Financial losses for today’s start-ups are much more common than they were decades ago, and the losses are much bigger. VCs are making back less from their initial investments than at any point since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. […]

About 85 percent of America’s unicorn start-ups (those valued at more than $1 billion before doing IPOs) that have gone public were unprofitable in 2023, despite most having been founded more than fifteen years earlier. […]

As of early 2024, twenty-three American unicorns had more than $3 billion in cumulative losses, the amount Amazon had the year it became profitable. Five of them (Uber, WeWork, Rivian, Teledoc Health, and Lyft) had more than $10 billion, with Uber well over $30 billion. Other members of this club offer crypto, AI, consumer products, business software, biotech, electric vehicles, and healthcare. Despite these compa­nies having significantly higher losses than Amazon, Amazon’s eventual success continues to be used as an excuse, as if all start-ups can do what it has done. […]

Venture capital funds earn fixed fees from investors that enable them to profit even if start-ups do not. These fixed fees encourage VCs to hire people who are good at raising money and spinning narratives, but not at identifying good opportunities. VCs also convinced not only investors but also cities, states, and countries that start-ups are key to economic growth.

{ American Affairs Journal | Continue reading }

Earlier this year, a boy in Sweden celebrated his 10th birthday. […] He was born in 2014 after his mother, a 35-year-old woman who had been born without a uterus, received a donated uterus from a 61-year-old close family friend. Around 135 uterus transplants have been performed, but it’s probably too soon to offer the procedure to trans women.

Indonesian man discovers woman he married after a year of in-person romance was a man trying to scam him for money

US epidemic of alcohol related mortality […] In 1999, there were 19,356 US alcohol-related deaths, a mortality rate of 10.7 per 100,000. By 2020, deaths increased to 48,870 or 21.6 per 100,000.

Fentanyl overdoses have dropped dramatically […] The Times article provides a bevy of possible reasons for the decline, but I have my own theory. One of the most consistent findings of drug research is that drug use is faddish.

Was MDMA really better back in the day? According to research, the average MDMA content of a pill in the 1990s and early 2000s was somewhere between 50 and 80mg […] one in three pills currently in circulation in the UK contain over 200mg of MDMA […] “People often attribute changes in their drug experiences to changes in the drugs themselves […] they tend to dramatically underestimate the influence of their own changing psychology.”

5 Drug Highs That Define the Grateful Dead’s Legacy

a new study has revealed an unexpected potential benefit of severe COVID infection: it may help shrink cancer.

The researchers analysed the videos to see how well the mother accurately referred to her infant’s internal experience (e.g., “Oh, you like this toy”) during the interaction. They also collected saliva samples from the infant and measured the level of the hormone oxytocin. “We have, for the first time, discovered that the amount that a mother talks to their infant about their infant’s thoughts and feelings is directly correlated with their infant’s oxytocin levels.”

Europeans who donate old clothes assume they’ll be go to the needy — but they could just as easily end up in an illegal dump in a foreign country.

Every material, surface, and furnishing of Villa Mahler is custom-made

Las Vegas Ranch, July 1873

A statue of Jesus in India mysteriously began dripping water from its toes. Worshippers started collecting it and drinking it believing it was holy. The source of the water was later found to be a clogged toilet near the statue.

When you deposit money at a bank, you expect the bank to give it back to you. There are two things you might worry about, two sets of risks that might prevent the bank from giving you back your money. One is that the bank might lose the money. Banks do not generally just keep your money in the vault. They use it to make loans, so there is risk: The loans might default, or depositors might all demand their money back at once when the bank does not have a lot of ready cash. […]

The other risk is that the bank might lose track of the money. You might go to the bank and deposit $100, and the bank might write down “$100” next to your name in its notebook, and then it might spill coffee on the notebook and be unable to read the entry and forget that it owes you the $100. And then you might come back to the bank in a week and ask for your $100 back and the bank might say “who are you? what $100?” […]

If a bank loses all your money, the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] can give you your money back, because the FDIC is the government and can print money. If the bank loses its list of who has the money, what can the FDIC do? […] The definitive list of who the bank owes money is kept by the bank. Unless it isn’t.

