THE U.S. NAVY WILL NO LONGER COMMUNICATE EXCLUSIVELY IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

The three highest paid officials on the Pentagon budget?  The football coaches at Army, Navy and Air Force.

Many things could trip up the housing recovery, from stalling job growth to higher mortgage rates; at the moment, a bursting bubble is not one of them.

Last year writer Evan Osnos chronicled on his New Yorker blog the premature decline of his courtyard house: “When the rainy season hit Beijing, our house began to show its age. About four years old, to be precise.”

The US is a world leader in sperm exports primarily because sperm banks in the U.S. are run on a for-profit basis. Denmark also exports a lot of sperm because of high standards and demand for that blond, blue-eyed look.

Trying to Learn a Foreign Language? Avoid Reminders of Home.

The geometry of persuasion: How do seating layouts influence consumers?

David Brooks Doesn’t Understand Neuroscience.

Interface between neurons and computers are still in their infancy. Here are four big improvements that will soon bring brain-machine interfacing to the next level.

Humans are meant to walk heel-to-toe, with the leg at about a 90-degree angle to the foot and the ankle joint employing a 60-degree range of motion during normal daily activities. By wearing a high heel, “you’re altering the position of the foot and how the foot is to function. Therefore, lots of bad things happen.”

Some 25% to 40% of the population suffers from motion sickness. Cool compress, listening to music can help.

If you are unlucky enough to be suffering from the effects of long-haul jet-lag, you could try shining a very bright light into your popliteal fossae (the backs of your knees).

Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 73-year-old Japanese artist, creates vibrant landscapes using Microsoft Excel. [Thanks Tim]

The average destination of international flights from every country in the world.

How many houseflies would it take to lift me?

Dog grooming competition – in pictures.

The ‘Face Slimmer Exercise Mouthpiece’ From Japan.

She explained how recent research, including her own, has shown that memories are not unchanging physical traces in the brain. Instead, they are malleable constructs that may be rebuilt every time they are recalled. The research suggests, she said, that doctors (and psychotherapists) might be able to use this knowledge to help patients block the fearful emotions they experience when recalling a traumatic event, converting chronic sources of debilitating anxiety into benign trips down memory lane.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

What is an electron? […]

Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s answer, in 1927, epitomized his beloved concept of complementarity: in some circumstances electrons are best described as particles, with definite positions; in others as waves, with definite momenta. Either description is valid and useful, yet according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle they are mutually exclusive, as positions and momenta cannot be known accurately at the same time. Each depiction captures an aspect of the electron’s nature, but neither exhausts it.

Modern quantum theory reinforces Bohr’s conclusion that what you see depends on how you choose to look. […]

Theoretical calculations have become intricate, now including fluctuations in fluctuations in fluctuations. […]

Attempts to pin down an electron’s position more accurately than this require, according to the uncertainty principle, injecting so much energy into the electron that additional electrons and anti-electrons get produced, confusing the issue.

{ Frank Wilczek | PDF }

related { First particle containing four quarks is confirmed }

fiberglass and pigment { Anish Kapoor, Void, 1989 }

Why do humans menstruate, when most animals don’t? When you shake the tree of life, you find that only a handful of mammals aside from us – primates, a small number of bat species, and the elephant shrew – have opted for the monthly bleed.

Evolution is often viewed in terms of a cost-benefit ledger: if something is costly, it must have some benefit. Women lose over half a standard glass of wine’s worth in iron-rich blood and tissue – about 90 millilitres – each time they menstruate, so the process does seem quite costly. And in the predator-filled environs of our early ancestors, leaving a trail of blood was presumably not advantageous.

So how did menstruation arise? Over recent decades, evolutionary biologists have come up with three key theories to explain human menstruation.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

Normally, tracking a criminal using DNA requires, at a minimum, that the perpetrator leaves behind a DNA sample in some form or other. As they are not often so accommodating, the role of DNA in crime busting, while significant, has its limits.

