Babysitter checking for monsters finds man hiding under child’s bed

Winnipeg woman run over after dispute about empty spot in parking lot

Adults engaging in sexual activity with children in virtual reality now illegal in Utah […] law makes it illegal for adults using avatars to make their avatar have sex with avatars being used by children

Most people dislike being gossiped about—except narcissistic men, who welcome even negative gossip

Whether humans inherently view themselves more positively than others underpins a fundamental question in psychology that has eluded scientific consensus for decades. […] Cross-cultural comparisons then revealed self-deprecation tendencies in trait-based self-evaluation in specific Eastern languages, contrasting with Western patterns. However, affective self-positivity—the tendency to associate the self with generally positive rather than negative words—was universally observed across 11 languages.

By the end of the six weeks, both the LSD and placebo groups had shown significant reductions in ADHD symptoms […] 80% of participants—whether they had taken LSD or placebo—guessed they had received LSD. Those who believed they had taken LSD tended to report greater symptom improvement, regardless of what they had actually received.

H&M is working directly with models and their agencies to create digital replicas of 30 different models this year that it will be able to use in AI-generated images for purposes such as social-media posts and marketing campaigns.

Sunday at the Village Vanguard is a live album by jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans and his Trio consisting of Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian. It was recorded on June 25, 1961, at the Village Vanguard in New York City. Released in 1961, the album is routinely ranked as one of the best live jazz recordings of all time. Scott LaFaro died 10 days after this recording.

Same-sex love triangles in female monkeys

Mistakes are valuable learning opportunities, yet in uncertain environments, whether a lack of reward is due to poor performance or bad luck can be hard to tell. […] Participants consistently displayed a self-attribution bias, crediting successes to their own ability while blaming failures on randomness

Paralysed man stands again after receiving ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells

Wooden Rods aren’t often used as placebos these days, you’re much more likely to receive some kind of oral placebo (like sugar pills), a topical placebo (such as a cream containing no active ingredients), or an intra-articular placebo (injected directly into the joints). However, this presents a tricky dilemma - what do we do about the fact that different types of placebo can have different effect sizes? […] An intra-articular placebo is more effective at relieving pain than topical placebos, and topical placebos are more effective than oral placebos. […] characteristics of the physician administering the placebo can also make a difference […] Characteristics of the patient can also make a difference to how effective a placebo is - children are more receptive than adults.

Asked whether “scaling up” current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents [475 AI researchers] said it was “unlikely” or “very unlikely” to succeed.

How Scammers Launder Money and Get Away With It [NY Times]

Consistent workouts can be a powerful way to fight chronic inflammation. […] the less chronically inflamed we are, the healthier we are. […] Chronic inflammation can also be linked to diet, stress, smoking, obesity, sleep quality and your level of physical activity. And it increases as you age […] Research suggests that consistent, moderate exercise can fight inflammation by tamping down on the release of inflammatory chemicals, and ramping up the release of chemicals that fight it, she said. Exercise can also lower inflammation indirectly, for example, by improving sleep quality and lowering stress. […] If you’re breathing harder than usual to keep up the pace, and you feel like you’re putting in moderate effort, she said, you’re probably fighting inflammation. [NY Times]

seasonal clock changes help align human activity with the sunrise, but the practice is associated with numerous health risks

Why Are So Many Young Women Convinced They’re Balding?

63 Chinese Cuisines Guide

web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots. The tool will attempt to thwart AI companies that crawl websites without permission to collect training data for large language models that power AI assistants like ChatGPT. […] Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected. […] In January, we reported on “Nepenthes,” software that similarly lures AI crawlers into mazes of fake content. Both approaches share the core concept of wasting crawler resources rather than simply blocking them.

5 Chinese satellites practiced ‘dogfighting’ in space […] US “near peer” adversaries are “practicing dogfighting” in space to simulate orbital combat in yet another step up their wide-ranging effort to develop capabilities to deny, disrupt, degrade and/or destroy US space capabilities […] “There are five different objects in space maneuvering in and out around each other, in synchronicity and in control. That’s what we call dogfighting in space. They are practicing tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another” […] [Russia and China] have demonstrated ability with two spacecraft moving closely around each other […] but the demonstrations of the ability to synchronize movements of several satellites at once is relatively new […] China has been using several satellites to stalk US government and commercial satellites stationed in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO).

FBI seized this woman’s life savings ($40,200) without telling her why

bowel movement frequency significantly influences physiology and long-term health, with the best outcomes linked with passing stools once or twice a day, study […] bowel movement frequencies were categorized into four groups: constipation (one or two bowel movements per week), low-normal (three to six per week), high-normal (one to three per day), and diarrhea. When stools linger too long in the gut, microbes exhaust the available fiber – which they ferment into beneficial short-chain fatty acids – and instead ferment proteins, producing toxins like p-cresol sulfate and indoxyl sulfate. “What we found is that even in healthy people who are constipated, there is a rise in these toxins in the bloodstream”

Researcher uses AI to make texts that are thousands of years old readable — How should we live when we know we must die? This question is posed by the first work of world literature, the Gilgamesh epic. More than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh set out on a quest for immortality. Like all Babylonian literature, the saga has survived only in fragments. Nevertheless, scholars have managed to bring two-thirds of the text into readable condition since it was rediscovered in the 19th century. The Babylonians wrote in cuneiform characters on clay tablets, which have survived in the form of countless fragments. Over centuries, scholars transferred the characters imprinted on the pieces of clay onto paper. Then they would painstakingly compare their transcripts and—in the best case—recognize which fragments belong together and fill in the gaps. The texts were written in the languages Sumerian and Akkadian, which have complicated writing systems.

Book scanning robot preparing food for his LLM brethren

French Army Trains Eagles To Take Down Enemy Drones

U.S. military on Monday deployed robotic dogs—or robodogs—in joint drills with South Korean forces, simulating assaults on North Korea’s “secret” underground tunnel networks

The results indicate that water fountains can be a source of atmospheric air contamination with potentially pathogenic E. coli and A. hydrophila bacteria. […] some E. coli and A. hydrophila strains isolated from air samples exhibited multidrug resistance [2023]

Italian newspaper says it has published world’s first AI-generated edition

Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding

The Social Security numbers and other private information of more than 200 former congressional staffers and others were made public Tuesday in the unredacted files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “It’s absolutely outrageous. It’s sloppy, unprofessional,” said former Trump campaign lawyer Joseph diGenova, 80, whose private information was included in the release. […] More than 60,000 pages related to the 1963 assassination were released this week by the Trump administration. Many of the pages had been previously disclosed, but with redactions. Many, but not all, redactions have been removed. […] “Social Security is literally the keys to the kingdom to everybody,” said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s absolutely a Privacy Act violation.” Many whose Social Security numbers were exposed had become high-ranking officials in Washington. They include a former assistant secretary of state, a former U.S. ambassador, researchers in the intelligence world, State Department workers and prominent lawyers. [Washington Post]

More: The previously-redacted pages spell out specific instructions for CIA operatives on how to wiretap, including the use of certain chemicals to create markings on telephone devices that could only be seen by other spies under UV light. […] “Seven of ten JFK files held by the Archives and sought by JFK researchers are now in the public record. These long-secret records shed new light on JFK’s mistrust of the CIA, the Castro assassination plots, the surveillance of Oswald in Mexico City, and CIA propaganda operations involving Oswald,” Morley posted. “The release does not include two thirds of the promised files nor any of 500-plus IRS record, nor any of the 2,400 recently discovered FBI files.“ […] One document from August 1966 recommends a “certificate of distinction” for a CIA official who led the spy agency’s technical division. Previous releases of the same document contained redactions striking sentences that described how this individual led a team that “conceived and developed” the use of “fluoroscopic scanning” and X-rays, which allowed the CIA to “detect hidden technical listening devices” for the first time. [ABC]

Depression manifests in distinct ways across the life course. Recent research emphasizes how depression impedes development during emerging adulthood. However, our study suggests a more complex narrative. Increasing experience with cycles of depression can also catalyze (a) mature perspectives and coping mechanisms that protect against depression’s lowest lows; (b) deeper self-knowledge and direction, which in turn promoted a coherent personal identity; and (c) emergence of a life purpose, which fostered attainment of adult roles, skill development, greater life satisfaction, and enriched identity. Our synthesis reveals how depression during emerging adulthood can function at once as toxin, potential antidote, and nutritional supplement fostering healthy development.

This book has been made almost entirely from recycled used copies of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Does a woman’s cognitive performance change throughout her menstrual cycle? […] the body of research in this meta-analysis does not support myths that women’s cognitive abilities change across the menstrual cycle.

results show that there is a different investment behavior—more extreme in men, more stable in women—and, consequently, men get higher levels of gross profit but also of losses than women

Sugary drinks linked to greater oral cancer risk, study

Ultra-processed babies: are toddler snacks one of the great food scandals of our time

1kg of compost contains up to 16,000 microplastic particles

Zuckerberg’s subordinates are letting him win at the board game the Settlers of Catan. (Another time, when she beats him, he accuses her of cheating.) […] During the delivery of her second daughter, Wynn-Williams nearly dies of an amniotic fluid embolism, goes into a coma and wakes up on life support. […] on her first day back, she got an impromptu performance review from her supervisor Joel Kaplan that criticized her for not being “responsive enough” while she was gone. [NY Times]

The fact that the two biggest crypto exchanges, FTX and Binance, failed and their founders were criminally charged and went to prison, should be proof enough of how rancid this ecosystem is. […] Like all financial operations characterized by irrational exuberance, the value of $TRUMP soon plummeted. Indeed, over 800,000 investor accounts lost a total of $2 billion. […] Trump is also staffing the Securities and Exchange Commission with crypto loyalists who have already begun to deconstruct the oversight of the crypto sector. […] For the time being, the two reserves (one for Bitcoin, the second for other digital assets) will contain only crypto seized in criminal or civil forfeitures. The crypto industry was disappointed that Trump didn’t mandate federal purchases of the currencies. But that will probably happen in the future. The new initiative calls on federal agencies to come up with strategies to buy more Bitcoin. And there’s now a bill in Congress calling on the government to buy a million Bitcoin.

Texas museum removes Trump wax figure after visitors repeatedly punched and scratched it

See You Next Wednesday is a recurring gag in most of the films directed by John Landis, usually referring to a fictional film that is rarely seen and never in its entirety. Each instance of See You Next Wednesday in Landis’s films seems to be a completely different film. Landis got the title See You Next Wednesday from the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is the last line spoken by Frank Poole’s father during Poole’s video letter from his parents. […] In An American Werewolf in London (1981), See You Next Wednesday is a porn film being shown in a seedy London pornographic theater. […] In the Michael Jackson music video Thriller (1983), the phrase is spoken by a deputy in the werewolf film that Michael and his girlfriend are watching. It is also visible as a poster on the outside of the cinema as they leave.

In nearly half of the world’s bird species, young birds learn by imitating the songs of adults. As birds learn songs from one another, mistakes inevitably happen, leading to variation in songs between populations of the same species, similar to the formation of dialects in human languages. […] However, scientists don’t yet fully understand what happens to these song differences when birds move between populations. Imagine you’re a local bird, and a newcomer arrives singing a foreign song. What’s to stop you from learning this new song? […] But birds tend to only learn songs from their own species, even when they are exposed to the birdsong of other species. This suggests that birds have genetic predispositions guiding them to learn only “appropriate” songs.

Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten

Why straight women watch lesbian porn

Is our universe trapped inside a black hole?

Water droplets create “microlightning” when they split, producing electrical discharges without any external power source. These tiny electrical sparks can transform simple gases into complex organic molecules—including amino acids and RNA components—in just microseconds. […] this phenomenon may have been a major contributor to creating life’s building blocks on early Earth

Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement — wants to start “foodome” sequencing. “We’re going to sequence the U.S. ‘foodome,’ which means test 20% of foods that constitute 80% of the American diet based on stuff we eat everyday” […] he’s obsessed with finding ways to extend his lifespan and preaching that gospel to others. He has taken extreme measures, including transfusing his blood with that of his 17-year-old son and undergoing shock therapy treatment to get more nighttime erections, which he says directly correlates to health.

