The opposite of déjà vu is “jamais vu”, when something you know to be familiar feels unreal or novel in some way

China will have nearly twice as many pets as young children by 2030 — China’s cat ownership will surpass that of dogs

Cats appear to grieve death of fellow pets – even dogs, study finds

We’re Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia

Three reasons we’re in an AI bubble (and four reasons we’re not)

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless

Inside the company that gathers ‘human data’ for every major AI firm

Who is watching you and how

A primer on the current state of longevity research

YouTuber ‘Norme’ has been Awake on Livestream For 228 Hours Trying To Break The Record For No Sleep

The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture

More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland — More than every tenth train from Germany was stopped at the Swiss border in the first quarter of this year. If Deutsche Bahn trains are late, they have to stop at the Swiss border. [Switzerland] wants to ensure punctuality in its own network with this measure.

World’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood nears completion in Texas

Meta Allows Drug Ads Selling Everything from Opioids to Cocaine

FDA rejects MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD

How Long Does Music Stardom Last? A Statistical Analysis

In the early days of TV and movies, people reported dreaming in black and white more than they do now, he said. In a 1942 study, around 70 percent of people said that they dreamed this way. When that same study was replicated nearly 60 years later, the number had dropped to under 18 percent.

We have known for some time that touch sensations from the genital region pass through four different nerves on their way to the spinal cord and, ultimately, the brain. Of these, the pudendal nerve is the most important for sexual sensation, carrying signals from the clitoris in cisgendered women and the penis in cisgendered men. In women, the pelvic nerve conveys touch signals from the labia minora, the vaginal walls, the anus and the rectum. In men, the pudendal nerve carries information from the anus and the scrotum as well as the penis. In women, sensations from the cervix and the uterus can also be conveyed by the hypogastric nerve as well as the vagus nerve, which travels directly to the brain stem, thereby bypassing the spinal cord entirely. Touch signals from the pelvis ultimately arrive at the outer rind of the brain, a region called the neocortex, where they are represented in a distorted and fragmented body map in the primary somatosensory region.

Seismic advances in generative AI algorithms for imagery, text, and other data types have led to the temptation to use AI-synthesized data to train next-generation models. Repeating this process creates an autophagous (“self-consuming”) loop whose properties are poorly understood. […] Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease. We term this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD), by analogy to mad cow disease, and show that appreciable MADness arises in just a few generations.

Time is an illusion

Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers

Engineering the world’s highest cited cat — A couple of weeks ago, Nick Wise showed me an advertisement from a paper mill offering to boost the buyer’s citation count and h-index on their Google Scholar profile. […] First, we generated 12 papers (using Mathgen) with Larry Richardson as the sole author. We then generated an additional 12 papers not authored by Larry, editing the LaTeX document of each paper so that each cited every one of Larry’s 12 papers (12 papers with 12 citations each = 144 citations with an h-index of 12).

AI-controlled autonomous robot dentist has performed an entire procedure on a human patient for the first time

You can find gibberish AI recipes on YouTube as well. One channel, SuperRecipess, has 1.19 million subscribers despite being driven by AI and despite its videos being called things like “I never bought ice-cream again, I only make it like this now” […] the recipes are often extraordinarily disgusting. […] publishers might want 10 books on air fryer recipes generated quickly. Rather than paying an author between £30,000 and £100,000 to do so, they might simply use AI and pay a popular food writer a £10,000 endorsement fee.

Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap. Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it on the SEC in a novel lawsuit —- and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again. Earlier this week, Frye and musician Jonathan Mann filed a federal lawsuit against the SEC […] The offbeat saga of this week’s lawsuit begins in 2019, when Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn’t a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye.

Moscow’s Spies Were Stealing US Tech — Until the FBI Started a Sabotage Campaign

Cellular senescence was discovered four decades ago, but scientists still don’t fully understand why it happens. One of the most widely accepted explanations is that the ends of each cell’s chromosomes—called telomeres—shorten a little during each replication and at some point signal the cell to stop dividing in order to protect itself from potential damage. The cells don’t necessarily die as a result, but they can no longer divide and function like younger, healthy cells.

