Police have arrested a teen girl they say took an empty New York City subway train on a brief joyride before they crashed it and fled.

For the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S.

researchers now run small AIs on their laptops Artificial-intelligence models are typically used online, but a host of openly available tools is changing that. Here’s how to get started with local AIs.

Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here’s how reporters can eschew it.

Scientists Identify New Blood Group After a 50 Year Mystery

2024 was the year the music festival died

Does the status people possess shape their subjective well-being? […] people have a competitive orientation towards status; they not only want to have high status on an absolute level (e.g., to be highly respected and admired), but also to have higher status than others (e.g., to be more respected and admired than others)

Diddy’s Homes Reportedly Fitted With Hidden Cameras In Every Room — cameras supposedly captured alleged disturbing footage of his guests including “celebrities, athletes, politicians, international dignitaries, and music label executives.” Related: United States of America vs. SEAN COMBS a/k/a “Puff Daddy,” a/k/a “P. Diddy”, a/k/a “PD, a/k/a “Love”

The Ring of Gyges is a hypothetical magic ring mentioned by the philosopher Plato in Book 2 of his Republic. It grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Using the ring as an example, this section of the Republic considers whether a rational, intelligent person who has no need to fear negative consequences for committing an injustice would nevertheless act justly. […] the man who abused the power of the Ring of Gyges has in fact enslaved himself to his appetites, while the man who chose not to use it remains rationally in control of himself and is therefore happy.

The basic rule is that the chief executive officer of a company works for the board of directors, and the directors work for the shareholders. Sometimes, though, the CEO is also the controlling shareholder, and this becomes circular: She works for the directors, who work for her. If they disagree, things get weird. If they’re unhappy with her, they can fire her, but then she can fire them.

This doesn’t come up all that often in basic job-performance situations […] It does happen, though: We talked last year about World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., whose board of directors pushed out founder-CEO Vince McMahon after sexual misconduct allegations, and then, as controlling shareholder, he pushed them out.

It comes up more often in mergers and acquisitions, and particularly in going-private transactions. […]

The directors work for all the shareholders, and they can’t just do what the controlling shareholder wants if it’s bad for the other shareholders. But the controlling shareholder gets to pick the board, and if they are too independent she can pick a new board. They can get fired for doing their job too well.

Anyway:

All seven independent directors of DNA-testing company 23andMe resigned Tuesday, following a protracted negotiation with founder and Chief Executive Anne Wojcicki over her plan to take the company private.

It is the latest challenge for 23andMe, which has struggled to find a profitable business model. The stock price rose a penny on Tuesday to $0.35 per share. At that price, 23andMe’s valuation is just $7 million more than the cash on its balance sheet. That represents a 99.9% decline from its $6 billion peak valuation just after going public in 2021. […]

Wojcicki controls 49% of 23andMe votes, giving her a level of control that blocked board members from shopping the company to other potential bidders. She is the only remaining board member after the resignations.

{ Matt Levine/Bloomberg | Continue reading }

The move is almost certainly the final nail in the coffin for the embattled company known for its mail-order DNA-testing kit. Since going public via merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2021, 23andMe has never turned a profit. […]

The board includes Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha as well as Neal Mohan, who took the helm as CEO of YouTube last year after Susan Wojcicki, Anne’s late sister, stepped down.

{ Fortune | Continue reading }

Thai woman freed after hours of being strangled by a python

Large Social Media and Video Streaming Companies Have Engaged in Vast Surveillance of Users, FTC Staff Report

Satellite images of the Sahara show a visible increase in vegetation compared to 2023, caused by the increased precipitation over the region

A new study sheds light on how we can work through regret … study helps people reenvision negative feelings about a bad decision or outcome … illustrates how you can reframe your memories to alter past regrets and make better choices in the future

How to Make Millions as a Professional Whistleblower

Why is it so hard to send humans back to the moon?

A network of fake accounts are posing as young American women and posting pro-Trump content online, hiding behind the images of European fashion influencers. [more]

Britain’s crime minister has bag stolen at police conference

A detailed study of a woman’s brain before, during and after pregnancy revealed sweeping neural changes, some of which stuck around months after her baby was born.

