I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider’s Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’ “Obviously this is a great fit for abusers,” an expert on domestic violence and cybersecurity said.

Hackers typically target victims with Qakbot by sending them spam emails containing malicious attachments or links. As soon as a victim downloads the attachment or clicks the link, Qakbot infects their computer, which then becomes part of a botnet — or a network of infected computers controlled remotely by hackers. From there, bad actors can install additional malware on their victims’ devices, such as ransomware. To take down the network, the FBI routed Qakbot through FBI-controlled servers

Most of My Instagram Ads Are for Drugs, Stolen Credit Cards, Hacked Accounts, Counterfeit Money, and Weapons — The ads are a window into a blatantly illegal underground economy that Meta is not only failing to moderate, but is actively profiting from and injecting into users’ feeds. More: Instagram Throttles 404 Media Investigation Into Drug Ads on Instagram

Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis.

The Art of Lying — A 51-year-old man I will call “Mr. Pinocchio” had a strange problem. When he tried to tell a lie, he often passed out and had convulsions. In essence, he became a kind of Pinocchio, the fictional puppet whose nose grew with every fib. For the patient, the consequences were all too real: he was a high-ranking official in the European Economic Community (since replaced by the European Union), and his negotiating partners could tell immediately when he was bending the truth. His condition, a symptom of a rare form of epilepsy, was not only dangerous, it was bad for his career. Doctors at the University Hospitals of Strasbourg in France discovered that the root of the problem was a tumor about the size of a walnut. The tumor was probably increasing the excitability of a brain region involved in emotions; when Mr. Pinocchio lied, this excitability caused a structure called the amygdala to trigger seizures. Once the tumor was removed, the fits stopped, and he was able to resume his duties.

The devious art of lying by telling the truth

McKinsey unveils its own generative AI tool for employees: Lilli

Is quantum computing hype or almost here?

Fighting fire with fire (and drones)

Chronic sleep deprivation — when you consistently get less rest than what you require — has more pernicious effects. Memory and learning suffer even more: Sleep is when the brain consolidates information after all. Blood pressure and heart rate tick higher. Immune functions fall. Metabolism slows, leading to weight gain. Inflammation rises. Brain cells die from overwork. All of these physiological effects seem to lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia. […] In a 2021 study, subjects slept an average of 5.3 hours for ten nights and then were given a week to sleep as long as they liked. While they felt normal after that week of unrestricted sleep, their cognitive function did not totally return to baseline levels before their sleep deprivation. […] if a person who needs eight hours of rest per night only gets five hours on a particular night, it will take six days of 8.5 hours of sleep to “repay” those three lost hours.

Georgia man arrested for stealing neighbor’s entire front porch

Most Americans have very little choice but to provide their personal information to credit bureaus. Hackers have found a way into that data supply chain, and are advertising access in group chats used by criminals.

Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale — “For some reason adding ‘hands on hips’ to the prompt completely breaks this [model]. Generates just the balls with no penis 100% of the time. What a shame,” one user commented on the model.

The social and psychological characteristics of individuals who hoard physical items are quite well understood, however very little is known about the psychological characteristics of those who hoard digital items […] analyses of email deletion and archiving behaviours in organisations show that users do not manage digital information in an effective way. They typically keep half of the emails they receive and reply to about a third of them (e.g. Dabbish, Kraut, Fussell, & Kiesler, 2005); with very few people engaging in proactive ‘clean-up’ of that stored information. […] As digital hoarding rises, businesses find it more difficult to extract value from the stored information and the risks associated with that information grow significantly […] Digital hoarding was significantly higher in employees who identified as having ‘data protection responsibilities’

Prohibition worked better than you think — America’s anti-alcohol experiment cut down on drinking and drinking-related deaths — and it may have reduced crime and violence overall. […] as Prohibition reduced drinking, it also reduced alcohol-induced violence, like domestic abuse. So the increase in organized crime may have been offset by a drop in more common, and less publicly visible, types of violence driven by alcohol. […] There are 88,000 deaths linked to alcohol each year — more than drug overdose deaths, car crash deaths, or deaths from gun violence. […] In modern times, the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence estimated alcohol is a factor in 40 percent of violent crimes, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that alcohol contributed to 47 percent of homicides.

