On the Inability to Ignore Useless Advice
Multiple arrested after fight inside Berkeley’s ‘empathy tent’
Senate map gerrymandered for senator’s house
Entrepreneurs are finding profits turning human waste into fertiliser, fuel and even food. The new economy of excrement
16 Ways QR Codes are Being Used in China
Chinese sex doll rental service suspended amid controversy
Chang et al. investigated the well-known asymmetry of the scrotum in man and showed that in right-handed subjects the right testis tended to be higher, whereas the converse applied in left-handed subjects. [Nature | PDF]
Do Men Overestimate or Women Underreport Their Sexual Intentions?
Eye movements of 105 heterosexual undergraduate students (36 males) were monitored while viewing photographs of men and women identified as a potential mate or a potential friend. Results showed that people looked at the head and chest more when assessing potential mates and looked at the legs and feet more when assessing potential friends. [Archives of Sexual Behavior]
Your future sex robot could be hacked and programmed to murder you
In what appears to be the first successful hack of a software program using DNA, researchers say malware they incorporated into a genetic molecule allowed them to take control of a computer used to analyze it. [...] To carry out the hack, researchers encoded malicious software in a short stretch of DNA they purchased online. They then used it to gain “full control” over a computer that tried to process the genetic data after it was read by a DNA sequencing machine. The researchers warn that hackers could one day use faked blood or spit samples to gain access to university computers, steal information from police forensics labs, or infect genome files shared by scientists. [Technology Review]
Biologists Use Gene Editing to Store Movies in DNA
Scientists build DNA from scratch to alter life’s blueprint
A major asthma drugmaker has been quietly investing in coal on the side [Thanks Tim]
Ten minutes difference, and Earth would still be Planet of the Dinosaurs
Quasi-steady state aerodynamics of the cheetah tail
Fish can't recognise faces if they’re upside down – just like us
Visual Face-preference in the Human Fetus?
Brain Training Has No Effect on Decision-making or Cognitive Function, Penn Researchers Report
Neurobiological research on memory has tended to focus on the cellular mechanisms involved in storing information, known as persistence, but much less attention has been paid to those involved in forgetting, also known as transience. It’s often been assumed that an inability to remember comes down to a failure of the mechanisms involved in storing or recalling information. “We find plenty of evidence from recent research that there are mechanisms that promote memory loss, and that these are distinct from those involved in storing information,” says co-author Paul Frankland. One recent study in particular done by Frankland’s lab showed that the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus seems to promote forgetting. This was an interesting finding since this area of the brain generates more cells in young people. The research explored how forgetting in childhood may play a role in why adults typically do not have memories for events that occurred before the age of four years old. [University of Toronto]
Sleep deprivation rapidly reduces depression symptoms in nearly half of depressed patients
The $100 billion per year back pain industry is mostly a hoax
"Digital self-harm" is the anonymous online posting, sending, or otherwise sharing of hurtful content about oneself. The current study examined the extent of digital self-harm among adolescents.
Parents of teenage daughters are more likely to divorce
The Null Relation between Father Absence and Earlier Menarche
Living near noisy roads could make it harder to get pregnant
When making trust decisions in economic games, people have some accuracy in detecting trustworthiness from the facial features of unknown partners. [...] We observed that trustworthiness detection remained better than chance for exposure times as short as 100 ms, although it disappeared with an exposure time of 33 ms. [Experimental Psychology]
People are often encouraged to only present the best aspects of themselves at interview so they appear more attractive to employers, but what we've found is that high-quality candidates -- the top 10% -- fare much better when they present who they really are. Unfortunately, the same isn't true for poorer quality candidates who can actually damage their chances of being offered the job by being more authentic.
The visibility of social class from facial cues
The key to understanding this is to think about what advertisers want: they don’t want to appear next to pictures of breasts because it might damage their brands, but they don’t mind appearing alongside lies because the lies might be helping them find the consumers they’re trying to target. Facebook has two priorities: growth and monetisation.
Researchers at Facebook realized their bots were chattering in a new language. Then they stopped it.
The real victor was Microsoft, which built an empire on the back of a shadily acquired MS-DOS
Millennials only have a 5-second attention span for ads
Cover image orientation in celebrity cookbooks, study
Voynich manuscript: the solution More: Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved? Experts say no.
The Not-so-secret ingredients of military coups
How long would it take for vampires to annihilate humanity
The cost of building the world’s skinniest skyscraper has ballooned so enormously that the 111 W. 57th St. project is facing imminent foreclosure while it’s less than one-quarter complete. The 82-story skyscraper has risen fewer than 20 stories and is $50 million over budget. [...] “Apparently they omitted some very significant items in their budget including cranes, which are very expensive in New York and can run into the millions of dollars.” [NY Post]
The Mutilated Currency Division
Eugene Schieffelin was a pharmacist who lived in the Bronx. He was an eccentric Anglophile and a Shakespeare aficionado. As deputy of the American Acclimatization Society of New York, Schieffelin, it is believed, latched onto the goal of bringing every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare to Central Park.
George Peter Metesky, better known as the Mad Bomber, terrorized New York City for 16 years in the 1940s and 1950s with explosives that he planted in theaters, terminals, libraries, and offices. [Wikipedia]
"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. An example of a tale of suspense and horror, it is also, to a certain degree, a hoax, as it was published without claiming to be fictional, and many at the time of publication (1845) took it to be a factual account.
Eminem music shares to hit the stock exchange
How Did Pop Music Get So Slow?
Why Is the Speed of Light So Slow?
In the US, young lawyers already don't get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. how our lives will change dramatically in 20 years
Like ancient warlords, China's three biggest airlines have dominated their regional cities: Air China Ltd. controlling Beijing, China Eastern Airlines Corp. holding sway in the financial center of Shanghai, and China Southern Airlines Co. ruling the roost down in export gateway Guangzhou. Until now. Beijing's New Mega Airport Will Challenge Air China's Dominance
Japan Is Selling Ice Cream That Doesn't Melt
Popsicles Made From 100 Different Polluted Water Sources
Two British science museums held a two-day fight on Twitter
Never pay a penny of a debt which isn’t yours. Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You
This elevator has a call button 30 feet away so that the elevator is there when you arrive
"We are aware of Oksana Zhnikrup’s work and have a license to use it for Mr Koons’s work."
Restoring Yves Klein's "Blue Monochrome" (1961)
Egon Schiele standing in front of a full-length mirror in his studio
3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image (via, Thanks Mark!)
Personalized ads in the real world
A vending machine in Russia for buying Likes for your Instagram pics