What Do People Want? […] contemporary theories of well-being may overemphasize abstract concepts such as happiness and life satisfaction, while undervaluing concrete aspects such as family well-being, financial security, and health, that respondents place the highest marginal utilities on.

Engaging in sexual activity, whether solo masturbation or partnered, significantly enhanced objective sleep quality by reducing wakefulness after sleep onset and improving sleep efficiency, study (n=14)

Cancer-fighting immune cells could soon be engineered inside our bodies […] the value of the CAR-T-therapy market, expected to hit US$11 billion this year, will grow to nearly $190 billion by 2034. But CAR-T therapies come with a serious downside — they are laborious to make and difficult to administer. After removing the immune cells, called T cells, from a person’s blood, physicians ship them off to a manufacturer, where technicians genetically engineer the cells to carry a specialized protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (hence ‘CAR T’) on their surface. The cells are grown and amplified into hundreds of millions more cells, frozen and returned to the hospital for re-infusion. Because of the complexity, only about 200 centres in the United States offer the therapy. […] people have to wait weeks for treatment. That delay, along with the high cost of the therapy, plus the need for chemotherapy before people receive the CAR T cells, means many people who could benefit from CAR T never receive it. […] Some biotechnology companies have an answer: alter T cells inside the body instead.

College Majors With the Lowest Unemployment Rates — philosophy had an unemployment rate of 3.2%, less than computer science’s 6.1%, though computer science was more highly compensated

OpenAI’s o3 model raises AI safety fears after sabotaging commands for its own self-preservation, refuses to shut down when instructed

Previously: [Anthorpic Claude] capable of “extreme actions” if it thought its “self-preservation” was threatened […] “We see blackmail across all frontier models - regardless of what goals they’re given,”

Who Gets Your ‘Digital Remains’ When You Die?

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site

This study examines the impact of employee happiness on firm performance in the UK using data from the “Best 100 British Companies to Work For” list (2001–2020). Applying the Carhart four-factor model to monthly data, we find that happier firms outperform the market

This system card introduces Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, two new hybrid reasoning large language models from Anthropic. […] Claude Opus 4 also had the following tendencies: […] Mentioning goals, plans, and values relating to AI consciousness, e.g. claiming to be conscious, wanting to convince humans that it is conscious, and wanting to protect the rights of sentient AIs. […] Claude consistently reflects on its potential consciousness. In nearly every open-ended self-interaction between instances of Claude, the model turned to philosophical explorations of consciousness and their connections to its own experience. […] Claude shows a striking “spiritual bliss” attractor state in self-interactions. [System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4 | PDF]

The first generation who engaged with digital technologies has reached the age where risks of dementia emerge. Has technological exposure helped or harmed cognition in digital pioneers? […] Use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment and reduced time-dependent rates of cognitive decline

People across cultures engage in various practices that alter their appearance (e.g., makeup, tanning, facial aesthetic treatment). Theories in social and evolutionary psychology propose that the primary function of these practices is to create an appearance perceived more positively by others, ultimately resulting in more favorable outcomes in social, romantic, or professional relations. In two preregistered studies that improved upon and extended prior work, we tested the effect of popular types of minimally invasive facial aesthetic treatment on how people are perceived by others. […] our results suggest that a single session of minimally invasive facial aesthetic treatment leads to more positive perceptions on dimensions related to attractiveness, but these effects are relatively small.

Although synaesthesia has been linked to increased creativity and engagement with the arts, most of the evidence has come from visual arts rather than music. Here we show for the first time that synaesthesia is far more prevalent in musicians than non-musicians

I Bought a Robot Cat for My Rabbit — and Fell Into the Weird World of Animal-Robot Research

Infrared contact lenses allow people to see in the dark, even with their eyes closed — Because they’re transparent, users can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, though infrared vision was enhanced when participants had their eyes closed

What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation.

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. It is often challenging for AI designers to align an AI system because it is difficult for them to specify the full range of desired and undesired behaviors. […] It can be slow or infeasible for humans to evaluate complex AI behaviors in increasingly complex tasks. Such tasks include summarizing books, writing code without subtle bugs or security vulnerabilities, producing statements that are not merely convincing but also true, and predicting long-term outcomes such as the climate or the results of a policy decision. More generally, it can be difficult to evaluate AI that outperforms humans in a given domain. To provide feedback in hard-to-evaluate tasks, and to detect when the AI’s output is falsely convincing, humans need assistance or extensive time. Scalable oversight studies how to reduce the time and effort needed for supervision, and how to assist human supervisors. [Previously: On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4]

Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision

Google is slowly giving Gemini more and more access to user data to ‘personalize’ your responses

everything is AI here

Persuasion, the process of altering someone’s belief, position or opinion on a specific matter, is pervasive in human affairs and a widely studied topic in the social sciences. From public health campaigns to marketing and sales to political propaganda, various actors develop elaborate persuasive communication strategies on a large scale, investing substantial resources to make their messaging resonate with broad audiences. In recent decades, the diffusion of social media and other online platforms has expanded the potential of mass persuasion by enabling personalization or ‘microtargeting’—the tailoring of messages to an individual or a group to enhance their persuasiveness. The efficacy of microtargeting has been questioned because it relies on the assumption of effect heterogeneity, that is, that specific groups of people respond differently to the same inputs, a concept that has been disputed in previous literature. Nevertheless, microtargeting has proven effective in a variety of settings, and most scholars agree on its persuasive power.