In 2018, at the height of VC investment, 51,302 start-ups were founded in China, according to data provider IT Juzi. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to 1,202 and is on track to be even lower this year. […] The crisis in the sector partly reflects the slowdown in the Chinese economy, which has been buffeted by the protracted Covid-19 lockdowns, the bursting of its property bubble and the stagnation of its equity markets. As bilateral tensions have risen, US-based investors have also largely pulled out. [FT]

Shein is officially the biggest polluter in fast fashion. the company nearly doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023. […] the fast fashion industry has begun embracing emerging AI technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine-learning applications — essentially, pattern-identification algorithms — to measure customer preferences in real time and predict demand, which it then services with an ultra-fast supply chain.

The first image of the Titan submersible sitting at the bottom of the ocean following its catastrophic implosion last year [Flashback: Missing Titanic sub crew killed after ‘catastrophic implosion’]

A woman who was in a sexual relationship with a plane for nine years has said she’s finally broken up with it.

Cheryl Meglio, “The Church Lady”, Specializing in the Sale of Church Real Estate. More: Monastery for sale in France

Hi, I’m Jimmy (MrBeast) and as the team is growing larger, I no longer get to spend as much time with everyone as I used to. […] Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. […]

What makes a Youtube video viral?

I spent basically 5 years of my life locked in a room studying virality on Youtube. Some days me and some other nerds would spend 20 hours straight studying the most minor thing: like is there a correlation between better lighting at the start of the video and less viewer drop off (there is, have good lighting at the start of the video haha) or other tiny things like that. And the result of those probably 20,000 to 30,000 hours of studying is I’d say I have a good grasp on what makes Youtube videos do well.

The three metrics you guys need to care about is Click Thru Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD), and Average View Percentage (AVP). Make sure you know those abbreviations because that’s how most people will refer to them. Up first we’ll talk about CTR. This is important no matter what department you work in. CTR is basically how many people see our thumbnail in their feeds divided by how many that click it. If 100,000,000 people see our thumbnail and 10,000,000 click on it then that means 10% clicked and we have a 10% ctr. This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”. […]

AVD. This is how long on average people watch a given video. The cool thing about Youtube is they give us super detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second we lose a viewer on every single video. […] The first minute of each video is the most important minute of each video. After the first minute of content you will have what we call minutes 1 thru 3. This is where you have to transition from hype to execution (generally). Stop telling people what they will be watching and start showing them.

{ HOW TO SUCCEED IN MrBEAST PRODUCTION | Continue reading }

Aggressive interactions can strongly influence an animal’s performance in subsequent contests. Winners of aggressive contests are more likely to win successive contests and losers are more likely to lose successive contests

Close friends seem to communicate almost telepathically. A single word or phrase can be loaded with meaning that would take pages of text to explain to an outsider. This linguistic compression is undeniably efficient. But is efficiency the only reason friends tend to speak in code? In a series of studies, we show that when people use “insider language” with each other they feel closer. Friends, as expected, use insider language more frequently than strangers, but even strangers are able to incorporate it into their conversations. While the content of insider language varies between friends and strangers, both groups experience heightened connection when it is used. These results suggest that the human ability to say more with less confers a social advantage beyond mere efficiency—one that may be challenging for conversational AI to replicate.

The Disunity of Consciousness in Everyday Experience

Online Dating Caused a Rise in US Income Inequality, Research Paper Shows

if there are macroscopic structures awaiting discovery in humans, imagine how much more true that will be of every other species that we haven’t been studying with extreme diligence and self-interest for millennia. […] Chickens are one of the commonly used model organisms in laboratory studies, and the basis for a multi- billion-dollar food industry. Surely we must know everything there is to know about their anatomy? (Spoiler alert: we do not.) […] A chicken or a cat has about the same number of body parts as a human, they’re just smaller and harder to see. Frogs seem to be a little simpler than shrews or hummingbirds, but it may also be that we know them less well, and dissect them less patiently and completely. […] Where is all this new anatomy hiding?

