The US supreme court just basically legalized bribery

The article is specifically focused on the risk of LLMs causing an extreme catastrophe in which they do something akin to taking over the world and killing everyone.

IBM, which has a $20 billion consulting business, ran into some of those issues on its work with McDonald’s. The companies developed an A.I.- powered voice system to take drive-through orders. But after customers reported that the system made mistakes, like adding nine iced teas to an order instead of the one Diet Coke requested, McDonald’s ended the project. […] McKinsey’s A.I. group, QuantumBlack, built a customer service chatbot for ING Bank […] The chatbot now handles 200 of 5,000 customer inquiries daily. ING has people review every conversation to make sure that the system doesn’t use discriminatory or harmful language or hallucinate. […] Over a four-month period this year, Reckitt worked with Boston Consulting Group to develop an A.I. platform that could create local advertisements in different languages and formats. With the push of a button, the system can turn a commercial about Finish dishwashing detergent from English into Spanish. Reckitt’s A.I. marketing system, which is being tested, can make developing local ads 30 percent faster. [NY Times]

The Joy of Reading Books You Don’t Entirely Understand

The triplets (whose abilities at walking, cycling, and donkey riding are identical) always leave home together at the last possible minute and arrive at school together on the last stroke of the bell.

a photo by Stephen Shore titled “Kingston, New York, November 8, 2020, 41°56.9443167N, 74°1.7406167W.” The image is from Shore’s fabulous new show of photographs shot from drones, at 303 gallery in New York.

S. Korea administrative robot defunct after apparent suicide, found unresponsive after having apparently fallen down a two-meter (six-and-a-half foot) staircase

The authors of the study reasoned that if black-and-white stripes ward off flies for zebras, they should also do the same for people painted with zebra stripes.

What makes a good tree? We used AI to ask birds

What drives mosquitoes’ bloodlust? Their hormones. One hormone seems to boosts the insects’ thirst for a blood meal, while another shuts it off.

Study suggests connection between anxiety and Parkinson’s disease Researchers compared a group of 109,435 people 50 and older who were diagnosed with a first episode of anxiety between 2008 and 2018 with a control group of 987,691 people without anxiety.

Teenagers with lower levels of mental ability may be three times more likely to experience a stroke before the age of 50, research suggests

Goldman signals end of an era in private equity […] No longer can you “be the highest bidder, buy the company, sit there, wait for multiple expansion and sell again”[…] investors shouldn’t expect the type of buyout returns that until 2022 were often buoyed by market exuberance, climbing valuations and financial engineering.

One study says a third of American workers have signed one; another puts the number at more than half. NDAs are being given out to roommates, to parents, to boyfriends and ex-girlfriends, and to bachelor-party attendees and wedding guests.

Lawsuit Claims Microsoft Tracked Sex Toy Shoppers With ‘Recording in Real Time’ Software

Scholars have known about the hidden Cupid since 1979 when x-rays and other tests first indicated a painting-within-a-painting underneath the blank background wall. At the time, it seemed that Vermeer had simply decided against including this element and painted it out. […] The museum ran additional tests, which provided significant clues such as dirt between the Cupid and the paint covering it. Further conservation revealed craquelure (cracks that form on paintings’ surfaces) on the Cupid itself. Both discoveries suggested that the Cupid had been exposed for a significant period of time. In other words, the overpaint must be by a later artist, not Vermeer. More: The Mysterious Cupid in Johannes Vermeer’s Paintings

The brain makes a lot of waste. Now scientists think they know where it goes

new technology using engineered living skin tissue and human-like ligaments gives robots a more natural smile

researchers develop visual tracking technology to detect drink drivers

Analysis of 400,000 healthy adults finds no health benefits from taking daily multivitamins […] Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period

Swallowable tiny robot with thrusters performs endoscopy at home Using a smartphone app, the distant doctor controls the robot within the patient’s stomach. PillBot shuts down and exits the body naturally within six to twenty-four hours. In addition, the team is working on using AI to make the preliminary diagnosis, after which a physician will create a course of therapy. [..] The team envisions expanding the technology to examine the bowels, vascular system, heart, liver, brain, and other parts of the body. […] With clinical trials underway, the company aims to secure FDA approval and launch commercially in the US by early 2026. [more]

Is Delaying Menopause the Key to Longevity? The ovaries, in particular, appear to be connected to virtually every aspect of a woman’s health. They also abruptly stop performing their primary role in midlife. Once that happens, a woman enters menopause, which accelerates her aging and the decline of other organ systems, like the heart and the brain. While women, on average, live longer than men, they spend more time living with diseases or disabilities. [NY Times]

Tumor-seeking radiopharmaceuticals promise targeted treatments with fewer side effects

Isoniazid can be detected in finger sweat for 1–6 h following controlled administration of the drug. This technique is adaptable for other drugs

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, may also increase risk-taking

cravings for drugs in addiction are supposed to be impossible to resist […] this image of craving is fundamentally flawed. My aim is to develop a more nuanced understanding of craving and rectify the damage done by this false image.

A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern. The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function. [NY Times]

study demonstrates how our initial impressions can have a lasting impact on our decisions, often leading us to persistently choose inferior options even when better ones are available.

Youtube has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels — Sony, Warner, and Universal — to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software

Man makes money buying his own pizza on DoorDash app — A pizza for which he charged $24 (£20) was being advertised for $16 on DoorDash - and when he secretly ordered it himself, the app paid his restaurant the full $24 while charging him $16.

Pooping on the Moon The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites […] Human feces is packed with microbial life […] Learning how long those microbes survived in the extraterrestrial excrement would reveal tantalizing insights into the mystery of life’s origins on Earth and its potential existence elsewhere. […] “Basically, in space a human no longer has gravity to assist pulling the feces away from the anus. It becomes really a sticky liquid problem of surface tension. As it is organically active, extreme care has to be taken to make sure one cleans up.”

Microbial dark matter comprises the vast majority of microbial organisms (usually bacteria and archaea) that microbiologists are unable to culture in the laboratory

the L.A. Influencer Who Is Trying to Get Famous By Never Tipping at Restaurants and Bars

The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2019 — ongoing) is an installation, and a vibe, that reimagines my father’s bar—the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco.

Shop Imp Kerr: Vive la France!

2 years of mild caloric restriction significantly reduces biological age

5 things you’re doing that can land you in a dentist’s chair: eating popcorn, chewing on ice, energy drinks, sodas, coffee, vaping, using fluoride-free toothpaste. Also: using your teeth to open packages, tear off tags, or even bite their nails, teeth grinding (bruxism), brushing too hard

The U.S. Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order. […] more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015 […] more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023

Almost half of U.S. teachers and K-12 students say they are using ChatGPT weekly.

Researchers describe how to tell if ChatGPT is confabulating

I am using AI to automatically drop hats outside my window onto New Yorkers

Calculator words

This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds. “If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream.”

Sensory secrets of penis and clitoris unlocked after more than 150 years Krause corpuscles — nerve endings in tightly wrapped balls located just under the skin — were first discovered in human genitals more than 150 years ago. The structures are similar to touch-activated corpuscles found on people’s fingers and hands, which respond to vibrations as the skin moves across a textured surface. […] Ginty and his collaborators activated the Krause corpuscles in both male and female mice using various mechanical and electrical stimuli. The neurons fired in response to low-frequency vibrations in the range of 40–80 hertz. Ginty notes that these frequencies are generally used in many sex toys; humans, it seems, realized that this was the best way to stimulate Krause corpuscles before any official experiments were published.

I started by dating somebody on an ENM app who was in a different polycule who was connected to someone in this polycule. And then I started dating someone else in this polycule. He’s married, and his wife and I are metamours, which is simply a word for my partner’s partner. — Lessons From a 20-Person Polycule

Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking. [PDF]

the group has collected venom from more than 500 species, building an unrivalled collection of animal toxins. Studying the molecules that make up venom, scientists have been able to develop compounds that can relieve chronic pain, treat diabetes and create eco-friendly insecticides.

“blue carbon” refers to the carbon dioxide sequestered and stored by coastal habitats such as mangroves and seagrass beds. These highly efficient ecosystems occupy just 0.5% of the seafloor but contribute over 50% of oceans’ carbon burial, sequestering even more carbon by area than rainforests.

This is the first animal ever found that doesn’t need oxygen to survive […] a jellyfish-like parasite that doesn’t have a mitochondrial genome […] it could also have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life

One of Vico’s chief claims is that, though civilizations rise and fall, the periods of decline do not return them to their original state. Some foundation remains from which rebuilding can commence. A central challenge for a science of politics, then, is to reduce the severity of the inevitable downturns, shorten the reign of “barbarism,” and through these means, hope for gradual improvement.

In California, the “Daughter from California” is known as the “Daughter from New York”

I jumped from a plane – and my parachute failed

Monitoring marine litter from space is now a reality

A lack of sleep can make it extraordinarily difficult to retain information. Two new studies uncover why this is and what is happening inside the brain during sleep and sleep deprivation to help or harm the formation of memories.

The con artists take on false online identities and spend months financially grooming their victims to get them to invest on fraudulent cryptocurrency websites. It’s theft at a scale so large that investigators are now calling it a mass transfer of wealth from middle-class Americans to criminal gangs. Last year, the FBI estimates, pig butchering scams stole nearly $4 billion from tens of thousands of American victims, a 53% increase from the year before.

Social-Media Influencers Aren’t Getting Rich—They’re Barely Getting By — Platforms are paying less for popular posts, brands are pickier about partnerships and a possible TikTok ban looms

‘mathematicians can’t agree on the definition of what makes two things equal

Nietzschean Language Models and Philosophical Chatbots: Outline of a Critique of AI

Chinese scientists and engineers are applying ChatGPT-like technology to sex robots, aiming to create interactive, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered companions

Shelly’s Leg (1973-1977) was Seattle’s first disco, an unapologetically gay establishment that welcomed revelers of every sexuality

Flashback: humansnotinvited.com

American Airlines passenger gagged and bound with duct tape to her seat after being accused of attempting to open an aircraft door mid-flight […] after drinking a neat Jack Daniels

One of the most coveted beauty products among teenagers is a creamy, fragrant lotion that comes in a tangerine-colored plastic tub. Called Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, it is sold for $48 by the beauty brand Sol de Janeiro. According to Sol de Janeiro, a jar of Brazilian Bum Bum Cream is sold every six seconds.

Stock-obsessed Gen Z are using astrology and tarot to invest

Researchers turn wool and hair offcuts into graphite for lithium batteries […] About 70 per cent of the world’s graphite, a key component in lithium batteries, comes from China.

U.S. government Sues Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions

The Excel World Championship

How I Made Trading Cards with E- Ink Displays

The first rule of avoiding scam calls is to never answer unknown numbers, and even some known ones.

Through a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging methods, experiments have identified sensory, perceptual, emotional and cognitive processes that make important contributions to our psychological experiences of art, in particular the emergence of aesthetic preferences. Here we conduct a selective review of this literature that will provide readers without a background in the neurosciences a first introduction into what we have learned so far

Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?

Pelvic floor muscle training, more

Wells Fargo Fires Over a Dozen for ‘Simulation of Keyboard Activity’

One of the bigger discussions happening right now on the internet is whether a “Remote Amazon Tribe” has become “addicted to porn” as a result of getting SpaceX’s Starlink internet. […] The Marubo people have been using the internet long before Starlink came to their village

Subvocalization: Why Do We Have A Voice In Our Heads When We Read?

How Data-Fueled Neurotargeting Could Kill Democracy the technique, which weaponizes emotional data for political gain, could erode the foundations of a fair and informed society

Where are the Female Composers? Evidence on the Extent and Causes of Gender Inequality in Music History

A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter. First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight. Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the 1970s and ’80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain. Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle, at first, but add up over time. Kuk believes that the proliferation of artificial sweeteners could also be playing a role.

On average, for every 555 million molecules of water, one is split into a negatively charged OH⁻ and a positively charged H⁺. And this actually matters a lot, in chemistry. It’s the reason we say water has pH 7.

The Missing Post Office is an artwork by Japanese artist Saya Kubota. It is a “post office” where undeliverable letters are collected The Missing Post Office receives mail from all over the world. Addressees include deceased individuals, future descendants, first loves to whom the writers were never able to express their feelings, themselves, and long-time favorite items.

