Employee Sneaks His Own Painting Onto the Walls of a German Museum

Cash incentives for weight loss work only for males

Sleeping more flushes junk out of the brain

Patterns of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication During Sex […] most preferred to communicate pleasure nonverbally. Some participants reported a tendency to communicate pain or dislike verbally.

“We found an association between broadly defined cat ownership and increased odds of developing schizophrenia-related disorders”

Why do some people always get lost? Research suggests that experience may matter more than innate ability when it comes to a sense of direction

Brush your teeth at least twice a day with a fluoride-containing toothpaste and spit — but don’t rinse.

NUS scientists uncover a missing link between poor diet and higher cancer risk — methylglyoxal, which is a chemical produced when our cells break down glucose to create energy, can cause faults in our DNA that are early warning signs of cancer development

L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism — A brief, weird history of brainwashing

Louisiana High Court: Priests Have a “Property Right” Not to Be Sued For Sexual Abuse

AI Could Explain Why We’re Not Meeting Any Aliens Previously: where might this Great Filter be located?

Adobe is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and anger

The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training. […] The robots don’t have peripheral vision; they can’t look left or look right like a human soldier can by simply turning their head. And the Army’s outdated network can’t always keep hundreds of drones aloft at the same time, or even tell U.S. troops which of the unpiloted aircraft are friend or foe. [But] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won’t be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams. […] Today, the Army might have three platoons deployed in a basic attack: one to fix the enemy in place, another to maneuver on them, and then one more in reserve. Put robots into that group of soldiers […] “Then you have basically three platoons entirely freed up”

In 2023, the average cost of attending law school reached $220,335 over three years—$146,484 of which goes to tuition alone. The fancier the school, the higher the sticker price: At Columbia Law School, the current cost of attendance is $118,357 per year, with tuition alone coming in at just under $80,000 annually. At Harvard Law, the annual cost of attendance is $116,00, or $348,000 over the course of a J.D. Although law school has never been considered cheap, these numbers represent a dramatic increase in recent years. In 2002, tuition at private law schools averaged $24,193 per year; in 2022, just 20 years later, that average had gone up to $54,070. […] Law school is getting more expensive and less useful to students. The Federalist Society is happy to fill the void.

Stamp prices in the U.S. and other countries

Postcards Revolutionized Pornography

Clifford Stoll is currently the sole proprietor and sole employee of Acme Klein Bottles. […] A Klein bottle is what mathematicians call a “non-orientable surface,” a one-sided plane that, when traversed, brings the traveler back to their starting point, while also flipping them upside-down. […] Its inside is its outside; you can’t tell which side you are on.

Smart rings

Let us look at how depictions of Odysseus and the Sirens change, depending on location, local tradition, a given society’s fashions, and popular tastes. […] So far I have found no images of a ‘syrinx’ – the pan-flute or panpipes – being played by Sirens on Greek vases, or otherwise in Greek art.

Emily Dickinson’s herbarium

historical dictionary of English slang

96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers. Could have been worse – last time researchers checked it was 98.6%

He went to the gate for the Delta flight to Austin, and used his phone to take pictures of the boarding passes of other passengers without their knowledge. He then boarded the aircraft using the barcode on another passenger’s boarding pass. […] he boarded and then tried to hide in the lavatory. The goal was to let everyone else board, and then take whatever empty seat was left. The problem is, there were no empty seats on the flight.

blinking does more than wet the eye, it also helps with vision

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows

Why Birds Survived, and Dinosaurs Went Extinct, After an Asteroid Hit Earth

whorearchy

Kardashian and Simpson first met around 1967 while both of them were at USC and became close friends. Simpson was the best man at Kardashian and Kris Houghton’s wedding in 1978. He had four children with his first wife, Kris Kardashian: Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob.

Following the June 12, 1994, murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Simpson stayed in Kardashian’s house to avoid the media. Kardashian was the man seen carrying Simpson’s garment bag the day that Simpson flew back from Chicago. Prosecutors speculated that the bag may have contained Simpson’s bloody clothes or the murder weapon.

Simpson was charged with the murders and subsequently acquitted of all criminal charges in a controversial criminal trial.

Kardashian had let his license to practice law become inactive before the Simpson case but reactivated it to aid in Simpson’s defense as a volunteer assistant on his legal team, alongside Simpson’s main defense attorneys, Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran.

