300-year-old note found inside butt of Jesus statue

If you want a baroque and high-tech method of bitcoin storage here is ConnectX, ”a private network of small satellites that stores digital currency wallets and performs financial transactions ‘off-planet’ eliminating the use of the Internet.”

Unpopular Ideas about Blockchains

We rely on economic theory to discuss how blockchain technology will shape the rate and direction of innovation

Rodents have joined mosquitoes in the cross-hairs of scientists working on a next-generation genetic technology known as “gene drive” to control pests.

The Hidden Signals in Corporate Ribbon-Cutting Ceremonies

Work gets done at 11AM on a Monday in October. At all other times of day, we’re basically slacking from our most productive

Probabilistic genotyping uses complex mathematical formulas to examine the statistical likelihood that a certain genotype comes from one individual over another. The Impenetrable Program Transforming How Courts Treat DNA Evidence

“People who serve on juries don’t have more sympathy or give a lighter sentence based on claims of bad genetics. And sometimes, introducing genetic evidence can even make things worse for a defendant.”

How criminal courts are putting brains — not people — on trial

When Ex-convicts Become Criminologists

The production effect is the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently

When your attention shifts from one place to another, your brain blinks. The blinks are momentary unconscious gaps in visual perception and came as a surprise to the team of Vanderbilt psychologists who discovered the phenomenon while studying the benefits of attention.

Neuroscientists have identified how exactly a deep breath changes your mind

Elevation of the eye-balls on winking

Drug-Associated Spontaneous Orgasm (Spontaneous orgasm is characterized by a spontaneous onset of orgasm without any preceding sexual or nonsexual trigger)

Coffee consumption and health: umbrella review of meta-analyses of multiple health outcomes (three to four cups a day provide largest risk reduction for various health outcomes)

At McKinley Climate Lab, researchers create fearsome weather to test cars and planes

How Independent Bookstores Have Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com

52 things I learned in 2017

How many colors were there in a medieval rainbow?

Graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff passes away at 85. His firm Chermayeff & Geismar designed logos for Pan Am, Mobile Oil, Chase Bank, Xerox, NBC, Showtime, The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic…

When Rome conquered Greece, they replaced their own dull pantheon with renamed versions of Zeus, Athena, and the others. But not all Roman gods were Greek copies — here are a few of the more important ones.

In the winter of 1961, Claes Oldenburg opened a store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (107E. 2nd St) selling his work, circumventing the usual practice of selling art  through a gallery.

Starbucks is opening its biggest and most interactive location to date, in Shanghai, with help from Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group [Thanks Tim]

CryptoKitties: Collect and breed digital cats.

{ The American Museum of Natural History window and New York Philharmonic window at Bergdorf Goodman | More: 2017 Bergdorf Goodman holiday windows }

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first digital pill for the US which tracks if patients have taken their medication. The pill called Abilify MyCite, is fitted with a tiny ingestible sensor that communicates with a patch worn by the patient — the patch then transmits medication data to a smartphone app which the patient can voluntarily upload to a database for their doctor and other authorized persons to see. Abilify is a drug that treats schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and is an add-on treatment for depression.

{ The Verge | Continue reading }

photo { Bruce Davidson, Subway platform in Brooklyn, 1980 }

I know of an art historian who was asked to authenticate a work by Leonardo, and he was going to, you know, charge the normal kind of fee charged for doing this kind of thing — a low six figures. And the owner said, “No, no, no. We want to pay you a percentage of what it sells for.” Now, what is the chance that any art historian given that particular contract is gonna say, “Oh no, it’s not by a famous artist. It’s by Joe Blow and it will sell for a thousand bucks”?

{ Blake Gopnik | Continue reading | more }

Detroit police officers fight each other in undercover op gone wrong

The newest museum in Washington, D.C., is a $500 million institution dedicated to a single book.

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met (A man who years ago donated sperm to a couple, secretly, so they could have a child—only to have Facebook recommend the child as a person he should know.)

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google

That program is called Amazon Flex, and it accomplishes Amazon’s “last-mile” deliveries

This 28-year-old’s company makes millions buying from Walmart and selling on Amazon

Researchers proved that it’s mathematically impossible to halt aging in multicellular organisms like humans [study]

Physicists find we’re not living in a computer simulation

Dark-matter hunt fails to find the elusive particles. Physicists begin to embrace alternative explanations for the missing material.

Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA

The neural underpinnings of the decoy effect — a marketing strategy in which one of three presented options is unlikely to be chosen but may influence how an individual decides between the other two options

Algorithm Predicts If Twitter Users Are Becoming Mentally Ill

Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women

Over almost 30 years of consulting, I’ve encountered countless examples of manipulation, bullying, and inappropriate use of power. Three kinds of responses have proven to be consistently effective for confronting most garden-variety manipulators.

