Dogs have been our closest companions for several millennia now, but they’ve been around for a lot longer. Millions of years longer, in fact. As reported by the University of Michigan, researchers recently took another look at a 30-million-year-old fossil from Oregon and realized they were dealing with one of the most complete early dog skeletons ever discovered.

The fossil was originally dug up back in the late 1980s. Like many archaeological finds, it was then shoved away to gather dust in a museum collection, largely because paleontologists thought it belonged to an oreodont, an extinct creature considered an early relative of several modern animals like sheep, camels, and pigs.

Eventually, further study showed it was actually a Mesocyon coryphaeus, an extinct early canid (aka dog). Previous evidence had only yielded skulls. This specimen yielded more than a skull; it was missing only its tail and portions of its hands and feet. It even contains a baculum, a.k.a. the penis bone dogs today still have.

Scientists Found a Lost Branch of Dog Evolution in an Oregon Museum Collection

The discovery, or, rather, the rediscovery, is important on its own, but it also gives researchers a better idea of how these dogs lived. They were shorter, for one, and a lot stockier. Their bones were thick, meaning they could literally be described as big-boned. Its elbows suggest that it could rotate its forearms, which could have helped it climb or grapple. It also had a prominent big toe.

This was not an ancient Golden Retriever. This was a sturdy dog built to survive the wild.

Eventually, its environment changed, as forests gave way to open woodlands as the climate cooled. This species eventually became an evolutionary midpoint between dogs that climbed trees and those that preferred staying on the ground. That said, you would think Mesocyon was an ancestor of modern dogs. It isn’t. It’s a branch that eventually disappeared, and that’s probably the most interesting part of this fossil’s rediscovery.

It’s evidence that something that just barely shares a link to a modern creature once existed.

The post Archaeologists Rediscover 30-Million-Year-Old Dog Fossil Hiding in a Museum Collection appeared first on VICE.

Dolphins are the kind of smart that’s a little unsettling for an animal. The more we observe their behavior, the freakier they become.

As researchers report in Marine Mammal Science, dolphins off Queensland, Australia, have been caught on camera using a rarely documented hunting technique called “shelling.” It’s a simple but effective strategy that lulls its prey, in this case a fish, into a false sense of security before it gets gobbled up.

A bottlenose dolphin will chase the fish into an empty sea snail shell. The fish, thinking it’s outsmarted the dolphin, will then experience the distinct sensation of sudden X pixie Haitian as the dolphin grabs the entire shell, carries it to the surface of the water, and then shakes it until the fish drops directly into its mouth. It’s the dolphin equivalent of turning over a bag of chips to pour the crumbs all over your face.

A Dolphin Was Filmed Shaking a Fish Out of a Shell Like a Snack Bag

The behavior was documented in Hervey Bay, where researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast were conducting routine surveys. Lead researcher Alexis Levengood immediately recognized what she was seeing and was reportedly so excited that she started screaming at the students on her boat.

Shelling had been previously documented, but only in Shark Bay, on the opposite side of Australia. The Queensland footage suggests that dolphins in different populations may have independently invented the same fishing technique. Alternatively, maybe they didn’t, and this is evidence that dolphins are passing on the tips and tricks they’ve learned, without having to deal with a rapid-fire TikTok video filled with “hacks” that take longer than just doing the thing.

The latter possibility makes sense, as the researchers filmed an adult female shelling while a calf watched. In a perfect example of cause and effect, of observation and imitation, the calf then picked up a shell and attempted the same trick. That doesn’t definitively prove the mom was teaching her kid a new hunting technique, but it could be the first evidence that dolphins may teach shelling to their offspring.

The post Scientists Filmed Dolphins Using a Rare Shell Trick to Catch Fish appeared first on VICE.

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Here’s a little-known fact about that highly expensive condiment you put on your Chipotle burrito: avocado trees are constantly changing their sex. Throughout the day, an avocado tree alternates between male and female flowers. Why it does this has been a mystery for about a century.

Now, a new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, may have finally figured it out.

According to UC Davis and the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists identified a gene called SDMYB that controls its constantly shifting reproductive schedule.

Avocado Trees Switch Sex Throughout the Day. Scientists Finally Know How.

Avocado trees are technically hermaphrodites, but the flowers don’t play the role of both sexes at the same time. A-type varieties, like the deliciously creamy Hass avocados most likely to be served up at your local Mexican restaurant, kickstart the day as females in the morning and become males in the afternoon.

And then there’s B-types, which have the opposite schedule. This helps trees exchange pollen instead of fertilizing themselves, which, as you can imagine, could lead to issues, leaving them weak and disease-ridden and, well, if you know anything about inbreeding, then you get it.

SDMYB controls this behavior, telling the tree when its flowers need to be male or female. This will ultimately prove extremely valuable for avocado farmers, since before this discovery avocado breeders had to plant hundreds of young trees and then wait several years for them to reach maturity to figure out whether it’s an A-type or B-type. Now, they can potentially look at the tree DNA while it’s still young and determine which type it’ll be.

Putting some B-type trees near some A-type trees will help them pollinate each other instead of pollinating like with like, which will help farmers meet the American consumer’s insatiable desire for avocados, since avocado consumption has quadrupled since 2000.

This could lead to more efficient breeding and help produce more avocado varieties better suited to a changing climate and a populace that is ever ravenous for guac.

The post Scientists Finally Figured Out How Avocado Trees Change Sex Throughout the Day appeared first on VICE.

Wondering whether acupuncture can right your body’s wrongs or if it’s just a bunch of woo-woo nonsense is a distinctly human question that manatees and ducks aren’t grappling with. A zoo in Tampa is taking full advantage of this lack of analysis and is administering acupuncture to said animals in an attempt to treat chronic conditions. Zoo reps say it appears to be working.

According to ZooTampa veterinarians and reporting from IFLScience, the zoo has begun using electroacupuncture alongside conventional veterinary care for animals dealing with nerve problems, pain, and injuries.

Sloth is not a sloth. Sloth is a manatee suffering from chronic facial paralysis after a suspected boat strike. It affected his ability to blink his right eye and properly open one nostril. After some electroacupuncture, Sloth has regained a bit of movement around his eye and nostril. How effective it will be in the long term remains to be seen, but so far things are looking up according to the zoo’s veterinarians.

A Tampa Zoo Is Treating a Manatee and a Duck With Electroacupuncture

Then there’s Earl Grey, a black-bellied whistling duck who developed sudden weakness in one leg. After two acupuncture sessions combined with pain medication, fluids and vitamins, Earl Grey was reportedly able to put weight on his weakened leg once again. Electroacupuncture was just one element of a broad, conventional suite of medical treatments that the vets also applied to a rosette spoonbill chick suffering a similar leg issue.

The animals may not be able to question whether electroacupuncture is doing anything or whether it’s the traditional medicine that’s doing all the heavy lifting in their recovery, but we can, and the question of whether it’s helping is as murky as the waters these animals wade through.

As IFLScience reports, acupuncture is typically considered a complementary therapy, meaning you do it in addition to what is hopefully a more traditional medical treatment. Studies on acupuncture’s effectiveness are a real mixed bag. The consensus seems to be that it won’t kill you, though whether or not it’s actually doing anything beyond that is up for debate.

IFLScience brings up a 2024 study of acupuncture as the only treatment for chronic pain in dogs. The researchers found the evidence of its effectiveness to be “weak.” Seems like even as a complementary piece, it wouldn’t be doing much.

That’s probably why ZooTampa isn’t abandoning all traditional medicine in favor of poking animals with electrified sticks. Acupuncture is being used as a supplemental treatment in addition to the conventional ones. Maybe the needles do help, but there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that they can help all on their own.

Meanwhile, there is a manatee, a duck, and a baby rosette spoonbill in Tampa wondering why they’re getting stabbed with a bunch of needles all the time.

