Rat sommeliers
Man Searching For Dumped £600 Million Bitcoin Drive Has Better Odds of Winning Lottery
These financiers crashed the U.S. economy and sent the global financial system to the brink. Now, structured finance is back. Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything-the more creative the better-including corporate loans and consumer credit-card debt, lease payments on cars, airplanes and golf carts, and payments to data centers. […] deals now reach into nearly every cranny of the economy. […] record levels in 2024 and are expected to surpass those tallies this year
How the British Broke Their Own Economy
Psychedelic-assisted therapy has gained growing interest to improve a range of mental health outcomes. In response, numerous training programs have formed to train the necessary workforce to deliver psychedelic therapy. These include both legal and ‘underground’ (i.e., unregulated) programs that use psychedelics as part of their training. We present the case of a psychologist who underwent psychedelic therapy training that involved repeated high doses of psilocybin-containing mushrooms and subsequently developed prolonged adverse effects including severe sleep impairment, anhedonia, and suicidal ideation requiring hospitalization. Despite worsening symptoms, her psychedelic therapy trainers advised her against seeking psychiatric support, delaying treatment. Ultimately, the patient’s symptoms resolved after a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. […] Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. In those days, the Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln and the secessionist slave-owning Confederates were Democrats.
Rat sommeliers demonstrate advanced olfactory learning in wine sniffing test
Chewing wood may boost memory and brain antioxidants, study finds
Skeuomorphism
Man sues Kim Kardashian for mistakenly identifying him as a death row inmate — Kardashian attempted to bring awareness to Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu and ask her followers to sign a petition to save his life, but mistakenly used a photo of a man who lives in New York that shares the same name.
surgeons put teeth in patients’ eyes to restore sight — teeth have dentine, which is the hardest substance the body produces, making it the ideal casing to bridge the plastic lens and the patient’s eye […] He has performed seven successful tooth-in-eye surgeries in his native Australia before being recruited to do them in Canada.
A study of over 6,000 Brazilians—the largest of its kind—found that a diet rich in polyphenol-rich foods such as grapes, strawberries, açaí, oranges, chocolate, wine, and coffee can reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome by up to 23%. Metabolic syndrome is a collection of metabolic imbalances and hormonal disruptions that significantly increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Polyphenols, known for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, may help counteract these risks. This is good news for people who like fruit, chocolate, coffee, and wine
Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud
Can Enhanced Street Lighting Improve Public Safety at Scale? […] Results show a 15% decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence following the streetlight upgrades.
Trump faced criminal charges for retaining national defense documents after leaving leaving office and allegedly conspiring to hide them from federal authorities, after FBI agents found more than 100 documents with classified markings at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022. […] “The FBl is giving the president his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids,” Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said.
This might be the first vehicle that drives and flies
Skeuomorphism is a term most often used in graphical user interface design to describe interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts.
Grab them by the pussy
The rape of the Sabine women, also known as the abduction of the Sabine women, was an incident in the legendary history of Rome in which the men of Rome committed bride kidnappings or mass abduction for the purpose of marriage, of women from other cities in the region. It has been a frequent subject of painters and sculptors, particularly since the Renaissance.
The word “rape” is the conventional translation of the Latin word raptio used in the ancient accounts of the incident. The Latin word means “taking”, “abduction” or “kidnapping”, but when used with women as its object, sexual assault is usually implied. […]
According to Roman historian Livy, the abduction of Sabine women occurred in the early history of Rome shortly after its founding in the mid-8th century BC and was perpetrated by Romulus [legendary founder and first king of Rome] and his predominantly male followers; it is said that after the foundation of the city, the population consisted solely of Latins and other Italic peoples, in particular male bandits. With Rome growing at such a steady rate in comparison to its neighbors, Romulus became concerned with maintaining the city’s strength. His main concern was that with few women inhabitants there would be no chance of sustaining the city’s population, without which Rome might not last longer than a generation. On the advice of the Senate, the Romans then set out into the surrounding regions in search of wives to establish families with. The Romans negotiated unsuccessfully with all the peoples that they appealed to, including the Sabines, who populated the neighboring areas. […]
The Romans devised a plan to abduct the Sabine women during the festival of Neptune Equester. They planned and announced a festival of games to attract people from all the nearby towns. At the festival, […] the Romans grabbed the Sabine women and fought off the Sabine men. […] All of the women abducted at the festival were said to have been virgins except for one married woman, Hersilia, who became Romulus’s wife and would later be the one to intervene and stop the ensuing war between the Romans and the Sabines.
