Nudists warned by police to cover up their mouths for coronavirus

Coronavirus could attack immune system like HIV by targeting protective cells, warn scientists

The virus seems to have binary properties: not very contageous under most circumstances, but highly contagious in others.

Three novel alphacoronaviruses and three novel betacoronaviruses were detected for the first time in bats in Myanmar. Ongoing land use change remains a prominent driver of zoonotic disease emergence in Myanmar, bringing humans into ever closer contact with wildlife, and justifying continued surveillance and vigilance at broad scales.

What is required to prevent a second major outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 upon lifting the quarantine of Wuhan city, China [PDF | Cell.com]

Study suggests extending school and workplace closures in Wuhan until April, rather than March, would likely delay a second wave of cases until later in the year, relieving pressure on health services [LSHTM]

Changes in sleep pattern, sense of time, and digital media use during COVID-19 lockdown in Italy

Italian mayor uses drones to tell people to stay home under coronavirus lockdown

Usually, a mortgage company can withstand a few borrowers failing to make payments, but the breadth of the coronavirus pandemic has sparked industry estimates of between 25 and 50 percent of borrowers being unable to pay. [Politico]

The stimulus allows the Trump administration to loan $349 billion to small businesses without naming the companies receiving the loans. [Washington Post]

If you think people were upset about bailing out banks where the CEOs were making $50m a year, how are they going to feel about bailing out private equity firms where the CEOs make $500m a year? [Financial Times]

Amazon and Walmart are hiring a combined 250,000 workers to keep up with demand

How the Virus Transformed the Way Americans Spend Their Money

Benefits of exercise on metabolism: more profound than previously reported This reinforces the mandate for exercise as a critical part of programmes to prevent cardiovascular disease.

The present findings generate the hypothesis that moderate total meat consumption and notably, red meat may be more beneficial to prevent depressed mood and in turn hard cardiovascular disease endpoints.

Eat at Jeff Burger

Children with heavy exposure to screens exhibit similar social skills trajectories compared to children with little exposure to screens. There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day.

Research indicates that women with tattoos are evaluated more negatively than women without tattoos on numerous qualities. Further, men perceive better chances for sexual success with tattooed women than those without visible tattoos. […] Among tattooed women alone, several personality and tattooing variables predicted sexual openness. [Sexuality & Culture]

This Man Owns The World’s Most Advanced Private Air Force

Study shows that listening to music everyday improves mental health

The preference for scarce things appears in children at age 5, suggesting it is neither grounded in evolution nor in experiences with the market.

Stability of women’s facial shape throughout the menstrual cycle

We will look into why the Internet as an informational resource currently fails to enhance cognition

Where there are girls, there are cats [The initial research interest was the negative impact free-range cats have had on the local wild-life in China—a problem that is similarly severe in Australia where many native bird species are under the threat of extinction due to cats, killing more than a million birds per day]

In November 1970, officials in Oregon, USA decided to blow up a rotting whale carcass. The whole thing went horribly wrong. [MyDoncaster]

Morbid curiosity is typically described as curiosity about unpleasant things, especially death. The commercial success of horror films, popularity of true crime shows, and prevalence of violence in the news implies that the average person possesses some degree of morbid curiosity. The goal of the current study was to create and validate a psychometric tool for measuring trait morbid curiosity. […] Morbid curiosity was most closely related to rebellious non-conformity and animal reminder disgust, suggesting that propensity to be morbidly curious is related to defying cultural conventions and not fearing the certainty of death.

Number 58 Joralemon Street [Brooklyn, NY] is not like the other houses. Behind its blacked out windows, no one is at home; no one has been at home for more than 100 years. In fact, number 58 is not a home at all, but a secret subway exit and ventilation point disguised as a Greek Revival brownstone. [Messy Nessy Chic]

A team of researchers at Stanford University developed a prototype smart toilet with four cameras that can identify users based on their “analprint.”

