beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time
The existence of the Five Eyes wasn’t officially acknowledged until 2010 […] The sheer extent of the global surveillance system overseen by the US and its allies made it difficult to hide.
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has the ability to track people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx by running images from 15,280 surveillance cameras into invasive and discriminatory facial recognition software, a new Amnesty International investigation reveals.
The many, many reasons space travel is bad for the human body — Like any other muscle, the heart doesn’t need to work as hard in microgravity and will begin to atrophy without rigorous exercise. Doused with radiation, many immune cells die and immunity is lowered. There’s also DNA damage, potentially upping cancer risk. Inflammation spikes throughout the body, possibly contributing to heart disease and other conditions. Bones thin by about 1.5 percent a month. Spinal discs harden.
While certain irritants can make the stomach more vulnerable to acid and ulcer formation, multiple large studies have found that this is not the case with coffee. Nonetheless, coffee does have an effect on the gut — it can speed up the colon and induce a bowel movement, and coffee increases acid production in the stomach. […] drinking coffee, especially if it’s black, without a meal can reduce the stomach’s pH more than it would if you drank it with milk or with a meal. Although a slightly lower pH is no problem for your stomach lining, it could pose an issue for the lining of your esophagus because it is far more vulnerable to damage from acid.
Their job is to grow monumental amounts of animal muscle cells; around 10 trillion are needed to make one measly steak. The first CRISPR gene-edited meat is coming
Scientists Just Invented an Entirely New Way to Refrigerate Things
ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees. […] an A.I. system with the sophistication of ChatGPT but trained on relevant data could selectively target key legislators and influencers to identify the weakest points in the policymaking system and ruthlessly exploit them through direct communication, public relations campaigns, horse trading or other points of leverage. […] Like human lobbyists, such a system could target undecided representatives sitting on committees controlling the policy of interest […] What makes the threat of A.I.-powered lobbyists greater than the threat already posed by the high-priced lobbying firms on K Street is their potential for acceleration. Human lobbyists rely on decades of experience to find strategic solutions to achieve a policy outcome. That expertise is limited, and therefore expensive. A.I. could, theoretically, do the same thing much more quickly and cheaply.
A wave of lawsuits argue that Tesla’s self-driving software is dangerously overhyped. What can its blind spots teach us about the company’s erratic C.E.O.? […] (The four available Tesla models are S, 3, X and Y, presumably because that spells the word “sexy.”)
This review examines phenomena that apparently contradict the notion that consciousness is exclusively dependent on brain activity, including phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time.
The Landlord’s Game (1904), inspiration for the 1935 board game Monopoly
