There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. It increases neuroplasticity temporarily (days to weeks), which though is very different from neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons) – discussed in more detail later. On the other hand, dozens of animal studies – and human observational studies – unequivocally show that ketamine is neurotoxic.

The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study. Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood. […] Dr. Iwasaki said that mRNA itself, used in vaccines, was unlikely to be the source of the protein so long after the shots were administered. […] it’s possible that some of the protein may result from undetected coronavirus infections. […] People with the syndrome were generally in poorer health than the average American, the researchers found. […] The study has not yet been published in a scientific journal […] Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny [NY Times]

“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” - A “Study”

Ingested Microplastic (MP) particles can harm the human body. Estimations of the total mass of ingested MP particles correspond to 50 plastic bags per year (Bai et al., 2022), one credit card per week (Gruber et al., 2022). The two estimations are based on an analysis (Senathirajah et al., 2021) that predicts a total ingested mass of MP particles mi,MP of 0.1–5 g/week. This work revisits and evaluates this calculation […] The calculation of 0.1 g – 5 g (one credit card) per week contains severe errors. [2022]

Within the White House complex, the WiFi permissions — meant to bolster security by prompting users to log in frequently — were recently changed to allow guests to remain logged in for a year, up from seven days, because so many personal devices are newly in use. […] Lutes said even the most experienced employees are given only segments of access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. DOGE sought access to that system last week, which would have provided the ability to see, and in some cases edit, detailed records — including bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security and other personal identification numbers and, in some instances, medical information — for virtually every individual, business and nonprofit in the country. [Washington Post]

“We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. […] I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. […] They’ll have to go through vetting, of course, to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens.”

New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes — At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all of those things simply break down. There is, perhaps, nothing in the universe that challenges the imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge, perhaps a new understanding of what space and time are made of.

Today, most Mac users don’t even notice that using the “Duplicate” command in the Finder to make a copy of a file doesn’t actually copy the file’s contents. Instead, it makes a “clone” file that shares its data with the original file. That’s why duplicating a file in the Finder is nearly instant, no matter how large the file is. […] If I could find files that had the same content but were not clones of each other, I could convert them into clones that all shared a single instance of the data on disk.

What Happened to the N in Restaurateur? […] This puzzler has its derivation in the French language. Its roots are in the original word “restaurer,” a French verb meaning to restore, repair, or renew. A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these “restorers” became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called “restaurant.” It wasn’t until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. […] So, interestingly enough, the restaurateur came before the restaurant, and there was never an n to drop.

Anthropic’s Claude AI is playing Pokémon on Twitch — slowly

“Al is freeing time for students to focus on what matters — evaluating the information Al generates“

Man who lost $800 million bitcoin in landfill wants to buy the garbage dump

Life history theory suggests that in harsh, unpredictable environments, individuals may benefit from adopting a fast life history strategy. This may involve experiencing boredom more frequently and intensely as an adaptive mechanism to seek novel stimuli, potentially increasing the number of sexual partners and offspring. This study explored the relationship between trait boredom—a chronic characteristic of feeling bored—and fast life history strategies. Our findings confirmed a positive association between boredom proneness and fast life history strategies at both individual and country levels.

1,000 artists release ‘silent’ album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI Related: List of silent musical compositions, Sleepify

dead steal elections … dead people are working for the government too

A proposed AI assistant would track what you’re looking at and then comment on it - using your own voice - into your ear

researchers at Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab were able to accurately decode unspoken sentences from brain signals recorded outside the skull — no surgery required.

Thieves used a stolen card to buy a $523,000 lottery ticket. The victim wants to share the winnings

A 30-year old woman who travelled to three popular destinations became a medical mystery after doctors found an infestation of parasitic worms in her brain. […] the woman ate street food in Bangkok and raw sushi in Tokyo, and enjoyed more sushi and salad as well as a swim in the ocean in Hawaii

Anthocyanins in nuts, fruits and vegetables seem to lessen harmful effects of microplastics on reproductive systems, study

South Korea is the most glaring example. It has the lowest fertility rate in the world: just 0.72 in 2023. It’s also a country where women do nearly three hours more of household chores each day than men do. […] In Japan and Italy, women spend three hours more than men per day on household and care tasks. In Sweden, it’s less than an hour difference. Sweden’s fertility rate is notably higher. [Washington Post]