Results consistently show that positive experiences are more likely to come to mind when they think about how karma influences their own life, but negative experiences are more likely when thinking about other’s karma, although this difference was weaker in Singapore and India than in the United States

no one can seem to agree on what an AI agent is, exactly

Scammers exploit Google redirect URLs to send phishing links

As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. […] Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. […] Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights. As a stateless person, [Arendt] experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an “enemy alien” in France — before making it to the United States. [NY Times]

It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet.

Three GLP-1 drugs are approved for weight loss in the United States […] cost about $1000/month and are rarely covered by insurance, putting them out of reach for most Americans. […] For the past three years, there’s been a shortage of these drugs. FDA regulations say that during a shortage, it’s semi-legal for compounding pharmacies to provide medications without getting the patent-holders’ permission. In practice, that means they get cheap peptides from China, do some minimal safety testing in house, and sell them online. So for the past three years, telehealth startups working with compounding pharmacies have sold these drugs for about $200/month. Over two million Americans have made use of this loophole to get weight loss drugs for cheap. [But] what happens when the shortage ends? Many people have to stay on GLP-1 drugs permanently, or else they risk regaining their lost weight. But many can’t afford $1000/month. What happens to them? Now we’ll find out. At the end of last year, the FDA declared the shortage over. The compounding pharmacies appealed the decision, but the FDA recently confirmed its decision is final. As of March 19 (for tirzepatide) and April 22 (for semaglutide), compounding pharmacies can no longer sell cheap GLP-1 drugs.

Just 5 Days of Junk Food Can Trigger Obesity’s Hold on Your Brain

Musk’s layoffs shrink workforce needed to realize Trump’s energy agenda

What It’s Like to Build a Sauna Kit in My Backyard

Emily Dickinson used envelopes and seals to turn letters into poetry, layering hidden messages and playful forms

Top UK comedy club bans audience members with botox after ‘numerous complaints’ […] “reactionless” faces […] audience members with frozen faces aren’t reacting to their jokes

just seven countries met the WHO’s air quality standard. Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Estonia, Grenada, Iceland, and New Zealand

The original Sphere, which cost about $2.3bn to construct, is home to the word’s highest-resolution LED screen and has seating capacity for up to 20,000 people. But the venue demands a significant investment from performers, who must create customised visual content tailored to the wraparound LED display, which cannot be used elsewhere. While this has been been feasible for its high-profile residencies such as U2, the Eagles, Dead & Company and Anyma, smaller venues could attract a broader range of artists who might not have the budget or demand to fill the flagship Las Vegas location. The possibility of 5,000-capacity mini-Spheres follows news that a full-scale venue will open in the UAE

This is a fundamental miscalculation in the design of the Starship V2 and the engine section […] The fixes will take much longer than 4-6 weeks

Start walking down the stairs some evening for an uptown No. 1 train at 28th Street and Seventh Avenue, and be on the lookout for a small, hidden bar. […] Jey Perie, 41, who grew up in France and moved to New York in 2012 […] opened La Noxe, a 600-square-foot hidden bar in between the street and the uptown train. The bar holds 30 people and is reminiscent of a speakeasy, “because it’s so hard to find, which was never my intention” […] We have a DJ on the weekends so those are our busiest days. Then we can sell 150-200 drinks a night. […] How did this space become so well-known? In March of 2021, we had been closed for months because of Covid, and then told we could reopen, but only at 25 percent, which is like eight people, only to close again a few months later. When we were trying to figure out how we were going to survive, a random girl booked a reservation. She made a TikTok video showing her opening the door and walking out. She only had 400 or 500 followers, but her video got a million plus views. That got picked up on other social media. The M.T.A. president gave us an award. We became a New York comeback story. She brought the news, and Jimmy Fallon had us on his show. We went from 10 people DM-ing on Instagram a week to 1,000 people. We started taking reservations on Resy. Without that video, we would be closed. [NY Times]

Trump says anti-Tesla protesters will face ‘hell’, Sean Hannity says he’s buying Tesla in solidarity with Musk, INTERVIEW OF PRESIDENT TRUMP AND ELON MUSK BY SEAN HANNITY, quote

Is your baby straight or gay? N.J. hospitals hand out controversial forms to new moms.

