According to legend, in 1040 Lady Godiva was upset that her husband, the Lord of Coventry, had imposed ruinously high taxes on his subjects. He responded that he would revoke the taxes if she would ride through the town naked. She took the challenge, and out of respect the townsfolk stayed inside during her ride, all save one tailor named Thomas, who peeked from his window and was promptly struck blind. This incident is said to be the origin of “peeping Tom” as a synonym for “voyeur.”

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents […] Creditors’ names were not listed on the court filing, but the largest is owed $226,280,579. The second largest entity is owed $203,292,504. FTX owes nearly $3.1 billion to top 50 creditors […] about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors

Why some feces float and others sink […] the bacteria in the gut — some produce more gas than others.

Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Mr. Musk has repeatedly used those tactics at many of his companies. […] As Mr. Musk and his advisers look for ways to generate more revenue at the company, they are said to have discussed adding paid direct messages, which would let users send private messages to high-profile users.[…] for Mr. Musk, remaking Twitter is only a part-time job. He remains chief executive of Tesla, which he said in court he continued to lead, and SpaceX, where, he said, he focuses on designing rockets rather than management. […] Mr. Musk also leads the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, and Neuralink, a brain-computer interface technology firm. He has said his long-term goal is to save humanity by developing technology for space travel, or, in his words, by “making life multiplanetary in order to ensure the long-term survival of consciousness.” The multitasking has become an issue in a lawsuit filed by Tesla shareholders who objected to the pay package that made Mr. Musk the world’s richest person. Last week in Delaware, under questioning by a lawyer representing shareholders who have accused Mr. Musk of neglecting his duties at Tesla, the billionaire said his intense involvement in Twitter was temporary.

For the female to male transsexual, surgical options include creation of a neophallus (phalloplasty) using a vascularized free-flap or pedicle flap. […] Additional procedures are also performed: glansplasty (to give the end of the phallus a natural glans-like appearance), transposition of the denuded clitoris to the neophallus base (to consolidate erogenous sensation to the neophallus), and vaginectomy. Placement of testicular and penile prostheses, for cosmesis and erectile function, respectively, are performed at second or third stage surgery. […] Previous groups have reported that the majority of patients retain the ability to achieve orgasm following phalloplasty.

The brain learns continuously, and typically learns best when new training is interleaved with periods of sleep for memory consolidation. […] Artificial neural networks (computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains) overwrite previously learned tasks when trained sequentially, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. […] Interleaving new task training with periods of off-line reactivation, mimicking biological sleep, mitigated catastrophic forgetting

Phantom Phone Signals (PPS) and other hallucinatory-like experiences (HLEs) are perceptual anomalies that are commonly reported in the general population. Both phenomena concern the same sensory modality, but PPS are restricted to smartphone use. The current study aimed to assess similarities and differences between these types of anomalies […] Smartphone dependency proved to be a stronger predictor of PPS than other measured variables, whereas for HLEs, general psychopathology was the strongest predictor.

Eye contact marks the rise and fall of shared attention in conversation

decoding fMRI-based brain activities and reconstructing images Previously: The Science of Mind Reading

A traveler at JFK Airport was arrested after $450,000 worth of cocaine was discovered hidden in the wheels of her wheelchair. Officers noticed the wheels on her wheelchair were not turning and X-rayed the wheelchair.

The Atacama desert, which stretches for approximately 1,600 km along the western coast of the cone of South America, is the driest place on Earth. Some weather stations there have never recorded rainfall throughout their existence. But it‘s far from barren: many species live here that occur nowhere else, adapted to its extreme conditions. And approximately every five to 10 years, from September to mid-November, the Atacama hosts one of the most spectacular sights of the natural world: the ‘desierto florido’ (literally ‘blooming desert’).

the whole idea was that electronic tokens whose validity was established with techniques borrowed from cryptography would make it possible for people to bypass financial institutions. […] It has never been clear exactly why anyone other than criminals would want to do this. […] cryptocurrencies are largely purchased through exchanges like Coinbase and, yes, FTX, which take your money and hold crypto tokens in your name.These exchanges are — wait for it — financial institutions, whose ability to attract investors depends on — wait for it again — those investors’ trust. In other words, the crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends on their perceived trustworthiness. Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? […] But if the government finally moves in to regulate crypto firms, which would, among other things, prevent them from promising impossible-to-deliver returns, it’s hard to see what advantage these firms would have over ordinary banks. Even if the value of Bitcoin doesn’t go to zero (which it still might), there’s a strong case that the crypto industry, which loomed so large just a few months ago, is headed for oblivion.

The iconic brand’s latest venture is a metaverse play called .Swoosh, a Web3-enabled platform where people will be able to buy its virtual products. […] Swoosh exists on a domain named “.nike” and will be an experimental digital space for registered members. […] the platform will use cash (USD), not cryptocurrency […] the NFT studio RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”) was bought by Nike in December 2021, so the porting of “codesigned” virtual clothing to that platform is hardly surprising. Nike acquired RTFKT last year and made $3.1 million selling 600 pairs of “Cryptokicks” NFT sneakers in April 2022

TikTok creators have gotten into the habit of coming up with substitutes for words that they worry might either affect how their videos get promoted on the site or run afoul of moderation rules. […] a fear that sexual topics would trigger problems prompted some creators to use “leg booty” for L.G.B.T.Q. and “cornucopia” instead of “homophobia.” Sex became “seggs.”

Almost everything with the truffle label that is available in stores or served in restaurants is a lie and a fraud. If you think you know what truffles taste like because you had them at restaurants, or you may have prepared something with the products you bought at specialty food stores, you almost certainly still don’t know the authentic truffle flavor. The flavor you are familiar with is the added aroma found in all the products labeled as containing “truffles.” […] There are more than 60 classified truffle species, around 25 species are edible, and four of those are most commonly used.

