More and more vultures eat their prey butt first […] That approach exposes a vulture to even more bacteria than they’d get from regular old rotting meat. […] A recent study found that vultures have tons of microbes on their faces (528 different species, on average) but shockingly few in the gut (around 76 types). In fact, the only bacteria that survive in a vulture’s gut are the really nasty ones.

Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed

Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss! The dynamics of mistypings and misspellings […] strengthen the meaning (e.g., ‘huuuuuge’), imply sarcasm (e.g., ‘suuuuure’), show excitement (e.g., ‘yeeeessss’), or communicate danger (e.g., ‘nooooooooooooo’). We will refer to words that are amenable to such lengthening as ‘stretchable words’.

A neurologist, at age 55, developed an irrepressible urge to rhyme after a series of strokes and seizures. His pronounced focus on rhyming led him to actively participate in freestyle rap and improvisation. More: How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

Why Is Everyone Smoking Toad Venom? […] Bufo is the venom of the Sonoran desert toad, Bufo alvarius, which contains the molecule 5-MeO-DMT, one of the most potent psychotropic drugs ever discovered. Related: Dogs that have attacked toads have suffered paralysis or even death.

Militarized Dolphins Protect Almost a Quarter of the US Nuclear Stockpile […] For protection against enemy divers, dolphins will swim up to the infiltrator, bump into them and place a buoy device on their back or a limb using their mouth. The buoy then drags the outed diver to the surface for easy capture.

Facebook’s Libra is still dead — Diem to be sold off for spare parts [Diem was the rebranding of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project] The intellectual property will consist of some trademarks, a website and the open-source code for a mediocre permissioned blockchain and various helper projects.

I’m the author of the best-selling book System Design Interview-An Insider’s Guide. 11 days ago, two fraudsters hijacked the “Buy Now” button on Amazon, fulfilling all orders with a different book.

How to Download Everything Amazon Knows About You (It’s a Lot)

Canadian Restaurant Ordered to Close After Accepting Dog Photos Instead of Vaccine Proof

Legislator dies using medical suicide law he helped pass

Cannabinoid receptors in the brain appear to play a key role in the euphoric experience known as the “runner’s high”

A machine learning model has now been taught to predict a person’s years of life simply by looking at their retina, which is the tissue at the back of the eye.

YouTuber Accused of Crashing a Plane for Views. Now the Feds Are Investigating

Investors are paying millions for virtual land in the metaverse — Yorio tells CNBC her company sold 100 virtual private islands last year for $15,000 each. “Today, they’re selling for about $300,000 each, which is coincidentally the same as the average home price in America,” she said.

The Federal Reserve took a key step in weighing the creation of its own digital currency

A leading French aquarium vendor has decided to stop selling round fish bowls because they drive fish mad and kill them quickly.

The height of skyscrapers is limited by physical, economic and regulatory barriers, but we should want to overcome them and build taller. Here’s how we can do it.

Mexico’s Little-Known Attempt to Save Freud From the Nazis

AI unmasks anonymous chess players, posing privacy risks

Scammers put fake QR codes on parking meters to intercept parkers’ payments

I found that those who called themselves feminists reported having more recently masturbated than non-feminist women. In addition, I found that in partnered sexual encounters, feminists were more likely to participate in anal play, as well as engage in more kissing, cuddling, and massage than non-feminists. I also found that feminist women were more likely to receive oral sex than non-feminists.

Elvira actress Cassandra Peterson: ‘Losing 11,000 horny old men as followers after coming out’ is no big deal

Walmart Plots ‘Super Intense’ Crypto, Metaverse Push, Filing Suggests

Customers are more likely to tip when paying by cash rather than by credit

New theory proposes ‘forgetting’ is actually a form of learning

Rat who detected land mines in Cambodia dies in retirement

The Torso Murderer: Jack the Ripper Wasn’t the Only Serial Killer Stalking London in 1888

A Personal Catalogue of the World’s Most Storied Bookstores

Multi-rider vehicle retention apparel (In which the passenger attaches him/herself to the front-rider with Velcro)

Marlon Bundo, the famous Pence family bunny who made history, dies

Tarrare was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits […] he would swallow corks, stones, live animals […] he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing.

