Our organs are kind of hard to miss. But researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, publishing their findings in Nature, say they’ve found what amounts to a new immune organ inside our skulls.

The researchers discovered lymph node-like structures in the bone marrow of mice skulls that seem to act as specialized immune safe spaces for the brain. The research builds on earlier findings that showed tiny channels connecting the brain, its protective membranes, and the skull.

Those channels let material from the brain reach the skull’s marrow. From there, the researchers found structures resembling the germinal centers usually found in lymph nodes, where immune cells multiply and prepare antibodies for battle against invaders.

What Happens When You Need Your Skull Immune System?

The researchers then tested what happens in the brain when it actually needs to use these little warriors. In mice with glioblastoma, disrupting the immune structures caused tumors to grow faster and reduced survival. When they delivered immune-boosting proteins through a gel applied under the scalp, the skull’s immune centers created stronger antitumor responses, and the mice lived longer.

This could one day lead to the development of, let’s say, a brain cancer treatment where a tumor is dealt with via hydrogel applied under the scalp instead of a risky brain surgery. Of course, for now, this is all just research involving mice. But if the science holds up and can be scaled up to humans, we may have a new way to treat brain cancer, and maybe even neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

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Scientists have managed to keep tiny lab-grown brains alive for nearly six years, and these little brains have shown signs that they age just like our organic, naturally grown brains do.

The researchers, publishing their findings in Nature, dramatically extended the lifespan of brain organoids, which are clumps of brain tissue grown from stem cells that more or less mimic aspects of human brain development. The big breakthrough here is that most organoid experiments only last a few weeks to months. These were kept going for years, continuing to mature and all the while maintaining a cellular record of how old they were.

The researchers found that the organoid developed a lot of the same broad cell types seen in real brains. Using genetic and molecular measurements, they found evidence that the tissues followed the same developmental patterns going on in organic brain tissue. When researchers broke older organoids apart and rebuilt them into “chimeroids,” the cells kept evidence of their previous developmental age, sometimes skipping developmental steps they had already completed.

Freaky!

The Mini Brains Experience Age, So Are They Conscious?

The research could give scientists a better way to study the brain’s development and devastating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. There are some caveats. The organoids are not actual tiny human brains. They lack blood vessels, for one, and don’t have the same architecture and ability to perceive sensory information detected by the body.

In other words, they’re missing out on a lot of information processing. Then there’s a ton of ethical questions about consciousness that could spring up one day. If researchers create a conscious living brain in a lab, is it right to continue poking and prodding it?

According to the study’s senior author, Paola Arlotta, speaking with Scientific American, one of these things being even a little bit conscious is “highly, highly, highly unlikely.” Given the complexities of determining whether something is even conscious in the first place, it’s safe to say that this is a question that will be debated for a long time.

For now, just know that scientists have not created miniature thinking brains in a lab. It’s just a cluster of neurons that can remember its age… which isn’t less soothing to know.

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Crocodiles are the prototypical cold-blooded creature. Both figuratively and literally. According to new research published in Paleobiology and detailed by its authors in The Conversation, crocodiles became literally cold-blooded in an effort to become more figuratively cold-blooded.

Scientists had always assumed that crocodiles had always been relatively slow-paced reptiles. Meanwhile, some of their closest relatives, dinosaurs and birds, eventually figured out how to run. Somewhere along the way, crocs and birds got themselves a shared ancestor that was warm-blooded and had a high metabolism. Odd, considering the crocodile is the poster boy for cold-bloodedness.

The researchers found this out by studying the size of the tiny holes in the leg bones of 81 ancient archosaur species. The holes carried blood vessels, and larger vessels in animals generally indicate higher blood flow and metabolism. The fossil evidence suggests that animals in the crocodile lineage maintained high-energy lifestyles for most of their evolutionary history, until about 66 million years ago when the asteroid came along and effectively cut that line off.

How the Chicxulub Asteroid Shifted Crocodile Biology

That asteroid, the Chicxulub impact, wiped out global ecosystems and dinosaurs along with it. The crocodile, meanwhile, survived, and one of the things that helped it stick around in a world without as many food sources was by flipping from warm-blooded to cold-blooded so it could slow down its metabolism.

As far as life pivots go, this one worked out pretty well. Modern day crocodiles are ambush artisans, lying in wait just beneath the surface of the water to ensnare some unsuspecting prey and its powerful jaws. Being cold-blooded helps them conserve energy and remain underwater for longer.

Evidence of their past warm-bloodedness can be found in their four-chambered hearts, suggesting that they once skittered about much more quickly than they do today. Though modern day crocs have been known to hoof it now and then when they need to.

