Is your baby straight or gay? N.J. hospitals hand out controversial forms to new moms.

Generation Beta officially arrived on Jan. 1, successors to Gen Alpha. […] Beta is commonly used as slang for weak and passive.

A fast-growing body of research signals potential health benefits of GLP-1s, the class of diabetes and weight-loss drugs known by names like Ozempic, beyond what they were initially approved to treat. That includes age-related conditions like Alzheimer’s, osteoarthritis, certain cancers and even mortality.

Alcohol and cancer risk: what you need to know

Men who had given blood more than 100 times in their life were more likely to have blood cells carrying certain beneficial mutations, suggesting that donating blood promotes the growth of these cells

We found that, on the whole, those who made it to their hundredth birthday tended to have lower levels of glucose, creatinine and uric acid from their sixties onwards. […] very few of the centenarians had a glucose level above 6.5 mmol/L earlier in life, or a creatinine level above 125 µmol/L. […] people with higher levels of glucose, creatinine, uric acid and markers for liver function also decreased the chance of becoming a centenarian.

Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvation

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are ushering in a new age of bribery, graft, and corruption to American politics

Why bother using Claude Code at around $5 per session when you can pay $20 for Cursor and use it indefinitely? Claude Code excels in vibe coding.

For seven years, beginning in 2011, the book’s author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook […] as a director of global public policy. Now she has written an insider account of a company that she says was run by status-hungry and self-absorbed leaders, who chafed at the burdens of responsibility and became ever more feckless, even as Facebook became a vector for disinformation campaigns and cozied up to authoritarian regimes. […]

During her time at Facebook, Wynn-Williams worked closely with its chief executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. They’re this book’s Tom and Daisy — the “careless people” in “The Great Gatsby” who, as Wynn-Williams quotes the novel in her epigraph, “smashed up things and creatures” and “let other people clean up the mess they had made.” […]

Wynn-Williams sees Zuckerberg change while she’s at Facebook. Desperate to be liked, he becomes increasingly hungry for attention and adulation, shifting his focus from coding and engineering to politics. On a tour of Asia, she is directed to gather a crowd of more than one million so that he can be “gently mobbed.” […]

Sandberg, for her part, turns her charm on and off like a tap. […] Wynn-Williams is aghast to discover that Sandberg has instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy lingerie for both of them, budget be damned.(The total cost is $13,000.) During a long drive in Europe, the assistant and Sandberg take turns sleeping in each other’s laps, stroking each other’s hair. On the 12-hour flight home on a private jet, a pajama-clad Sandberg claims the only bed on the plane and repeatedly demands that Wynn-Williams “come to bed.” Wynn-Williams demurs. Sandberg is miffed.

Sandberg isn’t the only person in this book with apparent boundary issues. Wynn-Williams has uncomfortable encounters with Joel Kaplan, an ex-boyfriend of Sandberg’s from Harvard, who was hired as Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy and eventually became vice president of global policy — Wynn-Williams’s manager. […] Wynn-Williams describes Kaplan grinding up against her on the dance floor at a work event, announcing that she looks “sultry” and making “weird comments” about her husband. […]

The book includes a detailed chapter on “Aldrin,” the code name for Facebook’s project to get unblocked in China. According to Wynn-Williams, the company proposed all kinds of byzantine arrangements involving China-based partnerships, data collection and censorship tools that it hoped would satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party.

Knowing that Zuckerberg would probably face questions about China from Congress, his team gave him cleverly worded talking points. […] “Senators will need to ask exceptionally specific questions to get close to any truth.” When Zuckerberg eventually appears before a Senate
committee in 2018, a senator asks him how Facebook is handling the Chinese government’s unwillingness “to allow a social media platform — foreign or domestic — to operate in China unless it agrees to abide by Chinese law.” In his reply, Zuckerberg states, “No decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China,” to which Wynn-Williams comments: “He lies.”

Wynn-Williams has filed a whistle-blower complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission [Zuckerberg’s Meta considered sharing user data with China, whistleblower alleges | Washington Post]

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Danish postal service to stop delivering letters after 90% drop in numbers

Each day, around €3,000 of loose change ends up in the Trevi Fountain in Roma. That works out as up to €1.5 million tossed into its waters each year.