Zugzwang (from German ‘compulsion to move’) is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because of their obligation to make a move; a player is said to be “in zugzwang” when any legal move will worsen their position.

Using the term ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions reduces purchase intentions

The AI boyfriend business is booming A growing number of women are seeking connection and comfort in relationships with chatbots

Friend.com, video, it doesn’t help you be more productive, it just keeps you company

Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi is an “Enlightened and miraculous being” with a Google Scholar page, an h-index of 62, and 12,031 citations of his work. Most of these are self-citations from a tangled collection of predatory journals that publish questionable papers without proper peer review. Guruji Trivedi claims to have the ability to harness his own “biofield energy to change the behaviour and characteristics of living organisms including soil, seeds, plants, trees, animals, microbes, and humans, along with non-living materials including metals, ceramics, polymers, chemicals, pharmaceutical compounds and nutraceuticals, etc.”

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. […] Hirsch estimated that after 20 years a “successful scientist” would have an h-index of 20, an “outstanding scientist” would have an h-index of 40, and a “truly unique” individual would have an h-index of 60

How pregnancy transforms the brain to prepare it for parenthood […] The rule seems to be that any brain region that changes size during pregnancy shrinks. Numerous brain structures are affected, including the ventral striatum, which is involved in reward processing, and the hypothalamus, which is instrumental in controlling instinctive behaviours. The hippocampus, a structure essential for memory, also transiently shrinks during gestation. […] After birth, most changes quickly and fully reverse — except in the default mode network. […] the default mode network is involved in social processes such as theory of mind and empathy; in thinking about and understanding others and yourself.

This is the story of the various histories of the Internet, where they came from and which ones are real. Was the Internet designed to withstand a nuclear attack?

New study finds people alter their appearance to suit their names

Boxers who failed gender tests at world championships cleared to compete at Olympics

Sexual synesthesia is a neurological condition in which sexual intercourse or orgasm intermittently triggers atypical supplementary perceptions (e.g. colors, shapes).

OnlyFans is a porn-saturated website that offers its subscribers a chance to forge “authentic relationships” with content creators. But many OnlyFans porn stars rely on “chatters” to impersonate them in messages designed to pry dollars from randy subscribers. And, increasingly, some of those chatters aren’t even human – they’re AI bots.

AI is complicating plagiarism.

A veteran investigator of video-game leaks reveals the tricks of the trade

Cancer Risk From Pesticides Comparable To Smoking For Some Cancers

Butterflies accumulate enough static electricity to attract pollen without contact

Do Penguins Have Knees?

I kind of date like a man. I know what I want. Recently, I met somebody I really liked, and my head whipped around and I was like, “Oh my God. Now that’s the guy I’d like to… you know.” It turns out he’s married, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that I think you know when somebody walks in the room. I know from my first marriage to the Count. We met, got married two weeks later. Five days [into the marriage] he goes, “You’re going to be the mother of my children.” I said, “I already know that.”

Brain-Invading Parasite Could Be Hacked to Deliver Meds in Your Head

Ford is trying to patent a way for its cars to report speeding drivers to the police. The patent said vehicles would monitor other vehicles using onboard cameras. Related: Ford has lost $2.5 billion on electric vehicles so far in 2024

Tesla’s Cybertrucks are being mistaken for garbage cans by dumpster-diving raccoons

Burglars are jamming Wi-Fi security cameras […] homeowners should use old-fashioned, wired sets of security cameras that require more elaborate installations and extra hardware

In 2023, Tinder’s base of 10 million subscription-paying users decreased by 8 percent following three consecutive quarters of declines. By the end of 2023, the stock price of Match Group, which operates the largest portfolio of online dating services, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge, had tumbled to about a fifth of its peak in 2021. Bumble’s stock, too, has fallen as much as 85 percent since its February 2021 IPO. To say that mainstream dating apps are in their flop era is not a controversial statement in 2024. Online and off, daters bemoan the user experience

We analyze the economic consequences of rising health care prices in the US. […] A 1% increase in health care prices lowers both payroll and employment at firms outside the health sector by approximately 0.4%. […] we estimate that a 1% increase in health care prices leads to a 1 per 100,000 population (2.7%) increase in deaths from suicides and overdoses.