Florida house of Ron Rice, creator of Hawaiian Tropic lotion, is on sale

in the middle of the ballroom at Trump’s address, somebody had placed on one of the tables a manila envelope with handwritten letters: ‘Top Secret Nuclear Codes.’ [photo left]

The firm that bought my car for more than I paid new has lost 98 percent of its value — Carvana, the used car dealer that trusts robotic algorithms to buy your car practically sight unseen, was the third-fastest company to ever make it onto the Fortune 500 — only Amazon and Google did it faster. But for the third day in a row, its stock is trading for just around $7 a share, plummeting 98 percent from its all-time high of over $360 last August.

Some types of artificial intelligence could start to hallucinate if they don’t get enough rest, just as humans do

U.S. intelligence officials have compiled a classified report detailing extensive efforts to manipulate the American political system by the United Arab Emirates, […]The UAE has spent more than $154 million on lobbyists since 2016, according to Justice Department records. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on donations to American universities and think tanks, many that produce policy papers with findings favorable to UAE interests. There is no prohibition in the United States on lobbyists donating money to political campaigns. […] it illustrates how American democracy is being distorted by foreign money […] One of the more brazen exploits involved the hiring of three former U.S. intelligence and military officials to help the UAE surveil dissidents, politicians, journalists and U.S. companies. In public legal filings, U.S. prosecutors said the men helped the UAE break into computers in the United States and other countries. Last year, all three admitted in court to providing sophisticated hacking technology to the UAE, agreeing to surrender their security clearances and pay about $1.7 million to resolve criminal charges. […] Thomas Barrack, a longtime adviser to former president Donald Trump, who was acquitted this month of charges alleging he worked as an agent of the UAE and lied to federal investigators about it. […] the UAE’s extensive courtship of retired high-ranking U.S. military personnel. The investigation showed that over the past seven years, 280 retired U.S. service members have worked as military contractors and consultants for the UAE, more than for any other country, and that the advisory jobs pay handsomely.

Apple is tracking you even when its own privacy settings say it’s not — The researchers said that the Health and Wallet apps, for example, didn’t transmit any analytics data at all, whereas Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, the iTunes Store, and Stocks all did. […] For example, the Stocks app sent Apple your list of watched stocks, the names stocks you viewed or searched for and time stamps for when you did it, as well as a record of any news articles you see in the app.

Apple Sued for Allegedly Deceiving Users With Privacy Settings After Gizmodo Story

People have always craved post-death contact with their loved ones. Efforts to remain in touch with the dead have existed for eons, such as photographing deceased children, holding seances and even keeping a corpse in the house for posterity. But artificial intelligence and virtual reality, along with other technological advances, have taken us a huge step closer to bringing the dead back to life. […] a platform called Augmented Eternity, which allows someone to create a digital persona from a dead person’s photos, texts, emails, social media posts, public statements and blog entries that will be able to interact with relatives and others. […] In June, Amazon unveiled a new feature it’s developing for Alexa, in which the virtual assistant can read aloud stories in a deceased loved one’s voice after just hearing a minute of that person’s speech. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for Amazon Alexa. […] HereAfter’s app takes users through an interview process before they’ve died, prompting them to recollect stories and memories that are then recorded. After they’ve passed, family members can ask questions, and the app responds in the deceased’s voice using the accumulated interview information, almost like it’s engaging in a conversation. [Washington Post]

Around 20% of people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death.

“At the beginning, I think, I heard the nurse say ‘dial 444 cardiac arrest’. I felt scared. I was on the ceiling looking down.”[Veridical Near-Death-Experiences]

Previously: All features of a classic Near-Death-Experiences can be reproduced by the intravenous administration of 50 - 100 mg of ketamine.

Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after [PDF]

Zolgensma is a one time shot that cures spinal muscular atrophy in infants by injecting a new DNA to correct the faulty gene. Novartis set the price at $2.125 million but offers insurers the ability to pay $425,000 a year for five years. This price tag makes Zolgensma the most expensive drug ever approved. [2019]

Zolgensma associated with two deaths — The deaths, which resulted from acute liver failure, occurred in Russia and Kazakhstan.

The Search of Shame — everyone you follow, who’s also paid Elon $8 for a dodgy tick

those who subscribed to Blue Verified were often accounts promoting right-wing politics, cryptocurrency speculation or adult content such as pornography

Web search hasn’t changed in 20 years. We’re building a new search engine from scratch, using the same ideas behind DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Metaphor is a language model that’s trained to predict links instead of text. You feed the model a “prompt” (similar to a GPT-3 prompt), and it tries to predict what link is most likely to come after.

It might be hard to remember that the index,the handy list of subjects at the back of a book, with the corresponding page numbers on which each subject is discussed, was invented in the early 13th century. […] “it’s invented twice at the same time […] once in Paris, and at the same time in Oxford.”

Honey bee life spans are 50% shorter today than they were 50 years ago

This sand-filled condom from Long Island was choked down in the 1750s by the likes of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, George Washington at Mount Vernon, and Benjamin Franklin as he declared it his favorite apple. Perhaps the Newtown Pippin was once a great apple whose quality has degraded over the centuries like the crumbling democracy the Founding Fathers established. Or perhaps, after decades of eating pigeon pie and squirrel meat, these wooden-toothed slave owners’ tastebuds are not to be trusted. Either way, in today’s world, aside from being excellent for apple cider production, the Newtown Pippin is a tasteless hunk of malformed donkey shit that should’ve been abolished during the reign of King George III. [Apple Rankings]

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

Positive and negative memories are stored in different parts of the brain. Additionally, positive and negative memory-formation is associated with vastly different gene expression profiles. This raises the distinct possibility of therapeutic memory manipulation.

Here we distinguished between 27 different types of love

Consumption of ultraprocessed foods containing little or no whole foods in their ingredients contributed to 57,000 premature deaths in Brazil in 2019

Lab-grown blood given to people in world-first clinical trial

An informal, unofficial guide for non-technical people who want to use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse.