Former model and Miss Switzerland finalist Kristina Joksimovic allegedly murdered and “pureed” in a blender by her husband

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars

LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This — This work introduces the concept of Structural Hallucination as an intrinsic nature of these systems. By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated.

people primed with sexual desire for an alternative partner reported increased sexual desire for their romantic partner. People primed with sexual desire for their romantic partner, however, did not report increased sexual desire for alternatives

Analysis of the Psychological Factors of Love Murder Cases

Unlike Wi-Fi, which uses radio waves to create a wireless connection, Li-Fi relies on light to transmit data. Through this process, Li-Fi promises speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. Oldecomm is predicting that Li-Fi will be available anytime between 2024 and 2029.

Experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory showed that the interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs […] the chatbot could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual

How come some experts can’t distinguish red and white wines, and others can tell that it’s a 1951 Riesling from the Seine River Valley?

Japan’s cat testicle calendar

The modern forecasting community largely emerged from the work of one man: Philip Tetlock. In 1984, Tetlock, then a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, held his first forecasting tournament. His goal was to investigate whether experts — government officials, journalists, and academics — were better at making predictions in their areas of interest than intelligent laypeople. The upshot: Experts make for terrible forecasters.

“It is the teenage women …who are advancing [language] change.” The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new. William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change. […] in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681. The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men.

How farms are using ‘magic dust’ to capture carbon — The dust is crushed basalt – volcanic rock which can be found in abundance in quarries across the country.

Scientists plan to seed part of the Pacific Ocean with iron to trigger a surface bloom of phytoplankton that will hopefully suck carbon dioxide out of the air, reviving field trials of a geoengineering technique that has been taboo for more than a decade.

When Was the Last Time We Built a New City? — California Forever wants to build a new city in Solano county. On paper, it would be an affordable, high-density urbanist wonderland — but can they actually pull it off?

A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. […] One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video. […] It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

Ig Nobel Prize goes to scientists who discovered butt-breathing mammals

Antibiotic use is a risk factor for development of inflammatory bowel diseases

tubal sterilisations among women, colloquially known as ‘having your tubes tied’, increased in all states following the 2022 US Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion

findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets’ reputations, while also protecting gossipers’ reputations […] women’s denial of their own malicious motivations is a feature—not a bug—of female psychology

Angry Men are Perceived as Less Intelligent by Their Female Romantic Partners

Laughter may be as effective as drops for dry eyes

Breaking Down OnlyFans’ Stunning Economics

How SEC mobile phones can signal an imminent stock price drop […] The research used geolocation data to identify mobile phones that spent significant amounts of time at the SEC’s various offices around the country. They then tracked those phones to corporate headquarters around the world […] When insiders sold shares right around a non-public visit by staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission, they avoided average losses of 4.9 per cent in the three months after the visit

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives are dying […] There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software.

Princeton mathematician John Horton Conway memorized π to more than a thousand decimal places by marrying it to the periodic table of the elements

Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads

Facebook is scraping the public photos, posts and other data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry. The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law.

Mark Zuckerberg says he’s done apologizing

Women who use lots of makeup are more narcissistic, but less psychopathic. Damn, they can’t win. [study]

Researchers in Gabon studied tropical plants eaten by wild gorillas - and used also by local human healers - identifying four with medicinal effects. Laboratory studies revealed the plants were high in antioxidants and antimicrobials. One showed promise in fighting superbugs.

Research has shown that consuming whole foods still “packaged” in their original fibers and polyphenols – the cellular wrappers and colorful compounds in plants that confer many of their health benefits – leads to more calories lost through stool, when compared with processed foods that have been “predigested” by factories into simple carbs, refined fats and additives. Weight Loss Involves More Than Calories In, Calories Out.

