Buying human breast milk online poses serious health risk, say experts

Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum

A power nap of under an hour can improve memory performance by five times, a new study finds.

One thousand genes you could live without

Can We Interpret Smoking Habits in Historic Skeletal Remains?

Anthropologists have shown that the practice of cannibalism is very often linked to magic, as the provider of the most potent ingredients to make ‘medicine’ to make a person bullet-proof, able to fly, all-powerful, and many more wondrous things.

Scientists have discovered a simple way to cook rice that reduces its calories by as much as 50 percent

Algorithm Clones Facial Expressions… And Pastes Them Onto Other Faces

There are only four people/organizations in the world who know my location at all times: my wife (because I tell her), Apple (because Siri), the NSA (because NSA), and now Uber.

Manipulating Wikipedia to Promote a Bogus Business School

Tinder hack made hundreds of bros unwittingly flirt with each other

Kinetic sculpture by Jennifer Townley

Four circles, and none of them touch

US researchers are investigating ways to extract the gold and precious metals from human faeces.

Radioactive sanitary pads from China seized by authorities in Lebanon [Thanks Tim]

New Alzheimer’s treatment fully restores memory function

Excess Time Indoors May Explain Rising Myopia Rates

A relationship between temperature and aggression in NFL football penalties

MIT discovers a new state of matter, a new kind of magnetism

Can Space Expand Faster Than the Speed of Light?

Bestselling books, 1900-1999

Sneeze catcher (new patent)

Sufficient sleep is important for healthy sexual desire

A psychology study sheds new light on today’s standards of beauty, attributing modern men’s preferences for women with a curvy backside to prehistoric influences.

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior

Psychopathic tendencies in chimpanzees

The Science of Near-Death Experiences

Can Synesthesia Be Learned?

Can you really catch a disease from bad bathroom smells?

How solar eclipses cause problems for countries that rely on solar power

The oddly beautiful (and sometimes disturbing) uniform patches of the DEA

Too Many Scientific Studies, Study Finds

Using a Foreskin to Repair Eyelids

Scientists discover how to change human leukemia cells into harmless immune cells

Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition

A few people become inebriated simply by eating carbohydrates

The origin of the anus

The effects of being in a “new relationship” on levels of testosterone in men [PDF]

5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World

Plastics designed to degrade don’t break down any faster than their conventional counterparts, according to research

Passports for a Price: The Business Showing Poor Countries How to Sell Citizenship

Construction of airports is proceeding at a blistering pace in China

Hertz puts cameras in its rental cars, says it has no plans to use them

In 2009, a man calling himself Peter Bergmann arrived in an Irish town with a plan to disappear forever

How To Break Free If Your Hands Are Bound With Duct Tape

Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She’s Not What She Appears

Things Bodies Can Do After Death [Thanks Nathan]

DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche’s voice

Oculus Rex

Model who is almost 9 months pregnant is so fit she has abs

Man created dating site — and he’s the only one on it

People who are trying to impress a date with their good looks might want to limit themselves to one drink

The risk of a heart attack increases by at least 8.5 times in the two hours after the intense emotions of anger and anxiety, a new study finds.

A mother has helped her 24-year-old son become a father by carrying his child as a surrogate. How a father became the brother of his own son

How easy would it be to edit a human embryo using CRISPR? Very easy, experts say.

Our results cannot confirm beneficial effects of breastfeeding on child intelligence.

Why Can’t Rodents Vomit?

Why can’t horses vomit?

Why Killer Whales Go Through Menopause But Elephants Don’t

Startups in the U.S. are working on 3D printing nipples and bits of liver tissue, while a Russian provocateur claims to have on-demand thyroids.

Scientists Insert a Synthetic Memory Into the Brain of a Sleeping Mouse

People are hopeless at drawing the Apple logo, and that tells us something about human memory

What one man learned by crashing elite colleges for 4 years

How a group of robbers staged one of history’s biggest bank heists - without setting foot in a bank

US May Run Out Of Oil Storage Space As Soon As June

Vincent van Gogh’s reds have been turning white

The facial pose of a person can be a good indicator of their importance, because important people often tend to be looking directly at the camera. The importance of specific individuals in photos of multiple people [PDF]

Effects of “vocal fry” on pitch perception

A simple brute force DDoS attack against one or two key points in the Internet would be enough to make the rest unusable. Personally I would probably go after MAE-West in San Jose, partly because almost all the traffic to and from Silicon Valley goes through there.