You can slow a rapid heart rate, caused by anxiety and even cardiac arrhythmias, using a classic technique called vagal maneuvers. These are simple actions that engage the vagus nerve — the major nerve connecting the brain to your internal organs. The straw trick: Place a straw in your mouth and pinch the other end closed. Blow for about 15-20 seconds. If you don’t have a straw, place your finger in your mouth and blow against it as if it were a straw. The technique is one example of a “Valsalva maneuver” — named after the Italian physician who discovered it. […] The easiest places to find a pulse are either the brachial artery (in your wrist) or the carotid artery (in your neck). Personally, I tend to find the carotid more readily palpable — that’s the one TV detectives check when they walk in on a murder scene, right before sadly shaking their heads. Use the pads of your index and middle finger — not your thumb, which has its own pulse and can confuse you. Slide two fingers to either side of your windpipe around the level of your Adam’s apple. Count your heartbeats for 15 seconds and then multiply by four to get a rough estimate. […] It’s normal for your heart to race when you’re frightened or stressed […] Panic attacks are common: At least 11 percent of American adults experience one each year. […] But sometimes people’s hearts start to race for no apparent reason. This is never normal.

In 1876 the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat transported 37 cats from Liège to the surrounding countryside. Released at 2 p.m., the first had found its way home by 6:48, and the rest followed within a day. ”It is proposed to establish a regular system of cat communication between Liège and the neighboring villages. […] Messages are to be fastened in water-proof bags around the necks of the animals.”

{ More charts }

An Australian field hockey player has opted to amputate part of his finger to compete at the Paris Olympics. Matt Dawson badly broke a digit on his right hand during team training in Perth two weeks ago, and recovery from surgery to repair it would have taken months.

Valeria was studying engineering in Venezuela before she arrived in Cúcuta at the start of 2023 to be what she called a camgirl. With her family struggling to eat, she said she made the decision to leave for Colombia […] A 2022 study estimated that in the border cities of Cúcuta and Villa Rosario alone, there were between 800 and 1,000 webcam houses hosting an estimated 11,700 migrants across them, the majority of whom are Venezuelan. The number of these houses could now be as high as 3,000.

In the film’s final scene, after deciding to leave Barbieland for the real world, Barbie enthusiastically tells a receptionist, “I’m here to see my gynecologist”[…] We hypothesized that this final line may have spurred public interest in gynecologic care. […] In the week following Barbie’s release, there were large increases in the national online search volume for terms referring to gynecologists and gynecologist definition. Meanwhile, there were no changes in searches for gynecologist appointments.

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects […] According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression.

More than one-third of the planet’s land is used to produce food, and 70 percent of all fresh water is used to irrigate farmland. […] the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals. […] And according to the World Resources Institute, we may need to add almost two Indias to the world’s existing farmland to meet food needs in the second half of this century. — but adding that farmland means cutting down forests, which store carbon, in order to graze more animals, which produce carbon. […] agriculture is responsible for one-third of the global total of emissions [NY Times]

the meta experience

Death Valley heat melts skin off a man’s feet after he lost his flip-flops in the dunes. To make matters worse, the temperatures made the air too thin for a helicopter to fly in and help him.

A Swiss Town Banned Billboards. Zurich, Bern May Soon Follow The trend toward ad-free cities poses a risk to the outdoor advertising industry, worth an estimated 400 million Swiss francs ($450 million) and contributing almost twice as much per year to the country’s $885 billion GDP. Markus Ehrle, the industry association’s president, said that money would instead “flow to big internet companies like Google or Meta,” adding that “ads online are much more energy-intensive than billboards.”

We bought everything needed to make fentanyl - for $3,600. At the tap of a buyer’s smartphone, Chinese chemical sellers will air-ship fentanyl ingredients door-to-door to North America. Reuters purchased enough to make 3 million pills.

water triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, helping our body rest and digest […] explains why so many people find joy and solace in water-related activities. […] Whether you’re planning a refreshing dip, a leisurely stroll along the coastline or a run along a canal, it’s crucial to know how to stay safe. following these five simple steps are highly effective

Could humans run on water?

