For years now, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, picking egg and sperm donors to influence their child’s traits. Today, a lot of those “designer babies” are full-on kids or teenagers. And some families are discovering that, as hard as you try, things don’t always work out as planned: The kids feel like walking science experiments; the parents are disappointed in how their progeny turned out. Now controversial new technologies promise parents even more control over their embryos. One US startup, called Orchid, claims its genetic screening can calculate a baby’s risk of autism, bipolar disorder, and hundreds of other health conditions. Another startup wants to help parents pick embryos with the highest predicted IQ. So WIRED spoke to a psychologist based in California who is already dealing with the fallout.

the results of the current investigation suggest that the direct effect of religion on well-being does not seem to have practical relevance

The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?

the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.

Emmanuel Todd: the most astonishing thing is that the rise in mortality has gone hand in hand with the highest health care costs in the world. […] Large pharmaceutical companies, supported by well-paid and unscrupulous doctors, have made available to patients in mental and emotional pain, for economic and social reasons, dangerous, addictive painkillers, very frequently leading to direct death, alcoholism or suicide. […] America is no longer functionally a democracy but rather a “liberal oligarchy.”

Fenethylline was first synthesized by the German pharmaceutical firm Degussa AG in 1961 and used for around 25 years as a milder alternative to amphetamine and related compounds. […] The drug was marketed for use as a psychostimulant under the brand names Captagon, Biocapton, and Fitton. It is now illegal in most countries and is produced primarily for illicit use, which takes place mainly in the Middle East. Syria under the Assad regime was considered to be the world’s largest producer of the drug, accounting for about 80% of the global supply. The global market for the drug is worth approximately $57 billion (USD)

Captagon factory in Syria [video]

A Digital Archive of the Sanborn Fire Maps

20-year-old Floridian called Sophie Rain […] had made $43,477,695.01 in the last year on a platform called OnlyFan. […] you have to understand the structure of an OnlyFans page […] Netflix or Spotify […] Those sites are like Chinatown buffets, where a fixed fee gets you access to all the dim sum and noodles you can eat, whereas OnlyFans operates like a private members club. $10 to get through the door, $10 to show your status. And then you start spending the real money.

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives.

Taking cues from ecological and evolutionary theories to expand the landscape of disgust

When to Blame Victims for Negligence: Noncooperators Are Deemed Responsible for Their Own Hardship

Staging a Shakespeare play in Grand Theft Auto

Breloom’s Pokedex number is 286. Proverbs 28:6 reads, ‘Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways!’ He also only has 286 posts on his X. Denial code 286 is when the appeal time limits for a healthcare claim are not met. The fact he was caught at a McDonald’s 286 miles away is icing on the cake.

The best way to avoid being picked up by facial recognition is to avoid cameras. But that task may soon become near impossible.

Researchers Use AI To Turn Sound Recordings Into Accurate Street Images

Facial expressions of pain can be predicted from brain activity

Bird Flu Virus Is One Mutation Away from Binding More Efficiently to Human Cells

Applicants for all kinds of government posts say they have been asked about their thoughts on Jan. 6 and who they believe won the 2020 election. [NY Times]

OnlyFans is now accessible in China

2016: In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA (Are CIA-backed Syrian Rebels Really Fighting Pentagon-backed Syrian Rebels?)

The first nonhuman artist to be given her own art exhibition was a female pig rescued from a South African slaughterhouse in 2016

Wikiracing

Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. More: 52 things I learned in 2024

Oldies bu goldies: This story describes a relationship between a teenage girl and an adult man. It is very explicit. [audio, 2021]

A liar who always lies says “All my hats are green.” Can we conclude that he has some hats?

Othello syndrome is a psychosis with delusions of infidelity, where the patient harbors a persistent, unfounded belief – a “delusion” – that their partner is being unfaithful. We report a rare case of a 50-year-old woman, with no previous psychiatric history, who developed a delusion of infidelity, leading to verbal and physical aggressions with bladed weapons, days after experiencing a bi-thalamic infarct due to the occlusion of the Percheron artery. […]

H.S. is a 50-year-old right-handed woman who had been in a joyful, jealousy-free marriage for three decades and was completely independent in all areas of daily living activities. Seventeen days from the onset of her symptoms and two days post-discharge, she exhibited symptoms of delusional jealousy, accusing her younger sister of having an affair with her husband and wanting to kick her out of the house, even though her sister had just come to visit her upon her hospital discharge.

