Free will implicates inner speech via self-regulation

Results from a new clinical trial suggest that a group of brain regions known as the “salience network” is activated after a drug is taken intravenously, but not when that same drug is taken orally. When drugs enter the brain quickly, such as through injection or smoking, they are more addictive than when they enter the brain more slowly, such as when they are taken orally. However, the brain circuits underlying these differences are not well understood. […] drug smoking and injection are associated with developing a substance use disorder more quickly than taking drugs orally or by insufflation (e.g., snorting).[…] The salience network attributes value to things in our environment and is important for recognizing and translating internal sensations—including the subjective effects of drugs. This research adds to a growing body of evidence documenting the important role that the salience network appears to play in substance use and addiction.

Google Maps captures B-2 Stealth Bomber crashing off runway

A Hiker Is Lucky to Be Alive After Following a Fake Trail on Google Maps

Las Vegas Sphere reports $98.4 million loss; CFO quits — Sphere, the $2.3 billion venue near the Strip opened Sept. 29

Inside The Small World of Simulating Other Worlds — Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations.

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

This document acknowledges that Lauren (“Talent”) has agreed to appear for a MAXIMUM of THREE (3) days and TWO (2) nights at the residence of her mother (“Venue”) during the Thanksgiving holiday, pursuant to the terms of this agreement. […] Venue shall provide Talent with unlimited, unmonitored access to a fully stocked bar for the duration of her appearance, featuring a MINIMUM of: ONE (1) gallon-size handle of vodka…

This is a rare music video about using a diamond cutting disk to cut an entrapped metal penile ring. The music is Mozart’s piano concerto no. 21 in C major.

Vittorio Gassman in I Mostri

Unrealistic optimism or optimism bias—the tendency for individuals to overestimate the chance of favorable outcomes occurring and underestimate the chance of bad —has been found to be one of the most pervasive human traits across many domains. For instance, research has shown that individuals tend to underestimate the likelihood of developing a drinking problem or getting divorced and to overestimate their future earnings and how long they are going to live. Our established tendency toward unrealistic optimism poses an evolutionary puzzle as normative models of human judgment, like expected utility theory, suggest unbiased assessments of probabilities are advantageous. Like any other judgmental bias, optimism bias distorts the decision-making process, leading to systematic decision errors, increased rash and risky behavior and a failure to take precautionary measures. […]

There are reasons for expecting that the optimism bias may be associated with cognitive ability. Supportive empirical evidence for this framework comes from the experimental literature on cognitive ability and judgmental biases. For instance, intelligence has been found to lower one’s susceptibility to hindsight bias, overconfidence, framing, and the sunk cost fallacy. […]

we used an unbalanced panel of 36,312 respondents […]

The findings we present provide evidence that forecasting accuracy is linked to cognitive ability. Specifically, we find that higher cognitive ability is associated with a higher incidence of realism and pessimism in beliefs and a lower incidence of unrealistic optimism.

Taken together, our results lead us to conclude that the rash and risky behaviors associated with excessive optimism may be a side product of the true driver, low cognitive ability.

{ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin | Continue reading }

It’s true: People do poop, a lot, in ride lines at Disneyland and Disney World

Psychedelic treatments are speeding towards approval — but no one knows how they work

The distribution of lie prevalence is specified to exhibit a non-normal, positively skewed distribution in which the majority of people are normatively honest, and most lies are told by a few prolific liars.

willful ignorance provides people with a built-in excuse to act selfishly

A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. […] our findings suggest that a wandering mind is not always necessarily a creative mind

People often make judgments about uncertain facts and events, for example `Germany will win the world cup’. Here we present a rational analysis of these judgments: we argue that a guess functions as a compressed encoding of the speaker’s subjective probability distribution over relevant possibilities.

Imagine a bowl of soup that never emptied, no matter how many spoonfuls you ate - when and how would you know to stop eating? Satiation can play a role in regulating eating behavior, but research suggests visual cues may be just as important. results suggest that eating can be strongly controlled by visual cues, which can even override satiation.

