Farmer owes $82,000 in contract dispute over use of a ‘thumbs-up’ emoji […] instead of “ok”, “yup” or “looks good.”

The number of people visiting ChatGPT’s website was down 10 percent worldwide in June

In 19th-century Philadelphia, an anatomist dissected and mounted a human nervous system. Now researchers are trying to figure out whose remains are stretched out in a glass case.

It may now be easier to get pregnant using the sperm of a deceased loved one. The practice is controversial—but it’s not inherently wrong.

Psychedelics are increasingly recognised for their therapeutic potential and ability to re-orient belief structures. However, the potential they carry for inducing false insights and beliefs has thus far been under-considered.

What Colors Can Deer See? […] red and orange look gray while blue is easy to spot.

According to a University of Chicago study [PDF], men claim to have sex 66.5 times a year, while women claim to have sex 57.2 times a year. That might be because men traditionally overreport their sexual activity while women traditionally underreport theirs. […] Teenage girls are 6.5 percent more sexually active than teenage boys.

Reflecting on my own life, I’ve noticed that most of the things that really went off-track were indeed consequences of incremental neglect and numerous small yet poor choices. I didn’t become addicted to drugs overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I prioritized momentary pleasure over health and safety. I didn’t become overweight overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I opted for immediate gratification over long-term health. I didn’t ruin relationships overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I chose comfort over confronting difficult conversations, admitting my mistakes, or even just acknowledging that someone was better than me at something. From these experiences, I’ve realized that avoiding bad habits is just as important as cultivating good habits.

One night of total sleep deprivation shown to have antidepressant effect for some people

People spend much of their free time engaging with narrative fiction. Research shows that, like real-life friends, fictional characters can sometimes influence individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and self-beliefs. Moreover, for certain individuals, fictional characters can stand in for real-life friends by providing the experience of belonging. […] results suggest that lonelier individuals may turn to fictional characters to meet belongingness needs

If You’re Looking for Love, Just Let It Go

the hidden labor that goes into artificial intelligence […] in Nairobi […] The office specializes in a task called annotation, essentially using human labor to parse images that confuse the algorithms and hopefully making systems better in the process. […] The move from content moderation to AI annotation isn’t all bad. Annotation work is boring, but it’s not traumatic the way moderation can be; you’re working with traffic photos and product imagery instead of severed heads. Annotation also doesn’t have the policy uncertainty of moderation, where managerial hypocrisy often leaves contractors with an impossible job. If the pay were better, annotation wouldn’t necessarily be a bad job. But the pay isn’t better.

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

another ByteDance-owned app has been quietly making inroads in select markets around the world. Launched in 2020, the music streaming app Resso is currently available in three major markets — India, Brazil, and Indonesia — and has grown into a dark-horse challenger to Spotify.

Was FTX A Ponzi Scheme From The Beginning?

Proof That “One of the Parallel Worlds Cannot Be Extremely Different from the Other”

News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

The global population milestone of 8 billion represents nearly 7% ofthe total number of people who have ever lived on Earth.

experts have identified two main categories of factors that make us more attractive to mosquitoes: biological aspects we can’t change and behaviors we can. […]

Dozens of diverse molecules distributed throughout your body come together to create your unique odor. […] it’s likely this distinctive mix of chemical compounds that draws mosquitoes in. It’s also possible that some people emit more of the odor that mosquitoes like […] mosquitoes are sensitive to different types of smells, even ones humans can’t detect, Dr. McBride said. For instance, “mosquitoes love forearm odor,” she said. “No one ever thinks of their arms as being smelly.” […]

Mosquitoes seem to gravitate toward people with Type O blood, he said, for reasons researchers haven’t confirmed. […]

The individual pattern of how you breathe — what Dr. Bazzoli called the “breathing signature” — also plays a role. Mosquitoes seek out carbon dioxide (which in part is why they’re so good at finding us), and the more we exhale, the more carbon dioxide we send into the air, inviting bugs our way. […]

Then there are the factors that are more dependent on how you act throughout the day. If you were to do a vigorous workout outside, you might breathe more heavily and exhale more carbon dioxide, which might usher in mosquitoes, Dr. Potter said. Sweat sends a powerful signal to mosquitoes too. […] And if you’ve had a few beach-side beers or happy hour margaritas, you might also emit some alcohol in your sweat, Dr. Bazzoli said, which can lure mosquitoes in. Alcohol might change the chemical makeup of your body odor, which could entice mosquitoes. […]

certain perfumes and scented soaps and lotions (including sunscreens) can attract mosquitoes […]

