A theme park next door would probably come with some trade-offs. Like, horrific screams whirring past your house, for example.
Universal Studios Hollywood’s “Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift” coaster—its first-ever outdoor roller coaster—has been in technical rehearsals since July, when a limited number of park guests were invited to test it. The ride hits 72 mph and features 360-degree rotating vehicles designed to simulate drifting. It sits on a hillside in the park’s upper lot, elevated above the Lakeside Golf Course, overlooking the residential streets of Toluca Lake below.
The neighbors noticed immediately. “When it’s running, it’s constant, and it sounds like bloody murder over there,” Toluca Lake resident Colby Jensen told KTLA. “It’s like a horror film going on. Constant screaming, yelling. Very intrusive.” Patrick Nazari described it to the LA Times with similar alarm: “You think something is happening. Like someone is getting murdered out there.” A third resident, Leonard R. Garner Jr., added: “I heard it, and I thought to myself, there are going to be problems with this.”
Universal Is Adding Sound Barriers After Complaints About Its New ‘Fast & Furious’ Coaster
The ride’s location compounds the issue. An outdoor coaster at 72 mph on an open hillside, with no natural buffer between the track and the residential neighborhood below, sends rider screams across the golf course and into homes with the doors shut.
Universal had tried to get ahead of this. Inside the Magic reported that sound-shield panels were incorporated around portions of the coaster in February, months before riders ever boarded. The park also promoted “sound reduction technology” as part of the ride’s design. Then the actual screaming started. LA City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian this week announced Universal would install two additional barriers, with construction expected to be complete by early September. Universal says the ride currently meets sound ordinance requirements and is adding more barriers in response to community feedback.
Universal’s statement walked a careful line, noting it welcomed community input, planned a meeting with HOA leadership, and would “continue to engage with our neighbors as the coaster remains in technical rehearsals ahead of its opening.” An official opening date has not been announced.
Universal’s first outdoor roller coaster doesn’t have an opening date yet. The neighbors, though, know exactly what it sounds like.
Svalbard sits about 620 miles from the North Pole and is one of the few places left on Earth where polar bears roam freely. Thousands of tourists visit every year to see them in their natural habitat, and the Golden Rule is—look, snap some pics, and move on. Not everyone gets that.
Earlier this month, an unidentified boat operator sailing through a fjord in northeastern Svalbard spotted a bear resting on land and responded by blasting the ship’s foghorn. The bear woke up and moved. The governor of the territory’s office issued a fine of $5,255 under Section 30a of the Svalbard Environmental Act, which prohibits needlessly disturbing, attracting, or pursuing a polar bear. The operator agreed to pay.
This wasn’t the first time this has happened. In June 2024, two guides with a French shipping company were each fined around $2,100 after steering paying guests in rubber boats toward a polar bear and cub feeding on a whale carcass in northern Svalbard. That incident was at least somewhat understandable, however dumb and misguided. Someone wanting a closer look is a human impulse. Blasting a foghorn at a sleeping bear is just being an a**hole.
Norway Fined a Boat Operator for Disturbing a Sleeping Polar Bear in Svalbard
The rules have gotten stricter because tourism has boomed. Svalbard saw 506 cruise ships carrying 67,000 passengers in 2024 alone, a number that has doubled in under 15 years. Protections that took effect in January 2025 now require vessels to stay at least 300 meters from bears in summer and 500 meters through June. Fines are just the starting point for violations. In serious cases, the penalty goes up to five years in prison.
The bears are doing better than the headlines around them suggest. Jon Aars, a senior scientist with the Norwegian Polar Institute, led a team that tracked the weight and size of nearly 800 bears in Svalbard between 1992 and 2019 and found them healthy and reproducing despite major sea ice loss. “I was quite surprised,” Aars told CBS News, “because we have lost so much sea ice since I started.” His data suggests the bears have adapted, hunting more efficiently as shrinking ice concentrates their prey. “Some of us would predict that they should be in trouble already,” he said.
They’ve outlasted unregulated hunting and a warming Arctic. A foghorn is a minor problem by comparison, but it’s still a d*ck move.
Some weeks ask you to dream bigger. This one asks you to be honest about what you’ve already got. Saturn opposing Venus hits exact Friday, stargazer, and whatever you’ve been carrying — a relationship running on hope, a desire you haven’t fully accounted for, an image of yourself you’ve been maintaining for other people — is going to need a clear-eyed look before the week is out. It’s not asking you to give anything up, just to see it clearly.
That’s not as grim as it sounds. Leo season closes Saturday, which means the sky is already in transition, asking what comes next. The First Quarter Moon midweek pushes for action rather than contemplation. Uranus squaring the Sun from Thursday adds a jolt to the identity question — not destabilizing, just honest. What this week wants from you isn’t a breakdown. It’s an accurate read. Those are different things; this week knows it.
How will your sign fare this week?
Aries: March 21 – April 19
Mars in Cancer has had you running on instinct and loyalty all month — protecting what you care about, moving from feeling rather than strategy. That’s not wrong, Aries, but Saturn opposing Venus this week puts a harder question underneath it: is what you’ve been so fiercely defending actually built on something solid, or just something that’s always been there?
Sit with that before Friday. The fog that’s been clouding your drive starts to lift right as Saturn’s opposition hits exact, and what you’re left with is a cleaner look at where your energy has actually been going. Some of it will check out. Some of it won’t. Either way, you’ll know — and you can adjust without making it a whole thing.
You know what you want — that’s never been the problem, Taurus. What Saturn opposing Venus this week is actually asking is whether you’ve been honest with yourself about what getting it costs. Not just money, though that’s part of it. Time, energy, compromise, the whole shape of your life you’d need to rearrange to actually have the thing you keep coming back to.
Saturn opposition Venus goes exact Friday, and it’s not here to take things away — it’s here to make the accounting visible. Jupiter sextile Venus is still in play early in the week, keeping the warmth alive. Use that window to get honest about what you actually want to fight for. By Friday you’ll need to know the answer.
Last week had a lot of words in it — big ones, pointed ones, ones you can’t entirely take back. Mercury trine Saturn on Monday is the follow-through ask, Gemini: did you mean what you said, and can you back it up with something concrete? Saturn doesn’t let bold declarations just float — it wants the structure underneath them.
Mercury conjuncting the Sun is building all week, which means how you think and how you present yourself are starting to converge in ways that will stick around longer than usual. That’s not pressure, it’s an invitation. Get your thinking straight early in the week while Saturn’s trine is keeping things grounded. What you settle on this week about who you are will hold.
You’re good at making people feel taken care of — it comes naturally, Cancer, and most of the time you don’t even track the cost. But with the Moon moving through relational territory all week and Saturn opposing Venus hitting exact Friday, the sky is asking a question you usually deflect: who’s holding you while you’re busy holding everyone else?
