Edible underwear was never meant to be eaten

Test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable — and after some participants were told that robot had broken down

Autistic ‘Prison Houdini’ who memorized guards’ keys and carved exact replicas for 13 escape attempts in 36 years is denied parole

On average, CEOs earn $176,840 annually. College presidents, $377,261.

Disney U.S. parks will charge visitors different prices based on anticipated demand, with weekdays during the school year much cheaper than holidays. Previously, the parks charged the same price for a one-day pass any time of year.

Hijab and “Hitchhiking”: A Field Study

“Social media is 95 percent of what happens in all relationships now”

New model explains how things go viral online

New research shows that you only need handful of influencers to give the impression that everyone is talking about your brand. [Thanks Tim]

Giraffe neck is longer than thought

Trouble with cats on your counters, table tops, furniture, curtains, floor areas – or maybe “hanging out at your entry door”? (new patent)

World’s first electronics transistor, assembled by hand, 1947 and and the suburb of agbogbloshie

Shazam for Plants and for birds

Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language

The Ross Sisters

Norman Reedus (Daryl) practicing his crossbow

Ass eating restaurant in Japan [Thanks GG]

Selling phone

When leaning forward to kiss to a romantic partner, individuals tend to direct their kiss to the right more often than the left. Studies have consistently demonstrated this kissing asymmetry, although other factors known to influence lateral biases, such as sex or situational context, had yet to be explored. The primary purpose of our study was to investigate if turning direction was consistent between a romantic (parent-parent) and parental (parent-child) kissing context, and secondly, to examine if sex differences influenced turning bias between parent-child kissing partners. […]

The results indicated that the direction of turning bias differed between kissing contexts. A right-turn bias was observed for romantic kissing; a left-turn bias was exhibited for parental kissing. There was no significant difference of turning bias between any parent-child kissing partners. Interpretations for the left-turn bias discuss parental kissing as a learned lateral behavior.

{ Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition | Continue reading }

publicity still { Joe Dallesandro and Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972) }

{ Leah Schrager }

There are 30 US $100 bills in circulation for every man, woman and child, and more than 300 billion euro in 500 euro notes. As Peter’s paper documents, the vast majority of this currency is involved with activity that is at a minimum problematic, and often criminal.

{ Larry Summers | Continue reading }

related { With fraud getting more expensive, startups are taking a new look at ways to shore up the security of ATM networks and other card transactions — cards are optional. | The Security Ledger }

related { China has become the billionaire capital of the world, with a total of 100 to the Big Apple’s 95. China’s growing clout in the rankings is even starker in the world of female “self-made” billionaires, according to Hurun, where the country dominates with 93 of the global total of 124. | Financial Times }

photo { Twiggy & Justin de Villeneuve }

Passion and sexual satisfaction typically diminish in longer-term relationships, but this decline is not inevitable. We identified the attitudes and behaviors that most strongly differentiated sexually satisfied from dissatisfied men and women who had been together for at least three years (N = 38,747). […]

The vast majority of these participants reported being satisfied with their sex lives during their first six months together (83% W; 83% M).

Satisfaction with their current sex lives was more variable, with approximately half of participants reporting overall satisfaction (55% W; 43% M) and the rest feeling neutral (18% W; 16% M) or dissatisfied (27% W; 41% M).

More than one in three respondents (38% W; 32% M) claimed their sex lives were as passionate now as in the beginning. Sexual satisfaction and maintenance of passion were higher among people who had sex most frequently, received more oral sex, had more consistent orgasms, and incorporated more variety of sexual acts, mood setting, and sexual communication.

{ Journal of Sex Research }

collage { Joseph Staples, At first you may only be able to progress this far, 2012 }

related { Those who sent romantic emails were more emotionally aroused and used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails }

A Canadian man who disappeared 30 years ago is set to be reunited with his family after remembering his identity

A woman in Brazil who had cosmetic surgery ended up with not only a flatter stomach and larger breasts, she also developed kleptomania for a few weeks, a new case report reveals.

Drinking more coffee may help prevent alcohol-related cirrhosis

A little-known effort to conduct biological warfare occurred during the 17th century

Why tipping is wrong

They found a 9% earnings premium for lesbians over heterosexual women, compared with a penalty of 11% for gay men relative to straight men. Lesbians receive no wage premium in the public sector.

Headphones that get you high on dopamine are tipped to go on sale next month

When is a Transport Map Too Complex for Your Brain?

How a dead millionaire convinced dozens of women to have as many babies as possible

Captured : People in prison drawing people who should be

A Naked Therapy session takes place via webcam

Smell Dating, the first mail odor dating service

It was an invitation-only party (crabs, cocktails and a D.J. on a moonlit dock) thrown by Jane Street, a secretive E.T.F. trading firm that, after years of minting money in the shadows of Wall Street, is now pitching itself to some of the largest institutional investors in the world.

And the message was clear: Jane Street, which barely existed 15 years ago and now trades more than $1 trillion a year, was ready to take on the big boys.

Much of what Jane Street, which occupies two floors of an office building at the southern tip of Manhattan, does is not known. That is by design, as the firm deploys specialized trading strategies to capture arbitrage profits by buying and selling (using its own capital) large amounts of E.T.F. shares.

It’s a risky business.

As the popularity of E.T.F.s has soared — exchange-traded funds now account for a third of all publicly traded equities — the spreads, or margins, have narrowed substantially, making it harder to profit from the difference.
And in many cases, some of the most popular E.T.F.s track hard-to-trade securities like junk bonds, emerging-market stocks and a variety of derivative products, adding an extra layer of risk. […]

While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls.

It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion.

And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital. […]

Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon).

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

oil on Masonite { Grant Wood, Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931 }

The war against cocaine rests on a simple idea: If you restrict its supply, you force up its price, and fewer people will buy it. Andean governments have thus deployed their armies to uproot the coca bushes that provide cocaine’s raw ingredient. Each year, they eradicate coca plants covering an area 14 times the size of Manhattan, depriving the cartels of about half their harvest. But despite the slashing and burning, the price of cocaine in the U.S. has hardly budged, bobbing between $150 and $200 per pure gram for most of the past 20 years. How have the cartels done it?

In part, with a tactic that resembles Wal-Mart’s. The world’s biggest retailer has sometimes seemed similarly immune to the laws of supply and demand, keeping prices low regardless of shortages and surpluses. Wal-Mart’s critics say that it can do this in some markets because its vast size makes it a “monopsony,” or a monopoly buyer. Just as a monopolist can dictate prices to its consumers, who have no one else to buy from, a monopsonist can dictate prices to its suppliers, who have no one else to sell to. If a harvest fails, the argument goes, the cost is borne by the farmers, not Wal-Mart or its customers. […]

The raw leaf needed to make one kilogram of cocaine powder costs about $400 in Colombia; in the U.S., that kilogram retails for around $150,000, once divided into one-gram portions. So even if governments doubled the price of coca leaf, from $400 to $800, cocaine’s retail price would at most rise from $150,000 to $150,400 per kilogram. The price of a $150 gram would go up by 40 cents—not much of a return on the billions invested in destroying crops. Consider trying to raise the price of art by driving up the cost of paint. […]

A dollar spent on drug education in U.S. schools cuts cocaine consumption by twice as much as spending that dollar on reducing supply in South America; spending it on treatment for addicts reduces it by 10 times as much.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank, Bar, New York City, 1955-56 }

Please notice how the Director of the NSA, unlike the vociferous FBI director, has been relatively silent. With a budget on the order of $10 billion at its disposal the NSA almost certainly has something equivalent to what the courts have asked Apple to create. The NSA probably doesn’t want to give its bypass tool to the FBI and blow its operational advantage.

{ Counterpunch | Continue reading }

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

{ Phys.org | Continue reading }

Organization members who engage in “moral objection” by taking a principled stand against ethically questionable activities help to prevent such activities from persisting. Unfortunately, research suggests that they also may be perceived as less warm (i.e., pleasant, nice) than members who comply with ethically questionable procedures.