Applied DNA Sciences (ADNAS) has developed a new approach to solve crimes using DNA tagging. The difference is that instead of tagging the objects being stolen, they tag the pilferer with DNA. While this has been tried before by applying the DNA to a fleeing criminal with a gun, ADNAS has adopted a more subtle approach. […]

DNA Fog is an airborne suspension of artificial DNA molecules with a known but biologically inert sequence. The DNA molecules (Applied DNA’s SigNature DNA) are artificially constructed, so that a strand of DNA with 20 base pairs can have over a trillion unique combinations. A security system could use one sequence per location, one sequence for each area within the location, or even use RFID tags to instruct a sophisticated spraying device to spray a unique DNA signature for each item stolen.

Once released, DNA molecules attach onto a malefactor’s clothing, shoes, hair, and skin, as well as the objects stolen.

{ Gizmag | Continue reading }

In Jorge Luis Borges short story, Funes el Memorioso, the titular Funes suffers a brain injury that results in an inability to forget. At first his altered status feels more gift than impairment. He is capable of fantastic mental feats. He no longer wastes time trying to learn things by repetition. Every important detail is immediately accessible to his extraordinary brain, allowing him to spend less time on drudgery. He is also able to focus and remember minutiae like he was never capable of before. The world unfolds before him in striking clarity. No data point, however inconsequential, escapes his viselike attention to detail. Alas, this becomes his downfall. He loses focus on the important. Not forced to prioritize on initial intake due to a limited storage capacity, he drowns in a sea of the irrelevant.

In his New York Times piece, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” legal commentator Jeffrey Rosen warns of the special problem the web presents, particularly for people’s personal lives. Rosen warns: “we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files.”

Although new tools like Google’s “Me on the Web” are allowing users to better monitor their personal information available on the web, there is no real means of managing this information. This article seeks to explore what it would take to have enforceable “administrative rights” to one’s personal information – the ability to edit or modify one’s online persona just as a webmaster would be able to edit or modify on an individual website.

{ Jamie R. Lund | PDF }

oil on canvas { Till Rabus }

Scientists on Long Island are preparing to move a 50-foot-wide electromagnet 3,200 miles over land and sea to its new home at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. The trip is expected to take more than a month. […]

The electromagnet, which weighs at least 15 tons, was the largest in the world when it was built by scientists at Brookhaven in the 1990s, Morse said. Brookhaven scientists no longer have a need for the electromagnet, so it is being moved to the Fermi laboratory, where it will be used in a new experiment called Muon g-2.

The experiment will study the properties of muons, subatomic particles that live only 2.2 millionths of a second.

{ AP | Continue reading }

If there are negative feelings gnawing at you, do you know the cause, and is there anything you could do right away to solve the problem? If it’s just a negativity bias kicking in, try the exercise that worked so well for me. Get a piece of paper and spend two or three of minutes writing down anything you’re especially grateful for in that moment. See what effect it has on how you’re feeling. […]

Here’s the paradox: The more you’re able to move your attention to what makes you feel good, the more capacity you’ll have to manage whatever was making you feel bad in the first place. Emotions are contagious, for better or worse. It’s your choice.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photos { Edward Steichen, Landon Rives as Melpomene, 1904 | Studio Manasse, Woman Smoking, 1928 }

The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

{ John Sifton/Warscapes | Continue reading | Thanks Aaron }

Tim Cook […] reminded a Senate subcommittee that Apple is investing $100 million to make some of its Macintosh computers in the U.S. […] The operation, to be based in Texas, will be Apple’s first domestic assembly foray since 2004, and other technology manufacturers are moving jobs onshore. Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility, for example, also plans to assemble smartphones in Texas.

