The prospect of living on the moon is getting even more far-fetched by the day. For example, researchers published concerning findings in The Planetary Science Journal using data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, finding that the Moon is shrinking and covered in over 10,000 visible faults that trigger moonquakes.

Study author Thomas R. Watters, a scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, found that our nighttime companion rock is basically shriveling up like an old grape. As its interior cools, the moon’s radius has contracted by about 148 feet over the past 400 to 800 million years. That is a very, very slow rate of contraction, about 0.1 micrometers a year, but the structural consequences are immense for anyone hoping to build a lunar dream home.

The Moon Is Slowly Shrinking, Triggering Thousands of Faults and Moonquakes

The Earth distributes 90 percent of the seismic activity along a neat network of tectonic plate boundaries. The Moon is surrounded by a giant, unbroken shell, so when the interior contracts and stress isn’t released along predictable boundaries, the shell cracks. Moonquakes can pop up anywhere, without warning, meaning you’ll never quite feel confident enough in your real estate selection.

This poses a theoretical threat to lunar colonization, but also a practical, very real threat to NASA’s Artemis missions, which had already identified potential landing spots that were sitting uncomfortably close to active fault zones. A tremor could trigger a landslide or damage mission infrastructure. The study offered a silver lining for anyone hoping to build lunar infrastructure one day: areas with the thickest crust had fewer faults, making them the safest places to set up camp.

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In-N-Out Burger doesn’t do delivery. The hugely popular burger chain, found almost exclusively in the western half of the US, has refused to join the thriving delivery scene, which is why you can’t find it on apps like Uber Eats or DoorDash. The lack of delivery has created a small but thriving black market of In-N-Out delivery drivers, according to a report by Pablo Goldstein of the independent LA-centric news outlet LA Material.

In-N-Out owner and CEO Lynsi Snyder has said in the past that delivery strips away the customer service experience that contributes to the vibe that plays a large role in the chain’s popularity. It also ruins food freshness. The burger and fries you eat in the restaurant are a whole different experience than the ones you eat 30 to 40 minutes later, after they’ve cooled and steamed into soggy imperfection in their wrapping.

People Are Paying Ridiculous Amounts of Money to Get In-N-Out Delivered

That’s not going to stop starving LA folks in need of a burger fix but unwilling or unable to leave their homes for it, so those in desperate need of a Double-Double and Animal-Style fries have turned to Facebook Marketplace to find couriers who charge exorbitant fees (sometimes up to $50 on top of the food cost) just to get some In-N-Out delivered to their doorstep.

Beyond being expensive, it’s also risky: LA Material reports that one attempt to use a Facebook Marketplace In-N-Out Burger Courier ended with the customer getting ghosted, their money stolen, and, saddest of all, burgerless.

As long as delivery access to In-N-Out remains outlawed, only outlaws will deliver In-N-Out.

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That scorching hot cup of coffee or tea you kick your day off with—the one that’s so hot that if a restaurant employee spilled it on you, you’d sue that establishment out of existence—is tripling your risk of esophageal cancer, according to a major study published in the International Journal of Cancer.

The idea that hot drinks could lead to cancer isn’t exactly new. In 2016, the World Health Organization announced that while coffee and tea themselves don’t cause cancer, serving them between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit could turn your cup of caffeine into a carcinogen.

Recently, researchers at the University of Oxford analyzed data from nearly 1 million adults across the UK, making it the largest study to date investigating the link between scalding hot beverages and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, or SCC. The findings show that folks who prefer their drinks “very hot” face a 3.17-fold higher risk of developing SCC compared to those who settle for a nice, sensible “warm” cup of joe.

If you knock back six or more hot beverages a day, you add 71 percent more risk on top of that.

Drinking Extremely Hot Coffee or Tea Could Triple Your Risk of Esophageal Cancer

The science behind it is pretty logical. Pouring hot, near-boiling liquid down your esophagus causes thermal injury that degrades your mucosal lining and encourages cellular damage that eventually spins wildly out of control until it becomes a cancer.

All that said, esophageal cancer is still relatively rare, and the overall risk is still pretty low, according to the researchers. But then when paired with other vices like excessive drinking and smoking, you’re just begging for your esophagus to eventually become more tumor than esophagus.