A fearsome killer croc that’s seemingly moving at a snail’s pace, without a care in the world, with seemingly no haste whatsoever, isn’t lazy; that’s tens of millions of years of evolution making sure that they remain as food-efficient as possible.

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As someone who makes choking, dying-hog sounds in my sleep thanks to sleep apnea, I am especially interested in the mechanics of snoring. What is it about my throat, nasal passages, tonsils, and tongue, and their interactions with one another, that makes it sound like I’m trying to crank-start an old lawnmower while I’m supposed to be resting? A team from Sweden, publishing its findings in Physics of Fluids, may have an answer.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a 3D computer model of the upper airway to simulate what happens during ordinary, non-apneic snoring. The model included the soft palate and uvula and, crucially, allowed airflow and tissue movement to interact with each other rather than simulating the throat as a rigid system of independent parts

Air moves through the airway, pushes against the soft palate, causing the tissue to vibrate. The vibration alters airflow, pushing the palate again, creating a feedback loop of rattling that we call snoring.

Researchers say that essentially all of the sound of a snore comes from this interaction between airflow and vibrating tissue. The model was able to produce sound levels and frequencies similar to the ones measured in actual snorers.

Understanding what makes a snore noise can help improve treatment. Instead of just trying to open the airway, researchers could potentially find some way to manipulate the soft palate itself by changing its stiffness or reducing the aerodynamic forces that make it vibrate.

The model is more of an idealized vision of a human throat, minus a lot of the messy complexities of an actual human throat and how it would interact with the nose or lungs. And it didn’t simulate sleep apnea, a much more severe, more serious version of snoring in which the airway is so thoroughly obstructed that the sleeper is essentially choking in the night. But it is nice to finally know what’s happening when someone sounds like they’re kickstarting a motorcycle in their sleep.

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Narwhals seem like magical creatures, the unicorns of the sea. Unfortunately, in real life, there is no magic, but there’s still an air of wonder about them, thanks in large part to their huge, majestic horn—which is really just a very long tooth, one that scientists have recently discovered is actually made up of two spirals twisting in opposite directions to help keep it straight as it grows.

The study, published in Nature Communications, used a combo of X-ray imaging techniques to examine two male narwhal tusks down to their microscopic structure. Researchers found that while the outer cementum twists to the left, the inner dentine twists the other way.

Narwhal tusks can grow nearly seven feet long and are actually canine teeth that pop out through the whale’s upper lip. They’re most common in males and are believed to have evolved mostly through sexual selection, essentially functioning as a long, pointy, and rather on-the-nose symbol of virility. Their exact purpose, though, is up for debate, since narwhals have been known to use them to stun fish, and millions of nerve endings in them allow the creature to detect changes in surrounding water. It’s a multipurpose horn that is just as practical as it is decorative.

Narwhal Tusks Are Multipurpose Marvels

The opposing spirals solve the very practical problem of ensuring the horn doesn’t bend, twist, or curl as it grows. Those inner and outer tissues twisting against one another create an internal tension the tusk straight while maintaining flexibility and resistance to cracking. That’s its biological purpose. It also serves a scientific purpose for human researchers. The horn keeps growing throughout the narwhal’s entire life; all the while, its hard tissue preserves a record of the changing environmental conditions in the Arctic that researchers can later study.

No, it’s not a magical task, but it is a self-straightening organic environmental time capsule that’s poking out of the whale’s face, which is actually much cooler.

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There were small dinosaurs. Microraptor is a good example. It was about the size of a crow, weighed roughly 1 to 3 pounds, and was only about 2½ feet long. They don’t get much smaller than that. There were no frog-sized dinosaurs. No dino hamsters. Scientists have wondered why for years, and might have finally come up with an answer. Or rather, they might have found someone to blame: mammals.

A new study published in Evolution used mathematical models to figure out why dinosaurs were generally so big and were rarely small enough that you would seriously consider turning them into a pet no matter how much they wanted to eat you. The model suggests that basic physiology and energy requirements alone can’t explain why non-bird dinosaurs never evolved into teeny tiny pocket-sized little guys.

With those ruled out, ecology became the next best possible solution. Specifically, competition with mammals.

Early mammals that shared the planet with dinosaurs were usually pretty small, and usually only ate small stuff like insects and seeds. Their size offered them the benefit of reproducing more quickly and needing to eat less to stay alive. Researchers suspect that mammals may have so thoroughly fulfilled the role of the Earth’s resident small creatures during dinosaur times that there was just no room for small dinosaurs to thrive.