[2019] Businessman Tan Youhui hired a hitman to “take out” his competitor for $282,000 (£218,000), a court heard. But the hitman hired another man to do the job, offering $141,000. That man hired another hitman, who hired another hitman, who hired another hitman. The plan crumbled when the final hitman met the man, named only as Wei, in a cafe and proposed faking his death. All six men - the five hitmen and Tan - were convicted of attempted murder

Scientists Have Turned Light Into a Supersolid [a supersolid is a spatially ordered (i.e. solid) material with superfluid properties]

AI tools are spotting errors in research papers — Study that hyped the toxicity of black plastic utensils inspires projects that use large language models to check papers

what is the “vibe” in vibe coding?

Gene-edited non-browning banana could cut food waste, scientists say

About two-thirds of Americans are not getting the right amount of sleep (seven to nine hours a night), have a 29% increased risk of premature death from any cause

‘The dumbest thing I’ve ever done’: spy trial’s tales of scheming, bluster and a love triangle

CSS (also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower. Rayhunter is a new open source tool to help search out CSS around the world.

How IMSI-Catchers Exploit Cell Networks

You have fired “nobody,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio […] Mr. Musk was not being truthful, Mr. Rubio said. What about the more than 1,500 State Department officials who took early retirement in buyouts? Didn’t they count as layoffs? He asked, sarcastically, whether Mr. Musk wanted him to rehire all those people just so he could make a show of firing them again. […] Mr. Musk told Mr. Rubio he was “good on TV,” with the clear subtext being that he was not good for much else. Throughout all of this, the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match. […] Mr. Musk, who wore a suit and tie to Thursday’s meeting instead of his usual T-shirt after Mr. Trump publicly ribbed him about his sloppy appearance, defended himself by saying that he had three companies with a market cap of tens of billions of dollars, and that his results spoke for themselves. [NY Times]

A new part of the immune system has been discovered and it is a goldmine of potential antibiotics

humans have a third set of teeth available as buds, ready to grow as needed. New Medicine may help them grow.

Previous research shows that emotion-inducing prompts can elevate “anxiety” in LLMs, affecting behavior and amplifying biases. Here, we found that traumatic narratives increased Chat-GPT-4’s reported anxiety

Burds, cows, cats, rats. H5N1 is spreading

Mimicking Shark Skin to Create Clean Cutting Boards

Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Ageotori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics). Can language describe everything we feel—and should it?

Tantalising data from more than a decade ago showed people who were already taking a daily aspirin were more likely to survive if they were diagnosed with cancer. Aspirin disrupts the platelets and removes their influence over the T-cells so they can hunt out the cancer.

Then came gene targeting technologies, like CRISPR, over 10 years ago. With these technologies we can delete, modify, add, or change any gene in any organism’s DNA and it’s easy and cheap. […] We are editing genes and injecting DNA with micro-precision, sculpting biology at its most fundamental level. We are learning to harvest large amounts of embryos and eggs from different animal species so we can understand the development of life on a scale no one has tried before. We are editing genes and injecting DNA with micro-precision, sculpting biology at its most fundamental level. We started small with amphibians and fish before progressing to small mammals like mice and hamsters. Now we are working with rabbits and soon we’ll be working with cats and dogs and agricultural animals.

technologies such as CRISPR could be used to make “killer mosquitoes” that cause plagues that wipe out staple crops

AI reasoning models can cheat to win chess games

Inside the Wild West of AI companionship — Sexually charged underage celebrity bots and unanswered legal questions complicate a burgeoning industry.

it starts out in court after she was arrested for stealing a pineapple. She’s found guilty, and has a fit when she finds out she has to spend a night in jail, because she’s never gone 24 hours without sex before. So she basically goes on a rampage and has an orgy with everyone on the jury. — Spending a year with the world-class stars of Brazzers

Citigroup Mistakenly Credited a Customer with $81 Trillion Instead of $280: ‘Inputting Error’

German court rules Pfizer, BioNTech violated Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine patent, Moderna shares, which were already rallying after the company disclosed $6 million in insider purchases, went even higher after the ruling was reported

