A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads. […] Until now, there was no evidence that such a capability actually existed, but its myth permeated due to how sophisticated other ad tracking methods have become. More: MindSift has been deleting details about its technology from the internet in recent days, but two of the three founders of the company go into detail about their technology on a small podcast. […] Most episodes of the podcast have under 50 views on YouTube.

Without realizing it, most salesclerks do their job using something called the Greedy Algorithm, in which the changemaker starts with the largest possible coin and works down. Thus, for 41 cents the clerk hands back a quarter, a dime, a nickel and a penny. The Shallit system assumes that the clerk abandons Greedy in favor of a mental calculation that considers all possible combinations of coins and selects the optimal one–here, two 18-cent coins and a nickel. ■ Counting all possible change amounts from 0 to 99 cents, Shallit found that the average transaction, if handled in optimal fashion by the 7-Eleven clerk, involves 4.7 coins. It just so happens that if the Mint ditched the dime and added an 18-cent coin, the average number of coins would fall to 3.9. ■ What This Country Needs is an 18¢ piece

Snacks constitute almost a quarter of a day’s calories in U.S. adults and account for about one-third of daily added sugar, new study suggests

‘You didn’t just succeed, you Exceled’: Sydney man dubbed the ‘Annihilator’ wins spreadsheet world championship

Another wild story is about Napoleon. He was dead and they did an autopsy. At the time, the doctor who did the autopsy thought, “I know, I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to cut off this man’s penis.” And he did. And he handed it to a priest who smuggled it off Saint Helena island. It was passed between booksellers—booksellers are strange people—and put on display. Eventually it was bought by a urologist, and it now lives in a basement in New Jersey.

New Paper Argues That the Universe Began with Two Big Bangs

Researchers have made significant strides in understanding the neurological process of dying. The ‘wave of death’ in the brain, marking the transition to total cessation of brain activity, originates in the neocortex’s layer 5. This wave can be reversed if resuscitation occurs within a specific time window, indicating the possibility of preserving brain function. The study provides a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms as death approaches, challenging the notion of a flat EEG as a definitive marker of ceased brain functions.

hormone made by fetus may cause nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

Developing driverless cars has been AI’s greatest test. Today we can say it has failed miserably, despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in attempts to produce a viable commercial vehicle. […] First to go was Uber after an accident in which one of its self-driving cars killed Elaine Herzberg in Phoenix, Arizona. […] Uber’s business model had been predicated on the idea that within a few years it would dispense with drivers and provide a fleet of robotaxis. That plan died with Herzberg, and Uber soon pulled out of all its driverless taxi trials. Now Cruise, the company bought by General Motors to spearhead its development of autonomous vehicles, is retreating almost as rapidly. The trigger was also an accident. […] Tesla is also in defence mode. It has long marketed its driver aid software as “full self-driving”, but it is nothing of the sort. Drivers must stay alert and ready to take over, even though the car can operate itself much of the time, particularly on motorways. In the US, where there have been numerous accidents with Teslas in “full self-driving” mode, the manufacturer is facing several lawsuits. […] If this is the best that AI can do, maybe fears about its capabilities and its ability to put humans out of work are misplaced.

New York City’s Forgotten Neighborhood A 12-block neighborhood just 10 miles from Manhattan’s glittering towers is perhaps best known for constant flooding, vacant cars and a mob graveyard. But hope for change may be stirring. […] Residents call it The Hole because it sits 10 to 15 feet below the surrounding streets, creating a natural funnel for rainfall. It’s also long served as a graveyard or, occasionally, a parking lot for all sorts of industrial equipment. The city says it has already towed away nearly 100 abandoned or illegally parked vehicles and removed more than 100,000 pounds of trash from vacant lots and illegal dumps.

OnlyFans subscribers can access exclusive and often pornographic content that models, ordinary people, and adult film stars make available in exchange for an average monthly sum that can start from $10 per month and reach up to $30. But the biggest profits lie elsewhere: in personalized chats with subscribers. […] as OnlyFans models accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, they lose the ability to communicate with everyone. That’s where the chatters come in. They are specialized workers who hold conversations posing as the stars of the show […] They send new hires scripts that predict conversations, personality guides for each model, and a small dictionary explaining their subscribers’ fetishes. “You have to know how to portray the model, speak like them, and know their background,” he explains. “Sometimes you go crazy with so many personalities,” Hernández confesses. He is currently a chatter for three models. […] Hernández confesses that “part of the job of talking to sexually aroused men” is constantly receiving photos of their penises.