I have never really understood the Synapse situation, but in my defense Synapse doesn’t understand it either. […]

Synapse functioned as a middleware provider between banks and fintechs. Synapse was a pioneer in what came to be known as “banking-as-a-service” (BaaS). In this role, Synapse opened accounts on behalf of approximately 100 fintech companies (and millions of end users) at four different partner banks.

On April 22, 2024, Synapse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On May 11, the partner banks lost access to the records maintained by Synapse and were unable to determine which end-users rightfully should be able to withdraw their funds.

[…]

You could imagine a world in which technology companies were better and nimbler and more accurate at keeping lists on computers than banks were. But in our world, banks have hundreds of years of history and regulation that have taught them that keeping an accurate list of who has the money is really, really, really, really, really important, and they tend to do it.

{ Matt Levine / Bloomberg| Continue reading }

Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes (catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions). Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acid building blocks in a huge variety of arrangements to make millions of different proteins. Some amino acid molecules can be built in two ways, such that mirror-image versions exist, like your hands, and life uses the left-handed variety of these amino acids. Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, the two mirror images are rarely mixed in biology, a characteristic of life called homochirality. It is a mystery to scientists why life chose the left-handed variety over the right-handed one.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the molecule that holds the instructions for building and running a living organism. However, DNA is complex and specialized; it “subcontracts” the work of reading the instructions to RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules and building proteins to ribosome molecules. DNA’s specialization and complexity lead scientists to think that something simpler should have preceded it billions of years ago during the early evolution of life. A leading candidate for this is RNA, which can both store genetic information and build proteins. The hypothesis that RNA may have preceded DNA is called the “RNA world” hypothesis.

If the RNA world proposition is correct, then perhaps something about RNA caused it to favor building left-handed proteins over right-handed ones. However, the new work did not support this idea, deepening the mystery of why life went with left-handed proteins. […]

“The experiment demonstrated that ribozymes can favor either left- or right-handed amino acids, indicating that RNA worlds, in general, would not necessarily have a strong bias for the form of amino acids we observe in biology now”

{ Nasa | Continue reading }

You know the “AI Overview” you get on Google Search? “Kyloren syndrome” is a fictional disease I invented as part of a sting operation to prove that you can publish any nonsense in predatory journals…

93% of Gen Z respondents, age 22 - 27, said they were using two or more AI tools a week, [compared to] 79% of millennials (28 - 39)

People are less generous with money compared to other resources. In multiple dictator game studies, people allocated less money to others (vs. themselves) compared to other resources (food, goods, space, time).

a small number of studies did suggest increasing your water intake has benefits for weight loss and kidney stones. There were also individual studies which they say raise the possibility of benefits for migraine prevention, UTIs, diabetes control, and low blood pressure.

In a healthy body, the brain detects when the body is becoming dehydrated and initiates thirst to stimulate drinking. It also releases a hormone which signals to the kidneys to conserve water by concentrating the urine.

About 1½ pints (a little less than a liter) of water are lost daily when water evaporates from the skin and is breathed out by the lungs. […] prolonged vomiting or severe diarrhea can result in the loss of a gallon or more a day.

Effective arousal-reducing activities included slow-flow yoga, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing, and taking a timeout […] going for a run is not an effective strategy because it increases arousal levels and ends up being counterproductive.

how lesbian escort agencies became a form of self-care in Japan

Mong Shuan was just 16 when she turned to an unconventional source of income: selling betel nuts from a little stall in northern Taiwan. […] The women would usually arrive for work in their normal clothes and get changed into more revealing garments in the booths

Here Are the 30,000 Pages of Federal Reserve Board Meeting Minutes I Got Through FOIA. They Completely Rewrite Federal Reserve History.

A parachute found in an outbuilding in North Carolina could be the new evidence that may crack the 53-year-old D.B Cooper case. It could lead investigators to the identity the man who jumped out of a hijacked plane carrying $200,000.

Man who spent $6.2 million on Maurizio Cattelan’s banana says he’s going to eat it — His purchase awarded him a roll of duct tape, instructions on how to “install” the banana properly and, most importantly, a certificate of authenticity guaranteeing the artwork, when reproduced, as an original work of Cattelan’s.