Mammals Were Better at Being Small Than Dinosaurs

It was probably for the best, since evidence suggests that dinosaurs were just better at being big and mammals were better at being small. It was a balance that was working out just fine until that asteroid slammed into the Earth, reducing food supplies. Suddenly, the gigantic dinosaurs that needed to eat a lot to stay alive weren’t spoiled by the Earth’s abundance of big fleshy creatures to snack on. All the smaller mammals that just ate bugs and seeds eventually realized that they didn’t need to limit themselves anymore. They had unlimited access to all the giant-animal food, eventually evolving into giant herbivores and sleek, deadly apex predators.

None of this is to say that there were absolutely no tiny dinosaurs ever. It’s just that the fossil record hasn’t turned up any, and researchers say that that’s likely to stay that way. Fossil beds don’t just preserve big T. rex bones, but also tiny bones from mammals, lizards, and amphibians.

If there were some dino hamsters scurrying around hundreds of millions of years ago, we probably would’ve found at least some evidence of them by now. That’s disappointing. It would be really cool to find a tiny, pocket-sized dinosaur. But now we know why they (probably) never came to be, and we know who to blame. And since we’re mammals, it’s technically us.

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Our galactic home, the Milky Way galaxy, was a hungry fella several eons ago. Scientists observing clusters of stars hanging out near the Milky Way’s center found evidence suggesting that our galaxy once collided with and devoured a smaller galaxy about 11.8 billion years ago. The findings, published in Nature Astronomy and detailed on NASA’s website, push the known history of the Milky Way’s galactic gluttony back roughly 1.8 billion years.

The devoured dwarf galaxy is named Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, or LKH. It got eaten alive yet is still named after two legendary fearsome mythological figures. It contained stars that were roughly 500 million times the mass of our own Sun and represented a huge chunk of the young Milky Way, which itself was still a rather large work in progress even 2 billion years after the Big Bang.

Scientists figured this out using observations from the Hubble space telescope in the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. They examined 39 globular clusters in the Milky Way’s inner 20,000 light-years, looking at ages, chemical compositions, and movement of the stars hanging out near the galactic core, which essentially function like galactic archaeological dig sites. Most of the stars formed inside the QA galaxy, and some showed up during later mergers. The researchers found a third set: stars that were brought in with a merger from another dwarf galaxy, the funny-named Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus.

The Milky Way Is One Hungry Galaxy

This means that they found evidence of an even earlier small galaxy that the Milky Way devoured. If you’re imagining a kind of demolition derby of planets slamming into each other, an admittedly very cool mental image, the truth is that space is so vast, so in enormous, that stars and planets almost never directly collide with one another. But the gas clouds of these galaxies? They slammed into each other, triggering the formation of stars while also dumping gas and dark matter, which were exactly what a growing Milky Way galaxy needed.

The Milky Way galaxy later swallowed Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus and has spent the past 6 billion or so years slowly merging with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy.

And LKH apparently wasn’t the last thing our galaxy ate. The Milky Way later swallowed Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus and has spent roughly the past 6 billion years merging with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Galaxies gotta eat too.

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Whale sharks, as the name implies, are huge, and aren’t particularly elusive creatures. So why is it that it’s historically been so difficult to catch a glimpse of a baby whale shark? A new report suggests whale shark babies may be hiding in places where almost nobody else wants to go.

As reported by the BBC, researchers studying a roughly 5-foot-long neonatal whale shark caught in Indonesia’s Saleh Bay in September 2024 think the four-month-old could finally give us some clues about where these gigantic fish babies begin their lives, as this was the first newborn whale shark documented in Indonesian waters and only one ever recorded by scientists.

Finding Whale Shark Nurseries Could Be the Key to Preserving Them

Adult whale sharks can get pretty large, about 40 feet long, yet scientists have never actually watched one mate or give birth. Saleh Bay itself may be a part of the answer. It has sheltered waters that are loaded with plankton and other food, making it an excellent feasting spot for baby whale sharks to get all the nutrients they need for their growing bodies. It also helps that the day is an “oxygen minimum zone,” which, as the name implies, is a part of the ocean with lower oxygen levels and, as such, is avoided by predators.

Whale sharks are endangered, with their populations having fallen by more than half since the 80s. Finding what essentially amounts to their nurseries could be just a missing piece conservationists have been looking for. The mystery of where exactly whale sharks are born persists, but by playing detective, sussing out the location of baby whale shark nurseries, we’re one step closer to pinpointing their maternity wards.