The use of liquid manure storage facilities poses several serious threats

A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta

Lifesaving organs for transplant go missing in transit

Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders

A Hacker Found a Way to Take Over Any Apple Webcam

ll of Alfred Hitchcock’s 37 cameos in his own films [stills]

Live View at a Waterhole in the Gondwana Namib Park [Fette Sans]

Write a letter to the Future

the legend that there is a baby boom nine months after any natural disaster has been debunked, repeatedly

If we do the testing of every single case, rapid isolation of the cases, you should be able to keep cases down low. If you simply rely on the big shut down measures without finding every case, then every time you take the brakes off, it could come back in waves. So that future frankly, may be determined by us and our response as much as the virus.

“If 30% of the population has already been exposed to this then that number will go to 70% in two weeks,” James said. Assuming that having the disease left you with immunity to it, the crisis would then be as good as over

If you have a smartphone, you’re probably contributing to a massive coronavirus surveillance system. And it’s revealing where Americans have — and haven’t — been practicing social distancing. A company called Unacast that collects and analyzes phone GPS location data launched a “Social Distancing Scoreboard” that grades, county by county, which residents are changing behavior at the urging of health officials. It uses the reduction in the total distance we travel as a rough index for whether we’re staying put at home. Comparing the nation’s mass movements from March 20 to an average Friday, Washington, D.C., gets an A, while Wyoming as a whole earns an F. [Washington Post]

A new study of the inner workings of our muscles finds that if muscles have been trained in the past, they seem to develop a molecular memory of working out that lingers through a prolonged period of inactivity, and once we start training again, this “muscle memory” could speed the process by which we regain our former muscular strength and size. [NY Times]

3D printed adapter to turn snorkeling mask into a non-invasive ventilator

How did such a simple thing as soap and warm water — and alcohol-based sanitizers — obtain such power over these parasites?

in other news:

Keeping a smartphone in hand and frequent checking is associated with extraversion and poorer performance on tests of sustained attention and general intelligence, particularly semantic reasoning.

according to a new study, many people will reject their own arguments - if they’re tricked into thinking that other people proposed them

we argue that, at times, the desire to appear honest can actually lead people to lie.

The Liar’s Walk: Detecting Deception with Gait and Gesture

Switzerland has voted as many times as all of the other countries in the world put together in the past century.

Things you can do with a browser in 2020

Where Did “Tibetan” Singing Bowls Really Come From?

Warhol’s Photo of a Painting of a Photo

A scientific meeting on coronaviruses was cancelled due to coronavirus

Chinese criminal gangs are spreading swine fever using drones to force farmers to sell pigs cheaply so they can profit

Live Facial Recognition Is Coming to U.S. Police Body Cameras

Banjo is applying artificial intelligence to government-owned surveillance and traffic cameras across the entire state of Utah to tell police about “anomalies.”

This dissertation examines how first impressions influence decision-making, why people persistently rely on first impressions, and how the influence of first impressions can be reduced.

Tilting the face upward increased dominance and decreased physical attractiveness

Amazon is now selling its cashierless store technology to other retailers

Each year, about 15% of queries on Google have never been searched for before. Other search engines like Bing will not have the same access to these queries, putting Google in a powerful position of being able to better train its algorithms and provide more accurate search results than its rivals.

In addition to more than 2,200 law enforcement agencies, Clearview’s software had been sold to companies in 27 countries, including major U.S. retailers such as Macy’s, Walmart, and Best Buy.

Reduction of Facebook use increased life satisfaction, enhanced the level of physical activity, reduced depressive symptoms and smoking behavior

Delayed negative effects of prosocial spending [donation] on happiness

This review provides time-dose and activity-type evidence for programs looking to use time in nature as a preventative measure for stress and mental health strain

The present study examines the differences between users and non-users of mobile-based dating applications, along with individual user experiences.

the majority of popular films—including films aimed toward children—have at least one torture scene

Dogs poop in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field, study finds

You can breathe in harmful chemicals from tobacco use even in non-smoking venues because they are carried on smokers’ bodies and clothes.

Consumers seem unable to identify their preferred lager beer in a blind taste.

