The sense of smell is one of our most powerful connections to the physical world. Our noses contain hundreds of different scent receptors that allow us to distinguish between odours. When you smell a rose or a pot of beef stew, the brain is responding to scent molecules that have wafted into your nose and locked on to these receptors. Only certain molecules fit specific receptors, and when they slot together, like a key in a lock, this triggers changes in cells. In the case of scent receptors, specialised neurons send messages to the brain so we know what we have sniffed. […]

In the last ten years, however, reports have trickled in from bemused biologists that these receptors, as well as similar ones usually found on taste buds, crop up all over our bodies.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

In Japan, where palm reading remains one of the most popular means of fortune-telling, some people have figured out a way to change their fate. It’s a simple idea: change your palm, change the reading, and change your future. All you need is a competent plastic surgeon with an electric scalpel who has a basic knowledge of palmistry. […]

From January 2011 to May 2013, 37 palm plastic surgeries have been performed at the Shonan Beauty Clinic alone. Several other clinics in Japan offer the surgery, but almost none of them advertise it.

{ The Daily Beast | Continue reading }

photo { Brendan Baker }

If you’re a corporate executive, this may be one of the last sentences you want to hear: “Erich Spangenberg is on the line.” Invariably, Mr. Spangenberg, the 53-year-old owner of IPNav, is calling to discuss a patent held by one of his clients, which he says your company is infringing — and what are you going to do about it?

Mr. Spangenberg is likely to open the conversation on a diplomatic note, but if you put up enough resistance, or try to shrug him off, he can also, as he put it, “go thug.”

[…]

“Once you go thug, though, you can’t unthug,” he explained, returning to his warm and normal tone. “Actually, you can unthug, but if you do that, you can’t rethug. Then you just seem crazy.”

Mr. Spangenberg’s company, based in Dallas, helps “turn idle patents into cash cows,” as it says on its Web site.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Sound waves with frequencies just above human hearing can levitate tiny particles and liquid droplets and even move them around, a team of engineers has demonstrated. […]

In the new research, the team […] uses the setup to lift and spin a toothpick. Previously, no one had been able to control objects larger than a few millimeters in diameter.

{ Science | Continue reading }

I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”

{ John Searle | via Open Culture | Continue reading }

Testicular Augmentation Using Chin Implants.

Porn Producers Say Unprotected Sex Is Free Speech Right.

There are now more elderly shoplifters than teenaged ones in Tokyo.

Why do we enjoy listening to sad music?

Researchers have developed a new tool that analyzes the cries of babies, searching for clues to potential health or developmental problems.

Study reveals early financial arguments are a predictor of divorce.

What’s Your Social Media Genotype?

This is quite possibly the least comprehensible abstract of a psychology article I have ever read. It starts off dense and wordy and ends up feeling like you’re huffing butane.

Researchers Build 3-D Structures Out of Liquid Metal.

Forget 3D printing—3D subtraction is going to arrive in your garage first.

Fabric as strong as steel? Japanese startup aims to replicate the silk of a spider web.

A group in California is starting to engineer glow-in-the-dark trees that could one day replace streetlights. “The big challenge with the trees is that trees take a long time to grow.”

What Does An Appendectomy Cost?

The Role of Financial Institutions.

The science and history of pepper spray.

Rauschenberg Research Project.

Joseph Beuys: New Letter Debunks More Wartime Myths.

A new film reconstructs Félix Guattari’s unproduced sci-fi script. [Thanks Niki]

Much nonsense is talked about Shakespeare not writing his plays, but more interesting questions remain: who edited the First Folio? And were substantial changes made?

The man behind the great Dickens and Dostoevsky hoax.

The Onion’s Tips For Treating A Sunburn.

Pen Tapping.

Teacher wears same clothes for 40 years of yearbook photos.

Kerr has a sister, Rosa, whoz ass is three muthafuckin years olda than her muthafuckin ass.

Make your own deer butt art.

Standard IQ tests are problematic on many levels — not least, because they do very little to tell us about the quality of our thinking. Looking to overcome this oversight, psychologist Keith Stanovich has started to work on the first-ever Rationality Quotient test. […]

I coined the term dysrationalia — an analogue of the word dyslexia — in the early-1990’s in order to draw attention to what is missing in IQ tests. I define dysrationalia as the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. […] Here are some irrational thinking tendencies to consider:

▪ Physicians choose less effective medical treatments
▪ People fail to accurately assess risks in their environment
▪ Information is misused in legal proceedings
▪ Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry
▪ Parents fail to vaccinate their children
▪ Unnecessary surgery is performed
▪ Animals are hunted to extinction
▪ Billions of dollars are wasted on quack medical remedies
▪ Costly financial misjudgments are made

{ IEET | Continue reading }

The objective of this study was to determine test characteristics (i.e., intra- and interobserver variability, intraassay variability, sensitivity, and specificity) of an evaluation of odor from vaginal discharge (VD) of cows in the first 10 days postpartum conducted by olfactory cognition and an electronic device, respectively. […]

The study revealed a considerable subjectivity of the human nose concerning the classification into healthy and sick animals based on the assessment of vaginal discharge.

{ Journal of Dairy Science }

Raising chickens in backyard coops is all the rage with nostalgia-loving hipsters but apparently the facial hair obsessed faux farmers often don’t realize that raising hens is loud, labor intensive work because animal shelters are now inundated with hundreds of unwanted urban fowl.