The post Can Acupuncture Help Injured Animals? A Tampa Zoo Is Trying It Out. appeared first on VICE.

From a fan perspective, seeing the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, attending the US Open and sipping on Honey Deuces, and getting a seat to Olivia Rodrigo’s Unraveled Tour and sing-screaming to “Stupid Song” couldn’t be more different. But they do have one thing in common: They’re all expensive. 

Attending a live event has become a luxury purchase. Not that long ago in 2019, the average price of a concert ticket was $92. Maybe your seats weren’t great, but you could afford to be in the room. Now the average price has risen to around $133 for face value, and you’re likely spending way more to see the biggest names in music and sports. And thanks to Live Nation’s grip on the music and sports ticketing industry, ever-increasing service fees, and features like dynamic pricing and a ruthless secondary resale market, it certainly feels like we’re not seeing any relief from these sky-high costs anytime soon. 

For those who, say, can’t afford a $1,845 nosebleed ticket to see the Nova Knicks or a $2,000 Olivia Rodrigo resale seat, that means watching at home, or, if something isn’t eventually streamed, just missing out entirely. 

Looking at a seating map and seeing exactly how much ticket prices are changes your perception of the people lucky enough to attend. Like, what kind of person is spending that much money to sit in the very last row? How do they move through this universe with that much money to spend on bad seats? Is everyone secretly rich? Is this just a matter of fiscal irresponsibility? What is going on????

While Vox cannot speak to how everyone in attendance is paying for their tickets, we did talk to one person who was willing to share.

Enter: Craig, a 44-year-old living in the Bay Area, who makes roughly $180,000 per year. Craig spent more than $15,000 seeing Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour six times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I want to know, are you a secret heiress? A billionaire oligarch? How does one afford to see Beyoncé six times? 

No, I’m not an heiress. I’m not unfortunately a billionaire — well, no, billionaires are bad, so don’t quote me on that. But it’s funny, one of the first things that comes to mind is my fandom for so many artists is expansive, but also I just spend money on certain things and not other things. My mom’s big motto in life was, “We’re making memories.” And so for me, I’m never going to regret going to Beyoncé six times. I’m going to regret only seeing her Renaissance tour twice.

One of my big regrets is not going to the Renaissance World Tour. 

I realized a lot of it is — it’s the only place where you can really have this communal experience with people that are in your same delusional mindset. With Cowboy Carter, I was at the very first show in LA, and then I had planned to go to three shows. But then it just became this thing that got into my soul and was like, “I need to keep going.” 

I don’t mind putting this into print or whatever, but I’m an addict, an alcoholic who’s been in recovery for decades, and so it’s easy for me to get hooked on things, but this is such a pure, very expensive way to have joy.

What was it about Cowboy Carter that compelled you to keep going? Was it because you knew Renaissance was amazing? Was it because you saw the movie?

Yeah, I saw the movie four times, but I just kind of knew. And my big three are Björk, Fiona Apple, and Beyoncé. And so Björk is in Iceland most of the time, thank God. Fiona Apple as much as —

Wait, wait, thank God because of your wallet?

Yes.

And Fiona Apple, I’ve seen her many times, but she just doesn’t tour. As much as I’d love her to, she just doesn’t. And I will see Robyn three times this year. I’ve seen Carly Rae Jepsen as many times as I can. But with Beyoncé, it’s like I know there’s a limited amount of how much she’s going to be doing what she’s doing. And with Act III at some point coming up, there’s a real push that I need to get as much as I can. And it sounds greedy, but I don’t feel bad taking up a ticket or space, when I enjoy it as much as I do. 

Take me through Cowboy Carter. You said you were going to initially see it three times.

Right.

You ended up seeing it how many times? Six?

I saw it six times.

Take me through that mentality — from three, how’d that balloon six?

I knew that I was going to see the first three shows. I had planned with a boyfriend who’s now an ex that was part of this whole process. I was going to go to the first show, the second show, and the third show, and then I was going to be done. But I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t probably done. And it’s so funny because my first outfit was pretty homegrown, a just-barely-put-together cowboy hat that I bought at the show. And then by the time I was at the fifth and the sixth show, I had a custom-made gold outfit.

It became this thing where I can’t quite explain how I ended up going to six shows other than it was this snowball rolling downhill.

What kind of tickets did you have? Were they all the same? 

I was in the section right by the catwalk. So it was like, Oh shit, I have to go do this again in the same spot. What I would’ve done differently is I would’ve seen it from way up above. I would’ve seen it from cheaper seats.

What was your more expensive ticket? 

I mean, honestly, my most expensive ticket was the last show and I paid $2,200. And at that point, it had built so much that there was no way I wasn’t going to not be where I wanted to be. It just was like, “Nope, this is happening.”

Tell me about that. You have amazing tickets. You’re up close… 

The last show, I was alone in Club Ho-Down. The amount of friends that I made and the amount of celebrities that I saw — to be in that environment with people that are on your same level and people are screaming and crying and know exactly what’s going to happen. And then when Shaboozey comes out or Jay-Z comes out or Destiny’s Child comes out — I’m getting chills just thinking about it. I can’t explain how I led myself to going to six, but once you’ve got $8,000 on your credit card, what is $12,000?

I — well, $4000 more? 

I know. 

Did you buy them all at one time or was it after you saw the first two?

I had planned the first three and then I had a friend who I went to New York with and we talked ourselves into going to New York. And then in the back of my mind I was like, “I have to go to the last two shows.”

I don’t regret it. I honestly probably will go to eight for Act III. But I will also be more strategic and I will get a seat that is a lot cheaper for a couple of shows. 

Now I’m going to ask you about the painful stuff. So you said if you’re already $8,000 down, what’s $12,000. But did you plan for it? Can you talk me through the financial planning of this?

There wasn’t really any. The breakup that I had happened after my New York show. And so I think my delusional sort of mania kicked in and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to spend $800 on an outfit that’s custom-made.” I’m going to go to both shows at the end and just — it got me through a really tough summer, and it was something that I don’t regret.

How does that work on a credit card? You said that you recently paid it off, right? Is that two years later?

It’s a year later. I live in San Francisco. I have a pretty good job, but also I work in education, and I’ve worked in education my whole life. So it was a lot of my interest, I paid a lot of fees, I’m sure, it takes so long to pay it off, and I was adding to it the whole year. I am not good with money. I wish I were. But again, I don’t have aspirations to own property yet, and I don’t have children.

Beyoncé is your big expense of the last couple years. 

Yeah, pretty much.

And again, I feel embarrassed about that a little bit because I have friends where one spouse, their entire salary goes to childcare. And I’m like, oh, that sounds not fun.

But think of it this way: that’s so much Beyoncé that you could be experiencing instead of having a kid.

Yeah. 

So Act III is rumored. Would you do it again?

Oh, absolutely. Like I said, I’m going to possibly go to, I think, between five and eight shows depending on. And one of my work friends, we talk about what’s happening in the world and we kind of decided that 2026 is Jay-Z’s year.

He has his shows. He has a show on her birthday. So I’m hoping that means the album doesn’t come out until 2027, which means the tour would be 2028, which means I have enough time to save, enough time to put some money away and be a little bit more strategic.

Do you have a limit of how much you’re willing to spend? 

On Beyoncé? I think the gay math, the boy math, that I do in my head is if I see it in chunks, it’s not as bad. The first time I looked at the whole thing was yesterday, and I looked at hotels and flights, merch, and tickets. But if I see it in little bits, I’m like, “Well, that’s not that much.” And I don’t think about how it adds up.

If Beyonce was like, “Oh, here’s my last show.” Is there a limit?

Anything up to $5,000 probably if it was a super important show or last show and I had the opportunity to do that. My parents have seen a lot of shows. That’s something sort of that I had grown up with — going to see artists.

And the real problem is Beyoncé has set this financial bar that now I almost feel like I could spend that kind of money on anyone. The fact that I’m seeing Robin in LA for $300, I’m like, “Oh my God, of course I’m going to go to three shows that week.”