New Zealand’s War on Rats Could Change the World The nation wants to eradicate all invasive mammal predators by 2050. Gene-editing technology could help—or it could trigger an ecological disaster of global proportions.

The Stephen Shore retrospective opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art could not have come at a better time.

Photographer Spends 9 Years on One Street Corner Capturing Same Commuters Every Day

{ continue reading | more reviews | Thanks Tim }

ML is short for machine learning, referring to computer algorithms that can learn to perform particular tasks on their own by analyzing data. AutoML, in turn, is a machine-learning algorithm that learns to build other machine-learning algorithms.

With it, Google may soon find a way to create A.I. technology that can partly take the humans out of building the A.I. systems that many believe are the future of the technology industry. […]

The tech industry is promising everything from smartphone apps that can recognize faces to cars that can drive on their own. But by some estimates, only 10,000 people worldwide have the education, experience and talent needed to build the complex and sometimes mysterious mathematical algorithms that will drive this new breed of artificial intelligence.

The world’s largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn’t going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work. […]

Eventually, the Google project will help companies build systems with artificial intelligence even if they don’t have extensive expertise.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

art { Ellsworth Kelly, Concorde I (state), 1981-82 }

Chinese restaurant offers discounts to women depending on their bra size

Scientists have called for Kyrgyzstan’s only mummy to be immediately dug back up after the 1,500-year-old relic was taken from a museum and hastily reburied on the eve of a presidential election in a decision celebrated by self-professed psychics.

NYC chess hustler makes $400 a day

Earlier this fall, Amazon announced it would build a second headquarters (known as HQ2) and asked cities to submit requests for proposal. It had received 238 proposals. Massachusetts offered a $500 million package that included 100 percent property tax exemptions for the headquarters’ employees. Philadelphia’s price tag was $2 billion. Newark, New Jersey upped the ante to $7 billion in tax benefits…

Virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities

The scientist who traveled the world in a shipping container to study cold storage

How quantum physics is bending the rules

Medical uses for paperclips

Males were perceived as being more likely to be creepy than females. Only four occupations were judged to be significantly higher than the neutral value of “3” on the creepiness rating scale: Clowns, Taxidermists, Sex Shop Owners, and Funeral Directors. [On the nature of creepiness | PDF]

Higher quality sleep patterns are associated with reduced activity in brain regions involved in fear learning

Participants rated women in less revealing and less tight clothing more positively.

A certain number of single-vehicle crashes into stationary roadside objects such as trees are thought to be occult suicides. More: Complex suicide is usually defined as the application of more than one killing mechanism to ensure a fatal outcome.

Why millennials are ditching religion for witchcraft and astrology

In memory of the Girl in Blue / Killed by Train / December 24, 1933 / Unknown but not forgotten

How to Spend $1,900 on Gene Tests Without Learning a Thing

The human genome was never completely sequenced. Some scientists say it should be.

Anyone can track you with $1,000 of online ads

Wireless charging will make drones always ready to fly

Company Rents Out Grounded Jets So Instagrammers Can Fool Followers About Their Luxurious Lifestyle [Thanks Tim]

White House Lobby during renovation, 1949

Scientists say 43 kilos of gold is flushed through Swiss sewers each year

New bill will make it legal for Californians to liquefy their corpses after death

Mobile phone companies appear to be providing your number and location to anyone who pays

The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.

Nearly every country on earth is named after one of four things

Domestication has not made dogs cooperate more with each other compared to wolves

Participants who had been breastfed scored lower in neuroticism, anxiety, and hostility and higher in openness and optimism than those not breastfed. Neuroticism was lowest for those breastfed for 9-12 months and highest for those either breastfed for >24 months or exclusively bottle-fed.

Wise and her colleagues recruited 10 heterosexual women to lay in a fMRI scanner and stimulate themselves to orgasm. They then repeated the experiment but had their partners stimulate them.

Wanting to know more about threesomes, he decided to conduct research on the subject himself. This led to a PhD about threesomes among two men and one woman (MMF).

“Forecasting agencies determine the trends to come and fashion companies are reluctant to take risks and to deviate from the path that forecasters have set them as their main aim is to make profit.”

Recognizing the popularity of John Waters films and the absence of merchandise for them, Curator Tyson Tabbert assembled a crew of designers to produce limited editions of such virtual merchandise.

Da Vinci is probably the only artist in history ever to dissect with his own hands the face of a human and that of a horse to see whether the muscles that move the lips are the same ones that can raise the nostrils of the horse’s nose More: Mona Lisa (Prado’s version), possibly painted simultaneously by a student of da Vinci in the same studio where he painted his own Mona Lisa

Has Duchamp’s Final Work Harbored a Secret for Five Decades?