South Korean man dodged draft by binge eating

The Holywood Reporter asked surgeons on both coasts to reveal what their clients are asking for these days. “Lifts and even breast reductions are on the rise, along with tummy tucks to make the midsection look more fit”

Trendy weight-loss drugs making headlines for shrinking waistlines may also be shrinking the human heart and other muscles. The systemic effect observed in mice was then confirmed in cultured human heart cells

To what degree is it possible to recognize a person’s ethnicity just from their face? Can Koreans identify Korean, Japanese, and Chinese faces?

Apple will now be treated like a bank

The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved.

The Philosophical Ontological Proof for P=NP

Elon Musk didn’t threaten to suspend “Accounts calling me fat, ‘Elonia’, ‘The First Lady’, saying I can’t jump, or pointing out my hair plugs and jawline gender affirming surgery“

Talking out loud to yourself is perfectly normal—and even beneficial. It can facilitate problem-solving and improve how well you perform at a task

An AI startup CEO on a Forbes ‘30 Under 30′ list has been charged with defrauding investors out of $10 million

OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit

Rapid advances in applying artificial intelligence to simulations in physics and chemistry have some people questioning whether we will even need quantum computers at all.

Cybercriminals exploit Spotify for malware distribution

Whitaker was involved with a sketchy company that marketed bizarre inventions — including a “masculine toilet” with extra space for well-endowed men. […] World Patent Marketing eventually settled with the FTC in 2018, agreeing to pay almost $26 million in fines and shutting down business for good.

Because microplastics are everywhere, we can’t exactly compare the health of people who are exposed to them to people who aren’t to determine their possible effects

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World. […] Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. […] But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies.

MoMA playing cards designed by Takenobu Igarashi

In January 2023, short seller Hindenburg Research put out a report claiming that executives at one of India’s largest conglomerates were manipulating the company’s stock price.

The Adani Group and its multibillionaire founder Gautam Adani strenuously deny the accusations, but the report instantly wiped off as much as $140bn from the conglomerate’s market value and sent ripples through the country’s establishment. It also catapulted the New York-based Hindenburg and its founder Nathan Anderson into Wall Street lore.

Few saw it coming. But one that did was a hedge fund in New York almost 13,000 kilometres away from the Indian conglomerate’s headquarters.

Kingdon Capital Management had received a draft of the short seller’s report in November 2022 as part of an agreement it had signed with Hindenburg a year earlier, India’s markets regulator revealed in June.

The hedge fund, which was founded by Mark Kingdon in the 1980s, had set up a special fund in Mauritius and had started building a short position on Adani two weeks before Hindenburg released its report.

Kingdon, which has less than $1bn in assets under management, turned a $22mn profit from the trade. As part of the agreement, Hindenburg received a 25 per cent cut of the spoils. […]

activist short sellers tend to explicitly look for evidence suggesting malfeasance. […] Hindenburg, for example, says that it seeks out situations where there might be some combination of accounting irregularities, undisclosed related-party transactions, and illegal or unethical business or financial reporting practices.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Francis Bacon, Man in blue IV, 1954 }

Banning free plastic bags for groceries resulted in customer purchasing more plastic bags, study finds

US Secret Service robot dogs patroll Mar-A-Lago

NYU scientists create crystals to extract water from air without using energy

This study aimed to investigate whether trainee therapists could estimate client deterioration after each session […] psychotherapists were unable to identify clients getting worse during therapy and failed to predict clients who would end therapy with more severe psychological problems than before therapy

Scientists have identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain, revealing just how much we still have to learn about its mysterious inner workings.

The current scientific consensus is that the placebo effect is a real healing effect operating through belief and suggestion. The evidence does not support this. In clinical trials of treatments, outcomes in placebo and no-treatment arms are similar, distinguishable only in tiny differences on self-report measures. A Case Against the Placebo Effect

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips

‘Handedness’ in snakes? […] only three out of 30 snakes showed a significant coil preference […] all three of these individuals were adult females and had a clockwise coil preference [PDF]

Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. The practice, first reported by 404 Media in April, has since exploded in popularity, showing Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood

Phillips’s evening sale of modern and contemporary art in New York on Tuesday evening (19 November) […] The next lot, a double self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1983 that had previously belonged to actor-turned-artist Johnny Depp, had one of the night’s highest estimates at $10m to $15m. After receiving just one bid, auctioneer Henry Highley appeared to sell it for a hammer price of $9.3m, however following the sale’s conclusion a spokesperson for Phillips revealed that the work had in fact failed to sell—knocking about 17% off the night’s total. (A Basquiat work on paper earlier in the evening sold for its low estimate of $1m, or $1.2m with fees.)