Across languages, the species–typical vocalization by domestic cats (Felis catus silvestris) is transcribed similarly, typically corresponding to [miau:] or [wau:]. Such consistent and ubiquitous cross-linguistic transcription is apparently onomatopoetic. However, in humans, these qualities make unique use of the tongue; in comparison, most nonhuman mammals do not appear to employ their tongues while vocalizing.

“Hello Kitty is not a cat” (Jill Cook, Director of retail business development at Sanrio) Previously: alternative facts are not facts

Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models. […] We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ […] the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet.

American Express stock trades at much higher multiples than Discover. Here is my attempt to understand why.

Watches account for around 30% of all counterfeit goods.

Global enterprises are grappling with the complexities of AI adoption. While enthusiasm for AI remains high, the path from pilot projects to full-scale implementation is proving slower than anticipated.

Some venomous snakes can bite even when they’re dead and decapitated

Seven ways to spot a bad argument

Shitposting-style tattoos are the latest trend

When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text.

Our brain doesn’t perceive time as a clock. Instead, time flows with experiences, study

A newly discovered hormone that keeps the bones of breastfeeding women strong could also help bone fractures heal and treat osteoporosis in the broader population.

After spending more than $20 billion to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood. […] Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

US Gen Z shopping habits & retail trends for 2024 — 56% of US Gen Z prefer to shop online than in-store […] Year-on-year, purchases of pet accessories (+20%) and grooming supplies (+19%) are also up. […] The number of US Gen Z who are willing to sacrifice other spending to buy a product sooner has dropped 13% YoY.

Change in global value variation, study

Do you want to hear how a Flemish illuminator, Lieven van Lathem dazzled readers in 1464 with the manuscript, Roman de Gillion de Trazegnies?

A significant correlation was identified between increased sleep duration and cognitive decline

Human parasites in the Roman World — Despite their large multi-seat public latrines with washing facilities, sewer systems, sanitation legislation, fountains and piped drinking water from aqueducts, we see the widespread presence of whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica that causes dysentery. This would suggest that the public sanitation measures were insufficient to protect the population from parasites spread by fecal contamination. Ectoparasites such as fleas, head lice, body lice, pubic lice and bed bugs were also present, and delousing combs have been found. The evidence fails to demonstrate that the Roman culture of regular bathing in the public baths reduced the prevalence of these parasites. Fish tapeworm was noted to be widely present, and was more common than in Bronze and Iron Age Europe. It is possible that the Roman enthusiasm for fermented, uncooked fish sauce (garum) may have facilitated the spread of this helminth.

In this paper, I try to add details and credence to a previously suggested, evolution-based model of consciousness. According to this model, the feature started to evolve in early amniotes (reptiles, birds, and mammals) some 320 million years ago. The reason was the introduction of feelings as a strategy for making behavioral decisions.

Designing a fake delivery company seemed to be the most logical, straightforward way of contacting a person. Hence, ”Future Delivers” was born. The company’s concept is that it delivers parcels from the future. This allows your future self in the year 2064 to send a parcel to your past self in the year 2024, filled with good advice, artefacts from the future, and warnings to hopefully improve your life ahead. […] we’re doing serious business here: delivery release documents, uniforms, wax seal, stickers, branded boxes, custom email address with delivery update notifications, blog, brand ambassador and of course, a delivery robot dog off AliExpress.

Every startup in JD Vance’s VC fund, Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview

Robot Dog Cleans Up Beaches With Foot-Mounted Vacuums — Cigarette butts are the second most common undisposed-of litter on Earth—of the six trillion-ish cigarettes inhaled every year, it’s estimated that over 4 trillion of the butts are just tossed onto the ground, each one leeching over 700 different toxic chemicals into the environment.

Each winter, a team of Tasmania Parks and Wildlife staff take on the task of cleaning the state’s show caves. The crew removes clothing fibres, microplastics, and dirt and spores brought in on visitors’ shoes.

