and give us Amazon).

First came dark pools, private trading venues that challenged old-school stock exchanges. Now something else lingers in the shadows of Wall Street: ping pools.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is responsible for over half of the world’s market for chips, and it’s the world’s largest contract manufacturer. Today it reported revenues driven by demand from cryptocurrency miners for the second consecutive quarter.

50 Cent Makes $8 Million in Bitcoin: “I forgot I did that s***.”

CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work

In order to show that happiness cannot be equated with pleasurable experiences, Robert Nozick (1974) invented a thought experiment involving an experience machine.

Teens whose eyes are habitually glued to their smartphones are markedly unhappier, study Specifically, young people’s life satisfaction, self-esteem and happiness plummeted after 2012. That’s the year that the percentage of Americans who owned a smartphone rose above 50 percent.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is imitating Snap in trying to focus on interactions with “friends and family.” Facebook’s New Mission May Be Impossible

The Navier-Stokes equations describe simple, everyday phenomena, like water flowing from a garden hose, yet they provide a million-dollar mathematical challenge.

Do ethicists steal more books?

The written word lacked the life of human speech; it encouraged idleness; it was dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation.

We show that the introduction of medical marijuana laws (MMLs) leads to a decrease in violent crime in states that border Mexico.

Why do dogs eat poop? [Washington Post]

Why a ‘paperless world’ still hasn’t happened

10 things to know about Garry Winogrand

Burger King | Whopper Neutrality [Thanks GG]

Phuong Tran, who is known as the Bunnyman, kicked out of a $75,000-a-year elite sex club, accused of ‘disgusting behavior’

Two people were accidentally shot at a church in Tellico Plains during a discussion about the recent church shooting in Texas

A Bangkok clinic that has drawn 100 men a month to its penis whitening service has caused a stir in Thailand

There are two vastly different worlds of garbage in New York City: day and night. Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection

A looming shortage of sand – a crucial resource once thought endless – could sink infrastructure projects, including those in China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Americans spend an average of 17 hours a year parking, but rather than get used to it, drivers allow themselves to become entitled and aggressive. A 2014 study found that 20 percent of men and 12 percent of women have had a verbal confrontation with another driver in a parking lot, and 8 percent of men and 2 percent of women have actually gotten physical over a parking incident.

Tokyo Restaurant Lets You Work a 50-Minute Shift to Earn a Free Meal

Have you ever looked up flights or hotels on an app on your phone, only to open your laptop and see different prices? How Retailers Use Personalized Prices to Test What You’re Willing to Pay

Two Ebola survivors are to sue the government of Sierra Leone in the first international court case intended to throw light on what happened to some of the millions of dollars siphoned off from funding to help fight the disease.

Why the U.S. spends so much more than other nations on health care: Studies point to a simple reason, the prices, not to the amount of care. And lowering prices would upset a lot of people in the health industry. [NY Times]

How blue eyes get their color

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

How We Hurt The Ones We Love

The scent of a romantic partner can help lower stress levels, new research found [Previously: Smell Dating]

Chinese dating apps closed after women revealed to be robots

How to Use Cognitive Faculties You Never Knew You Had

The Dunning-Kruger effect: The more limited someone is in reality, the more talented the person imagines himself to be.

Arbitrary deadlines are the enemy of creativity, according to Harvard research

How emoji are born

Can Machines Create Art?

Can Washington Be Automated? An algorithmic lobbyist sounds like a joke. But it’s already here. Here’s who the robots are coming for next.

The new machine isn’t an ATM, but a BTM—a Bitcoin teller machine. There are now more than 80 in New York City, and dozens more around the country.

Good Luck Spending Your KodakCoins

Rule 30 is a Class III rule, displaying aperiodic, chaotic behaviour [Related: A British train station with walls designed using “Rule 30″]

The Geometry and Pigmentation of Seashells [PDF]

Some birds intentionally spread fire from place to place, sometimes in cooperation with other birds, study

Gene editing can change an animal’s sex. Meet the Woman Using CRISPR to Breed All-Male “Terminator Cattle”

The Extraordinary Life of Nikola Tesla

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660 – 1731) was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, which is second only to the Bible in its number of translations. He died on 24 April 1731, probably while in hiding from his creditors. He often was in debtors’ prison.

