Who is C F Frost? It’s the name on all American Express cards in their ads. “Charles Frost–or Chuck, as we like to call him–is a real person.” American Express used his name on sample cards in the “Do you […]
An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Dry as a….? “You’ll notice that the top 3 bone, desert, and dust make up 43% of all usage, and there is a pretty quick drop-off after that with a long tail […]
Cucumbers used to be called “cowcumbers.” “By the end of the 18th century, ‘cowcumber’ had become a standard pronunciation, and even spread to the U.S.” It later became a class marker, and Dickens used it to signal lower class characters. […]
UFOs are the easy belief. “UFOs haven’t been disproven, whereas the blank slate has been disconfirmed nearly 3,000 times.” Jehan Azad argues that some respectable-sounding views (CICO denial, anti-building housing takes, tabula rasa) contradict entire fields more directly than aliens […]
China’s planting 100 billion trees and is 66% done. “Since 1978, China has planted more than 66 billion trees” to slow the expansion of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. The plan is to add 34 billion more over the next […]
How AI killed student writing (and revived it). From NYT: “High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.” I, for one, am sad to have missed […]
Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. “WOW!! First time seeing @Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. Fully nerding out and losing my mind”. Fruit from your favorite vacuum maker! ~ learn more
Magic mushrooms’ remarkable impact on Alzheimer’s patient. “Approximately 19 h post-administration, spontaneous autobiographical speech emerged.” A Frontiers in Neuroscience case report describes a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who showed days to weeks of temporary improvements after a high-dose psilocybin mushroom session, […]
Some people resist GLP-1 drugs. “More GLP-1 was needed to have the same biological effect, meaning they were resistant to GLP-1.” Stanford-led researchers found about 10% of people carry PAM gene variants tied to weaker blood sugar improvements on GLP-1 […]
Universal mortality signatures. Dense reading. The important bit is that researchers found a couple genes across multiple species that highly correlate with aging. “We developed rodent multi-tissue clocks of chronological age and expected mortality and decomposed them into co-regulated modules […]