Hackers stole a casino’s high-roller database through a thermometer in the lobby fish tank. They are increasingly targeting unprotected ‘internet of things’ devices such as air condition systems and CCTV to get into corporate networks.

‘Bitcoin Heist’ suspect climbs out prison window in Iceland, gets on plane to Sweden, reportedly same flight as Iceland’s leader

A powerful combination of lawyers, banks and hedge funds have lined up to talk hundreds of women into unnecessary and sometimes dangerous surgery, to help build better lawsuits against medical device companies

T-Mobile agreed to pay $40 million to resolve a government investigation that found it failed to correct problems with delivering calls in rural areas and inserted false ring tones in hundreds of millions of calls

researchers found that people at higher elevations in an office building were more willing to take financial risks

After working in a world of ‘tech bros,’ entrepreneur Kristina Roth founds SuperShe, a female-only island

we found that better government services were related to lower religiosity among countries (Study 1) and states in the United States (Study 2).

In jobs where existing research has posited that attractiveness is plausibly a productivity enhancing attribute—those that require substantial amounts of interpersonal interaction—a large beauty premium exists. In contrast, in jobs where attractiveness seems unlikely to truly enhance productivity—jobs that require working with information and data—there is no beauty premium.

The plastic, which can come from soft furnishings and synthetic fabrics, gets into household dust which falls on plates and is consumed. We could be swallowing more than 100 tiny plastic particles with every main meal, a Heriot-Watt study has revealed.

Women’s voice pitch lowers after pregnancy

Not using smartphones in the bedroom increases happiness and quality of life.

New research shows that we can train our brains to become memory champions [More: The Method of Loci]

This finding provides new insights on the attentional mechanisms behind the initial stages of serendipity.

HARVEST uses wind energy to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research [Thanks Tim]

A kakistocracy is a system of government which is run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens

{ while ordinary people are struggling, those at the top are doing just fine. Income and wealth inequality have shot up. The top 1% of Americans command nearly twice the amount of income as the bottom 50%. The situation is more equitable in Europe, though the top 1% have had a good few decades. | The Economist | full story }

{ Netflix performance burns hedge fund short sellers }

Twelve years ago, my now-Bloomberg colleague Joe Weisenthal proposed that startups that planned to disrupt an established industry should short the stock of the incumbents in that industry. That way, if they were right — if they were able to undercut big established public companies — then they’d get rich as those public companies declined. […] Their profits would come from the incumbents’ shrinking.

Weisenthal’s proposal was for disruptors offering a free product; the idea was that the entire business model would consist of (1) offering a free service that public companies offer for money and (2) paying for the service by shorting the public companies. But there’s a more boring and more widely generalizable — yet still vanishingly rare — version of this approach in which it just augments the disruptors’ business model: You sell better widgets cheaper and make a profit that way, while doubling down by also shorting your competitors. It’s a more leveraged way to do the business you were going to do anyway, an extra vote of confidence in yourself.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Across four experiments participants chose between two versions of a stimulus which either had an attractive left side or an attractive right side. […]

In each experiment participants showed a significant bias to choose the stimulus with an attractive left side more than the stimulus with an attractive right side. The leftward bias emerged at age 10/11, was not caused by a systematic asymmetry in the perception of colourfulness or complexity, and was stronger when the difference in attractiveness between the left and right sides was larger.

The results are relevant to the aesthetics of product and packaging design and show that leftward biases extend to the perceptual judgement of everyday items. Possible causes of the leftward bias for attractiveness judgements are discussed and it is suggested that the size of the bias may not be a measure of the degree of hemispheric specialization.

{ Laterality | Continue reading }

art { Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, 1970 }

The image of the world that we see is continuously deformed and fragmented by foreshortenings, partial overlapping, and so on, and must be constantly reassembled and interpreted; otherwise, it could change so much that we would hardly recognize it. Since pleasure has been found to be involved in visual and cognitive information processing, the possibility is considered that anhedonia (the reduction of the ability to feel pleasure) might interfere with the correct reconstruction and interpretation of the image of the environment and alter its appearance.