Interiew with the founder of Stability AI [audio]

How to run a small social network site for your friends [2019]

Stories are now available on Signal

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, created a VR headset that kills you if you die in the game: Oculus co-founder makes a VR headset that can literally kill you — the new VR headset uses three embedded explosive charges, planted above the forehead, that can “instantly destroy the brain of the user.” The lethal explosion is triggered via “a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency.”

Operation Popeye was a military cloud-seeding project carried out by the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War in 1967–1972. The highly classified program attempted to extend the monsoon season over specific areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to disrupt North Vietnamese military supplies by softening road surfaces and causing landslides.

Submarines are valued primarily for their ability to hide. The assurance that submarines would likely survive the first missile strike in a nuclear war and thus be able to respond by launching missiles in a second strike is key to the strategy of deterrence known as mutually assured destruction. Any new technology that might render the oceans effectively transparent, making it trivial to spot lurking submarines, could thus undermine the peace of the world. For nearly a century, naval engineers have striven to develop ever-faster, ever-quieter submarines. But they have worked just as hard at advancing a wide array of radar, sonar, and other technologies designed to detect, target, and eliminate enemy submarines. […] Nuclear-powered submarines each cost roughly US $2.8 billion […] the game of submarine hide-and-seek may be approaching the point at which submarines can no longer elude detection and simply disappear. It may come as early as 2050

50 years ago, an artist convincingly exhibited a fake Iron Age civilization – with invented maps, music and artifacts

Glenn Gould - “How Mozart Became a Bad Composer”

Sticky Vicky’s magic show began with her undressing slowly to background music. She later pulled several objects from her vagina, including ping-pong balls, eggs, handkerchiefs, sausages, razor blades, and Machetes. The lights dimmed, and Vicky pulled out a lit lightbulb. She concluded her act by opening a bottle of beer with her vagina, pouring it on the stage.

An Analysis of Vulva Appearance in Video Pornography — It is evident that both websites are depicting mostly uniform vulvas—small, groomed, and tidy. Undeviating depictions could influence women’s genital ideals, pushing them to seek out extreme surgery and beauty measures in order to adhere to the standards presented. Much like clothing advertisements, which now present a range of body shapes and sizes, presenting a diverse set of images of vulvas could be beneficial to viewers.

The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis

In paintings depicting nude males, the size of the penis has gradually increased throughout the past 6 centuries, and especially after the 20th century.

US Banks Spent $1 Billion on Ransomware Payments in 2021, Treasury Says

Distinguishable Cash, Bosonic Bitcoin, and Fermionic Non-fungible Token

Kanye West can’t sell ‘White Lives Matter’ shirts because two Black men own the trademark They became the legal owners of the phrase’s trademark for its use on clothing late last month to prevent West from using it.

His new aim is clear: to unlock Twitter’s moneymaking potential once and for all […] $1 billion in annual interest payments alone

Estimates from Bot Sentinel suggest that more than 875,000 users deactivated their accounts between October 27 and November 1, while half a million more were suspended.

So when I got this tip that Elon Musk and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true. […] oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code! […] This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right? If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code, that’s not necessarily a good thing. You might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? […] Also, who prints code? […] two hours later, they get — all the Twitter folks get this new notification […] change of plans […] why don’t you just bring it in on your laptop, and if you have printed out any code, we’re going to need you to shred it. So all the Twitter engineers have to run to the paper shredder on the 10th floor, I believe, and just start shredding the code base. […] Elon Musk folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? […] Elon Musk considers himself an engineer. [NY Times]

How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

AI Helps Design Baldness Treatment That Works Better Than Testosterone or Minoxidil

British govt is scanning all Internet devices hosted in UK

While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran’s data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called “SIAM” […] The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where.

Fully enclosed in a 7m (23ft)-high steel container, the battery consists of 100 tonnes of low-quality sand, two district heating pipes and a fan.

Anonychia is the absence of fingernails or toenails

Bioluminescence is the name given to the light that living organisms emit. This light comes from a reaction between two groups of molecules — luciferins and luciferases. While the exact form of these molecules varies from animal to animal, they all work in essentially the same way through the catalyzed oxidation of luciferin by the luciferase enzyme. […] there are three broad areas of bioluminescence: defense, attack, and communication

upon reflection, the new shelton resurrects — sorry for the change of mind

Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years — Despite the discovery, the work, titled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid damaging it

Strangers smiled less to one another when they had their phones in a waiting room

Earlier this month, the European Union approved legislation aimed at regulating social media platforms: the Digital Services Act. The law will take effect in 2024 [a subset of obligations for VLOPs and VLOSEs (avery large online platforms and very large online search engines) will start to apply next year. […] The law, among other requirements, places substantial content moderation expectations on large social media firms—many based in the U.S.—which include limiting false information, hate speech, and extremism. It’s not clear how social media firms will adapt to the law, but the fines they will face for failing to comply will be massive. Firms can be fined up to six percent of their annual revenue—that’s $11 billion for Google and $7 billion for Meta. […] That means an American politician’s conspiracy-filled Facebook post will create legal liability for Meta. The company might then take it down to avoid huge fines in Europe.

Tech industry appeals the bad Texas social media law to the Supreme Court The law makes bans on hate speech — or any content moderation — impossible

As lawsuits continue piling up against social media platforms for allegedly causing harms to children, a Pennsylvania court has ruled that TikTok is not liable in one case where a 10-year-old named Nylah Anderson died after attempting to complete a “Blackout Challenge” she discovered on her “For You” page. The challenge recommends that users choke themselves until they pass out, and Nylah’s mother, Tawainna Anderson, initially claimed that TikTok’s defective algorithm was responsible for knowingly feeding the deadly video to her child. The mother hoped that Section 230 protections under the Communications Decency Act—which grant social platforms immunity for content published by third parties—would not apply in the case, but ultimately, the judge found that TikTok was immune. [Memorandum]

Mr. Musk already has about $13 billion in debt from lenders, while other investors, like the venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, chipped in about $7.1 billion in cash. Mr. Musk was personally responsible for the buyout’s remaining roughly $25 billion, and it remains unclear whether he gathered more investors to help lighten that load. […] If even cost cuts do not help, Mr. Musk may need to raise more money from outside investors within a year, Mr. Talley said. […] Mr. Bruner said the worst deals are typically struck at the peak of a market — as with Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter. He offered what he thought could be a worst-case scenario for the company. In that future, Mr. Musk would not be able to “get the expenses down to the level necessary to cover the debt burden.” That would “slowly erode the company’s equity, and he’s unable to find more equity investors.” The final outcome? “Slowly, Twitter implodes,” Mr. Bruner said.