IQ numbers for historical figures are made up … the studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science … the standard error of measurement of IQ tests is around seven points, meaning you should regularly expect things like 10-20 point spreads … The situation is even worse for IQs of 140 plus

sample of 8,553 Americans […] we find intelligence, as measured with Wordsum, to have the largest effect size, negatively predicting belief in astrology […] Education also predicts disbelief, supporting the “superficial knowledge” hypothesis. Measures of religiosity and spirituality had null effects, in contradiction of the “metaphysical uncertainty” hypothesis that a need for metaphysical beliefs causes one to believe in astrology. We find that right-wing individuals are less likely to believe in astrology, in contradiction to Theodore W. Adorno’s “authoritarian” of astrology.

How (much) do people revise their goals after goal success and failure? A meta-analysis and research agenda on goal revision

Breaking into dozens of apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone

AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years

Social media posts and websites claim that the way in which people perceive ambiguous images (Duck-Rabbit, Younger-Older Woman, Rubin’s Vase and Horse-Seal) reveals insights into their personality and thinking style. […] Many of the claims received no empirical support and so constitute a new type of psychological myth

Searching for Rimbaud’s Lost Manuscript

We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct.

Frequent flyers have spent years staying loyal to airlines. Now airlines are giving them ‘the middle finger’

Fly simulator

Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust, study

Last week, a monkey snuck into a substation in Sri Lanka and knocked out power, plunging the island nation into darkness that lasted six hours. […] Unlike many developing nations, Sri Lanka has ample installed power generation capacity and has plenty to spare even during peak demand periods. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka, like many countries, has an outdated power grid that’s vulnerable to widespread disruptions. […] the U.S. is not much better, with rolling blackouts, freezing homes and skyrocketing electricity prices now the norm rather than the exception.[…] mass blackouts have now become a regular feature of modern American life. Power outages have increased 64% from the early 2000s while weather-related outages have soared 78%. According to one analysis, the United States now records more power outages than any other developed country, with people living in the upper Midwest losing power for an average of 92 minutes every year compared to just 4 minutes in Japan. […] Despite being the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S. only ranks 13th in the quality of its infrastructure.

Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding — According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library was simply a move to access “data from a ‘well-known online repository’ that was publicly available via torrents.” To defend its torrenting, Meta has basically scrubbed the word “pirate” from the characterization of its activity.

earlier this month the UK government asked for the right to see the data, which currently not even Apple can access. Apple did not comment at the time but has consistently opposed creating a “backdoor” in its encryption service, arguing that if it did so, it would only be a matter of time before bad actors also found a way in. Now the tech giant has decided it will no longer be possible to activate ADP in the UK. It means eventually not all UK customer data stored on iCloud - Apple’s cloud storage service - will be fully encrypted.

Eight Sleep offered the features of temperature control: set the bed to any temperature hot or cold. For someone who suffers from insomnia this seemed worth a shot. What Can They Do with This Access? Let’s start with the basics: They can know when you sleep. They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1. They can know when it’s night, and no people are in the bed. Imagine your ex works for Eight Sleep. Or imagine they want to know when you’re not home. (Of course, they can also change the bed’s temperature, turn on the vibrating feature, turn off your alarm clock, and any of the other normal controls they have power over.) Beyond the basics, what does access to a device on your home network grant them? Any other device connected to that home network - smart fridges, smart stoves, smart washing machines, laptops - is typically routable via your bed. The (in)security of those devices is now entrusted to random Eight Sleep engineers. […] eight sleep sure does harvest people’s bed data, and occasionally tweet about how they’re watching you sleep

Subway Poker is a two-player game that transforms your everyday subway ride into a dynamic poker experience. Child: Counts as a 10, Teenager: Counts as a Jack, Woman: Counts as a Queen, Man: Counts as a King, Elderly Person: Counts as an Ace

El Satario is the name of one of the earliest surviving pornographic films … it was likely produced in Argentina around 1907, and includes possibly the first use of extreme close-ups of genitalia. … a group of nude young women are frolicking in the countryside, a satyr appears … One of the women faints and is sexually assaulted by him, first in 69 position and then in various penile-vaginal positions, until he ejaculates in her vagina. At points he also attempts to finger her anus, an act she vigorously resists. The other women then return and put him to flight. [video]

update DOGE team has slashed hundreds of jobs paid for by fees from banks, medical device companies and other forms of funding rather than taxpayer dollars

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons, scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu, and officials responsible for supplying electricity are among those who have been accidentally fired […] Trump administration is now rushing to rehire hundreds of these workers […] Trump called the work by DOGE “amazing.”