This isn’t about keeping score. It’s about noticing the imbalance before it becomes resentment. Mars in your sign has you running on protective instinct, which means you’ll feel the impulse to keep giving even when you’re running low. Resist it this week. What you need is allowed to count too — Saturn’s opposition is as much an invitation as it is a limit.
The eclipse last week started something internally — a revision of who you are versus who you’ve been presenting. This week, Uranus squaring the Sun takes that process external, Leo. Something in your outside world is going to push back against the image you’ve been maintaining, and it won’t be polite about it.
That’s not a punishment. Uranus square Sun is the universe stress-testing what you’ve built around your identity — if it holds up, good. If it doesn’t, better to find out now than later. Saturday is the last day of Leo season, which means this week is also a closing. Whatever needed renegotiating about how you move through the world gets one more push before Virgo season asks something entirely different of you.
You’ve been in preparation mode for a while now — refining, adjusting, finding the one more thing that needs fixing before you feel ready. Mercury trine Saturn on Monday is the sky telling you the work is actually done, Virgo. The thinking is sound. The plan holds up. You’ve done the analysis. You don’t need another revision pass.
Virgo season starts Sunday, which means this week is the threshold between getting ready and actually going. Mercury conjuncting the Sun is building all week, pulling your mind and your sense of self into alignment — that’s not an accident. Who you are walking into your season doesn’t need to be perfected first. The prep work is finished, and it was good. Put it down and go.
You’re generous with people — you extend the benefit of the doubt, find the charitable read, hold space for the possibility that things will improve. That’s one of your better qualities, Libra. But Saturn opposing Venus in your sign this week, hitting exact Friday, is asking you to look at the evidence rather than the potential.
This isn’t about pessimism — it’s about accuracy. Jupiter sextile Venus keeps some warmth in the early part of the week, which helps. But by Friday, Saturn’s opposition makes the distance between what a relationship feels like and what it actually delivers hard to paper over. You already know which ones are holding up and which ones you’ve been carrying on goodwill alone. Saturn just makes it official
You’re careful about how much of yourself you let through — what you show, what you hold back, how much access people actually get. It’s not manipulation, it’s self-protection. But Saturn opposing Venus this week, hitting exact Friday, starts making that strategy feel costly in a way that’s harder to ignore than usual, Scorpio.
Not because anyone is pushing. Because you are. Pluto trine Uranus running in the background all week is loosening something at a structural level — the part of you that decided a long time ago that full visibility wasn’t safe. Saturn’s opposition isn’t asking you to throw the doors open. It’s asking whether the level of distance you’re maintaining is still actually protecting you, or just keeping you alone.
Jupiter sextiling Venus to start the week puts something warm and actually good in front of you, Sagittarius — a connection, an opportunity, a moment that feels easy in a way you don’t always let yourself enjoy. Your instinct will be to treat it as a stepping stone to something bigger. It isn’t. It’s the thing.
The week gets more demanding as it goes — Saturn trine Jupiter is still building, still asking the structural questions, and the First Quarter Moon midweek wants action, not contemplation. But the window Monday and Tuesday gives you is one to actually inhabit before the week picks up speed. Not everything has to be the setup for something larger. Some things are just good. Let this one be that.
You’re comfortable with what Saturn asks — discipline, accountability, doing the hard thing without complaint. What’s less comfortable, Capricorn, is when that same energy turns toward your relationships. Saturn opposing Venus exact Friday isn’t about your work or your ambitions. It’s pointed squarely at whether the people in your life are getting the same investment you give everything else.
The honest answer for most Capricorns is: not quite. It’s easier to go cold than vulnerable, easier to be busy than present, easier to optimize what responds to effort than sit with what doesn’t. This week the opposition makes that trade-off visible in a way that’s hard to rationalize past. You don’t have to overhaul anything. But you do have to look.
Uranus squaring the Sun from Thursday onward is making a lot of people uncomfortable this week — identity feeling shaky, outside circumstances refusing to cooperate with the image they’ve been projecting. You recognize this feeling, Aquarius. Disruption is where you’re most at home, and watching the rest of the sky get rattled by your ruling planet is not exactly a hardship. That’s not a problem. It’s just something to be clear-eyed about.
Because there’s a difference between using instability as fuel and just enjoying watching things get complicated. Uranus square Sun gives you energy this week that others don’t have access to — the question is whether you’re pointing it at something that actually moves or just running it in circles. Use it deliberately.
The fog that’s been sitting over your desires and decisions starts to lift this week, Pisces — Neptune opposition Venus clears Monday, and Neptune square Mars is waning fast. You’ve been navigating by feel for a while now, which is comfortable territory for you. What’s less comfortable is what happens when you can actually see.
Because what comes into focus isn’t always what you were hoping for. Saturn opposing Venus exact Friday means the clearer picture arrives with an edge to it — not cruel, just honest. Some of what you’ve been holding onto in the blur looks different in the open. That’s not a loss. It’s just the information you needed to make a decision you’ve been putting off. Now you have it.
No one’s getting hired by sending a PDF into the void anymore.
The math on job searching in 2026 helps explain why. The average corporate job posting attracts 242 applications, and according to data from The Interview Guys, 75% of resumes never reach a human being at all, filtered out in under a second by AI before anyone with a pulse sees them. Only 2-3% of applications lead to interviews. So now, people are posting their resumes on TikTok.
What started as a Gen Z workaround is now an actual job search strategy across generations. TikTok has officially overtaken LinkedIn as the top job search tool among Gen Z, with 22.1% using it compared to 20.8% on LinkedIn. And 46% of Gen Z workers say they’ve landed a job or internship by using the platform, according to Zety’s 2025 Gen Z Career Trends Report. One in five scored an interview because of a post.
Gen Z Is Using TikTok to Find Jobs Because Regular Applications Feel Broken
Times are-a-changin’ and how people look for jobs is no exception. “The application process seems kind of broken, and applying to jobs on LinkedIn feels like a wild black hole where your resume gets screened out by AI filters before you get seen by a person,” creative strategist Josh Katz told the New York Post. Katz posted a 60-second video resume and invited his comments section to serve as his reference letter. It pulled hundreds of thousands of views, produced multiple interviews, and kept pulling in freelance work months after posting.
TikTok is just the most visible example. 73% of millennials say they found their last job through a social media platform, and Instagram portfolios, LinkedIn video posts, and YouTube channels are all new platforms of choice, especially in creative fields. Employers are already looking at your social media profiles anyway: 91% of U.S. companies now use social media in their hiring process, with 82% using it to find candidates who aren’t actively applying anywhere. People sourced through social media are eight times more likely to get hired than those coming through traditional job boards.