Mr. Musk’s companies, and his fortune, were built with billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies for his electric-car company, Tesla, and billions more in NASA contracts to ferry American astronauts into space, launch satellites and provide high-speed internet services tethered to his fleet of some 3,000 satellites. he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.

There is no character in the entire canon of world literature and drama more useful for explaining markets than Wile E. Coyote. In the Roadrunner cartoons, he would run off the edge of a cliff, and continue running into midair. Only once he stopped, looked down, and realized that he was in midair, did he fall. He thus gave the market the invaluable concept of a Wile E. Coyote moment, when investors realize they’ve been running without support for a long time, and prices that should have long since been gradually coming down suddenly collapse.

As the company of Facebook grew, we faced a lot of challenges. One of them was explaining our company’s mission, history, and culture to new employees.: Facebook’s Little Red Book

Dreambooth, a tailor-made AI image generation tool [Start creating your unique images, How to

Fans waited four years for Frank Ocean’s second studio album, and on August 19, 2016 they got a 46-minute-long, high contrast black and white experimental visual album with an unmarked tracklist. Released exclusively as a video on Apple Music, Endless had no purchase option. It would be the next day when critics got what they were looking for but under the title Blond(e). Another album, this time sixty minutes long with eighteen tracks plus one unlisted, and widely available to stream and buy. The press would learn in the days to come that Endless marked the end of Ocean’s contractual obligations to Def Jam Records. Blond(e) was his first official release as an independent artist. […] Where Ocean imagined freedom from a future designed by UMG, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (henceforth QTBF) looks, within the realm of the poetic, to expressions of what is beyond the future designed by racial capitalism. […] If capitalism therefore consigns futures only to that which is presently knowable and if it seeks to police the imagination by limiting the possible only to that which is presently available to “common sense,” QTBF alternatively considers how Afrofuturist and Black queer media reveal otherworldly and profoundly non-linear futures that exist here, now. “Here now” is a refrain that is echoed throughout Keeling’s engagements with her capacious archive of audio, visual, and literary media, which she reads as instances of the impossible, errant, opaque, utopic and dystopic—the Black and queer. Asking what these works may offer us in the present and in our material relations to futures that remain beyond view, Keeling’s theoretical and close reading practice is animated by a commitment to “the stubborn spatiotemporalities of our senses”—something that she again credits to Lorde’s writing—so as to “intervene in the smooth and seductive assertions of capitalism’s inevitability.”

The world is running out of helium. Here’s why doctors are worried. Liquid helium, the coldest element on Earth, is needed to keep the magnets in MRI machines running. Without it, doctors would lose a critical medical tool. […] With a boiling point of minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, liquid helium is the coldest element on Earth. Pumped inside an MRI magnet, helium lets the current travel resistance-free. […] At any point, an MRI machine contains about 2,000 liters of liquid helium, though suppliers need to replenish any helium that boils off. Mahesh estimates that an MRI machine uses 10,000 liters of liquid helium over its life span. (According to GE Healthcare, a manufacturer of the machines, that life span is 12.8 years.) […] An enormous new facility in eastern Russia was supposed to supply nearly one-third of the world’s helium, but a fire last January derailed the timeline. Although the facility could resume operations any day, the war in Ukraine has, for the most part, stopped trade between the two countries. […] The forced innovation may preview what’s to come for MRIs. […] “There’s only a finite amount of helium in the Earth’s crust”

The idea that humans could be frozen and later brought back has survived for decades. The hope is still alive and even growing today— never mind that it’s still not possible. […] Today, around 500 people are preserved in liquid nitrogen globally, the vast majority in the United States. Around 4,000 people are on waiting lists of cryonics facilities around the world

Flushing a toilet produces both aerosol droplets that mix with the air in the room and larger droplets that land on and contaminate surrounding surfaces.

Manhattan congressional candidate publishes a porn video to highlight his sex positive platform

Black men account for fewer than 2 percent of sperm donors at cryobanks. The severe shortage is forcing Black women who need donor sperm into a painful choice: Choose a donor of another race and raise a biracial child or try to buy sperm from unregulated apps and online groups.

In a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, merely anticipating that a lecture would be boring led students to feel more bored

how ultra-processed meals are unhealthier than you think […] a study in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology found that people born after 1990 are more likely to develop cancer before they’re 50 than people born before 1970 […] “The ultra-processed nature of modern food generally means that the complex structure of the plant and animal cells is destroyed, turning it into a nutritionally empty mush that our body can process abnormally rapidly.”

Personal lubricant made from cow mucus may protect against HIV

Transparent wood could soon replace plastics

While the culture has always relied heavily on recycling, that impulse seems to have gone into overdrive in recent years; dance music’s most established genres (e.g. house, techno, jungle, electro, garage, dubstep, etc.) frequently sound as though they’re stuck in a neverending time loop, with sounds from the ’80s, ’90s and 2000s being constantly regurgitated for fresh crops of ravers. […] Dance music often swaddles itself in sci-fi imagery and utopian fantasy, but in many ways, it’s become a deeply nostalgic realm, with a healthy fetish for formats (e.g. vinyl and cassettes), gear (e.g. vintage synths and drum machines) and general modes of operation that were once cutting edge, but are now frequently impractical, wildly expensive or both. […] Dance music and DJ culture are no longer subversive, and arguably haven’t been for at least a decade; they’re now quite literally everywhere

Integrating Real-World Distractions into Virtual Reality [demo video]

Apple’s Sleeping Advertising Business

Apple bought all of the advertising space in November/December special election issue of Newsweek in 1984, and devoted it all to Macintosh

Mark Zuckerberg Is Going To Kill His Company

Man stole $122m from Facebook and Google by sending them random bills

How social media platforms respond to misinformation

More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll.