In 1997, Laura Ingraham wrote an essay in The Washington Post in which she stated that she had changed her views on homosexuality after witnessing “the dignity, fidelity, and courage” with which her gay brother, Curtis, and his partner coped with the latter being diagnosed with AIDS; Curtis’s partner ultimately died of the disease. Curtis, on the other hand, has called his sister “a monster” and said she was influenced by their father, whom he described as a Nazi sympathizer as well as an abusive alcoholic.

That kid’s gonna be chasing that high for the rest of his life

Shareholder democracy is weird because you can just buy votes. In fact, that’s kind of the point: Each share of a public company usually has one vote, so if you want to take control of the company, all you have to do is buy enough shares to win a shareholder vote. (Conservatively 50% plus one, but probably less, if you can get other shareholders to join you and/or they don’t vote.) The voting power is generally proportional to the economic ownership of the company; the more you own, the more say you have.

But it is reasonably easy to hedge stock. If you own a lot of stock of a company, and you want to (1) continue owning that stock but (2) not be fully economically exposed to the risk of the stock price, you can probably find a way to do that. Most simply, you could (1) buy 10 million shares of stock and (2) also borrow 10 million other shares of stock and sell them short. You’re long 10 million shares and short 10 million shares, so you have net zero exposure: If the stock goes up (or down), you will make (lose) money on the 10 million shares you own, and lose (make) an exactly offsetting amount of money on the 10 million shares that you are short. But you get to vote the 10 million shares that you’re long, while you don’t get negative votes for shares you are short. So you have zero economic ownership but 10 million votes. […]

The fun question, which people email me about from time to time, is: What if you go long 10 million shares and short 20 million shares? Then (1) you get to vote 10 million shares and, as a big economic owner, you have a say in the running of the company, but (2) you actually profit if the company does badly, so your voting incentives will be bad.

{ Matt Levine / Bloomberg | Continue reading }

What makes a person a badass? We investigated the concept in four experiments (total N = 2,020), investigating why radically different kinds of people, ranging from peaceful advocates to fierce warriors, can each be considered badasses.

This meteorite was far larger than the infamous Cretaceous era ending one. ‘We’re looking at a bolide that was 500 to 200 times bigger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs.’ The impact 3.26 billion years ago triggered a giant tsunami, as well as clouding the oceans and darkening the skies for years to decades. The impact also evaporated tens of metres of seawater. Yet there was a silver lining: the churning of the seas brought bioavailable iron up from the ocean depths to its depleted surface and allowed some microbes to flourish, while the meteorite also brought phosphorus vital for life.

Scientists recently discovered amber fragments that suggest the snow-covered continent of Antarctica could have once been a lush jungle.

More than 1,770 oil sector lobbyists have travelled to the COP29 summit in Baku, making them the fourth largest delegation at the summit.

Do Losses Promote More Reflection Than Gains?

the regular consumption of moderate doses of coffee attenuates all-cause mortality, attenuates age-associated diseases (cardiovascular, stroke, cancer) […] average increase healthspan of 1.8 years of lifetime […] discrete benefits afforded by the consumption of 1 cup of coffee a day, maximal benefits afforded by 3 cups a day, followed by a waning of the benefits with increasing doses of coffee consumed daily […] both caffeine and non-caffeine components contribute to the benefits on lifespan of coffee consumption […] Coffee is the most consumed beverage after water with 2.25 billion cups consumed every day by circa 70% of the world population

Red color signals dominance in both animals and humans. This study investigated whether a red background color influences the perception of dominance in human faces and geometric shapes. […] results showed that faces were more likely to be perceived as dominant when presented against a red background than against green or gray backgrounds, for both female and male faces

A Physicist Says ‘Paradox-Free’ Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible

It’s thought that 4 per cent of the global population is plagued by a persistent, rumbling sound in their ears – the source of which is a total enigma. […] a team of French scientists who proposed that the Hum was potentially made by ocean waves hitting continental shelves, shaking the Earth and causing vibrations. Other scientists have hypothesised that it could be linked to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. […] 5G […] military and government sonic weaponry and mind control […] “There is this idea that it could be the total summation of all the human activity that we make; the idea that it’s actually causing some kind of continuous, standing wave of vibration in the world. And not everybody can hear it.” He cites research by scientist David Baguley into hyperacusis, a condition that makes certain people extremely sensitive to sound and can be linked to trauma.