US physicists have studied the fluid dynamics of urine “splashback” - and found tips to help men and women with their accuracy and hygiene.

Lennart Green: Close-up card magic with a twist

The Museum of the Paranormal, The Museum of Medieval Torture Instruments, The Museum of Death…

website that deletes itself once indexed by Google [Thanks Darren!]

She’s just trying to shock us

There’s too much poo on Mount Everest, says mountaineering boss

We’ve killed off half the world’s animals since 1970

Wall Street Has Its Eyes on Millennials’ $30 Trillion Inheritance

On the origins of dishonesty: From parents to children

After handshakes, we sniff people’s scent on our hand

Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults

Adults only really catch flu about twice a decade, study

Genetically-modified mice resistant to frostbite

Life ‘not as we know it’ possible on Saturn’s moon Titan could harbor methane-based, oxygen-free cells that metabolize, reproduce and do everything life on Earth does.

What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?

The Price of Oil Is About to Blow a Hole in Corporate Accounting.

A Decentralized Lie Detector

We have a hallway in our apartment we would like to convert into the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding 1994 museum.

A start-up offers suspected shoplifters the chance to pay $320 to stop the police being called

Vial of Winston Churchill’s Blood to Be Sold at Auction [NY Times]

No, Head Transplants Are Definitely Not Going To Happen

In a rare legal move, prosecutors brought a deceased woman’s vagina into a murder trial Friday for jurors to view during testimony.

Bra Wearing Not Associated with Breast Cancer Risk

New study suggests yet another potential health benefit of coffee consumption: it could reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis.

Saunas help you live longer, study finds

Thinking about money makes you feel physically colder

Scientists discover part of brain that calculates the intentions of others

Is your punctuation as distinctive as your DNA?

Researchers create world’s first 3D-printed jet engines

20-year-old Military Weather Satellite Apparently Exploded in Orbit

Nicaragua has enlisted a little-known Chinese billionaire to dig a 161-mile canal across the country and link the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. If built, the Nicaragua Canal would be longer, wider, and deeper than the 51-mile Panama Canal.

The Wankband comes in the form of a high-tech wristband that generates power as the user creates a frenetic movement while pleasuring themselves. [Thanks Tim]

Zambia’s top prosecutor refused to prosecute himself on charges of abuse of office and declared himself a free man.

Police arrest conmen who sold a fake Goya, and were paid with fake cash

New DNA technique can predict a person’s physical appearance with 80 percent confidence. [more ]

What is done by the unconscious, and what requires conscious thought? New experiment shows just how much work is going on underneath the surface of our conscious minds.

The discovery that the human brain continues to produce new neurons in adulthood challenged a major dogma in the field of neuroscience

Moth tails divert bat attack: Evolution of acoustic deflection

Hippopotamuses and whales have a common ancestor

After 8 centuries, rats exonerated in spread of Black Death. Gerbils implicated. [previously]

See the monster in the mirror? If so, you are not depressed.

Men now outnumber women on the planet by 60 million, the highest ever recorded

Why a coffee is more likely to spill than a latte

Falconry accessories

Colombian teacher who likes to wear Nazi-themed bondage outfits changes her name to Abcdefg Hijklmn Opqrst Uvwxyz

You can now bet on shark racing in Florida

Mercury level in tuna is getting higher

Older scientists are often seen as less open to new ideas than younger scientists. We put this assertion to an empirical test. Our results buttress the importance of funding scientific work by young researchers. [PDF]

Researchers have found a way to store information in the form of DNA, presumably preserving it for nearly an eternity.

Regular coffee consumption contributes to DNA integrity

Langauge: Redefining the Role of Broca’s Area?

New insight into how brain performs ‘mental time travel’

Two New Particles Found at Large Hadron Collider

Think of a strand of spaghetti that can hold 3,000 pounds. Scientists have discovered nature’s newest strongest substance.

Scientists create contact lens that magnifies at blink of an eye

Why Do Inventors Sell to Patent Trolls?

Japan Has More Car Chargers Than Gas Stations

Are Submarines About to Become Obsolete?

Before Korea, America never lost a war. Ever since, other than the first Gulf War, it hasn’t won any. Why the world’s biggest military keeps losing wars.

Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication?

