For 6 months of 2020, I’ve been working on […] a wormable radio-proximity exploit which allows me to gain complete control over any iPhone in my vicinity. View all the photos, read all the email, copy all the private messages and monitor everything which happens on there in real-time.
Restaurant A was located on the first floor of a six-story building totaling 96.6 square meters in size (9.2 × 10.5 m) without windows or a ventilation system. […] The index case was infected at a 6.5 m away from the infector and 5 minutes exposure without any direct or indirect contact.
related { New Orleans swingers’ convention led to 41 Covid-19 infections, event organizer says }
Scotland becomes 1st country to make free period products the law
China Has Launched the World’s First 6G Satellite.
Turning Lunar Dust Into Oxygen – And Using the Leftovers to 3D Print a Moon Base
Google Must Disclose Emails in Russian Oligarch’s Divorce
One year after the interventions, cash transfer recipients had higher consumption, asset holdings, and revenue, as well as higher levels of psychological well-being than control households. In contrast, the psychotherapy program had no measurable effects on either psychological or economic outcomes.
China seeks to change Covid origin story The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.
NYT and WaPo digital subscriptions tripled since 2016
While we continue to espouse the use of 2L+5N dialing over all-number calling whenever possible, our primary aim today is to publicly oppose the proliferation of 10-digit dialing, which is fast becoming a public nuisance and dialing nightmare for ordinary people everywhere in this country. More: Telephone exchange names and the 2L-5N system
Scientists create diamonds at room temperature in minutes
[Buy] one of four metals that can be liquid near room temperature
U.S. government agencies from the military to law enforcement have been buying up mobile-phone data from the private sector to use in gathering intelligence, monitoring adversaries and apprehending criminals. Now, the U.S. Air Force is experimenting with the next step.
SignalFrame’s product can turn civilian smartphones into listening devices—also known as sniffers—that detect wireless signals from any device that happens to be nearby. The company, in its marketing materials, claims to be able to distinguish a Fitbit from a Tesla from a home-security device, recording when and where those devices appear in the physical world.
Using the SignalFrame technology, “one device can walk into a bar and see all other devices in that place,” said one person who heard a pitch for the SignalFrame product at a marketing industry event. […]
Data collection of this type works only on phones running the Android operating system made by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to Joel Reardon, a computer science professor at the University of Calgary. Apple Inc. doesn’t allow third parties to get similar access on its iPhone line.
photo { William Eggleston, Untitled (Greenwood, Mississippi), 2001 }
Vatican asks Instagram how pope’s account liked photo of Brazilian model
Airflow studies reveal strategies to reduce indoor transmission of COVID-19 — when people speak or sing loudly, they produce dramatically larger numbers of micron-sized particles compared to when they use a normal voice. The particles produced during yelling, they found, greatly exceed the number produced during coughing.
Vitamin D deficiency markedly increases the chance of having severe disease after infection with SARS Cov-2. The intensity of inflammatory response is also higher in vitamin D deficient COVID-19 patients. This all translates to increase morbidity and mortality in COVID-19 patients who are deficient in vitamin D. Related: In this randomized clinical trial, supplementation with vitamin D reduced the incidence of advanced (metastatic or fatal) cancer in the overall cohort
COVID-19 reinfection tracker (26 cases worldwide as of Nov. 24)
Don’t Eat Inside a Restaurant — The odds of catching the coronavirus are about 20 times higher indoors than outdoors.
Satoshi Nakamoto Lived In London While Working On Bitcoin. Here’s How We Know.
Social media entrepreneurs have rushed to find ways to make money from stars on popular platforms like TikTok. West of Hudson Group, for one, operates a network of content houses where many prominent young influencers live. Houses like these function as management companies, taking a percentage of revenue from the creators living in them. The influencers often don’t pay rent, but produce content for brands and promote products as a form of in-kind rent. Dozens of influencer houses have arrived in the Los Angeles area over the last year, and the companies that run them have been searching for sustainable business models. Going public, though, is a new strategy. [NY Times]
Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China […] The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would require U.S. companies to guarantee they do not use imprisoned or coerced workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, where academic researchers estimate the Chinese government has placed more than 1 million people into internment camps. Apple is heavily dependent on Chinese manufacturing, and human rights reports have identified instances in which alleged forced Uighur labor has been used in Apple’s supply chain. [Washington Post]
How Mozart became a bad composer, according to Glenn Gould
Deep Frozen Arctic Microbes Are Waking Up
In the last 10 years, warming in the Arctic has outpaced projections so rapidly that scientists are now suggesting that the poles are warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. This has led to glacier melt and permafrost thaw levels that weren’t forecast to happen until 2050 or later. In Siberia and northern Canada, this abrupt thaw has created sunken landforms, known as thermokarst, where the oldest and deepest permafrost is exposed to the warm air for the first time in hundreds or even thousands of years. […]
Permafrost covers 24 percent of the Earth’s land surface. […]
The layers may still contain ancient frozen microbes, Pleistocene megafauna and even buried smallpox victims. […] Other permafrost microbes (methanotrophs) consume methane. The balance between these microbes plays a critical role in determining future climate warming. […] Others are known but have unpredictable behavior after release. […]
Permafrost thaw in Siberia led to a 2018 anthrax outbreak and the death of 200,000 reindeer and a child.