Geographic Distribution of UAP Reports from May 1, 2023 - June 1, 2024 FUll story: Military’s UFO-Hunting Aerial Surveillance System Detailed In Report

A tiny new open-source AI model performs as well as powerful big ones. The results suggest that training models on less, but higher-quality, data can lower computing costs.

CONFIRMED: LLMs have indeed reached a point of diminishing returns

Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 owner announced last week that it has plans to reopen the plant and signed a deal with Microsoft. The company will purchase the plant’s entire electric generating capacity over the next 20 years.

Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors

Google to buy nuclear power for AI datacentres in ‘world first’ deal

The discovery of a rare species of bee by environmental regulators has blocked the plans of tech conglomerate Meta to build an artificial intelligence data center powered by nuclear energy

Why Are Cooling Towers Shaped Like [Truncated Cones]?

Haliey Welch, the 22-year-old who went viral for her “Hawk Tuah” video, […] amassed around 5 million followers across various social media platforms. After recently releasing her own podcast titled “Talk Tuah,” she’s now venturing into the tech world with a new AI-powered dating advice app called Pookie Tools. […] More established influencers, such as Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) and David Dobrik, have previously launched their own apps.

Dog-sitter films explicit OnlyFans content in client homes

How dogs were implicated during the Salem witch trials

How Al Capone Made Greyhound Racing Great More: When Chicago Went to the Dogs: Al Capone and Greyhound Racing in the Windy City, 1927–1933

Video Shows 2 Bees Working Together to Open a Bottle of Soda

Extract vocals, acapella, guitar, piano, bass, drums and various instruments from song or video files + more AI tools>

Museum of Bad Art

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them [here], ordered randomly.

Shop Imp Kerr and get 20% off any order over $50 with promo code WILDBABYWILD

Swedish tabloid Expressen revealed Wednesday that government officials have been ensuring in advance that all places frequented by Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg are free of bananas — due to the minister’s strong phobia of the yellow fruit.

René Descartes died on February 11, 1650, in Stockholm, Sweden, succumbing to pneumonia at the age of 53. He was in Stockholm at the time to help the queen of Sweden set up an academy of science. Queen Christina, only 22 years old, made Descartes rise before 5:00 AM for her daily lesson—something which proved detrimental to his health, as he was used to sleeping late since childhood to accommodate his sickly nature. One morning, likely as a result of this early rising, combined with the freezing Swedish winters, Descartes caught a chill that proved to be fatal.

For the pleasure: “Good sense or reason must be better distributed than anything else in the world, for no man desires more of it than he already has. This shows that reason is by nature equal in all men.” –Descartes

Rob Horning: Since the U.S. election, the Twitter-like platform Bluesky has been the beneficiary of millions of users deciding that they had finally had enough of serving time on and adding value to a platform owned by a egomaniacal charlatan increasingly devoted to promoting right-wing propaganda. (Why did those users wait so long? Haven’t they heard of the sunk-cost fallacy?) […] fewer and fewer people bother to read text and society is purportedly becoming increasingly “post-literate.” (This was a theme in some election postmortems: that a significant portion of the U.S. electorate lacks the critical thinking skills that come from better reading habits and are thus readily susceptible to demagoguery.) Passive consumption of video is the algorithmically enforced norm on most platforms, which have become more or less indistinguishable from conventional television, with a rationalized, rigidly formatted flow of content and ads. (Most of what Raymond Williams wrote about TV in 1974 applies equally well to social media today.) A recent post from Katherine Dee speculates that “social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture”

impkerr.bluesky.social

Texting abbreviations seem insincere and not worth answering

consumption on small screens is starting to dominate globally […] 67% of consumers watch video on their small screen daily, compared to 50% who watch on their big screen.