From California to New York, animal shelters are having a hard time coping with the hundreds of chickens being dropped off, sometimes dozens at a time, by bleary-eyed pet owners who might not have realized that chickens lay eggs for only two years but live for a decade or more. […]

The problem with urban farmed chickens starts at birth when hipsters purchase chicks from the same hatcheries that supply large commercial poultry producers. However, the commercial chickens are specifically bread to produce as many eggs as possible in the shortest amount of time.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

As newborns, we encounter our first microbes as we pass through the birth canal. Until that moment, we are 100 percent human.

Thereafter, we are, numerically speaking, 10 percent human, and 90 percent microbe.

Our microbiome contains at least 150 times more genes, collectively, than our human genome.

{ Mother Jones | Continue reading | via Sunday Reading/TNI }

photo { Matthu Placek }

Within a week of Random House and Penguin merging to become the world’s largest books publisher with an estimated revenue of $4 billion, the aftershocks have started. The new entity, eager to cut cost and streamline operations, has asked author Vikram Seth to return his $1.7 million advance, a part of which was paid to him for A Suitable Girl, the ‘jumpsequel’ to his best-selling novel, A Suitable Boy.

Seth, one of the world’s bestloved writers, was scheduled to submit his manuscript this June but has been unable to do so, leading to the publishers’ demarche. […]

“It’s possible that Vikram Seth has not started on the book or that it’s nowhere close to completion, which explains the move.”

{ Mumbai Mirror | Continue reading }

Nude swimmer distracts home burglary victim.

Drunk man is electrocuted peeing on third rail of G train.

The hero in martial arts movies usually steps in when a passive victim is picked on by a gang of thugs. However a new study finds that in real life, third parties are most likely to intervene in conflict situations when the incident involves mutual aggression between drunk men.

I can pinpoint the exact date our nation’s obesity epidemic began. The day that drinking straws got bigger.

How well can you see with your ears? Device offers new alternative to blind people.

Google spokeswoman confirms that the company has already inserted some of the NSA’s programming in Android OS.

Build Your Own Internet with Mobile Mesh Networking.

Employers Face Changes After Same-Sex-Marriage Ruling.

Moscow’s stray dogs learned to descend the stations’ escalators and, like true urbanites, now regularly navigate Moscow by metro.

The Education of a Bomb Dog.

Passengers in the rear of an aircraft were significantly more likely to survive than passengers near the front.

Q&A With a Pilot: Just How Does Autopilot Work?

How do bad numbers get into circulation in our political discourse, and how do they stay there, even after being refuted?

Searching for the World’s Worst Glass of Water.

Retraction Watch: Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.

Available Emblems of Belief for Placement on Government Headstones and Markers.

Cross-serial anaphora.

Airstream Interplanetary Explorer.

Garage Sale.

{ My friend found this bizarre Anonymous t-shirt in a Quebec gift shop. }

Amerigo Vespucci (1454 – 1512) was an Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer who first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia’s eastern outskirts as initially conjectured from Columbus’ voyages, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to Afro-Eurasians.

Colloquially referred to as the New World, this second super continent came to be termed “America,” probably deriving its name from the feminized Latin version of Vespucci’s first name.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

We’ve all experienced the sense of being familiar with somebody without knowing their name or even having spoken to them. These so-called “familiar strangers” are the people we see everyday on the bus on the way to work, in the sandwich shop at lunchtime or in the local restaurant or supermarket in the evening.

But while many researchers have studied the network of intentional links between individuals—using mobile phone records for example—little work has been on these unintentional links which form a kind of hidden social network.

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Lijun Sun at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore and a few pals who have analysed the passive interactions between 3 million residents on Singapore’s bus network (about 55 per cent of the city’s population). […]

Study revealed that about 85 per cent of these repeated encounters happen at the same time of day and that individuals were more likely to encounter familiar strangers in the morning than the afternoon.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Owens }

An executive at Tiffany & Co. allegedly stole $1.3 million worth of jewelry from the company. How did she do it?

Very slowly, it seems. Ingrid Lederhaas-Okun, 46, worked as the vice president of product development at the jeweler’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters from January 2011 to February of this year, when her position was terminated due to downsizing. […]

“She was careful to only keep items that were valued at under $10,000.” […] “Tiffany’s has a policy of only investigating missing inventory that’s valued over $25,000. […]

Ice-T (né Tracy Marrow), the longtime rapper, actor, and former professional jewel thief, suspects that Lederhaas-Okun may have had a buyer in advance.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

In Kafka’s “On Parables” a skeptic says that the abstruse words of the sages cannot really solve the real-life problems we face, since we can never actually “go over” into that fully spiritual realm these words point to. A sage responds by saying (parabolically) that we can overcome all these real-life problems simply by ourselves “becoming parables.”

{ Comparative Literature and Culture | PDF }

Look around the room you are sitting in now. How many right angles can you see? Book-spines, the ceiling, picture frames, door panels, the capital T and L at the bottom of this page, this page itself.

Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels.

{ TLS | Continue reading }

The Terminal Event Management Policy is an official policy of Wikipedia detailing the procedures to be followed to safeguard the content of the encyclopedia in the event of a non-localized event that would render the continuation of Wikipedia in its current form untenable.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

porcelain { Livia Marin }

By exploiting some exotic acoustic techniques, researchers have built a window that allows the passage of air but not sound.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { David Slijper }