As one of Simpson’s lawyers and a member of the defense “Dream Team”, Kardashian could not be compelled or subpoenaed to testify against Simpson in the case, which included Simpson’s past history and behavior with his ex-wife Nicole, and as to the contents of Simpson’s garment bag. He sat by Simpson throughout the trial.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

video { CNN’s coverage of O.J. Simpson’s infamous white Bronco chase in 1994 }

Polish priest jailed for throwing wild orgy where male prostitute died after overdosing on erectile dysfunction pills. In a similar incident, an Italian priest was sentenced to three years in prison in late 2021 for stealing nearly $120K from the church to buy drugs for gay sex parties he hosted.

Esketamine injection just after childbirth reduces depression in new mothers

Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic approved in the United States for inducing and maintaining anesthesia via intravenous infusion or intramuscular injection. It is not indicated for major depressive disorder (MDD) or TRD, although it is frequently used off-label for these indications. Esketamine, the (S) enantiomer of racemic ketamine, is FDA-approved for adults with TRD and adults with MDD with suicidal thoughts or actions in combination with an oral antidepressant. […] The United States has experienced a rapid proliferation of ketamine clinics to treat depression that operate with little, to no, regulation. Some clinics are now prescribing ketamine lozenges that patients take at home.

How Hackers Can Hijack Two-factor authentication Calls with Sneaky Call Forwarding

some experts argue that eliminating the chance of hallucinations entirely would also require stifling the creativity that makes AI so valuable

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. […] In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. […] Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true. […] In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup,” why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.

A Reading List on Fermentation — Somewhere in the grey zone between science and magic, the controlled addition of bacteria to food transforms it — mostly to our delight. Here are five pieces exploring these transitions (and their products).

South Korean election night graphics

Press reports in April 2019 and December 2021 stated that China might be developing a YJ-18 launcher that can be packaged inside a standard commercial shipping container

{ Congressional Research Service | PDF }

{ Everyone’s playing by the same rules now? }

Sierra Leone Declares Emergency After Addicts Dig Up Graves To Get High On Drug Made From Human Bones

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. […] an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.

we also provide evidence that growing up together does not make people more similar and genetic effects partly wear off with time/generations.

Each pregnancy is linked with an additional two to three months of biological ageing, researchers say

New research suggests that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits might not experience a lack of fear but instead find enjoyment in frightening situations

Our main finding is that the correlation between beauty and earnings is not causal […] with the exception of prostitutes for which the premium is still substantial. […] Athletes and politicians seem to enjoy relatively large beauty premiums. [PDF]

Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court

Other videos are stolen from the model Cece Rose and have been replaced with “Adrianna’s” face. The AI influencers I saw had one consistent “face” through all of the stolen reels they posted. But the women they stole from were not always the same, meaning that one AI influencer is often posting videos consisting of many different “bodies,” which are of course stolen from real women.

Animal-free egg protein startup Onego Bio is one step closer to cracking the traditional egg market

Cow Magnets

The perfect heist? Inside the seamless, sophisticated, stealthy L.A. theft that netted up to $30 million

Why is the Moon exactly the same apparent size from Earth as the Sun? Surely this cannot be just coincidence; the odds against such a perfect match are enormous. It actually is just a coincidence.

A former University of Iowa Hospital employee pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges that he had been living under another man’s identity since 1988, causing the other man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft and sent to a mental hospital.

researchers found that most cancer drugs granted accelerated approval do not demonstrate such benefits within five years.

Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair The traditional interview is a poor predictor of performance for multiple reasons. First, predicting the future is difficult to do under most circumstances. Moreover, an interview constitutes a tiny sample of the interviewee’s behavior. A small behavioral sample tells us little about overall behavior. That’s why you don’t get married after the first date.

Pussy (energy drink)

This AI company scans penis pictures for STIs. Its unproven tech is in an FDA gray zone.

A ‘Law Firm’ of AI Generated Lawyers Is Sending Fake Threats as an SEO Scam

Scientists create liquid metal robot that can pass through bars, Terminator-style [2023]

Why is Intelligence not Making You Happier?

Imagine this: You’re in the midst of an office presentation when suddenly, the realization hits you that you forgot to feed your cat this morning. Swiftly, you decide to send a quick text to your roommate. However, as you reach for your phone, a notification pops up—a sale on your favorite cosmetic product. Temptation takes hold, and you click on the link, intending to browse briefly. Yet, before you know it, you’ve added items to your cart, mentally replayed the techno version of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” four times and booked an evening show later that Friday. By the time you regain focus, the meeting has ended, discussions are in full swing and the memory of your cat’s empty bowl has slipped your mind. This a classic case of popcorn brain.