It looks like Standards, Annie, HEALTH, Swans, and a number of other notable one-word artists were targeted directly. Spotify confirmed that the onslaught of AI garbage was delivered from one source. How fake music targets real artists

A Serbian Film is a 2010 Serbian exploitation horror film produced and directed by Srđan Spasojević in his feature directorial debut. It tells the experience of a financially struggling pornstar who agrees to participate in an “art film”, only to discover that he has been drafted into a snuff film with pedophilic and necrophilic themes. […] a number of sources have described A Serbian Film as the single most disturbing movie of all time

Berlin’s techno clubs close their doors […] Watergate will shut for good at new year

Study confirms Egyptians drank hallucinogenic cocktails in ancient rituals

I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life — As animals – human or otherwise – navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life’s rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behavior. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain.

Octopuses are the species that are most likely to take over the world after humans. In the event of a wipeout through either wars or climate change, the marine invertebrates are said to possess the ‘physical and mental attributes necessary’ to evolve into the next civilisation-building species. […] Primates - long thought to be the successor to humans - would face the same challenges and also become extinct

Person dressed in a bear costume faked attacks on cars for insurance payout

CRISPR builds a big tomato that’s actually sweet. Deleting just two genes that control sugar production makes a more succulent fruit.

Memory Is Not Confined to Our Brains, Scientists Discover

A fundamental underlying question about the nature of overconfidence has continued to be subject to scholarly dispute: Is overconfidence a genuine psychological trait? […] some people do believe that they are able to perform relatively well on tasks even when there is little reason for that confidence. Our results support the claim that overconfidence might be a trait.

This study investigates the emerging phenomenon of “ghost hiring” or “ghost jobs”, where employers advertise job openings without intending to fill them. […] I find that up to 21% of job ads may be ghost jobs

bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships. A World Without Men — The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely.

The most common types of synesthesia · What are the rarest types of synesthesia? Do I have synesthesia?

Why didn’t people smile in old photographs?

Beginner’s Guide to Visual Prompt Injections: Invisibility Cloaks, Cannibalistic Adverts, and Robot Women

Alex Jones’ media empire has been sold at auction, and the winner is The Onion

Glaciers Reveal When Volcanoes Are on Brink of Eruption

Regular activity not only strengthens muscles but can bolster our bones, blood vessels, and immune system. Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines. In the presence of these muscle-generated signals, neurons grew four times farther compared to neurons that were not exposed to myokines.

The open oval-shaped toilet seat compresses the buttocks, keeping the rectum in a lower position than if you were sitting on the couch. With gravity pulling the lower half of the body down, the increased pressure affects your blood circulation. […] the veins and blood vessels surrounding the anus and lower rectum become enlarged and engorged with blood, increasing the risk of hemorrhoids. Don’t sit on the toilet for more than 10 minutes, doctors warn

children who followed a consistent bedtime routine and fell asleep at the same time each night displayed better control of their emotions and behavior when they were under stress or working with others. Consistent bedtime may be more influential than sleep quality or duration

Teens who use social media see conspiracy theories come across their feed at least once per week, according to a new study

Last summer, UNESCO endorsed banning smartphones in schools, citing research that found students can take up to 20 minutes to refocus once distracted by a single notification. That’s a startling statistic, considering the volume of notifications teens receive. (One widely publicized study last year by a U.S. nonprofit pegged the number at 237 per day.) […] confiscating phones is challenging and controversial. Where it’s been successful, it’s not driven by lone teachers.

Dermatologists say hot water, especially when combined with soaps that contain fragrances and harsh ingredients, may damage the outermost layer, known as the skin barrier. The skin barrier is made of dead skin cells, said Dr. Paola Baker, a dermatologist in Boston who has researched its function. Surrounding those cells is a dense matrix of fatty substances such as ceramides, fatty acids and cholesterol, she said. These substances, called lipids, help retain moisture in the skin and protect it from environmental irritants and allergens. [NY Times]

Why Hunting Coyotes May Actually Increase Their Numbers

The holy grail of AI, Sejnowski explains, is artificial general intelligence: a machine that can think, learn and solve problems across a wide range of tasks, much like a human can. The current generation of LLMs is far from that. Referred to pejoratively by some researchers as ‘stochastic parrots’, they mostly mimic human language without true comprehension. […] The next generation of LLMs must undergo a developmental process akin to the childhood learning phase in humans, he surmises, learning from real-world interactions as well as data. […] The addition of robotics and sensorimotor systems would allow AI tools to perceive and interact with their environment, nudging current models towards artificial general autonomy.