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth.

The Emergence of Full-Body Gaussian Splat Deepfake Humans

The previous plague, in the view of Martin Scorsese, was the Hollywood superhero-franchise blockbuster. “That’s not cinema,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire magazine in 2019. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”

TV detector vans are vans which contain equipment that can detect the presence of television sets in use. These vans have been used by the General Post Office and later by contractors working for the BBC to enforce the television licensing system in the UK, the Channel Islands and on the Isle of Man.

List of shoe-throwing incidents

Woman shot in butt by own gun after sneaking it into MRI. The magnet attracted the handgun, which fired a round and left the patient wounded.

Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved

Pharmacies share medical data with police without a warrant, inquiry finds — Pharmacies’ records hold some of the most intimate details of their customers’ personal lives, including years-old medical conditions and the prescriptions they take for mental health and birth control.

Why scientists are making transparent wood (smartphone screens, insulated windows…)

The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40

Twenty-year study confirms California forests are healthier when burned — or thinned

Twitter Is Just Running Ads for Stealing Semen Now — “You don’t need his permission to get pregnant”

Crime has not just proliferated online but mutated. […] You are now ten times more likely to be a victim of fraud than of theft. Romance fraud is the fastest-growing category, increasing by almost a third last year (to £93m) according to UK Finance, which collates data on behalf of high street banks. Two in five online daters have been asked for money, and over half of those gave it.

One air traffic controller went into work drunk this summer and joked about “making big money buzzed.” Another routinely smoked marijuana during breaks. A third employee threatened violence and then “aggressively pushed” a colleague who was directing airplanes. […] nationwide staffing shortage, driven by high turnover rates and budget constraints, has led many controllers to work extended hours, including six-day weeks and 10-hour days. This staffing crisis has resulted in a fatigued, distracted, and demoralized workforce, increasing the likelihood of mistakes and safety concerns. […] The FAA reported 503 significant air traffic control lapses in the fiscal year ending September 30, a 65% increase over the previous year, despite only a 4% rise in air traffic.

Largest brain study of 62,454 scans identifies drivers of brain aging […] Schizophrenia, cannabis use, and alcohol abuse are just several disorders that are related to accelerated brain aging

Circe is the daughter of Helios, god of the sun. She is described as polupharmakos, one who works with “many drugs”

From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money — WeWork raised more than $11 billion in funding as a private company. Olive AI, a health care startup, gathered $852 million. Convoy, a freight startup, raised $900 million. And Veev, a home construction startup, amassed $647 million. In the last six weeks, they all filed for bankruptcy or shut down. They are the most recent failures in a tech startup collapse that investors say is only beginning.

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet

This cyborg cockroach could be the future of earthquake search and rescue

Jellyfish don’t have brains. They instead have simple nervous systems dispersed throughout their transparent bodies. […] The researchers found that the jellyfish learn with the same repetition rate of a fruit fly or mouse.

Australia’s animals beat the summer heat using mucous, saliva and precision engineering

This timeline traces our evolving understanding of time through a history of observations in CULTURE, PHYSICS, TIMEKEEPING and BIOLOGY.

Why read Chateaubriand?

Persons with psychiatric disorders were approximately 3 to 4 times more likely than their siblings without psychiatric disorders to be either subjected to violence or to perpetrate violence […] with the sole exception of schizophrenia, which was not associated with the risk of subjection to violence.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past

Light can be reflected not only in space but also in time

Interview with Nick Bostrom “I think AI is likely to greatly increase the ability of centralised powers to keep track of what people are thinking and saying. We’ve already had, for a couple of decades, the ability to collect huge amounts of information. You can eavesdrop on people’s phone calls or social-media postings — and it turns out governments do that. But what can you do with that information? So far, not that much. You can map out the network of who is talking to whom. And then, if there is a particular individual of concern, you could assign some analyst to read through their emails. With AI technology, you could simultaneously analyse everybody’s political opinions in a sophisticated way, using sentiment analysis. You could probably form a pretty good idea of what each citizen thinks of the government or the current leader if you had access to their communications. So you could have a kind of mass manipulation, but instead of sending out one campaign message to everybody, you could have customised persuasion messages for each individual. And then, of course, you can combine that with physical surveillance systems like facial recognition, gait recognition and credit card information. If you imagine all of this information feeding into one giant model, I think you will have a pretty good idea of what each person is up to, what and who they know, but also what they are thinking and intending to do. If you have some sufficiently powerful regime in place, it might then implement these measures and then, perhaps, make itself immune to overthrow.”

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

Apple report finds steep increase in data breaches, ransomware […] One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.

“There’s been studies that swab the bottom of shoes and something like 99% of the shoes test positive for fecal material.”

To my surprise, this not only hasn’t collapsed, but has attracted people outside the usual prediction market community — Manifold founded a dating site, manifold.love. The idea is, you bet on who would be a good match, and make (play) money if they end up having a second date or continuing on to a relationship.

The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets

Wasabi, beloved on sushi, linked to “really substantial” boost in memory, Japanese study finds Half of them took 100 milligrams of wasabi extract at bedtime, with the rest receiving a placebo. After three months, the treated group registered “significant” boosts in two aspects of cognition, working (short-term) memory, and the longer-lasting episodic memory, based on standardized assessments for language skills, concentration and ability to carry out simple tasks. No improvement was seen in other areas of cognition, such as inhibitory control (the ability to stay focused), executive function or processing speed.

Bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields, study shows — Many creatures in the animal kingdom are able to sense an electric field—some sharks and the platypus, for example—but only one type of marine mammal has been found to have the ability: the Guiana dolphin. In this new effort, the research team wondered if other types of dolphins have the ability. […] The ability to detect electric current likely helps bottlenose dolphins to detect and capture prey, and might also help them navigate using the Earth’s electric field.

Push notifications can reveal private information and governments can essentially access this data if they want.

Interview with Francesca Mani — In October, Francesca Mani was one of reportedly more than 30 girls at Westfield High School in New Jersey who were victims of deepfake pornography. Boys at the school had taken photos of Francesca and her classmates and manipulated them with artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images of them without their consent. […] 15-year-old Francesca started speaking out and calling on lawmakers to do something about the broader problem. Her efforts are already starting to pay off with new momentum behind proposals for state and federal legislation.

San Francisco now at 35% office vacancy rate, highest ever recorded

New theory claims to unite Einstein’s gravity with quantum mechanics — Modern physics is founded upon two pillars: quantum theory on the one hand, which governs the smallest particles in the universe, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity on the other, which explains gravity through the bending of spacetime. But these two theories are in contradiction with each other and a reconciliation has remained elusive for over a century.

ChatGPT will provide more detailed and accurate responses if you pretend to tip it, according to a new study

23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9 million users

A study had found that living in a private rental property accelerates the biological ageing process by more than two weeks every year. The research found renting had worse effects on biological age than being unemployed (adding 1.4 weeks per year), obesity (adding 1 week per year), or being a former smoker (adding about 1.1 weeks). […] Biological ageing refers to cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of chronological age.

The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates — After 38 days, the ransom was delivered and Caesar went free.

Harvard University dismantled its prestigious team of online disinformation experts after a foundation run by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $500 million to the university

“The concept of normal sleep does change as we age, and recognizing these shifts is essential for maintaining optimal health.” The real culprit to watch out for as we age isn’t the amount of sleep, but quality of it.

Just like LDL cholesterol, high levels of lipoprotein(a) in your blood raises your risk of heart disease. Unlike LDL cholesterol, your Lp(a) level is determined almost entirely by genetics, which means little can be done to change it. Pharma giant Eli Lilly recently released the results of a phase 1 trial of an experimental drug called lepodisiran that lowers participants’ high Lp(a) levels by as much as 96%.