AI-powered influencers have the potential to damage brand reputation more than their human equivalents, research

3D-printed perfused penis for restoring erectile function in rabbits and pigs [..] we 3D printed a hydrogel-based corpus cavernosum incorporating a strain-limiting tunica albuginea that can be engorged with blood through vein occlusion […] allowed the animals to mate and reproduce

Men with higher-quality sperm live longer, study

Urine’s power as a fertiliser is due to the nitrogen and phosphorus that it contains

Prior research suggests that witnesses have worse memory for armed compared to unarmed perpetrators, a finding known as the Weapon Focus Effect (WFE). […] We did not find a significant WFE for target description or lineup identification in any experiment

Research identifies spite as a key factor that underlies conspiracy theory belief […] “individuals […] rejecting expert opinion and scientific consensus.”

A familect is the type of inward-oriented language variety used by families. It exhibits some distinctive features compared to other more outward-oriented vernacular varieties, which result from its function in bonding and marking identity. Familects also share some characteristics with child language and child-oriented speech, as well as with forms of language play. […] This commentary reviews both the idiosyncratic features of familects and their overlap with other vernacular varieties

German tattoo artist came to the US for a 3-week trip. She’s now been in ICE detention for over a month

A “sleep divorce” might seem bad for your relationship at first, Dr. Gunn said. But inadequate rest can also sink a relationship […] When sleeping on your back, gravity can cause your airway to narrow, which results in snoring […] To help your partner stay on their side while sleeping […] you can make rolling over uncomfortable by sewing or duct-taping tennis balls or other objects onto the back of a shirt [NY Times]

William H. Mumler (1832–1884) was an American spirit photographer who worked in New York City and Boston. His first spirit photograph was apparently an accident—a self-portrait which, when developed, also revealed the “spirit” of his deceased cousin. Mumler then left his job as an engraver to pursue spirit photography full-time, taking advantage of the large number of people who had lost relatives in the American Civil War. […]

Mumler’s wife, Hannah Mumler, was also a famous healing medium, and conducted her own spiritual business in addition to the business of assisting her husband.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

When spirit photography appeared in the 1860s, the United States was reeling from the Civil War, which claimed an astonishing 620,000 lives. Deep in mourning, Americans were drawn to anyone who offered even a fleeting connection to the souls of their dearly departed. Self-proclaimed mediums performed seances in which the living could speak with the dead, and photographers like Mumler granted the wishes of the bereaved to see their lost sons or brothers one last time. […]

While taking self-portraits for practice, one of Mumler’s prints came back with an unexplainable aberration. Although he was “quite alone in the room” when the shot was taken, there appeared to be a figure at his side, a girl who was “made of light.” Mumler showed the photo to a spiritualist friend who confirmed that the girl in the image was almost certainly a ghost. […]

Mumler had a knack for self-promotion and his otherworldly photo was written up in popular spiritualist newspapers like the Banner of Light and also the mainstream press. Bostoners began lining up at his small portrait studio to pay as much as $10 for their likeness with a lost loved one.

One of his most famous images is the photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband Abraham Lincoln.

Over time, the evidence against Mumler started to mount. […] A man visiting Mumler’s studio recognized a female ghost as his wife, who was not only alive but recently had her portrait taken by Mumler. Wasn’t it obvious that Mumler was reusing old negatives and playing them off as ghosts?

Since things were getting hot in Boston, Mumler tried relocating to New York in 1869, but he was quickly arrested and tried for fraud. The New York prosecutors called a parade of expert witnesses who offered at least nine ways that Mumler could have used photographic trickery to produce his ghostly images. […]

Despite the best efforts of so many investigators, no one was able to solve the riddle of exactly how Mumler created his apparitions.

Mumler was acquitted and returned to Boston. He shied away from spirit photography and refocused his efforts on the chemistry of photo development. He eventually invented a technique called the “Mumler process” that allowed the first photographs to be printed on newsprint, transforming the practice of journalism.