She started repeating to everyone coming to visit her that the cause of her illness was her husband’s infidelity. She kept accusing her sister for a week and then shifted her accusations to her friend’s daughter. She became suspicious and hyper-vigilant, seizing every chance to check her husband’s phone, spying on him, and frequently waking him up at night to confront him, with accusations like “Why are you here sharing my bed when you’re cheating on me?”

A year later, she verbally and physically assaulted her husband, using a bladed weapon on two separate occasions. Despite denial of these attacks, she persisted in her accusations of betrayal.

{ Neurocase | Continue reading }

A 68-year-old, right-handed, married male was admitted to the psychiatric facility for evaluation of agressive behavior toward his wife, whom he believed was having an affair with their 25-year-old neighbor.

The patient developed the belief of his wife’s infidelity shortly after a right cerebrovascular infarction 1 year earlier. He became impotent after the infarction, and a urologic consult discovered no other identifiable medical etiology. The patient became suspicious of the alleged affair when he began “putting together” evidence from various sources. For example, he noticed that his wife began leaving the first floor bedroom window open at night, presumably to allow her “lover” to enter the room while the patient was asleep. He found tracks in the snow beneath the window, and he noticed that the dust was disturbed on the window sill, which he took as evidence that the neighbor had entered through the window.

On another occasion, the patient discovered that his neighbor had generously offered to perform routine chores around the couple’s home, including fertilizing their lawn. The patient’s physical disabilities prevented him fromperforming such chores, and he interpreted this gesture as a threat to his marriage.

In response to the patient’s accusations, his wife began severely restricting her activities. She became fearful of getting up at night to go to the bathroom because the patient often awoke to reassert his belief that she was getting up to meet with her lover.

Furthermore, despite his impotence, he became sexually aggressive with his wife, repeatedly approaching her whenever she came to bed and demanding verbally and physically that she engage in intercourse with him. His advances would keep his wife awake all night, so that she eventually moved to a second bedroom, a decision that was interpreted by the patient as further proof that his wife was having an affair. Psychiatric hospitalization was finally precipitated by the patient’s increased threats to assault his wife if she did not discontinue her alleged affair. At one point, the patient became angered at her denials of infidelity, and he tried to strike her with his cane, finally throwing it at her. […]

The fact that the neighbor was a newlywed did not seem to sway the patient’s belief in the affair, as he merely contended that the neighbor’s new bride was also having an affair with another neighbor. […]

Misrepresentation or misinterpretation of events is common in brain disease […] Numerous cases of these monosymptomatic or content-specific delusions have been reported in association with identifiable insults or degenerative processes, Such delusions as reduplicative paramnesia (the belief that familiar surroundings have been duplicated), Capgras syndrome (the belief that one’s family members have been replaced by imposters), and de Clérambault’s syndrome (the belief that one is involved in an amorous relationship with a famous person) have been recognized with increasing frequency in association with insults to right hemisphere and bilateral frontal systems.

Traditionally, the Othello syndrome, and obsessive jealousy in general, has been treated purely as a symptom of a primary psychiatric disorder. In fact, delusional jealousy is not uncommonly found in association with chronic alcohol abuse, schizophrenia, primary delusional (paranoid) disorder, or as a secondary symptom in affective disorder. […]

one can argue that the patient’s inability to “fertilize his lawn” was a metaphor for his sexual dysfunction [“Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.” (Othello, I, 3)][…]

Delusional jealousy is rarely reported as a mono-symptomatic phenomenon of underlying neurologic disease. This is the first reported case of the Othello syndrome that clearly developed in association with a structural lesion and in the absence of general paranoia.

