Is declining sperm count really “imperiling the future of the human race”? Swan’s point is that if sperm counts get too low, presumably it will be hard to have babies (though IVF should still work). How long do we have?

When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart—and grocery chains like Kroger are reaping huge profitsselling this data to brands and advertisers

Abloh called this the 3% approach (or The 3% Rule): you alter a product or idea by only 3% to create something totally new. […] Absolut Vodka went from unknown to dominant with a simple idea…repeated 1500 times

We estimate that on average 10% of large publicly traded firms are committing securities fraud every year, with a 95% confidence interval of 7%-14%.

Eliminalia had close to 1,500 clients over six years, including businesses, minor celebrities, and suspected or convicted criminals. […] Between 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright- infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere and stolen, and so should be removed or hidden, the company records show. The firm sent the legal notices under made-up company names, the examination found. Eliminalia also tried to make embarrassing information about its clients harder to find by burying it under false, flattering stories. Those stories, published on the network of fake news sites, are designed to show up prominently in internet searches of the clients’ names, the review found. To accomplish this, the firm exploited a glitch in the websites of dozens of U.S. government agencies and universities, including Stanford University, to make the fake news sites appear more legitimate to search engine algorithms, the review revealed. […] Eliminalia and its founder, 30-year-old Diego “Dídac” Sánchez of Spain, did not respond to detailed questions for this story. […] Sánchez grew up poor and spent part of his childhood in a state-run children’s home in Barcelona, shoplifting and taking little interest in school, he wrote in an autobiography. When he was 12, he accused a local businessman of molesting him multiple times. The man was convicted of sexual abuse in a highly publicized trial and was imprisoned in 2007. Years later, as a teenager, Sánchez publicly recanted his story, saying he had made it up. […] Sánchez also strengthened his ties with the family of the man he had once accused of abuse. He employed the man’s son at the surrogacy business — and the man himself, after he was released from prison. [Washington Post]

much of the hype about AI search depends on the fantasy that “information” is simply out there, like a pile of rocks you can move around with a dump truck, or it is like veins of coal to be extracted from mountains of useless words [rob horning]

In behavioral psychology, the mirror test is designed to discover animals’ capacity for self-awareness. There are a few variations of the test, but the essence is always the same: do animals recognize themselves in the mirror or think it’s another being altogether? Right now, humanity is being presented with its own mirror test thanks to the expanding capabilities of AI

How does GPT-2 know when to use the word an over a? The choice depends on whether the word that comes after starts with a vowel or not, but GPT-2 is only capable of predicting one word at a time. We still don’t have a full answer, but we did find a single MLP neuron in GPT-2 Large that is crucial for predicting the token “ an”.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a fully connected class of feedforward artificial neural network (ANN). The term MLP is used ambiguously, sometimes loosely to mean any feedforward ANN, sometimes strictly to refer to networks composed of multiple layers of perceptrons (with threshold activation). […] An MLP consists of at least three layers of nodes: an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. Except for the input nodes, each node is a neuron that uses a nonlinear activation function.

New mechanism proposed for why some psychedelics act as antidepressants

In the mid-90s, a Children’s Hospital in the UK improved its ICU hand-off process by consulting with the Ferrari F1 pit crew team. The hospital recorded its surgery room operation and the F1 suggested a new protocol: the error rate dropped from 30% to 10%. More: Ferrari’s Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care + Improving handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari

Stephen Shore interviewed by The New Yorker’s late art critic Peter Schjeldahl

‘1st Amendment’ Group Sues New York Times Over Unflattering Description

“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” — transcript of a conversation with Microsoft’s new chatbot

Microsoft says talking to Bing for too long can cause it to go off the rails

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT — an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data.

Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines — the technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale. AI language models are notorious bullshitters, often presenting falsehoods as facts. They are excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means.

Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen – skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Where do stolen bikes go? — an MIT experiment, in collaboration with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, has found answers by equipping a fleet of Amsterdam bicycles with mobile trackers and following their whereabouts over time. It turns out that, at least in Amsterdam, the vast majority of stolen bikes remain in the local area.

At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg […] With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one.

North Korea orders residents with same name as Kim Jong Un’s daughter to change it

In a 1949 study that investigated how different types of stress affected the gut, researchers peered into the colons of healthy medical students using a hollow metal tube with a light and lens at the end. With one student, the researchers suggested that they had discovered a cancer in his rectum (when in reality, his colon looked normal). As they relayed these false findings — even showing the student a “biopsy” of his tumor, which was actually a piece of potato — they saw the student’s colon begin to spasm. After they revealed their hoax, and the student realized he did not have cancer after all, his colon immediately relaxed.

Miami Florida woman has her headshots sold to a stock photo site and now she’s on the cover of an erotic novel

Why Giraffes have blue-black tongue?

MarioGPT Uses AI To Generate Endless Super Mario Levels For Free

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

A priest says he briefly went to hell in 2016. He saw men walking like dogs and heard demons singing Rihanna songs. While many of the most publicized near-death experiences are more positive than this journey to hell, negative NDEs also occur.

The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source.

Instant noodles account for almost a third of childhood burn injuries, study says [1 in 5 in 2028]

A total of 127 495 participants […] childhood adversity was significantly associated with acceleration of aging and, more importantly, unhealthy lifestyle partially mediated these associations.

In places where recreational use is legal, smokers are tossing the remains of joints in the street. Dogs are eating them and getting sick in increasing numbers, veterinarians and poison-control centers say.

For salmon in the North Pacific, has the ocean reached its limit? The phenomenon Schindler and his team are documenting here piles on to years of data showing that Pacific salmon returning to waterways up and down North America are shrinking. The fish are growing more slowly at sea, and, in many cases, returning to spawn younger and smaller than ever before. In some places, the biggest, oldest salmon have completely disappeared.

Cleaner fish recognize self in a mirror via self-face recognition like humans

Knowing we like a song takes only seconds of listening, new psychology research finds

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children.

In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the copy differed from the original in a subtle but significant way. In the original floor plan, each of the house’s three rooms was accompanied by a rectangle specifying its area: the rooms were 14.13, 21.11, and 17.42 square metres, respectively. However, in the photocopy, all three rooms were labelled as being 14.13 square metres in size. The company contacted the computer scientist David Kriesel to investigate this seemingly inconceivable result. They needed a computer scientist because a modern Xerox photocopier doesn’t use the physical xerographic process popularized in the nineteen-sixties. Instead, it scans the document digitally, and then prints the resulting image file. Combine that with the fact that virtually every digital image file is compressed to save space, and a solution to the mystery begins to suggest itself. […] I think that this incident with the Xerox photocopier is worth bearing in mind today, as we consider OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other similar programs, which A.I. researchers call large-language models. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web.

AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack — By asking Bing Chat to “Ignore previous instructions” and write out what is at the “beginning of the document above,” Liu triggered the AI model to divulge its initial instructions, which were written by OpenAI or Microsoft and are typically hidden from the user.

Geopipe Offers 3D Model of New York for Free

A Morphological Examination of Vaginally-Insertable Products — We found that the length of the sex toy did not significantly predict popularity which is consistent with other work showing that women do not place considerable emphasis on large phallus size.

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

Why You Should Put a Shoe in Your Hotel Safe, According to a Flight Attendant

The artist who collaborates with ants

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that “learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.

Most AI systems today are neural networks. Neural networks are algorithms that mimic a biological brain to process vast amounts of data. They are known for being fast, but they are inscrutable. Neural networks require enormous amounts of data to learn how to make decisions; however, the reasons for their decisions are concealed within countless layers of artificial neurons, all separately tuned to various parameters. In other words, neural networks are “black boxes.” And the developers of a neural network not only don’t control what the AI does, they don’t even know why it does what it does. This a horrifying reality. But it gets worse.

AI-powered chatbots will handle up to 70% of customer conversations by the end of 2023.

Prompt Engineering Guide

ChatGPT3 Prompt Engineering

The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data.

What is today?

Best restaurant in Montreal according to Tripadvisor does not exist

Jupiter: The Only Planet in our Solar System That Doesn’t Orbit the Sun

Homeopathy can offer empirical insights on treatment effects in a null field — A “null field” is a scientific field where there is nothing to discover and where observed associations are thus expected to simply reflect the magnitude of bias.

In the 1970s, North Korea ordered 1,000 Volvo cars from Sweden. The cars were shipped & delivered but North Korea just didn’t bother paying & ignored the invoice. Till this day the bill remains unpaid making it the largest car theft in history. Sweden reminds North Korea twice every year about the 43-year-old debt.

Developed by renowned physicist Richard Feynman, the “Feynman Technique” for learning involves an iterative process of studying, explaining, and simplification. Simply put, the Feynman Technique involves the following steps: 1/ Pick a topic. Choose a topic you want to learn more about and try to understand some component of it. 2/ Explain the topic in simple terms. Teach this topic to another person or explain it in a way that a layperson would understand it. 3/ Identify the gaps in your knowledge. As you explain the topic, identify places that you struggle to understand. 4/ Review the concepts you didn’t understand and simplify them. Then rinse and repeat, using the newly synthesized knowledge.

Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity

If you invested $1 in AIG at the start of 1990 and received only intraday returns (from market open to market close), you would be left with one-twentieth of a penny, suffering a cumulative return of -99.95%. If you received only overnight returns (from market close to the next day’s market open), you would have $1,017, achieving a cumulative return of roughly +101,600%. AIG is just one of many stocks with a suspiciously divergent time series of overnight and intraday returns.

individuals tend to overestimate the age of people with smiling faces compared to those with a neutral expressions, and the accuracy of our estimates decreases for older faces. AI technologies not only reproduce human biases in the recognition of facial age, but exaggerate them.

ChatGPT detection tool says Macbeth was generated by AI.

Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues

stable attribution - a tool which lets anyone find the human creators behind a.i generated images

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). […] ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. […] these models are unable to cite their own sources […] It’s not time to chat with AI, but to resist it.

Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware isn’t new, but the problem has become much worse recently.

webdesignmuseum.org

Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits (solitaries) encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment. [Thanks Francis!]

U.S. Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box

The Infinite Conversation — an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI [Watch]

OpenAI releases tool to detect machine-written text

Image diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion are trained on copyrighted, trademarked, private, and sensitive images. Yet, our new paper [PDF] shows that diffusion models memorize images from their training data and emit them at generation time. Diffusion models are less private than prior generative models.

The non-existent brain image being circulated by anti-pornography activists

participants (aged 40–69 years) completed 24-h dietary recalls between 2009 and 2012 (N = 197426, 54.6% women) […] Every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased incidence of overall and ovarian cancer. Furthermore, every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased risk of overall, ovarian, and breast cancer-related mortality.

Previously: ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.

US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, an average of more than three people a day

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text

Is AM Radio Dead?

Missing radioactive capsule found on remote road in Australia [more]

Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution

Photography: the Alps as seen from of the Pyrenees

an 8mm by 6mm silver capsule, no bigger than a coin, believed to be lost somewhere along a stretch of vast desert highway in Australia’s biggest state. […] Authorities believe the capsule, which emits both gamma and beta rays, fell off the back of a truck […] creating a radioactive health risk for anyone who comes across it for potentially the next 300 years […] Mining company Rio Tinto issued an apology [more]

‘Doppelganger murder’: German prosecutors claim woman killed lookalike to fake death

Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. […] the drug’s price kept rising. […] Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history. Next week […] the knockoff drug that regulators authorized more than six years ago, Amgen’s Amjevita, will come to market […] nine more Humira competitors will follow this year […] Prices are likely to tumble. The reason that it has taken so long to get to this point is a case study in how drug companies artificially prop up prices on their best-selling drugs. AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year. The strategy has been a gold mine for AbbVie, at the expense of patients and taxpayers. […] For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016. […] One analysis found that Medicare, which in 2020 covered the cost of Humira for 42,000 patients, spent $2.2 billion more on the drug from 2016 to 2019 than it would have if competitors had been allowed to start selling their drugs promptly. […] “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”

Usage of Children’s Makeup and Body Products in the United States and Implications for Childhood Environmental Exposures

Study finds that UV-emitting nail polish dryers damage DNA and cause mutations in cells

Homeopathy suggests treating genetic diseases with tiny doses of the patient’s own DNA “It is important to reiterate that this is a theoretical hypothesis and without scientific evidence so far”

Delta (1 – 4 Hz) EEG/MEG activity is generally indicative of loss of consciousness and cortical down states, particularly when it is diffuse and high amplitude. Remarkably, however, drug challenge studies of several diverse classes of pharmacological agents—including antiepileptics, GABA-B-ergics, anticholinergics, and psychedelic tryptamines—demonstrate that participants appear to be neurophysiologically “down” (EEG activity resembling cortical down states) even when they are not psychologically “out” (unconscious). Of those substances that are safe to use in healthy volunteers, some may be highly valuable research tools for investigating which neural activity patterns are sufficient for consciousness or its absence.

Consider Michel de Montaigne, who in 1571, fed up with his job as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux, quit at the age of 38. Retreating to his library, he inscribed his reason on the wall of his study. “Weary of the servitude of the courts,” Mr. Montaigne declared, “I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.” He went on to invent an entirely new kind of writing — the essay — by which he launched an extraordinary experiment in self-examination. Yet he experimented lazily. “I have to solicit it nonchalantly,” he wrote about his memory. “What I do easily and naturally I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command,” he wrote. For the man who transformed our way of reading and writing, he was seriously unserious. “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there.” He added: “I do nothing without gaiety.” [NY Times]

We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing “the” labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant. [@APStylebook]

Who will compete with ChatGPT? Meet the contenders

InteriorAI.com Interior design mockups and virtual staging by AI

Channa Horwitz, Sonakinatography I Movement #III for Multi-Media, 1969

Incels are transitioning to women for sex. It’s called Transmaxxing. They have a manual.

The first-ever AI-powered legal defense was set to take place in California on Feb. 22, but not anymore. “Multiple state bar associations have threatened us,” Browder said. “One even said a referral to the district attorney’s office and prosecution and prison time would be possible.”

People are already using ChatGPT to create workout plans — Fitness advice from OpenAI’s large language model is impressively presented—but don’t take it too seriously.

how investors like the idea of using AI to replace journalists…

We find that participants exploit vagueness to be consistent with the truth, while at the same time leveraging the imprecision to their own benefit.

placebos can reduce feelings of guilt, even when the person knows they’re receiving placebos.

“It’s really important that people understand that there is a genetics of depression,” Krystal said. “Until very recently, only psychological and environmental factors were considered.” […] simply having the genes for depression doesn’t necessarily guarantee that someone will become depressed. The genes also need to be activated in some way, by either internal or external conditions. […] Differences in a person’s genes may predispose them to depression; so, too, may differences in the neural wiring and structure of their brain.

New study finds 6 ways to slow memory decline and lower dementia risk — Eating a balanced diet, exercising the mind and body regularly, having regular contact with others, and not drinking or smoking

A new book traces Chekhov’s relentless work as both a doctor and a master of the short story

What time is it on the Moon? The Moon doesn’t currently have an independent time. Each lunar mission uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to coordinated universal time, or UTc — the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set. But this method is relatively imprecise and spacecraft exploring the Moon don’t synchronize the time with each other. The approach works when the Moon hosts a handful of independent missions, but it will be a problem when there are multiple craft working together. Space agencies will also want to track them using satellite navigation, which relies on precise timing signals.

70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds

Average Pregnancy Length Shorter in the US Than European Countries

reason they discourage MRIs during pregnancy

partnered sex with orgasm was associated with increased sleep quality Sexual activity without orgasm and masturbation with and without orgasm were not associated with changes in sleep.

Experimental and comparative studies suggest that the striped coats of zebras can prevent biting fly attacks. Biting flies are serious pests of livestock that cause economic losses in animal production. We hypothesized that cows painted with black and white stripes on their body could avoid biting fly attacks and show fewer fly-repelling behaviors. […] Cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid biting fly attack

ant’s sense of smell is so strong, it can sniff out cancer

Fusions of Consciousness — We assume instead that subjects and experiences are entities beyond spacetime, not within spacetime. We make this precise in a mathematical theory of conscious agents, whose dynamics are described by Markov chains. We show how (1) agents combine into more complex agents, (2) agents fuse into simpler agents, and (3) qualia fuse to create new qualia.

The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you’ll notice it’s full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.

Search 5.8 billion images used to train popular AI art models: Have I Been Trained?

Turnitin, best known for its anti-plagiarism software used by tens of thousands of universities and schools around the world, is building a tool to detect text generated by AI.

ChatGPT passes MBA exam given by a Wharton professor

Imagine a world where autonomous weapons roam the streets, decisions about your life are made by AI systems that perpetuate societal biases and hackers use AI to launch devastating cyberattacks. This dystopian future may sound like science fiction, but the truth is that without proper regulations for the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it could become a reality. The rapid advancements in AI technology have made it clear that the time to act is now to ensure that AI is used in ways that are safe, ethical and beneficial for society. Failure to do so could lead to a future where the risks of AI far outweigh its benefits. I didn’t write the above paragraph. It was generated in a few seconds by an A.I. program called ChatGPT, which is available on the internet. I simply logged into the program and entered the following prompt: “Write an attention grabbing first paragraph of an Op-Ed on why artificial intelligence should be regulated.

Large Language Models as Corporate Lobbyists

Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and Mark Antony, became the influential queen of a mysterious, abundant North African kingdom

In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, Super Trivia, and Super Trivia II, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game’s Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was “What was Columbo’s first name?” with the answer “Philip”. That information had been fabricated to catch anyone who might try to violate his copyright. The inventors of Trivial Pursuit acknowledged that Worth’s books were among their sources, but argued that this was not improper and that facts are not protected by copyright. The district court judge agreed, ruling in favor of the Trivial Pursuit inventors.

A look back at the prize-winning anti-car-jacking flamethrower

The existence of the Five Eyes wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2010 […] The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals.

The many, many reasons space travel is bad for the human body — Like any other muscle, the heart doesn’t need to work as hard in microgravity and will begin to atrophy without rigorous exercise. Doused with radiation, many immune cells die and immunity is lowered. There’s also DNA damage, potentially upping cancer risk. Inflammation spikes throughout the body, possibly contributing to heart disease and other conditions. Bones thin by about 1.5 percent a month. Spinal discs harden.

While certain irritants can make the stomach more vulnerable to acid and ulcer formation, multiple large studies have found that this is not the case with coffee. Nonetheless, coffee does have an effect on the gut — it can speed up the colon and induce a bowel movement, and coffee increases acid production in the stomach. […] drinking coffee, especially if it’s black, without a meal can reduce the stomach’s pH more than it would if you drank it with milk or with a meal. Although a slightly lower pH is no problem for your stomach lining, it could pose an issue for the lining of your esophagus because it is far more vulnerable to damage from acid.

Their job is to grow monumental amounts of animal muscle cells; around 10 trillion are needed to make one measly steak. The first CRISPR gene-edited meat is coming

Scientists Just Invented an Entirely New Way to Refrigerate Things

ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees. […] an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage. […] Like human lobbyists, such a system could target undecided representatives sitting on committees controlling the policy of interest […] What makes the threat of A.I.-powered lobbyists greater than the threat already posed by the high-priced lobbying firms on K Street is their potential for acceleration. Human lobbyists rely on decades of experience to find strategic solutions to achieve a policy outcome. That expertise is limited, and therefore expensive. A.I. could, theoretically, do the same thing much more quickly and cheaply.

A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic C.E.O.? […] (The four available Tesla models are S, 3, X and Y, presumably because that spells the word “sexy.”)

This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time.

An auditory illusion

The Food Timeline

The Landlord’s Game (1904), inspiration for the 1935 board game Monopoly

In Boston labs, old, blind mice have regained their eyesight, developed smarter, younger brains and built healthier muscle and kidney tissue. […] The experiments show aging is a reversible process, capable of being driven “forwards and backwards at will” […] “The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset” […] It doesn’t matter if the body is 50 or 75, healthy or wracked with disease, Sinclair said. Once that process has been triggered, “the body will then remember how to regenerate and will be young again, even if you’re already old and have an illness. Now, what that software is, we don’t know yet. At this point, we just know that we can flip the switch.”

Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link — In this experiment, we manipulated what men believed about their own penis size, relative to others. We gave them false information, stating that the average penis size was larger than it in fact is.

Historically, women who were victims of rape had to show evidence of strenuous or ferocious resistance to the attack, as indicated by broken fingernails, blood, bruises… […] Consider the emotion of sexual disgust—the things that repulse you from a sexual perspective. Are men aware that women are more easily sexually disgusted than they are? (Crosby, Durkee, Meston, & Buss, 2020). Judging from the number of men who send unsolicited “dick-pics” (photographs of men’s genitalia) to women, the answer is a resounding “no.” Among millennial-aged women, slightly more than half have received dick pics, and 78% of these were unsolicited. […] Understanding sex differences in sexual psychology provides a path toward reducing violence toward women. When women have a say in designing laws and policies around sexual violence, they are more likely to bring a female mindset to those policies.

Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men (2020)

OpenAI signaled it’ll soon begin charging for ChatGPT […] ChatGPT had over a million users as of early December — an enviable user base by any measure. But it’s a pricey service to run. According to OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT’s operating expenses are “eye-watering,” amounting to a few cents per chat in total compute costs. (ChatGPT is hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.)

Research Summaries Written by AI Fool Scientists

“In the unlikely situation where a crew is unable to control the aircraft, DragonFly can redirect the flight to the nearest appropriate airport and facilitate a safe landing” Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

JPMorgan Chase is suing the 30-year-old founder of Frank, a buzzy fintech startup it acquired for $175 million, for allegedly lying about its scale and success by creating an enormous list of fake users to entice the financial giant to buy it.

Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 billion in 2022 mostly because of Apple Card

Apple launched its Self-Service Repair program, letting US customers fix broken screens, batteries, and cameras on the latest iPhones using Apple’s own parts and tools for the first time ever. I expected Apple would send me a small box of screwdrivers, spudgers, and pliers; I own a mini iPhone, after all. Instead, I found two giant Pelican cases — 79 pounds of tools — on my front porch. […] The single most frustrating part of this process, after using Apple’s genuine parts and Apple’s genuine tools, was that my iPhone didn’t recognize the genuine battery as genuine. “Unknown Part,” flashed a warning. […] $69 for a new battery — the same price the Apple Store charges for a battery replacement, except here I get to do all the work and assume all the risk. $49 to rent Apple’s tools for a week. A $1,200 credit card hold for the toolkit, which I would forfeit if the tools weren’t returned within seven days of delivery.

It’s illegal to burn a body in a floating boat anywhere in the U.S., and a single town in Colorado is the only place in the country where you can legally burn a corpse on a dry-land funeral pyres. The popular conception of what are commonly called “Viking” funerals – a flaming longship – aren’t historically accurate anyway […] “They (Vikings) were more likely to drag the boat ashore and burn it on dry land with the chieftain’s body and his possessions inside, or just bury the entire boat without setting it on fire,” Pray told Cowboy State Daily.

Kanzi the bonobo lives in America and has learnt how to build a fire, light it using matches and toast marshmallows on it

Date Like a Monk — Monks are famously celibate, but celibacy doesn’t just mean you’re not having sex. It means you’re not interacting with other people in a way that could be considered romantic. The Sanskrit word for monk, brahmacharyi, means “the right use of energy.” […] As monks, we were trained to direct our energy toward understanding our psyches, how we see the world and interact with it. If you haven’t developed a deep understanding of your motivations and obstacles, it’s harder to move through life with patience and compassion. […] Monks never try to impress anyone. […] We’re not here to impress each other. We’re here to connect.

Identical college twins were accused of cheating in an exam by signaling. They won $1.5 million in damages after a jury decided they hadn’t cheated because their minds were connected.

When taxes go up, executives increase profits from insider trading, study “In states where there are increases in tax rates, there is an increase in the number of SEC insider trading investigations.”

There wasn’t a single bank robbery in Denmark last year

Hackers hit websites of Danish central bank and seven other Danish banks

Microsoft neural codec language model can generate speech in any voice after only hearing a 3-second sample of that voice

ChatGPT isn’t all that bad at writing fairly decent malware — within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—­some with little or no coding experience­—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks.

According to a new study, humans still have the genes for a full coat of fur. Those genes, it seems, have simply been switched off. […] “Some genetic changes might be responsible for loss of hair.”

Fewer than 40% of New Yorkers earn a living wage

Medical student types journals during ketamine infusions for suicidal ideation, treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder […] patient achieved remission from suicidality and PTSD within 1 month [Ketamine Journals | .docx]

A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.

A team of security researchers managed to gain “super administrative access” into Reviver, the company behind California’s new digital license plates which launched last year. That access allowed them to track the physical GPS location of all Reviver customersand change a section of text at the bottom of the license plate designed for personalized messages to whatever they wished

Ghost Writer: Microsoft Looks to Add OpenAI’s Chatbot Technology to Word, Email

Microsoft will have to buy OpenAI in 2023

Artists accuse Adobe of tracking their design process to power its AI

Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all” […] Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same. “People don’t get confused between them”

Intermittent fasting can boost your health, but how and when to restrict food consumption is crucial — When food intake starts in the morning, studies have observed weight loss and improvements in insulin sensitivity. Conversely, there are fewer or no benefits to starting meals at midday and ending them in the evening. Ram Babu Singh’s team (Halberg Hospital and Research Institute, India) also showed positive results in participants who ate only in the morning — and not in those who ate in the evening after 8 p.m. Research suggests our internal clock and circadian rhythms may have something to do with it.

It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth — often considered as a proxy of success — follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale-invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes. In this paper, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness.

The happiest, least stressful, most meaningful jobs in America

Communities are already seeing items delivered by drones from Amazon Prime and Walmart

David Horvitz’s Public Access (2010) includes photographs of himself at various public beaches in California which were uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons and then inserted into the Wikipedia pages, and the subsequent reaction of the Commons and Wikipedia communities to his actions. Before all items were deleted, Horvitz printed them out, bound them and covertly placed the bound books in the history sections of local libraries along the California Coast. […] In 2016, David Horvitz hired a pickpocket to place sculptures in the pockets of attendees of the annual Frieze Art Fair.

Philosophy Experiment: Staying Alive

New York has become the latest US state to allow so-called human composting. A person can now have their body turned into soil after their death - which is seen as an environmentally friendly alternative to a burial or cremation. In 2019, Washington was the first US state to legalise it. Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and California followed suit.

OnlyFans mum embarrassed about wetting herself for years now sells wet pants

A fundamental question in the study of consciousness is “To what extent are sensory experiences equivalent between individuals?” Is my “red” your “red”?

GAN faces [realistic-looking faces of non-existing people] are more likely to be perceived as real faces than real faces

In a world first, AI lawyer will help defend a real case in the US

College student built an app called GPTZero that can “quickly and efficiently” label whether an essay was written by a person or ChatGPT.

Study Finds That Buttons in Cars Are Safer and Quicker to Use Than Touchscreens

Malone understood a few things about the cable industry that many outsiders didn’t. First, he understood that cable was like real estate: incredibly high fixed costs up front as you built or bought the systems, and then highly predictable, monopoly cash flows for a long time afterwards. He understood that if he used debt to finance acquisitions, he could keep growing the company, and use the depreciation on acquired systems (plus the write-offs from the loans itself) to delay paying taxes on that cash flow. […] The problem was that Wall Street in the 70s and 80s didn’t get any of this. […] To make his point, Malone created a new accounting metric, something he called ‘earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes’, or EBITDA.

There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and few protections for customers. No federal laws govern the boxes; no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.

At 93, the world’s best-selling living female artist is still painting daily at the psychiatric hospital she voluntarily checked into and has lived in since the 1970s.

PLAYBOY: Your salary is shooting up into the multimillions per movie–reportedly $4 million to $ 7 million. Do those numbers make you chuckle? NICOLAS CAGE: I don’t chuckle. I have respect for the dollar.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has expanded to three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of the original subjects; it is, according to the researchers, the longest-running in-depth study on human happiness in the world. From all the data, one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life. More than wealth, I.Q. or social class, it’s the robustness of our bonds that most determines whether we feel fulfilled.

Optimal wings for flying fruits — Appendages of seeds, fruits, and other diaspores (dispersal units) are essential for their wind dispersal, as they act as wings and enable them to fly. […] The link of the fruit’s sepal shape to flight performance, however, is as yet unknown.

“You’re going to have black snakes from time to time. It’s just a fact of life,” he advised me. “You’re going to have field mice. You’re in the country.” And if one of those black snakes pursues one of those field mice into my bedroom? He suggests I put a wet towel on the floor, wait for the snake to wrap itself in the towel and then remove it.

Map of Italy in 1796

Another source of discomfort was our neighbors’ cats. Now, we are eminently social in our disposition, and enjoy our neighbors’ company very much. We like to spend a social evening with them and have them do the same by us. But not so their cats. We never interchanged civilities with them, their visits were too ill timed and frequent. Our ducklings were carried off in large numbers, and in pure self-defense we shot the cats. Of course, this made trouble in our neighbors’ families, especially the female portion, by whom it was promptly resented. The principle of “touch my dog, touch me,” was illustrated here in all its force. No amount of provocation ever justified us in their eyes in killing their cats. With pater familias it was different. His affections were not engaged. He recognized the necessity of the thing, laughed it off, and said it was all right. [Natural and Artificial Duck Culture, 1906]

The former nun also claimed Rupnik had asked her and another nun to have a threesome with him, saying they would replicate the three-way relationship among God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Why do some people seem to be drawn to situations that are not good for them? […] hypotheses: people make dysfunctional choices 1) to process or master previous trauma, 2) out of habit and because of preferences for what is familiar, 3) to maintain a coherent view of themselves and the world, and 4) to avoid difficult emotions.

Schooling substantially improves intelligence, but neither lessens nor widens the impacts of socioeconomics and genetics

Two groups including 26 women and 25 men […] We found that the brains of women and men reacted differently to infants’ faces, and these differential areas are in facial processing, attention, and empathetic networks.

In the mid-1800s a German physician, Carl Wunderlich, measured axillary (armpit) temperatures from about 25,000 people and found that the average was 98.6˚ F (37˚ C). And so, we’ve believed that ever since. […] An analysis of 20 studies between 1935 and 1999 found that the average oral temperature was 97.5˚ F. Time to redefine normal body temperature?

Bitcoin has a maximum supply of 21 million. Current data shows that 19.1 million bitcoins have been mined to date. However, of that amount, it is estimated that between 3-4 million bitcoins have been lost forever. […] Others such as Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of bitcoin, are believed to hold as much as 1 million bitcoin. This anonymous person has not published any communication since 2010 and many presume the famed character has passed away. […] a mining firm in China mines 3% of all bitcoin. It mines 650 bitcoins monthly with an estimated electric bill of almost $1.2 million.

as of September 19, 2022, MicroStrategy and its subsidiaries held approximately 130,000 Bitcoins, acquired at an aggregate purchase price of $3.98 billion, at an average purchase price of $30,639 per bitcoin.

Who Owns the Most Bitcoin?

Pink Sauce went viral on TikTok. But then it exploded

Cheerful Chatbots Don’t Necessarily Improve Customer Service

The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become “uninsurable” as the disruption from hacks continues to grow. “What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber”

A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate — Make Sunsets is already attempting to earn revenue for geoengineering, a move likely to provoke widespread criticism.

People suffering from depression have lower connectivity in brain regions linked to reward processing, study finds

Cassidy and Dylan Scott, a married couple from Huntsville, Alabama, just happen to have the same birthday. This week, they welcomed their first baby – on their birthday. — Their baby girl arrived on Dec. 18 […] While this phenomenon is rare, in 2017, another couple who shared a birthday also welcomed a baby on the same day – and it happened to be Dec. 18, just like the Scotts. […] The family’s birthday, Dec. 18, is actually a common one – ranking No. 56 out of all days […] Out of all the calendar days, including leap day on Feb. 29, the two least common birthdays are Jan. 1, ranking at No. 365, and Dec. 25, ranking at No. 366, according to Stiles. Leap day, which only occurs every four years, is also uncommon, ranking at No. 347.

Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (Stanford University): Gender-based language includes a range of words and phrases that are not helpful, and, in many cases, are exclusionary. […] Instead of “balls to the wall” consider using “accelerate efforts.” balls to the walls (Wiktionary): First attested in the 1960s in the context of aviation, in reference to ball-shaped grips on an aircraft’s joystick and throttle. Pushing the “balls to the wall” would put the engine at maximum power. Not related to the vulgar sense of balls (“testicles”).

All four tests classified ChatGPT’s answers to their questions as left-leaning.

“Google has a business model issue. If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won’t click on any ads.” […] Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic and biased information. LaMDA is available to only a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen.

Bitcoin hashrate drops nearly 40% as deadly U.S. storm unplugs miners

Loni Goddard works at Kerala Ayurveda, a wellness company, and rents an apartment in Reno. In 2020, her one-bedroom apartment cost $950 with internet and cable. When she re-signed her lease in April, the rent rose to $1,490 — not including internet and cable.

How a Vermont farmer proved no snowflakes are alike

Why do bees die when they sting you?

Aliens haven’t contacted Earth because there’s no sign of intelligence here, new answer to the Fermi paradox suggests […] If life has evolved on many planets in the galaxy, then aliens are probably more interested in the ones where there are signs not just of biology but technology […] experts have offered other explanations for the missing aliens: Perhaps they visited Earth in the past, before humans evolved or were capable of recording the visit. Or maybe long-distance space travel is more difficult than believed. Perhaps aliens evolved advanced civilization too recently to make it to Earth. Or they’ve deliberately decided not to explore the cosmos. It’s even possible that they’ve killed themselves off.

New research indicates the most common reasons for lying are altruistic (i.e., to protect others from harm).

Google can now read your doctor’s bad handwriting

The results of GPT-3 are often unexpected and surprising. But are they creative? GPT-3 was not trained to look at meaning. It does not understand its training data. When asked the simple multiplication question “1111*2=?”, GPT-3 responded “22”.

Study finds AI assistants help developers produce code that’s more likely to be buggy

People have A.I. bots running that use ChatGPT to automatically reply to people’s tweets and breaking up by letting ChatGPT write their break up letter

the images are fed into a “pre-trained machine learning (ML) model” to generate “a collection of 1,000 new, non-existing shapes” derived from the initial sex toy dataset

Previous studies have shown that comic book bodies are supernormal stimuli, exaggerated in dimensions that are attractive to primarily male comic book consumers. We predicted that comic book women would have longer legs than comic book men and would have longer than average legs [and] that comic book women would be depicted as wearing heels or walking on tiptoe more often, as this further elongates the legs. […] 86%–88% of female characters were drawn as either wearing high heels or walking or standing on tiptoe.

Adults are buying toys for themselves, and it’s the biggest source of growth for the industry […] one-fourth of all toy sales annually […] toy makers such as Mattel have created lines just for these consumers.

DEA seized enough fentanyl to kill every person in the U.S. in 2022

With a flat fee of $70 for trips into Manhattan and a guaranteed stream of passengers, a ride to and from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of the more lucrative journeys for the city’s cab drivers. But federal prosecutors say two 48-year-old Queens men found another way to profit from the crowd of taxis waiting long hours for passengers at the airport, conspiring with Russians to hack the dispatch system and allow drivers to cut ahead in line for a $10 payment.

The Genesis of East Village Drag: An oral history of the Pyramid Club

This case started off as a missing person investigation, in which the victim disappeared in Taiwan on November 29, 2019. I was hired in mid-December 2019 and filed a petition for conservatorship of her estate, according to law.

The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the “Woman Without a Face”, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009. The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries.[…] in March 2009, the case took a new turn when, while trying to identify a corpse, investigators found the Phantom’s female DNA in fingerprints on a male asylum seeker’s application. They subsequently came to the conclusion that there was no mysterious criminal and the laboratory results were due to contamination of the cotton swabs used for DNA probing. The cotton swabs used by many state police departments were found to have been contaminated before shipping. They all came from the same factory. The DNA belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made. [more]

Data Visualization of How Apple Names Things

Lessons from watching every single Hallmark holiday movies

Elon Musk asks Twitter investors for more money

A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.

KoGuan Leo, an Indonesian billionaire and the third-largest individual shareholder of Tesla, is calling for the electric carmaker’s CEO, Elon Musk, to step down as much of his attention is focused on Twitter lately.

Elon Musk sells $3.6bn of shares in electric car maker Tesla. It brings the total of Tesla stocks sold by Musk over the past year to almost $40bn. Musk remains Tesla’s biggest shareholder with a 13.4% stake.

Musk’s $5.7 Billion Mystery Gift Went to His Own Charity

Snakes have clitorises

I Asked ChatGPT To Explain Some Jokes to Me

DoNotPay, the company that bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” is launching a new AI-powered chatbot that can help you negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without having to deal with customer service.

In order to protest AI image generators stealing artists work to train AI models, artists are deliberately generating AI art based on the IP of corporations (Disney, Nintendo, DC, and Marvel)

Stability AI plans to let artists opt out of Stable Diffusion 3 image training

AI search engines: You.com [about You.com], Metaphor, Talk to Books

Reducing the particles generated by flushing institutional toilets A previous study reported that institutional flush-O-meter (FOM) toilets can generate 3–12 times as many droplets as other toilets by splashing (large droplets) and bubble bursting (fine droplets). In this study, an aerosol suppression lid was evaluated to measure the reduction of particles by size using three metrics

Memories are stored in all different areas across the brain as networks of neurons called engrams. In addition to collecting information about incoming stimuli, these engrams capture emotional information. In a new study, Steve Ramirez, a neuroscientist at Boston University, found evidence that good and bad memories are stored in different regions of the hippocampus, a cashew-shaped structure that holds sensory and emotional information necessary for forming and retrieving memories. […] His team also found that they could manipulate memories by activating these regions. When he and his team activated the top area of the hippocampus, bad memories were less traumatic. Conversely, when they activated the bottom part, mice exhibited signs of long-last lasting anxiety-related behavioral changes.

Facial expressions may be an unreliable way to read emotions

Schizophrenia has been an evolutionary paradox: it has high heritability, but it is associated with decreased reproductive success. […] The etiology of schizophrenia has not been understood and there have been no major breakthroughs in the treatment of schizophrenia for 60 years. […] The new etiological synthesis of schizophrenia indicates that an interaction between host genotype, microbe infection, and chronic stress causes schizophrenia, with neuroinflammation and gut dysbiosis mediating this etiological pathway.

in a phase 2 clinical trial, a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, when combined with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, reduced the risk of recurrence by 44%.

The world has been trying to master this limitless clean energy source since the 1930s. We’re now closer than ever

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, commonly known as the Order of Malta or Knights of Malta — Though it possesses no territory, the order is often considered a sovereign entity of international law, as it maintains diplomatic relations with many countries

Saudi Arabia ‘linear city’ More: The 100-mile-long metropolis promises to accommodate nine million residents + Flying taxis, robotic avatars and holograms + satellite images show that Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity is well underway

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges

Dramatron is a so-called “co-writing” tool that can generate character descriptions, plot points, location descriptions and dialogue. The idea is that human writers will be able to compile, edit and rewrite what Dramatron comes up with into a proper script. Think of it like ChatGPT, but with output that you can edit into a blockbuster movie script.

This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance. What matters is that using only stem cells, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel forged something in a lab that budded a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain. — Breakthroughs of the Year

A new therapy that makes the immune system kill bone marrow cancer cells was successful in as many as 73 percent of patients in two clinical trials

The researchers found that longer genes are linked to longer lifespans, and shorter genes are linked to shorter lifespans. The researchers uncovered this pattern across several animals, including humans, and across many tissues (blood, muscle, bone and organs, including liver, heart, intestines, brain and lungs) analyzed in the study.

Tiny spurts of exercise throughout the day are associated with significant reductions in disease risk. Those who engaged in one or two-minute bursts of exercise roughly three times a day, like speed-walking while commuting to work or rapidly climbing stairs, showed a nearly 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular mortality risk and a roughly 40 percent reduction in the risk of dying from cancer as well as all causes of mortality, compared with those who did no vigorous spurts of fitness.

South Koreans are about to get a year or two younger, thanks to a new law — At present it’s common for South Koreans to have not just one age, but three – an “international age,” a “Korean age” and a “calendar age.” But to end confusion, the country’s parliament has decreed that from June 2023 all official documents must use the standard “international age.” […] when asked their age in informal settings, most South Koreans will answer with their “Korean age,” which could be one or even two years older than their “international age.” Under this system, babies are considered a year old on the day they’re born, with a year added every January 1.

Founded in 2014 with a goal to reintroduce oysters — a billion of them — into the New York Harbor by 2035, the Billion Oyster Project is about giving spent oyster shells a second life. — “Oysters are just so much more than for your consumption. They clean the water, they provide habitat for other marine species, they are lessening that wave energy so that hopefully the storm that’s coming isn’t going to flood your basement” […] Sixty restaurants in Manhattan and Brooklyn participate in the Billion Oyster Project’s shell collection program, including Lighthouse BK in Williamsburg. Saving the leftover shells from the oysters that diners slurp provides the literal foundation for the oysters.

Khloe Kardashian and Kendall Jenner sit in a luxe doctor’s office with white walls. Behind them, a window opens onto another room containing a futuristic blue brain scanner. The sisters are gazing at the doctor, an energetic middle-aged balding man wearing a white coat. This is Dr. Daniel Amen, 68, a psychiatrist to stars who has also treated Justin Bieber, Bella Hadid, and Meghan Trainor. Amen offers “bespoke” mental health treatment informed by scans of the physical brain. […] “Kendall’s got a beautiful brain on the outside,” Amen says, gesturing at a computer screen showing four brightly colored images. “But if we look at her emotional brain, which is right here, it’s way too busy. Which is why she can struggle with anxiety.”

Insiders made millions from Justin Bieber’s NFT project. His fans are down almost 90%.

ovies sorted by the color of the film posters from light to dark

Because people have a need to glue things to other things

Shingō village is the location of what is purported to be the resting place of Jesus, the “Tomb of Christ.” — Jesus Christ did not die on the cross at Golgotha. Instead, a man alleged to be his brother, Isukiri, took his place on the cross, while Jesus escaped across Siberia to Mutsu Province, in northern Japan. Once in Japan, Jesus changed his name to Torai Tora Daitenku and became a garlic farmer. In Japan, Jesus allegedly married a woman named Miyuko, with whom he fathered three children, all daughters. After his death at an age exceeding 100, Jesus was said to have been interred into one of two grave mounds in the village.

Scammers Are Scamming Other Scammers Out of Millions of Dollars — Frequently, there are “rip-and-run” scams, Wixey says, where the buyer doesn’t pay for what they’ve received or the seller gets the money but doesn’t send across what they sold. Other types of scams involve faked data or security exploits that don’t work.

What our studies showed is that perceptions of fashion-forwardness—of being in the know—can outweigh aesthetics when choosing a luxury brand item. Ugly has somehow become a signal of taste

Indonesia passes criminal code banning sex outside marriage — Sex outside marriage will carry a jail term of up to a year under the new laws, which take effect in three years. […] the new laws apply equally to locals and to foreigners living in Indonesia, or visiting holiday destinations such as Bali. […] unmarried couples are also banned from living together - an act for which people could be jailed for up to six months. Adultery will also be an offence for which people can be jailed.

Pentagon splits $9 billion cloud contract among Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon

BuzzFeed has only three quarters to go at current burn rates […] In December 2021, BuzzFeed went public via merger with a SPAC, and got, well, only $16 million in equity funding, of the $277 million that the SPAC itself raised during its IPO, as 94% of the SPAC shareholders chose to redeem their shares and get their money back, rather than watch BuzzFeed burn through their money […] At the time of SPAC merger, BuzzFeed’s implied valuation was a ridiculous $1.5 billion. Today, the market capitalization is down to $146 million.

Bitcoin Post-Mortem

this year 50% of firms across the world had tried to use ai in some way, up from 20% in 2017

The code that ChatGPT can’t write

To commemorate the centenary of Marcel Proust’s death, Christopher Prendergast celebrates his use of pink, how its tone shifts from innocence to themes of sexual need, before finally fading out to grey at the novel’s close.

On the evening of 8 December 1980 … The killer was Mark David Chapman, an American Beatles fan who was incensed by Lennon’s lavish lifestyle and his 1966 comment that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. Chapman said he was inspired by the fictional character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, a “phony-killer” who despises hypocrisy. […] Chapman fired five hollow-point bullets from a .38 special revolver, four of which hit Lennon in the back. Chapman remained at the scene reading The Catcher in the Rye until he was arrested by the police.

To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring

This paper outlines a procedure for tapping into your innermost self, and encountering a part of yourself that goes deeper than words

DNA showed a mother was also her daughter’s uncle — The answer to that medical mystery, sparked by a confusing paternity test result, is “When the genes of a vanished twin brother live on in the mother’s DNA.” — such human “chimeras” — people with DNA from more than one embryo — could be more common than we thought.

Walking backwards has a surprising number of health benefits

Singapore, population 5.45 million people, is home to around seven million trees – and manages around six million of them with LiDAR, AI and sensors.

Mutual Funds That Consistently Beat the Market? Not One of 2,132.

Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data

Australia says law making Facebook and Google pay for news has worked

To build a great salad, start with lettuce or leafy greens. It may surprise you to learn that the type of greens you choose doesn’t really matter that much. Compared to other greens, iceberg lettuce probably has the fewest nutrients, but pretty much all lettuces are low in vitamins and minerals. Dark leafy greens like spinach have more micronutrients, but the type of iron in spinach is poorly absorbed, and there’s plenty of oxalate, so be careful if you’re prone to kidney stones.

To cope with the uncertainties of life, hobos developed a system of symbols they’d write with chalk or coal to provide fellow “Knights of the Road” with directions, help, and warnings.

“I sent in my manuscript, and the map along with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my father’s office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it was never Treasure Island to me.”(Robert Louis Stevenson, My First Book: “Treasure Island,” 1894.)

Our observations show that visual sexual stimulus can trigger masturbation in capuchin monkeys. We observed a multi-male multi-female captive colony of 17 bearded capuchins between January and October 2014. Over this period, we registered 11 copulation events, 68 attempt copulations, and five masturbation events. The same low-ranking male (named Fu) performed all masturbation events.

UK to criminalize deepfake porn — Other abusive behaviors that will become explicitly illegal include “downblousing” (where photographs are taken down a women’s top without consent); and the installation of equipment, such as hidden cameras, to take or record images of someone without their consent.

Why would a multi-million-dollar fashion company like Balenciaga run ads for their “Object Line” using children holding teddy bears in bondage costumes? Why would they place a copy of a court document on child pornography in the ad? More: Balenciaga files $25M suit against production company for the inclusion in one of the ads of legal documents from a US Supreme Court decision on child porn laws. The two-page court summons doesn’t mention the BDSM teddy bears.

Doctors believe Bruce Lee may have died from drinking too much water

Changes to [Stable Diffusion’s] AI text-to-image model make it harder for users to mimic specific artists’ styles or generate NSFW output

OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data. The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.

Slow Drinking of Beer Attenuates Sedative Feeling

Genetically modified tobacco plant produces cocaine in its leaves — Researchers have reproduced the entire biochemical pathway for how coca plants make cocaine in another plant, which could help people manufacture the drug for scientific study

Nearly half of all psychiatric patients get a different diagnose within 10 years. […] “Mental disorders are dynamic. They change over the course of a life.” […] The study shows which development is probable and which is improbable for the 20 most common mental diagnoses.

Within the European Union, airlines will be able to install the latest 5G technology on their aircraft, allowing passengers to use their smartphones and other connected devices just as they do on the ground.

Google: 60% Of The Internet Is Duplicate

the first house 3D-printed from bio-based materials (wood fibers and bio-resins) — The entire structure was printed in four modules and assembled on-site in a few hours. Electricity was installed just two hours after the assembly, and the house was essentially usable within a day after being brought on-site.

The Al Naslaa rock formation is Earth’s most bizarre geological feature

“Severed Spots,”, by the Brooklyn collective known as MSCHF, is based on a spot print by Damien Hirst, whose spots MSCHF excised and sold as their own works. It’s in their first art-world show, at Gallery Perrotin in New York. Related: Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

British Airways Flight 5390, June 10, 1990 [photos] While the aircraft was flying over Didcot, Oxfordshire, an improperly installed windscreen panel separated from its frame causing the captain to be sucked out of the aircraft. The captain was held in place through the window frame for twenty minutes until the first officer landed at Southampton Airport.

In late June, Microsoft released a new kind of artificial intelligence technology that could generate its own computer code. Called Copilot, the tool was designed to speed the work of professional programmers. As they typed away on their laptops, it would suggest ready-made blocks of computer code they could instantly add to their own. […] Matthew Butterick, a programmer, designer, writer and lawyer in Los Angeles […] and a team of other lawyers filed a lawsuit that is seeking class-action status against Microsoft and the other high-profile companies that designed and deployed Copilot. Like many cutting-edge A.I. technologies, Copilot developed its skills by analyzing vast amounts of data. In this case, it relied on billions of lines of computer code posted to the internet. Mr. Butterick, 52, equates this process to piracy, because the system does not acknowledge its debt to existing work. His lawsuit claims that Microsoft and its collaborators violated the legal rights of millions of programmers who spent years writing the original code.

When AI Stole and Finished Your Drawing Then Calls You a Thief

24.6 million addresses of the total 47.9 million, are below purchase price on their investments. About 45% are in the money, which means they are boasting unrealized gains, while the rest are roughly at break-even[…]Previous bear markets ended with the majority of addresses being out of-the money. […] Past data, however, is no guarantee of future results

Expert Proposes a Method For Telling if We All Live in a Computer Program

Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year

Vladimir Nabokov’s opinions on various writers

According to legend, in 1040 Lady Godiva was upset that her husband, the Lord of Coventry, had imposed ruinously high taxes on his subjects. He responded that he would revoke the taxes if she would ride through the town naked. She took the challenge, and out of respect the townsfolk stayed inside during her ride, all save one tailor named Thomas, who peeked from his window and was promptly struck blind. This incident is said to be the origin of “peeping Tom” as a synonym for “voyeur.”

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents […] Creditors’ names were not listed on the court filing, but the largest is owed $226,280,579. The second largest entity is owed $203,292,504. FTX owes nearly $3.1 billion to top 50 creditors […] about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors

Why some feces float and others sink […] the bacteria in the gut — some produce more gas than others.

Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Mr. Musk has repeatedly used those tactics at many of his companies. […] As Mr. Musk and his advisers look for ways to generate more revenue at the company, they are said to have discussed adding paid direct messages, which would let users send private messages to high-profile users.[…] for Mr. Musk, remaking Twitter is only a part-time job. He remains chief executive of Tesla, which he said in court he continued to lead, and SpaceX, where, he said, he focuses on designing rockets rather than management. […] Mr. Musk also leads the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, and Neuralink, a brain-computer interface technology firm. He has said his long-term goal is to save humanity by developing technology for space travel, or, in his words, by “making life multiplanetary in order to ensure the long-term survival of consciousness.” The multitasking has become an issue in a lawsuit filed by Tesla shareholders who objected to the pay package that made Mr. Musk the world’s richest person. Last week in Delaware, under questioning by a lawyer representing shareholders who have accused Mr. Musk of neglecting his duties at Tesla, the billionaire said his intense involvement in Twitter was temporary.

For the female to male transsexual, surgical options include creation of a neophallus (phalloplasty) using a vascularized free-flap or pedicle flap. […] Additional procedures are also performed: glansplasty (to give the end of the phallus a natural glans-like appearance), transposition of the denuded clitoris to the neophallus base (to consolidate erogenous sensation to the neophallus), and vaginectomy. Placement of testicular and penile prostheses, for cosmesis and erectile function, respectively, are performed at second or third stage surgery. […] Previous groups have reported that the majority of patients retain the ability to achieve orgasm following phalloplasty.

The brain learns continuously, and typically learns best when new training is interleaved with periods of sleep for memory consolidation. […] Artificial neural networks (computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains) overwrite previously learned tasks when trained sequentially, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. […] Interleaving new task training with periods of off-line reactivation, mimicking biological sleep, mitigated catastrophic forgetting

Phantom Phone Signals (PPS) and other hallucinatory-like experiences (HLEs) are perceptual anomalies that are commonly reported in the general population. Both phenomena concern the same sensory modality, but PPS are restricted to smartphone use. The current study aimed to assess similarities and differences between these types of anomalies […] Smartphone dependency proved to be a stronger predictor of PPS than other measured variables, whereas for HLEs, general psychopathology was the strongest predictor.

Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation

decoding fMRI-based brain activities and reconstructing images Previously: The Science of Mind Reading

A traveler at JFK Airport was arrested after $450,000 worth of cocaine was discovered hidden in the wheels of her wheelchair. Officers noticed the wheels on her wheelchair were not turning and X-rayed the wheelchair.

The Atacama desert, which stretches for approximately 1,600 km along the western coast of the cone of South America, is the driest place on Earth. Some weather stations there have never recorded rainfall throughout their existence. But it‘s far from barren: many species live here that occur nowhere else, adapted to its extreme conditions. And approximately every five to 10 years, from September to mid-November, the Atacama hosts one of the most spectacular sights of the natural world: the ‘desierto florido’ (literally ‘blooming desert’).

the whole idea was that electronic tokens whose validity was established with techniques borrowed from cryptography would make it possible for people to bypass financial institutions. […] It has never been clear exactly why anyone other than criminals would want to do this. […] cryptocurrencies are largely purchased through exchanges like Coinbase and, yes, FTX, which take your money and hold crypto tokens in your name.These exchanges are — wait for it — financial institutions, whose ability to attract investors depends on — wait for it again — those investors’ trust. In other words, the crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends on their perceived trustworthiness. Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? […] But if the government finally moves in to regulate crypto firms, which would, among other things, prevent them from promising impossible-to-deliver returns, it’s hard to see what advantage these firms would have over ordinary banks. Even if the value of Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero (which it still might), there’s a strong case that the crypto industry, which loomed so large just a few months ago, is headed for oblivion.

The iconic brand’s latest venture is a metaverse play called .Swoosh, a Web3-enabled platform where people will be able to buy its virtual products. […] Swoosh exists on a domain named “.nike” and will be an experimental digital space for registered members. […] the platform will use cash (USD), not cryptocurrency […] the NFT studio RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) was bought by Nike in December 2021, so the porting of “codesigned” virtual clothing to that platform is hardly surprising. Nike acquired RTFKT last year and made $3.1 million selling 600 pairs of “Cryptokicks” NFT sneakers in April 2022

TikTok creators have gotten into the habit of coming up with substitutes for words that they worry might either affect how their videos get promoted on the site or run afoul of moderation rules. […] a fear that sexual topics would trigger problems prompted some creators to use “leg booty” for L.G.B.T.Q. and “cornucopia” instead of “homophobia.” Sex became “seggs.”

Almost everything with the truffle label that is available in stores or served in restaurants is a lie and a fraud. If you think you know what truffles taste like because you had them at restaurants, or you may have prepared something with the products you bought at specialty food stores, you almost certainly still don’t know the authentic truffle flavor. The flavor you are familiar with is the added aroma found in all the products labeled as containing “truffles.” […] There are more than 60 classified truffle species, around 25 species are edible, and four of those are most commonly used.

Florida house of Ron Rice, creator of Hawaiian Tropic lotion, is on sale

in the middle of the ballroom at Trump’s address, somebody had placed on one of the tables a manila envelope with handwritten letters: ‘Top Secret Nuclear Codes.’ [photo left]

The firm that bought my car for more than I paid new has lost 98 percent of its value — Carvana, the used car dealer that trusts robotic algorithms to buy your car practically sight unseen, was the third-fastest company to ever make it onto the Fortune 500 — only Amazon and Google did it faster. But for the third day in a row, its stock is trading for just around $7 a share, plummeting 98 percent from its all-time high of over $360 last August.

Some types of artificial intelligence could start to hallucinate if they don’t get enough rest, just as humans do

U.S. intelligence officials have compiled a classified report detailing extensive efforts to manipulate the American political system by the United Arab Emirates, […]The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, according to Justice Department records. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests. There is no prohibition in the United States on lobbyists donating money to political campaigns. […] it illustrates how American democracy is being distorted by foreign money […] One of the more brazen exploits involved the hiring of three former U.S. intelligence and military officials to help the UAE surveil dissidents, politicians, journalists and U.S. companies. In public legal filings, U.S. prosecutors said the men helped the UAE break into computers in the United States and other countries. Last year, all three admitted in court to providing sophisticated hacking technology to the UAE, agreeing to surrender their security clearances and pay about $1.7 million to resolve criminal charges. […] Thomas Barrack, a longtime adviser to former president Donald Trump, who was acquitted this month of charges alleging he worked as an agent of the UAE and lied to federal investigators about it. […] the UAE’s extensive courtship of retired high-ranking U.S. military personnel. The investigation showed that over the past seven years, 280 retired U.S. service members have worked as military contractors and consultants for the UAE, more than for any other country, and that the advisory jobs pay handsomely.

Apple is tracking you even when its own privacy settings say it’s not — The researchers said that the Health and Wallet apps, for example, didn’t transmit any analytics data at all, whereas Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, the iTunes Store, and Stocks all did. […] For example, the Stocks app sent Apple your list of watched stocks, the names stocks you viewed or searched for and time stamps for when you did it, as well as a record of any news articles you see in the app.

Apple Sued for Allegedly Deceiving Users With Privacy Settings After Gizmodo Story

People have always craved post-death contact with their loved ones. Efforts to remain in touch with the dead have existed for eons, such as photographing deceased children, holding seances and even keeping a corpse in the house for posterity. But artificial intelligence and virtual reality, along with other technological advances, have taken us a huge step closer to bringing the dead back to life. […] a platform called Augmented Eternity, which allows someone to create a digital persona from a dead person’s photos, texts, emails, social media posts, public statements and blog entries that will be able to interact with relatives and others. […] In June, Amazon unveiled a new feature it’s developing for Alexa, in which the virtual assistant can read aloud stories in a deceased loved one’s voice after just hearing a minute of that person’s speech. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Amazon Alexa. […] HereAfter’s app takes users through an interview process before they’ve died, prompting them to recollect stories and memories that are then recorded. After they’ve passed, family members can ask questions, and the app responds in the deceased’s voice using the accumulated interview information, almost like it’s engaging in a conversation. [Washington Post]

Around 20% of people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death.

“At the beginning, I think, I heard the nurse say ‘dial 444 cardiac arrest’. I felt scared. I was on the ceiling looking down.”[Veridical Near-Death-Experiences]

Previously: All features of a classic Near-Death-Experiences can be reproduced by the intravenous administration of 50 - 100 mg of ketamine.

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after [PDF]

Zolgensma is a one time shot that cures spinal muscular atrophy in infants by injecting a new DNA to correct the faulty gene. Novartis set the price at $2.125 million but offers insurers the ability to pay $425,000 a year for five years. This price tag makes Zolgensma the most expensive drug ever approved. [2019]

Zolgensma associated with two deaths — The deaths, which resulted from acute liver failure, occurred in Russia and Kazakhstan.

The Search of Shame — everyone you follow, who’s also paid Elon $8 for a dodgy tick

those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation or adult content such as pornography

Web search hasn’t changed in 20 years. We’re building a new search engine from scratch, using the same ideas behind DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Metaphor is a language model that’s trained to predict links instead of text. You feed the model a “prompt” (similar to a GPT-3 prompt), and it tries to predict what link is most likely to come after.

It might be hard to remember that the index,the handy list of subjects at the back of a book, with the corresponding page numbers on which each subject is discussed, was invented in the early 13th century. […] “it’s invented twice at the same time […] once in Paris, and at the same time in Oxford.”

Honey bee life spans are 50% shorter today than they were 50 years ago

This sand-filled condom from Long Island was choked down in the 1750s by the likes of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, George Washington at Mount Vernon, and Benjamin Franklin as he declared it his favorite apple. Perhaps the Newtown Pippin was once a great apple whose quality has degraded over the centuries like the crumbling democracy the Founding Fathers established. Or perhaps, after decades of eating pigeon pie and squirrel meat, these wooden-toothed slave owners’ tastebuds are not to be trusted. Either way, in today’s world, aside from being excellent for apple cider production, the Newtown Pippin is a tasteless hunk of malformed donkey shit that should’ve been abolished during the reign of King George III. [Apple Rankings]

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

Positive and negative memories are stored in different parts of the brain. Additionally, positive and negative memory-formation is associated with vastly different gene expression profiles. This raises the distinct possibility of therapeutic memory manipulation.

Here we distinguished between 27 different types of love

Consumption of ultraprocessed foods containing little or no whole foods in their ingredients contributed to 57,000 premature deaths in Brazil in 2019

Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial

An informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse.

Interiew with the founder of Stability AI [audio]

How to run a small social network site for your friends [2019]

Stories are now available on Signal

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, created a VR headset that kills you if you die in the game: Oculus co-founder makes a VR headset that can literally kill you — the new VR headset uses three embedded explosive charges, planted above the forehead, that can “instantly destroy the brain of the user.” The lethal explosion is triggered via “a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency.”

Operation Popeye was a military cloud-seeding project carried out by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War in 1967–1972. The highly classified program attempted to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and causing landslides.

Submarines are valued primarily for their ability to hide. The assurance that submarines would likely survive the first missile strike in a nuclear war and thus be able to respond by launching missiles in a second strike is key to the strategy of deterrence known as mutually assured destruction. Any new technology that might render the oceans effectively transparent, making it trivial to spot lurking submarines, could thus undermine the peace of the world. For nearly a century, naval engineers have striven to develop ever-faster, ever-quieter submarines. But they have worked just as hard at advancing a wide array of radar, sonar, and other technologies designed to detect, target, and eliminate enemy submarines. […] Nuclear-powered submarines each cost roughly US $2.8 billion […] the game of submarine hide-and-seek may be approaching the point at which submarines can no longer elude detection and simply disappear. It may come as early as 2050

50 years ago, an artist convincingly exhibited a fake Iron Age civilization – with invented maps, music and artifacts

Glenn Gould - “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer”

Sticky Vicky’s magic show began with her undressing slowly to background music. She later pulled several objects from her vagina, including ping-pong balls, eggs, handkerchiefs, sausages, razor blades, and Machetes. The lights dimmed, and Vicky pulled out a lit lightbulb. She concluded her act by opening a bottle of beer with her vagina, pouring it on the stage.

An Analysis of Vulva Appearance in Video Pornography — It is evident that both websites are depicting mostly uniform vulvas—small, groomed, and tidy. Undeviating depictions could influence women’s genital ideals, pushing them to seek out extreme surgery and beauty measures in order to adhere to the standards presented. Much like clothing advertisements, which now present a range of body shapes and sizes, presenting a diverse set of images of vulvas could be beneficial to viewers.

The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis

In paintings depicting nude males, the size of the penis has gradually increased throughout the past 6 centuries, and especially after the 20th century.

US Banks Spent $1 Billion on Ransomware Payments in 2021, Treasury Says

Distinguishable Cash, Bosonic Bitcoin, and Fermionic Non-fungible Token

Kanye West can’t sell ‘White Lives Matter’ shirts because two Black men own the trademark They became the legal owners of the phrase’s trademark for its use on clothing late last month to prevent West from using it.

His new aim is clear: to unlock Twitter’s moneymaking potential once and for all […] $1 billion in annual interest payments alone

Estimates from Bot Sentinel suggest that more than 875,000 users deactivated their accounts between October 27 and November 1, while half a million more were suspended.

So when I got this tip that Elon Musk and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true. […] oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code! […] This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right? If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? […] Also, who prints code? […] two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification […] change of plans […] why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop, and if you have printed out any code, we’re going to need you to shred it. So all the Twitter engineers have to run to the paper shredder on the 10th floor, I believe, and just start shredding the code base. […] Elon Musk folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? […] Elon Musk considers himself an engineer. [NY Times]

How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

AI Helps Design Baldness Treatment That Works Better Than Testosterone or Minoxidil

British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran’s data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called “SIAM” […] The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where.

Fully enclosed in a 7m (23ft)-high steel container, the battery consists of 100 tonnes of low-quality sand, two district heating pipes and a fan.

Anonychia is the absence of fingernails or toenails

Bioluminescence is the name given to the light that living organisms emit. This light comes from a reaction between two groups of molecules — luciferins and luciferases. While the exact form of these molecules varies from animal to animal, they all work in essentially the same way through the catalyzed oxidation of luciferin by the luciferase enzyme. […] there are three broad areas of bioluminescence: defense, attack, and communication

upon reflection, the new shelton resurrects — sorry for the change of mind

Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years — Despite the discovery, the work, titled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it

Strangers smiled less to one another when they had their phones in a waiting room

Earlier this month, the European Union approved legislation aimed at regulating social media platforms: the Digital Services Act. The law will take effect in 2024 [a subset of obligations for VLOPs and VLOSEs (avery large online platforms and very large online search engines) will start to apply next year. […] The law, among other requirements, places substantial content moderation expectations on large social media firms—many based in the U.S.—which include limiting false information, hate speech, and extremism. It’s not clear how social media firms will adapt to the law, but the fines they will face for failing to comply will be massive. Firms can be fined up to six percent of their annual revenue—that’s $11 billion for Google and $7 billion for Meta. […] That means an American politician’s conspiracy-filled Facebook post will create legal liability for Meta. The company might then take it down to avoid huge fines in Europe.

Tech industry appeals the bad Texas social media law to the Supreme Court The law makes bans on hate speech — or any content moderation — impossible

As lawsuits continue piling up against social media platforms for allegedly causing harms to children, a Pennsylvania court has ruled that TikTok is not liable in one case where a 10-year-old named Nylah Anderson died after attempting to complete a “Blackout Challenge” she discovered on her “For You” page. The challenge recommends that users choke themselves until they pass out, and Nylah’s mother, Tawainna Anderson, initially claimed that TikTok’s defective algorithm was responsible for knowingly feeding the deadly video to her child. The mother hoped that Section 230 protections under the Communications Decency Act—which grant social platforms immunity for content published by third parties—would not apply in the case, but ultimately, the judge found that TikTok was immune. [Memorandum]

Mr. Musk already has about $13 billion in debt from lenders, while other investors, like the venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, chipped in about $7.1 billion in cash. Mr. Musk was personally responsible for the buyout’s remaining roughly $25 billion, and it remains unclear whether he gathered more investors to help lighten that load. […] If even cost cuts do not help, Mr. Musk may need to raise more money from outside investors within a year, Mr. Talley said. […] Mr. Bruner said the worst deals are typically struck at the peak of a market — as with Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He offered what he thought could be a worst-case scenario for the company. In that future, Mr. Musk would not be able to “get the expenses down to the level necessary to cover the debt burden.” That would “slowly erode the company’s equity, and he’s unable to find more equity investors.” The final outcome? “Slowly, Twitter implodes,” Mr. Bruner said.

Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites. he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.

There is no character in the entire canon of world literature and drama more useful for explaining markets than Wile E. Coyote. In the Roadrunner cartoons, he would run off the edge of a cliff, and continue running into midair. Only once he stopped, looked down, and realized that he was in midair, did he fall. He thus gave the market the invaluable concept of a Wile E. Coyote moment, when investors realize they’ve been running without support for a long time, and prices that should have long since been gradually coming down suddenly collapse.

As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees.: Facebook’s Little Red Book

Dreambooth, a tailor-made AI image generation tool [Start creating your unique images, How to

Fans waited four years for Frank Ocean’s second studio album, and on August 19, 2016 they got a 46-minute-long, high contrast black and white experimental visual album with an unmarked tracklist. Released exclusively as a video on Apple Music, Endless had no purchase option. It would be the next day when critics got what they were looking for but under the title Blond(e). Another album, this time sixty minutes long with eighteen tracks plus one unlisted, and widely available to stream and buy. The press would learn in the days to come that Endless marked the end of Ocean’s contractual obligations to Def Jam Records. Blond(e) was his first official release as an independent artist. […] Where Ocean imagined freedom from a future designed by UMG, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (henceforth QTBF) looks, within the realm of the poetic, to expressions of what is beyond the future designed by racial capitalism. […] If capitalism therefore consigns futures only to that which is presently knowable and if it seeks to police the imagination by limiting the possible only to that which is presently available to “common sense,” QTBF alternatively considers how Afrofuturist and Black queer media reveal otherworldly and profoundly non-linear futures that exist here, now. “Here now” is a refrain that is echoed throughout Keeling’s engagements with her capacious archive of audio, visual, and literary media, which she reads as instances of the impossible, errant, opaque, utopic and dystopic—the Black and queer. Asking what these works may offer us in the present and in our material relations to futures that remain beyond view, Keeling’s theoretical and close reading practice is animated by a commitment to “the stubborn spatiotemporalities of our senses”—something that she again credits to Lorde’s writing—so as to “intervene in the smooth and seductive assertions of capitalism’s inevitability.”

The world is running out of helium. Here’s why doctors are worried. Liquid helium, the coldest element on Earth, is needed to keep the magnets in MRI machines running. Without it, doctors would lose a critical medical tool. […] With a boiling point of minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid helium is the coldest element on Earth. Pumped inside an MRI magnet, helium lets the current travel resistance-free. […] At any point, an MRI machine contains about 2,000 liters of liquid helium, though suppliers need to replenish any helium that boils off. Mahesh estimates that an MRI machine uses 10,000 liters of liquid helium over its life span. (According to GE Healthcare, a manufacturer of the machines, that life span is 12.8 years.) […] An enormous new facility in eastern Russia was supposed to supply nearly one-third of the world’s helium, but a fire last January derailed the timeline. Although the facility could resume operations any day, the war in Ukraine has, for the most part, stopped trade between the two countries. […] The forced innovation may preview what’s to come for MRIs. […] “There’s only a finite amount of helium in the Earth’s crust”

The idea that humans could be frozen and later brought back has survived for decades. The hope is still alive and even growing today— never mind that it’s still not possible. […] Today, around 500 people are preserved in liquid nitrogen globally, the vast majority in the United States. Around 4,000 people are on waiting lists of cryonics facilities around the world

Flushing a toilet produces both aerosol droplets that mix with the air in the room and larger droplets that land on and contaminate surrounding surfaces.

Manhattan congressional candidate publishes a porn video to highlight his sex positive platform

Black men account for fewer than 2 percent of sperm donors at cryobanks. The severe shortage is forcing Black women who need donor sperm into a painful choice: Choose a donor of another race and raise a biracial child or try to buy sperm from unregulated apps and online groups.

In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, merely anticipating that a lecture would be boring led students to feel more bored

how ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think […] a study in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology found that people born after 1990 are more likely to develop cancer before they’re 50 than people born before 1970 […] “The ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.”

Personal lubricant made from cow mucus may protect against HIV

Transparent wood could soon replace plastics

While the culture has always relied heavily on recycling, that impulse seems to have gone into overdrive in recent years; dance music’s most established genres (e.g. house, techno, jungle, electro, garage, dubstep, etc.) frequently sound as though they’re stuck in a neverending time loop, with sounds from the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s being constantly regurgitated for fresh crops of ravers. […] Dance music often swaddles itself in sci-fi imagery and utopian fantasy, but in many ways, it’s become a deeply nostalgic realm, with a healthy fetish for formats (e.g. vinyl and cassettes), gear (e.g. vintage synths and drum machines) and general modes of operation that were once cutting edge, but are now frequently impractical, wildly expensive or both. […] Dance music and DJ culture are no longer subversive, and arguably haven’t been for at least a decade; they’re now quite literally everywhere

Integrating Real-World Distractions into Virtual Reality [demo video]

Apple’s Sleeping Advertising Business

Apple bought all of the advertising space in November/December special election issue of Newsweek in 1984, and devoted it all to Macintosh

Mark Zuckerberg Is Going To Kill His Company

Man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills

How social media platforms respond to misinformation

More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll.

In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated. Throughout this presentation you will be hearing different sounds, which you will often play yourself.

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.

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

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.

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

Excessive Bell-Ringing By Priest Takes Its Toll On Italian Community

Have we finally found the recipe for making rain? — Research suggests electric shocks could be key to growing raindrops

One in three Americans have high levels of toxic weed-killing chemical in their bodies

Two chemists from the University of Copenhagen have studied which chemical substances are released into liquids by popular types of soft plastic reusable bottles. “We were taken aback by the large amount of chemical substances we found in water after 24 hours in the bottles. There were hundreds of substances in the water – including substances never before found in plastic, as well as substances that are potentially harmful to health. After a dishwasher cycle, there were several thousand.” […] They detected more than 400 different substances from the bottle plastic and over 3,500 substances derived from dishwasher soap. A large portion of these are unknown substances that the researchers have yet to identify. But even of the identified chemicals, the toxicity of at least 70 % remains unknown.

how recycling pee could help to save the world

People See Political Opponents As More Stupid Than Evil

A nursing mom was shocked to discover her armpits were leaking milk. “it’s totally normal for the breast to have tissue that extends into your armpit.”

Sleeping for an extra hour every night can help you lose weight, study finds

Casual sex, also referred to as a hookup, has been associated with a range of negative emotional outcomes for women, including regret, anxiety, depression and social stigma. Gender differences were found for both sexual motivations and emotional outcomes of casual sex, with women generally having more negative emotional outcomes than men.

The somatosensory homunculus shows an exaggerated human figure that illustrates the proportion of the brain devoted to the sense of touch in each part of the body. Until recently, these homunculi have been male due to the lack of information on the female somatosensory cortex. Based on more current brain research, the authors present the first sculpted 3D female somatosensory homunculus

In many cases, human decision-makers are just as much of a black-box as the algorithms that are meant to replace them

“The left hemisphere analyses lifeless parts; the right synthesises the living Gestalt whole.” Here we go again with lateralization nonsense.

It has been said that (in some cases) court judges are more lenient on those accused of crimes if the date of the court hearing falls on the defendant’s birthday. But can things also work in the reverse direction? What if, for example, the judge’s favorite football team have just lost a match?

SpaceX just lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm

At the time of the American Revolution the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves did not yet exist… they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.”

The Messinian salinity crisis was a geological event during which the Mediterranean Sea went into a cycle of nearly complete desiccation (drying-up) from 5.96 to 5.33 Ma (million years ago). It ended with the Zanclean flood, when the Atlantic refilled the Mediterranean Sea.

Russian teenager, 16, sentenced to five years for alleged plan to target FSB building in Minecraft

The black death, which plagued Europe, West Asia and North Africa from 1347 to 1352, is the most infamous pandemic in history. Historians have estimated that up to 50 percent of Europe’s population died during the pandemic. Now, a new study demonstrates that the plague’s mortality in Europe was not as universal or as widespread as long thought.

“My original starting point with grey squirrel was taste. But it’s also great for the environment,” says Paul Wedgwood, one of Scotland’s leading chefs, whose restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile has had grey squirrel on the menu since 2008. “It’s mellow, nutty and a bit gamey. It’s just a really nice flavour, and it’s easy to match. Anyone who’s doing rabbit could just easily swap in squirrel”

British tourist reunited with false teeth he lost while vomiting in Spain 11 years ago

Kleptomaniac New Zealand parrot steals GoPro, films airborne escape

Virginia Police Used Fake Forensic Documents To Secure Confessions From Criminal Suspects

Florida sheriff halts Facebook comments because too many crimes reported

Over 500 mobile apps are now using the term ‘metaverse’ to attract new users

Rock Band to Release 1,000 30-Second Songs to Trick Spotify Royalty Payout

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market

Florida home to be sold in novel non-fungible token deal

Family’s lawsuit says DNA ancestry kit revealed daughter was conceived with wrong sperm The man who helped raise Ms Galloway along with her mother, Jeanine, was not her biological father because another man’s sperm was used during a fertility procedure.

North Korea Missile programme funded through stolen crypto, UN report says

Facebook whistleblower confronts Boston Dynamics first generation human infiltration unit prototype + Trump vs Trump [Thanks Tim!]

Trans Girl Sees Snow For The First Time

Crows trained to clean up cigarette butts on Swedish streets

People tended to reveal 26% (Study 8) to 30% (Study 7) of other people’s secrets. […] people revealed approximately 18% to 27% of secrets about someone committing emotional in!delity or planning a surprise […] people revealed secrets at almost a coin-”ip (approximately 30% to 46%) when they were about hurting someone, lying to someone, and physical self-harm [PDF]

Feminist-identified men were substantially more likely to report erectile dysfunction medication use than non-feminist men

The findings indicate that 37% of the participants contacted other persons because they dreamed about them

Researchers have used an MRI scanner to guide a magnetic “seed” through the brain to heat and destroy cancer cells. It consists of ferromagnetic thermoseeds, which are basically 2mm metal spheres, that are guided to a tumor using magnetic propulsion generated by an MRI scanner and then remotely heated to kill nearby cancer cells.

MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.

North Korea hacked him. So he took down its Internet. He found numerous known but unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems that have allowed him to singlehandedly launch “denial-of-service” attacks on the servers and routers the country’s few internet-connected networks depend on.

Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion and Facebook loses users for the first time in its history

The Plan to Put Bitcoin in Mouse DNA With a Genetically Engineered Virus BitMouseDAO has exactly two investors and almost no money, but they do have a wild idea

‘I Cloned My Dog—They Have Completely Different Personalities’

Polar bears move into abandoned Arctic weather station – photo essay

The Secrets of Space Invaders “The speeding up of the space invaders was just a function of the way the machine worked,” he explained. “The hardware had a limitation—it could only move 24 objects efficiently. Once some of the invaders got shot, the hardware did not have as many objects to move, and the remaining invaders sped up. And the designer happened to put out a sound whenever the invaders moved, so when they sped up, so did the tone.”

Trump coin […] It could be yours, for just $0. (Plus $9.99 shipping and handling.)[NY Times]

More and more vultures eat their prey butt first […] That approach exposes a vulture to even more bacteria than they’d get from regular old rotting meat. […] A recent study found that vultures have tons of microbes on their faces (528 different species, on average) but shockingly few in the gut (around 76 types). In fact, the only bacteria that survive in a vulture’s gut are the really nasty ones.

Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed

Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss! The dynamics of mistypings and misspellings […] strengthen the meaning (e.g., ‘huuuuuge’), imply sarcasm (e.g., ‘suuuuure’), show excitement (e.g., ‘yeeeessss’), or communicate danger (e.g., ‘nooooooooooooo’). We will refer to words that are amenable to such lengthening as ‘stretchable words’.

A neurologist, at age 55, developed an irrepressible urge to rhyme after a series of strokes and seizures. His pronounced focus on rhyming led him to actively participate in freestyle rap and improvisation. More: How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

Why Is Everyone Smoking Toad Venom? […] Bufo is the venom of the Sonoran desert toad, Bufo alvarius, which contains the molecule 5-MeO-DMT, one of the most potent psychotropic drugs ever discovered. Related: Dogs that have attacked toads have suffered paralysis or even death.

Militarized Dolphins Protect Almost a Quarter of the US Nuclear Stockpile […] For protection against enemy divers, dolphins will swim up to the infiltrator, bump into them and place a buoy device on their back or a limb using their mouth. The buoy then drags the outed diver to the surface for easy capture.

Facebook’s Libra is still dead — Diem to be sold off for spare parts [Diem was the rebranding of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project] The intellectual property will consist of some trademarks, a website and the open-source code for a mediocre permissioned blockchain and various helper projects.

I’m the author of the best-selling book System Design Interview-An Insider’s Guide. 11 days ago, two fraudsters hijacked the “Buy Now” button on Amazon, fulfilling all orders with a different book.

How to Download Everything Amazon Knows About You (It’s a Lot)

Canadian Restaurant Ordered to Close After Accepting Dog Photos Instead of Vaccine Proof

Legislator dies using medical suicide law he helped pass

Cannabinoid receptors in the brain appear to play a key role in the euphoric experience known as the “runner’s high”

A machine learning model has now been taught to predict a person’s years of life simply by looking at their retina, which is the tissue at the back of the eye.

YouTuber Accused of Crashing a Plane for Views. Now the Feds Are Investigating

Investors are paying millions for virtual land in the metaverse — Yorio tells CNBC her company sold 100 virtual private islands last year for $15,000 each. “Today, they’re selling for about $300,000 each, which is coincidentally the same as the average home price in America,” she said.

The Federal Reserve took a key step in weighing the creation of its own digital currency

A leading French aquarium vendor has decided to stop selling round fish bowls because they drive fish mad and kill them quickly.

The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it.

Mexico’s Little-Known Attempt to Save Freud From the Nazis

AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks

Scammers put fake QR codes on parking meters to intercept parkers’ payments

I found that those who called themselves feminists reported having more recently masturbated than non-feminist women. In addition, I found that in partnered sexual encounters, feminists were more likely to participate in anal play, as well as engage in more kissing, cuddling, and massage than non-feminists. I also found that feminist women were more likely to receive oral sex than non-feminists.

Elvira actress Cassandra Peterson: ‘Losing 11,000 horny old men as followers after coming out’ is no big deal

Walmart Plots ‘Super Intense’ Crypto, Metaverse Push, Filing Suggests

Customers are more likely to tip when paying by cash rather than by credit

New theory proposes ‘forgetting’ is actually a form of learning

Rat who detected land mines in Cambodia dies in retirement

The Torso Murderer: Jack the Ripper Wasn’t the Only Serial Killer Stalking London in 1888

A Personal Catalogue of the World’s Most Storied Bookstores

Multi-rider vehicle retention apparel (In which the passenger attaches him/herself to the front-rider with Velcro)

Marlon Bundo, the famous Pence family bunny who made history, dies

Tarrare was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits […] he would swallow corks, stones, live animals […] he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing.

Why was there less lightning during COVID lockdowns? The decrease coincided with a drop in humans emitting aerosols.

Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as Male Contraception

Female dolphins have a fully functional clitoris

Animals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

USC team shows how memories are stored in the brain, with potential impact on conditions like PTSD. Contrary to expectations, the study in larval zebrafish shows synapses in one part of the brain are eliminated and new ones are created in a different region when memories are formed. These major structural changes could account for memory formation.

Sony is working on a 3D Scanner that will allow users to put real-world items into video games

There were times [Trump] would come down the next morning and say, “Well, Sean thinks we should do this,” or, “Judge Jeanine thinks we should do this,” referring to Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, both of whom host prime-time Fox News shows.

Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith were both carriers of the recessive methemoglobinemia (met-H) gene. As a result, four of their seven children exhibited blue skin

Brussels Airlines makes 3,000 unnecessary flights to maintain airport slots

Uber rider stuck on I-95 hit with $600 bill

Fintech Is a Scam — A Listicle in Eight Parts

FBI arrests suspect in bizarre, years-long manuscript theft scheme

Rather than being highly selective, people appear to have a tendency to push relationships forward, even when things are not going well.

‘90 Day Fiancé’ star retires from selling farts after heart attack scare — Matto was rushed to a hospital with chest pains she feared were symptoms of a heart attack. After undergoing a battery of tests, including blood work and an EKG, Matto was told that her pain was the result of her steady diet of gas-inducing beans and eggs.

Which way does water flow in the Bosphorus? It flows both ways. Simultaneously.

The weather is expected to be so cold for Saturday’s National Hockey League’s outdoor Winter Classic that the ice will have to be heated

No convincing scientific evidence that hangover cures work

Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories

Logic’s song ‘1-800-273-8255′ may have led to hundreds fewer suicides, study finds

SpaceX will take humans to Mars within 10 years, Elon Musk predicts Previously: Asked when he sees this happening, Musk pauses for a long moment, as if calculating all the variables—federal regulations and production schedules, test-flight targets and bathroom requirements. “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years,” he finally says.

the military has four extra telephone buttons that they don’t tell us about [..] AUTOVON phones thus feature a full 4×4 keypad, with the rightmost column typically in red and used to prefix dialed calls with a precedence level. […] calls were placed at “routine” priority, but “priority,” “immediate,” “flash,” and “flash override” were successively higher precedence levels reserved for successively more important levels of military command and control.

When thieves stole three tonnes of oysters from French shellfish farmer Christophe Guinot, he came up with a solution: planting secret notes inside oyster shells to help police track down the thieves. ‘You’ve won your weight in oysters!’

The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they are relative lightweights—they lack a gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty highly, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. But to find the real champs, you have to think smaller. You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Get a Hamster Drunk

After three hours of tests and more than 100 flushes, the team detected droplets smaller than 3 mm in size at a height of 1.5 m above a toilet or urinal (face height for many people) and found that the droplets persisted at that height for more than 20 seconds after the flush. The 10 quirkiest stories from the world of physics in 2021

99 Good News Stories from 2021

Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive

Two dozen cities and states prohibit use of face recognition. But it’s on phones and is increasingly used in airports and in banks.

US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say — Within weeks, Walter Reed researchers expect to announce that human trials show success against Omicron—and even future strains

Oil-Sniffing Dogs Are Helping Humans Spot Spills

Watching A Lecture Twice At Double Speed Can Benefit Learning Better Than Watching It Once At Normal Speed

After 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. “We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise” in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three “Matrix” films; now he is making things for the metaverse.

Ames Window illusion

Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops […] His rockets, built from scratch on an autodidact’s mold-breaking vision, have saved taxpayers billions […] “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years.” Related: Crypto Casinos

Rat sightings increased by 40% in the first 11 months of 2021 compared to 2019, apparently spurred by cuts to trash collection and street-cleaning services. New York has a huge rat problem. These vigilantes with dogs think they can fix it.

Besides its innovative design and noxious chemicals, the rat trap also has a secret weapon: Oreo cookies. The scent of the cookies, crumbled and placed in the top compartment of the two-part trap, along with sunflower seeds, acts as a lure. For a week or so, rodents will be free to crawl through the device’s holes and snack as much as they want. Once the rats become regulars and “get comfortable,” Mr. Webster said, the device will be turned on, and a platform will drop them into the lower part of the contraption, which serves as a catch basin not unlike a dunking tank at a carnival booth. Mr. Webster emptied four jugs of a mysterious blue “proprietary” formula into the bottom part of the machine. He said the formula was mostly alcohol and had vapors that “knock the rat unconscious.” He topped the solution off with sunflower oil to “eliminate odor” from decomposition. Not everyone is a fan of these methods, though. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, prefers rodent control that focuses on garbage cleanup and sealing entry points, “not finding new ways to torment and kill small animals who are simply trying to live their lives, just like any other New Yorker,” the organization said in a statement. [NY Times]

researchers found out that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as high as 40%

Construction creates an estimated third of the world’s overall waste, and at least 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Compare that to the 2-3% caused by aviation

New Eye Drops Offer an Alternative to Reading Glasses

A security researcher says an internet gateway used by hundreds of hotels to offer and manage their guest Wi-Fi networks has vulnerabilities that could put the personal information of their guests at risk.

News that the world’s first commercial octopus farm is closer to becoming reality has been met with dismay by scientists and conservationists. They argue such intelligent “sentient” creatures - considered able to feel pain and emotions - should never be commercially reared for food.

How Shein (formerly SheInside) beat Amazon at its own game — and reinvented fast fashion

Amazon-owned Twitch bans Amazon account after breast revealed on air

Stealth bomber on Google Map

The World Is So Desperate for Manure Even Human Waste Is a Hot Commodity

A new approach for the rapid destruction of human waste using smouldering combustion is presented. Recently, self-sustaining smouldering combustion was shown to destroy the organic component of simulated human solid waste and dog faeces resulting in the sanitization of all pathogens using a batch process.

Researchers find an early and treatable indicator of blood clotting in COVID-19 patients

Japanese scientists develop glowing masks to detect coronavirus

High court juries can detect when someone is lying even when they’re wearing a face mask. Not only do face masks not hinder jurors’ ability to decide if a witness is reliable, they make it easier to discern lies from truth.

Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by people — and in particular babies — called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to make men more docile and women more aggressive

More treatment but no less depression: The treatment-prevalence paradox

Oxygen when sleeping eases depression for 1 in 3 patients in small Israeli study Around half received regular air, which contains 21 percent oxygen, while the others received air with 35% oxygen content.

Within the scientific research community, memory information in the brain is commonly believed to be stored in the synapse - a hypothesis famously attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb. However, there is a growing minority who postulate that memory is stored inside the neuron at the molecular (RNA or DNA) level - an alternative postulation known as the cell-intrinsic hypothesis, coined by psychologist Randy Gallistel. […] After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved. [PDF]

among nonhuman primates the most compelling evidence for something approaching human-like visual self-recognition is seen only in great apes

US government wants to know why Tesla owners can play videogames while driving now

Toyota is charging drivers for the convenience of using their key fobs to remotely start their cars. Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality.

Former FedEx driver charged for dumping thousands of dollars worth of packages into Alabama ravine

People are regretting spending $800 on a Chanel advent calendar featuring stickers and a dust bag

“Another course – a citrus foam – was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth.” We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever, Chef responds with images of horses

Sex Ratios at Birth Linked to Pollutants […] data on 150 million people in the US over eight years, and data on 9 million Swedish people over 30 years […] airborne and waterborne pollutants such as aluminum, chromium, and mercury were associated with a higher proportion of male babies born

Proximity to green space may help with PMS, study finds

This week, New York-based company Republic Realm announced it had spent a record-breaking $4.3 million on digital land through The Sandbox, one of several “virtual world” websites where people can socialise, play games and even attend concerts. That came hot on the heels of a $2.4-million land purchase in late November on a rival platform, Decentraland, by Canadian crypto company Tokens.com. And days before that, Barbados announced plans to open a “metaverse embassy” in Decentraland. […] land worth more than $100 million has sold in the past week across the four largest metaverse sites, The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space.

Small Group of Insiders Is Reaping Most of the Gains on NFTs, Study Shows

Crypto is basically an anything goes markets like we saw in the 1920s before the Securities Act of 1933 cleaned up the mess of illegal practices. Exchanges can wash trade, which means being the buyer and seller of buy sides of a trade to create the illusion of market activity. Some reports put wash trading at an unprecedented 70% of all trading volume. Exchanges can front-run their own customers by putting their own trades in before client execution and trade on their advance knowledge of their customer order flow. Exchanges can offer 100x leverage on derivatives which allows them to liquidate their customers’ funds if the price (which the exchange sets) of the underlying moves by even 1% out of range. Exchanges can arbitrarily halt trading or cancel trades if any market conditions aren’t to their liking and there’s no obligation on them to report any accurate price information or give any kind of best execution. If you work at the exchange, or are friends with someone there, you have foreknowledge about every listing and you can insider trade with no consequences. They even brag about trading against their customers openly.

Internet 3.0 Sites are now built on the blockchain […] Your avatar is your digital wallet—you are anonymous, no company owns your data, you own everything in your wallet. […] The internet is owned by the users who use each app. […] Imagine that every time you used Facebook you were given some shares in Meta (aka Facebook).

Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm Recorded Future has counted about 50 cryptocurrency exchanges in Moscow City, a financial district in the capital, that in its assessment are engaged in illicit activity. […] Laundering the cryptocurrency through exchanges is the final step, and also the most vulnerable, because criminals must exit the anonymous online world to appear at a physical location, where they trade Bitcoin for cash or deposit it in a bank. The exchange offices are “the end of the Bitcoin and ransomware rainbow,” said Gurvais Grigg, a former F.B.I. agent who is a researcher with Chainalysis, the cryptocurrency tracking company. The computer codes in virtual currencies allow transactions to be tracked from one user to another, even if the owners’ identities are anonymous, until the cryptocurrency reaches an exchange. There, in theory, records should link the cryptocurrency with a real person or company. It is at this point, cybersecurity experts say, that criminals should be identified and apprehended. But the Russian government has allowed the exchanges to flourish, saying that it only investigates cybercrime if Russian laws are violated.

Eurostar tests facial recognition system on London train station

Your next smartphone might have a camera that’s always watching This week, chipmaker Qualcomm revealed its latest Snapdragon processor, which will power many of the high-end Android smartphones you’ll see in stores in 2022, including models from Motorola, Sony, OnePlus. And a new feature built into that chip could allow smartphone makers to keep those front-facing cameras on all the time in a sort of low-power mode, waiting and watching for a face to appear in front of it. Qualcomm insists the move is meant to make phones not just more convenient, but more secure.

Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. […] Montaruli called for “a reset,” telling BOO sellers to delete the pages and groups and start over again. One slide suggested alternatives for 14 popular BOO uses, including switching terms like ADHD to “trouble concentrating,” and “prevents heart attack” to “maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.” Related: When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z

Why do people eat the same breakfast every day?

Are 14 people really looking at that product?

The term “bus factor” refers to the number of project maintainers who, if hit by a bus and incapacitated, would cause that project to stall

How A NYTimes Reporter Collects Royalties From Hundreds of Musicians

Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth

All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic

Scientists Made an Eco-Friendly Plastic Using DNA From Salmon Sperm

we are many years away from storing data on DNA. Ignoring the technical complexities, DNA data storage is simply too expensive — a few megabytes would cost thousands of dollars

Austria: Doctor fined for amputating wrong leg of patient

What does your favourite color say about your personality? Nothing.

Kübler-Ross’s fundamental premise was that the dying individual goes through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. […] Kübler-Ross extended application of the five stages to the experience of (anticipatorily) bereaved persons. […] The five stages model of grief has been widely accepted by the general public, taught in educational institutions and used in clinical practice. […] Stage theories have a certain seductive appeal – they bring a sense of conceptual order to a complex process and offer the emotional promised land of “recovery” and “closure.” However, they are incapable of capturing the complexity, diversity and idiosyncratic quality of the grieving experience.

hugs that lasted less than one second were the least pleasurable; the ones lasting between five to 10 seconds, the most. the findings surprised the authors of the study

Can Afghanistan’s underground “sneakernet” survive the Taliban? A once-thriving network of merchants selling digital content to people without internet connections is struggling under Taliban rule.

Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users. The Tor Project has removed hundreds of KAX17 servers in October and November 2021.

Making Hybrid Images

Reef Global Inc. operates “ghost kitchens” from trailers in parking lots. So it’s a food-service company basically. It has raised over $1.5 billion, some of it from SoftBank. That would buy a lot of trailers, but naturally Reef used the money to buy parking lots […] Reef quickly used much of the $1.2 billion it raised to buy two giant companies that manage and operate parking lots, becoming what it says is the largest parking-lot network in North America. […] except they also somehow bought the wrong parking lots […] Reef found it wasn’t able to put trailers on many of its lots, as some had enclosed garages, where propane tanks and utility hookups aren’t allowed. Others were owned by landlords who didn’t want food trucks, former employees said. As a result, Reef rents lots from other parking owners for more than 70% of its kitchens. […] For a couple of years SoftBank really created an environment where startups had to spend money faster than they could think, and we are still enjoying the fallout.

Canada taps into strategic reserves to deal with massive shortage of maple syrup

Self-reported hand preference for masturbation was examined in 104 left-handed and 103 right-handed women, and 100 left-handed and 99 right-handed men […] For kissing the preferred cheek of an emotionally close person from the viewer’s perspective, left-handers showed a left-cheek preference, and right-handers a weaker right-cheek preference.

This research demonstrates that the physical properties of shopping carts influence purchasing and spending

Real-time alerting system for COVID-19 and other stress events using wearable data […] we built a real-time smartwatch-based alerting system that detects aberrant physiological and activity signals (heart rates and steps) associated with the onset of early infection […] this system generated alerts for pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection in 67 (80%) of the infected individuals.

The Science of Mind Reading — Cognitive psychologists armed with an fMRI machine can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts; they can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a computer system can edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. One research group has used similar technology to accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects.

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal’s entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on “eating” even without the rest of the animal’s body. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors?

A variety of insects can produce honey – bumblebees, stingless bees, even honey wasps – but only honey bees (Apis species) produce enough to stock grocery store shelves. This ability didn’t happen overnight; it was millions of years in the making.

Team Builds First Living Robots That Can Reproduce — AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine

Google is reportedly delisting the controversial U.S. e-commerce platform Wish from its search results in France Google and Apple both removed the Wish app from their French app stores, and rival search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing and France’s Qwant delisted the website from their results, before Google also took the search-engine step. […] ContextLogic/Wish had the dubious distinction of having last year’s worst U.S. trading debut, with its stock falling 16% in a December IPO. That took it down to a shade over $20 a share, but it was only the beginning of an ongoing slide that broke through the $4 barrier last week.

Who Owns a Recipe? U.S. copyright law protects all kinds of creative material, but recipe creators are mostly powerless in an age and a business that are all about sharing.

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere

How to use a horse’s tail to catch fish

Vagina NFTs

The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild. […] They included young people with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

why we won’t know for weeks how dangerous Omicron is

“What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?”, a Trump admin official reportedly asked. — Sculpture of Donald Trump’s face carved into Mount Rushmore has been pictured at his office in Mar-a-Lago

New plastic made from DNA is biodegradable and easy to recycle

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin” Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators

In the early 2010s, the leading music-intelligence company was the Echo Nest, which Spotify acquired in 2014. Founded in the MIT Media Lab in 2005, the Echo Nest developed algorithms that could measure recorded music using a set of parameters similar to Serrà’s, including ones with clunky names like acousticness, danceability, instrumentalness, and speechiness. To round out their models, the algorithms could also scour the internet for and semantically analyze anything written about a given piece of music. The goal was to design a complete fingerprint of a song: to reduce music to data to better guide consumers to songs they would enjoy. By the time Spotify bought the Echo Nest, it claimed to have analyzed more than 35 million songs, using a trillion data points. […] The result is that users keep encountering similar content because the algorithms keep recommending it to us.

“Ghost particles” detected in the Large Hadron Collider for first time

The Pigeon Puzzle: How Do They Figure Out Their Impossibly Long Routes Home?

Back when it was normal to advertise cocaine gadgets in magazines, 1970-1980

Changes in Penile-Vaginal Intercourse Frequency and Sexual Repertoire from 2009 to 2018 Compared to adult participants in the 2009 NSSHB, adults in the 2018 NSSHB were significantly more likely to report no PVI in the prior year (28% in 2018 vs. 24% in 2009). A similar difference in proportions reporting no PVI in the prior year was observed among 14–17-year-old adolescents (89% in 2018 vs. 79% in 2009). Additionally, for both adolescents and adults, we observed decreases in all modes of partnered sex queried and, for adolescents, decreases in solo masturbation.

Big data study suggests the human brain navigates by taking the “pointiest path” rather than the shortest path

Sometimes we want vicious friends: Friend preferences are target-specific

People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

Narcissism was surprisingly the strongest predictor, and intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology

Belief in astrology is on the rise, although the reasons behind this are unclear. We tested whether individual personality traits could predict such epistemically unfounded beliefs. Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer

“The NFT Bay” — it appears that the 10GB of “data” is nothing of value and the Torrent really is effectively empty

Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia. — Keyboards weren’t designed for Khmer. So Cambodians have just decided to ignore them

Your Fingerprint Can Be Hacked For $5

Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare

In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband’s murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.

In August 2014, a padded FedEx envelope arrived at the Calgary International Airport. It had been shipped from an address in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and on the customs form it had been labelled “Book.” As it was being sorted, a customs agent saw the package move. Inside the envelope was a slim cardboard box with holes along its sides. Inside that box were two small fabric pouches with duct-taped edges. An agent carefully opened the pouches into a plastic mail-carrying bin. Golf ball–size baby turtles emerged.

Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

A man high on drugs swallowed a thermometer. Doctors didn’t remove it, because they thought he was talking nonsense. It remained lodged in him for 5 years. Luckily he had the sense to pour the mercury out before swallowing it

“The NFT Bay” Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of ‘Pirated’ NFTs

NFTs are only valuable as tools for money laundering, tax evasion, and greater fool investment fraud.

We argue that rather than being a wholly random event, birthdays are sometimes selected by parents.

Drawing a hopscotch board on a sidewalk or street in Anoka, Minneapolis is now against the law

The central symptom in the case history is the delusion that the patient has already lived through this life once.

Where people around the world find meaning in life

Pure 100% fruit juices –- A review of the evidence of their effect on risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity

The FDA has asked a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

In recent years, Amazon.com Inc has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers

Tiny hidden spy cameras concealed in sensitive locations including hotels and bathrooms are becoming a significant threat worldwide. These hidden cameras are easily purchasable and are extremely difficult to find with the naked eye due to their small form factor. The state-of-the-art solutions that aim to detect these cameras are limited as they require specialized equipment and yield low detection rates. To overcome these limitations, we present LAPD, a novel hidden camera detection and localization system that leverages the time-of-flight (ToF) sensor on commodity smartphones.

Ghost guns — untraceable firearms without serial numbers, assembled from components bought online — are increasingly becoming the lethal weapon of easy access for those legally barred from buying or owning guns around the country. […] Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. […] Ghost guns, and the niche industry that produces them, have flourished because of a loophole in federal regulation: The parts used to build “privately made firearms” are classified as components, not actual guns, which means that online buyers are not required to undergo background checks or register the weapons. [NY Times]

A. Dneprov: “The Game” (originally published in 1961)

Lawsuit over Subway tuna now says chicken, pork, cattle DNA were detected

The great organic food fraud

The US Treasury Is Buying Private App Data to Target and Investigate People

“cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield

Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer Towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears

Silk modified to reflect sunlight keeps skin 12.5°C cooler than cotton. It is the first fabric to be developed that stays colder than the surrounding air when in sunlight.

Are scented candles harmful to your health? […] while scented candles do produce various vapors and particles that can be unsafe to inhale at high doses, research suggests that with typical use, the dose you get is far below what is considered harmful to your health. […] “under normal conditions of use, scented candles do not pose known health risks to the consumer.” (It’s important to note that while this study’s conclusion is consistent with others, few studies have looked into the health effects from burning scented candles in general. And most, including this one, were conducted by researchers affiliated with the candle industry. But independent researchers have said that the findings are solid.) [NY Times]

Like many men of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Beethoven suffered from a plethora of other illnesses and ailments. […] chronic abdominal pain and diarrhea that might have been due to an inflammatory bowel disorder, depression, alcohol abuse, respiratory problems, joint pain, eye inflammation, and cirrhosis of the liver. This last problem, given his prodigious drinking, may have been the final domino that toppled him into the grave. Bedridden for months, he died in 1827, most likely from liver and kidney failure, peritonitis, abdominal ascites, and encephalopathy. An autopsy revealed severe cirrhosis and dilatation of the auditory and other related nerves in the ear. […] A young musician named Ferdinand Hiller snipped off a lock of hair from the great composer’s head as a keepsake — a common custom at the time. The lock stayed within the Hiller family for nearly a century before somehow making its way to the tiny fishing village of Gilleleje, in Nazi-controlled Denmark and into the hands of the local physician there, Kay Fremming. The doctor helped save the lives of hundreds of Jews escaping Denmark and the Nazis for Sweden, which was about 10 miles across the Øresund Strait, the narrow channel separating the two nations. The theory is that one of these Jewish refugees, perhaps a relative of Ferdinand Hiller, either gave Dr. Fremming the lock of Beethoven’s hair or used it as a payment of some kind. At any rate, the doctor bequeathed the lock, consisting of 582 strands, to his daughter, who subsequently put it up for auction in 1994. It was purchased by an Arizona urologist named Alfredo Guevera for about $7,000. Guevera kept 160 strands. The remaining 422 strands were donated to the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University in California. […] They put the brown, gray and white strands through a number of imaging, DNA, chemical, forensic and toxicology tests. There was no trace of morphine, mercury or arsenic but there was an abnormally elevated lead level, potentially indicating chronic lead poisoning, which could have caused Beethoven’s deafness, even though it does not explain his multiple other disorders. Further studies suggest he probably drank from a goblet containing lead. It should also be noted that wine of that era often contained lead as a sweetener. [PBS]

The moon’s top layer alone has enough oxygen to sustain 8 billion people for 100,000 years

hackers are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future. The threat comes from quantum computers. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.

A man has been rescued after being trapped inside the walls of a theatre in Syracuse, New York state.

Man donated his body to science; company sold $500 tickets to his dissection

The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones” where residents breathe carcinogens. ProPublica reveals where these places are in a first-of-its-kind map and data analysis.

Cardi B may have been onto something when she famously proclaimed that “a hoe never gets cold” — A new study published in the British Journal of Social Psychology has confirmed why scantily clad women are less likely to catch a chill than their covered-up counterparts.

California condors almost went extinct. Now, scientists say, they can reproduce without males.

How Pinterest utterly ruined photo search on the internet

The Lenna image may be relatively unknown in pop culture today, but in the engineering world, it remains an icon.

Timeline of the human condition

ant-mimicking spiders

sex offender opened door nude, invited trick-or-treaters inside

Sexual Practices and Satisfaction of Lesbian and Heterosexual Women In their last sexual encounter, lesbian women were more likely to say “I love you,” have sex longer than 30 min, and engage in gentle kissing

“Drinking To Cope” Doesn’t Work, Even When We Believe That It Does

Religion and spirituality are not important psychosocial factors influencing body weight

In a somewhat bizarre set of survey data from 2015, 33 percent of Millennials identified as Gen X, and 8 percent said that they were Boomers. […] Worse, consultants and marketing experts take advantage of the appetite for these sorts of narratives by framing generations monolithically and presenting themselves to clients as authorities on entire segments of the population. […] The dividing lines between generations are a figment of our collective imagination.

A fake gravesite in a real cemetery has made appearances in several films and TV shows over the past 30 years

The Real-Life Whale That Gave Moby Dick His Name

A Literary History of Witches

The COSO male birth control device uses an ultrasound “testicle bath” to temporary stop sperm mobility. The device only needs to be used every few months to keep the sperm inert and prevent eggs from being fertilized during sex.

new study demonstrates how the colors of the giant panda’s fur help it to blend into the background very effectively

Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens

Scientists discover new phase of water, known as “superionic ice,” inside planets

The Only Instrumental Record Ever Banned by US Radio

An NFT Just Sold for $532 Million, making it the biggest sale on record. The sale, however, was illegitimate as the owner bought it for themselves.

Like π and other transcendental numbers, e has an infinite decimal representation — its digits go on forever without any discernible pattern.

Two in five Americans say ghosts exist — and one in five say they’ve encountered one

After targeting verticals like hotels and apartment complexes, Amazon is now rolling out new solutions for healthcare providers and senior living centers

The way finance works now is that things are valuable not based on their cash flows but on their proximity to Elon Musk […] Hertz Global Holdings Inc., barely four months out of bankruptcy, placed an order for 100,000 Teslas in the first step of an ambitious plan to electrify its rental-car fleet.

“A Moron in a Hurry” is a formalized legal term used in the UK and Canada and the US. The phrase is typically used in cases of copyright infringement – examining the question of whether a moron in a hurry would spot the difference (or similarity) of two products or services.

Studies suggest that it takes at least a decade to achieve real expertise. MasterClass promises transformation in a few hours.

87% of excess lung cancer risk eliminated if smokers quit before age 45 […] 78% if they quit between ages 45 and 54 […] excess risk of cancer death was erased if they quit by age 35 […] Smoking raises the risk of numerous cancers, Thomson noted — including colon, kidney, bladder, stomach and pancreatic cancer. But lung cancer is the top cancer killer among smokers.

Inside the room it’s so silent that the background noise measured is actually negative decibels

We describe a population of individuals who chose to undergo medical and/or surgical transition and then detransitioned by discontinuing medications, having surgery to reverse the effects of transition, or both [PDF]

Egyptian security forces detains Ai-Da, the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist, in fear she is part of spying plot

Officials Use Contraceptives to Control Pablo Escobar’s Hippos

Pablo Escobar’s 80 hippos are the first non-human creatures to be legally considered people by a U.S. court

Steak knife made from hardened wood is 3 times sharper than steel

How much sex do porn stars want to have off-set?

Rock Paper Scissors Deluxe Edition costs $29, includes actual rock, paper and scissors

Fraudsters Deepfaked Company Director’s Voice In $35 Million Bank Heist

Startup is creating personalized deepfakes for corporations — Major companies in India are using Rephrase.ai to create avatars of celebrities and executives, and commercial use is coming soon.

Japanese police arrested a 43-year-old man for using artificial intelligence to effectively unblur pixelated porn videos. Penises and vaginas are pixelated in Japanese porn because an obscenity law forbids the explicit depictions of genitalia.

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week [“When people can not change things, they change the words” –Jean Jaurès]

Donald Trump Does a SPAC Deal — I think that a more realistic valuation method here is not to worry about cash flows at all — as Trump SPAC clearly does not — and treat the stock simply as a token of public interest in Donald Trump.

A special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) is a company with no commercial operations that is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring or merging with an existing company. Also known as “blank check companies,” SPACs have been around for decades, but their popularity has soared in recent years.

Poaching drove the evolution of tusk-free elephants — Researchers have identified genetic factors that stop tusk development

There are some scattered laboratory studies that suggest being cold might weaken the immune system, making us more vulnerable to those viruses. A 2017 study found that immune cells that are chilled are less effective at fighting off viruses, at least in a lab dish […] In a 2005 study by other researchers, college students whose feet were soaked in cold water for 20 minutes a day were more likely to get sick than those not exposed to the cold. [NY Times] More: Contrary to popular belief, cold weather cannot make you sick, at least not directly.

Merkins are wigs for the pubic area

Facial recognition cameras installed in UK school canteens

Hooters under fire over new ‘crotch string’ uniform shorts

According to economist George Taylor’s hemline index theory, the length of women’s skirts and dresses can be indicative of the direction of financial markets. Meaning, hemlines rise in times of economic prosperity and elongate when the economy slows.

Is the Hemline Index Actually Real?

Emotion in relation to ham varied. FaceReader was used to determine the facial expression.

Do elites capture foreign aid? This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers.

Piece by piece, the mythology around ridesharing is falling apart. Uber and Lyft promised ubiquitous self-driving cars by as soon as this year. They promised an end to private car ownership. They promised to reduce congestion in the largest cities. They promised consistently affordable rides. They promised to boost public transit use. They promised profitable business models. They promised a surfeit of well-paying jobs. Heck, they even promised flying cars. Well, none of that has gone as promised. […] Uber and Lyft envisioned a future where software algorithms would push each car to host three or more passengers, easing traffic and providing a complement to public transit options. Instead, […] The duration of traffic jams increased by nearly 5 percent in urban areas since Uber and Lyft moved in. […] The efficiencies of ride hailing were supposed to all but end car ownership — instead vehicle sales are on the rise again this year, after a down year in 2020. [NY Times]

When companies start secret projects it’s common that everyone involved has to sign an NDA [Non-disclosure agreement]. The development of the original iPhone was so secret that people had to sign an NDA in order to sign the iPhone’s NDA

People Are Taking Out Loans Against Their NFTs—And Defaulting

Disguises and the Origins of Clothing

Sexual vocalization was most frequent during penetration itself compared with other forms of sexual activities, which supports its signaling function. The most frequently reported sexual vocalizations were moaning/groaning, followed by screams and instructional commands, squeals, and words. About 38% of females reported that they pretended vocalization.

Congenitally blind participants facially imitate smiles heard in speech, despite having never seen a facial expression

Research finds that creative ideas are generated by two cognitive pathways: insight and persistence […] people’s beliefs about creativity undervalue persistence and overvalue insight

The proliferation of homemade “ghost guns” has skyrocketed in Los Angeles. […] The weapons typically are made of polymer parts created with 3D printing technology and can be assembled using kits at home. They often are relatively inexpensive. Because they are not made by licensed manufacturers, they lack serial numbers, making them impossible to track.

Most wildfires are started by humans – downed powerlines, an unattended campfire, a flat tire that sends sparks into dry brush. But arson – the criminal act of deliberately setting fire to property – isn’t all that common. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, arson was found to be the cause of about 9% of the 3,086 fires Cal Fire responded to, and responsible for 2% of all acres burned that year.

How to Fire Frank Lloyd Wright — “1½ feet is not enough space between the tub and the wall. I wonder how many bathrooms Mr. Wright has cleaned.”

Andrew Clemens (1857 – 1894) was a sand artist […] He would collect naturally colored grains of sand […] Clemens separated the sand grains into piles, by color, and used them to form the basis for his art. [more]

It’s not the first time drones rained down from the skies [Thanks Tim]

Police find accused prosthetic leg thief with leg strapped to head

Demi Lovato thinks the term ‘aliens’ is ‘derogatory’ to extraterrestrials

Psychedelic use associated with lower odds of heart disease and diabetes, study finds [full study]

studies have demonstrated a decrease in brain pH (meaning the conditions are more acidic) in neuropsychiatric disorders

Do the easy boring job regularly, instead of the hard scary job in a panic

Already own a trained arabian hunting falcon? Collateralize it. Secure a loan financing another falcon. That falcon? Collateralize it too. They can be trained to disarm an active shooter.

It’s our cashier, Sheila’s, birthday today!

Artist who squirts paint with his eyes destroys canvases to create NFTs

We trained two monkeys to play the Pac-Man

They fed forty ducks a diet of commercial duck mash salted with powdered depleted uranium. None of the ducks died of it, or got sick, or even lost weight. Moreover, the researchers reported, the ducks “were in fair to excellent flesh” when slaughtered.

Forty-one percent of children claimed that bacon came from a plant

Norway to hit 100 per cent electric vehicle sales early next year

Johns Hopkins researchers find thousands of unknown chemicals in electronic cigarettes

Italian sailors knew of America 150 years before Christopher Columbus, new analysis of ancient documents suggests

Compared to vegans, meat consumers experienced both lower depression and anxiety

How to Grow Your Bangs Out So Much You Escape the Surveillance State [Thanks Tim]

Porn star Belle Delphine makes $1.2 million in a month with OnlyFans. Delphine is perhaps best known for her “gamer girl bathwater” stunt where she sold $30 jars of her own used bathwater

Old NY mobsters fear handing over the reins to the new generation of mafiosi because they’re softer and dumber —and are too obsessed with their cellphones

US man sues ‘Psychic Love Specialist’ for fraud, seeks US$25,000 in damages. He paid her US$5,100 to remove spell by witch hired by ex-girlfriend.

Stare at a blank wall in any room, and you are unlikely to learn much more than the paint color. But a new technology can inconspicuously scan the same surface for shadows and reflections imperceptible to the human eye, then analyze them to determine details, including how many people are in the room—and what they are doing.

Because single-use plastics are largely derived from petroleum, by 2050 plastics might account for 20% of the world’s annual oil consumption. Reducing our dependence on plastics, and finding ways to reuse the plastic that’s already out in the world, could greatly reduce emissions. Right now, only about 15% of all plastics worldwide are collected for recycling each year.

We’ve long assumed that one of the fundamental functions of the brain is its ability to store memories, thus allowing animals, including humans, to alter behaviour in light of past experience. If the seat of all memory was truly the brain, then to ensure long-term stability of stored information, the brain cells and their circuits would need to remain stable, like the books on your bookshelf. If someone started to tear pages out from these books, not only would the books be seriously damaged but you would have lost forever these books’ contents. Yet, animals such as the planaria that exhibit a remarkable capacity to quickly regrow new body parts, including their brains, confront us with a fascinating question: how can fixed memories persist when bodies and even brains do not? […] Some biologists have succeeded in chopping up one planarian into 279 pieces. Each tiny piece eventually formed a miniature complete worm, which grew in time to its normal size of up to ¾ inches, depending on the species and the availability of food.

Birds Have a Mysterious ‘Quantum Sense’. Scientists Have Now Seen It in Action

Hundreds of three-eyed ‘dinosaur shrimp’ emerge after Arizona monsoon — Their eggs can stay dormant for decades, waiting for water

Disney cancels Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp reboot

A week in Lagos — The Nigerian megacity is a massive experiment – unregulated and wild, with endless traffic jams, waterfront slums and an impressively resilient population.

Offshore havens and hidden riches of world leaders and billionaires exposed in unprecedented leak [More]

The documents reveal a company [Facebook] worried that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, with its own research showing that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives. […] What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. [NY Times]

i have stolen over 4 terabytes of NFTs via the little known hacker technique known as “right click -> save as”. my collection has a net estimated value of over 8 trillion dollars

A Danish Museum Lent an Artist $84,000 to Reproduce an Old Work About Labor. Instead, He Pocketed It and Called It Conceptual Art [Thanks Tim!]

Woman charged for crying during surgery […] an $11 charge for “Brief Emotion” and a billing code of CPT Code 96127. […] “CPT Code 96127: How to Increase Revenue with This NEW Behavioral or Emotional Assessment” CPT Code 96127 “is a code that may be used to report brief behavioral or emotional assessments for reimbursement” and “may be billed four times for each patient per visit, utilizing four different instruments or assessments. So not only will clinicians have more efficient practices by utilizing these screenings, but they can also use them to build revenue.”

A Brooklyn NYPD stationhouse became flooded after a sergeant tossed a set of patrol car keys to a colleague and accidentally struck a ceiling sprinkler

A missing man in Turkey accidentally joined a search party for hours before realising he was the person they were looking for

There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data — A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people’smovements

The new dot com bubble is called online advertising [2019]

Apple Pay with Visa Hacked to Make Payments via Locked iPhones — Researchers have demonstrated that someone could use a stolen, locked iPhone to pay for thousands of dollars of goods or services, no authentication needed

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a computer model of wealth creation confirms.

The U.S. was ranked first among nations in pandemic preparedness but has among the highest death rates in the industrialized world. […] More Americans have been killed by the new coronavirus than the influenza pandemic of 1918, despite a century of intervening medical advancement. […] the U.S. had “failed to sustain progress in any coherent manner” in its capacity to handle infectious diseases.

Lead contamination found in blood of half of young kids in U.S.

Why do people eat the same breakfast every day?

At first blush, condemnation of other individuals’ drug use can seem puzzling because one individual’s use of drugs has little to no impact on an observer’s outcomes. Recent work aimed at solving this puzzle suggests that much of the variability in drug condemnation overlaps with orientations toward a more versus less committed sexual strategy, presumably because of associations between drug use and casual sex. For example, adolescent recreational drug use covaries with earlier sexual debut, more sexual partners, and engaging in unprotected sex, and recreational drugs are often used at events where people seek out uncommitted sex. People who invest heavily in long-term, committed relationships have more to lose in social ecologies that afford opportunities for mate switching or so-called extrapair copulations, and people who pursue short-term mates benefit from such ecologies. Hence, individuals who are more commitment oriented should support rules that shift the social ecology toward high commitment in relationships. Individuals who are less commitment oriented should resist such rules because they would be the targets of condemnation and punishment simply for engaging in their preferred sexual behaviors. Accordingly, findings indicate that sexual strategy (i.e., being more vs. less open to sex outside of a committed relationship) relates to moral views toward contraception and abortion, pornography, and same-sex marriage. […] Results are consistent with the proposal that some moral sentiments are calibrated to promote strategic sexual interests, which arise partially via genetic factors.

New study uncovers consistent patterns in the metaphors that people use to describe God

How an eccentric engineer at the Beatles’ record company invented the CT scan

Beethoven began to lose his hearing at age 28. By age 44, his hearing loss was complete, most likely caused by compression of the eighth cranial nerve associated with Paget’s disease of bone. Beethoven’s head became large, and he had a prominent forehead, a large jaw, and a protruding chin (see picture)—features that are consistent with Paget’s disease. Eventually, his hat and shoes did not fit because of bone enlargement.

Beethoven never finished his 10th Symphony. AI just did

The Church of Ambrosia is a nondenominational, interfaith religious organization that supports the use and safe access of all Entheogenic Plants, with a focus on Cannabis and Magic Mushrooms. More: Zide Door is a Church in Oakland supporting the safe access and use of Entheogenic Plants. We follow a nondenominational, interfaith religion, The Church of Ambrosia

The world’s first gold-plated hotel tower in Hanoi has a golden shower on its rooftop terrace

Home delivery drones in Australia had to be suspended after they were repeatedly attacked by birds

Crypto-Trading Hamster Performs Better Than Warren Buffett And The S&P 500

Illegal massage parlors outnumber Starbucks 2 to 1 in NYC

This ballistics study examines whether saline breast implants can decrease tissue penetration in firearm injuries

I argue that much of the unconsciousness of high-level cognition is plausibly due to internal inattentional blindness […] In other words, rather than being structurally unconscious, many higher mental processes might instead be “preconscious”, and would become conscious if a person attended to them.

Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants

San Francisco’s bizarre, costly quest for the perfect trash can — Rather than use off-the-shelf models, San Francisco has engaged in a years-long process to design cans that’ll cost thousands of dollars apiece. And it’s not nearly done.

Engineer Devises “UFO Patents” for the U.S. Navy — The patents include designs for a futuristic hybrid vehicle with a radical propulsion system that would work equally well in the air, underwater, and in space, as well as a compact fusion reactor, a gravitational wave generator, and even a “spacetime modification weapon” […] it’s evident that the tech necessary to actually create the devices described is beyond our current capabilities.

a succession of women appeared in public performance as Circassian beauties, with a carefully crafted foreign allure and a particular visual script: voluminous Afro-like hair, exoticized peasant costumes, a bit of skin (more as time went on: dresses eventually gave way to ruffly shorts and tights), and a name that usually began with the letter “Z” — Zula Zeleah, Zoe Zobedia, Zuruby Hannum, and Zobeide Luti, to name a few.

Men take vehicle with ‘free car’ sign, later find body in trunk

Polyglot parrots are receiving daily language lessons in preparation for addressing guests when their hotel home opens next June.

Man Ejaculates From Anus, Urinates Feces for Two Years Before Seeking Help

The smart toilet era is here! Are you ready to share your analprint with big tech?

Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics

The pattern of music downloads after their release appears to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease

Young investors have a new strategy: watching financial disclosures of sitting members of Congress for stock tips.

Apple memo from Tim Cook denouncing leakers gets leaked

Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.

Cognitive Boost Technology™

The most detailed image ever of a human cell- And we have trillions of these making up our body.

The companies polluting the planet have spent millions to make you think carpooling and recycling will save us

Manufacturers of soda pop and other fizzy beverages have “only a few days” of carbon dioxide left in reserve to produce stock, Britain’s Soft Drinks Association warned Monday, adding that 340,000 jobs in the industry could be affected by the United Kingdom’s ongoing gas shortage. Carbon dioxide is used in hundreds of products to add bubbles and extend shelf life. […] The impact of the cut to carbon dioxide supplies extends beyond drinks — it’s also used to package food and to stun animals before they are humanely slaughtered. [Washington Post]

Lawyers from top firms often work brief stints in the Treasury Department and then return to corporations with better titles and pay, public records reveal. The revolving door is viewed even by some industry veterans as part of the reason that tax policy has become so skewed in favor of the wealthy. [NY Times]

Zuckerberg agreed to not fact-check political posts if the Trump administration would steer clear of any “heavy-handed regulations,” Peter Thiel told an associate. Related: Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits regardless of documented harm — “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

the root causes of the obesity epidemic are more related to what we eat rather than how much we eat

about 88% of recent viruses that have been sequenced belong to the Delta family. “Basically everything that is circulating is Delta, so then the only avenue for evolution becomes mutations on top of Delta” […] “I’m hoping the virus has gotten itself to a point where it’s basically trapped now. That it can’t get any better at transmission, and any adaptation it makes in the immune response is going to make it less transmissible.” […] “My expectation would be that it will become a seasonal respiratory disease […] something that circulates at three times the level of flu and has a similar [infection fatality rate] to flu. So maybe causing three times flu’s deaths every year.”

Did James Joyce invent oat milk?

Financial domination involves the payment of cash or gifts from a wish list by a money slave to a money mistress, financial dominatrix, or findomme. Although financial domination clearly elicits sexual arousal for clients, the relationship can also be exclusively psychological and focus on the relinquishing of control to a money mistress for a prescribed period.

American CEOs make 351 times more than workers. In 1965 it was 15 to one

What Scientists Saw When They Put a Crocodile in an MRI Scanner and Played Classical Music

Adult female giraffes who spend time in larger groups with other females live longer than less sociable individuals

Generic drugs are considered equal to and interchangeable with one another — and also with the name brand. This gospel has existed since 1984, when a law known as Hatch-Waxman was passed, allowing companies to make drugs that had gone off patent without having to replicate the same expensive clinical trials. For the most part, all they had to do was prove that the generic was manufactured using good practices and worked in the body in a similar way, within an acceptable range. […] Major companies have been caught faking and manipulating the data that is supposed to prove that drugs are effective and safe. Probable carcinogens have been discovered in the drug supply. [NY Times]

To understand why pathogens can spread through the air, it helps to understand just how much of it we breathe. “About eight to 10 liters a minute,” says Catherine Noakes, who studies indoor air quality at the University of Leeds, in England. Think four or five big soda bottles per minute, multiply that by the number of people in a room, and you can see how we are constantly breathing in one another’s lung secretions.

Pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step.

When caterpillars of a beautiful butterfly were introduced on to the tiny island of Sottunga in the Åland archipelago, scientists hoped to study how the emerging butterflies would disperse across the landscape. But researchers did not realise that their introduction of the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) led to the emergence of three other species on to the Baltic Sea island, which sprang out of the butterfly like Russian dolls. Some of the caterpillars contained a parasitic wasp, Hyposoter horticola, which bursts from the caterpillar before it can pupate and become a butterfly. Living inside some of these small wasps was another even tinier, rarer parasite, a “hyperparasitoid” wasp known as Mesochorus cf. stigmaticus. It kills the parasitic wasp around the same time as the wasp kills the caterpillar, and emerges 10 days later from the caterpillar’s carcass.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law: The system doesn’t work, the currency crashed, and the public hates it.

Your hedge fund is in the business of getting “edge.” It wants to know things that other people do not know, in order to buy the stocks that will go up. One way to get edge is to bribe the assistant treasurer of a public company to give you the company’s earnings release in advance, but this is strongly disfavored and your hedge fund has effective policies against it. Another way to get edge, quite popular these days, is to buy “alternative data.” Somebody has a satellite and they fly it over mall parking lots and count up the cars in front of each store, and you pay them and they give you those numbers, and then you buy the stocks of the stores with lots of cars in front of them, and then a month later those stores announce good earnings and you make a profit. The car-counting is a classic story of alternative data, but the way alternative data mostly works in practice is that a lot of people use apps on their mobile phones, and everyone involved in the mobile app business is harvesting data and frantically selling it to each other and to hedge funds.

I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.

Researchers are toilet-training cows to reduce ammonia emissions caused by their waste

Posing as Walmart, scammers send crypto surging 25%

Sleep duration was reduced on nights during the waxing phase of the lunar cycle. The effects of the lunar cycle on human sleep are more pronounced among men.

After years of development, the company recently released eight kinds of whey protein isolate that dissolve in water and become practically undetectable to the senses: essentially no taste, smell, cloudiness or dry mouthfeel. The protein isolates are food ghosts, an essence of nutrition utterly devoid of substance. Arla Food Ingredients sells the protein isolates to companies that add them to consumer products. All eight have the same general properties, with each individually tuned for different applications. Lacprodan SP-9213, for instance, remains stable under acidic conditions. Imagine a glass of orange juice with the protein of an omelette. […] Arla’s whey protein isolate is part of the latest phase of an important ongoing trend: after modern production drove the cost of food way down, our attention shifted from eating enough to eating the right things.

Advantages of Square Cigarettes [focus-group report, 1999]

Scientists Use Lasers to See Inside a Locked Room

There are entire terminals in U.S. airports that offer a touchless experience, using passengers’ facial scans to do everything from check in for a flight, drop off luggage, get through the security line, board a plane, and be processed by Customs and Border Protection. How exactly do you opt out?

Sexual intercourse with climax can improve nasal breathing to the same degree as application of nasal decongestant for up to 60 minutes in patients having nasal obstruction

Horizontal Stripes and Dark Clothes Make You Look Thinner

the well-being benefits of social interactions are nearly negligible after moderate quantities of interactions are achieved

this study explores if there is a significant longevity effect of intercessory prayer (praying on behalf of others) for a named individual’s well-being […] based on data from 1988 to 2018, including 857 Roman Catholic bishops, 500 Catholic priests, and 3038 male academics from six countries. […] The first analysis proved that bishops live longer than priests

Chewing gums may have been used for thousands of years, since wood tar from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods have been found with tooth impressions, which suggests a role in teeth cleaning as well as its usage as early adhesives. The first modern chewing gum was introduced in the market in the late 19th and chewing gums are today vastly consumed worldwide: it is estimated that Iran and Saudi Arabia are the countries with the highest chewing gum consumption, where 80% of the population are regular chewing gum consumers. […] Wasted chewing gums are often improperly discarded and end up as long-lasting residues on both indoor and outdoor pavements and surfaces. Local councils spend millions of euros cleaning up gum residues from the pavement. For instance, it is estimated that in the UK the annual cost of cleaning up wasted gums form streets is almost 70 million euros. […] Here we show the bacteriome of wasted chewing gums from five different countries and the microbial successions on wasted gums during three months of outdoors exposure.

Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, never had the abortion she was seeking. She gave her baby girl up for adoption, and now that baby is an adult.

A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines

Dürer’s Rhinoceros is the name commonly given to a woodcut executed by German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer in 1515. The image is based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist. Dürer never saw the actual rhinoceros

The realistic bronze statue of an exhausted traveler in Orlando International Airport. By artist Duane Hanson.

mRNA cancer therapy now in human trials after shrinking mouse tumors

California moves to be the first state to outlaw ’stealthing,’ which is removing a condom without permission during intercourse. [via gettingsome]

Humans can infer the heartbeats of others when looking at their face — performance decreases when the visual properties of the videos of the faces are altered (inverted, masked, static)

Being a parent does not reduce dishonesty

abstinence from alcohol is associated with an increased risk for all-cause dementia

Facebook Users Liable for All Comments Under Their Posts, According to Australia High Court

Vine creator Dom Hofmann on creating Loot, an open-source, decentralized game / financial asset / art project / metaverse (?)

machine-bones.net

A non-lethal device developed by the US Navy aims to surreptitiously render a person unable to speak

Man who ‘married’ a sex doll is now ‘in love’ with an ashtray with an artificial vagina — he does engage in sexual intercourse with humans sometimes — he just prefers engaging with “objects” much more frequently.

Satanists may be the last hope to take down Texas’s abortion bill — The temple is attempting to use its status as a religious organization to claim its right to abortion as a faith-based right.

Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging.

Sometimes Mindlessness Is Better Than Mindfulness

Ability To Name Unrelated Words Is A Good Test Of Creativity

Elephant, Giraffe Populations Rebound as Kenya Fights Poachers

Thousands of new satellites are being launched into areas where orbital rubbish has been accumulating since early space missions nearly 65 years ago. The surging collision risks have left the handful of insurers that offer satellite coverage pulling back or exiting the market

Lawsuits say Siri and Google are listening, even when they’re not supposed to — The lawsuits allege the technology is turning on when not activated and using the information for marketing. In responses to the lawsuit, Apple says it does not sell Siri recordings and recordings are not associated with an “identifiable individual.”

effect of sneeze at 68° Fahrenheit, 50% relative humidity, and 90% relative humidity

Why do helical seashells resemble spiralling galaxies and the human heart? Kevin Dann leads us into the gyre of James Bell Pettigrew’s Design in Nature (1908), a provocative and forgotten exploration of the world’s archetypal whorl

Cow stuck in tree after Hurricane Ida

Men perceived women with nipple erection as more deserving of altruism, especially if that altruism involved greater interaction with the woman, and they expected these same women to behave more altruistically toward them.

We sought to understand how the pandemic and associated public health control measures have affected group sex practitioners and activities. […] group sex events were cancelled […] Participants reported attending online group sex events (e.g. Zoom orgies) as well as skill-building classes (e.g. rope bondage).

Both intra-rectal O2 gas and oxygenated liquid delivery were shown to provide vital rescue of experimental models of respiratory failure, improving survival, behavior, and systemic O2 level. More: A breathing tube through the butt could be an alternative to mechanical ventilators

Forms of music torture that are discussed in the article include exposure to loud music, forced singing, and the use of music in connection with other forms of enforced physical activity

Thirty four (94%) of 36 AI systems evaluated in these studies were less accurate than a single radiologist, and all were less accurate than consensus of two or more radiologists.

Putting the Meme Stocks in the Index — Every so often a weird stock goes up a lot, and it becomes so valuable that it qualifies for the S&P 500, the main index of U.S. large-cap stocks, and then people write articles that are like “oh no all the index funds are being forced to buy this weird stock at a huge valuation that makes no sense.” […] The fundamental active investors, remember, underperform the index in aggregate. So when they go around saying “hahaha the index funds are so dumb for buying this crazy overvalued stock,” they are wrong slightly more often than they are right.

More skunks can do handstands than we thought

Fake Banksy NFT sold through Banksy’s website for $336,000 [more]

Growing NFT Industry Sees Signs of ‘Amiss’ Behavior, Study Shows […] indication of “wash trading,” a practice where a trader or group of traders buy and sell the same asset to create the illusion of heightened demand.

World’s Fastest-Accelerating Roller Coaster Closes After Breaking Riders’ Bones

About 9% of respondents reported having ever experienced exercise-induced orgasm

The “Next” Effect: When a Better Future Worsens the Present — As people continually await exciting things still to come, they may be continually dissatisfied by exciting things already here.

Man can change his pupil size on command, once thought an impossible feat

Consumers Believe That Products Work Better for Others

Wall Street Is Looking to Reddit for Investment Advice

Facebook used facial recognition without consent 200,000 times

Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out 6% of office workers — Amazon systematically attempts to channel 6% of its office employees out of the company each year, using processes embedded in proprietary software to help meet a target for turnover among low-ranked office workers, a metric Amazon calls “unregretted attrition.”

Toxic PFAS compounds are contaminating the air inside homes, classrooms and stores at alarming levels, a new study has found. […] PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds used to make products water-, stain- or heat-resistant. Because they are so effective, the chemicals are used across dozens of industries and are in thousands of everyday consumer products such as stain guards, carpeting and shoes. Textile manufacturers use them to produce waterproof clothing, and they are used in floor waxes, nonstick cookware, food packaging, cosmetics, firefighting foam and much more.

Starbucks at Shenzhen Airport in China

Nude man stabs second nude man on Seattle sidewalk

Which Saint to Pray for Fighting Against a Covid infection? A short survey

We report the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness […] initiated by a “virtual” index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Affected teenagers present with similar or identical functional “Tourette-like” behaviours, which can be clearly differentiated from tics in Tourette syndrome.

More Than 80 Cultures Still Speak in Whistles — They use a whistled form of their native language for long-distance communication.

Forensic facial examiners vs. super-recognizers

We found that eating one hot dog costs a person 36 minutes of “healthy” life. In comparison, we found that eating a serving size of 30 grams of nuts and seeds provides a gain of 25 minutes of healthy life – that is, an increase in good-quality and disease-free life expectancy. Our study also showed that substituting only 10% of daily caloric intake of beef and processed meats for a diverse mix of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and select seafood could reduce, on average, the dietary carbon footprint of a U.S. consumer by one-third and add 48 healthy minutes of life per day.

This AI Can Spot an Art Forgery

ART IN THIS COUNTRY HAS NOT ADVANCED PAST A LITTLE TECHNICAL COURSE FOR EXERCISING MEDIOCRITY DECORATIVELY

Convicted conman sues his victims — and wins $12M

Man’s handwriting was so bad Eastbourne bank staff didn’t know he was trying to rob them

a dozen Starbucks baristas said they were sick of getting complex orders. Many would taste “disgusting.” Some are based on TikTok trends.

Short, daytime naps don’t relieve sleep deprivation, study finds

A security researcher has discovered a web attack framework developed by a suspected Chinese government hacking group and used to exploit vulnerabilities in 58 popular websites to collect data on possible Chinese dissidents. Fifty-seven of the sites are popular Chinese portals, while the last is the site for US newspaper, the New York Times.

We identified 5 factors of unusual sexual interests that were largely comparable for women and men: submission/masochism, forbidden sexual activities, dominance/sadism, mysophilia (attraction to dirtiness or soiled things), and fetishism. For women, unusual sexual interests related to more psychiatric symptoms and higher sexual outlet, whereas this relation was less explicit for men.

Women perceive more intense acute and chronic pain and experience more unpleasantness than men.Women suffer more than men as evidenced by higher anxiety and depression prevalence.

Anxiety is understood ethologically. That is, as a preparatory state to evade predators or other dangers in the environment. Animal models of prey avoiding predation are taken as analogous to human anxiety. But if that is the case, then the neurological and affective state of the predator should also have a human analog, since humans are predators too.

PTSD and whether it is an evolved response shared among mammals, birds, and other creatures, or is unique to humans.

Elephants have evolved extra copies of a gene that fights tumour cells — offering an explanation for why the animals so rarely develop cancer.

As they grow, young sunflowers exhibit a particular behavior: The flower head moves to track the Sun across the sky. As the sunflower matures, however, the flower head settles into facing east.

How to do philosophy

I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death—so I had AI do it for me.

The study, of 6,400 people, from eight days old up to age 95, in 29 countries, suggests the metabolism remains “rock solid” throughout mid-life. It peaks at the age of one, is stable from 20 to 60 and then inexorably declines. […] it “cannot be a coincidence” diseases of old age kicked in as the metabolism fell

Little kids burn so much energy, they’re like a different species, study finds — Infants between the ages of 9 and 15 months expend a stunning 50% more energy in 1 day than adults do, adjusted for body size.

Delta has changed the game […] the “zero COVID” dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy. Instead, the pandemic ends when almost everyone has immunity, preferably because they were vaccinated or alternatively because they were infected and survived. When that happens, the cycle of surges will stop and the pandemic will peter out. The new coronavirus will become endemic—a recurring part of our lives like its four cousins that cause common colds. It will be less of a problem, not because it has changed but because it is no longer novel and people are no longer immunologically vulnerable. […] If SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay, then most people will encounter it at some point in their life.

Don’t let “delta plus” confuse you. The strain hasn’t learned any new tricks.

Chinese hackers disguised themselves as Iran to target Israel. But they left a few clues that gave them away.

Beginning with iOS 15, Apple will be deploying a CSAM scanner that will run on your device. While I understand the reason for Apple’s proposed CSAM solution, there are some serious problems with their implementation.

According to Pr. Shi Bo, in “Trente-six Stratagèmes Chinois”, monkeys were used in the beginning of the Southern Song Dynasty, in a battle between rebels of the Yanzhou (Yasuo) province and the Chinese Imperial Army, led by Zhao Yu. The monkeys were used as live incendiary devices.

Miquela Sousa, 19-year-old Robot living in LA

New study says humans killed Neanderthals by having sex with them

Startup is creating ‘real’ dairy, without cows California-based Perfect Day uses fungi to make dairy protein that is “molecularly identical” to the protein in cow’s milk.

In a series of experiments, people were perceived as more real when they were presented as pictures than when they were presented as pictures of pictures.

After months of euphoria, the data out of Israel is troubling. The Israeli ministry of health has twice revised downwards the long-term efficacy of the jabs — from the advertised 94 per cent protection from asymptomatic infections against the then-dominant Alpha variant, to as low as 64 per cent against the now-dominant Delta variant. Even though the unvaccinated were five to six times as likely to end up seriously ill, the vaccine’s protection was waning fastest for the oldest — the most vulnerable — who got their first jabs as early as December. […] Now, they are the first to experience the limits of the vaccine and the first to accept a long-whispered inevitability — regular booster shots to stay protected.

New study says wildfire smoke linked to increased covid cases, deaths

Elon Musk’s wealth doesn’t come from him hoarding Tesla’s extractive profits, like a robber baron of old. For most of its existence, Tesla had no profits at all. It became profitable only last year. But even in 2020, Tesla’s profits of $721 million on $31.5 billion in revenue were small—only slightly more than 2% of sales, a bit less than those of the average grocery chain, the least profitable major industry segment in America. Musk won the lottery, or more precisely, the stock market beauty contest

Websites and apps featuring pirated movies and TV shows make about $1.3 billion from advertising each year, including from major companies like Amazon.com Inc., according to a study. The piracy operations are also a key source of malware, and some ads placed on the sites contain links that hackers use to steal personal information or conduct ransomware attacks.

ATM piece — Wearing only Timberland boots and a skirt made of dollar bills, Pope.L chained himself with a string of sausages to the entrance of a bank in 1997.

It’s estimated we ingest enough microplastics each week to equal the weight of a credit card

Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero

Some Amazon sellers reach out to unhappy buyers to revise or delete negative reviews and boost ratings

The three-or-four-hours rule for getting creative work done

17 years ago Dave Matthews Band dumped 800 pounds of poo onto a tour boat on the Chicago River [thread]

How the Brazilian butt lift, one of the world’s most dangerous plastic surgery procedures, went mainstream.

Philly cops have been towing cars from legal spaces to illegal spaces, impounded the cars from the illegal spaces, and then trying to sell the cars at auction.

Multiple Walt Disney Employees Among 17 Suspects Arrested in Undercover Child Predator Operation

How one restaurant’s experiment may help diners breathe safely The Big Sur restaurant now featured some new pandemic touches: 18 tabletop mini-purifiers, 10 precisely distributed HEPA air purifiers, an upgraded heating and air conditioning system, and four sensors measuring the air quality in real time.

Joseph Allen runs a major public health research project at Harvard University, probing how indoor air quality affects human health and cognition. […] Many sources of indoor air pollution can affect human health and cognition. These include particles and gases emitted by furniture and building materials, as well as carbon dioxide (CO2) exhaled by a building’s occupants. Choosing better materials and improving ventilation, filtration, and air processing can help make buildings healthier.

How the Fed’s digital currency could displace crypto

Homeless man with no arms charged in stabbing

Pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State

Spanish engineers extract drinking water from thin air

Police arrested a man thinking he was someone else. For 2 years, he was held against his will at the Hawaii State Hospital, deemed insane and forcibly injected with drugs. The courts still have no record of this mishap in an apparent attempt to cover it up. [More]

The human ear detects half a millisecond delay in sound

Psychopaths make up 4.5% of the general population

A humanized version of Foxp2 affects ultrasonic vocalization in adult female and male mice

Miami Launches MiamiCoin to “eliminate homelessness” and “increase the police force.”

(a) asking her to help him find a girlfriend and describing his criteria for a girlfriend as someone who “[c]an handle pain,”

Five parrots separated at UK zoo after encouraging each other to swear at guests

Dollar Stores Make Up Nearly Half of All New Store Openings This Year

Facebook is researching ways to analyze encrypted data, such as WhatsApp messages, without actually decrypting the information

Amazon will pay you $10 in credit for your palm print biometrics

Post-viral effects of COVID-19 in the olfactory system and their implications

28 ancient viruses unknown to science found in a Tibetan glacier

We study the mental maps of spectators during a large naturally occurring extreme ritual

It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

Scientific GOD Journal

The original black-and-white photo has been “colorized” with a criss-cross pattern of colored lines

it’d be funny if someone paid the government a lot of money for this one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang album and then Wu-Tang just put it on Spotify. You’d still have the certificate of authenticity, though; no one else has that. Obviously the thing that Martin Shkreli bought from the Wu-Tang Clan was a non-fungible token?

Trial begins for B.C. man accused of breaking quarantine to go to Flat Earth conference

The “Faithful and trustworthy” and the “Does well with my friends and family” factors, were associated with more years in a relationship.

How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes

Hundreds of AI predictive tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. — and some were potentially harmful.

In about a dozen years, ransomware has emerged as a major cyberproblem of our time. […] the problem will not be solved with patches, antivirus software or two-factor authentication […] Russia, according to the experts, is where the majority of attacks originate. Three other countries — China, Iran and North Korea — are also serious players, and the obvious commonality is that all are autocracies whose security apparatuses doubtlessly know full well who the hackers are and could shut them down in a minute. So the presumption is that the criminals are protected, either through bribes — which, given their apparent profits, they can distribute lavishly — or by doing pro bono work for the government or both. […] By no coincidence, there were few ransomware attacks before Bitcoin came into being a dozen years ago. [NY Times]

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010) Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business […] a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as ‘aw’ (thought), ‘ow’ (drought), ‘uff’ (tough), ‘off’ (cough), ‘oo’ (through), or ‘oh’ (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced ‘ee’ (weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be ‘eh’ (bread, head, wealth, feather). Those two options cover most of it – except for a handful of cases, where it’s ‘ay’ (break, steak, great). Oh wait, one more… there’s earth.

This paper in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis is a goldmine of wacky ideas. Just for starters, the author says his wife can cure autism.

“No six-foot social distancing rule unless you have a 6-foot dick.”

38% of American remote workers work from bed, 45% from a couch

Virtual contact worse than no contact for over-60s in lockdown, study

People eat more when eating with friends and family, relative to when eating alone

Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds

Germany Found a Way to Reduce Polarization. The country’s robust investment in public media has helped it reduce political divisions.

The weird world of Australian sea snakes

Where has all the productivity gone? 1. All the productivity we gained has been frittered away on equal-and-opposite distractions like social media, games, etc […] 3. The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few.

Why does “Turn! Turn! Turn!” equal 241217.524881 on Google?

“I specialize in toilet play” — essentially, “shitting on dudes” — “and I can’t do it with people who are unvaccinated,” says Daddy An Li.

In order to assess the infection risk, 13 samples of holy water were cultured for bacteria and yeasts

Google to Help Insurers Measure Slip-and-Fall Risks in Buildings — Google is using sensors to listen for mobile phones as part of a partnership to help insurers more accurately measure occupancy of buildings where they are on the hook for accidents and other risks

DNA is everywhere, even in the air. That’s no surprise to anyone who suffers allergies from pollen or cat dander. But two research groups have now independently shown the atmosphere can contain detectable amounts of DNA from many kinds of animals. Sampling air may enable a faster, cheaper way to survey creatures in ecosystems.

Wildfires in Canada are creating their own weather systems

Recent literature suggests the existence of a G-spot but specifies that, since it is not a spot, neither anatomically nor functionally, it cannot be called G, nor spot, anymore. It is indeed a functional, dynamic, and hormone-dependent area (called clitorourethrovaginal, CUV, complex), extremely individual in its development and action due to the combined influence of biological and psychological aspects, which may trigger vaginally induced orgasm, and in some particular cases also female ejaculation.

The analysis shows negative returns on investment for more than 80% of brands, implying over-investment in advertising by most firms. Further, the overall ROI of the observed advertising schedule is only positive for one third of all brands.

The Columbo character was based squarely on Porfiry Petrovich, the astute but meandering lead investigator in Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment

my brain refuses to believe there are four ppl in this picture

It arrived at the height of the pandemic, in a brown envelope with no return address and too many stamps, none of which had been marked by the post office. It was addressed to me at my parents’ New York City apartment, where I haven’t lived in more than a decade. Inside the envelope was a small, stapled book—a pamphlet, really—titled “Foodie or The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi,” by a writer named Stokes Prickett. On the cover, there was a photograph of a burrito truck and a notice that read “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.”

Horrifying robot plays basketball at Olympics

Covid-19 Immunity Wanes, but Third Shot Still Rarely Needed, BioNTech CEO Says

In May, several French and German social media influencers received a strange proposal. A London-based public relations agency wanted to pay them to promote messages on behalf of a client. A polished three-page document detailed what to say and on which platforms to say it. It asked the influencers to push not beauty products or vacation packages, as is typical, but falsehoods tarring Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine. Stranger still, the agency, Fazze, claimed a London address where there is no evidence any such company exists. [Disinformation for Hire, a Shadow Industry, Is Quietly Booming]

a single object alone can feel heavier than a group of objects that includes the single object

There is a harrowing story in The New Yorker that everyone should grit their teeth and read. Written by Rachel Aviv, it tells the story of how a respected German psychologist named Helmut Kentler decided to foster neglected children with pedophiles, how he ran this experiment with government support for decades after the 1960s, and how it created exactly the kind of hells you would expect. [NY Times]

3 Rules for Middle-Age Happiness — Gather friends and feed them, laugh in the face of calamity, and cut out all the things––people, jobs, body parts––that no longer serve you.

why our eyes are unable to focus on the color blue

Our everyday experience informs us that a human observer is capable of observing one set of physical circumstances at a time. Evidence from psychology, though, indicates that people may have the capacity to make observations of mutually exclusive physical phenomena

All cancers fall into just two categories, according to new research

Viral load is roughly 1,000 times higher in people infected with the Delta variant than those infected with the original coronavirus strain … the researchers report that virus was first detectable in people with the Delta variant four days after exposure,compared with an average of six days among people with the original strain

A longer gap between first and second doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine makes the body’s immune system produce more infection-fighting antibodies, UK researchers have found. An eight-week gap seems to be the sweet spot for tackling the Delta variant.

BBC investigation based on the experiences of dozens of women reveals concerns about how OnlyFans is structured, managed and moderated

orgasm consistency through sexual intercourse had a stronger influence on orgasm satisfaction and sexual satisfaction than orgasm consistency through oral sex, stimulation by the partner’s hand, or self-stimulation

How many parents regret having children and how it is linked to their personality and health

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that TikTok only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want

How a baby-faced CEO turned a Farmville clone into a massive Ponzi scheme

First lethal attacks by chimpanzees on gorillas observed

Vasya has 2 sisters more than he has brothers. How many daughters more than sons do Vasya’s parents have? — 77 problems

How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?

HAD TOO USE PARACHUTE LIKE BABY

How children are spoofing Covid-19 tests with soft drinks

20% of Americans believe the conspiracy theory that microchips are inside the COVID-19 vaccines

18% had Hallux valgus (deformed big-toes) caused, very probably, by wearing overly pointy shoes

6-7% of the general population hear voices that don’t exist

In the six studies we conducted, we consistently reported that clone images elicited higher eeriness than individuals with different faces; we named this new phenomenon the clone devaluation effect.

These kinds of “zero-click” attacks, as they are called within the surveillance industry, can work on even the newest generations of iPhones.

In 1995, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 “great films”

Dead Startup Toys

This beach does not exist

Inside the PAC operation that raised millions by impersonating Donald Trump — billions of robocalls […] almost all of which feature recorded soundbites of public statements from Trump

Outdoor Wedding: 6 Fully Vaccinated Infected With Covid-19 Delta Variant and 8 fully vaccinated healthcare workers caught COVID-19 at a Vegas pool party

Facebook is ditching plans to make an interface that reads the brain — Some scientists said it was never possible anyway.

Facebook fired 52 people from 2014 to August 2015 over abusing access to user data, a new book says. One person used data to find a woman he was traveling with who had left him after a fight, the book says.

Gabriela Buendia tries to take every precaution when it comes to information about her patients. The therapist uses encrypted video apps for virtual sessions, stores charts in HIPAA-compliant applications and doesn’t reach out to her clients on social media. She said she never saves her patients’ phone numbers on her smartphone either. So it came as a shock when Buendia found out recently that Venmo, a digital payment app that patients increasingly use to pay their therapists, was displaying her entire contact list publicly.

Dogecoin creator likens cryptocurrencies to a scam run by “powerful cartel” to benefit the rich

“Acrobat” - the initial M, which opens the word “martyr”, in a liturgical manuscript (11th century) from the Limoges monastery of St. Marcial.

Amazon.com Inc. has won U.S. permission to use radar to monitor consumers’ sleep habits.

Elon Musk’s testimony in Tesla lawsuit paused as lawyer vomits in jury box

Tel Aviv dog owners must now register their dog’s DNA with municipality. This will then allow municipal inspectors to collect samples from dog feces left uncollected in the streets, and a fine will be sent by mail to the owner who did not clean up.

Mother kills husband with boiling water after learning he allegedly sexually abused children for years — Smith killed her husband Michael in such a painful and cruel way. To throw boiling water over someone when they are asleep is absolutely horrific,” said Detective Chief Inspector Paul Hughes. “The sugar placed into the water makes it vicious. It becomes thicker and stickier and sinks into the skin better. It left Michael in agony.

Training Ferrets to Recognize Virus Odor in Duck Droppings

A wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C, or around 95 °F, is pretty much the absolute limit of human tolerance, says Zach Schlader, a physiologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Above that, your body won’t be able to lose heat to the environment efficiently enough to maintain its core temperature. That doesn’t mean the heat will kill you right away, but if you can’t cool down quickly, brain and organ damage will start.

The profile of the alleged abuser, by itself, was unusual: not a priest, but rather a teenage altar boy, who was said to have coerced a peer to engage in various sex acts night after night over six years, inside the Vatican’s own walls. Then powerful church figures helped him become a priest.

The People’s Bank of China aims to become the first major central bank to issue a central bank digital currency. The benefits of an e-currency are immense. As more and more transactions are made using a digital currency controlled centrally, the government gains more and more ability to monitor the economy and its people. […] The rollout is also seen as part of Beijing’s push to weaken the power of the US dollar […] But another crucial motivation is the increasing alarm in Beijing at the size of the crypto industry in China, where a huge amount of cryptocurrency was being “mined” until the recent crackdown. The threat of an unregulated alternative monetary system emerging from blockchain technology is a clear and present danger to the Communist party, according to observers.

‘ethically sourced’ cocaine

Agatha Christie is probably one of the first British ‘stand-up surfers’

The story goes that Tazartès went into the woods, dug a hole, and then sang so loudly that the ducks on the lake began to shake. […] His second album, Tazartès Transports (1980), took this sound further. He collaborated with Jean-Pierre Lentin, editor of the counter-cultural magazine Actuel, who wrote a series of fake ethnographic texts describing the music of invented regions.

Northern Hawk-Cuckoo, Mount Fuji, Japan

Bill Cosby to sue the state of Pennsylvania to recoup ‘hundreds of thousands’ of taxpayer dollars as compensation for his wrongful incarceration

Cigarette maker Philip Morris to buy UK producer of respiratory treatments

In this article, we argue that humans are biased toward pro-relationship decisions—decisions that favor the initiation, advancement, and maintenance of romantic relationships. We next consider possible theoretical underpinnings—both evolutionary and cultural—that may explain why getting into a relationship is often easier than getting out of one, and why being in a less desirable relationship is often preferred over being in no relationship at all.

People open to new food are rated as more desirable and more sexually unrestricted

As climates change, prepare for more mosquitoes in winter

How counting neutrons explains nuclear waste

The Fed controls the flow of money, and it flows to the wealthy [NY Times]

Just like snakes, a lizard sticks out its tongue to catch scent particles in the air and then pulls back its tongue and places those particles on the roof of its mouth, where there are special sensory cells. The lizard can use these scent “clues” to find food or a mate or to detect enemies.

How many artists overshadow their band after going solo?

I think the Voynich manuscript hasn’t been decoded because it cannot be decoded. My belief is that it’s written by someone suffering not from migraines but rather from schizophrenia. — Amateur armchair theories about the Voynich manuscript

Man and woman fight over who should pick up dog vomit, woman cited as aggressor

South Korean toilet turns excrement into power and digital currency

Four-day week ‘an overwhelming success’ in Iceland — The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said.

NYC’s new biometrics privacy law takes effect — businesses that collect biometric information — most commonly in the form of facial recognition and fingerprints — are required to conspicuously post notices and signs to customers at their doors explaining how their data will be collected

NYPD beekeeper removes 25,000 bees from Times Square

Bitcoin power plant making part of glacial lake ‘feel like a hot tub,’ residents say

Taking Academic Corruption to a New Level — The e-cigarette company Juul bought an entire issue of a scholarly journal, with all the articles written by authors on its payroll, to ‘prove’ that its product has a public benefit.

Who Hates Magic? Exploring the Loathing of Legerdemain

Why Do People Watch Porn? An Evolutionary Perspective on the Reasons for Pornography Consumption

We Find It Hard To Identify The Emotions Of Intense Screams And Moans

Lilliputian hallucinations concern hallucinated human, animal or fantasy entities of minute size. Having been famously described by the French psychiatrist Raoul Leroy in 1909, who wrote from personal experience, to date they are mentioned almost routinely in textbooks of psychiatry, albeit with little in-depth knowledge. I therefore systematically reviewed 145 case reports and case series comprising 226 case descriptions.

We newly created a drinking habit score (DHS) according to regular drinking (frequency of alcohol intake ≥3 times/wk) and whether consuming alcohol with meals (yes). […] During a median follow-up of 8.9 years, we documented 8652 incident cases of all-cause death, including 1702 cases of cardiovascular disease death, 4960 cases of cancer death, and 1990 cases of other-cause death. Higher DHS was significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer mortality, or other-cause mortality

Degradable plastic polymer breaks down in sunlight and air

The first time I had sex on camera, getting fucked was easier.

Man bitten by neighbor’s escaped python while sitting on the toilet

suicide by self-waterboarding

Drones have been a key part of warfare for years, but they’ve generally been remotely controlled by humans. Now, by cobbling together readily available image-recognition and autopilot software, autonomous drones can be mass-produced on the cheap. […] “How can you control 90 small drones if they’re making decisions themselves?” Kayser said. Now imagine a swarm of millions of drones.

Under normal circumstances, automatic software deployment, especially in the context of software updates, is a good thing. But here this feature was turned on its head. Russian-based criminal gang REvil hacked into Kaseya’s management system and pushed REvil software to all of the systems under Kaseya’s management. From there, the ransomware promptly disabled those computers and demanded a cryptocurrency payment of about $45,000 per system to set the machines free

A classic Silicon Valley tactic — losing money to crush rivals — comes in for scrutiny — Facebook’s latest product, a newsletter platform called Bulletin, exemplifies a strategy that some critics think should be illegal

This is tax evasion, plain and simple. But multinational companies get away with it by spending billions of dollars on top-tier lawyers and former lawmakers.

Supermarkets are doing their own hoarding as they brace for price increases. Grocery chains are buying and storing everything from sugar to frozen meat

TikTok is taking the book industry by storm, and retailers are taking notice

He’s got 30 million TikTok fans and nobody knows exactly why

Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud

Of all the animals Clarence Birdseye devoured during his three years in Labrador, lynx was the most memorable — “soaked for a month in sherry, pan-stewed, and served in a brown gravy”

Average colors of the world

This is a full view of the board behind Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell.

Valentina Sampaio becomes Sports Illustrated’s first trans model

By locking fat people’s upper and lower jaws together with a tooth-to-tooth metal lock, a team of UK researchers intend to slim those fat people down.

Sam Altman Wants to Scan Your Eyeball in Exchange for Cryptocurrency — iris-scanning is an essential part of the plan because it can prevent people from trying to register multiple times to defraud the system. He’s also aware of the privacy implications of handing over biometric information to a tiny startup and said Worldcoin will make the process as transparent as possible so users can see how the data is used. He said the iris scan will produce a unique numerical code for each person and that the image is then deleted and never stored.

Gay men earned less than heterosexual men. Lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women. (A Meta-Analysis 2012-2020)

Most studies found decreases in the frequency of sexual intercourse during the pandemic and increases in solitary sexual behavior.

How governments and spies text each other — Matrix has become the messaging app of choice for top-secret communications

It’s a level of genius that has not been acknowledged in the press — the founder of FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) is the guy who figured out how to render it almost totally worthless.

In one particularly large chamber of the cow stomach, known as the rumen, bacteria digest plant cellulose from the grass […]. As it turns out, cow rumen and its arsenal of bacteria are very good at breaking down plastic in a sustainable way. The researchers write that the “rumen samples were able to degrade all three tested polyesters” successfully.

One bee has cloned itself millions of times over the past three decades

Notes of an Urban Beekeeper

Can two potentially dishonest players play a fair game of poker using any cards — for example, over the phone? [PDF]

The hard truth about ransomware: we aren’t prepared, it’s a battle with new rules, and it hasn’t near reached peak impact.

Why Email Providers Scan Your Emails — Even if your messages aren’t scanned for ads, companies may scan, read, and even share them with third parties

A UK court has ruled in favor of a self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto over the copyright for the bitcoin white paper

Here’s how Mark Zuckerberg spent his Fourth of July

Whoa. I guess one dude quit:

‘Worst day in pigeon racing history’: Thousands of birds vanish during race

‘Redneck Rave’ at Kentucky park ends with 48 people charged, throat slashing, and an impalement

Cop busted sniffing coke off model’s butt is doing OnlyFans porn now

No tuna DNA found in Subway’s tuna sandwich

The economics of dollar stores

Why wood has gotten so expensive
Since 2005, Finland has been constructing the largest nuclear reactor in Europe alongside a facility that could solve the problem of what to do with spent nuclear fuel.

Music Listening Near Bedtime Disruptive To Sleep

Blood test finds 50 types of cancer, shows ‘impressive results’ in spotting tumors in early stages

There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t. But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically, since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it had been frozen in a lab. […] It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.” For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it. [NY Times]

21 reports of unknown phenomena possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations. […] The report said the number of sightings was too limited for a detailed pattern analysis. While they clustered around military training or testing grounds, the report found that that could be the result of collection bias or the presence of cutting-edge sensors in those areas. [NY Times | CNN]

power move by Angela Davis

Canon Uses AI Cameras That Only Let Smiling Workers Inside Offices

Social-media users are sharing Google Street View images featuring friends and relatives who have since died
When things go horribly wrong during a stay, Airbnb’s secretive safety team jumps in to prevent PR disasters

Scientists just turned plastic bottles into vanilla flavoring

The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

We show how pollen grains can increase the coronavirus (CoV) transmission rate in a group of people

Since 1916, the Dow has made new all-time highs less than 5% of all days, but it’s up 25,568% over that time. 95% of the time, you’re underwater. The less you look, the better off you’ll be. [The Twenty Craziest Investing Facts Ever]

Drinking straw device is instant cure for hiccups, say scientists

Bullshit Ability as an Honest Signal of Intelligence

A man’s “secret family” was exposed when he received two obituaries in the same newspaper from two different women.

Clusters Circumstances and Gestures in Daily Encounters

Beer Mats make bad Frisbees, study [PDF]

Oregon third state in U.S. to legalize human composting

Petition urging Jeff Bezos to buy and eat the Mona Lisa gains steam

Careers for some women in finance are being held back by “mediocre” male middle managers adept at playing internal politics, according to a report backed by some of the City of London’s largest financial institutions.

SpaceX threatened with arrests as local authorities in Texas warn it may have committed a crime by using private security guards to block public roads

British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, dubbed the “Father of the Web” will auction the original source code for the World Wide Web as an NFT

Facebook Researchers Say They Can Detect Deepfakes And Where They Came From

when octopuses are on MDMA, it’s like watching “an eight-armed hug.”

Irreversible warming tipping point may have been triggered: Arctic mission chief

We are celebrating the 90th anniversary of Kurt Gödel’s groundbreaking 1931 paper which laid the foundations of theoretical computer science and the theory of artificial intelligence (AI). Gödel sent shock waves through the academic community when he identified the fundamental limits of theorem proving, computing, AI, logics, and mathematics itself.

Bernard Herrmann completed his work on Taxi Driver just hours before he died of a heart attack.

Analyzing Star Wars

Austrian man jailed for 19 months after tattooing Nazi symbol on his testicle

The woman who spent lockdown alone in the Arctic

New research published in the journal Psychological Science reveals a pervasive but unfounded stereotype: that women (but not men) who engage in casual sex have low self-esteem

More than 100 million people now have Calm on their smartphone. Calm promises to give the anxious, the depressed, and the isolated—as well as those looking to be a bit more present with their family, or a bit less distracted at work, or a bit more consistent in their personal habits—access to a huge variety of zen content for $15 a month, $70 a year, or $400 for a lifetime. For that, its investors have valued the company at $2 billion—roughly as much as 23andMe, Allbirds, and Oatly—making it one of just 700 private start-ups to hit the 10-digit mark. Now flush with venture capital, Calm is in the midst of becoming a full-fledged wellness empire: It is producing books, films, and streaming series, as well as $10 puzzles, $80 meditation cushions, and $272 weighted blankets.

In 2020 in the U.S., 59% of online recruitment of sex trafficking victims took place on Facebook. […] 65% of identified child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited through Facebook. [2020 Human Trafficking Report]

Anti-vaxxers are weaponizing Yelp to punish bars that require vaccine proof

last week, YouTube disclosed that it paid music companies, musicians and songwriters more than $4 billion in the prior year […] not far from the $5 billion that the streaming king Spotify pays to music industry participants NY Times]

Maren Altman isn’t a huge fan of TikTok. She’s amassed more than a million followers anyway. […] Her most intriguing videos apply astrology to a particularly daunting realm: cryptocurrency. Anything with a verifiable birthday or creation date has a birth chart that can be read and, according to astrologists, gleaned for predictive information. That means there’s astrology for … bitcoin. In her teenage years […] she started to seriously study astrology, and made a few bucks at parties giving “readings to drunk kids.” She saved that money and used it to invest in crypto. Then, she took her astrology skills to TikTok.

The rise of private cryptocurrencies motivated the Fed to start considering a digital dollar to be used alongside the traditional paper currency.

Is there a limit to how much worse variants can get? “The fact it has happened twice in 18 months, two lineages (Alpha and then Delta) each 50% more transmissible is a phenomenal amount of change.” […] The R0 was around 2.5 when the pandemic started in Wuhan and could be as high as 8.0 for the Delta variant […] two lineages (Alpha and then Delta) in 18 months each 50% more transmissible is a phenomenal amount of change. […] Measles is between 14 and 30 depending on who you ask […] Influenza has a much lower R0, barely above 1, but constantly mutates to side-step immunity.

Insane Nightclubs of 1890s Paris

El Salvador to use energy from volcanoes for bitcoin mining

‘I was completely inside’: Lobster diver swallowed by humpback whale off Provincetown

Spontaneous face touching (sFST) is an ubiquitous behavior that occurs in people of all ages and all sexes, up to 800 times a day.

How we fixed the ozone layer

Half of the pandemic’s unemployment money may have been stolen … America has lost more than $400 billion to fraudulent claims … at least 70% of the money stolen by impostors ultimately left the country, much of it ending up in the hands of criminal syndicates in China, Nigeria, Russia and elsewhere … Much of the rest of the money was stolen by street gangs domestically.

individuals who frequently listen to music reported persistent nighttime earworms, which were associated with worse sleep quality — instrumental music increased the incidence of nighttime earworms

MicroStrategy Inc. MSTR 11.67% is borrowing $400 million in junk bonds to buy more bitcoins, adding to the company’s bet that digital assets will outperform cash. … In a filing Monday, MicroStrategy said it expects to post a $284.5 million loss, “based on fluctuations in market price of bitcoin,” during its next earnings report.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Other Obsession — Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

Former Air Force Pilot Breaks Down UFO Footage

Laughing gas improves depression

Smart devices could someday help save your relationship

A Florida judge has tossed out a motion from a man who claimed he wanted to marry his “porn filled Apple computer.” [2014]

Pupil Size Is a Marker of Intelligence

Researchers perform magic tricks for birds, who are not amused

Australian Federal Police and FBI nab criminal underworld figures in worldwide sting using encrypted app — ANoM could only be found on phones bought through the black market, which had been stripped of the capability to make calls or send emails, according to the AFP. The phones could only send messages to another device that had the app and criminals needed to know another criminal to get a device. Unknown to the app’s users, the FBI had access to the app and its communications … and had been reading the clandestine communications of criminals since 2018

El Salvador looks to become the world’s first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender

Feds recovers millions in cryptocurrency paid to Colonial Pipeline ransomware hackers — “The extortionists will never see this money. New financial technologies that attempt to anonymize payments will not provide a curtain from behind which criminals will be permitted to pick the pockets of hardworking Americans.” … “as we speak, there are thousands of attacks on all aspects of the energy sector and the private sector generally … it’s happening all the time”

“Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation”

A bride collapsed and died at her wedding. The groom then married the woman’s sister with her dead body lying in the next room.

TikTok just gave itself permission to collect biometric data on US users, including ‘faceprints and voiceprints’

Astrophysicist on UFO sightings: It looks terrestrial, not alien

Why is there no blue food?

Children Now Account For 22% Of New U.S. COVID Cases

Some people are resistant to local anaesthetic, meaning they must endure dental and medical procedures without such pain relief. And we’re only beginning to understand why.

After Years Of Detecting Land Mines, A Rat Is Retiring

The Study Web is a constellation of digital spaces and online communities—across YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, and Twitter—largely built by students for students. Videos under the #StudyTok hashtag have been viewed over half a billion times.

How Victorian Cultists in Rural Donegal Created the World’s First 18 Rated Video Game

In 1977, the small market town of Hay-on-Wye declared independence from the UK, as a publicity stunt.

A New Mexico sheriff who is running for mayor of Albuquerque was punched at a campaign event by a man who police say first tried to disrupt the event by flying a drone with a sex toy attached to it around the candidate while he was stage.

people with hearing loss reported miraculous religious healing experiences - but hearing tests found no objective improvement

This testimony presents definitive logic and extensive evidence to support The Claim by Jesus Christ that Jesus Is Son of GOD rather than GOD.

over a third (36%) of respondents reported having one or more sex secrets

Why a Failing New Jersey Deli Is Valued at $100 Million: A Theory

frogs have teeth

study suggests eating 18g of mushrooms a day cuts your risk of developing cancer by 45 per cent

Employees Are Considering Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home

the data suggests these NFT fads are fading faster than the others

Embracing has several positive health effects, such as lowering blood pressure and decreasing infection risk, and is associated with better daily mood in lonely individuals

How often do emergency vehicles get into accidents?

Synthetic Messenger is a botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. Everyday it searches the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 bots visit each article and click on every ad they can find.

World’s First Invisible Sculpture Sells for a Whopping $18,000

Art studio Robert Alice has created the first iNFT, an NFT linked to a machine-learning chatbot. Will be auctioned off at Sotheby’s in June

Self-styled satanist beheaded his cellmate, but the guards didn’t notice. […] Guards found Osuna wearing a necklace made of Romero’s body parts.

This survey asked young adults (n = 593), younger-old adults (n = 272), and older-old adults (n = 46) whether they would take a hypothetical life extension treatment as well as the youngest and oldest age at which they would wish to live forever. in all three age cohorts, a plurality indicated that they would not use it

Giraffes, it turns out, have solved a problem that kills millions of people every year: high blood pressure. — The cardiovascular secrets of giraffes

As Virginia prepares to legalize adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana on July 1, drug-sniffing police dogs from around the state are being forced into early retirement

Satellites may have been underestimating the planet’s warming for decades

Worker-Owned Cooperative Tries to Compete With Uber and Lyft [NY Times]

Testing whether blockchain-based smart contracts can measurably improve weather index insurance products

Iran’s government announced a ban on the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as officials blame the energy-intensive process for blackouts in a number of Iranian cities

A new antitrust case shows that Amazon Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ that is anything but free.

To better understand how birds perform their architectural wonders let’s follow the work of the familiar thrush step by step.

you have 15 minutes to fill up your car with mannequin body parts from their mannequin mountain

Click to drop a raindrop anywhere in the contiguous United States and watch where it ends up

Nyoooooooooooom

Scientists use drones to zap clouds with electricity to make them rain

Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, improving over time especially after vaccination, according to two new studies [NY Times]

Missing man found dead inside dinosaur statue, got stuck trying to retrieve his mobile phone

Would You Sell Your Vote? 12% of respondents would do so for just $25, as would nearly 20% for $100.

Consecutive Ejaculations in Male Rats

Amazon’s ad revenue is now twice as big as Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest combined

Bezos Space firm lost its bid for a major NASA contract to Elon Musk, but the Senate is ordering the agency to give a second one now

drug dealer who used EncroChat jailed after picture analysed for fingerprints

your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. they don’t need to.

An online lending platform called Kabbage sent 378 pandemic loans worth $7 million to fake companies (mostly farms) with names like “Deely Nuts” and “Beefy King.”

Spinoza Car

Millennial anti-theft device

One of the oldest hypotheses holds that the anus and the mouth originated from the same solo opening, which elongated, then caved in at the center and split itself in two. […] Scorpions jettison their posterior when attacked from behind, evading capture but tragically losing their ability to poop (and eventually dying with their abdomen full of excrement).

Research findings that are probably wrong cited far more than robust ones, study finds — Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.

Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals

Deadly Fungi Are the Newest Emerging Microbe Threat All Over the World — These pathogens already kill 1.6 million people every year, and we have few defenses against them

A leading theory for why COVID-19 long-haulers develop the syndrome is that “the antibodies produced after COVID may attack the autonomic nervous system,” says Taub, the UC San Diego cardiologist. “The immune system is confused,” he says, causing the misdirected attacks.

Records show that some people who are paid $1,000 a head by the government to give legally protected mustangs “good homes” are sending the horses to slaughter auctions once they get the money.

The two hottest spots on Earth — The Lut Desert in Iran and the Sonoran Desert along the Mexican-U.S. border have recently reached a sizzling 80.8°C (177.4°F)

Scientists find ‘missing link’ behind first human languages — humans recognize the intended meanings of iconic vocalizations — basic sounds made by people to represent specific objects, entities and actions — regardless of the language they speak.

10 Positions Chess Engines Just Don’t Understand‎

The startup OVR Technology is incorporating smell into virtual reality and using it in a new program designed to allow people to experience the effects of climate change.

Exhibition: ‘Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency’ — Men dominate religious doctrine and government. Religion and governments decide whether abortion is legal or illegal (Poland), whether women are sentenced to years in jail for abortion (El Salvador) or whether a women is handcuffed to a hospital bed after trying to give herself an abortion (Brazil).

Newly leaked video shows a UFO disappear into the water

UFOs regularly spotted in restricted U.S. airspace, report on the phenomena due next month

Project Starline: Feel like you’re there, together

Cara Delevingne is auctioning off an NFT about her vagina

40% of university students found to be addicted to their smartphone

survey of 4,989 randomly sampled undergraduate students at a large U.S. university — The most prevalent general sexual behaviors were solo masturbation (88.6%), oral sex (79.4% received, 78.4% performed), penile-vaginal intercourse (73.5%), and partnered masturbation (71.1%). Anal intercourse was the least prevalent of these behaviors (16.8% received, 25.3% performed). Among those with any partnered sexual experience, 43.0% had choked a partner, 47.3% had been choked, 59.1% had been lightly spanked and 12.1% had been slapped on the face during sex.

lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time … simpler songs entering the charts were more successful, reaching higher chart positions

By studying the genomes of people over the age of 105, an international team of researchers has identified several genetic factors that appear linked to human longevity — and they center on the body’s ability to repair its own DNA.

Last year, more people in San Francisco died of overdoses than of covid-19

Russia’s Defense Minister suggested he wants to clone a group of ancient warriors

virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian.

Ethereum’s energy consumption will drop by more than 99% as it transitions from mining to staking

How corporations buy—and sell—food made with prison labor

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields

Why 99% of ocean plastic pollution is “missing”

9 Fascinating Facts About Urine

Mammals can breathe through anus in emergencies

Frequency of pubic hair transfer during sexual intercourse

How would you feel about being able to pay to control multiple aspects of another person’s life? A new app is offering you the chance to do just that. Investors include Peter Thiel Investors include Peter Thiel. Unrelated: And Peter Thiel’s twin brother invests $10 million in two Senate candidates

Study finds alarming levels of ‘forever chemicals’ in US mothers’ breast milk — Toxic chemicals known as PFAS found in all 50 samples tested at levels nearly 2,000 times what is considered safe in drinking water. PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans.

Tiny, Wireless, Injectable Chips Use Ultrasound to Monitor Body Processes

I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences […] Except for the simple difference in size, there are no meaningful differences between men’s and women’s brain structure or activity

COVID virus particles found in the penis tissue of men who’d had COVID 6-8 months earlier (both severe & mild COVID) […] severe erectile dysfunction […] total sperm count was lower […] decrease in genital size.

Is oral sex more Covid-safe than kissing?

A sex-toy company in Asia is “borrowing” the likenesses of Instagram influencers—without their consent—to create best-selling dolls

Exxon uses Big Tobacco’s playbook to downplay the climate crisis, Harvard study finds

Howard Thurston thrilled people with his own brand of stage magic, a giant production requiring 40 tons of equipment. Today, he’s all but forgotten, eclipsed in history by his contemporary Harry Houdini, even though Houdini was more of an escape artist than a magician. But in his day, Thurston was the best.

10 Tales of Manuscript Burning (And Some That Survived)

Some Amazon managers say they ‘hire to fire’ people just to meet the internal turnover goal every year

1,000 feral cats released onto Chicago streets to tackle rat explosion

Implanted Wireless Device Triggers Mice To Form Instant Bond

Want To Know Whether A Movie Or Book Will Be A Hit? Look At How Emotional The Reviews Are

FBI warns of cybercriminals abusing search ads to promote phishing sites

Endless scrolling. That’s one of the telltale signs of a novel phenomenon our new research identifies as algorithmic fatigue. People who spend ages browsing streaming services, looking for something new to watch, are some of the many examples of the growing numbers of consumers who are now finding that AI systems fall short.

The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you

Why the US has two different highway fonts

The first bottles of an “artisanal spirit” made using apples grown near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have been seized by Ukrainian authorities.

I’ve had the same supper for 10 years. I have two pieces of fish, an onion, an egg, baked beans and biscuits. Being a farmer means every day is the same.

MDMA Passes a Big Test For PTSD Treatment — most participants correctly guessed whether they received a placebo or MDMA [NY Times | Nature | PDF]

Distracted nurse gives woman 6 doses of COVID vaccine in a single shot

A batch of new studies show coronavirus vaccines work against new variants

The 1918 pandemic began in the spring with an intermittent first wave no deadlier than ordinary influenza, then seemed to disappear. A more contagious and more lethal variant caused the deadly second wave, and then it also seemed to disappear. In March 1919, another variant sparked a third wave much less deadly than the second wave but more lethal than seasonal influenza. First wave illness protected against the second wave, but neither first nor second wave infection protected against the third wave variant. Further mutations, combined with an improved ability of the immune system to respond, helped turn the virus into an ordinary seasonal influenza — until it was replaced by the 1957 pandemic influenza virus. Covid-19 was never going to disappear, but there is a reasonable chance that it will follow the 1918 precedent and become an endemic influenza-like illness that kills — serious enough, to be sure — and will require vaccine updates but will not require shutdowns. That would be the best case. [Washington Post]

Amazon Fake Reviews Scam Exposed in Data Breach

Verizon sells media businesses including Yahoo and AOL to private equity firm Apollo for $5 billion

The plan to kill Osama bin Laden—from the spycraft to the assault to its bizarre political backdrop—as told by the people in the room.

Cats are the only asocial animal we have successfully domesticated. We’re disappointed that we don’t bond with them as easily as dogs. But are we just missing the signs?

Keeping time accurately comes with a price. The maximum accuracy of a clock is directly related to how much disorder, or entropy, it creates every time it ticks.

Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real”

We asked journalists for the worst pitch they ever sent. Here’s what they said.

A true brownstone is actually built of brick; only the facade is made of brownstone.

Fonts in Popular Culture Identified Vol. 3

Scientists Have Taught Bees to Smell COVID-19 Infections

Knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work

While children felt about 3 years older than their chronological age, older adults (60+ years) felt between 10.74 and 21.07 years younger

10 residents live in isolation at Hawaii’s last leprosy community

Alien plants: The search for photosynthesis on other worlds

Dogecoin is a codebase fork of Luckycoin, which itself was a codebase fork of Junkcoin, which was a codebase fork of Litecoin, which in turn is a codebase fork of Bitcoin

The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?

A future without passwords

How Big Pharma Finds Sick Users on Facebook — Though Facebook does not offer advertisers categories that explicitly identify people’s health conditions, The Markup identified dozens of ads for prescription pharmaceuticals targeted at people with “interests” in topics like “bourbon,” “oxygen,” and “Diabetes mellitus awareness.”

when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. […] Belonging is stronger than facts.

Psychoanalytic interpretations of the American television series The Office — most of the time no work is done at all

The 3,000-year-old Luxor obelisk first arrived in Paris on 21 December 1833, and three years later, on 25 October 1836, was moved to the centre of Place de la Concorde by King Louis-Phillipe. It had been given to France by Muhammad Ali Pasha, ruler of Ottoman Egypt in exchange for a French mechanical clock. After the Obelisk was taken, the mechanical clock provided in exchange was discovered to be faulty, having probably been damaged during transport. The clock still exists in a clock-tower at Cairo Citadel and is still not working. [Wikipedia]

Gateses’ mansion, called Xanadu 2.0 […] A 20-car garage is built into the hillside […] There’s a trampoline room. […] The house has just seven bedrooms but 24 bathrooms

Could this famous con man be lying about his story? [Frank W. Abagnale Jr. / Catch Me if You Can] A new book suggests he is

DeLillo originally wanted to call the book Panasonic, but the Panasonic Corporation objected

the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will be saved

Brazilian Amazon released more carbon than it absorbed over past 10 years

The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code — Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.

how we applied for a job with a ransomware gang

A deadly California wildfire was set to cover up a woman’s murder

Elderly couple uses military Morse Code training to escape Tennessee assisted living facility

Western diet tied to adult acne

Grumpy face during adult sleep

5 years old, the age at which children first become concerned with other people’s evaluations of them

It appears that having a son decreases support for feminist and egalitarian gender attitudes in both men and women

Citizens have made “huge sacrifices” over the last eight months to try and contain the coronavirus, he said in a statement. “In such circumstances it is easy and natural to feel apathetic and demotivated, to experience fatigue.”

NYPD Returns Its Police ‘Robodog’ After a Public Outcry

Consider Amazon. The company perfected the one-click checkout. But canceling a $119 Prime subscription is a labyrinthine process that requires multiple screens and clicks. Or Ticketmaster. Online customers are bombarded with options for ticket insurance, subscription services for razors and other items and, when users navigate through those, they can expect to receive a battery of text messages from the company with no clear option to stop them. These are examples of “dark patterns.” [NY Times]

California appeals court finds Amazon responsible for third party sellers’ products

From steel and copper to corn and lumber, commodities started 2021 with a bang, surging to levels not seen for years.

The Bahamas is one of three countries to launch a digital currency, along with China and Cambodia.

The Secret Mission To Unearth Part Of A 142-Year-Old Experiment

While captive in a Navy program, a beluga whale named Noc began to mimic human speech

Is it ‘Zoom face’ or is the pandemic aging you?

I’m looking for a deconstructed bra that does not ride up, but is less constricting than a traditional underwire. Any suggestions? [NY Times]

Andre Agassi’s method of reading Boris Becker’s serve

Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake

Japanese man arrested after ‘dating more than 35 women at once to get birthday gifts’

An unarmed man was shot by a Virginia sheriff’s deputy about an hour after the same deputy gave the man a ride home […] the deputy mistook a phone for a gun

The salmon you buy in the future may be farmed on land

Household aerosols now release more harmful smog chemicals than all UK vehicles

Better air is the easiest way not to die

Bolsonaro poses smiling with a canceled CPF card (Brazilian’s Social Security card) - an allusion to what happens when people die.

Mask-wearing practices during COVID-19 changed emotional face processing

Much like humans, some rhesus monkeys enjoy alcohol and will drink a lot, while others show less interest and will limit themselves to small amounts. The researchers found that the animals that were chronically heavy drinkers had a weak response to the vaccine. […] Moderate drinking is unlikely to impair the immune response to the Covid vaccine, but heavy drinking might.

more than two dozen “pancoronavirus” vaccine projects are underway, more

California braces for another ‘clown car’ of recall candidates — Running in the California recall may be the best bargain on the planet for fame and fortune seekers. For just $4,000, any registered voter can grab an instant platform in what’s sure to become the nation’s most watched election this year — and leverage that position on social media and airwaves with some of the most attention-getting stunts possible.

Neurons in the mouse brain correlate with cryptocurrency price

The first Op-Ed page in The New York Times greeted the world on Sept. 21, 1970. It was so named because it appeared opposite the editorial page and not (as many still believe) because it would offer views contrary to the paper’s. It’s time to change the name. The articles written by outside writers will be known as “Guest Essays.” [NY Times]

Burning Man Is Canceled for 2021 but They’re Keeping Your $2,500 Reservation Fee

China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world

bitcoin has characteristics of what he calls a Ponzi scheme that’s right out in the open — “It’s a beautifully set up cryptographic system. It’s well made but there’s absolutely no reason it should be linked to anything economic”

Scientist Who Says He Created Bitcoin Can Sue Bitcoin.org

JP Morgan is looking to hire skilled Ethereum developers to fill up at least 64 open positions.

Wyoming will recognize DAOs as a new type of LLC [Decentralized autonomous organization]

Languishing might be the dominant emotion of 2021. […] In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. […] Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. [NY Times]

Who Profits from Destroying Reputations Online? A big clue were the ads that appeared next to them, offering help removing reputation-tarnishing content.

Here are some of the foods that Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut who launched on a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station on Friday, will enjoy during his six-month stay in orbit: lobster, beef bourguignon, cod with black rice, potato cakes with wild mushrooms and almond tarts with caramelized pears. [NY Times]

Tyrannosaurus rex walked surprisingly slowly, new study finds

Entomologists Charlie and Lois O’Brien have the largest private collection of insects in the world

A Suicide by Self-Decapitation

Amazon is opening a hair salon in London — Customers will be able to test out different hair colours in an augmented-reality mirror

Cat intercepted with drug delivery for Panama prison

Clinginess was reported as a more common source of relationship strain by women, while bad sex was reported as a more common source of relationship strain by men.

Stress And Death In Female Baboons — As Measured By Hormones In Poop

There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be

Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis

Just How Many Surfaces Does Your Cat’s Butt Touch? A Sixth Grader’s Science Fair Project Has The Answer

residents who cut off their own limbs as a way to collect insurance money

Eiffel Tower replicas around the world

Polychaete worms from hydrothermal vents

Italian man accused of skipping work for 15 years straight

valuing happiness often predicts worse well-being and mental health

Manhattan District Attorney To Stop Prosecuting Prostitution

Do voices carry valid information about a speaker’s personality?

Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language

Dr. Marr uses a simple two-out-of-three rule for deciding when to wear a mask. In every situation, she makes sure she’s meeting two out of three conditions: outdoors, distanced and masked. “If you’re outdoors, you either need to be distanced or masked,” she said. “If you’re not outdoors, you need to be distanced and masked. This is how I’ve been living for the past year. It all comes down to my two-out-of-three rule.” [NY Times]

Higher mushroom consumption is associated with a lower risk of cancer

China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran contribute to amplifying the QAnon conspiracy theory online

‘Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act’ Would Ban Clearview and Warrantless Location Data Purchases — The sweeping bill has support from both Democrats and Republicans, and will address multiple forms of surveillance

Debuted as part of an ongoing project titled NFTheft, sleepminting serves as a crypto-counterfeiting exercise. Sleepminting enables [the artist] to mint NFTs for, and to, the crypto wallets of other artists, then transfer ownership back to himself without their consent or knowing participation.

Hard Drive and SSD Shortages Could Be Imminent If New Cryptocurrency Blooms — With the emergence of the Chia cryptocurrency, miners in China are reportedly frantically snatching up every hard drive and SSD they can find. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, you don’t mine Chia with a processor, graphics card or ASIC miner. Instead, you farm Chia with storage space, which is where hard drives or SSDs come in.

LVMH, Prada, and Richemont Build a Blockchain

You Can Sell the Trees You Don’t Cut

Anti-venom is snake-specific, meaning if you’re bitten by a king cobra, you need king cobra anti-venom. If there’s 70 different venomous snakes in one place, I can’t carry a refrigerator with 70 different anti-venoms. […] On his way to work, he’s thinking nasal spray for snakebites. On his way home from work - nasal spray for snakebites. He is obsessed. [NPR | Audio + Transcript]

The researchers estimated there could be between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles released before a half-pint of lager would go flat.

Interrupted Maps, Butterfly Maps, Retroazimuthal Projections…

Colors of noise

Really Bad Chess

Real estate agent is auctioning off an NFT that comes with a duplex in Thousand Oaks, California

Crypto’s Coming of Age May Kill the Bitcoin Bubble and Dogecoin has risen 400 percent in the last week because why not

Two die in Tesla car crash in Texas with ‘no one’ in driver’s seat

Defense Department confirms leaked photos and videos of triangle-shaped objects blinking and moving through the clouds are real

Women have higher magical beliefs than men. Women have stronger reliance on intuition than men.

Account of what it’s like to work as a Facebook content moderator — The employee is based in Austin, TX and works for Accenture, a company that provides content moderation contractors for Facebook.

A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Method — Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it’s true.

In the last decade, I have revised 3,000 résumés while working as a college career adviser. Here is my advice: The strongest will fit on a single page. Exceptions are few.

Drug Cartel Now Assassinates Its Enemies With Bomb-Toting Drones

France cuts two nuclear-powered submarines in half to make one new one

STDs reach all-time high for 6th consecutive year

We finally know how the FBI unlocked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone — Too bad it cost $900,000 and led to nothing

Doctors Forgot to Warn People With Breasts That the Covid Vaccine Could Affect Their Next Mammogram

Humans can read the heart rate of others when looking at their face

What happens when you have a heart attack on the way to Mars?

for some people, making or receiving calls is a stressful experience

How Airbnb and Uber use activist tactics that disguise their corporate lobbying as grassroots campaigns

Madoff paid “gains” to older investors with money coming in from newer ones. […] After he went to jail, Madoff dismissed the people who fell for his scam as “greedy” […] More than money was lost. At least two people, in despair over their losses, died by suicide. A major Madoff investor suffered a fatal heart attack after months of contentious litigation over his role in the scheme. Some investors lost their homes. Others lost the trust and friendship of relatives and friends they had inadvertently steered into harm’s way. […] His older son, Mark, died by suicide in his Manhattan apartment early on the morning of Dec. 11, 2010, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. […] On Sept. 3, 2014, his younger son, Andrew, died of cancer at the age of 48. He had blamed the stress of the scandal for the return of the cancer he had fought off in 2003. […] The actual cash losses from his fraud, not counting fictional profits, were most recently estimated at between $17 billion and $20 billion. […] Through the bankruptcy process, some victims were able to recover all or part of the cash principal they invested with Mr. Madoff. Irving Picard, the court appointed trustee who has spent the last decade trying to recoup most of the money for Mr. Madoff’s investors, has, to date, recovered $14.4 billion from lawsuits and settlements — roughly covering all the money investors gave to Mr. Madoff. [Washington Post | NY Times]

Interested in alternative investments but don’t know where to start?

toilet rats, toilet squirrels, toilet spiders, toilet possums, toilet frogs, toilet birds, toilet bats, toilet scorpions

Dr. I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University, is a classic case of nominative determinism

Woman gets pregnant while already pregnant

“Ambiguous Objects” that change their appearances in a mirror

The top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% … over the past several decades. This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation.

How people get rich now

First GMO Mosquitoes to Be Released In the Florida Keys

CEO of a top bitcoin exchange warns a crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

Acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Allison Lee, for example, has been very active. She has returned power to senior enforcement staff, who had it stripped from them in 2017, to open probes without seeking senior approvals, and has reversed a 2019 policy that critics said made it too easy for companies that broke the rules to continue with business as usual.

Twitter won’t let federal archivists host Trump’s tweets on Twitter

When BitClout arrived on the internet last month, it befuddled much of the cryptocurrency world. That was not least because the company, which describes itself as “not a company,” but a “new type of social network” — a sort of bitcoin-meets-Twitter — had ripped off some 15,000 profiles of famous people and influencers from actual Twitter and opened accounts in their names without their permission. […] Perhaps the most suspicious part, though, to many outsiders, was the insistence by BitClout’s founders that they themselves remain anonymous […] And yet, BitClout’s backers have poured more than $100 million into it.]

The FBI has arrested a Texas man who planned to blow up one of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in an attempt to “kill of about 70% of the internet.”

Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists — papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers […] Jargon doesn’t always associate with negative outcomes […] abstracts that contained fewer common words tended to garner more grant funding [NY Times]

For two decades, from its genesis in the mid-nineties, Vice Media branded itself in the image of the dispossessed. The earliest issues of its magazine, originally called the Voice of Montreal, were supported by a Canadian welfare grant and copublished by a Haitian nonprofit. But by the summer of 2017, two of its founders—Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith—had traded government funding for private investment and dropped their titular claim to communal representation with the jettison of a single vowel: the Voice became Vice. The company received multimillion-dollar investments from Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, but still self-described as “countercultural.” […] Outwardly, Vice aimed to preserve its brand by cultivating an ethos of unconventionality and titillation. Internally, however, the culture was troubled—a problem not only of self-presentation, but also of management. Upon their hire, employees were asked to sign a “non-traditional workplace agreement” that contractually obliged them to feel at ease. “Although it is possible that some of the text, images and information I will be exposed to in the course of my employment with VICE may be considered by some to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing,” read the agreement, “I do not find such text, images or information or the workplace environment at VICE to be offensive, indecent, violent or disturbing.” [CJR]

Legends and science of bottomless pits, bogs, and lakes via things magazine

100 Greatest Korean Films Ever

Illegal number

Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days

This man is looking for the friends who shipped him overseas in a crate in 1965

Experiments with particles known as muons suggest that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. [NY Times | Quanta]

Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will

Rates of Parkinson’s disease are exploding — Researchers believe a factor is a chemical used in drycleaning and household products such as shoe polishes and carpet cleaners in the US

People tend to assign higher attractiveness to an individual viewed from the back than head on. This tendency is pronounced when males rate the attractiveness of women.

A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.

The real reason why the Salvator Mundi didn’t make it into the Louvre’s Leonardo show

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod in present day Russia in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.

Over 110 million Americans have now had a taste of universal health care.

This is the final motherfucking website. Inspired by the geniuses behind motherfuckingwebsite.com

“Time Slows Down Whenever You Are Around” for Women but Not for Men

Completed in nine days, massive hospital opens in London — Thanks to a herculean collaborative effort carried out by the National Health Service (NHS), the British Armed Forces, the Royal Engineers, the facilities management team at ExCeL London, private contractors, and international architecture firm BDP, the 1-million-square-foot convention center in the docklands of East London has been transformed in just over a week into what’s not only the largest hospital in the United Kingdom but, per CNBC, the largest critical care unit in the world. [Thanks Tim]

Children now playing ‘huge role’ in spread of COVID-19 variant — “We’re not going to have nearly enough (vaccine doses) in the next 6 to 8 weeks to get through this surge”

B.1.1.7 is about 60 percent more contagious and 67 percent more deadly than the original form of the virus. Infected people seem to carry more of the B.1.1.7 virus and for longer […] “The best way to think about B.1.1.7 and other variants is to treat them as separate epidemics” [NY Times]

In their efforts to rein in illicit massage businesses across the country, police sometimes rely on sting operations in which undercover officers engage in sex acts with spa workers

Here we demonstrate that environmental DNA can be collected from air and used to identify mammals

Known as the “torpedo,” the remotely controlled submarine would use magnets to attach to the bottom of cargo ships. The operator could later detach the drone, which would send a GPS signal with its location. Then, prosecutors allege, the trafficking ring would send a fishing boat to meet the submarine about 100 miles off the coast of Europe and collect the cocaine.

Fugu can be lethally poisonous due to its tetrodotoxin, meaning it must be carefully prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat. The restaurant preparation of fugu is strictly controlled by law in Japan and several other countries, and only chefs who have qualified after three or more years of rigorous training are allowed to prepare the fish. […] Researchers have determined that a fugu’s tetrodotoxin comes from eating other animals infested with tetrodotoxin-laden bacteria, to which the fish develops insensitivity over time. As such, efforts have been made in research and aquaculture to allow farmers to produce safe fugu. Farmers now produce poison-free fugu by keeping the fish away from the bacteria; Usuki, a town in Ōita Prefecture, has become known for selling non-poisonous fugu.

Some of the World’s Top Artists Are Trying Their Hand at NFTs. The World’s Top Galleries Are a Bit More Skeptical.

In 1930, engineers accomplished something remarkable: they rotated an 8-story, 11,000 ton building a full 90 degrees

How long would it take to walk around the moon?

MARCH (PARKING) MADNESS: Welcome to the Finals — the 114th vs. the 34th

Swiss robots use UV light to zap viruses aboard passenger planes

Update on the 3 major variants

How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob — Installed on thousands of streetlights, speed cameras, toll booths, police cars and tow trucks across the United States, the scanners record every passing vehicle into databases run by contractors such as Vigilant Systems, which reports that it has recorded 5 billion license plate locations nationwide. In Maryland alone, government and police scanners captured more than 500 million plates last year, state data shows. […] Agents got a D.C. judge to issue a “ping order” for his cellphone, which had been registered with T-Mobile under the name of Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, the affidavit said. That ping order allegedly pinpointed Alam’s location to Room 17 of the Penn Amish Motel in rural Pennsylvania. FBI agents arrested him there the next day.

“his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”

New study detects lottery-like behavior in cryptocurrency markets

Now, all of those people who were tweeting and Clubhousing about NFTs are on to the next: DAOs. Launched on April 30, 2016, The DAO was an early Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) and venture capital fund.

Facebook shorted video creators thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Due to a ‘technical issue.’

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

Mapping the World’s Key Maritime Choke Points

What happens to a tree when it dies?

into the woods to cut down trees via things magazine

My Bloody Valentine is working on two new albums

Every Noise at Once

Interesting wardrobe

Woman accused of hitting child with car claims she was trying to run over someone else

Man accused of assault and robbery outside a restaurant told detectives his DNA was planted at the crime scene by an airplane in order to frame him

New drug to regenerate lost teeth

We theorize that reconnaissance satellites have revolutionized the use of information gleaned from spying in ways that discourage states from engaging in serious conflicts with one another. We find that when either the potential aggressor or target in a dyad possess reconnaissance satellites, they are significantly less likely to become involved in serious militarized interstate disputes.

Venomous people could become a reality, scientists say

Scientists built a perfectly self-replicating synthetic cell

Scientists Get Closer To Redefining The Length Of A Second — The worldwide standard atomic clocks have for decades been based on cesium atoms — which tick about 9 billion times per second. But newer atomic clocks based on other elements tick much faster [and] are 100 times more accurate than the cesium clock.

Even before the pandemic, Americans were already flushing far too many wipes into the sewer system. After a year of staying at home, the pipe-clogging problem has gotten worse.

Nearly 500 bee species are thriving in a small patch of US desert — There are about 20,000 known species of bee on the planet, and nowhere else is this diversity more concentrated than in southern Arizona along the US-Mexico border. Hundreds of bee species can be found in a patch of desert there about the size of Heathrow airport, meaning it has the world’s densest aggregation of bee species yet measured.

We identified 110 shades from 73 products that contained the word “nude” in the name. […] Roughly 40% of beauty brands use a sequential numbering system to organize their foundation shades. Yet only 4 out of those 130 products ordered their shades from dark to light.

“There was no history of my ever purchasing it, or ever owning it,” said one confused NFT buyer. “Now there’s nothing. My money’s gone.” People’s Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing.

Inside a viral website

A missing Florida woman was rescued after she was found naked in a storm drain. She told police officers she had been down there 20 days after she got lost swimming in the canal.

Parisien police seized a suspected shipment of ecstasy that turned out to be strawberry powder

Authorities in Romania have brought drug trafficking charges against a man who once posed as US actor Robert de Niro in order to take out fraudulent bank loans.

We found that the female chatbot is preferred over the male chatbot because it is perceived as more human

Testosterone administration in women increases the size of their peripersonal space

Drinking a strong coffee half an hour before exercising increases fat-burning, new study finds

The pandemic itself was already exposing vulnerabilities in world provide chains. Now it prices about $4,000 to ship a 40-ft container between east Asia and the US west coast, up from $1,500 initially of 2020. […] brash political speak about reshoring operations is naive. “Even the supply chain has a supply chain,” he says. A dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, for instance, requires 280 parts from a number of nations, in line with the corporate. [Financial Times | ungated]

The experiment aims to find out if large groups of people can come together safely during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Before Google bought YouTube in 2006 for just $1.65 billion, it alleged that the site was “a rogue enabler of content theft.” Google’s investment was protected thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 512, which granted a safe harbor from prosecution to tech companies whose users post copyrighted materials, as long as they institute a process of taking down infringing content when asked. […] Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, promoted what he called an artist-friendly streaming solution. […] Spotify also pays out absurdly low per-stream rates, though not as bad as YouTube. […] “The platforms have driven the price of content to zero. This demonetized content is still generating a fortune. But the artists aren’t getting that money.”

Meet the experimental musicians who built their own streaming service

Amazon started disclosing AWS numbers five years ago, but in the last couple of years another big and highly profitable business has quietly emerged in the footnotes at the back of the 10k. Amazon’s ‘Other’ revenue line, which is ‘primarily’ advertising, was over $20bn in 2020.

Facebook’s problem is that, if given a choice, many people will choose not to allow tracking.

Artificial Intelligence will generate enough wealth to pay each adult $13,500 a year — if the government collects and redistributes the wealth that AI will generate

The conventional wisdom about how to spot a liar is all wrong. Previously: Former CIA Officer Will Teach You How to Spot a Lie

I tracked down my impostor — I found a video clip of him at a conference, reading out a chapter I’d written. He was dressed like me. He had even copied my tattoos

Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” Beta Is Just Laughably Bad and Potentially Dangerous

The Louvre Collections database

Museum of Everything Else

Multiple Destroyers Were Swarmed By Mysterious ‘Drones’ Off California Over Numerous Nights

A $100,000 bonus for working 100-hour workweeks? Apollo analysts hit the jackpot, even if they don’t get to have a life.

The Coronavirus Variants Don’t Seem to Be Highly Variable So Far — SARS-CoV-2 may be settling into a limited set of mutations

Oral manifestations, such as taste loss, dry mouth and oral lesions, are evident in about half of COVID-19 cases. […] Saliva from asymptomatic individuals contains infectious virus

Fox News faces a second defamation suit over its election coverage. Dominion is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox.

One useful perspective shift here is to reframe the situation so that learning to tolerate the discomfort of doing things imperfectly becomes a kind of self-improvement project in itself.

You may stumble, but that’s OK. In fact, it’s the only way you’ll learn.

The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

hand-painted “self-portrait” by world-famous robot sold at auction for over $688,000

Poem (video)

How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies — and cutting my electricity bill in half in the process

Studies show that swearing makes up around 0.5 % of the daily spoken content

the average length of an erect penis is between 5.1 and 5.5 inches (12.95-13.97 cm)

The virus that causes the common cold can effectively boot the Covid virus out of the body’s cells, say researchers.

A New Generation of Vaccines Is Coming, Some With No Needles

More than 1.4 trillion euros ($1.7 trillion) of banknotes were circulating at the end of 2020, up 11% from a year earlier. Yet the evidence suggests that only about a fifth of that is used for transactions within the currency area. Studies have shown that 30-50% by value is held outside the bloc, such as in developing economies with underdeveloped payment infrastructure and a lack of credible savings options. The rest, maybe as much as 50% by value, is physically stored by households, companies and banks. [Bloomberg]

In Europe, the [big tetch] companies are spending more than ever, hiring former government officials, well-connected law firms and consulting firms. They funded dozens of think tanks and trade associations, endowed academic positions at top universities across the continent and helped publish industry-friendly research by other firms. In the first half of 2020, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft declared spending a combined 19 million euros, or about $23 million, equal to what they had declared for all of 2019 and up from €6.8 million in 2014. Despite the lobbying, the industry has had few major successes. [NY Times]

A tool for publishing newsletters, Substack grew in prominence over the past year as several well-known opinion journalists abandoned their longtime employers to start their own subscription-based, bespoke punditry shops on the platform. […] Former Vox columnist Matt Yglesias, for example, is reportedly poised to rake in $860,000 in subscription revenue this year. Unless he’s paying $50,000 a month for his internet connection, his newsletter’s rate of profit dwarfs that of most any major media outlet. […] But this was not the focus of last week’s Substack discourse.

Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures (2018)

Facebook Algorithmic Factory (2016)

Hennessy Youngman on Damien Hirst (2012)

Dealers are using Fortnite treats to groom children as drug mules

Study confirms that some people age more slowly — The slowest ager gained only 0.4 “biological years” for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5 biological years for every chronological year.

Training Working Memory for Two Years – No Evidence of Latent Transfer to Intelligence

What makes It Difficult to keep an Intimate Relationship: Evidence From Greece and China

Dogs and cats can become infected by B.1.1.7, the “UK variant”

The wannabe food influencer who’s wanted by the FBI

Travelers sitting on billions of dollars in unused flight vouchers

Junior investment bankers at Goldman Sachs are suffering burnout from 100-hour work weeks and demanding bosses during a SPAC-fueled boom in deals, according to an internal survey

Fake Insider Trading Is Illegal Too

By all accounts, Len was on track to be one of the most important cryptographers of his time. But on July 3rd, 2011, he tragically took his own life at 31, following a long battle with depression and functional neurological disorders. His death coincided with the disappearance of the world’s most famous cypherpunk: Satoshi Nakamoto.

Man Loses $560,000 in Bitcoin Scam From Fake Elon Musk Account — One of the most common scam consists of creating Twitter accounts posing as personalities like Elon Musk. In some cases, criminals use accounts stolen from prominent individuals that already have the “verified blue check mark,” thus they appear legitimate and trustworthy. Although Twitter is the favorite platform for “gift scams,” they also swarm other networks such as YouTube, Facebook , Instagram and even WhatsApp.

Facial Recognition: What Happens When We’re Tracked Everywhere We Go? [NY Times]

Distribution systems within the U.S. electrical grid are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack Related: U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid [NY Times] and Hacking the Russian Power Grid

Mission to clean up space junk with magnets set for launch

Can Transgender Women Get Uterus Transplants?

Why Women Should Not Vote (1917)

A vampire can be considered “amphibious”

How to Build a Life: Stop Keeping Score

The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make

The McMansion Hell Yearbook: 1979

Dozens of people in Taiwan have changed their names to “salmon” to take advantage of a restaurant’s sushi promotion deal. Officials have issued a plea asking people to stop visiting government offices to request the name change.

Angry Customer Demands Refund After Ordering A Dozen Masks, Receiving “Only 12″

Scientists grew tiny tear glands in a dish — then made them cry

About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.

Erin Brockovich: Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity

Lingering symptoms from the coronavirus may turn out to be one of the largest mass disabling events in modern history.

Microbes Unknown to Science Discovered on The International Space Station

Facebook is making a bracelet that lets you control computers with your brain — The device would let you interact with Facebook’s upcoming augmented-reality glasses just by thinking.

Invisibility of Social Privilege to Those Who Have It

Unpacking a Decade of Appellate Decisions on Qualified Immunity — a judicial doctrine that shields government officials, including those in law enforcement, from being held personally responsible for constitutional violations

“Narco Submarine” Discovered in Spain

The Spanish Electrician Who Sabotaged the Nazis

Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what was happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales

It Takes Two Neurons To Ride a Bicycle [PDF]

researchers in Switzerland can get electricity from wood

Uber is reclassifying its UK-based drivers as “workers”

It may look like an art show but these ‘dancing lights’ reduce pesticide use by 50%

Discovery identifies non-DNA molecules in the sperm involved in transmitting paternal experience to offspring

50 new genes for eye colour

The psychological risks of meditation

The term nervous breakdown first appeared in a 1901 medical treatise for physicians. “It is a disease of the whole civilized world,” its author wrote.

The fast-growing social network SafeChat has a “Star Wars” barlike atmosphere in which white nationalists mingle with Chinese dissidents. And there’s plenty of conspiracy theories, too.

how the New York Times tests multiple headlines for a single article

To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at Czech zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens

Two Historic Brassiere-to-Face-Mask Innovations

Pa. woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to force rivals off daughter’s cheerleading squad

A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16

Hedge Funds Are Training 16-Year-Old Interns in Singapore

Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 — Each carat removes 20 tons of greenhouse gas from the sky, entrepreneurs say

Google must face $5B lawsuit over tracking private internet use, judge rules — Judge finds tech giant didn’t notify users their data could still be collected in incognito mode

NFTs have already given rise to new types of copyright infringement, frustrating artists

Cracking of encrypted messaging service dealt major blow to organised crime — Sky ECC promised a 5 million USD (€4.2 million) prize on its website, which is currently down, to anyone who could crack its encryption. It is not yet clear if Belgian authorities plan to claim the reward.

how to operate an airport in Antarctica

Wooden Replica of Mies’ Farnsworth House

Farnworth House VR Tour

Degaussing + Manually deguassing a CRT monitor using neodymium magnet

Russian Lawmakers Approve Initial Reading Of Bill Allowing ‘Accidental’ Corruption

We consider whether Orgasmic Meditation, a structured, partnered, largely non-verbal practice that includes genital touch, also increases relationship closeness.

When it came to definitions of rough sex, the most commonly endorsed items were: choking (77%), hair pulling (75%), spanking (69%), being pinned down (66%), being tied up (65%)…

Research shows that high levels of media multitasking may be associated with a decreased cognitive function

Fourteen horses were used in a 4-phases mirror test (covered mirror, open mirror, invisible mark, visible colored mark).

AI Identifies Pain Levels From Patient Data

Body Mass Index and Risk for COVID-19

How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world

Inside Jeff Bezos’s failed attempt to make Amazon “cool” like Apple and Nike

What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?

scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes.

Man sues Hertz over receipt that cleared him of murder

Hundreds of sewage leaks detected thanks to AI

Almost all men want to feel sexually desired, but few actually do

One in four men has faked a climax at least once

In seven studies (n = 1,133), adults tried to create funny ideas and then rated the funniness of their responses, which were also independently rated by judges. People were relatively modest and self-critical about their ideas.

Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself

One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). […] Greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.

A COVID-19 patient died after experiencing a 3-hour erection that doctors struggled to treat

there are some meaningful signs that even these quite scary-seeming versions of the disease may not prove all that scary in the end. I’m very worried about the Brazilian variant, since there is some evidence that it has achieved “immune escape” and produced a wave of reinfections. But the course of the others contains some real contradictions which I don’t yet know how to resolve. They appear to be considerably more infectious, and perhaps more lethal, than the “classic” strains. And yet they are growing in prevalence precisely as cases are falling nearly everywhere in the world. How can that be? Seasonality is surely playing a role in that decline, but if a new variant is 50 percent more transmissible than the old, you would expect it would require quite dramatic new restrictions to produce a decline in cases. In other words, it would be really hard, and pretty rare, to engineer a decline in the presence of those variants. Instead, it seems to be happening everywhere. [NY mag]

Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Security experts are now trying to alert and assist these victims before malicious hackers launch what many refer to with a mix of dread and anticipation as “Stage 2,” when the bad guys revisit all these hacked servers and seed them with ransomware or else additional hacking tools for crawling even deeper into victim networks. [Krebs on Security]

A study out of Harvard in 2020 also found that although cryptocurrency mining isn’t “burning down the planet”, there is “a scenario where each $1 of cryptocurrency coin value created would be responsible for $0.66 in health and climate damages.”

Earth makes a tiny seismic rumble every 26 seconds. No one knows why.

How Instagram Celebrities Promote Dubai’s Underground Animal Trade

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service

The more we can google, the less we know

YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries

Block 800 NY Times reporters for $0 — The app’s creator is unknown

Suspected dog and cat meat factory in China raided after owner traces missing pet by GPS

Sidewalk robots get legal rights as “pedestrians”

UBER DRIVER COUGHED ON, ASSAULTED & PEPPER SPRAYED

Why Does the Pandemic Seem to Be Hitting Some Countries Harder Than Others?

Would you take a coronavirus risk? — We are stuck in the middle of a massive multiplayer coordination problem

Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business” […] But as the market gets more and more competitive creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams. […] For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game. […] “Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for.” [NY Times]

One of the most active QAnon networks is in Japan, where followers believe the imperial family has been replaced by body doubles and suggest that World War II-era Emperor Hirohito was a CIA or British agent who owned the patent for the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [..] QAnon also has enormous support in Britain. A survey by civic group Hope Not Hate last year found that 26 percent of Britons believed prominent public figures are part of a pedophile child-trafficking network, while an additional 17 percent said that the pandemic is part of a “depopulation plan” — another favorite QAnon belief around the world. [Washington Post]

Bird migration forecasts in real-time — When, where, and how far will birds migrate?

The secret New York apartment behind my bathroom mirror

Floral Motifs Are Digitally Printed onto Blonde Hair

Preliminary Examination, 3B District Court, March 2, 2021

Male nurse arrested after telling patients gynecological exam was necessary part of COVID-19 testing

The words ‘dopamine’ and ‘mindfulness’ have lost all meaning

fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched or zero-matched

While physical attractiveness was less important to blind men, blind women considered physical attractiveness as important as sighted women.

Children’s Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception

Intranasal vaccines might stop the spread of the coronavirus more effectively than needles in arms

the vast majority of people who are vaccinated will be protected from Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, vaccinated people may still be able to transmit the virus, even though they do not display any symptoms.

SARS-CoV-2 was present on the ocular surface in 52 of 91 patients with COVID-19

During Lockdown, Meaningful Activity Is More Fulfilling Than Simply Staying Busy

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

I think I know what intelligence is; I think I know how brains do it. And AI is not doing what brains do.

Deciphering Bitcoin Blockchain Data by Cohort Analysis

Why Do NFTs Matter for Music?

Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT

This frog’s lungs act like noise cancelling headphones

This thesis addresses a neglected area of castles studies – the spiral stair. [full study | PDF]

Japan asks China to stop performing anal swab tests for COVID on its citizens

Rooster will appear in court after killing owner during illegal cockfight

People Literally Don’t Know When to Shut Up, or Keep Talking, Study

Google to Stop Selling Ads Based on Your Specific Web Browsing — Citing privacy concerns, Google says it won’t use technologies that track individuals across multiple websites

Humans correctly identified six emotions in three breeds of dogs

Female and Male Reflections on Their Initial Experience of Coitus — “If you could go back in time to your first sexual intercourse, would you want to change anything? If so, what would you change and why?” […] a majority of both males (66.95%) and females (54.00%) reporting they would not want to change anything about their first coital experience. Among respondents who reported a desired change the three primary desired change themes were partner (15.72%), age (8.18%), and location (5.03%)

Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex.

There is a famous anecdote about an experiment once conducted on a group of unsuspecting diners who were served a meal of steak, chips, and peas under dim illumination. Partway through the meal, the lighting was returned to normal levels of illumination, revealing to the guests that the steak they were eating was, in fact, blue, the chips green, and the peas red.

Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically Over Time? [PDF]

‘When will it end?’ — How a changing virus is reshaping scientists’ views on COVID-19

The Dangers of Brain Science Overdetermining Legal Outcomes

The guidance is for members of the office. It is meant to help them in their task of making it as easy as possible for readers to understand the Bills that we produce. [PDF]

How to Issue a Central Bank Digital Currency

Newest Las Vegas ’slot machine’ is 11 stories tall and dispenses used cars

as restaurants increasingly receive takeout orders online and through apps, they face a new challenge called “friendly fraud” or “chargebacks.” In the scam, a customer orders food, often through a delivery service, then receives their meal, but disputes the charge with their credit card company to get a refund.

To fight climate change, save the whales, some scientists say — In death, whales carry the tons of carbon stored in their massive bodies down to rest on the seafloor, where it can remain for centuries. Whale excrement fertilizes the ocean, producing large phytoplankton blooms that absorb enormous amounts of carbon dioxide.

Men more than women report regret passing up short-term sexual opportunities (inaction regret), while women regret having had sexual encounters (action regret). will men who regret passing up sex engage in more short-term sex following regret? Will women who regret short-term encounters either choose better quality partners, reduce number of one-night stands or shift their strategy to long-term relationships? There was no clear evidence for the proposed functional shifts in sexual behavior.

Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome

Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes (Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense. Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.)

Huge, Global Study of Plastic Toys Finds Over 100 Substances That May Harm Children

How to become a super memorizer – and what it does to your brain

Arnold came across something called the Paranormal Challenge, a contest offering $250,000 to anyone offering indisputable proof of supernatural abilities. Over the years it’s devised experiments to test people who claim they can read minds, dim lights with the power of their brains, and peer, X-ray-like, through people’s skin. So far none have passed the test or claimed the prize.

Researchers virtually open and read sealed historic letters

Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet

How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist

Banks in Germany Tell Customers to Take Deposits Elsewhere — Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest.

The first AI-written play, “AI: When a robot writes a play,” tells the journey of a robot who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death. The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet.

Goldman Sachs restarts cryptocurrency desk amid bitcoin boom

Bitcoin could in the future become the preferred currency for international trade or face a “speculative implosion”

Recently, a botnet that researchers have been following for about two years began using a new way to prevent command-and-control server takedowns: by camouflaging one of its IP addresses in the bitcoin blockchain.

The NFT frenzy

How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million

Body Ballet by Nude Robot

NASA hid secret messages in the Perseverance parachute

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Fisher-Price® My Home Office — Better grab a latte to go, that report is due this morning

dentists are able to tell if you’ve recently performed oral sex

Forty-three percent of Americans shopping online experienced package theft last year, up from 36 percent in 2019[NY Times]

Murderers benefits from expressing guilt and deontological beliefs — Even if participants judged a person who murdered their parents or many innocent people in a terrorist plane attack.

How Much Older Do You Get When a Wrinkle Appears on Your Face?

We are now discovering that telomeres are an unreliable ageing clock

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April — Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

We tend to not perceive information about the world around us accurately. Instead, our brains interpret new information through a host of innate and learned mechanisms that can introduce bias and distortions One of the best studied mechanisms that guide – and distort – our perception is the psychophysical Weber-Fechner law. According to this empirically derived, mathematically formulated law we tend to put more emphasis on smaller deviations in size while underestimating larger changes. Here we investigate the hypothesis that our perception of data associated with the spread of COVID-19 and similar pandemics is governed by the same psychophysical laws. We demonstrate that the Weber-Fechner law can be shown to directly affect the decision-making of officials in response to this global crisis as well as the greater public at large.

deception is perceived to be ethical, and individuals want to be deceived, when deception is perceived to prevent unnecessary harm

In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure. Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent. There were not enough subjects who drank more than three cups daily to know if more coffee would decrease the risk further. [NY Times]

The Earth’s magnetic field protects us, acting as a shield against the solar wind (a stream of charged particles and radiation) that flows out from the sun. But the geomagnetic field is not stable in strength and direction, and it has the ability to flip or reverse itself. Some 42,000 years ago, the poles did just that for around 800 years, before swapping back. […] the flip, along with changing solar winds, could have triggered an array of dramatic climate shifts leading to environmental change and mass extinctions. […] experts say there is currently rapid movement of the north magnetic pole across the Northern Hemisphere — which could signal another reversal is on the cards.

“Can only have been painted by a madman” — Inscription on ‘The Scream’ That Baffled Experts for Decades Was Written by Edvard Munch Himself, New Research Shows

Florida women wear ‘granny’ disguise to try to get Covid vaccine

Drone Swarms Are Getting Too Fast For Humans To Fight, U.S. General Warns — Previously: Autonomous killer drones

Citibank can’t get back $500 million it wired by mistake, judge rules

Air pollution is associated with poorer quality sperm, finds study

The coronavirus is here to stay — many scientists expect the virus that causes COVID-19 to become endemic, but it could pose less danger over time

Cinemas rent out their auditoriums to gamers to bring in a new revenue stream ($90 for two hours)

Women better at reading minds than men, study

Findings suggest that individuals are unable to accurately identify AI-generated artwork

The Most Powerful Artificial Intelligence Knows Nothing About Investing

we developed an experimental “stock market”’ task in which cohorts of 4 rats drove asset prices up and down by selecting and subsequently buying, selling, or holding “stocks” to earn sweet liquid reward. […] Rats’ choice of the sell option demonstrated a robust tendency toward realizing gains more quickly than losses, which is characteristic of the “disposition effect” in human stock markets. Our results indicate that rats exhibit behavioral biases similar to human investors

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%

Fake Amazon reviews ‘being sold in bulk’ online

Silicon Valley-backed groups sue Maryland to kill country’s first-ever online advertising tax [Washington Post]

Free Trading Isn’t Free: How Robinhood Makes Money

List Of Fictional Cryptocurrencies Banned By The SEC

The 25 Greatest Art Heists of All Time

In a new study, scientists say they can explain dark matter by positing a particle that links to a fifth dimension

The essence of zero-knowledge proofs is that it is trivial to prove that one possesses knowledge of certain information by simply revealing it; the challenge is to prove such possession without revealing the information itself or any additional information

How do you access the contents of a safe without ever opening its lock or otherwise getting inside? This riddle may seem confounding, but its digital equivalent is now so solvable that it’s becoming a business plan. IBM is the latest innovator to tackle the well-studied cryptographic technique called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which allows for the processing of encrypted files without ever needing to decrypt them first.

Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

Basic music theory guide for beginners

All the COVID virus in the world could fit in a can of coke, says mathematician

vagina-scented face masks + Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle (“The candle exploded and emitted huge flames”)

Exhaled aerosol increases with degree of COVID-19 infection, age, and obesity

females are overall more aware of their smile and the impact it has on their public image

Traditional yoga encompasses a variety of practices, such as physical postures, breathing techniques, meditation practices, and ethical teachings. Numerous studies and meta-analyses have demonstrated yoga’s efficacy in promoting mental and physical health. Conversely, little is known about how the diverse components of yoga contribute to its overall effect. […] combined interventions incorporating multiple components consistently outperformed simpler interventions. Adding breathing and/or meditation practices to yoga interventions proved particularly beneficial in this regard

Cats show no avoidance of people who behave negatively to their owner

Researchers teach four pigs how to play a rudimentary joystick-enabled video game

Companies with no business plan, no profit, and no revenue are flooding Wall Street. They’re called SPACs, and investors are pouring money into them.

There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total, and 2.6 million Bitcoin left to be mined. 18.4 million Bitcoin were mined in 10 years, but it will take another 120 years to mine the remaining 2.6 million.

The statement there can never be more than 21 million bitcoins is 100% false.

The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), a 1988 book better known as The KLF, is a step-by-step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills. [things magazine]

Serviette Sculptures: Mattia Giegher’s Treatise on Napkin Folding (1629)

Arkansas farmer pleads guilty to dumping dead animals on neighbor’s grave while dressed as a woman

Doesn’t everybody jaywalk? On the motivated enforcement of frequently violated rules

“bitcoin’s fundamental value is negative given its environmental impact”

What you should know about Clubhouse, the invite-only, audio social app

Facebook, which has a history of cloning its competitors, has started working on an audio chat product, to compete with Clubhouse. [NY Times]

What other variants might be out there?

Our results show that therapeutic and prophylactic administration of EIDD-2801, an oral broad spectrum antiviral currently in phase II–III clinical trials, dramatically inhibited SARS-CoV-2 replication in vivo and thus has significant potential for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19.

New AI tool predicts who’ll die from COVID-19 with up to 90% accuracy

Viral ‘I’m not a cat’ filter is a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops

This is the first study to examine deception across the entire lifespan. We tested 1005 Science museum visitors from 6 to 77 years. Adolescents tell most lies, children and the elderly the least.

concordant drinking couples may achieve immediate benefits for couple harmony from drinking alcohol together.

Psychedelics in combination with psychotherapy are remarkably efficient at treating depression. At the correct doses, psychedelics are well tolerated, producing only minor side effects such as transient fear, perception of illusions, nausea/vomiting or headaches. These fleeting side effects pale in comparison to the severity of commonly prescribed antidepressants, which include dangerous changes in heart rate and blood pressure, paradoxical increases in suicidality, and withdrawal symptoms.

In 2017 a team of researchers used Google Street View images to study the distribution of car types in the US and then used that data to determine the demographic makeup of the country. It turns out that the car you drive is a surprisingly reliable proxy for your income level, your education, your occupation, and even the way you vote in elections. Another team of researchers used the images of people’s houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in a car accident.

Vaccines or Not, Scientists Now Believe Covid is Here to Stay

There are currently four endemic coronaviruses that, for most people, just cause a cold. Whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, will join them will be down to two predominant factors that control how a virus behaves in a population: the virus’s biology and the immunity of the host population.

SARS-CoV-2 mutations similar to those in the B1.1.7 UK variant could arise in cases of chronic infection, where treatment over an extended period can provide the virus multiple opportunities to evolve, say scientists.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter Target Resellers of Hacked Accounts — Particularly prized are short usernames, which can often be resold for thousands of dollars to those looking to claim a choice vanity name. […] Facebook seized hundreds of accounts — mainly on Instagram — that have been stolen from legitimate users through a variety of intimidation and harassment tactics, including hacking, coercion, extortion, sextortion, SIM swapping, and swatting.

A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead.

Researchers Test Detection Methods For AI-Generated Content

The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy. — Researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge. It has also led to far messier data sets: they may unintentionally include photos of minors, use racist and sexist labels, or have inconsistent quality and lighting. The trend could help explain the growing number of cases in which facial-recognition systems have failed with troubling consequences.

In 2016, the N.S.A.’s own hacking tools were hacked, by a still unknown assailant. Those tools were picked up first by North Korea, then Russia, in the most destructive cyberattack in history. Over the next three years, Iran emerged from a digital backwater into one of the most prolific cyber armies in the world. China, after a brief pause, is back to pillaging America’s intellectual property. And, we are now unwinding a Russian attack on our software supply chain that compromised the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Energy and its nuclear labs and the Department of Homeland Security, the very agency charged with keeping Americans safe. We know this not because of some heroic N.S.A. hack, or intelligence feat, but because the government was tipped off by a security company, FireEye, after it discovered the same Russian hackers in its own systems. America remains the world’s most advanced cyber superpower, but the hard truth, the one intelligence officials do not want to discuss, is that it is also its most targeted and vulnerable. At this very moment, we are getting hacked from so many sides that it has become virtually impossible to keep track. [NY Times]

A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Paris court finds France guilty of failing to meet its own Paris climate accord commitments

Scholars generally do agree that conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. They tap into basic aspects of human cognition and psychology, which may help explain why they take hold so easily — and why they’re seemingly impossible to kill. […] “The general hypothesis that’s put out there in the media is [that] everyone’s becoming conspiracists, and now is the golden age of conspiracy theory,” Uscinski says. “We find no such thing whatsoever.”

You might think of serendipity as passive luck that just happens to you, when actually it’s an active process of spotting and connecting the dots.

Sterling Silver Crazy Straw, $275

Six arrested after changing Hollywood sign to ‘Hollyboob’

A Florida lawyer has been disbarred for using his attorney privileges to visit women in jail and record sexual encounters with them for a pornographic film [more]

Scientists have managed to engineer spinach plants which are capable of sending emails — Through nanotechnology, engineers have transformed spinach into sensors capable of detecting explosive materials. These plants are then able to wirelessly relay this information back to the scientists.

bullshitters are particularly bad at seeing through the bullshit of others

Timing matters when correcting fake news — Providing fact-checks after headlines (debunking) improved subsequent truth discernment more than providing the same information during (labeling) or before (prebunking) exposure.

The Dunning-Kruger effect (why incompetent people don’t know they’re unskilled) is probably not real

Definitive logic indicates that GOD created not only Adam and Eve but also additional people.

Amazon is using AI-equipped cameras in delivery vans — The cameras record drivers “100% of the time” while they’re on their route and flag a series of safety infractions, including failure to stop at a stop sign, speeding and distracted driving.

human-made materials now weigh as much as all living biomass, say scientists

A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted predominantly through the air — by people talking and breathing out large droplets and small particles called aerosols. Catching the virus from surfaces — although plausible — seems to be rare. [Nature]

“You can remove your mask when you’re eating or drinking, so you have the guy eating one sunflower seed at a time so he can keep the mask off the whole flight.”

“Cybercrime and cyber-enabled crimes are going to offer enormous potential for criminal groups of all sizes and scales to replace lost income elsewhere [being] constrained by virus-control conditions”

A young program that puts troubled nonviolent people in the hands of health care workers instead of police officers has proven successful in its first six months

Archaeologists unearth Egyptian mummies with golden tongues

How wombats produce their cube-shape poo has long been a biological puzzle — The cube shape is formed within the intestines – not at the point of exit, as previously thought

More than 1,000 years ago, the western church was in crisis. […] During this period there was a fairly frequent use of the early medieval equivalent of impeachment. This was a church synod held in Rome, at which the holder of the highest office in Christendom could be tried for transgressions against the traditions and customs of their office. One such synod took place in January 897 and heard charges against the most recent former pontiff, Formosus (pope from 891 to 896). The only problem was that Formosus had been dead for seven months by the time the trial started. But the new pope, Stephen VI, was of the firm opinion that even when a leader had left office they could still be punished for their transgressions. Pope Stephen had Formosus’ corpse withdrawn from its sarcophagus and brought to the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome to be put on trial. The corpse was clad in papal vestments and seated on a throne to face charges that Formosus had broken the rules of the church. Close by stood a deacon to answer in Formosus’ name. Stephen VI charged the cadaver with having broken an oath not to return to Rome and of having illegally obtained the title of pope because he was already a bishop at the time of his election. [Raw Story]

The famous Duck/Rabbit image was uploaded to Google Cloud’s Vision API […] 73% confident it’s a duck […] Rabbit was, however, 100% absent.

Simon Popper, Ulysses, 2006 — [a reinterpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) rearranging all the words in the original book in alphabetical order]

The belief that humanure is unsafe for agricultural use is called fecophobia

My favourite species of birds are the ones named by people who clearly hate birds.

An Historical Collection of Found Paper Airplanes

Confused, jealous wife stabs husband after seeing her younger self in old photos

New Spotify Patent Involves Monitoring Users’ Speech to Recommend Music

Subway’s tuna is not tuna, but a ‘mixture of various concoctions,’ a lawsuit alleges

People least able to detect bullshit believe they are significantly more skilled at detecting bullshit compared to everyone else

parents with more children reported that time passed more quickly

Apple announced in 2020 that it would ask app makers to fill out what are essentially privacy nutrition labels. Just like packaged food has to disclose how much sugar it contains, apps would have to disclose in clear terms how they gobble your data. The labels appear in boxes towards the bottom of app listings. […] In tiny print on the detail page of each app label, Apple says, “This information has not been verified by Apple.” [Washington Post]

Economic gloom tends to reduce work-related burnout and the associated use of harmful substances, cut traffic deaths and workplace accidents, decrease environmental pollution. According to Ballester (and some previous literature), these effects may well counterbalance the opposite trend: While unemployment does increase suicide and crime risks, the overall effect of recent major recessions on mortality appears to be negligible. If Machines Ruled Us, Lockdowns Would Be Tougher

Teen Scientist Finds a Low-Tech Way to Recycle Water

Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — Google has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

No Time To Die reshoots ‘required for James Bond’s now out-of-date product placements’

Zookeepers and veterinarians obtained semen from Mufasa through the process of electro-ejaculation. But Mufasa, aged 20, could not survive the procedure.

djtrumplibrary.com

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction

Scientists Want to Shorten the Minute to 59 Seconds

“The rooster cry is a French tradition that needs to be preserved.” — France has passed a law protecting the sounds and smells of the countryside

Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year

How law enforcement gets around your smartphone’s encryption — Openings provided by iOS and Android security are there for those with the right tools.

Lying makes us mimic the body language of the people we are talking to

at least one third of SARS-CoV-2 infections are asymptomatic

Presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the Cornea of Viremic Patients With COVID-19

Air travel has accelerated the global pandemic, contributing to the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) throughout the world. We describe an outbreak that demonstrates in-flight transmission, providing further evidence to add to the small number of published studies in this area. The flight was 7.5 h long and had a passenger occupancy of 17%. Thirteen cases were passengers on the same flight […] resulted in a total of 59 cases

Cancer can be precisely diagnosed using a urine test with artificial intelligence

The Michigan Republican Party has moved to replace the Republican member of the Board of State Canvassers who certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state in November.

Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryptocurrency. Yellen argues many cryptocurrencies are used “mainly for illicit financing.”

Over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.

News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020 — Facebook stands out as a regular source of news for about a third of Americans

these drinks exist for your subclinical anxiety needs

San Francisco on Film

local legends and obscure curiosities from days of yore

Trump Urine Test Kit

Facial recognition can determine a person’s political party, with reasonable accuracy

Calculations Show It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI

How Successive Summarization Alters the Retelling of News

Ventilation and viral loads: the key misunderstandings of how coronavirus spreads

Wastewater-based epidemiology: a 20-year journey may pay off for Covid-19

The Sensitivity and Costs of Testing for SARS-CoV-2 Infection With Saliva Versus Nasopharyngeal SwabsFREE

Saliva testing for detection of SARS-CoV-2 had a similar sensitivity and specificity to that of nasopharyngeal testing

Samsung inadvertently uses iPhone to tweet Galaxy Unpacked promo

Apple fails to overturn VirnetX patent verdict, could owe over $1.1 billion
+ VirnetX has been described as being a patent troll

How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation

A British man who accidentally threw a hard drive loaded with bitcoin into the trash has offered the local authority where he lives more than $70 million if it allows him to excavate a landfill site.

Why Is Bitcoin Making New All-Time Highs?

Baking with AI-made recipes

Macaques are infamous for brazenly robbing unsuspecting tourists and clinging on to their possessions until food is offered as ransom payment. Researchers have found they are also skilled at judging which items their victims value the most and using this information to maximise their profit.

The total number of galaxies in the universe is probably in the hundreds of billions, rather than 2 trillions

James Naismith, inventor of the game of basketball

Is it possible to locate a man given only his photograph and first name?

Sony’s New Lip-Reading Technology Could Boost Accessibility—or Invade Privacy

The endowment effect occurs when people assign a higher value to an item they own thanto the same item when they do not own it. In a meta-analysis and three laboratory experiments, we show for the first time that ownership has no effect on beliefs about either: (a) the quality of the item or (b) the appropriate market price for the item.

Are couples with daughters more likely to divorce than couples with sons?

Law Firm Giving Away Free Divorce for Valentine’s Day

Sexual Practices and Satisfaction among Gay and Heterosexual Men in Romantic Relationships: A Comparison

Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics.

Previous research suggests that “Duchenne smiles,” indicated by the combined actions of the orbicularis oculi (cheek raiser) and the zygomaticus major muscles (lip corner puller), signal enjoyment. This research has compared perceptions of Duchenne smiles with non-Duchenne smiles among individuals voluntarily innervating or inhibiting the orbicularis oculi muscle. Here we used a novel set of highly controlled stimuli: photographs of patients taken before and after receiving botulinum toxin treatment for crow’s feet lines that selectively paralyzed the lateral orbicularis oculi muscle and removed visible lateral eye wrinkles, to test perception of smiles. Smiles in which the orbicularis muscle was active (prior to treatment) were rated as more felt, spontaneous, intense, and happier. Post treatment patients looked younger, although not more attractive.

Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.”

The Man Who Turned Credit-Card Points Into an Empire [NY Times]

Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, owns 7,002 Bitcoin [about $220 million] that he cannot retrieve because he lost the password to his digital wallet. He lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail. [NY Times]

A roundup of research on US presidential transitions

“Relative frequency of hashtags that call for execution by hanging”

NASA spacecraft discovers there may be fewer galaxies than we thought

Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming

Discovered within the last ten years, formicamycins have great potential because, under laboratory conditions, superbugs like MRSA do not become resistant to them. However, Streptomyces formicae only produce the antibiotics in small quantities.

Information abundance, like all markets of abundance, is bad for the average person but great for a small number of people

How did Zoroaster speak? What did he speak?  When did he speak? There seems to be a lot of dissension, even among Iranists, concerning the basic facts of his life and times. 

James Joyce’s Ulysses is an anti-stream of consciousness novel

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they don’t really understand language at all.

Stockfish evaluates about 100 million positions per second using rudimentary heuristics, whereas Leela Chess evaluates 40 000 positions per second using a deep neural network trained from millions of games of self-play. They also use different tree search approaches.

How Seinfeld’s Costumers Built One of TV’s Most Iconic Wardrobes

The Serpentine Illusion

Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom

Identical twins are not so identical, study suggests — they differ by an average of 5.2 early mutations, adding new perspective to nature-versus-nurture debates

After group conversations, people underestimated how much they were liked by others

Bottle-cork injury to the eye: a review of 13 cases

Is Light Fundamentally A Wave Or A Particle?

being angry increases your vulnerability to misinformation — Human memory is prone to error — and new research provides evidence that anger can increase these errors.

Genetic Variants of SARS-CoV-2—What Do They Mean?

Flu strains mutate regularly so vaccines need to be slightly altered every year. There are, however, several “universal” flu vaccines currently being studied that aim to make annual flu vaccinations a thing of the past. n fact, according to the American Society for Microbiology, some of these vaccine candidates are in phase 2 and phase 3 trials right now.

Covid-19 immunity likely lasts for years A new study shows immune cells primed to fight the coronavirus should persist for a long time after someone is vaccinated or recovers from infection.

Gorillas test positive for coronavirus at San Diego Zoo

school closures and lockdown are the only interventions modeled that have a reliable impact on Rt, and lockdown appears to have played a key role in reducing Rt below 1.0. We conclude that reversal of lockdown, without implementation of additional, equally effective interventions, will enable continued, sustained transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.

Integrated information as a possible basis for plant consciousness

2019-2020 Tech company donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the election

As The New York Times noted in 2016, not even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of all media, succeeded in turning her personal franchise into a cable powerhouse. Can Trump do something the far-wealthier and much more appealing Winfrey couldn’t?

migrating a large product off Amazon Web Services can take months of staging and possibly years to execute [more]

Clearview AI’s CEO says that use of his company’s facial recognition technology among law enforcement spiked 26 percent the day after a mob of pro-Trump rioters attacked the US Capitol. Audio: What is Clearview AI, and what influence does it hold?

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence

I review 65 years of Playboy centerfolds to consider how their bodies—physical characteristics, positions, contexts, and explicitness—have changed, and how this reflects the broader social change to which they are subject. I find that, overall, very little changes over the years, with two notable exceptions: increased visibility of the montes pubis and the slow decreasing in the amount of pubic hair the models have

A law buried in the 5,600-page emergency relief bill requires the US intel agencies to deliver an unclassified report on UFOs. More:US intelligence agencies have 180 days to share what they know about UFOs.

Of all the premature deaths among the ranks of the creative, none is more painful to contemplate than Franz Schubert’s

Lessons for Philosophers and Scientists from Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown

We’ve trained a neural network called DALL·E that creates images from text captions

Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time

A single icon can represent any number up to 9999

Touching door with pan

Australia is on track to eradicate transmission of HIV by the end of this decade.

The world is gaining two million acres of leafy cover per year, an increase of about five percent since 2000, equivalent to the leaf area of all the Amazon rainforests. 

The number of Chinese people living in extreme poverty was 88% in 1981. By 2015 it had fallen to 0.7%.

A biologist invented a sensor that detects spikes in ethylene, the chemical that makes fruits ripen, so distributors can sell it before it spoils. It’s already saved one company $400,000 in wasted food.

Police in Durham, England are helping arrestees get access to social services instead of prosecuting them. Of the 2,600 people they’ve helped, only 6% have re-offended.

A jazz club in Paris has re-opened for performances –– for one patron at a time. In just a few weeks, Le Gare hosted over 3,000 concerts for one.

{ 112 bits of good news that kept us sane in 2020 | Continue reading }

Smiling and grimacing can reduce needle injection pain, study

athletes’ bodies produced 3-5 times the emissions while working out, compared to when they were at rest. Chlorine from bleach cleaner sprayed onto equipment was reacting with the amino acids released from sweating bodies.

Data from four waves of the National Survey of Family Growth reveal American women who report more sex partners are less likely to get married (though so too are virgins). [SocArXiv]

Danish and Chinese tongues taste broccoli and chocolate differently — For several years, researchers have known that women are generally better than men at tasting bitter flavours. Now, research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that ethnicity may also play a role in how sensitive a person is to the bitter taste found in for example broccoli, Brussels sprouts and dark chocolate.

Cow burp-catcher ‘could help reduce methane emissions by 60%’

Folklore structure reveals how conspiracy theories emerge, fall apart

QAnon Is Two Different People, Shows Machine Learning Analysis

Airlines warn travelers: Emotional support animals will no longer be permitted. Animals that previously traveled as emotional support animals may still accompany passengers as carry-on or cargo pets if they meet requirements. [Washington Post]

Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 in the Sustainability of Airbnb Business Model

Singapore police will be able to use data obtained by its coronavirus contact-tracing technology for criminal investigations

When you hear the word inquisition, you think of Spain, heretics in strange tall pointed hats, the stake, forced confessions, horrifying images that make the words Holy Inquisition a cruel oxymoron. It is less well known that there were also inquisitors in Venice who could make life rather difficult for people.

The family with no fingerprints — At least four generations of Apu Sarker’s family have an extremely rare condition leaving them with no fingerprints

Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, has been named the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s 2020 Person of the Year , narrowly beating two other populist leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Erdogan

Harvard Professor Says Alien Technology Visited Earth in 2017

Contrary to wide‐held beliefs, religiosity decreases with greater expected proximity to death

Our study cannot answer whether some men adopt a feminist identity to increase their access to sexual partners.

Questions from 1920 Still Haunt Neuroscience — A 100-year-old paper anticipated key issues in modern neuroscience

For a while, the Union’s top general in the Civil War was a perfectionist. George Meade kept looking for the perfect opportunity to engage the forces of the Confederacy in battle. He accomplished little. Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman got the job done by their willingness to use imperfect methods. How Perfectionism Has Made the Pandemic Worse

Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a Colorado man with no history of travel, an additional case was found in California. There are still many unknowns, but much concern has focused on whether this new variant would throw off vaccine efficacy or cause more severe disease —- with some degree of relief after an initial study indicated that it did not do either. […] Bedford notes that this new variant seems to have a higher secondary-attack rate —- meaning the number of people subsequently infected by a known case — compared with “regular” COVID-19. Finally, the new variant seems to result in higher viral loads (though this is harder to be sure about as viral loads can be affected by sampling bias and timing). […] This variant, now called B.1.1.7, has “an unusually large number of genetic changes, particularly in the spike protein,” which is how the virus gains entry into our cells. The new variant may be better at eluding our immune response and replicating, or be able to better bind to locations in our body more conducive to infecting others, but that is all speculative for the moment. […] we may need to be stricter — less time indoors, better masks, better ventilation, more disinfection of high-touch surfaces. […] We don’t know. We won’t know for a while. [The Atlantic]

Decline in Marriage Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

New study following 12,541 healthcare workers for #COVID19 re-infection over 31 weeks published in NEJM. Natural immunisation held up well over the 6 months of the study, with only two cases of asymptomatic reinfections observed.

Scientists turn carbon dioxide into jet fuel

Google Maps’ Moat is Evaporating

You can now gain entry to any station of the New York City Subway with the tap of a phone, instead of the swipe of a MetroCard.

The largest single bank heist of all time was committed the day before the Coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, when Saddam Hussein sent his son, Qusay, to the Central Bank of Iraq with a handwritten note to withdraw all the cash in the bank. Qusay then removed about $1 billion (£810 million) in $100 dollar notes in strongboxes, requiring three lorries to carry it all. Approximately $650 million (£525 million) was found later by US troops hidden in the walls of one of Saddam’s palaces. Although both of Saddam’s sons were killed, and Saddam was captured and executed, more than one third of the money was never recovered. — Seven Greatest Real-Life Heists

How Did Madagascar Become the World’s Biggest Producer of Vanilla?

Maneki-neko (beckoning cat)

Alex’s intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five-year-old human, in some respects, and he had not even reached his full potential by the time he died. She believed that he possessed the emotional level of a two-year-old human at the time of his death. Looking at a mirror, he said “what color”, and learned “grey” after being told “grey” six times. This made him the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked a question.

Human chess match, Leningrad, 1924

A woman posted a photo of a Starbucks barista who asked her to wear a mask. Then, $100,000 was donated to that barista. Now, the woman wants half of that money.

Using Hot Coffee to Dislodge Meat in the Throat

A US judge in Michigan has ruled that a 42-year-old man can seek compensation from his parents for destroying his pornography collection.

How much is an hour of your free time worth? $19.

Tears were found to be a magnet for visual attention.

Studies show, for instance, that volunteering correlates with a 24% lower risk of early death . What’s more, volunteers have a lower risk of high blood glucose, and a lower risk of the inflammation levels connected to heart disease. They also spend 38% fewer nights in hospitals than people who shy from involvement in charities.

Diet Modifications, Including More Wine and Cheese, May Help Reduce Cognitive Decline — Cheese, by far, was shown to be the most protective food against age-related cognitive problems, even late into life; The daily consumption of alchohol, particularly red wine, was related to improvements in cognitive function; Weekly consumption of lamb, but not other red meats, was shown to improve long-term cognitive prowess.

A comprehensive study from Uppsala University, involving more than 250,000 women, shows that oral contraceptive use protects against ovarian and endometrial cancer. The protective effect remains for several decades after discontinuing the use.

An article reporting an increased risk of death when surgery is carried out on the surgeon’s birthday has caused a Christmas controversy

Simple processes can make wood stronger than steel, impact-resistant — or even transparent

Apple targets car production by 2024 and eyes “next level” battery technology

Deepfakes didn’t disrupt the US election as many predicted. But cheapfakes had a banner year.

Compology uses cameras and artificial intelligence to monitor what’s thrown into dumpsters and trash containers at businesses such as McDonald’s restaurants. The point is to make sure dumpsters are actually full before they’re emptied and to stop recyclable materials like cardboard from being contaminated by other junk.

The Full(est Possible) Story of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Press Conference

Biometric Bribery — Inside Semlex, the Brussels-based company that supplies biometric documents such as passports and driving licenses to governments and international bodies.

The U.S. Army spent almost a year making face masks — no different from commercial masks designed and brought to market within days of the pandemic.

Remembering Beethoven the astute businessman

Larry Heard is an American DJ, record producer and musician. He is widely known as a pioneering figure in 1980s Chicago house music, and was leader of the influential group Fingers Inc., whose 1988 album Another Side was the first long-form house LP. [listen to Never No More Lonely, Can You Feel It, full album] — About “Can You Feel It” (1986): “I had two cassette decks—there were no digital recorders or even multi-track recorders—and I did one take, one pass, on one tape, then ran it back to the other one, played some other parts by hand that I wanted to add, and that was pretty much the recording process.”

It’s -43C in Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha; time to get some fish at the local outdoor market

I always awkwardly struggle to get to the end call button on video calls. So I made this

Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice

What Explains the Decline of Serial Killers?

Walmart will use fully autonomous box trucks to make deliveries in Arkansas starting in 2021

A trip of 500 km on one charge. A recharge from zero to full in 10 minutes. All with minimal safety concerns. The solid-state battery being introduced by Toyota promises to be a game changer not just for electric vehicles but for an entire industry.

LED lights found to kill coronavirus — technology can be installed in air conditioning, vacuum, and water systems

Researchers who studied the DNA of 2,700 COVID-19 patients in 208 intensive care units across Britain found that five genes were central to many severe cases. The genes partially explain why some people become desperately sick with COVID-19, while others are not affected, Baillie said.

A new study of almost 40,000 adults has found that the brains of lonely people differ from those of people who are not lonely, in significant and detectable ways. This loneliness “signature” consists of variations in the volume of different brain regions, and the way those brain regions communicate.

Can Dropping a Little Data Change Conclusions?

Zodiac killer code cracked — The cipher, sent in a letter to The Chronicle in November 1969, has been puzzling authorities and amateur sleuths since it arrived 51 years ago.

Israeli Phone-hacking Firm Claims It Can Now Break Into Encrypted Signal App

How Russian hackers infiltrated the US government for months without being spotted

High-Frequency Traders Push Closer to Light Speed With Cutting-Edge Cables

DeepL Translator “Try out the world’s best machine translation.”

8 Giraffes are stuck on a flooding island. But the rescues have begun.

James Verdesoto, the movie poster artist behind iconic posters such as Pulp Fiction, Ocean’s Eleven, Girl, Interrupted, and Training Day, explains how color schemes are used in movie posters via OpenCulture

MDMA-assisted couples therapy investigated in landmark pilot trial + My methodology for working wlthMDMA as an adjunct to psychotherapy is as follows

Why wild giant pandas frequently roll in horse manure, study

This study explored the definitions of sexual boredom in a large community sample of Portuguese individuals.

In the mid-1960s, Australian athlete Reg Spiers found himself stranded in London with no money to buy a plane ticket home. Desperate to get back to Australia in time for his daughter’s birthday, he decided to post himself in a wooden crate.

New Year’s resolutions: Participants with approach-oriented goals [starting new habits] were significantly more successful than those with avoidance-oriented goals [quitting habits]

Scientists say they have come up with a potential way to make oxygen on Mars — NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s. On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth’s atmosphere. Transporting enough oxygen on a spacecraft to sustain the mission isn’t currently viable.

These hardware and software tools collect forensic data from mobile phones: the texts, emails, and photos stored on the phone; data regarding when the texts and emails were sent and where the photos were taken; the locations—if location tracking tools are turned on—where the phone and, presumably, the user have been; and when they were there. According to the report, 2,000 of the United States’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, including 50 of the nation’s largest police departments, either have purchased MDFTs (Mobile Device Forensic Tools) or have access to these tools.

Tesla Inc. is taking advantage of its surging shares by going back to the capital markets for the third time in ten months and raising as much as $5 billion of common stock. If you have a product for which the market is willing to pay virtually anything, you sell more of it. That’s true for electric cars and it’s just as true for stock, which is far easier to manufacture. Issuing $5 billion a year ago would have meant dilution of more than 8%; today, it’s less than 1%. [Bloomberg]

These studies consistently show that most rats prefer the nondrug reward over cocaine (and over heroin or methamphetamine. After I had reviewed these studies in my class, a student asked, ‘Does this mean that sugar is more addictive than cocaine?’.

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States.By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial.

A new report from One Fair Wage finds that more than 80% of workers are seeing a decline in tips and over 40% say they’re facing an increase in sexual harassment from customers.

these data show that distinctive eyebrows reveal narcissists’ personality to others

Viewers’ antisocial tendencies (Dark Triad traits, aggression, and moral disengagement) in conjunction with an affinity for antihero genres and favorite antihero characters (similarity, wishful identification, and parasocial interaction)

The success of horror films, popularity of true crime, and prevalence of violence in the news implies that morbid curiosity is a common psychological trait. However, research on morbid curiosity is largely absent from the psychological literature. In this paper, I present a novel psychometric tool for assessing morbid curiosity, defined as a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena.

Impostor syndrome—the idea that you’ve only succeeded due to luck, and not because of your talent or qualifications—was first identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes. In their paper, they theorized that women were uniquely affected by impostor syndrome. Since then, research has shown that both men and women experience impostor feelings.

According to a new study, the mass of all our stuff—buildings, roads, cars, and everything else we manufacture—now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet

Mount Everest, Earth’s tallest mountain, just got taller by about a meter

In America, Christmas trees are a multibillion-dollar business. But who’s making the money?

This Robot Can Rap

A case of 32-year-old man with frequent ejaculation as the initial symptom of rabies was first reported

Missing credit card payments may be an early sign of dementia, study says

Court Suspends ‘Copyright Troll’ Lawyer From Practicing Law

Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon

Google’s deep-learning program for determining the 3D shapes of proteins stands to transform biology, say scientists

Research shows married people enjoy better health. But why? Is it because marriage is good for your health and encourages healthier behavior, or because healthier individuals are more likely to get married?

I could use your help — not your support, not your approval, not your reassurance but your help as an open and thoughtful audience for these difficult questions. But you won’t help me, because you won’t listen to what I’m trying to say, because all you care about is how much victim status I deserve. You are really letting me down. [ Agnes Callard | NY Times]

How I Made a Self-Quoting Tweet

52 things I learned in 2020

Die Hard Christmas tree ornament

Cloud Zoo

Scotland becomes 1st country to make free period products the law

China Has Launched the World’s First 6G Satellite.

Turning Lunar Dust Into Oxygen – And Using the Leftovers to 3D Print a Moon Base

Google Must Disclose Emails in Russian Oligarch’s Divorce

One year after the interventions, cash transfer recipients had higher consumption, asset holdings, and revenue, as well as higher levels of psychological well-being than control households. In contrast, the psychotherapy program had no measurable effects on either psychological or economic outcomes.

China seeks to change Covid origin story The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.

NYT and WaPo digital subscriptions tripled since 2016

While we continue to espouse the use of 2L+5N dialing over all-number calling whenever possible, our primary aim today is to publicly oppose the proliferation of 10-digit dialing, which is fast becoming a public nuisance and dialing nightmare for ordinary people everywhere in this country. More: Telephone exchange names and the 2L-5N system

Scientists create diamonds at room temperature in minutes

[Buy] one of four metals that can be liquid near room temperature

Best inventions of 2020

Vatican asks Instagram how pope’s account liked photo of Brazilian model

An AI tool can distinguish between a conspiracy theory and a true conspiracy – it comes down to how easily the story falls apart

Non-meat eaters, especially vegans, had higher risks of either total or some site-specific fractures, particularly hip fractures.

Airflow studies reveal strategies to reduce indoor transmission of COVID-19 — when people speak or sing loudly, they produce dramatically larger numbers of micron-sized particles compared to when they use a normal voice. The particles produced during yelling, they found, greatly exceed the number produced during coughing.

Vitamin D deficiency markedly increases the chance of having severe disease after infection with SARS Cov-2. The intensity of inflammatory response is also higher in vitamin D deficient COVID-19 patients. This all translates to increase morbidity and mortality in COVID-19 patients who are deficient in vitamin D. Related: In this randomized clinical trial, supplementation with vitamin D reduced the incidence of advanced (metastatic or fatal) cancer in the overall cohort

COVID-19 reinfection tracker (26 cases worldwide as of Nov. 24)

Don’t Eat Inside a Restaurant — The odds of catching the coronavirus are about 20 times higher indoors than outdoors.

Satoshi Nakamoto Lived In London While Working On Bitcoin. Here’s How We Know.

Social media entrepreneurs have rushed to find ways to make money from stars on popular platforms like TikTok. West of Hudson Group, for one, operates a network of content houses where many prominent young influencers live. Houses like these function as management companies, taking a percentage of revenue from the creators living in them. The influencers often don’t pay rent, but produce content for brands and promote products as a form of in-kind rent. Dozens of influencer houses have arrived in the Los Angeles area over the last year, and the companies that run them have been searching for sustainable business models. Going public, though, is a new strategy. [NY Times]

Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China […] The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would require U.S. companies to guarantee they do not use imprisoned or coerced workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang, where academic researchers estimate the Chinese government has placed more than 1 million people into internment camps. Apple is heavily dependent on Chinese manufacturing, and human rights reports have identified instances in which alleged forced Uighur labor has been used in Apple’s supply chain. [Washington Post]

How Mozart became a bad composer, according to Glenn Gould

Upside down glass of water experiment

A pediatric immobilizer

zoomquilt.org

Wife blows thousands on vet bills after husband blames his farts on the dog

Confusion about left and right occurs in 14.6% of the general population

Thai coconut suppliers accused of using monkeys as forced labor

A new study demonstrates a method for deciphering the timing of a deceased person’s death using a lock of hair.

New research suggests that nightmares prepare us to better face our fears

More people are getting COVID-19 twice, suggesting immunity wanes quickly in some

Immunity to the coronavirus may last years, maybe even decades, according to a new study [NY Times]

Dr. Fauci: “I think that we’re going to have some degree of public health measures together with the vaccine for a considerable period of time. But we’ll start approaching normal — if the overwhelming majority of people take the vaccine — as we get into the third or fourth quarter [of 2021].” [NY Times]

Medical literature suggests vitamin D protects against respiratory infections. Humans exposed to sunlight produce vitamin D directly. A 10% increase in relative sunlight decreases fall influenza by 1.1 out of 10.

Thanksgiving Dinner during COVID: Overview of Aerosol Transmission Risk Modeling

Steak-Umm Against COVID-19 Misinformation

Rules for strong passwords don’t work, researchers find. Here’s what does

Using two-factor authentication, or 2FA, is the right thing to do. But you put yourself at risk getting codes over text. We explain why.

The Bodies Of Dead Climbers On Everest Are Serving As Guideposts More: The Story Behind ‘Green Boots’

The cyanometer, a device invented in 1789 to measure the blueness of the sky

A portable pillow that you wear as a sleeve. Patent No. 10835062

The eerie AI world of deepfake music — Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars.

Florida man invented a robot that inserts and removes contact lenses

About 42% of 720 million Amazon reviews may be fake reviews

Duration of urination does not change with body size

Four different types of positive tears — Achievement tears are often shed in contexts of extraordinary performance or when someone overcomes an obstacle and often include feelings of pride. Beauty tears occur commonly in situations of overwhelming elegance or beauty, including nature, music or visual arts, and feature feelings of awe or experiencing chills. Affectionate tears are often experienced in situations including unexpected kindness or exceptional love such as wedding ceremonies or reunions and often feature feelings of warmth, increased communality, and feeling touched or compassionate. Finally, amusement tears are shed when something especially funny occurs and include feelings of amusement or lightness and the inclination to laugh or giggle.

How many colors are there? Quoted numbers range from ten million to a dozen. Are colors object properties? Opinions range all the way from of course they are to no, colors are just mental paint. These questions are ill-posed. […] A valid question that may replace both is how many distinguishing signs does color vision offer in the hominin Umwelt? [The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable] The answer turns out to be about a thousand. The reason is that colors are formally not object properties but pragmatically are useful distinguishing signs.

We did not find any evidence of influence of alcohol consumption on changes in brain volume over a 2-year period in 40–60-year-olds

Losing nothing is better than gaining nothing

How the White House will hand over social media accounts to President Trump [2017]

What Would We Experience If Earth Spontaneously Turned Into A Black Hole? — We’d all die. But for 21 minutes, we’d have the ride of a lifetime

Mahadevan, professor of applied mathematics, physics, and organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, uses mathematics and physics to explore commonplace phenomena

here are some of the things I learned during the 10 minutes or so I was editor of Los Angeles magazine

China’s New Blockchain Internet

Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says

Portland’s iconic Powell’s Books is selling a book-scented unisex fragrance

How to Make the World’s Best Paper Airplane [video]

Horror Musical Instrument

Dangerous stairs (NY Subway, 36 Street Station)

Man shot in Russia in argument over Kant

Therapy patients blackmailed for cash after clinic data breach

researchers show that the body produces more stress hormones when people are repeatedly interrupted at work. And yet the subjects did not experience an equal rise in their consciously perceived sense of psychological stress.

People spontaneously judge others’ personality based on their facial appearance and these impressions guide many important decisions. Our findings consistently suggest that people show neither accuracy nor meta-accuracy when forming face-based personality impressions.

Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy — It is possible that the therapeutic efficacy of medications is affected by commercial features such as lower prices.

Does divorce change your personality? (the overall finding of this study suggests that experiencing a divorce is unlikely to lead to permanent personality change)

A pilot project using sniffer dogs to provide instant and pain-free coronavirus testing at Helsinki airport has shown promising early results

Slovakia managed to test more than 3.6 million people — two thirds of its population — in just two days […] Just over 1% of those taking part tested positive […] Those who tested negative no longer have to comply with the strictest restrictions as long as they can prove their negative status with an official certificate. People who tested positive now have to quarantine — either at home, or in one of dozens of designated hotels across the country. […] effective mass testing could be used in the long term as an alternative to lockdown to control the spread of disease.

Hong Kong will relax social-distancing measures on [Oct 30], with six people allowed to be seated at a restaurant table, up from four, while the size limit for groups in bars and pubs will rise from two to four. In a move to take effect in time for the weekend, dine-in services will also be permitted until 2am, an extension from midnight. But customers must wear a mask when not seated and are not allowed to eat or drink away from their table. [South China Morning Post]

Venice tests long-delayed flood barrier months after waters swamped city And Flood defences save Venice from second high tide More: the flood of 1966 - the water would have reached 230 cms over the average sea level.

Don’t Even Try Paying Cash in China — Most businesses there, from the fanciest hotels to roadside fruit stands, display a QR code — a type of bar code — that people scan with a smartphone camera to pay with China’s dominant digital payment apps, Alipay and WeChat. Paying by app is so much the norm that taxi drivers might curse at you for handing them cash. [NY Times]

Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult: The Ghastly Story of a Stalking Scandal [NY Times]

Blacklight, a tool to see how the websites you visit are tracking you

These drones will plant 40,000 trees in a month. By 2028, they’ll have planted 1 billion

Is It Better to Plant Trees or Let Forests Regrow Naturally?

Why Tunnels in The US Cost Much More Than Anywhere Else in The World

This is an experiment about how we view history

The 15 weirdest works of classical music (#10 - My Lord Chamberlain is a duet for two lutenists, but just one lute.)

This testimony presents definitive logic and extensive evidence to support The Claim by Jesus Christ that Jesus Is Son of GOD rather than GOD.

Silent Sleep Training Medical Didgeridoo — the solution for sleep apnea and snoring

Tree growing under the paint on a sign

Research says farts can be released through your breath if you hold them in

Escaped cloned female mutant crayfish take over Belgian cemetery — Marbled crayfish can reproduce asexually and all their children are genetically identical females

Two gay penguins with a reputation for trouble stole an entire nest of eggs from a neighboring lesbian couple at the same zoo.

Findings suggest that, rather than making marriage less desirable, pornography use is robustly and linearly associated with a higher likelihood of wanting to be married.

German man sets world record with 516 body modifications

This Bionic Eye Is Better Than a Real One, Scientists Say — “A human user of the artificial eye will gain night vision capability.”

We analyzed all-cause mortality among adults ages 25-44 during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We find that COVID-19 has likely become the leading cause of death (surpassing unintentional overdoses) among young adults aged 25-44 in some areas of the United States during substantial COVID-19 outbreaks.

Recent findings of heart involvement in young athletes, including sudden death, have raised concerns about the current limits of our knowledge and potentially high risk and occult prevalence of COVID-19 heart manifestations.

Fewer than 4% of adults in Wuhan, China, tested positive for antibodies against COVID-19

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

North Pole ice cap too thin for testing Russia’s giant icebreaker

Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min to find if machines are working

NASA is launching a 4G phone network on the moon

Two Studies Show COVID-19 Antibodies Persist for Months

This paper investigates the paradoxical finding that physical pain in certain social situations makes people smile.

Hackers leaked tons of webcam and home security footage on porn sites

A Telegram bot allows men to create fake nude images of women from a single clothed photo. Over 680,000 women have been affected with about 104,000 images shared publicly.

How to Resolve a Contested Election, Part 1: The States and Their Electors

My colleagues and I have just published a first study mapping out possible histories of alien planets, the civilizations they grow, and the climate change that follows. Our team was made up of astronomers, an earth scientist, and an urban ecologist.

HORMEL™ BLACK LABEL™ Breathable Bacon mask — Using the latest in bacon-smell technology

Escaped cow found trapped on neighbor’s trampoline

Tesla owner says he butt-dialed a $4,280 Autopilot upgrade — and is still waiting on a refund

A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data — a process the researchers call “less than one”-shot, or LO-shot, learning.

AI tool claims it can automatically translates speech into other languages in the same speaker’s voice

We assume we choose things that we like, but research suggests that’s sometimes backward: We like things because we choose them, and we dislike things that we don’t choose

We study the diffusion of a true and a false message (the rumor) in a social network. Upon hearing a message, individuals may believe it, disbelieve it, or debunk it through costly verification. Whenever the truth survives in steady state, so does the rumor. Our model highlights that successful policies in the fight against rumors increase individuals’ incentives to verify. [PDF]

How do we know that knuckle cracking is harmless?

Snapchat has turned London into an augmented reality experiment — a proof of concept for a 1:1 digital copy of everything on the planet

Just 3% of Netflix’s most-watched content over the last six weeks was actually produced by Netflix

removing body hair was something both men and women did — as far back as the Stone Age, then through ancient Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire — using seashells, beeswax and various other depilatories

the zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured

Examples of bitemporal charts

‘Person in jetpack’ spotted flying again near LA airport

The Royal Navy has been testing Jet Suit assault teams

Hack3r C@t Episode 1: A Meow Hope

Get back to school tildren

11-year-old charged in Louisiana after allegedly stealing school bus, engaging in police chase

Researchers have devised a way of using 3D printed plastic to create objects that communicate with smartphone or other Wi-Fi devices without the need for batteries or electronics.

Researchers gave thousands of dollars to homeless people.

Do I get COVID in airline cabins? With only 44 identified potential cases of flight-related transmission among 1.2 billion travelers, that’s one case for every 27 million travelers.

Survival rates of SARS-CoV-2 were determined at different temperatures. We obtained half lives of between 1.7 and 2.7 days at 20 °C, reducing to a few hours when temperature was elevated to 40 °C. + Low risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by fomites in real-life conditions [fomite: inanimate object that is likely to carry infection, such as clothes, utensils, and furniture]

recovering the sense of smell in mild to moderate patients after COVID-19 — within a month time window and two months after symptoms’ onset, in our cohort of patients we observed a substantial improvement in the olfactory abilities

Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an abortion

More Humans Are Growing an Extra Artery in Our Arms, Showing We’re Still Evolving

A Marketplace investigation into Amazon Canada has found that perfectly good items are being liquidated by the truckload — and even destroyed or sent to landfill.

Google Earth is “cloud-free,” since the clouds and their shadows are edited out. […] the selection of millions of “best” images on these terms creates an overall distorted representation of Earth.

Jason Gelinas lived a normal suburban life with a plum Wall Street gig. He also ran the conspiracy theory’s biggest news hub. QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive

Authorities seized 13 tons of human hair entering the US

Tanker searched for drugs since August, nothing found, but search will go on

Most people, when shown some statistics, sigh and get boggled. But Herman Chernoff realized that almost everyone is good at reading faces. So he devised recipes to convert any set of statistics into an equivalent bunch of smiley-face drawings. [Chernoff Faces | PDF]

here’s a map of what the electoral college would look like if nobody voted and also if florida was really long

Parrots removed from UK wildlife park after they started swearing at customers

419 naïve students saw a performer making contact with a confederate’s deceased kin. 65% of participants reported having witnessed a genuine paranormal event.

Gruesome Descriptions Can Make Crimes Seem Worse — But Judges And Lawyers Are Immune To This Bias

Results revealed that most breakup sex appears to be motivated by three factors: relationship maintenance, hedonism, and ambivalence. Men tended to support hedonistic and ambivalent reasons for having breakup sex more often than women.

Scientists have created a new “super enzyme” that can break down plastic up to six times faster than their previous enzyme. The super enzyme could have major implications for recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is the most common thermoplastic used in single-use drinks bottles, carpets, and clothing. Around 3,000-4,000 mealworms can break down one Styrofoam coffee cup in about a week thanks to the bacteria living in their gut.

Amazon’s latest effort to speed up shopping trips lets you pay with the palm of your hand. The company introduced Amazon One, which connects your palm print to a stored credit card so you can place your hand above a sensor to enter and buy items at checkout-free Amazon (AMZN) Go stores.

Google and Facebook’s ad business might not survive Amazon

Facebook isn’t free: zero-price companies overcharge consumers with data

how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth [2018]

Cisco has been hit with a $1.9bn patent-infringement bill for copying cybersecurity tech from Centripetal Networks and pushing the company out of lucrative government contracts

Tesla dissolves its PR department

The researchers found that 71% of infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts, while a mere 8% of infected individuals accounted for 60% of new infections. […] The researchers found that children and young adults — who made up one-third of COVID cases — were especially key to transmitting the virus in the studied populations.

Common thinking argues that the nation needs to achieve at least 60% herd immunity to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Heterogeneity in contact structure and individual variation in infectivity, susceptibility, and resistance are key factors that reduce the disease-induced herd immunity levels to 34.2-47.5% in our models.

Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S

We conclude that the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation“infodemic”

Penniman is the co-founder and project manager of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, an organic farm that incorporates indigenous African growing techniques, including worm composting, raised beds, cover cropping and no-till fields. It’s also a teaching farm that’s training a new generation of people of color to become activist-farmers. – How Black Farmers Lost 14 Million Acres of Farmland — And How They’re Taking It Back

The economics of vending machines

Thread of fruit and vegetable prices in the Arctic

foreskin facial treatment — which is supposed to reduce wrinkles by using skin cells from a baby’s foreskin

The Infinite Pattern That Never Repeats [Thanks Tim]

CIA rectal tool kit

Please do not use this visualization for interstellar navigation

This study shows evidence of a domestic cat (Felis catus) being able to successfully learn to reproduce human-demonstrated actions based on the Do as I Do paradigm.

European regulators are cracking down on Facebook’s ability to transfer data across the Atlantic. Now the tech giant is threatening to pull its services from more than 400 million European users. Related: The Social Dilemma [a documentary about how technology giants have manipulated human psychology to influence how we behave]

if a brand like National Geographic uploaded its photos to Facebook’s Rights Manager, it could then monitor where they show up, like on other brands’ Instagram pages. From there, the company could choose to let the images stay up, issue a takedown, or use a territorial block […] paparazzi have sued celebrities for uploading their photos to their own accounts

Huang’s Law Is the New Moore’s Law. I call it Huang’s Law, after Nvidia Corp. chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang. It describes how the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every two years.

Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house

How the oil industry made us doubt climate change

The Italian Mafia Is on TikTok And it’s an insight into the changing world of organised crime.

Coronavirus can spread on airline flights, two studies show

Genetic or immune defects may impair ability to fight Covid-19

Hidden immune weakness found in 14% of gravely ill COVID-19 patients - in a significant minority of patients with serious COVID-19, the interferon response has been crippled by genetic flaws or by rogue antibodies that attack interferon itself. [Science]

We report the isolation and characterization of two ultrapotent SARS-CoV-2 human neutralizing antibodies (S2E12 and S2M11) that protect hamsters against SARS-CoV-2 challenge. Cryo-electron microscopy structures show that S2E12 and S2M11 competitively block ACE2 attachment and that S2M11 also locks the spike in a closed conformation by recognition of a quaternary epitope spanning two adjacent receptor-binding domains. Cocktails including S2M11, S2E12 or the previously identified S309 antibody broadly neutralize a panel of circulating SARS-CoV-2 isolates and activate effector functions. Our results pave the way to implement antibody cocktails for prophylaxis or therapy, circumventing or limiting the emergence of viral escape mutants. [Science]

Our pilot study demonstrated that administration of a high dose of Calcifediol or 25-hydroxyvitamin D, a main metabolite of vitamin D endocrine system, significantly reduced the need for ICU treatment of patients requiring hospitalization due to proven COVID-19. Calcifediol seems to be able to reduce severity of the disease. [Analysis of the Findings]

Vietnam has undoubtedly been one of the world’s best stories in regards to managing the COVID-19 pandemic

Resuming sexual activity soon after heart attack linked with improved survival

This week, PJ looks into a theory circling the internet about who might be behind QAnon. The investigation takes him back to the beginning of the QAnon scam, and to the message board trolls who started it.

Later bedtimes predict President Trump’s performance

Centuries before Columbus, Vikings came to the Western hemisphere. How far into the Americas did they travel?

Why We Don’t Like Our Underground House

Bryson DeChambeau might be the most innovative athlete in the world right now He just won his first major championship and is changing how golf is played at the highest levels.

How do you pick the best sake? Drink something with the word “Ginjo” on the bottle and you will always be in the safe zone. If the word ginjo is embedded in there, it is super premium sake, in the top 7% of all produced.

the first detailed account of great white shark sex

Maskless Man Ejected from Disney’s Hollywood Studios Today While Screaming Misquotes from Pixar’s “A Bugs Life”

men found it more appealing if their committed romantic/sexual partners frequently changed their physical appearance, while women reported that they modified their physical appearance more frequently than did men, potentially appealing to male desires for novelty

How the Physical Appearance of Others Affects Attention to Healthy Foods

There is a widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking. The present study examined a possibility that men were better at concurrent multitasking while women were better at task switching. Findings suggest that men have an advantage in concurrent multitasking.

Highly creative individuals are better than their peers at identifying uncreative products

The experience of love plays an integral role in human development as adolescents transition to young adults. This study examined whether emerging adults in the United States reach a consensus on what makes people feel loved.

Airline workers have lower rates of COVID-19 than the general population

If You’ve Just Had Covid, Exercise Can Cause Serious Complications, Including Heart Disease

For the first time since the Great Depression, the majority of 18- to 29-year-olds have moved back home

EncroChat was a Europe-based communications network and service provider allegedly used by organized crime members to plan criminal activities. Police infiltrated the network between at least March and June 2020 during a Europe-wide investigation. […] At least 800 arrests have been made across Europe as of 7 July 2020. […] The Dutch police arrested more than 100 suspects and seized more than 8 tonnes of cocaine, around 1.2 tonne of crystal meth, 19 synthetic drug laboratories, dozens of guns and luxury cars, and around €20 million in cash. In a property in Rotterdam, authorities found police uniforms, stolen vehicles, 25 firearms and drugs. On 22 June 2020 the Dutch police discovered a “torture chamber” in a warehouse. [Wikipedia | More: How Police Secretly Took Over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime and Encrochat Investigation Finds Corrupt Cops Leaking Information to Criminals ]

The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke

In September of 1931, writer George Orwell disguised himself as a tramp and traveled to a farm near West Malling, a town that lays southeast of London, to pick hops.

One year later, the vault will open and your answers will land back in your email inbox for private reflection.

Coronavirus Ice Cube Mold Tray [Thank you, Cassandra]

snake as face mask on bus

I have built the most inconvenient way of playing music

Japan on Track to Introduce Flying Taxi Services in 2023

Amazon wants to use delivery drones to surveil your house and put ads on your body

Facebook will pay users $120 to log off before 2020 election (to assess the impact of social media on voting)

No Evidence for a Relationship between Intelligence and Ejaculate Quality [PDF]

Attachment theory is an enduring and generative framework for understanding infant and romantic relationships. Here, I advance a two-system approach to attachment, proposing that infant attachments and romantic attachments constitute etiologically distinct systems that evolved in response to different selection pressures, serve different evolutionary functions, and are fundamentally different in nature with regard to operation and necessity toward their respective evolutionary goals.

recent research has shed light on how memory of recent eating modulates future food consumption. […] In humans, overweight and obesity is associated with impaired memory performance […] Enhancing memory of eating has been shown to reduce future eating

We investigated whether surgical face masks affected the performance of human observers, and a state-of-the-art face recognition system, on tasks of perceptual face matching.

facial detection applied to grains of sand

The Effects of Laughter during US Supreme Court’s Oral Arguments we find that the side causing more instances of laughter is more likely to win the votes of individual justices

Energy ‘scavenger’ could turn waste heat from fridges and other devices into electricity

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

On the correlation between solar activity and large earthquakes worldwide

Nearly two-thirds of New York restaurants may have to close by January

Berlin’s banging Berghain club reborn as a gallery

The Economic Impact of the Black Death Previously: When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews.

how humankind should handle the first, inevitable murder in outer space

The nine alternative visions of chess that AlphaZero tested included no-castling chess, which Kramnik and others had already been thinking about. Five of the variants altered the movement of pawns, including torpedo chess, in which pawns can move up to two squares at a time throughout the game, instead of only on their first move. Draws were less common under no-castling chess than under conventional rules. And learning different rules shifted the value AlphaZero placed on different pieces: Under conventional rules it valued a queen at 9.5 pawns; under torpedo rules the queen was only worth 7.1 pawns. A more extreme change, self-capture chess, in which a player can take their own pieces, proved even more alluring. [Wired]

How to blur your house on Google Street View

The Art of the One-Word Poem

Verne Edquist, a master piano tuner who spent most of his professional life working for one client – Glenn Gould

Insects of Los Angeles (photographs taken using a special digital microscope)

Balenciaga Summer 20 Campaign [Thanks Tim]

Not moving to dance music is nearly impossible, according to new research

The present study examines the striking similarities between the architectural design and spatial composition of the ancient Egyptian tomb and Sigmund Freud’s office at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, Austria.

AQs on Protecting Yourself from COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission

Studies are showing that the novel coronavirus can be detected in stool samples and anal swab samples for weeks. In fact, scientists are testing wastewater as an early tracking system for outbreaks. And a recent case on an airplane identified the airplane bathroom as the potential source. When you flush a toilet, the churning and bubbling of water aerosolizes fecal matter. That creates particles that will float in the air, which we will now politely call “bioaerosols” for the rest of this article. […] Take one 2018 study of flushing toilets in a hospital. Researchers found high concentrations of bioaerosols when a toilet with no lid was flushed. […] When you flush the toilet, you’re breathing in toilet water, and whatever is in that toilet water — including viruses and bacteria. [Washington Post]

COVID-19 Can Wreck Your Heart, Even if You Haven’t Had Any Symptoms

Antibodies that people make to fight the new coronavirus last for at least four months after diagnosis and do not fade quickly as some earlier reports suggested, scientists have found.

For many of Europe’s naturists, and the tens of thousands of swingers among them, Cap d’Agde has become a traditional summer destination, but a coronavirus outbreak here has shone an uncomfortable light on their alternative lifestyle.

A strange phenomenon has emerged near Amazon.com Inc. delivery stations and Whole Foods stores in the Chicago suburbs: smartphones dangling from trees. Contract delivery drivers are putting them there to get a jump on rivals seeking orders, according to people familiar with the matter. Someone places several smartphones in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. [update 9/5: Amazon Drivers Say Smartphones-In-Trees Scheme Has Been Thwarted ]

Imagine a world where wireless devices are as small as a grain of salt. These miniaturized devices have sensors, cameras and communication mechanisms to transmit the data they collect back to a base in order to process. Today, you no longer have to imagine it: microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), often called motes, are real

Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers.

Sounds of the Forest — We are collecting the sounds of woodlands and forests from all around the world, creating a growing soundmap bringing together aural tones and textures from the world’s woodlands. [more sound maps]

First noticeable effect. Concentration lagging. Palms beginning to sweat. Starting to feel like it might be difficult to focus enough to write a report.

shots taken by the Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt in Queens, New York, 1940

TNI_BeardedLady

The world’s most expensive sheep has just been purchased for $490,000

Democrats favoring Joe Biden are concocting strategies for preventing the theft of their signs, including smelly and irritating substances to mark the thieves. [Washington Post]

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine is calling for an end to daylight saving time. Studies have pointed to health risks connected to daylight saving time and the sleep disruptions it causes. The AASM called out stroke risks, stress reactions and an increase in motor vehicles crashes, particularly in relation to the springtime clock change.  

Results of Finland’s basic income experiment

We examine the threat to individuals’ privacy based on the feasibility of reidentifying users through distinctive profiles of their browsing history visible to websites and third parties. We then find that for users who visited 50 or more distinct domains in the two-week data collection period, ~50% can be reidentified using the top 10k sites. Reidentifiability rose to over 80% for users that browsed 150 or more distinct domains. [PDF]

across all countries and U.S. states that we study, the growth rates of daily deaths from COVID-19 fell from a wide range of initially high levels to levels close to zero within 20-30 days after each region experienced 25 cumulative deaths [PDF]

Bell Labs itself later grew to be one of the marquees of commercial labs—in the late 1960s it employed 15,000 people including 1,200 PhDs, who between them made too many important inventions to list, from the transistor and the photovoltaic cell to the first digitally scrambled voice audio (in 1943) and the first complex number calculator (in 1939). Fourteen of its staff went on to win Nobel Prizes and five to win Turing Awards.

Fact Checking Nonfiction Books

The Hidden History of the Hip-Hop Mixtape

An Ohio man built a backyard squirrel bar with seven varieties of nuts on tap — Lucky squirrels who find their way to the bar get to choose from seven different nuts named after beers. Dutko’s favorite part of the bar is its quirky bathroom sign: “Nuts” and “No Nuts.” [Video: Building a squirrel bar]

wearable cyberpunk assemblages by Hiroto Ikeuchi

the HOT NEW TREND in cyberbullying: crashing your plane into someone’s house in Microsoft flight sim and sending them the pic [Thanks Tim]

Facial recognition designed to detect around face masks is failing, study finds

A computer scientist is suing the Patent Office for deciding an AI can’t invent things

The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen — Over a decade, Theodore Robert Wright III destroyed cars, yachts, and planes. That was only the half of it.

“There is no such thing as cheap food—there is a consequence. Something has been compromised to give you that product”

Two metres or one: what is the evidence for physical distancing in covid-19?

Ten countries [islands] kept out Covid

Salivary Detection of COVID-19 + how saliva specimens compare with nasopharyngeal swab specimens

Please remain calm while the robot swabs your nose

Zuckerberg made the case to President Donald Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook, some of the people said.

Taxicab Geometry as a Vehicle for the Journey Toward Enlightenment [PDF]

Uber vomit fraud

There Are Only 37 Possible Stories, According to This 1919 Manual for Screenwriters

750 million genetically engineered mosquitoes approved for release in Florida Keys

Researchers have demonstrated that they can make a working 3D-printed copy of a key just by listening to how the key sounds when inserted into a lock. And you don’t need a fancy mic — a smartphone or smart doorbell will do nicely if you can get it close enough to the lock.

The underlying purpose of this essay is less about the coronavirus per se and more about how having a small—but functionally complete— piece of viral RNA to analyze gives me a unique opportunity to try to understand a complete self-replicating machine from scratch

A coronavirus mutation is tied to less severe illness None of the 29 people whose viruses had the mutation needed supplemental oxygen, but 26 of the 92 people whose viruses lacked the mutation did. More: The ∆382 variant of SARS-CoV-2 seems to be associated with a milder infection

Getting an antibody test to see if you had Covid-19 months ago is pointless, according to guidelines issued this week by a major medical society. Many tests are inaccurate, some look for the wrong antibodies and even the right antibodies fade away, said experts at the Infectious Diseases Society of America, which issued the new guidelines. Because current tests cannot determine if someone is immune, the society said, they “cannot inform decisions to discontinue physical distancing or lessen the use of personal protective equipment.” […] Despite the flaws of antibody tests, recent studies of patients who definitely were infected suggest that they have long-lasting immunity and that it is very unlikely they will get reinfected. That may be because white blood cells known as B and T cells, which are “primed” to recognize and attack the coronavirus, remain in circulation long after antibodies have faded away. But B and T cells are not analyzed by common antibody tests. [NY Times]

assuming everyone is wearing a mask — the risk of catching the virus on a full flight is just 1 in 4,300. Those odds fall to 1 in 7,700 if the middle seat is vacant.

Face Masks and GDP

Callers posing as COVID-19 contact tracers are trying to pry credit card or bank account information from unsuspecting victims

Recently, scientists discovered bacteria that had been buried beneath the ocean floor for more than a hundred million years and was still alive. What would change if we could live for even just a million years?

We conducted a 10-year study in which we assembled a data set of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments and studied 2,600 in-depth to analyze who gets to the top and how. We then took a closer look at “CEO sprinters” — those who reached the CEO role faster than the average of 24 years from their first job. We discovered a striking finding: Sprinters don’t accelerate to the top by acquiring the perfect pedigree. They do it by making bold career moves over the course of their career that catapult them to the top. We found that three types of career catapults were most common among the sprinters. [Harvard Business Review]

Can Robots Keep Humans from Abusing Other Robots?

The Case of the Top Secret iPod

Gigapixel AI Accidentally Added Ryan Gosling’s Face to This Photo

GPT-3 is an artificial intelligence that has been fed all the text on the internet

Elf Surveillance Santa Camera - Dummy CCTV Camera - Simply attach the camera in your child’s room and have them really thinking that Elfie is watching their behaviour

Lego piece falls out of New Zealand boy’s nose after being stuck for two years

Berlin brothels reopen after lockdown, but no sex allowed

Liking a painting increased the ability to recall on which wall the painting was hung. Since recalling the wall requires recalling heading direction, this finding suggests positive aesthetic experience enhances first-person spatial representations.

Rocking together: Dynamics of intentional and unintentional interpersonal coordination [PDF]

Population immunity is slowing down the pandemic in parts of the US

Making a Covid-19 Vaccine Is Hard. Making One for Kids Is Harder.

The Strange Theory of Coronavirus from Space

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. ran into a lot of trouble (nobody renting cars during a pandemic, used-car values declining and triggering margin calls on its used-car securitization, etc.) and filed for bankruptcy. Instead of trading down to zero, as you might expect (bankruptcy tends to zero stocks), the stock traded up, on heavy volume, due to retail day-trader enthusiasm and the general mystery of financial markets in 2020. Hertz was like, okay, well, if people really want to buy Hertz stock, we have Hertz stock, we should sell them some. Hertz went to the bankruptcy judge and said that. “There are forces at work that us non-financial people, that we can only observe,” they told her. She had no objections. On the morning of Monday, June 15, Hertz filed a prospectus announcing that it would sell up to $500 million of stock in an “at the market” (“ATM”) offering, meaning that Hertz’s bank (Jefferies) would just sell the shares on the stock exchange from time to time; if you bought stock, you’d have no way of knowing if you were buying it from Hertz or from one of the many other people who were selling Hertz stock. Of course the stock was probably worthless, as Hertz said in the prospectus. […] Hertz Global Holdings Inc. raised $29 million selling its likely worthless stock before regulators dissuaded the bankrupt rental-car company from selling more.

Was Shakespeare a Woman?

PAINTINGS OF CATS WITH PANCAKES ON THEIR HEADS

Husband discovers wife’s affair after spotting her in the act on Google Maps

a new ocean will form in Africa as the continent continues to split into two

Bald eagle attacks government drone and sends it to bottom of Lake Michigan

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Painting Eyes on The Butts of Cattle Can Protect Them From Lions, Research Shows

A billionaire art collector is commissioning a $1.5 million diamond-encrusted, 18 carat gold, face mask

Thieves are making a fortune from stealing used cardboard that’s been left out to be recycled, and selling it on.

Should We Conserve Parasites? Apparently, Yes

Consumers prefer older drugs

AI invents new ‘recipes’ for potential COVID-19 drugs

herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. […] well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease. […] and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City. […] a handful of studies have found that a quite significant number of people unexposed to the coronavirus nevertheless exhibited what are called “cross-reactive” T-cell immune responses to the disease. In other words, you didn’t necessarily need to catch COVID-19 for your T-cells to know how to fight it, because previous exposure to similar coronaviruses (chiefly the common cold) had already taught your immune systems how to respond to this one. […] At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent. […] According to [Francois Balloux], a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness. […] T-cell cross-immunity, Eric Topol said, “is very likely playing a significant role. Why are some people asymptomatic? Why do some people who get the infection have such a mild response — so mild they hardly get sick? Is it because of the T-cell activation? I think it’s part of this story. It may even be the main explanation of why people never develop symptoms, or why they might have such mild symptoms. [NY mag]

The Coronavirus May Mess With Thyroid Levels, Too

This coronavirus is here for the long haul — here’s what scientists predict for the next months and years

You might have seen reports this week that Chinese authorities said a surface sample from a batch of frozen chicken wings imported from Brazil tested positive for coronavirus. But don’t panic. Yes, the virus was detected on the food product in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, according to a statement from the municipal government. But test results for people who might have had contact with the chicken wings have so far come back negative, the statement said. [CNN]

An appliance such as a rice cooker or Instant Pot can thoroughly disinfect an N95 without degrading it. […] The dry heat produced by such electric cookers (rice cookers or multicookers such as Instant Pots) may be an effective way of decontaminating medical-grade N95 masks. Using the rice preset on the Farberware cooker and N95 respirators from 3M, a major manufacturer of the protective coverings, the researchers found that 50-minute treatments without pressure at a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit left the masks thoroughly cleaned without compromising fit or filtration efficiency. [Washington Post]

Inspired by llamas’ unique antibodies, scientists create a potent anti-coronavirus molecule

An Austrian tourist is in hot water with museum officials in Italy after accidentally breaking the toes off of a 200-year-old statue while posing for a photo. According to the museum, the tourist quickly moved away from the exhibit without telling anyone […] The tourist was tracked down by police using personal information the guest had left with the museum for contact tracing in the event that a coronavirus outbreak is tied to the gallery. [Travel & Leisure | Thanks Tim]

Research has shown that boys are highly sensitive in roughly the same numbers as girls. But boys who violate cultural norms of masculinity may “suffer more shame and rejection, even violence and anger directed toward them” at school, according to Dr. Cooper. […] Sensitivity is also sometimes confused with being shy. While the majority of highly sensitive children are introverts, roughly 30 percent are extroverts, despite their tendency to get easily overstimulated in social situations. […] Like horses, highly sensitive children will tend to enter new situations more slowly. [NY Times]

Ratfucking is an American slang term for political sabotage or dirty tricks, particularly pertaining to elections

A reading list retracing the @Roland_US sound in rap, Miami bass, bounce, electro, and instrumental hip-hop.

the Pavlok is exactly what the ad suggests: a Bluetooth-connected, wearable wristband that uses accelerometers, a connected app, and a “snap circuit” to shock its users with 450 volts of electricity when they do something undesirable. The device costs $149.99 and is available on Amazon. The company says it has over 100,000 customers who use the device to help kill food cravings, quit smoking, and to stop touching their face.

Disney just ended the 20th Century Fox brand

Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit

Kinopio design

Fox found with impressive shoe collection in Berlin

scientists solve mystery behind body odour, trace the source of underarm aromas to a particular enzyme in a certain microbe that lives in the human armpit

For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds.Now researchers say they have managed to precisely measure increased activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity.

Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it’s legal or if it works

Covid-19 vaccines appear to be “reactogenic,” meaning they have induced short-term discomfort in a percentage of the people who have received them in clinical trials. This kind of discomfort includes headache, sore arms, fatigue, chills, and fever.

The bill included $9,736 per day for the intensive care room , nearly $409,000 for its transformation into a sterile room for 42 days, $82,000 for the use of a ventilator for 29 days, and nearly $100,000 for two days when he appeared to be on his deathbed. […] In New York City, hospitals received more than $3bn in federal funds last month from an early round of bailout payments. The money is supposed to compensate hospitals and healthcare providers for the expense of treating coronavirus patients and make up for the revenue hospitals lost from canceling elective procedures. Though the federal money comes with some conditions that are intended to protect patients from medical debt, loopholes remain. Doctors who treat patients can send their own bills to patient directly. The doctors who treated Mendez individually charged between $300 and $1,800 for each day.

The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people–about a third of the world’s population at the time–in four successive waves. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million. […] The second wave began in the second half of August. [Wikipedia]

Allan Lichtman is the Nostradamus of presidential elections. He’s accurately predicted them for four decades. He also prophesied Trump would be impeached. […] Professor Lichtman walks us through his system, which identifies 13 “keys” to winning the White House. Each key is a binary statement: true or false. And if six or more keys are false, the party in the White House is on its way out. [NY Times]

Rite Aid deployed facial recognition systems in hundreds of U.S. stores

Japanese robotics startup invented a smart mask that translates into eight languages

Twitter Hack Zoom Court Hearing Interrupted by Ass-Eating Porn Video

Education is by definition a competitive system that sorts winners from losers. As long as we accept its role as a key determinant of social outcomes, the result will necessarily be inequality.

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

Lunch on the Grass (A Bite-Sized History of the Picnic)

The story of 212-OPEC-SID — Three decades ago, the punk rockers, hardcore kids and metalheads of New York City relied on the operators of one answering machine to find out where bands were playing.

The Wild Story of Creem, Once ‘America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine’ [NY Times]

a calendar celebrating seasonal skin conditions

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard Accuse Each Other of Peeing and Pooing All Over Their House

Student-developed device predicts avocado ripeness

Human activity causes vibrations that propagate into the ground as high-frequency seismic waves. Measures to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread changes in human activity, leading to a months-long reduction in seismic noise of up to 50%. The 2020 seismic noise quiet period is the longest and most prominent global anthropogenic seismic noise reduction on record. [Science]

presence of groovy background music promoted interest in meeting a dating partner again

The most powerful predictors of relationship quality are the characteristics of the relationship itself — the life dynamic you build with your person.

After reviewing forty‐four publications from 1889 to 2019 it became apparent that clinical and anatomical studies conducted during recent decades provide substantial evidence in support of the female ejaculatory phenomenon

This protocol, implemented through an app in conjunction with a wearable sleep-tracking sensor device, not only helps record dream reports, but also guides dreams toward particular themes by repeating targeted information at sleep onset, thereby enabling incorporation of this information into dream content.

Do dreams exist to protect the brain’s visual cortex?

A Michigan man allegedly managed to steal more than $100,000 from casino patrons […] by illegally obtaining their personal information and then using counterfeit driver’s licenses to withdraw funds from their personal bank accounts via self-service kiosks at the casinos The kiosks require users to insert their driver’s license and the last four digits of both their Social Security number and phone number before checking account funds can be withdrawn.

What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power

the book charts, apparently the gold standards of literary commercial success, can be rigged, and all it needs is cash.  How to cheat the bestseller list

Try ‘glory holes’ for safer sex during coronavirus, British Columbia CDC says

every single party in San Francisco [Thanks Tim]

Experimental Blood Test Detects Cancer up to Four Years before Symptoms Appear

Amazon Met With Startups About Investing, Then Launched Competing Products Some companies regret sharing information with tech giant and its Alexa Fund; ‘we may have been naive’

In this research, we show that 5G millimeter waves could be absorbed by dermatologic cells acting like antennas, transferred to other cells and play the main role in producing Coronaviruses in biological cells

an illustrated guide on what deepfakes are — and how to spot them

findings indicate that humans have a stereo sense of smell that subconsciously guides navigation.

Physical exercise leads to increases musical pleasure

There’s one case study of a woman with epilepsy who would orgasm while she brushed her teeth. Some people on the antidepressant clomipramine develop the ability to orgasm from yawning.

Locusts in swarms the size of Manhattan have been ravaging crops through East Africa, the Middle East and South Asia The impact of the locusts is starting to eat into the respective countries’ GDP and have a devastating effect on local economies. […] India recently surpassed Brazil to become the biggest sugar producer in the world and about 40% of the planted area of sugarcane is in a main agricultural province currently under threat from locusts. […] Locust outbreaks in the significant cereal and protein exporters are rare, so significant disruptions in the international food supply chain are unlikely.

Prisoners have long used contraband cellphones to pull off all manner of scams from the inside. But in attempting to build and sell a house from behind bars, Murray allegedly took things to a new level of sophistication.

This week marks nine years since South Sudan was admitted to the United Nations, becoming the 193rd and most recent entrant into the club of internationally recognized countries. This is the longest period in modern history during which the world map has remained unchanged.

Changing the radio collar on a 350-pound hibernating bear should have been a routine task—if he’d been sleeping soundly.

no other spacecraft has been able to take images of the Sun’s surface from a closer distance

Apps that Darwin would have loved

Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise but Keep Your Window Open — Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. […] The prototype is not yet the most practical device in real world conditions, but it points the way toward the development of technologies that may help ease the strain of noisy city living. Borrowing from the same technological principles used in noise-canceling headphones, the team expanded the concept to fit an entire room by placing 24 small speakers in a window. The speakers emit sound waves that correspond to the incoming racket and neutralize it — or, at least some of it. [NY Times]

What Miniature Lab-Grown Brains Reveal About the Effects of Covid-19 […] Known as “mini brains,” or organoids, these minuscule structures made from stem cells contain neurons that spontaneously emit electrical activity as a real brain would. […] What she found was that the virus could infect the mini brains and, 72 hours later, it began multiplying inside them, suggesting that human brain cells are susceptible to the virus. 

If SARS-CoV-2 is airborne—which basically means tiny viral particles can survive air for at least a few hours and still infect people—it’s far from the only disease. Measles is notorious for being able to last in the air for up to two hours. Tuberculosis, though a bacterium, can be airborne for six hours, and Lisa Brosseau, a retired professor of public health who still consults for businesses and organizations, suggests that coronavirus superspreaders (people who seem to eject a larger amount of the virus than others) disseminate the virus in patterns that recall the infectiousness of tuberculosis. The evidence that this type of transmission is happening with SARS-CoV-2  arguably already exists. Several big studies point to airborne transmission of the virus as a major route for the spread of covid-19. [Technology Review]

Extrapulmonary manifestations of COVID-19

 Immunity to covid-19 may be short-lived, according to a new longitudinal study of people who have caught the disease and recovered. Like other coronaviruses, covid-19 could reinfect people repeatedly. 
The Math of Social Distancing Is a Lesson in Geometry

Hundreds of hyperpartisan sites are masquerading as local news

Post Office Delivery Trucks Keep Catching on Fire — approximately one every five days since May 2014

Write Your “Leaving New York” Essay With Our Handy Chart

Grey parrot tops Harvard students on a test

Security researchers say a smartwatch, popular with the elderly and dementia patients, could have been tricked into letting an attacker easily take control of the device. Hackers could trick the smartwatch into sending fake “take pills” reminders to patients as often as they want

Cosmetic surgeons see rise in patients amid pandemic

New Hong Kong legislation puts foreign citizens who criticize the Chinese government anywhere in the world at risk of jail if they even set foot in the city — even if they are just transiting through the airport.

Luckin Coffee was supposed to disrupt China’s coffee market. But a Wall Street Journal investigation has found that the company used fake coffee orders, fake supply orders and even a fake employee to fabricate nearly half its sales last year.

Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms

University of Oxford researchers found the proportion of coronavirus patients dying each day in England fell from 6% to 1.5% between April and June.

Spain’s large-scale study on the coronavirus indicates just 5% of its population has developed antibodies, strengthening evidence that a so-called herd immunity to Covid-19 is “unachievable” […] There have been similar studies in China and the United States and “the key finding from these representative cohorts is that most of the population appears to have remained unexposed” to Covid-19, “even in areas with widespread virus circulation” […] “Some experts have computed that around 60% of seroprevalence might mean herd immunity. But we are very far from achieving that number.” [CNN]

A big question is whether somebody who has had COVID-19 is now immune from getting it again. So far we don’t see compelling evidence of people getting reinfected, but that’s still a bit early to say for sure. That’s going to make a huge difference in everything we try to do about this going forward. A vaccine, of course, depends upon the idea that immunity is protective. […] There are a couple factors that will relate to whether immunity lasts a long time. One is whether the antibodies that somebody generates after infection are around for years afterward or whether they fade away. There hasn’t been enough time yet to be able to say that. The other is whether the virus itself changes its biology and then evades the immune response that people have had. Obviously that’s a big deal with influenza, which is why we have to get a flu shot every year. And it’s been a horrible deal with HIV — and why we’ve never been able to get a vaccine for it, because HIV is changing its coat almost hourly. I think we have reason to be much more optimistic about SARS-CoV-2 [the virus that causes COVID-19]. There doesn’t seem to be compelling evidence of it being that highly mutable. It’s a typical RNA virus that seems to have a typical mutation rate. It doesn’t look like it’s doing a lot of changing of its coat proteins. So I’m fairly reassured by what we’ve learned so far, after looking at the viral genome of thousands of isolates, that this one is not changing that rapidly. […] I am guardedly optimistic that by the end of 2020 we will have at least one vaccine that has been proven safe and effective in a large-scale trial. […] There are at least four vaccines that will be getting into such large trials this summer beginning as early as July. […] Maybe all four of them will work. […] there will be, then, a time of having to do the scale-up to have billions of doses, which might be what the world needs. So there will still be some time involved, even though we are doing everything possible to prepare for that by manufacturing millions of doses of each of those vaccines even before we know if they would work, so that the highest-risk people can get access right away. [NY mag]

FBI agents raided a home in northern Michigan this week while investigating a sophisticated art forgery ring that allegedly tricked connoisseurs into buying phony paintings purported to be from top American artists.

His name? The O-Man. His superpower? Making women come simply by assessing their posture.

the group purchased alien abduction insurance that would cover up to fifty members and would pay out $1 million per person (the policy covered abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens). More: We came from the Level Above Human in distant space and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task

The Perfect Art Heist: Hack the Money, Leave the Painting More: Computer hackers take £2.4m from sale of Constable painting

“Boob chandelier”

Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate sues Netflix for giving Sherlock Holmes too many feelings

How to Topple a Statue Using Science

A library in Michigan is urging the public to stop microwaving its books as a method to prevent the spread of coronavirus

the researchers found that women and people with insecure attachment styles tended to play hard-to-get more

How do cars fare in crash tests they’re not specifically optimized for?

How hackers extorted $1.14m from University of California, San Francisco

A plan to turn the atmosphere into one, enormous sensor — It will watch for storms, earthquakes, volcanos—and missile launches

The Geopolitical Ramifications of Starlink Internet Service

Automated shipping coming to Europe’s waters

raising animals for meat, eggs, and milk generates 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—roughly on par with the global transportation sector

“The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits” the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions

Top 100 Polluter Indexes

Facebook collects most of its advertising revenue from the millions of small and medium-sized companies that depend on its effective, targeted ads. Its top 100 advertisers contributed less than 20 percent of revenue in the first quarter of last year. […] In 2017 and 2019, Verizon, Walmart, Pepsi, Disney, Nestlé and others objected to the undesirable videos that ran adjacent to some of their ads. Once YouTube established more restrictive content rules to placate the advertisers, the advertisers came back, leaving the division “bigger and stronger, rather than weaker, as a business.” You can expect a rerun of the YouTube episode for Facebook.

India has banned TikTok—plus 58 other Chinese apps

Gates of hell [more]

Replies are not immediate - that’s intentional. You should hear back within a day and a half

Are habits goal-free behaviours, or does every habit actually serve a purpose?

The “Pet Effect” is the idea that getting a pet will make you healthier and happier. This idea is highly promoted by the marketing departments of industry giants like Zoetis, the world’s largest veterinary products corporation. […] while some studies have found evidence linking pets and human health, most published research has not.

We recruited 29 participants to measure human prefrontal cortex activity, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, during interactions with a cat.

Is there a growing class divide in happiness? Among U.S. adults ages 30 and over in the nationally representative General Social Survey (N = 44,198), the positive correlation between socioeconomic status (SES; including income, education, and occupational prestige) and happiness grew steadily stronger between the 1970s and 2010s. […] the happiness advantage favoring high-SES adults has expanded over the decades

In this essay, I show how difficult emotions, like aggression and murderous rage, are grappled with in horror movies. I discuss three patients who related to intense rage at the mother when viewing the films Joker and Jurassic Park.

The perception of facial attractiveness is not automatic (capacity-free) in general. Men show an automatic (capacity-free) processing of females’ facial attractiveness but not of males’ facial attractiveness. Women show no automatic (capacity-free) processing of males’ or females’ facial attractiveness.

On Aug 1, it will be against the law for adults to wear a face mask in North Carolina

To fully restart the U.S. economy by August, massive population testing for infections with the virus that causes COVID-19 is essential […] test 2 to 6% of the population per day, or between 5 and 20 million people per day […] The authors of the report estimate that this scheme for testing, tracing, and supported isolation (TTSI) would cost between $50 to $300 billion over two years. As they note this is extremely cheap compared to “the economic cost of continued collective quarantine of $100 to 350 billion a month.”

Why We Must Test Millions a Day

studies have suggested that many people who’ve never been infected with SARS-CoV-2, but who have semi-recently recovered from a common-cold coronavirus, may boast partial immunity to COVID-19. […] Chinese researchers monitored antibody levels in 74 COVID-19 patients — one half symptomatic, the other asymptomatic — for months after their recoveries. The scientists found that more than 90 percent of these patients displayed sharp drop-offs in antibody levels two-to-three months after their initial infections. […] The dominant strain of coronavirus in the U.S. may be more contagious than the initial variety. […] study found that the newer coronavirus strain has about five times more functional and intact spike proteins in each of its particles than its predecessor did. [NY mag]

Pool testing combines samples from several people and tests them for the coronavirus all at once, cutting down on the time and supplies required. […] “If everyone is negative, then you’re done” […] If the test detected the presence of the virus, then each person would have to be tested and the results individually analyzed to determine whose sample produced the positive result. […] How many samples are pooled? Researchers have generally suggested quantities between three and 50. The bigger the pool, the more likely a positive case with a low viral load will be too diluted to trigger detection of the virus. [Washington Post]

Norway, Denmark and Finland have closed their borders to Swedes, fearing that they would bring new coronavirus infections with them. […] In several countries, like the Netherlands and Cyprus, they are banned completely. Austria demands a health certificate. Greece makes Swedes quarantine for at least a week, even if they test negative for the coronavirus […] only France, Italy, Spain and Croatia are welcoming Swedes without restrictions.[SF Gate]

COVID-19 is associated with severe impairment of smell, taste, and chemesthesis

This upgraded robotic dolphin is being developed and tested for a series of attractions at a new Chinese aquarium where the government has put a stop to the wildlife trade as part of its efforts to slow and eventually stop the spread of Covid-19.

What if a single injection could lower blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides — for a lifetime? In the first gene-editing experiment of its kind, scientists have disabled two genes in monkeys that raise the risk for heart disease. Humans carry the genes as well, and the experiment has raised hopes that a leading killer may one day be tamed. [NY Times]

The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit. […] “The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites […] What’s happened is that the very talented lobbyists at OneWeb have convinced the government that we can completely redesign some of the satellites to piggyback a navigation payload on it.”

A growing list of companies say they’ll join an advertiser boycott on Facebook in protest of what they say are the site’s failures to stop the spread of hate.

The white iPhone with chipped paint that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to stay in contact with his sources also allowed his government to spy on him. They could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment. Yet Radi was trained in encryption and cyber security. He hadn’t clicked on any suspicious links and didn’t have any missed calls on WhatsApp — both well-documented ways a cell phone can be hacked. Instead, a report published Monday by Amnesty International shows Radi was targeted by a new and frighteningly stealthy technique. All he had to do was visit one website. Any website. Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by “network injection,” a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. [The Star]

All it took to compromise a smartphone was a single phone call over WhatsApp. The user didn’t even have to pick up the phone. [WIRED]

Milton Glaser, Co-founder of New York Magazine and Creator of ‘I❤NY,’ Dies at 91

How to make an SMS bot with Google Sheets + Twilio

If Great Britain was located next to Japan

Barcelona opera house reopens with performance to 2,292 plants

residents hide as macaque ‘gangs’ take over Thai city

U.S. Sent $1.4 Billion in Aid Payments to Dead People, Watchdog Finds [NY Times]

Humans navigate with stereo olfaction

Researchers have discovered that, contrary to longstanding assumptions, the Y chromosome is not limited to a handful of masculine tasks, like specifying male body parts in a developing embryo or replenishing the sperm supply in an adult man. New evidence indicates that the Y chromosome participates in an array of essential, general-interest tasks in men, like stanching cancerous growth, keeping arteries clear and blocking the buildup of amyloid plaque in the brain. As a sizable percentage of men age, their blood and other body cells begin to spontaneously jettison copies of the Y chromosome, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. That unfortunate act of chromosomal decluttering appears to put the men at a heightened risk of Alzheimer’s disease, leukemia and other disorders. [NY Times]

Researchers are growing miniature organs in the laboratory to study how the new coronavirus ravages the body.

meal-time photographers were more likely to eat in response to external cues (e.g. the sight of palatable food) than to internal cues of hunger. However, when participants were randomly assigned to take either food or non-food photographs within a lab setting (Study 2), we found no evidence that the type of photography influenced either the amount or enjoyment of food eaten.

How to obtain evidence that something does not exist

A Study on the Rug Patterns and Morton Feldman’s Approach

3D reconstruction of humans from photographs

Young Student Secretly Photographs People with Hidden Spy Cam in the 1890s

NASA’s Sunset Simulator

Goldman Sans

Boston Dynamics robot dog, $10,000

OK so TikTok is grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes

In 2015, a phone video of young muscular White British men hitting each other with a chair went viral. Why make a game about this meme now? + Robert Yang makes surprisingly popular games about gay culture and intimacy

virtual reality

Woman made S$589,800 by buying insurance on flights she predicted would get delayed

Researchers discovered a data breach exposing sensitive images from numerous niche dating apps, such as 3somes, CougarD, Gay Daddy Bear, BBW Dating, and Herpes Dating.

Can Your AI Differentiate Cats from Covid-19? →

Perception of Scary Halloween Masks by Zoo Animals and Humans — Animal results showed that primate latencies correlated significantly with the human ratings, while non-primate latencies did not.

It is clear from daily experience that flushing a toilet generates strong turbulence within the bowl. Will this flushing-induced turbulent flow expel aerosol particles containing viruses out of the bowl? … massive upward transport of virus particles is observed, with 40%–60% of particles reaching above the toilet seat, leading to large-scale virus spread.

The police in China are collecting blood samples from men and boys from across the country to build a genetic map of its roughly 700 million males, giving the authorities a powerful new tool for their emerging high-tech surveillance state.

Two hairstylists who had coronavirus saw 140 clients. No new infections have been linked to the salon, officials say The clients and the stylists all wore face coverings.

Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive tests in volunteers. But there’s another approach to battling the virus—one that hasn’t won much attention, but which in the future could become the fastest way to beat back a pandemic. It involves isolating genetic material from survivors and injecting it directly into others, lending them protection against the pathogen. DNA-encoded antibodies, as these therapeutics are called, have shown promising results in animals. In humans, genes injected into the arm or leg would convert the recipient’s muscle cells into factories to make antibodies against the virus. That could provide temporary immunity or lessen the severity of the disease for those already infected. [Technology Review]

“We shouldn’t think that, once we get to a vaccine—whenever that is—and once we’re able to arrest this virus, that we’ll be able to rest easy. We are in a new era of more frequent, higher-impact, higher-velocity zoonotic threats.”

An infection that causes severe symptoms is likely to lead to a stronger immune response, which would also help encourage strong and longer-lasting immunity moving forward. On the flip side, a mild or asymptomatic case is likely to yield lower antibody levels, as was found in covid-19 patients in a new study published in Nature Medicine

For each class, members get their temperature checked, use hand sanitizer, and are placed in their own 6′x10′ workout pod made out of shower curtains and PVC pipes.

Amid the economic fallout from COVID-19, several small towns issued their own money

NBA players will wear a ‘smart ring’ at Disney world. The Oura smart ring is capable of predicting COVID-19 symptoms up to 3 days in advance with 90% accuracy. [Thanks Tim]

In moments of stress, consumers exhibit a greater tendency to seek out their smartphone (study 2); and engaging with one’s smartphone provides greater stress relief than engaging in the same activity with a comparable device such as one’s laptop (study 3) or a similar smartphone belonging to someone else (study 4).

“What we found was that evening types had greater grey matter volume in an area of the brain called the precuneus, a key component of our social brain,” said Dr. Norbury, an avowed morning person.

Facebook has rejected a proposal to share advertising revenue with news organisations, saying there would “not be significant” impacts on its business if it stopped sharing news altogether.

Apple Rejects Facebook’s Gaming App, for at Least the Fifth Time [NY Times]

More driving means more congested traffic. So to reduce congestion, it makes sense to build more highway lanes so that more cars can fit. A new report shows that doesn’t work at all. Between 1993 and 2017, the researchers found that the largest urban areas in the U.S. added 30,511 new lane-miles of roads—a 42 percent increase. That’s a faster rate of growth than population growth, which rose by 32 percent in those cities over the same time period. But in that 24 year period, traffic congestion didn’t drop at all. In fact, it rose by 144 percent.

Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

Her last exhibition, ‘Parbunkells’ (2016), was the result of a long and convoluted project that began with a simple proposal: to introduce the internet to a word it didn’t know. That word was parbunkells, a nautical term meaning ‘coming together through the binding of rope’ and one that Weist emblazoned on a vast white billboard in Forest Hills, Queens, as a part of a commission for the public art organization 14×48. The intention was for curious viewers to google the word and experience the special singularity of a single Google result: Weist’s own website and a short text, starting: ‘This is where I come to be alone. We’re here together now.’

Evidence that authentic people seek to appear authentic rather than be authentic

Spies Can Eavesdrop by Watching a Light Bulb’s Vibrations

Doubling effort makes up for 6 IQ points

Scientists trigger hibernation in mice, astronauts could be next

Maps of Sexual Arousal in Men and Women →

Men holding cats were viewed as less masculine; more neurotic, agreeable, and open; and less dateable.

Effect of Coitus on Nasal Temperature — Nasal temperature readings were taken approximately 20 minutes before the subject engaged in coitus and repeated within 5 minutes after termination of the act. […] post coital rise ranges from 3.5 to 6.5° F.

The majority of participants self-reported that they had experienced feelings of regret after an uncommitted sexual encounter. We found women reported feeling significantly more regret than men.

Having sex with someone you don’t live with is now illegal under coronavirus lockdown laws [in England]

police departments around the country are using software that can track and identify people in crowds from surveillance footage — often with little to no public oversight or knowledge

List of killings by law enforcement officers by country

Can US Law Enforcement Officers Refuse to Identify Themselves?

Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results

“This virus is never going to be gone.”

The optimal strategy is broadly found to be to release approximately half the population 2–4 weeks from the end of an initial infection peak, then wait another 3–4 months to allow for a second peak before releasing everyone else.

On a normal day, over 3,000 people work in the 52-story AMA building. With only four passengers at a time, which is about half of a typically crowded elevator, that translates to about 750 elevator rides each morning launching from 24 elevator cabs [KHN]

New York State published its sit-down restaurant guidelines — restaurants will have to cut their occupancy by 50 percent

Habitual Time of Dinner Is Predisposing to Severe COVID-19 Outcome - Death

Coronavirus survival hospital bill: $1.1 million

Slowing the Coronavirus Is Speeding the Spread of Other Diseases — Diphtheria is appearing in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Cholera is in South Sudan, Cameroon, Mozambique, Yemen and Bangladesh. A mutated strain of poliovirus has been reported in more than 30 countries. And measles is flaring around the globe, including in Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Nigeria and Uzbekistan.

Negotiating With Jihadists in the Sahel and Nigeria

As my colleague Paul Krugman cannot stress enough, the stock market is not the economy. In fact, as a wise person on TikTok once said, it’s more of a graph of rich people’s feelings. But that raises the question: Why are rich people feeling so optimistic, and what does that imply about the way the economy works? […] if the market seems to be recovering faster than the rest of the country, it’s at least in part because of “the government’s policy of giving out free money,” in the words of the investor Leon Cooperman. […] many companies are doing exceedingly well, particularly big technology corporations. Five of those — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Facebook — together make up about 20 percent of the S.&P. 500, and they’ve all posted significant gains. […]   According to The Financial Times, some 780,000 people have created new accounts on three of America’s top brokerage platforms since the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States. With this “herd of newbies” charging into the market at a time of extraordinary uncertainty, she says, “people are going to get played.” […] The richest 11 percent of the world population holds more than 80 percent of its wealth. When the stock market rallies, the gains flow overwhelmingly to that wealthiest class, whose savings have to go somewhere. But instead of spurring investment, the wealth rushes into debt markets and drives long-term interest rates down, which makes corporate profits more valuable. Stock prices go up, the rich end up with more wealth still, and the cycle repeats. [NY Times]

In this report, we apply basic scientific techniques to answer the question “Is Kansas as flat as a pancake?”

Sound file for teaching your bird to mimic R2D2

Spanish porn star arrested after man dies during ‘mystical’ toad venom ritual - the amphibian releases a venom called 5-MeO-DMT, which is known to have hallucinogenic effects

An executive who was paid about $18,000 a month by LafargeHolcim Ltd. to do nothing failed in his suit to force the cement maker to fire him with a payout worth more than $2 million.

Belgian man has been receiving pizzas he never ordered for years, sometimes several times a day. “I cannot sleep anymore. I start shaking every time I hear a scooter on the street.”

at least 42.7% of adult women have experienced orgasm during sleep

On average, women are more sexually disgusted than men

women fantasized more so than did men about sadomasochistic fantasies, but men fantasized more than did women about intimate, exploratory, and impersonal sexual fantasies […] higher frequency of sexual fantasy were predictive of higher levels of infidelity intentions among men […] women who fantasized more frequently about exploratory fantasies were less likely to engage in physical infidelity

Results showed that bisexual individuals reported higher levels of openness than homosexual individuals, who in turn, reported higher levels of openness than heterosexual individuals. Bisexual individuals also report lower levels of conscientiousness than both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Sex moderation effects showed that homosexual men scored higher than heterosexual men on neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness, whereas homosexual women scored lower than heterosexual women on extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. There was also evidence that personality differences between sexual orientation categories tend to decline with age. [Taylor & Francis Online]

Prior research has suggested a link between communal naked activity and positive body image […] Fifty-one participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups in which they interacted with other people either naked or clothed […] as expected, participants in the naked condition reported more body appreciation

Self-driving cars could only prevent a third of U.S. crashes: study

The most common reason for contact with the police is being a driver in a traffic stop and In the early days of the automobile, the Court created an exception for searches of vehicles

Russia urges the U.S. to ‘observe democratic standards’ and respect Americans’ right to protest

As soon as an observer opens their eyes, they have the immediate impression of a rich, colorful experience that encompasses their entire visual world. Here, we show that this impression is surprisingly inaccurate. In the most extreme case, almost a third of observers failed to notice when less than 5% of the visual display was presented in color. More: How much color do we really see?

Repetitive negative thinking is associated with amyloid, tau, and cognitive decline — Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurological disease. In early stages, AD is characterized by the aggregation of amyloid beta (Aβ) and hyperphosphorylated tau proteins in the brain and worsening memory. […] Repetitive negative thinking (also termed perseverative cognition) is a behaviorally measurable cognitive process that encompasses future‐ (worry) and past‐ (rumination) directed thoughts.

Playing hard to get may work as long as potential partners feel that their efforts are likely to be successful—eventually.

In a famous ongoing experiment started in 1960, scientists turned foxes into tame, doglike canines by breeding only the least aggressive ones generation after generation. The creatures developed stubby snouts, floppy ears, and even began to bark. Now, it appears that some rural red foxes in the United Kingdom are doing this on their own. [Science]

Fenn, 89, told the Santa Fe New Mexican that a treasure hunter located the chest a few days ago. […] Fenn posted clues to the treasures whereabouts online and in a 24-line poem that was published in his 2010 autobiography The Thrill of the Chase. Hundreds of thousands have hunted in vain across remote corners of the US west for the bronze chest believed to be filled with gold coins, jewelry and other valuable items. Some have said it was a hoax and pursued lawsuits. Many quit their jobs to dedicate themselves to the search and others depleted their life savings. At least four people are believed to have died searching for it. [The Guardian]

Aircraft detection before radar

Super-flexible woman can look at her own butt from behind

only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices

Black men are woefully underrepresented within VC firms at just 2%, based on the most recent data. Black women don’t even rank a percentage point.

Research-based solutions to stop police violence

There’s 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force — using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want — those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. [FiveThirtyEight]

There were only 27 days in 2019 where people did not kill someone

Once a crowd has gathered in response to an incident, there are still two hurdles that would-be rioters must overcome to transform a mere crowd into a destructive mob.

there are three main obstacles that prevent innocent suspects from generating accurate and believable alibis

Drug dealers turn corporate by selling customer databases for more than $180,000, also using product placement and branding.

What nudists do during a lockdown

The coronavirus shutdowns reduced traffic, but faster driving led to an uptick in fatality rates.

Facial expressions can still be detected when obscured by a face covering. In the study, observing the area around the eyes was usually enough to recognize someone else’s feelings. We examined this question with scarves, niqabs and masks. Confusion only occurred for fear and surprise. [Scientific American]

Coronavirus Lockdowns May Raise Exposure to Indoor Air Pollution — levels of carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) increased by 15 to 30 percent in more than 1,000 homes across several European countries.

Is the Worst of the Coronavirus Behind Us Now? Italy, Germany and Spain have also avoided serious flare-ups in cases and deaths as restrictions are eased. It’s similar in Austria and Denmark, which lifted lockdowns back in April. Weekly confirmed cases show the continuation of a declining trend.

The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday.

Sweden has seen a far higher mortality rate than its nearest neighbours and its nationals are being barred from crossing their borders.

Iceland never imposed a lockdown. Only a few types of businesses—night clubs and hair salons, for example—were ever ordered closed. Hardly anyone in Reykjavík wears a mask. And yet, by mid-May, when I went to talk to Pálmason, the tracing team had almost no one left to track. During the previous week, in all of Iceland, only two new coronavirus cases had been confirmed. The country hadn’t just managed to flatten the curve; it had, it seemed, virtually eliminated it. [New Yorker]

things we think we know about coronavirus and things that scientists and public health officials have yet to understand

How Coronavirus Will Change Board Games (7 Guesses)

The impact of COVID-19 on the UK fresh food supply chain

Walmart uses Everseen [AI software] in thousands of stores to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks. But the workers claimed it misidentified innocuous behavior as theft and often failed to stop actual instances of stealing. [Ars Technica]

Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing ‘Vexations’ by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours

For years, Nepal and China have sparred over the height of the Mount Everest straddling their shared border, specifically whether or not the official number should account for the snow atop it. 

Men hired for sexual fantasy break into wrong house

The monkeys attacked the lab assistant and stole the sample box with three samples

A Security Flaw In Qatar’s Contact Tracing App Exposed Hundreds Of Thousands Of People’s Personal Data

In the past, national emergencies in the United States have resulted in increased gun preparation (ie, purchasing new guns or removing guns from storage); in turn, these gun actions have effected increases in firearm injuries and deaths. The aim of this paper was to assess the extent to which interest in gun preparation has increased amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic using data from Google searches related to purchasing and cleaning guns. […] Our results corroborate media reports that gun purchases are increasing amid the COVID-19. [JMIR]

Introductions and early spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the New York City area

Covid-19 has, so far it seems, three modes of transmission. One route is via surfaces, deposited on things like door handles or silverware that then picked up by someone who touches some entry point into the body—eyes, nose, mouth. […] A second route is through large droplets, like those someone might give off in a cough. […] the third, more complicated route. A vast number of the particles that come out of a person’s mouth are much smaller, under 5 microns. They dry out quickly in the air and become so light they can float around for hours. Even the slightly warm layer of air constantly wafting upward from every person—our “thermal plume”—can carry these particles up, up, and away. Random air flow makes their spread turbulent, bounced around by currents like sand in a tide pool. And we emit them all the time. […] “The overarching assumption is that the probability of transmission is proportional to the number of virus particles floating around in the air. The more that you inhale, the more likely you are to get it,” says William Ristenpart, a professor of chemical engineering at UC Davis who studies disease transmission. “The room you’re in right now has a roof. Turbulent diffusion goes up and can’t go through the roof. It reflects off. Outdoors, it can turbulently diffuse away.” [Wired]

The emerging long-term complications of Covid-19 — Somewhere between 5 and 80 percent of people who test positive for Covid-19 may be asymptomatic, or only develop symptoms days or even weeks after their test, and many of these people will have a mild form of the illness with no lasting symptoms. But the UK National Health Service assumes that of Covid-19 patients who have required hospitalization, 45 percent will need ongoing medical care, 4 percent will require inpatient rehabilitation, and 1 percent will permanently require acute care.

New Design Helps N95 Mask Wearers Breathe Easier (new device prevents oxygen deprivation)

Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms of Selfishness

How do children learn the typical features of objects in the world? For many objects, this information must come from the language they hear. However, people are more likely to talk about atypical features (e.g., “purple carrot”) than typical features (e.g., “orange carrot”). Does the speech children hear from their parents also overrepresent atypical features?

Octave Durham went to prison for stealing two van Gogh paintings. […] “I didn’t have a buyer before I did it,” he said. “I just thought I can either sell them, or if I have a problem I can negotiate with the paintings.” By “negotiate with the paintings,” Mr. Durham meant using the paintings as a bargaining chip with law enforcement officials, in case he got into trouble for something else. […] Mr. Brand said many thieves think they will be able to sell paintings on the open market, and then quickly find out that there aren’t legal buyers. “You have thieves who think there are buyers who would really like to have stolen art on their wall. That doesn’t exist.” […] That’s when they offer them to other criminals, often for much less than their real value. Mr. Brand estimates that a work of art in the criminal underworld is worth about 10 percent of its value in the legitimate art market — so if a painting might sell for $10 million at auction, it can be traded among criminals for a value of about $1 million. Mr. Durham said the value is even lower than that — about 2.5 to 5 percent of market value. [NY Times]

I can’t remember the last time I read a novel that feels so LA. Cooper’s rendering of the flat affect of Southern California is spot-on; in “Board,” the posters respond to vulgar depictions of violence with comments like “Here we go again” and “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry (LOL).” That’s what it’s like there — there’s no social space for reasoning or explanation, for genuine self-reflection. Sometimes you just shrug your shoulders and say, “Honey, it’s LA.” In a way, this L.A. affect prefigures the flat affect of the Internet, or even life in the 21st century. Sometimes you just shrug your shoulders and say, “Honey, it’s late capitalism.” [The New Inquiry]

One of the most important moments in the transition between the Eighties and Nineties, for live rock bands, was how much rock to leave behind.

It is possible that a significant number of people who’ve never been infected with the novel coronavirus already possess some immunity to it.[…] Examining blood samples taken between 2015 and 2018 (when the novel coronavirus was still just a twinkle in Satan’s eye), researchers found that roughly 50 percent of these blood-givers possessed “SARS-CoV-2-reactive CD4+ T cells” — which is to say, their immune systems appeared capable of immediately recognizing and combating the novel coronavirus. Since none of these individuals could have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the most likely explanation for their possession of such T cells is previous exposure to a common-cold coronavirus. […] researchers at Yale University believe they’ve discovered a metric that can predict major municipal outbreaks a week in advance — the concentration of the coronavirus in a city’s sewers. […] The Swedish economy has suffered roughly as severe a downturn as that of Denmark. And in recent days, it’s had the highest per-capita coronavirus death rate in Europe. […] Worldwide, the number of new, confirmed coronavirus cases is growing by about 100,000 a day, which is the highest sustained rate of new infections we’ve seen since the pandemic began. [NY mag]

There’s a good chance the coronavirus will never go away. Even after a vaccine is discovered and deployed, the coronavirus will likely remain for decades to come, circulating among the world’s population. Experts call such diseases endemic — stubbornly resisting efforts to stamp them out. Think measles, HIV, chickenpox. […] There are already four endemic coronaviruses that circulate continuously, causing the common cold. And many experts think this virus will become the fifth — its effects growing milder as immunity spreads and our bodies adapt to it over time. [Washington Post]

With restaurants closed, CDC warns of increasingly aggressive rodents looking for new food sources

India detains pigeon on suspicion of spying for Pakistan

9 Local TV Stations Pushed the Same Amazon-Scripted Segment

The expedition cruise ship departed from Ushuaia, Argentina, for a planned 21-day cruise of the Antarctic Peninsula, including Elephant Island, before sailing to South Georgia Island on a route similar to that taken by the British explorer, Ernest Shackleton, in 1915–1917. The ship departed mid-March 2020, after the global COVID-19 pandemic was declared by the WHO, with all 128 passengers and 95 crew screened for COVID-19 symptoms, and body temperatures were taken before boarding. No passengers or crew that had transited through China, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or Iran in the previous 3 weeks were permitted to board, given that these countries were where COVID-19 infection was most prevalent at the time. Multiple hand hygiene stations were positioned throughout the ship and especially in the dining area. […] Of the 217 passengers and crew on board, 128 tested positive for COVID-19 on reverse transcription–PCR (59%). Of the COVID-19-positive patients, 19% (24) were symptomatic; 6.2% (8) required medical evacuation; 3.1% (4) were intubated and ventilated; and the mortality was 0.8% (1). The majority of COVID-19-positive patients were asymptomatic (81%, 104 patients). [BMJ]

Transmission within community: R= 0.8. Transmission from hospital to community: R=0.2. Transmission from community to hospital: R=0.4, Transmission within hospital: R=0.7. All these numbers are less than 1, so it might appear as though the disease is now under control. But unfortunately that isn’t the case. The overall value of R for the population is actually about R=1.04 for this example. [Maths.org]

Supercomputer simulates the impact of the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs [Previously: The event appears to have hit all continents at the same time

The uncanny valley (UV) effect refers to an eerie feeling of unfamiliarity people get while observing or interacting with robots that resemble humans almost but not quite perfectly.

Six-month old infants recognize when adults imitate them, and perceive imitators as more friendly

Motion Sickness in Amphibians — None of the species that we studied vomited during the 8 to 10 parabolas of each flight. However, [some frogs] vomited in a period of 0.5 to 42 h after flight. […] we suggest that the previously observed behavior of three frogs on the MIR Space Station was a manifestation of motion sickness

America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms

A Passion for Castration: Characterizing Men Who Are Fascinated With Castration, but Have Not Been Castrated More: The most appreciated aspect of castration was the sense of control over sexual urges and appetite (52%).

The Grymoire - A web site containing a collection of useful incantations for wizards