Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi made headlines in March 2021 when he paid $2.9m for an NFT of Twitter boss Jack Dorsey’s first tweet. But his efforts to resell it have run aground, with a top bid of just $6,800 as of Thursday. While announcing the NFT sale in a tweet on 6 April, Estavi pledged to give 50% of the proceeds – which he expected to be at least $25m – to charity.

Everything you see is from 15 seconds in the past, New Research Claims

NY times: New York beaches are stepping up shark patrols — including the use of drones and online shark tracking — amid an increase in sightings. And: Scientists say the reason it may seem like more sharks are being spotted is because more people are looking for them.

Ten years ago scientists announced one of the most momentous discoveries in physics: the Higgs boson. The particle, predicted 48 years earlier, was the missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. The machine built in part to find this particle, the 27-kilometer-long, circular Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, had fulfilled its promise by showing signals of a new fundamental bit of nature that matched expectations for the Higgs. —- How the Higgs Boson Ruined Peter Higgs’s Life

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”

Quantum Computing for Dummies — Whereas classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones or zeroes, quantum computers use quantum bits, or “qubits,” which because of the peculiar nature of quantum physics can exist in a state called superposition where they are both 1 and 0 at the same time. This essentially lets each qubit perform two calculations at once. The more qubits are quantum-mechanically linked, or entangled, within a quantum computer, the greater its computational power can grow, in an exponential fashion.

Information could become the fifth state of matter alongside gas, plasma, liquid, and solid states. A scientist has proposed an experiment involving particle annihilation that could establish that information truly has mass. If successful, the experiment could shed light on the mysterious dark matter in our universe—and help us manage the future of data storage.

The gunslinger effect, also sometimes called Bohr’s law or the gunfighter’s dilemma, is a psychophysical theory which says that an intentional or willed movement is slower than an automatic or reaction movement. The concept is named after physicist Niels Bohr, who first deduced that the person who draws second in a gunfight will actually win the shoot-out. […]

Bohr staged mock gunfights using cap guns with his students to test this hypothesis. Bohr found that the person who drew second always won in these experiments, leading him to conclude that drawing first created a distinct disadvantage.

Based on the inevitability of this outcome, Bohr suggested that the most logical conclusion to a gunfight would be a peaceful settlement, since neither gunslinger would want to draw first knowing that they would lose.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Japan: Man loses USB flash drive with data on entire city’s residents after night out

Coinbase Is Reportedly Selling Geolocation Data to ICE

Death is a trip – how new research links near-death and DMT experiences

we identified three previously unnamed, but distinct, anal touch techniques that many women find pleasurable and that expand the anal sexual repertoire beyond the more commonly studied anal intercourse behaviors: Anal Surfacing, Anal Shallowing, and Anal Pairing.

Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers. […] This new study is the latest in a robust line of research showing coffee’s potential health advantages, he said. Previous research has linked coffee consumption with a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, liver and prostate cancers and other health issues. Scientists don’t know exactly what makes coffee so beneficial, Dr. Goldberg said, but the answer may lie in its antioxidant properties, which can prevent or delay cell damage. [NY Times]

Married off at age 12, Isabella put up with her husband’s shenanigans over decades. Eventually, the She-Wolf of France had had enough.

640th Avenue? 180th Street? The backstory behind long rural addresses

MIT engineers have built and flown the first-ever plane with no moving parts. Instead of propellers or turbines, the light aircraft is powered by an “ionic wind” — a silent but mighty flow of ions that is produced aboard the plane, and that generates enough thrust to propel the plane over a sustained, steady flight. [Video: Ion drive: The first flight]

If you’ve flown recently, or attempted to, it might have gone something like this: Your 1 p.m. flight became a 5 p.m. flight that became a midnight flight before being summarily canceled. No explanation is given. The next flights out are already fully booked, but they have a middle seat with two stopovers leaving next week if that still works for you. […] According to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight cancellations and delays, there were 1,629 delays and 631 cancellations “within, into, or out of the United States” just Sunday. This was only by noon. Cancellations and delays become more likely as the day progresses. […] Throughout the last two years, airlines received more than $50 billion in pandemic relief money. […] That money was meant to preserve jobs and save an industry. […] Instead, the industry is in disarray, staff were laid off anyway and the money is gone.

