Using the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions reduces purchase intentions

The AI boyfriend business is booming A growing number of women are seeking connection and comfort in relationships with chatbots

Friend.com, video, it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company

Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi is an “Enlightened and miraculous being” with a Google Scholar page, an h-index of 62, and 12,031 citations of his work. Most of these are self-citations from a tangled collection of predatory journals that publish questionable papers without proper peer review. Guruji Trivedi claims to have the ability to harness his own “biofield energy to change the behaviour and characteristics of living organisms including soil, seeds, plants, trees, animals, microbes, and humans, along with non-living materials including metals, ceramics, polymers, chemicals, pharmaceutical compounds and nutraceuticals, etc.”

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. […] Hirsch estimated that after 20 years a “successful scientist” would have an h-index of 20, an “outstanding scientist” would have an h-index of 40, and a “truly unique” individual would have an h-index of 60

How pregnancy transforms the brain to prepare it for parenthood […] The rule seems to be that any brain region that changes size during pregnancy shrinks. Numerous brain structures are affected, including the ventral striatum, which is involved in reward processing, and the hypothalamus, which is instrumental in controlling instinctive behaviours. The hippocampus, a structure essential for memory, also transiently shrinks during gestation. […] After birth, most changes quickly and fully reverse — except in the default mode network. […] the default mode network is involved in social processes such as theory of mind and empathy; in thinking about and understanding others and yourself.

This is the story of the various histories of the Internet, where they came from and which ones are real. Was the Internet designed to withstand a nuclear attack?

New study finds people alter their appearance to suit their names

Boxers who failed gender tests at world championships cleared to compete at Olympics

Sexual synesthesia is a neurological condition in which sexual intercourse or orgasm intermittently triggers atypical supplementary perceptions (e.g. colors, shapes).

OnlyFans is a porn-saturated website that offers its subscribers a chance to forge “authentic relationships” with content creators. But many OnlyFans porn stars rely on “chatters” to impersonate them in messages designed to pry dollars from randy subscribers. And, increasingly, some of those chatters aren’t even human – they’re AI bots.

AI is complicating plagiarism.

A veteran investigator of video-game leaks reveals the tricks of the trade

Cancer Risk From Pesticides Comparable To Smoking For Some Cancers

Butterflies accumulate enough static electricity to attract pollen without contact

Do Penguins Have Knees?

I kind of date like a man. I know what I want. Recently, I met somebody I really liked, and my head whipped around and I was like, “Oh my God. Now that’s the guy I’d like to… you know.” It turns out he’s married, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that I think you know when somebody walks in the room. I know from my first marriage to the Count. We met, got married two weeks later. Five days [into the marriage] he goes, “You’re going to be the mother of my children.” I said, “I already know that.”

Brain-Invading Parasite Could Be Hacked to Deliver Meds in Your Head

Ford is trying to patent a way for its cars to report speeding drivers to the police. The patent said vehicles would monitor other vehicles using onboard cameras. Related: Ford has lost $2.5 billion on electric vehicles so far in 2024

Tesla’s Cybertrucks are being mistaken for garbage cans by dumpster-diving raccoons

Burglars are jamming Wi-Fi security cameras […] homeowners should use old-fashioned, wired sets of security cameras that require more elaborate installations and extra hardware

In 2023, Tinder’s base of 10 million subscription-paying users decreased by 8 percent following three consecutive quarters of declines. By the end of 2023, the stock price of Match Group, which operates the largest portfolio of online dating services, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge, had tumbled to about a fifth of its peak in 2021. Bumble’s stock, too, has fallen as much as 85 percent since its February 2021 IPO. To say that mainstream dating apps are in their flop era is not a controversial statement in 2024. Online and off, daters bemoan the user experience

We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. […] A 1% increase in health care prices lowers both payroll and employment at firms outside the health sector by approximately 0.4%. […] we estimate that a 1% increase in health care prices leads to a 1 per 100,000 population (2.7%) increase in deaths from suicides and overdoses.