Rare photos of uncontacted Amazon tribes, video

“I got a salmon sperm facial with salmon sperm injected into my face.” […] salmon sperm facials have enchanted Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Aniston

Flight attendant held up broken bathroom door for entire 16-hour trip from Hong Kong to New York

A drug has increased the lifespans of laboratory animals by nearly 25%, in a discovery scientists hope can slow human ageing too. The treated mice were known as “supermodel grannies” in the lab. They were healthier, stronger and developed fewer cancers than their unmedicated peers. The drug is already being tested in people.

“What we found is that even in healthy people who are constipated, there is a rise in these toxins in the bloodstream” […] during diarrhea, the body excretes excessive bile acid, which the liver would otherwise recycle to dissolve and absorb dietary fats. Fiber-fermenting gut bacteria known as “strict anaerobes,” associated with good health thrived in the “Goldilocks zone” of one or two poops a day.

Study reveals how anesthesia drug propofol induces unconsciousness

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials. […] a single dose (25 mg) demonstrated rapid and sustained symptom relief in depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. The image comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers who gave psilocybin to participants […] the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity. “Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected” […] these findings cannot show exactly what causes the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, but “it’s possible psilocybin is directly causing” the brain-network changes. That, or it is creating a psychedelic experience that in turn causes parts of the brain to behave differently. [Nature | NY Times | ScienceDaily]

The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player. He used his wealth to buy professional soccer teams and then inserted himself into the starting lineups.

Does Generative AI Facilitate Investor Trading? […] We first document a significant decline in stock trading volume during ChatGPT outages and find that the effect is stronger for firms with corporate news released immediately before or during the outages. We further document similar declines in the short-run price impact, return variance, and bid-ask spreads, consistent with a reduction in informed trading during the outage periods.

Everyone Is Judging AI by These Tests. But Experts Say They’re Close to Meaningless Benchmarks used to rank AI models are several years old, often sourced from amateur websites, and, experts worry, lending automated systems a dubious sense of authority

Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes. AI-generated fakes can be spotted by analyzing human eyes in the same way that astronomers study pictures of galaxies.

The golden age of scammers: AI-powered phishing — The 5/5 rule says that it takes 5 prompts and just 5 minutes to create a phishing campaign nearly as successful as a phishing campaign generated by IBM engineers. What took technically advanced humans 16 hours, generative AI did in 5 minutes

We’re over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history.

Catalog of Dark Patterns

We examined 200 videos from popular TikTok fitspiration hashtags (fitness, fitspo, gymtok, fittok). […] Videos of men included muscular idealised bodies and objectification through face obscurity (excluding the face from view) more frequently than videos of women. […] 60 % of videos presented incorrect or harmful information

we find that the involvement of social media influencers in propagating false claims is minimal, with only 0.003% of the more than 1.3 million posts analyzed actually supporting statements flagged as disputed by Politifact.

A drug commonly prescribed to thin blood can be repurposed as a cheap antidote to cobra venom […] Snakebites kill about 138,000 people a year. Cobras account for most bites in parts of Africa and India.

To avoid sea level rise, some researchers want to build barriers around the world’s most vulnerable glaciers

How Do You Price Your Wine List?

Maybe the easiest lucrative job in finance is:

Take a job at a hedge fund.
Get handed an employment agreement on the first day that says “you agree not to disclose any of our secrets unless required by law.”
Sign.
Take the agreement home with you.
Circle that sentence in red marker, write “$$$$$!!!!!” next to it and send it to the SEC.
The SEC extracts a $10 million fine.
They give you $3 million.
You can keep your job! Why not; it’s illegal to retaliate against whistleblowers.
Or, you know, get a new one and do it again.

[…]

The theory here is that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has a whistleblower protection rule that says that “no person may take any action to impede an individual from communicating directly with the Commission staff about a possible securities law violation, including enforcing, or threatening to enforce, a confidentiality agreement.”

[…]

Anyway:

OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

[…]

OpenAI made staff sign employee agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, the letter said. These agreements also required OpenAI staff to get prior consent from the company if they wished to disclose information to federal authorities. OpenAI did not create exemptions in its employee nondisparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC.

{ Matt Levine | Bloomberg | Continue reading }

Elon Musk is offering to donate his sperm to help colonize Mars […] he recently told employees he anticipates one million people living on Mars within two decades, affirming his personal commitment by stating his intention to die there.

