62% of women check their phones during sex, new study finds.
Kickstarter Project Canceled After Dude Spends All the Money.
No Menstrual Hygiene For Indian Women Holds Economy Back.
Dentist who used copyright to silence her patients is on the run. He threatened patients who wrote bad Yelp reviews with lawsuits.
Miracle Village, Florida, where half the population are sex offenders.
Coldhearted Psychopaths Feel Empathy Too.
Man acquitted in romantic bear-spray squabble.
Where Do Drugs For Lethal Injections Come From? Nobody Knows.
A banana may be healthier than a burger, but how it’s brought to you is not all that different. Before the fast-food industry learned to process, pack, and ship inexpensive temperature-controlled meals, banana carriers had already perfected their own shipping process. […] The result “is bananas that arrive at the market on their final green day, and which will last exactly seven days before turning brown.” By the time bananas land on the supermarket shelf, their ripening process has already been carefully engineered through the use of three gases: ethylene, carbon dioxide, and oxygen. [Nautilus]
In 1971, he declared that vitamin C would cause a 10 percent decrease in deaths from cancer. Subsequent studies have consistently shown that vitamin C doesn't treat cancer.
While in the U.S. and other wealthy countries viruses appear to be involved in about 5 percent of all cancers, in some countries the number can be as high as 20 percent. (The worldwide average is about 13 percent.)
Women are more vulnerable to infections.
“Never give up” has become one of the most popular pieces of advice in Western culture.[…] Many worthwhile goals require serious commitment and perseverance in order to achieve them. The problem with this advice is that at some point in our lives, we all have goals that are unattainable, and this is where “never give up” falls short. […] Results showed that the tendency to disengage from unattainable goals was associated with lower life stress, fewer intrusive thoughts about one’s problems, and feeling more control over one’s life. The flip side of this is that the tendency to stay engaged with unattainable goals was associated with more stress, more intrusive thoughts, and feeling less control. [Psych Your Mind]
To Change Behavior, Focus on a Single Situation.
The mystery of monogamy: scientists claim to have the answer.
There is another number in psychology that makes a lot less sense: the number 2.9013.
Same Programs + Different Computers = Different Weather Forecasts.
The perfect hexagonal array of bees’ honeycombs owes more to simple physical forces than to the skill of bees, according to a new study. Bees simply make cells that are circular in cross section and are packed together like a layer of bubbles. The wax, softened by the heat of the bees’ bodies, then gets pulled into hexagonal cells by surface tension at the junctions where three walls meet.
First, about how glaciers turn into ocean water. Consider this experiment. Take a large open-top drum of water and poke a hole near the bottom. Measure the rate at which water comes out of the hole. As the amount of water in the drum goes down, the rate of flow out of the hole will normally decrease because the amount of water pressure behind the hole decreases. Now, have a look at a traditional hourglass, where sand runs from an upper chamber which slowly empties into a lower chamber which slowly fills. If you measure the rate of sand flow through the connecting hole, does it decrease in flow rate because there is, over time, less sand in the upper chamber? I’ll save you the trouble of carrying out the experiment. No, it does not. This is because the movement of sand from the upper to lower parts of an hourglass is an entirely different kind of phenomenon than the flow of water out of the drum. The former is a matter of granular material dynamics, the latter of fluid dynamics. Jeremy Bassis and Suzanne Jacobs have recently published a study that looks at glacial ice as a granular material, modeling the ice as clumped together ice boulders that interact with each other either by sticking together or, over time, coming apart at fracture lines. This is important because, according to Bassis, about half of the water that continental glaciers provide to the ocean comes in the form of ice melting (with the water running off) but the other half consists of large chunks (icebergs) that come off in a manner that has been very hard to model. [Greg Laden/ScienceBlogs]
The definition of High-frequency trading varies, depending on whom you ask. Essentially, it’s the use of automated strategies to churn through large volumes of orders in fractions of seconds. Some firms can trade in microseconds. (Usually, these shops are trading for themselves rather than clients.) And HFT isn’t just for stocks: Speed traders have made inroads in futures, fixed income, and foreign currencies. Options, not so much. […] By 2010, HFT accounted for more than 60 percent of all U.S. equity volume and seemed positioned to swallow the rest. […] For the first time since its inception, high-frequency trading, the bogey machine of the markets, is in retreat. According to estimates from Rosenblatt Securities, as much as two-thirds of all stock trades in the U.S. from 2008 to 2011 were executed by high-frequency firms; today it’s about half. In 2009, high-frequency traders moved about 3.25 billion shares a day. In 2012, it was 1.6 billion a day. Speed traders aren’t just trading fewer shares, they’re making less money on each trade. [Bloomberg]
High-end art is one of the most manipulated markets in the world.
