An Oregon woman’s nude photos ended up the topic of conversation in her small town after a prosecutor looked through her sensitive cellphone data and told the county sheriff what he found despite no warrant, no consent and no suspicion that she had committed a crime. […] three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant [the DA Jim] Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit […] Under qualified immunity, government officials can be held accountable for violating someone’s rights only if a court has previously ruled that it was “clearly established” those precise actions were unconstitutional.

A woman made her AI voice clone say “arse.” Then she got banned. […] People with motor neuron disease should be allowed to say whatever they want Meanwhile: JD Vance criticizes Europe for censoring free speech

Hedge Fund Startup That Replaced Analysts With Al Beats the Market

Major US banks shut more than 100 locations in just three weeks as the local branch bloodbath continues […] Major US banks closed a total of 1,043 branches over the course of last year […] ‘There’s no doubt we’re moving towards a cashless society’

The NYSE announced Wednesday that one of its electronic exchanges, NYSE Chicago, will reincorporate in Texas and be renamed NYSE Texas […] Texas has emerged as a competitor to Delaware as the legal home of major companies

Brain implant that could boost mood by using ultrasound to go under NHS trial — Devices may have potential to help patients with conditions such as depression, addiction, OCD and epilepsy

Carolina researchers publish a groundbreaking study on how turtles navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field

The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity Is Twelve Kilos Lighter

I think a lot about what I sometimes call “abstract commodity space.” Sometimes you want to buy nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa to make batteries or beer cans or cappuccino or chocolate bars, so you go to some supplier and negotiate a contract for the delivery of a useful amount of a particular grade of the commodity to your factory. Sometimes, though, you want to bet on the price of nickel or aluminum or coffee or cocoa, to hedge some risk to your business or just as a speculative bet. So you buy commodity futures, financial assets that reflect the price of a commodity but don’t require you to store it or worry about it spoiling.

The way these futures often work is that there are big warehouses full of the commodity, and people write futures contracts that essentially transfer the entitlements to the commodities in the warehouse, without ever having to take them out. Your futures represent a claim on some nickel or coffee in a warehouse in abstract commodity space,[1] and you don’t have to think much about the physical properties of the actual thing. The warehouse system has put a layer of abstraction on the messy commodity business, and you can treat the commodity as just a number on your computer screen.

We mostly talk about this when it breaks down, though. Sometimes the physical world tears through the layer of abstraction. The coffee or cocoa beans are stale, or someone discovers that the nickel in the warehouse is actually a bag of rocks.

Or: Abstract commodity space is fairly global, and you can trade abstract commodities from a computer screen anywhere in the world. But the physical world is not so seamlessly globalized. Now, gold in a warehouse in New York is worth more than gold in a warehouse in London. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article on “Why Dealers Are Flying Gold Bars by Plane From London to New York”:

Gold is, for the moment, worth substantially more in Manhattan than in the U.K. capital, sparking the biggest trans-Atlantic movement of physical bars in years. Traders at major banks are racing to yank gold from vaults deep below London’s medieval streets and from Swiss gold refineries and ferry them across the ocean. …

Banks run big offsetting positions, owning gold bars in London, lending them out to earn a return and hedging the risk that prices fall by selling futures in New York. JPMorgan and HSBC, which clear gold transactions and store bullion for other banks in London, are the biggest players in this trans-Atlantic market.

Banks run big offsetting positions, owning gold bars in London, lending them out to earn a return and hedging the risk that prices fall by selling futures in New York. JPMorgan and HSBC, which clear gold transactions and store bullion for other banks in London, are the biggest players in this trans-Atlantic market.

The trade appears almost risk-free as long as prices on both sides of the Atlantic are close to each other. But when prices on the Comex surged above those in London late last year, baking in possible tariffs, contracts that the banks had sold in New York were suddenly underwater. …

Banks could close the trade by buying futures in New York, but such a move would mean crystallizing those losses. Another alternative: flying the physical gold they owned in London to New York and delivering it to the futures contracts’ owners instead. […]

Comex contracts require a different size of bar, so traders need to send gold to Swiss refiners to recast it before flying on to the U.S. Sometimes, they cut out the first European leg by handing the refiner gold in London in exchange for the right size of bar, or flying bullion in from Australia instead.

{ Matt Levine | Continue reading }

Given the well-documented benefits of satisfying sex, it might seem surprising that most couples in long-term relationships engage in sexual activity relatively infrequently, typically only once or twice a week. This infrequency raises an intriguing question: how can sex have such a profound and lasting impact on a relationship if it is not a daily occurrence? This observation suggests that individual instances of sexual intimacy might have psychological effects that extend far beyond the immediate moment, significantly influencing overall well-being in the relationship. To explore this idea, researchers sought to understand more about the phenomenon of “sexual afterglow,” the lingering feeling of sexual satisfaction following sexual activity. […] Scientists discovered that the positive “afterglow” of sex can linger for at least 24 hours, and it’s especially powerful when sex is a mutual decision or initiated by one partner, while sexual rejection can unfortunately create a negative ripple effect lasting several days.