Can a life full of suffering be good? This study might make it possible to answer this question in the affirmative. […] people’s expectations of how an event is going to impact them differ from thoughts and feelings during the event itself which differs from retrospective evaluations of the event in terms of associations with various indicators of wellbeing

Bijan’s father was Bijan Pakzad, a larger-than-life Iranian immigrant who founded House of Bijan in 1976 as an appointment-only Rodeo Drive temple of $65,000 croc-skin luggage, $15,000 vicuña coats and $120,000 chinchilla bedspreads. Over nearly four decades, Pakzad built the store into a destination for the ultra-rich. He parked a canary-yellow Rolls-Royce outside and appeared in ads smoking cigars with Michael Jordan and palling around with Bo Derek. House of Bijan developed a reputation for being the “most expensive store in the world,” before Pakzad died in 2011 and left it all to his youngest child, a then 19-year-old Nicolas. Today, the younger Bijan is 33 and trying to slip free from his father’s long shadow with an even more exclusive proposition: a members-only apparel brand. NB44, which he launched in 2021, costs $12,000 a year to join—a fee that doesn’t cover a single item of clothing. […] members get an all-in-one packaging of styling, networking, shipping, bespoke designs and even dry-cleaning. […] The company designs the clothes, styles them as outfits and ships them four times a year directly to members’ homes in personalized, racing-green trunks. […] over 5,000 people have filled out the prospective member questionnaire on NB44’s site. Just under 100 have been admitted [WSJ]

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) uses freeze marking to identify captured wild horses and burros. The left side of the neck is shaved and washed with alcohol, and the mark is applied with an iron that is chilled in liquid nitrogen. The hair at the site of the mark will grow back white and show the identification number.

“So long Google, the verb […] Younger audiences are ’searching’, not ‘Googling’”

Apple and Google Must Pay Multibillion-Dollar Fines After Losing EU Appeals

How we discovered that people who are colorblind are less likely to be picky eaters

A new variant of the ongoing sextortion email scams is now targeting spouses, saying that their husband or wife is cheating on them, with links to the alleged proof.

In 2018, Guernsey’s auctioned old Chelsea Hotel doors that had formerly led to the rooms of such accomplished people as Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol

A diamond – from the Greek ἀδάμας (adámas), meaning unconquerable – is a three-dimensional cubic or hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. As its bonds are strong and its atoms packed closely together, diamond is the hardest natural material and the least compressible. Diamonds have high thermal conductivity and high electrical resistivity, but can be combined with small amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and boron and made into semiconductors. […]

In nature, it takes billions of years to form a diamond. Most of the diamonds nature produces are too impure for jewelry or high-tech industry, and extracting them is costly and dirty. […]

Diamonds grown in the lab are now cheaper than mined diamonds and have superior physical, optical, chemical, and electrical properties. Consequently, they dominate the industrial market. In the past decade, diamond manufacturing technology progressed so much that it is now possible to mass-produce jewelry-quality diamonds in the lab. These lab diamonds are cheaper and more beautiful than mined diamonds. A perfectly cut, flawless lab diamond costs a fraction of the price of a mined diamond of lesser quality.

{ Works in Progress | Continue reading }

Almost half of doctors sexually harassed by patients, research covering seven countries finds, 52% of female doctors affected, 34% of male doctors

Rosenthal is among more than a thousand people who have received a procedure to help them burp […] Since 2019, the condition has had an official name: retrograde cricopharyngeus dysfunction, also known as “abelchia” or “no-burp syndrome.”

Emerging studies suggest that sleep plays a crucial role in optimising cognitive function by contributing to bodily restoration, memory consolidation, learning and emotional regulation. Sleep impairment, particularly common among elderly people, has been consistently linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. […] Severe sleep deprivation has been shown to induce alterations in synaptic plasticity and impairments in learning and memory, thus affecting cognition […] normal sleep duration (7-9 hours) and intermediate and evening chronotypes were generally associated with better cognitive performance than short sleep duration and morningness type. […] Our study showed an inverse relationship between morningness and cognitive performance in adults, contrasting with adolescent studies where morningness correlated with better health and mental well-being […] our results indicate that long sleep (≥10hours) is a significant negative predictor for cognitive performance […] findings highlight the vital role of sleep quality on cognitive health

Silicon Valley brides are handing out party-size packages of ZBiotics, an enzyme said to reduce headaches caused by too much wedding.