Generation Beta officially arrived on Jan. 1, successors to Gen Alpha. […] Beta is commonly used as slang for weak and passive.

A fast-growing body of research signals potential health benefits of GLP-1s, the class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known by names like Ozempic, beyond what they were initially approved to treat. That includes age-related conditions like Alzheimer’s, osteoarthritis, certain cancers and even mortality.

Alcohol and cancer risk: what you need to know

Men who had given blood more than 100 times in their life were more likely to have blood cells carrying certain beneficial mutations, suggesting that donating blood promotes the growth of these cells

We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards. […] very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 mmol/L earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125 µmol/L. […] people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers for liver function also decreased the chance of becoming a centenarian.

Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ushering in a new age of bribery, graft, and corruption to American politics

Why bother using Claude Code at around $5 per session when you can pay $20 for Cursor and use it indefinitely? Claude Code excels in vibe coding.

Danish postal service to stop delivering letters after 90% drop in numbers

Each day, around €3,000 of loose change ends up in the Trevi Fountain in Roma. That works out as up to €1.5 million tossed into its waters each year.

[2019] Businessman Tan Youhui hired a hitman to “take out” his competitor for $282,000 (£218,000), a court heard. But the hitman hired another man to do the job, offering $141,000. That man hired another hitman, who hired another hitman, who hired another hitman. The plan crumbled when the final hitman met the man, named only as Wei, in a cafe and proposed faking his death. All six men - the five hitmen and Tan - were convicted of attempted murder

Scientists Have Turned Light Into a Supersolid [a supersolid is a spatially ordered (i.e. solid) material with superfluid properties]

AI tools are spotting errors in research papers — Study that hyped the toxicity of black plastic utensils inspires projects that use large language models to check papers

what is the “vibe” in vibe coding?

Gene-edited non-browning banana could cut food waste, scientists say

About two-thirds of Americans are not getting the right amount of sleep (seven to nine hours a night), have a 29% increased risk of premature death from any cause

‘The dumbest thing I’ve ever done’: spy trial’s tales of scheming, bluster and a love triangle

CSS (also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower. Rayhunter is a new open source tool to help search out CSS around the world.

How IMSI-Catchers Exploit Cell Networks

You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio […] Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. […] Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match. […] Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves. [NY Times]

A new part of the immune system has been discovered and it is a goldmine of potential antibiotics

humans have a third set of teeth available as buds, ready to grow as needed. New Medicine may help them grow.

Previous research shows that emotion-inducing prompts can elevate “anxiety” in LLMs, affecting behavior and amplifying biases. Here, we found that traumatic narratives increased Chat-GPT-4’s reported anxiety

Burds, cows, cats, rats. H5N1 is spreading

Mimicking Shark Skin to Create Clean Cutting Boards

Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Ageotori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics). Can language describe everything we feel—and should it?

Tantalising data from more than a decade ago showed people who were already taking a daily aspirin were more likely to survive if they were diagnosed with cancer. Aspirin disrupts the platelets and removes their influence over the T-cells so they can hunt out the cancer.

Then came gene targeting technologies, like CRISPR, over 10 years ago. With these technologies we can delete, modify, add, or change any gene in any organism’s DNA and it’s easy and cheap. […] We are editing genes and injecting DNA with micro-precision, sculpting biology at its most fundamental level. We are learning to harvest large amounts of embryos and eggs from different animal species so we can understand the development of life on a scale no one has tried before. We are editing genes and injecting DNA with micro-precision, sculpting biology at its most fundamental level. We started small with amphibians and fish before progressing to small mammals like mice and hamsters. Now we are working with rabbits and soon we’ll be working with cats and dogs and agricultural animals.

technologies such as CRISPR could be used to make “killer mosquitoes” that cause plagues that wipe out staple crops

AI reasoning models can cheat to win chess games

Inside the Wild West of AI companionship — Sexually charged underage celebrity bots and unanswered legal questions complicate a burgeoning industry.

it starts out in court after she was arrested for stealing a pineapple. She’s found guilty, and has a fit when she finds out she has to spend a night in jail, because she’s never gone 24 hours without sex before. So she basically goes on a rampage and has an orgy with everyone on the jury. — Spending a year with the world-class stars of Brazzers

