European authorities say they have rounded up a criminal gang who stole rare antique books worth €2.5 million from libraries across Europe. Books by Russian writers such as Pushkin and Gogol were substituted with valueless counterfeits

A cosmetic process known as a “vampire facial” is considered to be a more affordable and less invasive option than getting a facelift […] During a vampire facial, a person’s blood is drawn from their arm, and then platelets are separated out and applied to the patient’s face using microneedles […] three women likely contracted HIV from receiving vampire facials at an unlicensed spa in New Mexico

Are women’s sexual preferences for men’s facial hair associated with their salivary testosterone during the menstrual cycle? […] participants selected the face they found most sexually attractive from pairs of composite images of the same men when fully bearded and when clean-shaven. The task was completed among the same participants during the follicular, peri-ovulatory (validated by the surge in luteinizing hormone) and luteal phases, during which participants also provided saliva samples for subsequent assaying of testosterone. […] We ran two models, both of which showed strong preferences among women for bearded over clean-shaven composite faces […] the main effect of cycle phase and the interaction between testosterone and cycle phase were not statistically significant

The effect of sound on physiology and development starts before birth, which is why a world that grows increasingly more noisy, with loud outdoor entertainment, construction, and traffic, is a concern. […] exposure of birds that are in the egg to moderate levels of noise can lead to developmental problems, amounting to increased mortality and reduced life-time reproductive success.

For the first time in at least a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into a single organism. The process, called primary endosymbiosis, has only happened twice in the history of the Earth, with the first time giving rise to all complex life as we know it through mitochondria. The second time that it happened saw the emergence of plants. Now, an international team of scientists have observed the evolutionary event happening between a species of algae commonly found in the ocean and a bacterium.

physicists have succeeded in building an artificial synapse. This synapse works with water and salt and provides the first evidence that a system using the same medium as our brains can process complex information.

The man, who is referred to as “Mr. Blue Pentagon” after his favorite kind of LSD, gave researchers a detailed account of what he experienced when taking the drug during his music career in the 1970s. Mr. Pentagon was born blind. He did not perceive vision, with or without LSD. Instead, under the influence of psychedelics, he had strong auditory and tactile hallucinations, including an overlap of the two in a form of synesthesia.

In the 1979 murder trial of Dan White, his legal team seemed to attempt to blame his heinous actions on junk-food consumption. The press dubbed the tactic, the “Twinkie defense.” While no single crime can be blamed on diet, researchers have shown that providing inmates with healthy foods can reduce aggression, infractions, and anti-social behavior.

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing. [2008]

E.T. and the three actors from inside the costume

An Unpredictable Brain Is a Conscious, Responsive Brain — Severe traumatic brain injuries typically result in loss of consciousness or coma. In deeply comatose patients with traumatic brain injury, cortical dynamics become simple, repetitive, and predictable. We review evidence that this low-complexity, high-predictability state results from a passive cortical state, represented by a stable repetitive attractor, that hinders the flexible formation of neuronal ensembles necessary for conscious experience.

His recent sales on Appointment Trader, where his screen name is GloriousSeed75, include a lunch table at Maison Close, which he sold for eight hundred and fifty-five dollars, and a reservation at Carbone, the Village red-sauce place frequented by the Rolex-and-Hermès crowd, which fetched a thousand and fifty dollars. Last year, he made seventy thousand dollars reselling reservations. Another reseller, PerceptiveWash44, told me that he makes reservations while watching TV. […] Last year, he made eighty thousand dollars reselling reservations. He’s good at anticipating what spots will be most in demand, and his profile on the site ranks him as having a “99% Positive Sales History” over his last two hundred transactions. It also notes that he made almost two thousand reservations that never sold—a restaurateur’s nightmare. How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out

How I search in 2024

Apple Vision Pro is a big flop, should further dispel the myth of tech inevitability

Physicists have proposed modifications to the infamous Schrödinger’s cat paradox that could help explain why quantum particles can exist in more than one state simultaneously, while large objects (like the universe) seemingly cannot.

The odds of contracting Lyme disease from tick bites during warmer weather months continue to rise. […] what are things that I can do to protect myself?