AI may not steal many jobs after all. It may just make workers more efficient

Ocean plastic pollution is one of the most urgent problems our oceans face today […] the elimination of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can be done at today’s level of performance in 10 years at a cost of $7.5bn

Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf.

Since 1953, the regional bank Credito Emiliano has accepted curious collateral for small-business loans: giant wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. […] The more it ages, the more delicious and valuable it becomes—like cash in an interest-bearing account.

Elon Musk now controls two thirds of all active satellites, SpaceX’s Starlink network is growing by an average of three satellites per day

The Hidden Engineering of Landfills — Digging a hole sounds like an obvious choice, but consider this: digging a hole is expensive, and not digging a hole is free. […] That’s why most landfills mostly build up into what sanitation professionals call the “air space.” […] eventually, it’s going to rain. […] We really don’t want garbage juice percolating into our soils. […] So, modern landfills use a bottom liner to keep waste separate from the underlying soils. Often this consists of a thick sheet of plastic […] Another option is thick clay soil compacted to create a watertight layer. In many cases, the two options are combined

For the third time this summer, birds on electrical lines have burst into flames, fallen to the ground and started a wildfire.

To understand how living cellular computers work, it’s helpful to think of them like a special kind of computer, where DNA is the “tape” that holds information. Instead of using silicon chips like regular computers, these systems use the natural processes in cells to perform tasks.

Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost.

People with greater mental resilience may live longer, especially women

Mosquitoes Are Using Infrared to Track Humans Down

“If you’re really lucky, someone might piss in your mouth.”

study links the decline of bats to a rise in newborn deaths […] Most North American bats eat insects, including pests like moths that damage crops. Without bats flying about, farmers spray more insecticides on their fields, the study shows, and exposure to insecticides is known to harm the health of newborns.

research suggests many planets that could evolve life don’t have a day and night cycle

Engineers have created a new type of robot that places living fungi behind the controls. The biohybrid robot uses electrical signals from an edible type of mushroom called a king trumpet in order to move around and sense its environment.

A common food dye can turn the skin of living mice transparent, enabling researchers to peer inside the body without surgery […] we don’t yet know if it’ll work in humans

Ketamine interrupts machine gun-like neural activity to alleviate depression

The New Recruitment Challenge: Filtering AI-Crafted Résumés

“ChatGPT needs to ‘drink’ a 500 ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed” […] What’s actually gobbling up all that H2O is the bit barn’s air handlers, often called evaporative or swamp coolers, used to keep those systems from overheating.

OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models without them.[…] OpenAI went on to insist that it complies with copyright laws and that the company believes “legally copyright law does not forbid training.”

Unlike past tech booms, this one is getting funded by tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia, rather than traditional venture firms

When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation.

Thieves typically “shoulder surf” victims to catch them entering their PIN before stealing the phone.

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, which houses 14 murals by American artist Mark Rothko, has been closed indefinitely due to damage from Hurricane Beryl

Charli XCX: I did a photo shoot yesterday and they dyed my eyebrows blonde, but then they dyed them back really dark. […] Were you hungover after Saturday? Rachel Sennott: 100 percent.

Barcelona Diarrhea Plane refers to a viral incident in early September 2023 in which a passenger on a transatlantic Delta Airlines flight to Spain reportedly had explosive diarrhea and, unable to contain it, defecated “all throughout the plane.” The incident forced the plane to turn around two hours into its flight and land from where it took off in Atlanta, Georgia so that the “biohazard” situation could be addressed.

comparison of near-death and psychedelic experiences — Results revealed areas of overlap between both experiences for phenomenology, attribution of reality, psychological insights, and enduring effects. A finer-grained analysis of the phenomenology revealed a significant overlap in mystical-like effects

Women are more likely to experience orgasm when masturbating or partnered with women than when partnered with men

A world-first study challenges our understanding of how humans cope with extreme heat

In this artwork, photos of people found on Google Street View were posted at the same physical locations from where they were taken. Life-size posters were printed in color, cut along the outlines, and then affixed to the walls of public buildings at the precise spot where they appear in Google Street View.