To avoid paying taxes, the rich are emptying their bank accounts in Switzerland and investing in art. This has spawned a new business of storing such works tax- and duty-free in warehouses across the world.
If we — art dealers, collectors, writers and experts — all agree a particular work has value, it surely does, irrespective of its cost of production, utility and purpose. In that sense a lot of the art market fuses the core characteristics of both Bitcoin and the gold market. Though, of course, art, unlike Bitcoin and gold, is not scarce. Certain works of established artists, especially those who are no longer living, are scarce. Only forgeries can threaten supply in that case. But overall there are no barriers of entry. New assets can always be produced. Consequently, regulating supply is down to the tight and clubby world of the art dealer and auctioneer network. [FT]
Art, then, is very similar to venture capital, insofar as who you know matters — and also insofar as both markets go to great lengths to hide natural valuation fluctuations. “Down rounds” are if anything even more harmful to an artist than they are to a startup: galleries will, as a rule, drop an artist before selling her art for less than she was charging at her previous show. The reason is entirely to protect the gallery’s own credibility: the gallery wants collectors to see it as a place where they can buy art which is going to rise in value, and as a result it will do everything in its power to make it look as though the work of all of its artists is only ever going up in price rather than down. [Salmon/Reuters]
By simply printing out your own shower curtain rings, iPhone case, jewelry organizer or other common products, an average homeowner could recoup the cost of a 3D printer in under a year.
Google Serves 25 Percent of North American Internet Traffic.
How do smartphones reveal shoppers’ movements?
Ms. Lee is among the roughly 1 in 5 students in South Korea who the government said is addicted to smartphone use. This addiction is defined as spending more than seven hours a day using the phone and experiencing symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia and depression when cut off from the device.
In the Violent Favelas of Brazil.
The tiny island where men have their own language.
Observations From a Tipless Restaurant.
Chinese Cuisine Patterns Revealed By Food Network Analysis.
Chinese Food Density by Neighborhood in NYC.
Circular map of New York City subway.
Lady Gaga’s early years in NYC.
On a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an unremarkable gray box protrudes from a telephone pole. Inside the box lies a state-of-the-art airflow-sampling device, one part of an experiment to track how a gas disperses through the city’s streets and subway system. […] The goal of the project is to develop a model for how a dangerous airborne contaminant, such as sarin gas or anthrax, would spread throughout the city in the event of a terrorist attack or accidental release. The scientists released tiny amounts of a colorless, nontoxic gas at several locations around the city. The airflow samplers, located at various points throughout the city, measured the gas to determine how fast and how far it spread. [LiveScience]
Eproctophilia is a paraphilia in which people are sexually aroused by flatulence. The following account presents a brief case study of an eproctophile.
Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster. The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s. […] Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula. [Slate]
Kubrick’s favorite films and viewing habits.
Of Submarines and Sharks: Musical Settings of a Silent Menace.
Escalator etiquette: The dos and don'ts.
How to escape a car underwater.
Today, almost 90 percent of American households have air conditioning. How to live without air conditioning.
Why Cities Are Safer Than Rural Areas.
Did Archaeologists Find a Piece of Jesus' Cross?
How to Teach Language to Dogs.
Will Sheep’s wool just keep growing and growing if humans don’t cut it off?
The deepest pool in the world.
Cutting golf balls in half reveals delightfully bonbon-esque interiors.
Lone Signal is a messaging platform that allows anyone with an Internet connection to send a message toward star systems selected for our METI (messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence) experiment. Through our website, users can send a 144-character text message for free, and they can send subsequent messages or photos for a fee.
“These two ad behemoths will have the industry’s largest and most formidable talent pool of people called ‘creatives’ who have never created a single thing in their lives and whose only apparent ability is to trick other people.”