2720 — the year when Japan is left with just one child […] if its birthrate continues on its current trajectory

Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits, 1,000 times more powerful than an average laptop.

Surviving in Cashless China 2025

The biggest change to the way search engines have delivered information to us since the 1990s is happening right now. No more keyword searching. No more sorting through links to click. Instead, we’re entering an era of conversational search. Which means instead of keywords, you use real questions, expressed in natural language. And instead of links, you’ll increasingly be met with answers, written by generative AI and based on live information from all across the internet, delivered the same way.

How Multitasking Drains Your Brain

Popular music and movies as autobiographical memory cues […] musical cues show a significantly more pronounced reminiscence bump than movie cues

Poor quality sleep is directly linked to inadequate levels of sex hormones […] The sex drive in both men and women is testosterone-related […] “Testosterone begins to rise about 3 or 4 o’clock and peaks in the morning. And studies have shown that if you have disrupted sleep, those levels fall […] A 2015 study of sleep and sex in college students found each additional hour of sleep was correlated to an improved libido, greater vaginal lubrication and a 14% increase in having sex the next day.

The purpose of this website is to simulate for you what your chosen color palette looks like to viewers who are colorblind.

After the war, Nietzsche was practically radioactive. In the newfound German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he was officially declared a “pioneer of fascism,” his writings were forbidden, while in West Germany he was shrouded in silence and suspicion. Not until the 1950s was an attempt at “denazification” seriously undertaken. […] two Italian philologists, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, plotted what they privately referred to as “Operation Nietzsche”: they would undertake a definitive complete edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings based on the manuscripts in the GDR. The two men made for unlikely candidates for such a daunting task. Colli was an adjunct professor in his mid-forties who taught ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa. Montinari, a former high-school student of Colli’s, was a disillusioned member of the Italian Communist Party “incapable of practical work,” as he put it himself. And yet these loveably eccentric dilettantes emerge in the pages of Felsch’s book as genuine heroes of intellectual history: two men who hoped that the patient, determined study and transcription of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and papers would not merely absolve him of his National Socialist associations, but allow him to speak for himself for the first time.

Retired Department of Natural Resources employee Bill Lockner created a Minnesota-shaped forest in northern Minnesota nearly 40 years ago.

Wives Earning More Than Husbands Linked To Rising Mental Health Diagnoses In Couples

asking an LLM to “write code better“ results in better code compared to direct prompting

Inside the wild fall and last-minute revival of Bench, the VC-backed accounting startup that imploded over the holidays

e-tattoos serve as the sensors for electroencephalography (EEG)

Governments will tell investors how and where to invest their capital. I say we are headed towards a system of national capitalism. […] Macron says that every year, Europeans send 300 billion euros to the US to fund the American government and American corporations. In other words, he’s outlining a concept of national savings, and they should be used for the national good. […] Globally, total debt to GDP today is close to 200%. We’ve never seen that before. France is at 311%, the US at 255%, Japan at 400%. We are talking about at least a decade and a half to get this under control. For Japan and France it will take even longer. […] The most important part is the idea that national savings shall be used for national purposes. There will be a big push to repatriate capital, back to Europe and back to Japan, for example.

In 1927, geologist Albert Heim clashed with cartographers at the Federal Office of Topography as he was convinced that their relief maps of Switzerland were depicted in the wrong light. Heim believed that the light source on maps should correspond to natural sunshine.

While filming Winter Light (1963), Ingmar Bergman felt Gunnar Björnstrand was too happy to play the lead character. Bergamn asked a doctor and friend to tell Björnstrand that he suffered from a severe disease. Björnstrand was put on medication and actually became depressed. [more]

The letter “J” is the only one not found on the periodic table

{ you can go on Indian Amazon at amazon.in its fucking wild }

unrelated { How To Make $100K From A Dick Joke }

Two men from Rochester, New York, who grew their own cannabis using bat poop as fertilizer died from pneumonia

An aquarium in southern China has come under scrutiny for showcasing a robotic whale shark instead of a live one

relative to women, men (a) expect more benefits from relationships and strive for a partner more strongly, (b) gain more mental and physical health benefits from romantic involvement, (c) are less likely to initiate breakups, and (d) suffer more from relationship dissolution [Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women | PDF]

findings suggest that women may be attracted to other women without necessarily desiring sexual encounters with them […] Implicit measures showed a higher rate of gynephilia (67.8%) than explicit non-heterosexuality (19.6%), with consistent results across continents

Why don’t new memories overwrite old ones? Sleep science holds clues — Research in mice points towards a mechanism that avoids ‘catastrophic forgetting’.

Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M

art museum openings and expansions of 2025

Flashback: Hennessy Youngman’s ART THOUGHTZ: Damien Hirst, Bono

Cybercrime is already a huge, multi-trillion dollar problem, and one that most victims don’t like to talk about. It is said to be bigger than the entire global drug trade. Four things could make it much worse in 2025.

First, generative AI, rising in popularity and declining in price, is a perfect tool for cyberattackers. Although it is unreliable and prone to hallucinations, it is terrific at making plausible sounding text (e.g., phishing attacks to trick people into revealing credentials) and deepfaked videos at virtually zero cost, allowing attackers to broaden their attacks.

Second, large language models are notoriously susceptible to jailbreaking and things like “prompt-injection attacks,” for which no known solution exists.

Third, generative AI tools are increasingly being used to create code; in some cases those coders don’t fully understand the code written, and the autogenerated code has already been shown in some cases to introduce new security holes.

Finally, in the midst of all this, the new U.S. administration seems determined to deregulate as much as possible, slashing costs and even publicly shaming employees. Federal employees who do their jobs may be frightened, and many will be tempted to look elsewhere; enforcement and investigations will almost certainly decline in both quality and quantity, leaving the world quite vulnerable to ever more audacious attacks.

{ Gary Marcus | Politico | Continue reading }

related { 2025 deepfake threat predictions from biometrics, cybersecurity insiders }

It’s well-known that regular exercise is good for your health. But a new scientific consortium is revealing fresh insights into just how profound the benefits are for the human body […] exercise was quite literally kind of reversing in a mirror-image-like way the changes that happen with disease and explaining a little bit about how exercise manages to protect from those diseases. […] reducing the risk of heart disease by 50 percent, reducing the list of many cancers by 50 percent and more, reducing the risk of back pain. People sleep better. They have better mood. They’re able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps. And I think the key is, is just stressing you just enough so that your body then in recovery builds these mechanisms that help you deal with the stress of life in other ways. […] If you can get 30 to 45 minutes of moderate intensity exercise, that’s like a brisk walk, if you can do that five, six times a week, that’s fantastic. […] One of the things I regularly tell my patients — I’m a cardiologist — is that one minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life. It doesn’t matter whether you do it in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evenings. It’s particularly good after meals, so the evening is a fine time to take a brisk walk. But the main thing is get up, move about as much as you can.

Coffee intake attenuates the major causes of mortality […] corresponds to an average increase in healthspan of 1.8 years of lifetime

Single cigarette takes 20 minutes off life expectancy, a pack of 20 cigarettes by seven hours

Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including significant drops in IQ scores […] COVID-19 – can affect brain health in many ways. In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including […] several mental health disorders. […] increased risk of cognitive deficits, such as memory problems. […] shrinkage of brain volume and altered brain structure after infection. […] changes that are commensurate with seven years of brain aging […] brain damage that are equivalent to 20 years of aging […] fusion of brain cells […] Autopsy studies of people who had severe COVID-19 but died months later from other causes showed that the virus was still present in brain tissue. This provides evidence that contrary to its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not only a respiratory virus […] Studies show that even when the virus is mild and exclusively confined to the lungs, it can still provoke inflammation in the brain and impair brain cells’ ability to regenerate. […] the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent.

Study 1 found that belief in karmic causality positively predicts a variety of system-justifying beliefs that legitimate social inequalities, but experimental reminders of karma also encouraged generosity towards others experiencing financial hardship.

A 17-year-old village boy has been gang raped by 10 knife wielding women in Papua New Guinea

FBI: Largest homemade explosives cache in agency history found in Virginia

use “murderous verbs” like “murder” or “kill” in movies has increased overall over the past 50 years […] violent language increased for both male and female characters

The traits that make up the dark triad may not truly reflect the most malevolent patterns in personality. New research shows that by looking at personality profiles, an even worse malevolent pattern emerges. it may be the people who seem nice that can present the real danger. […] They are “inclined to disguise their self-interested orientation when self-reporting, or when the stakes are low, yet [do] cheat and act competitively when there is an opportunity.”

