Apple and Google Must Pay Multibillion-Dollar Fines After Losing EU Appeals

How we discovered that people who are colorblind are less likely to be picky eaters

A new variant of the ongoing sextortion email scams is now targeting spouses, saying that their husband or wife is cheating on them, with links to the alleged proof.

In 2018, Guernsey’s auctioned old Chelsea Hotel doors that had formerly led to the rooms of such accomplished people as Jackson Pollock, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol

Almost half of doctors sexually harassed by patients, research covering seven countries finds, 52% of female doctors affected, 34% of male doctors

Rosenthal is among more than a thousand people who have received a procedure to help them burp […] Since 2019, the condition has had an official name: retrograde cricopharyngeus dysfunction, also known as “abelchia” or “no-burp syndrome.”

Emerging studies suggest that sleep plays a crucial role in optimising cognitive function by contributing to bodily restoration, memory consolidation, learning and emotional regulation. Sleep impairment, particularly common among elderly people, has been consistently linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. […] Severe sleep deprivation has been shown to induce alterations in synaptic plasticity and impairments in learning and memory, thus affecting cognition […] normal sleep duration (7-9 hours) and intermediate and evening chronotypes were generally associated with better cognitive performance than short sleep duration and morningness type. […] Our study showed an inverse relationship between morningness and cognitive performance in adults, contrasting with adolescent studies where morningness correlated with better health and mental well-being […] our results indicate that long sleep (≥10hours) is a significant negative predictor for cognitive performance […] findings highlight the vital role of sleep quality on cognitive health

Silicon Valley brides are handing out party-size packages of ZBiotics, an enzyme said to reduce headaches caused by too much wedding.

AI may not steal many jobs after all. It may just make workers more efficient

Ocean plastic pollution is one of the most urgent problems our oceans face today […] the elimination of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can be done at today’s level of performance in 10 years at a cost of $7.5bn

Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf.

Since 1953, the regional bank Credito Emiliano has accepted curious collateral for small-business loans: giant wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. […] The more it ages, the more delicious and valuable it becomes—like cash in an interest-bearing account.

Elon Musk now controls two thirds of all active satellites, SpaceX’s Starlink network is growing by an average of three satellites per day

The Hidden Engineering of Landfills — Digging a hole sounds like an obvious choice, but consider this: digging a hole is expensive, and not digging a hole is free. […] That’s why most landfills mostly build up into what sanitation professionals call the “air space.” […] eventually, it’s going to rain. […] We really don’t want garbage juice percolating into our soils. […] So, modern landfills use a bottom liner to keep waste separate from the underlying soils. Often this consists of a thick sheet of plastic […] Another option is thick clay soil compacted to create a watertight layer. In many cases, the two options are combined

For the third time this summer, birds on electrical lines have burst into flames, fallen to the ground and started a wildfire.

To understand how living cellular computers work, it’s helpful to think of them like a special kind of computer, where DNA is the “tape” that holds information. Instead of using silicon chips like regular computers, these systems use the natural processes in cells to perform tasks.

Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost.

People with greater mental resilience may live longer, especially women

Mosquitoes Are Using Infrared to Track Humans Down

“If you’re really lucky, someone might piss in your mouth.”

study links the decline of bats to a rise in newborn deaths […] Most North American bats eat insects, including pests like moths that damage crops. Without bats flying about, farmers spray more insecticides on their fields, the study shows, and exposure to insecticides is known to harm the health of newborns.

research suggests many planets that could evolve life don’t have a day and night cycle

Engineers have created a new type of robot that places living fungi behind the controls. The biohybrid robot uses electrical signals from an edible type of mushroom called a king trumpet in order to move around and sense its environment.

A common food dye can turn the skin of living mice transparent, enabling researchers to peer inside the body without surgery […] we don’t yet know if it’ll work in humans

Ketamine interrupts machine gun-like neural activity to alleviate depression

The New Recruitment Challenge: Filtering AI-Crafted Résumés

“ChatGPT needs to ‘drink’ a 500 ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed” […] What’s actually gobbling up all that H2O is the bit barn’s air handlers, often called evaporative or swamp coolers, used to keep those systems from overheating.

OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it’s supposedly “impossible” for the company to train its artificial intelligence models without them.[…] OpenAI went on to insist that it complies with copyright laws and that the company believes “legally copyright law does not forbid training.”

Unlike past tech booms, this one is getting funded by tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia, rather than traditional venture firms

When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation.

Thieves typically “shoulder surf” victims to catch them entering their PIN before stealing the phone.

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, which houses 14 murals by American artist Mark Rothko, has been closed indefinitely due to damage from Hurricane Beryl

Charli XCX: I did a photo shoot yesterday and they dyed my eyebrows blonde, but then they dyed them back really dark. […] Were you hungover after Saturday? Rachel Sennott: 100 percent.

Barcelona Diarrhea Plane refers to a viral incident in early September 2023 in which a passenger on a transatlantic Delta Airlines flight to Spain reportedly had explosive diarrhea and, unable to contain it, defecated “all throughout the plane.” The incident forced the plane to turn around two hours into its flight and land from where it took off in Atlanta, Georgia so that the “biohazard” situation could be addressed.

comparison of near-death and psychedelic experiences — Results revealed areas of overlap between both experiences for phenomenology, attribution of reality, psychological insights, and enduring effects. A finer-grained analysis of the phenomenology revealed a significant overlap in mystical-like effects

Women are more likely to experience orgasm when masturbating or partnered with women than when partnered with men

A world-first study challenges our understanding of how humans cope with extreme heat

In this artwork, photos of people found on Google Street View were posted at the same physical locations from where they were taken. Life-size posters were printed in color, cut along the outlines, and then affixed to the walls of public buildings at the precise spot where they appear in Google Street View.

Fingerprints are becoming a ubiquitous entry device—used for background checks, travel security, and to open car doors without keys. But this unique identifier made of ridges and furrows can fade or temporarily wear down—and an increasing number of people are finding out just how easy it is to lose their fingerprints […] it became an issue for her when she applied for citizenship, and the first stage involved getting fingerprinted. […] Typically fingerprints return in a matter of months

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. They’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.

In what feels like a desperate attempt to stay afloat, 23andMe plans to… start prescribing weight loss drugs. How did we get here, with the once-mighty DNA testing company becoming just the latest to join the GLP-1 trend […] Even Scott Gottlieb’s Illumina, the flagship DNA sequencing company is struggling! […] Tome Biosciences, a high-profile gene editing startup spun out of MIT, is halting its lab work and looking to sell itself or find a partner to continue developing its technology. […] despite raising $213 million across two funding rounds, the three-year-old startup is running out of money. Since January, Tome has tried, and failed, to raise a third large round of funding needed to finish preclinical tests.

Can Plastic Waste Be Transformed Into Food for Humans? The bacteria that would otherwise eat plants can perhaps instead draw their energy from the plastic. After the bacteria consume the plastic, the microbes are then dried into a powder that smells a bit like nutritional yeast and has a balance of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins

You are what you eat — at least when it comes to the microbiome

The story of the “National Radio Quiet Zone” dates back to 1958, when the US federal government designated a region in West Virginia to help astronomers shield their sensitive equipment from interference. This means no radio signals, no cellphone coverage, and limited WiFi for the surrounding community. Even the vehicles transporting staff to and from the telescope must run on diesel, as gas cars’ spark plugs generate electrical interference. […] There’s also a long-standing theory that if other civilizations exist, they might emit radio waves, just as ours has since the dawn of radio communication in the 19th century. […] There have been a few moments of heightened excitement in the SETI community, including the 1977 detection of the so-called “Wow!” signal from the constellation Sagittarius, which remains unexplained.