He pops a Viagra, straightens out the bed cover, showers and, when he’s ready, calls for Anne. […] The missionary position no longer works for them — David has put on weight and would be too heavy. Instead, he often lies behind Anne and puts one leg between hers, the other to the side. […] During oral sex, David stops just when Anne is on the verge of climaxing. […]

Even with Viagra, David can’t always have a full erection, but they usually have intercourse regardless; sometimes he has a dry orgasm, where he doesn’t produce enough semen to ejaculate. […]

David and Anne are in their 80s now, and they recently told me that at this stage of life, sex is the best it has ever been.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Why was there less lightning during COVID lockdowns? The decrease coincided with a drop in humans emitting aerosols.

Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as Male Contraception

Female dolphins have a fully functional clitoris

Animals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

USC team shows how memories are stored in the brain, with potential impact on conditions like PTSD. Contrary to expectations, the study in larval zebrafish shows synapses in one part of the brain are eliminated and new ones are created in a different region when memories are formed. These major structural changes could account for memory formation.

Sony is working on a 3D Scanner that will allow users to put real-world items into video games

There were times [Trump] would come down the next morning and say, “Well, Sean thinks we should do this,” or, “Judge Jeanine thinks we should do this,” referring to Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, both of whom host prime-time Fox News shows.

Martin Fugate and Elizabeth Smith were both carriers of the recessive methemoglobinemia (met-H) gene. As a result, four of their seven children exhibited blue skin

How do they keep blood flowing during heart transplant?

You’ll receive medication that causes you to sleep (general anesthetic) before the procedure. Your surgeons will connect you to a heart-lung bypass machine to keep oxygen-rich blood flowing throughout your body. This machine does the work of your heart and lungs while they are stopped.

Your surgeon will make an incision in your chest. Your surgeon will separate your chest bone and open your rib cage so that he or she can operate on your heart.

Your surgeon then removes the diseased heart and sews the donor heart into place. He or she then attaches the major blood vessels to the donor heart. The new heart often starts beating when blood flow is restored. Sometimes an electric shock is needed to make the donor heart beat properly.

{ Mayo Clinic | Continue reading }

related { In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig | NY Times }

quote { Ginny Hogan }

Brussels Airlines makes 3,000 unnecessary flights to maintain airport slots

Uber rider stuck on I-95 hit with $600 bill

Fintech Is a Scam — A Listicle in Eight Parts

FBI arrests suspect in bizarre, years-long manuscript theft scheme

Rather than being highly selective, people appear to have a tendency to push relationships forward, even when things are not going well.

‘90 Day Fiancé’ star retires from selling farts after heart attack scare — Matto was rushed to a hospital with chest pains she feared were symptoms of a heart attack. After undergoing a battery of tests, including blood work and an EKG, Matto was told that her pain was the result of her steady diet of gas-inducing beans and eggs.

Which way does water flow in the Bosphorus? It flows both ways. Simultaneously.

The weather is expected to be so cold for Saturday’s National Hockey League’s outdoor Winter Classic that the ice will have to be heated

No convincing scientific evidence that hangover cures work

Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories

Logic’s song ‘1-800-273-8255′ may have led to hundreds fewer suicides, study finds

SpaceX will take humans to Mars within 10 years, Elon Musk predicts Previously: Asked when he sees this happening, Musk pauses for a long moment, as if calculating all the variables—federal regulations and production schedules, test-flight targets and bathroom requirements. “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years,” he finally says.

the military has four extra telephone buttons that they don’t tell us about [..] AUTOVON phones thus feature a full 4×4 keypad, with the rightmost column typically in red and used to prefix dialed calls with a precedence level. […] calls were placed at “routine” priority, but “priority,” “immediate,” “flash,” and “flash override” were successively higher precedence levels reserved for successively more important levels of military command and control.

When thieves stole three tonnes of oysters from French shellfish farmer Christophe Guinot, he came up with a solution: planting secret notes inside oyster shells to help police track down the thieves. ‘You’ve won your weight in oysters!’