One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days […] unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment […] When a Meta security expert told Mark Zuckerberg that Instagram’s approach to protecting teens wasn’t working, the CEO didn’t reply. Now the former insider is set to tell Congress about the predatory behavior.

Zuurbier said “that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use” […] In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used .tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime

More than 40 years ago, Farouk El-Baz theorized that the wind played a big hand in shaping the Great Sphinx of Giza before the ancient Egyptians added surface details to the landmark sculpture. A new study offers evidence to suggest that theory might be plausible.

Erewhon’s Secrets — In the 1960s, two macrobiotic enthusiasts started a health-food sect beloved by hippies. Now it’s the most culty grocer in L.A.

Penguin of the month: Timmy - Stole fish - Pushed another penguin over. Good penguin, naughty penguin: Inside the incredible drama at the National Aquarium

Starfish bodies aren’t bodies at all “It’s as if the sea star is completely missing a trunk, and is best described as just a head crawling along the seafloor”

One sleepless night can rapidly reverse depression for several days — Acute sleep loss increases dopamine release and rewires the brain, new study finds

wasabi improves short- and long-term memory in older people

our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health

The significant health benefits of walking backward

When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached fortobacco’s PR playbook

Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. […] Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh over five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy. You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street… But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees. Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

I had my hoodies that featured these amazing 1940’s drawings of Snow White fucking the dwarfs and stuff like that. […] I do think retouching often ruins the image. In these 70s, 80s porn mags i’m talking about the woman looked so real and sexual in such a visceral way, the frizziness of the hair would look like a halo because of the lighting, she might have stretchmarks showing inside her thighs which just makes her more tangible and makes you want to fuck, you want to touch her because she feels real. […] It’s like you have bad values if you slept with more than like 9 people and if any less then you’re an angel. Why is there so much value put on sex, who you’ve had sex with and how many times […] I feel so sorry for the generation behind us, the saturation levels are insane. I watched something yesterday and it said in the last 20 years, the human race has risen by about 2 billion, which is insane. How can you expect to get your dream job, to be singular, to stand out and to have created something truly new? Can you actually even do anything new anymore? And that makes me so sad.

AI smoothie shop in San Francisco closes two months after launch

AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening

GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for one year of non-exclusive access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research

The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. Talent manager Ursus Magana can (almost) make sense of it, with a frenetic formula for gaming the algorithms.

40% of people faint at least once in their lifetime […] Mouse experiments reveal the brain-heart connections that cause us to rapidly lose consciousness

How to remove a spider from your ear

“Clue” is a comedy whodunit that is being distributed with three different endings […] The way Paramount is handling its multiple endings is ingenious. They’re playing each of the endings in a third of the theaters where the movie is booked. If this were a better movie, that might mean you’d have to drive all over town and buy three tickets to see all the endings. With “Clue,” though, one ending is more than enough.

Viagra could slash risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 60%

Scientists say they have successfully simulated a method of backward time travel that allowed them to change an event after the fact one out of four times. The Cambridge University team is quick to caution that they have not built a time machine, per se, but also note how their process doesn’t violate physics while changing past events after they have happened.

The future may be less about healing injured body parts and more about regenerating new ones. How bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs

The human body has 1.8 trillion cells dedicated to defending it. For the first time, a study has measured the size of the immune system: if it were an organ, it would weigh more than a kilo and represents 0.2% of all human cells.

Researchers found that when adjusted for body mass index (BMI), intake of unprocessed and processed red meat (beef, pork or lamb) was not directly associated with any markers of inflammation, suggesting that body weight, not red meat, may be the driver of increased systemic inflammation. Of particular interest was the lack of a link between red meat intake and C-reactive protein (CRP), the major inflammatory risk marker of chronic disease.

Some patients can have vivid and detailed sexual hallucinations during anesthesia with sedative-hypnotic drugs like propofol, midazolam, diazepam and nitrous oxide. Some make suggestive or sexual comments or act out, such as grabbing or kissing medical professionals or touching themselves in a sexual way. Others awaken erroneously believing they were sexually assaulted.