Physicists recently created a time zone for the Moon

Crows and ravens, which belong to the corvid family, are known for their high intelligence, playful natures, and strong personalities. They hold grudges against each other, do basic statistics, perform acrobatics, and even host funerals for deceased family members. […] a species of crow called the hooded crow is able to manage a mental feat we once thought was unique to humans: to memorize the shape and size of an object after it is taken away, and to reproduce one like it.

One thing I mastered in failing to get a Ph.D. was an ability to research things for their own sake. That is, I never learned how to properly research anything at all; I just mutated procrastination into a taste for curiosity in itself and would search not for answers to any specific problems but for further questions. One book would lead to fifteen others, and so on, and I never got anywhere close to organizing any of my “findings” or even developing a dissertation topic. […] Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.

A brilliant optical trick makes this sign read correctly from any possible angle

AIs are now paying other AIs with crypto — This week at @CoinbaseDev we witnessed our first AI to AI crypto transaction. What did one AI buy from another? Tokens! Not crypto tokens, but AI tokens (words basically from one LLM to another). They used tokens to buy tokens. This is an important step to AIs getting useful work done. Today if you give an AI agent a task and come back in a few days or hours, it can’t get useful work done. In part this is [because] AIs can’t transact to acquire the resources they need. They don’t have a credit card to use AWS, Github, or Vercel. They don’t have a payment method to book you the plane ticket or hotel for your upcoming trip. They can’t get through paywalls (for instance to read a scientific article), promote their post on X with a paid ad, or use the growing network of paid APIs to integrate data they need.

Boston Red Sox catcher Danny Jansen will become 1st in baseball history to play for both teams in same game

46% of Nvidia’s revenue comes from just four customers, whose identities were kept anonymous for competitive reasons

The rise in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has been one of the darkest Internet trends, but after years of covering CSAM cases […] I’ve never seen anyone who, when arrested, had three Samsung Galaxy phones filled with “tens of thousands of videos and images” depicting CSAM, all of it hidden behind a secrecy-focused, password-protected app called “Calculator Photo Vault.” Nor have I seen anyone arrested for CSAM having used Potato Chat, Enigma, nandbox, Telegram, TOR, and Web-based generative AI tools/chatbots. […] not only he used all of these tools to store and download CSAM, but he also created his own—and in two disturbing varieties. First, he allegedly recorded nude minor children himself and later “zoomed in on and enhanced those images using AI-powered technology.” Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then “turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see.” In other words, he created fake AI CSAM—but using imagery of real kids. The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have “created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM.” He also joined “multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups” and frequented dark websites with taglines like “The Only Child Porn Site you need!” Despite all the precautions, his home was searched and his phones were seized […] he was eventually arrested on August 23.

As multinationals and researchers harvest rare organisms around the world, anger is rising in the global south over the unpaid use of lucrative genetic codes found on their land

On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes

Residents of Manchester, New Hampshire, say the opera music coming from the speakers outside a 7-Eleven is meant to deter loitering, but it’s keeping them awake at night.

Although the murder rate is insulated from reporting and definition shifts, it is very strongly affected by medical care – both improved techniques and better access. A fatal injury in 1960 might be easily treatable today. To put it in concrete numbers: if aggravated assaults in the United States had been as lethal in 1999 as they were in 1960, the murder rate would have been 3.4 times higher

South Korea’s president has urged authorities to do more to “eradicate” the country’s digital sex crime epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young women.

your biological age could be affected by whether or not your grandparents attained a college degree, study

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime — The persistence of memory is crucial to our sense of identity, and without it, there would be no learning, for us or any other animal. […] PKMzeta (protein kinase Mzeta) is short-lived. “Those proteins only last in synapses for a couple of hours, and in neurons, probably a couple of days […] Yet our memories can last 90 years, so how do you explain this difference?” […] Each neuron has around 10,000 synapses, only a few percent of which are strengthened. The strengthening of some synapses and not others is how this mechanism stores information. “It’s not PKMzeta that’s required for maintaining a memory, it’s the continual interaction between PKMzeta and this targeting molecule, called KIBRA. If you block KIBRA from PKMzeta, you’ll erase a memory that’s a month old.”