It’s not all public relations: These companies are taking advantage of low energy costs and a decade of wage stagnation, which has made U.S. factory jobs more competitive with those in China, where wages are rising.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Holograms of human figures are appearing increasingly often in airports as virtual assistants. And they may also be introduced in various commercial activities. […]

The woman was two-dimensional, a projection on a human-shaped glass sheet. […] She is a product by Tensator®, a “queue control and management solutions” brand. Installed in June of last year, an aviation trade publication reported she cost the airport only 26,000 dollars. The avatar runs 24 hours a day and is portable so she can be moved to other areas of the terminal. […] You will find similar holographic announcers or “airport virtual assistants” in Dubai, Washington Dulles, Macau, Istanbul Ataturk and Long Beach, among other locations. […] The next step will be to install more interactive virtual assistants, which might answer basic questions from travellers about things like flight times, gates or rental car locations. Their plan is to provide models with a touch-screen interface next to the avatar rather than Siri-style speech technology. Voice recognition, while available in the more expensive models (roughly 100,000 dollars) isn’t recommended for airports due to the likelihood of interference from background noise. […]

Musion is better known for their less practical work: reviving dead celebrity singers. Their most famous project was the digital resurrection of Tupac Shakur at last year’s Coachella Festival. The company also recreated Frank Sinatra to perform at Simon Cowell’s 50th birthday party. […] Copyright permissions and objections from various estates, in addition to the high costs, have so far prevented “resurrections” from becoming a more widespread trend.

{ Domus | Continue reading }

art { Wayne White }

Sitting in front of a computer monitor all day may soon be officially against doctors’ advice.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Why More People Are Renting Tires.

Wal-Mart has in recent months been only hiring temporary workers at many of its U.S. stores, the first time the world’s largest retailer has done so outside of the holiday shopping season.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs.

The effectiveness of placebo treatment for pain is related to personality traits.

People anticipate others’ genuine smiles, but not polite smiles.

How many newly-adopted pets are still kept six months later?

Three Ways to Discover If Your Puppy’s a Prodigy.

Researchers used GPS trackers to record the cats’ movements over six 24-hour periods. Micro-cameras were attached to a selection of cats to film their activities.

Real-Life ‘Game of Life’ to be Played on Japanese Island.

Bill Regulating 3D Printed Guns Announced In NYC.

Can you patent genes? The court is trying to protect big pharma and our economy without offending basic principles of ethics and law. It may succeed in doing neither.

He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.

Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence.

Fraud cost online retailers $3.5 billion last year. Credit bureaus and payment companies (PayPal, Intuit…) have begun trials to see whether social posts can help prove identities or detect whether customers are lying about their finances.

Predicting collective online behavior. A new study shows that small websites, in terms of daily user flux based on number of clicks, have a disproportionally high impact when it comes to traffic generation and influence compared to larger websites.

New diet craze offers five days of feasting for two days of famine.

Japan’s youth is caught up in a new craze — eyeball licking.

The truth about female desire: It’s base, animalistic and ravenous. A new book on women’s sexuality turns everything we think we know on its head.

Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999) [PDF] [Thanks Paul]

When Winogrand died, of gallbladder cancer in 1984, he left behind more than half a million exposures. Most of them were unedited. Most of them he had never even looked at.

How Do Death Valley’s “Sailing Stones” Move Themselves Across the Desert?

How to: Instant Ice. [video]

Sid Vicious on his way to a David Bowie concert in London, 1973.

5 Unusual Ways to Reduce Crime.

47,000 Hand-Painted Stars.

40 Numbers Under 40.

Experience: I’ve worn the same outfit as my husband for 35 years.

How sad when atheists die.

Prisoner of the month.

Back in 1996, economist Paul Krugman wrote an essay about the next 100 years of economic history, as if looking back from the year 2096. […]

When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

… Many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. The others can be done by any intelligent person, whether or not she has studied world literature.