Google and Meta are now investing fortunes into building massive subsea cables […] the cables will also give the U.S.-based tech giants an unprecedented level of control

half-wheel bike shows two halves make a whole

Humans can think about possible states of the world without believing in them, an important capacity for high-level cognition.

Here we use fMRI and a novel “shell game” task to test two competing theories about the nature of belief and its neural basis.

According to the Cartesian theory, information is first understood, then assessed for veracity, and ultimately encoded as either believed or not believed. According to the Spinozan theory, comprehension entails belief by default, such that understanding without believing requires an additional process of “unbelieving”. […]

findings are consistent with a version of the Spinozan theory whereby unbelieving is an inhibitory control process.

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

I communicate with your animal remotely by looking at the picture you upload with your submission. The session is not live with you. After the session, I email you the full audio recording so you can listen to our entire conversation. One animal per session. Standard: $350 USD More: Lawyer Quits To Become Pet Psychic… Makes More Money

Caffeine Consumption Leads to Impulsivity during Shopping, New Study Shows

Research into falling sperm counts finds ‘alarming’ levels of chemicals in male urine samples

How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children — Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways

Memory: Synaptic or Cellular, That Is the Question

According to the current paradigm, perception of the outside world is not a passive process in which the “receiver” is passively fed sensory impressions. Rather, the organism at any time produces a “concurrent world model”, which includes hypotheses about the expected stimuli. These expected values are stored in long-term memory as a comprehensive simulation of external reality. During an ongoing act of perception, the retrieved hypotheses are checked against the incoming sensory data; perception is therefore an interactive process, which is taking shape through a gradual testing and refinement of predictions. This new perspective skews the whole picture: Our expectations control what we perceive; memory and perception are inextricably linked.

Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons.

Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites Experts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information

Following testing, only the HIV-negative results (or linked information) are uploaded to the blockchain, which results in high-risk individuals being able to determine the HIV-negative status of each other anonymously, conveniently, and credibly.

If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible. Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field

I used GPT-3 [AI] to write a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine about cats and then used DeepFake voices to perform it.

…Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well. […]

Axie’s creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the “play-to-earn” video game. “We believe in a world future where work and play become one,” it said in a mission statement on its website. “We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution.” […]

Andrew Yang called web3 “an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition” and “the biggest weapon against poverty that we have.” By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3’s utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

These researchers hooked a plant up to a lie detector. Asked if it was alive, the plant said “yes” but this was determined to be a lie. Also there was uranium involved for some reason. [PDF]

New AI Could Prevent Eavesdropping — “Neural Voice Camouflage” disguises words with custom noise

Scientists can reverse aging in mice “It’s a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age,” said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time. “If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer’s in your 90s. This is the world that is coming. It’s literally a question of when and for most of us, it’s going to happen in our lifetimes.”

the empirical evidence contradicted the idea that attraction occurs when people’s personalities match

A Qualitative Analysis of Gaslighting in Romantic Relationships

For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes […] You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers. PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search. […] Unlike Clearview AI, a similar facial recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites. […] In 2005, when Ms. Scarlett was 19 and broke, she considered working in pornography. She traveled to New York City for an audition that was so humiliating and abusive that she abandoned the idea. PimEyes unearthed the decades-old trauma, with links to where exactly the explicit photos could be found on the web. […] Worried about how people would react to the images, Ms. Scarlett immediately began looking into how to get them removed […] When she clicked on one of the explicit photos on PimEyes, a menu popped up offering a link to the image, a link to the website where it appeared and an option to “exclude from public results” on PimEyes. But exclusion, Ms. Scarlett quickly discovered, was available only to subscribers who paid for “PROtect plans,” which cost from $89.99 to $299.99 per month. “It’s essentially extortion,” said Ms. Scarlett, who eventually signed up for the most expensive plan. Mr. Gobronidze disagreed with that characterization. He pointed to a free tool for deleting results from the PimEyes index that is not prominently advertised on the site. He also provided a receipt showing that PimEyes had refunded Ms. Scarlett for the $299.99 plan last month. […] PimEyes has a free “opt-out” as well, for people to have data about themselves removed from the site, including the search images of their faces. To opt out, Ms. Scarlett provided a photo of her teenage self and a scan of her government-issued identification. At the beginning of April, she received a confirmation that her opt-out request had been accepted. [NY Times]