Certain clothing colors like black and dark blue can act like a mosquito magnet

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence

The first fully A.I.-generated drug enters clinical trials in human patients

The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications. And: AI is killing the old web

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a major antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of “leverag[ing] its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services and punish those who don’t”

Smartwatches can detect Parkinson’s years before diagnosis

Shopping Carts Can Tell If You Have a Heart Condition

foods with shorter (vs. longer) brand names are perceived as healthier, and consumers prefer such foods.

James Lewis and James Springer, identical twins adopted by separate families […] Both Jims, it transpired, had worked as deputy sheriffs, and had done stints at McDonald’s and at petrol stations; they’d both taken holidays at Pass-a-Grille beach in Florida, driving there in their light-blue Chevrolets. Each had dogs called Toy and brothers called Larry, and they’d married and divorced women called Linda, then married Bettys. They’d called their first sons James Alan/Allan. Both were good at maths and bad at spelling, loved carpentry, chewed their nails, chain-smoked Salem and drank Miller Lite beer. Both had haemorrhoids, started experiencing migraines at 18, gained 10 lb in their early 30s, and had similar heart problems and sleep patterns. […] much has changed in our understanding of genetics since the human genome was sequenced in 2003. It was discovered that we have far fewer genes than anticipated (around 20,000, rather than the anticipated 100,000), and that there are very few genes ‘for’ anything. A complex property such as intelligence, for example, involves a network of more than 1,000 genes, interacting with the environment.

MIT engineers develop “blackest black” material to date […] The results showed that the material absorbed at least 99.995 percent of incoming light, from every angle. In other words, it reflected 10 times less light than all other superblack materials, including Vantablack.

Erewhon […] The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence

Microscopic ‘Louis Vuitton’ bag created by art collective MSCHF for Pharrell Williams sells for more than $60,000

Messaging app startup that raised $200M shut down because 95% of its users were fake

U.S. pedestrian deaths reach 40-year high

Slim people have a genetic advantage when it comes to maintaining their weight

How to Steal a Masterpiece: Advice from the World’s Greatest Art Thief

Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations The AI-based abstract images and shapes that result from the machine’s unsupervised learning of modern art are dictated by the Museum’s collection archive

Google has a secret browser hidden inside the settings

1991 - Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum travels to Argentina for a mysterious operation. He returns with a large cranial scar, invents Python, is declared Dictator for Life by legions of followers, and announces to the world that “There Is Only One Way to Do It.” Poland becomes nervous. A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Map Your Workplace and Its Leaders

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As the founder of Ironic, a meteorology company based in Brooklyn, Mr. Leavitt, 33, knows how temperatures and atmospheric conditions can sometimes affect weddings. […] Mr. Leavitt, who said he has conducted weather advisory for more than 2,400 events, now works as a consultant to wedding planners and venues, with fees starting at around $2,500. […]

While we can’t predict if there will be rain that day, what we can do is look at the historical weather data. We look at a specific mile in a location around the country over the past 30 years, and analyze the information. Say it’s rained three out of seven days, five out of seven days or seven out of seven days — that tells you a lot. If you know it’s going to rain five out of seven days, it’s a good idea to find a venue with an indoor option. If it’s raining once out of seven days, you can plan for an outdoor wedding.

We’re tracking every radar possible, every reporting data possible, and creating a clear picture of what the weather will be on a specific day. […] For a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., we used marine data to look at the wave height to determine when boats should transport guests for the easiest ride with the most peaceful, calm waters. At what time will people become less seasick? We did it in Lake Como, Italy, too.

For a Florida wedding on the beach, a couple wanted to get married outside in the afternoon, but didn’t want guests to be sitting in direct sunlight or holding up parasols and blocking the view. We produced a sun study — looking at the topography of the land, trees on the property, angle of the sun, height of the house and the sun’s path — to choose the precise time to start the ceremony with the most shade.