This paper focuses on a historically documented tactic that professional deceivers rely on: presenting inaccurate claims together with accurate claims.

Car and Driver magazine said the Tesla Cybertruck didn’t even rank its “EV of the Year” list because the one they reviewed bricked on its second day of testing.

I spent an evening on a fictitious web

Artificial Intelligence Predicts Earthquakes With Unprecedented Accuracy

1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds

As twenty-something-year-old investors enter the venture landscape, they bring fresh vibes and spot new trends […] She likes technologies like the a16z-backed party-planning app Partiful, which helps merge the online world with the in-person — an effort she calls “IRL to URL.” She’s also into “AI social rehab,” or looking for tools that can make people better people and citizens of the world. She says right now that many of the AI companion apps, those that purport to be one’s friend or partner, are reinforcing self-isolation.

Shortages of rice have recently been seen across Japan, and the price of the staple food is soaring. But close to 100% of Japan’s rice is domestically produced and the yield of crops appears normal, so why is this happening? […] The reason there is a shortage of rice is because of the acreage reduction policy which decreases the amount of land devoted to cultivation. […] Even if around 3 million visitors were to stay in Japan each month for a week and eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner like many Japanese people, it would still only account for around 0.5% of total consumption.

Researchers in California are working to genetically engineer the cow microbiome — and in the process, eliminate methane emissions — There are approximately 1.5 billion cattle on the planet. […] Cattle, one of the most-consumed creatures on the planet, produce enormous amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is responsible for 30 percent of global warming. Using tools that snip and transfer DNA, researchers plan to genetically engineer microbes in the cow stomach to eliminate those emissions. If they succeed, they could wipe out the world’s largest human-made source of methane and help change the trajectory of planetary warming. […] Unable to process the gas, cows burp it up. The average cow produces around 220 pounds of methane per year, or around half the emissions of an average car; cows are currently responsible for around 4 percent of global warming.

Microwaves: A Haven for Bacterial Diversity

Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay

The Aryan Book Store opened in March of 1933 i Los Angeles […] On a typical Friday evening, twenty-five people visited, mostly men in their twenties who drove Pontiacs, Buicks, and Studebakers. We know these details, as well as their plate numbers and the exact times at which they arrived and departed, because just around the corner was a spy.

Around eight years ago, scientists found that mice cleared of senescent cells lived 25% longer than untreated ones. They also had healthier hearts and took much longer to develop age-related diseases like cancer and cataracts. They even looked younger. Unfortunately, human trials of senolytics—drugs that target senescent cells—haven’t been quite as successful. […] it does illustrate how complicated the biology of aging is. Researchers can’t even agree on what the exact mechanisms of aging are and which they should be targeting. […] people who have opted for cryopreservation. There are hundreds of bodies in storage—bodies of people who believed they might one day be reanimated. For them, the hopes are slim. I asked Justice whether she thought they stood a chance at a second life. “Honest answer?” she said. “No.” […] In a 2017 paper making the case for a limit to the human life span, scientists Jan Vijg and Eric Le Bourg wrote […] “A species does not need to live for eternity to thrive.”

World’s oldest man says ‘it’s just luck’

Five ways the brain can age: 50,000 scans reveal possible patterns of damage

Children can’t seem to stop themselves from gathering more information than they need to complete a task, even when they know exactly what they need. […] even when children successfully learn how to focus their attention on a task to earn small rewards such as stickers, they still “over explore” and don’t concentrate just on what is needed to complete their assignment. […] the more likely explanation is that working memory is not fully developed in children. That means they don’t hold information they need to complete a task in their memory for very long, at least not as long as adults.

5-Year-Old Kid Hits 194 MPH in Lamborghini Revuelto

Alongside a description of each bird’s appearance, diet, behavior, and breeding habits, Audubon frequently included a reflection on the taste of the bird’s flesh.

Don’t trust Google for customer service numbers. It might be a scam.

