A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.

The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from different periods,” said the study’s lead author, microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University in France.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

photo { John Gutmann, I am the Magic Hand, 1937 }

{ Arvida Byström }

Inventor Has Waited 43-Years For Patent Approval

Man Wakes up in Body Bag at Funeral Home

CEO Ticketed For Running In Central Park Too Early

Teen’s Facebook brag costs dad $80,000 lawsuit settlement

Case against man who texted photo of his tattooed genitals dismissed

Fear suppressing neurons found

Science can predict if a seemingly healthy person will die on the short term, based on 4 biomarkers

Strangers with easier-to-pronounce monikers are deemed more trustworthy

Blind people have more nightmares than those who can see.

Although many attempts have been made, it took until 2003 for the vortex ring scent canon to be developed.

Doctors’ Stethoscopes Can Transmit Bacteria As Easily As Unwashed Hands

…bottles of ChlorOxygen chlorophyll concentrate, which “builds better blood.” Whole Foods: America’s Temple of Pseudoscience

How the global banana industry is killing the world’s favorite fruit

3 Minutes of Tetris Reduces Cravings for Drink, Cigarettes and Food

NY Will Use Birth Control To Wipe Out Mute Swans Instead Of Executing Them

How many healthy animals do zoos put down?

Changing the color of rope used in lobster gear could prevent deadly whale entanglements, researcher says

Macroscopic inspection of feces has been used to investigate primate diet.

The city of Naples, Italy, is implementing a plan to take DNA tests from dog poop to catch people who don’t pick up after their pets

“during the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar water.”

Military and civilian drones have a crucial weakness that means they can be hacked, Katia Moskvitch discovers, so what might a stolen drone be used for?

How a Hacker Intercepted FBI and Secret Service Calls With Google Maps

A map of how much the time zones of the world vary from solar time (China is about as big across as the continental United States and has only one huge time zone) [more]

How a 40% decrease in X can be a 6% increase in non-X

Finally, A Strip-Proof Screw

A “web-enabled” toothbrush collects dental data while it cleans your teeth

The 14 synthesizers that shaped modern music

Satanists unveil design for OK statehouse statue [Thanks Tim]

Toy Story: The True Identity of Andy’s Mom

Google Image Search Result for “Exhausted” Printed onto Blanket, 2009, mixed media

Endless pizza

Ronald Wilson Reagan

Why does Daisy get ice cream before Cooper?

Handjob Tutorial and Demonstration

The simplest type of human communication is non verbal signals: things like posture, facial expression, gestures, tone of voice. They are in effect contagious: if you are sad, I will feel a little sad, if I then cheer up, you may too. The signals are indications of emotional states and we tend to react to another’s emotional state by a sort of mimicry that puts us in sync with them. We can carry on a type of emotional conversation in this way. Music appears to use this emotional communication – it causes emotions in us without any accompanying semantic messages. It appears to cause that contagion with three aspects: the rhythmic rate, the sound envelope and the timbre of the sound. For example a happy musical message has a fairly fast rhythm, flat loudness envelop with sharp ends, lots of pitch variation and a simple timbre with few harmonics. Language seems to use the same system for emotion, or at least some emotion. The same rhythm, sound envelope and timbre is used in the delivery of oral language and it carries the same emotional signals. Whether it is music or language, this sound specification cuts right past the semantic and cognitive processes and goes straight to the emotional ones. Language seems to share these emotional signals with music but not the semantic meaning that language contains.

{ Neuro-patch | Continue reading }

{ Oscar Pistorius’s account of events on the night that Reeva Steenkamp died }

Tips for Working From Home

[…]

1. Have a Backup Plan

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Chefs have been using the sensation of chillies and other peppers to spice up their culinary experiments for centuries. But it is only in the last decade or so that scientists have begun to understand how we taste piquant foods. Now they have found the mechanism that not only explains the heat of chillies and wasabi, but also the soothing cooling of flavours like menthol.

The implications of this discovery extend far beyond cuisine. The same mechanisms build the body’s internal thermometer, and some animals even use them to see in the dark. Understand these pathways, and the humble chilli may open new avenues of research for conditions as diverse as chronic pain, obesity and cancer.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Ultracrepidarian (n):”Somebody who gives opinions on subjects they know nothing about.”

Groke (v): “To gaze at somebody while they’re eating in the hope that they’ll give you some of their food.” My dog constantly grokes at me longingly while I eat dinner.