“This page has intentionally been left blank.” Intentionally blank pages have been around, in abundance, since at least the 18th century

Three Chinese women stuck at South Korea airport unable to confirm identities after plastic surgery

The common assumption that population sleep duration has declined in the past few decades has not been supported by recent reviews, which have been limited to self-reported data. The aim of this review was to assess whether there has been a reduction in objectively recorded sleep duration over the last 50+ years. […]

The results indicate relative stability of objectively-recorded sleep durations in healthy sleepers assessed over the last half-century. Similar results were found across all age groups, in both men and women. […] These data are consistent with recent comprehensive reviews that found no consistent or compelling evidence of significant decrements in self-reported sleep duration and/or prevalence of short sleep over a similar range of years. Together, these data cast doubt on the notion of a modern epidemic of insufficient sleep. […]

The cliche of an ever-expanding 24/7 society is not well-supported by empirical evidence, at least not over the past 50 y. For example, evidence suggests that the prevalence of shift-work has remained stable at about 15-20% over this interval of years. Such data might seem counterintuitive in light of the increased number of 24-h services and businesses. However, while many of these businesses (e.g., restaurants and convenience stores) can operate all-night with just a few employees, over the past half-century there has been a dramatic shutdown of factories which once employed thousands of shift-workers. Moreover, over the past 10-20 y, protective regulations and practices which limit shift-work and sleep deprivation and/or better accommodate individual’s preferences (e.g., flex time and telecommuting), have been implemented for various occupations, including medical residents, truck drivers, and transportation workers.

It is a widely repeated hyperbole that never before in human history have we faced such challenges to our sleep. It has been hypothesized that industrialization, urbanization, and technological advances have caused us to ignore or override our natural tendency to sleep more, and we do so at great costs to our health and quality of life. […] The light bulb has been blamed for sleep loss. However, recent anthropologic studies of people in societies with little or no electricity have failed to indicate that these people sleep more than people in industrialized societies. […]

The notion of a recent epidemic of insufficient sleep, and speculation that this is a primary contributor to modern epidemics of obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, etc., rests largely on the question of whether sleep duration has declined in the last few decades. Consistent with recent reviews of subjective data, this review does not support this notion, at least not in healthy sleepers. […]

Reasons for persistent assumptions about a temporal decline in societal sleep duration could include a larger number of people assessed and diagnosed with sleep disorders with the emergence of sleep medicine; greater knowledge about sleep and the risks of inadequate sleep; increased prevalence of depression; misperceptions about population norms; and persistent claims in the popular and scientific literature regarding a so-called modern epidemic of insufficient sleep.


{ Sleep Medicine Reviews | PDF }

photo { Aug. 5, 1962. Police officer points to an assortment of prescription bottles on the bedside table in Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom in Los Angeles, where she was found dead }

Strange-face illusions are produced when two individuals gaze at each other in the eyes in low illumination for more than a few minutes.

Usually, the members of the dyad perceive numinous apparitions, like the other’s face deformations and perception of a stranger or a monster in place of the other, and feel a short lasting dissociation. […]

Strange-face illusions can be considered as ‘projections’ of the subject’s unconscious into the other’s face. In conclusion, intersubjective gazing at low illumination can be a tool for conscious integration of unconscious ’shadows of the Self’ in order to reach completeness of the Self.

{ Explore | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

Multiple arrested after fight inside Berkeley’s ‘empathy tent’

Eminem music shares to hit the stock exchange

“Digital self-harm” is the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself. The current study examined the extent of digital self-harm among adolescents.

Parents of teenage daughters are more likely to divorce

Tattooed people, especially women, were rated as stronger and more independent, but more negatively in other ways

The visibility of social class from facial cues

3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image (via, Thanks Mark!)

When making trust decisions in economic games, people have some accuracy in detecting trustworthiness from the facial features of unknown partners. […] We observed that trustworthiness detection remained better than chance for exposure times as short as 100 ms, although it disappeared with an exposure time of 33 ms.

{ Experimental Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Miles Alridge }

Senate map gerrymandered for senator’s house

Entrepreneurs are finding profits turning human waste into fertiliser, fuel and even food. The new economy of excrement

Chinese sex doll rental service suspended amid controversy

Tourists at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Coowonga, Queensland, Australia, were randomly assigned to play a laptop-simulated Electronic Gaming Machine

Sleep deprivation rapidly reduces depression symptoms in nearly half of depressed patients

Is Shame Hallucinogenic?

Voynich manuscript: the solution More: Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved? Experts say no.

Two mathematicians have proved that two different infinities are equal in size, settling a long-standing question

Quasi-steady state aerodynamics of the cheetah tail

Two British science museums held a majestic, two-day fight on Twitter

Never pay a penny of a debt which isn’t yours. Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You

Your future sex robot could be hacked and programmed to murder you

This elevator has a call button 30 feet away so that the elevator is there when you arrive

Using a cheap robot, a team of hackers has cracked open a leading-brand combination safe, live on stage in Las Vegas

A major asthma drugmaker has been quietly investing in coal on the side [Thanks Tim]

The Null Relation between Father Absence and Earlier Menarche

When researchers tried to recruit 30 people for an experiment where all phone notifications (including text and email) would be disabled for a week, they simply couldn’t find the participants.

