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

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

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

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

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

Why do some people feel tired all the time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

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

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

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

Forensics gone wrong: When DNA snares the innocent

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

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

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

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

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

Vomit color chart

Madonna sued over late concert start by fans who ‘had to get up early’ the next morning

You Can Now Face Jail Time in Las Vegas if You Stop Walking in Certain Areas

A Canadian man who says he’s been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve “triangulation fraud”

Teachers say mobile phones make their lives a living hell – so one Massachusetts school barred them

A new paper released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found about 240,000 particles in the average liter of bottled water, most of which were “nanoplastics” — Scientists have also found microplastics in tap water, but in smaller amounts.

Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems—Simple Cells Can Do It

Many human morphological and behavioral characteristic — musicality, sense of rhythm, use of dissonances, entrainment, bipedalism, long head hair, long legs, strong body odor, armpit hair, traditions of body painting and cannibalism — are explained as predator avoidance tactics of an aposematic (warning display) defense strategy. […] Unlike crypsis, which is based on the strategy of remaining invisible, silent, odorless, and fleeing as quickly as possible if discovered by a predator, aposematism is the alternative defense strategy of intimidating predators by remaining visible, being noisy, presenting odor, and, rather than fleeing when confronted by a predator, actively approaching and threatening the predator with body size, loud sounds, odors, and fearless behavior. […] Humans are among the very rare terrestrial species that sing, though arguably some carnivores (e.g., wolves and coyotes) can also sing, and sing in choruses […] Early humans came down from the trees, and tree-living birds and primates (including a lesser ape, gibbons) are among the most ardent singers, so it would be logical to propose that our arboreal common (humans and apes) ancestor was a singer. The long-standing question that comes with this suggestion is why do terrestrial apes not sing? […] Many singing and noisy arboreal species (birds and monkeys) maintain silence whenever they visit the ground as a cryptic defense strategy from potential ground predators. Most likely, the ancestors of chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos stopped singing for the same reason—maintaining cryptic cover while on the ground. On the other hand, in a strategically different move, early humans continued singing, therefore changing their survival strategy from cryptic into aposematic. […] I propose that not stopping singing was probably the first and deciding move toward the new aposematic strategy of defense in the hominin lineage, followed by the other elements of aposematic display.

Many AI researchers think fakes will become undetectable

Winston Churchill’s false teeth are up for sale

Search still on for missing jawbone of whale believed mistaken for submarine and bombed during WWII

Lichen survived 18 months attached to outside of International Space Station and raises prospect life could exist on Mars

Trolley Problem Solution

Private equity firms are increasingly buying hospitals across the US, and when they do, patients suffer, according to two separate reports. Specifically, the equity firms cut corners, slash services, lay off staff, lower quality of care, take on substantial debt, and reduce charity care, leading to lower ratings and more medical errors, reports collectively find

Apple again banned from selling watches in U.S. with blood oxygen sensor. […] The ban stems from an intellectual property dispute with Masimo, a medical device company. In October, the International Trade Commission found that Apple’s blood oxygen sensors had infringed on Masimo’s intellectual property. […] Masimo had alleged that Apple had poached several of its top executives and copied its technology after declining a partnership.

“Is it the first (Tesla) dud? I think objectively, yes,” Conner told me in a recent chat.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Google lays off “hundreds” more as ad division switches to AI-powered sales

Altman believes future AI products will need to allow “quite a lot of individual customization” and “that’s going to make a lot of people uncomfortable,” because AI will give different answers for different users, based on their values preferences and possibly on what country they reside in.

AI Sleeper Agents More: AI poisoning could turn open models into destructive “sleeper agents,” says Anthropic

Venice’s Secret Service organized intelligence is not – as commonly thought – an invention of the modern industrial state, but already existed in Renaissance Venice of the 1500s and early 1600s.

data shows a higher number of conflict deaths in Ethiopia than in Ukraine […] 65% of men in Ukraine aged 20 to 24 years have fled the country, or died in the conflict [Global Peace Index ]

Orchids were Darwin’s “abominable mystery.” They continue to elude science—and efforts to save them.

Research indicates that staying up all night might have a transient antidepressant effect. Acute sleep deprivation in mice increased dopamine release and triggered brain changes that could alleviate depression. Some studies show similar results in humans. While a single sleepless night might lift the spirits, chronic sleep loss is detrimental to physical and mental health.

