a hardcore band named Llorona has fired their singer after he allegedly dosed his bandmate with estrogen in a plot to steal his fiancée.

Seventy-five percent of facial plastic surgeons reported a spike in demand from clients under 30, while 79 percent agree that “looking better in selfies” is a trend that continues to rise

In this research, we see a so-called nocebo effect when people eat gluten. If people expect gluten to produce negative effects, they experience symptoms, even if it turns out afterwards that they were not actually eating gluten.

Study Links Everyday Chemicals to Parkinson’s Disease in Western U.S. […] The study involved 21.5 million people. […] researchers looked for a possible relationship between rates of Parkinson’s and the use of 65 pesticides. They found that the pesticides and herbicides simazine, atrazine, and lindane had the strongest relationship with Parkinson’s disease

psychedelic research raises concerns about the potential for psychedelics to enhance suggestibility and create false memories

ChatGPT fails to meet the criteria of authorship because it lacks the ability to perform illocutionary speech acts such as promising or asserting, lacks the fitting mental states like knowledge, belief, or intention, and cannot take responsibility for the texts it produces.

One swipe from a tiger’s claw could kill you instantaneously. Meanwhile, grizzly bears have more strength in one paw than we do in our whole bodies, and gorillas can lift up to four times their own body weight. The world’s strongest animals are fearsome and for the most part predictable, but at the top of this formidable list is one that might surprise you: elephants. African bush elephants are the most powerful land animal by far […] During dry seasons, they dig up riverbeds and create watering holes that their neighbors benefit from, too. They clear away trees and saplings to keep the savannah accessible for other animals such as zebras. And they spread vast quantities of seeds through their dung, gardening and helping plants to thrive.

Asian elephants loudly mourn and bury their dead calves, new study

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is capable of using. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev (1932–2019). […] A Type I civilization is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption. Hypothetically, it should also be able to control natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. A Type II civilization can directly consume a star’s energy, most likely through the use of a Dyson sphere. A Type III civilization is able to capture all the energy emitted by its galaxy, and every object within it, such as every star, black hole, etc.

What happens if you take motion blur past its logical extreme?

A speculative essay proposing that the human subconscious mind can understand language but, while it can communicate with the sleeping mind via images in dreams, it can only communicate to an individual’s awake mind via what appear to the individual as a random recall of a musical song in working memory.

Lawyers who voided Elon Musk’s pay as excessive want $6 billion fee, payable in the electric car maker’s stock […] The fee works out to an hourly rate of $288,888

Cambridge academic escapes toilet using eyeliner and cotton

the researchers observed the body switching energy sources – from glucose to fat stored in the body – within the first two or three days of fasting. The volunteers lost an average of 5.7 kg of both fat mass and lean mass. After three days of eating after fasting, the weight stayed off – the loss of lean was almost completely reversed, but the fat mass stayed off. […] results provide evidence for the health benefits of fasting beyond weight loss, but these were only visible after three days of total caloric restriction

researchers in South Korea have figured out a way to use sound to influence the formation of connections between neurons — and not only could it lead to new medical treatments, it might even make learning easier for everyone.

The 3 myths of mindfulness Not all thoughts are equal […] Attention is often beyond your control […] It is impossible to “seize the day”

Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump.

The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost,

Is it possible to deduce the shape of a drum from the sounds it makes? Last summer, Polterovich and his international collaborators—Nikolay Filonov, Michael Levitin and David Sher—proved a special case of a famous conjecture in spectral geometry formulated in 1954 by the eminent Hungarian-American mathematician George Pólya. The conjecture bears on the estimation of the frequencies of a round drum or, in mathematical terms, the eigenvalues of a disk.

A pair of orcas working in concert have been killing great whites along a stretch of South African coastline since at least 2017, plundering the sharks’ nutrient-rich livers and discarding the rest. […] Scientists witnessed one of the hunters, a male orca known as Starboard, single-handedly kill a 2.5-meter (8.2-foot) juvenile white shark within a two-minute time frame last year. The killer orcas are scaring off great white shark populations, but researchers don’t know where the sharks are relocating. “As they relocate, they might end up overlapping with heavy commercial fisheries”

about 30% of the world’s countries mandate left-side driving and another 70% or so stay to the right […]

The Trojan War was fought in Finland and Ulysses sailed home to Denmark, says one controversial theory.

Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family (Why does this lady have a fly on her head?)

Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That’s Only About Roads

Meta’s layoffs continue to impact advertisers as the company replaces account team members with AI

It bothers me that there is so little usable infrastructure beneath artists and so much baroque architecture built on top of us. I’m sorry to bring him up incessantly but Pablo Picasso wasn’t fucking around with artist statements. He and his buddies were hanging out, inventing new ways to use the senses […] They want us to describe ourselves in GRANT-WRITING LANGUAGE like we are PROJECT MANAGERS rather than to describe our ideas with the MANY VARIED LANGUAGES OF ART! […] Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world

Late last year, astronomers discovered a fascinating star system only 100 light-years away from us. Its six sub-Neptune planets circle very close to their host star in mathematically perfect orbits, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures, which they argue would offer compelling evidence of advanced life beyond Earth.

Arctic Ice shipped its first container of around 22 tons of Greenland ice to Dubai this year for sale to high-end bars and restaurants

How does the sky turn dark at night?

{ Emma Stone by Yorgos Lanthimos for W | full story }

Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent

botanical gardens can lower the temperature of inner city air by as much as 5 °C. Wetlands and rain gardens are not far behind in the cooling stakes, at 4.7 and 4.5 °C respectively, trees planted along streets also lowered air temps by 3.8 °C while city parks managed 3.2 °C.

Maker uses Raspberry Pi and AI to block noisy neighbor’s music byhacking nearby Bluetooth speakers

A New York City medical school will offer students free tuition following a $1bn donation from the 93-year-old widow of a major Wall Street investor.

the number of active serial killers dwindled from 198 in 1987, the largest number on record, to 12 in 2018. Why the decline? Simply put, it’s harder than ever to get away with serial murder.

Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be?

Police only make an arrest — or “clear” a case, in justice jargon — in about 60 percent of all homicides. The other 5,000 end without closure. In other words, murderers have a 40 percent chance of getting away with murder. The question is, how many of those unsolved cases are the work of a serial killer?

Mary Poppins’ UK age rating raised to PG — It was changed because of a derogatory term for the Khoikhoi, a group of people who were among the first inhabitants of southern Africa.

The creation of the PG-13 rating in 1984

“Today’s date is April 20, approximately 7 a.m. Just want to document my visit to the Hayden Library. My attorney and I are just curious and would like to document this visit to see what kind of materials are on display here.” update: full video

Waymo’s self-driving cars keep hitting things, including a cyclist, a gate and a pickup

After listening to the same playlist, people from the United Kingdom, the United States, and China reported feeling nearly identical bodily sensations

More Generative AI Tools are Coming to Social Apps — there are already a heap of these options available, which, intentional or not, effectively reduce, and even eliminate, human input in the process.

the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.

How Incidental Sadness Reduces Morally Questionable Behavior

positive fortune telling can yield increased financial risk taking in men, but not (or less so) in women

American drivers are now even more distracted by their phones. Pedestrian deaths are soaring.

The division that includes the Apple Watch and AirPods now accounts for 10% of the company’s revenue, up from less than 5% a decade ago.

If generative models make video creation easier, it will mean we see more unwanted video in more and more places, as well as the further development of techniques to use video to confuse and con people.

Hallucination has been widely recognized to be a significant drawback for large language models (LLMs). There have been many works that attempt to reduce the extent of hallucination. These efforts have mostly been empirical so far, which cannot answer the fundamental question whether it can be completely eliminated. In this paper, we formalize the problem and show that it is impossible to eliminate hallucination in LLMs.