{ io9 | Continue reading }

A new study by Alison Lenton is one of the first to investigate what being true to oneself actually feels like. […]

Participants describing a time they’d felt authentic, as opposed to phony, tended to say the experience overlapped far more with their ideal self. There’s an obvious contradiction here. If they were being themselves, how come they resembled their ideal self, which is likely to be influenced by social expectations? One possibility is that what we really mean by “be true to yourself” is “be the person you want to be”.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Danny Lyon, Union Square station, New York City, 1966 }

Risk compensation is an interesting effect where increasing safety measures will lead people to engage in more risky behaviors.

For example, sailors wearing life jackets may try more risky maneuvers as they feel ‘safer’ if they get into trouble. If they weren’t wearing life jackets, they might not even try. So despite the ‘safety measures’ the overall level of risk remains the same due to behavioral change.

This happens in other areas of life.

{ MindHacks | Continue reading }

photo { Gert Jochems }

REITs [Real Estate Investment Trust] are sold like stocks, and they’re held by many individuals and institutional investors. You might have a REIT in your retirement fund. REITs are trusts that own and develop property and earn rental income. […] “They are forced by law — a law created in 1960 — that provides that real estate investment trusts have to meet certain tests,” says Brad Thomas, editor of the Intelligent REIT Investor. “And if they do, they are forced to pay out 90 percent of their taxable income in the form of dividends.” Those dividends are a regular stream of income, and they’re what make REITs attractive to investors.

I put down $513.94 on a REIT index fund. It’s basically a smorgasbord of many different REITs. It contains what you might expect — REITs that own apartment buildings and shopping centers. But Thomas says the range of REITs today goes far beyond that, “from billboards to prisons to cell towers, campus housing. Even solar is on the horizon potentially.”

{ NPR | Continue reading }

related { Agents use a median 250 characters for homes listed under $100,000. For homes priced over $1 million, they go nearly twice as long, with a median 487 characters. }

related { If There Is A “Housing Recovery” Then This Chart Can’t Be Right }

The US Supreme Court today ruled that Myriad, the US biotech company that holds a monopoly on testing for a set of breast-cancer related genes, can’t hold a patent on genetic material. But after the news broke, Myriad’s stock shot up.

Here’s why: […] While the court ruled that a gene in its natural state is something that can’t be owned—even if it’s been isolated, which Myriad argued warranted a patent—it also ruled that complementary DNA, or cDNA, could be proprietary. Created artificially in the lab, the cDNA version of the BRCA genes lack so-called “junk” DNA, the pieces that don’t contribute to the gene’s production of proteins. This technical difference, according to the ruling, makes the genes unique enough to be distinguished legally from their natural cousins.

{ Quartz | Continue reading | Washington Post }

Certain traits, like height and hair color can largely be explained through simple genetics: If both of your parents are tall with blond hair, chances are you will be too. However, not all genes are created equal and most traits are not controlled by a single gene. Instead, most traits, such as metabolism, personality, intelligence, and even many diseases, are much more complex and rely on the interactions of hundreds of different genes. The complexity doesn’t stop there. If it did, then identical twins would be exactly the same; but they are not. Although they tend to be extremely similar, identical twins can still differ greatly in health and personality. This is because, although they carry an identical set of genes, their genes may be expressed at different levels. Genes are not simply turned “on” or “off” like a light switch, but instead function more like a dimmer switch with a dynamic range of expression. The amount that a gene is expressed can differ from one person (or twin) to another and can even fluctuate within a single individual. The mechanisms by which these kinds of changes take place are extremely complicated and are influenced by a variety of factors including one’s internal and external environment. Epigenetics is the study of these kinds of changes and the mechanisms behind them.

{ Knowing Neurons | Continue reading }

photo { Berenice Abbott, Static Electricity, c1950 }

{ The Shepard tables use perspective and other contextual clues (such as the legs) to fool our visual system into thinking that two tabletops are different shapes, although measurement will confirm that they are in fact identical. | Natural selection has not equipped us with a truthful visual system }