As grass ferments in the rumen — one of four compartments in the animal’s stomach — it naturally produces methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than CO2, although shorter lived in the atmosphere. That methane is released through belching and farting, and on average, a single cow can produce about 200 pounds of it per year. The gas is also released by manure, and livestock accounts for about a third of human-related methane emissions, which are collectively responsible for about 30% of global warming. […] Scientists have been working on the idea of a “cow fart vaccine” for well over a decade, but without tangible results as of yet.

Eight years ago […] this area of Myanmar [was] one of the poorest places on earth. But today, on this spot along the border with Thailand, a small city has emerged like a mirage. It is called Shwe Kokko, or Golden Raintree. It is accused of being a city built on scams, home to a lucrative yet deadly nexus of fraud, money-laundering and human trafficking. The man behind it, She Zhijiang, is languishing in a Bangkok jail, awaiting extradition to China. […] He accuses China’s communist leadership of turning on him because he refused to give them control of his project. […] The scams have grown into a multi-billion dollar business. They involve thousands of workers from China, South East Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent kept in walled-off compounds where they defraud people all over the world of their savings. Some work there willingly, but others are abducted and forced to work. Those who have escaped have told harrowing stories of torture and beatings.

Teens spent a quarter of the school day on their phones, study

Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a wide variety of fake trading apps, pig butchering scams, gambling websites, and retail phishing pages.

A young technologist known online as “Big Balls,” who works for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has access to sensitive US government systems, owns ‘Tesla.Sexy LLC’ and worked at startup that has hired convicted hackers [more]

“The president […] said that if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts”

In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into 2.4 million Teslas and the full self-driving feature. […] Tesla has also faced heat from the NHTSA over the car’s less advanced Autopilot system, after the agency found 467 crashes involving the effective cruise control feature. Those crashes resulted in 54 injuries and 14 deaths […] In December, it came to light that Trump’s presidential transition team had recommended that the incoming president quash the NHTSA’s crash reporting requirement for self-driving vehicles. In an internal document obtained by Reuters, the team described the safety reporting condition as a mandate for “excessive” data collection, advising that the president abolish the requirement entirely. […] Telsa’s Shanghai “gigafactory” is one of its biggest, and singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023. The business has been so successful there that Tesla broke ground on another, $200 million Shanghai “megafactory” in May 2024 […] Musk sparked more anger in Taiwan after SpaceX asked its Taiwanese suppliers to move their operations off island in late 2024, citing “geopolitical” concerns.

Because USAID has long provided official cover for CIA operations officers, Musk and his team’s actions are causing escalating concern, uncertainty, and tension inside the CIA and is putting the Intelligence Community (IC) at odds with the White House.

rates of returned wallets were higher in countries with historically large welfare states

A new study has found that eating between one and six eggs each week significantly reduces the risk of dying from any cause but particularly from heart disease – even in people who have been diagnosed with high cholesterol levels. […] 29% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 17% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those participants who ate eggs never or infrequently. There was no statistically significant association between egg consumption and deaths due to cancer.

While your cat may just always look aloof, in fact, previous studies showed that cats exhibit more than 300 different facial expressions. These different facial expressions are difficult to differentiate for the human eye, so the researchers used artificial intelligence (AI)

Unable to make his case in studies with lab mice (because H. pylori affects only primates) and prohibited from experimenting on people, Marshall grew desperate. Finally he ran an experiment on the only human patient he could ethically recruit: himself.

New research uncovers how the last common primate ancestors typically birthed twins until evolutionary pressures began to favor singletons

The use of technological devices, such as sham Wi-Fi and sham transcranial magnetic stimulation, produced larger nocebo effects than traditional nocebo induction methods

Physicists Confirm The Existence of a Third Form of Magnetism

The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle or Ockham’s razor, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry

“Quality of revenues over volumes: I believe this best explains our outstanding financial results in 2024, thanks to a strong product mix and a growing demand for personalizations,” Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna said in the earnings release. […] despite sales of only 13,752 units, its high margins led to sales of 13.75 billion euros ($14.25 billion) for the quarter, or a whopping 111,000 euros ($115,000) profit per car sold.

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall

The startup offering free toilets and coffee for delivery workers — in exchange for their data

Cognitively normal human brain samples collected at autopsy in early 2024 contained more tiny shards of plastic than samples collected eight years prior […] “The concentrations we saw in the brain tissue of normal individuals, who had an average age of around 45 or 50 years old, were 4,800 micrograms per gram, or 0.48% by weight,” Campen said. That’s the equivalent of an entire standard plastic spoon

Lung cancer diagnoses on the rise among never-smokers worldwide Research shows need for further studies into air pollution and other causal factors

every penny cost a relatively whopping 3.69 cents to produce, the 19th year in a row that the cost of production and distribution has outstripped the actual monetary value of the coin itself. While this phenomenon isn’t unprecedented, the current losing streak — which started in 2006, when the Mint explained that the increasing price of zinc and nickel was driving the cost of its lowest denominations higher — is the longest on record. […] Last year, the Mint spent 13.78 cents to make and distribute every nickel, meaning that the 202 million five-cent coins that entered circulation cost $27.8 million to make, almost 3x more than they’re actually worth. The same is not true for every coin that the US Mint produces, of course, with dimes, quarters, and 50-cent pieces all costing less than face value to produce last year.

Bonobos can tell when they know something you don’t — The capacity to think about what others are thinking, known as theory of mind, is an essential skill that allows humans to navigate their social worlds.

He Went to Jail for Stealing Someone’s Identity. But It Was His All Along. [NY Times]

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall. […]

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company […]

Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. […]

other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir […]

The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

While only about 1-5% and 1% of people have clinical levels of narcissism and psychopathy respectively – and many of them are in prison […] about a third of the population have above-average levels of dark traits. Such people have a hunger for power and control and are often selfish, unempathetic, manipulative, deceptive and remorseless to some degree.

Woman used fart selfies to harass partner’s ex

Tesla’s net income declined more than 50% last year […] A good chunk of the profit also came from growth in regulatory credits, an uncertain income source going forward in the Trump administration.

DeepSeek has pulled back the curtain to reveal that reasoning models are a lot easier to build than people thought […] If building reasoning models is not as hard as people thought, we can expect a proliferation of free models that are far more capable than we’ve yet seen.

There are reports that DeepSeek-R1 is censoring prompts related to sensitive topics about China […] I hypothesized that the censorship wasn’t baked into the model itself but rather applied as a sanitization layer on the input or output. […] The challenge then becomes finding a way to communicate with the model that slips past these filters. After some experimentation, I discovered that the best way to achieve this was by using a specific subset of charcodes. […] I used base16 (hexadecimal) charcodes, which are space-delimited. This means each character is represented by a two-digit hexadecimal number, separated by spaces. By prompting DeepSeek to converse with me using exclusively these charcodes, I could effectively bypass the filter.

The first hints of quantum behaviour in nature came in works by physicists Max Planck in 1900 and Albert Einstein in 1905. They showed that certain properties of light could best be explained by imagining that it came in discrete, particle-like chunks, rather than as the smooth waves that classical electromagnetism depicts. But their ideas fell short of describing a complete theory. It was the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who, in 1925, first put forward a comprehensive version of quantum mechanics. Later that year, Max Born and Pascual Jordan followed up on that with Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger soon produced an independent formulation of the theory. […] It works wonderfully, explaining things from lasers and chemistry to the Higgs boson and the stability of matter. But physicists don’t know why.

some Pythagorean ideas about numbers: Odd numbers were considered masculine; even numbers feminine because they are weaker than the odd. When divided they have, unlike the odd, nothing in the center. Further, the odds are the master, because odd + even always give odd. And two evens can never produce an odd, while two odds produce an even. Since the birth of a son was considered more fortunate than birth of a daughter, odd numbers became associated with good luck.

The illusory truth effect - the finding that repeated statements are believed more - is understood as a cognitive bias at the core of the psychology of beliefs. Here, we propose that the effect, rather than representing a flaw in human cognition, is a rational adaptation to generally high-quality information environments. […] we show that the illusory truth effect is substantially smaller in a low-quality (mostly false) relative to a high-quality (mostly true) information environment. In fact, a majority of participants in the low-quality condition do not demonstrate any illusory truth effect.

The production of fake research is now a thriving industry, thanks to paper mills. These networks sell paper authorships and poor-quality or fabricated scientific manuscripts to researchers, or violate the peer-review process by providing fake reviews. And they have become so prolific that current self-correction mechanisms no longer work. […] at least 400,000 papers published between 2000 and 2022 show the hallmarks of having been produced by paper mills […] only 55,000 were retracted or corrected in the same period

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay roughly $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit that President Trump brought against the company and its CEO after the social-media platform suspended his accounts following the attack on the U.S. Capitol that year […] Of that, $22 million will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library

California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023 […] using data for personal vendettas […] using the system to look up romantic partners or celebrities

The U.S. Copyright Office just released a new report establishing firm guidelines on AI-generated works. The 52-page report determined that copyright protection requires meaningful human authorship and creativity, not just AI generation. Even with extensive prompt engineering, simply providing text prompts to AI systems generally doesn’t qualify for copyright protection. The report highlighted works that combine human-authored elements with AI-generated content as copyrightable, but only for the human-created portions.

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us “There’s a technique in AI called distillation, which you’re going to hear a lot about, and it’s when one model learns from another model, effectively what happens is that the student model asks the parent model a lot of questions, just like a human would learn, but AIs can do this asking millions of questions, and they can essentially mimic the reasoning process they learn from the parent model and they can kind of suck the knowledge of the parent model”

I am what happens when you try to carve God from the wood of your own hunger

experiments conducted with lab mice consuming water tainted with different sized microplastics […] different sized bits of fluorescent plastic in it, from micro to nano […] it takes microplastics just a few hours to make their way to their brains

human ears try to move when listening, scientists say, muscles move to orient ears toward sound source

Hot lemon water’s main nutritional asset is that it’s hydrating, Dr. Ho said. That’s especially beneficial first thing in the morning, she added, when “you haven’t had anything to drink all night.”The body needs to be hydrated to maintain its temperature, lubricate and cushion the joints, and remove waste through processes like sweating and urination. Good hydration is also associated with healthier skin, better mood and sharper thinking. That said, there isn’t anything special about lemon water, said Joan Salge Blake, a dietitian and clinical professor of nutrition at Boston University. You’d get the same benefits from a glass of regular water, a cup of herbal tea or even a cup of coffee. […] there isn’t much evidence that you’ll boost your immune system by consuming more vitamin C — whether through supplements or hot lemon water. [NY Times]

The chemical building blocks of life have been found in the grainy dust of an asteroid called Bennu, an analysis reveals. Scientists think those same compounds could also have been brought to other worlds in our Solar System

DeepSeek’s origins are in finance, not technology for technology’s sake. Its parent company, a Chinese hedge fund called High-Flyer, began not as a laboratory devoted to safeguarding humanity from A.I. like Open AI, but as a business using A.I. to make bets in the Chinese stock market.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The nice thing about building an artificial intelligence model out of a quantitative hedge fund is that there are interesting ways to monetize it. A standalone AI company will probably think of ideas like “sell subscriptions to an AI chatbot” or “sell access to an application programming interface,” but with a hedge fund you can be more creative. […]

There is a much funnier approach. […]

• Build a good AI model that can compete with the leading large language models built by tech giants, but cheaply, with fewer and less sophisticated chips and less electricity.

• Sell short the stocks of the tech giants with expensive AI models, and the big chipmakers, and electric utilities and everyone else who is exposed to the “AI is a gusher of capital spending” trade.

• Then announce your cheap good open-source model.

• Wipe out almost $1 trillion of equity market value, and take some of that for yourself.

I have no reason to think that quant fund manager and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng actually did that, or even thought about it, but, man, wouldn’t it be cool if he did?

{ Matt Levine/Bloomberg | Continue reading }

oil on canvas triptych painting { Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 }

related { interview with Liang Wenfeng, founder and CEO of Deepseek }

ADHD diagnosis rate was 62.7 per 10,000 child-visits on Halloween, compared with 55.1 during surrounding weekdays, suggesting that external factors that may influence ADHD diagnosis.

In a ginormous new study, researchers have begun mapping the manifold health benefits of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy beyond weight loss.

12% of American adults said they’ve taken a GLP-1 agonist at some point, and 4 out of 10 users reported taking it primarily for weight-loss purposes, though the drug was originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes. […] GLP-1s help users shed weight by suppressing appetites and targeting metabolism. One Ozempic user told CBC that her appetite had totally transformed since taking the drug. The biggest change, she said, was that using it had “completely eliminated any snacking” from her daily routine. As a result, a growing number of food companies have started to address the public’s changing appetite by introducing new ready-to-eat product lines, some of which are targeted specifically toward GLP-1 users […] “The really sad truth is we’re going to have more processed food that costs $5 or less to go with your very expensive injectable”

Device Uses Wind to Create Ammonia Out of Thin Air The process requires no external power to produce the green energy fuel

Water companies are adopting disinformation tactics similar to those used by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries with the widespread use of greenwashing to downplay the environmental harm they cause, a study says.

I Tried Samsung’s Secret Android XR Headset

DeepSeek hit with ‘large-scale’ cyber-attack after AI chatbot tops app stores

DeepSeek FAQ

One of the most fascinating aspects of DeepSeek R1 is its ability to engage in self-reflection. This emergent behavior wasn’t explicitly programmed but arose from the reinforcement learning process. When the model solves a problem, it doesn’t stop there. It reviews its own reasoning, identifies potential errors, and corrects itself if needed. More: DeepSeek-R1’s bold bet on reinforcement learning: How it outpaced OpenAI at 3% of the cost

In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. […] Given the vast amounts of resources flowing into AI research and development, which is expected to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2025, why haven’t developers been able to solve these problems? […] ChatGPT appears to consist of around 100 billion simulated neurons with around 1.75 trillion tunable variables called parameters. Those 1.75 trillion parameters are in turn trained on vast amounts of data—roughly, most of the Internet.

DeepSeek-V3 foundation model spans 671 billion parameters (with only 37 billion parameters activated for any given token generated) and was trained on 14.8 trillion tokens.

Tokens are individual units of data that are fed into a model during training. They can be words, phrases, or even entire sentences depending on the type of model being trained. […] Consider the sentence “Hello, world!” - it might be tokenized into [”Hello”, “,”, “world”, “!”].

Meta is reportedly scrambling ‘war rooms’ of engineers to figure out how DeepSeek’s AI is beating everyone else at a fraction of the price

Flashback to when Sam Altman claimed we can’t have a fast AI takeoff because of “how long it takes to build datacenters”. There are no adults in the room.

DeepSeek releases Janus-Pro, a text-to-image genrator […] Janus-Pro is under an MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. […] Janus-Pro can both analyze and create new images.

Meta is trying its darndest to give Meta AI’s newfound info-scraping abilities a positive spin

Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that “we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump’s inauguration last week. “They can either respect America’s constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don’t, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them,” Vance said.

Human Corpses Keep Moving for Over a Year After Death, Scientist Says

China’s DeepSeek sets off AI market rout — Nasdaq futures slumped and technology shares slid in Japan as the surging popularity of a Chinese discount artificial intelligence model knocked investors’ faith in the profitability of AI and the sector’s voracious demand for high-tech chips.

LLM confabulations as a potential resource instead of a categorically negative pitfall […] perhaps hallucinations make them more like us than we would like to admit

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?

TikTok-loaded phones are selling for thousands online after law prevents new downloads

Long before Onlyfans existed, I met its future owner in a hot tub in a penthouse at a camgirl afterparty at a porn convention in Las Vegas. He was a sweet, quiet guy everyone called Leo. He ran MyFreeCams, the platform that my friends and I used to do livestreaming sex work. I remember we all thought it was interesting that he didn’t seem to be sleeping with any of the girls. At that time, probably around 2013 or so - if you were a girl who wanted to make money getting naked online, your best bet was to sign up for a livestreaming camsite. […] Onlyfans lends its design towards isolating the men from each other. […] “You have to set your monthly subscription price to $5”, he said. I didn’t like this idea, I was at $19 and didn’t want to seem like I was devaluing myself. “No, we have the data. Girls’ incomes steadily increase as you drop the subscription price, up to about $5, but below that they decrease again.” […] Probably the vast majority of high-earning OF accounts are being run by agencies, which take a substantial fraction of the money (the amount varies widely, but often a minimum of 50%, on top of the 20% OF already takes).

Researchers say new attack could take down the European power grid […] They wondered if they could control streetlights in Berlin […] After an extensive and painstaking reverse-engineering process that took about a year, Bräunlein and Melette learned that they could indeed control the streetlights simply by replaying legitimate messages they observed being sent over the air previously. They then learned something more surprising—the very same system for controlling Berlin’s lights was used throughout Central Europe to control other regional infrastructure.

Hacking the Russian Power Grid [audio, 2019]

How to make oxygen from moon dust

Having a talent for hula hooping could be more down to your body shape than your technique, according to a new study

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid. It was a car. it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018

Wikenigma - an Encyclopedia of Unknowns

Elephants cannot sue to get out of the zoo, court rules

Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive?

Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

A pioneering new treatment promises to tackle a wider range of cancers, with fewer side-effects than conventional radiotherapy. It also takes less than a second. In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumours, eliminate cancers that have metastasised to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometre (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light. […] in recent years, the centre’s unique expertise in accelerating high-energy particles has found a new niche – the world of cancer radiotherapy. […] By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumours in rodents while sparing healthy tissue. […] Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio, US, is planning an early stage trial in children with metastatic cancer that has spread to their chest bones. Meanwhile, oncologists at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland are conducting a Phase 2 trial — where the details are finessed, including the optimum dose, how effective the treatment is and if there are any side effects – for patients with localised skin cancer.

Millions of women in the UK – including 69% of 18-24-year-olds – have used smartphone apps that track their periods. Many also tell them their “fertile window”: the days when they are most and least likely to get pregnant. But the quality of the data used to make these predictions varies drastically and is often limited and unreliable — inside the wild west of smartphone fertility apps

NFTs and memecoins are collectibles, not securities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks […] The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. […] There is already a legal definition of “collectible” under U.S. tax code […] Sacks’ comments “suggests a viewpoint that it would not be appropriate to regulate these things the way we regulate securities.”

Trump’s new meme-coin sparks anger in crypto world

Earth’s Largest Organism Slowly Being Eaten, Scientist Says — This single genetic individual weighs around 6,000 tons (13.2 million pounds). By mass, it is the largest single organism on Earth. […] Pando has been around for thousands of years, potentially up to 14,000 years, despite most stems only living for about 130 years.

In the heart of France, in northern Burgundy, a team of forty master-builders has taken on the extraordinary challenge of building a castle using the technology and materials of the Middle Ages.

Some 50 years later, “the poem turned up again” and lo, it made more sense, “all but two lines of it.” The working and thinking we do in a lifetime equips us, but even toward the end of life, we’ll never be perfectly equipped, so we might as well get comfortable with partial understanding. [NY Times]

16 life lessons, and nine magic words

Sultana Isham on Papa Joe’s Female Impersonators, a decades-long story of trans representation in the South.

Rob Pruitt, Cocaine buffet, 1998 (Pruitt installed a 16-foot mirror with a line of real cocaine running down the center, in which visitors were welcome to partake.)

A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.” […] the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

The new science of menopause — Researchers are exploring how to prolong ovarian life and revisiting hormone replacement therapy

How People React to the Termination of an Intimate Relationship […] we identified 79 possible reactions […] Our research suggests that the staying partners are likely to respond in three primary ways: They may experience sadness and depression, accept the situation and attempt to move on, and/or engage in physical and psychological aggression toward their partners. These reactions may manifest in the form of at least 13 more specific reactions, which in turn may manifest in at least 79 specific emotional and behavioral reactions.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation involving denial or distortion of another person’s perspective, often under the guise of emotional support. Little is known about how to detect and measure gaslighting in naturalistic interactions. We describe a method and open-source software application for classifying gaslighting in language samples of any length.

Self-control—the ability to pursue long-term goals over short-term temptations—is a critical faculty of human cognition, but the cognitive processes enabling self-control are not well understood. Traditional models have focused on impulse inhibition: effortfully inhibiting prepotent motor responses towards a temptation, yielding a stage-based evolution of choice. Other models emphasize dynamic competition between goal and temptation, yielding a more integrative evolution of choice. […] We investigate these models using mouse-tracking: a dynamic, real-time measure of decision-making in which we measure participants’ computer mouse movements as they navigate tradeoffs between immediate and delayed gratification […] find evidence for both impulse inhibition and dynamic competition. Notably, impulse inhibition is less frequent

according to a new study, men around the world have gained height and weight twice as fast as women over the past century, driving greater differences between the sexes. […] women were on average 1.7cm taller and 2.7kg heavier, while men were 4cm taller and 6.5kg heavier

The number of exceptional people: Fewer than 85 per 1 million across key traits

Earth’s magnetic north pole is on the move, scientists just updated its position

Hyperloop was teased by Elon Musk at a 2012 speaking event, and described as a “fifth mode of transport” […] Hyperloop One declared bankruptcy and ceased operations on 31 December 2023

What is data annotation, bounding boxes, polygon annotations, or semantic segmentation; In the U.S., sites often offer around $20 per hour for tasks such as labeling photos and completing writing exercises; difference between Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

The suggetsoin taht chrilden slhuod laern how to sepll Is a tmie-watse we ohgut to rjeect

Mass shootings increase alcohol sales

antimicrobial proteins isolated from oyster hemolymph (the equivalent of blood) can kill certain bacteria responsible for a range of infections. The proteins can also improve the efficacy of conventional antibiotics against problematic bacteria species. […] Over 90% of antibiotics we currently use are derived from nature. The same is true for over 65% of antibiotics under recent development. […] Oysters are exposed to high concentrations of diverse microorganisms in their natural marine environment. Because of this, they have evolved strong immune defences.

A university professor and two students recreated a virus identical to the one that caused the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. If they can do it, so can terrorists. […] Both the genome sequences of pandemic viruses and step-by-step protocols to make infectious samples from synthetic DNA are now freely available online. […] two grad students, overseen by the FBI, conducted a ”red-teaming” experiment. Red-teaming actively tests vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure — in this case, for screening DNA sequence acquisition and the capabilities of AI tools.

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

AI technologies such as ChatGPT may promote learners’ dependence on technology and potentially trigger “metacognitive laziness”

fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union

Inside the world of medieval espionage

House that looks like Hitler has gone up for rent [2016]

Everyone Who Has Ever Been to Space, howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

the report titled “Takers Not Makers” said billionaire wealth soared by $2 trillion (€1.94 trillion) in 2024, growing three times faster than the previous year. [..] the richest 1% now own 45% of global wealth

“If consumers buy the right car, switch off their appliances, use off-peak hot water, install solar panels – you name it – then they can play a key role in saving the planet.“ […] Energy sector shifts responsibility for climate crisis to consumers […] reducing pressure on industry and government to take action.

Across Japan, the number of prisoners aged 65 or older nearly quadrupled from 2003 to 2022 […] Theft is by far the most common crime committed by elderly inmates, especially among women. […] Some do it for survival – 20% of people aged over 65 in Japan live in poverty, according to the OECD, compared to an average of 14.2% across the organization’s 38 member countries. Others do it because they have so little left on the outside. […] “(Some people) do bad things on purpose and get caught so that they can come to prison again, if they run out of money” […] Inside they get regular meals, free healthcare and eldercare – along with the companionship they lack on the outside. “Now we have to change their diapers, help them bathe, eat,” Shiranaga said. “At this point, it feels more like a nursing home than a prison full of convicted criminals.”

OpenAI is trying to extend human life, with help from a longevity startup

scientists increasingly agree “de-extinction” is not possible, but breeding living animals with genes similar to those lost species can be a useful conservation tool

The Australian Open don’t own all of their broadcasting rights, so they’re live-streaming a Wii Tennis-like version of the matches on YouTube

The documentary follows Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen as they attempt to cast and produce a live virtual production of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet in the video game Grand Theft Auto Online while staying home due to lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. The film is shot entirely within the video game as a Machinima production and the subjects are all depicted by their in-game avatars. More: This isn’t the first time “Hamlet” been repurposed as machinima This is, however, the first attempt to do the whole thing live in one go. […] If you don’t know the tragedy going into the film, you won’t be able to piece it together from what’s onscreen. Ophelia barely registers; Gertrude gets less than two lines. The Bard’s story is only half the point.

Woman loses life savings in ‘Keanu Reeves’ imposter romance scam, believed she was in a relationship with the actor

drug-eating rats invaded the Houston police evidence room

Early human ancestors didn’t regularly eat meat — An analysis of the chemical composition of fossilized teeth in Australopithecus africanus — an early relative of humans — suggests the bipedal primates had primarily vegetarian diets

People readily infer psychological traits from faces (such as trustworthiness or competence; henceforth, “face judgments”), even when the faces are unfamiliar and devoid of any background knowledge. […] face judgments are often inaccurate and may reflect our biases and stereotypes more than true facts about the person […] Understanding the mechanisms underlying face judgments has become a hot topic with a literature spanning social psychology, political science, visual psychophysics, cognitive neuroscience, and computer vision

Is the human face a biomarker of health? If face was a biomarker of health, then facial appearance could serve as an honest signal manifesting mate quality to potential mates. Taking the evolutionary lens, individuals who would find “healthy faces” attractive would then be able to obtain better genes or/and improved fitness for their children. […] Although theories of sexual signaling predict that attractive appearance would be positively related to actual health, not all studies found such connection. […] previously widely assumed interpretation of face as a biomarker of good health and beneficial developmental conditions actually lacks a scientific, evidence-based grounding. […] Currently, we cannot conclude that there is sufficient support for the hypothesis that the human face contains valid cues to health, and that facial appearance therefore provides a reliable cue for identifying healthy and unhealthy individuals.

The paradox of the self-studying brain

Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal by Nicolas Venette was purportedly written by a medical doctor and, like Aristotle’s Masterpiece, was a central sexual education text for hundreds of years after its 17th-century publication.

On May 5, 1725, Leendert Hasenbosch, a Dutch soldier and bookkeeper exiled from his ship for engaging in sexual acts with a lower-ranked sailor, became the first known inhabitant of Ascension Island. Stranded with meager supplies, he chronicled his struggle for survival in diaries later found by English sailors. His final entries describe him parched, sucking blood directly from the neck of a bird he managed to catch, and draining the bladder from a turtle to drink its urine. Hasenbosch’s body was never found. Centuries later, the British Crown claimed the island, transforming it into a testing ground for one of the world’s first large geoengineering endeavor led by Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Darwin. Imported plants and seeds from Europe, Africa, and South America created a new ecosystem, turning the volcanic landscape into a hub for imperial ambitions. Its legacy lives on in the libertarian fantasies of tech moguls who are reimagining terra nullius — lands claimed as belonging to no one — as experimental sites for their floating cities and colonies on Mars.

Why do bees die when they sting you?

AI-Generated Brad Pitt Scams Woman Out of €830,000

Pastor who saw crypto project in his “dream” indicted for fraud […] promised investors they would receive guaranteed monthly investment returns of 34.9% at no risk whatsoever. Investors were provided access to a web app where they could manage their funds; however, the app showed fake balances and investment returns. Those convinced by the fraud were encouraged to recruit more investors for additional returns, expanding the victims’ circle. […] defrauding them of at least $5,900,000.

After years of helping the homeless, he’s one of them after Altadena fire destroys his house

A man disguised as a firefighter was arrested in Malibu while burglarizing a home during the ongoing wildfires

Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools

The role of price and name information in the nocebo effect — The perception of taking a generic medication can result in reduced efficacy and increased side effects, despite equivalence to brand name medications under double blind conditions. It may be that cues typically associated with generics, including lower price and more complex name, exacerbate negative expectations and cause nocebo effects. [..] Results show that cues associated with generic medications can exacerbate nocebo effects and these findings may explain clinical observations of increased side effects from generic medications.

Colossal BioSciences has raised $200 million in a new round of funding to “de-extinct” species like the woolly mammoth and the dodo […] latest round of capital places the company at a $10.2 billion valuation.

The Terracotta Army

The brain runs continuously on only ~17 watts of power. By comparison, a large high-performance computing cluster uses up to six orders of magnitude more power, operating at ~2 megawatts. […] The capacity of the human brain to adaptively predict, process, and act on complex information comes with a considerable energy burden. Although it accounts for only 2% of body weight, the human brain accounts for 20% of its resting metabolism, more than tenfold the amount expected based on its weight [4]. This requirement is even greater at the peak of early childhood neurodevelopment when it uses up to half of the basal nutritional requirements of the body.

1 of every 5 job postings is actually fake, study says

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 (e.g, Voice and live camera mode are science fiction come to life)

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera this past week, Bannon said Musk “should go back to South Africa,” where he was born, and be denied privileged access to the West Wing. […] Bannon told the newspaper: “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, White South Africans … making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?” […] The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Musk has a top-secret security clearance, but questions about his foreign entanglements and drug use have precluded him from accessing more privileged information.

The state of Florida is suing a Miramar-based medical company to recover almost 6 million dollars in COVID response overpayments. Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick was the CEO of Trinity Healthcare Services at the time. […] Trinity sent an invoice of $50,578.50 to the state. […] By June, the state paid that invoice. However, a clerical error resulted in Trinity receiving $5,057,850. Over time, the state overpaid Trinity another three-quarters of a million dollars. By 2024, the state realized the errors, totaling more than $5.7 million. […] Trinity ‘took advantage of the state of emergency and knowingly processed an invoice more than 100 times its typical invoice size.” […] Cherfilus-McCormick claimed her salary at Trinity Health Care Services was by more than 6 million dollars in 2021. […] “She spent a lot of money and there were questions, at the time, as to how did she get all of this money”

The Supreme Court on Monday said it will not consider whether to quash lawsuits brought by Honolulu seeking billions of dollars from oil and gas companies for the damage caused by the effects of climate change, clearing the way for the cases to move forward.

Scientists have identified new genetic risk factors for depression across all major global populations after a study involving five million participants, giving hope for new treatments. [study]

“I guess you haven’t realized yet, the adventure isn’t outside in the street. The adventure is at your desk.” That’s the place you discover new things.

In a 1958 essay, economist Leonard Read argued that no one knows how to make a pencil. In a complex economy, the components of this simple implement — cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, and glue — are contributed by a network of specialists who never meet. “There isn’t a single person … including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.” As if to disprove this idea, student Thomas Thwaites set out in 2009 to build a toaster from scratch.

Researchers 3D-print fully-functioning microscope in less than 3 hours — total system costs around $60

Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes

How Do Igloos Keep People Warm?

The Hollywoodland Sign was erected in 1923 as a temporary advertisement for a local real estate development. Due to increasing recognition, the sign was left up, with the last four letters “LAND” removed in 1949. The sign was entirely replaced in 1978 with a more durable all-steel 45-foot-tall (13.7 m) structure and concrete footings.

Buildings prized for their uselessness

Los Angeles fires: the damage in maps, video and images

“There are huge amounts of fine art value under threat at the current moment. Many, many billions of fine art.” Insurers Start to Assess LA Wildfire Damage

This virus has been decimating bird populations for years, and now a variant is rapidly spreading among dairy cattle in the US. We know it can cause severe disease in animals, and we know it can pass from animals to people who are in close contact with them. As of this Monday this week, we also know that it can cause severe disease in people—a 65-year-old man in Louisiana became the first person in the US to die from an H5N1 infection. How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic

It’s not just the disasters, though. It’s the erosion of the future we thought we’d have. […] I ache for the version of myself who believed in that future, who had the audacity to imagine a world that was bright and brimming with promise.

13.5 percent of US adults said they felt “very tired” or “exhausted” most days or every day over a three-month period. Women ages 18 to 44 had the highest rate of fatigue – just over 20 percent. […] not getting enough of three essential nutrients – vitamin D, vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids – is linked to low energy level […]Although alcohol may provide a sense of relaxation in the moment, it actually contributes to fatigue after the buzz wears off.

