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.
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.
The post Drinking Your Coffee Too Hot Could Triple Your Risk of Cancer, New Study Finds appeared first on VICE.
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.
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?
The post How Your Dog’s Brain Works More Like Yours Than You Think, According to Scientists appeared first on VICE.
We already know all about Bryan Johnson’s girlfriend’s vaginal microbiome. And now, for some ungodly reason, we know how many “female erections” she’s getting every night. Why? Because we live in a crazy world, people.
Kate Tolo, 30, Johnson’s girlfriend and business partner, has been sleeping with a tampon-shaped light sensor inside her vagina to measure blood flow overnight. The equipment costs a whopping $15,723.68 and involves a wire taped to her leg, a monitoring device, and a laptop that has to stay awake the whole time. “The laptop can’t fall asleep, or we lose the data. I sadly learned that through experience,” she told the New York Post.
Johnson, the millionaire biohacker who’s made a career out of trying not to die, already tracks his own nighttime erections with a $275 gadget connected to his phone. And, naturally, he wants women involved, too. “Women have erections too. This is news for most women,” he wrote on X, explaining that the clitoris contains erectile tissue just like the penis.
And he’s right about the anatomy. During sleep, specifically REM sleep, blood flow increases in the clitoris and vaginal tissue. Researchers have known about this for decades, although, surprise, surprise, no one is exactly rushing to develop affordable gadgets to monitor it. One older study even found that women who described themselves as highly arousable had similar nighttime vaginal blood-flow responses to women who reported much lower arousability.
That’s interesting because it raises questions about what nighttime responses can tell us about sexual function during the day. Low desire can have all sorts of contributing factors, including stress and relationship difficulties, although sleeping measurements by themselves can’t explain why someone isn’t interested in sex.
There’s also the cardiovascular angle. Erectile dysfunction in men can be an early warning sign of heart disease, but researchers haven’t established whether nighttime genital blood flow in women could provide similar information.
Tolo has argued that women’s nighttime erections have received very little scientific attention. If researchers eventually find a medical benefit to tracking them, she’d like to see someone develop a device that doesn’t require a small fortune and a laptop next to the bed.
And she’s got a point about the research imbalance. Urologist Rachel Rubin told PBS NewsHour that 27 fellowships focus on men’s sexual health. “We have one that even acknowledges women’s sexual health,” she said.
Of course, Tolo is one woman running an experiment on herself, and no established clinical test interprets these nighttime measurements. Still, if a millionaire biohacker and his girlfriend want to spend $16,000 investigating an overlooked aspect of women’s sexual health, there are certainly worse ways to spend their money.
Everyone else’s clitoris can keep doing its thing overnight, unmonitored and blissfully offline.
The post Bryan Johnson’s Girlfriend Has a $16,000 ‘Techno Tampon’ to Track Her ‘Female Erections’ appeared first on VICE.
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.
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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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.
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.
The post How Badly Does Smoking Wreck Your Reproductive Organs? Here’s What the Science Says. appeared first on VICE.
If you're a new user of Withings' fitness-tracking smartwatches or smart scales and want to sync and access your health data through third party apps like Apple Health or Google Health it's now going to cost you.
According to a discussion on Withings' support forums spotted by MacRumors, new Withings accounts created from October 13th, 2026, and onwards will require a Withings Plus subscription to use the "automatic sync to third-party apps" feature. The subscription costs $9.95 per month or $99.50 per year but Withings' devices come with a free one month trial that includes the option to sync their data to third-party apps. When the trial …
The promise of GLP-1 drugs has always depended on people being able to afford them. These drugs still cost hundreds of dollars per month if you’re paying cash, at which point access becomes a privilege: The higher-income executive who wants to trim a few pounds might be able to afford them either way, but the low-income worker who needs the drug to lose significant weight might not be able to afford them — unless their health insurance covers it.