Missouri Restaurant bans women under 30, men under 35, wants a ‘grown and sexy’ vibe

Entertainment Media as a Source of Relationship Misinformation We discuss two ways that relationship misinformation can appear in entertainment media – in the form of blatant claims and subtle content – and we provide an example of each from reality television.

study uncovers brain differences in sexual desire disorders in men and women […] HSDD (hypoactive sexual desire disorder), characterized by a persistent lack of sexual interest causing significant distress, affects about 10% of women and 8% of men. […] Women with HSDD exhibited greater activation in limbic regions such as the amygdala, striatum, and thalamus, which are associated with emotional processing and sexual motivation. In contrast, men showed greater activation in the visual cortex, indicating a heightened sensitivity to visual sexual cues.

In the morning, you report that you barely slept at all. Yet according to the test—polysomnography, the gold standard for sleep measurement—you slept all night. […] these people showed pockets of arousal in the form of fast brain waves during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM is the stage in normal sleep when your brain should completely disconnect from the systems that keep you aware and vigilant People with subjective insomnia with this interrupted REM do not experience their sleep as restful. When wakened, they reported having had thoughts similar to those when awake […] They were less likely to have immersive dreams […] interrupted REM is strongly linked to disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety.

No evidence sperm counts are dropping, researchers find

Depression and memory decline are intimately linked […] those with higher depressive symptoms were more likely to experience faster memory decline, while those who started off with a poorer memory were more likely to develop depressive symptoms during the study period.

Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines ingest the most microplastics among 109 countries, according to a study by Cornell University researchers. Indonesians, the top consumers of microplastics, were found to ingest about 15g of microplastics per month – equivalent to three credit cards – with the majority of plastic particles coming from aquatic sources such as fish and seafood. Indonesians’ daily consumption of microplastics increased by 59 times from 1990 to 2018.

More than a century ago, flamingos disappeared from Florida, when hunters nearly drove them to extinction in the quest for their fashionable — and highly profitable — plumage. Now they’re back, likely transported by Hurricane Idalia last August.

dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee […] African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls Audio: >Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them

The US dollar continues to cede ground to nontraditional currencies in global foreign exchange reserves, but it remains the preeminent reserve currency. Recent data from the IMF […] point to an ongoing gradual decline in the dollar’s share of allocated foreign reserves of central banks and governments. Strikingly, the reduced role of the US dollar over the last two decades has not been matched by increases in the shares of the other “big four” currencies—the euro, yen, and pound. Rather, it has been accompanied by a rise in the share of what we have called non-traditional reserve currencies, including the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi, South Korean won, Singaporean dollar, and the Nordic currencies. […] One non-traditional reserve currency gaining market share is the Chinese renminbi, whose gains match a quarter of the decline in the dollar’s share.

Ask most venture-backed founders why they get 10x more equity than employee #1, 100x more equity than employee #5, and 1000x more equity than employee #15, and you’ll get the same answer: “I’M TAKING SO MUCH RISK, IT’S SO HARD TO START A COMPANY, I MADE A BIG MOVE!!!” And then you’ll ask, “but why are you yelling?” […] Founder liquidity refers to the practice where founders sell a portion of their shares during a new funding round. This allows them to “take chips off the table,” securing personal financial stability while continuing to build the company with a fresh influx of venture capital. Why is it a secret that founders get liquidity in many venture rounds? Because it undermines the narrative of the founder who is “all-in.”

Waistlines are expanding in most countries, except for a skinny list of nations bucking the trend. How is France dodging the global obesity trend?

how we produce fresh water and how we dispose of wastewater at the South Pole

George Spelvin, Georgette Spelvin, and Georgina Spelvin are traditional stagename used to hide a performer’s identity. “Georgina Spelvin” has fallen out of general use since it was adopted as a screen name by pornographic actress Shelley Graham, who was credited by that name in The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and her subsequent films.

Level Devil

Smoking Devil in Stereohell

United Airlines starts serving passengers personalized ads on seat-back screens

Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election

First, we show that older people tend to underestimate their cognitive decline. We then show that those experiencing a severe decline but unaware of it are more likely to suffer wealth losses.

Sexuality plays a significant role in most romantic relationships and is a factor that differentiates romantic relationships from other types of close relationships. Research shows that different aspects of sexuality, such as sexual desire and satisfaction, have been consistently linked with relationship satisfaction, quality, and stability. Moreover, sexually active couples report higher individual and relational well-being. […] However, several factors may hinder couples from engaging in sexual activity, including stress.

Free Will Beliefs are Positively Associated With Health Behavior

Deciding Who Is Worthy of Help: Effect of the Probability of Reciprocity on Individuals’ Willingness to Help Others

Living in the afterlife: clues from direct experiencers Although most of the information obtained by our different sources converge on the general description of the afterlife, and how life proceeds in these realms, they cannot be considered definite proof of the afterlife and its characteristics.

Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

artificial intelligence system that can identify people who are likely to suffer heart attacks up to 10 years in the future, could soon be in operation across Britain

excessive vigorous exercise could muffle your immune system

Dreaming Under Anesthesia

How Do We Know When to Pee?

Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.”

According to an editor at a venerable publishing imprint, debut novelists need three key publicity achievements to “break out”: one, a major book club; two, a boost from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Indie Next, and/or Book of the Month; and three, a major profile. Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?

Advance market commitments allow us to buy products that don’t yet exist, giving innovators an incentive to invent and scale new products. This is a practical guide on how to start an AMC.

In 1910, Mare Samuella Cromer, a rural schoolteacher in South Carolina, organized a girl’s tomato club so females aged 9 to 20 could “not learn simply how to grow better and more perfect tomatoes, but how to grow better and more perfect women.

The Secret History of Holywell Street, Home to Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade

The music of “Detachable Penis” consists largely of a distorted electric guitar riff fed through a noise gate and a delay, backed by organ and drum grooves with brief lead guitar improvisation.

ASCII Silhouettify is an app that converts images into ASCII silhouettes

One of the best known non-bank banks is Starbucks – “a bank dressed up as a coffee shop”. […] “McDonald’s is a real estate company dressed up as a hamburger chain” and “Harvard is a hedge fund dressed up as an institution of higher learning”. […] The company had offered a gift card since 2001 but Schultz [Starbuck’s CEO] revitalized it, pairing it with a new loyalty program […] In 2010, Schultz put the card on an app […] more than 60% of the company’s peak morning business in the US comes from Starbucks Rewards members who overwhelmingly order via the app. The program has 33 million users, equivalent to around one in ten American adults. these users load or reload around $10 billion of value onto their cards each year […] not all of it gets spent at once. As at the end of March, $1.9 billion of stored card value sat on the company’s balance sheet waiting to be spent – kind of like customer deposits. To give that some context, 85% of US banks have less than $1 billion in assets. Unmasking the Banks Inside Starbucks, Carnival, Naked Wines, Delta, Travel + Leisure

US has the highest rate of maternal deaths among high-income nations. Norway has zero

Costco is building out an ad network built on its trove of loyalty membership data, using its 74.5 million household members’ shopping habits and past purchases

In the last few months, Meta started to sneakily train its generative AI tool on Instagram posts. Now, some artists are jumping ship to a lesser-known portfolio app, Cara, to protect their work from AI data scrapers.

If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files - it is time to cancel Adobe

Microsoft is about to launch a new AI-powered Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on your PC. Recall doesn’t perform content moderation, so it won’t hide information like passwords or financial account numbers in its screenshots.

Due to national security concerns, the U.S. government prohibits Nvidia from selling AI chips like the A100 and H100 directly to Chinese companies. The restrictions don’t prevent Chinese firms from renting chips for use within the U.S. — ByteDance is allegedly leasing servers with chips from Oracle. ByteDance reportedly had access to over 1,500 H100 chips and several thousand A100s last month through the Oracle deal. China Telecom, a large state-owned wireless carrier, has sought a similar deal with other cloud providers. How ByteDance Got the Best AI Chips Despite U.S. Restrictions

Known as “Roaring Kitty” on YouTube and “DeepF***ingValue” on Reddit’s popular WallStreetBets, Gill was a key figure in the so-called “Reddit rally” in which shares of GameStop surged 1600% at one point in Jan. 2021, crushing hedge funds that had bet against the videogame retailer. But after drawing congressional and regulatory scrutiny for his role in the extraordinary saga, Gill quickly disappeared, albeit much richer thanks to his GameStop investment which at one point reached $48 million in value. […] Then out of the blue Gill appeared in recent weeks to resurface online, sending GameStop’s shares soaring once again. On Monday, they rose 21% after Gill’s Reddit account posted a screenshot showing a $116 million bet on the stock. On Thursday, they surged almost 50% after Gill’s YouTube account scheduled a livestream for 12 p.m. ET (1600 GMT) on Friday.

