Researchers at Brigham Young University and Colorado State University have found that the noise your food makes while you’re eating can have a significant effect on how much food you eat.

The “Crunch Effect,” as they call it, suggests you’re likely to eat less if you’re more conscious of the sound your food makes while you’re eating. Therefore, watching loud TV or listening to loud music while eating can mask eating sounds that keep you in check.

To be clear, the researchers are not talking about the sizzle of bacon, the crack of crème brulee or popcorn popping. The effect comes from the sound of mastication: chewing, chomping, crunching.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them.

Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9. In a paper posted online today, Kannan Soundararajan and Robert Lemke Oliver of Stanford University present both numerical and theoretical evidence that prime numbers repel other would-be primes that end in the same digit, and have varied predilections for being followed by primes ending in the other possible final digits. […]

This conspiracy among prime numbers seems, at first glance, to violate a longstanding assumption in number theory: that prime numbers behave much like random numbers. Most mathematicians would have assumed, Granville and Ono agreed, that a prime should have an equal chance of being followed by a prime ending in 1, 3, 7 or 9 (the four possible endings for all prime numbers except 2 and 5).

{ Quanta | Continue reading }

A top Chinese military contractor is building a data analytics platform to help authorities identify terrorists before they strike. […]

So far, more data has just meant more noise, security experts say.. […]

Since the Mao era, the government has kept a secret file, called a dang’an, on almost everyone. Dang’an contain school reports, health records, work permits, personality assessments, and other information that might be considered confidential and private in other countries. The contents of the dang’an can determine whether a citizen is eligible for a promotion or can secure a coveted urban residency permit. The government revealed last year that it was also building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

For three years, she has calculated the cost of being different—that is, how much harder do you have to work as a woman, or as a gay man, to get the same jobs and the promotions as a straight, white man? […]

[S]he built models to measure how good people were at jobs they never had. This gave her the cost, or tax, in terms of the lifetime opportunity cost of lost work, the bill for extra degrees, or the extra experience needed to have the same opportunities as men from the dominant demographic group.

These are the results a few of her calculations: it costs about £38,000 ($54,000) to be a gay man in England; women in the US tech industry pay a tax of between $100,000 and $300,000; and women in tech in Hong Kong or Singapore face an even steeper $800,000 to $1.5 million.

{ Quartz | Continue reading }

photo { Chip Litherland, using expired film }

Scuba diver survives being sucked into Florida nuclear power plant

Monkeys Drive Wheelchairs Using Only Their Thoughts

Engineers develop flexible skin that traps radar waves, cloaks objects

According to a spectacularly misleading article in the Telegraph: Scientists discover how to ‘upload knowledge to your brain.’ That’s science fiction. Or rather, journalistic fiction.

High daily coffee consumption may lower Multiple Sclerosis risk

Why women’s education doesn’t always improve women’s equality

Smartwatches that allow pupils to ‘cheat’ in exams for sale on Amazon

Chinese hackers stole $100 million from the Bangladesh Central Bank’s account at the New York Fed and then laundered it through Philippine casinos.

Using geographic profiling to investigate Banksy

Nonlinear Effects of Superstar Collaboration: Why the Beatles Succeeded but Broke Up

A Physicist Is Building a Time Machine to Reconnect With His Dead Father [Thanks Tim]

How to build a time machine, from a university math professor

Mobile Robotic Fabrication System for Filament Structures

It’s a wearable LCD ‘mirror’ with facial recognition. and Behold, my new alarm clock hack. 1 shot of espresso every half hour until I wake up.

People Just Won’t Stop Stealing ‘Katie Crotch Road’ Signs. The thefts are costing a town hundreds of dollars each year.

Psychiatric facilities across the United States are at breaking point after the number of people claiming to be sent from the future to stop Donald Trump reached epidemic proportions.

Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women’s romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women - but only when their own partners were highly desirable. Exposure to ovulating women also increased women’s sexual desires for their (highly desirable) partners. These findings suggest that women can be sensitive to subtle cues of other women’s fertility and respond (e.g., via social exclusion, enhanced sexual attention to own mate) in ways that may facilitate their mate retention goals while not thwarting their affiliative goals.

{ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | Continue reading }

Using luteinizing hormone tests to verify ovulation, across two studies (Samples 1 and 2), we found that women whose partners were relatively low in sexual desirability felt less close to their partner (Samples 1 and 2) and were more critical of their partner’s faults (Sample 2) on high-fertility days of the cycle just prior to ovulation compared with low-fertility days of the cycle. Women whose partners were relatively high in sexual desirability felt closer to their partner (Sample 1) and more satisfied with their relationship (Sample 2) on high- than low-fertility days of the cycle. There were no such shifts in women’s commitment to their relationship. Therefore, partner sexual desirability predicts women’s high-fertility assessments of relationship quality but not their intentions to stay in their relationship, consistent with the dual mating hypothesis. These findings suggest that variations across the ovulation cycle in women’s reproductive hormones play an important role in relationship dynamics.

{ Hormones and Behavior | PDF }

images { 1. Frederike Helwig | 2. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), publicity still, Faye Dunaway }

Edible underwear was never meant to be eaten

Test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable — and after some participants were told that robot had broken down

Autistic ‘Prison Houdini’ who memorized guards’ keys and carved exact replicas for 13 escape attempts in 36 years is denied parole

On average, CEOs earn $176,840 annually. College presidents, $377,261.

Disney U.S. parks will charge visitors different prices based on anticipated demand, with weekdays during the school year much cheaper than holidays. Previously, the parks charged the same price for a one-day pass any time of year.

Hijab and “Hitchhiking”: A Field Study

“Social media is 95 percent of what happens in all relationships now”

New model explains how things go viral online

New research shows that you only need handful of influencers to give the impression that everyone is talking about your brand. [Thanks Tim]

Giraffe neck is longer than thought

Trouble with cats on your counters, table tops, furniture, curtains, floor areas – or maybe “hanging out at your entry door”? (new patent)

World’s first electronics transistor, assembled by hand, 1947 and and the suburb of agbogbloshie

Shazam for Plants and for birds

Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language

The Ross Sisters

Norman Reedus (Daryl) practicing his crossbow

Ass eating restaurant in Japan [Thanks GG]

Selling phone

When leaning forward to kiss to a romantic partner, individuals tend to direct their kiss to the right more often than the left. Studies have consistently demonstrated this kissing asymmetry, although other factors known to influence lateral biases, such as sex or situational context, had yet to be explored. The primary purpose of our study was to investigate if turning direction was consistent between a romantic (parent-parent) and parental (parent-child) kissing context, and secondly, to examine if sex differences influenced turning bias between parent-child kissing partners. […]

The results indicated that the direction of turning bias differed between kissing contexts. A right-turn bias was observed for romantic kissing; a left-turn bias was exhibited for parental kissing. There was no significant difference of turning bias between any parent-child kissing partners. Interpretations for the left-turn bias discuss parental kissing as a learned lateral behavior.

{ Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition | Continue reading }

publicity still { Joe Dallesandro and Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972) }

{ Leah Schrager }

There are 30 US $100 bills in circulation for every man, woman and child, and more than 300 billion euro in 500 euro notes. As Peter’s paper documents, the vast majority of this currency is involved with activity that is at a minimum problematic, and often criminal.

{ Larry Summers | Continue reading }

related { With fraud getting more expensive, startups are taking a new look at ways to shore up the security of ATM networks and other card transactions — cards are optional. | The Security Ledger }

related { China has become the billionaire capital of the world, with a total of 100 to the Big Apple’s 95. China’s growing clout in the rankings is even starker in the world of female “self-made” billionaires, according to Hurun, where the country dominates with 93 of the global total of 124. | Financial Times }

photo { Twiggy & Justin de Villeneuve }

Passion and sexual satisfaction typically diminish in longer-term relationships, but this decline is not inevitable. We identified the attitudes and behaviors that most strongly differentiated sexually satisfied from dissatisfied men and women who had been together for at least three years (N = 38,747). […]

The vast majority of these participants reported being satisfied with their sex lives during their first six months together (83% W; 83% M).