{ BI | Continue reading }

All you really need to do to seem clairvoyant about [Russia] is to be an utter pessimist. […]

[B]y Stalin’s very conscious design and very deliberate border drawing and population movement, most former Soviet republics are ethnic hodgepodges. So Ukraine has a sizable Russian population. Ditto Estonia, ditto Georgia, ditto Kazakhstan. And, according to Putin’s unspoken doctrine, anywhere Russian citizens are determined to be at risk, Mother Moscow can intercede with force on their behalf.

{ Julia Ioffe | Continue reading }

This leader came to power in democratic elections, to be sure, but then altered the system from within. For example, the leader had been a common criminal: a rapist and a thief. He found a judge who was willing to misplace documents related to his case. That judge then became the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There were no constitutional objections, subsequently, when the leader asserted ever more power for his presidency.

In power, this leader, this president, remained a thief, but now on a grand, perhaps even unsurpassed, scale. Throughout his country millions of small businessmen and businesswomen found it impossible to keep their firms afloat, thanks to the arbitrary demands of tax authorities. Their profits were taken by the state, and the autonomy that those profits might have given them were denied. Workers in the factories and mines had no means whatsoever of expression their own distress, since any attempt at a strike or even at labor organization would simply have led to their dismissal.

The country, Ukraine, was in effect an oligarchy, where much of the wealth was in the hands of people who could fit in one elevator. But even this sort of pluralism, the presence of more than one very rich person, was too much for the leader, Viktor Yanukovych. He wanted to be not only the president but the oligarch-in-chief. His son, a dentist, was suddenly one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Tens of billions of dollars simply disappeared from the state budget. Yanukovych built for himself a series of extravagant homes, perhaps the ugliest in architectural history. […]

If a leader steals so much from the people that the state goes bankrupt, then his power is diminished. Yanukovych actually faced this problem last year. […] He needed someone to finance the immediate debts of the Ukrainian state so that his regime would not fall along with it. […] the Ukrainian leader had two options. The first was to begin trade cooperation with the European Union. No doubt an association agreement with the EU would have opened the way for loans. But it also would have meant the risk of the application of the rule of law within Ukraine. The other alternative was to take money from another authoritarian regime, the great neighbor to the east, the Russian Federation.

{ NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

California Barbie fan is undergoing hypnotherapy in hopes that it will lower her IQ

We are more likely to perform a task when we receive the request in our right ear rather than our left.

Sword swallowing and its side effects

The Society of Mutual Autopsy

Our Memory for Sounds is Worse Than Touch or Sight

Most important years of your life were probably from 17 to 24. Those character-building formative years tend to stand out most in our memory, even if they included difficult or tragic events, researchers found.

Every Minute Of Exercise Could Lengthen Your Life Seven Minutes

Economists finally test prisoner’s dilemma on prisoners

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Boeing’s smartphone with a built-in self-destruct function.

If electric cars become popular quickly, the demand for charging them is likely to exceed supply

Why do Japanese people wear surgical masks? It’s not always for health reasons

Computer Recognition of Speakers Who Disguise Their Voice

Most recently, he tested how two different diets affected flatulence.

An Open-Source “Clothing Printer” That Lets You Make Your Own Garments [Thanks Tim]

Native American Tribe Launches Its Own Cryptocurrency

Keith Haring foundation sued by art collectors claiming loss of $40M after ‘counterfeit’ label [via gettingsome]

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral.

The Guy Who Wants to Sell Lab-Grown Salami Made of Kanye West Is “100% Serious” [Thanks Tim]

Sequentially Yours, Brazil, 1961

Today, credit cards are on supersale. Pageler says that means a big breach just happened.

Strangely, platinum credit cards on the site are selling for less money than gold cards. […]

The bots send out emails, and between 5 percent and 10 percent of recipients open the attachment, which lets the crooks in.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

Bitcoin itself may not flourish as a currency, but the underlying technology is beginning to suggest valuable new applications. […]

For example, Namecoin is a system used to create and exchange domain names: the coins contain information about the domain names themselves. Recall that the domain name market has about $3 billion in revenue per year: it’s a good example of a weird, scarce digital resource. And Bitmessage is a Bitcoin-inspired messaging platform that allows for anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) communication. What Namecoin and Bitmessage share is that they allow data to be added to the transaction, making the exchange one not just of perceived value but also of information.