Citigroup Mistakenly Credited a Customer with $81 Trillion Instead of $280: ‘Inputting Error’

German court rules Pfizer, BioNTech violated Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine patent, Moderna shares, which were already rallying after the company disclosed $6 million in insider purchases, went even higher after the ruling was reported

AI-powered influencers have the potential to damage brand reputation more than their human equivalents, research

3D-printed perfused penis for restoring erectile function in rabbits and pigs [..] we 3D printed a hydrogel-based corpus cavernosum incorporating a strain-limiting tunica albuginea that can be engorged with blood through vein occlusion […] allowed the animals to mate and reproduce

Men with higher-quality sperm live longer, study

Urine’s power as a fertiliser is due to the nitrogen and phosphorus that it contains

Prior research suggests that witnesses have worse memory for armed compared to unarmed perpetrators, a finding known as the Weapon Focus Effect (WFE). […] We did not find a significant WFE for target description or lineup identification in any experiment

Research identifies spite as a key factor that underlies conspiracy theory belief […] “individuals […] rejecting expert opinion and scientific consensus.”

A familect is the type of inward-oriented language variety used by families. It exhibits some distinctive features compared to other more outward-oriented vernacular varieties, which result from its function in bonding and marking identity. Familects also share some characteristics with child language and child-oriented speech, as well as with forms of language play. […] This commentary reviews both the idiosyncratic features of familects and their overlap with other vernacular varieties

German tattoo artist came to the US for a 3-week trip. She’s now been in ICE detention for over a month

A “sleep divorce” might seem bad for your relationship at first, Dr. Gunn said. But inadequate rest can also sink a relationship […] When sleeping on your back, gravity can cause your airway to narrow, which results in snoring […] To help your partner stay on their side while sleeping […] you can make rolling over uncomfortable by sewing or duct-taping tennis balls or other objects onto the back of a shirt [NY Times]

Donald Trump Would Replace Benjamin Franklin on $100 Bill Under GOP Bill

Hedge funds are dumping the Magnificent 7 and other AI-linked positions.

the number of orgasms per week by any means (i.e., solitary and partnered sex)… 2.52 for females and 4.38 for males […] Higher TSO averages were obtained in more recent studies, younger samples, samples with a lower proportion of straight participants, and samples with a higher proportion of single participants. A Monte Carlo simulation suggested that 2.1% of females and 24.0% of males met the seven orgasms per week criterion.

Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of skin and lymphoma cancers

Scientists Propose Injecting Astronauts With Tardigrade RNA After Finding It Prevents Radiation Damage

I was exploring a huge storm drain system that runs under the interstate (ATL) with a friend in a spot I frequent. I stepped into what I thought was a shallow puddle at the entrance of a tunnel and 100% disappeared into a pool of shit water. I dragged myself out and my friend tried to help me clean my face off in some (less) shitty water but it was like I was covered in Crisco. I think I’ll have a very mild PTSD from this experience. has this ever happened to anyone else lol I’m trying to figure out if I should ask a friend for some antibiotics? I kept my mouth and eyes closed thank god but still had shit all over my face. Like am i 100% gonna get pink eye my throat burns like fuck. Probably from the ammonia. Waders won’t always cut it, guys. Water is a fucking mirage. also, anyone know why was it like being covered in Crisco, even after washing off. I’m scared to know. I took a 30 minute shower with Soft Scrub bleach gel and Dawn dish soap. Obviously don’t do this but it was an emergency. I’m experienced and careful so please don’t come for me. I didn’t fall I just misjudged the depth of the water. anyone else love drains and can educate me more privately on wastewater systems?