By 2022, 2.78% of 18- to 24-year-old adults self-identified as transgender, up from 0.59% in 2014.

Lesbian women reported the highest orgasm frequency, followed by bisexual women, with heterosexual women having the lowest orgasm frequency. Lesbian women also outperformed heterosexual women on sexual duration, while heterosexual women outperformed lesbian and bisexual women on sexual frequency.

This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months

AT&T says hackers stole 2022 call and text data from ‘nearly all’ cell customers update: AT&T Paid a Hacker $370,000 to Delete Stolen Phone Records

Goldman Sachs: AI Is Overhyped, Wildly Expensive, and Unreliable

A fleet of drones patrolling New York City’s beaches for signs of sharks and struggling swimmers is drawing backlash from an aggressive group of birds

Why don’t we know how antidepressants work yet?

the man who used dreams and premonitions to predict the future — In 1966, a British psychiatrist had an idea: to change the course of history by asking the public to share their eerie intuitions

The reality is that the ability to read the brain and influence activity is already here. It’s no longer only in the realm of science fiction. Now, the question is, what exactly can we access and manipulate in the brain?

Taking principles from fractal geometry and the strategic game of chess, physicists have created what they say is the most fiendishly difficult maze ever devised. In a Knight’s tour, the chess piece (which jumps two squares forwards and one to the right) visits every square of the chessboard just once before returning to its starting square. This is an example of a ‘Hamiltonian cycle’ – a loop through a map visiting all stopping points only once.

Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work?

The inaugural Miss AI contest opened in spring, drawing entries from some 1,500 AI programmers around the world. […] After judges of the world’s first AI beauty pageant unveiled 10 finalists last month, the inaugural Miss AI has now been crowned.

O.J. Gude, The Man Who Invented Times Square

Creator Startups Have Already Raised as Much Money This Year as in All of 2023

majority of websites and mobile apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscription services — Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.

If you live in Phoenix or Houston and your air conditioner fails, staying in your house may be impossible and you may need to evacuate. Air-conditioning now plays a central role in protecting public health in homes, workplaces, and public spaces. […] Given the enormous importance of air conditioning, I thought it would be useful to put together a few posts about it. This is part one: some background on the physics of air conditioning.

A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area

Drug Trends […] Ketamine is approaching world domination […] According to wastewater analysis, the popularity of the drug rose in 12 of 15 cities in Eastern and Western Europe from 2022 to 2023 […] global seizures of ketamine hit a record high in East and South-East Asia where they saw an increase of 70 percent in just one year.

According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.

Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: ‘I believe climate change is a hoax whatever anyone else says, and I have a right to believe it!’ But is there such a right? […] belief is not knowledge.

Häxan is a Swedish-Danish film, a curious and groundbreaking mix of documentary and silent horror cinema, written and directed by Benjamin Christensen. Whereas most films of the period were literary adaptations, Christensen’s take was unique, basing his film upon non-fiction works. […] Reportedly the most expensive film of the Swedish silent film era, Häxan was actually banned in the United States, and heavily censored in other countries. In 1968, an abbreviated version of the film was released. Titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, it featured an eclectic jazz score by Daniel Humair and dramatic narration by the wonderfully gravel-toned William S. Burroughs. [video]

English lewd vocabulary for romance and erotica writers

Whataburger app becomes power outage map after Houston hurricane […] Whataburger is a San Antonio-based fast-food chain with 127 stores in the Houston area. On the Whataburger app, users can see a map of Whataburger locations, with an orange logo indicating a store is open, and a grey logo meaning it’s closed.

Eighteen hundred feet of rail expands by more than an inch for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit of temperature increase. So rails used to be laid down in sections — each between 30 and 60 feet long — with small gaps. Still, in a severe heat wave, the rail can swell until the underlying ties can no longer contain it. Then the rail gets visibly wavy, morphing into what’s known as a sun kink.