Why I ended up making my own mattress […] that is both organic and vegan

Which word begins with “y” and looks like an axe in this picture?

Seeing Blue at Night May Not Be What’s Keeping You Up After All

The best way to predict if you’ll benefit from psychedelic therapy is a questionnaire asking if you’ve met God. Where did it come from, and what is it really measuring?

The internet largely runs beneath the oceans. Here’s how it works

Amazon Is Selling Products With AI-Generated Names Like “I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy”

2023: Artifact, the personalized news reader built by Instagram’s co-founders, is now open to the public, no sign-up required. 2024: Shutting down Artifact

they casted all identical twins to give the audience the illusion that the models walk into this transform capsule and walk out in a different outfit in seconds [more]

Flaubert Versus the World “The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as nothing.”

AI girlfriend bots are already flooding OpenAI’s GPT store […] The AI girlfriend bots go against OpenAI’s usage policy, which was updated when the GPT store launched yesterday (Jan. 10). The company bans GPTs “dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities.” […] OpenAI’s store rules being broken on the second day of operation illustrates how hard it could be to regulate GPTs.

OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study finds

Authors keep finding what appear to be AI-generated imitations and summaries of their books on Amazon. There’s little they can do to rein in the rip-offs.

Over the last month or so, there’s been an uptick in people complaining that the chatbot has become lazy. Sometimes it just straight-up doesn’t do the task you’ve set it. Other times it will stop halfway through whatever it’s doing and you’ll have to plead with it to keep going. Occasionally it even tells you to just do the damn research yourself. So what’s going on? Well, here’s where things get interesting. Nobody really knows.

OpenAI reveals how many ChatGPT for Enterprise customers it has (so far…) — 260 business customers with more than 150,000 distinct […] pricing for ChatGPT for Enterprise varies and is not openly disclosed on OpenAI’s website, but one user on Reddit was quoted at $60 per seat

the group Public Citizen petitioned the state California to reevaluate OpenAI’s nonprofit status

Volkswagen is bringing ChatGPT into its cars and SUVs

What’s next for AI in 2024

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit — In September of this year, Google users discovered that the search engine was incorrectly telling people that eggs can melt. Why? Because instead of surfacing websites, Google now grabs snapshots of pages in a drop down menu, allowing users to read search results without clicking on anything. This practice often grabs incorrect information, like an AI-generated answer from Quora that insisted that eggs can melt when they definitely cannot.

More Than Half of the World Will Be Obese By 2035

Researchers have found a gene that links deafness to cell death in the inner ear in humans –- creating new opportunities for averting hearing loss

New research suggests that having books or plants in your video background inspires a greater deal of trust in calls

The United States just grew in size by 1 million square kilometers – that’s almost twice the area of Spain.

Brazil Arrests Man Suspected of Laundering Nearly US$2.66 Billion

We are less able to cook than we were 30 or 40 years ago

New Study Finds Microplastics in 88% of protein food samples tested. The samples were drawn from 16 different protein types* destined for U.S. consumers, including seafood, pork, beef, chicken, tofu, and three different plant-based meat alternatives […] suggesting that humans are likely eating microplastics no matter the source of protein they choose.

OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material Related: Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem

Holy shit! I finally figured it out! It took me a long time! When OpenAI filed as a “nonprofit corporation organized exclusively for charitable and/or educational purposes” with an interest in “public benefit” what they meant was that they would ask for (& lobby for) the donations of all intellectual property from all humans, everywhere. Brilliant!

asml’s market value has quadrupled in the past five years , to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most valuable technology firm [asml is a manufacturer of chipmaking tools] […] At the end of 2023 asml’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple […] asml holds a monopoly on a key link in the world’s most critical supply chain: without its kit it is next to impossible to make cutting-edge computer processors, such as those that go into smartphones and data centres where artificial intelligence (ai) is trained. With global semiconductor sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, every big country and every big chipmaker wants asml’s gear.

THE TRUE STORY OF THE ATTACK OF THE NAKED SHORT SELLERS

An attorney for Musk, Alex Spiro, said that Musk is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.” […] imagine being the SpaceX employee in charge of randomly drug testing Elon Musk. Tiptoe into Musk’s office after his night out not getting into Berghain and say “hey Mr. Musk it’s time for your random drug test, here’s a cup.” What if he says no? What if he hands you back the cup and it is just full of cocaine? What are you going to do about it? You work for him and he is not, like, a chill and understanding guy. Spiro’s non-denial comes from this Wall Street Journal story about how Elon Musk “has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms,” as well as using ketamine recreationally, that “his drug use is ongoing, especially his consumption of ketamine,” that people close to him “are concerned it could cause a health crisis,” and that “illegal drug use would likely be a violation of federal policies that could jeopardize SpaceX’s billions of dollars in government contracts.”