Shrimps
She graduated from high school with honors but can’t read or write. Now she’s suing
Just Five Days of Junk Food Can Throw Off Your Brain’s Metabolism
Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first
Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy […] Slowly, uncovered windows have become a status symbol
OpenAI CEO is ‘out of GPUs’ … Altman said that GPT-4.5, which he described as “giant” and “expensive,” will require “tens of thousands” more GPUs before additional ChatGPT users can gain access.
Trying out gpt-4.5. What do you think? No progress for years on questions that require actual thinking.
Chinese scientists have revealed the technology behind the world’s first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, giving China a permanent view of one-third of the Earth’s surface […] launched in August 2023 […] It continuously monitors the Asia-Pacific region from an altitude of 36,000km […] high, stable radar emissions that can penetrate cloud cover and darkness while maintaining relatively high resolution
Give a group of scientists the same data and the same research question, and they should come up with similar answers—in theory. But they don’t
Virtual reality rewrites rules of the swarm — present knowledge of the rules that govern the emergence of such complex, patterned behavior and decision-making is based on a handful of theoretical models that recapitulate only some aspects of the observed behavioral patterns. […] When reared alone, desert locusts tend to avoid one another and exhibit cryptic behavior, presumably to avoid attracting the attention of predators. Yet after only a few hours of crowding, they switch to being attracted to other locusts, forming jostling aggregations that then transition suddenly into marching bands. These groups behave as if they are of a single mind, yet there are no leader locusts or any hierarchy of control. Instead, collective behavior arises from interactions among individual locusts.
An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment — compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish. Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally, 27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish. These numbers wouldn’t matter if shrimp didn’t have the internal experience associated with suffering, but a growing body of evidence suggests that they do. A comprehensive review commissioned by the U.K. government found strong evidence of sentience in decapods, which includes shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and crabs. Evidence was particularly strong in true crabs. Crabs can learn. They can make trade-offs and act to protect themselves in flexible, complex ways. Everything we know about the structure of their brains suggests that they feel pain. While shrimp have been studied less extensively, the evidence suggests that they have similar capabilities. […] In modern shrimp farming, life begins in a hatchery born to a mother who has endured one of the industry’s most severe practices: eyestalk ablation.
What happened on February 26th? Related: Instagram is considering the launch of a separate app for its short-form video feature, Reels […] Meta previously tried out a standalone video-sharing app called Lasso in 2018, with the goal of competing with TikTok, but the app did not gain much traction and the company later shut it down.
train station
The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study. Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood. […] Dr. Iwasaki said that mRNA itself, used in vaccines, was unlikely to be the source of the protein so long after the shots were administered. […] it’s possible that some of the protein may result from undetected coronavirus infections. […] People with the syndrome were generally in poorer health than the average American, the researchers found. […] The study has not yet been published in a scientific journal […] Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny [NY Times]
“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” - A “Study”
Ingested Microplastic (MP) particles can harm the human body. Estimations of the total mass of ingested MP particles correspond to 50 plastic bags per year (Bai et al., 2022), one credit card per week (Gruber et al., 2022). The two estimations are based on an analysis (Senathirajah et al., 2021) that predicts a total ingested mass of MP particles mi,MP of 0.1–5 g/week. This work revisits and evaluates this calculation […] The calculation of 0.1 g – 5 g (one credit card) per week contains severe errors. [2022]
Within the White House complex, the WiFi permissions — meant to bolster security by prompting users to log in frequently — were recently changed to allow guests to remain logged in for a year, up from seven days, because so many personal devices are newly in use. […] Lutes said even the most experienced employees are given only segments of access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. DOGE sought access to that system last week, which would have provided the ability to see, and in some cases edit, detailed records — including bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security and other personal identification numbers and, in some instances, medical information — for virtually every individual, business and nonprofit in the country. [Washington Post]
“We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. […] I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. […] They’ll have to go through vetting, of course, to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens.”
New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes — At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all of those things simply break down. There is, perhaps, nothing in the universe that challenges the imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge, perhaps a new understanding of what space and time are made of.