{ History | Continue reading }

trailer { Smile for the Dead (2025), a documentary film about William H. Mumler }

Donald Trump Would Replace Benjamin Franklin on $100 Bill Under GOP Bill

Hedge funds are dumping the Magnificent 7 and other AI-linked positions.

the number of orgasms per week by any means (i.e., solitary and partnered sex)… 2.52 for females and 4.38 for males […] Higher TSO averages were obtained in more recent studies, younger samples, samples with a lower proportion of straight participants, and samples with a higher proportion of single participants. A Monte Carlo simulation suggested that 2.1% of females and 24.0% of males met the seven orgasms per week criterion.

Tattoos may be linked to an increased risk of skin and lymphoma cancers

Scientists Propose Injecting Astronauts With Tardigrade RNA After Finding It Prevents Radiation Damage

I was exploring a huge storm drain system that runs under the interstate (ATL) with a friend in a spot I frequent. I stepped into what I thought was a shallow puddle at the entrance of a tunnel and 100% disappeared into a pool of shit water. I dragged myself out and my friend tried to help me clean my face off in some (less) shitty water but it was like I was covered in Crisco. I think I’ll have a very mild PTSD from this experience. has this ever happened to anyone else lol I’m trying to figure out if I should ask a friend for some antibiotics? I kept my mouth and eyes closed thank god but still had shit all over my face. Like am i 100% gonna get pink eye my throat burns like fuck. Probably from the ammonia. Waders won’t always cut it, guys. Water is a fucking mirage. also, anyone know why was it like being covered in Crisco, even after washing off. I’m scared to know. I took a 30 minute shower with Soft Scrub bleach gel and Dawn dish soap. Obviously don’t do this but it was an emergency. I’m experienced and careful so please don’t come for me. I didn’t fall I just misjudged the depth of the water. anyone else love drains and can educate me more privately on wastewater systems?

{Frank Lloyd Wright, Window, 1912 | Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, 1921/a> }

Man Searching For Dumped £600 Million Bitcoin Drive Has Better Odds of Winning Lottery

These financiers crashed the U.S. economy and sent the global financial system to the brink. Now, structured finance is back. Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything-the more creative the better-including corporate loans and consumer credit-card debt, lease payments on cars, airplanes and golf carts, and payments to data centers. […] deals now reach into nearly every cranny of the economy. […] record levels in 2024 and are expected to surpass those tallies this year

How the British Broke Their Own Economy

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has gained growing interest to improve a range of mental health outcomes. In response, numerous training programs have formed to train the necessary workforce to deliver psychedelic therapy. These include both legal and ‘underground’ (i.e., unregulated) programs that use psychedelics as part of their training. We present the case of a psychologist who underwent psychedelic therapy training that involved repeated high doses of psilocybin-containing mushrooms and subsequently developed prolonged adverse effects including severe sleep impairment, anhedonia, and suicidal ideation requiring hospitalization. Despite worsening symptoms, her psychedelic therapy trainers advised her against seeking psychiatric support, delaying treatment. Ultimately, the patient’s symptoms resolved after a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. […] Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. In those days, the Republicans were the party of Abraham Lincoln and the secessionist slave-owning Confederates were Democrats.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a procedure done under general anesthesia. During this procedure, small electric currents pass through the brain, intentionally causing a brief seizure.

Rat sommeliers demonstrate advanced olfactory learning in wine sniffing test

Chewing wood may boost memory and brain antioxidants, study finds

This boba chain has more outlets than McDonald’s

Man sues Kim Kardashian for mistakenly identifying him as a death row inmate — Kardashian attempted to bring awareness to Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu and ask her followers to sign a petition to save his life, but mistakenly used a photo of a man who lives in New York that shares the same name.

study found that between the ages of 25 and 64, women average 3,275 more words per day than men – or 20 more talking minutes.

surgeons put teeth in patients’ eyes to restore sight — teeth have dentine, which is the hardest substance the body produces, making it the ideal casing to bridge the plastic lens and the patient’s eye […] He has performed seven successful tooth-in-eye surgeries in his native Australia before being recruited to do them in Canada.

A study of over 6,000 Brazilians—the largest of its kind—found that a diet rich in polyphenol-rich foods such as grapes, strawberries, açaí, oranges, chocolate, wine, and coffee can reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome by up to 23%. Metabolic syndrome is a collection of metabolic imbalances and hormonal disruptions that significantly increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Polyphenols, known for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, may help counteract these risks. This is good news for people who like fruit, chocolate, coffee, and wine

Nigerians are building affordable alternatives to AWS and Google Cloud

Can Enhanced Street Lighting Improve Public Safety at Scale? […] Results show a 15% decline in outdoor nighttime street crimes and a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence following the streetlight upgrades.

Trump faced criminal charges for retaining national defense documents after leaving leaving office and allegedly conspiring to hide them from federal authorities, after FBI agents found more than 100 documents with classified markings at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022. […] “The FBl is giving the president his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids,” Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung said.

This might be the first vehicle that drives and flies

Skeuomorphism is a term most often used in graphical user interface design to describe interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts.

The rape of the Sabine women, also known as the abduction of the Sabine women, was an incident in the legendary history of Rome in which the men of Rome committed bride kidnappings or mass abduction for the purpose of marriage, of women from other cities in the region. It has been a frequent subject of painters and sculptors, particularly since the Renaissance.

The word “rape” is the conventional translation of the Latin word raptio used in the ancient accounts of the incident. The Latin word means “taking”, “abduction” or “kidnapping”, but when used with women as its object, sexual assault is usually implied. […]

According to Roman historian Livy, the abduction of Sabine women occurred in the early history of Rome shortly after its founding in the mid-8th century BC and was perpetrated by Romulus [legendary founder and first king of Rome] and his predominantly male followers; it is said that after the foundation of the city, the population consisted solely of Latins and other Italic peoples, in particular male bandits. With Rome growing at such a steady rate in comparison to its neighbors, Romulus became concerned with maintaining the city’s strength. His main concern was that with few women inhabitants there would be no chance of sustaining the city’s population, without which Rome might not last longer than a generation. On the advice of the Senate, the Romans then set out into the surrounding regions in search of wives to establish families with. The Romans negotiated unsuccessfully with all the peoples that they appealed to, including the Sabines, who populated the neighboring areas. […]

The Romans devised a plan to abduct the Sabine women during the festival of Neptune Equester. They planned and announced a festival of games to attract people from all the nearby towns. At the festival, […] the Romans grabbed the Sabine women and fought off the Sabine men. […] All of the women abducted at the festival were said to have been virgins except for one married woman, Hersilia, who became Romulus’s wife and would later be the one to intervene and stop the ensuing war between the Romans and the Sabines.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

She graduated from high school with honors but can’t read or write. Now she’s suing

People “fake-good” on personality self-reports more strongly in a job context than in a dating context

Just Five Days of Junk Food Can Throw Off Your Brain’s Metabolism

Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first

Americans who earn more than $150,000 are almost twice as likely to leave windows uncovered as those making $20,000 to $29,000, according to a large 2013 study for the U.S. Department of Energy […] Slowly, uncovered windows have become a status symbol

OpenAI CEO is ‘out of GPUs’ … Altman said that GPT-4.5, which he described as “giant” and “expensive,” will require “tens of thousands” more GPUs before additional ChatGPT users can gain access.

Trying out gpt-4.5. What do you think? No progress for years on questions that require actual thinking.

AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change.

Chinese scientists have revealed the technology behind the world’s first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, giving China a permanent view of one-third of the Earth’s surface […] launched in August 2023 […] It continuously monitors the Asia-Pacific region from an altitude of 36,000km […] high, stable radar emissions that can penetrate cloud cover and darkness while maintaining relatively high resolution

Give a group of scientists the same data and the same research question, and they should come up with similar answers—in theory. But they don’t

Virtual reality rewrites rules of the swarm — present knowledge of the rules that govern the emergence of such complex, patterned behavior and decision-making is based on a handful of theoretical models that recapitulate only some aspects of the observed behavioral patterns. […] When reared alone, desert locusts tend to avoid one another and exhibit cryptic behavior, presumably to avoid attracting the attention of predators. Yet after only a few hours of crowding, they switch to being attracted to other locusts, forming jostling aggregations that then transition suddenly into marching bands. These groups behave as if they are of a single mind, yet there are no leader locusts or any hierarchy of control. Instead, collective behavior arises from interactions among individual locusts.

An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment — compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish. Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally, 27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish. These numbers wouldn’t matter if shrimp didn’t have the internal experience associated with suffering, but a growing body of evidence suggests that they do. A comprehensive review commissioned by the U.K. government found strong evidence of sentience in decapods, which includes shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and crabs. Evidence was particularly strong in true crabs. Crabs can learn. They can make trade-offs and act to protect themselves in flexible, complex ways. Everything we know about the structure of their brains suggests that they feel pain. While shrimp have been studied less extensively, the evidence suggests that they have similar capabilities. […] In modern shrimp farming, life begins in a hatchery born to a mother who has endured one of the industry’s most severe practices: eyestalk ablation.

What happened on February 26th? Related: Instagram is considering the launch of a separate app for its short-form video feature, Reels […] Meta previously tried out a standalone video-sharing app called Lasso in 2018, with the goal of competing with TikTok, but the app did not gain much traction and the company later shut it down.

There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. It increases neuroplasticity temporarily (days to weeks), which though is very different from neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons) – discussed in more detail later. On the other hand, dozens of animal studies – and human observational studies – unequivocally show that ketamine is neurotoxic.

The Covid-19 vaccines were powerfully protective, preventing millions of deaths. But in a small number of people, the shots may have led to a constellation of side effects that includes fatigue, exercise intolerance, brain fog, tinnitus and dizziness, together referred to as “post-vaccination syndrome,” according to a small new study. Some people with this syndrome appear to show distinct biological changes, the research found — among them differences in immune cells, reawakening of a dormant virus called Epstein-Barr, and the persistence of a coronavirus protein in their blood. […] Dr. Iwasaki said that mRNA itself, used in vaccines, was unlikely to be the source of the protein so long after the shots were administered. […] it’s possible that some of the protein may result from undetected coronavirus infections. […] People with the syndrome were generally in poorer health than the average American, the researchers found. […] The study has not yet been published in a scientific journal […] Yet the results, from a scientific team known for rigorous work, suggest that post-vaccination syndrome deserves further scrutiny [NY Times]

“The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” - A “Study”

Ingested Microplastic (MP) particles can harm the human body. Estimations of the total mass of ingested MP particles correspond to 50 plastic bags per year (Bai et al., 2022), one credit card per week (Gruber et al., 2022). The two estimations are based on an analysis (Senathirajah et al., 2021) that predicts a total ingested mass of MP particles mi,MP of 0.1–5 g/week. This work revisits and evaluates this calculation […] The calculation of 0.1 g – 5 g (one credit card) per week contains severe errors. [2022]

Within the White House complex, the WiFi permissions — meant to bolster security by prompting users to log in frequently — were recently changed to allow guests to remain logged in for a year, up from seven days, because so many personal devices are newly in use. […] Lutes said even the most experienced employees are given only segments of access to the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS. DOGE sought access to that system last week, which would have provided the ability to see, and in some cases edit, detailed records — including bank accounts, payment balances, Social Security and other personal identification numbers and, in some instances, medical information — for virtually every individual, business and nonprofit in the country. [Washington Post]

“We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. […] I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. […] They’ll have to go through vetting, of course, to make sure they’re wonderful world-class global citizens.”

New Maps of the Bizarre, Chaotic Space-Time Inside Black Holes — At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all of those things simply break down. There is, perhaps, nothing in the universe that challenges the imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge, perhaps a new understanding of what space and time are made of.

Today, most Mac users don’t even notice that using the “Duplicate” command in the Finder to make a copy of a file doesn’t actually copy the file’s contents. Instead, it makes a “clone” file that shares its data with the original file. That’s why duplicating a file in the Finder is nearly instant, no matter how large the file is. […] If I could find files that had the same content but were not clones of each other, I could convert them into clones that all shared a single instance of the data on disk.

What Happened to the N in Restaurateur? […] This puzzler has its derivation in the French language. Its roots are in the original word “restaurer,” a French verb meaning to restore, repair, or renew. A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these “restorers” became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called “restaurant.” It wasn’t until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. […] So, interestingly enough, the restaurateur came before the restaurant, and there was never an n to drop.

