11-year-old charged in Louisiana after allegedly stealing school bus, engaging in police chase

Researchers have devised a way of using 3D printed plastic to create objects that communicate with smartphone or other Wi-Fi devices without the need for batteries or electronics.

Researchers gave thousands of dollars to homeless people.

Do I get COVID in airline cabins? With only 44 identified potential cases of flight-related transmission among 1.2 billion travelers, that’s one case for every 27 million travelers.

Survival rates of SARS-CoV-2 were determined at different temperatures. We obtained half lives of between 1.7 and 2.7 days at 20 °C, reducing to a few hours when temperature was elevated to 40 °C. + Low risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by fomites in real-life conditions [fomite: inanimate object that is likely to carry infection, such as clothes, utensils, and furniture]

recovering the sense of smell in mild to moderate patients after COVID-19 — within a month time window and two months after symptoms’ onset, in our cohort of patients we observed a substantial improvement in the olfactory abilities

Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an abortion

More Humans Are Growing an Extra Artery in Our Arms, Showing We’re Still Evolving

A Marketplace investigation into Amazon Canada has found that perfectly good items are being liquidated by the truckload — and even destroyed or sent to landfill.

Google Earth is “cloud-free,” since the clouds and their shadows are edited out. […] the selection of millions of “best” images on these terms creates an overall distorted representation of Earth.

Jason Gelinas lived a normal suburban life with a plum Wall Street gig. He also ran the conspiracy theory’s biggest news hub. QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive

Authorities seized 13 tons of human hair entering the US

Tanker searched for drugs since August, nothing found, but search will go on

Most people, when shown some statistics, sigh and get boggled. But Herman Chernoff realized that almost everyone is good at reading faces. So he devised recipes to convert any set of statistics into an equivalent bunch of smiley-face drawings. [Chernoff Faces | PDF]

here’s a map of what the electoral college would look like if nobody voted and also if florida was really long

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is issuing this announcement to encourage Americans to exercise caution when using hotel wireless networks (Wi-Fi) for telework. FBI has observed a trend where individuals who were previously teleworking from home are beginning to telework from hotels. US hotels, predominantly in major cities, have begun to advertise daytime room reservations for guests seeking a quiet, distraction-free work environment. While this option may be appealing, accessing sensitive information from hotel Wi-Fi poses an increased security risk over home Wi-Fi networks. Malicious actors can exploit inconsistent or lax hotel Wi-Fi security and guests’ security complacency to compromise the work and personal data of hotel guests. Following good cyber security practices can minimize some of the risks associated with using hotel Wi-Fi for telework.

Attackers target hotels to obtain records of guest names, personal information, and credit card numbers. The hotel environment involves many unaffiliated guests, operating in a confined area, and all using the same wireless network. Guests are largely unable to control, verify, or monitor network security. Cyber criminals can take advantage of this environment to monitor a victim’s internet browsing or redirect victims to false login pages. Criminals can also conduct an “evil twin attack” by creating their own malicious network with a similar name to the hotel’s network. Guests may then mistakenly connect to the criminal’s network instead of the hotel’s, giving the criminal direct access to the guest’s computer. […]

Once the malicious actor gains access to the business network, they can steal proprietary data and upload malware, including ransomware. Cybercriminals or nation-state actors can use stolen intellectual property to facilitate their own schemes or produce counterfeit versions of proprietary products. Cybercriminals can use information gathered from access to company data to trick business executives into transferring company funds to the criminal.

{ iC3 | Continue reading }

ink on black paper { Aura Satz, Tone Transmission, 2020 }

What if a pill can change your politics or religious reliefs? […] Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms,” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine. […]

Although its precise therapeutic mechanisms remain unclear, clinically relevant doses of psilocybin can induce powerful mystical experiences more commonly associated with extended periods of fasting, prayer or meditation. Arguably, then, it is unsurprising that it can generate long-lasting changes in patients: studies report increased prosociality and aesthetic appreciation, plus robust shifts in personality, values and attitudes to life, even leading some atheists to find God. What’s more, these experiences appear to be a feature, rather than a bug, of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, with the intensity of the mystical experience correlating with the extent of clinical benefit.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

California is gonna have to ration water. You wanna know why? Because they send millions of gallons of water out to sea, out to the Pacific. Because they want to take care of certain little tiny fish, that aren’t doing very well without water.