A Third of Chocolate Products Are High in Heavy Metals

The Emptiness Of Literature Written For The Market

Italian woman wins court case to evict her two sons, aged 40 and 42

about 22 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity may provide an antidote to the ills of prolonged sitting

Cats have 276 facial expressions — Each expression combined about four of 26 unique facial movements, including parted lips, jaw drops, dilated or constricted pupils, blinks and half blinks, pulled lip corners, nose licks, protracted or retracted whiskers, and/or various ear positions. By comparison, humans have 44 unique facial movements, although researchers are still working out how many different expressions they combine into, Florkiewicz says. Dogs have 27 facial movements, but again, their total number of expressions isn’t known.

AI ‘breakthrough’: neural net has human-like ability to generalize language

Humans Absorb Bias from AI — And Keep It after They Stop Using the Algorithm

Thai Food Near Me, Dentist Near Me, Notary Near Me, Plumber Near Me — businesses across the country picked names meant to outsmart Google Search. Does it actually work?

How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

“african country that starts with k”

An account on Grindr called “GiantCockNYC” is constantly reappearing in users’ messages despite being blocked, with the account owner claiming they are an employee for the hookup app who is able to repeatedly remove the blocks. But Grindr itself says that isn’t the case here. A spokesperson said in an email that “The person created multiple profiles, deleted, then created another — with the same name/photos to make it appear as though blocks weren’t working.”

PimEyes, a public search engine that uses facial recognition to match online photos of people, has banned searches of minors over concerns it endangers children

Will Banksy’s Identity Finally Be Unmasked in a Defamation Lawsuit Brought by a U.K. Greeting Card Company?

Instagram linked to depression, anxiety, insomnia in kids, US states’ lawsuit — In a complaint filed in the Oakland, California, federal court on Tuesday, 33 states including California and Illinois said Meta, which also operates Facebook, has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its platforms

Higher levels of empathy may increase risk of inflammation, study suggests

The Paleo-fantasy often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer” […] dominates the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence

Data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI The tool, called Nightshade, messes up training data in ways that could cause serious damage to image-generating AI models.

Thousands of drivers have sensitive data exposed to hackers in major IT breach

1Password, a popular password management platform used by over 100,000 businesses, suffered a security incident after hackers gained access to its Okta ID management tenant.

Edgar Allan Poe lived at 35 different addresses in his 40 years.

The world’s longest possible train journey

A 29‐year‐old woman apparently jumped from the 86th‐floor observation deck of the Empire State Building last night, but survived when she landed on a three‐foot ledge about 20 feet below, the police said. She was admitted to Bellevue Hospital with a fractured pelvis. Authorities at the 102‐story building on West 34th Street theorized that strong wind gusts saved the life of Elvita Adams, of 975 Walton Avenue in the Bronx. [NY Times, December 3, 1979]

{ The Shortest Papers Ever Published }

Man arrested for faking heart attack 20 times at restaurants to avoid paying bill

Amazon sold bottles of urine marketed as an energy drink, a new documentary alleges. […] attained number one bestseller status in the “Bitter Lemon” category.

Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum

Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models — Meta has said its latest AI was partially trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts. According to Elon Musk, the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) plans to do the same with its own users’ content. Amazon, too, says it will use voice data from customers’ Alexa conversations to train its new LLM.

Biopiracy: when indigenous knowledge is patented for profit

Frying pan company sued for claiming temperatures that rival the Sun

In an unusual trial, Stanford Medicine researchers found that a patient’s belief that they had received ketamine, even if they didn’t, could improve their depression.

The Notorious Arrest of Cecil George Edwards

Monet Refuses the Operation ∆ By Lisel Mueller

A wild idea to protect the great barrier reef: Ships carry mist-making machines that cause clouds to block the sun. It could work.

Online voting is insecure. This doesn’t stop organizations and governments from using it.

From High Life Hackers to National Menace: The Rise and Fall of Digital Bandits ‘ACG’

A narrow majority of adults (53%) say they have between one and four close friends, while a significant share (38%) say they have five or more. Some 8% say they have no close friends.