The heaviest drinkers in the animal kingdom are punier than you might expect. Elephants, for example, are massive, but they are relative lightweights—they lack a gene for alcohol metabolism. Humans actually rank pretty highly, thanks to our ancestors’ propensity for picking fermented fruit off the ground. But to find the real champs, you have to think smaller. You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Get a Hamster Drunk

After three hours of tests and more than 100 flushes, the team detected droplets smaller than 3 mm in size at a height of 1.5 m above a toilet or urinal (face height for many people) and found that the droplets persisted at that height for more than 20 seconds after the flush. The 10 quirkiest stories from the world of physics in 2021

99 Good News Stories from 2021

I stepped out of an East Side funeral home into the bright June sunshine. I examined the white plastic bucket containing my mother’s ashes, and then I raised my arm to hail a cab.

One pulled up, but something made me wave it on. I stuffed the bucket into my backpack, loaded the pack onto my back and started walking.

For the next hour or so, I took my mother on a tour of some of the monuments of our New York lives.

Past the old Drake Hotel, where we would duck in to grab a handful of mini-Swiss chocolate bars from the cavernous bowl in the lobby.

Past Saks Fifth Avenue, where we would squeeze into the tightly packed elevators operated by “elevator men” calling out the floors in deep baritones.

Past the MoMA sculpture garden, which my mother’s first New York apartment overlooked.

Past the Pierre Hotel, where my mother had conned the receptionist into giving her a room when she ran away from home as a teenager.

Past the long gone Auto Pub in the General Motors Building, where my parents threw the best birthday party of my life.

Past the old Rumpelmayer’s on Central Park South, where my mother would take me for vanilla ice cream sodas on special days.

Into Central Park and onto the park drive, which my mother hectored many a taxi driver into taking to “save time.”

And, finally, home to the empty apartment on the Upper West Side.

Thanks, Mom, for sharing these things with me. How pleased I was that day to return the favor.

{ David London / NY Times | Continue reading }

Anti-5G necklaces found to be radioactive

Two dozen cities and states prohibit use of face recognition. But it’s on phones and is increasingly used in airports and in banks.

US Army Creates Single Vaccine Against All COVID & SARS Variants, Researchers Say — Within weeks, Walter Reed researchers expect to announce that human trials show success against Omicron—and even future strains

Oil-Sniffing Dogs Are Helping Humans Spot Spills

Watching A Lecture Twice At Double Speed Can Benefit Learning Better Than Watching It Once At Normal Speed

After 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. “We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise” in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three “Matrix” films; now he is making things for the metaverse.

Ames Window illusion

Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops […] His rockets, built from scratch on an autodidact’s mold-breaking vision, have saved taxpayers billions […] “I’ll be surprised if we’re not landing on Mars within five years.” Related: Crypto Casinos

Rat sightings increased by 40% in the first 11 months of 2021 compared to 2019, apparently spurred by cuts to trash collection and street-cleaning services. New York has a huge rat problem. These vigilantes with dogs think they can fix it.

Besides its innovative design and noxious chemicals, the rat trap also has a secret weapon: Oreo cookies. The scent of the cookies, crumbled and placed in the top compartment of the two-part trap, along with sunflower seeds, acts as a lure. For a week or so, rodents will be free to crawl through the device’s holes and snack as much as they want. Once the rats become regulars and “get comfortable,” Mr. Webster said, the device will be turned on, and a platform will drop them into the lower part of the contraption, which serves as a catch basin not unlike a dunking tank at a carnival booth. Mr. Webster emptied four jugs of a mysterious blue “proprietary” formula into the bottom part of the machine. He said the formula was mostly alcohol and had vapors that “knock the rat unconscious.” He topped the solution off with sunflower oil to “eliminate odor” from decomposition. Not everyone is a fan of these methods, though. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, prefers rodent control that focuses on garbage cleanup and sealing entry points, “not finding new ways to torment and kill small animals who are simply trying to live their lives, just like any other New Yorker,” the organization said in a statement. [NY Times]

researchers found out that feeding seaweed to cattle would reduce greenhouse gases by as high as 40%

Construction creates an estimated third of the world’s overall waste, and at least 40% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Compare that to the 2-3% caused by aviation

New Eye Drops Offer an Alternative to Reading Glasses

A security researcher says an internet gateway used by hundreds of hotels to offer and manage their guest Wi-Fi networks has vulnerabilities that could put the personal information of their guests at risk.