In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated. Throughout this presentation you will be hearing different sounds, which you will often play yourself.

The cells that make up our body are constantly making new cells by dividing. A biological technicality causes us to lose a bit of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes (structures made up of DNA and proteins) after each replication. DNA contains the blueprint for our lives, so in order to make sure we aren’t losing crucial information during these divisions, the long molecules of DNA are protected by shorter segments of DNA at their ends called “telomeres.” An analogy would be the plastic tips on a shoelace that prevent it from unraveling. When a cell multiplies, the only part of the chromosome that is lost is a piece of the telomeres. But as we age, our telomeres get shorter, until they reach a critical point where the cell can no longer replicate without damage to its essential DNA. When this occurs, the cell becomes inactive or dies. Shortening of telomeres is linked to senescence and increased risk of disease. Other contributors to aging include oxidative stress (hence the appeal of antioxidants).

Lobsters have a perpetual supply of telomerase – the enzyme that can restore telomeres, helping cells avoid that fateful end. Humans also have telomerase, just not enough to overcome the constant shortening of telomeres. In fact, telomerase is often found in cancer cells, giving tumours a survival advantage.

[A] large supply of telomerase can be a double-edged sword. Lobsters are still more likely to die with age because their hard-shell exoskeleton moults and has to be regrown. This requires reams of energy, eventually too much. As a result, common causes of death for lobsters are exhaustion, immobility, and shell disease, although the leading cause is still predation.

{ McGill | Continue reading }

Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi made headlines in March 2021 when he paid $2.9m for an NFT of Twitter boss Jack Dorsey’s first tweet. But his efforts to resell it have run aground, with a top bid of just $6,800 as of Thursday. While announcing the NFT sale in a tweet on 6 April, Estavi pledged to give 50% of the proceeds – which he expected to be at least $25m – to charity.

Everything you see is from 15 seconds in the past, New Research Claims

NY times: New York beaches are stepping up shark patrols — including the use of drones and online shark tracking — amid an increase in sightings. And: Scientists say the reason it may seem like more sharks are being spotted is because more people are looking for them.

Ten years ago scientists announced one of the most momentous discoveries in physics: the Higgs boson. The particle, predicted 48 years earlier, was the missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. The machine built in part to find this particle, the 27-kilometer-long, circular Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, had fulfilled its promise by showing signals of a new fundamental bit of nature that matched expectations for the Higgs. —- How the Higgs Boson Ruined Peter Higgs’s Life

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”

Quantum Computing for Dummies — Whereas classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones or zeroes, quantum computers use quantum bits, or “qubits,” which because of the peculiar nature of quantum physics can exist in a state called superposition where they are both 1 and 0 at the same time. This essentially lets each qubit perform two calculations at once. The more qubits are quantum-mechanically linked, or entangled, within a quantum computer, the greater its computational power can grow, in an exponential fashion.

Information could become the fifth state of matter alongside gas, plasma, liquid, and solid states. A scientist has proposed an experiment involving particle annihilation that could establish that information truly has mass. If successful, the experiment could shed light on the mysterious dark matter in our universe—and help us manage the future of data storage.

The gunslinger effect, also sometimes called Bohr’s law or the gunfighter’s dilemma, is a psychophysical theory which says that an intentional or willed movement is slower than an automatic or reaction movement. The concept is named after physicist Niels Bohr, who first deduced that the person who draws second in a gunfight will actually win the shoot-out. […]

Bohr staged mock gunfights using cap guns with his students to test this hypothesis. Bohr found that the person who drew second always won in these experiments, leading him to conclude that drawing first created a distinct disadvantage.

Based on the inevitability of this outcome, Bohr suggested that the most logical conclusion to a gunfight would be a peaceful settlement, since neither gunslinger would want to draw first knowing that they would lose.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Japan: Man loses USB flash drive with data on entire city’s residents after night out

Coinbase Is Reportedly Selling Geolocation Data to ICE

Death is a trip – how new research links near-death and DMT experiences

we identified three previously unnamed, but distinct, anal touch techniques that many women find pleasurable and that expand the anal sexual repertoire beyond the more commonly studied anal intercourse behaviors: Anal Surfacing, Anal Shallowing, and Anal Pairing.

Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers. […] This new study is the latest in a robust line of research showing coffee’s potential health advantages, he said. Previous research has linked coffee consumption with a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, liver and prostate cancers and other health issues. Scientists don’t know exactly what makes coffee so beneficial, Dr. Goldberg said, but the answer may lie in its antioxidant properties, which can prevent or delay cell damage. [NY Times]

Married off at age 12, Isabella put up with her husband’s shenanigans over decades. Eventually, the She-Wolf of France had had enough.

640th Avenue? 180th Street? The backstory behind long rural addresses

MIT engineers have built and flown the first-ever plane with no moving parts. Instead of propellers or turbines, the light aircraft is powered by an “ionic wind” — a silent but mighty flow of ions that is produced aboard the plane, and that generates enough thrust to propel the plane over a sustained, steady flight. [Video: Ion drive: The first flight]

If you’ve flown recently, or attempted to, it might have gone something like this: Your 1 p.m. flight became a 5 p.m. flight that became a midnight flight before being summarily canceled. No explanation is given. The next flights out are already fully booked, but they have a middle seat with two stopovers leaving next week if that still works for you. […] According to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight cancellations and delays, there were 1,629 delays and 631 cancellations “within, into, or out of the United States” just Sunday. This was only by noon. Cancellations and delays become more likely as the day progresses. […] Throughout the last two years, airlines received more than $50 billion in pandemic relief money. […] That money was meant to preserve jobs and save an industry. […] Instead, the industry is in disarray, staff were laid off anyway and the money is gone.