A mere 700 IT jobs were added in the US last year compared to 267,000 the year prior

2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues gave predictions on the pace of AI progress […] The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model. If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. […] the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116.

one of the mobile phones that had been sucked out of the Boeing Co. 737 Max 9 jet’s cabin remained in functioning condition after a 16,000-foot tumble, according to a post on X

OpenAI lobbying for copyright law revision in the UK More: In a submission to the House of Lords communications and digital select committee, OpenAI said it could not train large language models such as its GPT-4 model - the technology behind ChatGPT - without access to copyrighted work.

The New York Times Launches a Very Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI [NYT Complaint]

Stanford scientists boost hypnotizability with transcranial magnetic brain stimulation — Around two-thirds of adults show some level of hypnotizability, with about 15% being highly responsive. These high responders can achieve remarkable feats like undergoing surgeries without anesthesia solely under hypnosis.

Just How Healthy Is Salmon? Salmon packs more DHA and EPA omega-3s than almost any other food, apart from other fatty fish such as herring and sardines. […] Research suggests these fatty acids reduce arterial stiffness, which is associated with high blood pressure, and they may also have anti-inflammatory effects that could be protective against obesity and Type-2 diabetes. omega-3s are essential to early life brain development, and emerging evidence suggests that consuming them regularly may guard against age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. […] “The main finding of our work was that there’s not much difference between wild and farmed” […] Farmed Atlantic salmon, for example, tended to have lower mercury levels than wild-caught varieties. However , all the samples contained levels of mercury far below international safety standards. “Even if you ate salmon every day, mercury is not something you should be concerned about” […] Research has found that salmon, whether wild or farmed, does not contain harmful levels of these toxins. That’s partly because it doesn’t live long enough to absorb a lot of them.

Card game rules

How many times must you fold a paper to reach the Moon?

One year ago we flooded a forest (video)

Individuals with increased pain sensitivity were found to be more likely to support and even vote for politicians from the opposing political camp.

a new study says that contact with cigarette smoke, even if it’s on your clothes after coming from a smoky environment, can damage your dog’s health as well.

Examination of more recent IQ data indicate that IQ of university students and university graduates dropped to the average of the general population. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.

people throughout human history and across diverse societies have seldom invoked “chance” – a concept that has gained significant importance in contemporary, modern societies – as an explanation

The issue with multi-tasking at a brain level, is that two tasks performed at the same time often compete for common neural pathways – like two intersecting streams of traffic on a road. […] Generally, the more skilled you are on a primary motor task, the better able you are to juggle another task at the same time. Skilled surgeons, for example, can multitask more effectively than residents […] When walking, it takes much longer to complete a path if it also involves cognitive effort along the way.

Cybersecurity guru Mikko Hyppönen’s 5 biggest AI threats for 2024 — “With Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney you can just generate unlimited amounts of completely plausible Airbnbs which no one will be able to find.” […] AI is already writing malware. Hyppönen’s team has discovered three worms that launch LLMs to rewrite code every time the malware replicates. None have been found in real networks yet, but they’ve been published in GitHub — and they work. […] Another emerging concern involves zero-day exploits, which are discovered by attackers before developers have created a solution to the problem. AI can detect these threats — but it can also create them.

sacred sexuality, grimoires, legendary creatures, and more sacred texts

Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”

The big innovation in crypto in early 2024, the thing that has driven up prices, is anticipation that the US Securities and Exchange Commission will approve a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund this month. Then ETF providers — including traditional financial firms like BlackRock and Fidelity — will be able to hold Bitcoins in a pot, and institutional and retail investors will be able to buy and sell shares of that pot to get exposure to Bitcoin’s price without actually owning Bitcoin. This, it is thought, will increase the price of Bitcoin. […] Some investors want to be crypto investors, but a lot of institutional investors very much do not — they do not want to spend time or money on understanding blockchains or keeping track of private keys or complying with SEC requirements about crypto custody — but still want to own Bitcoin. Owning regular shares of stock that happen to be Bitcoins is, for them, very useful; it domesticates Bitcoin into the regular financial system.

