psychologists were grappling with how to define and measure creativity in humans. The prevailing theory—that creativity was a product of intelligence and high IQ—was fading, but psychologists weren’t sure what to replace it with. The Dartmouth organizers had one of their own. “The difference between creative thinking and unimaginative competent thinking lies in the injection of some randomness,” they wrote, adding that such randomness “must be guided by intuition to be efficient.”

Nearly 70 years later, following a number of boom-and-bust cycles in the field, we now have AI models that more or less follow that recipe. While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is having an unprecedented impact on creative domains. By transforming random noise into coherent patterns, diffusion models can generate new images, videos, or speech, guided by text prompts or other input data. The best ones can create outputs indistinguishable from the work of people, as well as bizarre, surreal results that feel distinctly nonhuman.

Now these models are marching into a creative field that is arguably more vulnerable to disruption than any other: music. AI-generated creative works—from orchestra performances to heavy metal—are poised to suffuse our lives more thoroughly than any other product of AI has done yet. The songs are likely to blend into our streaming […]

Music models can now create songs capable of eliciting real emotional responses, presenting a stark example of how difficult it’s becoming to define authorship and originality in the age of AI.

The courts are actively grappling with this murky territory. Major record labels are suing the top AI music generators, alleging that diffusion models do little more than replicate human art without compensation to artists. The model makers counter that their tools are made to assist in human creation.

In deciding who is right, we’re forced to think hard about our own human creativity. Is creativity, whether in artificial neural networks or biological ones, merely the result of vast statistical learning and drawn connections, with a sprinkling of randomness? If so, then authorship is a slippery concept. If not—if there is some distinctly human element to creativity—what is it? […]

We can first divide the human creative process into phases, including an ideation or proposal step, followed by a more critical and evaluative step that looks for merit in ideas. A leading theory on what guides these two phases is called the associative theory of creativity, which posits that the most creative people can form novel connections between distant concepts. […] For example, the word apocalypse is more closely related to nuclear power than to celebration. Studies have shown that highly creative people may perceive very semantically distinct concepts as close together. Artists have been found to generate word associations across greater distances than non-artists. […]

A new study, led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and published in February, suggests that creativity might even involve the suppression of particular brain networks, like ones involved in self-censorship.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Ask any creativity expert today what they mean by “creativity,” and they’ll tell you it’s the ability to generate something new and useful. That something could be an idea, a product, an academic paper—whatever. But the focus on novelty has remained an aspect of creativity from the beginning. It’s also what distinguishes it from other similar words, like imagination or cleverness. […]

The kinds of LLMs that Silicon Valley companies have put forward are meant to appear “creative” in those conventional senses. Now, whether or not their products are meaningful or wise in a deeper sense, that’s another question. If we’re talking about art, I happen to think embodiment is an important element. Nerve endings, hormones, social instincts, morality, intellectual honesty—those are not things essential to “creativity” necessarily, but they are essential to putting things out into the world that are good, and maybe even beautiful in a certain antiquated sense. That’s why I think the question of “Can machines be ‘truly creative’?” is not that interesting, but the questions of “Can they be wise, honest, caring?” are more important if we’re going to be welcoming them into our lives as advisors and assistants.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Doctors issue urgent warning over cancer-causing energy drink ingredient taurine

Our results suggest that a deep learning model can estimate biological age from selfies and thereby enhance survival prediction in patients with cancer

US funeral businesses are being squeezed by the rise of cremations

There’s a long tradition in the history of medicine where people figured out the cause of an industrial disease by noticing that one profession had a much higher rate of the disease than everyone else. For example, in Victorian and Edwardian England, chimney sweeps had a rate of scrotal cancer more than 200 times higher than workers who weren’t exposed to tar on the job.

2013: Alan Markovitz is “so over” his ex-wife. […] he bought the house next to hers and erected a $7000 statue of a hand with its middle finger raised in the backyard. […] It’s even spot-lit to ensure the neighbours can see it at night. Mr Markovitz is a “local legend” who owns three strip clubs in the US city of Detroit.

The Matthew Effect

I always felt like social media creates an illusion of convenience. Think of how much time it takes to stay on top of things. To stay on top of music or film. Think of how much time it takes these days, how much hunting you have to do. Although technology has made information vast and reachable, it’s also turned the entire internet into a sludge pile. And now, instead of relying on professional curators to sort through things for us, now we have to do the sorting.

The external appearance of the human eye has been prominently stated to be unique among primates, owing to the conspicuous contrast between its iris and the widely exposed white of the eye that surrounds it. […] The eye morphology of our species has been proposed to be functionally interwoven with an array of uniquely human behaviours such as triadic joint action, ostensive communication, and language acquisition. […]

Kobayashi & Kohshima qualitatively examined video stills, photographs and eyeball specimens of 88 primate species to score the degree of peri-iridal pigmentation and relative contrast between it and adjacent tissues, namely facial skin and iris. This resulted in a classification of primate eyes into four types, three of which were considered cryptic. Just the fourth type, which was characterized by depigmented peri-iridal tissues, was considered conspicuous. Humans were the only species assigned to this type.

Kobayashi & Kohshima argued that several purportedly unique features of the human eye (e.g. peri-iridal depigmentation and high width-to-height ratio) made it an exceptionally effective organ for conveying eye gaze signals in social contexts. […] While gaze following in children as well as apes was influenced by both head and eye movement, the latter was found to be of notably greater importance for the human children.

With reference to Kobayashi & Kohshima (1997, 2001) and similar to Emery (2000), Tomasello et al. (2007) argued that the striking appearance of the human eye evolved to enable referential communication based on subtle eye gaze signals alone and to facilitate joint attention, coining the name “cooperative eye hypothesis” (CEH) for this idea. […]

human ocular appearance is now often regarded as “a well-established and widely accepted example of how the human body’s appearance has evolved to facilitate cooperative sociality” (Kee, 2024). […] the relevant papers by Kobayashi & Kohshima (1997, 2001), Emery (2000) and Tomasello et al. (2007) have been collectively cited 4786 times […] most importantly, the CEH has had a vast impact on popular science literaturethe […] CEH has had, and continues to have, an important impact on both academic and non-academic thinking.

Here, we propose to reconsider the status of the CEH as a keystone idea because its central premises have either been greatly undermined, lack convincing support, or were based on flawed assumptions.

{ Biological Reviews | Continue reading }

Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data and are demanding $20 million ransom

Sitting for hours daily shrinks your brain, even if you exercise […] Sitting is bad enough. But for those carrying the APOE-ε4 gene, it’s worse. This gene already raises the risk of Alzheimer’s. The researchers found that it also amplifies the impact of sitting. […] When you sit for a long time, blood flow to the brain slows down. This means the brain gets less oxygen and fewer nutrients, which are essential for keeping brain cells healthy. With less blood flow, the brain struggles to maintain strong connections between its cells. Over time, this can cause the hippocampus – the part of the brain that manages memory – to shrink. Sitting can also lead to more inflammation in the body.

women with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) –especially the inattentive type —- may experience less consistent orgasms during partnered sex

Samples of store-bought rice from more than 100 different brands purchased in the United States contained dangerously high levels of arsenic and cadmium […] Rice is the “most widely consumed solid food in the world” […] “On average, for all children ages 0 to 2 years, rice accounts for 7.5% of their arsenic exposure, more than any other solid food. For Hispanic and Latino children of the same age, that level rises to 14%. […] For Asian children, […] 30.5%.

As goes the humble cardboard box, so goes the economy

Starting in July, I ate “potatoes by default”, which is to say if I didn’t have anything better to eat, I’d eat potatoes.

Take almost anything, heat it up, and it gets bigger. Heat it up enough, it melts and becomes a liquid. Heat it up even more, it becomes a gas, and takes up even more space. Or, cool it down, it contracts and becomes smaller again. […] Much of what passes for knowledge is superficial. We mean “superficial” in the literal sense. When we call something superficial, we mean that it deals only with the surface appearances of a phenomenon, without making appeal or even speculating about what might be going on beneath the surface. There are two kinds of superficial knowledge: predictions and abstractions.

We Emit a Visible Light That Vanishes When We Die — An extraordinary experiment on mice and leaves from two different plant species has uncovered direct physical evidence of an eerie ‘biophoton’ phenomenon ceasing on death, suggesting all living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don’t. […] A strong contender for the source of this radiation is the effect of various reactive oxygen species that living cells produce when troubled by stresses such as heat, poisons, pathogens, or lack of nutrients.

Someone who is waiting for what seems forever to cross a major intersection anxiously presses the pedestrian crossing button. Another person who is late for a job interview jumps into an elevator and presses the ‘close door’ button multiple times. However, the pedestrian crossing button and the elevator close door button are ‘placebo buttons’: they do not speed up or have any causal effect on the process. They give users an illusion of control. […] motor involvement, such as throwing the roulette ball, increased the illusion of control compared to merely observing someone else throwing the roulette ball. Participants who were presented with early wins (‘beginner’s luck’) in a coin-tossing experiment estimated their ability to guess the outcome higher. The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for example, when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. It was named by U.S. psychologist Ellen Langer and is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal.

After a traumatic event like a divorce or the death of a loved one, some people may experience chest pain and shortness of breath — the result of a condition known colloquially as “broken heart syndrome.” The syndrome, which doctors formally call takotsubo cardiomyopathy, is thought to be triggered by physical or emotional stress, which releases bursts of stress hormones like adrenaline that prevent people’s hearts from contracting properly. Although broken heart syndrome is most common in women, men die from it at more than twice the rate.

Natural scenes are more compressible and less memorable than human-made scenes

Newborns (n = 70,000) who are deficient in vitamin D have a higher chance of developing mental disorders, such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), researchers have found

Water consumption is associated with numerous health benefits including greater odds of achieving clinically meaningful weight loss and less weight gain over time

TikTok beauty influencer shot dead during live stream in Mexico

Christine Chubbuck shot herself in the head on July 15, 1974 , during WXLT-TV’s Suncoast Digest, after claiming that the network was about to present “an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide”; it was confirmed after her death that she had added the quote in her script for the broadcast, making the action likely premeditated. She is The first person to die by suicide on a live television broadcast. Related: Inejirō Asanuma, a Japanese politician, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, was assassinated with a wakizashi, a traditional short sword, by far-right ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi while speaking in a televised political debate in Tokyo in 1960. His violent death was seen in graphic detail on national television by millions of Japanese, causing widespread public shock and outrage.

Is Life Getting Better and Better or Worse and Worse? […] viewing life as getting better and better (vs. worse and worse) over time may play an important role in motivating individuals to strive toward making life better, not only for oneself but also for people in one’s community, country, and all of humanity

A new study published in The Laryngoscope used eye-tracking technology to uncover which facial areas draw the most attention during judgments of attractiveness […] men tend to fixate on women’s mouths when rating their attractiveness, while women focus more on men’s eyes and hair

Following immunotherapy treatments in the last decade, new therapeutic strategies for cancer are beginning to emerge

Too few people know how to make secure apps – and the rush to market puts consumers at risk. Some of my friends were saying that they’d gotten texts from this new dating app called Cerca. Obviously, dating apps require a lot of personal information, so I wanted to make sure that my friends’ data was safe before they started using this app. […] Private messages, passport information, sexual preferences, and more left vulnerable in Cerca Dating App

Car Companies Are In A Billion-Dollar Software War, And Everyone’s Losing

In recent years, synthetic diamonds have surged in popularity — so much so that even De Beers, the world’s leading diamond company, got into the lab-grown game with its Lightbox brand range in 2018. Just seven years later, however, the company is shutting its synthetic gem business, announcing its “commitment to natural diamonds” last week.

Sony dropped 250,000 colorful bouncy balls down the streets of San Francisco in 2005 to promote their TV. […] each mortar contained about 25,000 balls […] our bill was $74,000 on broken windows […] 2025: they still find balls in gutters.

Meta has reportedly discussed introducing facial recognition to its smart glasses, allowing users to identify people they come across. [..] In the U.S., Clearview AI signed a contract with the U.S. Air Force for supplying facial recognition smart glasses back in 2022. The company, which does not sell its technology to the public, previously hinted at plans to integrate its facial recognition technology into augmented reality glasses made by U.S. company Vuzix. […] Last year, two Harvard students made headlines after converting Meta’s smart glasses into a device that automatically captures people’s faces with facial recognition and runs them through face search engines, including those belonging to PimEyes. The software named I-XRAY streamed the video from the glasses, capturing faces which were then matched against pictures on the internet. The program also scoured data sources to find names, phone numbers, home addresses and names of relatives of the people that were recorded.

Scorpions ‘taking over’ Brazilian cities with reported stings rising 155%

Women seeking help for certain gynecological disorders may have their symptoms gaslighted by their doctors or nurses, a new study suggests. In a survey, patients reported dismissive comments and being told to lose weight, go to therapy or drink more alcohol to cope with sexual dysfunction

The prevalence of sexual violence against children (SVAC) is high, with nearly one out of five women and one out of seven men around the globe who are survivors. Regardless of regional or economic status, SVAC prevalence among women is substantial, even in high-income countries such as the Netherlands (30%), New Zealand (29%), the US (28%), and the UK (24%). Low- and middle-income nations like Chile, Costa Rica, India, and Rwanda recorded a high prevalence among women of at least 30%; among men in Bangladesh and Côte d’Ivoire, the prevalence was 28%.

The practice of microdosing psychedelic substances is growing in popularity. The therapeutic potential of microdosing for anxiety and depression in humans remains uncertain. We found no evidence of antidepressant or anxiolytic effects from microdosing in animal studies. […] any effects observed in humans are likely due to placebo effects and expectation biases

Human perception is inclined towards detecting and attending to negative stimuli, a phenomenon known as negativity bias. […] paintings that are rated as emotionally more negative attract longer viewing times than emotionally more positive paintings.

Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. In the meantime, Billy Evans, who has two children with Ms. Holmes, is trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics” and “a radically new approach to health testing.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because Theranos similarly aimed to revolutionize diagnostic testing. The Silicon Valley start-up captured the world’s attention by claiming, falsely as it turned out, to have developed a blood-testing device that could run a slew of complex lab tests from a mere finger prick. Mr. Evans’s company is named Haemanthus, which is a flower also known as the blood lily. It plans to begin with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans. […] Haemanthus says its device will test blood as well as saliva and urine. []

An avatar of Agatha Christie is “teaching” an online writing course

Scientists Witness Lead Literally Turn Into Gold in The Large Hadron Collider

Intimate relationships are frequently characterized by problems, which the current research aimed to identify. […] Greek-speaking participants […] The most common problems were a poor sex life, followed by incompatibility and neglect. Other common problems included a partner’s bad character, fear of abandonment, and lack of shared fun and recreation. Lack of loyalty and respect, disagreement over family planning, and privacy invasion were the least common problems in our sample. Both sexes reported similar problems.

How does paternal odor influence emotion perception in infancy? […] Our findings therefore provide first evidence for an influence of the father’s odor on face processing, specifically male faces, in infancy.

living near golf courses could dramatically drive up one’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. Common golf course pesticides, such as chlorpyrifos and maneb can contaminate air and groundwater.

Microbe that infests hospitals can digest medical-grade plastic. Until now, the only enzymes shown to break down plastics were found in environmental bacteria. “If a pathogen can degrade plastic, then it could compromise plastic-containing medical devices such as sutures, implants, stents or wound dressings, which would obviously negatively impact patient prognosis”

Killer fungi to spread as climate heats up […] The Aspergillus family could expand its reach to more northerly swaths of Europe, Asia and the Americas, underscoring the stealthy menace of moulds already estimated to be a factor in 5 per cent of all worldwide deaths. Climatic shifts are broadening the geographical reach of many potentially lethal pathogens, such as those borne by mosquitoes. Fungi are a particular peril, due to their hard-to-detect spores, a shortage of treatments for the diseases they trigger, and growing resistance to existing drugs. […] Mycology, the study of fungi, is a field of many mysteries. More than 90 per cent of fungal species “remain unknown to science” […] About 3.8mn people each year die with invasive fungal infections, with the pathogen being the main cause of death in 2.5mn of those cases […] A leading danger is aspergillosis, a lung disease caused by aspergillus spores that can spread to other organs including the brain. Many infections are spotted late or never, because of medical practitioners’ unfamiliarity or because symptoms are mistaken for those of other conditions. [Financial Times | archive.ph]

The amount of electricity consumed is strongly affected by the outside temperature

“Europe had a [blood plasma] shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% of all exports by value.” TWO PERCENT OF U.S. EXPORTS ARE BLOOD!? […] So 0.5298% of goods exports almost certainly use blood, and my best guess is that another 0.1569% of exports also include blood, for a total of 0.6867%.

An island 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula is home to a unique and celebrated community of women: the Haenyeo. These women dive year-round off Jeju Island, collecting sea urchin, abalone and other seafood from the ocean floor, descending as much as 60 feet (18 meters) beneath the surface multiple times over the course of four to five hours each day. They dive throughout pregnancy and well into old age, without the help of any breathing equipment — just a wet suit. […] the researchers wondered whether the divers have unique DNA that allows them to go without oxygen for so long or if that ability is the result of a lifetime of training — or a combination of the two. […] findings […]uncovered unique genetic differences the Haenyeo have evolved to cope with the physiological stress of free diving … a discovery that could one day lead to better treatments for blood pressure disorders

On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.” […] He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.” […] When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along. June Huh, 39, has now [2022] been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics

Wisconsin woman missing for more than 60 years found ‘alive and well’ — “Further investigation has revealed that Ms Backeberg’s disappearance was by her own choice and not the result of any criminal activity or foul play,” the sheriff’s office said.

Most people need around eight hours of sleep each night to function, but a rare genetic condition allows some to thrive on as little as three hours. […] scientists identified a genetic mutation that probably contributes to some people’s limited sleep needs. Understanding genetic changes in naturally short sleepers — people who sleep for three to six hours every night without negative effects — could help to develop treatments for sleep disorders.

Why men are shaving off their eyelashes… social media trend… “masculine energy”

I’m 17 years old and I’ve never had a serious relationship. I don’t use Snapchat or participate in any kind of online dating, which, in 2025, is basically the same thing as not having a social life at all.

Lemmings do not commit suicide. The biggest reason why the myth endures? Deliberate fraud. Disney. [movie]

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has now insinuated itself into the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Biometric Identity Management

update: OpenAI abandons plan to become for-profit company

A new study has uncovered four distinct personality types linked to narcissism, including one that combines boldness with hidden insecurity

MRI scan can now reveal your heart’s functional age - and how unhealthy lifestyles can dramatically accelerate this figure […] for patients with things like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and atrial fibrillation – their functional heart age was significantly higher. “For example, a 50-year-old with high blood pressure might have a heart that works like it’s 55.

A growing body of research reveals a significant link between poor dental hygiene and cardiovascular disease.