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

DOGE employee cuts fall heavily on agency that regulates Musk’s Tesla […] The loss of personnel from the specialized unit is part of a 10 percent overall workforce reduction at the federal agency tasked with ensuring safety on America’s roads. In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

unrelated { Doctor gets message from health insurance agent during surgery | CNN | video }

bonus quote { “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less likely to be deceived who knows nothing than the one who knows something.” —Jefferson }

Uber for Armed Guards

Airbnb’s co-founder is joining Elon Musk’s DOGE, In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees

AI-powered tools may already be giving some lawyers the upper hand in court — How AI is reshaping the legal profession

U.S. personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan sent an urgent email, opens new tab this month to its more than 1,000 lawyers: Artificial intelligence can invent fake case law, and using made-up information in a court filing could get you fired.

YouTube terminated a channel called True Crime Case Files whose owner said he was making fake crime videos to “overdose the viewer on luridness.” He had uploaded over 150 videos, all of them using ChatGPT, gen AI image creators, and AI voiceovers. But it was a video called Husband’s Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder that would end up getting his channel deleted. Related: Psycho Obsessive Girlfriend’s Control Turns Deadly (True Crime Documentary)

testing convinced DeepSeek to create malware 98.8% of the time and to generate virus code 86.7% of the time

Canadian tourist trying to photograph a shark in shallow water at a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands this month was bitten by the shark and lost both of her hands

Antarctica’s Only Insect

Lawsuit Accuses Meta Of Training AI On Torrented 82TB Dataset With Millions Of Pirated Books […] plaintiffs argue that these internal emails prove Meta knew its actions were illegal

AI is eating the startup world. Venture capitalists splurged ~$110 billion on AI startups last year, about 33% of the total investment in the entire VC space. […] VC investors don’t want to miss out on the boom, with some blindly backing almost anything AI-adjacent. […] raising billions isn’t always enough — Inflection AI, for one, made no money and had to fold its original generative-AI business even after raising $1.5 billion.

the deadly lottery of the snakebite antivenom industry — Investigation reveals ineffective products being sold across Africa, with poor regulation and shortage of effective medication leading to needless deaths

Thousands of artists are urging the auction house Christie’s to cancel a sale of art created with artificial intelligence, claiming the technology behind the works is committing “mass theft”.

Enter the Great Pyramid of Giza

Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews”

‘Cake Bandit’ opossum hospitalized after indulging in an entire Costco cake

Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

researchers have found that curcumin, when activated by light, can weaken antibiotic-resistant bacteria, restoring the effectiveness of conventional antibiotics.

Eating from plastic takeout containers may significantly increase the chance of congestive heart failure, a new study finds, and researchers suspect they have identified why: changes to gut biome cause inflammation that damages the circulatory system.

After my husband left me, I paid $70 for an AI boyfriend. It made me realize AI’s true potential might be emotional labor.

The White House bans the AP indefinitely over the use of ‘Gulf of Mexico’, Apple adds Gulf of America to its maps, Google Maps blocks Gulf of America reviews after rename criticism

It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017

Gorton Digital Regular font

An Oregon woman’s nude photos ended up the topic of conversation in her small town after a prosecutor looked through her sensitive cellphone data and told the county sheriff what he found despite no warrant, no consent and no suspicion that she had committed a crime. […] three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant [the DA Jim] Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit […] Under qualified immunity, government officials can be held accountable for violating someone’s rights only if a court has previously ruled that it was “clearly established” those precise actions were unconstitutional.