New compact facial-recognition system passes test on Michelangelo’s David

Do people and bananas really share 50 percent of the same DNA? […] “You share 50 percent of your DNA with each of your parents. But with bananas, we share about 50 percent of our genes, which turns out to be only about 1 percent of our DNA” […] One thing to keep in mind is that genes, which are the regions of the DNA that code for these proteins, only make up 2 percent of your DNA. […] Eight percent of the rest of your DNA regulates genes (as to whether a gene should be turned on or off). The other 90 percent appear to have unknown functions or functions that have been lost through evolution.

these shrimp are actually born with eyes, but they lose the eyes and develop a light sensor on their body as they reach adulthood

How Google is killing independent sites like ours And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google

A total of 30 male and 30 female subjects attended four speed-dates each. Subjects were more likely to choose those dating partners with whom they shared more eye-contact with. Perceived attractiveness played an important role for mate choice. Receiving but not giving eye-contact also predicted individual mate choice.

weird information to dispense on a first date

Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging

chatgpt is apparently going off the rails right now and no one can explain why, more

During World War II, when materials were scare, the Academy started using plaster for their Oscar bases as it was less expensive. (After the war, spun brass was used and still is today.)

Fake Funeral Live Stream Scams Are All Over Facebook

Kilt-clad man seen sticking antiques ‘in his rectum’ then ‘placing them back on the shelves,’ cops say

Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets

Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen

“For all adults engaging in any regular physical activity, compared to being inactive […] mortality risk was reduced by 24% in women and 15% in men.”

Researchers have created lab-grown testicle organoids

Penn Engineers have developed a new chip that uses light waves, rather than electricity, to perform the complex math essential to training AI. The chip has the potential to radically accelerate the processing speed of computers while also reducing their energy consumption.

Microsoft announced that it caught Chinese, Russian, and Iranian hackers using its AI tools — presumably coding tools — to improve their hacking abilities.

AI Your Home on Street View

Chinese Robot Waiter Enhances Dining Experience [Thanks Tim]

Instead of killing animals for food, why not manufacture beef or chicken in a laboratory vat? That’s the humane idea behind “lab-grown meat.” The problem, though, is making the stuff at a large scale. Take Upside Foods. The startup, based in Berkeley, California, had raised more than half a billion dollars and was showing off rows of big, gleaming steel bioreactors.

But journalists soon learned that Upside was a bird in borrowed feathers. Its big tanks weren’t producing its flagship “whole textured chicken” filets; to produce those it was growing chicken skin cells in much smaller laboratory flasks. Thin layers of cells were then being manually scooped up and pressed into chicken pieces. In other words, Upside was using lots of labor, plastic, and energy to make hardly any meat. […]

And even though lab-grown chicken has FDA approval, there’s doubt whether lab meat will ever compete with the real thing. Chicken goes for $4.99 a pound at the supermarket. Upside still isn’t saying how much the lab version costs to make, but a few bites of it sell for $45 at a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco.

{ The worst technology failures of 2023 | Technology Review }

oil on panel { Pablo Picasso, La Poule, 1950 }

A loophole got him a free New York hotel stay for five years. Then he claimed to own the building

Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. — How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000

There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running the campaign, but we do know it’s facilitated by Google’s amazingly trustworthy approach to DMCA complaints made by companies that don’t exist.

Los Angeles-based EQTY Lab created a new method, employing cryptography and blockchain, to track the origins and characteristics of large language models, and provide transparency on their inner workings, so companies and regulators can easily inspect them. Its software essentially tracks the different parts of an AI model as it’s being developed, and turns the information into a cryptographic signature stored on a blockchain, making it theoretically impossible to tamper with.

OpenAI tries to trademark ‘GPT’. US Patent Office says nope

there are small RNA species, hitherto unknown, that seem to be colonizing bacteria in the human oral mucosa and gut

consumption of certain food additive emulsifiers may increase the risk of cancer — the researchers found that higher intakes of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471) were associated with increased risks of cancer overall (a 15% higher risk among those consuming the most – 3rd tertile – compared with those consuming the least – 1st tertile), breast cancer (a 24% higher risk), and prostate cancer (a 46% higher risk). On the other hand, women with higher carrageenan intakes (E407 and E407a) had a 32% higher risk of developing breast cancer, compared with the group with lower intakes.