Satisfaction with their current sex lives was more variable, with approximately half of participants reporting overall satisfaction (55% W; 43% M) and the rest feeling neutral (18% W; 16% M) or dissatisfied (27% W; 41% M).

More than one in three respondents (38% W; 32% M) claimed their sex lives were as passionate now as in the beginning. Sexual satisfaction and maintenance of passion were higher among people who had sex most frequently, received more oral sex, had more consistent orgasms, and incorporated more variety of sexual acts, mood setting, and sexual communication.

{ Journal of Sex Research }

collage { Joseph Staples, At first you may only be able to progress this far, 2012 }

related { Those who sent romantic emails were more emotionally aroused and used stronger and more thoughtful language than those who left voicemails }

A Canadian man who disappeared 30 years ago is set to be reunited with his family after remembering his identity

A woman in Brazil who had cosmetic surgery ended up with not only a flatter stomach and larger breasts, she also developed kleptomania for a few weeks, a new case report reveals.

Drinking more coffee may help prevent alcohol-related cirrhosis

A little-known effort to conduct biological warfare occurred during the 17th century

Why tipping is wrong

They found a 9% earnings premium for lesbians over heterosexual women, compared with a penalty of 11% for gay men relative to straight men. Lesbians receive no wage premium in the public sector.

Headphones that get you high on dopamine are tipped to go on sale next month

When is a Transport Map Too Complex for Your Brain?

How a dead millionaire convinced dozens of women to have as many babies as possible

Captured : People in prison drawing people who should be

A Naked Therapy session takes place via webcam

Smell Dating, the first mail odor dating service

It was an invitation-only party (crabs, cocktails and a D.J. on a moonlit dock) thrown by Jane Street, a secretive E.T.F. trading firm that, after years of minting money in the shadows of Wall Street, is now pitching itself to some of the largest institutional investors in the world.

And the message was clear: Jane Street, which barely existed 15 years ago and now trades more than $1 trillion a year, was ready to take on the big boys.

Much of what Jane Street, which occupies two floors of an office building at the southern tip of Manhattan, does is not known. That is by design, as the firm deploys specialized trading strategies to capture arbitrage profits by buying and selling (using its own capital) large amounts of E.T.F. shares.

It’s a risky business.

As the popularity of E.T.F.s has soared — exchange-traded funds now account for a third of all publicly traded equities — the spreads, or margins, have narrowed substantially, making it harder to profit from the difference.
And in many cases, some of the most popular E.T.F.s track hard-to-trade securities like junk bonds, emerging-market stocks and a variety of derivative products, adding an extra layer of risk. […]

While traders at large investment banks watched their screens in horror, at Jane Street, a bunch of Harvard Ph.D.s wearing flip-flops, shorts and hoodies, swung into action with a wave of buy orders. By the end of the day, the E.T.F. shares had retraced their sharp falls.

It is not only Jane Street, of course. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Knight Capital Group and the Susquehanna International Group have all capitalized on the E.T.F. explosion.

And as these firms have grown, so has the demand for a new breed of Wall Street trader — one who can build financial models and write computer code but who also has the guts to spot a market anomaly and bet big with the firm’s capital. […]

Here is a small sample of Jane Street’s main traders: Tao Wang (doctorate in philosophy and finance from the National University of Singapore), Min Zhu (master’s in chemistry, Columbia), Brett Harrison (master’s in computer science with a focus in artificial intelligence, Harvard) and Srihari Seshadri (bachelor’s in computer science, Carnegie Mellon).

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

oil on Masonite { Grant Wood, Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931 }

The war against cocaine rests on a simple idea: If you restrict its supply, you force up its price, and fewer people will buy it. Andean governments have thus deployed their armies to uproot the coca bushes that provide cocaine’s raw ingredient. Each year, they eradicate coca plants covering an area 14 times the size of Manhattan, depriving the cartels of about half their harvest. But despite the slashing and burning, the price of cocaine in the U.S. has hardly budged, bobbing between $150 and $200 per pure gram for most of the past 20 years. How have the cartels done it?