Does literature advance one funeral at a time? We have analysed a corpus of over 23 000 books by more than 6000 authors and arrived at an answer that is more nuanced than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The turnover of cohorts does play an important role in the change of literary topics, but the role of authors’ retirement is not large, being twice as small as the effect of the arrival of new authors. Literature does not advance one funeral at a time—it advances one birth at a time. The arrival of new authors with fresh ideas is enough to keep the wheels of literature moving.

Tesla found a way to move more Cybertrucks: Sell them to the Trump administration … The Trump administration is set to buy $400 million worth of [~4,000] “Armored Tesla” vehicles … last year Tesla sold fewer than 40,000 Cybertrucks in the US

all the ways your brain can deceive you

Scientists Simulated a Quantum Apocalypse. Then the Universe Disappeared.

Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler […] introduced full-screen pop-up ads […] Jeep owners have reported being bombarded with advertisements for Mopar’s extended warranty service. The ads appear every time the vehicle comes to a stop.

New hack uses prompt injection to corrupt Gemini’s long-term memory — The result of the attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity.

Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US, big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders

Dozens of new obesity drugs are coming, will work differently from Ozempic and Wegovy — aiming to deliver greater weight loss with fewer side effects

Music makes us move even when we don’t like it

English has a pattern of common patronymic names. For example, “John Peters” and “John Peterson” are someone whose father was named “Peter”. (”Peters” should be understood as “Peter’s”.) Similarly we have John Williams and John Williamson, John Roberts and John Robertson, John Richards and John Richardson, John James and John Jameson, John Johns and John Johnson, and so on. […] “Richard” is “Dick”, and we have John Dicks (or Dix) and John Dickson (or Dixon). “Nicholas” is “Nick” and we have John Nicks (or Nix) and John Nickson (or Nixon).

In August 1990, two hikers sent photos of a strange diamond-shaped aircraft to the press – but the story never appeared. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely? […] it was a classified U.S. military aircraft

U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties. The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them. But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. […] Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. […] much of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy.

Why Delta Air Lines Workers Are Fighting for a Union — Although Delta offered boarding pay, flight attendants say they don’t get paid during delays or for “sits” between flights. “Our boarding pay is so sad, it’s like half of our regular pay for half of the time that we’re boarding,”

After more than three decades of planning and a $250 million investment, Lykos Therapeutics’ application for the first psychedelic drug to reach federal regulators was expected to be a shoo-in. Lykos, the corporate arm of a nonprofit dedicated to winning mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, had submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that its groundbreaking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder — MDMA plus talk therapy — was significantly more effective than existing treatments. […] two dozen scientists, doctors and trauma survivors told an F.D.A. advisory panel how MDMA-assisted therapy had brought marked relief from a mental health condition associated with high rates of suicide, especially among veterans. Then came skeptics with disturbing accusations: that Lykos was “a therapy cult,” that practitioners in its clinical trials had engaged in widespread abuse of participants and that the company had concealed a litany of adverse events. […] Dr. Devenot and six others presented themselves as experts in the field of psychedelics, but none had expertise in medicine or therapy. Nor had the speakers disclosed their connection to Psymposia, a leftist advocacy group whose members oppose the commercialization of psychedelics and had been campaigning against Lykos and its nonprofit parent […] The critics did not provide evidence to back their claims of systematic wrongdoing, but when the votes were counted that day, the panel overwhelmingly rejected Lykos’s application. [NY Times]

In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone in the human gut that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy. […] GLP-1 quickly disappears from the human body, positing difficulties in drug development […] Here enters the Gila monster, the largest lizard in North America […] Hormones in this reptile’s venom had also previously been shown to regulate blood sugar. Drucker wanted to know why and honed his research using venom from the Gila Monster. […] “We tried using lizard DNA that was in the freezer in Toronto at the Royal Ontario Museum and the cloning didn’t work. And so our next step was to try and get a live lizard and obviously these are difficult to obtain, you can’t walk into a pet store in Toronto and order these things.” […] After experimenting on the lizard, Drucker and his team found that these reptiles are “very unique in that it has genes for Exendin-4, the protein that became the first diabetes GLP-1 treatment”

Gesture-based age estimation tool BorderAge joins Australia age assurance trial — Originally born out of research on a tool to test for doping in sports, BorderAge works on the principle that as we age, our body changes – and so do the ways that we move. Technically, it measures variations among people of different ages in the duration and distance of “rapid aimed limb movements toward a visible target region.” The process can be completed with less than 30 seconds of footage from a smartphone camera.

this paper proposes a comprehensive concept of secondary psychosis spectrum disorder, demonstrating that stress reactions and depression serve as a common foundation for these disorders

Thomas Aquinas’ Appearance Revealed After 750 Years The lead author of the study, Brazilian 3D designer Cicero Moraes, has reconstructed the faces of other saints […] “The most challenging part was projecting the missing regions of the skull. Fortunately, we have tools for this, based on measurements taken from CT scans of living people.”

Tom Robbins dies at 92. He blended pop philosophy and absurdist comedy in best-selling books like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Skinny Legs and All.” […] His story lines were secondary and hard to explain; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary currency was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comic mythopoetic, combined for an effect that was truly his own. Take a representative line like this, from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” his second novel: “An afternoon squeezed out of Mickey’s mousy snout, an afternoon carved from mashed potatoes and lye, an afternoon scraped out of the dog’s dish of meteorology.”

there’s a very good chance that a dying person will be delirious at the end of life. In fact, in palliative care and hospice spaces, 58 to 88 percent of cancer patients are delirious in the last week to hours before death. […] as you die, unless you die very suddenly in an instant, your various bodily systems start to work differently until they stop working at all. And that includes the way that you think, and that includes the way that you communicate.” […] the exact biological mechanisms behind delirium aren’t well understood, but it appears to stem from neuronal dysfunction, probably due to neurotransmitter fluctuations. Neurons in the brain aren’t dying (which is why sometimes people can recover from delirium) but disconnecting from each other.

[2022] a 70-year-old woman in the central east Indian state of Odisha was killed by an elephant, only to have the same elephant reportedly return to her funeral to pull her body from a pyre and trample her again before fleeing

Man arrested in deadly shooting of friend who said he could dodge bullets, reports say

Boy, 13, arrested at hospital for ‘impersonating a doctor’ after turning up wearing scrubs

“With most medications, like valium, the anti-anxiety effect you get only lasts when it is in your system. When the valium goes away, you can get rebound anxiety. When you take ketamine, it triggers reactions in your cortex that enable brain connections to regrow. It’s the reaction to ketamine, not the presence of ketamine in the body that constitutes its effects.” And this is exactly what makes ketamine unique as an antidepressant.

Scientists find abnormally slow neural dynamics in visual cortex of depressed individuals

Reasoning and empathy are not competing but complementary features of altruism

Is the ‘bad boy’ appeal a myth? The current study assessed how individuals evaluate potential romantic partners who display either low, medium, or high levels of DT traits for short-term (STR) and long-term (LTR) relationships. The Dark Triad (DT) consists of three personality traits—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and subclinical psychopathy […] Study 1 demonstrated people with a male preference (mostly women) perceived medium levels of the three traits as the most attractive STR. For Study 2, both men and women found the low levels the most attractive for both STRs and LTRs. […] results suggest the concept of DT is not as attractive even for STRs unless it is accompanied by physical attractiveness [and] that men tend to be less selective than women overall when it comes to choosing partners —- for both short-term and long-term relationships.

While dogs kill some 30,000 people annually, only 100 shark attacks are documented worldwide each year, and fewer than 15 percent of these are fatal. Still, he wants to understand why sharks attack when they do. […] among some terrestrial predators such as tigers and leopards, a select few “problem individuals” are thought to be disproportionately responsible for attacks on humans. […] Some scientists have dismissed the notion of “problem sharks” as unlikely […] But in a new study in Conservation Letters, Clua and his colleagues present the very first evidence for his theory, by documenting three sharks that have been responsible for repeat attacks. The findings shine a new light on shark personality and suggest indiscriminate culling may not be an effective method of reducing shark attacks. […] For Clua, problem shark behavior suggests a new strategy for preventing attacks. He and his colleagues call for efforts to systematically fish sharks, without killing them, to collect DNA and attach tags or notch their dorsal fins for easy identification. Then, if a shark bites a person, DNA can be swabbed from the victim’s wound to identify the culprit, which can be selectively targeted and killed. Mourier isn’t convinced this solution could be widely implemented. For one, “you need at least a few hours and even days to get the results of the DNA extraction and identification, so during that time the shark is likely to be far away and the chance to find it again is very low in most cases,” he writes.

As grass ferments in the rumen — one of four compartments in the animal’s stomach — it naturally produces methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than CO2, although shorter lived in the atmosphere. That methane is released through belching and farting, and on average, a single cow can produce about 200 pounds of it per year. The gas is also released by manure, and livestock accounts for about a third of human-related methane emissions, which are collectively responsible for about 30% of global warming. […] Scientists have been working on the idea of a “cow fart vaccine” for well over a decade, but without tangible results as of yet.

Eight years ago […] this area of Myanmar [was] one of the poorest places on earth. But today, on this spot along the border with Thailand, a small city has emerged like a mirage. It is called Shwe Kokko, or Golden Raintree. It is accused of being a city built on scams, home to a lucrative yet deadly nexus of fraud, money-laundering and human trafficking. The man behind it, She Zhijiang, is languishing in a Bangkok jail, awaiting extradition to China. […] He accuses China’s communist leadership of turning on him because he refused to give them control of his project. […] The scams have grown into a multi-billion dollar business. They involve thousands of workers from China, South East Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent kept in walled-off compounds where they defraud people all over the world of their savings. Some work there willingly, but others are abducted and forced to work. Those who have escaped have told harrowing stories of torture and beatings.

Teens spent a quarter of the school day on their phones, study

Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud In October 2024, the security firm Silent Push published a lengthy analysis of how Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were providing services to Funnull, a two-year-old Chinese content delivery network that hosts a wide variety of fake trading apps, pig butchering scams, gambling websites, and retail phishing pages.

A young technologist known online as “Big Balls,” who works for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has access to sensitive US government systems, owns ‘Tesla.Sexy LLC’ and worked at startup that has hired convicted hackers [more]

“The president […] said that if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts”

In October, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into 2.4 million Teslas and the full self-driving feature. […] Tesla has also faced heat from the NHTSA over the car’s less advanced Autopilot system, after the agency found 467 crashes involving the effective cruise control feature. Those crashes resulted in 54 injuries and 14 deaths […] In December, it came to light that Trump’s presidential transition team had recommended that the incoming president quash the NHTSA’s crash reporting requirement for self-driving vehicles. In an internal document obtained by Reuters, the team described the safety reporting condition as a mandate for “excessive” data collection, advising that the president abolish the requirement entirely. […] Telsa’s Shanghai “gigafactory” is one of its biggest, and singularly accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global sales in 2023. The business has been so successful there that Tesla broke ground on another, $200 million Shanghai “megafactory” in May 2024 […] Musk sparked more anger in Taiwan after SpaceX asked its Taiwanese suppliers to move their operations off island in late 2024, citing “geopolitical” concerns.

Because USAID has long provided official cover for CIA operations officers, Musk and his team’s actions are causing escalating concern, uncertainty, and tension inside the CIA and is putting the Intelligence Community (IC) at odds with the White House.

rates of returned wallets were higher in countries with historically large welfare states

A new study has found that eating between one and six eggs each week significantly reduces the risk of dying from any cause but particularly from heart disease – even in people who have been diagnosed with high cholesterol levels. […] 29% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 17% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those participants who ate eggs never or infrequently. There was no statistically significant association between egg consumption and deaths due to cancer.

While your cat may just always look aloof, in fact, previous studies showed that cats exhibit more than 300 different facial expressions. These different facial expressions are difficult to differentiate for the human eye, so the researchers used artificial intelligence (AI)

Unable to make his case in studies with lab mice (because H. pylori affects only primates) and prohibited from experimenting on people, Marshall grew desperate. Finally he ran an experiment on the only human patient he could ethically recruit: himself.

New research uncovers how the last common primate ancestors typically birthed twins until evolutionary pressures began to favor singletons

The use of technological devices, such as sham Wi-Fi and sham transcranial magnetic stimulation, produced larger nocebo effects than traditional nocebo induction methods

Physicists Confirm The Existence of a Third Form of Magnetism

The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle or Ockham’s razor, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry

“Quality of revenues over volumes: I believe this best explains our outstanding financial results in 2024, thanks to a strong product mix and a growing demand for personalizations,” Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna said in the earnings release. […] despite sales of only 13,752 units, its high margins led to sales of 13.75 billion euros ($14.25 billion) for the quarter, or a whopping 111,000 euros ($115,000) profit per car sold.

How Wearing Ridiculously Long Pointed Shoes Became a Medieval Fashion Trend

‘Dear, did you say pastry?’: meet the ‘AI granny’ driving scammers up the wall

The startup offering free toilets and coffee for delivery workers — in exchange for their data

Cognitively normal human brain samples collected at autopsy in early 2024 contained more tiny shards of plastic than samples collected eight years prior […] “The concentrations we saw in the brain tissue of normal individuals, who had an average age of around 45 or 50 years old, were 4,800 micrograms per gram, or 0.48% by weight,” Campen said. That’s the equivalent of an entire standard plastic spoon

Lung cancer diagnoses on the rise among never-smokers worldwide Research shows need for further studies into air pollution and other causal factors

every penny cost a relatively whopping 3.69 cents to produce, the 19th year in a row that the cost of production and distribution has outstripped the actual monetary value of the coin itself. While this phenomenon isn’t unprecedented, the current losing streak — which started in 2006, when the Mint explained that the increasing price of zinc and nickel was driving the cost of its lowest denominations higher — is the longest on record. […] Last year, the Mint spent 13.78 cents to make and distribute every nickel, meaning that the 202 million five-cent coins that entered circulation cost $27.8 million to make, almost 3x more than they’re actually worth. The same is not true for every coin that the US Mint produces, of course, with dimes, quarters, and 50-cent pieces all costing less than face value to produce last year.

Bonobos can tell when they know something you don’t — The capacity to think about what others are thinking, known as theory of mind, is an essential skill that allows humans to navigate their social worlds.