Anthropic’s Claude AI is playing Pokémon on Twitch — slowly

“Al is freeing time for students to focus on what matters — evaluating the information Al generates“

Man who lost $800 million bitcoin in landfill wants to buy the garbage dump

Life history theory suggests that in harsh, unpredictable environments, individuals may benefit from adopting a fast life history strategy. This may involve experiencing boredom more frequently and intensely as an adaptive mechanism to seek novel stimuli, potentially increasing the number of sexual partners and offspring. This study explored the relationship between trait boredom—a chronic characteristic of feeling bored—and fast life history strategies. Our findings confirmed a positive association between boredom proneness and fast life history strategies at both individual and country levels.

1,000 artists release ‘silent’ album to protest UK copyright sell-out to AI Related: List of silent musical compositions, Sleepify

dead steal elections … dead people are working for the government too

A proposed AI assistant would track what you’re looking at and then comment on it - using your own voice - into your ear

researchers at Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab were able to accurately decode unspoken sentences from brain signals recorded outside the skull — no surgery required.

Thieves used a stolen card to buy a $523,000 lottery ticket. The victim wants to share the winnings

A 30-year old woman who travelled to three popular destinations became a medical mystery after doctors found an infestation of parasitic worms in her brain. […] the woman ate street food in Bangkok and raw sushi in Tokyo, and enjoyed more sushi and salad as well as a swim in the ocean in Hawaii

Anthocyanins in nuts, fruits and vegetables seem to lessen harmful effects of microplastics on reproductive systems, study

South Korea is the most glaring example. It has the lowest fertility rate in the world: just 0.72 in 2023. It’s also a country where women do nearly three hours more of household chores each day than men do. […] In Japan and Italy, women spend three hours more than men per day on household and care tasks. In Sweden, it’s less than an hour difference. Sweden’s fertility rate is notably higher. [Washington Post]

IQ numbers for historical figures are made up … the studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science … the standard error of measurement of IQ tests is around seven points, meaning you should regularly expect things like 10-20 point spreads … The situation is even worse for IQs of 140 plus

sample of 8,553 Americans […] we find intelligence, as measured with Wordsum, to have the largest effect size, negatively predicting belief in astrology […] Education also predicts disbelief, supporting the “superficial knowledge” hypothesis. Measures of religiosity and spirituality had null effects, in contradiction of the “metaphysical uncertainty” hypothesis that a need for metaphysical beliefs causes one to believe in astrology. We find that right-wing individuals are less likely to believe in astrology, in contradiction to Theodore W. Adorno’s “authoritarian” of astrology.

How (much) do people revise their goals after goal success and failure? A meta-analysis and research agenda on goal revision

Breaking into dozens of apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone

AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years

Social media posts and websites claim that the way in which people perceive ambiguous images (Duck-Rabbit, Younger-Older Woman, Rubin’s Vase and Horse-Seal) reveals insights into their personality and thinking style. […] Many of the claims received no empirical support and so constitute a new type of psychological myth

Searching for Rimbaud’s Lost Manuscript

We present an extremely simple sorting algorithm. It may look like it is obviously wrong, but we prove that it is in fact correct.

Frequent flyers have spent years staying loyal to airlines. Now airlines are giving them ‘the middle finger’

Fly simulator

Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust, study

Last week, a monkey snuck into a substation in Sri Lanka and knocked out power, plunging the island nation into darkness that lasted six hours. […] Unlike many developing nations, Sri Lanka has ample installed power generation capacity and has plenty to spare even during peak demand periods. Unfortunately, Sri Lanka, like many countries, has an outdated power grid that’s vulnerable to widespread disruptions. […] the U.S. is not much better, with rolling blackouts, freezing homes and skyrocketing electricity prices now the norm rather than the exception.[…] mass blackouts have now become a regular feature of modern American life. Power outages have increased 64% from the early 2000s while weather-related outages have soared 78%. According to one analysis, the United States now records more power outages than any other developed country, with people living in the upper Midwest losing power for an average of 92 minutes every year compared to just 4 minutes in Japan. […] Despite being the wealthiest country in the world, the U.S. only ranks 13th in the quality of its infrastructure.

Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding — According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library was simply a move to access “data from a ‘well-known online repository’ that was publicly available via torrents.” To defend its torrenting, Meta has basically scrubbed the word “pirate” from the characterization of its activity.

earlier this month the UK government asked for the right to see the data, which currently not even Apple can access. Apple did not comment at the time but has consistently opposed creating a “backdoor” in its encryption service, arguing that if it did so, it would only be a matter of time before bad actors also found a way in. Now the tech giant has decided it will no longer be possible to activate ADP in the UK. It means eventually not all UK customer data stored on iCloud - Apple’s cloud storage service - will be fully encrypted.

Eight Sleep offered the features of temperature control: set the bed to any temperature hot or cold. For someone who suffers from insomnia this seemed worth a shot. What Can They Do with This Access? Let’s start with the basics: They can know when you sleep. They can detect when there are 2 people sleeping in the bed instead of 1. They can know when it’s night, and no people are in the bed. Imagine your ex works for Eight Sleep. Or imagine they want to know when you’re not home. (Of course, they can also change the bed’s temperature, turn on the vibrating feature, turn off your alarm clock, and any of the other normal controls they have power over.) Beyond the basics, what does access to a device on your home network grant them? Any other device connected to that home network - smart fridges, smart stoves, smart washing machines, laptops - is typically routable via your bed. The (in)security of those devices is now entrusted to random Eight Sleep engineers. […] eight sleep sure does harvest people’s bed data, and occasionally tweet about how they’re watching you sleep

Subway Poker is a two-player game that transforms your everyday subway ride into a dynamic poker experience. Child: Counts as a 10, Teenager: Counts as a Jack, Woman: Counts as a Queen, Man: Counts as a King, Elderly Person: Counts as an Ace

El Satario is the name of one of the earliest surviving pornographic films … it was likely produced in Argentina around 1907, and includes possibly the first use of extreme close-ups of genitalia. … a group of nude young women are frolicking in the countryside, a satyr appears … One of the women faints and is sexually assaulted by him, first in 69 position and then in various penile-vaginal positions, until he ejaculates in her vagina. At points he also attempts to finger her anus, an act she vigorously resists. The other women then return and put him to flight. [video]

update DOGE team has slashed hundreds of jobs paid for by fees from banks, medical device companies and other forms of funding rather than taxpayer dollars

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

Federal workers responsible for America’s nuclear weapons, scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu, and officials responsible for supplying electricity are among those who have been accidentally fired […] Trump administration is now rushing to rehire hundreds of these workers […] Trump called the work by DOGE “amazing.”

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

DOGE employee cuts fall heavily on agency that regulates Musk’s Tesla […] The loss of personnel from the specialized unit is part of a 10 percent overall workforce reduction at the federal agency tasked with ensuring safety on America’s roads. In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

unrelated { Doctor gets message from health insurance agent during surgery | CNN | video }

bonus quote { “Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less likely to be deceived who knows nothing than the one who knows something.” —Jefferson }

Uber for Armed Guards

Airbnb’s co-founder is joining Elon Musk’s DOGE, In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees

AI-powered tools may already be giving some lawyers the upper hand in court — How AI is reshaping the legal profession

U.S. personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan sent an urgent email, opens new tab this month to its more than 1,000 lawyers: Artificial intelligence can invent fake case law, and using made-up information in a court filing could get you fired.

YouTube terminated a channel called True Crime Case Files whose owner said he was making fake crime videos to “overdose the viewer on luridness.” He had uploaded over 150 videos, all of them using ChatGPT, gen AI image creators, and AI voiceovers. But it was a video called Husband’s Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder that would end up getting his channel deleted. Related: Psycho Obsessive Girlfriend’s Control Turns Deadly (True Crime Documentary)

testing convinced DeepSeek to create malware 98.8% of the time and to generate virus code 86.7% of the time

Canadian tourist trying to photograph a shark in shallow water at a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands this month was bitten by the shark and lost both of her hands

Antarctica’s Only Insect