A woman made her AI voice clone say “arse.” Then she got banned. […] People with motor neuron disease should be allowed to say whatever they want Meanwhile: JD Vance criticizes Europe for censoring free speech

Hedge Fund Startup That Replaced Analysts With Al Beats the Market

Major US banks shut more than 100 locations in just three weeks as the local branch bloodbath continues […] Major US banks closed a total of 1,043 branches over the course of last year […] ‘There’s no doubt we’re moving towards a cashless society’

The NYSE announced Wednesday that one of its electronic exchanges, NYSE Chicago, will reincorporate in Texas and be renamed NYSE Texas […] Texas has emerged as a competitor to Delaware as the legal home of major companies

Brain implant that could boost mood by using ultrasound to go under NHS trial — Devices may have potential to help patients with conditions such as depression, addiction, OCD and epilepsy

Carolina researchers publish a groundbreaking study on how turtles navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field

The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity Is Twelve Kilos Lighter

I think a lot about what I sometimes call “abstract commodity space.” Sometimes you want to buy nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa to make batteries or beer cans or cappuccino or chocolate bars, so you go to some supplier and negotiate a contract for the delivery of a useful amount of a particular grade of the commodity to your factory. Sometimes, though, you want to bet on the price of nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa, to hedge some risk to your business or just as a speculative bet. So you buy commodity futures, financial assets that reflect the price of a commodity but don’t require you to store it or worry about it spoiling.

The way these futures often work is that there are big warehouses full of the commodity, and people write futures contracts that essentially transfer the entitlements to the commodities in the warehouse, without ever having to take them out. Your futures represent a claim on some nickel or coffee in a warehouse in abstract commodity space,[1] and you don’t have to think much about the physical properties of the actual thing. The warehouse system has put a layer of abstraction on the messy commodity business, and you can treat the commodity as just a number on your computer screen.

We mostly talk about this when it breaks down, though. Sometimes the physical world tears through the layer of abstraction. The coffee or cocoa beans are stale, or someone discovers that the nickel in the warehouse is actually a bag of rocks.

Or: Abstract commodity space is fairly global, and you can trade abstract commodities from a computer screen anywhere in the world. But the physical world is not so seamlessly globalized. Now, gold in a warehouse in New York is worth more than gold in a warehouse in London. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on “Why Dealers Are Flying Gold Bars by Plane From London to New York”:

Gold is, for the moment, worth substantially more in Manhattan than in the U.K. capital, sparking the biggest trans-Atlantic movement of physical bars in years. Traders at major banks are racing to yank gold from vaults deep below London’s medieval streets and from Swiss gold refineries and ferry them across the ocean. …

Banks run big offsetting positions, owning gold bars in London, lending them out to earn a return and hedging the risk that prices fall by selling futures in New York. JPMorgan and HSBC, which clear gold transactions and store bullion for other banks in London, are the biggest players in this trans-Atlantic market.

Banks run big offsetting positions, owning gold bars in London, lending them out to earn a return and hedging the risk that prices fall by selling futures in New York. JPMorgan and HSBC, which clear gold transactions and store bullion for other banks in London, are the biggest players in this trans-Atlantic market.

The trade appears almost risk-free as long as prices on both sides of the Atlantic are close to each other. But when prices on the Comex surged above those in London late last year, baking in possible tariffs, contracts that the banks had sold in New York were suddenly underwater. …

Banks could close the trade by buying futures in New York, but such a move would mean crystallizing those losses. Another alternative: flying the physical gold they owned in London to New York and delivering it to the futures contracts’ owners instead. […]

Comex contracts require a different size of bar, so traders need to send gold to Swiss refiners to recast it before flying on to the U.S. Sometimes, they cut out the first European leg by handing the refiner gold in London in exchange for the right size of bar, or flying bullion in from Australia instead.

{ Matt Levine | Continue reading }

Given the well-documented benefits of satisfying sex, it might seem surprising that most couples in long-term relationships engage in sexual activity relatively infrequently, typically only once or twice a week. This infrequency raises an intriguing question: how can sex have such a profound and lasting impact on a relationship if it is not a daily occurrence? This observation suggests that individual instances of sexual intimacy might have psychological effects that extend far beyond the immediate moment, significantly influencing overall well-being in the relationship. To explore this idea, researchers sought to understand more about the phenomenon of “sexual afterglow,” the lingering feeling of sexual satisfaction following sexual activity. […] Scientists discovered that the positive “afterglow” of sex can linger for at least 24 hours, and it’s especially powerful when sex is a mutual decision or initiated by one partner, while sexual rejection can unfortunately create a negative ripple effect lasting several days.

