Previous evidence suggests that masturbation has a complementary function for women and a compensatory function for men. However, in light of changing attitudes toward masturbation, this gendered model of compensation versus complementation may not remain valid. […] Men who reported the highest intercourse frequency were less likely to report masturbation in the past month, while women with higher intercourse frequency were more likely to report masturbation in the past month. […] when partnered sexuality faces challenges, masturbation may serve as a replacement for both women and men

Doctor leaves a patient on an operating table under anaesthetic to have sex with a nurse in another room

Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of German apartments turns out to be a slug

Re-freezing the Arctic? A giant sea curtain? High-tech efforts to save the ice sheets are doomed, report finds

Tesco trials avocado ripeness scanners

Never steal a hacker’s girlfriend’s phone: How an expert exposed a global network of thieves

Asking a Question is a Proposal in Shared Inquiry

More than 40% of American adults now report being online “almost constantly”

spiritual bliss attractor state

Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour for a year [more]

Buddhism, Nothingness, and Pessimism: From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche

Why does AI feel so human if it’s just a “calculator for words”? […]

Most language users are only indirectly aware of the extent to which their interactions are the product of statistical calculations.

Think, for example, about the discomfort of hearing someone say “pepper and salt” rather than “salt and pepper”. Or the odd look you would get if you ordered “powerful tea” rather than “strong tea” at a cafe.

The rules that govern the way we select and order words, and many other sequences in language, come from the frequency of our social encounters with them. The more often you hear something said a certain way, the less viable any alternative will sound.

In linguistics, the vast field dedicated to the study of language, these sequences are known as “collocations”. They’re just one of many phenomena that show how humans calculate multiword patterns based on whether they “feel right” – whether they sound appropriate, natural and human.

{ Science Alert | Continue reading }

A surgeon who froze his legs so they would require amputation to satisfy a sexual obsession before making nearly £500,000 in insurance claims has been jailed.

Mark Zuckerberg sues Mark Zuckerberg — Mark Zuckerberg the lawyer uses a commercial Facebook page to advertise his legal practice and communicate with potential clients. But his page has been disabled five times in the last eight years, since Meta’s moderation systems flag his account as falsely impersonating Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the platform.

OpenAI is working on a “jobs platform” for people who lose their jobs to AI

Study claims dark matter does not exist and the universe is 27 billion years old

Not all calories are equal: Men gained around 1 kg more of fat mass while on the ultra-processed diet compared to the unprocessed diet, regardless of whether they were on the normal or excess calorie diet. Ultra-processed foods harm men’s health —

There are 3 different scenarios. For each, you are given a list of constraints and statistics on the attribute distribution. You can assume, participants are sampled i.i.d., meaning the attribute distribution will not change as the night goes on. […] The person at the top of the leaderboard Sept 15 6am PT will be the winner and get to go to Berghain - we fly you out!

Zuckerberg went on an unprecedented hiring spree seeking to lure top AI researchers to his new team[…] At least three AI researchers hired have already left

Zuckerberg gave noise-canceling headphones to his neighbors in the Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto in an effort to address years of frustration over ongoing construction and disruption surrounding his expanding residential compound

Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 have discovered the key to getting large language model (LLM) chatbots to ignore their guardrails, and it’s quite simple. You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence

YouTube’s Sneaky AI ‘Experiment’ — Something strange has been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks. After being uploaded, some videos have been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything. Viewers have noticed “extra punchy shadows,” “weirdly sharp edges,” and a smoothed-out look to footage that makes it look “like plastic.” Many people have come to the same conclusion: YouTube is using AI to tweak videos on its platform, without creators’ knowledge.

In a Hotter World, Some People Age Faster, Researchers Find — Exposure to heat waves over just two years could add up to 12 extra days of age-related health damage. [NY Times]

Six scientists demonstrate in their laboratory that a sulfur compound could have been key to the appearance of the first proteins on early Earth […] In 1991, De Duve proposed a hypothesis about the origin of life that did not require any deity: “the thioester world,” a compound containing carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur. On that primordial planet, still devoid of life, thioesters would have provided the energy necessary for chemical elements to react and form more complex molecules, such as the first genetic material, RNA.