The menstrual rhythm of the brain — In the female brain, regions important for memory and perception are remodeled in the course of the menstrual cycle

Testicles like to be a tad bit cooler than the rest of your body because that’s the ideal temperature for sperm production. Lax scrotal skin allows your balls to hang lower, away from your body, when your internal temperature rises, like after the gym. When you’re in a cold room, testicles shrink up closer to your body for warmth.

“selfcest” fetishists — VFX Artists Are Bringing ‘Clone Porn’ to the Mainstream

What Is ChatGPT Vision? 7 Ways People Are Using This Wild New Feature Related: From Reading X-Rays to Decoding Classified UFO Reports, ChatGPT Shows Off Its Vision

Save the Robots was an underground after hours club in New York City’s East Village neighborhood. “Robots,” as the venue was popularly known, operated illegally from a nondescript storefront and basement at 25 Avenue B, between East 2nd and 3rd Streets, from 1983 until mid-1984, when the club was shut down for fire safety violations. […] Save the Robots was known for its late hours of operation and sold only vodka, soda and fruit juice. Patrons typically arrived after 4 a.m. and partied until the 8 a.m. closing time.

On 25 October 1946, Karl Popper (at the London School of Economics), was invited to present a paper entitled “Are There Philosophical Problems?” at a meeting of the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, which was chaired by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The two started arguing vehemently over whether there existed substantial problems in philosophy, or merely linguistic puzzles—the position taken by Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein used a fireplace poker to emphasize his points, gesturing with it as the argument grew more heated. Eventually, Wittgenstein claimed that philosophical problems were nonexistent.

In response, Popper claimed there were many issues in philosophy, such as setting a basis for moral guidelines. Wittgenstein then thrust the poker at Popper, challenging him to give any example of a moral rule, Popper (later) claimed to have said:

“Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Parnet: Let’s move on to “W”.

Deleuze: There’s nothing in “W”.

Parnet: Yes, there’s Wittgenstein. I know he’s nothing for you, but it’s only a word.

Deleuze: I don’t like to talk about that… For me, it’s a philosophical catastrophe. It’s the very example of a “school”, it’s a regression of all philosophy, a massive regression. […] They imposed a system of terror in which, under the pretext of doing something new, it’s poverty instituted in all grandeur… […] the Wittgensteinians are mean and destructive. […] They are assassins of philosophy.

{ The Deleuze Seminars | Continue reading }

NYU researchers reconstruct speech from brain activity, illuminates complex neural processes […] development of prostheses that can read brain activity and decode it directly into speech. While many researchers are working on developing such devices, the NYU prototype has one key difference — it is able to recreate the voice of the patient, using only a small data set of recordings, to a remarkable degree. The result may be that patients do not get a voice back after losing it — they will get their voice back.

Many primates produce copulation calls — Sexual vocalizations become longer, louder, more high-pitched, voiced, and unpredictable at orgasm in both men and women. Men are not less vocal overall, but women start moaning at an earlier stage; speech or even minimally verbalized exclamations are uncommon.

Female frogs appear to fake death to avoid unwanted advances, study shows

Amateur astronomers file class-action lawsuits alleging telescope price-fixing conspiracy

FBI warns against using public USB charging ports — Cybersecurity experts have warned that criminals can load malware onto public USB charging stations to maliciously access electronic devices while they are being charged

On TikTok, PimEyes has become a formidable tool for internet sleuths trying to identify strangers […] Originally founded in 2017 by two computer programmers in Poland, it’s an AI tool that’s like a reverse image search on steroids — it scans a face in a photo and crawls dark corners of the internet to surface photos many people didn’t even know existed of themselves in the background of restaurants or attending a concert.

PimEyes

Two Los Angeles Police Department officers who ignored a robbery in progress in order to catch a Snorlax and Togetic in Pokémon Go also rolled through a stop sign, sped through residential neighborhoods and zoomed over speed bumps, tailgated various cars, and drove the wrong way down a one-way road in order to catch ‘em all

Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection (UDCP) is suing TikTok over allegations that the app’s “addictive nature” harms children and that TikTok deceptively obscures its relationship with ByteDance, its parent company in China.