{ Journal of Applied Psychology | Continue reading }

The benefits of mindfulness meditation, increasingly popular in recent years, are supposed to be many: reduced stress and risk for various diseases, improved well-being, a rewired brain. But the experimental bases to support these claims have been few. Supporters of the practice have relied on very small samples of unrepresentative subjects, like isolated Buddhist monks who spend hours meditating every day, or on studies that generally were not randomized and did not include placebo­control groups.

This month, however, a study published in Biological Psychiatry brings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health. […]

First they recruited 35 unemployed men and women who were seeking work and experiencing considerable stress. Blood was drawn and brain scans were given. Half the subjects were then taught formal mindfulness meditation at a residential retreat center; the rest completed a kind of sham mindfulness meditation that was focused on relaxation and distracting oneself from worries and stress. […]

At the end of three days, the participants all told the researchers that they felt refreshed and better able to withstand the stress of unemployment. Yet follow-up brain scans showed differences in only those who underwent mindfulness meditation. There was more activity, or communication, among the portions of their brains that process stress-related reactions and other areas related to focus and calm. Four months later, those who had practiced mindfulness showed much lower levels in their blood of a marker of unhealthy inflammation than the relaxation group, even though few were still meditating.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. […]

Findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance.

{ Human Nature | Continue reading }

Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

{ The Book of Life | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 }

related { Women Like Being Valued for Sex, as Long as it is by a Committed Partner }

Man kicked out of all-you-can-eat buffet after eating more than 50 lbs of food, sues for $2-million

The Parmesan cheese you sprinkle on your penne could be wood. Some brands promising 100 percent purity contained no Parmesan at all.

People took the fewest calories when presented with smaller versus regular-sized pizza slices placed on a larger table

False confessions are surprisingly easy to extract from people simply by keeping them awake, according to a new study

Procrastination as a Fast Life History Strategy

You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

Parkinson’s patients trained to respond to placebos

Half the world to be short-sighted by 2050

Period pain can be “as bad as a heart attack.” So why aren’t we researching how to treat it?

“Your first experience of something is going to be well remembered, more than later experiences”Why we never really get over that first love

A quarter of men over 85 had sex in the last year

Postmodernism’s Self-Nullifying Reading of Nietzsche

How Voltaire made a fortune rigging the lottery

Son of a carpenter, he claimed income of $100 million per year and assets of $1 billion, owned a palatial Tokyo home and retained a private chef who cooked him marinated monkey meat.

-0.5% Interest rate: Why people are paying to save. Negative interest rates, once a theoretical curiosity, are now the stated policy of some powerful central banks. [NY Times]

People typically overestimate how much others are prepared to pay for consumer goods and services. [PDF]

What if we could record and rewind our thoughts?

A cocktail party in a dish: How neurons filter the chatter

Samsung warns customers not to discuss personal information in front of smart TVs

Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices

A court of appeals in Paris has ruled against an appeal filed by Facebook, after a 2015 ruling regarding suspension of an account for posting Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World.

You Can Now Download and 3D Print Your Dream Closet

3D-printed ear, bone and muscle structures come to life after implantation in mice

Cotton candy machines may hold key for making artificial organs

Computer programs used by John Cage

Automated office chairs

Things researchers do with ping-pong balls

Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage

The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, when Goethe (1749–1832) was just twenty-five years old. A product of true literary genius, it not only represents one of the greatest works of literature ever written, but it also offers keenly intuitive insight into one of the most terrible and mystifying emotional disorders that plague humankind.

Well before Sigmund Freud, and most probably destined to become an important source of Freud’s understanding of melancholic depression, Goethe was able to peer into the soul of those afflicted with what is now termed Major Depressive Disorder (and some forms of Bipolar Disorder) and see what is taking place within those who are suffering from it. It is impressive how clearly Goethe grasped the twin roles played in mel-ancholia of narcissistic object choice and extreme ambivalence toward a love object.

{ The Psychoanalytic Quarterly | PDF }

The First Brain - The Brain Occupying the Space in the Skull
All of us are familiar with the general presence and functioning of this brain as a receiver of information which then gets processed.