For a while, the trend lines for GLP-1 insurance coverage were positive. As of 2026, roughly two-thirds of private employer plans, which insure half of Americans, were covering GLP-1 medications for weight loss to treat obesity. Over the summer, Medicare launched a new $50-per-month prescription program. The US has struggled with an obesity epidemic for decades, but it looked like powerful drugs to treat it were finally starting to be more seamlessly integrated into the health system.
At least that’s how things appeared earlier this year. But now, private plans are pulling back from GLP-1 coverage. People are being left in the lurch, debating whether to try to pay for these drugs on their own or stop taking medicines they feel are making a real difference for their health.
The dilemma reveals one of the structural flaws in American healthcare. For working-age adults, your insurance depends on your job. Unfortunately, because people no longer stay at the same job for decades, there is not a strong financial incentive for employers to make investments that will benefit your health in the long term — but there is a strong incentive to minimize short-term costs as much as possible. It’s the kind of perverse rationale that could compel employer-sponsored health plans to stop covering a drug that, if taken over the full course of a person’s life, could help them not only lose weight but ultimately reduce their risk of heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic health problems, improving their health and saving all of us money as they get older.
“An employer or an insurer making coverage decisions doesn’t necessarily care if they’re saving Medicare money,” said Dan Sacks, a healthcare economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s a classic problem with the American health insurance system, and it’s certainly salient here.”
This mismatch between what’s good for people’s health and what’s good for the corporate bottom line has long been one of the underlying flaws in the US health system. Now access to GLP-1 drugs is shrinking just as these drugs were starting to make a real dent in the US obesity crisis. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
From the beginning, insurance coverage was the big question hanging over GLP-1s and their potential to revolutionize US healthcare. But recently, it looked like we’d turned a corner.
When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health festival over the summer, pharmaceutical reps seemed visibly relieved that GLP-1 coverage had been picking up among private insurers. In 2026, about two out of every three employer-sponsored plans were covering some of these drugs for weight management, up from about 20 percent just the year before.
“They’re recognizing that this is an investment in their workforce,” said Laura Steele, who leads the cardiometabolic health unit at Eli Lilly, which manufactures Zepbound and Foundayo. “Yes, there is a budget, and there is a benefit design that every employer has. That’s real. That’s not going away. But they’re also recognizing the overall cost that they’re experiencing by not dealing with this too.”
But as employers and private insurers make coverage decisions for next year, they are suddenly pulling back. At least 10 percent of employer plans that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss say they are likely to discontinue coverage in 2027, according to one survey by the Business Group on Health — and that number may still increase. A Mercer survey of large employers found that 6 percent had dropped coverage in 2026 and another 5 percent were planning to in 2027 or actively considering it. A separate report from the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts found that the number of commercially insured people in the state taking a GLP-1 drug had fallen by 50 percent between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 as private coverage started to drop off.
Some of the biggest brands in the US are reportedly eliminating or reducing their coverage: PepsiCo, Starbucks, and Lowe’s among them. And their reasons are simple: It’s too expensive. The drugs still carry a high net price tag — $600 or more for a 30-day supply — and potential demand is high (two in every five American adults have obesity).
When a lot of people start taking an expensive medication all at once, it’s going to raise costs for employer insurance plans — and they have to figure out how to adapt. Insurers set premiums at the start of each year, based on how many people are on the plan and how much healthcare they are expected to need. But if those estimates are off — say, if more people take an expensive GLP-1 drug than the insurer expected — they have to offset those costs somehow, and raising premiums the following year is a common solution. According to one estimate, premiums are projected to grow by 5 to 13 percent due to GLP-1 costs — and the burden of paying those higher premiums is likely to fall on the workers. The employer can also try to limit GLP-1 use by, for example, asking workers to pay more out of pocket for these drugs; according to Mercer, 27 percent of large US employers instituted some kind of utilization controls for GLP-1 drugs over the past year or plan to next year.
They also have the option to simply stop covering these drugs for weight loss altogether — and that’s the route more and more of them are deciding to take. The abrupt reversal has even caught economists like Sacks off guard.