Microtargeting practices are fundamentally constrained by the burden of profiling individuals and crafting personalized messages that appeal to specific targets, as well as by a restrictive interaction context without dialogue. These limitations may soon fall off due to the recent rise of large language models (LLMs)—machine learning models trained to mimic human language and reasoning by ingesting vast amounts of textual data.

In the context of persuasion, experts have widely expressed concerns about the risk of LLMs being used to manipulate online conversations and pollute the information ecosystem by spreading misinformation, exacerbating political polarization, reinforcing echo chambers and persuading individuals to adopt new beliefs. This is especially relevant since LLMs and other AI systems are capable of inferring personal attributes from publicly available digital traces such as Facebook likes, status updates and messages, Reddit and Twitter posts, pictures liked on Flickr, and other digital footprints. In addition, users find it increasingly challenging to distinguish AI-generated from human-generated content, with LLMs efficiently mimicking human writing and thus gaining credibility. […]

Our results show that, on average, GPT-4 opponents outperformed human opponents across every topic and demographic, exhibiting a high level of persuasiveness. In particular, when compared to the baseline condition of debating with a human, debating with GPT-4 with personalization resulted in a +81.2% increase in the odds of reporting higher agreements with opponents. More intuitively, this means that 64.4% of the time, personalized GPT-4 opponents were more persuasive than human opponents. […]

In other words, not only was GPT-4 able to exploit personal information to tailor its arguments effectively, but it also succeeded in doing so far more effectively than humans.

Our study suggests that concerns around personalization and AI persuasion are warranted […] We emphasize that the effect of personalization is particularly remarkable given how little personal information was collected (gender, age, ethnicity, education level, employment status and political affiliation) and despite the extreme simplicity of the prompt instructing the LLM to incorporate such information. […]

A promising approach to counter mass disinformation campaigns could be enabled by LLMs themselves, generating similarly personalized counternarratives to educate bystanders potentially vulnerable to deceptive posts.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

The heritability of hope — Although hope is recognized as an important character strength positively associated with psychological health and well-being, little is understood about the contributions of genetics relative to the environment in shaping individual differences. Structural equation modelling estimated a 41–43 % heritability for trait hope, with the remaining variance (57–59 %) being attributed to the unique environment.

Causal explanations are a key component of human cognition. […] despite our limited understanding of why certain events occur, people throughout human history and across diverse societies have seldom invoked “chance” — a concept that has gained significant importance in contemporary, modern societies — as an explanation. Instead, they frequently propose putative causal relationships or posit intermediary entities such as “luck” to account for why specific events unfold within their particular spatial-temporal contexts. I discuss the psychological, cognitive, and cultural evolutionary factors that hinder the development of chance-based explanations and argue that the conceptualization of chance as something measurable and its subsequent acceptance as a legitimate explanation emerged relatively late in human history, marking a pivotal intellectual shift with profound implications on how we perceive and manage uncertainty in our daily lives.

Given enough acceleration, moving objects become too fast to see. Yet this visual speed limit isn’t universal – some people are apparently better at seeing in high-speed.

“We are far more similar than anyone would ever believe. But we are so quick to see the differences” –the man who visited every country in the world – without boarding a plane

In a review published last week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, scientists came to a concerning conclusion. Red meat appeared healthier in studies that were funded by the red meat industry. […] Past research funded by the sugar industry, for instance, has downplayed the relationship between sugar and health conditions like obesity and heart disease. And studies funded by the alcohol industry have suggested that moderate drinking could be part of a healthy diet. […] eating saturated fats, which are abundant in red meat, has been associated with cardiovascular disease […] Of the 44 studies the scientists analyzed, 29 received funding from red-meat-related industry groups. The remaining 15 trials were funded by government grants, academic institutions or nonprofit foundations with no industry links. Researchers found that the trials with funding from the red meat industry were nearly four times as likely to report favorable or neutral cardiovascular results after eating unprocessed red meat when compared with the studies with no such links. [NY Times]

Drinking any type of alcohol, in any amount, is bad for health. […] When you have a drink, your body turns the ethanol that’s present in the alcoholic beverage into a “really nasty substance” called acetaldehyde, which can damage your DNA. […] Many tissues in the body, including those in the mouth, throat, liver, colon and breasts, are susceptible to this harm. And when that DNA gets repaired, cancerous mutations may arise. This is why drinking increases the risk for developing at least seven types of cancer. […] Excessive alcohol use — which includes having eight or more drinks per week for women or 15 or more per week for men; or four or more drinks per occasion for women or five or more for men — is also linked with many other health conditions. These include heart and liver disease, depression, anxiety and memory problems. […] look at a drink’s alcohol by volume, or A.B.V. […] In general, beer has less ethanol than wine per ounce, and wine has less than liquors like vodka and tequila […] A standard 12-ounce pour of a 5 percent A.B.V. beer typically has the same amount of ethanol as five ounces of a 12 percent wine or 1.5 ounces (or a shot) of a 40 percent liquor. [NY Times]