Today, most Mac users don’t even notice that using the “Duplicate” command in the Finder to make a copy of a file doesn’t actually copy the file’s contents. Instead, it makes a “clone” file that shares its data with the original file. That’s why duplicating a file in the Finder is nearly instant, no matter how large the file is. […] If I could find files that had the same content but were not clones of each other, I could convert them into clones that all shared a single instance of the data on disk.
What Happened to the N in Restaurateur? […] This puzzler has its derivation in the French language. Its roots are in the original word “restaurer,” a French verb meaning to restore, repair, or renew. A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these “restorers” became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called “restaurant.” It wasn’t until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. […] So, interestingly enough, the restaurateur came before the restaurant, and there was never an n to drop.
silent
“Al is freeing time for students to focus on what matters — evaluating the information Al generates“
Man who lost $800 million bitcoin in landfill wants to buy the garbage dump
Life history theory suggests that in harsh, unpredictable environments, individuals may benefit from adopting a fast life history strategy. This may involve experiencing boredom more frequently and intensely as an adaptive mechanism to seek novel stimuli, potentially increasing the number of sexual partners and offspring. This study explored the relationship between trait boredom—a chronic characteristic of feeling bored—and fast life history strategies. Our findings confirmed a positive association between boredom proneness and fast life history strategies at both individual and country levels.
1,000 artists release ‘silent’ album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI Related: List of silent musical compositions, Sleepify
dead steal elections … dead people are working for the government too
lottery ticket
Thieves used a stolen card to buy a $523,000 lottery ticket. The victim wants to share the winnings
A 30-year old woman who travelled to three popular destinations became a medical mystery after doctors found an infestation of parasitic worms in her brain. […] the woman ate street food in Bangkok and raw sushi in Tokyo, and enjoyed more sushi and salad as well as a swim in the ocean in Hawaii
South Korea is the most glaring example. It has the lowest fertility rate in the world: just 0.72 in 2023. It’s also a country where women do nearly three hours more of household chores each day than men do. […] In Japan and Italy, women spend three hours more than men per day on household and care tasks. In Sweden, it’s less than an hour difference. Sweden’s fertility rate is notably higher. [Washington Post]
IQ numbers for historical figures are made up … the studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science … the standard error of measurement of IQ tests is around seven points, meaning you should regularly expect things like 10-20 point spreads … The situation is even worse for IQs of 140 plus
sample of 8,553 Americans […] we find intelligence, as measured with Wordsum, to have the largest effect size, negatively predicting belief in astrology […] Education also predicts disbelief, supporting the “superficial knowledge” hypothesis. Measures of religiosity and spirituality had null effects, in contradiction of the “metaphysical uncertainty” hypothesis that a need for metaphysical beliefs causes one to believe in astrology. We find that right-wing individuals are less likely to believe in astrology, in contradiction to Theodore W. Adorno’s “authoritarian” of astrology.
Breaking into dozens of apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone
AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years
Social media posts and websites claim that the way in which people perceive ambiguous images (Duck-Rabbit, Younger-Older Woman, Rubin’s Vase and Horse-Seal) reveals insights into their personality and thinking style. […] Many of the claims received no empirical support and so constitute a new type of psychological myth
Searching for Rimbaud’s Lost Manuscript
We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct.
Subway Poker
Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust, study
Last week, a monkey snuck into a substation in Sri Lanka and knocked out power, plunging the island nation into darkness that lasted six hours. […] Unlike many developing nations, Sri Lanka has ample installed power generation capacity and has plenty to spare even during peak demand periods. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka, like many countries, has an outdated power grid that’s vulnerable to widespread disruptions. […] the U.S. is not much better, with rolling blackouts, freezing homes and skyrocketing electricity prices now the norm rather than the exception.[…] mass blackouts have now become a regular feature of modern American life. Power outages have increased 64% from the early 2000s while weather-related outages have soared 78%. According to one analysis, the United States now records more power outages than any other developed country, with people living in the upper Midwest losing power for an average of 92 minutes every year compared to just 4 minutes in Japan. […] Despite being the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S. only ranks 13th in the quality of its infrastructure.
Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding — According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library was simply a move to access “data from a ‘well-known online repository’ that was publicly available via torrents.” To defend its torrenting, Meta has basically scrubbed the word “pirate” from the characterization of its activity.
earlier this month the UK government asked for the right to see the data, which currently not even Apple can access. Apple did not comment at the time but has consistently opposed creating a “backdoor” in its encryption service, arguing that if it did so, it would only be a matter of time before bad actors also found a way in. Now the tech giant has decided it will no longer be possible to activate ADP in the UK. It means eventually not all UK customer data stored on iCloud - Apple’s cloud storage service - will be fully encrypted.
Eight Sleep offered the features of temperature control: set the bed to any temperature hot or cold. For someone who suffers from insomnia this seemed worth a shot. What Can They Do with This Access? Let’s start with the basics: They can know when you sleep. They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1. They can know when it’s night, and no people are in the bed. Imagine your ex works for Eight Sleep. Or imagine they want to know when you’re not home. (Of course, they can also change the bed’s temperature, turn on the vibrating feature, turn off your alarm clock, and any of the other normal controls they have power over.) Beyond the basics, what does access to a device on your home network grant them? Any other device connected to that home network - smart fridges, smart stoves, smart washing machines, laptops - is typically routable via your bed. The (in)security of those devices is now entrusted to random Eight Sleep engineers. […] eight sleep sure does harvest people’s bed data, and occasionally tweet about how they’re watching you sleep
El Satario is the name of one of the earliest surviving pornographic films … it was likely produced in Argentina around 1907, and includes possibly the first use of extreme close-ups of genitalia. … a group of nude young women are frolicking in the countryside, a satyr appears … One of the women faints and is sexually assaulted by him, first in 69 position and then in various penile-vaginal positions, until he ejaculates in her vagina. At points he also attempts to finger her anus, an act she vigorously resists. The other women then return and put him to flight. [video]
‘The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.’ —Bukowski
update DOGE team has slashed hundreds of jobs paid for by fees from banks, medical device companies and other forms of funding rather than taxpayer dollars
{ Reuters | Continue reading }
Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons, scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu, and officials responsible for supplying electricity are among those who have been accidentally fired […] Trump administration is now rushing to rehire hundreds of these workers […] Trump called the work by DOGE “amazing.”
{ Reuters | Continue reading }
DOGE employee cuts fall heavily on agency that regulates Musk’s Tesla […] The loss of personnel from the specialized unit is part of a 10 percent overall workforce reduction at the federal agency tasked with ensuring safety on America’s roads. In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people
unrelated { Doctor gets message from health insurance agent during surgery | CNN | video }
bonus quote { “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less likely to be deceived who knows nothing than the one who knows something.” —Jefferson }
photograph a shark
Airbnb’s co-founder is joining Elon Musk’s DOGE, In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees
YouTube terminated a channel called True Crime Case Files whose owner said he was making fake crime videos to “overdose the viewer on luridness.” He had uploaded over 150 videos, all of them using ChatGPT, gen AI image creators, and AI voiceovers. But it was a video called Husband’s Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder that would end up getting his channel deleted. Related: Psycho Obsessive Girlfriend’s Control Turns Deadly (True Crime Documentary)
snakebite antivenom industry
Lawsuit Accuses Meta Of Training AI On Torrented 82TB Dataset With Millions Of Pirated Books […] plaintiffs argue that these internal emails prove Meta knew its actions were illegal
AI is eating the startup world. Venture capitalists splurged ~$110 billion on AI startups last year, about 33% of the total investment in the entire VC space. […] VC investors don’t want to miss out on the boom, with some blindly backing almost anything AI-adjacent. […] raising billions isn’t always enough — Inflection AI, for one, made no money and had to fold its original generative-AI business even after raising $1.5 billion.
the deadly lottery of the snakebite antivenom industry — Investigation reveals ineffective products being sold across Africa, with poor regulation and shortage of effective medication leading to needless deaths
Cake Bandit
‘Cake Bandit’ opossum hospitalized after indulging in an entire Costco cake
Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
Eating from plastic takeout containers may significantly increase the chance of congestive heart failure, a new study finds, and researchers suspect they have identified why: changes to gut biome cause inflammation that damages the circulatory system.
The White House bans the AP indefinitely over the use of ‘Gulf of Mexico’, Apple adds Gulf of America to its maps, Google Maps blocks Gulf of America reviews after rename criticism
The Heart of a Giraffe
An Oregon woman’s nude photos ended up the topic of conversation in her small town after a prosecutor looked through her sensitive cellphone data and told the county sheriff what he found despite no warrant, no consent and no suspicion that she had committed a crime. […] three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant [the DA Jim] Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit […] Under qualified immunity, government officials can be held accountable for violating someone’s rights only if a court has previously ruled that it was “clearly established” those precise actions were unconstitutional.
A woman made her AI voice clone say “arse.” Then she got banned. […] People with motor neuron disease should be allowed to say whatever they want Meanwhile: JD Vance criticizes Europe for censoring free speech
Hedge Fund Startup That Replaced Analysts With Al Beats the Market
Major US banks shut more than 100 locations in just three weeks as the local branch bloodbath continues […] Major US banks closed a total of 1,043 branches over the course of last year […] ‘There’s no doubt we’re moving towards a cashless society’
The NYSE announced Wednesday that one of its electronic exchanges, NYSE Chicago, will reincorporate in Texas and be renamed NYSE Texas […] Texas has emerged as a competitor to Delaware as the legal home of major companies
Brain implant that could boost mood by using ultrasound to go under NHS trial — Devices may have potential to help patients with conditions such as depression, addiction, OCD and epilepsy
We can’t trust our government anymore. But you are the government now. Yes, that’s what I’m saying.
I think a lot about what I sometimes call “abstract commodity space.” Sometimes you want to buy nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa to make batteries or beer cans or cappuccino or chocolate bars, so you go to some supplier and negotiate a contract for the delivery of a useful amount of a particular grade of the commodity to your factory. Sometimes, though, you want to bet on the price of nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa, to hedge some risk to your business or just as a speculative bet. So you buy commodity futures, financial assets that reflect the price of a commodity but don’t require you to store it or worry about it spoiling.
The way these futures often work is that there are big warehouses full of the commodity, and people write futures contracts that essentially transfer the entitlements to the commodities in the warehouse, without ever having to take them out. Your futures represent a claim on some nickel or coffee in a warehouse in abstract commodity space,[1] and you don’t have to think much about the physical properties of the actual thing. The warehouse system has put a layer of abstraction on the messy commodity business, and you can treat the commodity as just a number on your computer screen.
We mostly talk about this when it breaks down, though. Sometimes the physical world tears through the layer of abstraction. The coffee or cocoa beans are stale, or someone discovers that the nickel in the warehouse is actually a bag of rocks.
Or: Abstract commodity space is fairly global, and you can trade abstract commodities from a computer screen anywhere in the world. But the physical world is not so seamlessly globalized. Now, gold in a warehouse in New York is worth more than gold in a warehouse in London. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on “Why Dealers Are Flying Gold Bars by Plane From London to New York”:
Gold is, for the moment, worth substantially more in Manhattan than in the U.K. capital, sparking the biggest trans-Atlantic movement of physical bars in years. Traders at major banks are racing to yank gold from vaults deep below London’s medieval streets and from Swiss gold refineries and ferry them across the ocean. …
Banks run big offsetting positions, owning gold bars in London, lending them out to earn a return and hedging the risk that prices fall by selling futures in New York. JPMorgan and HSBC, which clear gold transactions and store bullion for other banks in London, are the biggest players in this trans-Atlantic market.
Banks run big offsetting positions, owning gold bars in London, lending them out to earn a return and hedging the risk that prices fall by selling futures in New York. JPMorgan and HSBC, which clear gold transactions and store bullion for other banks in London, are the biggest players in this trans-Atlantic market.
The trade appears almost risk-free as long as prices on both sides of the Atlantic are close to each other. But when prices on the Comex surged above those in London late last year, baking in possible tariffs, contracts that the banks had sold in New York were suddenly underwater. …
Banks could close the trade by buying futures in New York, but such a move would mean crystallizing those losses. Another alternative: flying the physical gold they owned in London to New York and delivering it to the futures contracts’ owners instead. […]
Comex contracts require a different size of bar, so traders need to send gold to Swiss refiners to recast it before flying on to the U.S. Sometimes, they cut out the first European leg by handing the refiner gold in London in exchange for the right size of bar, or flying bullion in from Australia instead.
afterglow
Given the well-documented benefits of satisfying sex, it might seem surprising that most couples in long-term relationships engage in sexual activity relatively infrequently, typically only once or twice a week. This infrequency raises an intriguing question: how can sex have such a profound and lasting impact on a relationship if it is not a daily occurrence? This observation suggests that individual instances of sexual intimacy might have psychological effects that extend far beyond the immediate moment, significantly influencing overall well-being in the relationship. To explore this idea, researchers sought to understand more about the phenomenon of “sexual afterglow,” the lingering feeling of sexual satisfaction following sexual activity. […] Scientists discovered that the positive “afterglow” of sex can linger for at least 24 hours, and it’s especially powerful when sex is a mutual decision or initiated by one partner, while sexual rejection can unfortunately create a negative ripple effect lasting several days.
Does literature advance one funeral at a time? We have analysed a corpus of over 23 000 books by more than 6000 authors and arrived at an answer that is more nuanced than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The turnover of cohorts does play an important role in the change of literary topics, but the role of authors’ retirement is not large, being twice as small as the effect of the arrival of new authors. Literature does not advance one funeral at a time—it advances one birth at a time. The arrival of new authors with fresh ideas is enough to keep the wheels of literature moving.
Tesla found a way to move more Cybertrucks: Sell them to the Trump administration … The Trump administration is set to buy $400 million worth of [~4,000] “Armored Tesla” vehicles … last year Tesla sold fewer than 40,000 Cybertrucks in the US
all the ways your brain can deceive you
Scientists Simulated a Quantum Apocalypse. Then the Universe Disappeared.
breakdown
New hack uses prompt injection to corrupt Gemini’s long-term memory — The result of the attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity.
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US, big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders
Dozens of new obesity drugs are coming, will work differently from Ozempic and Wegovy — aiming to deliver greater weight loss with fewer side effects
Music makes us move even when we don’t like it
English has a pattern of common patronymic names. For example, “John Peters” and “John Peterson” are someone whose father was named “Peter”. (”Peters” should be understood as “Peter’s”.) Similarly we have John Williams and John Williamson, John Roberts and John Robertson, John Richards and John Richardson, John James and John Jameson, John Johns and John Johnson, and so on. […] “Richard” is “Dick”, and we have John Dicks (or Dix) and John Dickson (or Dixon). “Nicholas” is “Nick” and we have John Nicks (or Nix) and John Nickson (or Nixon).
In August 1990, two hikers sent photos of a strange diamond-shaped aircraft to the press – but the story never appeared. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely? […] it was a classified U.S. military aircraft
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties. The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them. But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. […] Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. […] much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy.
Cowgirls
Why Delta Air Lines Workers Are Fighting for a Union — Although Delta offered boarding pay, flight attendants say they don’t get paid during delays or for “sits” between flights. “Our boarding pay is so sad, it’s like half of our regular pay for half of the time that we’re boarding,”
After more than three decades of planning and a $250 million investment, Lykos Therapeutics’ application for the first psychedelic drug to reach federal regulators was expected to be a shoo-in. Lykos, the corporate arm of a nonprofit dedicated to winning mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, had submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that its groundbreaking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder — MDMA plus talk therapy — was significantly more effective than existing treatments. […] two dozen scientists, doctors and trauma survivors told an F.D.A. advisory panel how MDMA-assisted therapy had brought marked relief from a mental health condition associated with high rates of suicide, especially among veterans. Then came skeptics with disturbing accusations: that Lykos was “a therapy cult,” that practitioners in its clinical trials had engaged in widespread abuse of participants and that the company had concealed a litany of adverse events. […] Dr. Devenot and six others presented themselves as experts in the field of psychedelics, but none had expertise in medicine or therapy. Nor had the speakers disclosed their connection to Psymposia, a leftist advocacy group whose members oppose the commercialization of psychedelics and had been campaigning against Lykos and its nonprofit parent […] The critics did not provide evidence to back their claims of systematic wrongdoing, but when the votes were counted that day, the panel overwhelmingly rejected Lykos’s application. [NY Times]
In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone in the human gut that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy. […] GLP-1 quickly disappears from the human body, positing difficulties in drug development […] Here enters the Gila monster, the largest lizard in North America […] Hormones in this reptile’s venom had also previously been shown to regulate blood sugar. Drucker wanted to know why and honed his research using venom from the Gila Monster. […] “We tried using lizard DNA that was in the freezer in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum and the cloning didn’t work. And so our next step was to try and get a live lizard and obviously these are difficult to obtain, you can’t walk into a pet store in Toronto and order these things.” […] After experimenting on the lizard, Drucker and his team found that these reptiles are “very unique in that it has genes for Exendin-4, the protein that became the first diabetes GLP-1 treatment”
Gesture-based age estimation tool BorderAge joins Australia age assurance trial — Originally born out of research on a tool to test for doping in sports, BorderAge works on the principle that as we age, our body changes – and so do the ways that we move. Technically, it measures variations among people of different ages in the duration and distance of “rapid aimed limb movements toward a visible target region.” The process can be completed with less than 30 seconds of footage from a smartphone camera.