“I was surprised that anyone would do an about-face because I thought they understood the trade-offs well,” Sacks said. “My guess is that it turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated: Take-up is higher, and possibly more people are sticking with it. That’s one reason that you might not want to continue to offer it.”
For employers, the short-term costs of covering a drug often outweigh the long-term benefits that medication may confer, at least from the employer’s POV. One analysis — notably produced by Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas — concluded that covering GLP-1s for weight loss increased average employee health costs by $7,000 in the first year and another $4,200 in the second, largely due to the cost of the drugs themselves. And yet at the same time, there were no decreases in obesity-related medical events in that time period. Another study from Sacks and his colleagues at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina found that GLP-1 use did not lead to any cost savings over five years.
So in the short term, these employers are arguably making an economically rational decision — but one that may still come at their employees’ expense. “I’m completely screwed,” said one person on Reddit about Cigna’s plans to drop GLP-1 coverage for their own employees. They’re looking at at least $300 for one month’s supply at cash prices.
They weren’t alone either: “I’m devastated,” said another person, commenting on Starbucks’s decision to stop covering GLP-1 drugs. They said they had an autoimmune condition that had made it difficult to lose weight — until this new class of medicines came along.
How could we end up here, where it makes good business sense for companies to make a decision that could potentially harm their workers’ health in the long term? It is at least in part a result of the haphazard way the US has ended up insuring people.
When employer-sponsored insurance started to arise in the mid-20th century, eventually becoming the primary way to cover the working-age population, people tended to stay at the same job for a long period of time. In theory, there was a synergy: Companies wanted their workers to stay productive, and so it was worth it for the company to invest in their long-term health via their insurance benefits. And research has found that people who stay with the same company — and the same insurance plan — tend to have better health than those who switch a lot.
But these days, people change jobs all the time or work various gigs to piece together an income. You probably don’t expect to stay at your job for 10 years — and your employer doesn’t expect you to either. Instead, they want to keep their own costs as low as possible in the short term. This leads them to cut GLP-1 coverage, even though doctors do believe that people could benefit tremendously long term from the weight loss these drugs help them achieve and all of its potential health benefits.
“There are very real health benefits of these drugs,” Sacks told me. “The fact that we don’t find offsets or they’re even more expensive than we thought doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t cover them.”
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American healthcare policy. Sign up here.
In theory, the market is supposed to fix the price problem: Drug companies get a period of exclusivity for the drugs they develop, and then, once that time elapses, cheaper generic versions can come onto the market. But generic semaglutide won’t be available in the US until at least 2031 — and for some versions, the generic competitors aren’t going to debut until the 2040s. Offering GLP-1 coverage could become a competitive advantage for employers, a perk they can offer to entice potential workers as part of their benefits package.
Beyond that, though, the path to more affordable GLP-1s is not immediately obvious right now. A lot of people are already willing to pay cash for these drugs — and that may continue as long as people can afford to do it. But with inflation still steadily rising, these drugs could slip out of reach for more and more Americans.
The government could get involved, but, for now, the federal government’s negotiating authority only covers Medicare, not the private plans that are dropping coverage. Serious healthcare reform is probably off the table until at least 2028, and then only if Democrats win both Congress and the White House and decide to make a healthcare package their legislative priority.
But the lesson of these recent developments is that, at some point, the US may have to look seriously at the underlying problem creating this mess in the first place. A patchwork method of insuring people that privileges short-term cost-cutting over people’s long-term health isn’t a real healthcare system.
Ask a woman in her mid-40s how she slept, and she’ll probably laugh at you. Then she’ll tell you the exact minute she woke up, because it’s been the same one for months.
For many women, that hour is somewhere around 3:30 a.m. There’s even a name for the unfortunate experience now: Club 330. Membership is free, nobody wants to belong, and you’re probably reading this after getting four hours of sleep. I feel you.
Mattress company Simba surveyed 1,000 British women over 40 and found that 84% regularly wake up during the night. On average, it takes nearly 34 minutes to fall back asleep, although 27% spend at least 45 minutes lying there contemplating their existence.