{ Othello Syndrome Secondary to Right Cerebrovascular Infarction (1991) | PDF }

A gunman dressed in dark clothing and wearing a mask over his lower face ambushed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Wednesday morning in midtown Manhattan […]

The first thing that’s unusual is that the shooter appeared to have a silencer. They’re not impossible to get, but they’re not readily available. The second thing is that he appeared to have inside information on the victim’s location. He knew where to wait and when to wait.

The fact that he used the silencer didn’t make sense to me at first, until I saw that the shooting took place at about 6:30 in the morning. Generally, if it was a midmorning sort of thing, you’d want a gun that made a lot of noise to scare observers off. But obviously at that time, no one was around. It also suggested that the urgency of the shooting was important. CEOs of health care companies are just not that hard to find in isolated settings. So the fact that he chose to do it in midtown Manhattan was a little bit unique. […]

A professional hit man would probably prefer to do something less public with limited exposure. Doing it in the middle of midtown—there’s just too many things that can go wrong […] However, if it was time sensitive, then that would make a difference. […]

This obviously was not the target’s usual routine. A professional would generally try to catch him in his regular routine in a place where the exposure of the shooter is minimized so that the risk of being caught or observed is pretty low. Manhattan, particularly in midtown, you’ve got cameras everywhere. […]

I would guess this person, if they’re hired, they would be relatively on the low end. The fact that it appeared in the video that the guy’s gun might have jammed is also a little bit of a concern for a professional. You make sure your equipment works. […]

Generally, you get that information by observing the individual. You find their schedule and their routine, and then you intercept them somewhere along the line on their routine. This was obviously not a routine setting. […] It suggests some sort of inside information. […]

I would think more likely it was somebody with a particular grudge that had access to inside information to know where to be and when to be there.

{ Interview with Dennis Kenney, professor of Criminal Justice | Slate | Continue reading }

A woman who stowed away on a flight from New York to France last week managed to do so without a passport, much less a boarding pass […] First, she infiltrated a flight crew and passed through a checkpoint with them. Then, she slipped past Delta Air Lines employees, who failed to ask for a boarding pass, and onto a fully booked plane, they said. While on the plane Ms. Dali attempted to avoid detection during the seven-hour flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris by ducking into the aircraft’s bathrooms. Ms. Dali, who is believed to have migrated to the United States from Russia, was arraigned in federal court in Brooklyn on Thursday on a charge of “secreting aboard a vessel.” She was arrested at Kennedy Airport by F.B.I. agents upon her return Wednesday evening after spending about a week in the custody of French authorities. [NY Times]

AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably

Millions of people are turning to AI for companionship. They are finding the experience surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and profoundly confusing

getting eight hours of sleep every night helps the brain to store and learn a new language

The present study examined the justifications used by children, adolescents, and adults to justify eating animals.

Your Hands Could Predict Your Drinking Habits

Betel nut is driving record rates of cancer – yet millions continue to chew it — no matter how the nut is consumed, it gives the same mild, warming feeling of euphoria and alertness. And that’s what has made it so popular.

Researchers launch “moonshot” to cure blindness through eye transplants

Exports of GLP-1 Drugs like Ozempic & Wegovy are Driving the Majority of Danish GDP Growth

UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson was just 50 years old at the time of his murder, which is a lot more tragic when you know that his life expectancy as a member of the Top 1% was 88, or 15 years longer than the life expectancy of the average American male Related: Steal his look And: A major health insurance company is backing off of a controversial plan to limit coverage of anesthesia

Fastest Growing Brands Report 2024, 2025 trends according to Pinterest

we demonstrated that brain activity during unconsciousness is dominated by a recurrent pattern primarily mediated by structural connectivity and with a reduced capacity to transition to other patterns. Our results provide evidence supporting the pronounced differences between conscious and unconscious brain states in terms of whole-brain dynamics; in particular, the maintenance of rich brain dynamics measured by entropy is a critical aspect of conscious awareness.

each sex misperceives what the other sex desires; women exaggerate the thinness that men like and men exaggerate the muscularity that women like[…] The present study investigates whether misperception of opposite-sex desires extends to femininity/masculinity in facial morphology […] Women overestimated the facial femininity that men prefer in a partner and men overestimated the facial masculinity that women prefer in a partner.