1 in 5 women report mistreatment from medical staff during pregnancy

Build a business, not an audience

How to sabotage your salary negotiation efforts before you even start

Time of day perception in paintings

2012 was a “tipping-point” year

Texas electricity prices soar 6,000 percent as a fresh heat wave is expected to shatter records – Spot electricity prices jumped to $4,750 per megawatt-hour from the average of $75

What everyone agrees on is that the environment’s influence on our genes, or epigenetics, has played a large role in the rise of allergies, as does the makeup of our nose, gut and skin microbiomes. In the end, it appears, we are at least partially doing this to ourselves. Modern living is likely at the root of the recent rise in allergies.

excessive avoidance of feared situations prevents learning through exposure […] Anxious individuals shift emotion control from lateral frontal pole to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

The man who can talk backwards

Some called Tether the central bank of crypto. […] I’d been hearing rumors about illicit uses of Tether […]but pig butchering was the most concrete example I found. People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they’d been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams. […] Most pig-butchering operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They’d lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they’d be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. They described abuses that were worse than I could have imagined. Workers who missed quotas were beaten, starved, made to hit one another. One said he’d seen people forcibly injected with methamphetamine to increase productivity. Two others said they’d seen workers murdered, with the deaths passed off as suicides. They said the bosses would buy and sell captive laborers like livestock.

Major U.S. energy org targeted in QR code phishing attack

We Spent $1,500,000 on Ads Without Getting a Single Customer

While the average person might turn to Instagram to brag about their wealth, the mega-rich can afford to boast on “Rich Kids,” an exclusive photo sharing network. For $1,000 a month on Rich Kids, you’re guaranteed to only see photos from other wealthy patrons.

Spotify Annoyed by People Uploading Hours of White Noise — Some podcasters are making as much as $18,000 a month through ads placed in these episodes of crashing waves or recordings of fans blowing air

Child influencers in Illinois can now sue their parents

Netflix is Responsible for 15% of Global Internet Traffic

3 ways AI is transforming music

One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. that’s not the case anymore.

The shift to electronic medical reimbursements gave rise to payment processing companies demanding a 1.5% to 5% fee every time a doctor gets paid by insurers. The government banned such fees — until a company lobbyist got involved. […]With more than $2 trillion a year of medical claims paid electronically, these fees likely add up to billions of dollars that could be spent on care but instead are going to insurers and middlemen.

Falsely accused? Anger and silence are the two worst reactions

Why did people in the past look so much older?

Beer-loving raccoons are ‘trashing homes and eating pets’ in Germany and Two intoxicated US tourists ‘trapped’ overnight up the Eiffel Tower

Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song by Reading Brain Signals of Listeners The audio sounds like it’s being played underwater. [study]

Font Size Can ‘Nudge’ Customers Toward Healthier Food Choices

Nvidia’s H100 GPU is the most sought-after resource in the tech industry right now, thanks to the role it’s playing in powering the generative AI boom. […] Saudi Arabia has bought at least 3,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips — a $40,000 processor

‘Bored Apes’ investors sue Sotheby’s, Paris Hilton and others as NFT prices collapse

Trump, who currently holds $2.8 million in ETH, earned $4.87 million in licensing fees from his NFT collection

In an explosive new lawsuit, shutterbug Jacob Beam says his entire life has gone down the tubes thanks to Libbie Mugrabi—who reportedly once had a physical altercation with ex-husband David Mugrabi over a $500,000 Keith Haring sculpture—and that he now works as a part-time food deliveryman while attempting to get past the “psychological and emotional issues caused by [the] horrific ordeal he has undergone.”