World’s first wooden satellite wooden Moon shelters are also planned

chocolate manufacturers combine a paste made from cacao seeds with sugar. Lots and lots of sugar […] the few health benefits provided by the chocolate bean are swamped by ingredients that increase the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. […] To address this stark imbalance, a team of researchers reinvented the chocolate recipe from the ground up

During the Renaissance period, hands were as important a focus of attention as the face was, because they were the only other visible area of the body. […] Given its high visibility, hand gestures in portraits and paintings have been one of the most effective ways of conveying secrets, codes and messages. […] There is a peculiar hand gesture that is widely used by painters of several nationalities belonging to the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque and later artistic movements: It is an unnatural position of one or both hands in which the third and fourth digits are held tight together, as if almost fused, resembling syndactyly, and the second and fifth fingers are separated from the central ones. This paper will examine the eventual hidden meanings behind this peculiar hand gesture.

The Talk: Bernie Sanders & Slavoj Žižek and The Talk: Kanye West & Elon Musk

Remote Amazon tribe gained access to the Internet via Starlink last September — only to wind up hooked on porn, social media

About half of adults would prefer electric shocks over spending fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts. They’re the ones who want to hang out with you during a plague. They didn’t just consent to electric shocks. They did it to themselves. They were given a little button to push. […] Nearly 70 percent of the men preferred the shocks, compared to 25 percent of the women.

Women make fewer mistakes and have better mental agility while on their period despite feeling worse than at any other time during their menstrual cycle, research suggests.

brain scan could detect dementia several years before people develop noticeable symptoms, with an estimated 80% accuracy

when using cashless methods of payment, individuals tend to spend more when purchasing […] the effect was not observed when donating or tipping.

A group backed by more than two dozen investors—including Citadel Securities and BlackRock—is planning to start its own stock exchange in Texas

Stromatolites are the earliest geological record of life on Earth. These curious biotic structures are made of algae carpets growing toward the light and precipitating carbonates. After their first appearance 3.48 billion years ago, stromatolites dominated the planet as the sole living carbonate factory for almost three billion years.

Diamond industry ‘in trouble’ as lab-grown gemstones tank prices further

Online shop selling used tampons to strangers. “It is a lucrative business”

Italian village with 46 residents has 30 local election candidates

The FDA is poised to approve the notorious party drug as a therapy. Here’s what it means, and where similar drugs stand in the US.

Who Took the Cocaine Out of Coca-Cola?

Giving the drug before surgery instead of chemotherapy led to a huge increase in patients being declared cancer-free […] Drug that ‘melts away’ tumours hailed as ‘gamechanger’ for some bowel cancer patients

“I’ve made bunya nut ice cream, a bunya nut miso caramel, and a dish that we made from grated down bunya nuts.” Indigenous chef Jack Brown, trained in traditional French cuisine, is on a mission to change Australian cuisine

If English was written like Chinese

Catastrophic weather events influence the movement of wild animals. In particular, airborne animals such as birds and insects are expected to occasionally face challenging flights because of unfavorable atmospheric currents such as hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons. […] Here, I report on a rare case of […] a GPS-equipped streaked shearwater (Calonectris leucomelas) was apparently caught in a huge typhoon, showing swirling flight high over the mainland of Japan.

James Joyce would pick drunken fights, then duck behind his burly friend Ernest Hemingway and say, “Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him.”

Penis Dissatisfaction and Gun Ownership in America — We find that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns

we find that both men and women tend to work more hours when partnered with a female partner compared to a male partner

Late bedtimes are linked to higher rates of mental health disorders. The study recommends sleeping before 1 a.m. for optimal mental health.

Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users

Federal regulators have given Amazon key permission that will allow it to expand its drone delivery program […] and to operate drones “beyond visual line of sight,” removing a barrier that has prevented its drones from traveling longer distances. […] the approval applies to College Station, Texas, where the company launched drone deliveries in late 2022.