The Enshittification of Amazon Continues

the fashion designer creating cowboy boots with a little help from AI

Adding spider DNA to silkworms creates silk stronger than Kevlar

Quantum computing in healthcare: predicting diseases and improving patient care “Cancer cells are defeated through the precise modulation of biological quantum electron tunneling by ingenious nanoparticles. This triggers a symphony of electrical signals that activate the natural self-destruct mechanism within cancer cells,” explains lead researcher Frankie Rawson. Study co-author Ruman Rahman added, “This research highlights the potential of quantum therapy as a novel technology for communicating with biology. The combination of quantum bioelectronics and medicine brings us closer to a new treatment approach.”

Our data establish that SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary vessels, inducing plaque inflammation that could trigger acute cardiovascular complications and increase the long-term cardiovascular risk.

The System Isn’t Designed to Help You — if you manage to get what you need from the system, it’s almost by accident, or unintentional, or a byproduct of helping someone else.

the $1,000 Breakfast Club

The Garden of the Five Senses

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications

A video of a bird in a cat cage, in a cat cage

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure,it’s not your fault

Before psychedelic therapy for wartime trauma, there was narcosynthesis It was called narcohypnosis or narcosynthesis. In essence, this involved the use of potent sedatives — especially sodium pentothal and sodium amytal — to put patients in a prolonged dream-like state. Psychiatrists of the era hoped that this would allow them to process, or “synthesize,” trauma from repressed memories of violence or conflict.

New research provides evidence for conscious awareness during cardiac arrest, in the absence of clinical signs of consciousness.

placebos can work even if a patient knows they are getting a placebo the best explanation for the results of open-placebo trials suggests that, for certain illnesses where the brain amplifies symptoms, engaging in a healing drama can nudge the brain to diminish the volume or “false alarm” of what’s called central sensitization — when the nervous system overemphasizes or amplifies perceptions of discomfort. This mostly involves nonconscious brain processes that scientists call “Bayesian brain,” which describes how the brain modulates symptoms up
or down […] Considerable evidence also shows that placebos, even when patients know they are taking them, trigger the release of neurotransmitters like endorphins and cannabinoids and engage specific regions of the brain to offer relief. Basically, the body has an internal pharmacy that relieves symptoms.

at some level of heat and humidity, the human body can no longer cool itself and its internal temperature rises uncontrollably. […] Past research found that transfer of heat could no longer occur at 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) on what is known as the wet bulb temperature scale […] But, in a study published last year, the Penn State researchers found that threshold to be closer to a wet bulb temperature of 31 degrees Celsius (88 Fahrenheit) for a sample of young and healthy research subjects who were not accustomed to such muggy conditions.

the MP3 technology became patent-free in the United States on 16 April 2017 when U.S. Patent 6,009,399, held by and administered by Technicolor, expired. […] AAC and other newer audio codecs can produce better quality than MP3, but the difference is only significant at low bitrates (2017)

Our data therefore provide strong evidence that when some (but not all) people flip a fair coin, it tends to land on the same side it started

What Is a ”Document”?

German museum employee swaps painting for fake and sells original to fund ‘luxury lifestyle’

The story of how one independent researcher conducted the largest-ever survey on fetishes

Zurich opens drive-in ’sex boxes’ — Modelled after drive-in brothels used in Germany and the Netherlands, the sex boxes will be open daily from 7pm to 5am.

Given that goalkeepers use multiple sensory cues and are often required to make rapid decisions based on incomplete multisensory information to fulfil their role, we hypothesised that professional goalkeepers would display enhanced multisensory temporal processing relative to their outfield counterparts. […] Our finding that professional goalkeepers exhibit a narrower temporal binding window [the window of time within which separate sensory inputs are merged into a single perceptual event] relative to the other two groups is consistent with prior research indicating that individuals who frequently integrate multiple sensory cues, such as trained musicians and video game players, demonstrate more precise multisensory temporal processing. However, an important unresolved question is whether this multisensory advantage stems from a preexisting skill set that initially led them to become goalkeepers, or if it results from a perceptual learning effect whereby repeated exposure to audiovisual stimuli has improved their multisensory temporal processing over time.