Robot That Watched Surgery Videos Performs With Skill Of Human Doctor

Air fryers that gather your personal data and audio speakers “stuffed with trackers” are among examples of smart devices engaged in “excessive” surveillance, according to the consumer group Which? The organisation tested three air fryers, increasingly a staple of British kitchens, each of which requested permission to record audio on the user’s phone through a connected app.

the story of a woman who managed to fool a male-only, world-famous magic society into admitting her, before being unceremoniously kicked out when she revealed her true identity […] “We really do hope that Sophie can be found so that we can welcome her back into our society” The society now has more than 80 female members

The US Has a Cloned Sheep Contraband Problem

This elephant learned to use a hose as a shower. Then her rival sought revenge — Behaviors reveal sophisticated tool use—and possible “pranking”—among pachyderms

Plastic-eating insect discovered in Kenya

One of the most confounding concepts to emerge from the cauldron of early 20th-century physics was the idea that quantum objects can exist in multiple states simultaneously. A particle could be in many places at once, for example. The math and experimental results were unequivocal about it. And it seemed that the only way for a particle to go from such a “superposition” of states to a single state was for someone or something to observe it, causing the superposition to “collapse.” Must the observer be human? Can AI Save Schrödinger’s Cat?

A bribery experiment involving people from 18 countries reveals that the phenomenon is largely subject to circumstance […] The bad news is that even those who consider themselves immune to corruption can easily become corrupt

This paper argues that unusual coincidences, particularly those involving historical events, can be viewed as design patterns, suggesting an intelligent influence over the course of events. A compelling case examined in detail using probability theory concerns the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) and John F. Kennedy (1917–1963). This and other coincidences involving historical figures disfavor the materialistic perspective and point to the presence of an intelligent agent acting on a global scale, beyond the arrow of time, influencing human lives and the course of history.

Happiness should be the outcome of doing things you love, not the primary goal.

As scientists of language, the Grimms compiled a massive survey of mythology, edited epic poems, launched a historical dictionary—and collected old stories. As cultural detectives, they cast a wide net, creating a history for a nation that did not yet exist. The idea of one Germany was itself a fairy tale, a political construct shopping for an origin myth, and neither brother lived to see Otto von Bismarck’s triumphant unification of Germany in 1871. […] No German authors have been more translated, not even Goethe.

Russian State TV Airs Melania Trump’s Nudes on Prime Time

North Korean soldiers hooked on porn after getting internet access for first time while helping Russia fight Ukraine

Men’s Perceptions of Female Genitals

On average, people in relationships had higher life satisfaction than singles. Singles, even involuntary ones, had higher life satisfaction than people in bad relationships.

This scientist treated her own cancer with viruses she grew in the lab

How ChatGPT Brought Down an Online Education Giant — Chegg’s stock is down 99%, and students looking for homework help are defecting to ChatGPT

FBI says hackers are sending fraudulent police data requests to tech giants to steal people’s private information

DataBreach.com Emerges as Alternative to HaveIBeenPwned

We’re attempting to get a collection of humans to say every digit of the newly-discovered (and currently largest-known prime number) Mersenne prime M136279841

screenshots { Brian De Palma, The Fury, 1978 }

Swiss scientists have successfully grown lip cells in a dish, which will allow new treatments for lip injuries and infections to be trialed in the lab

Novel way to beat dengue: Deaf mosquitoes stop having sex — Mosquitoes have sex while flying in mid-air and the males rely on hearing to chase down a female, based on her attractive wingbeats. The researchers did an experiment, altering a genetic pathway that male mosquitoes use for this hearing. Female mosquitoes are the ones that spread diseases to people, and so trying to prevent them having babies would help reduce overall numbers.

Researchers are trying to “inoculate” people against misinformation by giving them small doses ahead of time — First, warn people they may be manipulated. Second, expose them to a weakened form of the misinformation, just enough to intrigue but not persuade anyone.

The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture A recent surge of human-curated guidance is both a reaction against and an extension of the tyranny of algorithmic recommendations.