Can I ask you, when was the first time you saw Beyoncé?

I mean, this is embarrassing to admit, but it was Renaissance. 

Oh my gosh. 

I know. And one of my big regrets is not going to see her earlier. 

It was 2016, and I just was like, “I can’t afford $1,000.” It’s ridiculous to say that now. And I’ve always been a fan. I had mix tapes in the ’90s with “Say My Name” and all the Destiny’s Child songs, and I’ve always been a fan of hers, but it really kicked into gear at self-titled or Lemonade. And that makes me sound like a fake fan, but that’s not true. It’s just seeing her live, it really brought it to a new level.

I was going to tell you that I saw her when she was touring that album —  the “Love on Top” album…

4.

4. I saw her at Barclays and it was only, I want to say, $200 for the lower bowl right off the floor. It’s obviously a lot more now. 

I honestly don’t know how some people afford it. I know some people save and save and save to go to one show and they don’t have a credit card or they don’t want to put things on a credit card. I know how privileged I am to have the ability to put something on a credit card, pay it off eventually — I live in the Bay Area and have a job that’s a pretty good job, blah, blah, blah.

@angelbuckens

We made it !!! Hey Chicago !! Cow boy Carter !!! #beyhive #beyonce #cowboycarter #chicago #cowboycarterbeyonce #tickets

♬ original sound – VicBlends

For a normie, what you spend on Beyoncé is mind-blowing, but I’m sure there are people that you met at Cowboy Carter that may have spent a lot more than you, right?

Oh, yeah. There was some video that popped up, I think it was from Renaissance, but it was like, “This is my 26th show.” And Beyoncé read the sign and stepped back a bit. I don’t remember what the exact number was [it was 35]. When I was in the pit at the very last show, it wasn’t abnormal to be where I was, and be like, “I’ve seen her six times.”

So when it comes to the most serious Beyhivers, some may consider you a casual fan?

Yeah. I mean, I’m in it, but I also feel like I’m a person that always goes to a lot of shows, and this is a little bit of a light year for me just because no one huge is touring for me, but she’s coming.

Rebecca Feinglos never expected to get divorced. She’d been with her partner for nine years, and married for six, but finally she had to admit to herself that her relationship had taken an abusive turn.

It was 2021 when she decided to end it. But Feinglos was surprised to discover then that the state she was living in, North Carolina, requires couples to reside in separate homes continuously for a full year before they can even file. 

“In amicable divorces you could lie, but I did not have an amicable divorce,” she told me. “It took 18 months for my divorce to be signed by a judge, and we did not have children.”

When she was finally out of her marriage she felt angry. She knew that many people could not afford to live in separate places, let alone pay for the attorneys needed to navigate all the fraught legal proceedings. Feinglos, a former state government employee with a master’s degree in public policy, started researching divorce laws nationwide. “It was so confusing even for me,” she said. “This was before ChatGPT, and all the Google search results were from family attorneys saying, ‘Oh this is really complicated, you definitely need to hire us to help you.’” She has spent the years since pushing to change those laws.

North Carolina is one of a handful of states, including South Carolina and Arkansas, that require couples to live separately for a set period before they can file for no-fault divorce. Most states make couples wait after they file, a “cooling-off” period meant to give spouses a chance to change their minds. In Wyoming, it’s 20 days. In Missouri, 30. In California, couples need to wait six months, and having children can stretch the timelines further. In some states the clock only starts when one’s spouse is formally served, which means a husband or wife who’s hard to track down can add weeks to the wait before it even begins.

“The system sets people up for conflict, sets people up for war,” said Erin Levine, a former divorce lawyer who founded a company that helps people navigate divorce outside the traditional law firm model. “In some states it’s called a ‘petition,’ in some states it’s called a ‘complaint,’ the forms say ‘spouse v. spouse’ — you are being sued.”

This issue runs, inevitably, into the culture wars. Today some conservatives are trying to make it even harder to get divorced, part of a broader push to strengthen the traditional nuclear family, built on the argument that children fare better when parents stay together. Over the last few years Republican lawmakers in states like Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas have considered new restrictions on no-fault divorce, which lets a person end a marriage without proving their spouse did something wrong. Others have proposed expanding so-called covenant marriages, which require counseling before the wedding and allow divorce only for specific reasons like adultery or abuse. House Speaker Mike Johnson has long endorsed making divorce harder, and Vice President JD Vance has complained that no-fault divorce allows people to “shift spouses like they change their underwear.” (Faced with criticism, a spokesperson later said that Vance does not support changes to divorce law.) 

But as more people come forward with stories of the financial cost, family stress, and even physical danger of extended divorce proceedings, there’s a growing push to address their complaints by making it easier to separate and divorce rather than harder. In 2023, Maryland lawmakers eliminated fault-based divorce entirely, cut Maryland’s separation mandate from a year to six months, and let couples count as separated even while living under the same roof. Washington, DC, has gone further. The same year, the DC Council unanimously scrapped its requirement that couples separate before divorce, and in Virginia, a law that took effect just last month lets people get in front of a judge on the first day they separate, instead of waiting six months or a year to sort out custody, support, and who stays in the house.

The issue has gotten more attention on social media over the last few weeks, as Jen Hamilton and Hadley (Vlahos) Fairley, two bestselling authors with more than 7 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, have started speaking out about how divorce laws in their respective states affect women like them. Hamilton, who is based in North Carolina and separated from her husband in June, has blasted the “asinine, outdated, and paternalistic laws” that keep people trapped in marriages, and has been fundraising on her platforms to help women afford to escape their unsafe relationships. 

Fairley, based in Mississippi, has been recounting the many court filings, legal fees, and emotional pain she endured for nearly three years trying to end her marriage. A no-fault divorce in Mississippi requires both spouses to agree to it, and when they don’t, the only way out is to prove in court that your spouse did something wrong, like adultery or desertion. In May, after eleven days in court, a judge finally granted Fairley a divorce, determining that her ex-husband’s conduct met the state’s legal standard for “habitual cruel and inhuman treatment,” citing a DUI he lied about under oath, more than $200,000 in secret trading losses that were mostly her earnings, a cancer diagnosis he faked to get her sympathy, and months of messages the judge called harassing and manipulative. Custody and the division of their assets are still unresolved, and more trial days are set for September.

“I understand burden of proof for a murder trial, but when it’s your personal life it’s very different,” Fairley told me. “I mean, you’re having our friends and our family go on the stand and testify to what they witnessed and it’s incredibly intrusive…even my therapy notes were subpoenaed.” 

Feinglos has been watching this all, and feeling cautiously hopeful that a reform bill pending in her state’s legislature might finally gain traction. “I do believe we’re at an inflection point,” she said.

The wait itself is the danger

Until the late 1960s, ending a marriage meant proving in court that your spouse had done something the state recognized as wrong, like cheating or abandonment. The burden fell on whoever wanted out, and meeting it often meant airing intimate details that judges weighed differently depending on whether a husband or a wife was asking. Starting in 1969, when California enacted the first no-fault law, states began letting couples divorce without assigning blame. Most followed within a decade, though holdouts like New York lingered. Divorce rates, already rising, peaked around 1980.

The laws mandating divorce waiting periods carry the logic of that earlier system. States tend to justify them by saying couples might reconcile if they’re given time. States also argue that decisions about custody and property shouldn’t be made quickly in the heat of the moment. Underneath both rationales is a theory that married households are valuable to the public, especially where children are involved, and so the state has a responsibility to slow couples down rather than treating marriages like contracts either side can simply cancel. 

Critics have long argued that the first rationale doesn’t hold up, since couples rarely reconcile during the waiting period and few people end a marriage on a whim. The second, they say, ignores what the wait actually does to someone leaving an unhappy or unsafe marriage, which is put them in danger. Separation is one of the most dangerous periods in an abusive relationship, and researchers have found that homicide risk climbs when an abuser senses they are losing control. Some research suggests a court’s intervention can make things worse rather than better if it provokes retaliation without actually getting the victim away from the abuser.

This danger has become a major issue in Virginia, where the push for divorce reform has been closely tied to a horrific murder-suicide by a prominent Democratic politician that made national headlines. 

Cerina Fairfax spent nearly two years in the same house as the husband she was trying to divorce, former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax. Up until last month, Virginia required couples with children to be separated a year before they could file, though permitted them to spend that year under one roof, so long as they could show a judge the marriage was genuinely over. When she finally filed for divorce in July 2025, her husband — a lawyer, representing himself — argued she hadn’t specified that she intended their separation to be permanent and in January a judge agreed with the technicality. Cerina Fairfax was told she could amend her complaint and try again. At some point during the proceedings she installed cameras throughout their house.

On March 30 a judge granted her sole physical custody and ordered Justin Fairfax to move out within a month. He was still there when he shot her in the house in the middle of April and then killed himself. Their two teenagers were home, and the cameras were recording.

Virginia’s new divorce law had just been signed days earlier. Tucked into it was an order for a work group to study whether the state should scrap fault-based divorce altogether. Activists pushing officials to take that next step point to the Fairfax episode, arguing it shows the dangers of prolonged divorce proceedings with a spouse who could become unstable or threatening. The report is due to the legislature in December.

Courtenay Schwartz, the legal and policy director for the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, told me that while the change that just took effect in Virginia is a big one, her state’s laws still make it “very onerous” to get divorced, noting that the requirement to be separated still stands. 

“If you have someone interested in dragging out the process which Justin Fairfax was, it can really get drawn out and run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she said. “It’s just prohibitively expensive, especially if you are experiencing domestic violence.” 

Schwartz says Virginia Democrats, who control both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office, have grown increasingly interested in “access to justice” issues, meaning reforms that make the legal system navigable for people who can’t afford a lawyer. This has been driven partly by a 2022 Legal Services Corporation study that found 92 percent of the civil legal problems experienced by low-income Americans received inadequate or no legal help. 

North Carolina’s governor tells Vox he backs reform

Woodson Bradley, a Democratic state senator in North Carolina, won her first race in 2024 by just 209 votes, in a district the Republican-controlled legislature had redrawn the year before. She holds one of the most competitive seats in the state.

Now Bradley is the lead sponsor of SB 626, which would cut North Carolina’s separation requirement from a year to six months and let survivors of domestic violence file for divorce immediately, with no separation at all. It’s been stalled in committee for nearly a year and a half.

The issue is personal to Bradley, who experienced domestic violence in her 20s while living in another state. “When I left I was tracked down and beaten, and there were no real stalking laws back then in the 1990s,” she told me. She later moved to North Carolina, remarried someone “who I thought was wonderful, had two kids, and then things weren’t wonderful anymore.”

Bradley soon found herself in yet another abusive, coercive relationship, fleeing with her children, an experience she describes as “the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through.” It took her years to finally get a divorce, because her ex-husband continued to contest and extend the proceedings. 

Jen Hamilton, the famous labor and delivery nurse and author of the New York Times bestselling book Birth Vibes, has been raising the issue on her platforms and talking with Bradley about changing North Carolina’s laws.

“Jen speaking out is very much changing things,” Bradley told me, adding that although the issue is very partisan in North Carolina, five Republican lawmakers have reached out to her recently about her bill. Past efforts at reform in North Carolina have failed, including in 2015, 2019, and 2021.

North Carolina’s lame-duck Senate leader Phil Berger, who lost his Republican primary in March, did not return requests for comment but a spokesperson for North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Josh Stein told me he supports reform. 

“North Carolinians don’t need government making their life harder, especially during some of their darkest times,” they said. “The Governor is willing to work with anyone to ensure our laws are more appropriate for the world we live in today.” Last year Stein signed a bill that made habitual domestic violence a felony.

For Rebecca Feinglos, the proposals moving through Raleigh are still catching up to what she already lived through.

“I remember the line in my divorce decree allowing me to change my last name back to my maiden name, my now late father’s last name,” she said. “Every moment I had to use my married name throughout the proceedings felt like a reminder that I was still stuck in a life I didn’t want.”

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

I am a (gracefully?) aging mother of three and proud grandmother of four. I keep hearing about how my generation (okay, I am a boomer) is hoarding wealth and failing to pass it down. 

When I look at my lifestyle, I’m facing a fork in the road. Either I splurge on a lovely retirement, or I save so my kids and their kids can have an easier life. We’re all middle-class, so this is not a question of survival. The kids have college funds. Do I owe it to my descendants to scrimp as I age? Surely it’s not right for me to spend my savings on bucket-list vacations…How should I balance spending on myself and on the others that will come after me?

Dear Rainy Day Funder,

I’m so glad to hear you’re not in financial survival mode. But you are facing some economic constraints: You can’t splurge on a luxurious retirement while at the same time saving a substantial nest egg for your kids and grandkids. 

It sounds like this feeling of either-or is causing you some anguish. The instinctual response is, as you suggest, to hoard as much as possible for your progeny to use later on. But at the same time, that feels like it’s zero-summing your own experience in your golden years. 

So I’d like to introduce you to an economic thinker who has some advice that might surprise you. John Maynard Keynes, 19th-century British economist, would say: Don’t save your money!

Keynes wrote that when times are tough, people react by keeping their money close, and not spending it. But this sets in motion what he called the paradox of thrift. One person’s expenses are actually another person’s income, he pointed out; if everyone saved their money, no one would make money either, and a recession could drag on and on. In the end, people’s savings would, paradoxically, go down, even though they were scrimping. 

We can apply the paradox of thrift to your own family as a mini-economy. Inheritance has traditionally worked by setting aside large chunks of your assets to pass along to your children and grandchildren — which could be helpful when the day of windfall comes. But why wait? And would waiting actually stymie your family’s financial potential? 

In past generations, an inheritance like this often happened far earlier. I’m comforted that we are living longer (an average of a decade or more longer) than in the mid-20th century, but this sets up new issues, as you’re stuck in, with when and in what quantity to transfer any extra resources. 

Now, as people retire with decades of good life to enjoy ahead of them, they are often doing so at the very same time their adult children are the most financially stressed: They are trying to buy homes, they’re in the busiest middle part of their careers, and many have children of their own they’re raising and trying to save for. 

This doesn’t mean you have to give away all your money to your family so that they can spend it on the pleasures you have given up. Keynes wasn’t anti-savings so that money could be spent frivolously. He did believe that spending money was one of the best ways to give the greater economy a boost. Perhaps there are ways you could think about spending your money that stimulate your family’s internal economy, that also help you enjoy your retirement. 

For example, you could invest in a lakeside property to kick your feet up at — an asset that will appreciate in value over time and be sold at a profit, or be passed down through the generations to enjoy for many summers to come. Maybe you assist your children in buying a home — one with a comfortable guest suite. You could invest in a business your children want to start, and help them grow something that could accrue more wealth over time. Using your money these ways may even feel more like splurging than scrimping! Yet, it ideally would achieve both: a fun way to spend your hard-earned money now, and create more abundance for your family’s future. 

A hidden bonus of non-traditional inheritance moves like these is that they all involve spending more time together with your family and potentially even strengthening those relationships along the way. The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that there were three kinds of friends. Some are based on utility, and exist only because of what people can get from one another. Other friendships are based on pleasure, when you like doing things with someone. Finally, friendships of virtue persist because you stick by people who inspire you by their strong character. Simply setting aside your money is a relationship that leans utilitarian. Working on a shared meaningful project could help deepen your relationships with your kids and grandkids in those pleasurable and virtuous directions.   

Speaking of, I don’t think you need to be making these decisions alone. 