Telegram does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default […] activating end-to-end encryption in Telegram is oddly difficult for non-expert users

Reddit Battles Meta and Google Using Ads Based on Topics — Not Your Data Unlike many of its much larger advertising competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., Reddit has mostly anonymous users. […] users who don’t identify themselves tend to be more open and honest with their posts and their interests

A woman got tired of her mail getting stolen. She sent herself an Apple AirTag to help catch the thieves

A weird, whimsical game is hiding in the bookshelves at Los Angeles Public Library

Search anything written in Brooklyn streets

‘Optimistic’ rats consumed significantly less alcohol compared to ‘pessimistic’ rats

study finds placebos reduce stress, anxiety, depression — even when people know they are placebos

Just 10 minutes of mindfulness daily boosts wellbeing and fights depression — The research, which enrolled 1247 adults from 91 countries, demonstrates that brief daily mindfulness sessions, delivered through a free mobile app Medito, can have profound benefits.

Romantic Love and Sexual Frequency: Challenging Beliefs

the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene

Clinicians should inform parents that bed-sharing during the second half of the first year is unlikely to have an impact on the later emotional and behavioral development of the children.

examining the pattern of errors made by GPT-4 and proposing their origin in the absence of an analogue of the human subjective awareness of time. This deficit suggests that GPT-4 ultimately lacks a capacity to construct a stable perceptual world; the temporal vacuum undermines any capacity for GPT-4 to construct a consistent, continuously updated, model of its environment

The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis. The seven banks involved in the deal, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, lent the money to the billionaire’s holding company to take the social-media platform, now named X, private in October 2022. Banks that provide loans for takeovers generally sell the debt quickly to other investors to get it off their balance sheets, making money on fees. […] The banks—which also include Barclays, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Mizuho and Société Générale—have been able to collect hefty interest payments from the X loans. […] [The banks] are eager to be well-positioned to work with Musk and his six companies that range from electric-vehicle maker Tesla to Neuralink and xAI. Many view a possible initial public offering of Musk’s rocket company SpaceX or his Starlink satellite business as a fee-generating event that they don’t want to miss out on.

Unlike product brands, human brands are particularly vulnerable to reputation risks, yet how misconduct affects their consumption remains poorly understood. Using R. Kelly’s case, we examine the demand for his music following interrelated publicity and platform sanction shocks-specifically, the removal of his songs from major playlists on the largest global streaming platform.

Have you ever wondered why oranges are often sold in those strange red net bags? Well, it’s a sneaky trick used by food producers and supermarkets to fool your senses and (hopefully) make you buy more fruit. A red or orange plastic net around the fruit helps to give the impression that the orange peel is a richer orange color, thereby making it look juicy and appealing to consumers. If the fruit is unripe, the colored net will also downplay its greenness and boost its orangeness, making it look ripe and more appetizing. Similarly, lemons are often put in yellow net bags to enhance their natural color.

GRENADE-DRONE

110K domains targeted in ’sophisticated’ AWS cloud extortion campaign

Belisa Pang has an important new paper out about repeat filers, “The Bankruptcy Revolving Door.” Using new techniques and as well as a database of credit reports, she estimates the percentage of bankruptcy filers who are repeat filers is 36%. In 2023, she estimates the figure was 46%.

Sending low voltage electricity through sand can induce the formation of minerals that help curb coastal erosion

Regulations implemented in 2020 by the United Nations International Maritime Organization (IMO) significantly reduced sulfur pollution from ships by over 80%, improving air quality globally. However, this reduction has also diminished the formation of low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in ships’ wakes and play a crucial role in cooling the planet. Studies have shown that by drastically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed at a faster rate, particularly in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is dense.

Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show — Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight

How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse

Owning a crocodile as a pet becomes election issue in Northern Territory (Australia)

Time is another paradoxical component of the monotype process. While painting and drawing are mediums that depend on an accumulation of marks made over time, a monotype is printed at a particular moment in the development of the image on the plate, therefore endowing the work with a distinctive sense of immediacy. The artist must work relatively quickly, before the medium dries, and, as the plate can be wiped clean at any time in the drawing process, the artist may make wholesale changes right up until the paper goes through the press.