There’s a mineral so rare that only one specimen of it has ever been found in the entire world.It’s called kyawthuite.

Ringtones, often sold through mobile carriers, were a vital piece of the music industry during the 2000s, peaking at $1.6 billion in inflation-adjusted US music revenues in 2007. That year, ringtones accounted for more revenue than both digital album and single downloads. […] Since their 2007 peak, yearly revenues have fallen over 99%, to $10.5 million. […] Nevertheless, over the past few years numerous ringtone apps have cropped up on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store top charts for music apps.

Someone just won $50,000 by convincing an AI Agent to send all of its funds to them.

Man who bought Cattelan’s banana, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million

Vegetarians eat ’significantly higher’ amount of ultra-processed food, data on the eating habits of 200,000 people taken from the UK Biobank

Scientists Finally Identified Where Gluten Reactions Begin

All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell […] single-celled organism (or, possibly, population of single-celled organisms) […] it’s the moment when life as we know it took off, the furthest point in evolutionary history that we can glimpse by working backward from what’s alive today.

Here, we measured daily salivary testosterone concentrations from 41 adult men for one month, along with daily self-reports of sexual desire […] We found no evidence for significant, positive relationships between testosterone and desire, which argues against the notion that day-to-day changes in eugonadal men’s baseline testosterone regulates changes in their sexual desire. However, additional analyses provided preliminary evidence for a positive relationship between testosterone and self-reported courtship effort

Northwest Pacific orcas have started wearing salmon hats again, bringing back a bizarre trend first described in the 1980s, researchers say.

Researchers found the ideal pattern to fool the sharks was to place the LED lights in stripes across the bodies of the seal decoys, perpendicular to the direction they were being towed through the water. The sharks still saw the decoy, but its shape was broken up and the great whites stopped attacking. […] “it potentially gives us an insight into how we can develop a non-lethal shark deterrent especially for surfers.”

Seagrass meadows are natural carbon sinks, and their conservation and restoration play a crucial role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Here, we show how satellite tracking of green turtles (Chelonia mydas) provided a major advance in identifying novel seagrass blue carbon resources in the Red Sea.

scientists have discovered that dogs living in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant area [fed by Chernobyl cleanup workers and tourists] are genetically distinct from dogs living farther away. […] researchers do not know whether radiation caused the genetic differences or not. The dogs may be genetically distinct simply because they’re living in a relatively isolated area.

Recently, my story as a Norwegian entrepreneur facing an unrealized gains wealth tax bill many times higher than my net income went viral […] Norway spends 45% more than Sweden on health care per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway has 2,5 times bigger share of the working population on sick leave than Denmark. Norway spends ~50% more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results. […] Norway is one of the richest countries in the world. The government does not need to send their entrepreneurs abroad with non-sensical taxes. […] The people of Norway currently enjoy and benefit from a host of generous welfare benefits. High income with short work days, free healthcare, free daycare, free education and beyond. For this to continue in the future Norway needs massive new post-oil industries.

My new car has a mysterious and undocumented switch

man hired to steal 1,500 Pokémon cards arrested in Tokyo More: A big story going around mass media in Japan is the rise in yamibaito (literally “dark part-time jobs”)

Criminals turn college campuses into recruitment hubs, recruiting chemistry students in Mexico with big paydays. […] People who make fentanyl in cartel labs, who are called cooks, told The New York Times that they needed workers with advanced knowledge of chemistry to help make the drug stronger and “get more people hooked” [and] to synthesize the chemical compounds, known as precursors, that are essential to making fentanyl, freeing them from having to import those raw materials from China.

Louis Vuitton Crack House, 2013

How do financial constraints affect individual innovation and creativity? […] financial support is crucial for fostering creativity and innovation

“I seem to be absolutely born for the cycle,” wrote Gustav Mahler, “and I’ve already reached the stage where all the horses avoid me, but I’m still not good at ringing my bell.” He claimed that only cycling offered any relief from the chronic pain of his hemorrhoids.