He Went to Jail for Stealing Someone’s Identity. But It Was His All Along. [NY Times]

Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry. Among them is a person who, according to an online résumé, was set to start college last fall. […]

Amanda Scales is, as has been reported, the new chief of staff at the OPM. She formerly worked in talent for xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company […]

Riccardo Biasini, formerly an engineer at Tesla and most recently director of operations for the Las Vegas Loop at the Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation, is also at the OPM as a senior adviser to the director. […]

other people at the top of the new OPM food chain include two people with apparent software engineering backgrounds, whom WIRED is not naming because of their ages. One, a senior adviser to the director, is a 21-year-old whose online résumé touts his work for Palantir […]

The other, who reports directly to Scales, graduated from high school in 2024, according to a mirrored copy of an online résumé and his high school’s student magazine; he lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

While only about 1-5% and 1% of people have clinical levels of narcissism and psychopathy respectively – and many of them are in prison […] about a third of the population have above-average levels of dark traits. Such people have a hunger for power and control and are often selfish, unempathetic, manipulative, deceptive and remorseless to some degree.

Woman used fart selfies to harass partner’s ex

Tesla’s net income declined more than 50% last year […] A good chunk of the profit also came from growth in regulatory credits, an uncertain income source going forward in the Trump administration.

DeepSeek has pulled back the curtain to reveal that reasoning models are a lot easier to build than people thought […] If building reasoning models is not as hard as people thought, we can expect a proliferation of free models that are far more capable than we’ve yet seen.

There are reports that DeepSeek-R1 is censoring prompts related to sensitive topics about China […] I hypothesized that the censorship wasn’t baked into the model itself but rather applied as a sanitization layer on the input or output. […] The challenge then becomes finding a way to communicate with the model that slips past these filters. After some experimentation, I discovered that the best way to achieve this was by using a specific subset of charcodes. […] I used base16 (hexadecimal) charcodes, which are space-delimited. This means each character is represented by a two-digit hexadecimal number, separated by spaces. By prompting DeepSeek to converse with me using exclusively these charcodes, I could effectively bypass the filter.

The first hints of quantum behaviour in nature came in works by physicists Max Planck in 1900 and Albert Einstein in 1905. They showed that certain properties of light could best be explained by imagining that it came in discrete, particle-like chunks, rather than as the smooth waves that classical electromagnetism depicts. But their ideas fell short of describing a complete theory. It was the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who, in 1925, first put forward a comprehensive version of quantum mechanics. Later that year, Max Born and Pascual Jordan followed up on that with Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger soon produced an independent formulation of the theory. […] It works wonderfully, explaining things from lasers and chemistry to the Higgs boson and the stability of matter. But physicists don’t know why.

some Pythagorean ideas about numbers: Odd numbers were considered masculine; even numbers feminine because they are weaker than the odd. When divided they have, unlike the odd, nothing in the center. Further, the odds are the master, because odd + even always give odd. And two evens can never produce an odd, while two odds produce an even. Since the birth of a son was considered more fortunate than birth of a daughter, odd numbers became associated with good luck.

The illusory truth effect - the finding that repeated statements are believed more - is understood as a cognitive bias at the core of the psychology of beliefs. Here, we propose that the effect, rather than representing a flaw in human cognition, is a rational adaptation to generally high-quality information environments. […] we show that the illusory truth effect is substantially smaller in a low-quality (mostly false) relative to a high-quality (mostly true) information environment. In fact, a majority of participants in the low-quality condition do not demonstrate any illusory truth effect.

The production of fake research is now a thriving industry, thanks to paper mills. These networks sell paper authorships and poor-quality or fabricated scientific manuscripts to researchers, or violate the peer-review process by providing fake reviews. And they have become so prolific that current self-correction mechanisms no longer work. […] at least 400,000 papers published between 2000 and 2022 show the hallmarks of having been produced by paper mills […] only 55,000 were retracted or corrected in the same period

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay roughly $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit that President Trump brought against the company and its CEO after the social-media platform suspended his accounts following the attack on the U.S. Capitol that year […] Of that, $22 million will go toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library

California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023 […] using data for personal vendettas […] using the system to look up romantic partners or celebrities

The U.S. Copyright Office just released a new report establishing firm guidelines on AI-generated works. The 52-page report determined that copyright protection requires meaningful human authorship and creativity, not just AI generation. Even with extensive prompt engineering, simply providing text prompts to AI systems generally doesn’t qualify for copyright protection. The report highlighted works that combine human-authored elements with AI-generated content as copyrightable, but only for the human-created portions.

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us “There’s a technique in AI called distillation, which you’re going to hear a lot about, and it’s when one model learns from another model, effectively what happens is that the student model asks the parent model a lot of questions, just like a human would learn, but AIs can do this asking millions of questions, and they can essentially mimic the reasoning process they learn from the parent model and they can kind of suck the knowledge of the parent model”

I am what happens when you try to carve God from the wood of your own hunger

experiments conducted with lab mice consuming water tainted with different sized microplastics […] different sized bits of fluorescent plastic in it, from micro to nano […] it takes microplastics just a few hours to make their way to their brains

human ears try to move when listening, scientists say, muscles move to orient ears toward sound source