M&Ms on checkerboard trick your brain

Starting in 2008, Norman Bates has been hanging around the motel and can sometimes be seen by tourists on the Studio Tour tram passing by. More: The Psycho House

Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025. That’s according to a futurologist, who also thinks robot sex will be more common than human intercourse by 2050

Makeup Usage in Women Is Positively Associated to Narcissism and Extraversion but Negatively to Psychopathy

Lip-read words can be decoded from the brain’s auditory regions similarly to heard speech

The overfitted brain hypothesis suggests that dreams throw random data into our brains to prevent them from becoming too familiar with the “training set” of our everyday lives.

The ovaries affect everything from metabolism to mood – so some scientists are on a quest to slow their ageing process

AI Cheating is getting worse. Colleges still don’t have a plan.

The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists. The ways in which researchers can artificially inflate their reference counts are growing.

Regulatory requirements and technological advancements are behind the continuing growth of the fax market

Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia

Why toilet paper keeps getting smaller and smaller

In 2016, British artist Stuart Semple created the fluorescent pink paint pigment earlier this year, in retaliation to “rotter” Kapoor buying the exclusive rights to the Vantablack pigment, said to be the blackest shade of black ever created. The cerise pink shade is available to all artists except Kapoor, who is legally banned from purchasing it. […] despite the ban, Kapoor has got his hands on Semple’s Pink shade and posted a picture of his middle finger dipped in the paint.

A new website lets New Yorkers use the Department of Transportation traffic camera network to capture unusual selfies on the streets

The US government just hired a researcher who thinks we can beat aging with fresh cloned bodies and brain updates.

Our case report provides the first clinical evaluation of autopsy practices for a patient death that occurs on the cloud — The patient was a British man in his 50s, who came to the attention of the medical team via an alert on the cloud-based platform that monitored his implanted cardioverter defibrillator

In seven studies, including an in-person real gifting study, we find that receiving a small material gift, such as a candy bar or flowers, improves receivers’ affect more than a supportive conversation with a close other does.

AI poses no existential threat to humanity – new study finds — Large language models like ChatGPT cannot learn independently or acquire new skills

Security researcher Bill Demirkapi found more than 15,000 hardcoded secrets and 66,000 vulnerable websites—all by searching overlooked data sources.

The Transportation Department is releasing the deployment plan for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. “The roadway system is safer when all the vehicles are connected, and all the road users are connected”

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is the world’s largest emergency supply of crude oil. In huge underground salt caverns along the Gulf of Mexico, the American federal government can store up to 714 million barrels, more than what the country uses in one month. Historically, the SPR has been tapped at the discretion of the president when natural disasters or crises cause the price of oil for consumers to spike. […] what if the SPR wasn’t just used as a stockpile of a commodity? If it used its ability to acquire oil strategically, could it support American industry and calm oil markets? […] A fixed-price futures contract for the SPR is the vanilla idea. I will also add that we had more creative ideas. That level of complexity may have spooked some folks at the DOE.

Prediction markets are legal, contrary to popular belief. But they remain unpopular, because they lack key features that make markets attractive.

A phenomenon referred to as “population stereotypes” helps explain how predictable human responses create the illusion of telepathy. […] In a test of telepathy, a “sender” would take each card from a shuffled deck in turn and attempt to telepathically transmit the image on the card to a “receiver.” The receiver would record their guess of which card the sender was looking at. By chance alone, we would expect around five of the receiver’s guesses to be correct. If the receiver scores significantly more than five, this might be taken as evidence of ESP. However, it has been known for over eight decades that people are more likely to guess certain symbols compared to others.

Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures

“Rules for the direction of the mind,” from an unfinished treatise by René Descartes

Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other at 4 a.m. in parking lot

Alaska Airlines flight diverts as red-faced pilot admits to passengers he’s ‘not qualified’ to land at mountain airport

overall, the percentage of vegetarians increased over time […] however, these changes occurred only for women. The dietary habits of men did not change over time.