inkjet print and silkscreen ink on canvas { Richard Prince, Untitled (Cartoon), 2015 }
An astrophysicist of the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon of the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies, and surprising similarities emerged. […]
The human brain functions thanks to its wide neuronal network that is deemed to contain approximately 69 billion neurons. On the other hand, the observable universe can count upon a cosmic web of at least 100 billion galaxies. Within both systems, only 30% of their masses are composed of galaxies and neurons. Within both systems, galaxies and neurons arrange themselves in long filaments or nodes between the filaments. Finally, within both system, 70% of the distribution of mass or energy is composed of components playing an apparently passive role: water in the brain and dark energy in the observable Universe. […]
Probably, the connectivity within the two networks evolves following similar physical principles, despite the striking and obvious difference between the physical powers regulating galaxies and neurons”
oil on canvas { Karel Appel, Portrait, 1966 }
Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions.
Fourteen experiments show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower responses as less sincere […].
the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, since the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty.
painted glass, in 26 parts { Xia Xiaowan, Lao P, 2005 }
Wife blows thousands on vet bills after husband blames his farts on the dog
Confusion about left and right occurs in 14.6% of the general population
Thai coconut suppliers accused of using monkeys as forced labor
New research suggests that nightmares prepare us to better face our fears
More people are getting COVID-19 twice, suggesting immunity wanes quickly in some
Immunity to the coronavirus may last years, maybe even decades, according to a new study [NY Times]
Dr. Fauci: “I think that we’re going to have some degree of public health measures together with the vaccine for a considerable period of time. But we’ll start approaching normal — if the overwhelming majority of people take the vaccine — as we get into the third or fourth quarter [of 2021].” [NY Times]
Medical literature suggests vitamin D protects against respiratory infections. Humans exposed to sunlight produce vitamin D directly. A 10% increase in relative sunlight decreases fall influenza by 1.1 out of 10.
Thanksgiving Dinner during COVID: Overview of Aerosol Transmission Risk Modeling
Steak-Umm Against COVID-19 Misinformation
Rules for strong passwords don’t work, researchers find. Here’s what does
The Bodies Of Dead Climbers On Everest Are Serving As Guideposts More: The Story Behind ‘Green Boots’
The cyanometer, a device invented in 1789 to measure the blueness of the sky
A portable pillow that you wear as a sleeve. Patent No. 10835062
Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs
The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of coughs, as well as spoken words. When they fed the model new cough recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from asymptomatics — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested positive for the virus.
The team is working on incorporating the model into a user-friendly app, which if FDA-approved and adopted on a large scale could potentially be a free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify people who are likely to be asymptomatic for Covid-19.
also { Detection of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in saliva with Shrinky-Dink© electrodes }
oil on canvas { Tom Wesselmann, Smoker #11, 1973 }
“A STUDENT IN 6 MINUTES HAD 776 HEAD AND EYE MOVEMENTS” Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic.
Early analysis finds Moderna’s vaccine nearly 95% effective. The biotechnology firm announced that in addition to the high rate of disease prevention overall, the shot reduced severe cases of illness. Moderna’s vaccine, co-developed with Fauci’s institute, is being tested in 30,000 people. [Washington Post]
55 people attended the Aug. 7 [wedding reception. But one of those guests arrived with a coronavirus infection. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 other people. Seven of them died. None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party. [LA Times]
Now the autumn is here, and hospitalisations from Covid-19 are currently rising faster in Sweden than in any other country in Europe […] The number of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 is doubling in Sweden every eight days currently, the fastest rate for any European country for which data is available. [Financial Times] _+ Deaths now tracking >40% USA equivalent
Message to Coronavirus from the Tarzan of TikTok [Thanks Tim] +TikTok says the Trump administration has forgotten about trying to ban it, would like to know what’s up
The possibility of points-of-no-return in the climate system has been discussed for two decades. A point-of-no-return can be seen as a threshold which, once surpassed, fundamentally changes the dynamics of the climate system. For example, by triggering irreversible processes like melting of the permafrost, drying of the rainforests, or acidification of surface waters. Recently, Lenton et al. summarized the global situation and warned that thresholds may be closer in time than commonly believed.