As meteorologists, we should never ever suggest what people do with their hair. But we can give you all the information on wind, speed, humidity and temperature, so you can take that to a hair stylist. If someone has naturally frizzy hair in a humid climate, or they’re more likely to sweat that leads to oily hair, we can give them the context so they can plan.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

art { Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2004–5 (detail) }

Apple, the company, wants rights to the image of apples, the fruit, in Switzerland—one of dozens of countries where it’s flexing its legal muscles

California restaurant used an alleged priest to get employees to admit workplace “sins”

Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer, became infamous for his viral online rants preaching male dominance, female submission and the pursuit of wealth. He has openly advocated for violence against women, and was previously banned from every major social media platformuntil Elon Musk reinstated his Twitter account after taking over the company.

AI bots should pass a new Turing test in which it receives a $100,000 seed investment and has to turn it into $1 million. As part of the test, the bot must research an e-commerce business idea, develop a plan for the product, find a manufacturer, and then sell the item. He expects AI to achieve this milestone in the next two years.

Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction

The people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI Previously: AI has poisoned its own well and Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

new web tool detects artificial intelligence images in less than a second

Neuro-sama, an AI vTuber who streams daily on Twitch.

Why Your Roses Smell Nice

the phrase “rule of thumb” has its roots in domestic violence: a British law stipulated that a man could beat his wife provided he used a switch no wider than his own thumb.

AI has poisoned its own well

Replied to The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget (arXiv.org)

What will happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the language found online? We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, where tails of the original content distribution disappear. […] the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of content generated by LLMs in data crawled from the Internet.

I suspect tech companies (particularly Microsoft / OpenAI and Google) have miscalculated, and in their fear of being left behind, have released their generative AI models too early and too wide. By doing so, they’ve essentially established a threshold for the maximum improvement of their products due to the threat of model collapse.[…]

They need an astronomical amount of training data to make any model better than what already exists. By releasing their models for public use now, when they’re not very good yet, too many people have pumped the internet full of mediocre generated content with no indication of provenance. […]

Obtaining quality training data is going to be very expensive in five years if AI doesn’t win all its lawsuits over training data being fair use.

{ Tracy Durnell | Continue reading }

Man ‘fakes his death’ before ‘arriving at his own funeral’ in a helicopter to teach family a lesson

Two-thirds of all online shopping scams now start on Facebook and Instagram Someone falls victim on Meta-owned platforms every seven minutes

Humans have pumped enough groundwater to change the tilt of the Earth

Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn’t actually commit. Research provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon

Humans have invisible skin patterns, due to a quirk in how our enveloping layer forms […] these patches and stripes can emerge with different skin conditions, including eczema and vitiligo

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

There is an old joke in Paris that the top of Montparnasse Tower has the prettiest view in the French capital. Not because of its breathtaking views of the Eiffel Tower or the Sacre-Coeur Basilica perched atop Montmartre, but because it is the only place where you do not have to see the skyscraper itself.

Men in Greek art seem to do pretty much everything without their pants on […] Nudity is often used as shorthand for ‘dead’ or ‘defeated’ in art from Eastern Mediterranean societies, where casualties of war or captives destined for execution most commonly appear unclothed. […] In addition to the dead or the doomed, divine figures like gods and heroes appear nude in many ancient artistic traditions […] athletes were – in life as in art – naked throughout both training and competition.

Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

Teslas account for fully 91 percent of all self-driving-related crashes in the NHTSA data.

Pizza startup Zume shuts down after raising $445 million Founded in 2015, the firm planned to cook pizzas in the back of a massive truck, with robots, while en route to customers’ homes. […] the company quickly gave up on the cooking-while-driving model — cheese kept sliding around when the truck hit bumps in the road […] Zume CEO Alex Garden was projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and talking about becoming the “Tesla of fresh food, and the Amazon of fresh food”

The idea behind private equity or PE is simple: a private equity firm gathers up a bunch of cash, raises some investor cash, and takes on a lot of debt to buy various companies, often taking them off the public stock market. Then, they usually install new management and embark on aggressive cost cutting and turnaround programs mostly because they have to pay down all that debt pretty fast. The company can then be sold or taken public again for a hefty profit. But don’t worry — if it doesn’t work out, the PE firms are extracting fees at every step of the process, so they get paid no matter what happens. […] Those funds buy companies, whether it’s nursing homes, single-family rentals, veterinary clinics, OB-GYN practices. The really interesting thing about that, and I think what drew me to this as a lawyer but also concerns me as a citizen, is that because of the layered ownership structure of private equity firms, oftentimes private equity firms have control of the companies they buy but very little responsibility when those companies do arguably illegal things.