News that the world’s first commercial octopus farm is closer to becoming reality has been met with dismay by scientists and conservationists. They argue such intelligent “sentient” creatures - considered able to feel pain and emotions - should never be commercially reared for food.

How Shein (formerly SheInside) beat Amazon at its own game — and reinvented fast fashion

Amazon-owned Twitch bans Amazon account after breast revealed on air

Stealth bomber on Google Map

The World Is So Desperate for Manure Even Human Waste Is a Hot Commodity

A new approach for the rapid destruction of human waste using smouldering combustion is presented. Recently, self-sustaining smouldering combustion was shown to destroy the organic component of simulated human solid waste and dog faeces resulting in the sanitization of all pathogens using a batch process.

Researchers find an early and treatable indicator of blood clotting in COVID-19 patients

Japanese scientists develop glowing masks to detect coronavirus

High court juries can detect when someone is lying even when they’re wearing a face mask. Not only do face masks not hinder jurors’ ability to decide if a witness is reliable, they make it easier to discern lies from truth.

Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by people — and in particular babies — called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to make men more docile and women more aggressive

More treatment but no less depression: The treatment-prevalence paradox

Oxygen when sleeping eases depression for 1 in 3 patients in small Israeli study Around half received regular air, which contains 21 percent oxygen, while the others received air with 35% oxygen content.

Within the scientific research community, memory information in the brain is commonly believed to be stored in the synapse - a hypothesis famously attributed to psychologist Donald Hebb. However, there is a growing minority who postulate that memory is stored inside the neuron at the molecular (RNA or DNA) level - an alternative postulation known as the cell-intrinsic hypothesis, coined by psychologist Randy Gallistel. […] After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved. [PDF]

among nonhuman primates the most compelling evidence for something approaching human-like visual self-recognition is seen only in great apes

US government wants to know why Tesla owners can play videogames while driving now

Toyota is charging drivers for the convenience of using their key fobs to remotely start their cars. Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality.

Former FedEx driver charged for dumping thousands of dollars worth of packages into Alabama ravine

People are regretting spending $800 on a Chanel advent calendar featuring stickers and a dust bag

“Another course – a citrus foam – was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth.” We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever, Chef responds with images of horses

Sex Ratios at Birth Linked to Pollutants […] data on 150 million people in the US over eight years, and data on 9 million Swedish people over 30 years […] airborne and waterborne pollutants such as aluminum, chromium, and mercury were associated with a higher proportion of male babies born

Proximity to green space may help with PMS, study finds

This week, New York-based company Republic Realm announced it had spent a record-breaking $4.3 million on digital land through The Sandbox, one of several “virtual world” websites where people can socialise, play games and even attend concerts. That came hot on the heels of a $2.4-million land purchase in late November on a rival platform, Decentraland, by Canadian crypto company Tokens.com. And days before that, Barbados announced plans to open a “metaverse embassy” in Decentraland. […] land worth more than $100 million has sold in the past week across the four largest metaverse sites, The Sandbox, Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, and Somnium Space.

Small Group of Insiders Is Reaping Most of the Gains on NFTs, Study Shows

Crypto is basically an anything goes markets like we saw in the 1920s before the Securities Act of 1933 cleaned up the mess of illegal practices. Exchanges can wash trade, which means being the buyer and seller of buy sides of a trade to create the illusion of market activity. Some reports put wash trading at an unprecedented 70% of all trading volume. Exchanges can front-run their own customers by putting their own trades in before client execution and trade on their advance knowledge of their customer order flow. Exchanges can offer 100x leverage on derivatives which allows them to liquidate their customers’ funds if the price (which the exchange sets) of the underlying moves by even 1% out of range. Exchanges can arbitrarily halt trading or cancel trades if any market conditions aren’t to their liking and there’s no obligation on them to report any accurate price information or give any kind of best execution. If you work at the exchange, or are friends with someone there, you have foreknowledge about every listing and you can insider trade with no consequences. They even brag about trading against their customers openly.

Internet 3.0 Sites are now built on the blockchain […] Your avatar is your digital wallet—you are anonymous, no company owns your data, you own everything in your wallet. […] The internet is owned by the users who use each app. […] Imagine that every time you used Facebook you were given some shares in Meta (aka Facebook).

Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm Recorded Future has counted about 50 cryptocurrency exchanges in Moscow City, a financial district in the capital, that in its assessment are engaged in illicit activity. […] Laundering the cryptocurrency through exchanges is the final step, and also the most vulnerable, because criminals must exit the anonymous online world to appear at a physical location, where they trade Bitcoin for cash or deposit it in a bank. The exchange offices are “the end of the Bitcoin and ransomware rainbow,” said Gurvais Grigg, a former F.B.I. agent who is a researcher with Chainalysis, the cryptocurrency tracking company. The computer codes in virtual currencies allow transactions to be tracked from one user to another, even if the owners’ identities are anonymous, until the cryptocurrency reaches an exchange. There, in theory, records should link the cryptocurrency with a real person or company. It is at this point, cybersecurity experts say, that criminals should be identified and apprehended. But the Russian government has allowed the exchanges to flourish, saying that it only investigates cybercrime if Russian laws are violated.

Eurostar tests facial recognition system on London train station

Your next smartphone might have a camera that’s always watching This week, chipmaker Qualcomm revealed its latest Snapdragon processor, which will power many of the high-end Android smartphones you’ll see in stores in 2022, including models from Motorola, Sony, OnePlus. And a new feature built into that chip could allow smartphone makers to keep those front-facing cameras on all the time in a sort of low-power mode, waiting and watching for a face to appear in front of it. Qualcomm insists the move is meant to make phones not just more convenient, but more secure.

Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. […] Montaruli called for “a reset,” telling BOO sellers to delete the pages and groups and start over again. One slide suggested alternatives for 14 popular BOO uses, including switching terms like ADHD to “trouble concentrating,” and “prevents heart attack” to “maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.” Related: When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z

Why do people eat the same breakfast every day?

Are 14 people really looking at that product?

The term “bus factor” refers to the number of project maintainers who, if hit by a bus and incapacitated, would cause that project to stall

How A NYTimes Reporter Collects Royalties From Hundreds of Musicians

Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth

All the Biomass of Earth, in One Graphic

Scientists Made an Eco-Friendly Plastic Using DNA From Salmon Sperm

we are many years away from storing data on DNA. Ignoring the technical complexities, DNA data storage is simply too expensive — a few megabytes would cost thousands of dollars

Austria: Doctor fined for amputating wrong leg of patient

What does your favourite color say about your personality? Nothing.

Kübler-Ross’s fundamental premise was that the dying individual goes through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. […] Kübler-Ross extended application of the five stages to the experience of (anticipatorily) bereaved persons. […] The five stages model of grief has been widely accepted by the general public, taught in educational institutions and used in clinical practice. […] Stage theories have a certain seductive appeal – they bring a sense of conceptual order to a complex process and offer the emotional promised land of “recovery” and “closure.” However, they are incapable of capturing the complexity, diversity and idiosyncratic quality of the grieving experience.

hugs that lasted less than one second were the least pleasurable; the ones lasting between five to 10 seconds, the most. the findings surprised the authors of the study

Can Afghanistan’s underground “sneakernet” survive the Taliban? A once-thriving network of merchants selling digital content to people without internet connections is struggling under Taliban rule.

Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users. The Tor Project has removed hundreds of KAX17 servers in October and November 2021.

Making Hybrid Images

Reef Global Inc. operates “ghost kitchens” from trailers in parking lots. So it’s a food-service company basically. It has raised over $1.5 billion, some of it from SoftBank. That would buy a lot of trailers, but naturally Reef used the money to buy parking lots […] Reef quickly used much of the $1.2 billion it raised to buy two giant companies that manage and operate parking lots, becoming what it says is the largest parking-lot network in North America. […] except they also somehow bought the wrong parking lots […] Reef found it wasn’t able to put trailers on many of its lots, as some had enclosed garages, where propane tanks and utility hookups aren’t allowed. Others were owned by landlords who didn’t want food trucks, former employees said. As a result, Reef rents lots from other parking owners for more than 70% of its kitchens. […] For a couple of years SoftBank really created an environment where startups had to spend money faster than they could think, and we are still enjoying the fallout.