Biometric ticketing for sports and live events set to explode in 2025

The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method

Jeff Koons on why he has drawn a red line on AI in art: ‘I don’t want to be lazy’ A SpaceX rocket took 125 of his miniature lunar sculptures out of the Earth’s orbit in February, to become the first authorised artworks on the moon.

“TOOK CLONAZEPAM DOSE THREE TIMES INSTEAD OF ONCE AND HAS A BATTERY IN RECTUM AND HAS NAUSEA,” “MOTORIZED TIRE PUMP INSERTED IN HER RECTUM AND WAS INSUFFLATED FOR A DURATION OF APPROXIMATELY 5 MINUTES” What did we get stuck in in our penises, vaginas, and rectums last year?

AI tools could be used to manipulate online audiences into making decisions – ranging from what to buy to who to vote for. […] The paper highlights an emerging new marketplace for “digital signals of intent” – known as the “intention economy” – where AI assistants understand, forecast and manipulate human intentions and sell that information on to companies who can profit from it.

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity.

it looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t do anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again

Facebook inflicted ‘lifelong trauma’ on Kenyan content moderators […] more than 140 are diagnosed with PTSD […] Kanyanya said the moderators he assessed encountered “extremely graphic content on a daily basis which included videos of gruesome murders, self-harm, suicides, attempted suicides, sexual violence, explicit sexual content, child physical and sexual abuse, horrific violent actions just to name a few.”

Analysis of population aging is typically framed in terms of chronological age. However, chronological age itself is not necessarily deeply informative about the aging process. We show that chronological age is an unreliable proxy for physiological functioning due to appreciable differences in how aging unfolds across people, health domains, and over time.

When to Blame Victims for Negligence

Is it true that … shampoo is a scam, because hair washes itself? […] “Imagine what would happen if you stopped washing your underarms – you’d be likely to develop a build up of sweat and dirt, which would smell awful,” Harvey says. “A proliferation of bacteria and yeasts would occur, as they thrive in oily environments.”

From FANG to BATMMAAN, BRICS to PIGS — How long those acronyms are useful depends on the markets

the trajectory of iOS spyware from the initial discovery of Pegasus in 2016 to the latest cases in 2024

This photo project pushes the possibility of pubic hair to its limits

Baby Bird Found Alive Inside Dead Man’s Stomach After Being Swallowed During Fertility Ritual — Villagers claim the victim had sought the assistance of an occultist for help with fertility issues.

The Average American Spent 2.5 Months on Their Phone in 2024

Personalized chatbots dating other chatbots on your behalf

DMT is used as a psychedelic drug […] DMT has a rapid onset, intense effects, and a relatively short duration of action. For those reasons, DMT was known as the “businessman’s trip” during the 1960s in the United States, as a user could access the full depth of a psychedelic experience in considerably less time than with other substances such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.

DMT reliably induces profound experiences of immersion in other worlds and encounters with seemingly autonomous presences, yet the lived qualities and unfolding of these experiences remain poorly understood. Using micro-phenomenological interviews with twenty-three healthy participants who received DMT during fMRI scanning, this study explores how these experiences arise and develop in awareness. Micro-phenomenological analysis reveals rich dimensions of immersive experience - from multisensory engagement to radical reconfigurations of self and world - and illuminates the varied ways presences can be seen, felt, or otherwise sensed.

Acetaminophen (paracetamol) can blunt various emotional states and evaluations, seemingly through the same mechanisms by which it dulls the affective component of physical pain. […] findings suggest that acetaminophen might reduce cautious behaviors in dangerous situations, but could also be potentially useful in clinical settings where overly cautious and avoidant behaviors are disproportionate to the danger posed.

Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, raised $60 million for the basic-income study, including $14 million of his own money. […] The experiment gave low-income participants $1,000 a month for three years, no strings attached. […] Recipients experienced decreased financial stress, but that faded over time, the study found [read more]

The Japanese ‘micro-forest’ method

The Greek Orthodox Monk Who Died Without Ever Seeing a Woman

the human brain processes information at just 10 bits […] This is no accident […] the brain is built this way for survival. Instead of getting overwhelmed by a flood of details, the brain has a system to focus on what matters most. It ensures we act quickly and effectively without being bogged down by unnecessary information. Technological advancements like Elon Musk’s Neuralink promise to bridge the gap between the brain and machines by creating direct neural interfaces. However, the study shows that even with this technology, the brain’s natural processing cap remains at 10 bits per second. The limitation is biological, not technological. This bottleneck is especially relevant to fields like neuroprosthetics. Vision restoration devices, for example, often attempt to stream raw video data to the brain, which overwhelms its processing capacity. A more practical approach would summarize visual information into actionable cues, such as identifying objects or hazards in the environment.

Increased gaze at the mouth in females and eyes and hair in males is associated with significantly higher ratings of attractiveness by observers of the opposite sex. Practitioners may want to pay special attention to these areas when designing an evidence-based aesthetic treatment plan.

Taxi and ambulance drivers, the two professions associated with the lowest levels of death due to Alzheimer’s disease. […] The jobs require frequent spatial and navigational processing: the ability to sense and incorporate information about the location of objects around them. Although, the trend was not seen in other related jobs, like driving a bus or piloting an aircraft. It was also not seen in other forms of dementia […] The hippocampus, located deep within the brain, has been shown to be enhanced in London taxi drivers compared to the general population. The region is also one of the parts of the brain involved in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. […] Across the general population, the proportion of deaths from Alzheimer’s was 1.69 percent, while the proportion for taxi and ambulance drivers was 1.03 percent and 0.91 percent, respectively. […] The authors acknowledged that there were limitations, including that individuals who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease may be less likely to enter driving occupations.

Pfizer Stopped Us From Getting Ozempic Decades Ago

from January 1, smoking will be banned outdoors in Milan

Jetliners being accidentally blasted out of the sky has become the leading cause of commercial-aviation deaths over recent years

World’s oldest living crocodile celebrates 124th birthday He resides in South Africa at a wildlife conservation center on private land, sharing his habitat with six female crocodiles. It appears the aging process hasn’t impacted him as it does other animals of his age.

Startups begin geoengineering the sea. Some groups are growing kelp forests or microalgae in the sea. Others propose pumping seawater between shallow and deep layers to move carbon around.

Meta reportedly expects to see artificial intelligence (AI) characters generating content on its social media platforms Instagram and Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of AI characters have already been created using a tool that Meta launched in the U.S.

Violette Morris (1893-1944) was a French athlete and Nazi collaborator who won two gold and one silver medal at the Women’s World Games in 1921–1922. […] Morris played football […] She won gold medals at the 1921 and 1922 Women’s Olympiads […] In addition to her football career, she was an active participant in many other sports. She was selected for the French national water polo team even though there was no women’s team at the time. She was an avid boxer, often fighting against, and defeating, men. […] At the 1924 Women’s Olympiad she won gold medals in discus and shot put. […] Morris had her breasts removed by a mastectomy, which she claimed was in order to fit into racing cars more easily. She mainly competed in cyclecar endurance races […] She won the 1927 Bol d’Or 24-hour car race at the wheel of a B.N.C. […] She was homosexual, dressed in men’s attire, was a heavy smoker and swore often. […] she was barred from participating in the 1928 Summer Olympics. The agency cited her lack of morals […] She punched a football referee and had been accused of giving amphetamines to other players. […] She had longstanding friendships with American-born entertainer Josephine Baker, actor Jean Marais, and poet, author, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. In 1939, Morris and her partner, actress Yvonne de Bray, invited Cocteau to stay with them at their houseboat docked at Pont de Neuilly. There he wrote the three-act play Les Monstres sacrés. […] During World War II and the German occupation of France, Morris served as a collaborator for the Nazis and Vichy France. […] no evidence exists to support Ruffin’s claim that she was involved either in spying or torturing [but] she became known as the “Hyena of the Gestapo” and was killed by the French Resistance

This is a starter collection of syllabi compiled by experts, aimed at helping you get quickly oriented to their area of expertise, Great English literature

When Japanese authorities sought to honor Tokyo’s oldest man in 2010, they were rebuffed repeatedly by his family.