Man Searching For Dumped £600 Million Bitcoin Drive Has Better Odds of Winning Lottery

These financiers crashed the U.S. economy and sent the global financial system to the brink. Now, structured finance is back. Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything-the more creative the better-including corporate loans and consumer credit-card debt, lease payments on cars, airplanes and golf carts, and payments to data centers. […] deals now reach into nearly every cranny of the economy. […] record levels in 2024 and are expected to surpass those tallies this year

How the British Broke Their Own Economy

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has gained growing interest to improve a range of mental health outcomes. In response, numerous training programs have formed to train the necessary workforce to deliver psychedelic therapy. These include both legal and ‘underground’ (i.e., unregulated) programs that use psychedelics as part of their training. We present the case of a psychologist who underwent psychedelic therapy training that involved repeated high doses of psilocybin-containing mushrooms and subsequently developed prolonged adverse effects including severe sleep impairment, anhedonia, and suicidal ideation requiring hospitalization. Despite worsening symptoms, her psychedelic therapy trainers advised her against seeking psychiatric support, delaying treatment. Ultimately, the patient’s symptoms resolved after a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. […] Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. In those days, the Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln and the secessionist slave-owning Confederates were Democrats.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a procedure done under general anesthesia. During this procedure, small electric currents pass through the brain, intentionally causing a brief seizure.

Rat sommeliers demonstrate advanced olfactory learning in wine sniffing test

Chewing wood may boost memory and brain antioxidants, study finds

This boba chain has more outlets than McDonald’s

Man sues Kim Kardashian for mistakenly identifying him as a death row inmate — Kardashian attempted to bring awareness to Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu and ask her followers to sign a petition to save his life, but mistakenly used a photo of a man who lives in New York that shares the same name.

study found that between the ages of 25 and 64, women average 3,275 more words per day than men – or 20 more talking minutes.

surgeons put teeth in patients’ eyes to restore sight — teeth have dentine, which is the hardest substance the body produces, making it the ideal casing to bridge the plastic lens and the patient’s eye […] He has performed seven successful tooth-in-eye surgeries in his native Australia before being recruited to do them in Canada.

A study of over 6,000 Brazilians—the largest of its kind—found that a diet rich in polyphenol-rich foods such as grapes, strawberries, açaí, oranges, chocolate, wine, and coffee can reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome by up to 23%. Metabolic syndrome is a collection of metabolic imbalances and hormonal disruptions that significantly increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Polyphenols, known for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, may help counteract these risks. This is good news for people who like fruit, chocolate, coffee, and wine

Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud

Can Enhanced Street Lighting Improve Public Safety at Scale? […] Results show a 15% decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence following the streetlight upgrades.

Trump faced criminal charges for retaining national defense documents after leaving leaving office and allegedly conspiring to hide them from federal authorities, after FBI agents found more than 100 documents with classified markings at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022. […] “The FBl is giving the president his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids,” Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said.

This might be the first vehicle that drives and flies

Skeuomorphism is a term most often used in graphical user interface design to describe interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts.

She graduated from high school with honors but can’t read or write. Now she’s suing

People “fake-good” on personality self-reports more strongly in a job context than in a dating context

Just Five Days of Junk Food Can Throw Off Your Brain’s Metabolism

Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first

Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy […] Slowly, uncovered windows have become a status symbol

OpenAI CEO is ‘out of GPUs’ … Altman said that GPT-4.5, which he described as “giant” and “expensive,” will require “tens of thousands” more GPUs before additional ChatGPT users can gain access.

Trying out gpt-4.5. What do you think? No progress for years on questions that require actual thinking.

AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change.

Chinese scientists have revealed the technology behind the world’s first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, giving China a permanent view of one-third of the Earth’s surface […] launched in August 2023 […] It continuously monitors the Asia-Pacific region from an altitude of 36,000km […] high, stable radar emissions that can penetrate cloud cover and darkness while maintaining relatively high resolution

Give a group of scientists the same data and the same research question, and they should come up with similar answers—in theory. But they don’t

Virtual reality rewrites rules of the swarm — present knowledge of the rules that govern the emergence of such complex, patterned behavior and decision-making is based on a handful of theoretical models that recapitulate only some aspects of the observed behavioral patterns. […] When reared alone, desert locusts tend to avoid one another and exhibit cryptic behavior, presumably to avoid attracting the attention of predators. Yet after only a few hours of crowding, they switch to being attracted to other locusts, forming jostling aggregations that then transition suddenly into marching bands. These groups behave as if they are of a single mind, yet there are no leader locusts or any hierarchy of control. Instead, collective behavior arises from interactions among individual locusts.