We don’t understand color vision as well as you’d think from decades of academic study. We have classic theories of how red, green, blue, yellow, bright, and dark encode in the brain. […] “That’s still the theory you get in textbooks. But it’s a very naive theory,” he said. “There’s a whole mystery of how the brain really represents color.” […] In a pivotal study from 2009, their team at the University of Washington cured color blindness in monkeys […] Most color deficiencies come from anomalies in the cones, but one form called “dichromatism” is a genetic condition where one cone is entirely missing. The Neitzes treated dichromat monkeys with this categorically severe version of color blindness. And not only did they replace the missing type of cone with a first-of-its-kind gene therapy, they did this in adult monkeys, raising entirely new questions about sensory plasticity. I’m not getting this treatment anytime soon. The therapy is far from approval and, more importantly, I’m not so deficient that I want an eye injection that temporarily detaches the retina.

researchers report developing ultrasensitive, nanoscale sensors that in small-scale tests distinguished a key change in the chemistry of the breath of people with lung cancer. […] People breathe out many gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, as well as other airborne compounds. Researchers have determined that declines in one exhaled chemical — isoprene — can indicate the presence of lung cancer.

22 pesticides consistently linked with the incidence of prostate cancer in the US

Plans by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to build an AI data centre in the US that runs on nuclear power were thwarted in part because a rare species of bee was discovered on land earmarked for the project [Financial Times]

We found that in most of the countries analyzed, right-wing (conservative) individuals have, on average, more children and grandchildren than left-wing (liberal) individuals. We also found that the proportion of right-wing individuals increases from generation to generation. to some extent, demography may explain longer-term political trends.

Trading for a Chinese software company, whose name, “Chuan Da Zhi Sheng,” can be literally translated as “Trump Big Wisdom Win,” was halted after its Shenzhen-listed shares rose 10%.

An Observer investigation has found that dating apps are increasingly pushing users to buy extras that have been likened to “gambling products” and can cost hundreds of pounds a year.

Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids — Registered as a child, we were also able to access games like “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”. We found over 600 “Diddy” games, including “Survive Diddy” and “Run From Diddy Simulator”.

Spending time alone is a virtually inevitable part of daily life that can promote or undermine well-being.

Here, we explore how the language used to describe time alone—such as “me-time” “solitude,” or “isolation”—influences how it is perceived and experienced […]

linguistic framing affected what people thought about, but not what they did, while alone […]

simple linguistic shifts may enhance subjective experiences of time alone

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

Hydro panels technology ’sucks’ liquid out of the air, providing drinking water for remote NSW town

Experts say the time changes are detrimental to health and safety, but agree that the answer isn’t permanent daylight saving time

Facial recognition website PimEyes has become a hit among digital ‘creeps’ and others eager to investigate strangers. Researchers fear there’s no way to prevent it from being abused.

AI-driven 0-day detection is here

Agentic AI is the top strategic technology trend for 2025, #4 is Postquantum Cryptography (data protection that resists quantum computing decryption risks), #5 is Ambient Invisible Intelligence (enabled by ultra-low-cost smart tags and sensors that deliver large-scale affordable tracking and sensing)

Research has shown an association between agreeableness and sweet taste preferences

Scientists found a clear link between red meat and cancer

Nobody knows when kissing emerged among humans. But the practice of plopping one’s mouth on another human, whether in friendship or love, is not universal; which suggests culture, rather than instinct, may be at play. […] “Grooming consists of picking through the fur/hair of others to remove parasites, dead skin, and debris” […] as we lost our fur, and spent less time grooming each other, we may have retained some vestigial remnant of the ritual. One of these remnants is what Lameira terms the “groomer’s final kiss”. Although combing through a partner’s fur to remove detritus and parasites would have become less necessary, each grooming session would have included – or ended with – the latching of the lips onto the groomee’s body to extract stubborn detritus.

Jaywalking legalized in New York City

Viral ’subway surfing’ trend has led to deaths of six youths in New York

Las Vegas Ruined this man entire life

When Does Instagram Decide a Nipple Becomes Female? — For the past two years an algorithmic artist who goes by Ada Ada Ada has been testing the boundaries of human and automated moderation systems on various social media platforms by documenting her own transition.

A collection of one-off actions that improve your life continuously — however marginally

Canadian Journal of Zombie Science