Scientists Strip Cancer of Its “Superpower” To Outsmart Drugs

This study demonstrates negative associations between stress and sexuality, with stronger effects in women

How Queen Victoria Became the Biggest Drug Dealer of All Time

Waymo granted first permit to begin testing autonomous vehicles in New York City

Short-term rental bans and the hotel industry: Evidence from New York city […] We find that total hotel lobbying in NYC in 2023 was about twenty times larger than lobbying by Airbnb and other home-sharing networks. […] the heavy involvement of the hotel industry in the rise of short-term rental regulations and their particular involvement with NYC’s short-term rental ban. […] Our findings are that total hotel revenue increased by roughly $2.1 to 2.9 billion over the first eighteen months after the ban’s enactment. We also find that NYC’s short-term rental ban increased average daily hotel prices by approximately $14 to 19 per night. Despite the substantial increase in prices, we find little, if any, increase in the quantity of rooms rented […] so the revenue increase was mostly due to the increase in room rates.

Study links rising temperatures and declining moods

Exercise is great for your health – but not necessarily for weight loss

Why Grindr decided to build a side hustle selling erectile dysfunction pills

‘Shrekking’ is ‘dating down’

How to draw a Space Invader

Delta, United sued for selling windowless ‘window seats’

Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears

How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work?

Strategies for Coping With the End of a Desirable Intimate Relationship

Pubertal development is believed to influence cognitive and behavioral development during adolescence, but measuring puberty is challenging.

How can England possibly be running out of water? […] The reservoirs England does have are at their lowest levels in at least a decade, just 67.7% full on average.

Rates of daily reading for pleasure have declined over the past 20 years in the US […] with decreases of 3% per year

How Croatian freediver held breath for 29 minutes

A brain implant can decode a person’s internal chatter — but the device works only if the user thinks of a preset password — The mind-reading device, or brain–computer interface (BCI), accurately deciphered up to 74% of imagined sentences. The system began decoding users’ internal speech — the silent dialogue in people’s minds — only when they thought of a specific keyword. This ensured that the system did not accidentally translate sentences that users would rather keep to themselves.

Scientists discover surprising language ‘shortcuts’ in birdsong – just like humans — “In human language, if we say something a lot, we tend to shorten it – like saying ‘TV’ instead of ‘television’. It turns out that the same pattern exists in birdsong.

How Baltimore’s violent crime rate hit an all-time low

Gamblers Now Bet on Al Models Like Racehorses

LinkedIn is the fakest platform of them all — It was meant for professionals—but it is filled with chatbots

Invitin is a French startup that allows couples to sell seats at their weddings to help finance their event.

A decade after losing her sight, a B.C. woman can see again — through her tooth

For a few dozen people in the world, the downside of living with a rare immune condition comes with a surprising superpower—the ability to fight off all viruses. […] Taking inspiration from this rare mutation that makes people impervious to viral diseases, a Columbia researcher is developing a therapy that could bestow this superpower on the rest of us

we found that participants consistently rated every common daily activity as more enjoyable when interacting with someone else. […] results suggest that whether we are eating, reading, or even cleaning up around the house, happiness thrives in the company of others. […] Across more than 40,000 participants and more than 100,000 episodes, we found that participants consistently rated every common daily activity as more enjoyable when interacting with someone else.

The ovulatory shift hypothesis proposes that women’s mate preferences for androgen-dependent secondary sexual traits in men are most pronounced during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle. […] we provide the first test of whether women’s sexual preferences for male facial hair, which is reliably associated with male sexual maturity and masculinity, peak during the ovulatory phase among women with higher salivary testosterone. […] While beards increased male attractiveness, preferences did not change over the menstrual cycle. […] Women’s preferences for men’s beards may not support the ovulatory shift hypothesis.

Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info

Kirsty Farts, 28, started the flatulence-themed content to help pay off an £11,000 vet bill. She now uploads up to 60 videos a month to her 9,000 fans on social media

FDA approves breakthrough eye drops that fix near vision without glasses

There have been at least 33 crypto kidnappings around the world this year. The case against William Duplessie and John Woeltz, who are accused of holding Italian tourist Michael Carturan captive in a $75,000 a month Nolita townhouse and torturing him for weeks in an attempt to get the password to his cryptocurrency accounts, would be the first known occurrence in New York. […] They moved from Kentucky to the five-story Prince Street townhouse, where they threw wild, drug-fueled parties, often attended by employees of the Brandy Melville store around the corner, and would show off their guns, knives, and cattle prods.