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If your concept of eradicating a potential “city killer” asteroid begins and ends with the plot of Armageddon, well, you’re actually not that far off from one proposed method of asteroid obliteration—just without actually putting anyone on the asteroid. Nuking an asteroid to smithereens is such a viable, if completely theoretical, tactic that scientists publishing their findings in The Planetary Science Journal just tested it out. In a computer simulation. No actual asteroids or Bruce Willises were harmed in the making of this research paper.

The team, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist Isaiah Santistevan, simulated detonating a one-megaton nuclear weapon near (not on or in) a 525-foot-wide asteroid modeled after Bennu, an asteroid which passes by Earth about every six years.

What Happened When Scientists Simulated Nuking an Asteroid

In their simulations, the researchers found that the detonation’s burst of X-rays could vaporize the asteroid’s surface. All the material that will be blown off of its surface would act like tiny rocket engines, changing the asteroid’s trajectory and creating a shockwave that could fracture the rock from the inside.

The team ran three simulations using different distances and asteroid fracture properties. In a 10-meter scenario, 98.2 percent of the asteroid material was damaged, and about 97 percent was moving faster than the asteroid’s escape velocity. Moving the bomb further away produced more widespread damage because the X-rays spread out over more of its surface.

The other pretty good tactic, if a bit nuts. But there is a catch: the simulations covered only the immediate aftermath of an asteroid’s obliteration. That means they don’t yet know whether the asteroid would safely break apart, or maybe reform itself, or maybe be reduced down from one big killer asteroid to thousands of smaller asteroids. So, there are some kinks to work out. But the study does suggest that if humanity ever truly discovers a giant killer rock barreling toward us, the dumb guy tactic of just throwing a nuke at it might not be the dumbest idea.

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It sounds like something out of a utopian vision of the future from a 1970s science-fiction movie: What if you could reap all the benefits of exercise without lifting a finger? Or, more accurately, you lift a finger to pop a pill that produces some of exercise’s benefits without ever actually moving? A drug that just completed a successful Phase 1 trial may one day make such a ludicrous achievement in pharmaceutical science possible.

As shared in a statement released by Enveda, the biotech company developing the experimental drug currently named ENV-308, the potentially wonder drug so far appears safe and well-tolerated in a trial involving 88 healthy adults.

To get into the scientific details, ENV-308 is designed to mimic a molecule called Lac-Phe, which the body produces during intense exercise. Scientists found that Lac-Phe can suppress appetite and possible that it could help regulate metabolism. When it’s naturally produced by your body, it disappears quickly. ENV-308 is designed to stick around longer, and it comes in the tried-and-true delivery device of a once-daily pill.

Don’t Get Carried Away by Exercise Pill Fantasies Just Yet

Animal studies provide evidence that the pill could help preserve muscle during weight loss and prevent animals from quickly regaining weight that they’ve lost. The drug has also been found to lower leptin levels in study participants, meaning that it could have an effect on hormonal systems involved in appetite and metabolism.

Before you start dreaming of sitting on your ass all day and somehow managing to be just as fit as the pro athletes are watching on TV, there’s one big caveat: the drug has not yet been shown to cause weight loss in humans. Phase I trials are all about testing safety, not whether the drug actually works for its intended purpose. That’s what Phase II is for.

Still a ways off before the pill hits the market, if ever, but it could be a potential boon for people who, for instance, can’t handle GLP-1 drugs because of the side effects or concerns about muscle loss. Enveda also says that it’s looking into whether the drug could also help with non-weight-loss-related conditions like migraines and inflammatory bowel disease.

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It used to be that if you were flipping through cable channels, the thought of eating didn’t even cross your mind until you landed on the Food Network. Times change, yet some things stay the same: a new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that today’s teenagers say TikTok, with its bevy of food content, makes them hungry.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota conducted focus groups with 25 teenagers, mostly 15- and 16-year-olds, about what they encounter while scrolling. The answer was essentially food, food, food. Recipe videos that move so fast there’s no way they’re actually useful. Restaurant reviews for places they’ll never go. Viral challenges that reach the perfect balance of stupid and wasteful to be entertaining. “What I eat in a day”-style videos that push the envelope of what is considered interesting.

There’s a ton of food content out there, and like one too many videos, watch one too many of them, and they all start magnetizing themselves straight to your For You page, sometimes filling the viewer with the immediate desire to consume.

The teens reportedly described seeing food from another city or country and wishing, hoping, that they could have it right now, if only that specific dish wasn’t half a world away.

TikTok Influences Gen Z Diets, But It’s Not the Only Thing

Pair up all that food content with influencers, and the effect strengthens. A creator with a huge following seems to lend legitimacy to the rapidly cut-together series of food images. That said, teens involved in the focus group can spot a sponsored post when they see one.