Or take digital art. Larry Smith, a partner at the business architecture consultancy The matix and an analyst with long experience in digital advertising and digital finance, asks us to “imagine digital items that can’t be reproduced.” If we attached a coin identifier to a digital image, Smith says, “we could now call that a unique, one-of-a-kind digital entity.” Media on the Internet—where unlimited copying and sharing has become a scourge to rights holders—would suddenly be provably unique, permanently identified, and attached to an unambiguous monetary value.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Author profiling is a problem of growing importance in applications in forensics, security, and marketing. E.g., from a forensic linguistics perspective one would like being able to know the linguistic profile of the author of a harassing text message (language used by a certain type of people) and identify certain characteristics. Similarly, from a marketing viewpoint, companies may be interested in knowing, on the basis of the analysis of blogs and online product reviews, the demographics of people that like or dislike their products. The focus is on author profiling in social media since we are mainly interested in everyday language and how it reflects basic social and personality processes.

{ PAN | Continue reading }

photos { Neal Barr, Texas Track Club, 1964 }

Cleaning woman mistakenly throws away contemporary artworks

A 10-year-old Norwegian boy who took his parents’ car for a joyride last week, claiming he was a dwarf who forgot his driver’s license, New research shows the way a room is lit can affect the way you make decisions

Scientists turn off pain using nothing but light

By mapping the links between themes that appear in dreams, network scientists reveal the connections between dreams in different cultures for the first time

Does snow make a city cleaner?

New breakthrough over the Voynich Manuscript: Professor says he has deciphered 10 words, which could lead to more discoveries.

Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation [PDF]

Skadden is the second largest law firm in the world in revenue. Forbes magazine called it “Wall Street’s most powerful law firm,” and it has been named as America’s best Corporate Law firm every year since 2001.

Edgar Allan Poe, Interior Design Critic

Designer creates type family from his beard, bold and medium variations are determined by beard growth

Analyzing selfies worldwide (gender proportions, average head tilt angles…)

4 Russian Travel Tips for Visiting America

What ended in 1896?

To answer the seemingly simple question “Have I been here before?” we must use our memories of previous experiences to determine if our current location is familiar or novel. In a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience researchers have identified a region of the hippocampus, called CA2, which is sensitive to even small changes in a familiar context. The results provide the first clue to the contributions of CA2 to memory and may help shed light on why this area is often found to be abnormal in the schizophrenic brain.

{ Function Space | Continue reading }

Crocodiles can climb trees: researchers

Snake-Handling Pastor Dies From Snake Bite

British internet users share more than 3.8 million cat photos and videos every day, compared to 1.4 million selfies.

China accounts for 27% of global cancer deaths

Fake Pub Studies Drinking Habits

Homophobia Takes Years Off of Your Life, Study

People who appear popular may actually be withdrawn and sad, new study claims.

Home made cigarettes are more addictive than the factory-rolled ones, study.

“Penis captivus” or can couples really get stuck together during sex?

“At a distance of 20 feet, they were clearly seeing what someone with normal vision could see at no farther than 7.5 feet away.” App Trains You to See Farther

German Hackers Are Building a DIY Space Program to Put Their Own Uncensored Internet into Space

Proust’s and Deleuze’s takes on enigmatic messages.

Instances of fuck before the fifteenth century are rare. On the origin of Fuck

The quality of work has plummeted to such a low point in the digital advertising and marketing industry that I feel like a fucking Creative God, when in reality I am just an above-average copywriter.

What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society And: The full Kappa Beta Phi member list

Challenging the conventional wisdom, the most expensive fares typically appear when purchased far in advance of a flight.

Toyota to debut wireless charging for 2016 model

A New Tool That Seals Bullet Wounds in Seconds With High-Tech Sponges

Rat-infested NYC restaurants [map]

Map of dirty NYC supermarkets

Part Of Sixth Avenue Shut Down Due To Electrified Doorknobs & Grates

200-year-old douche discovered under NYC city hall

Two works created by Banksy in New York City last fall fail to net minimum bid at auction [via gettingsome]

Underwater Acrobatics Using a Self-Propelled Wheelchair

{ Lee Price }

Almost half of all disturbing dreams contain primary emotions other than fear, study finds […]

The research also found that men and women tend to have different dreams. Men were “significantly” more likely to report themes involving disaster or calamity as well as insects while women’s dreams were more likely to feature interpersonal conflicts.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

related { Use what hotels know about sleeping to build your own dreamland }

The husband and wife team behind the handmade cosmetics company Lush – which this week won a high court battle against Amazon over its use of the word “lush” to sell rival cosmetics – has trademarked the name “Christopher North” as a brand name for a new range of toiletries, which could eventually extend to deodorants and hair removing cream. North is the managing director of Amazon.co.uk.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }