[Many thanks to Murch for their generous hit on our Ko-Fi tip jar. It is greatly appreciated, and helps keep this place going]

Chemists create world’s thinnest spaghetti

Co-author Professor Gareth Williams (UCL School of Pharmacy) said, “Nanofibers, such as those made of starch, show potential for use in wound dressings as they are very porous. In addition, nanofibers are being explored for use as a scaffold to regrow tissue, as they mimic the extra-cellular matrix—a network of proteins and other molecules that cells build to support themselves.”

Will spaghetti bandages with a neosporin sauce require a red wine, or a white wine IV drip?

The secret history of the world’s first suburb

Samual [sic] Brooks was the first to break ranks, converting his Moseley Street house into a warehouse and building a new suburban villa for his family far enough away from the smog and dirt of the city but near enough to be able to travel to work in his carriage every day. But he did not just build a house for himself, he built an entire neighbourhood where his fellow merchants (horrified that one of their neighbours was now a warehouse) could live permanently. Whalley Range, the world’s first suburb, was born.

Cities seem to have an interesting life cycle. First the posh people want to live there, and then they don’t, and then they do again. I’ve saved myself a lot of trouble by simply avoiding them.

Imagine a land in which Big Tech can’t send you down online rabbit holes or use algorithms to overcharge you

Internet echo chambers and nasty e-commerce tricks that analyze your behavior to milk you for more cash are set to be banned – in China.

Beijing’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), on Sunday launched a campaign to crack down on such practices and the recommendation algorithms that power them.

What many refer to as echo chambers, the CAC has called “information cocoons.” It wants to force tech providers into coming up with ways to prevent them, and has called for a ban on pushing “highly homogeneous content.”

Highly homogeneous content has never been a problem on this site. Having the attention span of a goldfish helps.

YouTube users report their recommendations are suddenly a total mess

More recently, YouTube and other platforms like TikTok have faced scrutiny from the European Commission under the Digital Services Act for not being transparent about how their recommendation systems work. This includes concerns about promoting harmful content or amplifying misinformation. Regulators are now pressuring these platforms to reveal more about how their algorithms mitigate risks like election manipulation and mental health issues for minors.

What flavor government internet intervention do you prefer? Ramen or spaghetti?

How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?

The median score on the test was 60%, only a little above chance. The mean was 60.6%. Participants said the task was harder than expected (median difficulty 4 on a 1-5 scale).

How meaningful is this? I tried to make the test as fair as possible by including only the best works from each category; on the human side, that meant taking prestigious works that had survived the test of time; on the AI side, it meant tossing the many submissions that had garbled text, misshapen hands, or some similar deformity. But this makes it unrepresentative of a world where many AI images will have these errors.

The author cheats a bit by favoring really bad human artists. What difference would it make if a machine or Basquiat painted something?

‘I have no money’: Thousands of Americans see their savings vanish in Synapse fintech crisis

Morris, like thousands of other customers, was snared in the collapse of a behind-the-scenes fintech firm called Synapse and has been locked out of her account for six months as of November. She held out hope that her money was still secure. Then she learned how much Evolve Bank & Trust, the lender where her funds were supposed to be held, was prepared to return to her.

“We were informed last Monday that Evolve was only going to pay us $500 out of that $280,000,” Morris said during a court hearing last week, her voice wavering. “It’s just devastating.”

I went to the Yotta website. It’s a ridiculous lottery website. The apotheosis of “stupid games.”

Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation

On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland’s government announced a new and very strange policy.

All Finns were required to take out a pair of scissors and snip their banknotes in half. This was known in Finland as setelinleikkaus, or banknote cutting. Anyone who owned any of the three largest denomination Finnish banknotes — the 5000 markka note, the 1000, or the 500 — was required to perform this operation immediately. The left side of the note could still be used to buy things, but at only half its value. So if a Finn had a 1000 markka note in their wallet, henceforth he or she could now only buy 500 markka worth of items at stores. As for the right side, it could no longer be spent and effectively became a bond

I’m sure the average Finn would have preferred to cut all the bankers in half instead, but they probably weren’t consulted on the matter.

Oldest US firearm unearthed in Arizona, a bronze cannon linked to Coronado expedition

Independent researchers in Arizona have unearthed a bronze cannon linked to the Vázquez de Coronado expedition, making it the oldest firearm ever found in the continental United States. The discovery sheds new light on the artillery used during the 1539–1542 expedition into the American Southwest.

I can’t imagine what the local dudes wielding bows and arrows and stone clubs thought when the conquistadors touched off that bad boy.