The four male crew members (models provided to Abercrombie) had to wear jeans, boxers, polo shirts, and flip-flops. The manual specified the seating arrangements for Jeffries’s three dogs, the length of the spoon Smith required for his tea, and the proper way to respond to requests (“No problem”). Behind the decline of Abercrombie & Fitch and the fall of its mastermind, Michael Jeffries

Shred Your Ex [more]

How to Make Breakfast With Your Vagina

‘Haunted’ laptop exposed to graveyard overnight gets eBay bids of over $3000. Texas seller claims his MacBook levitates and uses pen and paper to write notes after it was left at a graveyard next to an abandoned mental hospital all night.

To avoid wrinkles, woman hasn’t smiled in 40 years

Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality

Memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s reversed for first time

Dude Builds Tinder Bot to Automate Swipes Based on Facial Recognition [Thanks Tim]

While some expect sex robots to be commonplace in a decade, they may be leapfrogged by ‘neural virtual reality’

Robotic Extrusions

Swoosh swoosh! [Thanks Tim]

Baby girl born ‘pregnant’ with twins undergoes operation to remove foetuses

Napping reverses health effects of poor sleep

A meta-analysis of 193 brain-imaging studies shows similar gray-matter loss in the brains of people with diagnoses as different as schizophrenia, depression and addiction. The findings call into question a longstanding tendency to distinguish psychiatric disorders chiefly by their symptoms rather than their underlying brain pathology.

Most respondents reported their BDSM interests starting before age 15, sometimes creating a phase of anxiety and shame in the absence of reassuring information.

Bilingual infants lip-read more than monolingual infants

Native Americans Say Facebook Is Accusing Them of Using Fake Names

The Business of Fake Diplomas

Hollywood Agency to Manage Careers of Visual Artists

There’s No Plague on the NYC Subway. No Platypuses Either.

After only 100 feet of sea-level rise, the island of Manhattan is almost totally submerged. Brooklyn and Queens are reduced to a handful of small islands.

Bitchcoin

timder brooklyn [Thanks Tim]

Woman becomes obese after fecal transplant from overweight donor

Greek Judges Judge Judges’ Pensions Cuts Unconstitutional

Colorado May Pay Residents Over Excess Marijuana Revenue

Light jogging may be most optimal for longevity

“Testosterone is ridiculously powerful […] the feeling of well-being, of focus, and of masculine energy are massively increased. It’s like you’re back to being 35.”

The team’s model predicts that the most attractive penis would measure 12.8–14.2 centimetres in its flaccid state

Animals getting high, drunk and tripping

Why do people make stupid choices when gambling? We can discover intriguing insights by recruiting monkeys and getting them to gamble too.

New mathematical theory may explain patterns in fingerprints, raisins, and microlenses

Tor: the last bastion of online anonymity, but is it still secure after Silk Road?

Bloomberg News headlines, as we’ve observed in the past, often sound like they’ve been written by someone with a bizarre journalistic strain of aphasia.

The Facebook Page That Posts The Same Picture Every Day

US airplane accidents between 1983 and 2000: More than 95 percent of airplane occupants survived. [PDF | Thanks Nathan!]

Mapping the Bacteria in New York’s Subways More: Half the DNA on the NYC Subway Matches No Known Organism

World Famous Photographs Recreated in a Studio

Chemists find a way to unboil eggs

A glass of red wine is the equivalent to an hour at the gym, says new study

The App Economy Is Now ‘Bigger Than Hollywood’

Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

How Japan became a pop culture superpower

The woman who can’t feel fear

Doctors die, too. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. Why Doctors Die Differently

Why do some women prefer submissive men?

Women and men misunderstand each other’s signals of friendliness and sexual interest. But these misinterpretations are no surprise to evolutionary psychologists.

The variety of things we use time for means the brain keeps track of lengths from milliseconds to decades. These different estimations occur in different brain circuits that span the brain.

Spicer and Alvesson found that the organizations that acted the most stupidly were investment banks, public relations agencies, and consultancies.

The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted the article to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.”

New police radars can ’see’ inside homes

The gang had been targeting ATMs with a technique never before used in the U.K.

Michelle Esquenazi owns one of the largest bail bond agencies in New York state.

The FBI’s Top Hostage Negotiator Teaches You How To Lower Your Bills

Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde Sparks Facebook Legal Battle

Creator or buyer: Who really owns the art?