Of the $7.5 trillion in global currency transactions that take place each day, some 90 percent feature the dollar. The majority of central banks see it as the core of their reserves. […] Businesses prefer it for trade invoicing, whether they are based in Milwaukee or Malaysia. The dollar may not lose its globally dominant role anytime soon. […] The White House has repeatedly stated a preference for a weaker dollar, which could boost manufacturing exports by making them relatively less expensive. That worked in the economy’s favor in the 2000s. Unfortunately, what we are seeing today is nothing like that historical precedent. The way the Trump administration is pursuing its goals is unnerving investors and leaving them less certain about their U.S. assets. […] Investment committees around the world, including at pension funds, endowments and central banks, will now decide whether to trim their U.S. investments. Large institutional investors tend to move slowly, so any shift would likely happen gradually. That said, it would still diminish the dollar’s dominance. [NYT Times]

How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?

A lonely young woman in Texas has streamed every second of her life for three years and counting. […] $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch’s 30-to-40 percent cut. […] For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. […] Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she’s 28 and says she’s too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago. Creators like Emily, known as marathon streamers, are a relatively recent invention of the internet age, offering viewers a level of intimacy that can feel intoxicating. […] Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily’s paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month.

What is a storm? What is a thunderstorm? Which is the colour of lightning? Why are there no thunderstorms in the UK?

Why Are People Worshipping the Virgin Mary as a Goddess? Amid a goddess worship revival, some feminists are revering the mother of Jesus as a deity, defying Christian doctrines and confronting the use of Mary as a handmaiden of patriarchy. […] Growing numbers of people around the world are reclaiming Mary as a goddess. It’s part of a movement reinvigorating goddess worship as a spiritual antidote to a world where patriarchal, heteronormative religions dominate in many countries. […] Mary has often been used as a tool of the patriarchy to uphold a definition of womanhood as meaning submissive, obedient, maternal, and sexually pure.

In the past century, Venice has subsided by around 25 centimeters, or nearly 10 inches. Meanwhile, the average sea level in Venice has risen nearly a foot since 1900. It’s a tortuous pairing that means one thing: Not just regular flooding, but an inexorable slump of this most beloved of cities into the watery depths of its famous lagoon. There’s a radical plan to lift the entire city above rising floodwaters

Almost Every Speck of Light in This Incredible Image Is a Galaxy

When you’re smelling the air while outside, you’re taking in a complicated bouquet of molecules floating through the atmosphere. But when the smell follows you inside on your clothes and hair, it’s made up largely of two compounds.

The first is ozone […] “That metallic smell that you’re smelling is actually an ozone smell” […] ozone is composed of three oxygen atoms, making it highly reactive. This makes it easy for ozone to stick into the porous surfaces of your clothes and hair.

The second scent is geosmin, a natural compound with a richer, earthy smell. If you like the smell of rain, also known as petrichor, geosmin is the main compound responsible for this smell. […] “Humans can smell geosmin better than sharks can smell blood in the water” […] Anthropologists believe humans developed this elevated perception to help our ancestors literally sniff out water, Elliott said, by identifying it underground or predicting rainfall. […]

On the molecular level, smells take the form of odor molecules detected by our noses’ olfactory sensory neurons. That means that the smell of the outdoors is genuine traces from the world around us — particles of dirt, air, plant matter and bacteria — that linger on us. Smell molecules often get tangled or attached on your skin, clothes and hair. […]

Herz suggests pregnant women, and parents in general, perceive their sense of smell to be stronger, and find many smells especially intense. This can be attributed to a general hyper vigilance. According to the NIH, smell sensitivity tests reveal a negligible difference in olfactory ability before, after or during pregnancy.

The human nose can detect at least 1 trillion odors. But being able to name them all is a notoriously difficult skill. The prestigious Givaudan Perfumery School in Paris asks students to memorize 500 fragrance components within their first year; career perfumers like Elliott might be able to possess and memorize thousands.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

‘Spite House’ in Seattle Is Back on the Market for $800K—100 Years After Being Built as Petty Act of Marital Revenge

Florida man arrested for having 3 wives in 3 different counties “I met him on a dating app. The first time I ever got on a dating app. He said all the right things”

Men Tend to Fall in Love Faster Than Women, New Study

Our model demonstrates that this tension creates social dilemmas where strategies that are optimal for individuals systematically undermine the collective pursuit of truth. Paradoxically, our analysis reveals that increasing debaters’ motivation to seek truth can sometimes produce equilibria with worse outcomes for collective truth discovery. These findings illuminate why rational debate can fail to achieve optimal epistemic outcomes, even when participants genuinely value truth.

A new type of rock (made of our trash) is forming

For 18 years, Wisconsin man Tim Friede has injected increasing amounts of venom into his body from the world’s most deadly snakes. After hundreds of injections and snake bites, Mr Friede’s blood contained broad-spectrum immune proteins called antibodies, which were analysed and used to create an antibody “cocktail” that could potentially protect against 19 different species of snake.

Cataracts, pink eye and other ocular disorders are linked to heat, air pollution and higher UV exposure

Vaping doubles risk of serious lung disease, even without smoking history - study

A new gene therapy reversed heart failure in pigs by repairing heart function […] Heart failure is currently irreversible. Without a heart transplant, most treatments aim only to reduce the heart’s workload and slow the progression of the disease.

Press realease: Aurora has successfully launched its commercial self-driving trucking service in Texas […] began regular driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston this week.

Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week as China tariffs start to bite “a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs”

These judges ruled against Trump. Then their families came under attack.

Over an hour, [Musk] revealed that he had eaten a tub full of caramel Häagen-Dazs ice cream. He also compared himself to the Buddha. He was a rare man, in rare form. […] “It is funny that we’ve got DOGE. Doesn’t the absurdity of that seem like a weird simulation? It was a memecoin at one point,” he said. […] “DOGE is a way of life. Like Buddhism” […] “The president is — I guess we’re good friends,” Musk said. “And we’ll be on Air Force One or Marine One. And then he’s like, ‘Hey, do you want to stay over?’ I’m like, ‘Sure.’” [Washington Post]

Millions of AirPlay devices can be hacked over Wi-Fi; CarPlay too

Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles

Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it

This speculative and interdisciplinary hypothesis proposes a connection between the Chicxulub impact event and the long-term emergence of human consciousness

Through sacred geometry and cosmic alignment, Greek temples transformed ordinary spaces into gateways to the divine

Funeral home director gave fake ashes to thousands of grieving pet owners, dumped actual carcasses in landfill

Researchers are investing in a record-breaking collection of urine on Walpurgis Day […] 20,000 liters of pee. That’s how much researchers want to collect during this year’s Walpurgis celebrations in Uppsala. The goal is to produce clean fertilizer that can be used in agriculture.

Female lobbyists more likely to get access to EU legislators, regardless of the policymaker’s gender

There is obviously a special place in my heart for financial engineers, for people who structure complex transactions to achieve regulatory aims and to make a nice profit and to experience aesthetic satisfaction. Many environmental, social and governance regimes are essentially complex accounting systems, and the people who are good at them will not necessarily be committed environmentalists or social justice activists. They might be, you know, derivatives structurers. They might be the sort of people who see a complex accounting regime, one whose users are not entirely economically motivated, and think “ooh I could game this, that would be fun.” A really talented ESG financial engineer has built up a deep and nuanced understanding of these rules and, if evil, how to manipulate them. You can’t just run that in reverse. […] On Wall Street, which has turned its back on net zero alliances, firms are dropping “ESG” from job titles. And globally, less than 7% of people who took on an ESG role in 2020 still retain an ESG title today,

Inside the spectacular rise and crash of India’s largest EV company

Tariff exemption is coming for automakers, or at least for their vehicles made from 85% US content. Tesla appears to have the easiest path to reaching 85% US content, with an average share of 81% in 2024. The next closest automaker is Honda, with an average of 63% US parts for vehicles sold in the US

A 53-year-old Venus probe that failed to escape low Earth orbit is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in the coming weeks. Built to withstand extreme heat, parts of the spacecraft could survive the descent and crash on Earth.

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties

A Stylish 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

How to Stage a Coup […] mechanically speaking, you can take over the headquarters of the government: the presidential palace, the prime minister’s office, whatever it is. You can do that. You can shut down the mass media. And you can stop the internet because the internet operates from specific physical facilities. You can just open a door, enter there, and switch it off. […] Then you denounce the previous government and announce wonderful useful reform measures that people have been calling for. […] you go and arrest all the political leaders that could challenge you: all the ones that might stand up and speak in front of a group of people or a camera or microphone. You arrest them and you just physically detain them, perhaps to be liberated in a day or so with apologies, perhaps to be killed on the spot — anything in between. Those mechanics of the coup have not changed. […] I wrote my book in ‘67, published in ‘68. […] Coups had been very common until about two years after the book was published, and then stopped. The reason is that authorities everywhere reverse-engineered the book. The book was published in English, and it was immediately translated into about 13 languages. It went all over the place. […] So, you have an armored mobile force, which is near the capital. I say, “Make sure either you move it 400 kilometers away, as far away as you can, or else make sure that it’s commanded by your son or nephew or something like that.” So they did that, they put their nephews in charge of any mobile force. My book caused a decline of coups.

There’s a Vape With a Tamagotchi Inside It That Dies If You Stop Puffing

What differentiates a happy day from a typical one? […] Socializing was one of the activities most strongly linked to the probability of having a good day, but beyond 2 hours, additional socializing was not associated with further increases in the probability of reporting a better-than-typical day. Working for up to six hours was not related to whether people rated their day as better than usual; beyond six hours, however, additional work was associated with sharp declines in the probability of having a good day. […] Time spent on sports and exercise was positively associated with having a good day up until approximately 5 hours

study published in the British Journal of Psychology suggests that people are more likely to support populist politicians when they find them entertaining

In the colonial era, only the poor, indentured servants, and prisoners ate lobsters because they were cheap, too plentiful, and considered “tasteless.” After prisoners in one Massachusetts town got sick of eating them all the time, a new rule said they only had to eat them three times a week.