Does literature advance one funeral at a time? We have analysed a corpus of over 23 000 books by more than 6000 authors and arrived at an answer that is more nuanced than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The turnover of cohorts does play an important role in the change of literary topics, but the role of authors’ retirement is not large, being twice as small as the effect of the arrival of new authors. Literature does not advance one funeral at a time—it advances one birth at a time. The arrival of new authors with fresh ideas is enough to keep the wheels of literature moving.

Tesla found a way to move more Cybertrucks: Sell them to the Trump administration … The Trump administration is set to buy $400 million worth of [~4,000] “Armored Tesla” vehicles … last year Tesla sold fewer than 40,000 Cybertrucks in the US

all the ways your brain can deceive you

Scientists Simulated a Quantum Apocalypse. Then the Universe Disappeared.

Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler […] introduced full-screen pop-up ads […] Jeep owners have reported being bombarded with advertisements for Mopar’s extended warranty service. The ads appear every time the vehicle comes to a stop.

New hack uses prompt injection to corrupt Gemini’s long-term memory — The result of the attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity.

Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US, big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders

Dozens of new obesity drugs are coming, will work differently from Ozempic and Wegovy — aiming to deliver greater weight loss with fewer side effects

Music makes us move even when we don’t like it

English has a pattern of common patronymic names. For example, “John Peters” and “John Peterson” are someone whose father was named “Peter”. (”Peters” should be understood as “Peter’s”.) Similarly we have John Williams and John Williamson, John Roberts and John Robertson, John Richards and John Richardson, John James and John Jameson, John Johns and John Johnson, and so on. […] “Richard” is “Dick”, and we have John Dicks (or Dix) and John Dickson (or Dixon). “Nicholas” is “Nick” and we have John Nicks (or Nix) and John Nickson (or Nixon).

In August 1990, two hikers sent photos of a strange diamond-shaped aircraft to the press – but the story never appeared. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely? […] it was a classified U.S. military aircraft

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties. The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them. But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. […] Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. […] much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy.

Why Delta Air Lines Workers Are Fighting for a Union — Although Delta offered boarding pay, flight attendants say they don’t get paid during delays or for “sits” between flights. “Our boarding pay is so sad, it’s like half of our regular pay for half of the time that we’re boarding,”

After more than three decades of planning and a $250 million investment, Lykos Therapeutics’ application for the first psychedelic drug to reach federal regulators was expected to be a shoo-in. Lykos, the corporate arm of a nonprofit dedicated to winning mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, had submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that its groundbreaking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder — MDMA plus talk therapy — was significantly more effective than existing treatments. […] two dozen scientists, doctors and trauma survivors told an F.D.A. advisory panel how MDMA-assisted therapy had brought marked relief from a mental health condition associated with high rates of suicide, especially among veterans. Then came skeptics with disturbing accusations: that Lykos was “a therapy cult,” that practitioners in its clinical trials had engaged in widespread abuse of participants and that the company had concealed a litany of adverse events. […] Dr. Devenot and six others presented themselves as experts in the field of psychedelics, but none had expertise in medicine or therapy. Nor had the speakers disclosed their connection to Psymposia, a leftist advocacy group whose members oppose the commercialization of psychedelics and had been campaigning against Lykos and its nonprofit parent […] The critics did not provide evidence to back their claims of systematic wrongdoing, but when the votes were counted that day, the panel overwhelmingly rejected Lykos’s application. [NY Times]

In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone in the human gut that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy. […] GLP-1 quickly disappears from the human body, positing difficulties in drug development […] Here enters the Gila monster, the largest lizard in North America […] Hormones in this reptile’s venom had also previously been shown to regulate blood sugar. Drucker wanted to know why and honed his research using venom from the Gila Monster. […] “We tried using lizard DNA that was in the freezer in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum and the cloning didn’t work. And so our next step was to try and get a live lizard and obviously these are difficult to obtain, you can’t walk into a pet store in Toronto and order these things.” […] After experimenting on the lizard, Drucker and his team found that these reptiles are “very unique in that it has genes for Exendin-4, the protein that became the first diabetes GLP-1 treatment”

Gesture-based age estimation tool BorderAge joins Australia age assurance trial — Originally born out of research on a tool to test for doping in sports, BorderAge works on the principle that as we age, our body changes – and so do the ways that we move. Technically, it measures variations among people of different ages in the duration and distance of “rapid aimed limb movements toward a visible target region.” The process can be completed with less than 30 seconds of footage from a smartphone camera.

this paper proposes a comprehensive concept of secondary psychosis spectrum disorder, demonstrating that stress reactions and depression serve as a common foundation for these disorders

Thomas Aquinas’ Appearance Revealed After 750 Years The lead author of the study, Brazilian 3D designer Cicero Moraes, has reconstructed the faces of other saints […] “The most challenging part was projecting the missing regions of the skull. Fortunately, we have tools for this, based on measurements taken from CT scans of living people.”