The Sack of Palermo that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s dramatically changed the Sicilian capital’s economic and social landscape. Vast tracts of what was agricultural land, including the Conca d’Oro citrus plain, were destroyed as the city was engulfed by concrete. The Mafia played a principal role in this process. This paper will show how Cosa Nostra consolidated its business through social and local connections by granting employment to the members of lower classes such as craftsmen and construction workers and thus gaining consent.

Belgian man whose body makes its own alcohol cleared of drunk-driving

Many primates produce copulation calls, but we have surprisingly little data on what human sex sounds like. I present 34 h of audio recordings from 2239 authentic sexual episodes shared online. These include partnered sex or masturbation […] Men are not less vocal overall in this sample, but women start moaning at an earlier stage; speech or even minimally verbalized exclamations are uncommon.

Women are less likely to die when treated by female doctors, study suggests

For The First Time, Scientists Showed Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation

How the brain processes visual information — and its perception of time — is heavily influenced by what we’re looking at, a study has found.

Grindr Sued in UK for sharing users’ HIV data with ad firms

Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals — Staff went undercover on Walmart, eBay and other marketplaces as a third-party seller called ‘Big River.’ The mission: to scoop up information on pricing, logistics and other business practices.

Do you want to know what Prabhakar Raghavan’s old job was? What Prabhakar Raghavan, the new head of Google Search, the guy that has run Google Search into the ground, the guy who is currently destroying search, did before his job at Google? He was the head of search for Yahoo from 2005 through 2012 — a tumultuous period that cemented its terminal decline, and effectively saw the company bow out of the search market altogether. His responsibilities? Research and development for Yahoo’s search and ads products. When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4 percent market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4 percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce. [He] was so shit at his job that in 2009 Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its own search technology, instead choosing to license Bing’s engine in a ten-year deal.

Artificial intelligence can predict political beliefs from expressionless faces

I “deathbots” are helping people in China grieve — Avatars of deceased relatives are increasingly popular for consoling those in mourning, or hiding the deaths of loved ones from children.

MetaAI’s strange loophole. I can get a picture of macauley culk in home alone, but not macauley culkin — it starts creating the image as you type and stops when you get the full name.

Psychedelia was the first ever interactive ‘light synthesizer’. It was written for the Commodore 64 by Jeff Minter and published by Llamasoft in 1984. psychedelia syndrome is a book-length exploration of the assembly code behind the game and an atlas of the pixels and effects it generated.

Thermonator, the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog, $9,420

No evidence for differences in romantic love between young adult students and non-students — The findings suggest that studies investigating romantic love using student samples should not be considered ungeneralizable simply because of the fact that students constitute the sample.

Do insects have an inner life? Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does not end with vertebrates. Researchers are expanding their investigations of consciousness to a wider range of animals, including octopuses and even bees and flies. […] Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences”

No one wants to eat when they have an upset stomach. To pinpoint exactly where in the brain this distaste for eating originates, scientists studied nauseated mice.

“This research shows the complexity of how caloric restriction affects telomere loss” After one year of caloric restriction, the participant’s actually lost their telomeres more rapidly than those on a standard diet. However, after two years, once the participants’ weight had stabilized, they began to lose their telomeres more slowly.

”It would mean that two-thirds of the universe has just disappeared”

AI study shows Raphael painting was not entirely the Master’s work

I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service [2021]

Shadow trading is a new type of insider trading that affects people who deal with material nonpublic information (MNPI). Insider trading involves investment decisions based on some kind of MNPI about your own company; shadow trading entails making trading decisions about other companies based on your knowledge of external MNPI. The issue has yet to be fully resolved in court, but the SEC is prosecuting this behavior. More: we provide evidence that shadow trading is an undocumented and widespread mechanism that insiders use to avoid regulatory scrutiny

The sessile lifestyle of acorn barnacles makes sexual reproduction difficult, as they cannot leave their shells to mate. To facilitate genetic transfer between isolated individuals, barnacles have extraordinarily long penises⁠. Barnacles probably have the largest penis-to-body size ratio of the animal kingdom, up to eight times their body length

