In nearly half of the world’s bird species, young birds learn by imitating the songs of adults. As birds learn songs from one another, mistakes inevitably happen, leading to variation in songs between populations of the same species, similar to the formation of dialects in human languages. […] However, scientists don’t yet fully understand what happens to these song differences when birds move between populations. Imagine you’re a local bird, and a newcomer arrives singing a foreign song. What’s to stop you from learning this new song? […] But birds tend to only learn songs from their own species, even when they are exposed to the birdsong of other species. This suggests that birds have genetic predispositions guiding them to learn only “appropriate” songs.

Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten

Why straight women watch lesbian porn

Is our universe trapped inside a black hole?

Water droplets create “microlightning” when they split, producing electrical discharges without any external power source. These tiny electrical sparks can transform simple gases into complex organic molecules—including amino acids and RNA components—in just microseconds. […] this phenomenon may have been a major contributor to creating life’s building blocks on early Earth

Bryan Johnson — the investor and founder behind the Don’t Die movement — wants to start “foodome” sequencing. “We’re going to sequence the U.S. ‘foodome,’ which means test 20% of foods that constitute 80% of the American diet based on stuff we eat everyday” […] he’s obsessed with finding ways to extend his lifespan and preaching that gospel to others. He has taken extreme measures, including transfusing his blood with that of his 17-year-old son and undergoing shock therapy treatment to get more nighttime erections, which he says directly correlates to health.

Results consistently show that positive experiences are more likely to come to mind when they think about how karma influences their own life, but negative experiences are more likely when thinking about other’s karma, although this difference was weaker in Singapore and India than in the United States

no one can seem to agree on what an AI agent is, exactly

Scammers exploit Google redirect URLs to send phishing links

As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. […] Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. […] Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights. As a stateless person, [Arendt] experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an “enemy alien” in France — before making it to the United States. [NY Times]

It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet.

every day the same again | March 17th, 2025