LAPD Eyes ‘GeoSpy’, an AI Tool That Can Geolocate Photos in Seconds

The best lots are all taken, so developers are stretching the limits to make use of space that isn’t always ideal for skyscrapers. They’re not necessarily taller than buildings of the past, but they are a lot more slender. “Pencil tower” is the term generally used to describe buildings that have a slenderness ratio of more than around 10 to 1, height to width. […] limiting wind-induced motions is a major part of high-rise design […] I built a model in the garage to show you how this works

By conveying cues of their current fertility, females can provide valuable reproductive information to conspecifics. Our closest relatives, non-human primates, employ diverse strategies, including olfactory cues from the anogenital region, to communicate information about female fertility. While their shared phylogeny with humans suggests that analogous olfactory cues may have been preserved in modern women, empirical evidence is lacking.

In a comprehensive two-fold approach, we investigated fertility-related shifts in the chemical composition of women’s vulvar volatiles as well as men’s ability to perceive them. We collected vulvar odour from 28 naturally cycling women […]

Simulating a first encounter, 139 men evaluated a total of 274 vulvar odour samples from 28 women, collected on different cycle days. […]

men’s attraction to vulvar odour was not significantly predicted by female fertility. Overall, our data suggests a relatively low retention of chemical fertility cues in vulvar odour of modern women.

{ Evolution and Human Behavior | Continue reading }

Diabetic Man With Gene-Edited Cells Produces His Own Insulin

Currently, it is not clear whether any animal reaches an age comparable to a human in their 80s. Most species seem to age differently compared with humans. Some preliminary observations suggest that cats may share common patterns of aging with humans. We studied pet cats, research colony cats, and wildcats living in zoos to encapsulate species variation in the speed of development and aging. We found that cat and human brains atrophy with age, and that their age-related patterns in brain aging are sufficiently similar that we could use them to generate cross-species age alignments.

Breast milk-flavored ice cream

Butter made from carbon tastes like the real thing, gets backing from Bill Gates

Meeting partners online is related to lower relationship satisfaction and love: Data from 50 countries

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to express complex and structured meanings. Some have therefore argued for a tight relationship between complex thought and language, postulating that reasoning, including logical reasoning, relies on linguistic representations. […] Our findings reveal that the language system is not engaged during logical reasoning, and patients with severe aphasia exhibit intact performance on logic tasks. [PDF]

There are no new ideas in AI — only new datasets — All four big breakthroughs in LLMs happened because we unlocked a new source of data. What will be the next one?

How much money do Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, and Snapchat make from you?

An emerging form of surveillance, “wireless-tapping,” explores the possibility of remotely […] a team of computer science researchers at Penn State demonstrated that transcriptions of phone calls can be generated from radar measurements taken up to three meters, or about 10 feet, from a phone […] accuracy remains limited — around 60% for a vocabulary of up to 10,000

An Australian scientist says probabilities are the leading cause of the Bermuda Triangle disappearances […] every instance contains a degree of poor weather or likely human error (or both, as in the case of Flight 19) as the true culprit.

How can you cut an equilateral triangle into four pieces that can be reassembled to form a perfect square?

Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say

Toe transfer surgery – using one or more of the patients’ toes to replace the amputated digits – is a potential alternative to replantation. […] hand function was significantly better for patients undergoing toe transfer, compared to replantation. The difference in favor of toe transfer was substantial, with hand function scores about three times higher than the benefit considered clinically important. […] Amputations of the fingers and thumb are common injuries, affecting about 45,000 people per year in the United States alone

Eating three servings of French fries a week is associated with a 20% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but eating similar amounts of potatoes cooked in other ways – boiled, baked or mashed – does not substantially increase the risk

Americans get more than half their calories from ultra-processed foods

In many Western countries, the number 7 is considered lucky, causing it to be disproportionately selected in lotto games. This study quantifies the financial cost of this tendency

Welcome to the world of fake weddings – a rising trend in Indian cities where people gather to enjoy the wedding party, minus the actual marriage.

Costume tests for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Why do philosophers keep debating the same big questions—about free will, morality, knowledge, and political authority—without ever settling them? This piece explores several possible answers. Maybe philosophy makes progress by spinning off answerable questions into the sciences. Maybe some problems are just too hard for minds like ours. Or maybe the trouble lies in language: our concepts are vague, our disagreements often verbal, or the questions themselves may be confused. […]

I suggest that philosophy’s value doesn’t lie in delivering final answers, but in helping us clarify our assumptions, explore alternatives, and better understand the questions that matter most, even when we can’t resolve them.