Hot lemon water’s main nutritional asset is that it’s hydrating, Dr. Ho said. That’s especially beneficial first thing in the morning, she added, when “you haven’t had anything to drink all night.”The body needs to be hydrated to maintain its temperature, lubricate and cushion the joints, and remove waste through processes like sweating and urination. Good hydration is also associated with healthier skin, better mood and sharper thinking. That said, there isn’t anything special about lemon water, said Joan Salge Blake, a dietitian and clinical professor of nutrition at Boston University. You’d get the same benefits from a glass of regular water, a cup of herbal tea or even a cup of coffee. […] there isn’t much evidence that you’ll boost your immune system by consuming more vitamin C — whether through supplements or hot lemon water. [NY Times]

The chemical building blocks of life have been found in the grainy dust of an asteroid called Bennu, an analysis reveals. Scientists think those same compounds could also have been brought to other worlds in our Solar System

DeepSeek’s origins are in finance, not technology for technology’s sake. Its parent company, a Chinese hedge fund called High-Flyer, began not as a laboratory devoted to safeguarding humanity from A.I. like Open AI, but as a business using A.I. to make bets in the Chinese stock market.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The nice thing about building an artificial intelligence model out of a quantitative hedge fund is that there are interesting ways to monetize it. A standalone AI company will probably think of ideas like “sell subscriptions to an AI chatbot” or “sell access to an application programming interface,” but with a hedge fund you can be more creative. […]

There is a much funnier approach. […]

• Build a good AI model that can compete with the leading large language models built by tech giants, but cheaply, with fewer and less sophisticated chips and less electricity.

• Sell short the stocks of the tech giants with expensive AI models, and the big chipmakers, and electric utilities and everyone else who is exposed to the “AI is a gusher of capital spending” trade.

• Then announce your cheap good open-source model.

• Wipe out almost $1 trillion of equity market value, and take some of that for yourself.

I have no reason to think that quant fund manager and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng actually did that, or even thought about it, but, man, wouldn’t it be cool if he did?

{ Matt Levine/Bloomberg | Continue reading }

oil on canvas triptych painting { Francis Bacon, Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 }

related { interview with Liang Wenfeng, founder and CEO of Deepseek }

ADHD diagnosis rate was 62.7 per 10,000 child-visits on Halloween, compared with 55.1 during surrounding weekdays, suggesting that external factors that may influence ADHD diagnosis.

In a ginormous new study, researchers have begun mapping the manifold health benefits of drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy beyond weight loss.

12% of American adults said they’ve taken a GLP-1 agonist at some point, and 4 out of 10 users reported taking it primarily for weight-loss purposes, though the drug was originally developed to treat Type 2 diabetes. […] GLP-1s help users shed weight by suppressing appetites and targeting metabolism. One Ozempic user told CBC that her appetite had totally transformed since taking the drug. The biggest change, she said, was that using it had “completely eliminated any snacking” from her daily routine. As a result, a growing number of food companies have started to address the public’s changing appetite by introducing new ready-to-eat product lines, some of which are targeted specifically toward GLP-1 users […] “The really sad truth is we’re going to have more processed food that costs $5 or less to go with your very expensive injectable”

Device Uses Wind to Create Ammonia Out of Thin Air The process requires no external power to produce the green energy fuel

Water companies are adopting disinformation tactics similar to those used by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries with the widespread use of greenwashing to downplay the environmental harm they cause, a study says.

I Tried Samsung’s Secret Android XR Headset

DeepSeek hit with ‘large-scale’ cyber-attack after AI chatbot tops app stores

DeepSeek FAQ

One of the most fascinating aspects of DeepSeek R1 is its ability to engage in self-reflection. This emergent behavior wasn’t explicitly programmed but arose from the reinforcement learning process. When the model solves a problem, it doesn’t stop there. It reviews its own reasoning, identifies potential errors, and corrects itself if needed. More: DeepSeek-R1’s bold bet on reinforcement learning: How it outpaced OpenAI at 3% of the cost

In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. […] Given the vast amounts of resources flowing into AI research and development, which is expected to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2025, why haven’t developers been able to solve these problems? […] ChatGPT appears to consist of around 100 billion simulated neurons with around 1.75 trillion tunable variables called parameters. Those 1.75 trillion parameters are in turn trained on vast amounts of data—roughly, most of the Internet.

DeepSeek-V3 foundation model spans 671 billion parameters (with only 37 billion parameters activated for any given token generated) and was trained on 14.8 trillion tokens.

Tokens are individual units of data that are fed into a model during training. They can be words, phrases, or even entire sentences depending on the type of model being trained. […] Consider the sentence “Hello, world!” - it might be tokenized into [”Hello”, “,”, “world”, “!”].

Meta is reportedly scrambling ‘war rooms’ of engineers to figure out how DeepSeek’s AI is beating everyone else at a fraction of the price

Flashback to when Sam Altman claimed we can’t have a fast AI takeoff because of “how long it takes to build datacenters”. There are no adults in the room.

DeepSeek releases Janus-Pro, a text-to-image genrator […] Janus-Pro is under an MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially without restriction. […] Janus-Pro can both analyze and create new images.

Meta is trying its darndest to give Meta AI’s newfound info-scraping abilities a positive spin

Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that “we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power,” despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump’s inauguration last week. “They can either respect America’s constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don’t, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump’s leadership is not going to look too kindly on them,” Vance said.