{ Donald J. Trump | Continue reading }

People who manage investment funds have greatly increased in number and pay. Once their management fees are taken into account, they tend to give lower returns than simple index funds. Investors seem willing to accept such lower expected returns in trade for a chance to brag about their association should returns happen to be high. They enjoy associating with prestigious fund managers, and tend to insist that such managers take their phone calls, which credibly shows a closer than arms-length relation.

{ OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

sheep and formaldehyde solution { Damien Hirst, The Tranquility of Solitude (for George Dyer), Damien Hirst, The Tranquility of Solitude (for George Dyer), 2006 }

An earlier universe existed before the Big Bang and can still be observed today, Sir Roger Penrose has said, as he received the Nobel Prize for Physics. […]

“The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future.

“We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon. 

“So our Big Bang began with something which was the remote future of a previous aeon and there would have been similar black holes evaporating away, via Hawking evaporation, and they would produce these points in the sky, that I call Hawking Points.

“We are seeing them. These points are about eight times the diameter of the Moon and are slightly warmed up regions. There is pretty good evidence for at least six of these points.”

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

Parrots removed from UK wildlife park after they started swearing at customers

419 naïve students saw a performer making contact with a confederate’s deceased kin. 65% of participants reported having witnessed a genuine paranormal event.

Gruesome Descriptions Can Make Crimes Seem Worse — But Judges And Lawyers Are Immune To This Bias

Results revealed that most breakup sex appears to be motivated by three factors: relationship maintenance, hedonism, and ambivalence. Men tended to support hedonistic and ambivalent reasons for having breakup sex more often than women.

Scientists have created a new “super enzyme” that can break down plastic up to six times faster than their previous enzyme. The super enzyme could have major implications for recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is the most common thermoplastic used in single-use drinks bottles, carpets, and clothing. Around 3,000-4,000 mealworms can break down one Styrofoam coffee cup in about a week thanks to the bacteria living in their gut.

Amazon’s latest effort to speed up shopping trips lets you pay with the palm of your hand. The company introduced Amazon One, which connects your palm print to a stored credit card so you can place your hand above a sensor to enter and buy items at checkout-free Amazon (AMZN) Go stores.

Google and Facebook’s ad business might not survive Amazon

Facebook isn’t free: zero-price companies overcharge consumers with data

how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth [2018]

Cisco has been hit with a $1.9bn patent-infringement bill for copying cybersecurity tech from Centripetal Networks and pushing the company out of lucrative government contracts

Tesla dissolves its PR department

The researchers found that 71% of infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts, while a mere 8% of infected individuals accounted for 60% of new infections. […] The researchers found that children and young adults — who made up one-third of COVID cases — were especially key to transmitting the virus in the studied populations.

Common thinking argues that the nation needs to achieve at least 60% herd immunity to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Heterogeneity in contact structure and individual variation in infectivity, susceptibility, and resistance are key factors that reduce the disease-induced herd immunity levels to 34.2-47.5% in our models.

Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S

We conclude that the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation“infodemic”

Penniman is the co-founder and project manager of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, an organic farm that incorporates indigenous African growing techniques, including worm composting, raised beds, cover cropping and no-till fields. It’s also a teaching farm that’s training a new generation of people of color to become activist-farmers. – How Black Farmers Lost 14 Million Acres of Farmland — And How They’re Taking It Back

The economics of vending machines

Thread of fruit and vegetable prices in the Arctic

foreskin facial treatment — which is supposed to reduce wrinkles by using skin cells from a baby’s foreskin

The Infinite Pattern That Never Repeats [Thanks Tim]

CIA rectal tool kit

Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation

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.

{ Axios | Continue reading }

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.

{ i-Perception | Continue reading }

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.

{ i-Perception | Continue reading }

{ Newsweek | White House Gift Shop }

{ watch clips | Twitter }

{ Doctors monitoring Trump’s lungs, giving steroid dexamethasone to fight COVID-19 | Twitter }

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.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

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.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Kvartal 95 Studio }

{ 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.

{ Sex Roles | Continue reading }

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.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }