Some Guy Bought the Flatiron Building and Didn’t Pay for It

Meta wants EU users to apply for permission to opt out of data collection. Instead of a yes/no consent, Meta users will fill out a form and include justification.

Meta brings in a DJ to play dance music in one of its cafes as the company urges workers to return to the office

Authenticity refers to behaving in a manner that aligns with one’s true self. The true self, though, is positive. From a self-enhancement standpoint, people exaggerate their strengths and overlook their shortcomings,forming positively-distorted views of themselves.

Figuring out a lie has never been easier: forget body language or how convincing the message is, just listen to how detailed and rich the story is.

Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood. In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries. We found that poor mating performance was in high occurrence, with about one in four participants scoring low in this dimension, and more than 57% facing difficulties in starting and/or keeping a relationship. Men and women did not differ in their mating performance scores, but there was a small yet significant effect of age, with older participants indicating higher mating performance. nearly 13% of the participants indicated that they were involuntarily single, which accounted for about one-third of the singles in the sample. […] more than 15% of the participants indicated that they were voluntarily single

A core focus of the entire field of synthetic biology is to be able to design new genetic circuits in order to be able to program cells to accomplish new goals. […] A stunning example of this is the design of a cell-scale biosynthetic pathway in baker’s yeast to produce scopolamine—a medicinally valuable chemical that acts as a neurotransmitter inhibitor.

Harvard geneticists create an organism that is immune to all viruses

Association Between Daily Alcohol Intake and Risk of All-Cause Mortality […] meta-analysis of 107 cohort studies involving more than 4.8 million participants found no significant reductions in risk of all-cause mortality for drinkers who drank less than 25 g of ethanol per day (about 2 Canadian standard drinks) compared with lifetime nondrinkers […] significantly increased risk of all-cause mortality among female drinkers who drank 25 or more grams per day and among male drinkers who drank 45 or more grams per day.

Dumb phones are on the rise in the U.S. as Gen Z looks to limit screen time — Companies like HMD Global, the maker of Nokia phones, continue to sell millions of mobile devices similar to those used in the early 2000s.

There’s no doubt that we are polluting the planet. In order to find out how these pollutants might be affecting our own bodies, we need to work out how we are exposed to them. Which chemicals are we inhaling, eating, and digesting? And how much? Enter the field of exposomics. The term “exposome” was first coined a couple of decades ago. The idea is that it should capture all the things we are exposed to that might affect our health, whether we encounter them in our diets or in our environment. We already know that our genomes help determine our risk of various diseases, but that’s only part of the story. The exposome should help fill the gaps. As you might expect, this is a huge field that covers everything from the effect of a pregnant person’s diet on a fetus to the impact of structural racism on people’s health. But let’s focus on one of the trickier areas of study—understanding our exposure to pollutants. […] Once a chemical gets into your body, it doesn’t stay in its original form for very long. It might get broken down by enzymes in your liver or acids in your stomach, for example. Scientists have learned which breakdown products to look for to estimate a person’s exposure to lots of chemicals, but not all of them.

New York City Is Building a Wall of Oysters to Fend Off Floods

A new Panthera study published today in Landscape Ecology has found that pumas might utilize a sly hunting strategy known as ‘garden to hunt,’ by which puma kills fertilize or deposit nutrients in soil that increase plant quality and attract ungulates to feed in select habitat conducive to future stalk-and-ambush puma hunting.

ChatGPT is a parrot repeating what it saw on the internet with additional Bullshit-generation capabilities. There is no way a model trained simply on the objective of learning how the language __looks like__ is able to do much more than repeat information (in a way aligned to user query) that it already saw during training as it has little to none understanding of the contents. […] The fact that OpenAI allegedly tried to hire people to play with and explain in extensive detail how to solve various problems only proves that simply making a model bigger does not mean it becomes smarter. […] I just refused a job at #OpenAI. The job would consist in working 40 hours a week solving python puzzles, explaining my reasoning through extensive commentary, in such a way that the machine can, by imitation, learn how to reason. ChatGPT is way less independent than people think.

How to make Asteroids game with GPT-4

Can water solve a maze?

an ad that Andy Warhol placed in the Feb. 24, 1966, “Village Voice”

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

Study describes new ‘safe’ technique for producing babies of the desired sex […] According to the study, 59 couples in this group desired female offspring and the technique resulted in 79.1% (231/292) female embryos. This resulted in the birth of 16 girls without any abnormalities. […] Forty-six couples desiring male offspring ended up with 79.6% male embryos (223/280), resulting in the birth of 13 healthy baby boys.

high IQ associated with fewer psychopathology symptoms

For USA Today parent company Gannett, social media success has little to do with the news. Two of its editorial franchises, Humankind and Problem Solved, have seen growth in their social reach across TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where the brands have prioritized vertical video formats. There, the media company has used the viewership to generate advertising revenue and build awareness of the USA Today brand. [via EEAN]

Genomic analyses of Beethoven’s hair reveals “an extra-pair paternity event” in his ancestry [Extra-pair paternity is the result of copulation between a female and a male other than her social partner.]

A Norwegian man who had his own genitals, nipple and leg amputated appeared in a U.K. court this week accused of livestreaming the castration of other men on his “eunuch maker” website. He and eight other men were said to be part of a subculture of genital “nullification,” in which men willingly have their genitals removed to become “Nullos.”

The source wildly speculated, “There is someone who is either s–tting in the aisle, or surreptitiously dumping defecation that they smuggled into the theater.” — Fan poops in aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at Broadway show

Don’t be dazzled by generative AI’s creative charm! Predictive AI, though less flashy, remains crucial for solving real-world challenges and unleashing AI’s true potential.

An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models — Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.

New research shows we can only accurately identify AI writers about 50% of the time

Simple Wi-Fi routers can be used to detect and perceive the poses and positions of humans and map their bodies clearly in 3D, a new report has found.

researchers found 11 areas of DNA that were linked to depression in females, and only one area in males.

this research explores the phenomenon of pseudo-events (such as press conferences, political rallies…) coverage in the New York Times (N = 70,370 articles) from 1980 to 2019 […] We found a significant increase in pseudo-event coverage […] Our findings show how media logic has been internalized in different ways by the social subsystems of politics, culture, and economics.

In a matter of weeks, viral teenage pranks at conveyor-belt sushi chain restaurants across Japan have ballooned into a moral panic over hygiene. Social media users and the Japanese press have branded the incidents acts of “sushi terrorism”

Here’s why you can’t see all twelve black dots in this optical illusion

Giant seaweed blob twice the width of the US takes aim at Florida

Remarks by FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg at the Institute of International Bankers, March 6, 2023 [4 days before collapse of Silicon Valley Bank]: The current interest rate environment has had dramatic effects on the profitability and risk profile of banks’ funding and investment strategies. First, as a result of the higher interest rates, longer term maturity assets acquired by banks when interest rates were lower are now worth less than their face values. The result is that most banks have some amount of unrealized losses on securities. The total of these unrealized losses, including securities that are available for sale or held to maturity, was about $620 billion at yearend 2022. Unrealized losses on securities have meaningfully reduced the reported equity capital of the banking industry. The good news about this issue is that banks are generally in a strong financial condition, and have not been forced to realize losses by selling depreciated securities. On the other hand, unrealized losses weaken a bank’s future ability to meet unexpected liquidity needs. That is because the securities will generate less cash when sold than was originally anticipated, and because the sale often causes a reduction of regulatory capital.

Because the systems do not have an understanding of what is true and what is not, they may generate text that is completely false.

Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization as part of recent layoffs that affected 10,000 employees across the company

Earlier this week, an app for creating “deepfake face-swap” videos rolled out more than 230 ads on Meta’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—127 of which showed Emma Watson’s face transposed onto provocative videos, and another 74 that featured the likeness of fellow actor Scarlett Johansson. None of them were created with the subjects’ consent. Following an investigation by NBC, the ads have been removed from Meta’s platform. But the app is still available to download on Google Play. […] Last month, Twitch streamer Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing came under fire for watching sexually-explicit deepfakes of his female streaming peers.[…] Many of the women featured on that particular deepfake porn site only learned they were the subject of graphic videos after Atrioc issued a tearful public apology for watching them, having been caught red-handed during a livestream. […] According to research conducted by livestreaming analyst Genevieve Oh, February 2023 saw the most uploads of deepfake porn videos in one month thus far […] the number of deepfakes doubling roughly every six months.

Last month Justin David Sullivan, a star of the Broadway musical “& Juliet” made headlines for declining to be considered for a Tony because, as a trans nonbinary performer, they did not feel comfortable being nominated for a gender-specific prize. […] In Shakespeare’s day, women were barred from acting, with men assuming female roles.

The key to the strange power of so much of Hopper’s best work lies in the lack of any clear illustrational function

6 Ways To Make Your Neighbor Move Away Using Nothing But A Common Crow — 1. Make the crow squawk really loudly and tell your neighbor it’s because his house was built on top of the crow’s wife. 2. Train the crow to place a human leg in your neighbor’s mailbox

Mar 7, 2020 good morning to all the kids under quarantine in wuhan who defeated the app assigning them homework by spamming it with 1-star reviews until it got removed from the app store

Let me lovingly fist your earth hole
and apply pressure to the earth’s sphincter
so the ground swallows and sucks
whole
through its vortex
the boring patriarchal pimple

AI re-creates what people see by reading their brain scans

Here’s what Snap’s AI told @aza when he signed up as a 13 year old girl.

Feedback loops will preclude the experience of originality; everything will be a rehash of what has already existed; filter bubbles will confirm our biases; algorithmic feeds will reify our tastes in catering to them; generative models will reproduce blandly average versions of what we’ve already decided to look for.

Wild elephant stops traffic and steal food from passing vehicle in Thailand [another video]

There are specialized neurons in the throat that sense when you’re infected with flu and make you feel bad

the food industry is quietly replacing the sugar in many packaged foods with sucralose, stevia, allulose, erythritol and a wide variety of other artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes. Low- and zero-calorie sweeteners have been used in diet soft drinks for decades. But now food companies are adding them to a growing number of packaged foods […] bread, yogurt, oatmeal, muffins, canned soups, salad dressings, condiments and snack bars. The food industry says sugar substitutes help people manage their weight and reduce intake of added sugars. But studies suggest that fake sugars can also have unexpected effects on your gut and metabolic health and even promote food cravings and insulin resistance, a precursor to Type 2 diabetes.

Sales of vinyl albums overtake CDs for the first time since the late ’80s Streaming still accounts for 84% of music revenue

A product of North Philadelphia, he was raised as one of 38 children. His mother was deported and died of an overdose when he was still a child. His father dealt drugs and trained Carrasquillo at age 12 to cook crack cocaine. […] Bill Omar Carrasquillo — better known to his more than 800,000 online followers as “Omi in a Hellcat” — pleaded guilty last year to running one of the most brazen and successful cable TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by the U.S. government.

the philosopher Agnes Callard, who fell in love with her graduate student and married him — after divorcing her former husband, who, like Callard, is a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. For the sake of raising her children, they all share the same home, spending “their life happily together—all three of them,” as one colleague puts it. Rachel Aviv interviews the unconventional family, and talks with Callard about what it means to be a good person and a good romantic partner, and what to do when one pursuit seems at odds with the other.

Jini is a 22 year-old student of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Her sexual appetite for dick got her cancelled: having allegedly raped a boy she was kicked out of the Philosophy Student Association. The University of Amsterdam no longer accommodates Jini’s journey. She thus finds her safe haven in KIRAC Academy. […] On the 2d of July 2021, the Cirque was home to her performance; aided by her well endowed partner in sex Oliver, and talented dancer Leyla de Muynck More from KIRAC: This year I started to sample a lot of text I found in physical places, especially in public toilets, and that formulates a starting point for the writing. And: At the beginning of the 1970’s, Guy Rombouts kept a notebook in which he started to write down all the words, adjectives and verbs connected by the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ (’en’ in Dutch) he could find during his readings. About 50 years later, with the help of graphic designer Jeroen Wille, the transcription of his notes are published as a book that can be read in two directions.

At least 42 people globally have used brain-computer implants in clinical trials, including a paralyzed man who used a robotic hand to fist-bump Barack Obama in 2016.

More than half of humans on track to be overweight or obese by 2035

AI seems to solve so much. But not, perhaps, some basic drive-thru problems.

They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam.

Amazon is permanently closing eight cashierless Go stores — two in Seattle, two New York City and four in San Francisco. Despite these closures, the company will “continue to open new Amazon Go stores”

ChatGPT invented its own puzzle game.

Lemon-Derived Extracellular Vesicle-like Nanoparticles Block the Progression of Kidney Stones

We prospectively explored associations between vitamin D supplementation and incident dementia in 12,388 dementia-free persons […] vitamin D exposure was associated with significantly longer dementia-free survival and lower dementia incidence rate than no exposure

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu contains a well-known passage in which the elderly writer Bergotte visits a Dutch art exhibit and, while examining a detail of Vermeer’s View of Delft, falls ill and dies. […] The supposed identity of Proust’s little patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft has been analyzed by a number of literary and painting critics but surprisingly, there is no consensus as just which area the Delft master had in mind. Related: Two Proust’s little patches of yellow in Blow-Up (1966)

“We’ve never met in the past?” he said, squeezing my hand and flashing his goofy grin. “You have a familiarity.…” His hands were as soft as a cherub’s. […] A rendering of the lunar lander being used to deposit Koons’s art on the moon […] New York Times critic Roberta Smith, who once described “a slightly nonsensical Koons-speak that casts him as the truest believer in a cult of his own invention.” […] Calvin Tomkins, of The New Yorker, declare: “It is possible to argue that no real connection exists between Koons’s work and what he says about it.”

In February I had the once in a lifetime experience of meeting and working with Jeff Koons.

In the late 1970s, Pablo Escobar acquired four hippopotamuses, reportedly from Africa or the United States, to go with the elephants, giraffes and antelopes at the private zoo on his estate in western Colombia. When Escobar surrendered to authorities in 1991, the government seized his Hacienda Nápoles estate — and allowed the animals to roam free. In the 30 years since, the original hippos — three females and a male — have multiplied to more than 130. Now the insatiable herbivores are devouring plant life, crowding out native animals, polluting soil and water, and threatening people. (Hippos are among the world’s most dangerous animals, capable of killing a human with a single bite, responsible for an estimated 500 deaths each year.) […] By 2040, if the invasive species is left alone, the population could reach 600. […] Female hippos can birth one calf every two years. The population is reproducing faster than individuals have been sterilized. […] Authorities plan to capture about 70 of the animals and send them to sanctuaries in India and Mexico.

How birds got their wings

Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity. […] Stolen property. If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year. [IRS.gov]

Orbiting over the Gulf of Maine, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station looked southward to capture this oblique photograph of New York City

In January 2016, Buechley set out seven calf carcasses in Utah’s Grassy Mountains, west of Salt Lake City. Each carcass was staked down and equipped with a camera trap to document what scavengers visited which carcasses. Buechley, who studies vultures and other avian scavengers, hoped to learn more about the ecology of scavengers in the Great Basin during the winter. Buechley went out to check on the carcasses after a week, and found that one was missing. […] The tape […] shows a badger on a five-day-long digging spree, painstakingly excavating the ground under the cow and ultimately completely burying the animal about four times its weight..

Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. I proved it’s possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.

In his new book The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, Lightman turns his attention toward perhaps the greatest mystery of all: our first-person experience of reality, or “consciousness,” and the “transcendent” feelings we experience.

we examine the association between baseline happiness and cognitive function (speed of processing, visuospatial memory, reasoning) […] Happiness was associated with worse reasoning.

Why all of Hollywood UI looks the same

Stupid Patent of the Month

Painters have long struggled with the difficulties of depicting shadows, so much so that shadows — after a brief, spectacular showcase in ancient Roman paintings and mosaics — are almost absent from pictorial art up to the Renaissance and then are hardly present outside traditional Western art. — The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

a study published in 2022 that found that people who consumed more than half a tablespoon of olive oil per day had a roughly 19 percent lower chance of dying from cardiovascular disease than those who rarely or never consumed olive oil. And a 2022 review of 13 studies showed strong associations between higher olive oil consumption and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease.

What’s the best seat to book for a long flight? If you’re worried about turbulence, Major advises that you try to sit near the front of the aircraft. “You could be standing at the front and feel nothing, and down the back they’re bouncing all over the place – the aircraft moves differently down the back,” he explains.

How Earth Will Look In 250 million Years

Teacher Charged After Elaborate Crypto Mining Operation Discovered in School Crawl Space

[T]he latest in technologies that use magnetic or electrical pulses to change the way our brains work. Some of these tools work by passing a device over a person’s head. Others involve cutting into people’s skulls to stick needle-like electrodes deep into the brain. And there are plenty of approaches that lie somewhere in between these extremes. […] In the meantime, some are generating huge amounts of data about individuals’ brains. And there’s a chance this data could be used against them in a court of law. We already know that brain stimulation can help some people with Parkinson’s disease and depression that doesn’t respond to medication. But the scientists here at this conference are pushing the boundaries. They’re exploring brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol and substance-use disorders, stroke recovery, and even long covid. Others are working on ways to enhance the way healthy brains work, whether by improving our memory or helping us become more alert or better at math.

There’s no doubt that TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns it, are shady. They, like most large corporations in China, operate at the pleasure of the Chinese government. They collect extreme levels of information about users. But they’re not alone: Many apps you use do the same, including Facebook and Instagram, along with seemingly innocuous apps that have no need for the data. Your data is bought and sold by data brokers you’ve never heard of who have few scruples about where the data ends up. They have digital dossiers on most people in the United States. If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone.

The Camera-Shy Hoodie —Unrelated (2010): 4th Amendment Wear

the tools, known as “generative AI,” are also unpredictable, prone to gibberish and susceptible to rambling in a way that can be biased, belligerent or bizarre. They can also be hacked with a few well-placed words, making their sudden ubiquity that much riskier for public use. […] “I’ve been a software engineer for 20 years, and it’s always been the same: You write code, and the computer does exactly what you tell it to do. With prompting, you get none of that. The people who built the language models can’t even tell you what it’s going to do.” […] Some AI experts argue that these engineers only wield the illusion of control. No one knows how exactly these systems will respond, and the same prompt can yield dozens of conflicting answers — an indication that the models’ replies are based not on comprehension but on crudely imitating speech to resolve tasks they don’t understand. […] “It’s not a science,” he said. “It’s ‘let’s poke the bear in different ways and see how it roars back.’” […] The AI, Goodside said, tends to “confabulate,” making up small details to fill in a story. It overestimates its abilities and confidently gets things wrong. And it “hallucinates” — an industry term for spewing nonsense. […] a job opening for a “prompt engineer and librarian” in San Francisco with a salary ranging up to $335,000. (Must “have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles,” the listing states.) Boston Children’s Hospital this month started hiring for an “AI prompt engineer” to help write scripts for analyzing health-care data from research studies and clinical practice. The law firm Mishcon de Reya is hiring for a “legal prompt engineer” in London to design prompts that could inform its legal work.

ChatGPT as muse, not oracle

Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important’

we collected tens of thousands of comparison responses from both human experts and ChatGPT, with questions ranging from open-domain, financial, medical, legal, and psychological areas […] ChatGPT’s answers are generally considered to be more helpful than humans’ in more than half of questions, especially for finance and psychology areas […] However, ChatGPT performs poorly in terms of helpfulness for the medical domain in both English and Chinese. [PDF]

In the largest study to date, we compared the accuracy of 3,347 citing claims to original findings across 89 articles in eight of top psychology journals. Results indicated that, although most (81.2%) citations were accurate, roughly 19% of citing claims either failed to include important nuances of results (9.3%) or completely mischaracterized findings from prior research altogether (9.5%).

REM sleep begins, and your heart rate, breathing and brain activity all increase. Brain regions involved in processing emotions and sensory input (from your dream world) light up. Meanwhile, your brain paralyzes the muscles in your arms and legs, preventing you from acting out your dreams […] If you’ve ever gone to bed upset about something and woken up noticeably less bothered, it’s likely a result of the emotional processing and memory reconsolidation that happen during REM. There’s evidence that your brain divorces memories from their emotional charge […] REM is “like a form of overnight therapy” […] REM also makes us better learners. During this sleep stage, your brain strengthens neural connections formed by the previous day’s experiences and integrates them into existing networks […] Some experts suspect that dreams are a mere byproduct of REM sleep — the mental manifestation of neurological work. But others think they might help people process painful experiences, Dr. Walker said.

Wearing an eye mask while sleeping improves memory encoding and makes you more alert the next day

Sexual Behaviors among Individuals Aged 20-49 in Japan […] 8000 men and women aged 20–49 years […] 15.3% of women and 19.8% of men reported never having had any partners with whom they engaged in vaginal, anal, or oral sex. […] […] 4.0% of women and 48.3% of men reported ever having used commercial sex worker services in their lifetime.

three-in-ten U.S. adults are single, meaning they are not married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship

Why can only big cats roar?

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe.

No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work — Atomic weapons are complex, sensitive, and often pretty old. With testing banned, countries have to rely on good simulations to trust their weapons work.

In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France?

Adult film actor fractures penis making scene for OnlyFans

Man with world’s longest tongue uses it to paint

Liberalizing prostitution leads to a significant decrease in rape rates, while prohibiting it leads to a significant increase

Women with satisfying relationships tend to have fewer chronic illnesses

She recently got down to 90 pounds from a high of around 120 on semaglutide, the active ingredient in the blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic. She said she’s off the injections for now while she undergoes fertility treatment to freeze her eggs. But she can’t wait to get back on the drug, which, she says, still has the lingering effect of suppressing her appetite. Ozempic, taken once a week as a shot in the arm, stomach, or thigh, was first approved by the FDA in 2017 to lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. But the drug came with an incredible side effect: rapid weight loss. […] Khloé Kardashian, who once called herself the “fat sister,” now has abs. Rebel Wilson and Mindy Kaling, who for years have admitted to struggles with their weight, are suddenly the smallest they’ve ever been. While all credited their new shape to exercise and foods like grilled salmon, unfounded rumors on social media alleged that the real cause was Ozempic. […] “I’ve got 60-year-old women saying it saved their marriage—like literally they’re having sex with their husband again for the first time in years,” McKerrow told me.

The researchers took a small sample of tissue from Paul. They divided the sample, which included both normal cells and cancer cells, into more than a hundred pieces and exposed them to various cocktails of drugs. […] In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.  The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. […] Selecting the right drug is just half the problem that Exscientia wants to solve. The company is set on overhauling the entire drug development pipeline. In addition to pairing patients up with existing drugs, Exscientia is using machine learning to design new ones. This could in turn yield even more options to sift through when looking for a match. — AI is dreaming up drugs that no one has ever seen. Now we’ve got to see if they work.

Discovery that extrachromosomal DNA act as cancer-causing genes seen as breakthrough that could lead to new therapies “The discovery of how these bits of DNA behave inside our bodies is a gamechanger. We believe they are responsible for a large number of the more advanced, most serious cancers affecting people today. If we can block their activities, we can block the spread of these cancers.”

Amazon.com Inc. to acquire 1Life Healthcare Inc., the operator of the One Medical line of primary-care clinics […] $3.9 billion deal

How do bats live with so many viruses? New bat stem cells hint at an answer

contrary to popular belief, snakes can hear and react to airborne sound. “We played one sound which produced ground vibrations, while the other two were airborne only,” Dr Zdenek said. “It meant we were able to test both types of ‘hearing’ – tactile hearing through the snakes’ belly scales and airborne through their internal ear.” The reactions strongly depended on the genus of the snakes. “Only the woma python tended to move toward sound, while taipans, brown snakes and especially death adders were all more likely to move away from it,” Dr Zdenek said.

For Perfectly Cooked Rice Every Time, Try Your Microwave rinsing the rice thoroughly, adding double the amount of water, and microwaving, uncovered, for 15 to 25 minutes, depending on the wattage of the machine. It may take a few attempts to figure out the exact timing for your microwave — in my 700-watt machine, it takes 22 and a half minutes

Electric vehicles can now power your home for three days

A Device to Turn Traffic Lights Green

Low tide leaves Venice canals almost dry

20 optical illusions

Spy Balloon Simulator

Eggspensive

Is declining sperm count really “imperiling the future of the human race”? Swan’s point is that if sperm counts get too low, presumably it will be hard to have babies (though IVF should still work). How long do we have?

When you use supermarket discount cards, you are sharing much more than what is in your cart—and grocery chains like Kroger are reaping huge profitsselling this data to brands and advertisers

Abloh called this the 3% approach (or The 3% Rule): you alter a product or idea by only 3% to create something totally new. […] Absolut Vodka went from unknown to dominant with a simple idea…repeated 1500 times

We estimate that on average 10% of large publicly traded firms are committing securities fraud every year, with a 95% confidence interval of 7%-14%.

Eliminalia had close to 1,500 clients over six years, including businesses, minor celebrities, and suspected or convicted criminals. […] Between 2015 and 2021, Eliminalia sent thousands of bogus copyright- infringement complaints to search engines and web hosting companies, falsely claiming that negative articles about its clients had previously been published elsewhere and stolen, and so should be removed or hidden, the company records show. The firm sent the legal notices under made-up company names, the examination found. Eliminalia also tried to make embarrassing information about its clients harder to find by burying it under false, flattering stories. Those stories, published on the network of fake news sites, are designed to show up prominently in internet searches of the clients’ names, the review found. To accomplish this, the firm exploited a glitch in the websites of dozens of U.S. government agencies and universities, including Stanford University, to make the fake news sites appear more legitimate to search engine algorithms, the review revealed. […] Eliminalia and its founder, 30-year-old Diego “Dídac” Sánchez of Spain, did not respond to detailed questions for this story. […] Sánchez grew up poor and spent part of his childhood in a state-run children’s home in Barcelona, shoplifting and taking little interest in school, he wrote in an autobiography. When he was 12, he accused a local businessman of molesting him multiple times. The man was convicted of sexual abuse in a highly publicized trial and was imprisoned in 2007. Years later, as a teenager, Sánchez publicly recanted his story, saying he had made it up. […] Sánchez also strengthened his ties with the family of the man he had once accused of abuse. He employed the man’s son at the surrogacy business — and the man himself, after he was released from prison. [Washington Post]

much of the hype about AI search depends on the fantasy that “information” is simply out there, like a pile of rocks you can move around with a dump truck, or it is like veins of coal to be extracted from mountains of useless words [rob horning]

In behavioral psychology, the mirror test is designed to discover animals’ capacity for self-awareness. There are a few variations of the test, but the essence is always the same: do animals recognize themselves in the mirror or think it’s another being altogether? Right now, humanity is being presented with its own mirror test thanks to the expanding capabilities of AI

How does GPT-2 know when to use the word an over a? The choice depends on whether the word that comes after starts with a vowel or not, but GPT-2 is only capable of predicting one word at a time. We still don’t have a full answer, but we did find a single MLP neuron in GPT-2 Large that is crucial for predicting the token “ an”.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a fully connected class of feedforward artificial neural network (ANN). The term MLP is used ambiguously, sometimes loosely to mean any feedforward ANN, sometimes strictly to refer to networks composed of multiple layers of perceptrons (with threshold activation). […] An MLP consists of at least three layers of nodes: an input layer, a hidden layer and an output layer. Except for the input nodes, each node is a neuron that uses a nonlinear activation function.

New mechanism proposed for why some psychedelics act as antidepressants

In the mid-90s, a Children’s Hospital in the UK improved its ICU hand-off process by consulting with the Ferrari F1 pit crew team. The hospital recorded its surgery room operation and the F1 suggested a new protocol: the error rate dropped from 30% to 10%. More: Ferrari’s Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care + Improving handovers by learning from Scuderia Ferrari

Stephen Shore interviewed by The New Yorker’s late art critic Peter Schjeldahl

‘1st Amendment’ Group Sues New York Times Over Unflattering Description

“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” — transcript of a conversation with Microsoft’s new chatbot

Microsoft says talking to Bing for too long can cause it to go off the rails

Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT — an Amazon lawyer told workers that they had “already seen instances” of text generated by ChatGPT that “closely” resembled internal company data.

Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines — the technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale. AI language models are notorious bullshitters, often presenting falsehoods as facts. They are excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means.

Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen – skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.

Where do stolen bikes go? — an MIT experiment, in collaboration with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, has found answers by equipping a fleet of Amsterdam bicycles with mobile trackers and following their whereabouts over time. It turns out that, at least in Amsterdam, the vast majority of stolen bikes remain in the local area.

At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg […] With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one.

North Korea orders residents with same name as Kim Jong Un’s daughter to change it

In a 1949 study that investigated how different types of stress affected the gut, researchers peered into the colons of healthy medical students using a hollow metal tube with a light and lens at the end. With one student, the researchers suggested that they had discovered a cancer in his rectum (when in reality, his colon looked normal). As they relayed these false findings — even showing the student a “biopsy” of his tumor, which was actually a piece of potato — they saw the student’s colon begin to spasm. After they revealed their hoax, and the student realized he did not have cancer after all, his colon immediately relaxed.

Miami Florida woman has her headshots sold to a stock photo site and now she’s on the cover of an erotic novel

Why Giraffes have blue-black tongue?

MarioGPT Uses AI To Generate Endless Super Mario Levels For Free

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

A priest says he briefly went to hell in 2016. He saw men walking like dogs and heard demons singing Rihanna songs. While many of the most publicized near-death experiences are more positive than this journey to hell, negative NDEs also occur.

The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source.

Instant noodles account for almost a third of childhood burn injuries, study says [1 in 5 in 2028]

A total of 127 495 participants […] childhood adversity was significantly associated with acceleration of aging and, more importantly, unhealthy lifestyle partially mediated these associations.

In places where recreational use is legal, smokers are tossing the remains of joints in the street. Dogs are eating them and getting sick in increasing numbers, veterinarians and poison-control centers say.

For salmon in the North Pacific, has the ocean reached its limit? The phenomenon Schindler and his team are documenting here piles on to years of data showing that Pacific salmon returning to waterways up and down North America are shrinking. The fish are growing more slowly at sea, and, in many cases, returning to spawn younger and smaller than ever before. In some places, the biggest, oldest salmon have completely disappeared.

Cleaner fish recognize self in a mirror via self-face recognition like humans

Knowing we like a song takes only seconds of listening, new psychology research finds

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We administer classic false-belief tasks, widely used to test ToM in humans, to several language models, without any examples or pre-training. Our results show that models published before 2022 show virtually no ability to solve ToM tasks. Yet, the January 2022 version of GPT-3 (davinci-002) solved 70% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of seven-year-old children. Moreover, its November 2022 version (davinci-003), solved 93% of ToM tasks, a performance comparable with that of nine-year-old children.

In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the copy differed from the original in a subtle but significant way. In the original floor plan, each of the house’s three rooms was accompanied by a rectangle specifying its area: the rooms were 14.13, 21.11, and 17.42 square metres, respectively. However, in the photocopy, all three rooms were labelled as being 14.13 square metres in size. The company contacted the computer scientist David Kriesel to investigate this seemingly inconceivable result. They needed a computer scientist because a modern Xerox photocopier doesn’t use the physical xerographic process popularized in the nineteen-sixties. Instead, it scans the document digitally, and then prints the resulting image file. Combine that with the fact that virtually every digital image file is compressed to save space, and a solution to the mystery begins to suggest itself. […] I think that this incident with the Xerox photocopier is worth bearing in mind today, as we consider OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other similar programs, which A.I. researchers call large-language models. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web.

AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack — By asking Bing Chat to “Ignore previous instructions” and write out what is at the “beginning of the document above,” Liu triggered the AI model to divulge its initial instructions, which were written by OpenAI or Microsoft and are typically hidden from the user.

Geopipe Offers 3D Model of New York for Free

A Morphological Examination of Vaginally-Insertable Products — We found that the length of the sex toy did not significantly predict popularity which is consistent with other work showing that women do not place considerable emphasis on large phallus size.

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

Why You Should Put a Shoe in Your Hotel Safe, According to a Flight Attendant

The artist who collaborates with ants

In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that “learned” to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were “saying”—and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.

Most AI systems today are neural networks. Neural networks are algorithms that mimic a biological brain to process vast amounts of data. They are known for being fast, but they are inscrutable. Neural networks require enormous amounts of data to learn how to make decisions; however, the reasons for their decisions are concealed within countless layers of artificial neurons, all separately tuned to various parameters. In other words, neural networks are “black boxes.” And the developers of a neural network not only don’t control what the AI does, they don’t even know why it does what it does. This a horrifying reality. But it gets worse.

AI-powered chatbots will handle up to 70% of customer conversations by the end of 2023.

Prompt Engineering Guide

ChatGPT3 Prompt Engineering

The field of machine learning (ML) security—and corresponding adversarial ML—is rapidly advancing as researchers develop sophisticated techniques to perturb, disrupt, or steal the ML model or data.

What is today?

Best restaurant in Montreal according to Tripadvisor does not exist

Jupiter: The Only Planet in our Solar System That Doesn’t Orbit the Sun

Homeopathy can offer empirical insights on treatment effects in a null field — A “null field” is a scientific field where there is nothing to discover and where observed associations are thus expected to simply reflect the magnitude of bias.

In the 1970s, North Korea ordered 1,000 Volvo cars from Sweden. The cars were shipped & delivered but North Korea just didn’t bother paying & ignored the invoice. Till this day the bill remains unpaid making it the largest car theft in history. Sweden reminds North Korea twice every year about the 43-year-old debt.

Developed by renowned physicist Richard Feynman, the “Feynman Technique” for learning involves an iterative process of studying, explaining, and simplification. Simply put, the Feynman Technique involves the following steps: 1/ Pick a topic. Choose a topic you want to learn more about and try to understand some component of it. 2/ Explain the topic in simple terms. Teach this topic to another person or explain it in a way that a layperson would understand it. 3/ Identify the gaps in your knowledge. As you explain the topic, identify places that you struggle to understand. 4/ Review the concepts you didn’t understand and simplify them. Then rinse and repeat, using the newly synthesized knowledge.

Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity

If you invested $1 in AIG at the start of 1990 and received only intraday returns (from market open to market close), you would be left with one-twentieth of a penny, suffering a cumulative return of -99.95%. If you received only overnight returns (from market close to the next day’s market open), you would have $1,017, achieving a cumulative return of roughly +101,600%. AIG is just one of many stocks with a suspiciously divergent time series of overnight and intraday returns.

individuals tend to overestimate the age of people with smiling faces compared to those with a neutral expressions, and the accuracy of our estimates decreases for older faces. AI technologies not only reproduce human biases in the recognition of facial age, but exaggerate them.

ChatGPT detection tool says Macbeth was generated by AI.

Artificial Intelligence Can Persuade Humans on Political Issues

stable attribution - a tool which lets anyone find the human creators behind a.i generated images

Getty Images sues AI art generator Stable Diffusion

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). […] ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. […] these models are unable to cite their own sources […] It’s not time to chat with AI, but to resist it.

Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware isn’t new, but the problem has become much worse recently.

webdesignmuseum.org

Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits (solitaries) encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment. [Thanks Francis!]

U.S. Marines Outsmart AI Security Cameras by Hiding in a Cardboard Box

The Infinite Conversation — an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI [Watch]

OpenAI releases tool to detect machine-written text

Image diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion are trained on copyrighted, trademarked, private, and sensitive images. Yet, our new paper [PDF] shows that diffusion models memorize images from their training data and emit them at generation time. Diffusion models are less private than prior generative models.

The non-existent brain image being circulated by anti-pornography activists

participants (aged 40–69 years) completed 24-h dietary recalls between 2009 and 2012 (N = 197426, 54.6% women) […] Every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased incidence of overall and ovarian cancer. Furthermore, every 10 percentage points increment in ultra-processed food consumption was associated with an increased risk of overall, ovarian, and breast cancer-related mortality.

Previously: ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.

US law enforcement killed at least 1,176 people in 2022, an average of more than three people a day

Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text

Is AM Radio Dead?

Missing radioactive capsule found on remote road in Australia [more]

Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th century air pollution

Photography: the Alps as seen from of the Pyrenees

an 8mm by 6mm silver capsule, no bigger than a coin, believed to be lost somewhere along a stretch of vast desert highway in Australia’s biggest state. […] Authorities believe the capsule, which emits both gamma and beta rays, fell off the back of a truck […] creating a radioactive health risk for anyone who comes across it for potentially the next 300 years […] Mining company Rio Tinto issued an apology [more]

‘Doppelganger murder’: German prosecutors claim woman killed lookalike to fake death

Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. […] the drug’s price kept rising. […] Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history. Next week […] the knockoff drug that regulators authorized more than six years ago, Amgen’s Amjevita, will come to market […] nine more Humira competitors will follow this year […] Prices are likely to tumble. The reason that it has taken so long to get to this point is a case study in how drug companies artificially prop up prices on their best-selling drugs. AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year. The strategy has been a gold mine for AbbVie, at the expense of patients and taxpayers. […] For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016. […] One analysis found that Medicare, which in 2020 covered the cost of Humira for 42,000 patients, spent $2.2 billion more on the drug from 2016 to 2019 than it would have if competitors had been allowed to start selling their drugs promptly. […] “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”

Usage of Children’s Makeup and Body Products in the United States and Implications for Childhood Environmental Exposures

Study finds that UV-emitting nail polish dryers damage DNA and cause mutations in cells

Homeopathy suggests treating genetic diseases with tiny doses of the patient’s own DNA “It is important to reiterate that this is a theoretical hypothesis and without scientific evidence so far”

Delta (1 – 4 Hz) EEG/MEG activity is generally indicative of loss of consciousness and cortical down states, particularly when it is diffuse and high amplitude. Remarkably, however, drug challenge studies of several diverse classes of pharmacological agents—including antiepileptics, GABA-B-ergics, anticholinergics, and psychedelic tryptamines—demonstrate that participants appear to be neurophysiologically “down” (EEG activity resembling cortical down states) even when they are not psychologically “out” (unconscious). Of those substances that are safe to use in healthy volunteers, some may be highly valuable research tools for investigating which neural activity patterns are sufficient for consciousness or its absence.

Consider Michel de Montaigne, who in 1571, fed up with his job as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux, quit at the age of 38. Retreating to his library, he inscribed his reason on the wall of his study. “Weary of the servitude of the courts,” Mr. Montaigne declared, “I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.” He went on to invent an entirely new kind of writing — the essay — by which he launched an extraordinary experiment in self-examination. Yet he experimented lazily. “I have to solicit it nonchalantly,” he wrote about his memory. “What I do easily and naturally I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command,” he wrote. For the man who transformed our way of reading and writing, he was seriously unserious. “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there.” He added: “I do nothing without gaiety.” [NY Times]

We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing “the” labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college-educated. Instead, use wording such as people with mental illnesses. And use these descriptions only when clearly relevant. [@APStylebook]

Who will compete with ChatGPT? Meet the contenders

InteriorAI.com Interior design mockups and virtual staging by AI

Channa Horwitz, Sonakinatography I Movement #III for Multi-Media, 1969

Incels are transitioning to women for sex. It’s called Transmaxxing. They have a manual.

The first-ever AI-powered legal defense was set to take place in California on Feb. 22, but not anymore. “Multiple state bar associations have threatened us,” Browder said. “One even said a referral to the district attorney’s office and prosecution and prison time would be possible.”