Color preference in the insane: In every group of hospital patients examined blue was found to be the most pleasing color. Green was a distant second and red a close third, with violet, yellow and orange fourth, fifth and sixth.

How Mount Everest became a multimillion-dollar business

For nearly two decades leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Franklin lived in London in a house at 36 Craven Street. In 1776, Franklin left his English home to come back to America. More than 200 years later, 15 bodies were found in the basement, buried in a secret, windowless room beneath the garden.

The User Interface Design Process

A prototype of the Nintendo Play Station, a console that never came to market, fetched $360,000 at an auction

The Go Bag

Indonesia official says ’strong sperm’ can impregnate women in swimming pool

Mastercard is pioneering new payment technology that identifies commuters by the way they walk

Study finds parrots weigh up probabilities to make decisions

There is evidence that the spring Daylight Saving Time transition acutely increases motor vehicle accident risk

How artificial shrimps could change the world (a kilo of farmed shrimp is responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef, study)

Does tapping beer cans prevent beer loss? A randomised controlled trial

People are turning to YouTube and Facebook to learn how to do DIY fecal transplants

About 40% of US adults are obese, government survey finds

A quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots

This phone uses AI to block you taking naked selfies

“Instead of using a short, complex password that is hard to remember, consider using a longer passphrase,” the FBI said. “The extra length of a passphrase makes it harder to crack while also making it easier for you to remember.”

The Effect of Country Music on Suicide

The Shell oil and gas company invited me to London to advise them on millennials and climate change but they didn’t think they needed to get me to sign an NDA. Whoops!

Secret passage dating to 1660 is found inside U.K. parliament. An exclusive walkway once used by royalty was rediscovered inside the landmark building, along with some graffiti from Victorian laborers. [NY Times]

The National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) is a large area in which radio transmissions are heavily restricted by law to facilitate scientific research and the gathering of military intelligence.

The vast majority of light pollution is from cities: street lights, industrial zones, parking lots. But sometimes, it’s from something else.

There’s a reason so many memories with computers are blue

Sun Dayong designs wearable shield to protect against coronavirus outbreaks After an epidemic is contained, he thinks the bat-like shields could be upgraded with Google Glass technology, or simply be used as a “unique private mobile space for people.”

The Homeric Question

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, Creator Of Famous ‘Konami Code’ Gaming Cheat, Dies

Types of interchanges and their efficiency ratings.

For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps reading

Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition [Thanks Tim]

Victims thought they were paying millions to free hostages. But the ‘minister’ who asked them was a fraudster in a mask

Romantic kissing is not a human universal

The scent of a romantic partner can improve sleep

This study did not detect any effect of daily caffeine intake on sleep duration

Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation

The effect of touch on tipping: an evaluation in a French bar

Apple Pay accounts for about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to handle 1-in-10 such payments by 2025

Amazon wants to patent paying with a selfie [2016]

Samsung, which makes both handsets as well as 5G network equipment, told investors on its own call that it expects its 5G business in South Korea to “shrink somewhat compared to last year.”

Scientists testing a small but random sample of donated blood ready for transfusion have discovered that 70 percent contained traces of Xanax [Thanks Tim]

How to donate a piece of your brain to science—while you’re still alive

A newly discovered virus has 74 genes, out of which 68 are completely unknown to science.

List of unsolved problems in philosophy [Thanks Tim]

An interactive museum dedicated to words and language is opening on May 31, 2020, in Washington, DC

The 50 Most Drug-Addled Albums in Music History

Cy Twombly, a retrospective, 1994 [PDF]

Emoji Mashup Bot — Tries to create new emojis out of two (or three) random emojis. Tweets every 60 min.

Ideas for a website

#churchsecurity [Thanks Tim]

Visitors to the Kentucky capitol building are banned from entering with umbrellas or sticks that are used for protest signs because they can be “used as weapons,” but guns and rifles are permitted

‘Deaf’ genius Beethoven was able to hear his final symphony after all

CoronaVirus - FAQ, misconceptions, information, from a statistical perspective + An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

Several delivery apps add restaurants without their consent

Fingerprints can now be dated to within a day of when they were made

How a vegan diet could affect your intelligence

Researchers created a robot hand that can regulate its temperature through sweating

Google says its new chatbot Meena is the best in the world

Not all graffiti are written by alienated teenagers, and not all vandalism constitutes wilful damage. Preventing graffiti and vandalism (1990)

we examine the long-run buy-and-hold performance of an actual portfolio, namely, the collection of John Maynard Keynes

On the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd street is perhaps the most famous subway grate in the world.

Alvin Taylor at a salon getting a perm in Los Angeles, Calif., 1974

Land Art sculpture built by Robert Smithson in the Great Salt Lake only reemerges during drought

A man diagnosed with Wuhan coronavirus near Seattle is being treated largely by a robot

This paper provides evidence that daily fluctuations in the stock market have important–and hitherto neglected–spillover effects on fatal car accidents.

over the past few years, even as the fatal accident rate for commercial flights fell dramatically, fatal chopper crashes have actually become more common.

Waze fixes app after police say it left drivers stranded 45 miles from destination

Streetsblog has a report out on a systematic pattern of racial and ethnic bias in who is ticketed for jaywalking in New York City.

The E-11A is used to link troops in the field to headquarters and has been previously described by Air Force pilots as “WiFi in the sky.”

Metropolitan Police has announced it will use live facial recognition cameras operationally for the first time on London streets.

An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells ‘Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.’ Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey.

He left social media as a disgraced video star. Has he made a comeback with a whole new identity?

‘Podfasters’ listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. I tried listening to podcasts at 3x and broke my brain.

23andMe lays off 100 people as DNA test sales decline

Questions I would ask God about the game of go

Brazil saw nearly 60,000 murders in 2015, as many as the United States, China, all of Europe, Northern Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand combined

Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code

Big Bang May Have Created a Mirror Universe Where Time Runs Backwards (2014)

We amateurs typically achieve the blur effect by accident, with a thumb interrupting the smartphone’s lens. But these blurs in your newsfeed are purposeful. Rise of the Blur

“Other Orders” is a tool for sorting text and tweets

Maeklong Railway Market in Bangkok [Thanks Tim]

Igorrr - Very Noise [Thanks Tim] More: Ham

Sheep facial recognition: Funding helps bring software one step closer

3D-printed living skin with blood vessels created by scientists

Of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 62% suffered violent death

Police platform patrols create ‘phantom effect’ that cuts crime in London Underground

We study the effects that two of the largest gangs in Latin America, MS-13 and 18th Street, have on economic development in El Salvador.

MRI scanners built for two push limits of neuroimaging

women who reported to have sex weekly during the study period were 28% less likely to experience menopause than women who had sex less than monthly.

Prosociality and a Sociosexual Hypothesis for the Evolution of Same-Sex Attraction in Humans

We aim to determine whether shoes are a systematic form of self-expression [PDF]

Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques.

We conclude that researchers’ optimism about the benefits of music training is empirically unjustified

Insecurities are a result of market forces that prioritize costs over security and of governments, including the United States, that want to preserve the option of surveillance in 5G networks. To be sure, there are significant security improvements in 5G over 4G­in encryption, authentication, integrity protection, privacy, and network availability. But the enhancements aren’t enough.

The Case Against Huawei

Valuations of the major labels are currently at an all-time high — they generated $14 billion in 2019 alone. Now private equity firms, institutional investors, and high-profile managers want in on it, too. In recent years, billions of dollars have flooded the music business to invest in the catalogs of songwriters.

Through its partnerships with health care providers, Google can view tens of millions of patient records in at least three-quarters of states

Google researchers used neural networks to make weather forecasts

How the Navy SEALs wound up buying 450 counterfeit radio antennas

the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest manmade hole on Earth and deepest artificial point on Earth

A guitar made out of 106 iPhones and one iPod Touch

Air was collected from 8 different locations associated with death in Texas. A balloon artist was then hired to make 35 balloon hats using the air saved in the compressor.

San Diego strip club hands out branded tents to homeless

The effect of wearing different types of textiles on sexual activity was studied in 75 rats

Enhanced eyelashes increase perceived health and attractiveness

Does the presence of a mannequin head change shopping behavior?

Apple’s AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world’s most valuable company

Within the past year, 2 out of every 5 Americans made a purchase directly from the brand or manufacturer, bypassing middlemen like Walmart or Amazon in the process.

today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century

Geoengineering Wouldn’t Be Enough to Stop Greenland From Melting

The missing 99%: why can’t we find the vast majority of ocean plastic?

Why Knots Work and Why Some Don’t

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is an American franchise, founded by Robert Ripley, which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims

Draw a ridgeline map showing elevation, for anywhere on Earth

2020 Battle for the Whitehouse Chess Set

This wearable vest grows a self-sustaining garden watered by your own urine

Arizona man registers swarm of bees as emotional support animals

Returned online purchases often sent to landfill

Uniqlo’s Tokyo Warehouse is 90% Robotic

Psychopathic individuals have the ability to empathize

monkeys are able to discriminate appearance from reality, study

Punishment as communication

Chinese Scientist Who Edited Babies’ Genes Sentenced To Prison

Researchers fooled Chinese facial recognition terminals with just a mask

Bitcoin lost billions of dollars worth of valuation within a 30-minutes timeframe as a Chinese cryptocurrency scammer allegedly liquidated its steal via over-the-counter markets. The initial sell-off by PlusToken caused a domino effect.

An eight-year-old boy who reviews toys on YouTube has been named by Forbes as YouTube’s highest earner in 2019 He has 22.9 million subscribers and earned $26 million in 2019.

From SaaS idea validation in 1 day to 150+ Beta signups

Science-based dog training with feeling

As germs grow more resistant to antibiotics, many companies developing new versions of the drugs are hemorrhaging money and going out of business. Experts say the grim financial outlook is threatening to strangle the development of new lifesaving drugs.[NY Times]

Does tapping the bottom of a beer can really stop it fizzing over?

J’adore starring Mr Bean [DeepFake] [Thanks Tim]

The story of the “Amen Break”

Tag temen kalian [Thanks Tim]

Someone is putting tiny cowboy hats on pigeons in Las Vegas

Electric scooter start-up Unicorn is shutting down after spending too much money on Facebook adverts

Man Loses Home After Failing To Pay $8.41 In Property Taxes

Participants learned less from personal failure than from personal success, yet they learned just as much from other people’s failure as from others’ success. [PDF]

The ability to process alcohol may have saved humanity’s ancestors from extinction, a new book suggests.

Scientists’ brains shrank a bit after an extended stay in Antarctica

In boxing, the question of brain injury and its sequelae were analyzed from 1928 on, often on profoundly somatic grounds. With domestic violence, in contrast, the question of brain injury and its sequelae appear to have been first examined only after 1990.

New research found that some people excel at deciphering subtle differences in cats’ faces that reveal mood

The same face when seen with ‘richer’ clothes was judged significantly more competent than with ‘poorer’ clothes.

New York City is a deathtrap for birds. About 90,000 to 230,000 feathered creatures drop dead each year after colliding with the city’s buildings.

Expect the night sky to start changing fast. One day soon, the stars we can see from Earth could be outnumbered by a vast swarm of satellites.

Dim Ambient Lighting Increases Game Play Duration and Total Spend

Why When You Eat Might Be as Important as What You Eat

The Rise Of Restaurants With No Diners As Apps Take Orders

Your neighborhood NYPD officer isn’t likely to be your neighbor and the average restaurant is better on Manhattan streets than avenues

‘Laziness has won’: apostrophe protection society admits its defeat

‘I want this on a shirt’ Background reading: bots designed by aggregating retailers will download the image and upload it to their own online stores within minutes

If The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old, How Can We See 46 Billion Light Years Away?

Untangling the Unknot

Watch Transit Maps Transform to Real-Life Geography

Banana wall vandalized with lipstick at Art Basel. “This is the gallery where anyone can do art, right?” Previously: ‘Hungry Artist’ Eats $120,000 Banana

balloons are ok and Foiled again

Norman McLaren, Dots, 1940

“It was never the intention to share the menstrual information with their customers” Japanese store ‘rethinks’ badges for staff on periods

A teenage boy in North Carolina has been prosecuted for having nude pictures of himself on his own mobile phone The young man, who is now 17 but was 16 at the time the photos were discovered, had to strike a plea deal to avoid potentially going to jail and being registered as a sex offender.

we present evidence that violent crime declines in U.S. cities on days in which the local pollen count is unusually high

Juveniles represented by legal counsel were over two times more likely to receive an out-of-home placement compared to those without attorneys. The lawyer penalty was robust over time

Verbal Messages Coming from Behind are Perceived as More Negative

Flavor is the most important factor in eCig appeal

Individuals with dark traits have the ability but not the disposition to empathize

gray matter volume differences between bilinguals and monolinguals (there is considerable heterogeneity of results that complicate the understanding of the bilingual brain)

Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare play was written by someone else

The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries

music made in disparate cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds create music.

Hard Problems in Cryptocurrency

Quantum computing for the very curious

This page is designed especially for students of cheminformatics who are just starting to learn about how chemical structures are represented digitally.

An Outback pulling an Outback, stopped to eat at Outback, parked out back. [via many_loops]

Fake Lufthansa pilot tries to board airplane

Defecting Chinese spy offers information trove to Australian government. His testimony shows how Beijing’s spies are infiltrating Hong Kong’s democracy movement, manipulating Taiwan’s elections and operating with impunity in Australia.

Meetings at work should be seen as a form of “therapy” rather than about decision-making, say researchers.

Chess players make more mistakes on polluted days. Air pollution effects on cognitive functions. Bonus: The Effect of Traffic Pollution on Academic Performance

Merely 20% of the Tinder users in the sample have had one-night stands following Tinder use

Letting robots kill without human supervision could save lives [2017]

5 Ways Smart People Sabotage Their Success

More than a third of Ph.D. students have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by Ph.D. study, according to results of a global survey of 6,300 students from Nature.

Google made algorithmic changes to its search results that favor big businesses over smaller ones

Facebook, Google fund nonprofit think tanks shaping federal privacy debate

There Will Be No Turning Back on Facial Recognition

Jeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakers

Faces and licence plates are among the details that can be clearly seen in a 195 billion pixels photograph of Shanghai [photo + read more]

China to take over Kenya’s main port over unpaid huge Chinese Loan [Thanks Tim]

The rise of ‘ghost kitchens’

Salon Kitty was a high-class Berlin brothel used by the Nazi intelligence service for espionage purposes during World War II. The Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS, or SD) took over the brothel, had the place wire tapped and all the prostitutes replaced with trained spies in order to gather data on various members of the Nazi party and foreign dignitaries.

Thai photographer Visarute Angkatavanich portrays Siamese fighting fish (Betta Splendens)

it’s a single shot of herself dancing to a tearful voicemail from her ex-boyfriend, asking her to take him back after he confessed to cheating

Chilean protesters using lasers to take down a drone.

pitfalls can be easily dismissed — like photos of the Earth from space, which flat Earthers believe are photoshopped

The rise of ‘facadism’ in London [Thanks Tim]

See Forever™ from the observatory at One World Trade Center. Choose to skip just the ticket line or all the lines. [Thanks Tim]

Women Missing Brain’s Olfactory Bulb Can Still Smell, Puzzling Scientists

A recent experiment by Microsoft Japan suggests with a 4-day workweek we may be more productive if we work less

Tech writer Alex Wilhelm found the deck SoftBank is using to explain what just happened with their WeWork clusterfork and it is AMAZING.

This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works

Researchers in Japan and at the University of Michigan found a way to take over Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri devices from hundreds of feet away by shining laser pointers, and even flashlights, at the devices’ microphones. In one case, they said, they opened a garage door by shining a laser beam at a voice assistant that was connected to it. [NY Times]

how many times would I need people to stream my music on Spotify to pay for this double LP?