If the mere prospect of your hot cup of coffee eventually turning into esophageal cancer, the Oxford researchers behind the study say that an estimated 14 percent of these cancer cases could be avoided if you just stopped pouring caffeinated molten lava down your throat and instead just waited a couple of extra minutes until it cooled down to a normal drinking temperature that perhaps didn’t burn away your taste buds upon first gulp.

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We’ve long known that humans are susceptible to something called the “bouba-kiki effect,” a weird trick of the brain that links the nonsense words “bouba” and “kiki” to specific shapes. “Bouba” feels soft and rounded, while “kiki” feels sharp and spiky, both looking a little like comic-book impact effects, or stars, with solid centers surrounded by spokes. Not that you needed me to explain that. You probably already imagined it.

As it turns out, a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences suggests dogs might be just as susceptible to this weird quirk of the brain as we are.

Researchers at the University of Parma gathered 51 domestic dogs and their humans to test whether the dogs share this quirk of the brain. Sitting in a room flanked by screens displaying the respective shapes, the dogs listened to a human voice broadcast the nonsense words while cameras and AI tracked their gaze.

When “bouba” played through the speakers, the dogs lingered on the rounded shape; when “kiki” dropped, they stared harder at the spiky shape.

Dogs and Humans Share a Strange Brain Quirk, New Study Finds

To make sure the owners weren’t influencing the results, the researchers reran the trial with owners wearing headphones blasting rock music. The results stayed the same.

The first cohort showed only a mild overall bias toward the spikier “kiki” shape, which the scientists attribute to the fact that dogs’ faces look much more angular and pointy than ours. This goes hand in hand with humans showing a similarly slight bias toward “bouba,” since we’re used to seeing rounded features.  But in the second test, where the human owners wore headphones, the dogs were just as likely to think of “kiki” as spiky and “bouba” as round as we were.

This suggests that whatever drives our ability to associate sounds with symbols isn’t exclusive to us, as recent studies also show that baby chicks and even macaque monkeys seem to agree that “kiki” is spiky and “bouba” is round. This sensory wiring could be shared across species.

Who knows, maybe other animals associate the sharpness or roundness of words with the sharpness or roundness of shapes?

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No one knows why a hacker or group of hackers decided to remotely overheat French supermarket refrigerators, sparking fires and spoiling millions of euros worth of food that had to be tossed out, but they did. And all thanks to an outdated, un-updated security system riddled with easy-to-exploit loopholes, as The New York Times reported.

Affecting over 400 supermarkets across France, including several major chains that supply densely populated urban areas, the grocers found their industrial fridges cranked up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit, effectively low-temp cooking tons of food that can easily spoil, and it did just that.

Hackers Turned French Supermarket Fridges Up to 122°F, Sparking Fires and Spoiling Food

Apparently, when you leave operational technology connected to the internet without a security patch for who knows how long, hackers can digitally walk in and try to turn the milk aisle into the yogurt aisle.

The chaos led to towering mountains of spoiled meat and melted frozen foods being tossed into dumpsters across the country, with some actual fires erupting from overheated fridges.

Danfoss, the Danish engineering company whose software runs the now-hacked industrial fridges, said that the affected refrigeration units were “end-of-life” systems running legacy firmware that hadn’t received security updates in ages. France’s National Cybersecurity Agency and Paris prosecutors are coordinating with neighboring European countries since similar refrigerator attacks might have occurred in Portugal, Spain, and Poland, according to Reuters.

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It’s nothing to be too freaked out over, but it is at least a little concerning that a fungal pathogen is apparently being tested out there that seems resistant to every antifungal drug it’s been hit with.

In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, scientists described the weird case of a 28-year-old woman in Kenya who developed a hospital-acquired surgical infection caused by a strain of Candidozyma auris that is to antifungal medication as bullets are to Superman. It shrugs off all four major classes of antifungal meds, including powerhouses like fluconazole and amphotericin B.

That’s evolution at work, and it’s only mildly terrifying. C. auris was already considered a pretty serious pathogen according to the World Health Organization, thanks to it being a fungus that calls hospitals its home and that it has a 30 to 50 percent mortality rate.

What Is ‘Pan-Drug Resistance’? A Rare Fungal Case in Kenya Is Raising Concern.

It’s not often that there is a pan- drug resistance thing out there making us all feel just a little bit freaked out by its mere presence in the world. This is the first time pan-drug resistance has been documented in Africa and only the second time in the world; the first time was in New York in 2022.

The Kenyan case is a little more worrying, as the Kenyan bug doesn’t share the same genetic mutations as the New York version. That means the fungus didn’t hop on a plane from New York to Kenya, which would have made sense. It became resistant to all four major antifungal drug classes entirely on its own in a completely different part of the world.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be any immediate threat of this thing spreading, as the first line of defense is basic hygiene and strict hospital containment measures, but there is the bleak, perhaps overly anxious idea that immediately comes to mind: that this thing spreads and no modern medicine we currently have at our disposal can fight it.

Gulp.

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Earlier this year, an AI agent powered by Claude basically wiped out a person’s entire company by deleting the code that made the business run. It was pretty funny. Sad, but funny. Well, it happened again, but instead of deleting vital code, an AI agent deleted an entire upcoming season of a TV show.

According to reports from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, production company Mastiff gave an AI agent access to their servers while putting the final touches on The Challenge Sverige, Sweden’s version of the MTV reality show that feels like it’s been on the air here in the States for at least a century.

‘The Challenge Sverige’ Lost Its Entire Edited Season. Now It Has to Be Rebuilt.

According to the Swedish publication, the AI wiped out the entire edited season just five weeks before it was scheduled to air on November 22. No backup was available to restore the files, so weeks of editing vanished into thin air thanks to an AI agent that is basically also thin air.

The show’s broadcaster, TV4, has been forced to push the premiere date back into 2027 as post-production crews scramble to re-edit every single episode from scratch. The show’s host, Ahmed Berhan, seems to be taking the disaster in stride, telling Aftonbladet, “I knew AI would be the death of me” and “some days you just have to accept that you’re living in a f*cking sitcom.”

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It’s weird to think there was a time when people didn’t logically assume that inhaling cigarette smoke several times a day didn’t have some kind of native effect on the body. Some doctors even recommended smoking at one point. Now we know smoking causes a range of issues, like cancer and emphysema. But those are the broad implications that affect everyone. According to new research, cigarettes can impact our reproductive organs, but those impacts may affect men and women differently.

A study published in Frontiers in Toxicology by researchers at the Universities of Nottingham and Sheffield looked at how cigarette smoke extract affected male and female mice over twelve weeks. The team found that while tobacco smoke wrecks reproductive health across the board, regardless of whatever factors you threw in front of it, it does operate through distinct biological routes depending on sex.

Scientists Exposed Mice to Cigarette Smoke Extract. Here’s What Changed.

Female mice suffered damage that was invisible to the naked eye. Under a microscope, their ovaries and egg-developing follicles looked healthy. No visible signs of damage. But when researchers took a peek at the genetic level, they found that smoke exposure altered key genes linked to cell division and protein production, triggering a pattern that looked like premature ovarian aging paired with a reduction in function.

Male mice couldn’t hide the damage. Higher doses of smoke extract caused physical changes within the testicles, visibly enlarging the seminiferous tubules where sperm develop. The physical structures of male sex organs were damaged, and so were the genes regulating sperm production and immune responses.

As I always say in these cases, it is a study of mice, and while they were a lot like us and therefore make great test subjects, it’s not a one-to-one comparison. As study co-author Dr. Adam Watkins says, we know smoking is bad for your reproductive health, but “the exact mechanisms are not fully understood.”

We need to dig deeper into this research now that we know there is a lot of damage we can’t see at a glance.  

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A team of divers off the coast of Turkey found what might be the oldest shipwreck ever discovered, so they needed to check what was inside the large ancient jars the ship carried when it sank.

Archaeologists from Akdeniz University, who published a preliminary report in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology, discovered a site nearly 100 feet underwater off Kekova Island. There, they found about 30 ceramic amphorae and three stone anchors belonging to a sunken vessel dating to 4,400 to 4,700 years ago.

There’s not much of a ship to see in this shipwreck, as the wooden ship disintegrated long ago, but it still suggests a 33-foot vessel filled with ancient booze and olive oil.

An Archaeologist ‘Nearly Fainted’ After Seeing What Was Left in These Ancient Jars

Lead archaeologist Hakan Öniz described the site as a “time capsule at the bottom of the sea.” Is this time capsule filled with the usual time-capsule fodder? A newspaper from the day it sank? Nifty tchotchkes of the day? Nope.

They found a lot of sludge! Sludge that apparently has some kind of archaeological value, according to Australian archaeologist Karin Sowada, who says she “nearly fainted” when she looked inside the recovered jugs, bowled over by how much material was still lingering around after being at the bottom of the ocean for nearly 5,000 years,

Experts believe these Levantine-style vessels originally hauled wine, olive oil, or tree resin, but sailors were crafty and found other uses for their ships, like how one appeared to have two holes carved out in its body that researchers think may have been used to make butter or cheese, since these guys were likely hauling live goats across the Mediterranean.

Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy says the vessels match designs from Egypt, Troy, and Crete, suggesting global trade networks were already fully operational thousands of years ago, and that ancient sailors about 5000 years ago were the ancient version of the Sysco 18-wheelers you see on the highway.

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If companies are going to mine the seafloor, they might want to pay close attention to a recently published study in Scientific Reports that was recently detailed on the United States Geological Survey website, and for good reason, as it is a particular kind of rock that can be out there that could possibly spontaneously combust when exposed to air.

According to the USGS-led investigation, in the mad rush to extract valuable metals like copper, zinc, gold, and silver, mining operations might encounter the same kind of hydrothermal rock samples researchers found from the Escanaba Trough off the Oregon-California border in 2022.

When researchers tried to freeze-dry and crush the metal sulfide samples in a lab, they broke apart as intended, quickly oxidized, and then spontaneously caught fire, reaching temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees F). That part was unintended.

Some Rocks From the Seafloor Can Spontaneously Combust, a New Study Finds

This bit of rock owes its spontaneous combustibility to nanocrystalline marcasite, an unstable form of iron sulfide that hates oxygen and turns processing into a potentially explosive prospect.

When these deep-sea rocks were pulled up from the crushing pressure of the ocean floor and came into contact with oxygen, heat, and grinding machinery that caused tons of friction, they can trigger rapid exothermic self-heating, a.k.a. an explosion. An all-natural, self-igniting campfire waiting to happen.

Not every rock pulled up from the seafloor will spontaneously catch fire, but the study shows that massive sulfide deposits behave quite differently from the land-based materials most mining teams will encounter on the surface. If the burgeoning seafloor-mining industry wants to make the billions of dollars it envisions, it’ll have to be mindful of the exploding rocks.

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Every small town needs its own “thing.” That one little kitschy hook that offers them a sense of identity, even if it’s a little silly.

You’ve probably never heard of the Central Texas town of Buda, and you may not know any of the estimated 16,166 people who live there, but now you will forever know them as the “wiener dog capital of Texas” and as the place that has a 10-foot-tall, 19-foot-long steel sculpture of a dachshund, aka a wiener dog.

As reported by Chron, the Buda Economic Development Corporation recently unveiled the gigantic, rust-colored wiener dog at Buda City Park to an eager onlooking crowd. The statue is crafted from over 400 pieces of Cor-Ten weathering steel and is designed to age into a dachshund-like dark brown patina under the hot Texas sun.

A new statue has popped up in Buda, Texas, a Central Texas city known for its affinity for wiener dogs. The Buda Wiener Dog Races have been taking place in the city since 1997, and the event is now being honored with a 19-feet-long statue in Buda City Park. pic.twitter.com/hu12OKChsP

— Spectrum News 1 Texas (@SpectrumNews1TX) October 14, 2026

A Texas Town Is Trying to Lure Tourists With a Giant Metal Wiener Dog

If you’re wondering why they built this enormous statue to a very specific dog breed and why this small town is making the bold claim that it’s the “wiener dog capital of Texas,” it’s because the town really likes wiener dogs and is the host of the annual Buda Wiener Dog Races, where upwards of 20,000 spectators descend upon the town to watch hundreds of the famously stubby-legged, little hot dog-looking dogs sprint for glory.

If you’re thinking this feels like those old-school road trip roadside attractions like the old cliché of the largest ball of twine, which is, by the way, real and is located in Minnesota, Jennifer Storm, the CEO of Buda EDC, got the idea for the giant metal wiener dog statue after visiting Minnesota’s largest ball of twine. That is not to be confused with “the world’s largest ball of twine.” That’s a different roadside attraction in Kansas.

According to the publication Texashighways.com, Storm said, “I remember thinking, ‘If people will drive hours to see a ball of twine, what could we do in Buda to get people to exit I-35 and discover our community?’ I started Googling giant dachshunds right there in the car.” 

I appreciate the candor. You’ve got to be known for something, and if the one thing that consistently attracts out-of-towners to your small neck of the woods is a wiener dog race, then dammit, erect a wiener dog the size of the Colossus of Rhodes in your park to celebrate the majesty of the wiener dog race.

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As I wrote back in July, a brand-new expedition led by researchers from Purdue University and the Archaeological Legacy Institute is headed toward an extremely small island in the middle of the Pacific called Nikumaroro Island to finally investigate the long-held hypothesis that pilot Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were shooting for Howland Island back on their fateful voyage in 1937 and instead landed and were stranded on Nikumaroro.

The 17-person team finally reached the uninhabited island on October 12, 2026, hoping to investigate the “Taraia Object,” a weird thing researchers spotted on Apple Maps that might be Amelia Earhart’s downed Lockheed Electra 10E…or it could be a fallen tree. No one knows for sure, but they went there to find out.

It all sounds like the setup for a B science fiction movie, and we haven’t even gotten to the story’s horrifying monster, because there actually is one. Several, in fact: giant meat-eating crabs.

Amelia Earhart Search Team Flees Remote Island Nightly Due to Giant Flesh-Eating Crabs

Giant coconut crabs are enormous, land-dwelling crustaceans with three-foot leg spans and claws capable of crushing objects with 3300 newtons of force. Run-of-the-mill crabs eat random bits of ocean fodder like worms, snails, clams, and shrimp. Small stuff that any animal can tangle with.

Giant coconut crabs hunt live birds and rats. These monster crabs are also the stars of a popular, if slightly silly and intriguing, theory that suggests Earhart survived the crash landing but was killed and eaten by swarms of bloodthirsty giant crabs.

It sounds absurd, but it has a bit of scientific logic. Popular Mechanics notes that researchers tested the theory years back by tossing a pig carcass onto the island. Within days, the crabs tore the flesh to shreds and scattered the bones several feet away. Maybe Earhart and Noonan suffered a similar grisly fate?

We’ll see what the Purdue team uncovers as it sweeps the island with sonar and dredges the water during the day before retreating to safety at night.

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In a story that will assuredly be adapted into a Netflix movie no one knows exists, an avalanche slammed into a couple of mountaineers in Alaska, separating them from their dog. The dog went missing for about 50 hours before Scripps News Group reported it was finally found alive.

This all went down in Alaska’s Chugach State Park when a massive slab of snow engulfed two veteran human climbers and pushed them right off the side of a mountain ridge, sending them tumbling roughly 500 feet and causing severe injuries. Luckily, all they suffered were injuries, as the pair managed to survive, but they were separated from their dog, a four-year-old poodle-husky mix named LouLou, as it vanished into the freezing void of the Alaskan wilderness.

Lauren Padawer, the girlfriend of one of the swept-away climbers, learned of the disaster on Facebook while traveling overseas. After confirming that her partner was one of the affected mountaineers and that he was receiving medical care, she mobilized a digital army of local pet lovers, outdoor enthusiasts, and just general goodhearted folks with access to drones and helicopters.

A Dog’s AirTag Helped Searchers Find Her 50 Hours After an Alaska Avalanche

All that stuff and all that manpower was well and good, but the real hero was a fairly small, relatively inexpensive, yet seemingly invaluable piece of common consumer tech: LouLou’s Apple AirTag. The tracker pinged satellite grids from the mountain, giving aerial search teams a more precise target area to focus on in the blinding sea of snow.

The combination of AirTag and drone-assisted manpower found LouLou about 50 hours after the initial avalanche separated the dog from its owners. LouLou was found standing around in the freezing wilderness just kind of chilling, shockingly uninjured considering that she survived two full days and brutal subzero solitude after getting rammed off a mountain cliff by an avalanche.

All a screenwriter has to do is write in a bear encounter and maybe a friendly rabbit that leads LouLou to safety or something like that, and you’ve got a movie you can toss on your kid’s iPad for an hour and a half of silence.

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From Earth, the Moon looks like it’s covered in holes, but those are really dents—impact craters from space rocks hitting it over billions of years. The Moon does have actual holes that could be caves and might one day shelter astronauts. NASA has recently approved a new mission that hopes to explore that exact possibility.

According to research from the Planetary Science Institute, NASA’s Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program selected a mission called GIMLI (named after your favorite surly Lord of the Rings dwarf) to inspect the Marius Hills Pit, a hole in our moon that’s nearly 300 feet across.

It’s believed to be a “skylight,” the collapsed roof of an ancient, massive subterranean lava tube.

A Giant Hole in the Moon Could Lead to a Future Astronaut Hideout

A lot of billionaires with space on their minds dream of building some kind of habitat on the moon, but since the lunar surface is an inhospitable wasteland that’s constantly being bombarded with deadly cosmic radiation and experiences extreme temperature swings ranging from 200 degrees Fahrenheit down to -208 degrees Fahrenheit, that dream is, for now, nearly an impossibility.

But those underground lava tubes might offer a natural, climate-controlled bit of insulation, since Mare Tranquillitatis pit temperatures are known to be a much cozier 63 degrees Fahrenheit, putting it on par with the average annual temperature of lovely Laguna Beach, California, though I don’t think the views on the moon will be quite as beachy.

To make sure the pit opens into an actual cavern, GIMLI’s lander and rover will deploy ground-penetrating radar and seismic probes to send back as much information to Earth as possible. If there is a cool cave system, sound waves and gravitational mapping will reveal its true size. And even if we don’t find a habitable underground lair, possibly already inhabited by moon people, we’ll at least learn a little more about how ancient volcanic eruptions helped form the lunar crust.

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The word “bro” really has taken off, hasn’t it? For decades, it lagged behind other colloquial sentence tags like “dude” and “man.” Like those other terms that dominated the lexicons of the previous century, “bro” is now the perfect way to end an utterly stupid sentence, the exact way to let you know the speaker or reader is an idiot of the highest magnitude.

For example, take Isaiah Delgado, a 27-year-old Florida drug dealer who sold a deadly dose of fentanyl-laced cocaine to his customer, Kalev Kangro, in February 2024. Unaware that Kangro was already lying dead face-down inside his Boynton Beach apartment, Delgado returned later that same day with a fresh supply, knocked on the door, and, according to The Palm Beach Post, eventually texted the corpse: “Really hope ur ok bro. I waited a long time and even knocked hard as hell and no one answered.”

A Drug Dealer’s ‘Hope Ur OK Bro’ Text Helped Turn an Overdose Into a Murder Case

That check-in text eventually turned an accidental overdose into a murder prosecution. Delgado spent the next six months selling $7000 worth of cocaine to an undercover cop while bragging about his long history of supplying Kangro.

Boynton Beach police eventually slapped him with a premeditated murder charge in July 2024. Palm Beach County prosecutors have, of late, indicted multiple drug dealers on first-degree murder charges after customer overdoses, though they haven’t yet secured a single murder conviction at trial, opting instead for heavy plea deals, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Delgado is the latest drug dealer to take that deal as he pled guilty to manslaughter along with nearly 2 dozen drug charges in exchange for a 33-year prison sentence. Justice is served, bro.

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The giant tortoises of the Seychelles once dominated the landscape. And then, we came along. 15th-century human explorers hunted them for food, reducing the population to fewer than a thousand by the 19th century. Proving once again that conservation efforts work, a study published in Ecology and Evolution found that giant tortoises in the Seychelles now outnumber humans for the first time in centuries.