Heat waves reduce the number of motile sperm (the only ones capable of fertilizing an egg) by up to 10%

A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. [NY Times]

Airbnb’s hidden camera problem […] The Airbnb employee revealed that when a guest complains of a hidden camera, the company doesn’t – as a matter of practice – notify law enforcement, not even when a child is involved. […] Hidden cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms show guests during their most private moments – changing clothes, being with their children, even having sex […] while hotels can be held legally responsible for guests harmed on their property, Airbnb frequently is not. […] Madden initially denied ownership of the camera, which was concealed in a clock radio and pointed at his guests’ bed. Then, he said he put it there for security reasons. Ultimately, Madden admitted he’d been recording guests engaged in sexual activity. “I’m an artist,” he said. “I look at everything, I study everything.” Madden served 14 days behind bars.

how online shopping, persistent data collection, and machine-learning algorithms could combine to generate the stuff of economists’ dreams: individual prices for each customer.

the 19-year-old getting paid to rate Instagram profiles

Positive feedback is often given in an attempt to boost people’s performance. In many cases, however, positive feedback undermines performance […] when positive feedback was delivered before participants started preparing for their next task, it impaired subsequent performance.

The Barnum effect is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, yet which are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. […] general characterizations attributed to an individual are perceived to be true for them, even though the statements are such generalizations that they could apply to almost anyone. Such techniques are used by fortune tellers, astrologers, and other practitioners to convince customers that they, the practitioners, are in fact endowed with a paranormal gift.

Butterflies can cross the Atlantic in as few as five to eight days.

10 billion passwords leaked in the largest compilation of all time

the decision to be unfaithful is primarily driven by individual tendencies, with minimal influence from the partner. The study found that a strong commitment to one’s partner is linked to a lower likelihood of infidelity, whereas shared passion and intimacy do not serve as effective deterrents.

Destiny beliefs describe the belief that a relationship is meant to be while growth beliefs describe the tendency that relationships can be cultivated and maintained through effort. […] those with higher growth beliefs experienced a slower decline in relationship satisfaction over time.

The big problem for materialists is what contemporary philosopher David Chalmers dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that? […] Panpsychism lets you bypass the hard problem of consciousness altogether. That’s because the panpsychist starts out with the right ingredients. If you believe that consciousness resides, however minimally, in matter’s tiniest building blocks — atoms, electrons, quarks — then it’s much easier to explain how sophisticated forms of consciousness can eventually arise in, say, humans. This fits very well with the theory of evolution, which says that creatures gradually became more complex as they evolved. […] In a landmark 2006 paper, Strawson took this idea and ran with it, making a radical argument: Materialism, he said, actually entails panpsychism. Consciousness is real. (We know that from our own experience.) Everything is physical. (There’s no evidence that immaterial stuff exists.) Therefore, consciousness is physical. There’s no “radical emergence” in nature. (We don’t get something from nothing.) Consciousness emerging from totally non-conscious stuff would be radical emergence. Therefore, all stuff must have some consciousness baked into it.

the biology of fatigue

Treating several individuals suffering from post-COVID-19 syndrome with a nicotine patch application, we witnessed improvements ranging from immediate and substantial to complete remission in a matter of days.

In the 13th century, a boie was a servant, but already in that time the provenance of the word was obscure. A century later, the term started being used to indicate a male child. […] Since the 14th century, gyrle was a word used to indicate a child, with no gender distinction. Despite the apparent simplicity of the term, so far nobody has been able to reconstruct its origins.

Sometimes the Jersey Devil features a dog’s head and pig’s feet; sometimes he’s an eighth child instead of a thirteenth. The story’s emotional crux, however, is consistent: an unwanted pregnancy, a mother’s anger, a curse. It reads as what folklore scholars Joan Radner and Susan Lanser might call a “coded” tale—a story that invites multiple, even contradictory, interpretations to “protect the creator from the dangerous consequences of directly stating particular messages.” A hallmark of feminist folklore, coding allows a tale-teller to convey ideas that are controversial or forbidden by camouflaging morals in ambiguity, ensuring the story reads differently to different audiences. […] it’s easy to see the Jersey Devil as a critique of callous mothering […] Though gynaehorror often represents female reproductivity negatively, it can function as a “way of exposing misogyny.”