Billionaire food delivery app CEO wants you to pay for the privilege of working with him

This church has an AI Jesus for confessions: ‘It gave me so much advice’

AI can now create a replica of your personality. A two-hour interview is enough to accurately capture your values and preferences, according to new research from Stanford and Google DeepMind

The independent-label share of new-music promotion rose from 38 percent in late 2017 to 55 percent in early 2020, which helps to explain the reported decline in the share of Spotify royalty payments to major-label suppliers over the same period.

Faith in connecting Central Bank Digital Currencies drops sharply, Central banks unconvinced by stablecoins Related: The list of people not yet sold on the idea of central bank digital currencies continues to grow. […] One of the main motivations for CBDCs is heading off the risk that a tech giant like Alibaba, Google or Meta becomes dominant in payments. Tokenisation has downsides, however, such as surrendering monetary autonomy by letting foreigners hoard treasury tokens. The proposed solution is to create multi-currency CBDC exchanges for licensed dealers to trade among themselves. But it’s already gone VHS vs Betamax. [Financial Times]

Did you know a murder mystery party game was widely published and played from the 1930s to the 1980s?

How Typing Transformed Nietzsche’s Consciousness [video and photos of the Hansen Writing Ball, Nietzsche’s typewriter]

Continueandpersist.org

Former Disney World employee accused of hacking menus to add profanity, alter allergen info

Airlines have pocketed billions of dollars in so-called “junk fees” […] From 2018 to 2023, five US airlines made more than $12 billion on seat selection fees alone

Woman who wanted a baby while in prison, falls pregnant after inmate sends his sperm through the air vent

Plankton may not survive global warming scientists have expressed concern over what impact this will have upon the “huge swathes” of marine life that depend on them as a food source.

Doctors say it’s fine to pee in the shower

AI-generated faces have become virtually indistinguishable from real human faces. In this study, we demonstrate that super-recognisers—individuals with exceptional face recognition abilities—can reliably detect AI-generated faces, while typical observers cannot.

malware can record video through the webcam without the LED indication

[In UK,] nine people a day are being arrested for posting allegedly offensive messages online as police step up their campaign to combat social media hate speech. More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums

“There’s a cat on the cover. There is no cat in the book. Not a mention.” (The sequel, he observes, has two cats on the cover.)

What is a Mirror House?

{ Carl-Heinz Hargesheimer, Unter Krahnenbäumen, Cologne, around 1958, ‘Chargesheimer’ at Museum Ludwig, Cologne | Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza in The Little Hours (2017) }

Financial losses for today’s start-ups are much more common than they were decades ago, and the losses are much bigger. VCs are making back less from their initial investments than at any point since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. […]

About 85 percent of America’s unicorn start-ups (those valued at more than $1 billion before doing IPOs) that have gone public were unprofitable in 2023, despite most having been founded more than fifteen years earlier. […]

As of early 2024, twenty-three American unicorns had more than $3 billion in cumulative losses, the amount Amazon had the year it became profitable. Five of them (Uber, WeWork, Rivian, Teledoc Health, and Lyft) had more than $10 billion, with Uber well over $30 billion. Other members of this club offer crypto, AI, consumer products, business software, biotech, electric vehicles, and healthcare. Despite these compa­nies having significantly higher losses than Amazon, Amazon’s eventual success continues to be used as an excuse, as if all start-ups can do what it has done. […]

Venture capital funds earn fixed fees from investors that enable them to profit even if start-ups do not. These fixed fees encourage VCs to hire people who are good at raising money and spinning narratives, but not at identifying good opportunities. VCs also convinced not only investors but also cities, states, and countries that start-ups are key to economic growth.

{ American Affairs Journal | Continue reading }

Earlier this year, a boy in Sweden celebrated his 10th birthday. […] He was born in 2014 after his mother, a 35-year-old woman who had been born without a uterus, received a donated uterus from a 61-year-old close family friend. Around 135 uterus transplants have been performed, but it’s probably too soon to offer the procedure to trans women.