Google and Meta are now investing fortunes into building massive subsea cables […] the cables will also give the U.S.-based tech giants an unprecedented level of control

half-wheel bike shows two halves make a whole

Humans can think about possible states of the world without believing in them, an important capacity for high-level cognition.

Here we use fMRI and a novel “shell game” task to test two competing theories about the nature of belief and its neural basis.

According to the Cartesian theory, information is first understood, then assessed for veracity, and ultimately encoded as either believed or not believed. According to the Spinozan theory, comprehension entails belief by default, such that understanding without believing requires an additional process of “unbelieving”. […]

findings are consistent with a version of the Spinozan theory whereby unbelieving is an inhibitory control process.

{ PsyArXiv | Continue reading }

I communicate with your animal remotely by looking at the picture you upload with your submission. The session is not live with you. After the session, I email you the full audio recording so you can listen to our entire conversation. One animal per session. Standard: $350 USD More: Lawyer Quits To Become Pet Psychic… Makes More Money

Caffeine Consumption Leads to Impulsivity during Shopping, New Study Shows

Research into falling sperm counts finds ‘alarming’ levels of chemicals in male urine samples

How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children — Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways

Memory: Synaptic or Cellular, That Is the Question

According to the current paradigm, perception of the outside world is not a passive process in which the “receiver” is passively fed sensory impressions. Rather, the organism at any time produces a “concurrent world model”, which includes hypotheses about the expected stimuli. These expected values are stored in long-term memory as a comprehensive simulation of external reality. During an ongoing act of perception, the retrieved hypotheses are checked against the incoming sensory data; perception is therefore an interactive process, which is taking shape through a gradual testing and refinement of predictions. This new perspective skews the whole picture: Our expectations control what we perceive; memory and perception are inextricably linked.

Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons.

Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites Experts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information

Following testing, only the HIV-negative results (or linked information) are uploaded to the blockchain, which results in high-risk individuals being able to determine the HIV-negative status of each other anonymously, conveniently, and credibly.

If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible. Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field

I used GPT-3 [AI] to write a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine about cats and then used DeepFake voices to perform it.

…Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well. […]

Axie’s creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the “play-to-earn” video game. “We believe in a world future where work and play become one,” it said in a mission statement on its website. “We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution.” […]

Andrew Yang called web3 “an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition” and “the biggest weapon against poverty that we have.” By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3’s utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

These researchers hooked a plant up to a lie detector. Asked if it was alive, the plant said “yes” but this was determined to be a lie. Also there was uranium involved for some reason. [PDF]

New AI Could Prevent Eavesdropping — “Neural Voice Camouflage” disguises words with custom noise

Scientists can reverse aging in mice “It’s a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age,” said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time. “If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer’s in your 90s. This is the world that is coming. It’s literally a question of when and for most of us, it’s going to happen in our lifetimes.”

the empirical evidence contradicted the idea that attraction occurs when people’s personalities match

A Qualitative Analysis of Gaslighting in Romantic Relationships

For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes […] You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers. PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search. […] Unlike Clearview AI, a similar facial recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites. […] In 2005, when Ms. Scarlett was 19 and broke, she considered working in pornography. She traveled to New York City for an audition that was so humiliating and abusive that she abandoned the idea. PimEyes unearthed the decades-old trauma, with links to where exactly the explicit photos could be found on the web. […] Worried about how people would react to the images, Ms. Scarlett immediately began looking into how to get them removed […] When she clicked on one of the explicit photos on PimEyes, a menu popped up offering a link to the image, a link to the website where it appeared and an option to “exclude from public results” on PimEyes. But exclusion, Ms. Scarlett quickly discovered, was available only to subscribers who paid for “PROtect plans,” which cost from $89.99 to $299.99 per month. “It’s essentially extortion,” said Ms. Scarlett, who eventually signed up for the most expensive plan. Mr. Gobronidze disagreed with that characterization. He pointed to a free tool for deleting results from the PimEyes index that is not prominently advertised on the site. He also provided a receipt showing that PimEyes had refunded Ms. Scarlett for the $299.99 plan last month. […] PimEyes has a free “opt-out” as well, for people to have data about themselves removed from the site, including the search images of their faces. To opt out, Ms. Scarlett provided a photo of her teenage self and a scan of her government-issued identification. At the beginning of April, she received a confirmation that her opt-out request had been accepted. [NY Times]

Chickens were first tempted down from trees by rice. […] It was previously believed that chickens were bred for the table up to 10,000 years ago, but the new report, published in the journal Antiquity, suggests humans did not come into close contact with chickens until about 1500BC. Chickens, native to the tropical jungles of south-east Asia, did not arrive in Europe until about 800BC. Then, after arriving in the Mediterranean region, it took almost 1,000 years longer for chickens to become established in the colder climates of Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland. The experts re-evaluated chicken remains found in more than 600 sites in 89 countries. They found that the oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were at the Neolithic Ban Non Wat in central Thailand, dating to between 1650BC and 1250BC.

Scientists can now grow wood in a lab without cutting a single tree

The world’s largest plant is a 112-mile-long seagrass in Australia

Despite being around 4,300 miles in length, the Amazon River surprisingly has no bridges. The Amazon River is the world’s second-longest river and one of the planet’s most significant waterways. It contains more fresh water by volume than any other river, is home to the world’s largest species of river dolphin, and hosts 100 species of electric fish and up to 60 species of piranhas.

Electric organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, do all sorts of amazing things: They send and receive signals that are akin to bird songs, helping them to recognize other electric fish by species, sex and even individual. A new study explains how small genetic changes enabled electric fish to evolve electric organs.