Room Acoustics and Musical Emotion in Recorded Music Listening — The main findings showed that room acoustic features did not have a strong effect on ‘Unease’ or ‘Vitality’ components of the GEMS, but rather influenced aspects of ‘Sublimity’ (i.e., ‘Nostalgia’, ‘Transcendence’, ‘Wonder’).

Inside Johnny Depp’s Epic Bromance With Saudi Crown Prince MBS

In ancient Sparta, it was accepted practice for more women to marry and have children by more than one man […] unmarried men could be forced to march around the public square in the winter, wearing a tunic and singing about themselves. In contrast, men with three sons were exempt from military service, and those with at least four didn’t have to pay any taxes.

The most blatant exaggeration was the listed size of Mr. Trump’s triplex apartment in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. For years, the former president had valued it as if it were 30,000 square feet, when it was actually 10,996.

Trump Supporters Start GoFundMe Page for $355M Fine

update feb 18: Trump launches a pair of gold sneakers named “The Never Surrender High-Tops,” $399, “At Least 10 Randomly Autographed by Trump,” “Only 1000 Pairs,” SOLD OUT, also selling two versions of sneakers that have “T” and “45” on the sides for $199, the “Victory47 Cologne by President Trump” for $99…

This work investigated the prevalence of filter bubble or echo chamber-related phenomena, psychological factors rendering individuals resilient or vulnerable to them, and their associations to political views focusing on extremity and polarization. […] These findings challenge the prevailing notion of filter bubbles and echo chambers as widespread phenomena and indicate that relationships between political news consumption homogeneity and political views are not necessarily deleterious with respect to extremization and polarization. […] As such, the results suggest that these phenomena might not be as significant for the general population as previously thought

The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce.

A year or more after weight loss, the desire to eat grows stronger, study

States with higher narcissism had lower obesity and depression rates, and a lower likelihood of heart failure and hypertension deaths. However, these states reported less sleep and higher demand for plastic surgeons.

Water found on the surface of an asteroid for the 1st time ever […] that can shed light on how water was delivered to Earth […] asteroids are believed to be the primary source of Earth’s water, providing the necessary elements for life as we know it.

Our human ancestors often ate each other, some of the time they did it to honour their dead

With maceration, bones are cleaned of tissue by bacteria; it is a rotting process. There are several maceration techniques, of which warm-water maceration at 35 C is the most effective. This temperature is optimal for the bacteria to live, digest and multiply. With these techniques, all cartilage gets dissolved, and all unfused bones will separate. Therefore, warm-water maceration is not the most ideal technique for complete skeletons of small mammals (up to the size of a rabbit), since putting the many small bones of hands and feet together will be extremely difficult. […] A closed container is needed, like a plastic bucket with lid, a glass jar or a metal can.

It wasn’t illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition […] In 1851 the Maine legislature passed a statewide prohibition on selling alcohol […] To this day, 10 states still contain counties where alcohol sales are prohibited outright. 10 Things You Should Know About Prohibition

While most fast food restaurants have their Coca-Cola syrup delivered to them in plastic bags,
McDonald’s gets their syrup specially delivered in stainless steel tanks.

Sapolsky’s “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” employs modern scientific evidence to argue that intent and volition are products of antecedent causes rather than manifestations of free will. Through a comprehensive review of cognitive neuroscience, Sapolsky illustrates how intent emerges from the complex interplay of brain structures that are effectively predetermined by a web of causality that includes genetic, environmental and cultural factors. This review also highlights the book’s implications of determinism for concepts such as moral responsibility, retributive justice, and societal perceptions of human exceptionalism.

We recruited 204 marital dyads from South Korea […] Wives with long and high-quality hair have more frequent sex

Attraction to an Alternative and Romantic Relationship Quality, Breakups and Infidelity

San Antonio had the highest proportion of agreeable people, while Manhattan had the highest proportion of open persons, but the lowest proportion of people who were agreeable or conscientious. Does Your Community Have a Personality Type?