{ Schizophrenia Research and Treatment | Continue reading }

It is often claimed that negative events carry a larger weight than positive events. Loss aversion is the manifestation of this argument in monetary outcomes. In this review, we examine early studies of the utility function of gains and losses, and in particular the original evidence for loss aversion reported by Kahneman and Tversky (Econometrica  47:263–291, 1979). We suggest that loss aversion proponents have over-interpreted these findings.

{ Psychological Research | Continue reading }

Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level. The difference is small but can be measured with precision timepieces that can be bought today for a few thousand pounds. This slowing down can be detected between levels just a few centimetres apart: a clock placed on the floor runs a little more slowly than one on a table.

It is not just the clocks that slow down: lower down, all processes are slower. Two friends separate, with one of them living in the plains and the other going to live in the mountains. They meet up again years later: the one who has stayed down has lived less, aged less, the mechanism of his cuckoo clock has oscillated fewer times. He has had less time to do things, his plants have grown less, his thoughts have had less time to unfold … Lower down, there is simply less time than at altitude. […]

Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. The single quantity “time” melts into a spiderweb of times.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Julie Blackmon }

Coding theorists are concerned with two things. Firstly and most importantly they are concerned with the private lives of two people called Alice and Bob. In theory papers, whenever a coding theorist wants to describe a transaction between two parties he doesn’t call then A and B. No. For some longstanding traditional reason he calls them Alice and Bob.

Now there are hundreds of papers written about Alice and Bob. Over the years Alice and Bob have tried to defraud insurance companies, they’ve played poker for high stakes by mail, and they’ve exchanged secret messages over tapped telephones.

If we put together all the little details from here and there, snippets from lots of papers, we get a fascinating picture of their lives. This may be the first time a definitive biography of Alice and Bob has been give

In papers written by American authors Bob is frequently selling stock to speculators. From the number of stock market deals Bob is involved in we infer that he is probably a stockbroker. However from his concern about eavesdropping he is probably active in some subversive enterprise as well. And from the number of times Alice tries to buy stock from him we infer she is probably a speculator. Alice is also concerned that her financial dealings with Bob are not brought to the attention of her husband. So Bob is a subversive stockbroker and Alice is a two-timing speculator.

But Alice has a number of serious problems. She and Bob only get to talk by telephone or by electronic mail. In the country where they live the telephone service is very expensive. And Alice and Bob are cheapskates. So the first thing Alice must do is MINIMIZE THE COST OF THE PHONE CALL.

{ John Gordon, The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech, 1984 | Continue reading }

acrylic, fluorescent acrylic, and roll-a-tex on canvas { Peter Halley, Laws of Rock, 2008 }

Long-term relationships and especially marriage have long got a bad rap in terms of the erotic. The German poet Gottfried Benn, for example, stated: “Marriage is an institution for the paralysis of the sexual instinct” Even women like the American author Erica Jong join in the lament. “Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger.” That such remarks are not far-fetched, psychologist Kirsten von Sydow from the University of Hamburg has verified with a comprehensive literature review. […]

This loss of libido in marriage is also called the “Coolidge effect”. Among cattle breeders, it is known as the bull’s reluctance to mount the same cow repeatedly, with the libido returning after the encounter with a new cow. The name Coolidge refers to the 30 U.S. President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933). According to a famous anecdote, Mr. Coolidge once visited a farm with his wife where Mrs. Coolidge became aware of a cock who just mounted a hen. When they told her that the cock accomplished this feat up to twelve times a day, she replied: “Tell that to my husband!” When the president learned of the miracles, he asked: “Always with the same hen?” When he was assured that it was another one every time, he replied: “Tell that to my wife!” […]

The Coolidge effect can be expressed in numerical values, says von Sydow. “In the first year of living together, the weekly coital activity of three times drops to just under twice, then it further diminishes over two to three years.” […] For gay and lesbian couples, the decline in coital frequency is at least as strong. And this is not a question of age, because after a divorce and with a new partner, the sex drive is easily rekindled. […]

“Men love the idea of getting between the blankets with a woman just for fun, including with a woman with whom they do not want to have a long-term relationship,” Baumeister points out. “From the standpoint of these men, sex affords pleasure, and sex with new partners affords a particularly great pleasure. Why shouldn’t they have it off other with those women without tying up? Unfortunately for these men, most women do not share that view. ”

{ Rolf Degen | Continue reading }

Austrian nobles Princess Pauline von Metternich and Countess Anastasia Kielmansegg agreed to a topless duel in the summer of 1892.