Women have been discussing these middle-of-the-night awakenings online for years. One woman on X asked, “How did 3 am become the universal perimenopause wake-up time?” The replies were full of women who’d apparently been keeping the exact same miserable schedule.
Perimenopause likely explains many of them. Estrogen and progesterone fluctuate during the transition, interfering with sleep and making it harder to stay asleep. And, of course, there are the night sweats, because who doesn’t love waking up at 3 a.m. in soaking wet pajamas?
The second half of the night is also when sleep naturally becomes lighter, so interruptions are more likely. Hormones don’t cause every 3 a.m. awakening, but they can make an already frustrating situation worse.
According to the University of Texas Medical Branch, up to 70% of women experience sleep disturbances around menopause. Researcher Emily Lantz, Ph.D., said nighttime hot flashes were among the biggest complaints women raised during sleep interviews.
In her team’s 2026 study, 43 women received either menopause education or cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) that included help managing hot flashes. Women in the therapy group slept better and had fewer nighttime hot flashes. It’s a small study, involving 43 participants, but the findings offer another option for women tired of spending their nights staring at the ceiling.
One thing you can try tonight is resisting the urge to check the time. Sleep expert Dr. Zoe Gotts told Metro that checking the time can increase alertness, making it harder to fall asleep again.
And if this has been happening for months, bring it up with your doctor. There’s no prize for making it through perimenopause on four hours of sleep.
The post Club 330 Is the Club Nobody Wants to Join, But Women Over 40 Know It Well appeared first on VICE.
In the annals of Texas political mythology is the tale of a young Lyndon B. Johnson, so worried he was going to lose an election that he decided to start a rumor that his opponent enjoyed sexual relations with pigs.
His campaign manager was outraged, telling Johnson no one would believe such a bald-faced lie.
“I know,” Johnson replied, according to legend. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”
Some six decades later, Republican activists returned to Johnson’s old bag of tricks in an effort to undermine Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, by falsely telling millions of people he was being treated at a mental health facility in Ohio.
Despite a generation of Republican dominance in Texas, Talarico is running ahead of Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general who is costing the party millions to hold a once-safe seat. Polls show Talarico, a Presbyterian pastor and Austin state representative, has so far proven impervious to Paxton’s attacks on his progressive record.
So while Talarico was off the campaign trail recovering from the flu, Paxton and his allies seized an opportunity and sowed a scandal. Paxton alleged that Talarico was having a mental breakdown, and right-wing influencers piled on, linking together unrelated non-events to deduce that he was being treated out of state. The story, largely based on speculation and red string, was echoed by White House officials and shared online millions of times.
Michelle Smith, a senior adviser to Paxton, said on social media Sunday that she was told by a friend that a doctor confirmed Talarico “has definitely been admitted to a mental institution.”
Paxton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about his or Smith’s claims.
Talarico was forced to deny that he’d been in mental health treatment — or had ever been to Ohio at all. The health care center confirmed he’d never been a patient. With the story still gaining traction, Talarico provided home security footage to the New York Times to further prove his whereabouts.
Competitive elections are known to get nasty. But the speed at which this conspiracy took hold and was laundered into the mainstream shows the power of social media influencers to shape political discourse through misinformation, especially when empowered by candidates themselves.
“We’ve entered into a time in politics where truth and reality don’t really seem to matter,” said Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies social media disinformation campaigns.
The facts everyone agrees on: Talarico attended a campaign event near Dallas on Sept. 26 and fundraisers in New York City on Sept. 28 and 29. The next day, he made a virtual appearance at the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, saying he was too sick with the flu to attend in person.
“I guess I’ve been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail, and so I want to keep everybody safe,” he said at the virtual event. “If I was passing on this illness to somebody and got someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby sick, I couldn’t live with myself.”
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But the longer Talarico stayed off the campaign trail, the more those shared facts began to fray.