Mouse studies suggest that drugs from LSD to ecstasy renew the brain’s flexibility — but some scientists are sceptical

The role of eyebrows in face recognition (2003) we find that the absence of eyebrows in familiar faces leads to a very large and significant disruption in recognition performance. In fact, a significantly greater decrement in face recognition is observed in the absence of eyebrows than in the absence of eyes.

After years spent researching and protecting sea turtles, Nichols started studying the impact that water has on the human body and brain. “When you see water, when you hear water, it triggers a response in your brain that you’re in the right place”

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85 meters [280 feet] below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years […] abandoned in the 1920s […] “rediscovered” in 1963 by an anonymous local who kept losing his chickens. While he was renovating his home, the poultry would disappear into a small crevasse created during the remodel, never to be seen again. Upon closer investigation and some digging, the Turk unearthed a dark passageway. It was the first of more than 600 entrances found within private homes leading to the subterrestrial city of Derinkuyu.

Hundreds attend church service generated by ChatGPT

Two-thirds of people who use sleep meds said they slept just as well or better after sex

Price was the first person ever to be diagnosed with what is now known as highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSAM, a condition she shares with around 60 other known people. She can remember most of the days of her life as clearly as the rest of us remember the recent past.

Eastern philosophy says there is no “self.” Science agrees.

David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November. […] The 13-sided polygon, which 64-year-old Smith called “the hat”, is the first single shape ever found that can completely cover an infinitely large flat surface without ever repeating the same pattern […] solving a problem posed 60 years ago that some mathematicians had thought impossible. […] After stunning the mathematics world, Smith then did it again [..] revealed a new shape — “the specter.”

Twitter is refusing to pay its Google Cloud bills

This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in the late 2000s to early 2010s until they were uncovered by target countries

New York City will charge drivers going downtown. Proposals range from charging vehicles $9 to $23 during peak hours, and it’s set to go into effect next spring.

How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in New York City?

Emoji Kitchen

A man in China ended up in a legal battle after walking out on a blind date who expected him to pay for her and 23 of her relatives […] the woman’s family ordered a significant amount of expensive cigarettes and premium alcoholic beverages.

Taurine supplementation improved life span in mice and health span in monkeys, Taurine linked with healthy aging

A joint investigation by academics and The Wall Street Journal shows how Instagram’s algorithms promote networks of accounts sharing child sexual abuse material.

AI Prompt Engineering Isn’t the Future

How Math Has Changed the Shape of Gerrymandering — New tools make it possible to detect hidden manipulation of maps

The average color of the New York City sky, updated every 5 minutes

Hanging Testicles Door Knocker

Paralyzed man walks naturally, thanks to wireless ‘bridge’ between brain and spine

A New York fertility doctor who was accused of using his own sperm to impregnate several patients died over the weekend when the hand-built airplane he was in fell apart mid-flight and crashed

McKinsey says ‘about half’ of its employees are using generative AI

TikTok accounts are posting horrifying artificial intelligence-generated clips of murder victims — mostly children — describing their own ghastly demise

The U.S. Patent Office has proposed new rules about who can challenge wrongly granted patents. If the rules become official, they will offer new protections to patent trolls. Challenging patents will become far more onerous, and impossible for some.

How to secretly communicate with people on LSD

Wittgenstein was always disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion. Once he whispered to me, “This is like a shower bath.”

Some experts estimate China can build three warships in the time it takes the US to build one.

Lung cancer pill cuts risk of death by half — Everyone in the trial had a mutation of the EGFR gene, which is found in about a quarter of global lung cancer cases, and accounts for as many as 40% of cases in Asia. An EGFR mutation is more common in women than men, and in people who have never smoked or have been light smokers.

ChatGPT took their jobs — Those that write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools like chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work. Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.

Scientists have blasted the brains of mice and rats with ultrasound to knock them into a hibernation-like state, and the researchers say the technique could one day be used on injured humans in critical care or on astronauts taking long-haul spaceflights.