Mario meets Pareto More: Who is the best character in Mario Kart?

Philbrick, 36, was once one of the most accomplished and admired young art dealers of his generation. Yet when we begin our correspondence in April 2023, he is prisoner 05863093 in Allenwood, serving a seven-year sentence for what the FBI believes is the largest art-based fraud scheme in US history.

“pissotte” are casts of mortar which had the task of preventing thugs and bandits hid in corners to ambush or escape the authorities. Venice didn’t have public lighting and walking through the streets in the darkest hours of the night could be dangerous for a passer-by and an excellent opportunity for a criminal.

This Camera Turns Every Photo Into a Nude

Navies are obsolete, but no one will admit it […] First, under modern conditions, it’s impossible for a ship (except for submarines, but that will change soon) to hide from satellites and aircraft. By contrast, it’s easy to hide land-based weapons and to move them about quickly. Second, a ship has to carry its own defences and weapons with it, which is a big engineering challenge. Land based systems can be spread out over a large area.

Donald Trump has sued two co-founders of his newly public Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., claiming they set the company up improperly and shouldn’t get any stock in it. […] The lawsuit, which was filed on March 24 in Florida state court and hasn’t previously been reported, comes after the pair brought their own suit against the former president in Delaware Chancery Court over their promised stake in the social media company. [The complaint | PDF]

In a single-item auction, a duplicitous seller may masquerade as one or more bidders in order to manipulate the clearing price. This paper characterizes auction formats that are shill-proof: a profit-maximizing seller has no incentive to submit any shill bids. […] The Dutch auction (with suitable reserve) is the unique optimal and strongly shill-proof auction.

Lin Qi, who was named as an executive producer in the opening credits of “3 Body Problem,” was poisoned and killed at age 39, months after Netflix announced its plans to produce the series in 2020. The culprit was one of Lin’s own executives, a high-flying lawyer who helped Lin’s Yoozoo Games secure the rights to adapt the highly acclaimed trilogy. […] Xu was a huge fan of “Breaking Bad” […] He set up a lab in a suburb of Shanghai and bought more than a hundred toxins on the dark web to experiment with, often testing mixed poisons on cats, dogs and other pet animals. He then made the lethal substances into a pill, gifting the “probiotic pills” to Lin. Xu held 160 cellphone numbers and set up a trading company in Japan to acquire hazardous chemicals, including the substances he used to poison his colleagues.

The gravitational problem of three bodies in its traditional sense dates in substance from 1687, when Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The term “three-body problem” is sometimes used in the more general sense to refer to any physical problem involving the interaction of three bodies.

The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997) — Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague.

A man lost in the desert with his donkey comes across an oasis with six naked women. Filmed in 3-D but released “flat.” Tagline: The six Eves join YOU in the audience!

Thief disguises as garbage bag to steal package off a porch

Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

For most of the twentieth century, psychologists dismissed the interior lives of birds because avian brains are smaller and differently structured than those of mammals. But it turns out that bird brains are much denser with neurons and consume less energy, giving crows similar cognitive abilities to large-brained mammals such as great apes, elephants, and whales. […] In 2020, a business-school graduate, Jules Mollaret, set out to build a new vending machine for crows, which would exchange trash for bird food.

Cancer-causing forever chemicals found in 65 percent of adhesive bandages where they can get directly into blood through open wounds, report warns

studies show: We’re more likely to buy a vacation using gift money rather than money earned as a work bonus. We spend more when we pay with a credit card instead of cash. When we get a refund, we’re more likely to use that refunded money to buy stuff we didn’t originally plan on buying.

Our tools shape our selves — According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible […] In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation.

How to Spot Fake/Unsafe Eclipse Glasses — Safe solar viewers block all but a minuscule fraction of the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infrared (IR) light. Overexposure to sunlight in these parts of the spectrum can cause severe eye injury, ranging from temporarily impaired vision to permanent blindness.

Osama Vinladen is a Peruvian professional footballer. He has a brother named Sadam Huseín, the Spanish spelling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Additionally, his father planned on naming his third child George Bush, but could not since they turned out to be female.

Tennessee lawmakers have passed a bill banning the release of airborne chemicals that critics say is inspired by “chemtrails” conspiracy theories

The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at birth.” […] “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer. [NYT]

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender. The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out

Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its bills for rented cloudy GPUs — Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million.