The key to understanding this is to think about what advertisers want: they don’t want to appear next to pictures of breasts because it might damage their brands, but they don’t mind appearing alongside lies because the lies might be helping them find the consumers they’re trying to target. Facebook has two priorities: growth and monetisation.

Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.

The real victor was Microsoft, which built an empire on the back of a shadily acquired MS-DOS

16 Ways QR Codes are Being Used in China

George Peter Metesky, better known as the Mad Bomber, terrorized New York City for 16 years in the 1940s and 1950s with explosives that he planted in theaters, terminals, libraries, and offices. [Wikipedia]

Ten minutes difference, and Earth would still be Planet of the Dinosaurs

The Economic Value of Birds

Trees with “Crown Shyness” Mysteriously Avoid Touching Each Other [Thanks Tim]

Cover image orientation in celebrity cookbooks, study

Japan Is Selling Ice Cream That Doesn’t Melt

How Did Pop Music Get So Slow?

The Books We Don’t Understand

Pollution is turning dogs blue in Mumbai [Thanks Brad]

Flying the Birdly Virtual Reality Simulator [Thanks Tim]

In what appears to be the first successful hack of a software program using DNA, researchers say malware they incorporated into a genetic molecule allowed them to take control of a computer used to analyze it. […]

To carry out the hack, researchers encoded malicious software in a short stretch of DNA they purchased online. They then used it to gain “full control” over a computer that tried to process the genetic data after it was read by a DNA sequencing machine.  

The researchers warn that hackers could one day use faked blood or spit samples to gain access to university computers, steal information from police forensics labs, or infect genome files shared by scientists.  

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

The cost of building the world’s skinniest skyscraper has ballooned so enormously that the 111 W. 57th St. project is facing imminent foreclosure while it’s less than one-quarter complete.

The 82-story skyscraper has risen fewer than 20 stories and is $50 million over budget.

[…]

“Apparently they omitted some very significant items in their budget including cranes, which are very expensive in New York and can run into the millions of dollars”

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

Biologists Use Gene Editing to Store Movies in DNA

Scientists build DNA from scratch to alter life’s blueprint

Millennials only have a 5-second attention span for ads

Fish can’t recognise faces if they’re upside down – just like us

The $100 billion per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax

Do Men Overestimate or Women Underreport Their Sexual Intentions?

Pornography trains us to redirect sexual desire as mimetic desire. That is, the sociological theory — and the marketers’ dream — that humans learn to want what they see.

Living near noisy roads could make it harder to get pregnant

Those who used maladaptive strategies like suppressing, avoiding, or denying their feelings, had higher levels of problems associated with stress.

Brain Training Has No Effect on Decision-making or Cognitive Function, Penn Researchers Report

To the French, she explains, conversations are for exchanging points of view, not finding things in common, the goal of conversation for North Americans.

War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies [PDF]

The Not-so-secret ingredients of military coups

In the US, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. how our lives will change dramatically in 20 years

Like ancient warlords, China’s three biggest airlines have dominated their regional cities: Air China Ltd. controlling Beijing, China Eastern Airlines Corp. holding sway in the financial center of Shanghai, and China Southern Airlines Co. ruling the roost down in export gateway Guangzhou. Until now. Beijing’s New Mega Airport Will Challenge Air China’s Dominance

Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World’s Richest Person

How long would it take for vampires to annihilate humanity

In this paper, we focus on the difference in the way of pulling a toilet paper roll and propose a system that identifies individuals based on features of rotation of a toilet paper roll with a gyroscope.

Can’t Find a Public Bathroom in NYC? Hail This Toilet Van

“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. An example of a tale of suspense and horror, it is also, to a certain degree, a hoax, as it was published without claiming to be fictional, and many at the time of publication (1845) took it to be a factual account.

Richard D. James [Aphex Twin] interviews ex. Korg engineer about their collaboration on the monologue, microtuning, geometry and dreams.

McMansion Hell: The Devil is in the Details [Thanks Tim] + How the McMansion Hell blogger fended off a lawsuit threat from real estate site Zillow

Eye movements of 105 heterosexual undergraduate students (36 males) were monitored while viewing photographs of men and women identified as a potential mate or a potential friend. Results showed that people looked at the head and chest more when assessing potential mates and looked at the legs and feet more when assessing potential friends.

{ Archives of Sexual Behavior | Continue reading }

photo { Michelle Pfeiffer photographed by Jim Britt, 1979 }