When it comes to food, parents didn’t have as much influence as the algorithm, which is probably a good summation of the modern age as a whole. But they weren’t entirely irrelevant. The teens said that family meals and other face-to-face activities that did a decent enough job of pulling them away from TikTok and genuine conversations about dieting and body image helped them make sense of the barrage of content they were seeing and gave them the tools necessary to question it.

Obviously, it was a small exploratory study based on a small group of teenagers and their perceptions. There were no real scientific measurements of what they actually eat nor did the researchers try to form a direct link between viewing habits and eating habits, but it’s not much of a stretch to assume that if you’re watching footage of food, you’re probably going to want it in your mouth in due time.

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In the wetlands of prehistoric Colombia, there was once a fearsome 4,000-pound, 23-foot-long relative of the crocodile with a bite that could probably chomp through a car. And it needed it, judging by fossil evidence indicating that the animals it ate were even bigger as the predator itself. It was called Purussaurus, and it was a beast.

As researchers report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, fossil bite marks from Colombia’s La Venta region provide the clearest evidence that giant crocodilians actively hunted even bigger creatures, mostly mammals, during the Middle Miocene, over 10 million years ago.

The Pebas wetland system is a vast Amazonian mega swamp that spread across the nation’s we now know as Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. La Venta was one section, and it was packed with giant animals, from gigantic birds to enormous saber-toothed marsupials and snakes so big that we usually only see them imagined in horror movies. Even in a land of giants, Purussaurus was near the top of the heap.

The Purussaurus Had Twice the Bite Force of a Saltwater Crocodile

Researchers looked at four fossils belonging to three large plant-eating species, including a rhino-sized mammal called a Pericotoxodon that could weigh up to nearly 1000 kilograms. Several bones had circular puncture marks, showed evidence of crushing damage, and had scratches consistent with crocodilian attacks. The wounds were mostly concentrated around the head and jaws, the exact places modern crocodiles like to latch onto their prey.

If that wasn’t enough evidence, the tooth marks were a pretty close match for Purussaurus teeth, which were more than an inch across. The researchers ran some bite force calculations and found that the animal could exert roughly twice the force of a modern saltwater crocodile, which has one of the, if not the, strongest bites of any living animal, coming in around 3,700 psi.

Purussaurus was taking down animals weighing just over half a ton, sometimes animals approaching a full metric ton, so it needed every square inch of bite force it could muster.

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For as devastating as a direct hit from a trebuchet seems like it would be, archaeological evidence has never provided much proof that any one person was killed by one. Logic dictates that somebody must have been. We just never had much direct evidence…until now.

As reported by Science and presented by University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry at the 25th European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin, Skeleton 150 may be the first definitive archaeological evidence of a person killed by a trebuchet. And the poor guy was obliterated. His top half, at least.

The skeleton was discovered beneath Stirling Castle’s medieval chapel in 1997. It belonged to a man roughly 22 to 34 years old. His remains were absolutely wrecked: more than 160 fractures, including 61 breaks in the skull and extensive damage to his ribs, right shoulder and leg.

How Archaeologists Determined Skeleton 150 Was Hit by a trebuchet

Using X-rays, microscopy and micro-CT scans, Buckberry’s team determined that the injuries happened around the time of death and were caused by one gigantic, high-speed impact. These were not sword wounds, nor did they come off as the result of a trampling or a fall from a castle wall. Buckberry says that the closest modern comparisons she found were people hit by trains or involved in severe car crashes. Sounds to me like he’d been hit by a Dodge Ram going 60 mph. Since Dodge Rams have been absent from the historical record until fairly recently, we can assume it was medieval siege weaponry.

Skeleton 150 appears to have died during the Wars of Scottish Independence, probably during Edward I’s 1304 siege of Stirling Castle. English armies used trebuchets during the three-month assault, including a real Death Star laser cannon of a trebuchet called the War Wolf, a siege weapon capable of throwing massive stones through castle walls.

Could skeleton 150 have been killed by War Wolf itself? Maybe, maybe not. Impossible to prove. It only fired at the end of the siege, after all the other siege weapons had been pummeling the castle walls for months.

The evidence of this one guy getting absolutely obliterated by a trebuchet is convincing, and if it’s saying what Joe Buckberry thinks it’s saying, it might have taken several centuries for us to finally have documented proof that these things crushed more than walls.  

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Supercentenarians, a.k.a. people who live beyond 100, might have their superpowered, anti-cancer-fighting immune systems to thank. According to research published in Cell Reports, people who make it past 100 appear to develop more of a rare type of immune cell that helps fend off cancer and other cellular troubles.