Canada taps into strategic reserves to deal with massive shortage of maple syrup

Self-reported hand preference for masturbation was examined in 104 left-handed and 103 right-handed women, and 100 left-handed and 99 right-handed men […] For kissing the preferred cheek of an emotionally close person from the viewer’s perspective, left-handers showed a left-cheek preference, and right-handers a weaker right-cheek preference.

This research demonstrates that the physical properties of shopping carts influence purchasing and spending

Real-time alerting system for COVID-19 and other stress events using wearable data […] we built a real-time smartwatch-based alerting system that detects aberrant physiological and activity signals (heart rates and steps) associated with the onset of early infection […] this system generated alerts for pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection in 67 (80%) of the infected individuals.

The Science of Mind Reading — Cognitive psychologists armed with an fMRI machine can tell whether a person is having depressive thoughts; they can see which concepts a student has mastered by comparing his brain patterns with those of his teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a computer system can edit together crude reconstructions of movie clips you’ve watched. One research group has used similar technology to accurately describe the dreams of sleeping subjects.

Rather than being centralized in one part of the body like our own brains, the jellyfish brain is diffused across the animal’s entire body like a net. The various body parts of a jellyfish can operate seemingly autonomously, without centralized control; for example, a jellyfish mouth removed surgically can carry on “eating” even without the rest of the animal’s body. But how does the decentralized jellyfish nervous system coordinate and orchestrate behaviors?

A variety of insects can produce honey – bumblebees, stingless bees, even honey wasps – but only honey bees (Apis species) produce enough to stock grocery store shelves. This ability didn’t happen overnight; it was millions of years in the making.

Team Builds First Living Robots That Can Reproduce — AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine

Google is reportedly delisting the controversial U.S. e-commerce platform Wish from its search results in France Google and Apple both removed the Wish app from their French app stores, and rival search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing and France’s Qwant delisted the website from their results, before Google also took the search-engine step. […] ContextLogic/Wish had the dubious distinction of having last year’s worst U.S. trading debut, with its stock falling 16% in a December IPO. That took it down to a shade over $20 a share, but it was only the beginning of an ongoing slide that broke through the $4 barrier last week.

Who Owns a Recipe? U.S. copyright law protects all kinds of creative material, but recipe creators are mostly powerless in an age and a business that are all about sharing.

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere

How to use a horse’s tail to catch fish

Vagina NFTs

{ YassifyBot }

Sophia Urista apologizes for peeing on fan. The rocker ordered the man to lie down on his back before she unbuttoned her pants, popped a squat and relieved herself on his head. Sophia Urista isn’t first rocker to urinate onstage

The first South African doctor to alert the authorities about patients with the omicron variant has told The Telegraph that the symptoms of the new variant are unusual but mild. […] They included young people with intense fatigue and a six-year-old child with a very high pulse rate. None suffered from a loss of taste or smell.

why we won’t know for weeks how dangerous Omicron is

“What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore?”, a Trump admin official reportedly asked. — Sculpture of Donald Trump’s face carved into Mount Rushmore has been pictured at his office in Mar-a-Lago

New plastic made from DNA is biodegradable and easy to recycle

“It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin” Europe must ban Bitcoin mining to hit the 1.5C Paris climate goal, say Swedish regulators

In the early 2010s, the leading music-intelligence company was the Echo Nest, which Spotify acquired in 2014. Founded in the MIT Media Lab in 2005, the Echo Nest developed algorithms that could measure recorded music using a set of parameters similar to Serrà’s, including ones with clunky names like acousticness, danceability, instrumentalness, and speechiness. To round out their models, the algorithms could also scour the internet for and semantically analyze anything written about a given piece of music. The goal was to design a complete fingerprint of a song: to reduce music to data to better guide consumers to songs they would enjoy. By the time Spotify bought the Echo Nest, it claimed to have analyzed more than 35 million songs, using a trillion data points. […] The result is that users keep encountering similar content because the algorithms keep recommending it to us.