On Oct. 7, Paxton released an ad saying Talarico had been missing for 11 days. (It had been seven days since the Hispanic Business Council event.) At a rally put on by President Donald Trump that night, Paxton started a chant of “Where is James Talarico?”
“Where do you think they hid that little socialist?” he asked the crowd.
An extended absence from the campaign trail in the home stretch is unusual, said Kirby Goidel, a political scientist at Texas A&M.
“It opens the door to speculation, and the world we live in means you can speculate in a very public way without a lot of friction,” he said. “You can spread misinformation pretty quickly and easily, especially among people who really want to believe it.”
The story Paxton and his supporters landed on was that Talarico was having a mental breakdown from the pressure of the campaign.
Paxton released multiple ads saying Talarico was “mentally fragile,” and posted on social media that he was “having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage.” Paxton set up a “Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line” for people to report on his whereabouts.
Sara Gonzales, a Blaze TV host and conservative social media influencer, posted that she had “unverified information on James Talarico’s whereabouts. If true, it will END his campaign.” Another influencer, who goes by the handle TickleTexts, said Talarico was “in a mental health facility after breaking down.” Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor, said “sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility.”
On Oct. 9, the erstwhile candidate reappeared at the Austin City Limits music festival, seemingly of sound mind and body. That could have been the end of it, a tidy Friday afternoon bow on a week of rank speculation.
But it was not.
Saturday morning, Caroline Wren, a prominent GOP fundraiser, posted about a private plane she claimed flew from Austin to Ohio and back the same day Talarico showed up at ACL. Ohio, she noted, was where Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo sought mental health treatment for seven weeks in 2023.
“So many coincidences!” she wrote on the post which has almost two million views.
Saturday night, a right-wing influencer named Rhein Amacher said he called the Lindner Center, identifying himself as Tim and purporting to be Talarico’s cousin. Amacher has said on social media that he was initially turned away because he didn’t have a patient identification code, but when he made up four numbers, the facility began confirming patient details.
In the 46-second audio clip, the woman on the other end of the line says that someone named James Talarico was “just discharged this evening.”
How could Talarico have been discharged from a hospital in Ohio Saturday evening and also be at ACL Friday afternoon? Why would an employee at a medical facility violate state and federal privacy laws to give out patient information? Those questions were left in the rearview mirror as some conservatives rushed to amplify the story.
Former Texas GOP chair Abraham George reposted the audio, saying it was “time for Talarico to step aside and focus on his mental health.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted about this over a dozen times in four days, saying in one post that “a Senate candidate with a history of disturbing behavior who suddenly disappears for two weeks has a lot of explaining to do.” Elon Musk claimed the “Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening,” and reposted another user’s post of the audio clip.
Talarico’s campaign repeatedly denied that he had any connection to this mental health facility. Sunday evening, the Lindner Center confirmed on social media that Talarico had never been treated at their facility.
Paxton himself never shared the audio, but Smith, his campaign adviser, amplified the false reports.
Mainstream Texas Republicans didn’t engage; Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows ignored it entirely. The handful of state representatives who did jump into the conversation came from the same far-right, extremely online corner of the party. Most reposted vague commentary or made general digs at Talarico’s mental health.
“If you’re a Texas voter who’s just now learning that James Talarico is a mentally unstable liar, you need to reevaluate your trusted news sources. And read your Bible,” State Rep. Brent Money, R-Greenville, posted on Sunday. “Even if Talarico has not been hiding in an in-patient mental health institution for almost 2 weeks, his public statements over his entire political career are evidence of his depravity.”
Money told The Texas Tribune he had no information about Talarico’s whereabouts, but that his “depraved mind is on full display when he fights [to] sterilize children and when he can name his favorite drag queen without a second’s hesitation.”
Goidel said he’s not surprised to see elected officials and prominent leaders amplifying unverified claims like these. There’s “virtually no penalty” to being wrong in politics these days, he said. But the cost to the rest of us is significant.
“It’s one thing to have political disagreement, but you don’t want a campaign decided on misinformation,” he said. “Not if you care about democracy, at least.”