We explain Traditional Chinese Medicine

New Mexico’s state senate took up a startling amendment in 1995 — it would have required psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony on a defendant’s competency

Except for the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd […] we estimate precise null effects of protests on public opinion and electoral behavior.

speakers consistently perceived disagreeing listeners as worse listeners

Last June, Inflection Al was riding high. The artificial intelligence startup founded by veterans of Google’s famous DeepMind Al lab had just raised $1.3 billion from Microsoft and tech billionaires Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt to build out its chatbot business. But less than a year later, the tide has turned. Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan have left Inflection Al for jobs at Microsoft, which also now has the rights to use its technology. Inflection Al is now focused on helping other companies improve their own Al tools. It’s not the only case of Al hype coming back down to Earth.

TikTok is reportedly developing a feature that would allow brands to use AI-generated influencers to promote products via videos and live-streams.

How the Food Industry Pays Influencers to Shill Blueberries, Butter, and More Previously: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat

In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world. During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world. […] B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of some of the most easily recognized yet enigmatic structures in the biological world: feathers.

Invisible particles called tachyons, which break causality and move faster than light, may dominate the cosmos

Progress update for the first soon to be mass manufactured penetration depth detecting sex robot

Employee Sneaks His Own Painting Onto the Walls of a German Museum

Cash incentives for weight loss work only for males

Sleeping more flushes junk out of the brain

Patterns of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication During Sex […] most preferred to communicate pleasure nonverbally. Some participants reported a tendency to communicate pain or dislike verbally.

“We found an association between broadly defined cat ownership and increased odds of developing schizophrenia-related disorders”

Why do some people always get lost? Research suggests that experience may matter more than innate ability when it comes to a sense of direction

Brush your teeth at least twice a day with a fluoride-containing toothpaste and spit — but don’t rinse.

NUS scientists uncover a missing link between poor diet and higher cancer risk — methylglyoxal, which is a chemical produced when our cells break down glucose to create energy, can cause faults in our DNA that are early warning signs of cancer development

L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism — A brief, weird history of brainwashing

Louisiana High Court: Priests Have a “Property Right” Not to Be Sued For Sexual Abuse

AI Could Explain Why We’re Not Meeting Any Aliens Previously: where might this Great Filter be located?

Adobe is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and anger

The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training. […] The robots don’t have peripheral vision; they can’t look left or look right like a human soldier can by simply turning their head. And the Army’s outdated network can’t always keep hundreds of drones aloft at the same time, or even tell U.S. troops which of the unpiloted aircraft are friend or foe. [But] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won’t be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams. […] Today, the Army might have three platoons deployed in a basic attack: one to fix the enemy in place, another to maneuver on them, and then one more in reserve. Put robots into that group of soldiers […] “Then you have basically three platoons entirely freed up”

In 2023, the average cost of attending law school reached $220,335 over three years—$146,484 of which goes to tuition alone. The fancier the school, the higher the sticker price: At Columbia Law School, the current cost of attendance is $118,357 per year, with tuition alone coming in at just under $80,000 annually. At Harvard Law, the annual cost of attendance is $116,00, or $348,000 over the course of a J.D. Although law school has never been considered cheap, these numbers represent a dramatic increase in recent years. In 2002, tuition at private law schools averaged $24,193 per year; in 2022, just 20 years later, that average had gone up to $54,070. […] Law school is getting more expensive and less useful to students. The Federalist Society is happy to fill the void.

Stamp prices in the U.S. and other countries

Postcards Revolutionized Pornography

Clifford Stoll is currently the sole proprietor and sole employee of Acme Klein Bottles. […] A Klein bottle is what mathematicians call a “non-orientable surface,” a one-sided plane that, when traversed, brings the traveler back to their starting point, while also flipping them upside-down. […] Its inside is its outside; you can’t tell which side you are on.

Smart rings

Let us look at how depictions of Odysseus and the Sirens change, depending on location, local tradition, a given society’s fashions, and popular tastes. […] So far I have found no images of a ‘syrinx’ – the pan-flute or panpipes – being played by Sirens on Greek vases, or otherwise in Greek art.

Emily Dickinson’s herbarium

historical dictionary of English slang

96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers. Could have been worse – last time researchers checked it was 98.6%

He went to the gate for the Delta flight to Austin, and used his phone to take pictures of the boarding passes of other passengers without their knowledge. He then boarded the aircraft using the barcode on another passenger’s boarding pass. […] he boarded and then tried to hide in the lavatory. The goal was to let everyone else board, and then take whatever empty seat was left. The problem is, there were no empty seats on the flight.

blinking does more than wet the eye, it also helps with vision

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows

Why Birds Survived, and Dinosaurs Went Extinct, After an Asteroid Hit Earth

whorearchy

Polish priest jailed for throwing wild orgy where male prostitute died after overdosing on erectile dysfunction pills. In a similar incident, an Italian priest was sentenced to three years in prison in late 2021 for stealing nearly $120K from the church to buy drugs for gay sex parties he hosted.

Esketamine injection just after childbirth reduces depression in new mothers

Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic approved in the United States for inducing and maintaining anesthesia via intravenous infusion or intramuscular injection. It is not indicated for major depressive disorder (MDD) or TRD, although it is frequently used off-label for these indications. Esketamine, the (S) enantiomer of racemic ketamine, is FDA-approved for adults with TRD and adults with MDD with suicidal thoughts or actions in combination with an oral antidepressant. […] The United States has experienced a rapid proliferation of ketamine clinics to treat depression that operate with little, to no, regulation. Some clinics are now prescribing ketamine lozenges that patients take at home.

How Hackers Can Hijack Two-factor authentication Calls with Sneaky Call Forwarding

some experts argue that eliminating the chance of hallucinations entirely would also require stifling the creativity that makes AI so valuable

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. […] In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. […] Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true. […] In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup,” why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.

A Reading List on Fermentation — Somewhere in the grey zone between science and magic, the controlled addition of bacteria to food transforms it — mostly to our delight. Here are five pieces exploring these transitions (and their products).

South Korean election night graphics

Sierra Leone Declares Emergency After Addicts Dig Up Graves To Get High On Drug Made From Human Bones

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. […] an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.

we also provide evidence that growing up together does not make people more similar and genetic effects partly wear off with time/generations.

Each pregnancy is linked with an additional two to three months of biological ageing, researchers say

New research suggests that individuals with elevated psychopathic traits might not experience a lack of fear but instead find enjoyment in frightening situations

Our main finding is that the correlation between beauty and earnings is not causal […] with the exception of prostitutes for which the premium is still substantial. […] Athletes and politicians seem to enjoy relatively large beauty premiums. [PDF]

Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court

Other videos are stolen from the model Cece Rose and have been replaced with “Adrianna’s” face. The AI influencers I saw had one consistent “face” through all of the stolen reels they posted. But the women they stole from were not always the same, meaning that one AI influencer is often posting videos consisting of many different “bodies,” which are of course stolen from real women.

Animal-free egg protein startup Onego Bio is one step closer to cracking the traditional egg market

Cow Magnets

The perfect heist? Inside the seamless, sophisticated, stealthy L.A. theft that netted up to $30 million

Why is the Moon exactly the same apparent size from Earth as the Sun? Surely this cannot be just coincidence; the odds against such a perfect match are enormous. It actually is just a coincidence.

A former University of Iowa Hospital employee pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges that he had been living under another man’s identity since 1988, causing the other man to be falsely imprisoned for identity theft and sent to a mental hospital.

researchers found that most cancer drugs granted accelerated approval do not demonstrate such benefits within five years.

Poor Predictors: Job Interviews Are Useless and Unfair The traditional interview is a poor predictor of performance for multiple reasons. First, predicting the future is difficult to do under most circumstances. Moreover, an interview constitutes a tiny sample of the interviewee’s behavior. A small behavioral sample tells us little about overall behavior. That’s why you don’t get married after the first date.

Pussy (energy drink)

This AI company scans penis pictures for STIs. Its unproven tech is in an FDA gray zone.

A ‘Law Firm’ of AI Generated Lawyers Is Sending Fake Threats as an SEO Scam

Scientists create liquid metal robot that can pass through bars, Terminator-style [2023]

Why is Intelligence not Making You Happier?

Imagine this: You’re in the midst of an office presentation when suddenly, the realization hits you that you forgot to feed your cat this morning. Swiftly, you decide to send a quick text to your roommate. However, as you reach for your phone, a notification pops up—a sale on your favorite cosmetic product. Temptation takes hold, and you click on the link, intending to browse briefly. Yet, before you know it, you’ve added items to your cart, mentally replayed the techno version of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” four times and booked an evening show later that Friday. By the time you regain focus, the meeting has ended, discussions are in full swing and the memory of your cat’s empty bowl has slipped your mind. This a classic case of popcorn brain.

Mario meets Pareto More: Who is the best character in Mario Kart?

Philbrick, 36, was once one of the most accomplished and admired young art dealers of his generation. Yet when we begin our correspondence in April 2023, he is prisoner 05863093 in Allenwood, serving a seven-year sentence for what the FBI believes is the largest art-based fraud scheme in US history.

“pissotte” are casts of mortar which had the task of preventing thugs and bandits hid in corners to ambush or escape the authorities. Venice didn’t have public lighting and walking through the streets in the darkest hours of the night could be dangerous for a passer-by and an excellent opportunity for a criminal.

This Camera Turns Every Photo Into a Nude

Navies are obsolete, but no one will admit it […] First, under modern conditions, it’s impossible for a ship (except for submarines, but that will change soon) to hide from satellites and aircraft. By contrast, it’s easy to hide land-based weapons and to move them about quickly. Second, a ship has to carry its own defences and weapons with it, which is a big engineering challenge. Land based systems can be spread out over a large area.

Donald Trump has sued two co-founders of his newly public Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., claiming they set the company up improperly and shouldn’t get any stock in it. […] The lawsuit, which was filed on March 24 in Florida state court and hasn’t previously been reported, comes after the pair brought their own suit against the former president in Delaware Chancery Court over their promised stake in the social media company. [The complaint | PDF]

In a single-item auction, a duplicitous seller may masquerade as one or more bidders in order to manipulate the clearing price. This paper characterizes auction formats that are shill-proof: a profit-maximizing seller has no incentive to submit any shill bids. […] The Dutch auction (with suitable reserve) is the unique optimal and strongly shill-proof auction.

Lin Qi, who was named as an executive producer in the opening credits of “3 Body Problem,” was poisoned and killed at age 39, months after Netflix announced its plans to produce the series in 2020. The culprit was one of Lin’s own executives, a high-flying lawyer who helped Lin’s Yoozoo Games secure the rights to adapt the highly acclaimed trilogy. […] Xu was a huge fan of “Breaking Bad” […] He set up a lab in a suburb of Shanghai and bought more than a hundred toxins on the dark web to experiment with, often testing mixed poisons on cats, dogs and other pet animals. He then made the lethal substances into a pill, gifting the “probiotic pills” to Lin. Xu held 160 cellphone numbers and set up a trading company in Japan to acquire hazardous chemicals, including the substances he used to poison his colleagues.

The gravitational problem of three bodies in its traditional sense dates in substance from 1687, when Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The term “three-body problem” is sometimes used in the more general sense to refer to any physical problem involving the interaction of three bodies.

The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997) — Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague.

A man lost in the desert with his donkey comes across an oasis with six naked women. Filmed in 3-D but released “flat.” Tagline: The six Eves join YOU in the audience!

Thief disguises as garbage bag to steal package off a porch

Google Books Is Indexing AI-Generated Garbage

For most of the twentieth century, psychologists dismissed the interior lives of birds because avian brains are smaller and differently structured than those of mammals. But it turns out that bird brains are much denser with neurons and consume less energy, giving crows similar cognitive abilities to large-brained mammals such as great apes, elephants, and whales. […] In 2020, a business-school graduate, Jules Mollaret, set out to build a new vending machine for crows, which would exchange trash for bird food.