Tips for Linking Shell Companies to their Secret Owners

The list of health conditions linked to loneliness is long and sobering. Some of these make intuitive sense — people who feel lonely are often depressed, for example, sometimes to the point of being at risk of suicide. Other links are more surprising. Lonely people are at greater risk of high blood pressure and immune-system dysfunction compared with those who do not feel lonely, for example. There’s also a startling connection between loneliness and dementia, with one study reporting that people who feel lonely are 1.64 times more likely to develop this type of neurodegeneration than are those who do not.

The average human spends at least one quarter of their life growing up. Our childhood is preposterously long compared to other animals. Is it the secret to our evolutionary success?

Where the Amish go on vacation

MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN [PARADICE: PARADISE] The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

reducing hours of alcohol sales from 6 am to 2 am to 9 am to 10 pm was associated with a 23% annual decrease in all violent crime compared with control areas.

Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal debate. Here, we propose the Nested Observer Windows (NOW) Model, a framework for hierarchical consciousness wherein information processed across many spatiotemporal scales of the brain feeds into subjective experience.

The study involved with 48 people who flipped 350,757 coins from 46 currencies. After all of this flipping, the researchers found that the coins had a 50.8 percent chance of landing on the side that it started on. This is down to a theory called the Diaconis Model

Advertisers sue Meta for allegedly inflating ad viewership in $7 billion lawsuit

Scientists in South Korea have announced a new world record for the length of time they sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the sun’s core — during a nuclear fusion experiment. Nuclear fusion seeks to replicate the reaction that makes the sun and other stars shine, by fusing together two atoms to unleash huge amounts of energy

there might be some justification for Eurocentrism after all, at least geographically

GeoGuessr is a browser-based geography game in which players are tasked to guess locations from Google Street View imagery.

The Mongolian Meta — It is important to know that in Ulaanbaatar there are several sunsets. But I will go into further detail on that in the chapter dedicated to Ulaanbaatar.

Mental health of Jesus — Some psychiatrists, religious scholars and writers explain that Jesus’ family, followers, and contemporaries seriously regarded him as delusional, possessed by demons, or insane.

Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study

Netflix’s relationship with Facebook was remarkably strong due to the former’s ad spend with the latter […] the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users’ private messages […] Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December. And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Meta used a spyware to access user activities on rival platforms, including Snapchat and YouTube

Previously: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me.” Dumb fucks.

Nobody knows how AI works, expect more glitches and fails as it becomes a part of real-world products […] In another now-famous incident, Microsoft’s Bing chat told a New York Times reporter to leave his wife

‘To the train lady with dark brown hair … ’: extraordinary stories of four couples who found love via small ads

“Most of what’s passing for information right now is total fiction. I try to turn the lie back on itself.” Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87 at Gagosian gallery in New York

Packaging the First LSD Blotter Related: Secret Sauce

{ The city of Lopburi is experiencing unprecedented violence between two monkey gangs [Thailand]. Local authorities successfully apprehended one of the gang leader, Ai Krao, using a tranquilizer gun. Upon his arrest, cries could be heard from his subordinates. A hierarchy chart has been published, showing Yellow as Krao’s group and Green as Yak’s group. A citywide monkey-hunt is underway to capture the remaining leaders. | Twitter | with videos | businesstoday.in }

Menstrual synchrony was first demonstrated in a 1971 paper published in Nature by Martha McClintock. […]

she asked 135 college girls living in dorms to recall their period start dates at three times throughout the academic year. She found that close-friend groups had periods significantly closer together in April (later in the year) compared with October: lessening from an average of 6.4 to 4.6 days apart.

The phenomenon was dubbed “the McClintock effect” and is widely held as the first example of pheromones — unconscious chemical signals that influence behavior and physiology — among humans. […] Many subsequent researchers went on to reproduce the results from McClintock’s original experiment in people, rats, hamsters and chimpanzees.

But a cohort of studies that found no evidence for menstrual synchrony began to grow, too. […]

In 1992 H. Clyde Wilson […] re-analyzed McClintock’s first experiment, along with a few others that used a similar design. He found that all had inflated the difference between period start dates at the beginning of their studies […] their model of two pheromones — one that pulls ovulation forward and one that delays it — driving synchrony didn’t work […]

The insurmountable hurdle in all the studies is that women often have persistent cycles of different lengths. As such, they can never truly synchronize, just randomly phase in and out of synchrony over the months as their cycles diverge and converge. […]