You used an interesting word in your question: Do you, as an individual, owe it to your family to set them up with a more comfortable financial future, at the expense of personal indulgences? A lot of the discussion around older generations’ money, and whether or how they should pass it on, avoids dealing with this sticky moral component. Why should parents give their kids money? 

I think there’s clarity to be found in thinking more closely about why we owe each other anything.  

There are few better thinkers to turn to than Confucius to consider our obligations to family. The fifth-century Chinese philosopher believed that we can’t understand ourselves only as individuals. You are nobody when you are alone; you only come alive as a mother, a daughter, or a sister. These relational roles each come with specific duties and ways of interacting. Successfully fulfilling these roles within the family has a bigger impact, according to Confucius. It’s what creates the foundations for a harmonious and functional society. For children in this web of relations, it’s critical to uphold filial piety, or the need to respect, honor, and care for parents as well as all of their other elders and ancestors. 

Filial piety has, over the years, been criticized for being too rigid, and setting overly high expectations for blind obedience and conformity in children. So I’ve been interested to see the concept of reciprocal filial piety emerge. In reciprocal filial piety, children have a genuine feeling of gratitude to their parents for raising them, and any obligation they feel is heartfelt — they want to return the favor and care for their parents too. 

As a half-Chinese person, I find it interesting that in family life in the West, filial piety is often reversed. There’s a lot of air time discussing what parents owe their children, and not so much the other way around.

For example, I noticed that you don’t mention how your family intends to care for you in the future, or what they might feel a sense of owing you. If you do take a Keynesian approach to your family and decide to spend your money in ways that could benefit everyone, it might be worth engaging in some Confucian-tinted conversations not only about what you owe everyone else, but what you all appreciate about each other.

You can reflect, together, on how your family is stronger because of all the ways you’ve chosen to look after one another, not only because of how much money is in the bank. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I think it’s worth having a copy of The Analects of Confucius lying around, which is full of nuggets of wisdom. One morsel I recently read was about how to best get along with others: “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” The lesson is that we don’t gain much by blindly following and copying what other people do. The most harmonious way to be in a society, or even a family, is to have interlocking roles that complement each other, like different pitches do in a choir. 
  
• I thought a lot about getting older when reading this piece on death doulas by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. It serves as a reminder that people outside of the immediate family can also help with life’s hardest transitions. 
  
• And, for something fun: I enjoyed this investigation by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta on why she (or anyone) is left-handed. She explores left-handed stigma and neuroscience, as well as a theory about humans using their right hands because they once were better to win fights with. 

A theme park next door would probably come with some trade-offs. Like, horrific screams whirring past your house, for example. 

Universal Studios Hollywood’s “Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift” coaster—its first-ever outdoor roller coaster—has been in technical rehearsals since July, when a limited number of park guests were invited to test it. The ride hits 72 mph and features 360-degree rotating vehicles designed to simulate drifting. It sits on a hillside in the park’s upper lot, elevated above the Lakeside Golf Course, overlooking the residential streets of Toluca Lake below.

The neighbors noticed immediately. “When it’s running, it’s constant, and it sounds like bloody murder over there,” Toluca Lake resident Colby Jensen told KTLA. “It’s like a horror film going on. Constant screaming, yelling. Very intrusive.” Patrick Nazari described it to the LA Times with similar alarm: “You think something is happening. Like someone is getting murdered out there.” A third resident, Leonard R. Garner Jr., added: “I heard it, and I thought to myself, there are going to be problems with this.”

Universal Is Adding Sound Barriers After Complaints About Its New ‘Fast & Furious’ Coaster

The ride’s location compounds the issue. An outdoor coaster at 72 mph on an open hillside, with no natural buffer between the track and the residential neighborhood below, sends rider screams across the golf course and into homes with the doors shut.

Universal had tried to get ahead of this. Inside the Magic reported that sound-shield panels were incorporated around portions of the coaster in February, months before riders ever boarded. The park also promoted “sound reduction technology” as part of the ride’s design. Then the actual screaming started. LA City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian this week announced Universal would install two additional barriers, with construction expected to be complete by early September. Universal says the ride currently meets sound ordinance requirements and is adding more barriers in response to community feedback.

Universal’s statement walked a careful line, noting it welcomed community input, planned a meeting with HOA leadership, and would “continue to engage with our neighbors as the coaster remains in technical rehearsals ahead of its opening.” An official opening date has not been announced.

Universal’s first outdoor roller coaster doesn’t have an opening date yet. The neighbors, though, know exactly what it sounds like.

The post Universal’s New ‘Fast & Furious’ Coaster Has Neighbors Complaining About Screams appeared first on VICE.

Svalbard sits about 620 miles from the North Pole and is one of the few places left on Earth where polar bears roam freely. Thousands of tourists visit every year to see them in their natural habitat, and the Golden Rule is—look, snap some pics, and move on. Not everyone gets that. 

Earlier this month, an unidentified boat operator sailing through a fjord in northeastern Svalbard spotted a bear resting on land and responded by blasting the ship’s foghorn. The bear woke up and moved. The governor of the territory’s office issued a fine of $5,255 under Section 30a of the Svalbard Environmental Act, which prohibits needlessly disturbing, attracting, or pursuing a polar bear. The operator agreed to pay.

This wasn’t the first time this has happened. In June 2024, two guides with a French shipping company were each fined around $2,100 after steering paying guests in rubber boats toward a polar bear and cub feeding on a whale carcass in northern Svalbard. That incident was at least somewhat understandable, however dumb and misguided. Someone wanting a closer look is a human impulse. Blasting a foghorn at a sleeping bear is just being an a**hole. 

Norway Fined a Boat Operator for Disturbing a Sleeping Polar Bear in Svalbard

The rules have gotten stricter because tourism has boomed. Svalbard saw 506 cruise ships carrying 67,000 passengers in 2024 alone, a number that has doubled in under 15 years. Protections that took effect in January 2025 now require vessels to stay at least 300 meters from bears in summer and 500 meters through June. Fines are just the starting point for violations. In serious cases, the penalty goes up to five years in prison.

The bears are doing better than the headlines around them suggest. Jon Aars, a senior scientist with the Norwegian Polar Institute, led a team that tracked the weight and size of nearly 800 bears in Svalbard between 1992 and 2019 and found them healthy and reproducing despite major sea ice loss. “I was quite surprised,” Aars told CBS News, “because we have lost so much sea ice since I started.” His data suggests the bears have adapted, hunting more efficiently as shrinking ice concentrates their prey. “Some of us would predict that they should be in trouble already,” he said.

They’ve outlasted unregulated hunting and a warming Arctic. A foghorn is a minor problem by comparison, but it’s still a d*ck move. 

The post A Boat Operator Was Fined for Waking a Sleeping Polar Bear With a Foghorn appeared first on VICE.

The tiny microbes in your gut play a big role in who you are, how healthy you are, and, apparently, according to new research published in Translational Psychiatry, whether or not you exhibit psychopathic tendencies.

Scientists have found a link between certain gut and oral bacteria and traits associated with psychopathy. Don’t start chugging Greek yogurt and gobbling barrels of kimchi to veer your microbes away from psychopathy, because there are some huge caveats to that eye-popping claim.

The study involved 200 healthy adults who completed a questionnaire measuring psychopathic traits. They also supplied blood, saliva, and fecal samples. The researchers found that people with higher levels of three types of bacteria tended to score higher for traits including callousness, impulsivity, manipulation, and antisocial behavior—all hallmarks of the common psychopath.

Those three bacteria were Allisonella, Prevotella, and Cloacibacillus evryensis. If you’re wondering if there’s a bacterium that shows the opposite association, that would be Treponema vincentii.

Your Gut Bacteria May Be Linked to Psychopathic Tendencies

Now here’s the big caveat: the study does not show that bacteria make people psychopaths. As is often the case with scientific research, especially some of the more sensationalistic headlines you read out there, this study found correlation and not causation. A link and not a firm, fully established cause and effect. For now, this is merely a finding that makes you go “hmm” as you stroke your beard.