Researchers at Osaka University studied blood samples from 28 Japanese people, ranging from their 70s to more than 110. They found that CD4 cytotoxic T lymphocytes, or CD4 CTLs (because I’m not typing that again), accounted for roughly 4 percent of T cells in participants under 100, nearly 10 percent in centenarians, and 17.6 percent in supercentenarians.

CD4 CTLs help coordinate the body’s immune response to infection, damage, or potentially cancerous cells. These cells didn’t appear depleted in the oldest participants despite having dealt with all sorts of biological mayhem and nonsense for a century or more.

A Rare Immune Cell May Help Explain Why Some People Live So Long

These cells seek out potentially dangerous cells and snuff them out, then clone themselves to create even larger populations. This suggests that the immune systems of supercentenarians were adapting to the increasing number of abnormal cells in their bodies, plus the infections and other challenges that arise when you far outlive the average person. They are, in essence, adapting to old age.

Before we start throwing macabre parties where we bathe in kiddie pools filled with the blood of 110-year-olds, keep in mind the study only involved 28 people, and all in Japan, so it’s hard to prove that CD4 CTLs are solely responsible for people who live for exceptionally long times. Other regional factors could be at play.

Researchers also don’t quite know exactly what these cells are attacking or whether having more of them is beneficial or just redundant.

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An otter in New York. It sounds like the title of a direct-to-VHS children’s movie starring Jason Alexander as both the voice of the otter and his human nemesis. Seeing an otter in the Bronx River doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. It’s a huge sign that decades of efforts to clean up one of the city’s most polluted waterways are finally paying off.

As the Wildlife Conservation Society and Bronx Zoo reported this week, a motion-sensitive camera caught a glimpse of a North American river otter swimming in the Bronx River in June. It’s the first documented sighting of an otter there since the early 1900s.

Nature is healing, as they say. And it didn’t do it on its own. It took tremendous effort from countless people who spent much of the 19th and 20th centuries cleaning up a waterway the city and its people treated like a moist garbage dump. Factories would dump chemicals in it. Slaughterhouses would toss in animal waste.

It was filled with oil, sewage, tires, appliances, and assorted detritus that definitely wouldn’t have been there without us. That’s why it was on us, more specifically those of us in New York, to clean it up.

In time, pollution drove away animal life, including river otters.

An Otter Was Spotted in the Bronx River for the First Time Since the Early 1900s

In the 1970s, people started to wake up to the fact that they were poisoning their own waterways, driving off the wildlife that helps maintain delicate ecological balance, so conservation groups, government agencies, and Bronx communities started the long, hard work of restoring it to its former glory. One surefire sign that the work has paid off is the return of wildlife. It took a while, but the otters might be back.

It joins a growing list of evidence that the efforts have not been in vain. Beavers returned in 2007 after being gone for more than two centuries. Camera traps have captured images of turtles, muskrats, and a variety of birds that had been around for several presidential administrations. The otters themselves are particularly encouraging since they were considered indicators of freshwater health.

They’re near the top of the food chain wherever they hang out, and need clean water and enough fish to survive. If they’re back, it means the water is well on its way to being healthy enough to sustain them.

Now just a matter of not letting up, not rescinding efforts at the first signs of success. Besides, researchers don’t know whether the otter is living there permanently or just stopping by on the way to somewhere more hospitable. Still, the picture, captured by scientist RJ Hawkins with a motion-activated camera, represents the potential rejuvenation of a place that was once so trashed and disrespected that not even animals wanted to live there.

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A headline recently published by Fast Company suggests that I might be surprised to find out which generation is most comfortable with AI, and I can assure the writer and editor of that piece that I am absolutely not surprised in any way to discover that Gen X is cool with it while the rest of us are ready to hang a chatbot in the town square.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans are becoming more skeptical of artificial intelligence. Fifty-two percent now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI, up from 37 percent in 2021. Among people under 30, that number has reached 55 percent. But people ages 50 to 64, aka Gen Xers, are the only age group where a majority doesn’t describe itself as more concerned than excited.

This is where my completely anecdotal and scientifically useless theory comes in: Older people seem to have spent their lives being remarkably uncritical about new technology. Millennials and Gen Z, meanwhile, appear much more inclined to look at whatever Silicon Valley is currently selling as the Next Big Thing and see it for what it really is: marketing hype selling a product that’s probably more dangerous than it is helpful.

Gen X Is Less Worried About AI Than Every Other Generation

Meanwhile, and again this is purely anecdotal on my part, Gen Xers seem more inclined to view AI as more of a cool toy, and they can see downsides but aren’t terribly concerned about them. Or at least don’t think they outweigh the benefits.