The purpose of this article is to report that we have identified a point-of-no-return in our climate model—and that it is already behind us. ESCIMO is a climate model which we run from 1850 to 2500. In ESCIMO the global temperature keeps rising to 2500 and beyond, irrespective of how fast humanity cuts the emissions of man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. […]
To stop the self-sustained warming in ESCIMO, enormous amounts of CO2 have to be extracted from the atmosphere.
oil on canvas { John William Waterhouse, Pandora, 1898 }
What makes some COVID patients so much sicker than others? […] Advancing age and underlying medical problems explain only part of the phenomenon […]
In an international study in Science, 10% of nearly 1,000 COVID patients who developed life-threatening pneumonia had antibodies that disable key immune system proteins called interferons. These antibodies — known as autoantibodies because they attack the body itself — were not found at all in 663 people with mild or asymptomatic COVID infections. Only four of 1,227 healthy individuals had the autoantibodies.
In a second Science study by the same team, authors found that an additional 3.5% of critically ill patients had mutations in genes that control the interferons involved in fighting viruses. Given that the body has 500 to 600 of these genes, it’s possible researchers will find more mutations.
Two studies done at the University of Minnesota Medical School and published in the early 1980’s measured the intensity, frequency, and durations of pelvic muscle contractions (measured with a pressure sensitive anal probe) of males and females during masturbation. There was basically no difference in the pattern of these contractions between males and females. […] A study done at Stanford University in 1994 found no significant gender differences in observed increases in heart rate, blood pressure, oxytocin, and anal contractions during orgasm.
{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }
The refractory period is the recovery phase after orgasm during which it is physiologically impossible for a man to have additional orgasms. This phase begins immediately after ejaculation. […] Although it is generally reported that women do not experience a refractory period and can thus experience an additional orgasm (or multiple orgasms) soon after the first one, some sources state that […] women may also experience a moment after orgasm in which further sexual stimulation does not produce excitement. […] clitoral hypersensitivity after orgasm can effectively create a refractory period. these women may be capable of further orgasms, but the pain involved in getting there makes the prospect undesirable. […]
the refractory period varies widely among individuals, ranging from minutes to days […] According to some studies, 18-year-old males have a refractory period of about 15 minutes, while those in their 70s take about 20 hours, with the average for all men being about half an hour. Although rarer, some males exhibit no refractory period or a refractory period lasting less than 10 seconds. […]
An increased infusion of the hormone oxytocin during ejaculation is believed to be chiefly responsible for the male refractory period, and the amount by which oxytocin is increased may affect the length of each refractory period. Another chemical which is considered to be responsible for the male refractory period is prolactin, which is repressed by dopamine, and is responsible for sexual arousal. […]
One alternative theory explains the male refractory period in terms of a peripheral autonomic feedback mechanism, rather than through central chemicals like oxytocin, serotonin, and prolactin. Autonomic feedback is already known to regulate other physiologic systems, such as breathing, blood pressure, and gut motility. This theory suggests that after male ejaculation, decreased wall tension in structures such as the seminal vesicles leads to a change in the fine autonomic signals sent from these organs, effectively creating a negative feedback loop. Such a mechanism is similar to decreased gastric and bowel motility once gastric contents have passed through. Once the feedback loop has been created, the refractory period remains until the loop is broken through restoration of the wall tension in the seminal vesicles. As men age, the time to restore tension in the seminal vesicles increases.
Senior campaign and GOP officials vented that Trump’s finance team, led by former Fox TV host and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, underperformed and was an HR nightmare. Trump couldn’t compete with Biden’s small-dollar fundraising machine, and some donors were horrified by what they described as Guilfoyle’s lack of professionalism: She frequently joked about her sex life and, at one fundraiser, offered a lap dance to the donor who gave the most money.
previously { Dear 45, I ain’t Kanye }
related { To the other educational benefits of Rudy Giuliani’s recent press conference in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, we can add the opportunity to learn about Hazard Communications (HazCom) signage | Language Log | full sotry }
image { Trump campaign dismissing its own appeal from the Nevada Supreme Court }
The eerie AI world of deepfake music — Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars.
Florida man invented a robot that inserts and removes contact lenses
About 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews may be fake reviews
Duration of urination does not change with body size
Four different types of positive tears — Achievement tears are often shed in contexts of extraordinary performance or when someone overcomes an obstacle and often include feelings of pride. Beauty tears occur commonly in situations of overwhelming elegance or beauty, including nature, music or visual arts, and feature feelings of awe or experiencing chills. Affectionate tears are often experienced in situations including unexpected kindness or exceptional love such as wedding ceremonies or reunions and often feature feelings of warmth, increased communality, and feeling touched or compassionate. Finally, amusement tears are shed when something especially funny occurs and include feelings of amusement or lightness and the inclination to laugh or giggle.