The duel went down in history as the first ‘emancipated duel’ because it involved female participants, female seconds’ and a female medic.

Baroness Lubinska from Warsaw, who had a medical degree, oversaw the duel and advised the women to sword fight topless to avoid infection.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

Princess Pauline was involved in many charitable organizations. It was in her capacity as Honorary President of the Vienna Musical and Theatrical Exhibition that she quarreled with the Countess Kilmannsegg, wife of the Statthalter of Lower Austria and President of the Ladies Committee of the Vienna Musical and Theatrical Exhibition, apparently over the flower arrangements for the exhibition.

Whatever was said about those flowers could not be unsaid, and the Princess, then 56 years old, challenged the Countess to settle their dispute by blood.

The two adversaries and their seconds, Princess Schwarzenberg and Countess Kinsky, traveled to Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, and took to the field of honor. Presiding over the encounter was Baroness Lubinska who, unusually for women of the time, was a medical doctor. Her modern understanding of infection proved pivotal. Having seen many superficial battle wounds turn septic and fatal because fragments of dirty clothes were driven into them, the Baroness insisted both parties remove all clothing above the waist.

So the Princess Metternich and Countess Kilmannsegg, both topless, took up their swords to fight until first blood.

After a few exchanges, the Princess received a small cut to the nose and the Countess was cut on the arm practically at the same time. The seconds called the duel and Princess Metternich was declared the winner.

{ Mental Floss | Continue reading }

A French waiter is suing for the right to be rude at work

The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers

How do blind people represent rainbows?

What Happens When a Blind Person Takes LSD?

Retaliation on a voodoo doll symbolizing an abusive supervisor restores justice

A new device, created by mad scientists at MIT, can accept commands that you say only in your own head. It works by analyzing “subvocalization,” or silent speech.

DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one

It took about 50 hours of interaction to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to move from casual friend to friend, and more than 200 hours to qualify as a best friend. A new study shows how long—in hours—friendships take to develop.

Sleeping without smartphones improves sleep, relationships, focus and wellbeing, although impacts is relatively small

Mark Bittman and doctor David L. Katz patiently answer pretty much every question we could think of about healthy food

76% of sports sponsorships tied to junk food, study says

Last year, some social media genius discovered that single-paragraph updates did inordinately well on LinkedIn. Thus, through the opportunistic gaming of oblique algorithms, a new literary genre was born. [Thanks Tim]

By creating free wifi on the London Underground, Transport for London is harvesting data. Uber harvests data well beyond car journeys (the app continues to collect data on passenger behaviour after a ride has finished, although users can now opt out of this). New digital advertising billboards at Piccadilly Circus are harvesting data (they contain cameras to analyse the facial expressions of people in the crowds passing by).

Next month, the US government is expected to green-light a number of agreements between private drone operators and states and local entities that want to test drone services involving “beyond-line-of-sight operations”

Unicorns Take Different Paths to Being Public

Sex Workers Making Underground Porn on Snapchat

Self-storage: How warehouses for personal junk became a $38 billion industry

Scientists have spent 60 years agonizing over how our knuckles crack [study]

Why it’s Impossible to Accurately Measure a Coastline

Maine Restaurant Announces It Will Only Accept Reservations Via Snail-Mail

A brief history of audio recording and playback, from the 1850s onward [The Museum of Obsolete Media]

Metropolitan Police Coat Hook

Amalia Ulman’s Instagram art hoax

Japanese Are Polishing Foil Balls To Perfection

A distant galaxy that appears completely devoid of dark matter has baffled astronomers and deepened the mystery of the universe’s most elusive substance.