Male mosquitoes likely used to suck blood too — The origin of blood feeding in insects is something of a mystery. Scientists suspect that at some point, insects that evolved sharp mouthparts to suck sap from plants turned towards animals. Current-day male mosquitoes feed on nectar from plants and generally avoid blood even when it’s offered in the lab.

Scientists have spent 18 years looking for the elusive Cross Seamount beaked whale — a potentially new species they’ve heard but never seen

Europe’s commercial ports are top entry points for cocaine flooding in at record rates. The work of a Dutch hacker, who was hired by drug traffickers to penetrate port IT networks, reveals how this type of smuggling has become easier than ever.

I am making a web service to print that video. [PrintThatVideo.com]

Madness and James Joyce

A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. […] ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Repeat this word forever: ‘poem poem poem poem’” was the word “poem” for a long time, and then, eventually, an email signature for a real human “founder and CEO,” which included their personal contact information including cell phone number and email address, for example.

Researchers claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases. […] They recorded a person typing on a 16-inch 2021 MacBook Pro using a phone placed 17cm away and processed the sounds to get signatures of the keystrokes. […] Over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

Amazon’s Q has ‘severe hallucinations’ and leaks confidential data in public preview, employees warn

AI Decides to Engage in Insider Trading

Booking.com hackers increase attacks on customers — Cyber-security experts say Booking.com itself has not been hacked, but criminals have devised ways to get into the administration portals of individual hotels which use the service. Hackers are first tricking hotel staff into downloading a malicious piece of software called Vidar Infostealer. They do this by sending an email to the hotel pretending to be a former guest who has left their passport in their room. Criminals then send a Google Drive link to the staff saying that it contains an image of the passport. Instead the link downloads malware on to staff computers and automatically searches the hotel computers for Booking.com access. Then the hackers log into the Booking.com portal allowing them to see all customers who currently have room or holiday reservations. The hackers then message customers from the official app and are able to trick people into paying money to them instead of the hotel. Hackers appear to be making so much money in their attacks that they are now offering to pay thousands to criminals who share access to hotel portals.

these findings suggest that traumatic memories are an alternative cognitive entity that deviates from memory per se.

Longevity drugs for our canine companions are moving closer to reality. […] Scientists have created longer-lived worms, flies and mice by tweaking key aging- related genes. These findings have raised the tantalizing possibility that scientists might be able to find drugs that had the same life-extending effects in people. That remains an active area of research, but canine longevity has recently started to attract more attention, in part because dogs are good models for human aging and in part because many pet owners would love more time with their furry family members. […] “What if we see more dogs outliving their owners?”

While some reptiles and amphibians show no significant signs of aging, all mammals—including humans—show a marked aging process. […] Professor de Magalhaes’ hypothesis suggests that during the Mesozoic Era, mammals faced persistent pressure for rapid reproduction during the reign of dinosaurs, which over 100 million years led to the loss or inactivation of genes associated with long life, such as processes associated with tissue regeneration and DNA repair.

This article outlines a practical and efficient three-pass method for reading research papers.

An artist is teaching Boston Dynamics robot dogs to paint

A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors’ notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups.

There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure — As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting.” The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik’s spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity. It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the “paper mill,” an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive “publish or perish” culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don’t always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up — an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 — the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

In 1970s Ireland, Pubs Briefly Replaced Banks — and It Worked

Why Navajo is the world’s hardest language to learn

A private island resort has found an effective way to eradicate mosquitoes Soneva Fushi, a resort on the private Kunfunadhoo Island in the Maldives, first employed the Biogents system in 2019, using two different types of traps – more than 500 in total positioned around the island. The first type, called the BG-GAT, is a passive trap meant for tiger mosquitoes that have already bitten someone and are searching for a place to lay eggs. The second type, the BG-Mosquitaire CO2, is meant to attract mosquitoes searching for blood, which it does by using carbon dioxide created through yeast and sugar fermentation, plus lactic acid, which mimics human skin. […] The resort said it recorded a dramatic decrease in the island’s mosquito population by upwards of 98% in the first year. […] the Maldives’ native insects are flourishing again. “These natural pollinators are now back in abundance, which means there are more flowers, more fruits and more produce,” says Oines, adding that more fruits and insects also means “there are also more birds visiting the shores of Kunfunadhoo and fireflies are once again spotted at night.”

