These researchers hooked a plant up to a lie detector. Asked if it was alive, the plant said "yes" but this was determined to be a lie. Also there was uranium involved for some reason. [PDF]
New AI Could Prevent Eavesdropping -- “Neural Voice Camouflage” disguises words with custom noise
Scientists can reverse aging in mice "It's a permanent reset, as far as we can tell, and we think it may be a universal process that could be applied across the body to reset our age," said Sinclair, who has spent the last 20 years studying ways to reverse the ravages of time. "If we reverse aging, these diseases should not happen. We have the technology today to be able to go into your hundreds without worrying about getting cancer in your 70s, heart disease in your 80s and Alzheimer's in your 90s. This is the world that is coming. It's literally a question of when and for most of us, it's going to happen in our lifetimes."
A Qualitative Analysis of Gaslighting in Romantic Relationships
For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes […] You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers. PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search. […] Unlike Clearview AI, a similar facial recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites. […] In 2005, when Ms. Scarlett was 19 and broke, she considered working in pornography. She traveled to New York City for an audition that was so humiliating and abusive that she abandoned the idea. PimEyes unearthed the decades-old trauma, with links to where exactly the explicit photos could be found on the web. […] Worried about how people would react to the images, Ms. Scarlett immediately began looking into how to get them removed […] When she clicked on one of the explicit photos on PimEyes, a menu popped up offering a link to the image, a link to the website where it appeared and an option to “exclude from public results” on PimEyes. But exclusion, Ms. Scarlett quickly discovered, was available only to subscribers who paid for “PROtect plans,” which cost from $89.99 to $299.99 per month. “It’s essentially extortion,” said Ms. Scarlett, who eventually signed up for the most expensive plan. Mr. Gobronidze disagreed with that characterization. He pointed to a free tool for deleting results from the PimEyes index that is not prominently advertised on the site. He also provided a receipt showing that PimEyes had refunded Ms. Scarlett for the $299.99 plan last month. […] PimEyes has a free “opt-out” as well, for people to have data about themselves removed from the site, including the search images of their faces. To opt out, Ms. Scarlett provided a photo of her teenage self and a scan of her government-issued identification. At the beginning of April, she received a confirmation that her opt-out request had been accepted. [NY Times]
Chickens were first tempted down from trees by rice. [...] It was previously believed that chickens were bred for the table up to 10,000 years ago, but the new report, published in the journal Antiquity, suggests humans did not come into close contact with chickens until about 1500BC. Chickens, native to the tropical jungles of south-east Asia, did not arrive in Europe until about 800BC. Then, after arriving in the Mediterranean region, it took almost 1,000 years longer for chickens to become established in the colder climates of Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland. The experts re-evaluated chicken remains found in more than 600 sites in 89 countries. They found that the oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were at the Neolithic Ban Non Wat in central Thailand, dating to between 1650BC and 1250BC.
Scientists can now grow wood in a lab without cutting a single tree
The world's largest plant is a 112-mile-long seagrass in Australia
Despite being around 4,300 miles in length, the Amazon River surprisingly has no bridges. The Amazon River is the world's second-longest river and one of the planet's most significant waterways. It contains more fresh water by volume than any other river, is home to the world's largest species of river dolphin, and hosts 100 species of electric fish and up to 60 species of piranhas.
Electric organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, do all sorts of amazing things: They send and receive signals that are akin to bird songs, helping them to recognize other electric fish by species, sex and even individual. A new study explains how small genetic changes enabled electric fish to evolve electric organs.