There’s also the matter of this particular study not yet undergoing peer review, so please do not use it as a means of accusing your roommate of being a psychopath because he didn’t take his probiotic that morning.

All that said, it’s an interesting find since psychopathy has traditionally been studied almost exclusively through the brain, genetics, and behavior. Examining it through the gut is a burgeoning concept that different research teams may explore down the line. Researchers already know that certain brain regions can be involved in the development of psychopathy; knowing that doesn’t provide the full story of its development. Our gut microbiome could be a huge missing piece of the puzzle.

Exactly how it fits in needs much more study. Maybe it has something to do with inflammation, neurotransmitters, or how gut bacteria influence emotional processing. For now, the researchers only have theories.

The post Scientists Found a Strange Link Between Gut Bacteria and Psychopathic Traits appeared first on VICE.

The “protein in everything” trend is rapidly approaching its logically ludicrous endgame. Recently, I wrote about how scientists are using a “gene gun” to shoot pig DNA into produce to create protein-packed lettuce. Now comes word that a separate research team is using algae proteins to create protein-enriched ketchup.

We’re really well on our way to creating a burger that, on its own, helps people get all their protein macros for an entire day in just a few bites. What hath man wrought.

According to a new study published in ACS Food Science & Technology, researchers in Russia and New Zealand experimented with adding protein extracted from Chlorella vulgaris, a protein-rich microalgae, to homemade tomato ketchup.

Regular ketchup contains a pathetic 1.6 percent protein by weight. Researchers managed to push that number to 6.3 percent by adding algae protein. The fortified ketchup also contained more essential amino acids, minerals, and antioxidants. It’s ketchup so healthy you can practically rub it on your skin as a beauty cream.

The Protein-in-Everything Trend Has Reached Ketchup

But the researchers did find a limit to how much algae humans are willing to put up with in their ketchup. A taste panel of 15 people found that ketchup containing 1 to 3 percent algae still looked and tasted like traditional ketchup. Once things tipped over into the five percent range, that’s when the unmistakable flavor of algae started to pop up.

At 13 percent, the ketchup was darker, thicker, and the algae-ness of it was dominating the flavor profile, causing its popularity to plummet. Turns out, people are willing to tolerate a precise amount of pond scum in their ketchup as long as it means a little protein boost.

Researchers say that microalgae could be a sustainable protein source and say can be grown year-round using just a little land and freshwater. This would make it perfect for adding a sustainable, affordable bit of protein to nearly any food on grocery store shelves. At the rate that we’re turning junk foods into health foods, it won’t be long before your mayo is filled with creatine and your American cheese is loaded with HGH.

We’re all going to be shredded, and we’ll have our greasy, 1,500-calorie burgers to thank.

The post Scientists Made Protein-Packed Ketchup With Algae. Here’s Why They Did It. appeared first on VICE.

There’s a reason dogs are trusted as emotional companions. If it seems like they have a nearly supernatural ability to sense human emotion, it’s because they practically do. As researchers at the University of Vienna recently found, dogs are especially good at parsing the emotions we humans are expressing with our faces.

The study, published in iScience, used fMRI scans to watch what happened inside dogs’ brains while they looked at photographs of human faces showing happiness, sadness, anger and fear. One of the study’s limitations is also one of the reasons the researchers were able to complete it at all. It’s difficult to get humans to sit still for an MRI scan, let alone a dog. The researchers had to use a specific breed, border collies, because they were especially good at sitting still on command. Border collies are great at following social cues and love following human orders.

In the first experiment, researchers found that happy human faces activated areas including the dogs’ temporal cortex and caudate nucleus. In a follow-up experiment involving 12 dogs, researchers went further, finding distinct brain activity patterns when the animals viewed fearful, angry and sad faces.

Dogs Can Apparently Read Your Face, Even When You’re Trying to Hide It

The researchers found that the dogs could distinguish between several nuanced expressions of emotion, particularly negative ones. That doesn’t necessarily mean that dogs totally understand emotion. They don’t look at your sad face and know that you’re sad because of your recent breakup. They just know that you’re sad.

In the real world, they have more information to work with than a still image of a sad face. Dogs pick up on and respond to a variety of cues, including body language, vocal tics, and even a person’s smell can tip off their mood.

While the study primarily focused on collies, broadly speaking, the study does offer some direct evidence of something that dog owners have long suspected: our precious, angelic little pooches really do seem to know what we’re feeling.

They don’t know why you’re in a bad mood. But they know you’re in one, which is a lot more than some people can say about their human partners.

The post Your Dog May Know You’re Sad Just by Looking at Your Face, Study Finds appeared first on VICE.

No matter how hard we try, remembering anything that happened to us before the age of, say, 3 or 4 years old feels impossible. Even memories before 7 years old feel hazy and fragmented.

Our brains just aren’t built to store specific memories from our first few years, something known as “infantile amnesia.”

And chances are, even the earliest memories we think we have might just be amalgamations of stories we’ve been told, images cribbed from old family snapshots and home videos, or scenes we’ve borrowed from movies or TV shows.

So does it really matter if it happened, if we can’t really remember it?

Yes, science says. Even if we don’t have a specific memory of what happened when we were babies, those experiences leave lasting impressions on us of being safe and being loved, which shapes how we form relationships later in life. But whether babies are able to encode and store permanent memories is still an open question.

Columbia University cognitive psychologist Tristan Yates put babies in MRI machines and showed them a series of images, and found that the babies tended to stare longer at an image they’d been shown before, suggesting that they remembered seeing the image the first time.

“We are showing that they’re able to form some memories,” Yates said. “The hippocampus is capable of forming specific memories over a few minutes, but now we need to start doing the research that can get us at longer durations, that can get at more complex memories.”

One theory for infantile amnesia is that an infant’s brain is prioritizing learning general skills, like how to walk or talk or eat, or learning to detect patterns like a bedtime routine, rather than storing specific memories that aren’t necessary for survival.

Noam Hassenfeld spoke with Yates and Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Suskind studies early childhood development and the important role that parents and caregivers play, and she told Noam about how our early childhood experiences can shape us.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

You started out as a cochlear implant surgeon and now you’re working on childhood development. How did that happen? What’s the connection there?

It actually makes a whole lot of sense. When I first started our pediatric cochlear implant program at the University of Chicago, I started implanting cute little kids who all look like they had the same potential to thrive after implant surgery, and found very quickly that I could implant two children who looked very much the same, who had parents who loved them equally, with the same technology, but they would have very different outcomes, with one of them really thriving after surgery in terms of language learning and trajectories, and others barely able to communicate. 

It was that experience and seeing these huge differences in outcomes after the same surgery that led me into this incredible world of childhood development and the importance of the early years and the importance of parents.

Humans come out with brains that are literally only one-third the size of adult brains. That’s very different than any other species. It’s why the puppy can start feeding itself pretty quickly and start walking, whereas the human infant is helpless. In those first three years of life, 85 percent of the physical brain is built during those periods of time. 

A million new neural connections happen every second. The environmental input, the input from parents and caregivers — every serve and return, every touch, every gaze — literally is helping shape and strengthen the neural connections that happen in our brain. 

The brain isn’t being just built for your child’s vocabulary development or their literacy ability. It’s building their social brain, their ability to relate to and connect to the rest of the world. The relationships and the expectations for relationships are built in those early years.

Tell me if this is maybe an oversimplification, but I’m a parent of a young son; he’s a little over 7 months old. And I feel like what I’m doing when I’m raising him is building the structure of his brain, or building the architecture, and all the other stuff, all the specific things, are going to fill in all the rooms of the big building that we’re constructing together. But he’s not going to start filling those in with specific ideas or specific memories until later on in his development. 