Firm develops jet fuel made entirely from human poo

What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?

What Horrible Things Did We Do To Our Penises Last Year?

In 1967, Singapore’s political and administrative leadership unexpectedly confronted a ‘pre-modern’ public health scare that threatened their still fragile aspirations for national development. Hundreds of people suddenly became overwhelmed by intense alarm. Sufferers (mostly men, but sometimes women; almost entirely ethnically Chinese) suddenly believed that their genitals were disappearing. This medical condition, known as Koro, was sparked by a false rumour among residents of Singapore that eating pork from pigs vaccinated against swine fever caused genital shrinkage. [PDF | more]

I moved to Finland after reading it’s the happiest place on Earth. It’s exceeded all my expectations.

A list of ideas that help explain how the world works (90% of everything is crap, noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence, avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing, people can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine…)

Our results indicate that countries with the greater meat intake have greater life expectancy and lower child mortality. Over the last 50 years, although the associations between meat eating and illness are circumstantial and controversial to some extent, they have prompted the spread of vegetarianism and veganism, based on the assumption that non-meat diets provide more health benefits than diets that include meat. The suggestion that vegetarian diet improves longevity is questionable. […] It is worth noting that, in this study, countries on the Mediterranean diet have a greater life expectancy if there is more total meat in their diet. […] Meat contains high protein with all the essential amino acids, and is a good source of minerals (iron, phosphorus, selenium and zinc) and vitamins (B12, B6, K, choline, niacin, riboflavin). Simply put – a human animal consuming a body of another animal gets practically all constituent compounds of its own body. Recently, massive agricultural production and advanced food manufacturing technologies have made it possible to replace the beneficial nutrients of meat with other agricultural industry products and/or synthetic chemicals. For example, proteins are easy to obtain by incorporating nuts and beans into diet. Vitamin B12 can be absorbed adequately from cheese, eggs, milk, and artificially fortified pills, and iron can be found in legumes, grains, nuts, and a range of vegetables.84,85 Relying on meat nutrient replacements and available food products, well-planned vegetarian diets, including vegan diets, are nutritionally adequate and are appropriate for various individuals during all stages of life, but it is only because their nutritional composition adequately imitates and replaces what is commonly provided by meat.

New research links high salt consumption to risk of Type 2 diabetes

A retired nurse had her life savings stolen from her bank account after inadvertently downloading a malicious mobile app (PDF reader)

New Jersey Used COVID Relief Funds to Buy Banned Chinese Surveillance Cameras

23andMe tells victims it’s their fault that their data was breached

A biohybrid computer combining a “brain organoid” and a traditional AI was able to

According to a new study, the human brain has two separate ways of processing numbers of things: one system for quantities of four or fewer, and another system for five and up.

Twitch will ban people pretending to be naked. The platform already prohibits nudity, but Twitch’s new attire policy, which goes into effect today, also doesn’t allow streamers to “imply or suggest that they are fully or partially nude”

Gong Hengliang, who has been a “fish beautician” for 4 years, performs cosmetic surgery on an Asian arowana fish in 2020 in Lanzhou, China. — The crazy market for the world’s most expensive pet fish

Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws

Generative AI systems produce materials that infringe on copyright. They do not inform users when they do so. My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed. […] In all likelihood, the New York Times lawsuit is just the first of many.

Get Ready for Corporate Digital Currency — Facebook failed, but another tech giant might soon pull it off

Lying lowers people’s self-esteem and increases negative experienced affect

Our results suggest that maternal use of hormonal contraception may be associated with autism risk in children, especially for the progestin-only products.

There are few cases of creative and intellectual theft more egregious than the origins of the billion-dollar grossing Monopoly. The short version: a brilliant woman economist invented an anti-capitalist board game that was stolen by a lying, opportunistic man and repackaged as capitalist family fun. […] Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement

Why are Bloody Marys only for the morning?

On June 14, 2015, sheriff’s deputies in Greene County, Missouri, United States, found the body of Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard (née Pitre; born May 3, 1967, in Chackbay, Louisiana) face down in the bedroom of her house just outside Springfield, lying on the bed in a pool of blood from stab wounds inflicted several days earlier. There was no sign of her daughter, Gypsy Rose, who, according to Blanchard, had chronic conditions including leukemia, asthma, and muscular dystrophy and who had the “mental capacity of a seven-year-old due to brain damage” as the result of premature birth.