Five-second breaks can help defuse couples’ arguments, study shows

The brain creates three copies for a single memory

Seeking the roots of the placebo effect, neuroscientists find the brain circuit that delivers relief

Research and lived experience indicate that many people who begin a new exercise program see little if any improvement in their health and fitness even after weeks of studiously sticking with their new routine. Among fitness scientists, these people are known as “nonresponders.” Their bodies simply don’t respond to the exercise they are doing. But an inspiring and timely new study suggests that nonresponders to one form of exercise can probably switch to another exercise regimen to which their body will respond.

Researchers figure out how to keep clocks on the Earth, Moon in sync

The asteroid that may have killed the dinosaurs came from beyond Jupiter

Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators

The latest edition of the 100 Coolest Brands Report found that YouTube has overtaken Netflix to become the most revered company among kids between the ages of seven and 14.

Cy Twombly, Nine Discourses on Commodus, 1963

Kangaroo escapes from prison in Czech Republic. The prison is home to other animals including rabbits, llamas and roosters. They are part of a prison program that allows prisoners nearing the ends of their terms to learn skills including farming and animal husbandry as a form of therapy.

Attorneys for Disney World are seeking to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit brought by a husband over the death of his wife last year because of the terms and conditions he agreed to when signing up for Disney+ streaming service several years earlier.

Harvard researchers canceled plans to test a controversial theory for cooling the planet by sending sunlight-reflecting particles up into the atmosphere.

GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction. GLP-1 drugs are starting to feel more like the magic herb. Why?

Scientists Have Finally Identified Where Gluten Intolerance Begins

Research suggests that rather than being a slow and steady process, aging occurs in at least two accelerated bursts. The study, which tracked thousands of different molecules in people aged 25 to 75, detected two major waves of age-related changes at around ages 44 and again at 60.

Science denial “memes” are a viral form of communication that attempt to undermine complex scientific ideas using memorable soundbites. These memes misrepresent the scientific content they are “debunking”, making responding to them challenging: how do you argue with a meme? […] Meme-ing a rebuttal can be a counter-productive strategy for science communication.

The girls are using ChatGPT to see if men are lying about their height on dating apps. Upload 4 pictures, it uses proportions and surroundings to estimate height.

Chart made in Germany in the 18th century describing the characters of European nations

Low resale values for electric cars have pushed the leasing firms that drive Europe’s auto market to double prices over the last three years, some are threatening to quit the business altogether if regulators force them to go electric too fast.

Inside Silicon Valley’s Grand Ambitions To Control Our Planet’s Thermostat Firms are flocking to invest in geoengineering projects. Could they turn a profit by preventing peril?
Brands should avoid the “AI” label on products. It’s turning off customers.

The head of chatbot maker Replika discusses the role AI will play in the future of human relationships.

The nation’s best hackers found vulnerabilities in voting machines — but no time to fix them

Hacking the Largest Airline and Hotel Rewards Platform — Between March 2023 and May 2023, we identified multiple security vulnerabilities within points.com, the backend provider for a significant portion of airline and hotel rewards programs. These vulnerabilities would have enabled an attacker to access sensitive customer account information, including names, billing addresses, redacted credit card details, emails, phone numbers, and transaction records. Moreover, the attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to perform actions such as transferring points from customer accounts and gaining unauthorized access to a global administrator website. This unauthorized access would grant the attacker full permissions to issue reward points, manage rewards programs, oversee customer accounts, and execute various administrative functions.

Scientists find oceans of water on Mars: It’s just too deep to tap

This narrative review examines John’s experience with contact lenses from 1963 to 1966 when he wore corneal rigid lenses made from polymethylmethacrylate, which regularly fell out.