Data centers consume enormous amounts of water? Yes, but the robot just gave me a delightful scrambled eggs recipe that uses the shell! Chatbots confidently invent information? Not according to the chatbot! Generative AI produces convincing fake images that can distort a person’s view of reality? Look! LOOK! The machine — no, I — made a picture of me as Superman!

That’s just my non-peer-reviewed theory. While younger Americans are increasingly worried that AI will eliminate jobs and wreck society as a whole, as it further damages interpersonal human connections and cheapens the very idea of human creative output, Gen Xers are clapping like happy seals in the comments section of an AI video. Meanwhile, according to the Pew survey, 72 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds think AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, up from 69 percent who believed the same thing when the same survey was conducted in 2024.

The one silver lining is that only eight percent of Gen Xers surveyed were “more excited than concerned” about AI. Overall, though, the survey paints a picture of a generation that acknowledges a problem but just doesn’t care. It makes sense why. Again, anecdotally, they seem to have grown up more trusting of corporations, truly believing they have their best interests at heart.

When they’re told that every new tech innovation is just another tool in the toolbox, they seem to be the first ones eager to believe it, and the AI-generated pictures of friends and family members posted to Facebook depicting them on vacations they never went on are just a small price to pay for whatever damage they cause.

Kind of fitting for the generation best known for its apathy.

The post This Is the Only Generation That Isn’t Totally Freaked Out by AI appeared first on VICE.

Not to make light—or lightning, I guess—of a man’s death, but when an active volcano known for spewing molten rock and ash and occasionally producing volcanic lightning has signs telling people to please be careful because the area is experiencing intense volcanic activity, it’s probably best to abide by the sign’s wisdom.

According to the Associated Press, a 29-year-old Kansas man died Sunday after being struck by lightning while hiking on Sicily’s Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano.

Rescuers found the man alone in an exposed area around 4,600 feet above sea level. He was airlifted to a hospital in Catania in cardiac arrest and was later pronounced dead. His name has not been released.

Kansas Man Dies After Being Struck by Lightning on Mount Etna

Local authorities had restricted access to parts of the volcano because of recent heightened activity, some of which, namely its volcanic ash, had disrupted flights at nearby Catania Airport. The area where the man was reportedly found, Valle del Bove, had been closed to hikers, according to local fire officials.

The source of the lightning is up for debate. Weather forecasts had predicted thunderstorms in Sicily on Sunday, but lightning can also be generated by volcanic eruptions, which create electrical charges when ash particles collide, creating terrifying electrical bolts nestled within the ominous dark plumes billowing out of a vent. Officials say that more people have died from lightning strikes on Etna in recent decades than from the volcano itself.

The last time someone died from an eruption-related incident was in 1987.

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If any lesson can be taken from the extremely, laughably ugly animated film Niu Lai, as it dominates the Chinese box office, blowing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey out of the water, it’s probably that people will always love a viral, memeable disaster just as much, if not more, than a meticulously crafted masterwork. And they will come out in droves so they, too, can be in on the joke.

Niu Lai is an 86-minute animated film about a newborn calf learning life lessons or some such s—t. It went from making roughly 7,700 yuan in its first 10 days to more than 14.9 million yuan, according to The Guardian, after social media turned the too-earnest-and-scrappy-for-its-own-good movie into a national joke.

If you haven’t seen any footage, it looks like the animation you see in a late-90s children’s TV show. Like ReBoot, but much worse. Probably closer to the more recent Adult Swim show Xavier: Renegade Angel, but Xavier had the benefit of looking shitty on purpose. Niu Lai was made over five years by just two people, a mother-son filmmaking duo. It had no marketing, no trailer, and almost no audience.

Then some of the few people who did see it started posting clips recorded in the theater showing off its bizarrely bare-bones visuals, and it took off.

An Animated Movie With Almost No Audience Became a Hit After Everyone Started Mocking It

That puts Niu Lai into the proud cinematic tradition of movies that become successful because they sucked real hard. American film history is littered with films with more ambition than budgets and filmmaking know-how could support, creating a whole subgenre we affectionately call “so bad it’s good.”

I feel like we’ve been seeing fewer and fewer of these in recent years. There used to be a whole lower-middle class of filmmakers and film financiers who seemed to specialize in making objectively terrible movies that were still undeniably watchable. The kinds of movies that were the bread and butter of podcasts like How Did This Get Made and the legendary show Mystery Science Theater 3000 before it, along with countless local TV hosts like Elvira and Joe Bob Briggs.