After reading troubling Facebook posts earlier in the evening, concerned neighbors notified the police, reporting that Dee Dee might have fallen victim to foul play and that Gypsy Rose, whose wheelchair and medications were still in the house, might have been abducted. The next day, police found Gypsy Rose in Wisconsin, where she had traveled with her then-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online. When investigators announced that she was actually an adult and did not have any of the physical and mental health issues her mother claimed she had, public outrage over the possible abduction of a disabled girl gave way to shock and some sympathy for Gypsy Rose.

Further investigation found that some of the doctors who had examined Gypsy Rose had found no evidence of the claimed disorders. One physician suspected that Dee Dee had factitious disorder imposed on another, a mental disorder in which a parent or other caretaker exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness in a person under their care to obtain sympathy or attention. Dee Dee had changed her name after her family, who suspected she had poisoned her stepmother, confronted her about how she treated Gypsy Rose. Nonetheless, many people accepted her situation as true, and the two benefited from the efforts of charities such as Children’s Mercy Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Dee Dee had been making her daughter pass herself off as younger and pretend to be disabled and chronically ill, subjecting her to unnecessary surgery and medication, and controlling her through physical and psychological abuse. […]

Many people who met Gypsy were charmed by her. Her 5-foot (150 cm) height, nearly toothless mouth, large glasses, and high, childlike voice reinforced the perception that she had all the problems her mother claimed she did. Dee Dee regularly shaved Gypsy’s head to mimic the hairless appearance of a chemotherapy patient, allegedly telling Gypsy that since her medication would eventually cause her hair to fall out, it was best to shave it in advance; Gypsy often wore wigs or hats to cover her baldness. When they left the house, Dee Dee often took an oxygen tank and feeding tube with them; Gypsy was fed the children’s liquid nutrition supplement PediaSure well into her 20s. […]

Marc Feldman, an international expert on factitious disorders, said this was the first case he knew of in which an abused child killed an abusive parent. Gypsy Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served 8 years of a 10-year sentence. She was granted parole in September 2023 and was released from prison on December 28, 2023. After a brief trial in November 2018, Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Most viewed pages of en.wikipedia.org, daily }

CLEAR, a publicly traded company, allows its subscribers to bypass the security line at more than 50 U.S. airports.

Comment on schneier.com: Google no longer needs to collect and store the data from maps on their servers because they have been working with the NSA for a few years now on “how to ID any location on the planet without a geolocation reference attached to the image”.

how to find a street from an album cover in 2 minutes

In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

Until now, most of the focus on antimicrobial resistance has been on the inappropriate use of existing antibiotics and the dwindling global supply of new ones as pharmaceutical companies have steadily withdrawn from the market. These have certainly been the main drivers of drug resistance over time, but conflict is now also playing an increasingly significant role, because of its potential to drastically accelerate the emergence and spread of drug-resistant bugs

NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances — The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: “statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity.”

Copyright for original Mickey Mouse persona to run out 1 January 2024

How to perfectly crack an egg (with one hand)

the trapezoid-shaped Chrysler Building

Burger King in Brazil has launched a “Hangover Whopper” campaign that provides hungover consumers with discounts on the brand’s sandwiches. Accessible through a microsite and the brand’s mobile app, the effort uses facial recognition technology to scan a consumer’s face, with the degree of hangover detected corresponding with the size of the recommended combo and discount offered.

Our results show that humans engage in self-sniffing behaviour quite often […] respondents with lower standards of hygienic habits engage significantly more in intimate self-inspection (sniffing body parts such as genitals, anus, or navel). Interestingly, individuals who reported more frequent health issues sniff more frequently areas such as the armpits, feet, or own breath (Social acceptability self-inspection), probably to check for possible changes in smell due to illness.

most viewers either did not care about the male ejaculation or its placement, or preferred for it to be in the female partner’s vagina. In contrast to common assumptions found in the literature, very few viewers expressed a preference for ejaculation on a woman’s face or in her mouth and many of them found such practices disturbing.

research suggests that normal body temperature has decreased from 98.6 degrees (37 degrees Celsius) by about 0.05 degrees every decade since the 19th century to about 97.9 degrees (36.6), probably the result of better living conditions and health care that reduce inflammation, which causes temperature to rise