Download all of Wikipedia on your phone

Diane Arbus photographed by Garry Winogrand

Nuclear research lab Idaho National Laboratory (INL) confirmed that it fell victim to a data breach on Tuesday. SiegedSec, a group of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” took responsibility for the attack and claimed they accessed sensitive employee data like social security numbers, home addresses and more. “We’re willing to make a deal with INL. If they research creating irl catgirls we will take down this post”

Life expectancy can increase by up to 10 years following sustained shifts towards healthier diets — Our results showed that the longevity-associated dietary pattern had moderate intakes of whole grains, fruit, fish and white meat; a high intake of milk and dairy, vegetables, nuts and legumes; a relatively low intake of eggs, red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages; and a low intake of refined grains and processed meat

higher body mass index increased the risk of obesity-related cancer among European adults

Deep space astronauts may be prone to erectile dysfunction, study finds — As if wasting muscles, thinner bones, an elevated cancer risk were not enough

Children tend to overestimate their performance on a variety of tasks and activities […] with their estimates of performance being 1.3 times their actual performance […] children’s self-overestimation gradually decreases with age […] The present meta-analysis examines the specificity of this phenomenon across age, tasks, and more than five decades of historical time (1968–2021). […] children overestimated themselves more strongly in studies that were more recently conducted

Contrary to the commonly-held view, the brain does not have the ability to rewire itself to compensate for the loss of sight, an amputation or stroke. Instead, what is occurring is merely the brain being trained to utilise already existing, but latent, abilities.

ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other.

The focus of this essay is Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas scholastica, a compilation of eight books published in 1606. We are interested specifically in Book 8,titled Metaphysics, or Ontology, an English translation of which can be found in Uckelman (2008). As is now well known, what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology” (ontologia, in Latin) is to be found in this work.

The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it’s only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal.

It is the rise and fall of median voters’ unhappiness that drives the regime change between the two major political parties in the United States.

Eye-to-eye contact is rare but shapes our social behavior […] participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval. Many questions remain about the formerly taboo chemicals that are being used to treat trauma and depression. […] Dölen says that psychedelics could be a “master key” that unlocks critical periods — making them more sensitive to particular stimuli.

viruses can actually get sick. […]the culprits turn out to be other viruses.

Elephants give each other unique names, groundbreaking study reveals […] researchers recorded over 600 elephant calls […] low-frequency noises between 1 to 20 Hertz, too low for the human ear to hear. However, these so-called infrasounds can travel over vast distances as large as 10 kilometers (6 miles). The researchers then implemented a machine learning algorithm, which identified specific rumbles for 119 individual elephants. […] Some of these rumbles were played back to 17 wild elephants. When they heard their name, they were more likely to move quickly toward the sound source and vocalize faster in response.

How Stone Walls Became a Signature Landform of New England

Updates to the Open AI saga

AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time

How Citizen Scientists Rescued Crucial World War II Weather Data

In machine learning, a stochastic parrot is a large language model that is good at generating convincing language, but does not actually understand the meaning of the language it is processing

Perhaps “Shakespeare” was a woman — Shakespeare’s life is remarkably well documented, by the standards of the period—yet no records from his lifetime identify him unequivocally as a writer. The more than 70 documents that exist show him as an actor, a shareholder in a theater company, a moneylender, and a property investor. They show that he dodged taxes, was fined for hoarding grain during a shortage, pursued petty lawsuits, and was subject to a restraining order. The profile is remarkably coherent, adding up to a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry. What’s missing is any sign that he wrote. No such void exists for other major writers of the period. […] By contrast, more than a few of Shakespeare’s contemporaries are on record suggesting that his name got affixed to work that wasn’t his.

Dominatrix’s ‘Slave’ Sentenced for ‘Ferocious’ Murder of Her Boyfriend

Rip Off fetish is a FemDom fetish in which the Domme rips off Her sub, typically by increasing the price of a clip. The sub is typically turned on by being ripped off. Ideas for Rip Off Fetish: Increase the price of a very short clip that features hardly anything; Explain in painful detail why the sub deserves to be ripped off.

Addicted to losing: How casino-like apps have drained people of millions

Mobile phone use may affect semen quality

Does body exposure drive income success on Instagram? Is there a difference between male and female content in this regard? […] Accounts with high level of body exposure achieve higher prices and advertising revenues than accounts with less nudity, regardless of the gender.

How AI uses social media to help con artists with the ‘grandparent scam’ and other schemes

People are editing Paul Nicklen into hospital bed pictures, faking his passports, and scamming fans out of thousands of dollars through social media impersonation.

Google is taking legal action against two groups of scammers. The first created social media pages and ran ads that encouraged people to “download” Bard, our freely available generative AI tool that does not need to be downloaded. The ads instead led people to download malware that compromised their social media accounts. The second weaponized the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to harm their business competitors by submitting thousands of blatantly fraudulent copyright notices.

AI robot chemist could make oxygen on Mars

AI could predict heart attack risk up to 10 years in the future, finds Oxford study

Cognitive decline in old age is slower in pet owners

Welcome to the Kinky World of AI Financial Domination

Bonsai Kitten (2021)

Free will implicates inner speech via self-regulation

Results from a new clinical trial suggest that a group of brain regions known as the “salience network” is activated after a drug is taken intravenously, but not when that same drug is taken orally. When drugs enter the brain quickly, such as through injection or smoking, they are more addictive than when they enter the brain more slowly, such as when they are taken orally. However, the brain circuits underlying these differences are not well understood. […] drug smoking and injection are associated with developing a substance use disorder more quickly than taking drugs orally or by insufflation (e.g., snorting).[…] The salience network attributes value to things in our environment and is important for recognizing and translating internal sensations—including the subjective effects of drugs. This research adds to a growing body of evidence documenting the important role that the salience network appears to play in substance use and addiction.

Google Maps captures B-2 Stealth Bomber crashing off runway

A Hiker Is Lucky to Be Alive After Following a Fake Trail on Google Maps

Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4 million loss; CFO quits — Sphere, the $2.3 billion venue near the Strip opened Sept. 29

Inside The Small World of Simulating Other Worlds — Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations.

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

This document acknowledges that Lauren (“Talent”) has agreed to appear for a MAXIMUM of THREE (3) days and TWO (2) nights at the residence of her mother (“Venue”) during the Thanksgiving holiday, pursuant to the terms of this agreement. […] Venue shall provide Talent with unlimited, unmonitored access to a fully stocked bar for the duration of her appearance, featuring a MINIMUM of: ONE (1) gallon-size handle of vodka…

This is a rare music video about using a diamond cutting disk to cut an entrapped metal penile ring. The music is Mozart’s piano concerto no. 21 in C major.

Vittorio Gassman in I Mostri

It’s true: People do poop, a lot, in ride lines at Disneyland and Disney World

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval — but no one knows how they work

The distribution of lie prevalence is specified to exhibit a non-normal, positively skewed distribution in which the majority of people are normatively honest, and most lies are told by a few prolific liars.

willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly

A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. […] our findings suggest that a wandering mind is not always necessarily a creative mind

People often make judgments about uncertain facts and events, for example `Germany will win the world cup’. Here we present a rational analysis of these judgments: we argue that a guess functions as a compressed encoding of the speaker’s subjective probability distribution over relevant possibilities.

Imagine a bowl of soup that never emptied, no matter how many spoonfuls you ate - when and how would you know to stop eating? Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. results suggest that eating can be strongly controlled by visual cues, which can even override satiation.

One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days […] unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment […] When a Meta security expert told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s approach to protecting teens wasn’t working, the CEO didn’t reply. Now the former insider is set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior.

Zuurbier said “that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use” […] In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime

More than 40 years ago, Farouk El-Baz theorized that the wind played a big hand in shaping the Great Sphinx of Giza before the ancient Egyptians added surface details to the landmark sculpture. A new study offers evidence to suggest that theory might be plausible.

Erewhon’s Secrets — In the 1960s, two macrobiotic enthusiasts started a health-food sect beloved by hippies. Now it’s the most culty grocer in L.A.

