Romanian Government Pays Subsidy of £400,000 For Farmville Farms.

Carjackers Who Stole Truck Full of Radioactive Waste Likely to Die

Masturbation is good for your health.

The role of facial hair in women’s perceptions of men’s attractiveness, health, masculinity and parenting abilities. [Thanks Tim]

The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads.

Insomnia drugs like Ambien are notorious for their side effects. Has Merck created a blockbuster replacement?

Experiments showed that a traumatic event could affect the DNA in sperm and alter the brains and behavior of subsequent generations.

Shapes of Things to Come: Exotic Shapes for Liquid Drops Have Many Possible Uses.

Sharks prefer to sneak up from behind, study shows.

The Art and Science of Growing Snowflakes in a Lab

How I Cured My Impostor Syndrome.

I believe Google is making a huge mistake in completely banning facial recognition systems for its Glass product.

A typical smartphone could be covered by as many as 250,000 patents. Google says patents are rubbish. Yet it’s accumulating more of them than ever.

Does parody trump copyright?

Top 10 Ways the US is the Most Corrupt Country in the World.

Inventions to detect and prevent annoying phone calls, documents, or people.

Can mixing up the running shoes prevent overuse running injury?

Toyota is getting more serious about wireless charging for its electric cars .

3-D Printing Metal Objects Is Now Possible

The GER mood-sweater, which uses Galvanic Skin Response, will automatically tell people how you are feeling.

You’ll learn about litotes, synecdoches, zeugmas, isocolons and the right way to order your adjectives.

New York was legendary. It was where things happened. David Byrne on NYC’s present and future.

Blogger shows how to take travel photos with an imaginary girlfriend.

And the future never arrives. [Thanks Tim]

Romanian Legs crushing watermelon.

Topless barber charged with unlicensed cosmetology.

Drone tries to sneak contraband into Georgia prison.

Amazon will need to answer questions about everything from privacy to physical safety if it wants its delivery-drone program to fly.

Australia and China are way ahead of Amazon in the commercial drone race.

21.8% of all online Black Friday sales were made from mobile devices.

The number of homeless people in shelters and living on the streets in Massachusetts has risen 14 percent since 2010.

How can it be that great wealth is created on Wall Street with products like credit-default swaps that destroyed the wealth of ordinary Americans—and yet we count this activity as growth? Likewise, fortunes are made manufacturing food products that make Americans fatter, sicker, and shorter-lived. And yet we count this as growth too.

Nasa to grow plants on the moon by 2015.

3-D printing lithium-ion batteries.

With free air cooling and 100 percent renewable electricity, does it make sense to outsource our data to Iceland?

Studies suggest red-haired women tend to choose the best passwords and men with bushy beards or unkempt hair, the worst. The gentle art of cracking passwords.

UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles shows significant increases in the reported prevalence of anal sex, lesbian activity, and female intercourse before age 16.

Psychologists have shown humans are poor judges of their own abilities, from sense of humour to grammar. Why the stupid think they’re smart.

In September I covered a paper that described the massive amount of bias created in the legal system in parts of the US where forensic laboratories are paid in return for coming to conclusions resulting in guilty verdicts. Another recent paper, published in Psychological Science has found that extraordinary levels of bias can occur even when money is not explicitly involved.

It took them 8 years after publication of the paper—and five after we submitted a retraction and 4 and a half years after we published PROOF of fraud (later borne out by Rutgers’ investigation) for them finally to “retract” a paper now cited 136 times. At long last, disputed dance study retracted from Nature.

How to Burst the “Filter Bubble” that Protects Us from Opposing Views.

The visual behavior of 320 elevator riders was observed by two experimenters. It was found that about half of all riders gave the confederate a brief visual notice at the beginning of the ride and then refrained from further eye contact.

Human Babies Are 75 Percent Water. Then Comes The Drying.

Despite the research telling us people will like you more if you are warm and hire you more when you are competent–perhaps, it is more important that you are moral.

Your Brain Has 2 Clocks.

During the past decade or two, there’s been a growing body of work arguing for a special connection between endogenous brain rhythms and timing patterns in speech.

To do everything that it needs to, the brain splits up the stream of visual information into a few different streams. One of these streams is linked to object recognition and representing abstract forms. For companies like Facebook or Google, copying this would be something of a holy grail.

DARPA Wants to Fix Broken Brains, Restore Lost Memories.

Starting next March, New York magazine will print only two issues a month.

Gawker Media has more readers than the top-circulation U.S. magazines.

Photographer wins $1.2 million from companies that took pictures off Twitter.

Heavy metal shows piracy is not killing music, offers new business model.

You have only three seconds to decide what to say. An angry soldier in front of you is about to shoot an unarmed prisoner. What words can you use to stay his itchy trigger finger?