Regardless of what you’re attempting to measure: height, political preferences, number of flowers owned, or even coin toss results, if your sample size is large enough, you always get a Bell curve, or normal distribution. There’s a profound reason why

Kunath asked one group of people who had Parkinson’s and another group of people who didn’t have Parkinson’s to take home white T-shirts, wear them overnight and then return them. Then Kunath gave the T-shirts to Joy Milne to smell. Joy not only could smell Parkinson’s but could smell it even in the absence of its typical medical presentation.

Lyft Inc. issued a massive correction to its outlook for earnings margin in 2024 , saying its margin is expected to expand by 50 basis points — not the 500 basis points written into an earnings presentation released earlier on Tuesday. […] The blowout forecast may have contributed to a surge in Lyft’s shares in after-market trading on Tuesday. The stock jumped as much as 67% on the company’s outlooks before erasing gains during the call with investors. It was up 20% at 5:52 p.m. in New York.

Tesla Sold Only One Car in Korea in January and Cybertruck Owners Say They’re Already Rusting

“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans.” A spicy paper. It’s not clear how to calculate emissions for human writers though because it depends on what you assume the writer would be doing if not writing

Your AI Girlfriend Is a Data-Harvesting Horror Show — the chatbots actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than in a typical app.

Air Canada found liable for chatbot’s bad advice on plane tickets

Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article

Passing Stars Changed the Orbits of Planets in the Solar System

How to Lay Claim to a Brand New Island

At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was walking through a park one day in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.

The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll saying “please don’t cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures.” Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka’s life.

During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable. Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin.

“It doesn’t look like my doll at all,” said the girl. Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: “my travels have changed me.” The little girl hugged the new doll and brought the doll with her to her happy home. A year later Kafka died. Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter signed by Kafka it was written: “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way.”

{ Avi | a true anecdote, unproven }

How Walmart, Delta, Chevron, T-Mobile, Starbucks, Nestle and AstraZeneca are using AI to monitor employee messages […] can see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular geography are responding to a new corporate policy or marketing campaign […] AI models, built to read text and process images, can also identify bullying, harassment, discrimination, noncompliance, pornography, nudity and other behaviors

A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco

Viagra may help reduce Alzheimer’s risk, according to a new study Previously: Viagra was originally developed for the treatment high blood pressure (hypertension) and angina pectoris (chest pain due to heart disease)

Women who had their first period at age 12 or younger had a decreased risk for dementia. Women who experienced menopause after the age of 50 had a 24 percent decreased risk for dementia.

smokers who quit smoking before age 40 can expect to live almost as long as those who never smoked

24 million Americans have an autoimmune diseases. Can these therapies cure them?

Growing evidence indicates that the benefits stemming from dance are in both physical and mental dimensions, and these advantages are not limited to specific people. Compared to the non-exercise group, dance can ameliorate VO2peak [maximum rate of oxygen consumption attainable during physical exertion], blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, physical fitness, cognitive disorders, and mental health. For physically inactive females, Ljubojevic et al. observed that an 8-week Zumba achieved effective enhancements in body composition and respiratory functionality. Similar improvements were also identified within the diseased population. A pilot study demonstrated that dance can improve body mass index(BMI) and body fat percentage(Fat(%)), while also enhancing their physical activity. People with Parkinson’s disease can achieve physical(balance, functional mobility, and cognition) and mental(self-esteem, quality of life, and motor symptoms) improvements from dancing.

One year in the life of a part-time hermit

Balancing cube

Scientists can reverse aging in mice — Using proteins that can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, Sinclair and his team have reset aging cells in mice to earlier versions of themselves.

We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards.

Chernobyl’s mutant wolves appear to have developed resistance to cancer, study finds

Indian model Poonam Pandey fakes death to raise cervical cancer awareness

Previously: The courts believed that the actors who portrayed the missing film crew and the native actress featured in the impalement scene were killed for the camera. Compounding matters was the fact that the supposedly deceased actors had signed contracts with the production which ensured that they would not appear in any type of media, motion pictures, or commercials for one year following the film’s release. This was done in order to promote the idea that Cannibal Holocaust was truly the recovered footage of missing documentarians.