Tom Robbins dies at 92. He blended pop philosophy and absurdist comedy in best-selling books like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Skinny Legs and All.” […] His story lines were secondary and hard to explain; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary currency was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comic mythopoetic, combined for an effect that was truly his own. Take a representative line like this, from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” his second novel: “An afternoon squeezed out of Mickey’s mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog’s dish of meteorology.”

there’s a very good chance that a dying person will be delirious at the end of life. In fact, in palliative care and hospice spaces, 58 to 88 percent of cancer patients are delirious in the last week to hours before death. […] as you die, unless you die very suddenly in an instant, your various bodily systems start to work differently until they stop working at all. And that includes the way that you think, and that includes the way that you communicate.” […] the exact biological mechanisms behind delirium aren’t well understood, but it appears to stem from neuronal dysfunction, probably due to neurotransmitter fluctuations. Neurons in the brain aren’t dying (which is why sometimes people can recover from delirium) but disconnecting from each other.

[2022] a 70-year-old woman in the central east Indian state of Odisha was killed by an elephant, only to have the same elephant reportedly return to her funeral to pull her body from a pyre and trample her again before fleeing

Man arrested in deadly shooting of friend who said he could dodge bullets, reports say

Boy, 13, arrested at hospital for ‘impersonating a doctor’ after turning up wearing scrubs

“With most medications, like valium, the anti-anxiety effect you get only lasts when it is in your system. When the valium goes away, you can get rebound anxiety. When you take ketamine, it triggers reactions in your cortex that enable brain connections to regrow. It’s the reaction to ketamine, not the presence of ketamine in the body that constitutes its effects.” And this is exactly what makes ketamine unique as an antidepressant.

Scientists find abnormally slow neural dynamics in visual cortex of depressed individuals

Reasoning and empathy are not competing but complementary features of altruism

Is the ‘bad boy’ appeal a myth? The current study assessed how individuals evaluate potential romantic partners who display either low, medium, or high levels of DT traits for short-term (STR) and long-term (LTR) relationships. The Dark Triad (DT) consists of three personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy […] Study 1 demonstrated people with a male preference (mostly women) perceived medium levels of the three traits as the most attractive STR. For Study 2, both men and women found the low levels the most attractive for both STRs and LTRs. […] results suggest the concept of DT is not as attractive even for STRs unless it is accompanied by physical attractiveness [and] that men tend to be less selective than women overall when it comes to choosing partners —- for both short-term and long-term relationships.

While dogs kill some 30,000 people annually, only 100 shark attacks are documented worldwide each year, and fewer than 15 percent of these are fatal. Still, he wants to understand why sharks attack when they do. […] among some terrestrial predators such as tigers and leopards, a select few “problem individuals” are thought to be disproportionately responsible for attacks on humans. […] Some scientists have dismissed the notion of “problem sharks” as unlikely […] But in a new study in Conservation Letters, Clua and his colleagues present the very first evidence for his theory, by documenting three sharks that have been responsible for repeat attacks. The findings shine a new light on shark personality and suggest indiscriminate culling may not be an effective method of reducing shark attacks. […] For Clua, problem shark behavior suggests a new strategy for preventing attacks. He and his colleagues call for efforts to systematically fish sharks, without killing them, to collect DNA and attach tags or notch their dorsal fins for easy identification. Then, if a shark bites a person, DNA can be swabbed from the victim’s wound to identify the culprit, which can be selectively targeted and killed. Mourier isn’t convinced this solution could be widely implemented. For one, “you need at least a few hours and even days to get the results of the DNA extraction and identification, so during that time the shark is likely to be far away and the chance to find it again is very low in most cases,” he writes.

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.