While I haven’t seen the whole thing, from everything I’ve read and seen online, Niu Lai is bad in a way a lot of things aren’t bad anymore. In an era where things are bad because they were run through AI, which only knows how to make things aggressively subpar using a factory process that churns out a sea of sameness, Niu Lai is a special, handcrafted kind of bad that used to be an abundant resource and has sadly dried up like the rivers and lakes being chugged by data centers. It’s quaint. It’s cozy.

It has the distinct whiff of human-made garbage, and that’s exactly why it’s made millions.

The post The ‘Worst Animated Movie Ever’ Is Somehow Becoming a Box Office Hit appeared first on VICE.

When we think about data collection and the potential for some all-powerful entity to amass a comprehensive dossier of our behaviors, we tend to think of shadowy government agencies. You probably never would’ve suspected that McDonald’s has one on you. Because they do if you’re part of its loyalty program, which, according to a report from WIRED, collects an enormous amount of data that’s used to predict what you’ll eat next.

WIRED reporter Reece Rogers found this out after requesting his personal data from McDonald’s as a California resident. He got back a 515-page report detailing his years of purchases, his loyalty-points history, his activity, any promotional offers associated with this account, and even the codes he scanned for the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

Every interaction he had with the brand over the years was compiled into a report longer than the average novel. And it was all being fed into an algorithm that could predict his McDonald’s-related behavior.

A McDonald’s Customer Requested His Data and Got Back a 515-Page Report

For instance, the company was able to predict that Rogers would visit McDonald’s 2.16 times of the next six weeks, spending an average of $13.49 per order. It even provided him with a ranking of McDonald’s menu items that were most relevant to him. The top three included some McDonald’s standards, like a large Diet Coke and a spicy snack wrap.

I got a real kick out of the item in the number three slot, wherein McDonald’s predicted that Rogers would be gaga over the Grinch McShaker Fry Large, a limited-time offering that let people pour a little packet of Grinch-themed dill pickle-flavored powder over fries.

His “Customer Attrition Likelihood,” a.k.a. the odds that he’ll stop going to McDonald’s, was zero. They even know when they’ve ensnared you for life.

McDonald’s says this info helps provide personalized deals and messages, while privacy experts say all this extensive data collection is the norm for loyalty programs. Every transaction you make as a loyalty rewards program member is grist for the algorithmic mill.

Rogers asked McDonald’s to delete his information. Probably for the best. Being in the thrall of a fast food menu is bad enough. Having gone so often, so regularly, that they know, for absolute fact, that you’ll never free yourself from its trap is just a bit unsettling.

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A lot of guys out there are freaking out over their testosterone levels, which can lead to things that make men feel less masculine, like erectile dysfunction and the loss of muscle mass. The body naturally loses testosterone as it gets older, because it’s your body’s form of retirement from the wild life of manhood. You’re done making babies; you’re done needing your muscles. It’s time to wither away and die. If you’re among the men desperately hoping to hold onto testosterone as much as you can, consider drinking coffee. A lot of it.

According to a new study published in the European Journal of Nutrition, men who drink more coffee tend to have higher levels of total and bioavailable testosterone (aka, the amount of testosterone in your blood that your body can actively use). Researchers at the University of Oulu analyzed 2,264 46-year-olds in Finland and found that testosterone increased as coffee consumption rose, even after accounting for factors like body size and lifestyle.

Men Who Drink More Coffee Tend to Have Higher Testosterone, According to a New Study

On top of that, the researchers found that coffee drinkers also had less total and visceral fat and more skeletal muscle, while both men and women had lower levels of certain amino acids that are associated with insulin resistance and type II diabetes.

Now here’s the bummer part of the story for anyone with low-T who stopped reading this article to go make a pot of coffee: the researchers couldn’t prove that coffee caused any of this. This is a perfect example of data establishing a link but not a direct cause. And of course, as I often preach in these science-based articles, correlation does not equal causation.

The researchers didn’t assign people the task of drinking a ton of coffee and then sitting back and watching what happens. That means it’s entirely possible that guys with naturally higher testosterone just really like coffee.

Yes, the researchers found that heavy coffee drinkers had more total testosterone and more bioavailable testosterone. But they also had lower free testosterone (aka the tiny bit of testosterone in your blood that your body can use immediately) and a lower free androgen index (a ratio that estimates the amount of active, unbound testosterone circulating through the body). These guys also had high levels of SHBG, a protein that moves sex hormones through the body.

It’s probably wise to remove the espresso IV you inserted after reading the headline, because for now, all science can tell is that coffee drinking and some hormonal patterns appear to move in concert… and that’s about it. Nothing definitive yet.  

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