Looking up flights on multiple browser tabs can be cumbersome, but Google’s Gemini has a solution. The model integrates with Google Flights and Google Hotels, pulling in real-time information from Google’s partner companies in a way that makes it easy to compare times and, crucially, prices. How to use AI to plan your next vacation

Russian Space Chiefs Finally Admit US Landed on Moon

Shark Fishing in Miami with the South Beach Shark Club + Rene De Dios and the South Beach Shark Club [video]

How many times do you have to riffle a deck of cards before it is completely shuffled? It’s a tricky question, but math has us covered: hyou need seven riffles.

Thai teacher banned from school after she livestreamed under her skirt while teaching

High-speed hippos can get airborne, says new study

Explanations of consciousness abound and the radical diversity of theories is telling. My purpose here must be humble: collect and categorize, not assess and adjudicate. Seek insights, not answers. Unrealistically, I’d like to get them all, at least all contemporary theories that are sufficiently distinct […] It’s the classic “mind-body problem:” How do the felt experiences in our minds relate to the neural processes in our brains?

Watching a movie, sisters’ brain activity is more similar than that of friends

how brain activity triggers these severest of headaches — migraines — has long puzzled scientists. A study in mice suggests that a brief brain ‘blackout’ — when neuronal activity shuts down — temporarily changes the content of the cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. This altered fluid, researchers suggest, travels through a previously unknown gap in anatomy to nerves in the skull where it activates pain and inflammatory receptors, causing headaches.

In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. […] In 1875, he injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries. At first, he wrote, the patient “complained that her head felt like bursting.” She soon developed a high fever and an abnormally high heart rate, but recovered a week later. […] Saline solutions, still used today, were introduced the next decade as a much less dangerous, if imperfect, stopgap measure for emergency bleeding. […] ErythroMer is made from “recycled” human hemoglobin—the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body—wrapped in a membrane to mimic a tiny cell. In the rabbit, the transfusion appeared to be working.

Not only had Microsoft hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology […] Amazon hired “close to” to 66 percent of Adept’s employees […] Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology […] The problem for Big Tech is that they are no longer allowed to buy companies like they once did. The current antitrust enforcement regime would most certainly try to block an Amazon acquisition of Adept […] Even still, capitalism finds a way. What Microsoft did to Inflection, and what Amazon just did to Adept, is the new Big Tech playbook for swallowing the AI industry and getting away with it.

Over the past two decades, Chinese leaders have built a high-tech surveillance system of seemingly extraordinary sophistication. […] Although the protesters were careful to conceal their faces with masks and hats, the police used mobile-phone location data to track them down. […] Over the past eight decades, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed a vast network of millions of informers and spies whose often unpaid work has been critical to the regime’s survival. It is these men and women, more than cameras or artificial intelligence, that have allowed Beijing to suppress dissent. […] Generations of Chinese leaders have struck a delicate balance between making the secret police powerful enough to do its job, but not so powerful that it threatens the regime itself.

The r/SecurityClearance subreddit […] where government workers and public servants share their secrets before they share them with the U.S. government.

“It seems like every block in New York now has a tailored-for-millennial-women piercer, both in terms of VC-backed brands like Studs and boutique-y local spots”

Revenge saving has become a trend on Chinese social media websites, with Chinese youth setting extreme monthly savings targets

In Australia, strangulation has been explicitly criminalized in all states and territories. However, it continues to be a “normalized” sexual practice despite its potentially fatal consequences and associated short and long-term sequelae. […] Confidential, cross-sectional online surveys were conducted with 4702 Australians aged 18–35 years […] 57% reported ever being sexually strangled and 51% reported ever strangling a partner.

The dangers of sneezing—from ejected bowels to torn windpipes

Despite the great amount of time spent on ships and ferries, swimming was a rare skill among men. Among women, it was unheard of—­even suspect. Benjamin Franklin, however, was in his element.

Why Music Is Getting Worse

The Mauritanian iron ore train spans up to 3km (1.8 miles) in length, travels on a single track of 704 kilometres (437 miles), with 200 – 300 freight carriages, weighing up to a total of 84 tons and making it the longest and heaviest train in the world. […] This train has no ticket, no conductor, no dining cart, or any sort of announcements.