The Second Brain - The brain in the gut
It has been proven that the very same cells and neural network that is present in the brain in the skull is present in the gut as well and releases the same neurotransmitters as the brain in the skull. Not just that, about 90 percent of the bers in the primary visceral nerve, the vagus, carry information from the gut to the brain and not the other way around.

The Third Brain - The Global Brain
This is connected to the neural network that extends from each being on this planet beyond the con nes of the skull and the anatomy of the gut. It is inter-dimensional in nature and contains all frequencies of energies (low and high) and their corresponding information.

[…]

Every human being is born with the three brains described above, but Autistic Beings are more connected and more in-tune with all three simultaneously. But make no mistake – most autistic beings are not necessarily aware of the existence or their connection to these three brains beyond their volitional control although they are accessing information from all three to varying degrees almost all the time.

One of the manifestations of being tuned-in to this third brain is Telepathy.

{ Journal of Neurology and Neurobiology | PDF }

photo { Video screen shows images of blue sky on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, January 23, 2013 }

Marijuana is one of the most commonly used drugs in the United States, and use during adolescence — when the brain is still developing — has been proposed as a cause of poorer neurocognitive outcome. Nonetheless, research on this topic is scarce and often shows conflicting results, with some studies showing detrimental effects of marijuana use on cognitive functioning and others showing no significant long-term effects.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the associations of marijuana use with changes in intellectual performance in two longitudinal studies of adolescent twins (n = 789 and n = 2,277). We used a quasiexperimental approach to adjust for participants’ family background characteristics and genetic propensities, helping us to assess the causal nature of any potential associations. Standardized measures of intelligence were administered at ages 9–12 y, before marijuana involvement, and again at ages 17–20 y. Marijuana use was self-reported at the time of each cognitive assessment as well as during the intervening period.

Marijuana users had lower test scores relative to nonusers and showed a significant decline in crystallized intelligence between preadolescence and late adolescence. However, there was no evidence of a dose–response relationship between frequency of use and intelligence quotient (IQ) change. Furthermore, marijuana-using twins failed to show significantly greater IQ decline relative to their abstinent siblings.

Evidence from these two samples suggests that observed declines in measured IQ may not be a direct result of marijuana exposure but rather attributable to familial factors that underlie both marijuana initiation and low intellectual attainment.

{ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences }

photo { Julia Margaret Cameron, Paul and Virginia, 1864 }

We investigate the role of networks of alliances in preventing (multilateral) interstate wars. We first show that, in the absence of international trade, no network of alliances is peaceful and stable. We then show that international trade induces peaceful and stable networks: Trade increases the density of alliances so that countries are less vulnerable to attack and also reduces countries’ incentives to attack an ally.

We present historical data on wars and trade showing that the dramatic drop in interstate wars since 1950 is paralleled by a densification and stabilization of trading relationships and alliances.

Based on the model we also examine some specific relationships, finding that countries with high levels of trade with their allies are less likely to be involved in wars with any other countries (including allies and nonallies), and that an increase in trade between two countries correlates with a lower chance that they will go to war with each other.

{ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | Continue reading }

photo { Mark Cohen, Girl Holding Blackberries, 1975 }

The problem we will address can be characterized in either one of two ways. The first is this: why do people pursue art that evokes negative emotions, when they tend to avoid things that evoke such emotions? The emphasis here is on the disagreeable nature of certain mental states. The second characterization emphasizes the disagreeable nature of their causes (which are also, typically, their objects): why do we appreciate tragic events in art when we don’t appreciate tragic events in life? […]

We think both questions involved in the paradox can be answered with reference to the fact that sad art acknowledges sad aspects of life. […] Acknowledging involves recognizing, giving credit, honoring, or doing justice. We think that sad art does just this for its subject matter. In this respect, works of sad art have much in common with monuments to real life tragedies. The difference is that since sad art typically touches on universal themes, it ‘commemorates’ not only specific events, but general aspects of life. […]

The acknowledgement theory says that people derive pleasure from the fact that certain aspects of life are acknowledged in works of art, and answers the question why we pursue tragic art with reference to this pleasure.

{ Philosophical Studies | Continue reading }