I decided that there is literally no non-creepy way to say “Excuse me, do you mind if I place my hands on your breasts?”

Waiting in Line 3D is a very boring video game about queuing.

Why Aren’t Cities Taller?

Forty years after “The Exorcist” premiered, the anniversary of that classic horror movie has led to renewed interest in the 1949  possession case that reportedly inspired it. The boy at the centre of the exorcism case remains anonymous although he was assigned the pseudonym of “Roland Doe” by the Catholic Church.

Data gathered from horror movies show there are two strains of zombie infection and that both can be modeled in the same way as influenza.

Sony issued patent for ‘SmartWig.’

The artist takes one canned good to multiple supermarkets and re-buys it. This single can of corn has been re-bought from 105 supermarkets for a total of $113.07.

Wish you were beer.

Driver Arrested In Ohio For Secret Car Compartment Full of Nothing.

A Fake Slum for Luxury Tourists Who Don’t Want to See Real Poverty.

“A friend told him that when the toll booths were unmanned after 11:30 p.m., you could use the road without paying.” Reston man runs up $202,000 bill driving through E-ZPass gates without paying.

Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought.

In a mile-long run, contemporary children would finish a full minute and a half later than their parents did at their age in the 1980s. It’s a sad visual that exemplifies just how unhealthy our lifestyles have become.

Taking up exercise relativly late in life could help older individuals age healthily.

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley say that wives are the key player in toning down marital spats. And after a heated argument, she’s the one who needs to calm down to maintain peace.

A study finds men regret missing opportunities to have sex, while women feel remorse for having casual, meaningless sex.

Heavy Drinking Is Bad for Marriage if One Spouse Drinks, but Not Both.

Researchers say repeatedly exposing yourself to a negative event may prevent it from affecting you.

Going to the Movies: The Seat Choice Dilemma.

Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims.

The neuroscientist who was a psychopath? Or just narcissistic?

23andMe’s problem isn’t the FDA—it’s that no one knows if it works.

A simple explanation of how money moves arounds the banking system.

Chat rooms have become integral tools of the modern trading floor. UBS has become the latest bank to bar multi-dealer chat rooms.

“All that had changed was people’s opinion of the place.” Bitcoin vs. South Seas Stock.

Researchers found 20 million fake Twitter accounts for sale. That would mean almost 9% of Twitter’s monthly active users are fake.

A voyage into the strange underworld of spambots, shady marketing, and non-human intelligence.

Here’s yet another Twitter bot: Pizza Clones. Every two hours it generates a joke in the form of “Every {NOUN} is a(n) {ADJECTIVE} {NOUN} when/if/as long as {SUBORDINATE-CLAUSE}.”

Netflix has 20,000 customers in Australia—where it hasn’t even launched.

Online Anonymity in a Box, for $49.

Stuxnet is not really one weapon, but two. It turns out that it was far more dangerous than the cyberweapon that is now lodged in the public’s imagination.

From 1945 onwards, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI spied on Camus and Sartre. The investigation soon turned into a philosophical inquiry…

Aldous Huxley is the true visionary.

Interview with US Defense Attorney turned Tijuana Narcojunior.

Prankster applies to art schools with famous artist’s portfolio.

A guidebook for an Alien language.

Snapchat’s 23-year-old founder continues his goodwill campaign.

Booth has been dedicating his free time to designing and demonstrating a variety of homemade weapons constructed out of items commonly found in airports.

The device is offered for sale under the brand name ”Sandun-Evaco Toilet Converter.”

Gagadoll.

It’s a dish where a chicken is stuffed into a duck which is then stuffed into a turkey.

Smart glasses let nurses see veins through skin.

Women’s expectations of the opposite sex are at least as unrealistic as men’s.

For a mother, the smell of a newborn baby — not even her own, according to this study — provides a dose of dopamine and fills her with feelings of positivity and well-being, which acts as a reward for cuddling and snuggling the baby.

New research has shown that people who are not accustomed to holding power are more likely to be vengeful when placed in charge. Experienced power-holders, on the other hand, were found to be more tolerant of perceived wrongdoing.

What makes for a beautiful visage, and why, may have been discovered accidentally on a Russian fur farm.

The Macbeth Effect (when feelings of moral disgust provoke a desire for physical cleansing): A failure to replicate the Macbeth Effect across three continents.

An article in The Observer about our tendency to perceive meaning where there is none.

Where is language located in the brain? There are two sides to this story.

Tickling yourself is impossible.

Odds of being murdered closely tied to your social network.

Multilevel study finds no link between minimum wage and crime rates.

Inside the world of the double-crossing fake hitman.

I know of no other account of any decipherment that gives a clearer idea for nonspecialists of how some of the detailed technicalities of the process actually work. Margalit Fox’s account of the decipherment of Linear B.
The experiment that led to the concept of “Thinking Outside the Box.”

Is Google’s Secretive Research Lab Working on Human-Dolphin Communication?

Snails high on acid make poor choices, get eaten by predators.

If you use the surface as a table then your computer can bring you real objects such as your mobile phone.

Burberry has teamed up with Google to let people capture their kisses by direct contact with their touch screen device.

Couponer, Hipster, Superparent, Pseudo-Foodie… Archetypes in the restaurant industry.
12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes About Grammar Mistakes Makes.

‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar.

In traditional print, the distinction is easy: a font was a typeface set at a certain size, weight and style and cast in metal. There was no way to buy just a typeface. Instead you bought a font: Garamond Bold at 13 points.

Knitting for ants.

Rescuers search for passenger who fell from plane.

U.S. military may have 10 robots per soldier by 2023.

Nearly 1 in 4 adults surf the Internet while driving.

Manhattan architect sues an ex-lover $1.25M for posting online saying he has a “tiny STD-infested weiner.”

A new study suggests it’s less important to be friendly than to be good.

Here’s another reason to love coffee. Researchers from Brazil found that morning coffee consumption not only keeps you awake and alert, but also improves performance on cognitively demanding tasks. That is, if you’re already a habitual drinker.

Chocolate and chili peppers can help us lose fat.

Why can we taste bitter flavors? Turns out, it’s still a mystery.

The sun is producing barely half the number of sunspots as expected, and its magnetic poles are oddly out of sync.

Using examples from a wide range of application areas in science and engineering, we will demonstrate how standard uses of color can distort the meaning of the underlying data, and can lead the analyst to incorrect evaluations, conclusions or decisions.

The impossibility of being literal.

NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor [PDF]

Google Finally Gets Legal OK to Scan the World’s Books.

Nearly 3 in 10 adults say one of their social-media accounts has been hacked.

It will go down as one of the biggest missed opportunities in the boardroom: Blockbuster deciding not to buy Netflix.

Why Did Snapchat Turn Down $3 Billion?

Why is Silicon Valley funding these really silly internet companies and not major life changing innovations?

In an all-out battle over the summer, Christie’s beat Sotheby’s on consignment after consignment, snaring major trophies of the contemporary art world.

What is the value of stolen art? [NY Times]

How would you weigh an airplane without a scale?

“If you ask people about their experience of falling in love, over 90 percent will say that a major factor was discovering that the other person liked them,” according to Dr. Aron.

People will just disappear.

The Wow! signal.

Line of T-shirts and dresses featuring various images of Oprah’s head Photoshopped onto nude bodies.

Dai Macedo Wins 2013 Miss Bum Bum Competition, Despite Controversy.

Harry Smith collected paper airplanes he found on the streets of New York.

LEARNING TO SWALLOW follows Patsy, a charismatic artist who destroys her digestive system during an unmedicated bipolar episode.

Bunny takes a shower. [via Stella and Tim]

White Jesus Skin Bleach [more]

Growth.

New Mexico man sues over repeated anal probes by police.

Man apparently ate his dog, who saved him from a bear attack, to stay alive in woods.

World’s one hundred richest people have added $200 billion to their fortunes this year.

South Korea now has five times as many credit cards as people — and more per capita debt than anyone. But the market is not what it was.

How early do we learn to lie? And what purpose does it serve in young children? 

What is the most common nightmare?

Apple said developing curved iPhone screens.

Simply by looking at geotagged tweets, an algorithm can track the spread of flu and predict which users are going to get sick .

Last year, Netflix and YouTube made up 47.8 % of Internet traffic. This year, 50.3 %.

What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move?

In the 1960s, scientists discovered a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?

Is there any reason to think dolphins and humans have a special relationship?

Only one planet has been proven to support life: our own. But with at least 11 billion Earth-sized words in our galaxy orbiting in their stars’ habitable zones, plus new evidence of strange kinds of life that thrive in extreme environments, the odds that we are not alone are improving.

Things con men can teach you about persuasion.

I think you’ve got the RIGHT number, if you want to know about dudes not wearing a shirt right now.

These NYC Neighborhoods Are Having The Most Sex.

Carpet made of 20,000 folded DIN A4 papers.

Google patent: THROAT TATTOO with lie-detecting mobe microphone built-in.

Guests at Paris restaurants are seated following a strict appearance policy. Owners would tell staff “where to seat ugly people.”

Cornell University accidentally destroyed more than $200,000 worth of horse semen.

Unlike just about every other developing country’s carbon print, Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling—fast.

“The impostor syndrome describes the countless millions of people who do not experience an inner sense of competence or success.”

I study a new explanation grounded in the idea that altruists want to think they are helping.