Cancer-causing forever chemicals found in 65 percent of adhesive bandages where they can get directly into blood through open wounds, report warns

studies show: We’re more likely to buy a vacation using gift money rather than money earned as a work bonus. We spend more when we pay with a credit card instead of cash. When we get a refund, we’re more likely to use that refunded money to buy stuff we didn’t originally plan on buying.

Our tools shape our selves — According to French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible […] In the decade after 1968, Stiegler opened a jazz club in Toulouse that was shut down by the police a few years later for illegal prostitution. Desperate to make ends meet, Stiegler turned to robbing banks to pay off his debts and feed his family. In 1978, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. A high-school dropout who was never comfortable in institutional settings, Stiegler requested his own cell when he first arrived in prison, and went on a hunger strike until it was granted. After the warden finally acquiesced, Stiegler began taking note of how his relationship to the outside world was mediated through reading and writing. This would be a crucial realisation.

How to Spot Fake/Unsafe Eclipse Glasses — Safe solar viewers block all but a minuscule fraction of the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infrared (IR) light. Overexposure to sunlight in these parts of the spectrum can cause severe eye injury, ranging from temporarily impaired vision to permanent blindness.

Osama Vinladen is a Peruvian professional footballer. He has a brother named Sadam Huseín, the Spanish spelling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Additionally, his father planned on naming his third child George Bush, but could not since they turned out to be female.

Tennessee lawmakers have passed a bill banning the release of airborne chemicals that critics say is inspired by “chemtrails” conspiracy theories

The Cleveland Clinic’s online glossary of diseases and conditions tells us that the “inability to achieve or maintain an erection” is a symptom of sexual dysfunction, not in “males,” but in “people assigned male at birth.” […] “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer. [NYT]

Mr Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who previously spent time in prison, ran several chat groups for monkey torture enthusiasts from around the world on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. The groups were used to share ideas for custom-made torture videos, such as setting live monkeys on fire, injuring them with tools and even putting one in a blender. The ideas were then sent, along with payments, to video-makers in Indonesia who carried them out

Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its bills for rented cloudy GPUs — Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million.

Tips for Linking Shell Companies to their Secret Owners

The list of health conditions linked to loneliness is long and sobering. Some of these make intuitive sense — people who feel lonely are often depressed, for example, sometimes to the point of being at risk of suicide. Other links are more surprising. Lonely people are at greater risk of high blood pressure and immune-system dysfunction compared with those who do not feel lonely, for example. There’s also a startling connection between loneliness and dementia, with one study reporting that people who feel lonely are 1.64 times more likely to develop this type of neurodegeneration than are those who do not.

The average human spends at least one quarter of their life growing up. Our childhood is preposterously long compared to other animals. Is it the secret to our evolutionary success?

Where the Amish go on vacation

MY NEW LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN [PARADICE: PARADISE] The Solution of the Zodiac Killer’s 340-Character Cipher

reducing hours of alcohol sales from 6 am to 2 am to 9 am to 10 pm was associated with a 23% annual decrease in all violent crime compared with control areas.

Foremost in our experience is the intuition that we possess a unified conscious experience. However, many observations run counter to this intuition: we experience paralyzing indecision when faced with two appealing behavioral choices, we simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs, and the content of our thought is often characterized by an internal debate. Here, we propose the Nested Observer Windows (NOW) Model, a framework for hierarchical consciousness wherein information processed across many spatiotemporal scales of the brain feeds into subjective experience.

The study involved with 48 people who flipped 350,757 coins from 46 currencies. After all of this flipping, the researchers found that the coins had a 50.8 percent chance of landing on the side that it started on. This is down to a theory called the Diaconis Model

Advertisers sue Meta for allegedly inflating ad viewership in $7 billion lawsuit

Scientists in South Korea have announced a new world record for the length of time they sustained temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius — seven times hotter than the sun’s core — during a nuclear fusion experiment. Nuclear fusion seeks to replicate the reaction that makes the sun and other stars shine, by fusing together two atoms to unleash huge amounts of energy

there might be some justification for Eurocentrism after all, at least geographically

GeoGuessr is a browser-based geography game in which players are tasked to guess locations from Google Street View imagery.

