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The racial differences in the US are reflected in the countries of origin after various populations. Overall, people of European and East Asian descent spend much less time on social media and then people from latin America, the Middle East or the Southeast Asia. The map above relaxed data...

I came across this intriguing ceremonial hat dating from about 1000 to 800 BCE. Here is a close-up. It seems to have been used as a kind of calendar. Archaeologists seem to believe that it was used as a hat, but it could just as well have been used for display in a sort of temple.

The European search engine Ecosia has reached a new milestone. They have now planted 250 million trees. Just by millions of people switching to a browser that puts privacy and the environment first.

More than half of all new city buses in Europe are now electric.

A new bioRxiv preprint reports that a small subset of Neanderthal-derived genetic variants still affects brain structure in present-day humans, even though many archaic variants appear to have been removed over time by selection. Using genetic and MRI data, the authors argue that surviving...

If anyone is still in doubt that the US war on Iran is hugely profitable to the United States, have a look at this chart. Qatar's LNG exports have dropped from 8.3% of the world's supply to almost nothing. The US, to a lower extent, Australia have filled the gap. Overall consumption has dropped...

Most of us have an intuitive sense that people differ not just in how "smart" they are overall, but in their specific cognitive strengths and weaknesses — some people are gifted at math, others at language, others at rapid processing. But how much of that profile is inherited? A major 2022...

Here is a list of all the individuals whose mtDNA was determined from the samples tested in this study (on he assumption that the maternal lineage was not broken). Count numberName of Historical FigureDate of deathDynastySpousemtDNA HGSample IDTitleSource 1N.N.??Uroš IT2b2b1 2Marija of...

We had already discussed the pre-print last year here. Good to have the final paper. As mentioned before, there were two non-paternity events with Leszek and Kasimierz I

A summary of Steve Stewart-Williams's recent newsletter post, itself summarising Russell Warne's Quillette article "Education's Elephant in the Room" Most of us want to believe that a good school can level the playing field — that with the right teachers, curriculum, and resources, all...

It's important to keep in mind that this study found that AI lies specifically when it is under pressure. This made me wonder what it meant exactly by under pressure. The MASK benchmark study defines "under pressure" as exposing AI models to carefully crafted pressure prompts — situations where...

A team of researchers from the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI has published a groundbreaking study exposing a troubling gap in how we evaluate AI trustworthiness. Their benchmark, called MASK (Model Alignment between Statements and Knowledge), reveals that most leading AI models will readily...

This chart shows the evolution of house prices and happiness levels over a 10-year period from 2015 to 2025. It attempts to determine if there is a relation between rising unhappiness in English-speaking countries and the increase in housing prices. These are highlighted in orange...

We've all suspected it. Now there's peer-reviewed evidence. A study published in Science — co-authored by researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon — found that today's most popular AI assistants systematically validate users, even when those users are clearly wrong. The paper, led by PhD...

Sorry I thought you posted twice the same message.

In what world are the Epstein files, anywhere remotely as important as this war? Over 3,000 people have already died in this conflict. As far as I know, nobody died in the Epstein files. Rape is bad but not as bad as death.

Personally, I believe it's all just an act. Just think about who wins in this situation. As long as the Strait of Hormuz stays closed petroleum prices increase. And who is the biggest oil producer in the world? The United States. Gulf countries basically cannot sell their oil anymore. So who...

Here are four other strong tea-drinking cultures. Iranian people consume 1.5 kg of dried tea leaves per capita per year, placing them in between British and Russian people. Polish people drink one kilo per year, about the same as Japanese people, making them the biggest tea drinkers in Europe...

That's a question that had been on my mind. How do countries differ in the age at which children start drinking tea in tea-drinking cultures such as Britain, Turkey, Morocco, Russia and Japan. I also wondered whether tea was usually available at school in these countries. Tea Around the World...

I asked the AI if among prominent historical feminists, be it writers, activists, or even politicians, a significant percentage of them ended up childless after their childbearing years? Answer : Based on a biographical analysis of 48 prominent historical feminists — spanning proto-feminist...