During a discussion on X Sunday, Grant Cardone, a popular finance influencer, congratulated Amacher for surfacing the since-debunked story.
“Whether it’s true or not, people deserve to know the potential of this,” he said.
Disclosure: The New York Times has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.
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As you get older, you get a running list of things you can’t do anymore, like pulling an all-nighter or eating a gas station burrito without regretting it for two days. How much that list ruins your mood might come down to one thing.
That thing is control, or at least the feeling of having some.
Researchers Maria Wirth, Anna Elena Kornadt, and Klaus Rothermund studied 268 adults between 50 and 91 to see how getting older affects happiness. They focused on perceived control, or the belief that your decisions can still influence what happens in your life.
The people who noticed themselves losing abilities were less happy when they also felt powerless to do anything about it. Those who believed they still had some control were far less bothered by the same age-related losses.
Think about developing a bad knee. You could decide your hiking days are over and retire your boots permanently. Or you could find another way to stay active, even if that means trading the mountains for a swimming pool. The researchers warned that avoiding activities out of fear of injury can lead to further physical decline. And being stuck at home because you’ve stopped doing things you enjoy won’t improve your mood.
There’s also a strange upside to aging that researchers have been discussing for years. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has studied why older adults often report greater happiness than younger people, despite more physical limitations.
“Older people are happy. They’re happier than middle-aged people, and younger people certainly,” she said during a TED talk. Her research suggests that as people become more aware of how much time they have left, they get better at deciding what’s worthy of their attention.
Your attitude toward aging could even be connected to how long you live. Yale researcher Becca Levy found that older adults with positive beliefs about aging lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with negative ones. That’s an association, of course, but a fascinating one.
So what can you do with all this? The research suggests that maintaining some independence and finding ways to adapt when your body stops cooperating could help. You can learn something new at 65. You can change your routine at 80. And you can certainly stop assuming that every new birthday means another thing you have to give up.
The burrito is probably still a bad idea. Nearly everything else is negotiable.
The post This Is the One Thing That Helps People Stay Happy as They Age, According to Researchers appeared first on VICE.
Switching hands mid-masturbation feels kind of like driving on the wrong side of the road in London. You know the rules in theory, but you’re still convinced you’re about to hurt somebody, possibly yourself.
But according to the internet, jerking off with your non-dominant hand might be good for your brain. The theory centers on neuroplasticity, your brain’s ability to adapt when learning something new. Apparently, using the hand you can barely use to operate a toothbrush is supposed to give your brain a workout.
Most people are creatures of habit when it comes to getting themselves off. A 2022 study involving 406 adults found that 79% always or usually used their dominant hand. Left-handed people were a little more adventurous than righties.
Psychologist Paul Rodway, one of the study’s authors, told Cosmopolitan that people generally prefer their dominant hand because it’s easier to control and feels more natural. Understandable. Most of us have spent years perfecting our technique, and relearning it with the other hand sounds like unnecessary work.
The study also found that 75% of women used sex toys, compared with 33% of men. So for many people, the whole hand debate is irrelevant anyway.
The brain research gets interesting, though. In a study involving 22 right-handed adults, researchers had participants practice drawing with their left hands for 10 days. Their speed and accuracy improved, and brain scans showed changes in the connections involved in controlling movement.
The catch? They got better at drawing with their left hands. Researchers haven’t demonstrated that this translates into improved memory or intelligence. If it did, every left-handed person forced to use right-handed scissors in elementary school would presumably be a genius by now.
Psychosexual therapist Michael Stock was equally skeptical when VICE asked him about the technique. He doubted switching hands would make much neurological difference, though he suggested people might enjoy the “novel physical stimulation.”
And there’s something to that. Using the other hand feels unfamiliar, and novelty can be fun when you’ve been doing things the same way for years. Some internet circles even have a name for the technique: “the Stranger.”