Adults who are married report being far happier than those in any other relationship status, according to a Gallup Poll — “In my practice over the last decade I’ve noticed a gradual shift from the ‘romantic marriage’ to the ‘companionate marriage,’ meaning that people are increasingly choosing spouses at the outset who are more like best friends than passion-partners”

A Grand Bargain Is Emerging in the Supreme Court’s Trump Cases The Supreme Court unanimously, or nearly so, holds that Colorado does not have the power to remove Donald Trump from the ballot, but in a separate case it rejects his immunity argument and makes Trump go on trial this spring or summer on federal election subversion charges

Add coffee stains to your documents

stract.com

Did you know that there’s a building on wheels in New York City?

Why China Can’t Export Its Model of Surveillance — It’s Not the Tech That Empowers Big Brother in Beijing—It’s the Informants

Epicurus considered pleasure to be the highest value, the attainment of which must be subordinated to all actions. He understood it as the absence of pain and suffering, as the absence of anxiety and emotional turmoil, as inner order, harmony and unshakeable peace of mind. […] Epicurus became very popular in Athens but, as often happens, over-popularity does not pay.

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005), Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links (1989) [more]

Casey Neistat + Apple Vision Pro

Look at the dot (and breathe) for just 1 minute to improve mental focus for your next task

Scientists have 3D bioprinted functioning human brain tissue

When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence. Instead, genes’ activity — whether they are expressed or not, for instance, or the length of protein that they encode — depends on myriad external factors, from the diet to the environment in which the organism develops. And each trait can be influenced by many genes.

This AI learnt language by seeing the world through a baby’s eyes

An underground website called OnlyFake is claiming to use “neural networks” to generate realistic looking photos of fake IDs for just $15

Zero-knowledge security model: an introduction

TikTok is fumbling critical business partnerships and cluttering its app with unpopular features.

Many night-flying insects hear the sonar sounds of attacking bats and take evasive action. Among moths, evasive flight is often accompanied by the production of ultrasonic sounds. Three functions of these sounds have been proposed: to startle the bat, to warn of distastefulness, or to “jam” the bat’s sonar system.

Scientists now think they know why tardigrades are so indestructible

Last month, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon office responsible for investigating unexplained aerial events, stepped down. He said he was tired of being harassed and accused of hiding evidence, and he lamented an erosion in “our capacity for rational, evidence-based critical thinking.” No, aliens haven’t visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’ — “(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake”

Chinese spy pigeon in lockup during 8 months

Our data revealed that overall, a ketogenic diet was associated with a significant upregulation of pathways and enrichment in cells associated with the adaptive immune system. In contrast, a vegan diet had a significant impact on the innate immune system […] Our study revealed that a 2-week dietary intervention can impose a striking shift in host immunity, superseding genetics, age, sex, ethnicity, race and even body mass index.

The innate immune system is the body’s first line of defense against germs entering the body. It responds in the same way to all germs and foreign substances […] The adaptive immune system takes over if the innate immune system is not able to destroy the germs. It specifically targets the type of germ that is causing the infection. But to do that it first needs to identify the germ. This means that it is slower to respond than the innate immune system, but when it does it is more accurate. It also has the advantage of being able to “remember” germs, so the next time a known germ is encountered, the adaptive immune system can respond faster.

A fentanyl cook — who calls himself Miguel — carries out macabre experiments on a handful of consumers, who test the merchandise before it’s shipped off to the United States. They start with one dose: one third pure and the rest, cut. The “human guinea pigs” inject it in front of him. If they say, “No, it didn’t rock me, it didn’t put me to sleep, add more,” the percentage increases.

Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

the “only physician-owned Diaper Spa in the world” and says it is open to “all diaper-wearing individuals who seek acceptance, respite, and care” […] All clients are required to wear adult diapers.

How many people randomly had a dream about a plane crash the night before 9/11 and have believed they were psychic ever since?