Trick Yourself into Breaking a Bad Habit — A few years back, my colleagues and I studied 5,000 people who had attempted to change a stubborn career-limiting habit. Fewer than 10% succeeded at creating deep and lasting change. As we reviewed what separated the successful few from the rest, we found a quirky distinction: The successful people talked about themselves the way an experimental psychologist might refer to a cherished lab rat. For example, a shy manager with executive aspirations talked about how he took himself to the employee cafeteria three times a week to eat lunch with a complete stranger. Tickling with anxiety, he stripped himself of his smart phone before exiting his office — knowing that if it was with him, he would retreat to it. He knew that if he simply ensconced himself in these circumstances, he would connect with new people — a habit and skill he wanted to cultivate. […] We are less motivated when we feel less competent. […] Create structured practice opportunities to increase your competence and your motivation will follow suit.

After killing his father, Dadd managed to escape to France, where he tried to murder a passenger in the carriage in which he was traveling. It had been his intention to go to Austria to assassinate the emperor. He was arrested and taken to an asylum in Clermont, remaining there for ten months before extradition to England. His main treatment in Clermont was cold showers. […] He is very eccentric and glories that he is not influenced by motives that other men pride themselves in possessing—thus he pays no sort of attention to decency in his acts or words, if he feels the least inclination to be otherwise; he is perfectly a sensual being, a thorough animal, he will gorge himself with food till he actually vomits, and then return to the meal. […] In 1865, the asylum notes show Dadd to have been painting almost every day. […] One of the most extraordinary pictures ever painted, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, which is only 15 by 21 inches and took him ten years to paint, seems to me to have been done by a man with a personal, though presumably not continuing, experience of micropsia, a condition in which everything seems much smaller than it is, and which is one of the possible effects of intoxication with hashish.

when it comes to truly dangerous toys, you’d struggle to beat the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab. Billed as ‘Exciting and Safe’, the kit contained four sealed jars containing actual Uranium ores. this kit came on the market in 1950 at a price of $49.50 (over $500 in today’s money).

participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores.

Objective: To determine if using a parachute prevents death or major traumatic injury when jumping from an aircraft.Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.

Generative AI Podcasts Are Here. Prepare to Be Bored

Dead Silicon Valley Unicorns Pile Up as ‘Unicorpses’

we introduce a cryptographically-inspired notion of undetectable watermarks for language models. That is, watermarks can be detected only with the knowledge of a secret key […] it is impossible for a user to observe any degradation in the quality of the text.

Most Important Papers for Quantitative Traders

Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.

From underground exploration to brain science and air-traffic control, the sensing potential of quantum devices is enormous. — Unlike quantum computers, which get a lot of press but might be decades away from offering wide commercial advantage, quantum sensors are already in use in the lab.A handful are in commercial use: atomic clocks, for example, measure the passage of time supremely accurately using high-frequency quantum transitions in atoms. Their accuracy maintains the synchronization of communication and energy networks, and digital radio stations. They are crucial for satellite navigation services such as GPS.

Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant changed her sense of agency and self. She told researchers that she “became one” with her device. She was devastated when, two years later, she was told she had to remove the implant because the company that made it had gone bust. […] “Being forced to endure removal of the [device] … robbed her of the new person she had become with the technology” […] Trial volunteers had four electrodes implanted to monitor their brain activity. Recordings were sent to a device that trained an algorithm to recognize patterns preceding a seizure. Leggett received her device during a clinical trial for a brain implant designed to help people with epilepsy. […] A handheld device would signal how likely a seizure was to occur in the coming minutes or hours—a red light indicated an imminent seizure, while a blue light meant a seizure was very unlikely […] With the advance warning from the device, she could take medication that prevented the seizures from occurring.

YouTube will stop removing false presidential election fraud claims — ‘The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society.’

Two Men Got Jobs At Amazon Just To Steal Copies Of Zelda

An Illustrated Guide to Mouth Gestures and Their Meanings Around the World

no known drug, including caffeine, can effectively reverse sleep deprivation.

The reason has to do, in part, with the circadian rhythm of a chemical called adenosine that plays a major role in the regulation of sleep.

When you awake from a restful night of sleep, the adenosine level in your brain is at its nadir. Throughout the day, it steadily rises and gradually produces the pressure to sleep in the evening. During sleep, adenosine is cleared from the brain, which helps us wake up and stay alert.

Caffeine is a powerful antagonist at adenosine receptors in the brain, blocking the sedating effects of adenosine and making you feel stimulated and mentally sharp.