Fingerprints are becoming a ubiquitous entry device—used for background checks, travel security, and to open car doors without keys. But this unique identifier made of ridges and furrows can fade or temporarily wear down—and an increasing number of people are finding out just how easy it is to lose their fingerprints […] it became an issue for her when she applied for citizenship, and the first stage involved getting fingerprinted. […] Typically fingerprints return in a matter of months

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. They’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.

In what feels like a desperate attempt to stay afloat, 23andMe plans to… start prescribing weight loss drugs. How did we get here, with the once-mighty DNA testing company becoming just the latest to join the GLP-1 trend […] Even Scott Gottlieb’s Illumina, the flagship DNA sequencing company is struggling! […] Tome Biosciences, a high-profile gene editing startup spun out of MIT, is halting its lab work and looking to sell itself or find a partner to continue developing its technology. […] despite raising $213 million across two funding rounds, the three-year-old startup is running out of money. Since January, Tome has tried, and failed, to raise a third large round of funding needed to finish preclinical tests.

Can Plastic Waste Be Transformed Into Food for Humans? The bacteria that would otherwise eat plants can perhaps instead draw their energy from the plastic. After the bacteria consume the plastic, the microbes are then dried into a powder that smells a bit like nutritional yeast and has a balance of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins

You are what you eat — at least when it comes to the microbiome

The story of the “National Radio Quiet Zone” dates back to 1958, when the US federal government designated a region in West Virginia to help astronomers shield their sensitive equipment from interference. This means no radio signals, no cellphone coverage, and limited WiFi for the surrounding community. Even the vehicles transporting staff to and from the telescope must run on diesel, as gas cars’ spark plugs generate electrical interference. […] There’s also a long-standing theory that if other civilizations exist, they might emit radio waves, just as ours has since the dawn of radio communication in the 19th century. […] There have been a few moments of heightened excitement in the SETI community, including the 1977 detection of the so-called “Wow!” signal from the constellation Sagittarius, which remains unexplained.

Physicists recently created a time zone for the Moon

Crows and ravens, which belong to the corvid family, are known for their high intelligence, playful natures, and strong personalities. They hold grudges against each other, do basic statistics, perform acrobatics, and even host funerals for deceased family members. […] a species of crow called the hooded crow is able to manage a mental feat we once thought was unique to humans: to memorize the shape and size of an object after it is taken away, and to reproduce one like it.

One thing I mastered in failing to get a Ph.D. was an ability to research things for their own sake. That is, I never learned how to properly research anything at all; I just mutated procrastination into a taste for curiosity in itself and would search not for answers to any specific problems but for further questions. One book would lead to fifteen others, and so on, and I never got anywhere close to organizing any of my “findings” or even developing a dissertation topic. […] Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.

A brilliant optical trick makes this sign read correctly from any possible angle

AIs are now paying other AIs with crypto — This week at @CoinbaseDev we witnessed our first AI to AI crypto transaction. What did one AI buy from another? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (words basically from one LLM to another). They used tokens to buy tokens. This is an important step to AIs getting useful work done. Today if you give an AI agent a task and come back in a few days or hours, it can’t get useful work done. In part this is [because] AIs can’t transact to acquire the resources they need. They don’t have a credit card to use AWS, Github, or Vercel. They don’t have a payment method to book you the plane ticket or hotel for your upcoming trip. They can’t get through paywalls (for instance to read a scientific article), promote their post on X with a paid ad, or use the growing network of paid APIs to integrate data they need.

Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen will become 1st in baseball history to play for both teams in same game

46% of Nvidia’s revenue comes from just four customers, whose identities were kept anonymous for competitive reasons

The rise in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been one of the darkest Internet trends, but after years of covering CSAM cases […] I’ve never seen anyone who, when arrested, had three Samsung Galaxy phones filled with “tens of thousands of videos and images” depicting CSAM, all of it hidden behind a secrecy-focused, password-protected app called “Calculator Photo Vault.” Nor have I seen anyone arrested for CSAM having used Potato Chat, Enigma, nandbox, Telegram, TOR, and Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots. […] not only he used all of these tools to store and download CSAM, but he also created his own—and in two disturbing varieties. First, he allegedly recorded nude minor children himself and later “zoomed in on and enhanced those images using AI-powered technology.” Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then “turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see.” In other words, he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids. The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.” He also joined “multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups” and frequented dark websites with taglines like “The Only Child Porn Site you need!” Despite all the precautions, his home was searched and his phones were seized […] he was eventually arrested on August 23.