The one real caution is how public this all is. A post that comes across as sloppy or desperate can circulate just as fast as one that was done well. Before you post, ask yourself if this is how you would really present yourself at an interview. Just because the platform changed doesn’t mean the job standards did.
China’s short drama industry is worth nearly $18 billion globally. And some of that money is going toward very personalized passion projects
Actor Zhong Yufei, 23, recently went public on social media about a production that was supposed to be his big break in the Chinese short drama world. The unnamed investor behind the 50-episode series had two non-negotiable conditions for putting up the money: she would play the lead female role, and she would have final say on the script. No one on set was in a position to argue, because she could pull the plug at any time, and everyone knew it.
What she did with that power was commission over 60 kissing scenes.
According to Zhong and producer Meng Xing, who later came forward to explain what happened, the crew pushed back. The director reportedly told the investor repeatedly that the volume of intimate scenes would disrupt the plot and lose audiences. The investor’s alleged response: “I’ve seen more short dramas than you’ve ever made.” The kissing scenes stayed.
A Short Drama Investor Allegedly Gave Herself the Lead Role and 60 Kissing Scenes
Zhong says his co-star took things further on set. During their first romantic scene, he claims she French-kissed him without warning. When he instinctively pulled back, she allegedly grabbed the back of his head and held him there. He was new to lead roles, and he felt like speaking up could cost him the project, so he didn’t. He also says the rest of the crew looked the other way.
The production ended in commercial failure. After filming wrapped, the streaming platform rejected over 20 scenes for being too explicit, gutting chunks of the plot. The investor then allegedly refused to pay the remaining 30,000 yuan (roughly $4,100) of the production fee, reportedly because she was unhappy that so many of her kissing scenes got cut.
The story blew up on Chinese social media, and the numbers behind the industry make it more unsurprising than it sounds. China’s short drama market hit $6.9 billion domestically in 2024, and the flood of outside investment has come with almost no creative gatekeeping. Whoever controls the budget controls everything, including the script, the casting, and how many times the male lead has to kiss them.
Producer Meng Xing said he and his team had almost no say throughout the entire production. The director clarified publicly that all decisions ran through the investor. The production company stated it would do a better job protecting actors’ rights in future contracts. Whether that actually changes anything remains to be seen.
There’s a fluffy Yorkie in the produce section, and its owner cannot understand why anyone has a problem with this.
Pet humanization has been building to this for years. Sixty-nine percent of millennials and Gen Z now describe their pets as family members. The American Pet Products Association projects the US pet industry will hit $165.6 billion in 2026. When the average annual cost of dog ownership hits $2,500, the grocery store ban feels almost arbitrary.
Reddit has been arguing about it for weeks. On r/AskUK, shoppers complained about dogs urinating in aisles, owners touching produce while carrying their pets, and staff allegedly affording animals “superior rights.” One commenter described the habit as “unsanitary and inconsiderate.” Not everyone agreed.
“Do you really think having a dog in a grocer is that unhygienic compared to the average person? They’re hardly going to be licking the fruit,” one commenter wrote on Reddit. “If anything, letting kids run amok would be less hygienic.”
Why Are People Bringing Dogs Into Grocery Stores?
People act surprised by the rules, but the rules aren’t new. The FDA Food Code bans live animals from food establishments across the board. Trained service animals get an exception under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Emotional support animals do not. Publix felt compelled to post signs about this at its store entrances in 2023—”not permitted in Publix, even with a doctor’s note”—and the signs went viral.
The fact that a grocery chain had to put up a sign explaining federal law tells you where things stood. AKA—entitled owners. The UK draws a similar line, with pet dogs holding no legal right of access to food shops and only assistance dogs protected—though enforcement gets complicated when handlers aren’t required to show proof.
Dogs carry pathogens on their paws and coats, and a grocery store has no shortage of open surfaces for those to land on. Fresh produce bins, deli counters, and bakery displays were not designed with a dog in the aisle in mind. A calm, leashed dog poses minimal risk. What’s harder to manage is the dog that isn’t calm or leashed, the one sniffing shelves and making contact with surfaces that don’t get wiped down between shoppers.
That dog exists; it shows up in grocery stores, and most stores have no infrastructure to address it before something has already gone wrong.
The pet industry got to $165 billion by following the dog wherever it wanted to go. Federal food safety law draws the line at the grocery store. One of those forces is winning, and it isn’t the FDA.
When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California in August 2023, the first of its kind to make direct landfall this century, most people were focused on the flooding. They weren’t paying attention to what the sharks were doing.
When Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall in August 2023, researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Shark Lab at CSU, Long Beach were already tracking 22 juvenile great white sharks off the San Diego coast with acoustic tags. The resulting study is the first to document storm-response behavior in white sharks, and the behavior was much more coordinated than anyone expected.
As the storm closed in, more than half the sharks bailed on their nursery off Torrey Pines and Del Mar, retreating to the calmer waters of La Jolla Cove, which sits next to a submarine canyon with quick access to depth. One individual dove 433 feet, probably trying to escape the chop near the surface. Most came back within days.
“We think that some were seeking shelter from the storm,” said co-author Chris Lowe of the CSULB Shark Lab. “It makes sense that not all sharks did the same things, in much the same way people respond differently. It’s a key survival characteristic that humans seem to share, too.”
Great White Sharks May Know When It’s Time to Flee a Storm, and That Could Help Humans
The likely trigger was temperature. Sea-surface temps at the nursery dropped from 68°F to 57°F in under 24 hours as the storm hit. Juvenile great whites are more sensitive to cold than adults, and researchers believe that drop was the cue. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to document storm-response behavior in white sharks,” said lead author and Scripps PhD student Jack Elstner.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, researchers at the University of Delaware are running a different experiment with a similar cast of characters. They’re attaching electronic tags to shortfin makos, blue sharks, smooth hammerheads, and juvenile great whites to pull ocean temperature and salinity data from the Atlantic. The data feeds into hurricane intensity forecasting, specifically around the Mid-Atlantic’s “cold pool,” a layer of bottom water under 50°F that affects how fast storms strengthen before hitting shore.
“For hurricanes, warm water is the gas, and cold water is the brakes,” doctoral candidate Caroline Wiernicki told the University of Delaware. “Depending on where that cold pool is relative to the shore, that will impact how strong a hurricane is when it makes landfall.”
Sharks are clearing out ahead of storms and simultaneously serving as floating weather stations for the scientists trying to forecast them. That’s a pretty good week for shark research.
By Friday you’ve usually figured out what the week actually was — not what you planned it to be, but what it turned out to be. This one turned out to be a lot, stargazer, and the sky isn’t quite done with it. Saturn opposing Venus today is a fresh aspect, asking something pointed about your relationships and what you’re actually putting into them. Jupiter and Mercury are one day from an exact conjunction, which means the ideas that came out of this week are still live and still building. Use today to sort out what’s actually going somewhere from what just felt big in the moment. The weekend is close.
This has been a big week, and your instinct is to keep pushing through it — squeeze one more thing in before the weekend. Neptune squaring Mars has a different idea. The drive is there, but the traction isn’t, and forcing it today will cost you more than it gets you, Aries. Consolidate what you’ve already moved on this week. End it clean.
You’ve done a lot of honest accounting this week — figured out what you want, found the words for it, maybe said some of it. Saturn opposing Venus today is the follow-up question nobody loves: okay, but does the structure support it? Not a buzzkill, Taurus. Just Saturn doing its job. If the answer is yes, great. If not, now you know what to build.
Tomorrow Jupiter and Mercury are exactly conjunct — your ruling planet at peak amplification — and whatever you put out there carries more than usual. Today is the last day to get the shape right before it sets, Gemini. Not the final edit, not the overthink. Just: what do you actually want to say when your voice has that much behind it? Figure it out today.
The Moon in Virgo on a Friday after a week like this has one thing on its mind — enough feeling, time to start doing. Your Moon has been working overtime since Wednesday, Cancer, and today it wants a return on that. Make the list. Send the message. Take the practical step you’ve been turning over all week. Actually do it.
You’ve had a big week, and the energy is still running high — Jupiter in your sign has seen to that. Today, Saturn opposing Venus brings a more grounded question: are the people in your life actually on board with where you’re headed? Not every beginning gets automatic buy-in, Leo. The ones who matter will show you this weekend. Good thing to know early.
Mercury peaks with Jupiter tomorrow — big ideas, maximum amplification, everything running large. Today, though, Saturn opposing Venus is asking you to do something very Virgo before that happens: figure out what actually deserves your energy and what doesn’t. Not everything needs the Jupiter treatment, Virgo. Triage first. The things that make the cut tomorrow will actually go somewhere. The rest can wait.
Saturn opposing Venus today — your Venus — is the relationship audit you didn’t schedule but probably needed. Something in your life has been running on maintenance mode: you’re showing up, doing the things, keeping it going, but the actual investment has been gone for a while. You can feel the difference today, Libra. That feeling isn’t a problem to solve. It’s just information. Use it.
Everyone had a big week. The feelings, the big declarations, all of it. You’ve been watching and keeping track the whole time — not coldly, just accurately. Pluto opposing Jupiter is asking what actually moved this week versus what was just a lot of activity. You already know the answer, Scorpio. The question is what you do with that information going into the weekend.
You’ve got about six things you want to act on simultaneously — big week, big ideas, Jupiter doing its thing. It’s Friday, Sagittarius, and launching everything at once before the weekend is very on-brand. Pick one. Just the one that actually has legs right now. Jupiter conjuncts Mercury tomorrow, and it’ll all still be there. You don’t have to do it all today.
Saturn is your planet, and you’re comfortable with its demands — the work, the discipline, the long game. But Saturn opposing Venus today is your own ruling planet asking when you last let yourself actually enjoy something. Not planned it, not earned it first. Just let it happen. It’s Friday, Capricorn. The work will be there Monday. Give tonight to Venus.
You’ve been expanding an idea all week, stress-testing it, running it through every mental filter you own. Uranus sextiling Jupiter has been giving it reach. Today, Friday, do the thing that doesn’t come naturally: tell someone about it face to face. Not a post, not a draft. An actual conversation, Aquarius. That’s where Uranus in Gemini does its best work.
You’ve been seeing something through a generous filter this week — Neptune opposing Venus has a way of making everything look more beautiful than it is. On a Friday that filter slips a little, and you catch the thing as it actually is rather than how you’ve been painting it, Pisces. That’s not a letdown. That’s the truth being friendly about it.
Human beings have built an entire secondary social economy around pretending to be just slightly less interested than they are.
To examine how people interpret availability in social and romantic life, ReverseLookup surveyed 9,100 adults across the US, EU, UK, and Latin America. What they found was a portrait of collective performance. Over half of respondents (52%) had deliberately sat on a reply or held off accepting an invitation even if they had no plans—not because they were playing games, necessarily, but because appearing too available seems desparate. Thirty-seven percent had flat-out lied about being busy. Thirty-three percent had passed on a same-day plan they wanted to go to because agreeing immediately felt like too much.
Most people have been on both sides of this, which is why reading about it feels a little exposing. Forty-four percent of respondents had assumed that someone consistently free at short notice probably had a less active social life. A wide-open schedule gets interpreted as low demand, regardless of what’s actually behind it. Forty-six percent had brought up other plans while arranging to meet someone—those plans didn’t affect anything; they just made clear that other people also wanted this person’s time.
Being Too Available Can Make You Less Attractive, According to Psychology
This behavior has been around for a long time. It’s the scarcity principle, documented by psychologists since a landmark 1975 study found that people consistently rated identical cookies as more desirable when only two were in the jar than when there were ten. Researchers at the University of Rochester later found the same dynamic in dating: people who interacted with a more selective online dating profile rated that person as more attractive and more valuable as a partner. The brain is running a crude supply-and-demand analysis on your DMs.
Think about the difference between “I’m free Friday” and “I can probably make Friday work.” Same night, same result, but only one sounds like it came from a calendar with other things on it. The survey found that 29% had lost interest in a new friend or romantic prospect who appeared too available on a consistent basis. They weren’t making a deliberate decision. They were responding the same way people respond to a jar with two cookies versus a jar with ten—the one that’s easier to access feels like it’s worth less.
There’s an obvious irony in all of this. The behaviors the data flags as working against you—answering right away, being flexible, openly expressing interest—are the exact ones that build trust and actual connection. Research consistently finds that hard-to-get behavior inflates short-term desire while eroding the very intimacy it’s supposed to create. One of those things eventually has to give.
Half of adults are out here manufacturing scarcity about themselves. The ones who aren’t are probably still more fun to spend your time with.
America leads the world in a lot of things. The serial killer count is harder to brag about—but we’ve done it, folks.
A new analysis by PokerTube of official serial killer data found the US has 3,615 documented serial killers, accounting for 66.2% of all known cases worldwide. That’s more than 18 times the number recorded in Russia (196) or the UK (190). Two in every three documented serial killers in recorded history operated on American soil.
The state breakdown produces some counterintuitive results. Wyoming, not New York or Los Angeles, leads the nation in serial killers per capita, at 13.59 per million residents—roughly one known killer for every 73,584 people. Alaska has the scariest victim rate, at 8.67 serial killer victims per 100,000 residents, driven largely by Robert Hansen, the “Butcher Baker,” who abducted and hunted at least 17 women in the Alaskan wilderness before being sentenced to 461 years in prison. Missouri rounds out the top five with 350 total victims—the highest raw count among the leading states.