Indonesian man discovers woman he married after a year of in-person romance was a man trying to scam him for money

US epidemic of alcohol related mortality […] In 1999, there were 19,356 US alcohol-related deaths, a mortality rate of 10.7 per 100,000. By 2020, deaths increased to 48,870 or 21.6 per 100,000.

Fentanyl overdoses have dropped dramatically […] The Times article provides a bevy of possible reasons for the decline, but I have my own theory. One of the most consistent findings of drug research is that drug use is faddish.

Was MDMA really better back in the day? According to research, the average MDMA content of a pill in the 1990s and early 2000s was somewhere between 50 and 80mg […] one in three pills currently in circulation in the UK contain over 200mg of MDMA […] “People often attribute changes in their drug experiences to changes in the drugs themselves […] they tend to dramatically underestimate the influence of their own changing psychology.”

5 Drug Highs That Define the Grateful Dead’s Legacy

a new study has revealed an unexpected potential benefit of severe COVID infection: it may help shrink cancer.

The researchers analysed the videos to see how well the mother accurately referred to her infant’s internal experience (e.g., “Oh, you like this toy”) during the interaction. They also collected saliva samples from the infant and measured the level of the hormone oxytocin. “We have, for the first time, discovered that the amount that a mother talks to their infant about their infant’s thoughts and feelings is directly correlated with their infant’s oxytocin levels.”

Europeans who donate old clothes assume they’ll be go to the needy — but they could just as easily end up in an illegal dump in a foreign country.

Every material, surface, and furnishing of Villa Mahler is custom-made

Las Vegas Ranch, July 1873

A statue of Jesus in India mysteriously began dripping water from its toes. Worshippers started collecting it and drinking it believing it was holy. The source of the water was later found to be a clogged toilet near the statue.

When you deposit money at a bank, you expect the bank to give it back to you. There are two things you might worry about, two sets of risks that might prevent the bank from giving you back your money. One is that the bank might lose the money. Banks do not generally just keep your money in the vault. They use it to make loans, so there is risk: The loans might default, or depositors might all demand their money back at once when the bank does not have a lot of ready cash. […]

The other risk is that the bank might lose track of the money. You might go to the bank and deposit $100, and the bank might write down “$100” next to your name in its notebook, and then it might spill coffee on the notebook and be unable to read the entry and forget that it owes you the $100. And then you might come back to the bank in a week and ask for your $100 back and the bank might say “who are you? what $100?” […]

If a bank loses all your money, the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] can give you your money back, because the FDIC is the government and can print money. If the bank loses its list of who has the money, what can the FDIC do? […] The definitive list of who the bank owes money is kept by the bank. Unless it isn’t.

I have never really understood the Synapse situation, but in my defense Synapse doesn’t understand it either. […]

Synapse functioned as a middleware provider between banks and fintechs. Synapse was a pioneer in what came to be known as “banking-as-a-service” (BaaS). In this role, Synapse opened accounts on behalf of approximately 100 fintech companies (and millions of end users) at four different partner banks.

On April 22, 2024, Synapse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. On May 11, the partner banks lost access to the records maintained by Synapse and were unable to determine which end-users rightfully should be able to withdraw their funds.

[…]

You could imagine a world in which technology companies were better and nimbler and more accurate at keeping lists on computers than banks were. But in our world, banks have hundreds of years of history and regulation that have taught them that keeping an accurate list of who has the money is really, really, really, really, really important, and they tend to do it.

{ Matt Levine / Bloomberg| Continue reading }

Proteins are the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from structures like hair to enzymes (catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions). Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acid building blocks in a huge variety of arrangements to make millions of different proteins. Some amino acid molecules can be built in two ways, such that mirror-image versions exist, like your hands, and life uses the left-handed variety of these amino acids. Although life based on right-handed amino acids would presumably work fine, the two mirror images are rarely mixed in biology, a characteristic of life called homochirality. It is a mystery to scientists why life chose the left-handed variety over the right-handed one.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the molecule that holds the instructions for building and running a living organism. However, DNA is complex and specialized; it “subcontracts” the work of reading the instructions to RNA (ribonucleic acid) molecules and building proteins to ribosome molecules. DNA’s specialization and complexity lead scientists to think that something simpler should have preceded it billions of years ago during the early evolution of life. A leading candidate for this is RNA, which can both store genetic information and build proteins. The hypothesis that RNA may have preceded DNA is called the “RNA world” hypothesis.