OpenAI/Microsoft deal leaked — the two companies came to agree in 2023 that AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits

Google is using Anthropic’s Claude to improve its Gemini AI

How the FDA allows companies to add secret ingredients to our food

A new type of addict is showing up at Gamblers Anonymous meetings across the country: investors hooked on the market’s riskiest trades. […] one man called options “the crack cocaine” of the stock market.

Early cocaine use in Europe Analysis of the brains of individuals from 17th-century Milan indicates that they were utilising the coca plant (Erythroxylum spp.) several centuries before the drug was previously believed to have reached Europe. […] In the early 17th century, the Duchy of Milan was under Spanish control, and subsequently had direct access to maritime networks transporting goods from the Americas, including other exotic plants. It is, therefore, entirely possible that some coca leaves may have made their way to Milan via the same routes.

“They had laid her in it bottomside up. Cash made it clock-shape, like this” — Faulkner drew coffins in both the manuscript and the carbon copy of the typescript that he kept for himself when he sent the typed version off

being a vegetarian makes a person less attractive as a potential partner among omnivores

polymer-based commercial tea bags release millions of nanoplastics and microplastics when infused

Your blood can reveal your biological age — and risk of health problems. Researchers say having a biological age higher than your chronological age could raise your risk of death from any cause by 51 percent.

Surprise Hair Loss Breakthrough: A Sugar Gel Triggers Robust Regrowth

[2023] Four Nigerian stowaways survive 14 days on ship’s rudder before rescue […] On their 10th day at sea, they ran out of food and drink […] They survived another four days by drinking the sea water crashing just meters below them […] The four men said they had hoped to reach Europe in their voyage and were shocked to learn they had in fact landed on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brazil. Two of the men have since been returned to Nigeria upon their request.

Even if someone time travels, they may not remember or capture it: Study t “Any memory that is collected along the closed timelike curve will be erased before the end of the loop”

The world’s first nuclear-powered battery, which uses a radioactive isotope embedded in a diamond, could power small devices for thousands of years, scientists say

Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

Aging brings two opposing trends in cancer risk: first, the risk climbs in our 60s and 70s, as decades of genetic mutations build up in our bodies. But then, past the age of around 80, the risk drops again. […]

What emerged was higher levels of a protein called NUPR1 in the older mice. This caused cells to act as if they were deficient in iron, which in turn limited their regeneration rates – putting restrictions on both healthy growth and cancerous tumors. […]

The same processes were found to be happening in human cells too […]

“Aging cells lose their capacity for renewal and therefore for the runaway growth that happens in cancer.”

{ Science ALert | Continue reading }

Women are found to mate with a younger partner in only one specific case: above their 60s, when they provide at least 75% of the household income or rank higher than their partner in the distribution of income in their respective age group.

Scientists Developed a Questionnaire to Identify if Your Cat Is a Psychopath [The Cat Triarchic + questionnaire]

Recent reports highlight the emergence and growth of a “shadow industry” in which companies and governments hire firms to create misleading information about competitors and political opponents. This trend is compounded by the growing concern that online labor markets may facilitate the production of disinformation due to the ease with which virtually anyone can hire freelance workers from across the globe. […] We created an employer account and recruited 1,197 workers […] 61% accepted a disinformation job requiring them to manipulate COVID-19 data. […] 13% of workers declined the disinformation job specifically due to ethical concerns

Assad visited Moscow on Nov. 28, a day after Syrian rebel forces attacked the northern province of Aleppo and lightning drive across the country, but his pleas for military intervention fell on deaf ears in the Kremlin which was unwilling to intervene […] Assad didn’t convey the reality of the situation to aides back home […] “He told his commanders and associates after his Moscow trip that military support was coming” […] After exhausting his options, Assad finally accepted the inevitability of his downfall and resolved to leave the country […] Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov did “whatever he could” to secure Assad’s safe departure. Qatar and Turkey made arrangements with HTS to facilitate Assad’s exit […] Moscow also coordinated with neighbouring states to ensure that a Russian plane leaving Syrian airspace with Assad on board would not be intercepted or targeted […] Assad told his presidential office manager on Saturday when he finished work he was going home but instead headed to the airport […] He also called his media adviser, Buthaina Shaaban, and asked her to come to his home to write him a speech, the aide said. She arrived to find no one was there. […] Assad didn’t even inform his younger brother, Maher, commander of the Army’s elite 4th Armoured Division, about his exit plan […] Assad’s maternal cousins, Ehab and Eyad Makhlouf, were similarly left behind as Damascus fell to the rebels. The pair tried to flee by car to Lebanon but were ambushed on the way by rebels who shot Ehab dead and wounded Eyad […] Assad himself fled Damascus by plane on Sunday, Dec. 8, flying under the radar with the aircraft’s transponder switched off. He flew to Russia’s Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian coastal city of Latakia, and from there on to Moscow. [Reuters]

Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately seized control over the account by convincing him to click “yes” to a Google prompt on his mobile device.

the number of eighth, 10th, and 12th graders who collectively abstained from the use of alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine hit a new high Use of illicit drugs also fell on the whole […] For alcohol, use in the past 12 months among eighth graders was at 12.9 percent in 2024, similar to 2023 levels, which are all-time lows. […] “This trend in the reduction of substance use among teenagers is unprecedented”

Learning to Live with the Voices in Your Head

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index

Solving 3 Rubik’s Cubes whilst juggling

Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya is a hill in South Australia. Its name means “where the devil urinates.”

‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.

Doctors remove live cockroach from the intestine of man complaining of abdominal issues

Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. […] growing number of people in the state […] are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. […] Finding a model can be difficult. Areas of Utah with high concentrations of Mormons—who also call themselves Latter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack potential Jesus doppelgängers. Some men who work or volunteer for the church, one of the state’s largest employers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short. [WSJ]

images on Google Street View of a person appearing to load a body bag into the back of a car have provided Spanish police with a “decisive” clue over the disappearance of a man.

California squirrels are now apparently hunting and eating other rodents

Earth’s clouds are shrinking — Narrowing storm bands may be a surprising and dangerous new feedback of climate change

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index

In 2024, the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK. […] Since about December of last year, White Nights has been all over BookTok and its Instagram parallel, Bookstagram. Searching for the 1848 tale on these platforms will result in page after page of reviews, quotes, and moody shots of the book next to cups of coffee. There are White Nights Spotify playlists full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users from all over the world have rhapsodised about the beautiful love story it tells, and bewailed getting their hearts smashed into pieces by it.

you have been gifted 100 expensive wine bottles by 100 different people. … you discover that one of the bottles has been poisoned, and you have no idea which one. you have a test that can detect poison very accurately … you have only 7 of these tests available. What should you do?

Broccoli contains the enzyme myrosinase […] Through what’s known as ‘myrosinase activity’, the glucosinolates get transformed into sulforaphane, which is what we want. […] Unfortunately, studies have shown that common broccoli cooking methods, like boiling and microwaving, seriously reduce the amount of glucosinolates in the vegetable – even if you just zap it for a couple minutes. And myrosinase is super-sensitive to heat, too. Hence, by far the largest amount of sulforaphane you can get from broccoli is by munching on raw florets.

Microgravity is known to alter the muscles, bones, the immune system and cognition, but little is known about its specific impact on the brain. […] scientists sent tiny clumps of stem-cell derived brain cells called “organoids” to the International Space Station (ISS) the organoids were still healthy when they returned from orbit a month later, but the cells had matured faster compared to identical organoids grown on Earth

Ancient DNA suggests syphilis originated in Americas before ravaging Europe […] The sexually transmitted disease remains a public health menace today, despite the fact that it is easily cured with antibiotics.

Nebraska sues Change Healthcare over security failings that led to medical data breach of over 100 million Americans

Starbucks is the new Venmo for Gen Alpha

“if bitcoin is going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way.” […] Either Mr. Trump has conducted some novel — and faulty — policy analysis, or he is seeking personal gain.

Deutsche Bank is reportedly creating a layer-2 (L2) blockchain solution on Ethereum using ZKsync technology Previously: Banks Tried to Kill Crypto and Failed. Now They’re Embracing It (Slowly) [NYT, 2021]

Someone Is Sticking Googly Eyes on Public Sculptures in Oregon

An Anti-Tag Cloud shows you the most common English words that never appear in a text

‘I intend to take nothing but my night-bag.’