Wyoming Leads the U.S. in Serial Killers Per Capita, New Analysis Finds
The PokerTube numbers also add some wild context. Americans are statistically more likely to live next to a serial killer (1 in 94,800) than to win the lottery (1 in 292.2 million) or get bitten by a shark (1 in 11.5 million). The more comforting comparison: you’re still more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 15,300) than to have a serial killer for a neighbor. So, yay?
Some of the margin is about how you count. Radford University’s Serial Killer Information Center runs the most thorough global database on the subject and has noted that countries differ significantly in how they define, investigate, and document serial killings. The US count benefits from decades of rigorous FBI classification and recordkeeping that most countries don’t have. That explains part of the number. Not all of it.
James Thompson, a strategist at PokerTube, noted that serial killer hotspots “cluster heavily in the West, with six of the top ten states being western states.” One detail the data also reveals: criminologists at Northeastern University have documented a significant decline in US serial killings from the 1990s peak. The golden age of the American serial killer appears to be, cautiously, behind us.
The US has 3,615 documented serial killers and retains every record that comes with that. The good news is that the number has been declining. The bad news is that Wyoming is still pulling some terrifying numbers.
Unless you’re both on the same page about an open relationship or love wild experiences together, most couples don’t want a third party in their bedroom. But what they’re not realizing is that there already kind of is. It’s that dang phone.
Let’s back things up. Between 1996 and 2008, 59% of married adults had sex at least once a week, according to the Institute for Family Studies. That fell to 49% for the period 2010 to 2024. By 2025, nearly half of married couples reported going without sex for 12 months or longer, per Gitnux. Sexless marriages—defined as fewer than ten times per year—affect between 15 and 20% of US couples, with relationship stress cited as the leading driver at 40%. The factor increasingly backed by research, though, is the phone.
A 2023 IFS study found that married adults reported lower sexual frequency when their spouse replaced couple time with staring at their phone or computer. The habit researchers have named is called “bedtime procrastination”—two or more hours of screen time in the last stretch before sleep. Two people in the same bed, each in a separate universe. The bedroom is still there, but the place it used to represent mostly isn’t.
Your Phone Might Be Quietly Killing Your Sex Life
The pattern is a named behavior in couples therapy. “Couples begin living parallel lives,” Dr. Anna Elton, a licensed marriage and family therapist and clinical sexologist, told Fox News Digital. “Conversations revolve around schedules, errands, bills and the kids. Intentional time together becomes less frequent. Affection, physical touch, flirting and playfulness become less frequent, replaced by stress, conflict and growing resentment.”
A 2025 SimpleTexting survey, cited by Psychology Today, found that 40% of adults would rather give up sex for a year than their smartphone—or rather, that’s where they’d prefer to focus their attention. The same device couples use to scroll through other people’s vacation photos is the one creating a wall between them.
The fix, according to therapists, starts before the bedroom is even a thought. “Physical intimacy and emotional closeness go hand in hand,” Elton said. “If we want to improve our sex lives, we have to focus on the connection itself.” That connection requires time that’s currently being allocated elsewhere. Elton advises couples to define what satisfied looks like for their relationship and commit to protecting it before the drift becomes the autopilot move.
The morning after something big always feels a little anticlimactic — the sky goes back to its regular business, the alarm still goes off, and you’re left holding whatever the eclipse handed you. That’s where we are today, stargazer, and it’s not a bad place to be. Mercury sextiling Venus at noon makes this one of the better days of the week for conversation — saying the thing you’ve been trying to say, making the connection you’ve been circling. Jupiter and Mercury are building toward an exact conjunction Saturday, which means the ideas are still gaining traction. The reset happened. Now comes the part where you decide what to do with it.
Yesterday the eclipse fired and something got set in motion. Today is the morning after — and Mars in Cancer isn’t interested in charging ahead of what you just started. Moon sextiling Mars this morning has a steadier energy: check in on the people you care about, tend what got planted, move with intention instead of speed. The beginning happened, Aries. Now nurture it.
Something reset yesterday and you’ve been sitting with it, turning it over, trying to figure out what it means going forward. Mercury sextiling Venus today is the aspect that gives you the words for it, Taurus. The thing you’ve been struggling to articulate — what you want, where you’re headed — it comes out better today. Use that. Say it to someone.
All week your ideas have been running big — Jupiter amplifying, Mercury in Leo adding flash. Today the delivery catches up, Gemini. Mercury sextiling Venus at noon is the aspect where what you say hits the way you meant it to — charming, easy, received well. Stop hiding the good stuff in texts. Take it into an actual room today and watch it work.
The eclipse was yours in a big way yesterday. Today your Moon has moved into Virgo and the energy has gone from charged and expansive to: okay, now what? You’re trying to get practical about what just reset, and Moon squaring Uranus this afternoon throws a wrinkle in that. Something unexpected interrupts the processing, Cancer. Let it. Not every post-eclipse realization arrives on schedule.
The eclipse was in your sign yesterday, which means today is the first day of whatever just began. The fanfare is over. Nobody’s watching the sky anymore. And now comes the part that actually counts, Leo — the follow-through. What you do today and tomorrow with what the eclipse seeded is the whole thing. The beginning was yesterday. Begin like you mean it.
The Moon is in your sign today, and Mercury is sextiling Venus at noon — which means the stars are actually cooperating with how you want to come across. You don’t have to work as hard as usual to make things connect, Virgo. Conversations go smoother. You come across better than you think you will. Stop bracing for the critique. It might not come today.
Yesterday the eclipse asked you to figure out what you actually want for yourself. Today Mercury sextiling Venus hands you the conditions to say it — charming delivery, smooth timing, the other person in a receptive mood. The tools are right there, Libra. Use them to have the honest conversation, not just to make everyone comfortable again. You know which one you’ve been choosing.
Everyone’s leaning into their post-eclipse new beginning — saying yes, starting things, making moves. You’re asking a different question, the one nobody wants to answer first: what has to go before any of this actually works? Pluto opposing Jupiter has you doing the edit while everyone else is still writing, Scorpio. It’s not pessimism. It’s the thing that makes the beginning stick.
Yesterday was enormous — Jupiter right in the eclipse, everything feeling possible and bigger than usual. Today is the morning after, and the question is what you do with all that feeling. Jupiter conjuncting Mercury by Saturday means the words for it are forming, Sagittarius. Don’t wait for the perfect articulation. Start getting it down now, rough and incomplete. Saturday will clean it up.