But a team of Japanese researchers at Yokohama City University, led by Kazuyuki Shinohara, also found in a series of papers that donor women undergoing these two phases of the menstrual cycle release compounds that when inhaled by other women can significantly impact the frequency in the latter of pulses of luteinizing hormone (LH), which helps control the timing of ovulation and cycle length.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

Any viral post on X now almost certainly includes A.I.-generated replies, from summaries of the original post to reactions written in ChatGPT’s bland Wikipedia-voice, all to farm for follows. Instagram is filling up with A.I.-generated models, Spotify with A.I.-generated songs. Publish a book? Soon after, on Amazon there will often appear A.I.-generated “workbooks” for sale that supposedly accompany your book (which are incorrect in their content; I know because this happened to me). Top Google search results are now often A.I.-generated images or articles. Major media outlets like Sports Illustrated have been creating A.I.-generated articles attributed to equally fake author profiles. Marketers who sell search engine optimization methods openly brag about using A.I. to create thousands of spammed articles to steal traffic from competitors.

Then there is the growing use of generative A.I. to scale the creation of cheap synthetic videos for children on YouTube. Some example outputs are Lovecraftian horrors, like music videos about parrots in which the birds have eyes within eyes, beaks within beaks, morphing unfathomably while singing in an artificial voice, “The parrot in the tree says hello, hello!” The narratives make no sense, characters appear and disappear randomly, and basic facts like the names of shapes are wrong. After I identified a number of such suspicious channels on my newsletter, The Intrinsic Perspective, Wired found evidence of generative A.I. use in the production pipelines of some accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of subscribers. […]

There’s so much synthetic garbage on the internet now that A.I. companies and researchers are themselves worried, not about the health of the culture, but about what’s going to happen with their models. As A.I. capabilities ramped up in 2022, I wrote on the risk of culture’s becoming so inundated with A.I. creations that when future A.I.s are trained, the previous A.I. output will leak into the training set, leading to a future of copies of copies of copies, as content became ever more stereotyped and predictable.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

and { When Marie was first approached by Arcads in December 2023, the company explained they were seeking test subjects to see whether they could turn someone’s voice and likeness into AI. […] Marie doesn’t worry that by giving up her rights to an AI company, she’s bringing about the end of her work—as many actors fear. […] Hyperrealistic deepfakes and AI-generated content have rapidly saturated our digital lives. The impact of this ‘hidden in plain sight’ dynamic is increasing distrust of all digital media—that anything could be faked. }

Rising divorce rates, forgoing condoms as there is no risk of pregnancy, the availability of drugs for sexual dysfunction, the large number of older adults living together in retirement communities, and the increased use of dating apps are likely to have contributed to the growing incidence of STIs in the over 50s

Multiple Orgasms in Men—What We Know So Far Few men are multiorgasmic: <10% for those in their 20s, and <7% after the age of 30. [...] Various factors may facilitate multiple orgasms: (1) practicing to have an orgasm without ejaculation; (2) using psychostimulant drugs; (3) having multiple and/or novel sexual partners; or (4) using sex toys to enhance tactile stimulation. [...] In some cases, the ability to experience multiple orgasms may increase after medical procedures that reduce ejaculation (eg, prostatectomy or castration)

variation in how attractive one is perceived follows a bell curve distribution

Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it — When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows.

Conspiracy Believers Act More Dishonestly and Overestimate Others’ Dishonesty

Digital signs around Brookline, MA are collecting data from your phone as you walk by […] The sign collects the phone’s Media Access Control (MAC) address, a series of numbers that identifies devices on networks. […] The signs also collect IP addresses. […] the data collection is “perfectly legal” but problematic.

Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers […] deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates […] a grey font on a white background in text displayed at the very bottom of a page — a classic example of so-called dark pattern design

How Curb Your Enthusiasm Saved an Innocent Man

Sweely [& his friend] Home grooves with AKAI MPC 1000/ Elektron Machinedrum / APC 40 / Ableton / Victor

The fight began when a customer threw a banana at the gas station employees, who then threw it back. The customer and staff then began throwing multiple bananas back and forth. The customer then punched one of the workers in the face. One employee then chased the customer into the parking lot and hit him several times in the head with a PVC pipe.

Parents file $1.5M lawsuit after Quebec teacher accused of selling students’ artwork online

The solar eclipse will likely lead to a spike in fatal car crashes […] 31% more fatal car crashes than on a usual day […] It’s during the hours immediately before when people are rushing to the site of observation and the hours after when they hurry to get back home that these tragic accidents can happen.

couples who are concordant in their drinking behavior (that is, both members drink alcohol) tend to live longer.

two nights of sleep restriction (4 h in bed per night) made people feel 4.44 years older compared to sleep saturation (9 h in bed per night) Additionally, moving from feeling extremely alert to feeling extremely sleepy was associated with feeling 10 years older

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Deepfakes are spreading, putting creator and brand safety at risk

Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.