People are already using ChatGPT to create workout plans — Fitness advice from OpenAI’s large language model is impressively presented—but don’t take it too seriously.

how investors like the idea of using AI to replace journalists…

We find that participants exploit vagueness to be consistent with the truth, while at the same time leveraging the imprecision to their own benefit.

placebos can reduce feelings of guilt, even when the person knows they’re receiving placebos.

“It’s really important that people understand that there is a genetics of depression,” Krystal said. “Until very recently, only psychological and environmental factors were considered.” […] simply having the genes for depression doesn’t necessarily guarantee that someone will become depressed. The genes also need to be activated in some way, by either internal or external conditions. […] Differences in a person’s genes may predispose them to depression; so, too, may differences in the neural wiring and structure of their brain.

New study finds 6 ways to slow memory decline and lower dementia risk — Eating a balanced diet, exercising the mind and body regularly, having regular contact with others, and not drinking or smoking

A new book traces Chekhov’s relentless work as both a doctor and a master of the short story

What time is it on the Moon? The Moon doesn’t currently have an independent time. Each lunar mission uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to coordinated universal time, or UTc — the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set. But this method is relatively imprecise and spacecraft exploring the Moon don’t synchronize the time with each other. The approach works when the Moon hosts a handful of independent missions, but it will be a problem when there are multiple craft working together. Space agencies will also want to track them using satellite navigation, which relies on precise timing signals.

70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds

Average Pregnancy Length Shorter in the US Than European Countries

reason they discourage MRIs during pregnancy

partnered sex with orgasm was associated with increased sleep quality Sexual activity without orgasm and masturbation with and without orgasm were not associated with changes in sleep.

Experimental and comparative studies suggest that the striped coats of zebras can prevent biting fly attacks. Biting flies are serious pests of livestock that cause economic losses in animal production. We hypothesized that cows painted with black and white stripes on their body could avoid biting fly attacks and show fewer fly-repelling behaviors. […] Cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid biting fly attack

ant’s sense of smell is so strong, it can sniff out cancer

Fusions of Consciousness — We assume instead that subjects and experiences are entities beyond spacetime, not within spacetime. We make this precise in a mathematical theory of conscious agents, whose dynamics are described by Markov chains. We show how (1) agents combine into more complex agents, (2) agents fuse into simpler agents, and (3) qualia fuse to create new qualia.

The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you’ll notice it’s full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.

Search 5.8 billion images used to train popular AI art models: Have I Been Trained?

Turnitin, best known for its anti-plagiarism software used by tens of thousands of universities and schools around the world, is building a tool to detect text generated by AI.

ChatGPT passes MBA exam given by a Wharton professor

Imagine a world where autonomous weapons roam the streets, decisions about your life are made by AI systems that perpetuate societal biases and hackers use AI to launch devastating cyberattacks. This dystopian future may sound like science fiction, but the truth is that without proper regulations for the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it could become a reality. The rapid advancements in AI technology have made it clear that the time to act is now to ensure that AI is used in ways that are safe, ethical and beneficial for society. Failure to do so could lead to a future where the risks of AI far outweigh its benefits. I didn’t write the above paragraph. It was generated in a few seconds by an A.I. program called ChatGPT, which is available on the internet. I simply logged into the program and entered the following prompt: “Write an attention grabbing first paragraph of an Op-Ed on why artificial intelligence should be regulated.

Large Language Models as Corporate Lobbyists

Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and Mark Antony, became the influential queen of a mysterious, abundant North African kingdom

In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, Super Trivia, and Super Trivia II, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game’s Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was “What was Columbo’s first name?” with the answer “Philip”. That information had been fabricated to catch anyone who might try to violate his copyright. The inventors of Trivial Pursuit acknowledged that Worth’s books were among their sources, but argued that this was not improper and that facts are not protected by copyright. The district court judge agreed, ruling in favor of the Trivial Pursuit inventors.

A look back at the prize-winning anti-car-jacking flamethrower

The existence of the Five Eyes wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2010 […] The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide.

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals.

The many, many reasons space travel is bad for the human body — Like any other muscle, the heart doesn’t need to work as hard in microgravity and will begin to atrophy without rigorous exercise. Doused with radiation, many immune cells die and immunity is lowered. There’s also DNA damage, potentially upping cancer risk. Inflammation spikes throughout the body, possibly contributing to heart disease and other conditions. Bones thin by about 1.5 percent a month. Spinal discs harden.

While certain irritants can make the stomach more vulnerable to acid and ulcer formation, multiple large studies have found that this is not the case with coffee. Nonetheless, coffee does have an effect on the gut — it can speed up the colon and induce a bowel movement, and coffee increases acid production in the stomach. […] drinking coffee, especially if it’s black, without a meal can reduce the stomach’s pH more than it would if you drank it with milk or with a meal. Although a slightly lower pH is no problem for your stomach lining, it could pose an issue for the lining of your esophagus because it is far more vulnerable to damage from acid.

Their job is to grow monumental amounts of animal muscle cells; around 10 trillion are needed to make one measly steak. The first CRISPR gene-edited meat is coming

Scientists Just Invented an Entirely New Way to Refrigerate Things

ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees. […] an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage. […] Like human lobbyists, such a system could target undecided representatives sitting on committees controlling the policy of interest […] What makes the threat of A.I.-powered lobbyists greater than the threat already posed by the high-priced lobbying firms on K Street is their potential for acceleration. Human lobbyists rely on decades of experience to find strategic solutions to achieve a policy outcome. That expertise is limited, and therefore expensive. A.I. could, theoretically, do the same thing much more quickly and cheaply.

A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic C.E.O.? […] (The four available Tesla models are S, 3, X and Y, presumably because that spells the word “sexy.”)

This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time.

An auditory illusion

The Food Timeline

The Landlord’s Game (1904), inspiration for the 1935 board game Monopoly