Physicists showed that photons can seem to exit a material before entering it, revealing observational evidence of negative time [study]

birth control pills for men

In the current study, we investigate the familial genetic and environmental transmission of depression by incorporating data from both adolescent twins and their parents. Our results, based on both self- and parent-report, demonstrate significant additive and dominant genetic influences on depression. We also found mild yet significant sibling environmental influences, while familial environmental influences were absent.

Why is the Speed of Light So Fast?

Study of 500,000 Medical Records Links Viruses With Alzheimer’s Again And Again

newly released data finds that the US adult obesity rate fell by around two percentage points between 2020 and 2023. We have known for several years from clinical trials that Ozempic, Wegovy and the new generation of diabetes and weight loss drugs produce large and sustained reductions in body weight. Now with mass public usage taking off — one in eight US adults have used the drugs, with 6 per cent current users — the results may be showing up at the population level.

Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta’s Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers

Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap — and Companies Need to Prepare

Woman with rare double uterus gives birth to twins

Mystery creator of Bitcoin identified, new HBO documentary claims […] the exposure of Satoshi as its alleged creator threatens to raise some huge questions, not least his potential complicity in crimes that have featured Bitcoin use. It could also establish him as one of the world’s richest people: Satoshi himself is estimated to control about 1.1 million Bitcoin. […] The big reveal is set to air next Wednesday at 2 a.m. CET (Tuesday at 9 p.m. EST).

Andy Kill, a spokesperson for 23andMe, would not comment on what the company might do with its trove of genetic data beyond general pronouncements about its commitment to privacy. “For our customers, our focus continues to be on transparency and choice over how they want their data to be managed,” he said.

research shows that adult brains are also negatively impacted by excessive screen time, defined as more than two hours a day outside of work hours. The study shows that in adults aged 18 – 25, excessive screen time causes thinning of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outermost layer responsible for processing memory and cognitive functions, such as decision-making and problem-solving. Another study found that adults who watched television for five hours or more per day had an increased risk of developing brain-related disease like dementia, stroke, or Parkinson’s. Additional studies found that adults who engage in excessive screen time or have a diagnosed smartphone addiction had lower gray matter volume. Gray matter is brain tissue essential for daily human functioning and is responsible for everything from movement to memory to emotions.

Shifting away from undesired habits involves weakening the neural pathways that fuel them. Instead of relying solely on penalties for engaging in a bad habit, introduce a positive action right after to replace it. This method gradually diminishes the unwanted habit’s hold over you.

Hundreds of millions of small packages pour into the U.S. each year from China – some with fentanyl ingredients stashed inside. […] a few paragraphs buried in a 2016 U.S. trade law supported by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms that made it easier for imported goods, including those fentanyl ingredients, to enter the United States. […] In short, a regulatory tweak fueling America’s online shopping habit is also enabling the country’s crippling addiction to synthetic opioids. […] U.S. lawmakers inadvertently turbocharged this problem as part of the 2016 legislation by loosening a regulation known as de minimis. Individual parcels of clothing, gadgets and other merchandise valued at up to $800 – one of the highest such limits in the world – now enter the country duty-free and with minimal paperwork and inspections. Fully 90% of all shipments now enter the country this way, and most arrive by air. […] a fight is shaping up over whether and how to undo the rule change that helped set off this deadly import boom.

Is the World Really Running Out of Sand?

Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze

Cybercriminals using stolen cloud credentials to operate and resell sexualized AI-powered chat services [which] often veer into darker role-playing scenarios, including child sexual exploitation and rape

REVEALED: Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025. That’s according to a professional

Man amputates penis with an axe after consuming psilocybin mushrooms

At Exxon Mobil’s only “advanced recycling” facility in Baytown, Texas, only 8% of plastic is remade into new material, while the remaining 92% is processed into fuel that is later burned.

Will Plants Grow on the Moon?

anomalous decrease observed in lunar surface temperatures is attributed to the COVID-19 global lockdown effect

Switzerland and Italy have redrawn part of their border in the Alps due to melting glaciers

How did birds survive while dinosaurs went extinct?

women were more likely to engage in rival derogation towards women with larger breast sizes

Impulsivity, Disgust

The external anal sphincter is the only part of the digestive process we have conscious control over. So, if we decide the time is not right to pass gas, we constrict the sphincter and the fart is trapped. Without a backdoor to escape from, the gases recede back into the colon. […] farts that are ignored during the day are mostly released during bathroom breaks or as the body relaxes in sleep at night. […] always holding it in can be bad for the bowels over time.

