The New Inquiry is a space for discussion that aspires to enrich cultural and public life by putting all available resources—both digital and material—toward the promotion and exploration of ideas.
“A doctor’s refusal to recognize my illnesses as illness still infuriates me. Every time is like the first time.”… twitter.com/i/web/status/15251…
Southwest passenger arrested for masturbating 4 times during flight
‘How to Murder Your Husband’ author on trial for husband’s death
Nike Wants to ‘Destroy’ Unauthorized NFTs—How Will That Work?
Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientist claims [study]
A physician didn’t shower for 5 years. Here’s what he found out.
Proclaiming one’s own goodness is deeply annoying. Yet signalling theory explains why it’s a peculiarly powerful manoeuvre.
Experts push for genetic testing to personalise drug prescriptions
The human genome is, at long last, complete
UK Antarctic post office is hiring
Deutsche Bank fired a number of top bankers in New York after a tab run up at a strip club was expensed as legitimate business spending
People sometimes avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix others’ problems. For example, only 2.6% of individuals in a pilot field study provided feedback to a survey administrator who had food or lipstick on their face.
She noticed grey smoke billowing from the chimney of the house next door. Next, she says, came the sore throats, headaches, and tight lungs. Remmers had no history of respiratory issues, but by 2016 she ended up in the emergency room in the middle of the night when she had trouble breathing. The far-reaching consequences of woodsmoke pollution
‘Forever chemicals’ found in fast food wrappers
Fashion accounts for up to 10% of global carbon dioxide output—more than international flights and shipping combined. It also accounts for a fifth of the 300 million tons of plastic produced globally each year. […] Eighty-seven percent of the total fiber input used for clothing is ultimately incinerated or sent to a landfill.
The speed of sound has been measured on Mars for the first time, and it’s very different to Earth’s. The results was achieved by firing bursts of 30 laser shots over a period of 10 seconds at target locations.
Experience: I let a baby bird nest in my hair for 84 days
Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can
Digital Curator — AI library for machine learning TensorFlow, the computer service Google Cloud Vision and custom trained neural networks were used for the automatic detection of the depicted iconographic motifs.
The prevalence of ash tattoos is increasing as a way for those mourning a loved one to cherish that person’s life and legacy
Officials intend to reserve the first 100 or more retail licenses to sell marijuana in New York for people who have been convicted of related offenses, or their relatives. [NY Times]
Healthy and cancerous cells emit different ‘smells’ ants can distinguish between
Studies show that both women and men want longer foreplay than they generally experience
individuals largely lack insight into the quality of their judgments, which is particularly problematic because they cannot reliably discriminate between lies and truths.
algae with three sexes that all mate in pairs identified in Japanese river
How low can you go? Kakonomics describes the situation where both parties prefer to give and receive a low-quality product. They ”connive on a low-low exchange”, and trust in each other’s untrustworthiness.
HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers’ viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law.
Those wishing to publish a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night need to request permission, pay for rights, and then credit the artist appropriately. Otherwise, there’s risk of fines. […] According to European Copyright Law, such monuments are protected for the lifespan of the work’s legal creator—plus 70 years. The Tower’s creator, Gustave Eiffel, died in 1923, so in 1993 it re-entered public domain, but there’s still un petit problème: The lights installed by Pierre Bideau didn’t ignite until 1985, which means nighttime images and videos that feature his choreographed light show are still protected under the law.
This is from NASA’s Apollo 10 mission’s transcript
Mike Tyson Is Making Pot Edibles in the Shape of a Bitten Ear
We considered the concept of the discrepancy between a patient’s desired time in bed (TIB) and total sleep time (TST), which we termed the DBST. The DBST could be a possible new sleep index due to its relation with insomnia severity, depression, dysfunctional beliefs about sleep, or preoccupation with sleep.
Even Moderate Ambient Light During Sleep Is Harmful – Increases Risk for Heart Disease and Diabetes
(Why) Is misinformation a problem?
Is information the fifth state of matter?
This observational study recorded the frequency of same-aged, adult human groups appearing in public spaces through 2636 hours, recording group formation by 1.2mn people via 170 research assistants in 46 countries across the world. […] ~50% more female-female than male-male pairs are observed in public spaces globally
The Limitless Potential of Virtual Influencers on TikTok
Cryptocurrencies: The Power of Memes — The byzantine premium arises because of confusion around the apparent complexities of blockchain. Investors read confusing, jargon-laden articles and become convinced that smarter people than themselves are investing, so they should too.
Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild. It takes only a second to crack the handful of weak keys.
A $4 Billion Hedge Fund Is Shorting Tether’s Stablecoin
The 18 Minutes of Trading Chaos That Broke the Nickel Market Nickel prices usually move a few hundred dollars per ton in a day. For most of the past decade, they’d traded between $10,000 and $20,000. Yet the day before, the market had started to unravel, with prices rising by a stunning 66% to $48,078. Already at an all-time high by 5:42 a.m., it lurched higher in stomach-churning leaps, soaring $30,000 in a matter of minutes. Just after 6 a.m., the price of nickel passed $100,000 a ton. Miners, traders, and manufacturers often use the market to make short bets—that is, to make money when prices fall. And when those wagers move violently in the opposite direction, they can be hit with huge margin calls, or requests to put down more cash to back their trades. The head of one London metals brokerage recalls feeling sick as he watched the moves, realizing what the spike in prices would mean for his company, the market, and the global metals industry. Nickel’s 250% price spike in little more than 24 hours plunged the industry into chaos, triggering billions of dollars in losses for traders who bet the wrong way and leading the London Metal Exchange to suspend trading for the first time in three decades.
In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents. By inverting the use of our machine learning models, we had transformed our innocuous generative model from a helpful tool of medicine to a generator of likely deadly molecules.
Handwashing and Detergent Treatment Greatly Reduce SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load on Halloween Candy Handled by COVID-19 Patients — From the candies not washed posthandling, we detected SARS-CoV-2 on 60% of candies that were deliberately coughed on, 60% of candies normally handled with unwashed hands, but only 10% of candies handled after hand washing.
“You hit the gym at 4:30 in the morning, go to work and then you get wasted”
The claim that personality is more important than intelligence in predicting important life outcomes has been greatly exaggerated
The latest edition of the DSM-5, sometimes known as “psychiatry’s bible,” includes a controversial new diagnosis: prolonged grief disorder. [NY Times]
a student at Hosei University, Japan, wrote a thesis about sleeping with a cat night after night in locations chosen by the cat.
Modern research methods have made it possible to trace quotations to the most accurate sources. […] Because it capitalizes on Big Data and other technological advances, the Yale Book can claim an authoritativeness that is unsurpassed. Hundreds of famous misattributions have been corrected — and probably thousands of misquotations as well. The Yale Book can legitimately claim to be the most accurate, thorough, and up-to-date quotation book ever compiled.
After a decade of work, the FIDO Alliance says it’s found the missing piece in the bridge to a password-free future.
In maglev innovation, Chinese researchers transfer power wirelessly to moving train
Rooftop gardens and greenery can help ease some of the severe heat in cities, according to research from climate scientists
New research shows that pollen season is going to get a lot longer and more intense with climate change
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASN’T ME ON THE TV SHOW — Zodiac Killer cipher is cracked after eluding sleuths for 51 years
Scientists believe there could be an ‘anti-universe’ next to ours – where time runs backwards
Feedback networks, unstable oscillators, shaky fat quivering filters, distorted mayhem, a bunch of labels in Japanese, a bunch of switches and knobs and a tape recorder – Bentō is a delight of software madness. It’s a delicious meal of noise.