Efficacy of light therapy versus antidepressant drugs, and of the combination versus monotherapy

Is it dangerous to wake a sleepwalker?

Airplane Mode, a game that tasks you with sitting through a nearly six-hour transatlantic flight… in real time.

Her pills, all individual and artisanally crafted from various kinds of digestible matter, disappoint and refuse any shift to reality + If I can’t sleep at night is it because I am [redacted] - Part I & II

Closed Loop is a recording of two artificial intelligence models conversing with each other - one with words the other with images

New York train rider reports suspicious packages, turn out to be machines used to report suspicious packages

Man kept getting drunk without drinking. Docs found brewer’s yeast in his guts.

Australia wants to use face recognition for porn age verification

Man saves his nail clippings for a year and turns them into engagement ring

Men are funnier than women, study claims

Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels

MIT Taught Self-Driving Cars to See Around Corners with Shadows

You Got a Brain Scan at the Hospital. Someday a Computer May Use It to Identify You. The brain scans of 84 volunteers were used to create reconstructions of their faces, then tested against photographs. A facial recognition program correctly matched 70 subjects. [NY Times]

Fingerprinting isn’t yet as widespread as cookies, but it’s concerning because it’s much, much more aggressive.

Uber made a feature called “Copter” available to all of its users in New York City. A significant portion of helicopter traffic above NYC isn’t monitored. Since 1983, there have been at least 30 crashes.

Air pollution trigger hundreds more heart attacks and strokes, research suggests

Facebook alters video to make people invisible to facial recognition [ De-Identification Video Samples ]

Silicon Valley drug-fueled, sex-laced parties

It was June 6, 1984, and Tetris had just started its journey from behind the Iron Curtain.

What was Condé Nast? And what is Condé Nast today?

Why Thousands Are Watching The Decay Of A Decade-Old McDonald’s Burger

Emoji Frequency

Snoop Dogg employs a full-time blunt roller

Extreme sea level events will hit once a year by 2050, no matter whether climate heating emissions are curbed or not

the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions

Would you give up Google for $17,000 a year? The Federal Reserve wants to know

Alphabet’s Wing Begins First Commercial Drone Delivery Service in U.S., Beating Amazon, Uber

The expansion by Amazon Web Services into state and local elections has quietly gathered pace since the 2016 U.S. presidential vote. More than 40 states now use one or more of Amazon’s election offerings. Amazon pitches itself as a low-cost provider of secure election technology.

what’s happening today is the very opposite of the dot-com bubble

Two mathmaticians developed a new method for multiplying giant numbers together

Temperatures in Qatar – one of the hottest places on Earth – have risen so much that authorities have installed air conditioning in the open air including in streets and outdoor markets.

Gravity is not 9.8 m/s^2. That is just the global average. On this globe it is stronger in the red areas and weaker in the blue areas. + Gravity map reveals Earth’s extremes

Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World, directed by Michel Gondry

curing a migraine headache

Electricity consumption in Europe in 1507

U.S. protects already extinct caribou herd

Nike Jesus trainers injected with ‘holy water’ from Jordan River, costing $3,000, sell out in minutes

Annoyed victim hacks back ransomware gang and releases all their decryption keys, along with a free decrypter.

Problematic sexual attraction research (Retraction of High Heels Increase Women’s Attractiveness)

When asked to answer questions quickly and impulsively, people tend to respond with a socially desirable answer rather than an honest one

Machine-vision systems use radio waves to see through walls and in darkness

How to weigh a whale without a scale

The World’s Most-Used Cryptocurrency Isn’t Bitcoin (Tether’s monthly trading volume is about 18% higher than that of Bitcoin)

Uber Technologies Inc. plans to buy a majority stake in online grocer Cornershop, a deal designed to extend its geographic reach and bolster profits by bundling food delivery with rides. + Uber scrambles into groceries with cornershop. Why?

The marketplace is sort of saying that after WeWork and Uber, there’s two types of companies in the unicorn space: ones that are overvalued and ones that are just going to zero.

Aliens may have bugged space rocks to spy on Earth, scientist says

Aliens will likely be discovered within 30 years, Nobel Prize-winning astronomer says

On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”) PDF

Typing speeds on mobile devices are approaching those on physical keyboards, a new study shows

Hundreds of thousands of people read novels on Instagram

More than 250 people around the world have died taking selfies since 2011

Not a single child born in the U.K. in 2016 was named Nigel

Dior’s Kim Jones and Apple’s Jony Ive predict what our future will look like

Year 2038 problem

Meghalaya is a radical redesign of a train station, using a pile of dirt, Deleuzian theory, illegal plants, Xenofeminism, Dewey’s Aesthetics, and ionizing radiation.

Create a digital voice that sounds like you from a small audio sample [and then] replace recorded words and phrases with synthesized speech

Augmented-Reality-Sandbox

me interpretive dancing to movie company intros and me improvising to Theresa May’s resignation speech [Thanks Tim]

New starting-block cameras censored after female athletes protest. The cameras showed images of athletes’ intimate areas.

Man charged after deliberately farting during strip search, saying, “How do you like that?”

Traders Who Can’t Code May Become Extinct, Goldman’s Tech Pioneer Warns

Preference for high heels correlated with female self-perceived attractiveness

bullshitting frequency was positively associated with overclaiming and negatively associated with sincere self-presentation, honesty, cognitive ability, open-minded cognition, and self-regard

Smart TVs send private data to Netflix and Facebook

Google is reducing how much audio it saves for human review

North Korean hackers have new malware to target ATMs

The top 50 most-surveilled cities in the world

Piracy will Surge if More Legal Streaming Services Launch, Research Shows

Polling by phone has become very expensive, as the number of Americans willing to respond to unexpected or unknown callers has dropped. Back in the mid-to-late-20th century response rates were as high as 70%, according to SSRS, a market research and polling firm. But the Pew Research Centre estimates that it received completed interviews from a mere 6% of the people it tried to survey in 2018.

With more than 700 creations, Adrian Fisher is the world’s most prolific maze designer

CRISPR might be the banana’s only hope against a deadly fungus

The Pentagon notified Congress of its purchase of a microwave weapon system designed to knock down swarms of enemy drones with pulses of energy

Grumman X-29: The impossible fighter jet with inverted wings

Psycho was, and still is, a radical approach to serial killer films

Picasso’s The Old Guitarist is interesting for another reason. Art historians have long noted the presence of a ghostly woman’s face faintly visible beneath the paint.

How one stylist for Silicon Valley helps tech bros go “from boys to men.” “Many of her clients have zero fashion sensibility”

an ad blocker that works on podcasts and radio

French company liable after employee dies during sex on business trip

Google Maps shows sunken car where missing man’s body was found

Human corpses move around significantly as they decompose, according to an Australian researcher who observed a dead body over a 17-month period

Multiple students on campus have offered to pay their classmates to drop out of classes they are waitlisted for

Guizhou ended up with 40 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. Read that again. I didn’t say China had 40% of the world’s tallest, I said a poor, small province in the interior with only 2.5% of China’s population has 40 of the world’s 100 tallest bridges.

A host of innocent-seeming items are contraband: savoury spreads like Marmite contain yeast and can be used in illicit brewing; chewing gum can be used to make an imprint of a key or lock; baby oil can make an inmate’s arms slippery, rendering them impossible to restrain. Cash is treated as top-level contraband. How the prison economy works

What Happens When You Don’t Pay a Hospital Bill The debt typically comes from out-of-network doctors who people thought were in-network, hospital stays, or ambulance rides.

This study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses

Fat Relocation Research [PDF]

A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data

A space elevator is possible with today’s technology, researchers say (we just need to dangle it off the moon)

Why is movie theater popcorn so outrageously expensive?

Two Mathematicians Just Solved a Decades-Old Math Riddle (how do you solve x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = k, where k equals any whole number from 1 to 100?)

The Death of Alexander the Great: One of History’s Great Unsolved Mysteries

How much data is generated every minute

Alaskan map of the United States