Every day, the first thing that I encounter when the hospital doors open is the omnipresent smell of antiseptic. To most people, this scent likely triggers involuntary memories of negative events — the illness of a loved one, for example. For me, the first wave of antiseptic reminds me of my previous hospital rotations and prompts me to be ready to work for my patients and for my team.

The design of Chinese computers also changed dramatically. None of the competing designs that emerged in this era employed a QWERTY-style keyboard. Instead, one of the most successful and celebrated systems—the IPX, designed by Yeh—featured an interface with 120 levels of “shift,” packing nearly 20,000 Chinese characters and other symbols into a space only slightly larger than a QWERTY interface. Other systems featured keyboards with anywhere from 256 to 2,000 keys.

Repairing my mug with kintsugi

After artist Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, her husband, painter Diego Rivera, blocked off two bathrooms in their home, La Casa Azul, on the condition that they not be opened until at least 15 years after his death. What Frida Kahlo Kept in Her Bathroom

Brainrot Romcom

“This is the loudest restaurant I’ve ever reviewed in D.C.,” he tells us as we look over the menu. “Here, it was 100 decibels at the bar during happy hour, and not much better in the center of the dining room.” […] The sound levels blow away a normal, 60-decibel conversation. […] The decibel scale (dB) is a scientific measure of sound intensity. To human ears a 10dB difference is about twice as loud, but the sound intensity is 10 times greater. […]

Our brains have a tough time sorting through the cacophony in crowded dining rooms, which can influence our behavior. Multiple studies show that prolonged exposure to noise has physical effects such as increased anxiety and fatigue. Taken together, these effects can make the restaurant experience more taxing than relaxing for patrons, and they can leave staff drained from a long day straining to offer service while risking permanent hearing damage. […]

Alcohol blunts our hearing — especially at lower frequencies. This means when I reach the legal limit to drive, my brain will turn down the volume of most sounds I’m hearing in a restaurant. This effect may give me some relief from the music, but it will also drown out voices. It explains why intoxicated individuals talk louder: They don’t hear themselves as well as they normally do and speak up to compensate. […]

Strangely, noise also seems to drive more alcohol consumption. French researchers discovered this effect by raising music levels in bars by about 15 decibels and recording the number of drinks served. […]

Sorting through noise in restaurant dining rooms is particularly taxing to our brains, studies have shown. Working memory is under high demand when we need to switch our attention from one voice to another in a sea of voices. […]

At 95 decibels, scientists observe people and rodents eat less and consume food faster. Wang suggests that this fact may be understood by restaurant managers trying to turn their tables.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Man who transformed into a dog says he wants to become another animal The man known only as Toco spent around $14,000 on his hyperrealistic dog costume, which was completed last spring.

Visitors and protesters expected to gather this summer in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention will be allowed to carry assault rifles -— but not metal water bottles -— inside the RNC’s “security footprint.” […] proposed ordinance aims to prohibit air rifles, umbrellas, tennis balls, nonplastic containers, light bulbs and locks. […] “Fake guns are prohibited, but real guns are allowed”

Washington has a law against felons running for office […] It seems possible that under Washington state law, there would be no name listed on ballots as a Republican candidate for president in November.

“He is the worst actor I’ve ever worked with,” a former colleague told me. Sharing a scene with Zach [Horwitz], he said, was like interacting with a banana. […] it was like “dealing with a dead horse.” […] As the end of 2019 approached, Horwitz had raised three hundred and fifty-eight million dollars in the past year. He was running what scholars of confidence games call an “affinity fraud,” built around trust and personal connections. He found wealthy investors —- in Napa Valley, Orange County, Las Vegas, and Chicago —- who then spread the word on the tennis court and the charity circuit. But every network has limits, and the arithmetic of a Ponzi scheme is unforgiving. When you run out of new investors, the mechanism begins to collapse. After Thanksgiving, Horwitz fell behind on his payments for the first time. The Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Hollywood History

A renewable energy company will soon begin clearing thousands of protected Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert, including many thought to be a century old. […] Joshua trees grow just 1 to 3 inches a year, which means a 16-foot tree could be more than 100 years old. More than 500 of trees found on the site are at least 16 feet tall.