Who would’ve thunk decades of strict environmental protections on the Aldabra Atoll would make a difference by turning the island into a full-blown giant tortoise metropolis? Other than, of course, conservationists who logically figure that if you protect the species and let it thrive, it will. Statistical modeling estimates that the current population sits at somewhere around 180,000 free-roaming giant tortoises, blowing past the island nation’s roughly 100,000 human residents.

The giant tortoises spend their days lounging in open grasslands known as “tortoise turf,” knocking down trees to eat their leaves and spreading seeds in their poop, seeds that will probably grow into a tree one day, which their ancestors, or maybe even they themselves, will get to knock down.

Seychelles Giant Tortoises Now Outnumber Humans After Centuries of Decline

In related news, you might remember that a deeply unfunny person thought it would be funny to announce that Jonathan, the 194-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise living on St. Helena, had died. That was a hoax, thankfully, because in a study published in Science Advances, researchers recently announced that they were able to analyze cheek swabs from the living legend known as Jonathan and found that perhaps some of the keys to his extraordinarily long life are 287 gene variants linked to DNA repair and anti-inflammation that contributed to his overall cellular resilience.

Unlike us humans, whose cellular machinery breaks down and starts causing all sorts of age-related diseases, Jonathan somehow maintains the genetic control switches of a much younger animal. By studying how these living ancient creatures dodge cancer and tissue degradation, researchers hope to develop a new drug that could help humans slow cellular decline.

In other words, it’s in our best interest not just to keep giant tortoises of the Seychelles alive and well, but to keep them thriving so we can study what makes them live so long, in the hope that we can one day apply some of that knowledge to ourselves.

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Whatever we dig up from an ancient civilization, we end up learning that, while we may have our differences, we all ultimately had tons of overlap, like how we all came up with roughly similar ways of honoring our dead. Some of those ways were a little more unusual than others, sure, and sometimes we didn’t so much honor the dead as we just stuffed them into whatever space we had available.

For as much as we like to mythologize some cultures, like the Vikings, imagining them sending off their, let’s say, dead warriors on a boat that they’ve lit up with a flaming arrow or whatever you saw the movie one time, real archaeological evidence shows that only a small fraction of traditional cemetery burials actually showed any signs of combat trauma.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, if you want to find the real remains of ancient iron and Viking Age Scandinavian dead, don’t look in a cemetery, don’t look for evidence of burials at sea; look under the floorboards in their homes.

Human Remains Found Beneath Ancient Scandinavian Homes Reveal a Darker History

Researchers from the BODY-POLITICS project examined 192 human remains discovered in homes across Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Instead of proper cemeteries, tons of fragmented bones were discarded in hearths, wells, post holes, and house floors.

Of the 192, at least 12 individuals had suffered pretty brutal injuries before or around the time of their deaths, which researchers interpret as part of a series of systemic violence inflicted on marginalized members of the community.

For instance, in one Iron Age home, archaeologists found the partial skull of a boy somewhere between the ages of two and four had been cut by a sword. Radiocarbon dating showed the skull was up to two centuries older than the home it was within, meaning that the house’s residents spent years unconsciously stepping all over a child’s head. A likely murdered child, at that.

Another set of remains includes a woman’s slashed skull that had been tossed into a well, and another was a man buried near a royal feasting hall who survived multiple severe skull fractures and broken bones before finally dying.

These were likely all victims of domestic abuse, human sacrifice, or, for one reason or another, the scorn of the community and received the brunt of communal aggression. Their bodies weren’t honored and respected, buried in sacred grounds and whatnot. They were treated as insulation, stuffing for a living space, because not everyone who died in Scandinavia’s past was honored.

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No miracle drug is without its trade-offs. GLP-1s may help you shed pounds, but they can cause nausea, vomiting, severe dehydration, and, as research presented at the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology Congress 2026 reveals, they may cause your fingernails to… fall off.

According to the multinational study, people taking GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy were four times as likely to report nail detachment as non-users, with 39 percent experiencing the ghastly term “nail detachment” versus 9 percent of controls.

Two-thirds of users reported at least one nail disorder, along with significantly higher rates of discoloration, according to Science Daily.