De Groft and the owners of the 25 paintings have said that they were done on slabs of cardboard scavenged by Basquiat in late 1982 while he was living and working out of a studio beneath the Los Angeles home of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, as he prepared new work for a show at Gagosian’s gallery. They said the works were then sold by Basquiat for $5,000 to a now-deceased television screenwriter, Thad Mumford, who put them into a storage unit and forgot about them for 30 years — until the unit’s contents were seized for nonpayment of rent and auctioned off in 2012. (Gagosian has said he “finds the scenario of the story highly unlikely.”) [...] An article in The New York Times raised questions about their authenticity, reporting that a designer who had previously worked for Federal Express had identified the FedEx typeface on a piece of cardboard Basquiat was said to have painted on as one that was not designed until 1994 — six years after the artist’s death. [NY Times]
McCarthy used plagiarism software to compare the text of North’s translations—about a million words in all—with the text of Shakespeare’s plays—another million words. When he did, his computer lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying thousands of phrases in common, many found in similar situations and contexts, and many unique in English. Some were up to eight words long, the equivalent of hitting every number in a Powerball ticket and then some. [...] Another possibility is that this is yet one more piece of evidence lending credence to McCarthy’s theory, demonstrating that North was making notes for his own play about King Cymbeline, that Shakespeare acquired and adapted years after his death.
Minus is a finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.
I communicate with your animal remotely by looking at the picture you upload with your submission. The session is not live with you. After the session, I email you the full audio recording so you can listen to our entire conversation. One animal per session. Standard: $350 USD More: Lawyer Quits To Become Pet Psychic... Makes More Money
Caffeine Consumption Leads to Impulsivity during Shopping, New Study Shows
Research into falling sperm counts finds 'alarming' levels of chemicals in male urine samples
How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children -- Adverse experiences can change future generations through epigenetic pathways
Memory: Synaptic or Cellular, That Is the Question
According to the current paradigm, perception of the outside world is not a passive process in which the "receiver" is passively fed sensory impressions. Rather, the organism at any time produces a "concurrent world model", which includes hypotheses about the expected stimuli. These expected values are stored in long-term memory as a comprehensive simulation of external reality. During an ongoing act of perception, the retrieved hypotheses are checked against the incoming sensory data; perception is therefore an interactive process, which is taking shape through a gradual testing and refinement of predictions. This new perspective skews the whole picture: Our expectations control what we perceive; memory and perception are inextricably linked.
Janine Chandler et al vs. California Department of Corrections targeted a new California state law, the “The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act,” a.k.a. S.B. 132. The statute allows any prisoner who self-identifies as a woman — including prisoners with penises who may have stopped taking hormones — into women’s prisons.
Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites Experts say some hospitals’ use of an ad tracking tool may violate a federal law protecting health information
Following testing, only the HIV-negative results (or linked information) are uploaded to the blockchain, which results in high-risk individuals being able to determine the HIV-negative status of each other anonymously, conveniently, and credibly.
If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible. Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object’s strong gravitational field
Do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard.
Alarmist narratives about the flow of misinformation and its negative consequences have gained traction in recent years. If these fears are to some extent warranted, the scientific literature suggests that many of them are exaggerated. We find that the strongest, and most reliable, predictor of perceived danger of misinformation is the third-person effect (i.e., the perception that others are more vulnerable to misinformation than the self) and, in particular, the belief that ‘distant’ others (as opposed to family and friends) are vulnerable to misinformation.
Some psychotherapeutic approaches are not only ineffective, they’re actively harmful. We’re now starting to identify them
When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal — sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. [...] In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff [...] It seems we created these new, health-conscious cockroaches by accident, after decades of trying to kill their ancestors with sweet powders and liquids laced with poison. The cockroaches that craved sweets ate the poison and died, while cockroaches less keen on glucose avoided the death traps and survived long enough to breed, thus passing that trait down to the next cockroach generation. [...] The good news for consumers is that pesticide manufacturers share Dr. Wada-Katsumata and Dr. Schal’s enthusiasm for understanding cockroach evolution, and they are actively changing their cockroach-killing formulations to move away from glucose. But given how new this research is, it will take some time for those changes to make their way to the products on our shelves. [NY Times]
Polyester went from being the world’s most hated fabrics to one of its favorites.
I used GPT-3 [AI] to write a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine about cats and then used DeepFake voices to perform it.