20,000 bees chase car for TWO DAYS after queen bee gets trapped in trunk

Children with no shoes on ‘do better in classroom’, major study finds

The more inept you are, the smarter you think you are, study

When we act unethically, we’re more likely to remember these actions less clearly. Researchers coined the term “unethical amnesia” to describe this phenomenon.

How do trees go to sleep?

Why Your Laundry Stinks, and How to Stop It

Niobium — the commodity that no one knows about but everybody wants to buy

Characteristics of the built environment and the presence of the Norway rat in New York City: results from a neighborhood rat surveillance program, 2008-2010

Donald Duck used in odd sting operation

China bans ‘erotic’ banana-eating live streams [video]

Terence Koh, Self-Proclaimed ‘Naomi Campbell of the Art World,’ Un-Quits Art [map of his social relations | PDF]

{ This butterfly is a bilateral gynandromorph: literally half male, half female | A gynandromorph is an organism that contains both male and female characteristics. The term gynandromorph, from Greek “gyne” female and “andro” male, is mainly used in the field of entomology. | Thanks Cassandra }

Trump sued the woman for $250,000. She countersued for $20 million. […] Trump then quickly settled, paying the woman a half-million dollars.

{ Politico | Continue reading }

A disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism [the liking of things connected to the self], are now included in most modern social psychology textbooks and many university courses. […]

This paper re-evaluates evidence that seemed to show that implicit egotism can influence marriage, occupation, and moving decisions, finding that all existing evidence appears to be spurious.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

art { Lawren Harris, Mount Thule, Bylot Island, 1930 }

A 2013 study published in the journal Circulation found that men who skipped breakfast had a significantly higher risk of coronary heart disease than men who ate breakfast. But, like almost all studies of breakfast, this is an association, not causation. […]

In a paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013, researchers reviewed the literature on the effect of breakfast on obesity to look specifically at this issue. They first noted that nutrition researchers love to publish results showing a correlation between skipping breakfast and obesity. […] They also found major flaws in the reporting of findings. People were consistently biased in interpreting their results in favor of a relationship between skipping breakfast and obesity. […]

Further confusing the field is a 2014 study that found that getting breakfast skippers to eat breakfast, and getting breakfast eaters to skip breakfast, made no difference with respect to weight loss. […]

Many of the studies are funded by the food industry, which has a clear bias. Kellogg funded a highly cited article that found that cereal for breakfast is associated with being thinner. The Quaker Oats Center of Excellence (part of PepsiCo) financed a trial that showed that eating oatmeal or frosted cornflakes reduces weight and cholesterol.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Jeff Koons, Hair, 1999 }

related { Corn Flake Portraits of Pop Stars }

The researchers recruited 25 non-obese adult subjects. All had moderate sleep apnea, with somewhere between 15 and 30 episodes per hour at night. (All them also reported that they snored.)

Fourteen of these subjects were randomly assigned to learn the didgeridoo. […] They learned proper lip technique and circular breathing (inhaling through the nose while continuously blowing on the instrument). They also had to practice at home for at least 20 minutes a day, five days a week.

After four months […] people who’d been playing the didgeridoo had fewer sleep apnea events at night. And they reported feeling significantly less tired during the day.

{ Inkfish | Continue reading }

Breccia marble, copper, steel { Elena Damiani, Rude Rocks No. 3 and No. 2, 2015 }

Age and gender are two important factors that play crucial roles in the way organisms allocate their social effort. In this study, we analyse a large mobile phone dataset to explore the way life history influences human sociality and the way social networks are structured. Our results indicate that these aspects of human behaviour are strongly related to age and gender such that younger individuals have more contacts and, among them, males more than females. However, the rate of decrease in the number of contacts with age differs between males and females, such that there is a reversal in the number of contacts around the late 30s. […]

The maximum number of connections for both males and females occurs at the age of around 25. During this early phase, males appear to be more connected than females. After this, the number of alters decreases steadily for both genders, although the decrease is faster for males than for females. The different rates of decrease result in a crossover around the age of 39 such that after 39 females become more connected than males.

{ Royal Society Open Science | Continue reading }

Google patents adhesive coating that glues pedestrians to the hood in self-driving car accidents

Businessman raising £1m to recreate 9/11 to prove conspiracy theories true or false ‘once and for all’

The average age for the onset of depression has dropped from late forties or early fifties, where it was 30 years ago, to mid twenties, and it’s expected to drop further.