Here’s the problem. If you cut short your normal night of sleep, adenosine is not fully cleared from the brain. With chronic sleep deprivation, adenosine levels continue to rise, creating a persistent sense of fatigue and sleepiness and impairing cognitive function.

The brain adapts to this flood of adenosine by increasing the number of adenosine receptors in an attempt to get you to fall asleep, which of course only makes you feel more tired.

You will probably respond by increasing your caffeine consumption, in an attempt to block rising adenosine activity, which can only be restored by a normal night of sleep — the very thing my patient was trying to cut short.

Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired. It impairs the brain’s ability to consolidate memory.

During sleep, your neurons are remodeled and change their firing pattern, which helps burn in the memories that are formed during the day.

Too little sleep can also exacerbate preexisting depression and anxiety disorders and make people with no previous mental health problems generally more angry and impulsive. […]

Intriguingly, while caffeine can’t eradicate sleep deprivation, it does appear to offset some of the harmful cognitive effects of sleep loss on memory. […]

Caffeine is usually metabolized within four to six hours. […] Some people are genetically slow metabolizers of caffeine and will have significant sleep-onset insomnia even from early morning coffee.

And here’s the most effective trick for falling asleep, which has been studied and shown to be as effective — if not more — than any hypnotic drug. Don’t do anything in bed except sleep or have sex — no reading, listening to music or anything else.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see. They’re afraid that their little AIs are going to come for them. They’re apocalyptic, and so existential, because they have no connection to real life and how things work. They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us. […]

What happened to the cigarette companies will eventually happen to the social media companies. They’ve had all the research for 20 years, and they’ve been knowingly saying this stuff is not harmful when they know it to be harmful.

{ Doug Rushkoff | Continue reading | More: Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution }

{ Ninalee Craig photographed by Ruth Orkin, Florence, 1951 | more }

Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug? — People taking Ozempic for weight loss say they have also stopped drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting.

US police are selling seized phones with personal data still on them — Nude photos, bank details and stolen credit card numbers have been found on devices sold by US police forces via auction sites

Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem?

The surprising reason luxury goods are booming A not-insignificant portion of luxury growth comes from middle- and low-income consumers. According to GlobalData, Americans with a household income of less than $50,000 make up about 27 percent of regular luxury consumers.

A family thought they were adopting a 6-year-old girl. Now they claim the girl — a little person — was an adult con artist masquerading as a child

Brain Connectivity and Memory Improve in Older Adults After Walking

The domestic cat’s can detect an extremely broad range of frequencies ranging from 55 Hz to 79 kHz, whereas humans can only detect frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. It can hear a range of 10.5 octaves, while humans and dogs can hear ranges of about 9 octaves.[…] Recent research has shown that cats have socio-spatial cognitive abilities to create mental maps of owners’ locations based on hearing owners’ voices.

The following trial is interesting not only for documenting a well organized blackmail ring at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but also for revealing the existence of the first recorded “glory hole”

Stuxnet Dossier Version 1.3 (November 2010)[PDF]

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Mathematics [PDF]

A reliable lie-detection method would be extremely useful in many situations, especially in forensic contexts. […] [However] the science shows that there are no reliable behavioral signs of deceit that human are able to detect. […] There is evidence that some structured methods do indeed pick up some signal of deceit but with large error rates, meaning that great care must be taken in practical contexts not to overinterpret results, especially as such methods will typically be employed when there is an absence of alternative strong evidence. […] Surprising as it may seem, and despite a hundred years research on the topic, currently “the best general advice from the psychological literature on verbal lie detection remains simply that a person is lying if what they say is inconsistent either with other things that they have said or with other evidence.”

Food delivery by drone is just part of daily life in Shenzhen

Scientists find way to make energy from air using nearly any material — The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores. But there are many questions about how to scale the product. […] The air-powered generator, known as an “Air-gen,” would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind.

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink announces FDA approval of in-human clinical study

New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

AI generated Captcha asks users to identify objects that don’t exist

A lawyer used chatGPT and cited non-existent cases, in court. Then doubled down and wrote fake cases to try to cover it up [PDF] More: NY Times

I got banned from Midjourney AI for generating realistic images of politicians cheating on their wives […] These generators are mostly just mashing up photos available on the internet. Privacy, copyright, dignity, and safety be damned […] QAnon was founded on the worst memes you’ve ever seen […] I think we’ll see AI videos of Democrats and children within a year or 2

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907)