You do your best work when nobody’s watching, and you’ve been heads-down so long that you forgot other people eventually catch up to what you’re building. The eclipse cleared some air, and Saturn trining Jupiter means what you’ve been working on is now visible in a way it wasn’t before, Capricorn. Someone’s going to notice today. Don’t deflect it. You earned this one.
Yesterday you committed to something more personal than usual — the eclipse pushed you there. Today, the Moon squaring Uranus this afternoon throws a variable into it, an interruption that makes you want to retreat back into your head and call the whole thing a thought experiment. Don’t, Aquarius. The complication is the test. If you meant it yesterday, you still mean it now.
The dream has a place to go now — you gave it one. Today it’s pushing back, not because it was the wrong move, but because Neptune squaring Mars makes execution feel a lot harder than the vision promised. The idea is still good, Pisces. The distance between imagining it and doing it is wider than you expected. Cross it anyway. That’s the whole job.
Pheromone maxxing is the latest self-optimization trend to make a bold claim about attraction. Like most bold claims about attraction, it’s about 30% correct.
The practice, circulating on TikTok as part of the looksmaxxing pipeline, involves ditching deodorant, skipping showers, and occasionally—among the more committed—drinking their own urine to “sweat out toxins.” All of this in service of amplifying a “natural musk” that allegedly contains pheromones that make you biologically irresistible. The sell is basically this. Stop trying so hard, smell like an animal, watch the attraction happen.
The trend is running several laps ahead of the research. “As a means of survival, sex workers are eroticizing body parts that can get through the algorithm,” sex educator Topher Cusumano told Men’s Journal. As platforms have cracked down on explicit content, underarms and sweat became vehicles for erotic material that doesn’t trigger a flag. What starts as an algorithmic workaround becomes a trend. A trend becomes a guy skipping showers and calling it a dating strategy.
The problem with the whole thing is that human pheromones, as a confirmed scientific category, are still theoretical. A 2025 review in Physiology & Behavior took a detailed look at androstadienone—a steroid in male sweat that’s been the frontrunner for decades—and still concluded the classification “remains inconclusive.” That’s 60-plus years of searching, and the answer is still a polite shrug. The pheromone cologne industry, though, is not letting that slow it down.
What Is Pheromone Maxxing? The Dating Trend Telling Men to Stop Showering.
The actual science is more interesting than the trend. Research on the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a cluster of immune system genes, has found that people are unconsciously drawn to partners whose immune profile differs from their own. In a famous set of experiments nicknamed the sweaty T-shirt studies, women consistently preferred the body odor of men whose MHC genes were most different from theirs.
There’s a wrinkle. Research has found that hormonal birth control appears to completely reverse the MHC preference. Women on the pill tend to be drawn to men with similar immune profiles rather than different ones, raising a question no one warned them about when they started the prescription. The scent-attraction connection has more going on than a hygiene boycott can fix. It also works better when you don’t smell like a gym bag.
Your body odor is carrying biological data that someone, somewhere, is evolutionarily primed to find attractive. The deodorant is probably getting in the way, but please, please still take a shower.
Sex with yourself is, theoretically, the time when you can drop the moaning and the sexy faces and just enjoy yourself. New data suggests we’ve found a way to ruin that too.
A 2026 Pleasure Census conducted by dating app HUD and sexual wellness brand Girls Get Off surveyed 2,183 people across 63 countries and found that 54% of Gen Z catch themselves “performing” during solo sex—thinking about how they look, sound, or should feel, with no one even in the room. Across all age groups, the figure sits at 44%. The same survey found 73% of Gen Z say appearance concerns make sex harder to enjoy.
There’s a clinical name for this. Spectatoring—coined by sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson in 1970—describes the act of mentally observing yourself during sex from a third-person perspective, evaluating your performance rather than experiencing your body. It was originally studied as a factor in sexual dysfunction and assumed to require a partner. The Pleasure Census data suggests the imagined audience is sufficient.
Performance Anxiety Is Ruining Masturbation for Gen Z
And once again, you can’t not talk about porn. A 2026 study found that women who watched porn reported increased performance anxiety about how they look and behave during sex. One participant said: “I feel stressed about not looking like the girls in porn movies.” The study found pornography led many respondents to view sex as performative rather than a shared pleasurable experience—a subconscious thought that doesn’t turn off when the other person leaves the room.
“For a generation raised on porn, it can be genuinely hard to unlearn the way we think we’re supposed to behave during sex,” sexologist Becky Crepsley-Fox told Metro. The internal audience doesn’t switch off. For many people, it eventually becomes the default, operating beneath every experience that was supposed to be free of it.
There’s decades of spectatoring research confirming what most people already know from experience: the moment your attention shifts outward, your body checks out. Orgasm requires presence, not an audience. Solo sex is the one place in the world where nobody else’s needs, reactions, or expectations are in the room. Using it to rehearse for them anyway is a waste
The only audience in the room is the one you built yourself. That’s both the problem and the only place the solution lives.
Every once in a while, the day arrives with a quality that’s hard to name — not good or bad, just charged, like everything is holding its breath. If you’re feeling it today, stargazer, you’re not imagining things. Today’s Solar Eclipse in Leo is the biggest sky event we’ve seen in months: a Sun-Moon conjunction that seeds new beginnings, resets the emotional and creative landscape, and asks every sign to start something they’ve been circling too long. Mars is newly in Cancer, bringing drive with a protective edge. Mercury is in Leo and firing. The eclipse doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It just goes. Best to go with it.
The Solar Eclipse in Leo today is doing its new-beginning thing across the sky, and you’re feeling it — but not in the way you’d expect. Mars in Cancer has your drive pointed at the people around you rather than your own agenda right now, Aries. Whatever clicks into focus today isn’t about what you want. It’s about who you’d do anything for. Start there.
Solar eclipses are reset buttons, and today’s in Leo is asking everyone to get honest about what they’re really after. For you, Taurus, that question lands squarely in values — not what looks good on paper, but what you’d choose if no one was watching. Jupiter sextiling Venus this week is backing whatever answer you give. Make it a true one.
Mercury sextiling Uranus this afternoon produces your best ideas — the ones that arrive fully formed, from nowhere, at an inconvenient time. Write it down immediately, Gemini. Today also happens to be a Solar Eclipse in Leo, right where your ruling planet is sitting, which means whatever you put out there has more reach than a normal Wednesday. Don’t waste it on small talk.
Most signs are experiencing today’s Solar Eclipse from the outside. You’re not. A Solar Eclipse is a Sun-Moon conjunction — and the Moon is yours, Cancer. Your ruling body isn’t a bystander to one of the biggest sky events of the year. It’s the other half of it. Whatever gets seeded today has your name on it at a cellular level. This one’s actually yours.