You can slow a rapid heart rate, caused by anxiety and even cardiac arrhythmias, using a classic technique called vagal maneuvers. These are simple actions that engage the vagus nerve — the major nerve connecting the brain to your internal organs. The straw trick: Place a straw in your mouth and pinch the other end closed. Blow for about 15-20 seconds. If you don’t have a straw, place your finger in your mouth and blow against it as if it were a straw. The technique is one example of a “Valsalva maneuver” — named after the Italian physician who discovered it. […] The easiest places to find a pulse are either the brachial artery (in your wrist) or the carotid artery (in your neck). Personally, I tend to find the carotid more readily palpable — that’s the one TV detectives check when they walk in on a murder scene, right before sadly shaking their heads. Use the pads of your index and middle finger — not your thumb, which has its own pulse and can confuse you. Slide two fingers to either side of your windpipe around the level of your Adam’s apple. Count your heartbeats for 15 seconds and then multiply by four to get a rough estimate. […] It’s normal for your heart to race when you’re frightened or stressed […] Panic attacks are common: At least 11 percent of American adults experience one each year. […] But sometimes people’s hearts start to race for no apparent reason. This is never normal.

In 1876 the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat transported 37 cats from Liège to the surrounding countryside. Released at 2 p.m., the first had found its way home by 6:48, and the rest followed within a day. ”It is proposed to establish a regular system of cat communication between Liège and the neighboring villages. […] Messages are to be fastened in water-proof bags around the necks of the animals.”

An Australian field hockey player has opted to amputate part of his finger to compete at the Paris Olympics. Matt Dawson badly broke a digit on his right hand during team training in Perth two weeks ago, and recovery from surgery to repair it would have taken months.

Valeria was studying engineering in Venezuela before she arrived in Cúcuta at the start of 2023 to be what she called a camgirl. With her family struggling to eat, she said she made the decision to leave for Colombia […] A 2022 study estimated that in the border cities of Cúcuta and Villa Rosario alone, there were between 800 and 1,000 webcam houses hosting an estimated 11,700 migrants across them, the majority of whom are Venezuelan. The number of these houses could now be as high as 3,000.

In the film’s final scene, after deciding to leave Barbieland for the real world, Barbie enthusiastically tells a receptionist, “I’m here to see my gynecologist”[…] We hypothesized that this final line may have spurred public interest in gynecologic care. […] In the week following Barbie’s release, there were large increases in the national online search volume for terms referring to gynecologists and gynecologist definition. Meanwhile, there were no changes in searches for gynecologist appointments.

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects […] According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression.

More than one-third of the planet’s land is used to produce food, and 70 percent of all fresh water is used to irrigate farmland. […] the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals. […] And according to the World Resources Institute, we may need to add almost two Indias to the world’s existing farmland to meet food needs in the second half of this century. — but adding that farmland means cutting down forests, which store carbon, in order to graze more animals, which produce carbon. […] agriculture is responsible for one-third of the global total of emissions [NY Times]

the meta experience

Death Valley heat melts skin off a man’s feet after he lost his flip-flops in the dunes. To make matters worse, the temperatures made the air too thin for a helicopter to fly in and help him.

A Swiss Town Banned Billboards. Zurich, Bern May Soon Follow The trend toward ad-free cities poses a risk to the outdoor advertising industry, worth an estimated 400 million Swiss francs ($450 million) and contributing almost twice as much per year to the country’s $885 billion GDP. Markus Ehrle, the industry association’s president, said that money would instead “flow to big internet companies like Google or Meta,” adding that “ads online are much more energy-intensive than billboards.”

We bought everything needed to make fentanyl - for $3,600. At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills.

water triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, helping our body rest and digest […] explains why so many people find joy and solace in water-related activities. […] Whether you’re planning a refreshing dip, a leisurely stroll along the coastline or a run along a canal, it’s crucial to know how to stay safe. following these five simple steps are highly effective

Could humans run on water?

Across languages, the species–typical vocalization by domestic cats (Felis catus silvestris) is transcribed similarly, typically corresponding to [miau:] or [wau:]. Such consistent and ubiquitous cross-linguistic transcription is apparently onomatopoetic. However, in humans, these qualities make unique use of the tongue; in comparison, most nonhuman mammals do not appear to employ their tongues while vocalizing.

“Hello Kitty is not a cat” (Jill Cook, Director of retail business development at Sanrio) Previously: alternative facts are not facts

Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models. […] We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ […] the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet.

American Express stock trades at much higher multiples than Discover. Here is my attempt to understand why.

Watches account for around 30% of all counterfeit goods.

Global enterprises are grappling with the complexities of AI adoption. While enthusiasm for AI remains high, the path from pilot projects to full-scale implementation is proving slower than anticipated.

Some venomous snakes can bite even when they’re dead and decapitated

Seven ways to spot a bad argument

Shitposting-style tattoos are the latest trend

When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text.

Our brain doesn’t perceive time as a clock. Instead, time flows with experiences, study

A newly discovered hormone that keeps the bones of breastfeeding women strong could also help bone fractures heal and treat osteoporosis in the broader population.

After spending more than $20 billion to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood. […] Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

US Gen Z shopping habits & retail trends for 2024 — 56% of US Gen Z prefer to shop online than in-store […] Year-on-year, purchases of pet accessories (+20%) and grooming supplies (+19%) are also up. […] The number of US Gen Z who are willing to sacrifice other spending to buy a product sooner has dropped 13% YoY.

Change in global value variation, study

Do you want to hear how a Flemish illuminator, Lieven van Lathem dazzled readers in 1464 with the manuscript, Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies?

A significant correlation was identified between increased sleep duration and cognitive decline

Human parasites in the Roman World — Despite their large multi-seat public latrines with washing facilities, sewer systems, sanitation legislation, fountains and piped drinking water from aqueducts, we see the widespread presence of whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica that causes dysentery. This would suggest that the public sanitation measures were insufficient to protect the population from parasites spread by fecal contamination. Ectoparasites such as fleas, head lice, body lice, pubic lice and bed bugs were also present, and delousing combs have been found. The evidence fails to demonstrate that the Roman culture of regular bathing in the public baths reduced the prevalence of these parasites. Fish tapeworm was noted to be widely present, and was more common than in Bronze and Iron Age Europe. It is possible that the Roman enthusiasm for fermented, uncooked fish sauce (garum) may have facilitated the spread of this helminth.

In this paper, I try to add details and credence to a previously suggested, evolution-based model of consciousness. According to this model, the feature started to evolve in early amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) some 320 million years ago. The reason was the introduction of feelings as a strategy for making behavioral decisions.

Designing a fake delivery company seemed to be the most logical, straightforward way of contacting a person. Hence, ”Future Delivers” was born. The company’s concept is that it delivers parcels from the future. This allows your future self in the year 2064 to send a parcel to your past self in the year 2024, filled with good advice, artefacts from the future, and warnings to hopefully improve your life ahead. […] we’re doing serious business here: delivery release documents, uniforms, wax seal, stickers, branded boxes, custom email address with delivery update notifications, blog, brand ambassador and of course, a delivery robot dog off AliExpress.

Every startup in JD Vance’s VC fund, Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview

Robot Dog Cleans Up Beaches With Foot-Mounted Vacuums — Cigarette butts are the second most common undisposed-of litter on Earth—of the six trillion-ish cigarettes inhaled every year, it’s estimated that over 4 trillion of the butts are just tossed onto the ground, each one leeching over 700 different toxic chemicals into the environment.

Each winter, a team of Tasmania Parks and Wildlife staff take on the task of cleaning the state’s show caves. The crew removes clothing fibres, microplastics, and dirt and spores brought in on visitors’ shoes.

Rare photos of uncontacted Amazon tribes, video

“I got a salmon sperm facial with salmon sperm injected into my face.” […] salmon sperm facials have enchanted Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Aniston

Flight attendant held up broken bathroom door for entire 16-hour trip from Hong Kong to New York

A drug has increased the lifespans of laboratory animals by nearly 25%, in a discovery scientists hope can slow human ageing too. The treated mice were known as “supermodel grannies” in the lab. They were healthier, stronger and developed fewer cancers than their unmedicated peers. The drug is already being tested in people.

“What we found is that even in healthy people who are constipated, there is a rise in these toxins in the bloodstream” […] during diarrhea, the body excretes excessive bile acid, which the liver would otherwise recycle to dissolve and absorb dietary fats. Fiber-fermenting gut bacteria known as “strict anaerobes,” associated with good health thrived in the “Goldilocks zone” of one or two poops a day.

Study reveals how anesthesia drug propofol induces unconsciousness

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials. […] a single dose (25 mg) demonstrated rapid and sustained symptom relief in depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. The image comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers who gave psilocybin to participants […] the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity. “Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected” […] these findings cannot show exactly what causes the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, but “it’s possible psilocybin is directly causing” the brain-network changes. That, or it is creating a psychedelic experience that in turn causes parts of the brain to behave differently. [Nature | NY Times | ScienceDaily]

The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player. He used his wealth to buy professional soccer teams and then inserted himself into the starting lineups.

Does Generative AI Facilitate Investor Trading? […] We first document a significant decline in stock trading volume during ChatGPT outages and find that the effect is stronger for firms with corporate news released immediately before or during the outages. We further document similar declines in the short-run price impact, return variance, and bid-ask spreads, consistent with a reduction in informed trading during the outage periods.

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless Benchmarks used to rank AI models are several years old, often sourced from amateur websites, and, experts worry, lending automated systems a dubious sense of authority

Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes. AI-generated fakes can be spotted by analyzing human eyes in the same way that astronomers study pictures of galaxies.

The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing — The 5/5 rule says that it takes 5 prompts and just 5 minutes to create a phishing campaign nearly as successful as a phishing campaign generated by IBM engineers. What took technically advanced humans 16 hours, generative AI did in 5 minutes

We’re over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history.

Catalog of Dark Patterns

We examined 200 videos from popular TikTok fitspiration hashtags (fitness, fitspo, gymtok, fittok). […] Videos of men included muscular idealised bodies and objectification through face obscurity (excluding the face from view) more frequently than videos of women. […] 60 % of videos presented incorrect or harmful information

we find that the involvement of social media influencers in propagating false claims is minimal, with only 0.003% of the more than 1.3 million posts analyzed actually supporting statements flagged as disputed by Politifact.

A drug commonly prescribed to thin blood can be repurposed as a cheap antidote to cobra venom […] Snakebites kill about 138,000 people a year. Cobras account for most bites in parts of Africa and India.

To avoid sea level rise, some researchers want to build barriers around the world’s most vulnerable glaciers

How Do You Price Your Wine List?

Elon Musk is offering to donate his sperm to help colonize Mars […] he recently told employees he anticipates one million people living on Mars within two decades, affirming his personal commitment by stating his intention to die there.

By 2022, 2.78% of 18- to 24-year-old adults self-identified as transgender, up from 0.59% in 2014.

Lesbian women reported the highest orgasm frequency, followed by bisexual women, with heterosexual women having the lowest orgasm frequency. Lesbian women also outperformed heterosexual women on sexual duration, while heterosexual women outperformed lesbian and bisexual women on sexual frequency.

This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months

AT&T says hackers stole 2022 call and text data from ‘nearly all’ cell customers update: AT&T Paid a Hacker $370,000 to Delete Stolen Phone Records

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable

A fleet of drones patrolling New York City’s beaches for signs of sharks and struggling swimmers is drawing backlash from an aggressive group of birds

Why don’t we know how antidepressants work yet?

the man who used dreams and premonitions to predict the future — In 1966, a British psychiatrist had an idea: to change the course of history by asking the public to share their eerie intuitions

The reality is that the ability to read the brain and influence activity is already here. It’s no longer only in the realm of science fiction. Now, the question is, what exactly can we access and manipulate in the brain?

Taking principles from fractal geometry and the strategic game of chess, physicists have created what they say is the most fiendishly difficult maze ever devised. In a Knight’s tour, the chess piece (which jumps two squares forwards and one to the right) visits every square of the chessboard just once before returning to its starting square. This is an example of a ‘Hamiltonian cycle’ – a loop through a map visiting all stopping points only once.

Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work?

The inaugural Miss AI contest opened in spring, drawing entries from some 1,500 AI programmers around the world. […] After judges of the world’s first AI beauty pageant unveiled 10 finalists last month, the inaugural Miss AI has now been crowned.

O.J. Gude, The Man Who Invented Times Square

Creator Startups Have Already Raised as Much Money This Year as in All of 2023

majority of websites and mobile apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscription services — Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.

If you live in Phoenix or Houston and your air conditioner fails, staying in your house may be impossible and you may need to evacuate. Air-conditioning now plays a central role in protecting public health in homes, workplaces, and public spaces. […] Given the enormous importance of air conditioning, I thought it would be useful to put together a few posts about it. This is part one: some background on the physics of air conditioning.

A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area

Drug Trends […] Ketamine is approaching world domination […] According to wastewater analysis, the popularity of the drug rose in 12 of 15 cities in Eastern and Western Europe from 2022 to 2023 […] global seizures of ketamine hit a record high in East and South-East Asia where they saw an increase of 70 percent in just one year.

According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.

Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: ‘I believe climate change is a hoax whatever anyone else says, and I have a right to believe it!’ But is there such a right? […] belief is not knowledge.

Häxan is a Swedish-Danish film, a curious and groundbreaking mix of documentary and silent horror cinema, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Whereas most films of the period were literary adaptations, Christensen’s take was unique, basing his film upon non-fiction works. […] Reportedly the most expensive film of the Swedish silent film era, Häxan was actually banned in the United States, and heavily censored in other countries. In 1968, an abbreviated version of the film was released. Titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, it featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and dramatic narration by the wonderfully gravel-toned William S. Burroughs. [video]

English lewd vocabulary for romance and erotica writers

Whataburger app becomes power outage map after Houston hurricane […] Whataburger is a San Antonio-based fast-food chain with 127 stores in the Houston area. On the Whataburger app, users can see a map of Whataburger locations, with an orange logo indicating a store is open, and a grey logo meaning it’s closed.

Eighteen hundred feet of rail expands by more than an inch for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature increase. So rails used to be laid down in sections — each between 30 and 60 feet long — with small gaps. Still, in a severe heat wave, the rail can swell until the underlying ties can no longer contain it. Then the rail gets visibly wavy, morphing into what’s known as a sun kink.

Heat waves reduce the number of motile sperm (the only ones capable of fertilizing an egg) by up to 10%

A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. [NY Times]

Airbnb’s hidden camera problem […] The Airbnb employee revealed that when a guest complains of a hidden camera, the company doesn’t – as a matter of practice – notify law enforcement, not even when a child is involved. […] Hidden cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms show guests during their most private moments – changing clothes, being with their children, even having sex […] while hotels can be held legally responsible for guests harmed on their property, Airbnb frequently is not. […] Madden initially denied ownership of the camera, which was concealed in a clock radio and pointed at his guests’ bed. Then, he said he put it there for security reasons. Ultimately, Madden admitted he’d been recording guests engaged in sexual activity. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I look at everything, I study everything.” Madden served 14 days behind bars.

how online shopping, persistent data collection, and machine-learning algorithms could combine to generate the stuff of economists’ dreams: individual prices for each customer.

the 19-year-old getting paid to rate Instagram profiles

Positive feedback is often given in an attempt to boost people’s performance. In many cases, however, positive feedback undermines performance […] when positive feedback was delivered before participants started preparing for their next task, it impaired subsequent performance.

The Barnum effect is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. […] general characterizations attributed to an individual are perceived to be true for them, even though the statements are such generalizations that they could apply to almost anyone. Such techniques are used by fortune tellers, astrologers, and other practitioners to convince customers that they, the practitioners, are in fact endowed with a paranormal gift.

Butterflies can cross the Atlantic in as few as five to eight days.

10 billion passwords leaked in the largest compilation of all time

the decision to be unfaithful is primarily driven by individual tendencies, with minimal influence from the partner. The study found that a strong commitment to one’s partner is linked to a lower likelihood of infidelity, whereas shared passion and intimacy do not serve as effective deterrents.

Destiny beliefs describe the belief that a relationship is meant to be while growth beliefs describe the tendency that relationships can be cultivated and maintained through effort. […] those with higher growth beliefs experienced a slower decline in relationship satisfaction over time.

The big problem for materialists is what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that? […] Panpsychism lets you bypass the hard problem of consciousness altogether. That’s because the panpsychist starts out with the right ingredients. If you believe that consciousness resides, however minimally, in matter’s tiniest building blocks — atoms, electrons, quarks — then it’s much easier to explain how sophisticated forms of consciousness can eventually arise in, say, humans. This fits very well with the theory of evolution, which says that creatures gradually became more complex as they evolved. […] In a landmark 2006 paper, Strawson took this idea and ran with it, making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually entails panpsychism. Consciousness is real. (We know that from our own experience.) Everything is physical. (There’s no evidence that immaterial stuff exists.) Therefore, consciousness is physical. There’s no “radical emergence” in nature. (We don’t get something from nothing.) Consciousness emerging from totally non-conscious stuff would be radical emergence. Therefore, all stuff must have some consciousness baked into it.

the biology of fatigue

Treating several individuals suffering from post-COVID-19 syndrome with a nicotine patch application, we witnessed improvements ranging from immediate and substantial to complete remission in a matter of days.

In the 13th century, a boie was a servant, but already in that time the provenance of the word was obscure. A century later, the term started being used to indicate a male child. […] Since the 14th century, gyrle was a word used to indicate a child, with no gender distinction. Despite the apparent simplicity of the term, so far nobody has been able to reconstruct its origins.

Sometimes the Jersey Devil features a dog’s head and pig’s feet; sometimes he’s an eighth child instead of a thirteenth. The story’s emotional crux, however, is consistent: an unwanted pregnancy, a mother’s anger, a curse. It reads as what folklore scholars Joan Radner and Susan Lanser might call a “coded” tale—a story that invites multiple, even contradictory, interpretations to “protect the creator from the dangerous consequences of directly stating particular messages.” A hallmark of feminist folklore, coding allows a tale-teller to convey ideas that are controversial or forbidden by camouflaging morals in ambiguity, ensuring the story reads differently to different audiences. […] it’s easy to see the Jersey Devil as a critique of callous mothering […] Though gynaehorror often represents female reproductivity negatively, it can function as a “way of exposing misogyny.”

Looking up flights on multiple browser tabs can be cumbersome, but Google’s Gemini has a solution. The model integrates with Google Flights and Google Hotels, pulling in real-time information from Google’s partner companies in a way that makes it easy to compare times and, crucially, prices. How to use AI to plan your next vacation

Russian Space Chiefs Finally Admit US Landed on Moon

Shark Fishing in Miami with the South Beach Shark Club + Rene De Dios and the South Beach Shark Club [video]

How many times do you have to riffle a deck of cards before it is completely shuffled? It’s a tricky question, but math has us covered: hyou need seven riffles.

Thai teacher banned from school after she livestreamed under her skirt while teaching

High-speed hippos can get airborne, says new study

Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of theories is telling. My purpose here must be humble: collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate. Seek insights, not answers. Unrealistically, I’d like to get them all, at least all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct […] It’s the classic “mind-body problem:” How do the felt experiences in our minds relate to the neural processes in our brains?

Watching a movie, sisters’ brain activity is more similar than that of friends

how brain activity triggers these severest of headaches — migraines — has long puzzled scientists. A study in mice suggests that a brief brain ‘blackout’ — when neuronal activity shuts down — temporarily changes the content of the cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. This altered fluid, researchers suggest, travels through a previously unknown gap in anatomy to nerves in the skull where it activates pain and inflammatory receptors, causing headaches.

In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. […] In 1875, he injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries. At first, he wrote, the patient “complained that her head felt like bursting.” She soon developed a high fever and an abnormally high heart rate, but recovered a week later. […] Saline solutions, still used today, were introduced the next decade as a much less dangerous, if imperfect, stopgap measure for emergency bleeding. […] ErythroMer is made from “recycled” human hemoglobin—the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body—wrapped in a membrane to mimic a tiny cell. In the rabbit, the transfusion appeared to be working.

Not only had Microsoft hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology […] Amazon hired “close to” to 66 percent of Adept’s employees […] Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology […] The problem for Big Tech is that they are no longer allowed to buy companies like they once did. The current antitrust enforcement regime would most certainly try to block an Amazon acquisition of Adept […] Even still, capitalism finds a way. What Microsoft did to Inflection, and what Amazon just did to Adept, is the new Big Tech playbook for swallowing the AI industry and getting away with it.

Over the past two decades, Chinese leaders have built a high-tech surveillance system of seemingly extraordinary sophistication. […] Although the protesters were careful to conceal their faces with masks and hats, the police used mobile-phone location data to track them down. […] Over the past eight decades, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed a vast network of millions of informers and spies whose often unpaid work has been critical to the regime’s survival. It is these men and women, more than cameras or artificial intelligence, that have allowed Beijing to suppress dissent. […] Generations of Chinese leaders have struck a delicate balance between making the secret police powerful enough to do its job, but not so powerful that it threatens the regime itself.

The r/SecurityClearance subreddit […] where government workers and public servants share their secrets before they share them with the U.S. government.

“It seems like every block in New York now has a tailored-for-millennial-women piercer, both in terms of VC-backed brands like Studs and boutique-y local spots”

Revenge saving has become a trend on Chinese social media websites, with Chinese youth setting extreme monthly savings targets

In Australia, strangulation has been explicitly criminalized in all states and territories. However, it continues to be a “normalized” sexual practice despite its potentially fatal consequences and associated short and long-term sequelae. […] Confidential, cross-sectional online surveys were conducted with 4702 Australians aged 18–35 years […] 57% reported ever being sexually strangled and 51% reported ever strangling a partner.

The dangers of sneezing—from ejected bowels to torn windpipes

Despite the great amount of time spent on ships and ferries, swimming was a rare skill among men. Among women, it was unheard of—­even suspect. Benjamin Franklin, however, was in his element.