Moderna CEO Says Melanoma Vaccine Could Be Available By 2025

Patients are more likely to fall, get new infections, or experience other forms of harm during their stay in a hospital after it is acquired by a private equity firm, study

Not all animals experience ageing during their lives. Some animals’ bodies do not gradually degenerate as they get older the way our bodies do. But for humans once they reach about age 30 their chance of dying doubles roughly every eight years. […] the reason humans age so markedly may be due to the fact our ancestors evolved during the time of the dinosaurs. […] For 100 million years, during the time of the dinosaurs, mammals were at or near the bottom of the food chain. Mammals were more often prey than predators. During this time there was no reason for mammals to keep processes and genes related to long life, such as DNA repair and tissue regeneration systems. My longevity bottleneck hypothesis proposes that repair and regeneration systems were lost, mutated or inactivated by the evolution of early mammals.

‘Zombie deer disease’ epidemic spreads in Yellowstone as scientists raise fears it may jump to humans — Warnings that ‘slow-moving disaster’ in North America raises chances of fatal mad cow-type disease jumping species barrier

An international team of researchers looked for all the cases of infections acquired in a laboratory or times a pathogen accidentally “escaped” from a laboratory setting. They found 309 laboratory-acquired or -associated infections from 51 pathogens; eight of these cases were fatal, including one of “mad cow” disease. The 16 incidents they found of a pathogen escaping a lab setting included well-publicized accidents such as the time where a West Nile researcher became infected with the first SARS virus in 2003 after handling contaminated samples in Singapore.

Crown shyness is a feature observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, instead forming a canopy with channel-like gaps

By the end of the 18th century, however, the Enlightenment dream had become a nightmare. […] Religious superstition was replaced by political enthusiasm. Just as soon as people stopped being willing to kill and die for their religion, they started killing and dying for their country. Human beings are naturally violent creatures, simultaneously suspicious of difference and perfectly content to live within oppressive systems that provide some degree of affluence.

Tech bubbles come in two varieties: The ones that leave something behind, and the ones that leave nothing behind. […]

cryptocurrency/NFTs, or the complex financial derivatives that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. These crises left behind very little reusable residue. […]

World­Com was a gigantic fraud and it kicked off a fiber-optic bubble, but when WorldCom cratered, it left behind a lot of fiber that’s either in use today or waiting to be lit up. On balance, the world would have been better off without the WorldCom fraud, but at least something could be salvaged from the wreckage.

That’s unlike, say, the Enron scam or the Uber scam, both of which left the world worse off than they found it in every way. Uber burned $31 billion in investor cash, mostly from the Saudi royal family, to create the illusion of a viable business. Not only did that fraud end up screwing over the retail investors who made the Saudis and the other early investors a pile of money after the company’s IPO – but it also destroyed the legitimate taxi business and convinced cities all over the world to starve their transit systems of investment because Uber seemed so much cheaper. Uber continues to hemorrhage money, resorting to cheap accounting tricks to make it seem like they’re finally turning it around, even as they double the price of rides and halve driver pay (and still lose money on every ride). The market can remain irrational longer than any of us can stay solvent, but when Uber runs out of suckers, it will go the way of other pump-and-dumps like WeWork.

What kind of bubble is AI? […]

Accountants might value an AI tool’s ability to draft a tax return. Radiologists might value the AI’s guess about whether an X-ray suggests a cancerous mass. But with AIs’ tendency to “hallucinate” and confabulate, there’s an increasing recognition that these AI judgments require a “human in the loop” to carefully review their judgments. In other words, an AI-supported radiologist should spend exactly the same amount of time considering your X-ray, and then see if the AI agrees with their judgment, and, if not, they should take a closer look. AI should make radiology more expensive, in order to make it more accurate. […]

Cruise, the “self-driving car” startup that was just forced to pull its cars off the streets of San Francisco, pays 1.5 staffers to supervise every car on the road. In other words, their AI replaces a single low-waged driver with 1.5 more expensive remote supervisors – and their cars still kill people. […]

Just take one step back and look at the hype through this lens. All the big, exciting uses for AI are either low-dollar (helping kids cheat on their homework, generating stock art for bottom-feeding publications) or high-stakes and fault-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology, hiring, etc.).

{ Locus/Cory Doctorow | Continue reading }

Female visitor inadvertently locked overnight at Orange County jail. Sheriff’s deputies did not notice the woman had fallen asleep in a jail visiting booth

beautiful people are more likely to trigger disappointment since they do not live up to the high expectations others put into them.