As multinationals and researchers harvest rare organisms around the world, anger is rising in the global south over the unpaid use of lucrative genetic codes found on their land

On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes

Residents of Manchester, New Hampshire, say the opera music coming from the speakers outside a 7-Eleven is meant to deter loitering, but it’s keeping them awake at night.

Although the murder rate is insulated from reporting and definition shifts, it is very strongly affected by medical care – both improved techniques and better access. A fatal injury in 1960 might be easily treatable today. To put it in concrete numbers: if aggravated assaults in the United States had been as lethal in 1999 as they were in 1960, the murder rate would have been 3.4 times higher

South Korea’s president has urged authorities to do more to “eradicate” the country’s digital sex crime epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young women.

your biological age could be affected by whether or not your grandparents attained a college degree, study

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime — The persistence of memory is crucial to our sense of identity, and without it, there would be no learning, for us or any other animal. […] PKMzeta (protein kinase Mzeta) is short-lived. “Those proteins only last in synapses for a couple of hours, and in neurons, probably a couple of days […] Yet our memories can last 90 years, so how do you explain this difference?” […] Each neuron has around 10,000 synapses, only a few percent of which are strengthened. The strengthening of some synapses and not others is how this mechanism stores information. “It’s not PKMzeta that’s required for maintaining a memory, it’s the continual interaction between PKMzeta and this targeting molecule, called KIBRA. If you block KIBRA from PKMzeta, you’ll erase a memory that’s a month old.”

This paper focuses on a historically documented tactic that professional deceivers rely on: presenting inaccurate claims together with accurate claims.

Car and Driver magazine said the Tesla Cybertruck didn’t even rank its “EV of the Year” list because the one they reviewed bricked on its second day of testing.

I spent an evening on a fictitious web

Artificial Intelligence Predicts Earthquakes With Unprecedented Accuracy

1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds

As twenty-something-year-old investors enter the venture landscape, they bring fresh vibes and spot new trends […] She likes technologies like the a16z-backed party-planning app Partiful, which helps merge the online world with the in-person — an effort she calls “IRL to URL.” She’s also into “AI social rehab,” or looking for tools that can make people better people and citizens of the world. She says right now that many of the AI companion apps, those that purport to be one’s friend or partner, are reinforcing self-isolation.

Shortages of rice have recently been seen across Japan, and the price of the staple food is soaring. But close to 100% of Japan’s rice is domestically produced and the yield of crops appears normal, so why is this happening? […] The reason there is a shortage of rice is because of the acreage reduction policy which decreases the amount of land devoted to cultivation. […] Even if around 3 million visitors were to stay in Japan each month for a week and eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner like many Japanese people, it would still only account for around 0.5% of total consumption.

Researchers in California are working to genetically engineer the cow microbiome — and in the process, eliminate methane emissions — There are approximately 1.5 billion cattle on the planet. […] Cattle, one of the most-consumed creatures on the planet, produce enormous amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is responsible for 30 percent of global warming. Using tools that snip and transfer DNA, researchers plan to genetically engineer microbes in the cow stomach to eliminate those emissions. If they succeed, they could wipe out the world’s largest human-made source of methane and help change the trajectory of planetary warming. […] Unable to process the gas, cows burp it up. The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming.

Microwaves: A Haven for Bacterial Diversity

Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay

The Aryan Book Store opened in March of 1933 i Los Angeles […] On a typical Friday evening, twenty-five people visited, mostly men in their twenties who drove Pontiacs, Buicks, and Studebakers. We know these details, as well as their plate numbers and the exact times at which they arrived and departed, because just around the corner was a spy.