How far away can you see light from a candle? 1.6 miles (~2.6 km)

An emerging area of future technology is motor augmentation – using motorised wearable devices such as exoskeletons or extra robotic body parts to advance our motor capabilities beyond current biological limitations. […] The Third Thumb is worn on the opposite side of the palm to the biological thumb and controlled by a pressure sensor placed under each big toe or foot.

Supernumerary body part — one or more additional breasts, having two penises, an extra head, additional fingers or toes

robot sets new Rubik’s cube Guinness World Record (0.305 seconds)

a massive leak of 14,000 ranking features exposes the blueprint for how Google secretly curates the Internet. More: Perhaps the most notable revelation from the 2,500 documents is that they suggest Google representatives have misled the public in the past

A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe Time spent outdoors is the best defence against rising rates of short-sightedness, but scientists are searching for other ways to reverse the troubling trend.

Drawing on the work of earlier scholars, Muraresku suggests there was some sort of psychedelic beer used in sacred ceremonies at the Temple of Eleusis that unleashed heavenly visions. What’s more, he believes this experience not only shaped generations of Greeks, it also laid the foundation for the Eucharist in early Christianity.

the logic of animal patterns

ultrasonic coffee — Australian scientists have developed a method of brewing coffee by blasting ground beans with sound waves – and it produces a powerful cup

no matter what tune you’re humming – a timeless melody from back in the day, a chart-topper from last week, or even one of your own songs – they all share the same 24 melodic figures. It’s like uncovering the secret code of melody that’s been right under our noses!

$6 on pump two, please

“If you need somebody to get vicious,” Mr. Trump once said, “hire Roy Cohn.” His legal strategy boiled down to: Delay and deny. Don’t hesitate to attack the judge and prosecutor (“I don’t care what the law is; tell me who the judge is” was his most famous line). Address the press every chance you get. And intimidate and ridicule witnesses.

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North Korea flies 260 feces-filled balloons across border to the South […] Authorities said timers and explosives were attached to a string connecting balloons and the trashed-filled packages in order to make the balloon burst after a certain amount of time passed

Romantic love is a psychobehavioral motivational state that facilitates pair-bonding in humans. Evolutionarily, it is thought to help establish and maintain long-term pair-bonds that enhance a heterosexual couple’s reproductive fitness. Romantic love can also occur in same-sex partnerships, yet not much is known, either psychologically or behaviorally, about the similarities or differences in how romantic love manifests in homosexual or bisexual couples compared with heterosexual couples. This study investigated romantic love in a cross-cultural sample of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual young adults (N = 783) experiencing romantic love. […] Homosexual females reported a significantly lower frequency of sex per week than heterosexual and bisexual females. Bisexual males reported a greater number of times ever in love than heterosexual males.

A new study of over 70,000 American women born between 1950 and 2005 has shown that girls are getting their periods earlier and they’re taking longer to become regular.

Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. […] actors are telling us an important truth about memory — deep understanding promotes long-lasting memories.

How Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password to a $3 Million Crypto Wallet

Continuing a string of successful botnet takedowns, on Thursday, May 30th 2024, a coalition of international law enforcement agencies announced “Operation Endgame”. This effort targeted multiple botnets such as IcedID, Smokeloader, SystemBC, Pikabot and Bumblebee, as well as some of the operators of these botnets. These botnets played a key part in enabling ransomware More: operation-endgame.com

Meet Ethiopia’s stilt walking tribe

The middle finger from the right hand of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) is a secular relic in the collection of the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. The finger was removed from his body posthumously and is encased in a gilded glass egg.

When faced with the need to transform an object, idea, or situation, people have a tendency to favor adding new components rather than removing existing ones. This is called the additive bias.

SignLLM, the first AI model capable of generating avatar videos of sign language gestures from prompts across eight languages.

the LLM outperforms financial analysts in its ability to predict earnings changes. […] LLM prediction does not stem from its training memory.

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption […] For example, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness,” which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user

Previously: Reddit has struck a deal with Google to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s AI models in a contract worth about $60 million per year

Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero

My patient was dead before I even saw her. She had been in a car accident. Now she was scheduled for organ donation. Last hours of an organ donor

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