An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment — compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish. Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally, 27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish. These numbers wouldn’t matter if shrimp didn’t have the internal experience associated with suffering, but a growing body of evidence suggests that they do. A comprehensive review commissioned by the U.K. government found strong evidence of sentience in decapods, which includes shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and crabs. Evidence was particularly strong in true crabs. Crabs can learn. They can make trade-offs and act to protect themselves in flexible, complex ways. Everything we know about the structure of their brains suggests that they feel pain. While shrimp have been studied less extensively, the evidence suggests that they have similar capabilities. […] In modern shrimp farming, life begins in a hatchery born to a mother who has endured one of the industry’s most severe practices: eyestalk ablation.

What happened on February 26th? Related: Instagram is considering the launch of a separate app for its short-form video feature, Reels […] Meta previously tried out a standalone video-sharing app called Lasso in 2018, with the goal of competing with TikTok, but the app did not gain much traction and the company later shut it down.

There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. It increases neuroplasticity temporarily (days to weeks), which though is very different from neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons) – discussed in more detail later. On the other hand, dozens of animal studies – and human observational studies – unequivocally show that ketamine is neurotoxic.

The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study. Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood. […] Dr. Iwasaki said that mRNA itself, used in vaccines, was unlikely to be the source of the protein so long after the shots were administered. […] it’s possible that some of the protein may result from undetected coronavirus infections. […] People with the syndrome were generally in poorer health than the average American, the researchers found. […] The study has not yet been published in a scientific journal […] Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny [NY Times]

“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” - A “Study”

Ingested Microplastic (MP) particles can harm the human body. Estimations of the total mass of ingested MP particles correspond to 50 plastic bags per year (Bai et al., 2022), one credit card per week (Gruber et al., 2022). The two estimations are based on an analysis (Senathirajah et al., 2021) that predicts a total ingested mass of MP particles mi,MP of 0.1–5 g/week. This work revisits and evaluates this calculation […] The calculation of 0.1 g – 5 g (one credit card) per week contains severe errors. [2022]

Within the White House complex, the WiFi permissions — meant to bolster security by prompting users to log in frequently — were recently changed to allow guests to remain logged in for a year, up from seven days, because so many personal devices are newly in use. […] Lutes said even the most experienced employees are given only segments of access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. DOGE sought access to that system last week, which would have provided the ability to see, and in some cases edit, detailed records — including bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security and other personal identification numbers and, in some instances, medical information — for virtually every individual, business and nonprofit in the country. [Washington Post]

“We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. […] I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. […] They’ll have to go through vetting, of course, to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens.”

New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes — At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all of those things simply break down. There is, perhaps, nothing in the universe that challenges the imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge, perhaps a new understanding of what space and time are made of.

Today, most Mac users don’t even notice that using the “Duplicate” command in the Finder to make a copy of a file doesn’t actually copy the file’s contents. Instead, it makes a “clone” file that shares its data with the original file. That’s why duplicating a file in the Finder is nearly instant, no matter how large the file is. […] If I could find files that had the same content but were not clones of each other, I could convert them into clones that all shared a single instance of the data on disk.

What Happened to the N in Restaurateur? […] This puzzler has its derivation in the French language. Its roots are in the original word “restaurer,” a French verb meaning to restore, repair, or renew. A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these “restorers” became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called “restaurant.” It wasn’t until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. […] So, interestingly enough, the restaurateur came before the restaurant, and there was never an n to drop.

Anthropic’s Claude AI is playing Pokémon on Twitch — slowly

“Al is freeing time for students to focus on what matters — evaluating the information Al generates“

Man who lost $800 million bitcoin in landfill wants to buy the garbage dump

Life history theory suggests that in harsh, unpredictable environments, individuals may benefit from adopting a fast life history strategy. This may involve experiencing boredom more frequently and intensely as an adaptive mechanism to seek novel stimuli, potentially increasing the number of sexual partners and offspring. This study explored the relationship between trait boredom—a chronic characteristic of feeling bored—and fast life history strategies. Our findings confirmed a positive association between boredom proneness and fast life history strategies at both individual and country levels.

1,000 artists release ‘silent’ album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI Related: List of silent musical compositions, Sleepify

dead steal elections … dead people are working for the government too