Stanley Kubrick shoots the N.Y.C. subway, 1946

Sand can be anything from shrimp excrement to skeletons of tiny organisms

The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument under construction in South Dakota.

Finally. A boyfriend your friends can believe in. + Invisible girlfriend [Thanks GG]

Celebrities that Look Like Mattresses [Thanks Tim]

Colorado baker is facing a discrimination complaint after refusing to write “God hates homosexuality” on a cake

The Secret to Smart Groups Isn’t Smart People—It’s Women

Frequent Internet and social media users do not have higher stress levels than those who use technology less often. And for women, using certain digital tools decreases stress. [NY Times]

Closing your eyes boosts memory recall

People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened

Environment, more than genetics, shapes immune system

If the decision-making algorithm were to always choose the option in which the fewest people die, the car might avoid another car carrying two passengers by running off the road and risking killing just one passenger: its own. Or it might choose to hit a Volvo instead of a Mini Cooper because its occupants are more likely to survive a crash, which means choosing the vehicle that is more dangerous for its owner to plow into. [NY Times]

Cicada, the Web’s Deepest Mystery

The Mysteries Of White Mist On The Surface of Black Coffee

Computer scientists have developed a set of Android-based tools that turn PacMan into street-based chase games.

Hitler suffered from uncontrollable flatulence. His health issues only got worse after meeting Dr. Theodor Morell.

Why the Inside of a Camel’s Mouth Looks Like a Sarlacc Pit

When did people start smiling in photographs?

Conman sold urine as whiskey

Certain wavelengths of visible light are nearly 100% lethal to insects. Blue LEDs could be a new form of pest control.

Unhealthy people more likely to vote for attractive candidates

Solar activity affects fertility across generations in historical Norway. More sun means fewer children and grandchildren.

Antibiotics: US discovery labelled ‘game-changer’ for medicine

Does sleeping naked prevent diabetes?

They discreetly asked me if I would mind waiting a few minutes because Yoko Ono (!!!) was just finishing a treatment. Cryotherapy is a process in which you subject the body to extreme cold for a short period of time in order to reduce inflammation.

Neuroscience research fails to support claims that excessive pornography consumption causes brain damage

Amongst heterosexuals, men are almost twice as likely to be upset by sexual infidelity as women, a new study finds. Heterosexual women, meanwhile, are much more likely to be upset by emotional infidelity.

New research suggests that reflecting on a breakup may help heal the heart.

Experiments to explore how we might artificially cool the Earth—commonly called geoengineering.

The Satellite Search for Genghis Khan’s Tomb

The Phantom Cannibal (Part Two) [Previously: Part One]

The scam has been dubbed virtual kidnapping

In the past few years, street gangs have been retreating from public view all over Southern California.

Nicknamed “stingrays,” the devices are decoy cell towers that capture locations and identities of mobile phone users and can intercept calls and texts.

A.I. still can’t recognize these simple pictures.

Saving everything in case it might be useful later is a recipe for disaster.

Radio, not YouTube, was still the top method of music discovery in the US last year

Google sees biggest search traffic drop since 2009 as Yahoo gains ground. The increase comes after Firefox switched its default search from Google to Yahoo.

The First Quantum Art Exhibition in Space

How NASA and other space agencies colorize space photos

U.S. ambassador to Finland

UK couple stranded in New York after baby arrived 11 weeks early face potential £130,000 medical bill

Art critic Julian Spalding banned from Damien Hirst’s Tate exhibition after calling him a talentless conman

Two-thirds of cancer cases due to “bad luck”

Arsenic in drinking water linked to 50 percent drop in breast cancer deaths

Scientists ‘edit’ DNA to correct adult genes and cure diseases

Researchers discover Asian fanged frog that don’t lay eggs but gives birth to tadpoles

Cleaning waste water with algae

Science Word of the Day: Kleptothermy

We conclude that early socio-economic conditions predict, to some extent, facial attractiveness in young adulthood.

Two centuries before the Swinging Sixties the weakening of social customs caused by the Industrial Revolution led to a modest transformation in people’s sexual behaviour

In September, the right-wing scandal sheet Keiten Shimbun obtained the photo of the vice chairman of Japan’s Olympic Committee sitting next to the head of Japan’s largest yakuza syndicate

When he was growing up, Spartz said, his parents made him read “four short biographies of successful people every single day.

Why Some Things Are Popular

What is it like to be a blind film critic?