The absence of dark matter from a small patch of sky might appear to be a non-problem, given that astronomers have never directly observed dark matter anywhere. However, most current theories of the universe suggest that everywhere that ordinary matter is found, dark matter ought to be lurking too, making the newly observed galaxy an odd exception. […]

Paradoxically, the authors said the discovery of a galaxy without dark matter counts as evidence that it probably does exist.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Luc Kordas }

‘Time-traveller’ brings food item from 2200 that has ‘ended world hunger’

An Oklahoma mother married her daughter after the pair “hit it off.” Investigators later discovered she had previously wed her son.

How optimistic are you about the future?

Frustrated husband creates spreadsheet of wife’s excuses for not having sex with him

One study found that 81% of women orgasm during oral sex, which is about three times more often than during intercourse. But in a survey Cristol conducted, she discovered that 80% of women turn down oral sex when they wanted to say yes.

Stability of Genetic and Environmental Influences on Female Sexual Functioning

We report the first case in literature of a work nail gun injury to male external genitalia.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms

Envy is harmful to psychological health and wellbeing [PDF]

New evidence suggests that by age five, children begin to understand the broad importance of reputation and to engage in surprisingly sophisticated impression management.

MDMA appears to have a stronger effect on emotional memories than non-emotional memories, according to new research. The finding may explain why the drug has beneficial effects for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and similar psychiatric conditions.

Using sleep deprivation to lift people out of severe depression may seem counterintuitive, but for some people, it’s the only thing that works

Acoustical Analysis of Shouting Into the Wind

Overtrafficked and underserviced, aircraft lavatories are swarming with E. coli. “Your typical flight will have one for every 50 people.” More: Behaviors, movements, and transmission of droplet-mediated respiratory diseases during transcontinental airline flights

“Salami slicing” refers to the practice of breaking scientific studies down into small chunks and publishing each part as a seperate paper.

We are experiencing a fundamental paradigm shift in our relationship to knowledge. From the ‘information age’, we are moving towards the ‘reputation age’, in which information will have value only if it is already filtered, evaluated and commented upon by others.

The history of the ‘ideal’ woman

A staggering number of golf balls wind up in the ocean. What happens to them?

René Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, once called the best in the world, reopens

Henderson Island is isolated and uninhabited—but its beaches are still covered in garbage.  

Murders in Brazil

No one, presently, sees the Moon rotate like this

A phone line that puts callers on hold for seven years

VR

{ Border wall prototypes in San Diego | Richard Serra’s ‘East-West/West-East’ in Qatar }

A group of scientists who study Artificial Intelligence (AI) say they’ve come up with a process that can not only measure biological age, but tell you whether you will live longer or die younger than other people your age, and how to increase your odds that you will do the former.

They’ve called it the Aging Clock—an aging clock that is embedded in our body’s blood chemistry that forecasts when our cells and bodies are most likely to die and whether we’re getting old too quickly compared with other people our age.

It’s the result of a big-data, AI-driven analysis of blood tests from 130,000 people from South Korean, Canadian and Eastern European patient populations. The results netted a computer algorithm scientists at Insilico Medicine describe as the most precise measure of a person’s biological age. They say the algorithm and corresponding website, young.ai, can provide visitors real time information about their potential life span and hopefully help them lengthen it. […]

“Our biological age measures how quickly the cells in our body will deteriorate compared with the general population,” he said. “Depending on the genetics we inherit and the lifestyle choices we make regarding diet, exercise, weight, stress and habits like smoking or drinking, our biological age can vary as much as 30 years compared with our chronological age.”

{ Forbes | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Amy Sherald, A clear, unspoken, granted magic, 2017 }

2017 was a big year for Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, already the largest in the world. After surpassing $1 trillion in assets, the fund announced today that it made an annual return of 1,028 billion kroner ($131 billion), the largest amount in the fund’s 20-year history. […]

how many stocks this fund already owns: 1.4% of all listed stocks in the world […] its biggest boost last year came from Apple. It has a 0.9% stake in the US tech company […]

The fund has now made more money in investment returns than was put into it […] since inception in 1997

{ Quartz | Continue reading }

art { Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434 }

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. […]

In this paper, […] we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

In a study published in Nature Neuroscience on Jan. 21, neuroscientists and systems biologists from Harvard Medical School reveal just how inexorably interwoven nature and nurture are.