New nuclear deflection simulations advance planetary defense against asteroid threats

Did he own a tank, live in a bank and do a DJ set using solely sandpaper and a food mixer?

Cryonics — attempting to cryopreserve the human body — is widely considered a pseudoscience. […] When a cryonic patient dies, a race begins to prepare and cool the body before it decays and then to place it inside a Dewar: a thermos bottle full of liquid nitrogen (LN). The inner vessel of the Dewar contains a body, or bodies, wrapped in several layers of insulating material, attached to a stretcher, and suspended in LN. The head is oriented downward to keep the brain the coldest and most stable. […] So far, bodies that have been examined following cryopreservation are hopelessly beyond repair.

What is Generative AI? It’s going to alter everything about how we use the internet

Who cares if AI books are reviewed by AI critics? […] Much like advertising, another unwanted kind of discourse, automated content — which is intrinsically intrusive, interruptive, the voice of someone who doesn’t really know what they are talking about but insists on being heard anyway — will be injected into all occasions for communication, polluting the discursive space between any subject and object and pre-empting the possibility of intersubjectivity with endless loops of noise that make it so that we can’t hear ourselves think. The skills necessary to communicate with other people or to even carry out an inner dialogue with oneself will presumably atrophy as we are cocooned in thickets of automatic language aimed at eliminating the need for any effort of attunement. AI books will read themselves and tell us what they were about, and we won’t be able to get them to shut up about it.

Risk of penile fractures rises at Christmas, doctors find “This injury tends to occur during wild sex – particularly in positions where you’re not in direct eye contact [with your partner] […] When [patients] present to their doctor their penis often looks like an eggplant”

Tiny “biobots” made from human windpipe cells encouraged damaged neural tissue to repair itself in a lab experiment — potentially foreshadowing a future in which creations like this patrol our bodies, healing damage, delivering drugs, and more.

From plaque cleaning to drug delivery, nanoelectronics are rapidly developing, with major implications for medicine

A tiny ball of brain cells hums with activity as it sits atop an array of electrodes. For two days, it receives a pattern of electrical zaps, each stimulation encoding the speech peculiarities of eight people. By day three, it can discriminate between speakers. Dubbed Brainoware, the system raises the bar for biocomputing by tapping into 3D brain organoids, or “mini-brains.” These models, usually grown from human stem cells, rapidly expand into a variety of neurons knitted into neural networks. […] In another test, the system successfully tackled a complex math problem that’s challenging for AI.

A car dealership added an AI chatbot to its site. Then all hell broke loose. Pranksters discovered that a local car dealer’s AI chatbot could be used as a way to access ChatGPT. People shared attempts to trick the chatbot into selling them a new Chevy for as little as $1.

CaliExpress in Pasadena touted as world’s first fully autonomous, AI-powered restaurant

A stalker haphazardly posing as a cop demanded sensitive data from Verizon. Verizon complied, and the stalker drove to an address armed with a knife.

“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pen, he chooses — simultaneously — all of them” (The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941). Because Borges could not possibly write this almost unfathomable book using a pencil or a typewriter, he instead chose to write about the book as an idea. He can imagine the book without writing it down in the same way that we can imagine the number π without writing down all its digits. Can a computer provide an approximation of the garden of all plausible texts like it provides approximations of the transcendental number π? PDF

The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.

Although people can identify judgment biases and their consequences, they tend to perceive their peers as more susceptible to such biases than themselves: a phenomenon called “bias blind spot”

Higher pathological narcissism is associated with greater involvement in feminist activism, US sample (N = 458)

This study addresses the challenge of measuring the stream of consciousness by introducing a classification system, CoMS-5T, encompassing five mental states: focus, task-related interference, external distraction, daydream, and blank. [PDF]

Light may cause water to evaporate (even without heat)

Daily vocal exercise is necessary for peak performance singing in a songbird

Here we tested whether alcohol exposure affected female mate-preference, choosiness, and copulation duration in the fly Drosophila simulans, while simultaneously testing for genetic variation in these effects. We found that alcohol exposure did not affect copulation duration, but did weaken mate-preference, as females copulated with a broader range of males after exposure, and it tended to reduce female choosiness as females mated more quickly.

A turbo-jet engine from a British Airways Concorde is being sold to the public on eBay