How to Fight 70′s-Era Ryan O’Neal

Chinese Kung Fu master demonstrates ‘ball-breaking stamina’

Hairdresser Arrested for Giving a Bad Haircut

Panda poop is being turned into tissues in China

‘Scientist leading ‘de-extinction’ effort says Harvard team could create hybrid mammoth-elephant embryo in two years

The most common physiological changes result from the lack of gravity. “Your inner ear thinks you’re tumbling. Meanwhile your eyes are telling you you’re not tumbling.” What One Year of Space Travel Does to the Human Body

People avoid learning the calories in a tempting dessert to protect their preferences to eat the dessert. People sometimes choose to remain ignorant.

“There’s a lever to control how much tear gas goes in the water cannon.” Tear Gas author Anna Feigenbaum visits Milipol, the world’s largest security expo

Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists

Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.

Why did everything take so long?

Slaughterbots

One photo (not a composite) [zoomed out]

The rise of “stealthing” — when a man secretly removes his condom during sex (and other ways dating got so much worse in 2017)

You could earn cryptocurrency riding a bike next year

Using an ambulance to travel to the hospital in an emergency can cost upwards of $1,000 USD. Now research demonstrates that a significant number of people are instead choosing Uber to perform the same service.

People apply for patents on ideas that are obvious, vague, or were invented years earlier. Too often, applications get approved and low-quality patents fall into the hands of patent trolls, creating headaches for real innovators. Why so many bogus patents get approved?

The Amount and Source of Millionaires’ Wealth (Moderately) Predicts Their Happiness [PDF]

Why didn’t Denmark sell Greenland?
How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?

Circadian mood variations in Twitter content

On December 30, 1967, senior detectives from Scotland Yard sent owners of gambling clubs into a proverbial spin. Anyone operating a roulette wheel that contained the number zero would be prosecuted, they warned.

The body of one of America’s first serial killers rests 10 feet down. He requested the extra deep cement burial to prevent any potential grave robbers or medical examinations, and rumors have persisted that this was a way to avoid anyone discovering the body isn’t actually his.

“if a dick can go into a woman, it can go up on a wall”

Long Island Iced Tea Corp. to Rebrand as “Long Blockchain Corp.” [shares rose 238 percent after the company rebranded itself ] More: Rich Cigars, Inc. announced today that it has filed to change its name to “Intercontinental Technology, Inc.” in order to reflect a change in the Company’s direction and overall strategy (“to invest in the development of a unique cryptocurrency mining business”)

A pair of lovers accused of killing the woman’s husband and then seeking cosmetic surgery so the male lover could take his place.

A Contraceptive Gel for Men Is About to Go on Trial

Inside The Shady World Of DNA Testing Companies

Upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. Participants in the upper-class rank condition took more candy that would otherwise go to children than did those in the lower-rank condition.

Results provide a strong and clear demonstration that listeners can’t distinguish between laughter from different nationalities.

How this man tricked TripAdvisor into listing his shed as London’s No. 1-rated restaurant

How two men turned a Google search and $100 into a hit podcast and a TV deal

Algorithms made him a Wall Street billionaire. His new research center helps scientists mine data for the common good.

After creationism arrived in South Korea in 1980 through the global campaign of leading American creationists, it steadily grew in the country. Our historical study will explain why South Korea became “the creationist capital of the world.”

Rome revokes Ovid’s exile [More: Exile of Ovid ]

Streetlights could be replaced by glow-in-the-dark trees after scientists create plants that shine like fireflies

300-year-old note found inside butt of Jesus statue

If you want a baroque and high-tech method of bitcoin storage here is ConnectX, ”a private network of small satellites that stores digital currency wallets and performs financial transactions ‘off-planet’ eliminating the use of the Internet.”