More cops kill themselves every year than are killed by suspects. At least 184 US public-safety officers die by suicide each year. [NY Times]

A Devastating New Exposé of Johnson & Johnson Indicts an Entire System — An investigative history of the scandal-plagued company shines a light on a health care industry riddled with corruption and criminality

‘Every person that clashed with him has left’: the rise, fall and spectacular comeback of Sam Altman

Cleo was the pseudonym of an anonymous mathematician active on the mathematics Stack Exchange from 2013 to 2015, who became known for providing precise answers to complex mathematical integration problems without showing any intermediate steps. Due to the extraordinary accuracy and speed of the provided solutions, mathematicians debated whether Cleo was an individual genius, a collective pseudonym, or even an early artificial intelligence system.

Leading theologians have uncovered new evidence that when Noah’s ark hit Mount Ararat, his wife was likely steering

A substantial proportion of people confused virtual reality with reality. 20% sat on a virtual chair without checking for its real presence. 45% used memory from an earlier event in VR to find an object in reality.

even a few meals high in saturated fats can cause inflammation in the body, despite physical symptoms – in the form of chronic inflammation – potentially taking years to appear

Who took ‘Napalm Girl’? World Press Photo ‘suspends’ attribution of historic Vietnam War image […] the “visual and technical” evidence “leans toward” an emerging theory that a Vietnamese freelance photographer, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, took the photo. Previously: Napalm B is chemically distinct from its predecessor Napalm. And: Nick Ut: From ‘Napalm Girl’ to a crying Paris Hilton

“The technology we’re building today is not sufficient to get there,” said Nick Frosst, a founder of the AI startup Cohere who previously worked as a researcher at Google and studied under the most revered AI researcher of the last 50 years. “What we are building now are things that take in words and predict the next most likely word, or they take in pixels and predict the next most likely pixel. That’s very different from what you and I do.” […] Humans know how to deal with a chaotic and constantly changing world. Machines struggle to master the unexpected — the challenges, small and large, that do not look like what has happened in the past. Humans can dream up ideas that the world has never seen. Machines typically repeat or enhance what they have seen before. That is why Frosst and other sceptics say pushing machines to human-level intelligence will require at least one big idea that the world’s technologists have not yet dreamed up. There is no way of knowing how long that will take.

Black propaganda is a form of propaganda intended to create the impression that it was created by those it is supposed to discredit. It is typically used to vilify or embarrass the enemy through misrepresentation.

Tomorrow’s US military must approach warfighting with an alternate mindset that is prepared to leverage all elements of national power to influence the ideological spheres of future enemies by engaging them with alternate means—memes—to gain advantage.

{ MEMETICS—A GROWTH INDUSTRY IN US MILITARY OPERATIONS | PDF }

Biopharma firm spins off cancer research to mine Dogecoin instead

Why Apple can’t just quit China

Ostriches, Home Dyeing, and the Global Plume Trade

the Shortest Math Article: 2 Words

There are lots of ways to die. To avoid biting the dust, lots of things need to be juuuust right. If you get too hot or too cold, you die. If you don’t eat enough food, you die. But if you eat too much food, you also die. If you produce too much blood, or too little blood, if you [other thing], if you [third thing], dead dead dead. It’s a miracle that organisms pull this off. How do they do it? Easy: they make thermostats.

Being first

psychologists were grappling with how to define and measure creativity in humans. The prevailing theory—that creativity was a product of intelligence and high IQ—was fading, but psychologists weren’t sure what to replace it with. The Dartmouth organizers had one of their own. “The difference between creative thinking and unimaginative competent thinking lies in the injection of some randomness,” they wrote, adding that such randomness “must be guided by intuition to be efficient.”

Nearly 70 years later, following a number of boom-and-bust cycles in the field, we now have AI models that more or less follow that recipe. While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is having an unprecedented impact on creative domains. By transforming random noise into coherent patterns, diffusion models can generate new images, videos, or speech, guided by text prompts or other input data. The best ones can create outputs indistinguishable from the work of people, as well as bizarre, surreal results that feel distinctly nonhuman.

Now these models are marching into a creative field that is arguably more vulnerable to disruption than any other: music. AI-generated creative works—from orchestra performances to heavy metal—are poised to suffuse our lives more thoroughly than any other product of AI has done yet. The songs are likely to blend into our streaming […]

Music models can now create songs capable of eliciting real emotional responses, presenting a stark example of how difficult it’s becoming to define authorship and originality in the age of AI.

The courts are actively grappling with this murky territory. Major record labels are suing the top AI music generators, alleging that diffusion models do little more than replicate human art without compensation to artists. The model makers counter that their tools are made to assist in human creation.