Using novel technologies developed at HMS, the team looked at how a single sensory experience affects gene expression in the brain by analyzing more than 114,000 individual cells in the mouse visual cortex before and after exposure to light.

Their findings revealed a dramatic and diverse landscape of gene expression changes across all cell types, involving 611 different genes, many linked to neural connectivity and the brain’s ability to rewire itself to learn and adapt.

The results offer insights into how bursts of neuronal activity that last only milliseconds trigger lasting changes in the brain, and open new fields of exploration for efforts to understand how the brain works.

{ Harvard Medical School | Continue reading }

art { Josef Albers, Hotel Staircase, Geneva, 1929/1932 }

‘Banana’ is the most common safe word used by kinky couples indulging in S&M sex [thanks GG]

China cracks down on funeral strippers hired to entertain mourners, attract larger crowds

DNA of women who have had children are as short as if they were childless and 11 years older

Girls now reaching puberty before 10 – a year sooner than 20 years ago. Scientists have yet to discover the reason behind the phenomenon but believe it could be linked to unhealthy lifestyles or exposure to chemicals in food.

Adolescent behaviour goes beyond impetuous rebellion or uncontrollable hormones. In some situations, teenagers can be more risk-averse than their older peers.

Students who show interest in school report greater income 50 years later, regardless of IQ, parental income, study says

Social media use during an experience impairs memory for that experience

We looked at 168 cultures and found couples kissing in only 46 percent of them.

Our results show that monkeys form preferences for brand logos repeatedly paired with images of macaque genitals and high status monkeys

When listening to rain sounds boosts arithmetic ability

When faced with an explicit choice, participants were more likely to choose an advisor who provided uncertain advice over an advisor who provided certain advice

Are We Running Out of Trademarks? An Empirical Study of Trademark Depletion and Congestion

Exaggerated or simplistic news is often blamed for adversely influencing public health. However, recent findings suggested many exaggerations were already present in university press releases, which scientists approve.

Researchers in the US have used a new scanning technique to discover a painting underneath one of Pablo Picasso’s great works of art

52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.”

Self-driving cars aren’t good at detecting cyclists. The latest proposed fix is a cop-out.

The Death of a NYC Skyscraper

For many New Yorkers, 33 Thomas Street has been a source of mystery for years. It has been labeled one of the city’s weirdest and most iconic skyscrapers, but little information has ever been published about its purpose. It appears to be one of the most important NSA surveillance sites on U.S. soil

A new generation of skyscrapers is pushing manufacturers to update a 2,000-year-old Roman technology

Mr Chow: How a Chinese restaurant became an art world mecca

Mat Hofma explains starting Mini Materials, a company that sells miniature construction supplies, and how he has grown it to $17k/mo.

Our collection of independently patented drink-through plastic cup lids is the largest in the United States.

The Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to ahoymitpe@mit.edu with name and MIT ID number

Skier lost in New York doesn’t know how he got to California

Severe pizza stalker has sent over 100 pizzas to a lawyer

Stormy Daniels kept a dress from alleged hotel tryst with Trump, she claims – and plans to test it for DNA

Across three studies, totaling over 600 participants, we found no support for the claim that red products enhance sexual attractiveness

criminal psychopaths’ brains show atypical structural asymmetries, with reduced right hemisphere grey and white matter volumes, and abnormal interhemispheric connectivity

The study is the first to connect humans’ ability to detect rhythms to the posterior parietal cortex, a brain region associated with planning body movements as well as higher-level functions such as paying attention and perceiving three dimensions.

Many companies let workers monitor and manage machines—and sometimes entire industrial processes—via mobile apps. The apps promise efficiency gains, but they also create targets for cyberattacks. At worst, hackers could exploit the flaws to destroy machines—and potentially entire factories.

Facebook disappointed after conviction by Brussels court for violation of privacy

Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked

Rage room