Unpopular Ideas about Blockchains

We rely on economic theory to discuss how blockchain technology will shape the rate and direction of innovation

Rodents have joined mosquitoes in the cross-hairs of scientists working on a next-generation genetic technology known as “gene drive” to control pests.

The Hidden Signals in Corporate Ribbon-Cutting Ceremonies

Work gets done at 11AM on a Monday in October. At all other times of day, we’re basically slacking from our most productive

Probabilistic genotyping uses complex mathematical formulas to examine the statistical likelihood that a certain genotype comes from one individual over another. The Impenetrable Program Transforming How Courts Treat DNA Evidence

“People who serve on juries don’t have more sympathy or give a lighter sentence based on claims of bad genetics. And sometimes, introducing genetic evidence can even make things worse for a defendant.”

How criminal courts are putting brains — not people — on trial

When Ex-convicts Become Criminologists

The production effect is the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently

When your attention shifts from one place to another, your brain blinks. The blinks are momentary unconscious gaps in visual perception and came as a surprise to the team of Vanderbilt psychologists who discovered the phenomenon while studying the benefits of attention.

Neuroscientists have identified how exactly a deep breath changes your mind

Elevation of the eye-balls on winking

Drug-Associated Spontaneous Orgasm (Spontaneous orgasm is characterized by a spontaneous onset of orgasm without any preceding sexual or nonsexual trigger)

Coffee consumption and health: umbrella review of meta-analyses of multiple health outcomes (three to four cups a day provide largest risk reduction for various health outcomes)

At McKinley Climate Lab, researchers create fearsome weather to test cars and planes

How Independent Bookstores Have Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com

52 things I learned in 2017

How many colors were there in a medieval rainbow?

Graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff passes away at 85. His firm Chermayeff & Geismar designed logos for Pan Am, Mobile Oil, Chase Bank, Xerox, NBC, Showtime, The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic…

When Rome conquered Greece, they replaced their own dull pantheon with renamed versions of Zeus, Athena, and the others. But not all Roman gods were Greek copies — here are a few of the more important ones.

In the winter of 1961, Claes Oldenburg opened a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (107E. 2nd St) selling his work, circumventing the usual practice of selling art  through a gallery.

Starbucks is opening its biggest and most interactive location to date, in Shanghai, with help from Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group [Thanks Tim]

CryptoKitties: Collect and breed digital cats.

Detroit police officers fight each other in undercover op gone wrong

The newest museum in Washington, D.C., is a $500 million institution dedicated to a single book.

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met (A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know.)

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google

That program is called Amazon Flex, and it accomplishes Amazon’s “last-mile” deliveries

This 28-year-old’s company makes millions buying from Walmart and selling on Amazon

Researchers proved that it’s mathematically impossible to halt aging in multicellular organisms like humans [study]

Physicists find we’re not living in a computer simulation

Dark-matter hunt fails to find the elusive particles. Physicists begin to embrace alternative explanations for the missing material.

Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA

The neural underpinnings of the decoy effect — a marketing strategy in which one of three presented options is unlikely to be chosen but may influence how an individual decides between the other two options

Algorithm Predicts If Twitter Users Are Becoming Mentally Ill

Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women

Over almost 30 years of consulting, I’ve encountered countless examples of manipulation, bullying, and inappropriate use of power. Three kinds of responses have proven to be consistently effective for confronting most garden-variety manipulators.

New Zealand’s War on Rats Could Change the World The nation wants to eradicate all invasive mammal predators by 2050. Gene-editing technology could help—or it could trigger an ecological disaster of global proportions.

The Stephen Shore retrospective opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art could not have come at a better time.

Photographer Spends 9 Years on One Street Corner Capturing Same Commuters Every Day

Chinese restaurant offers discounts to women depending on their bra size

Scientists have called for Kyrgyzstan’s only mummy to be immediately dug back up after the 1,500-year-old relic was taken from a museum and hastily reburied on the eve of a presidential election in a decision celebrated by self-professed psychics.

