Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep.
Scientists think sleep is the brain’s rinse cycle, when fluid percolating through the organ flushes out chemical waste that accumulated while we were awake. But what propels this circulation has been uncertain. A study of mice, reported today in Cell, suggests regular contractions of blood vessels in the brain, stimulated by the periodic release of a chemical cousin of adrenaline, push the fluid along.
Three articles regarding the ongoing Elon Musk coup.
The newsy bits from the Verge, Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government, particularly the GSA:
The GSA, an agency most of us have never had to think about, is in charge of buildings, sure. But also it runs an awful lot of the technical infrastructure of the government — it is basically the feds’ IT. If the US government were a brain, the GSA is the brain stem, the part that manages heartbeats and breathing so they’re below the level of thoughts.
The US Treasury has designated DOGE an insider threat:
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
And Mike Masnick sums it up, No people didn’t vote for this:
The campaign promised economic relief: cheaper eggs and lower gas prices. Instead, voters got an unelected tech billionaire systematically dismantling federal agencies, surrounded by a coterie of 4chan edgelord trolls LARPing as cabinet secretaries, all operating without congressional oversight or constitutional authority. They voted for economic stability and got the effective end of the American Constitutional Republic instead.
If you watched Superbowl 59 yesterday, you most likely saw Tom Brady’s wrist shine brighter than the sun.Turns out it’s a $740,000 piece with 338 yellow sapphires, 338 diamonds, and an 18k yellow gold case.
The evil housekeeper problem refers to a concept in computer security where once somebody is in the room where your computer is, security of that device can no longer be guaranteed. And right now, we are seeing this play out in real time with Elon Musk and DOGE.
You might think that there would be technical measures to stop someone right out of high school from coming in and changing the code to a government system. That the system could require two-factor authentication to deploy the code to the cloud. That you would need a smart card to log in to a specific system to do that. Nope—all those technical measures can be circumvented by coercion at the hands of the evil housekeeper.
Midnight in Chernobyl is a meticulous examination of the Chernobyl disaster. It accounts for the bureaucratic neglect the Soviet system grew into that contributed towards key events. Neglect that contributed to the way the plant and reactor were designed, the town and state response, and the attempted cover up. Plus, it tells of the horrific human toll paid by those exposed to the radiation.
Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.
Katy Kelleher connects how scent shouldn’t be discounted as one of our senses. Scent makes a place, both physical as to where we are in the world at a particular time and the emotion and memories it evokes. With the background as a perfumer, they illustrate the importance unique smells brought to different cultures. Historically, language has had difficulty accurately translating or describing smell despite the power it can evoke.
Helen Keller called our sense of smell the “fallen angel.”
“It is difficult to put into words the thing itself,” she wrote. “There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.”
Do you like chocolate, peanut butter, a gentle but satisfying crunch with a light touch of salt? Here’s a super easy homemade crunch bar recipe in 15 minutes (plus chill time).
This is the Tom Green Documentary is an insightful work of nostalgia, showing his rise, how he made it work, and how he understood media and technology. The documentary serves as a segue to his new reality series on Prime.
He performed TikTok, street style pranks before Gen Z was born. He executed Jackass style physical stunts before the Jackass crew got together. He even produced a web stream talk show before podcasting became a word.
Green’s parents and friends all appear, and towards the end, there’s a contemplative aura about him.
From first singing, the song, Pink Pony Club in front of 50 people in 2021 and thinking it too a 150,000 person sing-along in 2024.
Aspiring piano tuner, Josiah Jackson, fixed a public piano in O’Hare Airport during an 8 hour layover.
On YouTube, his channel name is the Piano Doctor, and he posted a video of the endeavor.