Chickens were first tempted down from trees by rice. […] It was previously believed that chickens were bred for the table up to 10,000 years ago, but the new report, published in the journal Antiquity, suggests humans did not come into close contact with chickens until about 1500BC. Chickens, native to the tropical jungles of south-east Asia, did not arrive in Europe until about 800BC. Then, after arriving in the Mediterranean region, it took almost 1,000 years longer for chickens to become established in the colder climates of Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland. The experts re-evaluated chicken remains found in more than 600 sites in 89 countries. They found that the oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were at the Neolithic Ban Non Wat in central Thailand, dating to between 1650BC and 1250BC.

Scientists can now grow wood in a lab without cutting a single tree

The world’s largest plant is a 112-mile-long seagrass in Australia

Despite being around 4,300 miles in length, the Amazon River surprisingly has no bridges. The Amazon River is the world’s second-longest river and one of the planet’s most significant waterways. It contains more fresh water by volume than any other river, is home to the world’s largest species of river dolphin, and hosts 100 species of electric fish and up to 60 species of piranhas.

Electric organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, do all sorts of amazing things: They send and receive signals that are akin to bird songs, helping them to recognize other electric fish by species, sex and even individual. A new study explains how small genetic changes enabled electric fish to evolve electric organs.

Neptune and Uranus are so similar that scientists sometimes refer to the distant, icy planets as planetary twins. But these ice giants have one big difference: their color.

repeated low doses of LSD are safe, but produce negligible changes in mood or cognition in healthy volunteers

De Groft and the owners of the 25 paintings have said that they were done on slabs of cardboard scavenged by Basquiat in late 1982 while he was living and working out of a studio beneath the Los Angeles home of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, as he prepared new work for a show at Gagosian’s gallery. They said the works were then sold by Basquiat for $5,000 to a now-deceased television screenwriter, Thad Mumford, who put them into a storage unit and forgot about them for 30 years — until the unit’s contents were seized for nonpayment of rent and auctioned off in 2012. (Gagosian has said he “finds the scenario of the story highly unlikely.”) […] An article in The New York Times raised questions about their authenticity, reporting that a designer who had previously worked for Federal Express had identified the FedEx typeface on a piece of cardboard Basquiat was said to have painted on as one that was not designed until 1994 — six years after the artist’s death. [NY Times]

McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another million words. When he did, his computer lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying thousands of phrases in common, many found in similar situations and contexts, and many unique in English. Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some. […] Another possibility is that this is yet one more piece of evidence lending credence to McCarthy’s theory, demonstrating that North was making notes for his own play about King Cymbeline, that Shakespeare acquired and adapted years after his death.

Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.

In more than 900 hours of recordings from wild chimpanzees, researchers heard hundreds of unique phrases that could resemble a language.

Many mentally well people experience hallucinations. An estimated 6 – 15% of us hear, see, feel or even smell things that aren’t real.

Do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard.

Alarmist narratives about the flow of misinformation and its negative consequences have gained traction in recent years. If these fears are to some extent warranted, the scientific literature suggests that many of them are exaggerated. We find that the strongest, and most reliable, predictor of perceived danger of misinformation is the third-person effect (i.e., the perception that others are more vulnerable to misinformation than the self) and, in particular, the belief that ‘distant’ others (as opposed to family and friends) are vulnerable to misinformation.

Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify them

When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal — sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. […] In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff […] It seems we created these new, health-conscious cockroaches by accident, after decades of trying to kill their ancestors with sweet powders and liquids laced with poison. The cockroaches that craved sweets ate the poison and died, while cockroaches less keen on glucose avoided the death traps and survived long enough to breed, thus passing that trait down to the next cockroach generation. […] The good news for consumers is that pesticide manufacturers share Dr. Wada-Katsumata and Dr. Schal’s enthusiasm for understanding cockroach evolution, and they are actively changing their cockroach-killing formulations to move away from glucose. But given how new this research is, it will take some time for those changes to make their way to the products on our shelves. [NY Times]

The Plastics Recycling Lie

Polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites.

Navy Ships Swarmed By Drones, Not UFOs, Defense Officials Confirm

‘Smoke-Free’ Cities and Islands — Sponsored by Philip Morris

Calling a man bald counts as sexual harassment, UK judge rules

New York Now Has More Airbnb Listings Than Apartments for Rent

San Francisco Police Are Using Driverless Cars as Mobile Surveillance Cameras

Biofire Technologies has raised $17 million in seed funding to further develop its smart gun, which uses a fingerprint sensor to unlock the trigger.

Do Insects Have Consciousness? — bugs feel something like hunger and pain, and “perhaps very simple analogs of anger,” but no grief or jealousy. “They plan, but don’t imagine”

Canada Proposes Space Law to Punish Crimes Committed on Moon

Man died from heart attack while burying woman he strangled, South Carolina deputies say

While males and females are equally at risk of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), females are less likely to be resuscitated. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) may be inhibited by socio-cultural norms about exposing female victims’ chests. […] Participants were randomly assigned to provide CPR and defibrillation as instructed by a commercially-available automated external defibrillator on a patient simulator presented as either a male or female experiencing cardiac arrest. […] Rescuers removed significantly more clothing from the male than the female, with men removing less clothing from the female.

Scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients’ blood to attack breast, prostate and other tumours. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumours. The second focuses on soil bacteria that manufacture magnets which they use to align themselves in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Long-duration space flight alters fluid-filled spaces along veins and arteries in astronauts’ brains

the human sclera—the white of the eye—is unique among primates for its whitish color […] Our data support the claim that indeed there is a sex difference in sclera color, with male sclera being yellower and redder than female sclera.

Twitter bots, explained

“Temporarily on hold” is not a thing. Elon Musk has signed a binding contract requiring him to buy Twitter. […] You are not supposed to say things that aren’t true and that will affect the stock of a public company that you are trying to buy. That is what is usually called “securities fraud,” or what I sometimes like to call “lite securities fraud.” Musk has a long history of lite securities fraud

Position of the north magnetic pole since 1590

Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations, that are captured annually.

Flashback: ‘Tinder for threesomes’ gets $500K investment (2015), Threesome app CEO: ‘Swiping is dead’ (2017)

We quickly and irresistibly form impressions of what other people are like based solely on how their faces look. We collected over 1 million human judgments to power a model that can both predict and manipulate first impressions of diverse and naturalistic faces

Perceptions of Authenticity Are Systematically Biased and Not Accurate

VR Researchers Have Basically Figured Out How to Simulate the Feel of Kisses

Despite no differences in general intelligence, there are sex differences in specific abilities. Reliable and meaningful female advantages are found in processing speed and writing. Reliable and meaningful male advantages are found in visual processing.

Having an unsupportive romantic partner is associated with neurophysiological changes in error processing

Results suggested that people were less ready to commit to a romantic relationship to the extent that they perceived they had many partners available to them.

Intuition: When is it right to trust your gut instincts?

We show that free-flying honeybees can visually acquire the capacity to differentiate between odd and even quantities […] This study thus demonstrates that a task, previously only shown in humans, is accessible to a brain with a comparatively small numbers of neurons.

New study suggests “comedowns” associated with MDMA are not a result of the drug itself

Time was remembered as passing significantly more quickly than normal during alcohol, cocaine and MDMA use. Marijuana was associated with time passing more slowly than normal.