The Mongolian Meta — It is important to know that in Ulaanbaatar there are several sunsets. But I will go into further detail on that in the chapter dedicated to Ulaanbaatar.

Mental health of Jesus — Some psychiatrists, religious scholars and writers explain that Jesus’ family, followers, and contemporaries seriously regarded him as delusional, possessed by demons, or insane.

Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study

Netflix’s relationship with Facebook was remarkably strong due to the former’s ad spend with the latter […] the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users’ private messages […] Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption “for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook” in December. And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn’t use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing “hundreds of pages of Facebook documents,” reported that Facebook “gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.”

Meta used a spyware to access user activities on rival platforms, including Snapchat and YouTube

Previously: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me.” Dumb fucks.

Nobody knows how AI works, expect more glitches and fails as it becomes a part of real-world products […] In another now-famous incident, Microsoft’s Bing chat told a New York Times reporter to leave his wife

‘To the train lady with dark brown hair … ’: extraordinary stories of four couples who found love via small ads

“Most of what’s passing for information right now is total fiction. I try to turn the lie back on itself.” Richard Prince: Early Photography, 1977–87 at Gagosian gallery in New York

Packaging the First LSD Blotter Related: Secret Sauce

Rising divorce rates, forgoing condoms as there is no risk of pregnancy, the availability of drugs for sexual dysfunction, the large number of older adults living together in retirement communities, and the increased use of dating apps are likely to have contributed to the growing incidence of STIs in the over 50s

Multiple Orgasms in Men—What We Know So Far Few men are multiorgasmic: <10% for those in their 20s, and <7% after the age of 30. [...] Various factors may facilitate multiple orgasms: (1) practicing to have an orgasm without ejaculation; (2) using psychostimulant drugs; (3) having multiple and/or novel sexual partners; or (4) using sex toys to enhance tactile stimulation. [...] In some cases, the ability to experience multiple orgasms may increase after medical procedures that reduce ejaculation (eg, prostatectomy or castration)

variation in how attractive one is perceived follows a bell curve distribution

Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it — When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows.

Conspiracy Believers Act More Dishonestly and Overestimate Others’ Dishonesty

Digital signs around Brookline, MA are collecting data from your phone as you walk by […] The sign collects the phone’s Media Access Control (MAC) address, a series of numbers that identifies devices on networks. […] The signs also collect IP addresses. […] the data collection is “perfectly legal” but problematic.

Amazon has been fined in Poland for misleading consumers […] deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates […] a grey font on a white background in text displayed at the very bottom of a page — a classic example of so-called dark pattern design

How Curb Your Enthusiasm Saved an Innocent Man

Sweely [& his friend] Home grooves with AKAI MPC 1000/ Elektron Machinedrum / APC 40 / Ableton / Victor

The fight began when a customer threw a banana at the gas station employees, who then threw it back. The customer and staff then began throwing multiple bananas back and forth. The customer then punched one of the workers in the face. One employee then chased the customer into the parking lot and hit him several times in the head with a PVC pipe.

Parents file $1.5M lawsuit after Quebec teacher accused of selling students’ artwork online

The solar eclipse will likely lead to a spike in fatal car crashes […] 31% more fatal car crashes than on a usual day […] It’s during the hours immediately before when people are rushing to the site of observation and the hours after when they hurry to get back home that these tragic accidents can happen.

couples who are concordant in their drinking behavior (that is, both members drink alcohol) tend to live longer.

two nights of sleep restriction (4 h in bed per night) made people feel 4.44 years older compared to sleep saturation (9 h in bed per night) Additionally, moving from feeling extremely alert to feeling extremely sleepy was associated with feeling 10 years older

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Deepfakes are spreading, putting creator and brand safety at risk

Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called “Project Ghostbusters.” Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn’t private at all.

He said Trump Media is likely worth somewhere around $2 a share — nowhere near its closing stock price of $58. […] Trump Media generated just $3.4 million of revenue through the first nine months of last year, according to filings. The company lost $49 million over that span. And yet the market is valuing Trump Media at approximately $11 billion. For context, Reddit was only valued at $6.4 billion at its IPO last week — even though it generated 160 times more revenue than Trump Media.