The association between coffee and mortality risk has been found in most previous studies, and recent studies have found an association between coffee consumption and cognition. However, there is still a lack of research exploring whether the association between coffee and mortality is influenced by cognitive function […] Our study suggested that the association between coffee consumption and mortality is influenced by cognition and varies with cognitive impairment in different cognitive domains

the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world

seagrass beds can capture and retain carbon for centuries—even in situations where the seagrass dies off. The findings offer new optimism for using nature-based solutions in the fight against climate change.

What is the world’s biggest digital bank? No, not HSBC — it’s Brazil’s Nubank, which reported close to $5 billion in revenue last year. What is the most widely used social media platform in Vietnam? Not Facebook or TikTok — it’s Zalo, with an impressive 87% adoption rate. And what was one of the earliest online food delivery platforms? That would be Talabat, launched by a group of Kuwaiti students in Cairo, in 2004. That’s three years before the iPhone came to market. 40 trailblazing companies that, in their own ways, beat the West.

Untruths spouted by chatbots ended up on the web—and Microsoft’s Bing search engine served them up as facts. Generative AI could make search harder to trust.

Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster

Oldest evidence of human cannibalism as a funerary practice

Fake History Hunter: Medieval staircases were NOT built going clockwise for the defender’s advantage

5 schools of philosophy that died out

Airports live radio transmission

During the making of this programme members of the production team and crew experienced numerous inexplicable phenomena.

In Singapore, the right to own a car starts at $76,000. And that doesn’t include the car.

Researchers in Germany have found that classical music audience members synchronize their heart rate and breathing during the performance.

male pattern baldness may be associated with increased risk of skin cancer, but the associations may only exist for those occurring at head and neck, particularly at scalp and “Balding men are more susceptible to sun damage and skin cancer because they have less hair protection.”

The Tollund Man is a naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 5th century BC. The man’s physical features were so well preserved that he was mistaken for a recent murder victim. The cause of death has been determined to be by hanging. Scholars believe the man was a human sacrifice, rather than an executed criminal, because of the arranged position of his body, and his eyes and mouth being closed. Scientists identified the man’s last meal as porridge or gruel made from grains and seeds, both cultivated and wild. Approximately 40 kinds of seeds were identified, but the porridge was primarily composed of four types: barley, flax, false flax (Camelina sativa), and knotgrass. […] Scientists identified the man’s last meal as porridge or gruel made from grains and seeds, both cultivated and wild. Approximately 40 kinds of seeds were identified, but the porridge was primarily composed of four types: barley, flax, false flax (Camelina sativa), and knotgrass. From the stage of digestion it was concluded that the man had eaten 12 to 24 hours prior to his death. Because neither meat nor fresh fruit was found in the last meal, it is suggested that the meal was eaten in winter or early spring, when these items were not available. In 1976, the Danish police made a fingerprint analysis, making Tollund Man’s thumbprint one of the oldest prints on record.

Where does my computer get the time from?

The ozone hole above Antarctica has grown to three times the size of Brazil

Los Angeles is using AI to predict who might become homeless and help before they do

Meta’s new AI-generated stickers — child soldiers, nude politicians, and lots and lots of boobs.

Anyone who uses a chatbot like Bard or ChatGPT is participating in a massive training exercise. In fact, one reason that these bots are provided for free may be that a user’s data is more valuable than her money: everything you type into a chatbot’s text box is grist for its model. Moreover, we aren’t just typing but pasting—e-mails, documents, code, manuals, contracts, and so on. We’re often asking the bots to summarize this material and then asking pointed questions about it, conducting a kind of close-reading seminar.