If the RNA world proposition is correct, then perhaps something about RNA caused it to favor building left-handed proteins over right-handed ones. However, the new work did not support this idea, deepening the mystery of why life went with left-handed proteins. […]

“The experiment demonstrated that ribozymes can favor either left- or right-handed amino acids, indicating that RNA worlds, in general, would not necessarily have a strong bias for the form of amino acids we observe in biology now”

{ Nasa | Continue reading }

You know the “AI Overview” you get on Google Search? “Kyloren syndrome” is a fictional disease I invented as part of a sting operation to prove that you can publish any nonsense in predatory journals…

93% of Gen Z respondents, age 22 - 27, said they were using two or more AI tools a week, [compared to] 79% of millennials (28 - 39)

People are less generous with money compared to other resources. In multiple dictator game studies, people allocated less money to others (vs. themselves) compared to other resources (food, goods, space, time).

a small number of studies did suggest increasing your water intake has benefits for weight loss and kidney stones. There were also individual studies which they say raise the possibility of benefits for migraine prevention, UTIs, diabetes control, and low blood pressure.

In a healthy body, the brain detects when the body is becoming dehydrated and initiates thirst to stimulate drinking. It also releases a hormone which signals to the kidneys to conserve water by concentrating the urine.

About 1½ pints (a little less than a liter) of water are lost daily when water evaporates from the skin and is breathed out by the lungs. […] prolonged vomiting or severe diarrhea can result in the loss of a gallon or more a day.

Effective arousal-reducing activities included slow-flow yoga, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing, and taking a timeout […] going for a run is not an effective strategy because it increases arousal levels and ends up being counterproductive.

how lesbian escort agencies became a form of self-care in Japan

Mong Shuan was just 16 when she turned to an unconventional source of income: selling betel nuts from a little stall in northern Taiwan. […] The women would usually arrive for work in their normal clothes and get changed into more revealing garments in the booths

Here Are the 30,000 Pages of Federal Reserve Board Meeting Minutes I Got Through FOIA. They Completely Rewrite Federal Reserve History.

A parachute found in an outbuilding in North Carolina could be the new evidence that may crack the 53-year-old D.B Cooper case. It could lead investigators to the identity the man who jumped out of a hijacked plane carrying $200,000.

Man who spent $6.2 million on Maurizio Cattelan’s banana says he’s going to eat it — His purchase awarded him a roll of duct tape, instructions on how to “install” the banana properly and, most importantly, a certificate of authenticity guaranteeing the artwork, when reproduced, as an original work of Cattelan’s.

South Korean man dodged draft by binge eating

The Holywood Reporter asked surgeons on both coasts to reveal what their clients are asking for these days. “Lifts and even breast reductions are on the rise, along with tummy tucks to make the midsection look more fit”

Trendy weight-loss drugs making headlines for shrinking waistlines may also be shrinking the human heart and other muscles. The systemic effect observed in mice was then confirmed in cultured human heart cells

To what degree is it possible to recognize a person’s ethnicity just from their face? Can Koreans identify Korean, Japanese, and Chinese faces?

Apple will now be treated like a bank

The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved.

The Philosophical Ontological Proof for P=NP

Elon Musk didn’t threaten to suspend “Accounts calling me fat, ‘Elonia’, ‘The First Lady’, saying I can’t jump, or pointing out my hair plugs and jawline gender affirming surgery“

Talking out loud to yourself is perfectly normal—and even beneficial. It can facilitate problem-solving and improve how well you perform at a task

An AI startup CEO on a Forbes ‘30 Under 30′ list has been charged with defrauding investors out of $10 million

OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit

Rapid advances in applying artificial intelligence to simulations in physics and chemistry have some people questioning whether we will even need quantum computers at all.