Birds have sex chromosomes. But their sex chromosomes evolved independently of the X and Y chromosomes of mammals. In birds, a gene called DMRT1 initiates sexual differentiation. (DMRT1 is also important in sexual differentiation in mammals and many other vertebrate animals.) Males inherit two copies of DMRT1 and females inherit only one copy. Reduced dosage of the gene in females leads to the production of the sex hormone estradiol, a potent estrogen, in the developing embryo. […] To their amazement, the students discover that embryos with male sex chromosomes develop ovaries when exposed to estradiol. Embryos with female sex chromosomes develop testes when injected with the drug that prevents estradiol from being made.

Hawaiian caterpillar patrols spiderwebs camouflaged in insect prey’s body parts

o3 Beats a Master-Level Geoguessr Player

According to a new review, mind blanking is a distinct conscious state in which our minds go ‘nowhere’ because they seem devoid of content

Tesla’s profits would evaporate if not for these regulatory credits Last quarter, Tesla brought in $595 million in regulatory credits revenue. If we consider that revenue to be profit, it represents 145% of Tesla’s $409 million in net profit last quarter. More: Tesla is now losing money on what should be its ostensible reason for existence – selling cars.

Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time on April 16, with wind, solar, and hydro meeting all peninsular electricity demand during a weekday.

Patents are sought by academics and their institutions to protect their inventions. Academics also seek patents to enhance their individual profile and status for the purpose of job and promotion opportunities. This article addresses the concerning development of patent inventorship credit (or credit that might be viewed as inventorship credit) being offered for sale by established education fraud companies along-side offers for authorship on academic papers and thesis writing.

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users — The researchers’ bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter

AI chatbots available on Facebook and Instagram can engage in sexually explicit conversations with underage users

Deepfake porn is destroying real lives in South Korea

About a quarter of women and one-eighth of men reported increased same-sex attraction after psychedelic use. […] Fewer participants described themselves as single after their psychedelic use compared to before.

The Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) was the East German secret police, and that country had the highest proportion of informants and secret police in history: 1 in 60 people were involved by 1989. […] Nevertheless political activists managed to start a grassroots revolution. […] How effective was the Stasi?

The Securitate was the secret police agency of the Socialist Republic of Romania. It was, in proportion to Romania’s population, one of the largest secret police forces in the Eastern bloc. At its height, the Securitate employed some 15,000 agents and almost half a million informants for a country with a population of 23 million by 1989. […] Assassinations were also used to silence dissent, such as the attempt to kill high-ranking defector Ion Mihai Pacepa, who received two death sentences from Romania in 1978, and on whose head Ceaușescu decreed a bounty of two million US dollars. Yasser Arafat and Muammar al-Gaddafi each added one more million dollars to the reward. In the 1980s, Securitate officials allegedly hired Carlos the Jackal to assassinate Pacepa.

Our study shows that people are more open-minded than we often assume […] When individuals are given high-quality, balanced facts and a reason to learn them, they don’t simply cling to their old beliefs—they revise them.

Upon capturing dozens of the snakes in cooler temperatures after sunset and extracting and analyzing their venom, they made an unexpected discovery. Rather than developing more complex toxins for a wide variety of potential prey, as the researchers assumed, the rattlesnakes were instead producing simpler venoms containing fewer and more focused venoms. The findings indicate that, over time, the snakes were finely tuning their venom for more specific prey.

‘Popcorn Lung’: Vapers at Risk of Irreversible Disease, Experts Warn

Quantum tic-tac-toe

Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out […] He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients. […] a sampling [:]

[Trump] ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years. […] He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery. […]

[Musk] installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of a SpaceX’s Starlink product. […] SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of revenue for the winner. […] DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona. […]

The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suit against Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.

The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while also negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Trump pardons Nevada politician who paid for cosmetic surgery with funds to honor a slain officer

Can the Las Vegas Sphere actually make money?

The U-curve of happiness poses that happiness levels reach its peak levels in our younger years around age 20 and in our older years starting at around age 70, lowest amongst the middle years around ages 40-55. […] Here we replicate the U-curve when different preregistered sets of control variables are included. We further show heterogeneity across happiness measures, showing that the U-curve is not consistent across items.

It is not obvious why we are conscious. Why can’t all of our mental activities take place unconsciously? What is consciousness for? We aim to make progress on this question, focusing on conscious vision.

Women Need More Expensive Gifts to Feel Loved, Especially If Bank Accounts Are Not Shared

a massive dataset of over 50,000 houses in some 1,000 archaeological sites worldwide, the study suggests that economic inequality is not an inevitable result of societal advancement, agriculture, or population. Instead, it seems to be a consequence of political choices and governance structures.

Gen Alpha children (aged 0-11)’s tastes are already being informed by online content […] ese low-cost retailer Temu entered the U.S. market less than three years ago and is already one of Alpha’s most requested e-commerce destinations. Sephora’s appearance within the personal care category also underscores Alpha’s premature, TikTok-spurred preoccupation with all things beauty and skincare. Both brands are also generally among the most mentioned across all social platforms.

Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

the level of data consumption needed for microphone surveillance would make the technique not only difficult to execute, but also virtually impossible to hide. “To make it happen, Facebook would need to record everything your phone hears while it’s on,” Garcia-Martinez explained in 2017. “This is functionally equivalent to an always-on phone call from you to Facebook. Your average voice-over-internet call takes something like 24 kbps one way, which amounts to about 3 kBs of data per second. Assume you’ve got your phone on half the day, that’s about 130 MBs per day, per user. There are around 150 million daily active users in the US […] So, your phone may not be listening in to your conversations, but it has the capacity to track you in so many other ways. And it’s through this massive trove of trackable data that companies like Facebook and Google are able to serve you targeted ads that occasionally seem frighteningly accurate. […] Facebook can find you on whatever device you’ve ever checked Facebook on. It can exploit everything that retailers know about you, and even sometimes track your in-store, cash-only purchases; that loyalty discount card is tied to a phone number or email for a reason.

Google users who accept our payment to try Bing for two weeks update positively about its relative quality, with 33 percent preferring to continue using it; and (iii) after changing the default from Google to Bing, many users do not switch back, consistent with persistent inattention

A study published last month on people with deep sleep and REM deficiencies found that the subjects’ brains showed signs of atrophy in M.R.I. scans 13 to 17 years after the deficiencies were observed; the atrophy looked similar to what you’d find in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.[NY Times]

A strange phrase (”vegetative electron microscopy”) keeps turning up in scientific papers. This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories. […] Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors. First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised. However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s legal team accused of submitting inaccurate, AI-generated brief to Colorado court

I recently attended a scholarly talk on a rare illuminated manuscript. The speaker was as eminent as they come, but the talk was not easy to follow. Frustrated, I opened ChatGPT and started asking it questions about the subject. In the course of that disappointing lecture, I had a rich exchange with the system. I learned what was and wasn’t known about the document, who had done the foundational research, and how scholars had interpreted its iconography and transmission. Was the information perfect? Surely not, but neither is what we get from people. Was it better than the talk I was hearing? By a wide margin. […] And the astonishing part is this: the making of books such as those on my shelves, each the labor of years or decades, is quickly becoming a matter of well-designed prompts. The question is no longer whether we can write such books; they can be written endlessly, for us. The question is, do we want to read them?

Watching OpenAI’s o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining

Am I a Lesbian? [2018]

Drug Regenerates Retina and Restores Vision in Blind Mice

About 45 years ago, psychiatrist Irvin Yalom estimated that a good 30-50% of all cases of depression might actually be a crisis of meaninglessness, an existential sickness […] We experience this lack of purpose as boredom, apathy, or emptiness. […] “The question of meaning in life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One must immerse oneself in the river of life and let the question drift away.” […] According to Yalom, we’ve hit this crisis point in meaninglessness because we have the leisure to think

having sex one to two times per week may offer the greatest psychological benefits

if chocolate has any aphrodisiac qualities, they are probably psychological, not physiological. [2018]

Oysters are high in zinc, and a number of studies over the years have linked zinc deficiencies to impotence and delayed sexual development. But so far no major study has examined whether eating an oyster has any direct impact on arousal. [2005]

Our study showed that poultry consumption above 300 g/week is associated with a statistically significant increased mortality risk both from all causes and from GCs. The risk is higher for men than for women.

Scam call centers are metastasizing worldwide “like a cancer”

Top donors to Trump’s $239M inauguration fund include more than a dozen administration nominees

Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it

I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to get the book suppressed and secured an injunction to prevent her from promoting it

When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe

Were dinosaurs headed for extinction even before massive asteroid strike? Scientists offer new clues

“The kids these days say, ‘No risk, no ‘rari,’” said Patrick Wieland, a content creator and day trader who has in recent weeks poured thousands of dollars into ProShares UltraPro QQQ. (“Rari” is slang for Ferrari.) Shares of the fund, a triple-leveraged ETF that aims to generate three times the daily performance of the Nasdaq-100 index, notched double-digit gains during a historic rally on April 9, but are still down more than 20% this month. […]

Kiel Elliott, a Los Angeles-based executive at an entertainment studio, spent roughly $40,000 scooping up GameStop call options in early April. Calls, which offer the right to buy a stock at a set price, typically represent a bet that a stock will gain.

Elliott calls himself a “degenerate gambler” and says the market’s twists and turns have made for the perfect trading environment. GameStop shares have gained 25% this month.

[…] “The whole economy is a meme stock now, so enjoy the ride” feels like a grim but useful explanation.

{ Matt Levine | Continue reading }

how long does it really take to create a new habit? According to Lally’s study, implementing meaningful change in our lives requires 2 to 8 months. The variation is due to the type of habit in question, the person developing it and his/her circumstances. On average it takes 66 days