{ Michael Hannon | Continue reading }

Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry’

Denmark zoo asks people to donate unwanted pets to feed predators and imitate ‘natural food chain’

From 2017 to 2022, Uber customers reported incidents of sexual assault or sexual misconduct every 8 minutes in the US

we applied a technique to extract the patterns the model uses to represent character traits – like evil, sycophancy (insincere flattery), or propensity to hallucinate (make up false information). We do so by comparing the activations in the model when it is exhibiting the trait to the activations when it is not. We call these patterns persona vectors.

This paper aims to structurally analyze what it means for thought to “leap.” By redefining phenomena traditionally labeled as “inspiration” or “intuition”—typically viewed as accidental or emotional—into a reproducible cognitive model, the paper introduces the concept of Mindflight Cognition. Unlike simple perspective shifts, mindflight cognition involves the simultaneous occurrence of perspective leaps, structural reconfigurations, and the emergence of new meaning. The paper identifies six constitutive elements (hierarchical jumpability, multiperspectival shifting, structural overlooking, cognitive cartography, ideation germination sensitivity, and core-belief orientation), and three essential activating factors (core belief, structural quotient, and structural shards). Using the author’s hot dog business model as a real-world implementation case, it visualizes how mindflight cognition manifests in structural terms.

Trait-Based Embryo Selection […] When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis1. The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall. […] Last month, a startup called Nucleus took the plunge. They had previously offered 23andMe style genetic tests for adults. Now they announced a partnership with Genomic Prediction focusing on embryos. Although GP would continue to only test for health outcomes, you could forward the raw data from GP to Nucleus, and Nucleus would predict extra traits, including height, BMI, eye color, hair color, ADHD, IQ, and even handedness. And this week, Herasight4 entered the space with the most impressive disease risk scores yet, an IQ predictor worth 6-95 extra points, and a series of challenges to competitors, whom they call out for insufficient scientific rigor.

Scientists in South Africa are making rhino horns radioactive to fight poaching

Multiple hypotheses have been suggested to explain why the three zebra species (Equus quagga, E. grevyi and E. zebra) are striped. […] The main hypotheses discussed during the last decade are the deterrence of biting flies, thermoregulation through stripe-generated air movement, and three anti-predation hypotheses: crypsis to avoid detection; dazzle coloration to confuse pursuers; and interspecies signalling to encourage protective mixed-species herding. Our evaluation suggests that these theories struggle to explain all aspects of variation in striping. […] Deterrence of biting flies is the theory that currently has strongest empirical support, but this theory alone struggles to explain why striping occurs so strongly in zebra but not in other African mammals, and the distribution of stripes across the body.

Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality […] [Some] argue that Copenhagen’s emergence as the default comes from historical accident, rather than its strengths. Critics say it allows physicists to sidestep deeper questions.

“That’s subjective!” People sometimes respond like this to claims about what’s true, what’s ethical, what others find beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, and more. To call a claim “subjective” seems in part to say that something important about the claim depends on the subject—the person—making the claim. What this “something” is varies depending on the claim. Are judgments like these truly “subjective”? What does “subjective” really mean?

the study of aesthetics is the study of the felt quality of perceptions of the senses, while the study of art is the study of the historical practice of making art objects.

Dark patterns: tricks to make you spend more online

While the free will debate tends to focus primarily on the implications of determinism for freedom, a long line of philosophers have also argued that free will would not be compatible with indeterminism either. These arguments typically take the form of a so-called Luck Objection: a family of related arguments which all seek to show, roughly, that if an action is not causally pre-determined then it must be a sort of random happening, over which the agent lacks the control required for free will. […]

We develop an empirically plausible model of agential decision-making and apply this to the problem of luck. We argue that, under such a model, it is entirely natural to think of an agent’s actions as both ‘undetermined’ (in the sense of being under-determined) and under their own control.

{ Chance, Choice, and Control: Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe | Continue reading }

‘Ozempic face’ may be driving a cosmetic surgery boom “Although they felt much better losing weight, in some ways they felt they looked older. And this was due to the loss of volume in their face.”

changes in pedestrian behavior since 1980 […] pedestrians now walk faster and linger less, researchers find

while males born during summer had a higher risk of developing depression symptoms, there was no observed association among females, study (n = 303)

Decades of global surveys point to a single, consistent foundation of well-being: our relationships

Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. […] the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom

the Mosquito Bucket of Death

Three Chinese women were detained and questioned by immigration officers at the airport because their passport photos did not match their post-cosmetic surgery faces. [2017]