The analogy you make is exactly right. I think of building the physical brain — if you were thinking about it through a computer lens — as building the hardware, the firmware, the memory, the RAM. I think of K-12 as really important, but I think of those as software updates. But these early years are building that infrastructure.

“I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence.”

At the end of the day, it’s your attachment with him, being the perfectly imperfect parent. I want you to not strive for perfection, because the one thing that AI has shown us is that humans don’t grow from perfection and frictionless existence. So feel okay every time you misstep, misunderstand and repair, because that is, for him, building the understanding of, “I can be loved by another human who missteps but is able to repair.” He is starting to understand how to expect to be treated. 

That’s why it’s almost like you’re building the relationship map for him that’s going to allow him in the future to have expectations of how he’s going to be treated and loved by an imperfect human: building that strong bond, showering him with rich language, that back and forth, looking at him as a conversational partner from day one. 

It’s interesting you brought up AI and friction. What do you think this idea of a more frictionless existence is going to start meaning for kids?

I had a book that just came out on this called Human Raised, and that’s a lot of the argument of the book. Children learn from imperfect parenting through friction, through the productive struggle. And we’re seeing that friction that we’ve always looked at as a bug in the system — like, “Oh my gosh, I wish this was a more frictionless existence with the other humans in our world” — what we’re finding is that it is key for relationships development, learning to have relationships, and actually even learning. 

That’s why, writing an essay with an LLM — you don’t remember it at the end of the day. There’s something about what happens in the brain that we’ve discounted on the friction side of things. So I actually think in some ways friction should be the word of the year, and we need to embrace it a little bit more. We don’t need to friction-max, but we do need to see the power of the friction.

It sounds like even if my son is going to forget all of this, maybe on a deep level it’ll stick with him. But should I still have a nice big 1-year-old birthday party?

Heck yes. Because you’re doing it partially for you — and the grandparents, let’s be clear. Those are wonderful moments that they do remember at some level. My son, who’s now 20-something in medical school, was obsessed with Thomas the choo-choo train. I still have the box of the Thomas the choo-choo train. 

He may not remember exactly that birthday party and the cake that I worked very hard on, but it’s even fun to talk about it now in his twenties. So yes, do enjoy every moment. Don’t get obsessed, like everything has to be perfect, but those are memories for everyone.

No one’s getting hired by sending a PDF into the void anymore.

The math on job searching in 2026 helps explain why. The average corporate job posting attracts 242 applications, and according to data from The Interview Guys, 75% of resumes never reach a human being at all, filtered out in under a second by AI before anyone with a pulse sees them. Only 2-3% of applications lead to interviews. So now, people are posting their resumes on TikTok.

What started as a Gen Z workaround is now an actual job search strategy across generations. TikTok has officially overtaken LinkedIn as the top job search tool among Gen Z, with 22.1% using it compared to 20.8% on LinkedIn. And 46% of Gen Z workers say they’ve landed a job or internship by using the platform, according to Zety’s 2025 Gen Z Career Trends Report. One in five scored an interview because of a post.

Gen Z Is Using TikTok to Find Jobs Because Regular Applications Feel Broken

Times are-a-changin’ and how people look for jobs is no exception. “The application process seems kind of broken, and applying to jobs on LinkedIn feels like a wild black hole where your resume gets screened out by AI filters before you get seen by a person,” creative strategist Josh Katz told the New York Post. Katz posted a 60-second video resume and invited his comments section to serve as his reference letter. It pulled hundreds of thousands of views, produced multiple interviews, and kept pulling in freelance work months after posting.

TikTok is just the most visible example. 73% of millennials say they found their last job through a social media platform, and Instagram portfolios, LinkedIn video posts, and YouTube channels are all new platforms of choice, especially in creative fields. Employers are already looking at your social media profiles anyway: 91% of U.S. companies now use social media in their hiring process, with 82% using it to find candidates who aren’t actively applying anywhere. People sourced through social media are eight times more likely to get hired than those coming through traditional job boards.

The one real caution is how public this all is. A post that comes across as sloppy or desperate can circulate just as fast as one that was done well. Before you post, ask yourself if this is how you would really present yourself at an interview. Just because the platform changed doesn’t mean the job standards did. 

The post Gen Z Started Using TikTok to Find Jobs Out of Desperation, and It’s Actually Working appeared first on VICE.

China’s short drama industry is worth nearly $18 billion globally. And some of that money is going toward very personalized passion projects

Actor Zhong Yufei, 23, recently went public on social media about a production that was supposed to be his big break in the Chinese short drama world. The unnamed investor behind the 50-episode series had two non-negotiable conditions for putting up the money: she would play the lead female role, and she would have final say on the script. No one on set was in a position to argue, because she could pull the plug at any time, and everyone knew it.

What she did with that power was commission over 60 kissing scenes.

According to Zhong and producer Meng Xing, who later came forward to explain what happened, the crew pushed back. The director reportedly told the investor repeatedly that the volume of intimate scenes would disrupt the plot and lose audiences. The investor’s alleged response: “I’ve seen more short dramas than you’ve ever made.” The kissing scenes stayed.

A Short Drama Investor Allegedly Gave Herself the Lead Role and 60 Kissing Scenes

Zhong says his co-star took things further on set. During their first romantic scene, he claims she French-kissed him without warning. When he instinctively pulled back, she allegedly grabbed the back of his head and held him there. He was new to lead roles, and he felt like speaking up could cost him the project, so he didn’t. He also says the rest of the crew looked the other way.

The production ended in commercial failure. After filming wrapped, the streaming platform rejected over 20 scenes for being too explicit, gutting chunks of the plot. The investor then allegedly refused to pay the remaining 30,000 yuan (roughly $4,100) of the production fee, reportedly because she was unhappy that so many of her kissing scenes got cut.

The story blew up on Chinese social media, and the numbers behind the industry make it more unsurprising than it sounds. China’s short drama market hit $6.9 billion domestically in 2024, and the flood of outside investment has come with almost no creative gatekeeping. Whoever controls the budget controls everything, including the script, the casting, and how many times the male lead has to kiss them.

Producer Meng Xing said he and his team had almost no say throughout the entire production. The director clarified publicly that all decisions ran through the investor. The production company stated it would do a better job protecting actors’ rights in future contracts. Whether that actually changes anything remains to be seen.

The post A Wealthy Woman Funded a Drama Series Just So She Could Kiss the Male Lead 60 Times appeared first on VICE.

There’s a fluffy Yorkie in the produce section, and its owner cannot understand why anyone has a problem with this.

Pet humanization has been building to this for years. Sixty-nine percent of millennials and Gen Z now describe their pets as family members. The American Pet Products Association projects the US pet industry will hit $165.6 billion in 2026. When the average annual cost of dog ownership hits $2,500, the grocery store ban feels almost arbitrary.

Reddit has been arguing about it for weeks. On r/AskUK, shoppers complained about dogs urinating in aisles, owners touching produce while carrying their pets, and staff allegedly affording animals “superior rights.” One commenter described the habit as “unsanitary and inconsiderate.” Not everyone agreed.

“Do you really think having a dog in a grocer is that unhygienic compared to the average person? They’re hardly going to be licking the fruit,” one commenter wrote on Reddit. “If anything, letting kids run amok would be less hygienic.”

Why Are People Bringing Dogs Into Grocery Stores?

People act surprised by the rules, but the rules aren’t new. The FDA Food Code bans live animals from food establishments across the board. Trained service animals get an exception under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Emotional support animals do not. Publix felt compelled to post signs about this at its store entrances in 2023—”not permitted in Publix, even with a doctor’s note”—and the signs went viral.

The fact that a grocery chain had to put up a sign explaining federal law tells you where things stood. AKA—entitled owners. The UK draws a similar line, with pet dogs holding no legal right of access to food shops and only assistance dogs protected—though enforcement gets complicated when handlers aren’t required to show proof.

