Can you think of a random number? Sure you can, but not as good as when you were (or will be) 25 years of age.

Cognitive scientist Nicolas Gauvrit and colleagues at Laboratoire de Recherche Scientifique in Paris, France, tested more than 3,400 people on their ability to "be random" and discovered something interesting: that ability peaked at 25 years of age.

Scientists believe that the ability to behave in a way that appears random arises from some of the most highly developed cognitive processes in humans, and may be connected to abilities such as human creativity. Previous studies have shown that aging diminishes a person's ability to behave randomly. [...]

The scientists analyzed the participants' choices according to their algorithmic randomness, which is based on the idea that patterns that are more random are harder to summarize mathematically. After controlling for characteristics such as gender, language, and education, they found that age was the only factor that affected the ability to behave randomly. This ability peaked at age 25, on average, and declined from then on.

"This experiment is a kind of reverse Turing test for random behavior, a test of strength between algorithms and humans," says study co-author Hector Zenil. "25 is, on average, the golden age when humans best outsmart computers," adds Dr. Gauvrit.

Read more over at Phys.org

Image: @sumirock27

Two turntables and a microphone ... and some delicious, delicious dumplings!

Meet 82-year-old Sumiko Iwamuro, who is a dumpling chef by day and club DJ by night. Iwamuro decided to take up the turntables when she was 70 - today, she's a regular fixture at the DecabarZ, a club in Shinjuku, Tokyo, going by the name DJ Sumirock:

Iwamuro describes her sound as fundamentally techno music, with jazz, French chanson and classical music mixed in. Ever curious and never one to give up her dreams, she hopes one day to debut on the New York club scene.

“When I spin the tables, I just want to match the beat, choose the right music,” she says when asked what keeps her practising her tunes and returning to spin records. “But the best thing is for my audience to enjoy themselves.”

Check out DJ Sumirock in action in this YouTube clip below:

Don't be silly. Robots aren't going to become sentient superbeings and kill us humans. No, that's ridiculous. Why kill us when they can just take all of our jobs and toss us bums out on the street instead.

In an ironic twist that many people who lost their jobs due to competition from cheap labor overseas will appreciate, a Chinese firm discovered that machines are far cheaper than cheap labor. From South China Morning Post:

The machines can sort up to 200,000 packages a day and are self-charging, meaning they can operate around the clock.

An STO Express spokesman told the South China Morning Post on Monday that the robots had helped the company save half the costs it typically required to use human workers.

They also improved efficiency by around 30 per cent and maximised sorting accuracy, he said.

Read the rest over at South China Morning Post or take a look at the cute little job-stealing, er package sorting bots:

Image: Toronto Star

What is the reason that you get up in the morning?

That question may be the answer to the age old quest of living longer, according to this interesting article by Neil Pasricha (previously on Neatorama) in the Toronto Star:

A National Geographic study shows that some of the happiest and longest living people in the world are from Okinawa, Japan. Their average lifespan is seven years longer than ours in North America. They have more 100-year-olds than anywhere else in the world. And you know what they call retirement?

They don’t.

They don’t even have a word for retirement. Literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely.

Instead, they have a word called ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), which roughly translates to “the reason you get out of bed in the morning.” It’s the thing that drives you the most.

Dan Buettner touched on this in his 2009 TED talk about people who live to be 100 year old or even older:

"They have vocabulary for sense of purporse, ikigai ... You know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you're born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate in their life, that's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy."

So, Neatoramanauts, what is your ikigai?

(Via Rusty's Electric Dreams)

Image: @Anthony Quintano

Under the cover of night after the 1987 stock market crash, artist Arturo Di Modica installed a 7,000-lb sculpture of a bronze "Charging Bull" in front of the New York Stock Exchange as a Christmas gift to the people of New York. The bull, Di Modica, had stated, is a symbol of "the strength and power of the American people."

Even though Di Modica's art was a guerilla installation, public outcry when it was impounded by the police led to its permanent installation two blocks south of the Exchange, where it remains as a popular tourist attraction.

Fast forward to today, when artist Kristen Visbal sculpted "Fearless Girl," a girl staring down the bull as a marketing campaign for a stock market index fund comprised of companies that have higher percentage of women in senior leadership roles.

Like the bull, the new Fearless Girl statue was an instant hit. "Fearless Girl stands as a powerful beacon, showing women - young and old - that no dream is too big and no ceiling is too high," wrote public advocate Letitia James to New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

Di Modica, however, was not amused. He claimed that the Fearless Girl statue "distorts the intent of his statue from 'a symbol of prosperity and for strength' into a villain" and that it was done for commercial gain, as reported by NPR. "That is not a symbol! That is an advertising trick."

Di Modica has vowed to fight the effort to make the Fearless Girl into a permanent art installation. And a fight he's going to get - Mayor de Blasio has tweeted "Men who don't like women taking up space are exactly why we need the Fearless Girl."

What do you get when you mix LEGO, Raspberry Pi Zero mini-computer, e-paper display and nostalgia for Apple's 1990 Macintosh Classic? This awesome LEGO Macintosh Classic by programmer Jannis Hermanns.

Take a look at the build pics over at Hermanns' blog. Very cool!

Think your cell phone's security PIN is secure? Here's a new worry: hackers can guess your mobile phone's security PIN with astonishing accuracy just by watching how the phone tilts when you type them in.

