Madame Medusa: You FORCE them to like you, idiot!

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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.

Y chromosome

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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

first date

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

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]

Das große Fressen

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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 }

Sublimity

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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.

10,996

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.

passing stars

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

What happened to the doll? It was destroyed.

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 }

part-time hermit

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

aging

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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

building on wheels

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

bat’s sonar system

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?

immune systems

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?

Beaver: [inspects the tree] Let me see here… 6 foot 6 and 7/16 inches.

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A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That’s the essence of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they’ve cracked the conundrum. […]

“We found that the reverse sprinkler spins in the ‘reverse’ or opposite direction when taking in water as it does when ejecting it, and the cause is subtle and surprising.” […] found that the reverse sprinkler rotates a good 50 times slower than a regular sprinkler, but it operates along similar mechanisms, which is surprising. […]

The reverse sprinkler problem is associated with Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach’s thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.

{ ArsTechnica | Continue reading }

acrylic on canvas { David Hockney, A Lawn Being Sprinkled, 1967 }

The court’s location

Meta is the world’s ‘single largest marketplace for paedophiles’, says New Mexico attorney general — Internal company documents obtained by the attorney general’s office as part of its investigation have also revealed that the company estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram receive online sexual harassment each day.

Meta’s Reality Labs loses record $4.65 billion ahead of Apple’s Vision Pro launch — Meta continues to sink billions of dollars a quarter into developing the metaverse. The metaverse division has now lost more than $42 billion since the end of 2020.

Meta’s $197 Billion Surge Is Biggest in Stock-Market History — It was only a couple of years back the Facebook owner suffered the single biggest market value destruction in stock-market history. But the company has come a long way since then, on Thursday it dazzled shareholders with yet another impressive quarterly earnings report as the social media giant focuses on cutting back costs and shoring up billions in profits. The stock rose as much as 21% Friday, poised to add roughly $200 billion to its market capitalization. This would be the biggest single-session market value addition, eclipsing the $190 billion gains made by Apple and Amazon in 2022.

The private data of European citizens can legally be surveilled by U.S. intelligence agencies, but unlike Americans, Europeans have no recourse under American law if agencies overreach. As Europe began to implement its stringent 2018 data-privacy law, that imbalance sat badly with EU authorities […] The 2020 ruling officially halted the flow of personal data between the EU and the United States, and created the risks of large fines for companies that continued to put European data on U.S. servers. Meta, most prominently, was hit with a $1.2 billion fine in May for continuing to transfer European user data to its U.S. servers. Biden’s proposal for a new data court created a path for Europeans to access American surveillance protections, and in July, European officials declared it adequate to the task, reopening a smoother transatlantic data trade. The court never officially opened for business, at least not publicly. […] The court’s location is a secret, and the Department of Justice will not say if it has taken a case yet, or when it will. Though the court has a clear mandate — ensuring Europeans their privacy rights under U.S. law — its decisions will also be kept a secret

“In the past 20 years, price per earnings was something you could grasp; today [it’s] all over the place. It’s a modern accident, an accident of history, we have no idea how to value companies. It’s mostly narratives and stories about the future to raise money so you can sell to someone else. Think of the number of people who made a lot of money in venture capital off of companies that ended up making no money. Someone got stuck with that bill at the end of the meal.” […] Currently the American national debt stands at $34.14 trillion—about $100,000 for every person in the U.S.

Craig Wright Dr. has long claimed he is the founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. However, due to a lack of conclusive proof, few in the industry believe him. A trial in London may bring us closer to finding the answer.

Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity

Germany: Police seize bitcoins worth €2 billion

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search’s “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off.

Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me. — A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with artificial intelligence.

unelected political elites such as lobbyists, civil servants, journalists, and the like exhibit egocentrism bias, rather than partisan confirmation bias, astheir perceptions about others’ opinions systematically correspond to their own policy preferences.

The US is dealing with an “out-of-control” epidemic of sexually transmitted infections […] it is the recent rise in syphilis that is concerning health officials most.

Why flying insects gather at artificial light

How to do things if you’re not that smart and don’t have any talent

For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. How did the habit disappear?

Should you flush with toilet lid up or down? Study says it doesn’t matter

the female brain

NJ animal shelter will name feral cat after an ex, then neuter it

Half of all surgical patients receiving anesthesia are females. Anesthetics affect sexually dimorphic brain regions involved in sleep and arousal. We demonstrate that the female brain in mice and humans is resistant to the hypnotic effects of volatile anesthetics. Sex differences in anesthetic sensitivity are largely due to acute effects of sex hormones. […] It may explain the higher incidence of awareness under anesthesia in females.

A new study suggests a link between gut inflammation and changes in the brain and declines in memory, further supporting a connection between the gut and brain in Alzheimer’s disease. […] as levels of calprotectin, an inflammatory marker, increased in the volunteer study participants’ stool samples, so did the amount of amyloid plaque accumulating in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease. […] Even volunteers who did not have Alzheimer’s disease had lower scores on a memory test correlated with higher levels of calprotectin. […] The concept that the gut and brain are functionally connected has become more prominent in the last 10 years and this study offers some of the first evidence that asymptomatic gut inflammation and Alzheimer’s disease may be linked.