Polar ice is melting and changing Earth’s rotation. It’s messing with time itself. — The hours and minutes that dictate our days are determined by Earth’s rotation. But that rotation is not constant; it can change ever so slightly, depending on what’s happening on Earth’s surface and in its molten core. These nearly imperceptible changes occasionally mean the world’s clocks need to be adjusted by a “leap second,” which may sound tiny but can have a big impact on computing systems. Plenty of seconds have been added over the years. But after a long trend of slowing, the Earth’s rotation is now speeding up. For the first time ever, a second will need to be taken off. More: UTC as now defined will require a negative discontinuity by 2029

Researchers Show that Tardigrade Proteins Can Slow Metabolism in Human Cells — Measuring less than half a millimeter long, tardigrades — also known as water bears — can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero (about minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, when all molecular motion stops); heated to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit; irradiated several thousand times beyond what a human could withstand; and even survive the vacuum of outer space. They survive by entering a state of suspended animation called biostasis, using proteins that form gels inside of cells and slow down life processes.

Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That’s 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023

donna summer billboards in the 1970s

A ten-year scientific study into the nature of luck has revealed that, to a large extent, people make their own good and bad fortune. The results also show that it is possible to enhance the amount of luck that people encounter in their lives. [PDF]

The man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas

Life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2022 was 77.5 years, an increase of 1.1 years from 2021. The infant mortality rate was 560.4 infant deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022, an increase of 3.1% from the rate in 2021 (543.6).

In June 2023, a SpaceX rocket deployed a first-of-its-kind spacecraft designed to autonomously synthesize a drug — the HIV-AIDS medication ritonavir — while in Earth’s orbit.

What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move? (Earth’s tremors can tweak your GPS coordinates)

A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl

The trendy second-hand clothing market is huge and still growing – yet nobody is turning a profit

Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are leading a parade of corporate insiders who have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of their companies’ shares this quarter, in a signal that recent stock market exuberance could be peaking. [FT | ungated]

Man arrested after allegedly taking leg of pedestrian after train incident in Wasco

Women experience disruptions in their sleep patterns in the days leading up to and during their period (peri-menstrual phase), spending more time awake at night, with a lower proportion of time spent in bed that is asleep (lower sleep efficiency). During the peri-menstrual phase, women report heightened feelings of anger compared to other phases of their menstrual cycle. Sleep disturbances during the peri-menstrual phase correlate with reduced positive emotions such as calmness, happiness, and enthusiasm.

Pregnancy advances your ‘biological’ age — but giving birth turns it back — Carrying a baby creates some of the same epigenetic patterns on DNA seen in older people

Scientists Reveal a Healthier Way to Cook Broccoli — pulverized the broccoli, chopping it into 2-millimeter pieces to get as much myrosinase activity going as possible (remember, the activity happens when broccoli is damaged). […] then left alone for 90 minutes before being stir-fried for four minutes […] they didn’t test it but thought “30 minutes would also be helpful”

The bizarre world of people who see ‘demonic’ faces

Facial Recognition Technology and Human Raters Can Predict Political Orientation From Images of Expressionless Faces

How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth [PDF]

In two court orders, the federal government told Google to turn over information on anyone who viewed multiple YouTube videos and livestreams. Privacy experts say the orders are unconstitutional.

How to Run a CIA Base in Afghanistan — Targeting officers are the officers at CIA who basically write the book on a specific target. They are analyzing all sorts of information coming in, whether it’s signals intelligence (SIGINT), HUMINT, open source, and they’re creating a profile of an individual or perhaps a terrorist group that CIA wants to go out and recruit a source from or within, and really helps the case officer think about how they approach an individual and perhaps where to find that individual overseas.

Why Is It So Hard to Build an Airport?

Global prediction of extreme floods in ungauged watersheds — Using AI and open datasets, we are able to significantly improve the expected precision, recall and lead time of short-term (0–7 days) forecasts of extreme riverine events.