12 Trivia Tidbits for Friday, May 10, 2024
Some of America’s best and brightest brains are in a war against parasites and glitches. So if you’re lucky enough to have a working brain, treat it with a fact binge!
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Brace for Mental Health Diagnosis Apps
MoodCapture is an app that can collect basic data from your phone, and accurately diagnose depression about 75 percent of the time. It analyzes random selfies for symptoms (like being in bed all day), and combines that with motion data (like the angle you’re holding your phone at). It’s only a matter of time before some A.I. dipshit says he can diagnose you with Cotard’s syndrome.
What Does Human Meat Taste Like?
Journalists and researchers who have talked to actual cannibals say it’s often described as having a beefy taste with a porky consistency. Some outliers have made weirder comparisons, like roast turkey or raw tuna.
Uber Appears to Be Eating Shit
Last year, industry killer and labor exploiter Uber was profitable for the first time since its founding 2009. They were talking a big game about sustained growth going forward, but they ended Q1 2024 back in the red, thanks to some legal settlements and stupid investments.
LSD Is a Promising Treatment for Anxiety
The first scientists who freaked out on elephant-strength doses of LSD could never have guessed: LSD can help cure anxiety. While it was once marketed as “a cure for everything from schizophrenia to criminal behavior, ‘sexual perversions,’ and alcoholism,” a recent clinical trial finally found that a little bit of LSD can be a solid treatment for anxiety.
A Growing German Political Movement: Cheaper Kebabs
A German political party is campaigning on putting a price cap on the popular street food doner kebab. Put more Germanly, Die Linke party is demanding a Dönerpreisbremse.
Science Says Smoking Weed Doesn’t Make You Lazy After All
A bunch of cool scientists published a study that found that stoners’ “behaviors might change a bit in the moment while they’re high, but our evidence shows they are not lazy or lacking motivation at all.”
RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm
The New York Times found a 2012 deposition in which the 47th President of the United States explained that a dark spot in a brain scan “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”
The First On-Screen Death in Movie History
The performers in the film were uncredited, but it’s thought that actor David Henderson flopped his body down dramatically on a table in the 1895 film Trilby, making him the first guy to die in a movie. A much more elaborate death happened later that year, in Edison’s The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, when actor Robert Thomae was beheaded.
A Huge Milestone for Renewable Energy
Thirty percent of the world’s electricity in 2023 was produced via renewable resources. That’s the highest in history.
Some Birds Bathe in Ants
About 200 species of birds engage in anting, the practice of letting ants (or sometimes millipedes) crawl all over them. The bugs secrete acidic compounds that act as protection against other insects, mites, fungi and bacteria. And sometimes they’ll eat the ants after they’ve expelled all their acid, which makes them tastier.
The First Neuralink Has Glitched, But Everything’s FINE
Neuralink just admitted it: The dude is totally fine, don’t even worry about him, but “a number of threads retracted from the brain, resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes.”
Google’s Finally Using A.I. for Pharmaceuticals
One of the few actually cool uses of A.I. is finding molecular combinations that may address or cure various diseases. Doing it the analog way is extremely time, resource and data intensive, but A.I. can blow through countless possible configurations in no time flat. Google just released a product called AlphaFold 3 that aims to predict “the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules.”