The most common types of coincidences

Computer scientists have created a way of letting law enforcement tap any camera that isn’t password protected so they can determine where to send help or how to respond to a crime

A group of ex-Google engineers have launched Otto, a self-driving truck startup

How fast is your Internet connection

So why do we use all caps instead of bold or italic or even highlighted? Because back when lawyers used typewriters, the only simple way to emphasize anything was to use ALL CAPS. But let’s look beyond all caps, to perhaps the most famous place where typeface choices might save lives: on the road.

One of the park’s main attractions is the “Flight of the Peacocks”, a seven-times-a-day show in which three hundred trained peacocks fly down from a small hill. Some just couldn’t figure out the flying thing. On the other hand, the park also had a restaurant.

Two Buildings on Canal Street Are Waging a Post-it War in Their Windows and Agency Post-it Wars Are Spreading

Service available to US phone numbers only

When you making a playdoh snake

To fall in love feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it is strange — and a bit insulting — to suggest that we’re only copying what the novels and the movies tell us to do. However, the differences in how people have loved throughout history suggest that our style of loving is to a significant extent determined by what the prevailing environment dictates. In certain eras, we’ll swoon at the sight of the beloved’s ankle; in others, we’ll coldly put romanticism aside for the sake of dynastic or practical concerns. We learn how to love by copying a range of more or less subtle cues emitted by our culture. Or, as that brilliant observer of human foibles, François de La Rochefoucauld, wickedly put it: “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.”

Crucially, over the centuries, the most important factor to have shaped how we love is art. It is through novels, poems, songs and, latterly, films that we have acquired our ideas about what aspects of our feelings we should value and where our emotional emphases should fall.

This is unfortunate. […]

We may break up with our partners or feel romantically cursed because we have been systematically exposed to the wrong sorts of love stories.

{ FT | Continue reading }

In two studies, the authors examined the projection of romantic and sexual desire in opposite-sex friendships. In both studies, perceivers who strongly desired their friends projected this desire onto their friends, believing that their desire was more reciprocated than was actually the case.

{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | Continue reading }

Although genius has been defined in the dictionary as requiring an IQ above 140, this definition depends on an arbitrary methodological decision made by Lewis Terman for his longitudinal study of more than 1500 intellectually gifted children, a study that occupies four of the five volumes of Genetic Studies of Genius. […]

[T]he actual relation between IQ and genius is small and heavily contingent on domain-specific assessment, the operation of traits like persistence and openness to experience, and the impact of diversifying experiences, including both developmental adversity and subclinical psychopathology. Hence, the dictionary definition of “genius” has minimal, if any, justification.

{ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences | Continue reading }

image { Details | PDF }

Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20 P.M. […]

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit-mould, rice, turnips, camphorated sausages, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). […]

My doctor has always told me to smoke.

{ Erik Satie | Continue reading }

art { Andy Warhol, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (detail), 1963 }

Polar Bears in Canada Are Pooping Glitter

Oxytocin is made by the hypothalamus and acts on the brain, playing a role in bonding, sex and pregnancy. But findings that a sniff of the hormone is enough to make people trust each other more are being called into question after a string of studies failed to replicate classic experiments.

A 10% relative drop in smoking in every state is predicted to be followed by an expected $63 billion reduction (in 2012 US dollars) in healthcare expenditure the next year.

The great strange fact of human history is how it came to be that a good chunk of our species, after more than 100,000 years of scraping by, suddenly got rather wildly rich

Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing. Hidden microphones that are part of a clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the Bay Area has been exposed.

Friday the 13th: The Empirics of Bad Luck [PDF]

Scientists made see-through wood that’s stronger than glass

Origami robot unfolds from ingestible capsule, removes button battery stuck to wall of simulated stomach

I made an app that orders delivery to a random location, and ubers you there…

{ Sandro Miller, Homage: Malkovich and the Masters }

We present a case with excessive Internet use, with a particular focus on phenomenology and psychiatric comorbidities. Fifteen-year-old girl with childhood onset attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, adolescent onset trichotillomania, and disturbed family environment presented with excessive Facebook use. Main online activity was creating profiles in names of mainstream fictional characters and assuming their identity (background, linguistic attributes, etc.).

{ Journal of Behavioral Addictions | Continue reading }

art { thedatadrive.com }

related { After learning to identify with someone else’s face, do people think their appearance has changed? }

unrelated { Punk Parents Blame Child’s Terrible Taste in Music on Vaccinations | Thanks GG }

Poultry Workers Forced to Wear Diapers to Increase Efficiency [Thanks GG]

NRA Convention sells “ex-girlfriend” target that bleeds when you shot at it

There is indeed evidence that all cities are starting to look the same. Boring architecture may take an emotional toll on the people forced to live in and around it.