The Solar Eclipse fires in your sign today, which means the Sun — your Sun — is the one pulling the trigger on a reset that everyone feels. That’s not a small thing, Leo. You’re not just experiencing this eclipse. You’re the sign it’s happening through. What you put into motion today, what you decide, what you begin — it has an outsized effect. Make it count.
You’ve had a plan for how this was going to come together, and Mercury sextiling Uranus this afternoon would like to respectfully ignore it. The answer arrives from a direction you didn’t map out — faster, cleaner, a little annoying in how obvious it is in hindsight. The eclipse in Leo is backing it, Virgo. Stop second-guessing it just because it wasn’t your idea first.
The Solar Eclipse today is seeding a new beginning, and the question it’s putting to you is one you tend to avoid: what do you actually want, separate from what everyone around you wants? Venus is at home in your sign, Libra, which means you’ve got the self-awareness for this — you just don’t always use it. The eclipse is a decent occasion to start.
Solar eclipses are all about new beginnings and bold intentions. You know that. You’re also already thinking three moves ahead — what this beginning leads to, what it closes off, what the cost looks like once the excitement settles. Everyone else is popping the champagne, Scorpio. You’re the one in the back reading the contract. The sky needs both. You’re better at one of them.
Jupiter is sitting right in the middle of today’s Solar Eclipse in Leo, which means your ruling planet is directly in the blast radius of one of the year’s biggest reset buttons. For most signs, today seeds something small and personal. For you, Sagittarius, the scale is different. Whatever you’re beginning today has room to go much further than you think. Don’t sandbag it.
The Solar Eclipse today is asking a question you don’t love: what are you building for yourself, separate from what you’re supposed to be building? Not the career, not the reputation — something that’s just yours. Saturn in trine to Jupiter is giving you the structural support to answer it, Capricorn. The door’s open. You don’t have to move quickly. Just don’t pretend you didn’t see it.
You spend a lot of time thinking about what’s good for everyone — systems, ideas, the bigger picture. Today’s Leo eclipse is firing directly across from your sign with a more personal agenda, Aquarius. What do you actually want for yourself? Singular. Just you. Mercury sextiling Uranus this afternoon gives you the language for it, if you’re willing to use it.
You’ve been carrying something around for a while — an idea, a feeling, a life you keep imagining but haven’t started. Neptune in Aries has been slowly giving it legs, and today’s Solar Eclipse is the closest thing to a starting gun you’re going to get, Pisces. The dream doesn’t have to stay in your head anymore. Give it somewhere to go.
The friend zone sucks. You liked someone, they liked you back as a good listener, and you either waited it out or moved on. The whole thing was painful, but at least it was cheap. Not anymore.
The average all-in date in 2026 costs $189, up 12.5% from the year before, according to BMO’s Real Financial Progress Index — and that includes the grooming products, the gas money, and whatever restaurant managed to charge $40 for pasta. Americans who dated went out about 12 times over the past year, down from 14 in 2025, spending an average of $2,323. Restaurant prices have climbed nearly 40% since early 2019, per S&P Global. Nearly half of single Americans say dating has priced them out.
Into this economic climate, the friend zone has become a casualty. The premise of it, paying for someone who might never reciprocate romantically (drinks, dinners, planned outings), was always a gamble. When the tab was smaller, the gamble was more manageable. Now, with the average date approaching $200 and 71% of men expecting to cover everything early in courtship, according to the same BMO survey, the case for waiting out the friend zone has gotten much harder to make.
Why People Are Starting to Abandon the ‘Friend Zone’ for Good
The sentiment has been circulating online for months. The case people are making is sadly understandable. Money spent on someone who might never become a romantic partner is money wasted in an economy where groceries, rent, and utility bills are already eating through the paycheck. Comment sections reliably fill with men who agree. One commenter on Team Blind said. “I would be happy to pay for dates in a monogamous relationship,” he wrote, “but with the way dating is, you’ll get taken advantage of as a man if you pay for anything beyond a drink or coffee too early.”
The friend zone exit is part of an accelerating trend. The 14th annual Singles in America survey from Match and the Kinsey Institute found 53% of U.S. singles reporting dating burnout. A Bank of America survey found over half of Gen Z adults spent $0 a month on dating in the past year. A growing number of men are treating the friend zone exit as an early move in a longer withdrawal from dating entirely.
Being friend-zoned when you really like someone is a blow. Now you’re going broke too? Who wants to opt into that?
There was a time when feeding two people meant making dinner. Maybe somebody hated mushrooms or picked the onions out, but the basic premise held. Now one person is on a GLP-1, the other is tracking protein, dairy is a problem, carbs are off limits, and dinner for two can require two separate meals. That’s food divorce for you.
Americans have gotten much pickier, or at least much more specific, about what goes on the plate. In 2018, 36% said they followed a dedicated diet or eating plan. By 2025, that number had climbed to 57%, according to the International Food Information Council. Then came the GLP-1 boom. A March 2026 KFF poll found 12% of U.S. adults were taking medications like Ozempic or Wegovy, and the CDC says 6.7% of people have a food allergy. Two people can share a kitchen and still have completely different ideas about what to eat for dinner.
The thing is, eating together is actually good for us. A 2026 study published in Appetite followed more than 12,000 couples in Germany and found that couples who shared meals regularly reported greater relationship satisfaction, fewer depressive symptoms, and better overall health. Meanwhile, Americans are doing increasingly little of it. The 2025 World Happiness Report found about 1 in 4 Americans eats every meal alone on any given day, a 53% increase since 2003.
What Is a ‘Food Divorce’? The Relationship Trend Splitting Up Dinner.
Food has also become heavily loaded with identity. Julie Menanno, a marriage and family therapist and author of Secure Love, told Bustle that the pressure around food has become pervasive. “There is enormous pressure to get food right, exercise right, health right, body right,” she said. “And nobody really has the answers.”
GLP-1 medications also bring this into laser focus at home. Dr. Leila Fathi, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Food Policy at City St George’s University of London, told Metro that side effects including nausea and reduced appetite can “reshape individuals’ relationships with food,” creating associations that leave couples preparing and eating meals separately.
A food divorce—the term Metro has coined for couples who shop, cook, and eat independently—is the name for an arrangement that’s already emerging across households. The logic is clear: if the shared meal has become a source of friction, eating separately removes one argument from the rotation. What’s less clear is whether removing the friction also removes the ritual.
Maybe the family dinner was always given too much credit. Plenty of miserable couples have eaten lasagna together. Still, when two people start shopping separately, cooking separately, and eating separately, it’s fair to wonder what else gets divided up along the way.
You know the feeling. A notification, an offhand comment from your boss, an awkward conversation you can’t stop replaying—and your stress response is completely out of proportion to what actually happened. There’s a reason for that, and it goes back about 300,000 years.