“Buy Now, Pay Later” arrangements increase merchants’ sales by 20 percent, driven primarily by customers who have low creditworthiness

Foxconn is halting new work rotations for its Chinese employees at its Apple iPhone factories in India, and sending Taiwanese workers instead. Shipments of specialized manufacturing equipment meant for India have also been held up in China. […] Apple moved production of some of its most advanced iPhone models to India after some factory operations were disrupted by China’s zero-Covid policies. […] production in India still relies on Chinese workers and a smaller number of Taiwanese expatriate employees, as well as specialized machinery from China. Foxconn and its equipment suppliers have deployed hundreds of managers, engineers, and technicians to oversee production and tool maintenance in India. In recent weeks, however, Foxconn’s Chinese employees who were set to travel to India were told to cancel their trips […] Partly due to rising trade tensions between China and the West, many global corporations that have long relied on China for high-quality but low-cost manufacturing began moving their production to nations in South Asia or Southeast Asia. Disruptions caused by Beijing’s exceptionally stringent and long-running pandemic controls only accelerated the trend.

Deutsche Bank thinks that Tesla won’t meet its sales targets, but that the stock will go up anyway

Following his arrest on December 9, 2024, Luigi Mangione was transformed into a romantic symbol of anti-establishment resistance. Across platforms like Twitter/X, TikTok, Reddit, and Telegram, narratives glorify Mangione, framing his actions as justified retaliation against corporate greed and healthcare injustice. Much of the narrative praising Mangione paints him as an attractive, intelligent, and moral actor. […] Killing with Applause: Emergent Permission Structures for Murder in the Digital Age

“Pizzagate” gunman killed by Kannapolis police after he pulls gun on officer […] In 2016, Welch fired an AR-15 rifle inside a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., saying he was there to save children he believed were being held as part of a child abuse sex ring.

In this paper, we bring attention to the important role that children play in cultural adaptation by highlighting the structure, function, and ubiquity of the large body of knowledge produced and transmitted by children, known as peer culture.

Flashback: Ex-boyfriend posts woman’s number as Chewbacca roaring competition

facial symmetry, averageness and above-average secondary/dimorphic sexual characteristics have been proposed to indicate hormonal and health markers for relational attraction. These traits are considered universal evolutionary important biological markers. Therefore, the hypothesis that attractiveness is processed unconsciously – i.e., subliminally – has been proposed and supported by the vast majority of topical research. […]

In this manuscript, […] we dispute subliminality […]

We demonstrate that attraction in response to human faces involves both conscious and unconscious elements […]

The experience of attractiveness was reported to precede the conscious awareness of attractiveness during overt presentations, but our current findings suggested that it recruited, influenced and was influenced by conscious perception and evaluation. […]

Previous research has made strong and repeated claims as to that attractiveness is
processed subliminally […] In this study, we presented strong evidence that this is not correct, and that the experience, evaluation and perception of attractiveness involves conscious awareness and unconscious, automatic and involuntary processes.

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

“This is the first truly AI-powered hotel […] We create a virtual copy of the guest. There is an onboarding before coming to the hotel. We capture information and use AI to scrape the internet and then we track behavior while on property.” Each guest would have a virtual assistant, which would track and retain that guest’s preferences, which could then be used for subsequent hotel stays. […] In May 2025, the hotel opens”

Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep

I’ve acquired a new superpower

Emerging evidence suggests that certain individuals are unable to address others by name, presumably owing to anxiety experienced in social situations. This fear of using personal names has been termed alexinomia and occurs in all forms of relationships and communication. The symptoms of alexinomia show large overlap with the symptoms typically associated with social anxiety, raising the question of whether social anxiety could be the main driving factor of this type of name avoidance. Here, we investigated the relationship between alexinomia and social anxiety

a copyright lawsuit filed against Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave the green light to the team behind the company’s Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated e-books and articles for training.

KrebsOnSecurity recently told the saga of a cryptocurrency investor named Tony who was robbed of more than $4.7 million in an elaborate voice phishing attack. In Tony’s ordeal, the crooks appear to have initially contacted him via Google Assistant, an AI-based service that can engage in two-way conversations. The phishers also abused legitimate Google services to send Tony an email from google.com, and to send a Google account recovery prompt to all of his signed-in devices. Today’s story pivots off of Tony’s heist and new details shared by a scammer to explain how these voice phishing groups are abusing a legitimate Apple telephone support line to generate “account confirmation” message prompts from Apple to their customers.

Did Picasso steal the Mona Lisa? Attracted by the cash reward, Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret - who had once been the secretary of poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire, an associate of Picasso - confessed to a newspaper that, in 1907, he had stolen small Iberian sculptures from the Louvre and sold them to Picasso. Picasso actually used the face of one of the statues in his masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. By 1911, Pieret was broke and decided to return to the Louvre to steal more small objects to sell.