Man awarded $12,500 after Google Street View camera captured him naked in his yard in Argentina

When I say GPT may be an information virus, I am referring to the spread that is about to happen. The economic incentives of our information economy will drive thousands of businesses to create AI-generated content. As more of the internet becomes AI-generated, humans will no longer be able to effectively use it as an information storage system. […] In the information cesspool that is an internet filled with 99% of AI-generated content, Google’s search will no longer work. People will no longer use it. Advertisers will stop advertising. [2023]

An extra copy of chromosome 21 was discovered as the cause of Down syndrome more than half a century ago […] Using a system to rescue human cells with trisomy 21, this study successfully demonstrates the efficient elimination of excess chromosomes using multiple allele-specific targeting.

people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate […] the study suggests that some tissues — especially blood vessels — age faster than others

How Some Butterflies Fooled Evolution and Developed a Second “Head”

Lucier was a pioneer of experimental music who died in 2021. But here in the Art Gallery of Western Australia he has been resurrected with cutting-edge neuroscience. […] “We have developed a brain on a dish, more or less, that has the ability to take action in the real world” […] This “brain on a dish” takes the form of two small, white blobs on a pedestal at the gallery. […] it was grown out of stem cells created from blood samples the composer agreed to donate to the project the year before he died. […] In order to produce new music, the blobs — Alvin Lucier’s surrogate self — are connected to 20 handcrafted brass plates attached to the gallery walls, like paintings. The plates, which contain hidden transducers and mallets, respond to neural signals the biological matter gives out in real time, creating an ethereal soundscape.

Compared with people who walked only 2,000 steps per day, those who took 7,000 steps saw a 47 percent drop in the risk of death from any cause within several years

Flight attendant who police say secretly recorded girls in airplane bathroom sentenced to 18.5 years

On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727-223 airliner was stolen at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola […] prompting a worldwide search by law enforcement intelligence agencies in the United States. No trace of the aircraft has ever been found.

The Fermi paradox — the apparent absence of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations despite vast cosmic opportunities — may arise from a fundamental misunderstanding of advanced technological development. Building on Smart’s transcension hypothesis (2012) and extending it through the Quantum-Patterned Cosmos (QPC) framework, we propose that civilizations undergo “dimensional deepening” rather than spatial expansion upon reaching a critical coherence threshold. Previously: From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter”

Kleptocracy is a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population. Kleptocracy is different from plutocracy (rule by the richest) and oligarchy (rule by a small elite). In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favors from lobbyists and corporations, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates.

“You go on Instagram and everyone is somehow living their best lives,” […] Approximately 60 per cent of Coachella tickets this year were purchased using BNPL (buy now, pay later)

Con man Joseph Weil once paid a Chicago bartender $10 to watch his dog, saying he had an urgent business meeting. He told him it was a pedigreed hunting dog.

Man dies after being pulled into an MRI by a metal chain he wore

Optimists have similar patterns of brain activation when they think about the future—but pessimists are all different from one another, a brain scan study suggests

Why do some people keep making choices that hurt them, even when the outcomes are obvious? […] for a small number of people, the problem isn’t due to a lack of motivation or capacity, but rather a subtle but persistent failure to connect their actions with its consequences. […] “We found that some people just don’t learn from experience,”

Dopamine in the brain is different to dopamine in the rest of the body. In the blood, dopamine helps modulate the function of multiple organs as well as our immune responses. In the brain, it’s a chemical messenger involved in mediating a diversity of animal behaviors – from movement and mood to sleep and memory to reward and motivation. Neurons that release dopamine are known to do so with different firing patterns, and yet it’s not clear what messages these specific signals encode, or why. […] “We are really only at the tip of the iceberg in trying to understand how dysfunctions in dopamine contribute to diseases like Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia or addiction”

Sex at birth is not always random — mum’s age and genetics can play a part — Families with three or more boys, for example, are more likely to have another boy than a girl as the next child. […] The authors note that changes in vaginal pH as women age could explain this phenomenon. For instance, the changes could influence the sex of the child by affecting whether sperm carrying the X chromosome or the Y chromosome are more successful at fertilizing the egg.

Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission

According to the Pacific Institute, global water-related violence surged by more than 50 percent in 2023 alone. Yet international institutions still treat water as a development or an environmental issue—not as the national security flashpoint it has become. Around the globe, from Yemen to Ukraine, this critical resource is increasingly being used as a tool of control.