Why Music Is Getting Worse

The Mauritanian iron ore train spans up to 3km (1.8 miles) in length, travels on a single track of 704 kilometres (437 miles), with 200 – 300 freight carriages, weighing up to a total of 84 tons and making it the longest and heaviest train in the world. […] This train has no ticket, no conductor, no dining cart, or any sort of announcements.

The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery

The article is specifically focused on the risk of LLMs causing an extreme catastrophe in which they do something akin to taking over the world and killing everyone.

IBM, which has a $20 billion consulting business, ran into some of those issues on its work with McDonald’s. The companies developed an A.I.- powered voice system to take drive-through orders. But after customers reported that the system made mistakes, like adding nine iced teas to an order instead of the one Diet Coke requested, McDonald’s ended the project. […] McKinsey’s A.I. group, QuantumBlack, built a customer service chatbot for ING Bank […] The chatbot now handles 200 of 5,000 customer inquiries daily. ING has people review every conversation to make sure that the system doesn’t use discriminatory or harmful language or hallucinate. […] Over a four-month period this year, Reckitt worked with Boston Consulting Group to develop an A.I. platform that could create local advertisements in different languages and formats. With the push of a button, the system can turn a commercial about Finish dishwashing detergent from English into Spanish. Reckitt’s A.I. marketing system, which is being tested, can make developing local ads 30 percent faster. [NY Times]

The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand

The triplets (whose abilities at walking, cycling, and donkey riding are identical) always leave home together at the last possible minute and arrive at school together on the last stroke of the bell.

a photo by Stephen Shore titled “Kingston, New York, November 8, 2020, 41°56.9443167N, 74°1.7406167W.” The image is from Shore’s fabulous new show of photographs shot from drones, at 303 gallery in New York.

S. Korea administrative robot defunct after apparent suicide, found unresponsive after having apparently fallen down a two-meter (six-and-a-half foot) staircase

The authors of the study reasoned that if black-and-white stripes ward off flies for zebras, they should also do the same for people painted with zebra stripes.

What makes a good tree? We used AI to ask birds

What drives mosquitoes’ bloodlust? Their hormones. One hormone seems to boosts the insects’ thirst for a blood meal, while another shuts it off.

Study suggests connection between anxiety and Parkinson’s disease Researchers compared a group of 109,435 people 50 and older who were diagnosed with a first episode of anxiety between 2008 and 2018 with a control group of 987,691 people without anxiety.

Teenagers with lower levels of mental ability may be three times more likely to experience a stroke before the age of 50, research suggests

Goldman signals end of an era in private equity […] No longer can you “be the highest bidder, buy the company, sit there, wait for multiple expansion and sell again”[…] investors shouldn’t expect the type of buyout returns that until 2022 were often buoyed by market exuberance, climbing valuations and financial engineering.

One study says a third of American workers have signed one; another puts the number at more than half. NDAs are being given out to roommates, to parents, to boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, and to bachelor-party attendees and wedding guests.

Lawsuit Claims Microsoft Tracked Sex Toy Shoppers With ‘Recording in Real Time’ Software

Scholars have known about the hidden Cupid since 1979 when x-rays and other tests first indicated a painting-within-a-painting underneath the blank background wall. At the time, it seemed that Vermeer had simply decided against including this element and painted it out. […] The museum ran additional tests, which provided significant clues such as dirt between the Cupid and the paint covering it. Further conservation revealed craquelure (cracks that form on paintings’ surfaces) on the Cupid itself. Both discoveries suggested that the Cupid had been exposed for a significant period of time. In other words, the overpaint must be by a later artist, not Vermeer. More: The Mysterious Cupid in Johannes Vermeer’s Paintings

The brain makes a lot of waste. Now scientists think they know where it goes

new technology using engineered living skin tissue and human-like ligaments gives robots a more natural smile

researchers develop visual tracking technology to detect drink drivers

Analysis of 400,000 healthy adults finds no health benefits from taking daily multivitamins […] Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period

Swallowable tiny robot with thrusters performs endoscopy at home Using a smartphone app, the distant doctor controls the robot within the patient’s stomach. PillBot shuts down and exits the body naturally within six to twenty-four hours. In addition, the team is working on using AI to make the preliminary diagnosis, after which a physician will create a course of therapy. [..] The team envisions expanding the technology to examine the bowels, vascular system, heart, liver, brain, and other parts of the body. […] With clinical trials underway, the company aims to secure FDA approval and launch commercially in the US by early 2026. [more]