‘Liking’ on Facebook may mean less giving.

Women have greater shortness of breath than men when exercising.

City birds use cigarette butts to smoke out parasites. [Thanks Tim]

Fully autonomous robots that collect human urine to power themselves could be a step closer.

The Internet killed distance. Mobile computing brought it back. Here’s why location matters again in e-commerce.

Credit Card Numbers Still Google-able.

Soon, nearly every device will be online. That is both a beautiful and a dangerous thing

Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.

How smart cities must plan for electric cars.

What makes a city a great place to live – your commute, property prices or good conversation?

Why do we hate seeing photos of ourselves?

7 Research-Backed Ways to Raise Kids Right.

What goes on in our minds when we see someone naked? The more we see of a person’s body the less intelligent they seem.

The way people move can influence the likelihood of an attack by a stranger.

Bulletproof three-piece suits.

Scissors That Cut Perfectly Straight Lines—Every Time.

Taking A Dip With Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy.

Japan’s ‘Liberation Wrapper’ lets women eat burgers without violating social taboo.

Gangster Party Line. [Thanks GG]

Man arrested after bringing chain saw to bar fight.

1,000 men caught trying to pay a CGI child to perform sex acts online.

Tomahawk-throwing champion who chased thief from home: ‘I hit what I aim for.’ [Thanks Tim]

China discovers that pollution makes it really hard to spy on people.

Tests of Google’s autonomous vehicles in California and Nevada suggests they already outperform human drivers.

Alligator shows up at Chicago airport baggage claim.

A new study reveals how Somali piracy is financed.

Are you more likely to click headlines that are phrased as a question?

Cheerleader effect: Why people are more beautiful in groups.

The cheater’s high - how being bad feels good.

6 Psychological Effects of Washing Your Hands.

The incidence of most cancers increases with age but then mysteriously drops. Now one biomedical engineer has worked out why.

New ligament found in humans’ knees.

Japanese scientists create Rock-paper-scissors robot that wins 100% of the time.

The number of smartphones shipping with fingerprint sensors will rise from 46 million this year to 525 million by 2017, the report says. Only four companies of any scale operate in this industry.

50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers.

Overview of the New Patent Law of the United States.

The Prison Guard With a Gift for Cracking Gang Codes.

Introduction to Game Theory [PDF] [more]

Analysing the Bond movie — three approaches.

Umberto Eco, The Narrative Structure of Ian Fleming, 1969 [PDF]

Steven Soderbergh: For me there’s no question that cinematically ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is the best Bond film and the only one worth watching repeatedly for reasons other than pure entertainment.

Increasingly, people expect to get all their social needs met by their spouse or partner. This is a prescription for disaster.

The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry.

Five Reasons why Mermaids Can’t Physically Exist: 4: They would be constipated.

Michael H. Rohde, From Below

Lost Unicorn. [Thanks Tim]

Insect-inspired flying robot handles collisions, goes where other robots can’t.

Australia’s highest court on Wednesday denied worker’s compensation to a bureaucrat who was injured while having sex in her hotel room on a business trip.

Latest weapon for American police: GPS bullets that can track the location of a suspect’s car.

Florida Cops Made Millions Dealing Cocaine.

Eye tracking technology has reconfirmed what women have known all along: that people look at their sexual body parts more and faces less when evaluating their appearance.

Psychologist finds that unrealistic pessimists less likely to take preventive action after receiving good news.

Breast milk protein may be key to protecting babies from HIV infection.

Broccoli could help improve cancer treatment and cure radiation sickness.

Which is healthier - coffee or smoothies? It seems obvious that the answer must be a smoothie. But when you look into the scientific studies they reveal something much more surprising.

5 Crazy Cures that Actually Work.

Want To See An Enzyme? Check Inside Your Nose.

Problematic Labelling: The Case of “Drunkorexia.”

Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold—Physicists Solve the Mpemba Effect.

Why is broadband more expensive in the US?

Say you’re a supervillian. Your goal is not to take over the world, but to create more unpleasantness. So you set out to create a device that would ensnare normal, rational people and turn them into ranting lunatics. What would your Argument Machine look like? How would it work?

I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling.

How would an astronaut falling into a black hole would die.

15 years ago, President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended copyright protection. As a result, the great creative output of the 20th century, from Superman to “Gone With the Wind” to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to Mickey Mouse, were locked down for an extra 20 years. Will they do it again?

On Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, David and Goliath, which promotes the idea that apparent disadvantages are often actually advantages, and in particular suggests that dyslexia might be Good For You.

Can we excavate evidence of witchcraft and witches?

Three and a half thought experiments in philosophy of mind.

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana, katakana, Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet.

How To Get Happy RIGHT NOW: Sex, Exercise, Socialize.

The latest so-called “controversy” in Toronto revolves around a 23-year-old girl who is willing to go on a date with practically anyone, in order to score a free grilled octopus.

New York City soundscape, circa 1930

Japanese artist makes mini 3D masterpieces out of coffee froth.

Have you ever wished your undergarments could be more social? The tweeting bra.

3 photos of people posing with their own hearts.

Selfies at Funerals. [Thanks Tim]

Unagi Travel, the “Japan Travel Agency for Stuffed Animals.”

The drink is designed to taste like kissing an older man who has just shaved and smoked a cigarette.

Miley Cyrus files lawsuit over sex doll. [Thanks TG]

In basic literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries.

Salsa overtakes ketchup as America’s No. 1 condiment, tortillas outsell burger and hot dog buns.

In Japan, sales of adult diapers exceed those for babies.

Washing your hands makes you optimistic.

Your body language doesn’t only reflect your mood, it causes it.

Reading this in a meeting? Women are twice as likely as men to be offended by smartphone use.

Recipe For A Happy Marriage: The 7 Scientific Secrets.

A team of scientists has explained the physics behind why beer in a bottle transforms into an overflowing mass of foam when the bottle receives a vertical tap on the mouth.

The science of ice, melting, and chilling (as it pertains to drinks).

The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even Human.

Trees mark the spot of buried gold. Tiny bits of the precious metal in eucalyptus leaves indicate much more belowground.

The world’s oldest bank struggles to survive.

The movie “Gravity” depicts two astronauts fighting to survive while floating in the void of space. German astronaut Ulrich Walter explains what the film got right and wrong.

Before we take a look at where Freud was right, let’s consider where he went wrong.

Lady Gaga‘s Telephone music video was a strange but significant addition to our collection of material that in one or another way signaled a move beyond, post, or after postmodernism.

Until now theorists have predicted that information can always spread until it saturates a network to the point where everybody has received it. These predictions come from models based on our understanding of diseases and the way they percolate through a population. The basic assumption is that information spreads in the same way. Not so fast, say Chuang and co. Information is different.

Don’t expect self-driving cars to take over the roads anytime soon. Here’s what carmakers are really working on.

The Decline of Wikipedia.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Morrissey’s “Autobiography.”

13+ Things You Shouldn’t Eat At A Restaurant.

List of cognitive biases.

suckmydicknewyorker.tumblr.com [Thanks GG]

An underwear company designed a range of pants using chemical warfare technology to filter your farts.

Gal finds success as a male model.

12% of the respondents said they would pay a home’s full market value or more if they believed a house was haunted.

The “good” partners’ faces proved to be represented differently in the brain from those of the “bad” partners.

New drug reduces negative memory.

Marc Umile, calendar calculator; Moira Jones, super-recogniser… People with extreme abilities.

Are You What You Read or Do You Read What You Are?

Variation in women’s mating strategies depicted in the works and words of Jane Austen. [PDF]

How IBM is making computers more like your brain.

A Camera That Captures Scent Instead of Sights.

The battle to destroy Wikipedia’s biggest sockpuppet army.

Friends of friends = strangers.

Before going public, Twitter is already funneling money through shady Cayman Islands companies.

Today 4chan is more popular than ever.

Whether a gallery discloses the price of a work can depend on who you are and why you want to know.

Keeping Breaking Bad on the air was a big investment. Shooting the show cost about $3 million per episode in 2010, and $3.5 million per episode in its final season. The Economics of a Hit TV Show.

What economists and marketers are learning from newly accessible consumer data.

Transcript of a 1972 conversation between Foucault and Deleuze.

What do cats see?

Actual Business Name.

A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia.

My friend is upset because one of her OCD pills is backward.

German Groom Forgets Bride at Gas Station.

US Army explores predicting suicides as way to prevent them.

China to install GPS in government cars to track misuse.

A German scientist is developing a new way of testing prices by measuring brain waves. Some marketing critics are horrified by the idea of feel-good pricing, but others argue it could make products more successful.

The brain of a female migraineur looks so unlike the brain of a male migraineur, asserts Harvard scientist Nasim Maleki, that we should think of migraines in men and women as “different diseases altogether.”

Calling in sick, from America to Zimbabwe: Research shows attitude toward absenteeism differs between cultures.

Search engine optimization is filling the Internet with misinformation about human bathroom habits and more. How Google flushes knowledge down the toilet.

In a room with no cell service, Verizon works on the future of mobile.

Hollywood talent agency paid $150K to Satisfy Gambler’s Debt to Deadmau5, settling a dispute over what might be the most expensive five minutes ever at a Las Vegas nightclub.

Whatever all this neo-Cicciolina bs is all about, graphically it looks like the rinky-dink work of some bottoming-out artist.

13 Things You Didn’t Know About Deleuze and Guattari, Part I and Part II and Part III.

Where the food is great, and so is the wait!

These crazy inventions are the latest sign that entrepreneurship in China is alive and well.

First internet-connected e-cigarette.

10 London & U.K. - Album Cover Locations. More: Annie Hall Rooftop Balcony Scene.

MIT’s Self-Assembling Robots.

Rise Of The Ghost.

9-year-old sneaks onto flight without boarding pass, flies to Vegas alone.

Google wants a patent on splitting the restaurant bill.

Chicago eatery serves burger with communion wafer garnish. [Thanks Tim]

How to make (and where to eat) the best dim sum.

A robot that hunts the coastline for swarms of jellyfish and destroys them has been developed by scientists in South Korea.

Korea’s plan to shred a jellyfish plague with robots could spawn millions more.

Dolphins are one of the few animals that can truly imitate.

Canadian researchers have worked out how to send text messages using chemical spray.

How four car companies are forging ahead on fuel efficiency.

No other vertebrate is known to have green blood.

Algorithm writes people’s life histories using Twitter stream. And: How your Facebook profile reveals more about your personality than you know.

A new study claims to identify the times of the week that women are feeling the most insecure about their bodies, and recommends that brands “concentrate media during prime vulnerability moments.” [Thanks Tim]

FBI profiler talks serial killers, deception and danger.

A spoon for people with Parkinson’s.

The older $100 notes will eventually get returned to the Federal Reserve, where they will be destroyed.

Signage for the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Treasury reimburses dog owner whose pet ate $500.

Eye contact may make people more resistant to persuasion.

New study finds that superstitions actually do “reverse” perceived bad fortune.

Altered wine chemical helps kill cancer.

Genetically Modified Bacteria Produce 50 Percent More Fuel.

Scientists have engineered “unjetlaggable” mice.

How traffic actually works.

How one transportation business survived hurricane sandy.

Humans Could Walk On Water.

The effect of diminished belief in free will.

Remember that crazy story about the dude in Mississippi who mailed ricin to Obama and then tried to frame some other dude in Mississippi for the crime? Well, the story is a thousand times crazier than you thought.

Many groups lack privilege, here in the discriminatory Babylon that is the USA. But who lacks privilege the most?

Guy gets ticketed for not riding in bike lane, makes video of himself smashing into things in bike lanes.

Ivanhoe Reservoir Covered With 400,000 Black Plastic Balls. [thanks quarqonia]

A pool filled with lagoon water from which every 3 minutes a replica of the Giardini in Venice emerges for a few seconds and then sinks back down.

There is no lake in this photo, tilt your head to the right.

New York police search for parachutists who landed near Ground Zero.

A 111-year-old’s secret to a long life? 20 cigs a day and a pint of sherry for breakfast.

Neuroscientists have identified the location in the brain’s visual cortex responsible for generating a common perceptual illusion: Seeing shapes and surfaces that don’t really exist when viewing a fragmented background.

The Science of Why Girls Love flowers.

Why airline food is so bad.

FDA approves portable artificial pancreas. The device syncs the results of a continuous reading of the wearer’s glucose levels with a pump that provides appropriate amounts of insulin.

China is known for its pirated DVDs and fake designer gear, but these criminals were producing something more intellectual: fake scholarly articles which they sold to academics, and counterfeit versions of existing medical journals in which they sold publication slots.

Peru exports more illegal gold than cocaine, and it’s the world’s biggest exporter of cocaine.

All you have to do is place your phone next to your keyboard to provide a direct channel for anyone to read what you are typing - and it’s all down to the vibration of the keys.

Internet reputation systems let individuals rate other individuals over the internet and provide recommendations based on those ratings. The Problem of Trust in the Sharing Economy

What makes an image go viral?

Madness and hallucination in The Shining.

Demon Hill.

A4 papercuts.

Walk-in vagina installed in Johannesburg women’s prison.

TomTato, a plant grows both tomatoes and potatoes.

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter.

19-year-old computer science student arrested for allegedly hijacking webcams of young women — among them Miss Teen USA — taking nude images.

Sex 4 Days Per Week Will Raise Your Salary Up To 5%.

1/6 of US deaths from hospital errors.

Size, shape and color of wine glass affect how much you pour.

Medical experts have been powerless to stop the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are increasingly desperate to develop novel drugs. But a new study finds that smarter use of current antibiotics could offer a solution.

What if finding “The One” meant finding the person whose genome is most compatible with your own?

When presented with a baby, you’ve experienced a fleeting desire to eat it. Now science has an explanation. More: Cuteness Inspires Aggression. [both, thanks Tim]

Designs that borrow from biology are making robots flexible.

A new system called Sedasys, made by Johnson & Johnson, would automate the sedation of many patients undergoing colon-cancer screenings called colonoscopies. That could take anesthesiologists out of the room, eliminating a big source of income for the doctors.

How Google Converted Language Translation Into a Problem of Vector Space Mathematics.

“I personally wouldn’t invest in beachfront property anymore.”

Wealth in Africa Mapped Using Mobile Phone Data.

People who believe in one conspiracy theory are likely to espouse others, even when they are contradictory.

Errol Morris deconstructs the Zapruder Film.

Taken once daily, the pill Truvada can prevent HIV. It’s safe, effective, FDA -approved, and usually covered by health plans. So why are so few gay men taking it?

Are people in the Central time zone more productive because TV schedules let them sleep more?

How a Social Media Guy Took an Underground Drug Market Viral.

A Mercedes sport utility vehicle stripped of its body panels and chassis sat on a platform like a cadaver on an autopsy table, components of its exhaust system arranged neatly on a cart for examination. GM engineers are tearing apart the competition. Literally.

Socotra Island in Yemen, The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth. [more

We’ve banned pennies!

DATE ___________ HOUR ______________

Man’s Penis Amputated After “Enthusiastic” Viagra Overdose.

Study suggests men succumb to sexual temptations more than women — for example, cheating on a partner — because they experience strong sexual impulses, not because they have weak self-control.

Why parents think your partner isn’t good enough.

Most of what we perceive as flavor is not mouth-derived but actually due to your sense of smell.

Blood Sugar Linked to Dementia.

Vaccines: what is the meaning of phase I, II and III?

The big money has moved from developing psychiatric drugs to manipulating our brain networks.

Facebook Launches Advanced AI Effort to Find Meaning in Your Posts.

We compare the productivity of Fields medalists (winners of the top mathematics prize) to that of similarly brilliant contenders. The two groups have similar publication rates until the award year, after which the winners’ productivity declines. [PDF]

The case of the disappearing teaspoons: 70 discreetly numbered teaspoons placed in tearooms around the institute and observed weekly over five months. 56 of the 70 teaspoons disappeared during the study. The rate of loss was not influenced by the teaspoons’ value.

How to Design a City for Women.

China just bought 5% of Ukraine.

There are now half a million people over 100, and the number is growing at 7 per cent a year. Why are there so few people over 115 years of age?

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

Placenta prints, live tweeting labor: Pregnancy trends gone too far?

Woman swallows toothbrush while talking on the phone.

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Man with brewer’s yeast in his gut gets drunk from beer he generates.

Swedish court: Public masturbation not a crime.

What if someone told you the stock market crashed and spiked 18,000 times since 2006, and you had no idea? The secret financial market only robots can see.

In 2012, real median household income was 8.3% lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession. [PDF]

Always Emerging, Never Arriving: The Middle Class.

New Revelations about the Biodiversity of Belly Buttons.

Women’s feelings toward their partners shift subtly during peak fertility.

Researchers analyzed how the body language of the potential customer helps bartenders to identify who would like to place an order and who does not.

Forget good cop, bad cop - the real psychology of two-person interrogation.

Is it ethical to instil false hope in people with mental illness?

Happiness = Reality - Expectations

Scientists have proven again and again that major life events usually influence your well-being for no longer than three months.

The 10,000-hour theory: More than 20 percent of the best players made even quicker work of the process, becoming masters in 5,000 hours or fewer.

Political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding.

Perceiving causes; why knowledge doesn’t trump perception.

Why Are Some People Left-Handed?

The Science Behind Napping.

We’re told studies have proven that drugs like heroin and cocaine instantly hook a user. But it isn’t that simple – little-known experiments over 30 years ago tell a very different tale.

Vaccine against cocaine.

How people argue with research they don’t like.

Parking space strategy: pick a row, closest space.

The most famous models for how cities grow are wrong.

These 20 cities have the most to lose from rising sea levels.

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. The Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole, theorists propose.

We discuss how a creature accustomed to Euclidean space would fare in a world of spherical geometry, and conversely.

Slaves as grave gifts for the Vikings.

Flying Snakes: Aerodynamic Secrets Finally Revealed.

Power outages caused by squirrels. [NY Times]

How Iran built a skyscraper in the middle of New York City and held onto it for decades.

A fake hospital to figure out what saves money.

US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing.

Pseudonymity, part of Net culture since its early beginnings, may become a quaint relic of the early Internet.

Google knows nearly every Wi-Fi password in the world.

How to Boost Your WiFi Signal.

How a Food Delivery Service Got into Porn.

How to Raise Money. “Treat investors as saying no till they unequivocally say yes, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies.”

In 1858, a stationer named Hymen Lipman patented a newfangled pencil with a rubber plug embedded in one end of its wood shaft. An entrepreneur named Joseph Reckendorfer guessed that the pencil-plus-eraser would become a blockbuster product and bought the patent from Lipman for $100,000, about $2 million in today’s dollars. [NY Times]

The best pen.

The languages on Chinese banknotes.

Five Years Of Hard Work By The Federal Reserve.

How to make a clubbing dress out of a boy’s turtleneck.

A video shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying.

A comparison of the real stars of Back To The Future almost 30 years later compared to their “30 years older” makeup from the movie.

Putting All the World’s Water into a Big Cube.

Yekaterinburg’s Mafia Cemeteries.

P.E.N.I.S. Foundation

Wine Snake Bites Woman After Spending 3 Months In The Bottle.

New Smartphone Tech To Alert Pedestrians: ‘You Are About To Be Hit By a Car’. And there’s another phone app in development to help you avoid gunfire.

The number of fires is down but the number of career firefighters is up.

Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America’s jobs will be automated within the next 20 years.

Wasted rice in Asia emits over 600 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.

Germany is the first European country to recognize a third gender.

Are women less corrupt?

Your DNA is not a blueprint. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your surroundings. Your neighbors, your family, your feelings of loneliness: They don’t just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells.

Do Left Handed People Die Young?

According to surveys of art books and exhibitions, artists prefer poses showing the left side of the face when composing a portrait and the right side when composing a self-portrait. Smartphones Reveal a Side Bias in Non-Artists.

A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that exposure to pornography was related to and increased sexist attitudes, but only among a subgroup of users.

Sexiest parts of the body.

There is currently an article making the rounds in the popular media suggesting that testicular volume is a predictor of paternal investment in children.

Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas.

Could paper aeroplanes be used as disposable, biodegradable monitoring-and-surveillance drones?

Chinese Researchers Make An Invisibility Cloak In 15 Minutes.

Before the advent of gas or electric ovens, dogs also provided a convenient power source for kitchen appliances.

Why You Can’t Travel Back in Time and Kill Hitler.

What if a typical family spent like the federal government?

New toilet-themed restaurant opens in China.

Yes, I’m the real Sammy Sosa, and this is my Pinterest.

Triggered lightning technology.

Researchers want to 3-D print pizza for astronauts.

London skyscraper melts cars, fries eggs.

Women selling positive pregnancy tests on Craigslist.

Drones are slow and noisy; they fly at a low altitude; and they require time to hover over a potential target before being used. The only real way for the United States to use them would be to first destroy Syrian planes and anti-aircraft batteries.

The vast amounts of rain that fell during the Australian floods in 2010 and 2011 caused the world’s sea levels to drop by as much as 7mm, according to oceanographers.

The man whose smelly hallucinations predict the weather.

Number of drivers who say they feel road rage has doubled, poll finds.

Alcohol breaks brain connections needed to process social cues.

During a normal conversation, your brain is constantly adjusting the volume to soften the sound of your own voice and boost the voices of others in the room. New research could lend insight into schizophrenia and mood disorders that arise when brain circuitry goes awry and individuals hear voices other people do not hear..

New research suggests that trypophobia — a fear of holes — may occur as a result of a specific visual feature also found among various poisonous animals.

Single gene change increases mouse lifespan by 20 percent.

People who look young for their age live longer.

While physical health deteriorates when weight is gained, mental well-being seems to improve, especially in women.

Why the other queue always seem to move faster than yours.

Memento and Personal Identity.

What’s more powerful in negotiating: dirty tricks or being a decent person?

What simple thing kills many relationships?

Researchers unveiled a new mechanism that could potentially explain why we recover so slowly from jet-lag.

We’ve been looking at ant intelligence the wrong way.

Recent literature suggests that individuals may consume less food when it is served on red plates.

Truffle Hunting: Why dogs have surpassed pigs.

Just How Bad is Fukushima Fish?

Unlike other weekly news magazines, The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper. Why?

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes.

Ministry of Sound sues Spotify for copyright infringement. Lawsuit focuses on playlists created on streaming music service that mirror dance brand’s compilation albums.

Thomson Reuters has smashed a Brazilian self-citation cartel in which editors of journals cited each other to boost their impact factors.

Second Life: What went wrong?

How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire. [Thanks Tim]

Meet 4chan’s /x/philes, investigators of the Internet’s strangest mysteries.

From the other lines in the song, we have come to understand that you may in fact be a ‘God.’ Yet if this were the case  —  and we, of course, take you at your word  —  we wonder why you do not more frequently employ your omnipotence to change time and space to better suit your own personal whims.

My name is Andy. I make maps.

Robotic Doorknob Disinfector.

Jellyfish water balloon.

Business in the front.