Officers raided the facility on Oct. 18, 2023, and detained the lone female employee while they searched the business, the lawsuit said. However, they didn’t find a single cannabis plant and only saw a typical medical facility with rooms used for conducting x-rays, ultrasounds, CT scans and MRIs, the owners said. At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine.

Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first

Do AI companies work? The billions that OpenAI spent on building prior versions of GPT is not, because better versions of it are already available for free on Github. […] An LLM vendor that doesn’t spend tens of millions of dollars a year—and maybe billions, for the leaders—improving their models is a year or two from being out of business. Though that math might work for huge companies like Google and Microsoft, and for OpenAI, which has become synonymous with artificial intelligence, it’s hard to see how that works for smaller companies that aren’t already bringing in sizable amounts of revenue. […] the winners won’t be who ran the fastest or reached some finish line, but whoever was leading when the market decided the race is over.

Microsoft claims its new tool can correct AI hallucinations, experts advise caution

SocialAI is an online universe where everyone you interact with is a bot. More: SocialAI takes the social media “filter bubble” to an extreme with 100% fake interactions

The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure […] Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful

The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure […] Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful

NKRYPT is a cryptography related installation outside the Questacon science exploration centre in Canberra, Australia

Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.

Boy abducted from California at age 6 found alive more than 70 years later […] [kidnapped in 1951 by a woman] he ended up with a couple who raised him as if he were their own son

Several people are detained in Switzerland in connection with suspected death in a ‘suicide capsule’ — The “Sarco” capsule, which has never been used before, is designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining seat inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.

Study sheds new light on severe COVID’s long-term brain impacts — post-COVID deficits in hospitalized patients look similar to 20 years of normal aging. The team also found that people who had been hospitalized with COVID had reduced brain volume in key areas and abnormally high levels of brain injury proteins in their blood.

Why do obesity drugs seem to treat so many other ailments?

Why are the violins the biggest section in the orchestra?

Meet the Internet’s Scrappiest Home for Obscure Cinema

Man stabbed himself to death separating frozen burgers

Given a pair of candidate photos, monkeys spent more time looking at the loser than the winner, and this gaze bias predicted not only binary election outcomes but also the candidates’ vote share […] Our findings endorse the idea that voters spontaneously respond to evolutionarily conserved visual cues to physical prowess and that voting behavior is shaped, in part, by ancestral adaptations shared with nonhuman primates.

AI chatbots predict elections better than humans

We study alcohol’s impact on trust at the event “La Notte della Taranta” with objective intoxication measures. […] Alcohol consumption correlates positively with instantaneous trust, especially among like-minded attendees.

Scientists Calculated How Much Exercise We Need to ‘Offset’ a Day of Sitting — Up to 40 minutes of “moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity” every day is about the right amount to balance out 10 hours of sitting still, the research says – although any amount of exercise or even just standing up helps to some extent.

The human heart shows signs of ageing after just a month in space After 12 days on the ISS, the tissues’ contraction strength had almost halved, whereas that of their on-ground counterparts had remained relatively stable. This weakening was still apparent even after nine days of recovery back on Earth.

following the start of PhD studies, the use of psychiatric medication among PhD students increases substantially. This upward trend continues throughout the course of PhD studies, with estimates showing a 40 percent increase by the fifth year compared to pre-PhD levels. After the fifth year, which represents the average duration of PhD studies in our sample, we observe a notable decrease in the utilization of psychiatric medication.

Puberty Hasn’t Changed Since the Ice Age — The data collected also suggests the Paleolithic kids underwent growth spurts similar to those experienced by modern humans, but significantly shorter than those of medieval children—in other words, they matured faster

the emergence of new multicellular life-forms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a “third state” that lies beyond the traditional boundaries of life and death. […] practices such as organ donation highlight how organs, tissues and cells can continue to function even after an organism’s demise. […] Researchers have also found that solitary human lung cells can self-assemble into miniature multicellular organisms that can move around.

The earliest method of contraception was probably coitus interruptus. Barrier methods of contraception were later developed. The use of a goat’s bladder as a female sheath was described in Roman literature and ancient Egyptian texts describe the use of vaginal pessaries. In the 17th century Casanova used condoms made of animal intestine. In the 1920s research confirmed the timing of ovulation and the role of the ovarian hormones, oestrogen and progesterone, in reproduction. This led to the development of the rhythm method of contraception, based on the woman’s monthly variation in body temperature, and the development of the contraceptive pill. The first large scale trial of the pill took place in 1956, and it has been refined since then.

Octopuses seen hunting together with fish in rare video — and punching fish that don’t cooperate

Fake AI “podcasters” are reviewing my book and it’s freaking me out

Using YouTube to steal your files

How hackers gain access to phones

Radioactive Consumer Products

Cops lure pedophiles with AI pics of teen girl

Brit, 15, forced to strip for airport security after they ‘didn’t believe she was a girl’

After 12 yrs of marriage… Wife discovers hubby is a woman via JSTOR

how Celsius became Red Bull for women

The price of oil can rise because of a disruption to supply or an increase in demand. The nature of the price change determines the dynamic effects. As Kilian (2009a) put it: “not all oil price shocks are alike.” [PDF]

In 1959, voracious invasive rats were blamed for killing hundreds of white-faced storm petrels, a small seabird, on New Zealand’s Maria Island. In part to protect the birds, conservationists spread rat poison on the 2-hectare island, also known as Ruapuke. They didn’t intend to eradicate the rats but 5 years later were pleasantly surprised to discover that the rodents had disappeared, and the seabirds were safe. Today, that pioneering effort and others have helped inspire a global push to eradicate rats from many other islands. Over the past half-century, people have made 820 attempts on 666 islands. Some 88% have succeeded. […] Although the world’s 465,000 islands comprise just 5.3% of Earth’s land, island-dwelling species account for an estimated 75% of all known bird, mammal, amphibian, and reptile extinctions.

Water was plentiful in the early universe — the universe’s first reservoirs of water may have formed much earlier than previously thought - less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Previously: Now, just where might this Great Filter be located?

For his 1959 work Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, Yves Klein sold the ownership of empty space. In its 1967 Air-Conditioning Show, English conceptual collaborative Art & Language presented an empty room containing two air conditioning units; the artwork was “what is felt and said about it.” […] Tom Friedman’s 1992 work Untitled (A Curse) consisted of a region of empty space that had been cursed by a witch. […] Andy Warhol’s 1985 Invisible Sculpture was entirely intangible. […] Ruben Gutierrez’s 2022 work This Sculpture Makes Me Cry (A Spell) was said to represent what the artist could not see but which affected him emotionally. Warhol and Gutierrez both presented their sculptures on white pedestals. Is there any way to prove they’re not the same piece?

The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “The Republic.”

Police have arrested a teen girl they say took an empty New York City subway train on a brief joyride before they crashed it and fled.

For the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S.

researchers now run small AIs on their laptops Artificial-intelligence models are typically used online, but a host of openly available tools is changing that. Here’s how to get started with local AIs.

Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here’s how reporters can eschew it.

Scientists Identify New Blood Group After a 50 Year Mystery

2024 was the year the music festival died

Does the status people possess shape their subjective well-being? […] people have a competitive orientation towards status; they not only want to have high status on an absolute level (e.g., to be highly respected and admired), but also to have higher status than others (e.g., to be more respected and admired than others)

Diddy’s Homes Reportedly Fitted With Hidden Cameras In Every Room — cameras supposedly captured alleged disturbing footage of his guests including “celebrities, athletes, politicians, international dignitaries, and music label executives.” Related: United States of America vs. SEAN COMBS a/k/a “Puff Daddy,” a/k/a “P. Diddy”, a/k/a “PD, a/k/a “Love”

The Ring of Gyges is a hypothetical magic ring mentioned by the philosopher Plato in Book 2 of his Republic. It grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Using the ring as an example, this section of the Republic considers whether a rational, intelligent person who has no need to fear negative consequences for committing an injustice would nevertheless act justly. […] the man who abused the power of the Ring of Gyges has in fact enslaved himself to his appetites, while the man who chose not to use it remains rationally in control of himself and is therefore happy.

Thai woman freed after hours of being strangled by a python

Large Social Media and Video Streaming Companies Have Engaged in Vast Surveillance of Users, FTC Staff Report

Satellite images of the Sahara show a visible increase in vegetation compared to 2023, caused by the increased precipitation over the region

A new study sheds light on how we can work through regret … study helps people reenvision negative feelings about a bad decision or outcome … illustrates how you can reframe your memories to alter past regrets and make better choices in the future

How to Make Millions as a Professional Whistleblower

Why is it so hard to send humans back to the moon?

A network of fake accounts are posing as young American women and posting pro-Trump content online, hiding behind the images of European fashion influencers. [more]

Britain’s crime minister has bag stolen at police conference

A detailed study of a woman’s brain before, during and after pregnancy revealed sweeping neural changes, some of which stuck around months after her baby was born.

In 2018, at the height of VC investment, 51,302 start-ups were founded in China, according to data provider IT Juzi. By 2023, that figure had collapsed to 1,202 and is on track to be even lower this year. […] The crisis in the sector partly reflects the slowdown in the Chinese economy, which has been buffeted by the protracted Covid-19 lockdowns, the bursting of its property bubble and the stagnation of its equity markets. As bilateral tensions have risen, US-based investors have also largely pulled out. [FT]

Shein is officially the biggest polluter in fast fashion. the company nearly doubled its carbon dioxide emissions between 2022 and 2023. […] the fast fashion industry has begun embracing emerging AI technologies. Shein uses proprietary machine-learning applications — essentially, pattern-identification algorithms — to measure customer preferences in real time and predict demand, which it then services with an ultra-fast supply chain.

The first image of the Titan submersible sitting at the bottom of the ocean following its catastrophic implosion last year [Flashback: Missing Titanic sub crew killed after ‘catastrophic implosion’]

A woman who was in a sexual relationship with a plane for nine years has said she’s finally broken up with it.

Cheryl Meglio, “The Church Lady”, Specializing in the Sale of Church Real Estate. More: Monastery for sale in France

Aggressive interactions can strongly influence an animal’s performance in subsequent contests. Winners of aggressive contests are more likely to win successive contests and losers are more likely to lose successive contests

Close friends seem to communicate almost telepathically. A single word or phrase can be loaded with meaning that would take pages of text to explain to an outsider. This linguistic compression is undeniably efficient. But is efficiency the only reason friends tend to speak in code? In a series of studies, we show that when people use “insider language” with each other they feel closer. Friends, as expected, use insider language more frequently than strangers, but even strangers are able to incorporate it into their conversations. While the content of insider language varies between friends and strangers, both groups experience heightened connection when it is used. These results suggest that the human ability to say more with less confers a social advantage beyond mere efficiency—one that may be challenging for conversational AI to replicate.

The Disunity of Consciousness in Everyday Experience

Online Dating Caused a Rise in US Income Inequality, Research Paper Shows

if there are macroscopic structures awaiting discovery in humans, imagine how much more true that will be of every other species that we haven’t been studying with extreme diligence and self-interest for millennia. […] Chickens are one of the commonly used model organisms in laboratory studies, and the basis for a multi- billion-dollar food industry. Surely we must know everything there is to know about their anatomy? (Spoiler alert: we do not.) […] A chicken or a cat has about the same number of body parts as a human, they’re just smaller and harder to see. Frogs seem to be a little simpler than shrews or hummingbirds, but it may also be that we know them less well, and dissect them less patiently and completely. […] Where is all this new anatomy hiding?

Former model and Miss Switzerland finalist Kristina Joksimovic allegedly murdered and “pureed” in a blender by her husband

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars

LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This — This work introduces the concept of Structural Hallucination as an intrinsic nature of these systems. By establishing the mathematical certainty of hallucinations, we challenge the prevailing notion that they can be fully mitigated.

people primed with sexual desire for an alternative partner reported increased sexual desire for their romantic partner. People primed with sexual desire for their romantic partner, however, did not report increased sexual desire for alternatives

Analysis of the Psychological Factors of Love Murder Cases

Unlike Wi-Fi, which uses radio waves to create a wireless connection, Li-Fi relies on light to transmit data. Through this process, Li-Fi promises speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi. Oldecomm is predicting that Li-Fi will be available anytime between 2024 and 2029.

Experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory showed that the interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs […] the chatbot could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual

How come some experts can’t distinguish red and white wines, and others can tell that it’s a 1951 Riesling from the Seine River Valley?

Japan’s cat testicle calendar

The modern forecasting community largely emerged from the work of one man: Philip Tetlock. In 1984, Tetlock, then a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, held his first forecasting tournament. His goal was to investigate whether experts — government officials, journalists, and academics — were better at making predictions in their areas of interest than intelligent laypeople. The upshot: Experts make for terrible forecasters.

“It is the teenage women …who are advancing [language] change.” The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new. William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change. […] in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681. The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men.

How farms are using ‘magic dust’ to capture carbon — The dust is crushed basalt – volcanic rock which can be found in abundance in quarries across the country.