Neptune and Uranus are so similar that scientists sometimes refer to the distant, icy planets as planetary twins. But these ice giants have one big difference: their color.

repeated low doses of LSD are safe, but produce negligible changes in mood or cognition in healthy volunteers

De Groft and the owners of the 25 paintings have said that they were done on slabs of cardboard scavenged by Basquiat in late 1982 while he was living and working out of a studio beneath the Los Angeles home of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, as he prepared new work for a show at Gagosian’s gallery. They said the works were then sold by Basquiat for $5,000 to a now-deceased television screenwriter, Thad Mumford, who put them into a storage unit and forgot about them for 30 years — until the unit’s contents were seized for nonpayment of rent and auctioned off in 2012. (Gagosian has said he “finds the scenario of the story highly unlikely.”) […] An article in The New York Times raised questions about their authenticity, reporting that a designer who had previously worked for Federal Express had identified the FedEx typeface on a piece of cardboard Basquiat was said to have painted on as one that was not designed until 1994 — six years after the artist’s death. [NY Times]

McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another million words. When he did, his computer lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying thousands of phrases in common, many found in similar situations and contexts, and many unique in English. Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some. […] Another possibility is that this is yet one more piece of evidence lending credence to McCarthy’s theory, demonstrating that North was making notes for his own play about King Cymbeline, that Shakespeare acquired and adapted years after his death.

Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.

In more than 900 hours of recordings from wild chimpanzees, researchers heard hundreds of unique phrases that could resemble a language.

Many mentally well people experience hallucinations. An estimated 6 – 15% of us hear, see, feel or even smell things that aren’t real.

Do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard.

Alarmist narratives about the flow of misinformation and its negative consequences have gained traction in recent years. If these fears are to some extent warranted, the scientific literature suggests that many of them are exaggerated. We find that the strongest, and most reliable, predictor of perceived danger of misinformation is the third-person effect (i.e., the perception that others are more vulnerable to misinformation than the self) and, in particular, the belief that ‘distant’ others (as opposed to family and friends) are vulnerable to misinformation.

Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify them

When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal — sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. […] In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff […] It seems we created these new, health-conscious cockroaches by accident, after decades of trying to kill their ancestors with sweet powders and liquids laced with poison. The cockroaches that craved sweets ate the poison and died, while cockroaches less keen on glucose avoided the death traps and survived long enough to breed, thus passing that trait down to the next cockroach generation. […] The good news for consumers is that pesticide manufacturers share Dr. Wada-Katsumata and Dr. Schal’s enthusiasm for understanding cockroach evolution, and they are actively changing their cockroach-killing formulations to move away from glucose. But given how new this research is, it will take some time for those changes to make their way to the products on our shelves. [NY Times]

The Plastics Recycling Lie

Polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites.

Navy Ships Swarmed By Drones, Not UFOs, Defense Officials Confirm

‘Smoke-Free’ Cities and Islands — Sponsored by Philip Morris

Calling a man bald counts as sexual harassment, UK judge rules

New York Now Has More Airbnb Listings Than Apartments for Rent

San Francisco Police Are Using Driverless Cars as Mobile Surveillance Cameras

Biofire Technologies has raised $17 million in seed funding to further develop its smart gun, which uses a fingerprint sensor to unlock the trigger.

Do Insects Have Consciousness? — bugs feel something like hunger and pain, and “perhaps very simple analogs of anger,” but no grief or jealousy. “They plan, but don’t imagine”

Canada Proposes Space Law to Punish Crimes Committed on Moon

Man died from heart attack while burying woman he strangled, South Carolina deputies say

While males and females are equally at risk of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), females are less likely to be resuscitated. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) may be inhibited by socio-cultural norms about exposing female victims’ chests. […] Participants were randomly assigned to provide CPR and defibrillation as instructed by a commercially-available automated external defibrillator on a patient simulator presented as either a male or female experiencing cardiac arrest. […] Rescuers removed significantly more clothing from the male than the female, with men removing less clothing from the female.

Scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients’ blood to attack breast, prostate and other tumours. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumours. The second focuses on soil bacteria that manufacture magnets which they use to align themselves in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Long-duration space flight alters fluid-filled spaces along veins and arteries in astronauts’ brains

the human sclera—the white of the eye—is unique among primates for its whitish color […] Our data support the claim that indeed there is a sex difference in sclera color, with male sclera being yellower and redder than female sclera.

Twitter bots, explained

“Temporarily on hold” is not a thing. Elon Musk has signed a binding contract requiring him to buy Twitter. […] You are not supposed to say things that aren’t true and that will affect the stock of a public company that you are trying to buy. That is what is usually called “securities fraud,” or what I sometimes like to call “lite securities fraud.” Musk has a long history of lite securities fraud

Position of the north magnetic pole since 1590

Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations, that are captured annually.

Flashback: ‘Tinder for threesomes’ gets $500K investment (2015), Threesome app CEO: ‘Swiping is dead’ (2017)

We quickly and irresistibly form impressions of what other people are like based solely on how their faces look. We collected over 1 million human judgments to power a model that can both predict and manipulate first impressions of diverse and naturalistic faces

Perceptions of Authenticity Are Systematically Biased and Not Accurate

VR Researchers Have Basically Figured Out How to Simulate the Feel of Kisses

Despite no differences in general intelligence, there are sex differences in specific abilities. Reliable and meaningful female advantages are found in processing speed and writing. Reliable and meaningful male advantages are found in visual processing.

Having an unsupportive romantic partner is associated with neurophysiological changes in error processing

Results suggested that people were less ready to commit to a romantic relationship to the extent that they perceived they had many partners available to them.

Intuition: When is it right to trust your gut instincts?

We show that free-flying honeybees can visually acquire the capacity to differentiate between odd and even quantities […] This study thus demonstrates that a task, previously only shown in humans, is accessible to a brain with a comparatively small numbers of neurons.