“Ghost particles” detected in the Large Hadron Collider for first time

The Pigeon Puzzle: How Do They Figure Out Their Impossibly Long Routes Home?

Back when it was normal to advertise cocaine gadgets in magazines, 1970-1980

Changes in Penile-Vaginal Intercourse Frequency and Sexual Repertoire from 2009 to 2018 Compared to adult participants in the 2009 NSSHB, adults in the 2018 NSSHB were significantly more likely to report no PVI in the prior year (28% in 2018 vs. 24% in 2009). A similar difference in proportions reporting no PVI in the prior year was observed among 14–17-year-old adolescents (89% in 2018 vs. 79% in 2009). Additionally, for both adolescents and adults, we observed decreases in all modes of partnered sex queried and, for adolescents, decreases in solo masturbation.

Big data study suggests the human brain navigates by taking the “pointiest path” rather than the shortest path

Sometimes we want vicious friends: Friend preferences are target-specific

People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own

Narcissism was surprisingly the strongest predictor, and intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology

Belief in astrology is on the rise, although the reasons behind this are unclear. We tested whether individual personality traits could predict such epistemically unfounded beliefs. Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer

“The NFT Bay” — it appears that the 10GB of “data” is nothing of value and the Torrent really is effectively empty

Fifty percent of Facebook Messenger’s total voice traffic comes from Cambodia. — Keyboards weren’t designed for Khmer. So Cambodians have just decided to ignore them

Your Fingerprint Can Be Hacked For $5

Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare

In “the trial of the century,” a Houston socialite was accused of plotting her husband’s murder—and of having an affair with her nephew. But Candace Mossler was only getting started.

In August 2014, a padded FedEx envelope arrived at the Calgary International Airport. It had been shipped from an address in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and on the customs form it had been labelled “Book.” As it was being sorted, a customs agent saw the package move. Inside the envelope was a slim cardboard box with holes along its sides. Inside that box were two small fabric pouches with duct-taped edges. An agent carefully opened the pouches into a plastic mail-carrying bin. Golf ball–size baby turtles emerged.

Adele gets Spotify to take shuffle button off all album pages

A man high on drugs swallowed a thermometer. Doctors didn’t remove it, because they thought he was talking nonsense. It remained lodged in him for 5 years. Luckily he had the sense to pour the mercury out before swallowing it

“The NFT Bay” Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of ‘Pirated’ NFTs

NFTs are only valuable as tools for money laundering, tax evasion, and greater fool investment fraud.

We argue that rather than being a wholly random event, birthdays are sometimes selected by parents.

Drawing a hopscotch board on a sidewalk or street in Anoka, Minneapolis is now against the law

The central symptom in the case history is the delusion that the patient has already lived through this life once.

Where people around the world find meaning in life

Pure 100% fruit juices –- A review of the evidence of their effect on risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity

The FDA has asked a federal judge to make the public wait until the year 2076 to disclose all of the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

In recent years, Amazon.com Inc has killed or undermined privacy protections in more than three dozen bills across 25 states, as the e-commerce giant amassed a lucrative trove of personal data on millions of American consumers

Tiny hidden spy cameras concealed in sensitive locations including hotels and bathrooms are becoming a significant threat worldwide. These hidden cameras are easily purchasable and are extremely difficult to find with the naked eye due to their small form factor. The state-of-the-art solutions that aim to detect these cameras are limited as they require specialized equipment and yield low detection rates. To overcome these limitations, we present LAPD, a novel hidden camera detection and localization system that leverages the time-of-flight (ToF) sensor on commodity smartphones.

Ghost guns — untraceable firearms without serial numbers, assembled from components bought online — are increasingly becoming the lethal weapon of easy access for those legally barred from buying or owning guns around the country. […] Over the past 18 months, the officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25 to 50 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes. […] Ghost guns, and the niche industry that produces them, have flourished because of a loophole in federal regulation: The parts used to build “privately made firearms” are classified as components, not actual guns, which means that online buyers are not required to undergo background checks or register the weapons. [NY Times]

A. Dneprov: “The Game” (originally published in 1961)