Spinoza: Life and Legacy

ChatGPT produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time

Common Alzheimer’s disease gene may have helped our ancestors have more kids

By his estimates, Alex has performed at least six separate sex acts in robotaxis

A WWII Propaganda Campaign Popularized the Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark

A journey inside Mexico’s underground vanilla economy

We are drowning in a sea of irrelevance: so much information that we can no longer make sense of it. In a world of decontex- tualized shards of content, each with an increasingly short shelf life, what does free and open communication mean? To grapple with this, one common heuristic is to look to the source of informa- tion as a guide as to its importance or veracity. But in an Internet without information gatekeepers—for good and ill—this heuristic itself has a key flaw: who is the gatekeeper of the gatekeepers in a fully-decentralized online ecosystem?

how geckos stick to walls. The answer is van der Waals forces

“5 stages of grief” is a myth — and knowing that helps us better cope with loss

Google and Universal Music Discuss Making an AI Tool to Replicate Artists’ Voices

Bots are better than humans at cracking ‘Are you a robot?’ Captcha tests, study finds

The U.S. spends 17.8 percent of GDP on health care, nearly twice as much as the average OECD country. Health spending per person in America is almost twice as high as in the next most expensive country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea. […] longevity: according to the UN, the U.S. ranks No. 70 out of 227 sovereign or semi-sovereign state entities. […] lower longevity has implications for many other statistics, such as infant mortality; America’s ranking among developed countries is abysmal: “U.S. maternal mortality in 2020 was over 3 times the rate in most of the other high-income countries.” So much for the pro-life charade of the religious right. — Why America is going backward

A transgender woman has gone to court alleging that her ex-boyfriend stole her surgically removed genitals and is demanding that he return them.

we are more likely to make rational decisions when decision-making on the behalf of others than for ourselves

The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms — like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon’s policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission. The use of these tools in tandem has allowed the books to rise near the top of Amazon search results and sometimes garner Amazon endorsements such as “#1 Travel Guide on Alaska.” A recent Amazon search for the phrase “Paris Travel Guide 2023,” for example, yielded dozens of guides with that exact title. One, whose author is listed as Stuart Hartley, boasts, ungrammatically, that it is “Everything you Need to Know Before Plan a Trip to Paris.”

tonight while you sleep, something amazing will happen within your brain. Your neurons will go quiet. A few seconds later, blood will flow out of your head. Then, a watery liquid called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) will flow in, washing through your brain in rhythmic, pulsing waves.

Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican American DJ who is credited for the creation of hip hop music in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s.

It appears Australia is truly on its way to becoming a cashless society, with the number of notes in circulation officially declining for the first time since dollars and cents were introduced in 1966.

The Billionaire Who Controls Your Medical Records — The company dress code is: “When there are visitors, you must wear clothes.”

“One of the security guards was saying to the guy, ‘Dude, you cannot be naked in here,’” she recalled. “The guy was all confused and upset that he couldn’t be naked in the theater … he was getting all worked up.” […] Some people seem to have forgotten how to go to the movies, with widespread reports of drunken outbursts, rampant cellphone use and exhibitionism.

I Went to 50 Different Dentists and Almost All of Them Gave Me a Different Diagnosis

The “full Ginsburg” is a term used in American politics to refer to a person who appears on all five American major Sunday morning talk shows on the same day. The term is named for William H. Ginsburg, the lawyer for Monica Lewinsky during the sexual conduct scandal involving President Bill Clinton. Ginsburg was the first person to accomplish this feat, on February 1, 1998.

Elon Musk Will Train His AI Project Using Your Tweets

Not enough films feature dykes talking about fisting

A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.

The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency’s own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. […] the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient […] Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show. […] Another serious cancer risk associated with the boat fuel ingredient […] For every 100 people who ate fish raised in water contaminated with that same product over a lifetime, seven would be expected to develop cancer.

A majority of American adults report having used sex toys, which, by design, interact with intimate and permeable body parts yet have not been subject to sufficient risk assessment or management. Physical and chemical data are presented examining potential risks associated with four types of currently available sex toys: anal toy, beads, dual vibrator, and external vibrator. […] After extraction, phthalates known to be endocrine disruptors were present in all tested sex toys at levels exceeding hazard warnings.