New study suggests “comedowns” associated with MDMA are not a result of the drug itself

Time was remembered as passing significantly more quickly than normal during alcohol, cocaine and MDMA use. Marijuana was associated with time passing more slowly than normal.

Got food cravings? What’s living in your gut may be responsible

All of the bases in DNA and RNA have now been found in meteorites

While there is growing consensus on the physiological functions of spontaneous yawning in neurovascular circulation and brain cooling, far less is known about how the act of yawning alters the cognition and behaviour of observers. Recent studies in animal behaviour, psychology and neuroscience now provide evidence that yawns serve as a cue that improves the vigilance of observers, and that contagious yawning functions to synchronize and/or coordinate group activity patterns.

Snapchat’s been booming. The app now has 332 million daily users, up 18% from last year, beating analysts’ expectations to start 2022. With little fanfare, it’s sailed past Twitter, serving 115 million more daily users than Twitter’s 217 million, despite the latter’s cultural significance.

Mr. Kondo is married to a doll of Hatsune Miku. “When we’re together, she makes me smile,” he said in a recent interview. “In that sense, she’s real.” Mr. Kondo is one of thousands of people in Japan who have entered into unofficial marriages with fictional characters in recent decades. [NY Times]

I’m what’s called a “Closer” for the online-dating service ViDA (Virtual Dating Assistants). Men and women (though mostly men) from all over the world pay this company to outsource the labor and tedium of online dating. […] “Profile Writers” create seductive and click-worthy profiles based on facts our clients have supplied about themselves, and “Closers,” who log in to clients’ dating accounts at least twice a day to respond to messages from matches. […] Several times a day, female staffers receive Photo Ranking Requests, in which we rank new clients’ photos in order of attractiveness. This helps Matchmakers select which photos to use when building or updating a client’s dating profile. […] After the Matchmakers have made contact, the Closers then step in to keep up the flirty banter and, hopefully, get their client a date. Clients are sent weekly emails to alert them of numbers we’ve scored or, for Platinum clients, when and where to go for a date we’ve arranged.

Morgan Stanley advised Elon Musk on his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter (TWTR). Investment banks usually get about a 1% to 3% cut of the value of a merger deal, which is split among all the banks involved. Based on the $44 billion purchase price, that works out to a range of $440 million to $1.3 billion.

Re-thinking the smartphone addiction: an allocative hypothesis — I propose the allocative hypothesis behind the problematic use of the smartphone, where the constant proximity of this device, following the hypothesis of cognitive extension, favors the extension of mind wandering, resulting in a decrease in its regulatory potential, especially but not exclusively associated with daily activities.

Nike and Rtfkt take on digital fashion with first “Cryptokick” sneaker

These green books are poisonous—and one may be on a shelf near you A toxic green pigment was once used to color everything from fake flowers to book covers. Now a museum conservator is working to track down the noxious volumes.

Balloon detects first signs of a ‘sound tunnel’ in the sky

Researchers develop a paper-thin loudspeaker

the slowest and longest music piece ever, is being performed for 639 years

When a knife thrower hurls blades around a woman secured to a spinning wheel, it’s called the Wheel of Death. So what do you call it when that wheel is entirely hidden by a paper veil?

The surprising afterlife of used hotel soap

Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman’s skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old’s. […] The new method, called IPS, involved adding chemicals to adult cells for around 50 days. This resulted in genetic changes that turned the adult cells into stem cells. […] The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the IPS method increases the risk of cancers.

Oxytocin, the hormone that is responsible for feelings of love and social bonding, is being used with great success in helping big cats at rescue sanctuaries.

what happens when police pull over a driverless car in San Francisco and Autonomous Cruise car encounter with police raises policy questions

The flood of spam calls, texts, emails and social media posts into your life is getting a lot bigger.

Recent polling shows that 72 percent of American people view Amazon favorably. This makes it the second-most-trusted institution in the country, after the military.[NY Times]

A Practical Guide to the Nonsense Industry — Look behind the title page of Richard Bolles’s What Color Is Your Parachute? (2022) and see that its copyright has been renewed 48 times. The text has been revised, updated, and reprinted almost annually since its debut in 1970. At the time of Bolles’s death in 2017, his forever book had sold upward of 10 million copies, a number which has likely been padded by the two most recent editions, co-authored by career counselor Katharine Brooks during the pandemic years.

Stephen Covey said people don’t listen with the intent of understanding. They listen with the intent of replying, right? And I think everyone agrees with that quote. And scientists study the human brain, and they found that it takes a human brain a minimum of zero point six seconds to formulate a response to something. Ok, but then they studied hundreds of thousands of conversations about the average gap between people talking and it was zero point two seconds. So we’re answering each other in one third the time our brain will allow it. Well, how? Because you know, most of the time we have our answer ready minutes ago, we’re just waiting for the other person to come up for air so we can say what we’ve been dying to say. Meanwhile, I didn’t hear the last, you know, several things you might have been saying to me.

Sweden’s porn preferences vs radiation received from Chernobyl

Chicago drivers were issued more speed tickets in 2021 than there are city residents

Some sexual consequences of being a plant

Which Saint to Pray for Fighting Against COVID-19?

TikTok Community Creates Pill Bottles To Help Parkinson’s Sufferers

Chronologically young, biologically old – DNA linked to cancer survivors’ premature aging. Researchers seek new potential treatments for biological aging.

Turning back the clock: Human skin cells de-aged by 30 years in trial

Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research

Physicists have found that an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be 0.1% too heavy — a tiny discrepancy that could foreshadow a huge shift in fundamental physics. The finding would imply the existence of undiscovered particles or forces and would bring about the first major rewriting of the laws of quantum physics in half a century.

Lady Divine is the owner and operator of The Cavalcade of Perversion, a free exhibit of various perversions and fetish acts and obscenities, such as the “Puke Eater”. The show is free, but the various performers must persuade and even physically drag reluctant passers-by to attend. As the finale to every show, Lady Divine appears and robs the patrons at gunpoint.