Human Corpses Keep Moving for Over a Year After Death, Scientist Says

China’s DeepSeek sets off AI market rout — Nasdaq futures slumped and technology shares slid in Japan as the surging popularity of a Chinese discount artificial intelligence model knocked investors’ faith in the profitability of AI and the sector’s voracious demand for high-tech chips.

LLM confabulations as a potential resource instead of a categorically negative pitfall […] perhaps hallucinations make them more like us than we would like to admit

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?

TikTok-loaded phones are selling for thousands online after law prevents new downloads

Long before Onlyfans existed, I met its future owner in a hot tub in a penthouse at a camgirl afterparty at a porn convention in Las Vegas. He was a sweet, quiet guy everyone called Leo. He ran MyFreeCams, the platform that my friends and I used to do livestreaming sex work. I remember we all thought it was interesting that he didn’t seem to be sleeping with any of the girls. At that time, probably around 2013 or so - if you were a girl who wanted to make money getting naked online, your best bet was to sign up for a livestreaming camsite. […] Onlyfans lends its design towards isolating the men from each other. […] “You have to set your monthly subscription price to $5”, he said. I didn’t like this idea, I was at $19 and didn’t want to seem like I was devaluing myself. “No, we have the data. Girls’ incomes steadily increase as you drop the subscription price, up to about $5, but below that they decrease again.” […] Probably the vast majority of high-earning OF accounts are being run by agencies, which take a substantial fraction of the money (the amount varies widely, but often a minimum of 50%, on top of the 20% OF already takes).

Researchers say new attack could take down the European power grid […] They wondered if they could control streetlights in Berlin […] After an extensive and painstaking reverse-engineering process that took about a year, Bräunlein and Melette learned that they could indeed control the streetlights simply by replaying legitimate messages they observed being sent over the air previously. They then learned something more surprising—the very same system for controlling Berlin’s lights was used throughout Central Europe to control other regional infrastructure.

Hacking the Russian Power Grid [audio, 2019]

How to make oxygen from moon dust

Having a talent for hula hooping could be more down to your body shape than your technique, according to a new study

On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid. It was a car. it was Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018

Wikenigma - an Encyclopedia of Unknowns

Elephants cannot sue to get out of the zoo, court rules

Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive?

Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

A pioneering new treatment promises to tackle a wider range of cancers, with fewer side-effects than conventional radiotherapy. It also takes less than a second. In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumours, eliminate cancers that have metastasised to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body. The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometre (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light. […] in recent years, the centre’s unique expertise in accelerating high-energy particles has found a new niche – the world of cancer radiotherapy. […] By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumours in rodents while sparing healthy tissue. […] Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio, US, is planning an early stage trial in children with metastatic cancer that has spread to their chest bones. Meanwhile, oncologists at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland are conducting a Phase 2 trial — where the details are finessed, including the optimum dose, how effective the treatment is and if there are any side effects – for patients with localised skin cancer.

Millions of women in the UK – including 69% of 18-24-year-olds – have used smartphone apps that track their periods. Many also tell them their “fertile window”: the days when they are most and least likely to get pregnant. But the quality of the data used to make these predictions varies drastically and is often limited and unreliable — inside the wild west of smartphone fertility apps

NFTs and memecoins are collectibles, not securities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks […] The classification differences have vast regulatory implications. […] There is already a legal definition of “collectible” under U.S. tax code […] Sacks’ comments “suggests a viewpoint that it would not be appropriate to regulate these things the way we regulate securities.”

Trump’s new meme-coin sparks anger in crypto world

Earth’s Largest Organism Slowly Being Eaten, Scientist Says — This single genetic individual weighs around 6,000 tons (13.2 million pounds). By mass, it is the largest single organism on Earth. […] Pando has been around for thousands of years, potentially up to 14,000 years, despite most stems only living for about 130 years.

In the heart of France, in northern Burgundy, a team of forty master-builders has taken on the extraordinary challenge of building a castle using the technology and materials of the Middle Ages.

Some 50 years later, “the poem turned up again” and lo, it made more sense, “all but two lines of it.” The working and thinking we do in a lifetime equips us, but even toward the end of life, we’ll never be perfectly equipped, so we might as well get comfortable with partial understanding. [NY Times]

16 life lessons, and nine magic words

Sultana Isham on Papa Joe’s Female Impersonators, a decades-long story of trans representation in the South.

Rob Pruitt, Cocaine buffet, 1998 (Pruitt installed a 16-foot mirror with a line of real cocaine running down the center, in which visitors were welcome to partake.)

A state senator in Mississippi has filed a bill entitled the “Contraception Begins at Erection Act.” […] the bill would make it “unlawful for a person to discharge genetic material without the intent to fertilize an embryo.”