"Most smart phones, tablets, and other wearables are now equipped with a multitude of sensors, from the well-known GPS, camera and microphone to instruments such as the gyroscope, proximity, NFC, and rotation sensors and accelerometer," Maryam Mehrnezhad of Newcastle University said, "But because mobile apps and websites don’t need to ask permission to access most of them, malicious programs can covertly ‘listen in’ on your sensor data and use it to discover a wide range of sensitive information about you such as phone call timing, physical activities and even your touch actions, PINs and passwords."

By analyzing the movement and tilt of the phone using data collected by the phone's various internal sensors, the security team was able to crack the four-digit PIN with an astounding 70% accuracy on the first guess, and 100% by the fifth.

Image: @Jennifer Bowman

Penny, a dog owned by Jennifer Bowman's neighbor, loves to say hello. But a tall wooden fence means that the dog has to jump like it's on a trampoline just to get a glimpse. So Bowman had an ingenious solution: a peekaboo hole for a dog (complete with accomodations for the dog's nose, of course!).

Oh, and of course there's a YouTube clip of Penny peeking through the fence.

Image: @Salty Dog Fishing Charters

Dan Hoey of Salty Dog Fishing Charters was fishing for yellowtail kingfish off the coast of Victoria, Australia, when he encountered a whole different kind of fish: a white pointer or better known as a great white shark. Luckily, the fisherman had his trusty red broom.

"We need the broom to clean at the end of the day, that's it's primary job. It's second job has become fending off white pointers," Hoey told 9News.com.au, "It was coming right up to the boat. It didn't bite it properly but it started to get pretty fired up at one stage."

The great white sharked, nicknamed "Black Betty," circled the boat a couple of times before swimming off, knowing that it has met its match in the trusty red broom.

Here's the video:

Nils Ušakovs may be the Big Man in Riga but we know who's actually the boss. Usakovs, the mayor of the capital of Latvia, was being interviewed live on television when his cat nonchalantly walked on his desk to take a sip out of his mug.

The moment it happened is at 17:15 in this video:

Well, at least the cat walked in gently and didn't just strut in ...

Image: @mimles

Mimi Choi, a 31-year-old makeup artist from Vancouver, Canada, creates some of the most fascinating optical illusions we've seen. The artist's work went viral recently, and deservedly so. This one above, called "Sliced + Shifted Face" is my favorite.

Just how did she do it?

Choi explained:

Key to doing this type of #trickart is using the color black to mimic space and depth, and using light colors to highlight edges to create the illusion of height, volume and separation. Taking your photo and video at the right angle is also crucial in creating an impactful illusion.

I think she used magic. Don't miss the video:

Loneliness is bad for your health, that much we know.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy once remarked that despite the ubiquity of social media, Americans are facing "an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation."

One of the worst things about loneliness is that it can be a self-perpetuating loop:

... in a cruel twist, the loneliest among us are set up to get lonelier still. People with few social connections experience brain changes that cause them to be more likely to view human faces as threatening, making it harder for them to bond with others.

In this interesting article over The Atlantic, Olga Khazan spoke with University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo about why people are getting lonelier and how to break the loneliness cycle:

Khazan: Why do people who are lonely interpret social situations more negatively?

Cacioppo: [...] If you look at early humans and other hominids, they were not uniformly positive toward each other. We exploit each other, we punish each other, we threaten each other, we coerce. And so it isn't that I want to connect with anyone, I need to worry about friend or foe. Just like bitter versus sweet, poison vs. non poison, if I make an error and detect a person as a foe who turns out to be a friend, that's okay, I don’t make the friend as fast, but I survive.

But if I mistakenly detect someone as a friend when they're a foe, that can cost me my life. Over evolution, we’ve been shaped to have this bias.

That sets up an expectation, because what I expect is often what I see. If I think you're going to be hostile, I'm going to answer questions very differently than if I trust you.

You’re motivated to connect. But promiscuous connection with others can lead to death. A neural mechanism kicks in to make you a little skeptical or dubious about connecting.

Read the rest over at The Atlantic.

Well, at least this snake didn't swallow a porcupine, but ouch!

This YouTube clip showed a boa constrictor in Brazil that realized that hugging, er contricting, a porcupine (specifically the Brazilian porcupine with short, thick, whitish or yellowish spines) is a bad, bad idea.

It looks like it tried to bite the porcupine as well, which got him a mouthful of barbs:

YouTube clip - via Boing Boing

Image: Niki Walker

Love Costco? Not like Kimber Walker, you don't!

The 5-year-old girl loves shopping with her parents at Costco so much that she asked for a Costco-themed birthday party. "I really don't know what possessed her to want that theme," Kimber's mom Niki Walker said to TODAY, "She loves the pizza and the samples ... and the giant teddy bears."

Imagine the giant-sized goodie bags that the partygoers get! Check out more cute pics over at TODAY (warning: auto-play video with sound)

If you like that, don't miss our 10 Fascinating Facts About Costco article.

Images: @SarahCatherine

Bryce Maine of Eufaula High School in Alabama knows that his grandmother had never been to the prom. So on his 18th birthday, Bryce asked his "Nanny" Catherine Maine to the senior prom as his date.

Nanny said yes - she so excited to be asked to the prom that she bought a new dress - but unfortunately the school said no. WTVM reported that the board of education "thinks that if Bryce takes his grandmother to prom then future students will do it as a joke and make the school a mockery."

Bryce's cousin made a post on Facebook, which went viral. After the social media uproar over the matter, the school's principal explained:

"Safety of students and staff is the first and most important of the many tasks of a school administrator. For the 10 years I have been high school principal, we have denied requests each year from students asking to bring older dates to prom.  We do not chance leaving any stone unturned when it comes to safety. Most high schools have an age limit for prom attendees."