Is Delaying Menopause the Key to Longevity? The ovaries, in particular, appear to be connected to virtually every aspect of a woman’s health. They also abruptly stop performing their primary role in midlife. Once that happens, a woman enters menopause, which accelerates her aging and the decline of other organ systems, like the heart and the brain. While women, on average, live longer than men, they spend more time living with diseases or disabilities. [NY Times]

Tumor-seeking radiopharmaceuticals promise targeted treatments with fewer side effects

Isoniazid can be detected in finger sweat for 1–6 h following controlled administration of the drug. This technique is adaptable for other drugs

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, may also increase risk-taking

cravings for drugs in addiction are supposed to be impossible to resist […] this image of craving is fundamentally flawed. My aim is to develop a more nuanced understanding of craving and rectify the damage done by this false image.

A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern. The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function. [NY Times]

study demonstrates how our initial impressions can have a lasting impact on our decisions, often leading us to persistently choose inferior options even when better ones are available.

Youtube has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels — Sony, Warner, and Universal — to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software

Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app — A pizza for which he charged $24 (£20) was being advertised for $16 on DoorDash - and when he secretly ordered it himself, the app paid his restaurant the full $24 while charging him $16.

Pooping on the Moon The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites […] Human feces is packed with microbial life […] Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal tantalizing insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere. […] “Basically, in space a human no longer has gravity to assist pulling the feces away from the anus. It becomes really a sticky liquid problem of surface tension. As it is organically active, extreme care has to be taken to make sure one cleans up.”

Microbial dark matter comprises the vast majority of microbial organisms (usually bacteria and archaea) that microbiologists are unable to culture in the laboratory

the L.A. Influencer Who Is Trying to Get Famous By Never Tipping at Restaurants and Bars

The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2019 — ongoing) is an installation, and a vibe, that reimagines my father’s bar—the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco.

Shop Imp Kerr: Vive la France!

2 years of mild caloric restriction significantly reduces biological age

5 things you’re doing that can land you in a dentist’s chair: eating popcorn, chewing on ice, energy drinks, sodas, coffee, vaping, using fluoride-free toothpaste. Also: using your teeth to open packages, tear off tags, or even bite their nails, teeth grinding (bruxism), brushing too hard

The U.S. Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order. […] more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015 […] more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023

Almost half of U.S. teachers and K-12 students say they are using ChatGPT weekly.

Researchers describe how to tell if ChatGPT is confabulating

I am using AI to automatically drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers

Calculator words

This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. “If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.”

Sensory secrets of penis and clitoris unlocked after more than 150 years Krause corpuscles — nerve endings in tightly wrapped balls located just under the skin — were first discovered in human genitals more than 150 years ago. The structures are similar to touch-activated corpuscles found on people’s fingers and hands, which respond to vibrations as the skin moves across a textured surface. […] Ginty and his collaborators activated the Krause corpuscles in both male and female mice using various mechanical and electrical stimuli. The neurons fired in response to low-frequency vibrations in the range of 40–80 hertz. Ginty notes that these frequencies are generally used in many sex toys; humans, it seems, realized that this was the best way to stimulate Krause corpuscles before any official experiments were published.

I started by dating somebody on an ENM app who was in a different polycule who was connected to someone in this polycule. And then I started dating someone else in this polycule. He’s married, and his wife and I are metamours, which is simply a word for my partner’s partner. — Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule

Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. [PDF]

the group has collected venom from more than 500 species, building an unrivalled collection of animal toxins. Studying the molecules that make up venom, scientists have been able to develop compounds that can relieve chronic pain, treat diabetes and create eco-friendly insecticides.

“blue carbon” refers to the carbon dioxide sequestered and stored by coastal habitats such as mangroves and seagrass beds. These highly efficient ecosystems occupy just 0.5% of the seafloor but contribute over 50% of oceans’ carbon burial, sequestering even more carbon by area than rainforests.

This is the first animal ever found that doesn’t need oxygen to survive […] a jellyfish-like parasite that doesn’t have a mitochondrial genome […] it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life

One of Vico’s chief claims is that, though civilizations rise and fall, the periods of decline do not return them to their original state. Some foundation remains from which rebuilding can commence. A central challenge for a science of politics, then, is to reduce the severity of the inevitable downturns, shorten the reign of “barbarism,” and through these means, hope for gradual improvement.

In California, the “Daughter from California” is known as the “Daughter from New York”

I jumped from a plane – and my parachute failed