The new science of menopause — Researchers are exploring how to prolong ovarian life and revisiting hormone replacement therapy

How People React to the Termination of an Intimate Relationship […] we identified 79 possible reactions […] Our research suggests that the staying partners are likely to respond in three primary ways: They may experience sadness and depression, accept the situation and attempt to move on, and/or engage in physical and psychological aggression toward their partners. These reactions may manifest in the form of at least 13 more specific reactions, which in turn may manifest in at least 79 specific emotional and behavioral reactions.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation involving denial or distortion of another person’s perspective, often under the guise of emotional support. Little is known about how to detect and measure gaslighting in naturalistic interactions. We describe a method and open-source software application for classifying gaslighting in language samples of any length.

Self-control—the ability to pursue long-term goals over short-term temptations—is a critical faculty of human cognition, but the cognitive processes enabling self-control are not well understood. Traditional models have focused on impulse inhibition: effortfully inhibiting prepotent motor responses towards a temptation, yielding a stage-based evolution of choice. Other models emphasize dynamic competition between goal and temptation, yielding a more integrative evolution of choice. […] We investigate these models using mouse-tracking: a dynamic, real-time measure of decision-making in which we measure participants’ computer mouse movements as they navigate tradeoffs between immediate and delayed gratification […] find evidence for both impulse inhibition and dynamic competition. Notably, impulse inhibition is less frequent

according to a new study, men around the world have gained height and weight twice as fast as women over the past century, driving greater differences between the sexes. […] women were on average 1.7cm taller and 2.7kg heavier, while men were 4cm taller and 6.5kg heavier

The number of exceptional people: Fewer than 85 per 1 million across key traits

Earth’s magnetic north pole is on the move, scientists just updated its position

Hyperloop was teased by Elon Musk at a 2012 speaking event, and described as a “fifth mode of transport” […] Hyperloop One declared bankruptcy and ceased operations on 31 December 2023

What is data annotation, bounding boxes, polygon annotations, or semantic segmentation; In the U.S., sites often offer around $20 per hour for tasks such as labeling photos and completing writing exercises; difference between Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

The suggetsoin taht chrilden slhuod laern how to sepll Is a tmie-watse we ohgut to rjeect

Mass shootings increase alcohol sales

antimicrobial proteins isolated from oyster hemolymph (the equivalent of blood) can kill certain bacteria responsible for a range of infections. The proteins can also improve the efficacy of conventional antibiotics against problematic bacteria species. […] Over 90% of antibiotics we currently use are derived from nature. The same is true for over 65% of antibiotics under recent development. […] Oysters are exposed to high concentrations of diverse microorganisms in their natural marine environment. Because of this, they have evolved strong immune defences.

A university professor and two students recreated a virus identical to the one that caused the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. If they can do it, so can terrorists. […] Both the genome sequences of pandemic viruses and step-by-step protocols to make infectious samples from synthetic DNA are now freely available online. […] two grad students, overseen by the FBI, conducted a ”red-teaming” experiment. Red-teaming actively tests vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure — in this case, for screening DNA sequence acquisition and the capabilities of AI tools.

A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies.

AI technologies such as ChatGPT may promote learners’ dependence on technology and potentially trigger “metacognitive laziness”

fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union

Inside the world of medieval espionage

House that looks like Hitler has gone up for rent [2016]

Everyone Who Has Ever Been to Space, howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

the report titled “Takers Not Makers” said billionaire wealth soared by $2 trillion (€1.94 trillion) in 2024, growing three times faster than the previous year. [..] the richest 1% now own 45% of global wealth

“If consumers buy the right car, switch off their appliances, use off-peak hot water, install solar panels – you name it – then they can play a key role in saving the planet.“ […] Energy sector shifts responsibility for climate crisis to consumers […] reducing pressure on industry and government to take action.

Across Japan, the number of prisoners aged 65 or older nearly quadrupled from 2003 to 2022 […] Theft is by far the most common crime committed by elderly inmates, especially among women. […] Some do it for survival – 20% of people aged over 65 in Japan live in poverty, according to the OECD, compared to an average of 14.2% across the organization’s 38 member countries. Others do it because they have so little left on the outside. […] “(Some people) do bad things on purpose and get caught so that they can come to prison again, if they run out of money” […] Inside they get regular meals, free healthcare and eldercare – along with the companionship they lack on the outside. “Now we have to change their diapers, help them bathe, eat,” Shiranaga said. “At this point, it feels more like a nursing home than a prison full of convicted criminals.”

OpenAI is trying to extend human life, with help from a longevity startup

scientists increasingly agree “de-extinction” is not possible, but breeding living animals with genes similar to those lost species can be a useful conservation tool

The Australian Open don’t own all of their broadcasting rights, so they’re live-streaming a Wii Tennis-like version of the matches on YouTube

The documentary follows Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen as they attempt to cast and produce a live virtual production of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet in the video game Grand Theft Auto Online while staying home due to lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. The film is shot entirely within the video game as a Machinima production and the subjects are all depicted by their in-game avatars. More: This isn’t the first time “Hamlet” been repurposed as machinima This is, however, the first attempt to do the whole thing live in one go. […] If you don’t know the tragedy going into the film, you won’t be able to piece it together from what’s onscreen. Ophelia barely registers; Gertrude gets less than two lines. The Bard’s story is only half the point.