He said Trump Media is likely worth somewhere around $2 a share — nowhere near its closing stock price of $58. […] Trump Media generated just $3.4 million of revenue through the first nine months of last year, according to filings. The company lost $49 million over that span. And yet the market is valuing Trump Media at approximately $11 billion. For context, Reddit was only valued at $6.4 billion at its IPO last week — even though it generated 160 times more revenue than Trump Media.

Polar ice is melting and changing Earth’s rotation. It’s messing with time itself. — The hours and minutes that dictate our days are determined by Earth’s rotation. But that rotation is not constant; it can change ever so slightly, depending on what’s happening on Earth’s surface and in its molten core. These nearly imperceptible changes occasionally mean the world’s clocks need to be adjusted by a “leap second,” which may sound tiny but can have a big impact on computing systems. Plenty of seconds have been added over the years. But after a long trend of slowing, the Earth’s rotation is now speeding up. For the first time ever, a second will need to be taken off. More: UTC as now defined will require a negative discontinuity by 2029

Researchers Show that Tardigrade Proteins Can Slow Metabolism in Human Cells — Measuring less than half a millimeter long, tardigrades — also known as water bears — can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero (about minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, when all molecular motion stops); heated to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit; irradiated several thousand times beyond what a human could withstand; and even survive the vacuum of outer space. They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes.

Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That’s 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023

donna summer billboards in the 1970s

A ten-year scientific study into the nature of luck has revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. The results also show that it is possible to enhance the amount of luck that people encounter in their lives. [PDF]

The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas

Life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2022 was 77.5 years, an increase of 1.1 years from 2021. The infant mortality rate was 560.4 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022, an increase of 3.1% from the rate in 2021 (543.6).

In June 2023, a SpaceX rocket deployed a first-of-its-kind spacecraft designed to autonomously synthesize a drug — the HIV-AIDS medication ritonavir — while in Earth’s orbit.

What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move? (Earth’s tremors can tweak your GPS coordinates)

A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl

The trendy second-hand clothing market is huge and still growing – yet nobody is turning a profit

Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are leading a parade of corporate insiders who have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of their companies’ shares this quarter, in a signal that recent stock market exuberance could be peaking. [FT | ungated]

Man arrested after allegedly taking leg of pedestrian after train incident in Wasco

Women experience disruptions in their sleep patterns in the days leading up to and during their period (peri-menstrual phase), spending more time awake at night, with a lower proportion of time spent in bed that is asleep (lower sleep efficiency). During the peri-menstrual phase, women report heightened feelings of anger compared to other phases of their menstrual cycle. Sleep disturbances during the peri-menstrual phase correlate with reduced positive emotions such as calmness, happiness, and enthusiasm.

Pregnancy advances your ‘biological’ age — but giving birth turns it back — Carrying a baby creates some of the same epigenetic patterns on DNA seen in older people

Scientists Reveal a Healthier Way to Cook Broccoli — pulverized the broccoli, chopping it into 2-millimeter pieces to get as much myrosinase activity going as possible (remember, the activity happens when broccoli is damaged). […] then left alone for 90 minutes before being stir-fried for four minutes […] they didn’t test it but thought “30 minutes would also be helpful”

The bizarre world of people who see ‘demonic’ faces

Facial Recognition Technology and Human Raters Can Predict Political Orientation From Images of Expressionless Faces

How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth [PDF]

In two court orders, the federal government told Google to turn over information on anyone who viewed multiple YouTube videos and livestreams. Privacy experts say the orders are unconstitutional.

How to Run a CIA Base in Afghanistan — Targeting officers are the officers at CIA who basically write the book on a specific target. They are analyzing all sorts of information coming in, whether it’s signals intelligence (SIGINT), HUMINT, open source, and they’re creating a profile of an individual or perhaps a terrorist group that CIA wants to go out and recruit a source from or within, and really helps the case officer think about how they approach an individual and perhaps where to find that individual overseas.

Why Is It So Hard to Build an Airport?

Global prediction of extreme floods in ungauged watersheds — Using AI and open datasets, we are able to significantly improve the expected precision, recall and lead time of short-term (0–7 days) forecasts of extreme riverine events.