Penguin of the month: Timmy - Stole fish - Pushed another penguin over. Good penguin, naughty penguin: Inside the incredible drama at the National Aquarium

Starfish bodies aren’t bodies at all “It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor”

One sleepless night can rapidly reverse depression for several days — Acute sleep loss increases dopamine release and rewires the brain, new study finds

wasabi improves short- and long-term memory in older people

our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health

The significant health benefits of walking backward

When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached fortobacco’s PR playbook

Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. […] Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh over five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy. You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street… But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees. Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

I had my hoodies that featured these amazing 1940’s drawings of Snow White fucking the dwarfs and stuff like that. […] I do think retouching often ruins the image. In these 70s, 80s porn mags i’m talking about the woman looked so real and sexual in such a visceral way, the frizziness of the hair would look like a halo because of the lighting, she might have stretchmarks showing inside her thighs which just makes her more tangible and makes you want to fuck, you want to touch her because she feels real. […] It’s like you have bad values if you slept with more than like 9 people and if any less then you’re an angel. Why is there so much value put on sex, who you’ve had sex with and how many times […] I feel so sorry for the generation behind us, the saturation levels are insane. I watched something yesterday and it said in the last 20 years, the human race has risen by about 2 billion, which is insane. How can you expect to get your dream job, to be singular, to stand out and to have created something truly new? Can you actually even do anything new anymore? And that makes me so sad.

AI smoothie shop in San Francisco closes two months after launch

AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening

GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for one year of non-exclusive access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research

The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.

40% of people faint at least once in their lifetime […] Mouse experiments reveal the brain-heart connections that cause us to rapidly lose consciousness

How to remove a spider from your ear

“Clue” is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings […] The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings. With “Clue,” though, one ending is more than enough.

Viagra could slash risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 60%

Scientists say they have successfully simulated a method of backward time travel that allowed them to change an event after the fact one out of four times. The Cambridge University team is quick to caution that they have not built a time machine, per se, but also note how their process doesn’t violate physics while changing past events after they have happened.

The future may be less about healing injured body parts and more about regenerating new ones. How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs

The human body has 1.8 trillion cells dedicated to defending it. For the first time, a study has measured the size of the immune system: if it were an organ, it would weigh more than a kilo and represents 0.2% of all human cells.

Researchers found that when adjusted for body mass index (BMI), intake of unprocessed and processed red meat (beef, pork or lamb) was not directly associated with any markers of inflammation, suggesting that body weight, not red meat, may be the driver of increased systemic inflammation. Of particular interest was the lack of a link between red meat intake and C-reactive protein (CRP), the major inflammatory risk marker of chronic disease.

Some patients can have vivid and detailed sexual hallucinations during anesthesia with sedative-hypnotic drugs like propofol, midazolam, diazepam and nitrous oxide. Some make suggestive or sexual comments or act out, such as grabbing or kissing medical professionals or touching themselves in a sexual way. Others awaken erroneously believing they were sexually assaulted.

A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals

The Emptiness Of Literature Written For The Market

Italian woman wins court case to evict her two sons, aged 40 and 42

about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may provide an antidote to the ills of prolonged sitting

Cats have 276 facial expressions — Each expression combined about four of 26 unique facial movements, including parted lips, jaw drops, dilated or constricted pupils, blinks and half blinks, pulled lip corners, nose licks, protracted or retracted whiskers, and/or various ear positions. By comparison, humans have 44 unique facial movements, although researchers are still working out how many different expressions they combine into, Florkiewicz says. Dogs have 27 facial movements, but again, their total number of expressions isn’t known.

AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalize language

Humans Absorb Bias from AI — And Keep It after They Stop Using the Algorithm

Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, Plumber Near Me — businesses across the country picked names meant to outsmart Google Search. Does it actually work?

How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

“african country that starts with k”

An account on Grindr called “GiantCockNYC” is constantly reappearing in users’ messages despite being blocked, with the account owner claiming they are an employee for the hookup app who is able to repeatedly remove the blocks. But Grindr itself says that isn’t the case here. A spokesperson said in an email that “The person created multiple profiles, deleted, then created another — with the same name/photos to make it appear as though blocks weren’t working.”