Cybercriminals exploit Spotify for malware distribution

Whitaker was involved with a sketchy company that marketed bizarre inventions — including a “masculine toilet” with extra space for well-endowed men. […] World Patent Marketing eventually settled with the FTC in 2018, agreeing to pay almost $26 million in fines and shutting down business for good.

Because microplastics are everywhere, we can’t exactly compare the health of people who are exposed to them to people who aren’t to determine their possible effects

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World. […] Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. […] But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies.

MoMA playing cards designed by Takenobu Igarashi

In January 2023, short seller Hindenburg Research put out a report claiming that executives at one of India’s largest conglomerates were manipulating the company’s stock price.

The Adani Group and its multibillionaire founder Gautam Adani strenuously deny the accusations, but the report instantly wiped off as much as $140bn from the conglomerate’s market value and sent ripples through the country’s establishment. It also catapulted the New York-based Hindenburg and its founder Nathan Anderson into Wall Street lore.

Few saw it coming. But one that did was a hedge fund in New York almost 13,000 kilometres away from the Indian conglomerate’s headquarters.

Kingdon Capital Management had received a draft of the short seller’s report in November 2022 as part of an agreement it had signed with Hindenburg a year earlier, India’s markets regulator revealed in June.

The hedge fund, which was founded by Mark Kingdon in the 1980s, had set up a special fund in Mauritius and had started building a short position on Adani two weeks before Hindenburg released its report.

Kingdon, which has less than $1bn in assets under management, turned a $22mn profit from the trade. As part of the agreement, Hindenburg received a 25 per cent cut of the spoils. […]

activist short sellers tend to explicitly look for evidence suggesting malfeasance. […] Hindenburg, for example, says that it seeks out situations where there might be some combination of accounting irregularities, undisclosed related-party transactions, and illegal or unethical business or financial reporting practices.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

oil on canvas { Francis Bacon, Man in blue IV, 1954 }

Banning free plastic bags for groceries resulted in customer purchasing more plastic bags, study finds

US Secret Service robot dogs patroll Mar-A-Lago

NYU scientists create crystals to extract water from air without using energy

This study aimed to investigate whether trainee therapists could estimate client deterioration after each session […] psychotherapists were unable to identify clients getting worse during therapy and failed to predict clients who would end therapy with more severe psychological problems than before therapy

Scientists have identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain, revealing just how much we still have to learn about its mysterious inner workings.

The current scientific consensus is that the placebo effect is a real healing effect operating through belief and suggestion. The evidence does not support this. In clinical trials of treatments, outcomes in placebo and no-treatment arms are similar, distinguishable only in tiny differences on self-report measures. A Case Against the Placebo Effect

Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips

‘Handedness’ in snakes? […] only three out of 30 snakes showed a significant coil preference […] all three of these individuals were adult females and had a clockwise coil preference [PDF]

Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. The practice, first reported by 404 Media in April, has since exploded in popularity, showing Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood

Phillips’s evening sale of modern and contemporary art in New York on Tuesday evening (19 November) […] The next lot, a double self-portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1983 that had previously belonged to actor-turned-artist Johnny Depp, had one of the night’s highest estimates at $10m to $15m. After receiving just one bid, auctioneer Henry Highley appeared to sell it for a hammer price of $9.3m, however following the sale’s conclusion a spokesperson for Phillips revealed that the work had in fact failed to sell—knocking about 17% off the night’s total. (A Basquiat work on paper earlier in the evening sold for its low estimate of $1m, or $1.2m with fees.)

In 1997, Laura Ingraham wrote an essay in The Washington Post in which she stated that she had changed her views on homosexuality after witnessing “the dignity, fidelity, and courage” with which her gay brother, Curtis, and his partner coped with the latter being diagnosed with AIDS; Curtis’s partner ultimately died of the disease. Curtis, on the other hand, has called his sister “a monster” and said she was influenced by their father, whom he described as a Nazi sympathizer as well as an abusive alcoholic.

That kid’s gonna be chasing that high for the rest of his life