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. 

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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 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.

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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Near Athens is where you’ll find the Phaleron Burial Ground, where, in 2016, archaeologists found the remains of 79 adult men placed in three distinct rows, many still wearing metal shackles around their wrists. The discovery instantly sparked debate over who these men were and what they had done to get themselves confined and buried this way. The leading theory was that they were foreign invaders who had been rounded up, shackled, and tossed into the dirt.

New analysis of their teeth suggests something considerably more uncomfortable: They were probably locals.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science and detailed by Archaeology Magazine, examined strontium isotopes in the teeth of 66 men from the mass grave, along with 97 other adults buried at Phaleron. Strontium from local rocks enters food and water and gets incorporated into developing teeth. Researchers can use these chemical traces as a sort of chemical-level GPS.

Nearly 80 Shackled Men Found Near Athens Were Probably Locals, Study Finds

They found that about 97 percent of the shackled men had isotope signatures indicating that the group was somewhere in Attica, the region around Athens. Only two showed evidence of growing up somewhere else. The broader cemetery around them yielded similar results.

Suddenly, the “foreign invaders” theory is a whole lot less convincing. These weren’t dangerous outsiders who needed to be dealt with to protect locals. They were locals who did something that warranted being shackled and buried in unison.

The more likely explanation, according to the researchers, is that the men were on the wrong side of some internal political drama that ended in violence during a period when Athens was still figuring out the whole democracy thing it would later become famous for inventing. Who exactly they were, what side they were on, and why they were shackled is still, and may forever be, a mystery.

The post Ancient Shackled Men Found Near Athens Were Probably Locals, Not Invaders appeared first on VICE.

Pro athletes always hold some degree of cultural significance, not just now but in civilizations long past. Archaeologists excavating an ancient town in Turkey may have found proof of this from thousands of years ago in the form of a grave that may belong to a beloved wrestler.

According to the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and reporting by Live Science, researchers excavating a newly discovered cemetery near ancient Aspendos uncovered a stone-slab tomb dating to roughly 475 to 300 B.C. Inside was a human skeleton accompanied by coins depicting two wrestlers locked in combat.

Turns out, adding a picture into a grave showing off a very specific act is a strong hint at what that dead person did when they were alive.

I’m fighting every instinct to call this guy a professional wrestler, because that immediately conjures images of modern-day beefy people in tights, silly gimmicks, and fake grudges. This was Greco-Roman-style wrestling—the “real” wrestling, the kind eventually seen at the Olympics.

A 2,400-Year-Old Grave in Turkey May Belong to an Ancient Wrestler

Still, even though the evidence strongly suggests this person was a wrestler, the researchers aren’t fully ready to declare him the John Cena of his day. Live Science spoke with a historian not involved in the study, Sarah E. Bond, who said that coins were a common currency used by everybody, so their presence in the grave doesn’t necessarily mean the deceased was a wrestler.

Maybe people in this region of Turkey liked wrestlers so much that they printed them on their money? Researchers are going to need to find some stronger evidence that this guy was a professional wrestler, like evidence of injuries consistent with the sport, to definitively claim that wrestling was this guy’s claim to fame, but there may be something linking the two ideas.

Aspendos minted silver coins depicting wrestlers for more than a century, suggesting to the researchers of the sport had some importance to the city and its people. The settlement also had an ancient gymnasium and eventually built itself a stadium big enough for thousands of fans to come watch sporting events.

So, maybe two things can be true: maybe this guy was a wrestler, and his significance was honored by the inclusion of coins depicting what he did in life in his grave. Whether the answer is this combined explanation or not, either way, it goes to show that humanity has been holding athletes in high regard for thousands of years.

The post Archaeologists Found Coins Depicting Wrestlers Inside a 2,400-Year-Old Grave appeared first on VICE.

Oxytocin is the hormone associated with the good vibes and positive emotions we’re all chasing: love, trust, bonding. Scientists just found that it might have a secondary role in helping the brain quickly get back to those positive feelings by making us realize that scary things maybe aren’t that scary and probably aren’t actually trying to hurt us.

According to research published in the journal Brain, researchers in Japan studied a small group of oxytocin-sensitive neurons in the brains of male mice, located in the paraventricular thalamus, the part of the brain that processes stress, motivation, and emotional behavior. The researchers suppressed the neurons, making the mice less social, less interested in being around animals they were unfamiliar with, and they had trouble learning that a place they had previously received an electric shock was now a safe space.

Scientists Found a Brain Circuit That Links Oxytocin and Fear

When those neurons were activated, they produced the opposite effect. The mice froze less after returning to the previously dangerous spot. The effect didn’t last long, though. And it didn’t make them much more sociable. All this is helping researchers understand that oxytocin isn’t just an all-natural love potion number nine.

Its effects may be situational, dependent on where and when it acts in the brain, and different neural circuits can either encourage social or antisocial behavior.

Oxytocin may be associated with positivity and good vibes, but researchers have not yet found a way to constantly activate it so we are in a perpetual state of bliss. But what the research did find is that oxytocin could help the brain to figure out when the stuff we fear isn’t really worth our time and energy, which itself could be a pretty useful discovery.  

The post Oxytocin May Help the Brain Let Go of Fear, New Study Suggests appeared first on VICE.

America leads the world in a lot of things. The serial killer count is harder to brag about—but we’ve done it, folks.

A new analysis by PokerTube of official serial killer data found the US has 3,615 documented serial killers, accounting for 66.2% of all known cases worldwide. That’s more than 18 times the number recorded in Russia (196) or the UK (190). Two in every three documented serial killers in recorded history operated on American soil.

The state breakdown produces some counterintuitive results. Wyoming, not New York or Los Angeles, leads the nation in serial killers per capita, at 13.59 per million residents—roughly one known killer for every 73,584 people. Alaska has the scariest victim rate, at 8.67 serial killer victims per 100,000 residents, driven largely by Robert Hansen, the “Butcher Baker,” who abducted and hunted at least 17 women in the Alaskan wilderness before being sentenced to 461 years in prison. Missouri rounds out the top five with 350 total victims—the highest raw count among the leading states.

Wyoming Leads the U.S. in Serial Killers Per Capita, New Analysis Finds

The PokerTube numbers also add some wild context. Americans are statistically more likely to live next to a serial killer (1 in 94,800) than to win the lottery (1 in 292.2 million) or get bitten by a shark (1 in 11.5 million). The more comforting comparison: you’re still more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 15,300) than to have a serial killer for a neighbor. So, yay?

Some of the margin is about how you count. Radford University’s Serial Killer Information Center runs the most thorough global database on the subject and has noted that countries differ significantly in how they define, investigate, and document serial killings. The US count benefits from decades of rigorous FBI classification and recordkeeping that most countries don’t have. That explains part of the number. Not all of it.

James Thompson, a strategist at PokerTube, noted that serial killer hotspots “cluster heavily in the West, with six of the top ten states being western states.” One detail the data also reveals: criminologists at Northeastern University have documented a significant decline in US serial killings from the 1990s peak. The golden age of the American serial killer appears to be, cautiously, behind us.

The US has 3,615 documented serial killers and retains every record that comes with that. The good news is that the number has been declining. The bad news is that Wyoming is still pulling some terrifying numbers. 

The post This State Has the Most Serial Killers Per Capita in America, According to a New Study appeared first on VICE.

Pheromone maxxing is the latest self-optimization trend to make a bold claim about attraction. Like most bold claims about attraction, it’s about 30% correct.

The practice, circulating on TikTok as part of the looksmaxxing pipeline, involves ditching deodorant, skipping showers, and occasionally—among the more committed—drinking their own urine to “sweat out toxins.” All of this in service of amplifying a “natural musk” that allegedly contains pheromones that make you biologically irresistible. The sell is basically this. Stop trying so hard, smell like an animal, watch the attraction happen.

The trend is running several laps ahead of the research. “As a means of survival, sex workers are eroticizing body parts that can get through the algorithm,” sex educator Topher Cusumano told Men’s Journal. As platforms have cracked down on explicit content, underarms and sweat became vehicles for erotic material that doesn’t trigger a flag. What starts as an algorithmic workaround becomes a trend. A trend becomes a guy skipping showers and calling it a dating strategy.

The problem with the whole thing is that human pheromones, as a confirmed scientific category, are still theoretical. A 2025 review in Physiology & Behavior took a detailed look at androstadienone—a steroid in male sweat that’s been the frontrunner for decades—and still concluded the classification “remains inconclusive.” That’s 60-plus years of searching, and the answer is still a polite shrug. The pheromone cologne industry, though, is not letting that slow it down.

@fluffdumpster

first off #table #computer #firstoff

♬ original sound – Fluffdumpster

What Is Pheromone Maxxing? The Dating Trend Telling Men to Stop Showering.

The actual science is more interesting than the trend. Research on the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a cluster of immune system genes, has found that people are unconsciously drawn to partners whose immune profile differs from their own. In a famous set of experiments nicknamed the sweaty T-shirt studies, women consistently preferred the body odor of men whose MHC genes were most different from theirs. 

There’s a wrinkle. Research has found that hormonal birth control appears to completely reverse the MHC preference. Women on the pill tend to be drawn to men with similar immune profiles rather than different ones, raising a question no one warned them about when they started the prescription. The scent-attraction connection has more going on than a hygiene boycott can fix. It also works better when you don’t smell like a gym bag.

Your body odor is carrying biological data that someone, somewhere, is evolutionarily primed to find attractive. The deodorant is probably getting in the way, but please, please still take a shower. 

The post Introducing Pheromone Maxxing, TikTok’s Latest Disgusting Dating Trend appeared first on VICE.

Sex with yourself is, theoretically, the time when you can drop the moaning and the sexy faces and just enjoy yourself. New data suggests we’ve found a way to ruin that too.

A 2026 Pleasure Census conducted by dating app HUD and sexual wellness brand Girls Get Off surveyed 2,183 people across 63 countries and found that 54% of Gen Z catch themselves “performing” during solo sex—thinking about how they look, sound, or should feel, with no one even in the room. Across all age groups, the figure sits at 44%. The same survey found 73% of Gen Z say appearance concerns make sex harder to enjoy.

There’s a clinical name for this. Spectatoring—coined by sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson in 1970—describes the act of mentally observing yourself during sex from a third-person perspective, evaluating your performance rather than experiencing your body. It was originally studied as a factor in sexual dysfunction and assumed to require a partner. The Pleasure Census data suggests the imagined audience is sufficient.

Performance Anxiety Is Ruining Masturbation for Gen Z

And once again, you can’t not talk about porn. A 2026 study found that women who watched porn reported increased performance anxiety about how they look and behave during sex. One participant said: “I feel stressed about not looking like the girls in porn movies.” The study found pornography led many respondents to view sex as performative rather than a shared pleasurable experience—a subconscious thought that doesn’t turn off when the other person leaves the room.

“For a generation raised on porn, it can be genuinely hard to unlearn the way we think we’re supposed to behave during sex,” sexologist Becky Crepsley-Fox told Metro. The internal audience doesn’t switch off. For many people, it eventually becomes the default, operating beneath every experience that was supposed to be free of it.

There’s decades of spectatoring research confirming what most people already know from experience: the moment your attention shifts outward, your body checks out. Orgasm requires presence, not an audience. Solo sex is the one place in the world where nobody else’s needs, reactions, or expectations are in the room. Using it to rehearse for them anyway is a waste

The only audience in the room is the one you built yourself. That’s both the problem and the only place the solution lives.

The post A Fear of Looking Weird Is Ruining Masturbation for Gen Z appeared first on VICE.

Fandom in general seems to have been one of humanity’s big mistakes. That’s a broad statement, but you see what I mean when you start exploring individual fandoms, from the notoriously toxic corners of Star Wars to unsettling devotion surrounding The Pitt. You know, a show that has only released 30 episodes and already has a fanbase that has developed enough toxicity for several fandoms.

Harry Potter fans are making a strong case for the top spot in the toxic fandom rankings. Case in point: a Welsh beach where a fictional elf was buried in a movie has apparently become sacred ground, and fans successfully stopped a $570 million electrical cable project from passing underneath it.

The key word here is underneath.

Harry Potter Fans Successfully Protected Dobby’s Grave From an Underground Power Cable

As reported by The New York Times, the character Dobby, the enslaved house elf who eventually wins his freedom and then dies shortly thereafter in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. In the movie, Harry buries him at Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, beneath a marker reading, “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”

Dobby is of course fictional. He was words on a page that got turned into a fully computer-generated character voiced by famed British character actor Toby Jones. Dobby is very fake, and so is his grave, along with everyone who buried him. Fake. Fake. Fake; they’re all fake.

None of that mattered to hundreds of Harry Potter fans who contacted Greenlink after project manager Simon Ludlam mentioned during a BBC interview that the company’s undersea electricity cable would pass beneath the beach. Ludlam initially had no idea who Dobby was. His colleagues eventually explained that, apparently, this was “very, very serious,” as The Guardian reports.

So planners changed the route.

The new cable avoided Dobby’s imaginary grave while also avoiding actual Bronze Age burial remains nearby. We put this in the plainest terms possible: a fictional dead elf got roughly the same consideration as ancient dead humans.

The cable is now operational, and Dobby remains undisturbed. So… win-win, I guess?

Fans can keep on visiting his memorial and leaving stones to honor him, and now they can take pride in the fact that they rerouted millions of dollars of infrastructure as they moved a cable that links the power grids of two nations, all underground, and all because they are emotionally attached to a dead CGI elf.  

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You might remember how, in Jaws, a particularly hungry great white shark terrorized a small vacation town at the peak of summer tourism season. This story is a bit like that, just instead of an almost supernaturally violent great white shark, it’s rabid beavers.

According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, two people have been attacked by beavers at Cunningham Falls State Park in less than two weeks, forcing officials to close additional areas around Hunting Creek Lake while they investigate a possible outbreak.

All the story needs is a terrible mayor who refuses to close the park at risk of losing our tourism dollars. Thankfully, all state officials involved seem to be sane.

Two Rabid Beavers Attacked People at the Same Maryland State Park

The first attack happened July 26, when a beaver bit a 13-year-old boy who was swimming in the lake. He suffered injuries to his hands and chest and was airlifted to Johns Hopkins Hospital. The beaver was captured and euthanized. A rabies test came back positive.

It would’ve been an unremarkable one-off incident if only it didn’t happen again, this time obviously with a completely different rabid beaver, this one attacking a 19-year-old fisherman on August 5, delivering a bite to the fisherman’s ankle. He got a tetanus shot and a preventive rabies treatment, so you should be fine. The same cannot be said of the second beaver, which was captured and euthanized. Tests also confirmed that it had rabies.

Beavers rarely attack humans. Quite the opposite, really. They tend to avoid people whenever possible so they can focus on constructing their very cool wooden dams. They aren’t attacking because they want to, but because animals with rabies get disoriented and aggressive. That usual healthy fear of humanity falls away and is replaced with an intense, uncontrollable ferociousness.

Officials have prohibited pretty much any activity around the lake as they conduct day-and-night surveillance to see if any other beavers are infected.

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The country is, by most measures, getting sober. Millions of Americans have walked away from the nightly pour, picked up a sparkling water, and started logging their “dry lifestyle” alongside everyone else who did the same. Two states didn’t participate.

A 2025 Gallup poll found just 54% of American adults say they drink—the lowest figure since tracking began in 1939, down from 67% three years ago. New Hampshire and Delaware received no such memo. Data from the World Population Review puts New Hampshire at 4.67 gallons of ethanol per capita, over twice the national goal of 2.1 gallons, and Delaware at 3.52, both above the national average of 2.48 gallons.

Here’s the part that should make neighboring-state residents feel played. New Hampshire’s numbers are based on sales, not residency. The state runs a government liquor monopoly that sells wine and spirits tax-free, with outlets planted at highway exits along the Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine borders. Redditors have flagged it for years. “People from NY always bootleg from NH; it is literally 30% cheaper,” one commenter wrote. “A handle of Crown Royal in NH is $29.99. In NY, it’s $47.99.”

Why New Hampshire and Delaware Sell So Much Alcohol

The operation has a founding irony baked in. New Hampshire created its Liquor Commission in 1934 to rein in drinking after Prohibition ended. Nine decades and $4.7 billion in profits later, that same commission funds the state’s schools, roads, and addiction treatment, in a state that collects no income or sales tax.

Delaware runs the same play, without the government monopoly. There’s no state sales tax on anything, liquor included, and a sprawl of private warehouse outlets clustered near the Pennsylvania and New Jersey borders have made it a reliable stop for out-of-state shoppers. State health data puts the adult binge drinking rate at 14%—Delaware has its own drinkers, tax advantages aside.

Nevada came in third at 3.42 gallons, unsurprising for a state with Las Vegas in it. North Dakota and Montana rounded out the top five, with Montana also leading the country in alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Utah, with strict alcohol laws and a large Mormon population, came in last at 1.34 gallons per capita. No shocker there. 

If the sobriety trend holds, New Hampshire has a problem on its hands. Its tax-free liquor empire was built for people who want to drink. Fewer of them do.

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In April 2029, a potentially dangerous asteroid the size of a skyscraper will fly by Earth, sailing closer to us than even some of our own satellites. It’s going to be one heck of a spectacle for those of us on the ground.

According to Live Science, Asteroid 99942 Apophis isn’t expected to hit Earth. Scientists have crunched the numbers quite a bit, and we always come out alive in the end. Apophis will pass within about 20,000 miles of Earth on April 13, 2029, close enough to be visible to the naked eye for most people on the planet, and that’s not an exaggeration.

Up to 90 percent of the Earth’s population will be able to catch a glimpse of the asteroid that has been dubbed the “God of Chaos,” a name that isn’t really doing much to make people feel better about its chances of smacking into the planet, considering how close of a shave it will be giving us as it is. But, considering the state of things down here, maybe getting whacked with an asteroid will be an improvement.

A Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Will Fly Safely Past Earth in 2029

North America will mostly miss the spectacle, as it’ll be just outside of our view except for people living in the farthest reaches of the northeastern tip of the United States, along with Canadians living in Nova Scotia.

There is one small wrinkle that may throw a wrench in all of the currently projected smooth sailing, and it’s a subject I’ve written about quite a bit before: space junk.

As reported by Science Alert, in a study published in The Planetary Science Journal, researchers theorize that since the asteroid is flying so close to us, closer than even some of our satellites, there is a small but real chance that a piece of man-made debris in the Earth’s orbit could collide with Apophis. Thus, spoiling the scientific community’s perfect opportunity to study such an astrophysical spectacle from such close distance, as any collision with a man-made object could send it veering off course.

It sounds like the makings of a disaster movie, but all it would ruin is our chances at getting to study something this rare from this close.

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I consider the invention of the Squatty Potty a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting moment of genius that forever altered the course of human history. For those tragically unaware, it’s a specialized stool that tucks neatly beneath your toilet until it’s time to poop. You prop your feet on it, lifting your knees into a squat, giving them a bit of elevation, bringing you a few inches closer to the ideal pooping position, that of course being an animalistic squat like you’re some woodland beast.

For all its genius, there is one issue with the squatty potty: it isn’t chic. People who see it tucked beneath the toilet bowl know that your bowels are evacuating with ease, but they know you aren’t doing it with style.

According to USA Today and, like, everyone on the internet who suddenly started talking about it about a month ago, a company called Let Loose has finally offered a solution. It made a wearable version of the squatty potty that looks like a pair of comically enormous 1970s platform shoes. And, since we live in the age of near-fatal levels of self-aware irony, they are called S—t Shoes.

These 7-Inch Bathroom Shoes Are Built for One Thing: Pooping

S—t Shoes are seven-inch platform wedges designed not for walking (please, never step outside of your bathroom with them) but for planting beside the toilet and resting your feet on while seated. All the benefits of a Squatty Potty-like device, with the style of a short woman trying to look fashionable as she peeks over a crowd of tall people at a Deee-Lite concert, but while pooping.

The platform shoes mimic a squatting posture that strengthens the anorectal angle, thereby reducing the need to strain and potentially making bowel movements easier. If you’ve been struggling to poop at Studio 54, your prayers have been answered.

The Internet has apparently gone wild for them, as the $69 patent-pending shoes quickly sold out and remain sold out as I write this, with the website proudly claiming that the “First Drop Sold Out In Seven Days,” but you can pre-order the next drop.

You could just eat more fiber, exercise, drink more water, and maybe even get yourself a significantly less expensive Squatty Potty. Or an even cheaper knockoff of a Squatty Potty. But if you’re the kind of person who prefers to squeeze every last bit of flair and panache out of everything in your home as you squeeze every last bit of fecal matter out of your bowels, then I guess the S—t Shoes were made for you.

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If a new Wall Street Journal feature is to be believed (I have my doubts about how prevalent the issue truly is), then Gen Z is truly screwed, job-wise. Not just because AI is gobbling up entry-level work, but because the hiring process has become so bleak, so competitive and so demoralizing that some of their parents (who are mostly Gen Xers, our most lead-poisoned generation) are reportedly making their adult children look foolish by barging into the job hunt.

The WSJ reports that moms and dads are sitting just off-camera during Zoom interviews, calling hiring managers and applying for jobs on their kids’ behalf, and even popping into meetings to ask about benefits packages and such.

The Journal spoke with recruiters and HR professionals who say that this kind of thing used to be an occasional oddity, but now it’s increasingly becoming routine. Steven Clark, who runs an Alaska staffing firm, says he’s fielded enough calls from parents demanding to know why their child wasn’t hired, or aesthetically pleading with him after they were fired.

He tells the story of how he had to fire a 24-year-old construction worker because he had “showed up late or not at all four times in his first week,” only to have to do the entire conversation again with the guy’s mom.  

Gen Z’s Brutal Job Market Has Parents Getting Way Too Involved

Another hiring manager, Lynne Alba, says parents have approached her at job fairs carrying their adult children’s résumés. Amber Little says parents have called to dispute performance reviews, ask about health insurance and even call in sick for their grown kids. Jasmine Escalera, a career coach at Zety, calls it “co-piloting,” and a Zety survey found one in five Gen Z respondents had a parent attend a job interview.

Again, I do wonder how prevalent all this actually is, Zety survey or not, though there is a logic to it. The pandemic hit right as Gen Z was in the midst of its adolescence, disrupting their early work experience and social skills. They reentered the workforce, and the world, to find that the corporate world (run mostly by their Gen X parents and their Boomer grandparents) seemed to be hastily scrambling to replace as many human workers with AI as it possibly could.

Paired with an economy that is seemingly designed to discourage, and I get why young people are struggling and why their parents (hopefully sympathetically) are trying to hold their hand through the process, even if it has the unintended consequence of making them look like big babies no one in their right mind would hire.

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