NYC chess hustler makes $400 a day

Earlier this fall, Amazon announced it would build a second headquarters (known as HQ2) and asked cities to submit requests for proposal. It had received 238 proposals. Massachusetts offered a $500 million package that included 100 percent property tax exemptions for the headquarters’ employees. Philadelphia’s price tag was $2 billion. Newark, New Jersey upped the ante to $7 billion in tax benefits…

Virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities

The scientist who traveled the world in a shipping container to study cold storage

How quantum physics is bending the rules

Medical uses for paperclips

Males were perceived as being more likely to be creepy than females. Only four occupations were judged to be significantly higher than the neutral value of “3” on the creepiness rating scale: Clowns, Taxidermists, Sex Shop Owners, and Funeral Directors. [On the nature of creepiness | PDF]

Higher quality sleep patterns are associated with reduced activity in brain regions involved in fear learning

Participants rated women in less revealing and less tight clothing more positively.

A certain number of single-vehicle crashes into stationary roadside objects such as trees are thought to be occult suicides. More: Complex suicide is usually defined as the application of more than one killing mechanism to ensure a fatal outcome.

Why millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology

In memory of the Girl in Blue / Killed by Train / December 24, 1933 / Unknown but not forgotten

How to Spend $1,900 on Gene Tests Without Learning a Thing

The human genome was never completely sequenced. Some scientists say it should be.

Anyone can track you with $1,000 of online ads

Wireless charging will make drones always ready to fly

Company Rents Out Grounded Jets So Instagrammers Can Fool Followers About Their Luxurious Lifestyle [Thanks Tim]

White House Lobby during renovation, 1949

Scientists say 43 kilos of gold is flushed through Swiss sewers each year

New bill will make it legal for Californians to liquefy their corpses after death

Mobile phone companies appear to be providing your number and location to anyone who pays

The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.

Nearly every country on earth is named after one of four things

Domestication has not made dogs cooperate more with each other compared to wolves

Participants who had been breastfed scored lower in neuroticism, anxiety, and hostility and higher in openness and optimism than those not breastfed. Neuroticism was lowest for those breastfed for 9-12 months and highest for those either breastfed for >24 months or exclusively bottle-fed.

Wise and her colleagues recruited 10 heterosexual women to lay in a fMRI scanner and stimulate themselves to orgasm. They then repeated the experiment but had their partners stimulate them.

Wanting to know more about threesomes, he decided to conduct research on the subject himself. This led to a PhD about threesomes among two men and one woman (MMF).

“Forecasting agencies determine the trends to come and fashion companies are reluctant to take risks and to deviate from the path that forecasters have set them as their main aim is to make profit.”

Recognizing the popularity of John Waters films and the absence of merchandise for them, Curator Tyson Tabbert assembled a crew of designers to produce limited editions of such virtual merchandise.

Da Vinci is probably the only artist in history ever to dissect with his own hands the face of a human and that of a horse to see whether the muscles that move the lips are the same ones that can raise the nostrils of the horse’s nose More: Mona Lisa (Prado’s version), possibly painted simultaneously by a student of da Vinci in the same studio where he painted his own Mona Lisa

Has Duchamp’s Final Work Harbored a Secret for Five Decades?

“This page has intentionally been left blank.” Intentionally blank pages have been around, in abundance, since at least the 18th century

Three Chinese women stuck at South Korea airport unable to confirm identities after plastic surgery

Multiple arrested after fight inside Berkeley’s ‘empathy tent’

Eminem music shares to hit the stock exchange

“Digital self-harm” is the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself. The current study examined the extent of digital self-harm among adolescents.

Parents of teenage daughters are more likely to divorce

Tattooed people, especially women, were rated as stronger and more independent, but more negatively in other ways

The visibility of social class from facial cues

3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image (via, Thanks Mark!)

Senate map gerrymandered for senator’s house

Entrepreneurs are finding profits turning human waste into fertiliser, fuel and even food. The new economy of excrement

Chinese sex doll rental service suspended amid controversy

Tourists at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Coowonga, Queensland, Australia, were randomly assigned to play a laptop-simulated Electronic Gaming Machine

Sleep deprivation rapidly reduces depression symptoms in nearly half of depressed patients

Is Shame Hallucinogenic?