GLP-1 Users Reported an Unsettling Nail Problem in a New Study

A companion study of the same participants from the nail detachment study found similar trends on the scalp, where half of GLP-1 users experienced unusual hair loss that was often paired with redness and itching. The researchers found similar trends on the scalp, with half of GLP-1 users experiencing unusual hair loss

All of this may be attributed to the shock the body experiences during sudden, rapid weight loss. Of course, this only demonstrates an association, not a direct cause. About half of the GLP-1 users in the study reported pre-existing nail issues, and the study is self-reported, meaning the researchers couldn’t determine firsthand whether the medication directly caused the hair loss and nail detachment.

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Humans have taken the mighty wolf and turned it into the pug, a dog so malformed it struggles to breathe. That, of course, is not our only attempt at playing God with dogs. We crossbreed and create new kinds of dogs all the time, and every once in a while we try to do it on a mass scale.

The BBC recently ran a feature on one such large-scale attempt: scientists in Maine in the 1940s built a huge facility to create a kind of “super-dog,” an experiment that went quite terribly, though thankfully fell short of devolving into an Island of Doctor Monroe-style disaster.

After World War II, according to the BBC, a eugenics-obsessed Rockefeller Foundation director named Alan Gregg put up a ton of money, which today would equal about $9 million, for a 13-year project called the “School For Dogs.” That sounds like a fun Disney-produced family film from 2007, but it was actually a bit more nefarious.

The idea was to subject over 500 puppies of varying species to a series of maze runs and intelligence tests to prove that dog smarts are purely genetic, and then use that to breed some kind of hyper-intelligent super dog.  

More Than 500 Puppies Were Part of a ‘Super-Dog’ Experiment. Here’s What Happened.

The research team, led by John Paul Scott and John Fuller, quickly found a rather funny universal truth: no single dog breed is smarter than any other. Yes, some breeds excel at specific tasks, but overall they found that trying to find one dog breed that was definitively, cumulatively smarter than any other was a waste of time.

The result of all this was a series of experiments that intended to prove eugenics right, but instead proved that eugenics is in itself a stupid pursuit that will not lead to the creation of any kind of master race, dog or otherwise, and it did that by proving that social species thrive on a mix of diverse personalities rather than a single genetically engineered master race.

When the dream of building the genetically superior super dog fell apart, the researchers pivoted to even darker experiments, like raising puppies in total isolation behind eight-foot fences to study attachment styles, which led to discovering that puppies deprived of human contact between four and 12 weeks turned into unmanageable a**holes.

The Rockefeller Foundation pulled its funding when the higher-ups realized they weren’t going to get an ingenious dog from it. The facility was eventually shut down in 1958.

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It’s never really been a question of whether sharks can hear well. They can. But measuring how well is difficult.

If hearing is somewhat subjective for us humans, imagine how hard it would be to objectively judge a shark’s hearing. But we recently learned more about a particular breed’s sharp hearing: according to a study published in Integrative Organismal Biology, blacktip sharks off the Florida coast have surprisingly sensitive hearing and can instantly pinpoint where a noise is coming from.

Scientists at Florida Atlantic University parked a boat off southeast Florida. They cranked low-frequency sounds through an underwater speaker and tracked the local shark population using aerial drones. The idea was to startle the sharks with noise they’re not used to and see how they react.

Scientists Played Sounds for Sharks. They Reacted From 243 Feet Away.

And so they did. The blacktips reacted to low-frequency noise up to 74 meters away, or 243 feet. When they heard it, they made sharp, quick turns away from the sound, assuming it was an oncoming threat they’d rather flee than confront. More than 70 percent of the reactions

There is a zone called the “acoustic far field” where sound waves have stretched themselves thin. Researchers previously assumed sharks were basically deaf to sounds in this field, yet 70 percent of black tip sharks’ reactions occurred within the acoustic far field.

This is a little surprising because sharks lack a gas-filled swim bladder, the organ bony fish use to translate sound pressure into vibrations, much like a human eardrum. Marine biologists think black tips rely on a specialized inner-ear structure called a macula neglecta to detect tiny particle movements in distant water.

While it’s fascinating that sharks can hear much better than we give them credit for, it’s probably not reassuring to anyone who already has an innate fear of taking a dip in the ocean because of them. You are probably already pretty terrified of them, and now you know that they can hear you from about three-quarters of an American football field away.

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