Got food cravings? What’s living in your gut may be responsible

All of the bases in DNA and RNA have now been found in meteorites

While there is growing consensus on the physiological functions of spontaneous yawning in neurovascular circulation and brain cooling, far less is known about how the act of yawning alters the cognition and behaviour of observers. Recent studies in animal behaviour, psychology and neuroscience now provide evidence that yawns serve as a cue that improves the vigilance of observers, and that contagious yawning functions to synchronize and/or coordinate group activity patterns.

Snapchat’s been booming. The app now has 332 million daily users, up 18% from last year, beating analysts’ expectations to start 2022. With little fanfare, it’s sailed past Twitter, serving 115 million more daily users than Twitter’s 217 million, despite the latter’s cultural significance.

Mr. Kondo is married to a doll of Hatsune Miku. “When we’re together, she makes me smile,” he said in a recent interview. “In that sense, she’s real.” Mr. Kondo is one of thousands of people in Japan who have entered into unofficial marriages with fictional characters in recent decades. [NY Times]

I’m what’s called a “Closer” for the online-dating service ViDA (Virtual Dating Assistants). Men and women (though mostly men) from all over the world pay this company to outsource the labor and tedium of online dating. […] “Profile Writers” create seductive and click-worthy profiles based on facts our clients have supplied about themselves, and “Closers,” who log in to clients’ dating accounts at least twice a day to respond to messages from matches. […] Several times a day, female staffers receive Photo Ranking Requests, in which we rank new clients’ photos in order of attractiveness. This helps Matchmakers select which photos to use when building or updating a client’s dating profile. […] After the Matchmakers have made contact, the Closers then step in to keep up the flirty banter and, hopefully, get their client a date. Clients are sent weekly emails to alert them of numbers we’ve scored or, for Platinum clients, when and where to go for a date we’ve arranged.

Morgan Stanley advised Elon Musk on his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (TWTR). Investment banks usually get about a 1% to 3% cut of the value of a merger deal, which is split among all the banks involved. Based on the $44 billion purchase price, that works out to a range of $440 million to $1.3 billion.

Re-thinking the smartphone addiction: an allocative hypothesis — I propose the allocative hypothesis behind the problematic use of the smartphone, where the constant proximity of this device, following the hypothesis of cognitive extension, favors the extension of mind wandering, resulting in a decrease in its regulatory potential, especially but not exclusively associated with daily activities.

Nike and Rtfkt take on digital fashion with first “Cryptokick” sneaker

These green books are poisonous—and one may be on a shelf near you A toxic green pigment was once used to color everything from fake flowers to book covers. Now a museum conservator is working to track down the noxious volumes.

Balloon detects first signs of a ‘sound tunnel’ in the sky

Researchers develop a paper-thin loudspeaker

the slowest and longest music piece ever, is being performed for 639 years

When a knife thrower hurls blades around a woman secured to a spinning wheel, it’s called the Wheel of Death. So what do you call it when that wheel is entirely hidden by a paper veil?

The surprising afterlife of used hotel soap

Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman’s skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old’s. […] The new method, called IPS, involved adding chemicals to adult cells for around 50 days. This resulted in genetic changes that turned the adult cells into stem cells. […] The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the IPS method increases the risk of cancers.

Oxytocin, the hormone that is responsible for feelings of love and social bonding, is being used with great success in helping big cats at rescue sanctuaries.

what happens when police pull over a driverless car in San Francisco and Autonomous Cruise car encounter with police raises policy questions

The flood of spam calls, texts, emails and social media posts into your life is getting a lot bigger.

Recent polling shows that 72 percent of American people view Amazon favorably. This makes it the second-most-trusted institution in the country, after the military.[NY Times]

A Practical Guide to the Nonsense Industry — Look behind the title page of Richard Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute? (2022) and see that its copyright has been renewed 48 times. The text has been revised, updated, and reprinted almost annually since its debut in 1970. At the time of Bolles’s death in 2017, his forever book had sold upward of 10 million copies, a number which has likely been padded by the two most recent editions, co-authored by career counselor Katharine Brooks during the pandemic years.

Stephen Covey said people don’t listen with the intent of understanding. They listen with the intent of replying, right? And I think everyone agrees with that quote. And scientists study the human brain, and they found that it takes a human brain a minimum of zero point six seconds to formulate a response to something. Ok, but then they studied hundreds of thousands of conversations about the average gap between people talking and it was zero point two seconds. So we’re answering each other in one third the time our brain will allow it. Well, how? Because you know, most of the time we have our answer ready minutes ago, we’re just waiting for the other person to come up for air so we can say what we’ve been dying to say. Meanwhile, I didn’t hear the last, you know, several things you might have been saying to me.

Sweden’s porn preferences vs radiation received from Chernobyl

Chicago drivers were issued more speed tickets in 2021 than there are city residents

Some sexual consequences of being a plant

Which Saint to Pray for Fighting Against COVID-19?

TikTok Community Creates Pill Bottles To Help Parkinson’s Sufferers

Chronologically young, biologically old – DNA linked to cancer survivors’ premature aging. Researchers seek new potential treatments for biological aging.

Turning back the clock: Human skin cells de-aged by 30 years in trial

Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research

Physicists have found that an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be 0.1% too heavy — a tiny discrepancy that could foreshadow a huge shift in fundamental physics. The finding would imply the existence of undiscovered particles or forces and would bring about the first major rewriting of the laws of quantum physics in half a century.

Lady Divine is the owner and operator of The Cavalcade of Perversion, a free exhibit of various perversions and fetish acts and obscenities, such as the “Puke Eater”. The show is free, but the various performers must persuade and even physically drag reluctant passers-by to attend. As the finale to every show, Lady Divine appears and robs the patrons at gunpoint.

Southwest passenger arrested for masturbating 4 times during flight

‘How to Murder Your Husband’ author on trial for husband’s death

Nike Wants to ‘Destroy’ Unauthorized NFTs—How Will That Work?

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims [study]

A physician didn’t shower for 5 years. Here’s what he found out.

Proclaiming one’s own goodness is deeply annoying. Yet signalling theory explains why it’s a peculiarly powerful manoeuvre.

Experts push for genetic testing to personalise drug prescriptions

The human genome is, at long last, complete

UK Antarctic post office is hiring

Deutsche Bank fired a number of top bankers in New York after a tab run up at a strip club was expensed as legitimate business spending

People sometimes avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix others’ problems. For example, only 2.6% of individuals in a pilot field study provided feedback to a survey administrator who had food or lipstick on their face.

She noticed grey smoke billowing from the chimney of the house next door. Next, she says, came the sore throats, headaches, and tight lungs. Remmers had no history of respiratory issues, but by 2016 she ended up in the emergency room in the middle of the night when she had trouble breathing. The far-reaching consequences of woodsmoke pollution

‘Forever chemicals’ found in fast food wrappers

Fashion accounts for up to 10% of global carbon dioxide output—more than international flights and shipping combined. It also accounts for a fifth of the 300 million tons of plastic produced globally each year. […] Eighty-seven percent of the total fiber input used for clothing is ultimately incinerated or sent to a landfill.

The speed of sound has been measured on Mars for the first time, and it’s very different to Earth’s. The results was achieved by firing bursts of 30 laser shots over a period of 10 seconds at target locations.

Experience: I let a baby bird nest in my hair for 84 days

Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can

Digital Curator — AI ​​library for machine learning TensorFlow, the computer service Google Cloud Vision and custom trained neural networks were used for the automatic detection of the depicted iconographic motifs.

Handwashing and Detergent Treatment Greatly Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load on Halloween Candy Handled by COVID-19 Patients — From the candies not washed posthandling, we detected SARS-CoV-2 on 60% of candies that were deliberately coughed on, 60% of candies normally handled with unwashed hands, but only 10% of candies handled after hand washing.

“You hit the gym at 4:30 in the morning, go to work and then you get wasted”

The claim that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes has been greatly exaggerated

The latest edition of the DSM-5, sometimes known as “psychiatry’s bible,” includes a controversial new diagnosis: prolonged grief disorder. [NY Times]

a student at Hosei University, Japan, wrote a thesis about sleeping with a cat night after night in locations chosen by the cat.

Modern research methods have made it possible to trace quotations to the most accurate sources. […] Because it capitalizes on Big Data and other technological advances, the Yale Book can claim an authoritativeness that is unsurpassed. Hundreds of famous misattributions have been corrected — and probably thousands of misquotations as well. The Yale Book can legitimately claim to be the most accurate, thorough, and up-to-date quotation book ever compiled.

After a decade of work, the FIDO Alliance says it’s found the missing piece in the bridge to a password-free future.

In maglev innovation, Chinese researchers transfer power wirelessly to moving train

Rooftop gardens and greenery can help ease some of the severe heat in cities, according to research from climate scientists

New research shows that pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW — Zodiac Killer cipher is cracked after eluding sleuths for 51 years

Scientists believe there could be an ‘anti-universe’ next to ours – where time runs backwards

Feedback networks, unstable oscillators, shaky fat quivering filters, distorted mayhem, a bunch of labels in Japanese, a bunch of switches and knobs and a tape recorder – Bentō is a delight of software madness. It’s a delicious meal of noise.

Mike Tyson Is Making Pot Edibles in the Shape of a Bitten Ear

We considered the concept of the discrepancy between a patient’s desired time in bed (TIB) and total sleep time (TST), which we termed the DBST. The DBST could be a possible new sleep index due to its relation with insomnia severity, depression, dysfunctional beliefs about sleep, or preoccupation with sleep.

Even Moderate Ambient Light During Sleep Is Harmful – Increases Risk for Heart Disease and Diabetes

(Why) Is misinformation a problem?

This observational study recorded the frequency of same-aged, adult human groups appearing in public spaces through 2636 hours, recording group formation by 1.2mn people via 170 research assistants in 46 countries across the world. […] ~50% more female-female than male-male pairs are observed in public spaces globally

Is information the fifth state of matter?

The Limitless Potential of Virtual Influencers on TikTok

Cryptocurrencies: The Power of Memes — The byzantine premium arises because of confusion around the apparent complexities of blockchain. Investors read confusing, jargon-laden articles and become convinced that smarter people than themselves are investing, so they should too.

Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild. It takes only a second to crack the handful of weak keys.

A $4 Billion Hedge Fund Is Shorting Tether’s Stablecoin

The 18 Minutes of Trading Chaos That Broke the Nickel Market Nickel prices usually move a few hundred dollars per ton in a day. For most of the past decade, they’d traded between $10,000 and $20,000. Yet the day before, the market had started to unravel, with prices rising by a stunning 66% to $48,078. Already at an all-time high by 5:42 a.m., it lurched higher in stomach-churning leaps, soaring $30,000 in a matter of minutes. Just after 6 a.m., the price of nickel passed $100,000 a ton. Miners, traders, and manufacturers often use the market to make short bets—that is, to make money when prices fall. And when those wagers move violently in the opposite direction, they can be hit with huge margin calls, or requests to put down more cash to back their trades. The head of one London metals brokerage recalls feeling sick as he watched the moves, realizing what the spike in prices would mean for his company, the market, and the global metals industry. Nickel’s 250% price spike in little more than 24 hours plunged the industry into chaos, triggering billions of dollars in losses for traders who bet the wrong way and leading the London Metal Exchange to suspend trading for the first time in three decades.

In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents. By inverting the use of our machine learning models, we had transformed our innocuous generative model from a helpful tool of medicine to a generator of likely deadly molecules.

The prevalence of ash tattoos is increasing as a way for those mourning a loved one to cherish that person’s life and legacy

Officials intend to reserve the first 100 or more retail licenses to sell marijuana in New York for people who have been convicted of related offenses, or their relatives. [NY Times]

Healthy and cancerous cells emit different ’smells’ ants can distinguish between

Studies show that both women and men want longer foreplay than they generally experience

individuals largely lack insight into the quality of their judgments, which is particularly problematic because they cannot reliably discriminate between lies and truths.

Tyrannosaurus rex may have been three species, scientists say

algae with three sexes that all mate in pairs identified in Japanese river

How low can you go? Kakonomics describes the situation where both parties prefer to give and receive a low-quality product. They ”connive on a low-low exchange”, and trust in each other’s untrustworthiness.

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers’ viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law.

Those wishing to publish a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night need to request permission, pay for rights, and then credit the artist appropriately. Otherwise, there’s risk of fines. […] According to European Copyright Law, such monuments are protected for the lifespan of the work’s legal creator—plus 70 years. The Tower’s creator, Gustave Eiffel, died in 1923, so in 1993 it re-entered public domain, but there’s still un petit problème: The lights installed by Pierre Bideau didn’t ignite until 1985, which means nighttime images and videos that feature his choreographed light show are still protected under the law.

This is from NASA’s Apollo 10 mission’s transcript

Disney is developing planned communities for fans who never want to leave its clutches [Thanks Tim]

The FDA needs to take another look at laser-based ‘vaginal rejuvenation’

Here, we present continuous electroencephalography (EEG) recording from a dying human brain

With a few exceptions, musical taste has been researched via likes or preferences of certain types of music. The present study focuses on disliked music

The elaborate con that tricked dozens into working for a fake design agency

Distraction is no longer a relief from tedium but its metronome

“I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.” [Stephen Hawking on time travel, M-theory, and extra terrestrial life, 2012]

One of the two main hypersonic prototypes now under development in the United States is meant to fly at speeds between Mach 15 and Mach 20, or more than 11,400 miles per hour. This means that when fired by the U.S. submarines or bombers stationed at Guam, they could in theory hit China’s important inland missile bases, like Delingha, in less than 15 minutes. President Vladimir Putin has likewise claimed that one of Russia’s new hypersonic missiles will travel at Mach 10, while the other will travel at Mach 20. If true, that would mean a Russian aircraft or ship firing one of them near Bermuda could strike the Pentagon, some 800 miles away, in five minutes. China, meanwhile, has flight-tested its own hypersonic missiles at speeds fast enough to reach Guam from the Chinese coastline within minutes. [NY Times]

The post-modern novel “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” by David Markson (1988) pre- sents the reader with a very challenging non-linear narrative, that itself appears to one of the novel’s themes. Using a combina- tion of text analysis, entity recognition and networks, we plot repetitive structures in the novel’s narrative relating them to its critical analysis. [PDF]

Suicide Club (secret society): 30 members riding the San Francisco cable cars naked and making post cards commemorating the event was perhaps the best known [prank]

Cacophony Society: According to self-designated members of the Society, “you may already be a member.”

have you ever seen a baby’s hand x ray?

AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy [images]

The winning bid in Melania Trump’s NFT auction appears to have come from a wallet associated with Melania Trump

Exploring the ownership of child-like sex dolls

How animals heal themselves ― and get high

A child’s TikTok stardom took an alarming turn when an adult fan came to her door with a gun. But her parents haven’t stopped her from posting. [NY Times]

How do we know Google is dying?

Our ability to process information during decision-making doesn’t drop off until age 60, according to new findings that challenge the widespread belief that mental speed starts to decline in our 20s. […] “People become more cautious in their decisions with increasing age” […] it is possible that age may affect other tasks differently, such as those relying on memory. [more]

To make an Olympic ski jump, China clad a hillside in steel and blanketed it with artificial snow. To construct a high-speed rail line linking the venues and Beijing, engineers blasted tunnels through the surrounding mountains. And to keep the coronavirus at bay, workers are conducting tens of thousands of P.C.R. tests on Games participants every day. Hosting the Winter Olympics is costing China billions of dollars, a scale of expenditure that has made the event less appealing to many cities around the world in recent years. More and more of them have concluded that the Games are not worth being left with a hefty bill, white elephant stadiums and fewer benefits from tourism than they had hoped. But China looks at the Games with a different calculus. Beijing has long relied on heavy investments in building railway lines, highways and other infrastructure to provide millions of jobs to its citizens and reduce transportation costs. […] Perhaps most important of all to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the Olympics are a chance to demonstrate to the world his country’s unity and confidence under his leadership. [NY Times]

Swiss cottages in England

How “Fake” My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins Lyrics Ended Up on Spotify

everyday experiments