Voynich manuscript: the solution More: Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved? Experts say no.

Two mathematicians have proved that two different infinities are equal in size, settling a long-standing question

Quasi-steady state aerodynamics of the cheetah tail

Two British science museums held a majestic, two-day fight on Twitter

Never pay a penny of a debt which isn’t yours. Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

Your future sex robot could be hacked and programmed to murder you

This elevator has a call button 30 feet away so that the elevator is there when you arrive

Using a cheap robot, a team of hackers has cracked open a leading-brand combination safe, live on stage in Las Vegas

A major asthma drugmaker has been quietly investing in coal on the side [Thanks Tim]

The Null Relation between Father Absence and Earlier Menarche

When researchers tried to recruit 30 people for an experiment where all phone notifications (including text and email) would be disabled for a week, they simply couldn’t find the participants.

The key to understanding this is to think about what advertisers want: they don’t want to appear next to pictures of breasts because it might damage their brands, but they don’t mind appearing alongside lies because the lies might be helping them find the consumers they’re trying to target. Facebook has two priorities: growth and monetisation.

Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.

The real victor was Microsoft, which built an empire on the back of a shadily acquired MS-DOS

16 Ways QR Codes are Being Used in China

George Peter Metesky, better known as the Mad Bomber, terrorized New York City for 16 years in the 1940s and 1950s with explosives that he planted in theaters, terminals, libraries, and offices. [Wikipedia]

Ten minutes difference, and Earth would still be Planet of the Dinosaurs

The Economic Value of Birds

Trees with “Crown Shyness” Mysteriously Avoid Touching Each Other [Thanks Tim]

Cover image orientation in celebrity cookbooks, study

Japan Is Selling Ice Cream That Doesn’t Melt

How Did Pop Music Get So Slow?

The Books We Don’t Understand

Pollution is turning dogs blue in Mumbai [Thanks Brad]

Flying the Birdly Virtual Reality Simulator [Thanks Tim]

Biologists Use Gene Editing to Store Movies in DNA

Scientists build DNA from scratch to alter life’s blueprint

Millennials only have a 5-second attention span for ads

Fish can’t recognise faces if they’re upside down – just like us

The $100 billion per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

Do Men Overestimate or Women Underreport Their Sexual Intentions?

Pornography trains us to redirect sexual desire as mimetic desire. That is, the sociological theory — and the marketers’ dream — that humans learn to want what they see.

Living near noisy roads could make it harder to get pregnant

Those who used maladaptive strategies like suppressing, avoiding, or denying their feelings, had higher levels of problems associated with stress.

Brain Training Has No Effect on Decision-making or Cognitive Function, Penn Researchers Report

To the French, she explains, conversations are for exchanging points of view, not finding things in common, the goal of conversation for North Americans.

War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies [PDF]

The Not-so-secret ingredients of military coups

In the US, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. how our lives will change dramatically in 20 years

Like ancient warlords, China’s three biggest airlines have dominated their regional cities: Air China Ltd. controlling Beijing, China Eastern Airlines Corp. holding sway in the financial center of Shanghai, and China Southern Airlines Co. ruling the roost down in export gateway Guangzhou. Until now. Beijing’s New Mega Airport Will Challenge Air China’s Dominance

Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World’s Richest Person

How long would it take for vampires to annihilate humanity

In this paper, we focus on the difference in the way of pulling a toilet paper roll and propose a system that identifies individuals based on features of rotation of a toilet paper roll with a gyroscope.

Can’t Find a Public Bathroom in NYC? Hail This Toilet Van

“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. An example of a tale of suspense and horror, it is also, to a certain degree, a hoax, as it was published without claiming to be fictional, and many at the time of publication (1845) took it to be a factual account.

Richard D. James [Aphex Twin] interviews ex. Korg engineer about their collaboration on the monologue, microtuning, geometry and dreams.

McMansion Hell: The Devil is in the Details [Thanks Tim] + How the McMansion Hell blogger fended off a lawsuit threat from real estate site Zillow