That response comes from a brain built for a world that no longer exists. Researchers at James Cook University published a 2026 review in Behavioral Sciences calling it evolutionary mismatch—what happens when ancient mental systems get dropped into environments they were never designed for.
Humans evolved in small communities where threats were immediate and physical. That same brain now has to process social media feeds, 24-hour news cycles, and an ungodly amount of unread emails.
Psychologist Chris Gilbert, M.D., Ph.D., and neuroscientist Eric Haseltine, Ph.D., developed the five-step-no-tiger method (outlined in their book There’s No Tiger Around That Corner) around a simple premise: most of the time, there is no tiger. The threat your brain thinks is existential is, by modern standards, an annoyance. The approach, detailed in Psychology Today, draws from evolutionary psychology and CBT to help the modern brain stop treating everyday stressors like predator attacks.
Step 1: Follow the Anxiety Back
The fear response your brain is running didn’t originate with the thing that set it off today. Negativity bias—the brain’s evolved tendency to fixate on threats over everything else — has a way of making a minor stressor feel fatal. Step one is getting under the current anxiety to find what’s actually driving it, and asking whether that source justifies the response.
Step 2: Talk to Both Brains
Rational self-talk by itself doesn’t reach the part of your brain generating the anxiety, because that part predates language. The primitive brain responds to images and physical sensation, while the rational mind works with logic and evidence — that’s why telling yourself to just “calm down” doesn’t work. Gilbert and Haseltine suggest pairing the two: downgrade the mental image from predator to pest (a skunk, not a tiger), then back it up with data—test results, actual probabilities, real-world evidence—so both sides of the brain have something to work with.
Step 3: Expect a Non-Linear Recovery
Setbacks are part of life, and the method asks you to accept that before they happen. Not as a warning, but as a given. A bad day you saw coming is a different animal than one that blindsides you—the first is something to move through, the second usually feels like proof that nothing’s working.
Step 4: Count What’s Improved
The same mechanism that amplifies threats also lets progress slip by completely unnoticed—which means the brain can be improving while still feeling like it isn’t. Deliberately taking note of what’s easier, even in small increments, is how you change that.
Step 5: Mine the Setbacks
Every relapse carries information—the trigger, what made it worse, what didn’t help. The method asks you to examine setbacks rather than just survive them. Done over time, that examination makes the next one easier to move through.
Your ancestors needed a brain that treated uncertainty as a death threat. You inherited that brain. The five steps exist because that’s not going away, but it can be managed.
After a brutal hot yoga class—mat-soaked, muscles done, head finally clear—I’ve always left with the sense that whatever’s coming tonight, sleep won’t be a problem. I’ll be dead to the world as soon as I hit the pillow.
Recently, researchers at Harbin Sport University pooled data from 30 randomized controlled trials involving over 2,500 people with sleep disturbances across more than a dozen countries. Of all the exercise types they compared, including walking, aerobic exercise, resistance training, tai chi, qi gong, and combination workouts, high-intensity yoga came out on top. Two sessions per week, capped at 30 minutes each, for eight to ten weeks produced the strongest improvements in sleep quality, according to the study, published in Sleep and Biological Rhythms.
If you’re picturing candlelit yin yoga with blocks, slow movement, and stretching, that’s a different class. High-intensity yoga moves fast, flows between poses, and uses body weight as resistance. Think power flow or hot yoga rather than a restorative session with props. The researchers say that intensity level is what drives the results.
The Best Workout for Sleep Might Not Be What You Think
What separates yoga from a 30-minute run is the breathwork. A 2025 meta-analysis published in the International Journal of Yoga found that regular yoga practice boosts melatonin levels (the hormone your body produces naturally to regulate sleep, not the gummy version), likely by activating the parasympathetic nervous system through controlled breathing. Separate research suggests yoga also regulates brainwave activity in ways that promote deeper sleep.
Aerobic exercise used to be at the top. This study places it well behind yoga, by a margin the researchers described as “significantly superior.” The discrepancy might have a simple explanation. The aerobic-versus-anaerobic question has no settled answer when it comes to yoga, and that ambiguity can pull results in different directions depending on how each trial categorizes it. Walking finished second here, followed by resistance training.
A 2025 study found tai chi produced results on par with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, the clinical gold standard for sleep treatment. Yoga covers much of the same ground—breath control, physical load, sustained attention—which may explain why the two keep producing similar results.
The Harbin team was transparent about the caveats. Studies were limited in size, and the populations were so varied that a universal prescription remains elusive. If sleep disruption is affecting daily life, a conversation with a doctor is a more reliable starting point.
Lots of money gets spent on melatonin supplements every year. Two yoga sessions a week in a 100-degree room is really all it takes.
The country is, by most measures, getting sober. Millions of Americans have walked away from the nightly pour, picked up a sparkling water, and started logging their “dry lifestyle” alongside everyone else who did the same. Two states didn’t participate.
A 2025 Gallup poll found just 54% of American adults say they drink—the lowest figure since tracking began in 1939, down from 67% three years ago. New Hampshire and Delaware received no such memo. Data from the World Population Review puts New Hampshire at 4.67 gallons of ethanol per capita, over twice the national goal of 2.1 gallons, and Delaware at 3.52, both above the national average of 2.48 gallons.
Here’s the part that should make neighboring-state residents feel played. New Hampshire’s numbers are based on sales, not residency. The state runs a government liquor monopoly that sells wine and spirits tax-free, with outlets planted at highway exits along the Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine borders. Redditors have flagged it for years. “People from NY always bootleg from NH; it is literally 30% cheaper,” one commenter wrote. “A handle of Crown Royal in NH is $29.99. In NY, it’s $47.99.”
Why New Hampshire and Delaware Sell So Much Alcohol
The operation has a founding irony baked in. New Hampshire created its Liquor Commission in 1934 to rein in drinking after Prohibition ended. Nine decades and $4.7 billion in profits later, that same commission funds the state’s schools, roads, and addiction treatment, in a state that collects no income or sales tax.
Delaware runs the same play, without the government monopoly. There’s no state sales tax on anything, liquor included, and a sprawl of private warehouse outlets clustered near the Pennsylvania and New Jersey borders have made it a reliable stop for out-of-state shoppers. State health data puts the adult binge drinking rate at 14%—Delaware has its own drinkers, tax advantages aside.
Nevada came in third at 3.42 gallons, unsurprising for a state with Las Vegas in it. North Dakota and Montana rounded out the top five, with Montana also leading the country in alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Utah, with strict alcohol laws and a large Mormon population, came in last at 1.34 gallons per capita. No shocker there.
If the sobriety trend holds, New Hampshire has a problem on its hands. Its tax-free liquor empire was built for people who want to drink. Fewer of them do.
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