In part, with a tactic that resembles Wal-Mart’s. The world’s biggest retailer has sometimes seemed similarly immune to the laws of supply and demand, keeping prices low regardless of shortages and surpluses. Wal-Mart’s critics say that it can do this in some markets because its vast size makes it a “monopsony,” or a monopoly buyer. Just as a monopolist can dictate prices to its consumers, who have no one else to buy from, a monopsonist can dictate prices to its suppliers, who have no one else to sell to. If a harvest fails, the argument goes, the cost is borne by the farmers, not Wal-Mart or its customers. […]

The raw leaf needed to make one kilogram of cocaine powder costs about $400 in Colombia; in the U.S., that kilogram retails for around $150,000, once divided into one-gram portions. So even if governments doubled the price of coca leaf, from $400 to $800, cocaine’s retail price would at most rise from $150,000 to $150,400 per kilogram. The price of a $150 gram would go up by 40 cents—not much of a return on the billions invested in destroying crops. Consider trying to raise the price of art by driving up the cost of paint. […]

A dollar spent on drug education in U.S. schools cuts cocaine consumption by twice as much as spending that dollar on reducing supply in South America; spending it on treatment for addicts reduces it by 10 times as much.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Frank, Bar, New York City, 1955-56 }

Please notice how the Director of the NSA, unlike the vociferous FBI director, has been relatively silent. With a budget on the order of $10 billion at its disposal the NSA almost certainly has something equivalent to what the courts have asked Apple to create. The NSA probably doesn’t want to give its bypass tool to the FBI and blow its operational advantage.

{ Counterpunch | Continue reading }

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

{ Phys.org | Continue reading }

Organization members who engage in “moral objection” by taking a principled stand against ethically questionable activities help to prevent such activities from persisting. Unfortunately, research suggests that they also may be perceived as less warm (i.e., pleasant, nice) than members who comply with ethically questionable procedures.

{ Journal of Applied Psychology | Continue reading }

The benefits of mindfulness meditation, increasingly popular in recent years, are supposed to be many: reduced stress and risk for various diseases, improved well-being, a rewired brain. But the experimental bases to support these claims have been few. Supporters of the practice have relied on very small samples of unrepresentative subjects, like isolated Buddhist monks who spend hours meditating every day, or on studies that generally were not randomized and did not include placebo­control groups.

This month, however, a study published in Biological Psychiatry brings scientific thoroughness to mindfulness meditation and for the first time shows that, unlike a placebo, it can change the brains of ordinary people and potentially improve their health. […]

First they recruited 35 unemployed men and women who were seeking work and experiencing considerable stress. Blood was drawn and brain scans were given. Half the subjects were then taught formal mindfulness meditation at a residential retreat center; the rest completed a kind of sham mindfulness meditation that was focused on relaxation and distracting oneself from worries and stress. […]

At the end of three days, the participants all told the researchers that they felt refreshed and better able to withstand the stress of unemployment. Yet follow-up brain scans showed differences in only those who underwent mindfulness meditation. There was more activity, or communication, among the portions of their brains that process stress-related reactions and other areas related to focus and calm. Four months later, those who had practiced mindfulness showed much lower levels in their blood of a marker of unhealthy inflammation than the relaxation group, even though few were still meditating.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. […]

Findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance.

{ Human Nature | Continue reading }

Anyone we could marry would, of course, be a little wrong for us. It is wise to be appropriately pessimistic here. Perfection is not on the cards. Unhappiness is a constant. Nevertheless, one encounters some couples of such primal, grinding mismatch, such deep-seated incompatibility, that one has to conclude that something else is at play beyond the normal disappointments and tensions of every long-term relationship: some people simply shouldn’t be together.

{ The Book of Life | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 }

related { Women Like Being Valued for Sex, as Long as it is by a Committed Partner }