Translate: “We got a call from Google’s PR team” Excerpt: How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet

Not only did Isaac Newton master physics and mathematics, but he was also a theologian. He was obsessed with eschatology (end-times prophecy), and he calculated — based on his interpretation of the Bible — that Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 2060. […] later in life, Newton dabbled in economics […] As Master of the Mint, Newton was tasked with tracking down currency counterfeiters […] When notorious counterfeiter William Chaloner attacked Newton’s personal integrity, he doubled down his efforts to catch him. […] Newton bribed crooks for information. He started making threats. He leaned on the wives and mistresses of Chaloner’s crooked associates. […] what truly separates Newton from other luminaries was his unparalleled creativity. He created multiple tools that simply never existed before. […] Sadly, despite his fame, Isaac Newton led a very lonely life. His incomparable brilliance came at a hefty cost; his reclusive and anti-social nature strongly suggest that he was autistic, and his obsessive and disagreeable nature suggest mental illness, perhaps obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Quicksand escape technique

13-foot-long python survives five months eating cats in trailer park

Turns out pumps at gas stations are controlled via Bluetooth, and that the connections are insecure.

A growing movement decrying the lack of proper pockets in women’s clothing has begun to find disciples in the world of high fashion, as well as among mainstream chains.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the alleged crypto criminal who stands accused of masterminding one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history, was considering paying Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for president

Psychedelics plus psychotherapy can trigger rapid changes in the brain

Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don’t agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram

TikTok is reportedly testing a paid, ad-free version of its app

Several Taiwanese technology companies are helping Huawei Technologies Co. build infrastructure for an under-the-radar network of chip plants across southern China, an unusual collaboration

For years, Apple Inc. pondered building a search engine that could replace Google as the preferred option on its devices. […] Right now, Apple gets a cut of Google’s search ad revenue, a commission that has brought in roughly $8 billion annually in recent years. But imagine if Apple could keep more of that money. […] Google may be dominant in search, but the company still needs Apple and its billions of users. […] John Giannandrea, a former Google executive who now oversees machine learning and AI at Apple, has a giant search team under him. Over the past few years, his group developed a next-generation search engine for Apple’s apps codenamed “Pegasus.” That technology, which more accurately surfaces results, is already available in some Apple apps, but will soon be coming to more, including the App Store itself. […] Apple also has its own advertising technology team, which will be helpful if its search ambitions grow. […] One acquisition Apple could have made but didn’t was Bing. I reported this past week that Microsoft tried to spin off Bing and sell it to Apple in order to make it the default search engine on the iPhone and other devices. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, balked at the deal.

Exploiting the iPhone 4, Part 1: Gaining Entry — Step one. Acquire a device. I don’t know anything about writing a jailbreak or about what my approach will look like, so let’s just start somewhere obvious. I pick up an iPhone 4 and a 3GS off eBay. Older devices seem like a good place to start as their security is presumably worse, but you’ve got to find the sweet spot: really old devices are wildly valuable. […] I’ll need to be able to run some code on the device. The imagined path here is that I manage to set up a toolchain that can produce and install applications the way it was done back in 2010. Using that, I would then write an app and poke around from within the sandbox to investigate the attack surface.

Humans inherit artificial intelligence biases

Tech companies have not solved some of the persistent problems with AI language models, such as their propensity to make things up or “hallucinate.” […] Tech companies are putting this deeply flawed tech in the hands of millions of people and allowing AI models access to sensitive information such as their emails, calendars, and private messages. In doing so, they are making us all vulnerable to scams, phishing, and hacks on a massive scale.

The model takes a font description as an input, and produces a font file as an output. I named the project ‘FontoGen’.

How Mexico built a state — Building a state is not a matter of copying first world institutions. It is a tough process of deals and compromises. 19th century Mexico is a good example.

Venice Explained: Its Architecture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Experience Them All

A pair of Chinese scam artists wanted to turn a radiation-soaked Pacific atoll into a future metropolis. They ended up in an American jail instead. […] Yan and Zhou went from hawking a miracle water cure to running a sham United Nations organization on Manhattan’s Third Avenue and rubbing shoulders with diplomats and world leaders. The pair managed to gain access to the U.N. thanks to over $1 million in clandestine payments to diplomats.

Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850 — Gin was one of a wide range of new intoxicants — including chocolate, coffee, opium, sugar, tea, and tobacco — that, in what has been called a “psychoactive revolution”, radically expanded the mind-altering possibilities for European people between 1600 and 1800.

one of the 472 (Warhol) prints of sunsets, each in its own colorway, that got used to decorate 472 rooms in Philip Johnson’s groovy new Hotel Marquette in Minneapolis in 1972.

about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications a day. Some get nearly 5,000 in 24 hours. The pop-ups are almost always linked to alerts from friends on social media.

we ask that the Norwegian temporary ban on behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram be made permanent and extended to the entire European Union

Anyone who has used H&R Block’s tax return preparation services in recent years may have unintentionally helped line Meta and Google’s pockets. That’s according to a new class action lawsuit which alleges the three companies “jointly schemed” to install trackers on the H&R Block site to scan and transmit tax data back to the tech companies which then used elements of the data to engage in targeted advertising.

One-hour training is all you need to control a third robotic arm

Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration […] Sleep regularity may be a simple, effective target for improving general health and survival.

Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics, Study Finds — 78 percent of ocean microplastics are from synthetic tire rubber […] It’s an emissions problem that won’t go away with the transition to electric vehicles […] EVs tend to shed around 20 percent more from their tires due to their higher weight and high torque compared to traditional internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.

Waste plastic can be recycled into hydrogen fuel and graphene

Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge 3

Couple suing Disney World claims water slide caused ‘painful wedgie’

Top Chinese Scientist Says India’s Moon Landing Not Even Close to South Pole

Scientific experiments have repeatedly shown that sharks have no interest in human blood

Walking more than five flights of stairs (at least 50 steps up) a day can cut risk of heart disease by 20%, data collected from more than 450,000 adults over 12.5 years shows

Ten weird things you can buy online

Letterboxd has been acquired in a deal that values it at $50 million — and promises ‘very little’ will change

some of Silicon Valley’s biggest AI companies are hiring poets and writers with humanity degrees

Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.

The octopus, considered to be separated from us by about 700 million years of evolution, is believed to be the most intelligent invertebrate. It challenges many common assumptions about animal intelligence because it is also a short-lived loner. And we are discovering that its nervous system apparatus for intelligence is also completely different from typical mammal or bird models.

A viral account is using off-the-shelf facial recognition tech to dox random people on the internet for the amusement of millions of viewers.

Hotel hackers redirect guests to fake Booking.com to steal cards

Mastercard sells cardholder transaction data through third party online data marketplaces and through its in-house Data & Services division, giving many entities access to data and insights about consumers at an immense scale. […] For example, Mastercard’s listing on Amazon Web Services Data Exchange states that companies can access data like the amount and frequency of transactions, the location, and the date and time. Mastercard creates categories of consumers based on this transaction history, like identifying “high spenders” on fast fashion or “frequent buyers” of big ticket items online, and sells these groupings, called “audiences”, to other entities. These groups can be targeted at the micro-geographic level, and even be based on AI-driven scores Mastercard assigns to consumers predicting how likely they are to spend money in certain ways within the next 3 months.

we find no consistent relation between hormones and unethical behavior or tendencies

two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency. An astounding 40 percent are essentially nonreaders. Most are taught through phonics—a system of instruction based on sounding out letters that is mandated in at least 32 states and the District of Columbia. The phonics method of converting each letter to a particular sound is totally unsuited to the English language.

For decades, tobacco companies hooked people on cigarettes by making their products more addictive. Now, a new study suggests that tobacco companies may have used a similar strategy to hook people on processed foods. In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables. By the 2000s, the tobacco giants spun off their food companies and largely exited the food industry — but not before leaving a lasting legacy on the foods that we eat.

Dark Tower was the subject of trade secret litigation in 1985. Two independent game developers named Robert Burton and Allen Coleman submitted a game to Milton Bradley titled “Triumph” that involved an electronic tower as the centerpiece. Milton Bradley rejected the game, but proceeded to release Dark Tower some time later. The inventors sued for misappropriation of trade secrets and won a jury verdict for over $700,000.