This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. One is forced to deal with the recognition that human perception, action, and cognition proceed at a glacially slow pace. Our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at much higher rates, on the order of gigabits/s. This defines a paradox: the vast gulf between the tiny information throughput of human behavior and the huge information inputs on which the behavior is based. This enormous ratio—about 100,000,000—remains largely unexplained.

Uncertainty is part of being human, so how can we learn to live with it? […] There is no safe level of driving, but we don’t recommend everyone stay at home. […] My main inspiration is my spaniel. She lives in the moment, starts each day with bounding enthusiasm, yelps when she gets trodden on and then immediately forgives you, and leaps at the hint of a sausage. She accepts the lack of control in her life, but relishes the uncertainty of walking and sniffing in new places. And when it’s time for her to die, she will curl up and go quietly.

People who walk a higher number of steps each day are less likely to have depressive symptoms

Researchers analyzed US death certificates for almost 9 million people who died during 2020–2022, linking occupational data across 443 professions with Alzheimer’s as a cause of death [and found that] driving an ambulance or taxi as your job may provide some protection against Alzheimer’s.

Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found. [NYT]

Amazon is reportedly hitting pause on its return-to-office (RTO) plans due to a shortage of office space […] Employees in cities like Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, and New York have received notifications that they can continue with their hybrid work arrangements until their offices are ready.

US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from app stores Jan. 19

US earnings growth would not look so exceptional if not for the supernormal profits of its big tech firms, and massive government spending. Over time, supernormal profits get competed away. Growth and profits are also getting an artificial lift from the heaviest deficit spending ever recorded at this stage of an economic cycle, by far. […] My calculations suggest it now takes nearly $2 of new government debt to generate an additional $1 of US GDP growth — a 50 per cent increase on just five years ago. If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing, but for now, they think America can get away with anything, as the world’s leading economy and issuer of the reserve currency. More likely, by some point next year, investors will balk and demand higher interest rates or a demonstration of fiscal discipline, triggered perhaps by an even larger deficit or ever bigger auctions of Treasuries. Those demands will wean the US off its dependence on government spending, at least temporarily, and in turn undermine economic growth and corporate profits. To be clear, this is a bubble in America’s performance relative to the rest of the world, not a 1990s-style mania in the US market. So, it can deflate in a benign way if the alternatives begin to look more attractive. [Financial Times]

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style — The convoluted “legalese” used in legal documents conveys a special sense of authority, and even non-lawyers have learned to wield it.

Cyborg cockroach armies can now be mass-produced at a rate of one every 68 seconds

Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with novels from Faulkner and Hemingway

Rockefeller Center application to NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to replace its neon signs with LEDs [PDF]

The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (1987)

Google video generation model

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish Nigel Richards has also been champion in English and – after memorising dictionary in nine weeks – French

Being overweight overtakes tobacco smoking as the leading disease risk factor in 2024

Fasting can reduce weight — but also hair growth

Is the five-second rule true? In 2003 […] she inoculated two types of tiles—smooth and rough—with Escherichia coli and dropped gummy bears and cookies on the tiles for five seconds […] bacteria transferred to food very quickly, even in just five seconds. […] A few years later, […] When they dropped bologna sausage onto a piece of tile contaminated with Salmonella typhimurium, over 99% of the bacteria transferred from the tile to the bologna after just five seconds. […] [In 2016,] they looked at bacterial transfer to four different foods (watermelon, bread, bread with butter, and gummies) when dropped on four different surfaces (stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood, and carpet) contaminated with Enterobacter aerogenes. By analyzing bacterial transfer at <1, 5, 30, and 300 seconds, they found that longer contact times resulted in more transfer but some transfer took place “instantaneously,” after less than 1 second, thus debunking the five-second rule once and for all.

Life Could Exist in Space Even Without Planets, Scientists Say

Mouseless. Lightning-fast mouse control with the keyboard

Welcome to the Elm Wealth Crystal Ball Trading Game […] you’re going to see how well you can do trading stocks and bonds if you know the news from the front page of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) one day in advance. […] Your starting wealth is $1,000,000. Have fun!