Scientists plan to seed part of the Pacific Ocean with iron to trigger a surface bloom of phytoplankton that will hopefully suck carbon dioxide out of the air, reviving field trials of a geoengineering technique that has been taboo for more than a decade.

When Was the Last Time We Built a New City? — California Forever wants to build a new city in Solano county. On paper, it would be an affordable, high-density urbanist wonderland — but can they actually pull it off?

A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. […] One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video. […] It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.

Ig Nobel Prize goes to scientists who discovered butt-breathing mammals

Antibiotic use is a risk factor for development of inflammatory bowel diseases

tubal sterilisations among women, colloquially known as ‘having your tubes tied’, increased in all states following the 2022 US Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion

findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets’ reputations, while also protecting gossipers’ reputations […] women’s denial of their own malicious motivations is a feature—not a bug—of female psychology

Angry Men are Perceived as Less Intelligent by Their Female Romantic Partners

Laughter may be as effective as drops for dry eyes

Breaking Down OnlyFans’ Stunning Economics

How SEC mobile phones can signal an imminent stock price drop […] The research used geolocation data to identify mobile phones that spent significant amounts of time at the SEC’s various offices around the country. They then tracked those phones to corporate headquarters around the world […] When insiders sold shares right around a non-public visit by staff from the Securities and Exchange Commission, they avoided average losses of 4.9 per cent in the three months after the visit

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives are dying […] There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software.

Princeton mathematician John Horton Conway memorized π to more than a thousand decimal places by marrying it to the periodic table of the elements

Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads

Facebook is scraping the public photos, posts and other data of all Australian adults on the platform, it has acknowledged in an inquiry. The company does not offer Australians an opt out option like it does in the EU, because it has not been required to do so under privacy law.

Mark Zuckerberg says he’s done apologizing

Women who use lots of makeup are more narcissistic, but less psychopathic. Damn, they can’t win. [study]

Researchers in Gabon studied tropical plants eaten by wild gorillas - and used also by local human healers - identifying four with medicinal effects. Laboratory studies revealed the plants were high in antioxidants and antimicrobials. One showed promise in fighting superbugs.

Research has shown that consuming whole foods still “packaged” in their original fibers and polyphenols – the cellular wrappers and colorful compounds in plants that confer many of their health benefits – leads to more calories lost through stool, when compared with processed foods that have been “predigested” by factories into simple carbs, refined fats and additives. Weight Loss Involves More Than Calories In, Calories Out.

Can a life full of suffering be good? This study might make it possible to answer this question in the affirmative. […] people’s expectations of how an event is going to impact them differ from thoughts and feelings during the event itself which differs from retrospective evaluations of the event in terms of associations with various indicators of wellbeing

Bijan’s father was Bijan Pakzad, a larger-than-life Iranian immigrant who founded House of Bijan in 1976 as an appointment-only Rodeo Drive temple of $65,000 croc-skin luggage, $15,000 vicuña coats and $120,000 chinchilla bedspreads. Over nearly four decades, Pakzad built the store into a destination for the ultra-rich. He parked a canary-yellow Rolls-Royce outside and appeared in ads smoking cigars with Michael Jordan and palling around with Bo Derek. House of Bijan developed a reputation for being the “most expensive store in the world,” before Pakzad died in 2011 and left it all to his youngest child, a then 19-year-old Nicolas. Today, the younger Bijan is 33 and trying to slip free from his father’s long shadow with an even more exclusive proposition: a members-only apparel brand. NB44, which he launched in 2021, costs $12,000 a year to join—a fee that doesn’t cover a single item of clothing. […] members get an all-in-one packaging of styling, networking, shipping, bespoke designs and even dry-cleaning. […] The company designs the clothes, styles them as outfits and ships them four times a year directly to members’ homes in personalized, racing-green trunks. […] over 5,000 people have filled out the prospective member questionnaire on NB44’s site. Just under 100 have been admitted [WSJ]

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) uses freeze marking to identify captured wild horses and burros. The left side of the neck is shaved and washed with alcohol, and the mark is applied with an iron that is chilled in liquid nitrogen. The hair at the site of the mark will grow back white and show the identification number.

“So long Google, the verb […] Younger audiences are ’searching’, not ‘Googling’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People with greater mental resilience may live longer, especially women

Mosquitoes Are Using Infrared to Track Humans Down

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

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

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

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

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

Ketamine interrupts machine gun-like neural activity to alleviate depression

The New Recruitment Challenge: Filtering AI-Crafted Résumés

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physicists recently created a time zone for the Moon

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

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

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

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