Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to American biochemist Jennifer A. Doudna (left) and French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier who discovered gene-editing tool CRISPR […] Doudna and Charpentier have been considered top candidates for the prize for several years, but there’s an ongoing fight over patents for CRISPR and its use.
Faces provide not only cues to an individual’s identity, age, gender, and ethnicity but also insight into their mental states. The aim was to investigate the temporal aspects of processing of facial expressions of complex mental states for very short presentation times ranging from 12.5 to 100 ms. […]
Results show that participants are able to recognise very subtle differences between facial expressions; performance is better than chance, even for the shortest presentation time. Importantly, we show for the first time that observers can recognise these expressions based on information contained in the eye region only.
We showcase an optical phenomenon that we call Third-Eye Rivalry. The effect is most easily induced by viewing one’s own reflection in a mirror. Using the pupil of the opposing eye as a fixation target, people can easily cross their eyes in free fusion to experience vivid rivalry. The resulting percept is of a prominent central “third” eye and two peripheral faces rivaling for perceptual dominance.
Frederick Trump […] paternal grandfather of Donald J. Trump, […] made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel in Canada […] He died from the Spanish flu in 1918.
more { Trump coughed after the word “therapeutics” and it was edited out }
related { company that sells software used in hundreds of clinical trials, including the crash effort to develop tests, treatments and a vaccine for the coronavirus, was hit by a ransomware attack | NY Times }
Volodymyr Zelensky is the sixth and current president of Ukraine. Before entering politics, he was a comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and director.
Prior to his political career, he created a production company, Kvartal 95, which produces […] TV comedy shows, including Servant of the People, in which Zelensky played the role of President of Ukraine. The series aired from 2015 to 2019. A namesake political party bearing the same name as the television show was created in March 2018 by employees of Kvartal 95.
Zelensky announced his candidacy for the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election on the evening of 31 December 2018 [and] won the election with 73.22% of the vote in the second round. […]
After Zelensky’s inauguration most leading figures of Kvartal 95 joined Zelensky’s administration as Deputy Heads of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine and one was appointed Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Secret Service.
{ COVID-19 at the White House | “He’s fucked, we’re fucked,” said one White House aide. When informed of the Biden campaign’s announcement that the former VP and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, had both tested negative, the aide replied: “Double fucked.” }
To test the “sex sells” assumption, we examined how Italian men and women react to sexualized advertising. […] Women reacted negatively to both female and male sexualized ads by expressing higher negative emotions, which in turn disinclined them to purchase these products. On the other hand, men did not show any significant increment either on product attractiveness or purchase intentions toward female sexualized compared to neutral ads, and they also reacted negatively to male sexualization in ads. […]
Another important finding of the present study is that exposure to sexualized ads significantly impacts women’s emotions. […]
men with higher hostile sexism showed more purchase intentions after viewing sexualized than neutral ads. […]
The present study was conducted in Italy and all models were White and reflected the sexualized thin ideal for women and the muscular ideal for men. Therefore, we suggest more diversity in future studies.
image { “In a mere 30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole, you will receive more energy from this electric node than you would in an entire day being outside with your clothes on” […] “this practice is meant to be done in the time of 30 seconds to 5 minutes MAX in the sun” | Perineum Sunning — Here’s Why Doctors Definitely Don’t Want You to Try It }
{ In the book “#nyc,” photographer Jeff Mermelstei presents a series of iPhone photographs that he took over the course of two and a half years, capturing the quotidian dramas taking place on the phone screens of unsuspecting strangers. | New Yorker | full story }
{ Images generated from captions by AI models | Technology Review | full story }
Data analytics company Palantir Technologies and workplace software maker Asana Inc are set to debut on the U.S. stock market on Wednesday bypassing an initial public offering (IPO). […]
[S]ome investors and corporate executives have been pushing to shed investment banks as their middlemen. For years, they have criticized IPOs as chummy deals that allowed bankers to allocate the most shares to their top clients. […] “If Palantir and Asana are successful, which they should be, more and more companies will return to looking seriously at direct listings,” Narasin added. […]
In 2020, the price of a newly listed company’s shares has risen by an average of 38% on the first day of trading, according to IPOScoop data and Reuters calculations.
This has fueled renewed criticism among investors snubbed by the investment banks underwriting the IPOs, as well as suspicion among some companies that bankers are leaving money on the table in their IPO to help create a first-day trading “pop”. […]In a direct listing, no shares are sold in advance, as is the case with IPOs. The company’s share price in its market debut is determined by orders coming into the stock exchange.