Although Florida has more than an estimated 1.25 million alligators, attacks by the reptiles are rare – there were 442 unprovoked bite attacks from 1948 to 2021, with 26 of the bites resulting in death

First aircraft to fly on Mars perished on 18 January during its 72nd flight — It was supposed to make only five flights and last about a month, but ultimately it traversed 17 kilometres of the red planet and flew for a total of nearly 129 minutes between 2021 and 2024. An image that the helicopter took of the ground after the flight ended shows the shadow of one of the blades, with at least one-quarter of it missing. The helicopter can still communicate with Earth, at least for now, but it will not fly again.

STOP KNOWING HOW TO READ

helium

Hair Sample That Put a Man in Prison Turned Out to Be Dog Hair

Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face — and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It

5 Deaf Children Have Hearing Restored by AAV-Based Gene Therapy — Hearing loss affects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide

undergraduates’ IQs have steadily fallen from roughly 119 in 1939 to a mean of 102 in 2022, just slightly above the population average of 100 […] a degree has become increasingly meaningless, as more people have one.

Every year spent in school or university improves life expectancy, study says — Analysis also says not attending school is as deadly as smoking or heavy drinking

Why do some people feel tired all the time?

the U.S. government just sold its helium stockpile, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium. MRI machines need thousands of liters of liquid helium to function

San Francisco sues California over ‘unsafe,’ ‘disruptive’ self-driving cars — Waymo and Cruise have both cited self-reported data that their robot cars have a superior track record to human drivers

Initially focused on cybercrime, the proposed UN Treaty has alarmingly evolved into an expansive surveillance tool. — Historically, cybercrime legislation has been exploited to target journalists and security researchers, suppress dissent and whistleblowers, endanger human rights defenders, limit free expression, and justify unnecessary and disproportionate state surveillance measures.

It’s only a matter of time before disinformation leads to disaster

I’m gonna win that Golden Arrow, and then I’m goin’ to present meself to Maid Marian.

The frequently repeated view that men are attracted to women with low waist–hip ratios (WHRs) and low body mass indices (BMI) (in well-nourished populations) because these traits indicate health and fertility does not appear to be well supported. Indeed, a low WHR and BMI are most likely to occur in young women in their late teens who have never been pregnant (nulligravidas), women who have demonstrably lower fertility and greater liability to infection than women in their 20s. […]

A nubile woman is a nulligravida who has recently completed physical growth, puberty, and sexual development. This is usually accomplished 3–4 years after menarche in the mid to late teens when female reproductive value is maximal. As noted, women in the nubile age group have the lowest WHRs and, in well-nourished populations, have lower BMIs than women in their 20s, traits strongly associated with attractiveness. […]

Using data for 1.7 million first births from 1990 U.S. natality and mortality records, we compared outcomes for women with first births (primiparas) aged 16–20 years (when first births typically occur in forager and subsistence groups) with those aged 21–25 years. The younger primiparas had a much lower risk of potentially life-threatening complications of labor and delivery and, when evolutionarily novel risk factors were controlled, fetuses which were significantly more likely to survive despite lower birth weights.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

Vomit color chart

Harvard morgue theft ring stole body parts, sold brains, turned human flesh into leather, officials say

Can autoimmune diseases be cured? Scientists see hope at last — After decades of frustration and failed attempts, scientists might finally be on the cusp of developing therapies to restore immune ‘tolerance’ in conditions such as diabetes, lupus and multiple sclerosis.

‘Can you walk a kilometre?’ The question that predicts fracture risk “We’ve discovered that trouble walking even short distances appears closely tied to higher fracture risk over the following five years”

Forensics gone wrong: When DNA snares the innocent

Most people who regularly drink more than the recommended limit of 14 units of alcohol per week (about six pints of normal strength beer [4% ABV] or about six average [175ml] glasses of wine [14% ABV]) will have a fatty liver. In people with fatty liver, after only two to three weeks of giving up alcohol, the liver can heal and looks and functions as good as new.

How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus — “First, placenta the only temporary organ. Second, it’s the baby’s lung, it’s a waste-disposal system, and it’s a nutrition source.” […] “Half of the fetus is maternal, the other half is paternal, and yet the pregnancy can go on for nine months without the mom’s body destroying it,” Barroeta said. “And that, from an immune standpoint, is fascinating, because if you were to receive a piece of someone else and insert that under your skin, that would not last there for three days, your body will actively reject it.” […] This wall of cells keeps mom and baby working in harmony and not killing each other. […] When evolutionary biologists mapped the genomes of these cells, they found that the protein that allowed these cells to fuse into a wall, called syncytin, didn’t look like it came from human DNA. It looked more like HIV. According to Chuong, this protein actually came from an ancient retrovirus, the most famous of which is HIV.

Buffalofish live beyond 100 — and get healthier as they age. What can humans learn from them?

Last month, former president Donald Trump dismissed an ad on Fox News featuring video of his well-documented public gaffes, claiming the footage was generated by AI. […] AI creates a “liar’s dividend,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies digital propaganda and misinformation. “When you actually do catch a police officer or politician saying something awful, they have plausible deniability” in the age of AI. […] Trump is not alone in seizing this advantage. Late last year, a grainy video surfaced of a ruling-party Taiwanese politician entering a hotel with a woman, indicating he was having an affair. Commentators and other politicians quickly came to his defense, saying the footage was AI-generated — though it remains unclear whether it actually was.

When does “no” mean no? Insights from sex robots

Vomit color chart