How many colors are there? Quoted numbers range from ten million to a dozen. Are colors object properties? Opinions range all the way from of course they are to no, colors are just mental paint. These questions are ill-posed. […] A valid question that may replace both is how many distinguishing signs does color vision offer in the hominin Umwelt? [The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable] The answer turns out to be about a thousand. The reason is that colors are formally not object properties but pragmatically are useful distinguishing signs.
Losing nothing is better than gaining nothing
How the White House will hand over social media accounts to President Trump [2017]
What Would We Experience If Earth Spontaneously Turned Into A Black Hole? — We’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime
China’s New Blockchain Internet
Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says
Portland’s iconic Powell’s Books is selling a book-scented unisex fragrance
On planet K2-141b, hundreds of light-years away, oceans are made of molten lava, winds reach supersonic speeds and rain is made of rocks. Scientists have referred to the bizarre, hellish exoplanet as one of the most “extreme” ever discovered.
Scientists have uncovered details of one of the newest “lava planets” — a world that so closely orbits its host star that much of it is composed of flowing lava oceans. […]
The Earth-sized exoplanet appears to have a surface, ocean and atmosphere all made of the same ingredients: rocks. […]
While analyzing the planet’s illumination pattern, scientists found that about two-thirds of the planet experiences perpetual daylight. K2-141b’s close proximity to its star gravitationally locks it in place — meaning the same side always faces the star.
This scorching hot part of the planet reaches temperatures of over 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s hot enough to not only melt rocks, but also vaporize them, creating a thin, inhospitable atmosphere.
The rest of the planet is cloaked in never-ending darkness, reaching frigid temperatures of negative 328 degrees Fahrenheit.
In Earth’s water cycle, water evaporates, rises up into the atmosphere, condenses, and returns to the surface as rain. Now imagine that process, but instead of water, K2-141b only has rocks to work with.
screenprint { Bridget Riley, Composition with Circles 2 (Schubert 46), 2001 }
previously { Is Heaven hotter than Hell? }
scientist and physician Eric Topol says the early results about the new COVID vaccine really are a ray of hope. He believes it might even be a so-called “superhuman vaccine… meaning it’s even more powerful than the typical human response. […] the vaccines, when we talk about 90 percent efficacy, that’s against pneumonia or getting your body infected with illness, it doesn’t sterilize the upper respiratory tract. That is the nose. And so you could be a carrier of the virus. You’re going to have to wear a mask because you won’t know if the virus is sitting” in your nose. […] We could see the virus having a hard time finding people to infect by mid-year [but] it’ll be here for years.”
As promising as the [BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine] announcement sounded, a critical question wasn’t answered: Does the vaccine prevent people from getting the infection and spreading it to others, or merely prevent symptoms? […] Another unanswered question is whether it will be possible to continue clinical trials of other vaccines. And if one later proves better than the front-runner, will it be safe to use it on people who’ve already had a vaccine with more modest benefits? What Happens to the Other Vaccines Now?
Covid Superspreader Risk Is Linked to Restaurants, Gyms, Hotels — according to a study that used mobile phone data from 98 million people
I am an imaging cardiologist who is developing diagnostic techniques to assess changes in heart muscle function in patients with COVID-19. In a study released Nov. 4, my colleagues and I found evidence of heart abnormalities in over one-third of student athletes who tested positive for COVID-19 [The Conversation]
One in 5 COVID-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days - study
“Social distancing and mask wearing to reduce the spread of COVID-19 have also protected against many other diseases…But susceptibility to those other diseases could be increasing, resulting in large outbreaks when masking and distancing stop.”
A nasal spray that blocks the absorption of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has completely protected ferrets it was tested on, according to a small study released on Thursday by an international team of scientists. The study, which was limited to animals and has not yet been peer-reviewed, was assessed by several health experts at the request of The New York Times. If the spray, which the scientists described as nontoxic and stable, is proved to work in humans, it could provide a new way of fighting the pandemic. A daily spritz up the nose would act like a vaccine. […] The spray attacks the virus directly. It contains a lipopeptide, a cholesterol particle linked to a chain of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. This particular lipopeptide exactly matches a stretch of amino acids in the spike protein of the virus, which the pathogen uses to attach to a human airway or lung cell. Before a virus can inject its RNA into a cell, the spike must effectively unzip, exposing two chains of amino acids, in order to fuse to the cell wall. As the spike zips back up to complete the process, the lipopeptide in the spray inserts itself, latching on to one of the spike’s amino acid chains and preventing the virus from attaching. [NY Times]