The downside is that the companies involved cannot raise money, though both NYSE and Nasdaq have requested U.S. regulators allow them to change their rules to allow companies to sell new stock in a direct listing.
life expectancy for men in 1907 was 45.6 years; by 1957 it rose to 66.4; in 2007 it reached 75.5. Unlike the most recent increase in life expectancy (which was attributable largely to a decline in half of the leading causes of death including heart disease, homicide, and influenza), the increase in life expectancy between 1907 and 2007 was largely due to a decreasing infant mortality rate, which was 9.99 percent in 1907; 2.63 percent in 1957; and 0.68 percent in 2007.
But the inclusion of infant mortality rates in calculating life expectancy creates the mistaken impression that earlier generations died at a young age; Americans were not dying en masse at the age of 46 in 1907. The fact is that the maximum human lifespan — a concept often confused with “life expectancy” — has remained more or less the same for thousands of years. The idea that our ancestors routinely died young (say, at age 40) has no basis in scientific fact. […]
If a couple has two children and one of them dies in childbirth while the other lives to be 90, stating that on average the couple’s children lived to be 45 is statistically accurate but meaningless.
Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus. However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected, that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place. This is a paradox, an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe. […] In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would. No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you. Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency.
{ Popular Mechanics | Continue reading | More: Classical and Quantum Gravity }
European regulators are cracking down on Facebook’s ability to transfer data across the Atlantic. Now the tech giant is threatening to pull its services from more than 400 million European users. Related: The Social Dilemma [a documentary about how technology giants have manipulated human psychology to influence how we behave]
if a brand like National Geographic uploaded its photos to Facebook’s Rights Manager, it could then monitor where they show up, like on other brands’ Instagram pages. From there, the company could choose to let the images stay up, issue a takedown, or use a territorial block […] paparazzi have sued celebrities for uploading their photos to their own accounts
Huang’s Law Is the New Moore’s Law. I call it Huang’s Law, after Nvidia Corp. chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang. It describes how the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every two years.
Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house
How the oil industry made us doubt climate change
The Italian Mafia Is on TikTok And it’s an insight into the changing world of organised crime.
Coronavirus can spread on airline flights, two studies show
Genetic or immune defects may impair ability to fight Covid-19
Hidden immune weakness found in 14% of gravely ill COVID-19 patients - in a significant minority of patients with serious COVID-19, the interferon response has been crippled by genetic flaws or by rogue antibodies that attack interferon itself. [Science]
We report the isolation and characterization of two ultrapotent SARS-CoV-2 human neutralizing antibodies (S2E12 and S2M11) that protect hamsters against SARS-CoV-2 challenge. Cryo-electron microscopy structures show that S2E12 and S2M11 competitively block ACE2 attachment and that S2M11 also locks the spike in a closed conformation by recognition of a quaternary epitope spanning two adjacent receptor-binding domains. Cocktails including S2M11, S2E12 or the previously identified S309 antibody broadly neutralize a panel of circulating SARS-CoV-2 isolates and activate effector functions. Our results pave the way to implement antibody cocktails for prophylaxis or therapy, circumventing or limiting the emergence of viral escape mutants. [Science]
Our pilot study demonstrated that administration of a high dose of Calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D, a main metabolite of vitamin D endocrine system, significantly reduced the need for ICU treatment of patients requiring hospitalization due to proven COVID-19. Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease. [Analysis of the Findings]
Resuming sexual activity soon after heart attack linked with improved survival
This week, PJ looks into a theory circling the internet about who might be behind QAnon. The investigation takes him back to the beginning of the QAnon scam, and to the message board trolls who started it.
Later bedtimes predict President Trump’s performance
Why We Don’t Like Our Underground House
Bryson DeChambeau might be the most innovative athlete in the world right now He just won his first major championship and is changing how golf is played at the highest levels.
How do you pick the best sake? Drink something with the word “Ginjo” on the bottle and you will always be in the safe zone. If the word ginjo is embedded in there, it is super premium sake, in the top 7% of all produced.
Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there may be a black hole like structure at the centre of the earth. We show that the existence of life on the earth may be a reason that this black hole like object is a black brane that has been formed from biological materials like DNA. Size of this DNA black brane is 109 times longer than the size of the earth’s core and compacted interior it. By compacting this long object, a curved space-time emerges, and some properties of black holes emerge. This structure is the main cause of the emergence of the large temperature of the core, magnetic field around the earth and gravitational field for moving around the sun. Also, this structure produces some waves which act like topoisomerase in biology and read the information on DNAs. […]
These dark DNAs not only exchange information with DNAs but also are connected with some of the molecules of water and helps them to store information and have memory. Thus, the earth is the biggest system of telecommunication which connects DNAs, dark DNAs and molecules of water.
{ Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences | Continue reading }
photo ( Nadia Von Scotti }
men found it more appealing if their committed romantic/sexual partners frequently changed their physical appearance, while women reported that they modified their physical appearance more frequently than did men, potentially appealing to male desires for novelty
How the Physical Appearance of Others Affects Attention to Healthy Foods
There is a widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking. The present study examined a possibility that men were better at concurrent multitasking while women were better at task switching. Findings suggest that men have an advantage in concurrent multitasking.
Highly creative individuals are better than their peers at identifying uncreative products
The experience of love plays an integral role in human development as adolescents transition to young adults. This study examined whether emerging adults in the United States reach a consensus on what makes people feel loved.
Airline workers have lower rates of COVID-19 than the general population
If You’ve Just Had Covid, Exercise Can Cause Serious Complications, Including Heart Disease
EncroChat was a Europe-based communications network and service provider allegedly used by organized crime members to plan criminal activities. Police infiltrated the network between at least March and June 2020 during a Europe-wide investigation. […] At least 800 arrests have been made across Europe as of 7 July 2020. […] The Dutch police arrested more than 100 suspects and seized more than 8 tonnes of cocaine, around 1.2 tonne of crystal meth, 19 synthetic drug laboratories, dozens of guns and luxury cars, and around €20 million in cash. In a property in Rotterdam, authorities found police uniforms, stolen vehicles, 25 firearms and drugs. On 22 June 2020 the Dutch police discovered a “torture chamber” in a warehouse. [Wikipedia | More: How Police Secretly Took Over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime and Encrochat Investigation Finds Corrupt Cops Leaking Information to Criminals ]
The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke
Coronavirus Ice Cube Mold Tray [Thank you, Cassandra]
Japan on Track to Introduce Flying Taxi Services in 2023
Amazon wants to use delivery drones to surveil your house and put ads on your body
Facebook will pay users $120 to log off before 2020 election (to assess the impact of social media on voting)
No Evidence for a Relationship between Intelligence and Ejaculate Quality [PDF]
Attachment theory is an enduring and generative framework for understanding infant and romantic relationships. Here, I advance a two-system approach to attachment, proposing that infant attachments and romantic attachments constitute etiologically distinct systems that evolved in response to different selection pressures, serve different evolutionary functions, and are fundamentally different in nature with regard to operation and necessity toward their respective evolutionary goals.
recent research has shed light on how memory of recent eating modulates future food consumption. […] In humans, overweight and obesity is associated with impaired memory performance […] Enhancing memory of eating has been shown to reduce future eating
facial detection applied to grains of sand
The Effects of Laughter during US Supreme Court’s Oral Arguments we find that the side causing more instances of laughter is more likely to win the votes of individual justices
Energy ‘scavenger’ could turn waste heat from fridges and other devices into electricity
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
On the correlation between solar activity and large earthquakes worldwide
Nearly two-thirds of New York restaurants may have to close by January
Berlin’s banging Berghain club reborn as a gallery
The Economic Impact of the Black Death Previously: When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews.
how humankind should handle the first, inevitable murder in outer space
The nine alternative visions of chess that AlphaZero tested included no-castling chess, which Kramnik and others had already been thinking about. Five of the variants altered the movement of pawns, including torpedo chess, in which pawns can move up to two squares at a time throughout the game, instead of only on their first move. Draws were less common under no-castling chess than under conventional rules. And learning different rules shifted the value AlphaZero placed on different pieces: Under conventional rules it valued a queen at 9.5 pawns; under torpedo rules the queen was only worth 7.1 pawns. A more extreme change, self-capture chess, in which a player can take their own pieces, proved even more alluring. [Wired]
How to blur your house on Google Street View
Insects of Los Angeles (photographs taken using a special digital microscope)
Balenciaga Summer 20 Campaign [Thanks Tim]
I examine the relationship between unhappiness and age using data from eight well-being data files on nearly 14 million respondents across forty European countries and the United States and 168 countries from the Gallup World Poll. […] Unhappiness is hill-shaped in age and the average age where the maximum occurs is 49 with or without controls.
{ Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization | Continue reading }
A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries. […] The U-shape of the curve is forcefully confirmed, with an age minimum, or nadir, in midlife around age 50 in separate analyses for developing and advanced countries as well as for the continent of Africa. The happiness curve seems to be everywhere.
photo { Joseph Szabo }