Thomas Aquinas’ Appearance Revealed After 750 Years The lead author of the study, Brazilian 3D designer Cicero Moraes, has reconstructed the faces of other saints […] “The most challenging part was projecting the missing regions of the skull. Fortunately, we have tools for this, based on measurements taken from CT scans of living people.”
Tom Robbins dies at 92. He blended pop philosophy and absurdist comedy in best-selling books like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Skinny Legs and All.” […] His story lines were secondary and hard to explain; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary currency was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comic mythopoetic, combined for an effect that was truly his own. Take a representative line like this, from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” his second novel: “An afternoon squeezed out of Mickey’s mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog’s dish of meteorology.”
there’s a very good chance that a dying person will be delirious at the end of life. In fact, in palliative care and hospice spaces, 58 to 88 percent of cancer patients are delirious in the last week to hours before death. […] as you die, unless you die very suddenly in an instant, your various bodily systems start to work differently until they stop working at all. And that includes the way that you think, and that includes the way that you communicate.” […] the exact biological mechanisms behind delirium aren’t well understood, but it appears to stem from neuronal dysfunction, probably due to neurotransmitter fluctuations. Neurons in the brain aren’t dying (which is why sometimes people can recover from delirium) but disconnecting from each other.
[2022] a 70-year-old woman in the central east Indian state of Odisha was killed by an elephant, only to have the same elephant reportedly return to her funeral to pull her body from a pyre and trample her again before fleeing
ketamine
Man arrested in deadly shooting of friend who said he could dodge bullets, reports say
Boy, 13, arrested at hospital for ‘impersonating a doctor’ after turning up wearing scrubs
“With most medications, like valium, the anti-anxiety effect you get only lasts when it is in your system. When the valium goes away, you can get rebound anxiety. When you take ketamine, it triggers reactions in your cortex that enable brain connections to regrow. It’s the reaction to ketamine, not the presence of ketamine in the body that constitutes its effects.” And this is exactly what makes ketamine unique as an antidepressant.
Scientists find abnormally slow neural dynamics in visual cortex of depressed individuals
Reasoning and empathy are not competing but complementary features of altruism
Is the ‘bad boy’ appeal a myth? The current study assessed how individuals evaluate potential romantic partners who display either low, medium, or high levels of DT traits for short-term (STR) and long-term (LTR) relationships. The Dark Triad (DT) consists of three personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy […] Study 1 demonstrated people with a male preference (mostly women) perceived medium levels of the three traits as the most attractive STR. For Study 2, both men and women found the low levels the most attractive for both STRs and LTRs. […] results suggest the concept of DT is not as attractive even for STRs unless it is accompanied by physical attractiveness [and] that men tend to be less selective than women overall when it comes to choosing partners —- for both short-term and long-term relationships.
While dogs kill some 30,000 people annually, only 100 shark attacks are documented worldwide each year, and fewer than 15 percent of these are fatal. Still, he wants to understand why sharks attack when they do. […] among some terrestrial predators such as tigers and leopards, a select few “problem individuals” are thought to be disproportionately responsible for attacks on humans. […] Some scientists have dismissed the notion of “problem sharks” as unlikely […] But in a new study in Conservation Letters, Clua and his colleagues present the very first evidence for his theory, by documenting three sharks that have been responsible for repeat attacks. The findings shine a new light on shark personality and suggest indiscriminate culling may not be an effective method of reducing shark attacks. […] For Clua, problem shark behavior suggests a new strategy for preventing attacks. He and his colleagues call for efforts to systematically fish sharks, without killing them, to collect DNA and attach tags or notch their dorsal fins for easy identification. Then, if a shark bites a person, DNA can be swabbed from the victim’s wound to identify the culprit, which can be selectively targeted and killed. Mourier isn’t convinced this solution could be widely implemented. For one, “you need at least a few hours and even days to get the results of the DNA extraction and identification, so during that time the shark is likely to be far away and the chance to find it again is very low in most cases,” he writes.
