The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.

The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users’ most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.

Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.

via NSA and GCHQ target ‘leaky’ phone apps like Angry Birds to scoop user data | World news | The Guardian.

How a 40-year-old IT consultant became nod, one of Silk Road’s highest volume heroin dealers, who turned informant and then fugitive.

The Daily Dot – The final confessions of a Silk Road kingpin.

xkcd: Cold.

[Love Monsanto or hate them, this is pretty interesting. Note: the use of the word “organic” in the headline is completely misleading; they mean “non-GMO.” -egg]

But here’s the twist: The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren’t genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same tech­nology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn’t mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark’s division is drawing on Monsanto’s accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor.

via Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie – Wired Science.

I just finished Cat Valente’s _Deathless_. One of the best books I’ve ever read. If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, you owe it to yourself to read this as soon as possible. Valente isn’t Gaiman — she’s something rare and beautiful and unique — but his work is the closest point of reference I can offer. They’re both working in the realm of fairy tale as literature, fairy tale as high art. In this case it’s a Russian folk tale (warning! Spoilers on the Wikipedia article about the folk tale), woven together with the gritty history of the Siege of Leningrad. _Deathless_ is powerful and mythic and moving, and I give it my very highest recommendation. -Egg

[Really fantastic piece of journalism from George Saunders. -egg]

A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? Let’s find out.

via Longform Reprints: The Incredible Buddha Boy by George Saunders.

[I don’t give a damn about artisanal toast, but the story ends up really being about a pretty amazing person. -egg]

At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. “I did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,” she said. “I wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.”

The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast,” she said.

Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.

via How Did Toast Become the Latest Artisanal Food Craze? – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society.

[Want. -egg]

The ‘Skull Chair’ is part of my ‘Vanitas’ collection which is a collection of products inspired by the Dutch vanitas still-life paintings from the 16th and 17th century. The characteristic type of paintings where symbols of emptiness, time and death were placed on the canvas as a reminder of the vanity of earthly life. My goal was to combine the idea of thinking about death with a modern design vision and to allow the user of the product to enjoy every moment of his life by surrounding himself with the Vanitas symbols. This creates an environment that makes you understand the mortality and the absurdity of the present, but does so by letting you enjoy the very moment by giving an authentic and interesting product experience.

via Skull chair with brain ottoman – Boing Boing.

Created by artist Kohei Nawa (previously here and here) for the 2013 Aichi Triennale, Foam is an immersive cloud-like installation made from huge plumes of amorphous bubbles, meant to mimic a bleak primordial landscape. Nawa is known for his explorations of cellular forms as seen in his extensive series of PixCell sculptures where animal forms are covered in glass beads, and Foam seems to be a natural extension of this.

via Immersive Foam Clouds Tower Over Visitors to the 2013 Aichi Triennale | Colossal.

[Oooh, induced neuroplasticity? Hell yeah! -egg]

Research had previously shown that adult mice given histone-deacetylase inhibiting drugs (HDAC inhibitors) could “establish perceptual preferences that are otherwise impossible to acquire after youth.” To test whether this connection also existed in humans, Valproate, another HDAC inhibitor, was given to a group of healthy young men with no musical training. The men were then asked to perform a set of exercises for two weeks with the aim of improving their pitch while another control group was asked to perform the same exercises, but given a placebo.

According to the study, those subjects given valproate learned to identify pitch “significantly better than those taking the placebo.” Hensch calls the results remarkable, telling NPR that until now there had been “no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.” The implications of the study aren’t limited to learning how to sing beautifully: by altering brain plasticity, users of valproate could conceivably learn other skills normally picked up during the early critical period. Hensch picks out language learning as an obvious area of application for the drug.

via The pill that might give you perfect pitch by altering your brain | The Verge.