Will destruction of any planet in the solar system have an impact on earth?

How women can go the full nine months without knowing they’re pregnant

Sextortion: Cybersecurity, teenagers, and remote sexual assault

Fred Trump could be seen during construction patrolling the work site, pouring water into paint buckets to save money

Moore’s Law Is Dead

Running app Runkeeper is secretly tracking you around the clock and sending your data to advertisers

New app makes your iPhone photos searchable

Sign language translation gloves

Sweaty Guy at Show Uses You as Personal Towel

Why is there something rather than nothing? […]

No experiment could support the hypothesis ‘There is nothing’ because any observation obviously implies the existence of an observer.

{ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }

art { Tom Wesselmann, Smoker #14, 1974 }

The mantra of Wall St hedge funds was once “only the strongest will survive.” It may now have to change to “the geeks will inherit the earth.”

Hedge fund “quants” who use computer systems to trade financial markets earned more money than some of the industry’s most famous stockpickers, who posted large losses in 2015.

The most prominent among the quants was string theory expert and former code breaker James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who earned $1.7bn, putting him in joint first place.

He was joined in the top 10 earners by former Columbia University computer science professor David Shaw of DE Shaw who made $750m and John Overdeck and David Siegel of Two Sigma who made $500m each.

Their success came in stark contrast to some of the biggest names on Wall Street who rely on human investment judgment rather than lines of computer code.

{ FT | Continue reading }

quote { Cabinet magazine | full story }

Most of us think that friendship is a two-way street — but that’s true only half the time, according to research from Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Their new joint study says only half of your friends would consider you their own friend. People have a very poor perception of friendship ties, and this limits their ability to influence their “friends,” according to the research, published in PLoS One on March 22, 2016.

If researchers can understand this limitation, companies and social groups that depend on social influence for collective action, information dissemination and product promotion could improve their strategies and interventions.

“It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are,” says Dr. Erez Shmueli, who conducted the study with Dr. Laura Radaelli, both of TAU’s Department of Industrial Engineering, in collaboration with Prof. Alex Pentland and Abdullah Almatouq of MIT. “And our difficulty determining the reciprocity of friendship significantly limits our ability to engage in cooperative arrangements.”

{ Tel Aviv University | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Kei Imazu, Berlin 1943-1945, 2014 }

A survey of 5000 sleepers from across the world has revealed that women get the most sleep, particularly those under the age of 25. […] As a whole, women appear to sleep on average for 30 minutes longer than men, thanks to going to bed slightly earlier and waking up slightly later.

For an individual, the time they woke up had the strongest link to how much sleep they got, suggesting that having a job that starts early every day can mean that you get less sleep than someone who starts work at a later hour. […]

People in Singapore sleep for an average of 7.5 hours a night, while Australians get 8.1 hours. Late bedtimes seem to be to blame – people in Singapore tended to stay up until after 11.45 pm each night, while people in Australia were likely to hit the hay closer to 10.45 pm.

The team found that, in general, national wake-up times were linked more to daylight hours than bedtimes. This could be because bedtimes are more affected by social factors.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

The spread of national averages of sleep duration ranged from a minimum of around 7 hours, 24 minutes of sleep for residents of Singapore and Japan to a maximum of 8 hours, 12 minutes for those in the Netherlands. That’s not a huge window, but the researchers say every half hour of sleep makes a big difference in terms of cognitive function and long-term health.

{ Eurekalert | Continue reading }

still { Jean Delannoy, L’éternel retour, 1943 }

Indian restaurant owner accused of killing customer with curry

KFC Is Making a Nail Polish That Tastes Like Chicken [thanks GG]

‘Second skin” could reduce appearance of wrinkles and be used to cover birthmarks or treat conditions such as eczema [study] [Thanks Tim]

First baby drop-off box for unwanted newborns installed in Indiana

Imposter becomes guest editor of scientific journal, using a fake email address

The art of skywriting

Where Does The U.S. Get Its Oil?

When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive.

Every top 5 song, from 1958 - 2016

A Canadian Ph.D. student has invented a topical cream that he says can cheaply and easily remove unwanted tattoos [Thanks Tim]

Erase™ and Replace™

meanwhile, in bushwick