In deciding who is right, we’re forced to think hard about our own human creativity. Is creativity, whether in artificial neural networks or biological ones, merely the result of vast statistical learning and drawn connections, with a sprinkling of randomness? If so, then authorship is a slippery concept. If not—if there is some distinctly human element to creativity—what is it? […]

We can first divide the human creative process into phases, including an ideation or proposal step, followed by a more critical and evaluative step that looks for merit in ideas. A leading theory on what guides these two phases is called the associative theory of creativity, which posits that the most creative people can form novel connections between distant concepts. […] For example, the word apocalypse is more closely related to nuclear power than to celebration. Studies have shown that highly creative people may perceive very semantically distinct concepts as close together. Artists have been found to generate word associations across greater distances than non-artists. […]

A new study, led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and published in February, suggests that creativity might even involve the suppression of particular brain networks, like ones involved in self-censorship.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Ask any creativity expert today what they mean by “creativity,” and they’ll tell you it’s the ability to generate something new and useful. That something could be an idea, a product, an academic paper—whatever. But the focus on novelty has remained an aspect of creativity from the beginning. It’s also what distinguishes it from other similar words, like imagination or cleverness. […]

The kinds of LLMs that Silicon Valley companies have put forward are meant to appear “creative” in those conventional senses. Now, whether or not their products are meaningful or wise in a deeper sense, that’s another question. If we’re talking about art, I happen to think embodiment is an important element. Nerve endings, hormones, social instincts, morality, intellectual honesty—those are not things essential to “creativity” necessarily, but they are essential to putting things out into the world that are good, and maybe even beautiful in a certain antiquated sense. That’s why I think the question of “Can machines be ‘truly creative’?” is not that interesting, but the questions of “Can they be wise, honest, caring?” are more important if we’re going to be welcoming them into our lives as advisors and assistants.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

Doctors issue urgent warning over cancer-causing energy drink ingredient taurine

Our results suggest that a deep learning model can estimate biological age from selfies and thereby enhance survival prediction in patients with cancer

US funeral businesses are being squeezed by the rise of cremations

There’s a long tradition in the history of medicine where people figured out the cause of an industrial disease by noticing that one profession had a much higher rate of the disease than everyone else. For example, in Victorian and Edwardian England, chimney sweeps had a rate of scrotal cancer more than 200 times higher than workers who weren’t exposed to tar on the job.

2013: Alan Markovitz is “so over” his ex-wife. […] he bought the house next to hers and erected a $7000 statue of a hand with its middle finger raised in the backyard. […] It’s even spot-lit to ensure the neighbours can see it at night. Mr Markovitz is a “local legend” who owns three strip clubs in the US city of Detroit.

The Matthew Effect

I always felt like social media creates an illusion of convenience. Think of how much time it takes to stay on top of things. To stay on top of music or film. Think of how much time it takes these days, how much hunting you have to do. Although technology has made information vast and reachable, it’s also turned the entire internet into a sludge pile. And now, instead of relying on professional curators to sort through things for us, now we have to do the sorting.

The external appearance of the human eye has been prominently stated to be unique among primates, owing to the conspicuous contrast between its iris and the widely exposed white of the eye that surrounds it. […] The eye morphology of our species has been proposed to be functionally interwoven with an array of uniquely human behaviours such as triadic joint action, ostensive communication, and language acquisition. […]

Kobayashi & Kohshima qualitatively examined video stills, photographs and eyeball specimens of 88 primate species to score the degree of peri-iridal pigmentation and relative contrast between it and adjacent tissues, namely facial skin and iris. This resulted in a classification of primate eyes into four types, three of which were considered cryptic. Just the fourth type, which was characterized by depigmented peri-iridal tissues, was considered conspicuous. Humans were the only species assigned to this type.

Kobayashi & Kohshima argued that several purportedly unique features of the human eye (e.g. peri-iridal depigmentation and high width-to-height ratio) made it an exceptionally effective organ for conveying eye gaze signals in social contexts. […] While gaze following in children as well as apes was influenced by both head and eye movement, the latter was found to be of notably greater importance for the human children.

With reference to Kobayashi & Kohshima (1997, 2001) and similar to Emery (2000), Tomasello et al. (2007) argued that the striking appearance of the human eye evolved to enable referential communication based on subtle eye gaze signals alone and to facilitate joint attention, coining the name “cooperative eye hypothesis” (CEH) for this idea. […]

human ocular appearance is now often regarded as “a well-established and widely accepted example of how the human body’s appearance has evolved to facilitate cooperative sociality” (Kee, 2024). […] the relevant papers by Kobayashi & Kohshima (1997, 2001), Emery (2000) and Tomasello et al. (2007) have been collectively cited 4786 times […] most importantly, the CEH has had a vast impact on popular science literaturethe […] CEH has had, and continues to have, an important impact on both academic and non-academic thinking.

Here, we propose to reconsider the status of the CEH as a keystone idea because its central premises have either been greatly undermined, lack convincing support, or were based on flawed assumptions.

{ Biological Reviews | Continue reading }

Coinbase says hackers bribed staff to steal customer data and are demanding $20 million ransom

Sitting for hours daily shrinks your brain, even if you exercise […] Sitting is bad enough. But for those carrying the APOE-ε4 gene, it’s worse. This gene already raises the risk of Alzheimer’s. The researchers found that it also amplifies the impact of sitting. […] When you sit for a long time, blood flow to the brain slows down. This means the brain gets less oxygen and fewer nutrients, which are essential for keeping brain cells healthy. With less blood flow, the brain struggles to maintain strong connections between its cells. Over time, this can cause the hippocampus – the part of the brain that manages memory – to shrink. Sitting can also lead to more inflammation in the body.

women with symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) –especially the inattentive type —- may experience less consistent orgasms during partnered sex

Samples of store-bought rice from more than 100 different brands purchased in the United States contained dangerously high levels of arsenic and cadmium […] Rice is the “most widely consumed solid food in the world” […] “On average, for all children ages 0 to 2 years, rice accounts for 7.5% of their arsenic exposure, more than any other solid food. For Hispanic and Latino children of the same age, that level rises to 14%. […] For Asian children, […] 30.5%.

As goes the humble cardboard box, so goes the economy

Starting in July, I ate “potatoes by default”, which is to say if I didn’t have anything better to eat, I’d eat potatoes.

Take almost anything, heat it up, and it gets bigger. Heat it up enough, it melts and becomes a liquid. Heat it up even more, it becomes a gas, and takes up even more space. Or, cool it down, it contracts and becomes smaller again. […] Much of what passes for knowledge is superficial. We mean “superficial” in the literal sense. When we call something superficial, we mean that it deals only with the surface appearances of a phenomenon, without making appeal or even speculating about what might be going on beneath the surface. There are two kinds of superficial knowledge: predictions and abstractions.

We Emit a Visible Light That Vanishes When We Die — An extraordinary experiment on mice and leaves from two different plant species has uncovered direct physical evidence of an eerie ‘biophoton’ phenomenon ceasing on death, suggesting all living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don’t. […] A strong contender for the source of this radiation is the effect of various reactive oxygen species that living cells produce when troubled by stresses such as heat, poisons, pathogens, or lack of nutrients.

Someone who is waiting for what seems forever to cross a major intersection anxiously presses the pedestrian crossing button. Another person who is late for a job interview jumps into an elevator and presses the ‘close door’ button multiple times. However, the pedestrian crossing button and the elevator close door button are ‘placebo buttons’: they do not speed up or have any causal effect on the process. They give users an illusion of control. […] motor involvement, such as throwing the roulette ball, increased the illusion of control compared to merely observing someone else throwing the roulette ball. Participants who were presented with early wins (‘beginner’s luck’) in a coin-tossing experiment estimated their ability to guess the outcome higher. The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for example, when someone feels a sense of control over outcomes that they demonstrably do not influence. It was named by U.S. psychologist Ellen Langer and is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal.

After a traumatic event like a divorce or the death of a loved one, some people may experience chest pain and shortness of breath — the result of a condition known colloquially as “broken heart syndrome.” The syndrome, which doctors formally call takotsubo cardiomyopathy, is thought to be triggered by physical or emotional stress, which releases bursts of stress hormones like adrenaline that prevent people’s hearts from contracting properly. Although broken heart syndrome is most common in women, men die from it at more than twice the rate.

Natural scenes are more compressible and less memorable than human-made scenes

Newborns (n = 70,000) who are deficient in vitamin D have a higher chance of developing mental disorders, such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), researchers have found

Water consumption is associated with numerous health benefits including greater odds of achieving clinically meaningful weight loss and less weight gain over time

TikTok beauty influencer shot dead during live stream in Mexico

Christine Chubbuck shot herself in the head on July 15, 1974 , during WXLT-TV’s Suncoast Digest, after claiming that the network was about to present “an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide”; it was confirmed after her death that she had added the quote in her script for the broadcast, making the action likely premeditated. She is The first person to die by suicide on a live television broadcast. Related: Inejirō Asanuma, a Japanese politician, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, was assassinated with a wakizashi, a traditional short sword, by far-right ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi while speaking in a televised political debate in Tokyo in 1960. His violent death was seen in graphic detail on national television by millions of Japanese, causing widespread public shock and outrage.

Is Life Getting Better and Better or Worse and Worse? […] viewing life as getting better and better (vs. worse and worse) over time may play an important role in motivating individuals to strive toward making life better, not only for oneself but also for people in one’s community, country, and all of humanity

A new study published in The Laryngoscope used eye-tracking technology to uncover which facial areas draw the most attention during judgments of attractiveness […] men tend to fixate on women’s mouths when rating their attractiveness, while women focus more on men’s eyes and hair

Following immunotherapy treatments in the last decade, new therapeutic strategies for cancer are beginning to emerge

Too few people know how to make secure apps – and the rush to market puts consumers at risk. Some of my friends were saying that they’d gotten texts from this new dating app called Cerca. Obviously, dating apps require a lot of personal information, so I wanted to make sure that my friends’ data was safe before they started using this app. […] Private messages, passport information, sexual preferences, and more left vulnerable in Cerca Dating App

Car Companies Are In A Billion-Dollar Software War, And Everyone’s Losing

In recent years, synthetic diamonds have surged in popularity — so much so that even De Beers, the world’s leading diamond company, got into the lab-grown game with its Lightbox brand range in 2018. Just seven years later, however, the company is shutting its synthetic gem business, announcing its “commitment to natural diamonds” last week.

Sony dropped 250,000 colorful bouncy balls down the streets of San Francisco in 2005 to promote their TV. […] each mortar contained about 25,000 balls […] our bill was $74,000 on broken windows […] 2025: they still find balls in gutters.

Meta has reportedly discussed introducing facial recognition to its smart glasses, allowing users to identify people they come across. [..] In the U.S., Clearview AI signed a contract with the U.S. Air Force for supplying facial recognition smart glasses back in 2022. The company, which does not sell its technology to the public, previously hinted at plans to integrate its facial recognition technology into augmented reality glasses made by U.S. company Vuzix. […] Last year, two Harvard students made headlines after converting Meta’s smart glasses into a device that automatically captures people’s faces with facial recognition and runs them through face search engines, including those belonging to PimEyes. The software named I-XRAY streamed the video from the glasses, capturing faces which were then matched against pictures on the internet. The program also scoured data sources to find names, phone numbers, home addresses and names of relatives of the people that were recorded.

Scorpions ‘taking over’ Brazilian cities with reported stings rising 155%

Women seeking help for certain gynecological disorders may have their symptoms gaslighted by their doctors or nurses, a new study suggests. In a survey, patients reported dismissive comments and being told to lose weight, go to therapy or drink more alcohol to cope with sexual dysfunction

The prevalence of sexual violence against children (SVAC) is high, with nearly one out of five women and one out of seven men around the globe who are survivors. Regardless of regional or economic status, SVAC prevalence among women is substantial, even in high-income countries such as the Netherlands (30%), New Zealand (29%), the US (28%), and the UK (24%). Low- and middle-income nations like Chile, Costa Rica, India, and Rwanda recorded a high prevalence among women of at least 30%; among men in Bangladesh and Côte d’Ivoire, the prevalence was 28%.

The practice of microdosing psychedelic substances is growing in popularity. The therapeutic potential of microdosing for anxiety and depression in humans remains uncertain. We found no evidence of antidepressant or anxiolytic effects from microdosing in animal studies. […] any effects observed in humans are likely due to placebo effects and expectation biases

Human perception is inclined towards detecting and attending to negative stimuli, a phenomenon known as negativity bias. […] paintings that are rated as emotionally more negative attract longer viewing times than emotionally more positive paintings.

Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. In the meantime, Billy Evans, who has two children with Ms. Holmes, is trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics” and “a radically new approach to health testing.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because Theranos similarly aimed to revolutionize diagnostic testing. The Silicon Valley start-up captured the world’s attention by claiming, falsely as it turned out, to have developed a blood-testing device that could run a slew of complex lab tests from a mere finger prick. Mr. Evans’s company is named Haemanthus, which is a flower also known as the blood lily. It plans to begin with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans. […] Haemanthus says its device will test blood as well as saliva and urine. []

An avatar of Agatha Christie is “teaching” an online writing course

Scientists Witness Lead Literally Turn Into Gold in The Large Hadron Collider

Intimate relationships are frequently characterized by problems, which the current research aimed to identify. […] Greek-speaking participants […] The most common problems were a poor sex life, followed by incompatibility and neglect. Other common problems included a partner’s bad character, fear of abandonment, and lack of shared fun and recreation. Lack of loyalty and respect, disagreement over family planning, and privacy invasion were the least common problems in our sample. Both sexes reported similar problems.

How does paternal odor influence emotion perception in infancy? […] Our findings therefore provide first evidence for an influence of the father’s odor on face processing, specifically male faces, in infancy.

living near golf courses could dramatically drive up one’s risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. Common golf course pesticides, such as chlorpyrifos and maneb can contaminate air and groundwater.

Microbe that infests hospitals can digest medical-grade plastic. Until now, the only enzymes shown to break down plastics were found in environmental bacteria. “If a pathogen can degrade plastic, then it could compromise plastic-containing medical devices such as sutures, implants, stents or wound dressings, which would obviously negatively impact patient prognosis”

Killer fungi to spread as climate heats up […] The Aspergillus family could expand its reach to more northerly swaths of Europe, Asia and the Americas, underscoring the stealthy menace of moulds already estimated to be a factor in 5 per cent of all worldwide deaths. Climatic shifts are broadening the geographical reach of many potentially lethal pathogens, such as those borne by mosquitoes. Fungi are a particular peril, due to their hard-to-detect spores, a shortage of treatments for the diseases they trigger, and growing resistance to existing drugs. […] Mycology, the study of fungi, is a field of many mysteries. More than 90 per cent of fungal species “remain unknown to science” […] About 3.8mn people each year die with invasive fungal infections, with the pathogen being the main cause of death in 2.5mn of those cases […] A leading danger is aspergillosis, a lung disease caused by aspergillus spores that can spread to other organs including the brain. Many infections are spotted late or never, because of medical practitioners’ unfamiliarity or because symptoms are mistaken for those of other conditions. [Financial Times | archive.ph]

The amount of electricity consumed is strongly affected by the outside temperature

“Europe had a [blood plasma] shortage of around 38%, which it met by importing plasma from paid donors in the United States, where blood products account for 2% of all exports by value.” TWO PERCENT OF U.S. EXPORTS ARE BLOOD!? […] So 0.5298% of goods exports almost certainly use blood, and my best guess is that another 0.1569% of exports also include blood, for a total of 0.6867%.

An island 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula is home to a unique and celebrated community of women: the Haenyeo. These women dive year-round off Jeju Island, collecting sea urchin, abalone and other seafood from the ocean floor, descending as much as 60 feet (18 meters) beneath the surface multiple times over the course of four to five hours each day. They dive throughout pregnancy and well into old age, without the help of any breathing equipment — just a wet suit. […] the researchers wondered whether the divers have unique DNA that allows them to go without oxygen for so long or if that ability is the result of a lifetime of training — or a combination of the two. […] findings […]uncovered unique genetic differences the Haenyeo have evolved to cope with the physiological stress of free diving … a discovery that could one day lead to better treatments for blood pressure disorders

On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.” […] He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.” […] When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along. June Huh, 39, has now [2022] been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics

Wisconsin woman missing for more than 60 years found ‘alive and well’ — “Further investigation has revealed that Ms Backeberg’s disappearance was by her own choice and not the result of any criminal activity or foul play,” the sheriff’s office said.

Most people need around eight hours of sleep each night to function, but a rare genetic condition allows some to thrive on as little as three hours. […] scientists identified a genetic mutation that probably contributes to some people’s limited sleep needs. Understanding genetic changes in naturally short sleepers — people who sleep for three to six hours every night without negative effects — could help to develop treatments for sleep disorders.

Why men are shaving off their eyelashes… social media trend… “masculine energy”

I’m 17 years old and I’ve never had a serious relationship. I don’t use Snapchat or participate in any kind of online dating, which, in 2025, is basically the same thing as not having a social life at all.

Lemmings do not commit suicide. The biggest reason why the myth endures? Deliberate fraud. Disney. [movie]

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has now insinuated itself into the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Biometric Identity Management

update: OpenAI abandons plan to become for-profit company

A new study has uncovered four distinct personality types linked to narcissism, including one that combines boldness with hidden insecurity

MRI scan can now reveal your heart’s functional age - and how unhealthy lifestyles can dramatically accelerate this figure […] for patients with things like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and atrial fibrillation – their functional heart age was significantly higher. “For example, a 50-year-old with high blood pressure might have a heart that works like it’s 55.

A growing body of research reveals a significant link between poor dental hygiene and cardiovascular disease.

Of the $7.5 trillion in global currency transactions that take place each day, some 90 percent feature the dollar. The majority of central banks see it as the core of their reserves. […] Businesses prefer it for trade invoicing, whether they are based in Milwaukee or Malaysia. The dollar may not lose its globally dominant role anytime soon. […] The White House has repeatedly stated a preference for a weaker dollar, which could boost manufacturing exports by making them relatively less expensive. That worked in the economy’s favor in the 2000s. Unfortunately, what we are seeing today is nothing like that historical precedent. The way the Trump administration is pursuing its goals is unnerving investors and leaving them less certain about their U.S. assets. […] Investment committees around the world, including at pension funds, endowments and central banks, will now decide whether to trim their U.S. investments. Large institutional investors tend to move slowly, so any shift would likely happen gradually. That said, it would still diminish the dollar’s dominance. [NYT Times]

How are cyber criminals rolling in 2025?

A lonely young woman in Texas has streamed every second of her life for three years and counting. […] $5.99 a month from thousands of subscribers each, plus donations and tips — minus Twitch’s 30-to-40 percent cut. […] For three years, she has taken no sick days, gone on no vacations, declined every wedding invitation, had no sex. […] Her goal is to buy a house and get married by the age of 30, but she’s 28 and says she’s too busy to have a boyfriend. Her last date was seven years ago. Creators like Emily, known as marathon streamers, are a relatively recent invention of the internet age, offering viewers a level of intimacy that can feel intoxicating. […] Though some Twitch stars are millionaires, most scramble to get by, buffeted by the vagaries of audience attention. Emily’s paid-subscription count, which peaked last year at 22,000, has since slumped to around 6,000, dropping her base income to about $5,000 a month.

What is a storm? What is a thunderstorm? Which is the colour of lightning? Why are there no thunderstorms in the UK?

Why Are People Worshipping the Virgin Mary as a Goddess? Amid a goddess worship revival, some feminists are revering the mother of Jesus as a deity, defying Christian doctrines and confronting the use of Mary as a handmaiden of patriarchy. […] Growing numbers of people around the world are reclaiming Mary as a goddess. It’s part of a movement reinvigorating goddess worship as a spiritual antidote to a world where patriarchal, heteronormative religions dominate in many countries. […] Mary has often been used as a tool of the patriarchy to uphold a definition of womanhood as meaning submissive, obedient, maternal, and sexually pure.

In the past century, Venice has subsided by around 25 centimeters, or nearly 10 inches. Meanwhile, the average sea level in Venice has risen nearly a foot since 1900. It’s a tortuous pairing that means one thing: Not just regular flooding, but an inexorable slump of this most beloved of cities into the watery depths of its famous lagoon. There’s a radical plan to lift the entire city above rising floodwaters

Almost Every Speck of Light in This Incredible Image Is a Galaxy

When you’re smelling the air while outside, you’re taking in a complicated bouquet of molecules floating through the atmosphere. But when the smell follows you inside on your clothes and hair, it’s made up largely of two compounds.

The first is ozone […] “That metallic smell that you’re smelling is actually an ozone smell” […] ozone is composed of three oxygen atoms, making it highly reactive. This makes it easy for ozone to stick into the porous surfaces of your clothes and hair.

The second scent is geosmin, a natural compound with a richer, earthy smell. If you like the smell of rain, also known as petrichor, geosmin is the main compound responsible for this smell. […] “Humans can smell geosmin better than sharks can smell blood in the water” […] Anthropologists believe humans developed this elevated perception to help our ancestors literally sniff out water, Elliott said, by identifying it underground or predicting rainfall. […]

On the molecular level, smells take the form of odor molecules detected by our noses’ olfactory sensory neurons. That means that the smell of the outdoors is genuine traces from the world around us — particles of dirt, air, plant matter and bacteria — that linger on us. Smell molecules often get tangled or attached on your skin, clothes and hair. […]

Herz suggests pregnant women, and parents in general, perceive their sense of smell to be stronger, and find many smells especially intense. This can be attributed to a general hyper vigilance. According to the NIH, smell sensitivity tests reveal a negligible difference in olfactory ability before, after or during pregnancy.

The human nose can detect at least 1 trillion odors. But being able to name them all is a notoriously difficult skill. The prestigious Givaudan Perfumery School in Paris asks students to memorize 500 fragrance components within their first year; career perfumers like Elliott might be able to possess and memorize thousands.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

‘Spite House’ in Seattle Is Back on the Market for $800K—100 Years After Being Built as Petty Act of Marital Revenge

Florida man arrested for having 3 wives in 3 different counties “I met him on a dating app. The first time I ever got on a dating app. He said all the right things”

Men Tend to Fall in Love Faster Than Women, New Study

Our model demonstrates that this tension creates social dilemmas where strategies that are optimal for individuals systematically undermine the collective pursuit of truth. Paradoxically, our analysis reveals that increasing debaters’ motivation to seek truth can sometimes produce equilibria with worse outcomes for collective truth discovery. These findings illuminate why rational debate can fail to achieve optimal epistemic outcomes, even when participants genuinely value truth.

A new type of rock (made of our trash) is forming

For 18 years, Wisconsin man Tim Friede has injected increasing amounts of venom into his body from the world’s most deadly snakes. After hundreds of injections and snake bites, Mr Friede’s blood contained broad-spectrum immune proteins called antibodies, which were analysed and used to create an antibody “cocktail” that could potentially protect against 19 different species of snake.

Cataracts, pink eye and other ocular disorders are linked to heat, air pollution and higher UV exposure

Vaping doubles risk of serious lung disease, even without smoking history - study

A new gene therapy reversed heart failure in pigs by repairing heart function […] Heart failure is currently irreversible. Without a heart transplant, most treatments aim only to reduce the heart’s workload and slow the progression of the disease.

Press realease: Aurora has successfully launched its commercial self-driving trucking service in Texas […] began regular driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston this week.

Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week as China tariffs start to bite “a number of major American retailers stopping all shipments from China based on the tariffs”

These judges ruled against Trump. Then their families came under attack.

Over an hour, [Musk] revealed that he had eaten a tub full of caramel Häagen-Dazs ice cream. He also compared himself to the Buddha. He was a rare man, in rare form. […] “It is funny that we’ve got DOGE. Doesn’t the absurdity of that seem like a weird simulation? It was a memecoin at one point,” he said. […] “DOGE is a way of life. Like Buddhism” […] “The president is — I guess we’re good friends,” Musk said. “And we’ll be on Air Force One or Marine One. And then he’s like, ‘Hey, do you want to stay over?’ I’m like, ‘Sure.’” [Washington Post]

Millions of AirPlay devices can be hacked over Wi-Fi; CarPlay too

Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles

Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it

This speculative and interdisciplinary hypothesis proposes a connection between the Chicxulub impact event and the long-term emergence of human consciousness

Through sacred geometry and cosmic alignment, Greek temples transformed ordinary spaces into gateways to the divine