When a Crystal Ball Isn’t Enough to Make You Rich

House Hopping with Elon Musk

four appears to be the magic number when it comes to conversation […]

“You very rarely get more than four people in a conversation. In the normal run of things, when a fifth person joins a group, it’ll become two conversations within about 20 seconds” […]

groups that work in challenging situations — such as SAS patrols and surgical teams — tend to do best when there are four members. […]

“[Shakespeare] instinctively understood the mentalising capacities of his audience. He was anxious to ensure his audience wasn’t cognitively overloaded by the number of minds in the action on stage. [It is] a masterclass in the study of human psychology.”

{ The Times | Continue reading }

photo { William Klein, Mten hidden their faces / 69 Sauna & Massage , 1980 }

A grandmother died after she was pinned against a wall for two days by her Sleep Number bed

McKinsey to pay $650 million for role in opioid crisis More: How the Opioid Crisis Started [The Daily, NYT | audio]

Meta asks the government to block OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit Meta argues OpenAI “should not be allowed to flout the law by taking and reappropriating assets it built as a charity and using them for potentially enormous private gains.”

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit […] demanded majority equity, absolute control, and to be CEO of the for-profit […] said OpenAI was on a path for certain failure unless we [OpenAI] merged into Tesla […] resigned as co-chair of OpenAI

The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla. […] Removing the crash-disclosure provision would particularly benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes – more than 1,500 – to federal safety regulators under the program. […] the NHTSA crash data shows Tesla accounted for 40 out of 45 fatal crashes reported.

This study employs a Bayesian Probit model to empirically analyze peer effects and herd behavior among consumers during the “Double 11″ shopping festival, using data collected through a questionnaire survey. The results demonstrate that peer effects significantly influence consumer decision-making, with the probability of participation in the shopping event increasing notably when roommates are involved. Additionally, factors such as gender, online shopping experience, and fashion consciousness significantly impact consumers’ herd behavior.

almost one in four (24%) young people (16-24) [in UK] say they’ve never been readers [..] People who are good at reading have different brains […] Will people’s preference for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species?

On September 13, 1961, a tall, balding man with “spiteful eyes” (according to a CIA report), collected a large package from a Damascus post office addressed to “Abu Hussein”. He took the parcel home to his luxury apartment on the Rue Georges Haddad in the diplomatic quarter of the Syrian capital and opened it, whereupon the packet exploded, removing his eye and parts of his arm.

The bomb was a gift from Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister of Israel but then head of Mifratz, the special operations unit of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.

Hussein’s real name was SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, one of the world’s most wanted Nazis, a mass-murdering monster nicknamed “the bloodhound” who was personally responsible for deporting 128,500 people to death camps.

In 1980, he lost the fingers on his left hand when a second letter bomb blew up in his hands.

{ The Times | Wikipedia }

Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, once the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution during World War II […] was in charge of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from 1943 to 1944.

By the early 1950s, Brunner is thought to have fled to Egypt and then to Syria, where he was known as Georg Fischer and worked as an arms dealer in Damascus.

Syria had already provided refuge to Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.

When Hafez al-Assad seized power in a 1970 coup, Brunner helped the new regime set up an effective system of repression, inspired by the practices of the Third Reich.

Brunner shared his expertise in surveillance, interrogation and torture techniques, drawing on his experience with the Gestapo.

The brutal methods he taught the Syrian secret services were to have a lasting influence on the way the regime repressed political dissent.

One of the means of torture used by the Syrians, drawing on Brunner’s expertise, was the “German Chair,” a medieval-style rack used to stretch the victim’s spine.

In the 1990s, he gradually lost influence with the authorities. Things went badly awry when Bashar al-Assad took over from his father in July 2000. Brunner is then locked in a cell. Former security guards in charge of the protection of Brunner said that Brunner “suffered and cried a lot in his final years,” “couldn’t even wash” and ate only “an egg or a potato” a day. He ultimately died in deplorable conditions in December 2001, aged 89.

{ France 24 }

related { French Guiana’s Devil’s Island has witnessed some of humanity’s hardest moments […] Thousands of alleged criminals — some innocent, many not — were sent to Devil’s Island […] It was a sentence that carried with it a high probability of death, whether by the guillotine, tropical maladies, or from barbaric treatment by the prison’s notoriously sadistic guards. The dehumanizing treatment prisoners received on Devil’s Island was, in effect, a continuation of the barbarity long inflicted on French Guiana’s enslaved population. | JSTOR }