Sex therapist Catherine O’Dowd told MEL Magazine about a client who enjoyed switching hands simply because it felt different. Which is a perfectly good reason to experiment, assuming you’re interested.
So if you’re bored with your usual routine, go ahead and try the other hand. You could discover something you enjoy. Just don’t expect to finish with a higher IQ.
The post Can Jerking Off With Your Other Hand Actually Make You Smarter? Here’s What the Science Says. appeared first on VICE.
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Flu season is starting earlier than usual this year, which I know from reviewing federal data. But I also know it because I woke up with body aches and chills last night, mere days before I’d planned to get my flu vaccination (!).
Already, some parts of the country are seeing levels of flu activity typically associated with late fall or early winter. In Washington state, for instance, doctors are reporting seeing as much flu now as they usually would around Christmas.
Flu activity overall is still low, to be clear. But as of October 7, infections were rising in all 50 states. And flu is spreading before many people — like, say, me — have received their annual vaccine.
Epidemiologists don’t yet know why the flu arrived early this year, or why cases first started rising in Western states like Washington, California, and Nevada. It’s possible that a mutation is helping this year’s flu variants evade existing immunity, one virologist told NPR. International travel could play a role, too: Flu cases also spiked early in Japan and other parts of Asia.
We don’t need to know why the flu arrived early to take some basic precautions, though. So today, we’re talking through some practical tips for coping with an early flu season.
An early flu season doesn’t necessarily mean a worse season — but even a moderate season can do serious damage. Last year, influenza sent hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital and caused tens of thousands of deaths, including almost 200 among children.
The first and best way to avoid those kinds of harms is by getting the flu shot, which reduces the risk of serious illness by an average of 40 to 60 percent. In the US, people aged 6 months and older are typically told to get the vaccine by October’s end.
In light of the early onset, however (it takes two weeks to build up full immunity), you might instead want to get your shot ASAP.
There are some everyday precautions you can take, too — many of them familiar from the Covid-19 era. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, for slightly longer than feels appropriate. Mask when you’re sick or might encounter someone else who is.
And don’t neglect the good habits that support your overall health: getting enough sleep, drinking a lot of water, and eating a balanced diet. (There’s very little evidence for trendier interventions, like supplements, saunas, cold plunges, or the infused herbal baths that my kooky former yoga teacher used to recommend.)
If you do get flu symptoms, reach out to your doctor early — especially if you’re older, pregnant, immunocompromised, or otherwise at higher risk for complications. Prescription antiviral medications, like Tamiflu, prevent the flu virus from spreading inside your body so that your immune system can clear it. But they work best within 48 hours of symptom onset.
To be clear, you needn’t take my word on any of this; I’m just another voice in the public health cacophony! Besides, recent polling suggests that my particular voice — that is, the voice of someone who works in media — is not quite as persuasive as it used to be. (Ditto medical websites and government health agencies.)
But if you have doubts or questions about vaccines, there is someone much closer to home you can consult: Ask your doctor (or nurse or pharmacist) about the flu shot’s risks and benefits. They’re best positioned to break the science down and apply it to your health. In hindsight, mine surely would have told me to stop delaying my shot for a more convenient weekend.
➨ Get creative in the fight against inflation. The latest inflation numbers are out today, and they are pretty bad. The cost of many goods and services is rising more quickly than both consumers’ incomes and economists’ expectations. For me, this news brought to mind a question that Vox’s former personal finance columnist tackled a few years ago: Namely, am I cursed to keep spending more money on more things forever?! Her answer was essentially “yes,” but she offered a few ways to help offset those costs: things like moving to a cheaper area or pooling resources via initiatives like tool libraries and community gardens.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
For the past 100 days or so, my mornings have had a new rhythm. When I wake up, the first thing I have to do is feed my digital twin. It consumes my metabolic data, and its first "meal" of the day is my body composition data, sent straight from a smart scale.
Once that's logged in the app, I scoot over to the kitchen to fill an Owala with lemon water to take my medications with. That, too, gets logged in the app. On Mondays, I'll …
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