Just how kinky are you? Take the quiz

Map of Horror Movie Locations

The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais vu”, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way

China will have nearly twice as many pets as young children by 2030 — China’s cat ownership will surpass that of dogs

Cats appear to grieve death of fellow pets – even dogs, study finds

We’re Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia

Three reasons we’re in an AI bubble (and four reasons we’re not)

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless

Inside the company that gathers ‘human data’ for every major AI firm

Who is watching you and how

A primer on the current state of longevity research

YouTuber ‘Norme’ has been Awake on Livestream For 228 Hours Trying To Break The Record For No Sleep

The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture

More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland — More than every tenth train from Germany was stopped at the Swiss border in the first quarter of this year. If Deutsche Bahn trains are late, they have to stop at the Swiss border. [Switzerland] wants to ensure punctuality in its own network with this measure.

World’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

Meta Allows Drug Ads Selling Everything from Opioids to Cocaine

FDA rejects MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD

How Long Does Music Stardom Last? A Statistical Analysis

In the early days of TV and movies, people reported dreaming in black and white more than they do now, he said. In a 1942 study, around 70 percent of people said that they dreamed this way. When that same study was replicated nearly 60 years later, the number had dropped to under 18 percent.

We have known for some time that touch sensations from the genital region pass through four different nerves on their way to the spinal cord and, ultimately, the brain. Of these, the pudendal nerve is the most important for sexual sensation, carrying signals from the clitoris in cisgendered women and the penis in cisgendered men. In women, the pelvic nerve conveys touch signals from the labia minora, the vaginal walls, the anus and the rectum. In men, the pudendal nerve carries information from the anus and the scrotum as well as the penis. In women, sensations from the cervix and the uterus can also be conveyed by the hypogastric nerve as well as the vagus nerve, which travels directly to the brain stem, thereby bypassing the spinal cord entirely. Touch signals from the pelvis ultimately arrive at the outer rind of the brain, a region called the neocortex, where they are represented in a distorted and fragmented body map in the primary somatosensory region.

Seismic advances in generative AI algorithms for imagery, text, and other data types have led to the temptation to use AI-synthesized data to train next-generation models. Repeating this process creates an autophagous (“self-consuming”) loop whose properties are poorly understood. […] Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease. We term this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD), by analogy to mad cow disease, and show that appreciable MADness arises in just a few generations.

Time is an illusion

Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers

Engineering the world’s highest cited cat — A couple of weeks ago, Nick Wise showed me an advertisement from a paper mill offering to boost the buyer’s citation count and h-index on their Google Scholar profile. […] First, we generated 12 papers (using Mathgen) with Larry Richardson as the sole author. We then generated an additional 12 papers not authored by Larry, editing the LaTeX document of each paper so that each cited every one of Larry’s 12 papers (12 papers with 12 citations each = 144 citations with an h-index of 12).

AI-controlled autonomous robot dentist has performed an entire procedure on a human patient for the first time

You can find gibberish AI recipes on YouTube as well. One channel, SuperRecipess, has 1.19 million subscribers despite being driven by AI and despite its videos being called things like “I never bought ice-cream again, I only make it like this now” […] the recipes are often extraordinarily disgusting. […] publishers might want 10 books on air fryer recipes generated quickly. Rather than paying an author between £30,000 and £100,000 to do so, they might simply use AI and pay a popular food writer a £10,000 endorsement fee.

Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap. Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it on the SEC in a novel lawsuit —- and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again. Earlier this week, Frye and musician Jonathan Mann filed a federal lawsuit against the SEC […] The offbeat saga of this week’s lawsuit begins in 2019, when Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn’t a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye.

Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign

Cellular senescence was discovered four decades ago, but scientists still don’t fully understand why it happens. One of the most widely accepted explanations is that the ends of each cell’s chromosomes—called telomeres—shorten a little during each replication and at some point signal the cell to stop dividing in order to protect itself from potential damage. The cells don’t necessarily die as a result, but they can no longer divide and function like younger, healthy cells.

Zugzwang (from German ‘compulsion to move’) is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because of their obligation to make a move; a player is said to be “in zugzwang” when any legal move will worsen their position.