Most cars still cost more to charge than to fill up with gas

labyrinth and maze

How a doctor’s two-decade quest to grow the penis is leaving some men desperate and disfigured

Are blind individuals immune to bodily illusions? Somatic rubber hand illusion in the blind revisited

Marx is more than just a competitive gun-disarmer and martial artist. He is also a former Marine, a self-proclaimed exorcist, and an author and filmmaker. He also helped launch the Skull Games, a privatized intelligence outfit that purports to hunt pedophiles, sex traffickers, and other “demonic activity” using a blend of sock-puppet social media accounts and commercial surveillance tools — including face recognition software.

Forget subtitles: YouTube now dubs videos with AI-generated voices

10 Cities With Their Own Psychological Disorders — Less well known, Lima Syndrome describes the exact opposite of Stockholm Syndrome—that is, the captors develop positive attachments to their hostages.

— Scientists are finding ways to help people sober up faster and feel fewer bad effects

The reshuffling of neurons during fruit fly metamorphosis suggests that larval memories don’t persist in adults

In The Future, Death Will Be Different

Knife Throwing Machine [Accuracy Testing Trick Shots]

38-year-old Florida manatee dies after ‘high-intensity’ sex with brother

Reverse cowgirl: the world’s most dangerous sexual position

People see themselves differently from how they see others. They are immersed in their own sensations, emotions, and cognitions at the same time that their experience of others is dominated by what can be observed externally. This basic asymmetry has broad consequences. It leads people to judge themselves and their own behavior differently from how they judge others and those others’ behavior. Often, those differences produce disagreement and conflict. Understanding the psychological basis of those differences may help mitigate some of their negative effects. [PDF]

Mind-reading machines are coming — how can we keep them in check?

Meta’s Reality Labs, which develops virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, has lost more than $21 billion since 2022

Every major subscription streaming company has increased its prices in the past year in an effort to address Wall Street’s push for profits. The average consumer is willing to pay roughly $42 monthly for streaming services, according to a recent survey.

The secret economics of the Birkin bag

Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons

Between psychopathy and deviant socialization: A close look at the mafia men

“I met Iggy Pop at Max’s Kansas City in 1970 or 1971,” recalled David Bowie. “Me, Iggy and Lou Reed at one table with absolutely nothing to say to each other, just looking at each other’s eye makeup.” William Burroughs smoking in a corner with Allen Ginsberg. Twiggy and Mick Jagger and Dennis Hopper — dancing to live performances upstairs like the Velvet Underground (performing at Max’s during their last days), Bob Marley or a young Bruce Springsteen on acoustic guitar.

Mind Grenade

Vintage Las Vegas

Doctors reattach boy’s head after car accident thanks to ‘amazing’ surgery

Want fewer car accidents? Remove traffic signals and road signs

An alleged killer joined a Facebook group for passing on kids’ items to find pregnant mothers and possibly kidnap them, according to a search warrant. Some moms in the group say neither the FBI nor Meta informed them that their data was caught up in a murder investigation.

Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement, digging through license plate databases with billions of records. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date.

Increased exercise or daily steps were associated with better sleep quality (for example, faster sleep onset and less time awake in bed), especially in countries like the U.S. and Finland.

Fully AI-Generated Influencers Are Getting Thousands of Reactions Per Thirst Trap

Nearly six years after his mysterious disappearance, on September 4th, 2019, xkcdHatGuy emerged from oblivion, looking older but with his unmistakable voice intact

facekinis

The man who won the lottery 14 times — How a rogue Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery and won millions of dollars around the world.

Half of U.S. beaches are contaminated with poop

Something in space has been lighting up every 22 minutes since 1988 We have no idea what kind of physics or what kind of objects can power that.

advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books

Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors

Book of the Civilized Man (13th century) (“Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate,” “sit up straight”, “do not put your elbows on the table”)

The Greater Fool Theory

German ‘king’ jailed after court refuses him immunity as ‘head of state’

Phone numbers for airlines listed on Google directed to scammers

The United States Air Force is investigating a company that’s purchased $800 million of land near Travis Air Force Base, one of the most critical military bases in the U.S. […] Public records show the company “Flannery Associates LLC” began purchasing land around the military base in 2018. […] Now literally three sides of that base are totally controlled by the Flannery group […] “Where did they get the money where they could pay five to ten times the normal value that others would pay for this farmland?” Even after eight months of investigation, Garamendi says federal authorities are still struggling to get those answers. “To this day we don’t know where these people are coming from”

‘ChatGPT’s evil twin’ WormGPT is devoid of morals and just €60 a month on the darkweb

AI That Teaches Other AI

One million US deaths in 2020 and 1.1 million US deaths in 2021 would have been averted if the United States had the mortality rates of other wealthy nations. About half of these missing Americans died before age 65. The number of excess US deaths relative to peers is unprecedented in modern times, at least since the 1930s. These excess US deaths were a result of a decades-long divergence in mortality from other wealthy nations, beginning in the 1980s, and were further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Masters of the Bubbleverse Secretive hedge fund Tiger Global changed the rules on tech investing. Then it all went bad. […] Tiger Global partner Scott Shleifer spent $122.7 million for Donald Trump’s former Palm Beach estate after looking at the house for 15 minutes.

Goldman Sachs has lost over a billion dollars, mostly because of the Apple Card

‘Steve Jobs’ is an Italian company — and Apple can’t do anything about it

Las Vegas’ $2.3 Billion LED Sphere Looked Better in Renderings — the $2.3 billion structure is really only good at displaying spherical objects like planets, gigantic basketballs or jack-o-lanterns

Paper Airplane Tips

Humans are pumping out so much groundwater that it’s changing Earth’s tilt

GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better. GPT-4 (March 2023) was very good at identifying prime numbers (accuracy 97.6%) but GPT-4 (June 2023) was very poor on these same questions (accuracy 2.4%).

You search Delta Air Lines’ website … the Phoenix-Atlanta flights on the day before the holiday are sold out. Then you see a Delta flight to Orlando, Florida, from Phoenix for $260 per passenger in basic economy with a layover in Atlanta. You decide to book the flight and leave the plane in Atlanta instead of flying to Orlando. This travel hack is called skiplagging. Some passengers use it to save money when the longer route is cheaper than the desired destination.

Teenager detained at Florida airport and accused of ‘skiplagging’ travel hack

VanMoof — the independent e-bike maker that once bragged about being the “most funded e-bike company in the world” — has been declared bankrupt in the Netherlands.

Biotech startup aims to make lab-grown human eggs […] The experimental technology could help women who have lost their eggs to cancer treatment, women who have never been able to produce healthy eggs and women whose eggs are no longer viable because of their age. IVG would enable these women to have their own genetically related babies at any age. That’s because induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from just a single cell from anyone’s skin or blood. So these lab-grown eggs would have that person’s DNA.

loss of smell — known as hyposmia — has emerged as an early indicator of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s

With blackouts imposed across the United Kingdom in a bid to keep German bombers at bay, so came the opportunity for criminals to commit their dark deeds in almost perfect darkness. But did crime levels increase during the Second World War?

Take PinkyDoll, a TikToker with skyrocketing views, who is now known for her NPC streaming performances on the app. Often using the catchphrases, “Ice cream so good” and “Yes, yes, yes!” […] PinkyDoll reportedly makes anything from $2,000 to 3,000 per stream [more]

Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever

Far from being worth trillions of dollars, the Metaverse turned out to be worth absolutely bupkus. It’s not even that the platform lagged behind expectations or was slow to become popular. There wasn’t anyone visiting the Metaverse at all. […] one of the features designed to reward users in Meta’s flagship product Horizon Worlds produced no more than $470 in revenue globally. […] McKinsey claimed that the Metaverse would bring businesses $5 trillion in value. Citi valued it at no less than $13 trillion.

researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds. While the study offers no insight into how our brains might be processing silence, the results suggest that people perceive silence as its own type of “sound,” not just as a gap between noises.

Exposing C-section babies to vaginal fluid boosts their development

aspartame is a ‘possible carcinogen.’ The FDA disagrees

New research puts age of universe at 26.7 billion years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

If 10 percent of the brain is normally used, then damage to other areas should not impair performance. Instead, there is almost no area of the brain that can be damaged without loss of abilities. Even slight damage to small areas of the brain can have profound effects. Brain scans have shown that no matter what one is doing, all brain areas are always active.

Parrots Are Taking Over the World Today at least 60 of the world’s 380 or so parrot species have a breeding population in a country outside their natural geographical range. All are by-products of the pet trade and animal trafficking around the world. Because they’re parrots, they’re smart, adaptable, creative and loud.

Bird nests made from anti-bird spikes

Cat vs snake More: How fast does a snake move during a strike? A 2016 study found that the average strike lasts between 44 and 70 milliseconds … compare it to the the 200 milliseconds it takes you just to blink your eye. A snake can strike faster than we can move ANY part of our bodies. In fact, if you could attain snake super speed, you would simply black out. … The study found that snakes experience forces up to 30G, 30 times the force of gravity when striking their prey. For human comparison, even the most seasoned fighter pilots would lose limb control around 8G, and experience complete black out shortly after reaching 10G.

Welcome to the universe of Hobby Horses

For our first ever production, Claire Hentschker and I attempted to reduce the overly-dimensional film “Avatar 2: Way of the Water” into a single dimension.

NPC streaming

We explored the psychology of those who believe in manifestation: the ability to cosmically attract success in life through positive self-talk, visualization, and symbolic actions […] Those who scored higher on the [Manifestation Scale] perceived themselves as more successful, had stronger aspirations for success, and believed they were more likely to achieve future success. They were also more likely to be drawn to risky investments, have experienced bankruptcy

New Oxford study sheds light on the origin of animals — Animals first occur in the fossil record around 574 million years ago. Their arrival appears as a sudden ‘explosion’ in rocks from the Cambrian period (539 million years ago to 485 million years ago) and seems to counter the typically gradual pace of evolutionary change. Many scientists (including Darwin himself) believe that the first animals actually evolved long before the Cambrian period, but they cannot explain why they are missing from the fossil record.

A recent UK government report suggested that between 11 and 15 percent of consumer electronics reviews on e-commerce platforms are fake — How to Spot Fake Reviews on Amazon

She believes scammers cloned her daughter’s voice in a fake kidnapping

A biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA

To acquire a Vision Pro, customers must first schedule a fitting appointment. A special machine and an iPhone app will scan the user’s head so Apple can determine the proper headband and light seal size. Users with glasses must provide the company with prescription data to ensure the headset includes appropriate lenses. Although Apple will sell the Vision Pro at all 270 US Apple Stores, demo stations will initially only be available in major regions like New York or Los Angeles. Furthermore, online purchases will not become available until 2025.

If you’re printing something on actual paper, there’s a good chance it’s important, like a tax form or a job contract. But popular printing products and services won’t promise not to read it. In fact, they won’t even promise not to share it with outside marketing firms.

Twitter rival Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone.

Death from drinking coconut water — The coconut was preshaved, with visible endosperm (coconut meat) at the top for easy access to the carpels (holes) and the coconut water. A straw was included and used for puncturing the coconut at the time of consumption. Recommended storage was at 4°C–5°C in the refrigerator, but the coconut had been kept on the kitchen table for 1 month after purchase. Approximately 3 hours after drinking the coconut water, the patient developed sweating, nausea, and vomiting.

Farmer owes $82,000 in contract dispute over use of a ‘thumbs-up’ emoji […] instead of “ok”, “yup” or “looks good.”

The number of people visiting ChatGPT’s website was down 10 percent worldwide in June

In 19th-century Philadelphia, an anatomist dissected and mounted a human nervous system. Now researchers are trying to figure out whose remains are stretched out in a glass case.

It may now be easier to get pregnant using the sperm of a deceased loved one. The practice is controversial—but it’s not inherently wrong.

Psychedelics are increasingly recognised for their therapeutic potential and ability to re-orient belief structures. However, the potential they carry for inducing false insights and beliefs has thus far been under-considered.

What Colors Can Deer See? […] red and orange look gray while blue is easy to spot.

According to a University of Chicago study [PDF], men claim to have sex 66.5 times a year, while women claim to have sex 57.2 times a year. That might be because men traditionally overreport their sexual activity while women traditionally underreport theirs. […] Teenage girls are 6.5 percent more sexually active than teenage boys.

Reflecting on my own life, I’ve noticed that most of the things that really went off-track were indeed consequences of incremental neglect and numerous small yet poor choices. I didn’t become addicted to drugs overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I prioritized momentary pleasure over health and safety. I didn’t become overweight overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I opted for immediate gratification over long-term health. I didn’t ruin relationships overnight. It happened over hundreds of moments where I chose comfort over confronting difficult conversations, admitting my mistakes, or even just acknowledging that someone was better than me at something. From these experiences, I’ve realized that avoiding bad habits is just as important as cultivating good habits.

One night of total sleep deprivation shown to have antidepressant effect for some people

People spend much of their free time engaging with narrative fiction. Research shows that, like real-life friends, fictional characters can sometimes influence individuals’ attitudes, behaviors, and self-beliefs. Moreover, for certain individuals, fictional characters can stand in for real-life friends by providing the experience of belonging. […] results suggest that lonelier individuals may turn to fictional characters to meet belongingness needs

If You’re Looking for Love, Just Let It Go

the hidden labor that goes into artificial intelligence […] in Nairobi […] The office specializes in a task called annotation, essentially using human labor to parse images that confuse the algorithms and hopefully making systems better in the process. […] The move from content moderation to AI annotation isn’t all bad. Annotation work is boring, but it’s not traumatic the way moderation can be; you’re working with traffic photos and product imagery instead of severed heads. Annotation also doesn’t have the policy uncertainty of moderation, where managerial hypocrisy often leaves contractors with an impossible job. If the pay were better, annotation wouldn’t necessarily be a bad job. But the pay isn’t better.

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they’re nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

another ByteDance-owned app has been quietly making inroads in select markets around the world. Launched in 2020, the music streaming app Resso is currently available in three major markets — India, Brazil, and Indonesia — and has grown into a dark-horse challenger to Spotify.

Was FTX A Ponzi Scheme From The Beginning?

Proof That “One of the Parallel Worlds Cannot Be Extremely Different from the Other”

News is bad for your health. It leads to fear and aggression, and hinders your creativity and ability to think deeply. The solution? Stop consuming it altogether.

The global population milestone of 8 billion represents nearly 7% ofthe total number of people who have ever lived on Earth.

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence

The first fully A.I.-generated drug enters clinical trials in human patients

The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications. And: AI is killing the old web

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a major antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of “leverag[ing] its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services and punish those who don’t”

Smartwatches can detect Parkinson’s years before diagnosis

Shopping Carts Can Tell If You Have a Heart Condition

foods with shorter (vs. longer) brand names are perceived as healthier, and consumers prefer such foods.

James Lewis and James Springer, identical twins adopted by separate families […] Both Jims, it transpired, had worked as deputy sheriffs, and had done stints at McDonald’s and at petrol stations; they’d both taken holidays at Pass-a-Grille beach in Florida, driving there in their light-blue Chevrolets. Each had dogs called Toy and brothers called Larry, and they’d married and divorced women called Linda, then married Bettys. They’d called their first sons James Alan/Allan. Both were good at maths and bad at spelling, loved carpentry, chewed their nails, chain-smoked Salem and drank Miller Lite beer. Both had haemorrhoids, started experiencing migraines at 18, gained 10 lb in their early 30s, and had similar heart problems and sleep patterns. […] much has changed in our understanding of genetics since the human genome was sequenced in 2003. It was discovered that we have far fewer genes than anticipated (around 20,000, rather than the anticipated 100,000), and that there are very few genes ‘for’ anything. A complex property such as intelligence, for example, involves a network of more than 1,000 genes, interacting with the environment.

MIT engineers develop “blackest black” material to date […] The results showed that the material absorbed at least 99.995 percent of incoming light, from every angle. In other words, it reflected 10 times less light than all other superblack materials, including Vantablack.

Erewhon […] The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence

Microscopic ‘Louis Vuitton’ bag created by art collective MSCHF for Pharrell Williams sells for more than $60,000