As you get older, your body gets weirder, malfunctioning in some awfully creative, uniquely torturous ways, like how those with a prostate will have to wake up a few times a night to dribble out an obnoxiously small amount of pee. This is because the prostate commonly enlarges in men as they age, though why it does so when cancer isn’t involved has been a little bit of a mystery.

A research team from Johns Hopkins University, publishing their findings in the Journal of Pathology, may have found an answer.

Doctors knew that benign prostatic hyperplasia starts in one specific part of the organ: the transition area around the urethra. Why that tiny ring of tissue suddenly started pumping out extra cells out of nowhere while the rest of the gland kept on doing its thing wasn’t well understood.

By running single-cell RNA sequencing on around 130,000 individual prostate cells, the researchers discovered a brand-new subtype of basal epithelial cells called WIF1+ (which, written out, looks like an improved form of Wi-Fi), and it’s that cell that might be why you have to bleary-eyed shuffle to the bathroom at one, three, and five in the morning.

Your Prostate’s WIF1+ Cells Are Betraying You

The prostate is broken up into several distinct areas, but these WIF1+ cells are holed up almost exclusively in the transition zone. Tissue samples taken from men with enlarged prostates showed a huge surge in these cells, promoting tissue growth and cellular remodeling that puts your urethra in a chokehold, thus explaining why only a little bit of pee comes out at a time.

As obnoxious as that sounds, that might be why the transition zone rarely gets hit with prostate cancer, as these cells might actively dampen local inflammation and tweak specific growth signaling pathways.

There’s some more research to be done to prove direct causation, but if this finding proves true, it will go a long way in identifying a clear target for future drug therapies, thus giving a glimmer of hope to men who just want to sleep without having to drain a leaky hose a few times a night.

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If you’ve intuited by now that the people at the very top of the corporate hierarchy are complete and utter wackos who have little regard for human life, you’d probably think that there’s just something about the version of the corporate CEO that came around sometime during the Industrial Revolution that is uniquely psychopathic.

A research team publishing their findings in the Asian Journal of Business Ethics, however, found that corporate psychopathy is nothing new, since there is strong evidence of a maniac fostering a toxic workplace dating back to 1629.

And of course, they were an executive with the Dutch East India Company, one of the old world’s foremost examples of a corporation run amok.

Jeronimus Cornelisz was an under-merchant for the Dutch East India Company and a contender for the worst boss in recorded history. When the company’s flagship, Batavia, hit a reef near Western Australia, senior management hopped into a longboat to go get help, leaving Cornelisz in charge of roughly 200 stranded survivors. What followed was absolute chaos and insanity that ended with mutiny and massacre, as Cornelisz immediately initiated a hostile takeover.

The Hallmark Traits of a Corporate Psychopath

According to study author Clive Boddy of Anglia Ruskin University, Cornelisz ticked off all ten hallmark traits of a modern corporate psychopath, which are…

Not being in it to help, but for the attainment of money and power.

Use superficial charm to gain trust.

Surround themselves with loyalists and yes-men.

Clear the path of anyone who might challenge them.

Create division among enemies.

Create a climate of fear.

Refuse to take responsibility when all of their bad ideas inevitably blow up in their face.

Cornelisz met all 10 criteria, and he did so by purging the existing island council, replacing them with loyal lackeys who swore personal oaths to him, and exiled potential whistleblowers to nearby islands so they could starve to death. To stretch out the remaining water and food, he ordered his goons to systematically murder around 100 men, women and children, all while subjecting women to sexual abuse and hoarding the ship’s gold inside his personal tent so he could start a pirate empire.

It’s Not All Bad, Though

In the midst of all of Cornelisz’s chaos, the exact kind of person Cornelisz thought he was rose to power — a soldier named Wiebbe Hayes. Cornelisz had left Wiebbe and his group stranded on an island. The group found freshwater to drink and plenty of food to eat. They eventually fought off Cornelisz’s gang until a rescue ship arrived.

As Clive Boddy explained, “Perhaps the most striking finding is that another leader facing the same circumstances achieved completely different outcomes. Hayes built cooperation, discovered new resources and kept people alive. This was effectively a natural experiment in leadership. One group prospered while the other descended into murder and abuse.”

As for Cornelisz, his insane lust for power did not end well for him. Authorities chopped off his hands and hanged him by the neck. Goes to show that corporate psychopaths like him have been making life miserable for people for centuries, and while they have their fun for a time, it ultimately rarely ends well for people like him.

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As the world teeters on ecological collapse, it’s occasionally nice to hear that an animal that was once thought to have gone extinct was just really good at hiding. Take the Bangka slow loris, an extremely slow primate that lives in trees and is also venomous.

For years, it had been considered critically endangered, maybe even fully extinct, as the last time any scientific team saw one was back in the 1930s. But it’s back, and according to new research published in Spixiana, there are at least 90 of them hanging out on the island of Bangka, off the southern coast of Sumatra.

Scientists thought this nocturnal tree-dweller was gone, but local residents and Indonesia’s Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center knew better. They’d been looking into the loris’ gigantic glassy eyes for about a decade, as Alobi workers had been spotting the loris since about 2015. As researchers assumed these slow-footed creatures had been lost to time, they’d actually been hanging out in backyards and getting nearly hit by cars. What the neighborhood cats and raccoons are to your neck of the woods, the slow loris was to Bangka.

Toxic Armpits and Secondary Tongues

“Slow” isn’t just a nickname. It’s a pretty good description of the creature’s whole demeanor. You’d think it would make them a great snack for predators, but that’s where its venomous qualities come into play. It secretes a toxin from armpit glands that it licks to mix it with its saliva and then delivers a venomous bite capable of putting a grown human into anaphylactic shock. It’s also got a specialized “toothcomb” for gouging bark and a secondary tongue underneath its main tongue that it uses to clean the toothcomb.

The species evaded scientific detection for nearly a century even though it’s only about an hour away from Jakarta. As for why researchers assumed it had gone extinct, it’s the usual explanation: the man-made horrors of obliterating its habitat to mine tin and to plant palm oil plantations so your chocolate bar is smooth and creamy.

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