Why do People Behave Immorally When Drunk?

Is the Secret Service responsible for keeping the president from getting drunk?

Why is there a worm in bottles of tequila?

How to spot a liar [TED talk]

CIA takes blame for more than half of UFO sightings in late 1950s and 60s

JFK and 9/11 in Back to the Future - Hidden Messages In Plain Sight

Woman stabs son on Christmas over cell phone

Colorado couple arrested for stealing neighbors’ Christmas decorations, displaying them in yard (w/ mugshots)

Male Birth Control, Without Condoms, Will Be Here by 2017

Not as many married couples as expected are taking advantage of a loosening in China’s one-child policy that allows them to have two children if one spouse is an only child.

Researchers identify a few cases where identical twins’ genes behave differently

Why you can live a normal life with half a brain

The compound behind all those stories about red wine being good for you

Many people use too many plastic bags, drive their cars too much, eat too much meat or bluefin tuna, drink bottled water … Small Impacts and Imperceptible Effects

Possible alternative explanation for dark energy [previously]

Hundreds of Portuguese Buses and Taxis Are Also Wi-Fi Routers (and collect data for city planners)

Chrisdien Deny, a retail chain with more than 500 locations across China, sells belts, shoes and clothing with an “Italian style” — and a logo with the same font as Christian Dior’s. [NY Times]

How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View

They once called him “Sweden’s Hannibal Lector.” 

How the “Paul McCartney is Dead” Hoax Started at an American College Newspaper and Went Viral (1969)

Take life by the balls

Chinese passenger opens plane door for fresh air

Cuban spy’s ultimate mystery: How he got his wife pregnant from a U.S. prison

Amazon ’suppresses’ book with too many hyphens

Lost memories might be able to be restored, study

How Psychology and Neuroscience Get Sex and Gender Wrong

A company given $21 million by leading Silicon Valley investors aims to extend Bitcoin’s functionality so it can power much more than just payments.

Why an electric car may be much dirtier than a petrol one

The celebrity analysis that killed celebrity analysis

Queen Victoria enjoyed sex, bought modern art, liked looking at drawings of naked men, was emotionally self-indulgent, histrionic and luxurious. Victorian values, as we understand them, reached their apogee in the reigns of her grandson George V and his son George VI

Andy Warhol at a Party with His Tape Recorder, Which he Referred to as “My Wife Sony” [more]

ISIS using bombs containing live scorpions

NY City council votes to ban sale of bunnies by pet shops. The bunny ban is part of a larger legislative package also regulating the sale of dogs and cats in pet stores. [more]

Scientists locate ‘homing signal’ in the brain, explaining why some people are better navigators

Balancing on one leg may indicate if a person is at risk of dementia or stroke, a study has found.

Researchers have identified a neural circuit in the mouse brain that controls attention and sensory processing, providing insight into how the brain filters out distractions

Bankers not as dishonest as purported

The Conventional Wisdom On Oil Is Always Wrong

Uber Seeks to Patent “Surge Pricing”

Fundamental plot arcs, seen through multidimensional analysis of thousands of TV and movie scripts

quantum physics is less complicated than we thought. Researchers has proved that two peculiar features of the quantum world previously considered distinct are different manifestations of the same thing.

A Brief History of Pubic Hair in Art

Expressions to avoid

Oscar selfie

A Dutchman’s plan to propose to his girlfriend has ended with a mobile crane smashing the roof of a house and forcing the evacuation of two others

Outgoing, sociable people also have the strongest immune systems, a new study finds

Men Who Love Spicy Food Have More Testosterone

There are ways to replace those bad habits with good ones… and all it takes is 66 days.

A 52 year old woman suffered from a strange problem: she saw dragons wherever she looked.

“Mondegreen” means a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your head, but is, in fact, entirely incorrect.

How Birds Lost Their Teeth

An In-Depth Analysis of a Piece of Shit: Distribution of Schistosoma mansoni and Hookworm Eggs in Human Stool

A Brief History of Investment Banking from Medieval Times to the Present

A new method for mapping how information flows around the globe identifies the best languages to spread your ideas

Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch, but time and again it is drawn back to its lure

Nobody can say exactly when the trend first started, but in 2014 we saw the first major outbreaks of bogus data distributed by private companies just so it would go viral online.

Can the umbrella be improved?

The saltine cracker challenge

Robot flies to Germany as airline passenger from Los Angeles