Dogs carry pathogens on their paws and coats, and a grocery store has no shortage of open surfaces for those to land on. Fresh produce bins, deli counters, and bakery displays were not designed with a dog in the aisle in mind. A calm, leashed dog poses minimal risk. What’s harder to manage is the dog that isn’t calm or leashed, the one sniffing shelves and making contact with surfaces that don’t get wiped down between shoppers.

That dog exists; it shows up in grocery stores, and most stores have no infrastructure to address it before something has already gone wrong.

The pet industry got to $165 billion by following the dog wherever it wanted to go. Federal food safety law draws the line at the grocery store. One of those forces is winning, and it isn’t the FDA.

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In 1987, the descendants of Boston-area blacksmith Thomas Wells donated a label belonging to a chest of Chinese tea recovered from the Boston Tea Party to the Old South Meeting House. It’s a museum today, but back in 1773, that’s where the Boston Tea Party was planned. The problem, as researchers have just discovered, is that the label was probably created somewhere between the 1860s and 1870s, about 100 years after the historic event.  

MIT historian Tristan Brown initially assumed the label was genuine. Then he translated the Chinese script on the label.

It’s not like he was the first to do this. Previous researchers have translated its writing, but they translated it in Mandarin. Brown is a historian of China and, as such, realized that part of the writing made more sense in Cantonese, the language that dominated Chinese commercial shipping networks.

Suddenly, the label made a lot more sense. It revealed an American name, “Smith, Archer,” as it identified Smith, Archer and Co., a New York trading firm active in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s.

A Supposed Relic From the Boston Tea Party Just Got a Very Different Origin Story

And thus, the idea that this label belonged to a chest of tea tossed into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party died. But that doesn’t mean the label doesn’t have a little bit of fascinating history of its own. Brown says the label likely made it to the Wells family through John Milton Wells, a relative who went west during the gold rush and later sold imported Asian teeth in Michigan.

Somewhere along the way, as it traveled through the tangled web of history, the label became associated with a foundational moment in American history and eventually became a museum piece.

The myth grew larger and larger during the 19^th century, an era when America became obsessed with its own revolutionary past. Family stories, museum displays, and newspaper articles passed it on. At some point, what might’ve started as an understanding became historical fact.

The post A Supposed Boston Tea Party Artifact May Not Be From the Boston Tea Party at All appeared first on VICE.

When Tropical Storm Hilary hit Southern California in August 2023, the first of its kind to make direct landfall this century, most people were focused on the flooding. They weren’t paying attention to what the sharks were doing.

When Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall in August 2023, researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Shark Lab at CSU, Long Beach were already tracking 22 juvenile great white sharks off the San Diego coast with acoustic tags. The resulting study is the first to document storm-response behavior in white sharks, and the behavior was much more coordinated than anyone expected.

As the storm closed in, more than half the sharks bailed on their nursery off Torrey Pines and Del Mar, retreating to the calmer waters of La Jolla Cove, which sits next to a submarine canyon with quick access to depth. One individual dove 433 feet, probably trying to escape the chop near the surface. Most came back within days.

“We think that some were seeking shelter from the storm,” said co-author Chris Lowe of the CSULB Shark Lab. “It makes sense that not all sharks did the same things, in much the same way people respond differently. It’s a key survival characteristic that humans seem to share, too.”

Great White Sharks May Know When It’s Time to Flee a Storm, and That Could Help Humans

The likely trigger was temperature. Sea-surface temps at the nursery dropped from 68°F to 57°F in under 24 hours as the storm hit. Juvenile great whites are more sensitive to cold than adults, and researchers believe that drop was the cue. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to document storm-response behavior in white sharks,” said lead author and Scripps PhD student Jack Elstner.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, researchers at the University of Delaware are running a different experiment with a similar cast of characters. They’re attaching electronic tags to shortfin makos, blue sharks, smooth hammerheads, and juvenile great whites to pull ocean temperature and salinity data from the Atlantic. The data feeds into hurricane intensity forecasting, specifically around the Mid-Atlantic’s “cold pool,” a layer of bottom water under 50°F that affects how fast storms strengthen before hitting shore.

“For hurricanes, warm water is the gas, and cold water is the brakes,” doctoral candidate Caroline Wiernicki told the University of Delaware. “Depending on where that cold pool is relative to the shore, that will impact how strong a hurricane is when it makes landfall.”

Sharks are clearing out ahead of storms and simultaneously serving as floating weather stations for the scientists trying to forecast them. That’s a pretty good week for shark research.

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As I’ve gotten older, standing on one leg when I, say, put on pants has become a trickier athletic feat than it used to be. It probably means I have to get myself in shape before it’s too late, because according to a study published in JAMA Network Open, my ability to balance on one leg may be a decent indicator of how many years I’ve got left ahead of me.

Researchers from Taiwan tracked 13,423 adults aged 65 and older. All the participants had to do was complete seven basic fitness tests that measured balance, agility, strength, flexibility, and cardiovascular endurance. By the end of the study, 1631 participants had died. The study didn’t kill them, but rather their deaths revealed some valuable information to the researchers.

They found that the strongest predictor of life expectancy in older folks had nothing to do with heart and lung fitness, despite how much medical professionals focus on them. The strongest predictors were standard tests involving standing on one leg for 30 seconds and a classic “8-foot up-and-go” test, wherein the participant had to stand from a seated position in a chair, walk around a cone, and return to the seat as quickly as possible.

People in the fastest group had about 59 percent lower mortality risk than those in the slowest group.

Standing on One Leg May Reveal How Long You’ll Live

People who could stand on one leg for 30 seconds had roughly half the mortality risk of the worst performers.

People who passed all seven tests had a strong association with long-term survival. As for why, the researchers think that balance and mobility reveal a lot about a person’s survivability because they require several parts of your body to work in concert. Standing on one leg requires vision for balance, leg strength, a well-balanced inner ear, and a functioning brain that can coordinate with the body. It also helps that not falling is a great trait to have as you get older. That alone can tack on extra years to your life.

It’s a low-tech health test that isn’t a replacement for in-depth medical analysis, but serves as a supplement and a general rule of thumb for estimating someone’s overall health and how many years they may have.

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Almost exactly a year after I wrote about how one of the biggest nuclear power plants in Europe was shut down by a swarm of jellyfish that clogged its cooling system, it happened again.

According to Reuters, three reactors at France’s Gravelines nuclear power plant were taken offline Monday after a massive jellyfish swarm clogged the systems that draw in seawater to cool the reactors. A fourth reactor was reduced to half power, just in case.

This is becoming an annual tradition for the jellyfish, as in August 2025 they did the same thing, shutting down four of six reactors at the very same nuclear power plant. Back then, officials spent hundreds of thousands of euros installing cameras to improve monitoring and arranging for fishing boats to patrol the area.

While it sounds like they failed, actually, all did their jobs. The swarm was just too powerful. The fishing boats were deployed this year after early warnings, and the crews got to work using vacuum trucks to suck up the jellyfish and already reached the plant.

Three Reactors Went Offline After Jellyfish Clogged a French Nuclear Plant’s Cooling System

French utility provider EDF says the massive jellyfish swarm poses no danger to anyone and that the affected reactors will return to service soon. Don’t worry, your Godzilla nightmares will not come true, as the jellyfish are not being exposed to radiation of any kind, though the reason they were swarming a nuclear reactor is something of a weapon of mass destruction: climate change.

Warm oceans encourage jellyfish to reproduce and extend their breeding seasons. Other factors, like overfishing, habitat loss, and population declines in their natural predators, also help these blooms grow.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time this has happened, but even last year’s jellyfish clog wasn’t the first time. It’s been happening at nuclear reactors all over the world for at least a decade and a half, maybe more. Like the rest of us during the peak of summer, when it gets too hot, we retreat to cooler temps. And since we don’t seem to be doing too much about climate change, we can probably expect this to happen more often.

So I’ll see you back here in a year.

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