Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous version simply said it wouldn't do that, as of October 16th, Google has added the line, "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads."

That means anyone who has connected their Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos to AI Mode and other Search tools …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display.

Here's how one user in Australia described what happened to their phone:

Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times.

I was showing it to a friend, and as I opened it, I felt something around the internal hinge, underneath the screen.

As I cont …

Read the full story at The Verge.

After years of debating how driverless cars should tell the world no one is at the wheel - flashing text, audio alerts, custom lights - the feds just stepped in with a single answer: cyan.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 108, specifically rewriting the rules to fit autonomous vehicles. It's a mix of cutting red tape for human-free designs and standardizing how robotaxis communicate with the world around them - starting with a distinctive blue-green light.

NHTSA is proposing cyan-colored marker lamps "to clearly and consistently signal to law e …

Read the full story at The Verge.

SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners.

The move would give SpaceX access to half of the 158,500 cell towers currently operational in the US, according to Reuters. When asked about a potential partnership with SpaceX, Amazon, or other satellite services during an earnings call on Wednesday, Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant said, "I don't think I want to get into customer-specific detail, but you can …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is delaying the enforcement of its new business terms after publishers raised concerns that they could allow the company to scrape news sites for AI training, as reported earlier by Fast Company. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the terms will go into effect on November 20th "to allow more time for us to explain to our partners and stakeholders what's changing and what's not."

The business terms, which were originally supposed to go into effect on October 30th, appeared to give Meta permission to freely scrape the new sites that use its platforms, while using the material for AI training. Though Meta u …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Seven years after Sigma claimed its original fp was the world's smallest and lightest full-frame mirrorless camera, the company has announced a similarly compact follow-up with several welcome upgrades, including an improved sensor, an articulating LCD display, and longer battery life. But this time around, Sigma is only claiming its new FP2 is the "world's smallest" full-frame shooter since those upgrades have increased its body-only weight by about 6 grams.

The Sigma FP2 will be available on November 11th and starts at $2,199 for the camera body alone. For $2,749, you can bundle it with Sigma's upgraded EVF-21 viewfinder featuring a 5.76 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you've been feeling nostalgic for your old iPod, you can head over to Apple Music's 404 page to listen to music on a virtual re-creation of the first-generation iPod. The hidden iPod was spotted by users on social media on Friday. It's appropriately stocked with music from the early 2000s, like Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" or Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." The iPod seems to pop up on any non-existent Apple Music page, so you can find it by just adding a string of random letters after the main Apple Music URL.

theres a hidden fully functional ipod as a 404 page on apple music https://t.co/vLYpnkHG4x pic.twitter.com/0cSz4SF1kp

- Kian (@kianworld …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Justice Department asked a federal judge on Friday to stop Alaska from certifying the winner of the state’s Senate election if Mary Peltola (D) unseats Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) in a close race.

If your circadian rhythm is constantly being thrown off by your terrible, no good, absolutely miserable nights of sleep, congratulations, you might also have a whole new kind of depression. It’s called circadian depression, a term coined by researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia, who published their findings in the British Journal of Psychiatry and detailed them in a press release.

The researchers analyzed data from over 11,000 participants with severe or recurrent depression. After a while, the researchers figured these people probably weren’t suffering from your run-of-the-mill doom-and-gloom. Their internal body clocks seem fundamentally out of whack.

They all seem to be suffering from the same debilitating combo of traits, like seasonal mood shifts, severe morning fatigue, delayed sleep timing, and something called “social jet lag, which is when your weekend sleep schedule looks completely different than your workweek schedule. For instance, they might sleep for five hours on a weekday and 11 hours on a weekend.

Scientists Just Identified a New Type of Depression Linked to Your Body’s Internal Clock

As you can imagine, that kind of life comes with tremendous downsides. In this case, the study notes that people with circadian depression are more prone to hitting rock bottom early in life. They might also suffer from mania at higher rates, along with psychosis, and tend to have suicidal thoughts.

If that wasn’t enough, they also have elevated genetic risks for other ailments that blaze their own paths of destruction, like inflammation that leads to all sorts of health issues, ADHD, and heart issues.

Sadly, common treatments like SSRIs and SNRIs don’t often work on these people since the condition stems from a misfiring of their internal clocks. Traditional antidepressants can’t fix that.

Instead of a pill that fixes everything, researchers suggest fixing your chronobiology. Light therapy might help. Taking melatonin before bed could help you knock out. Maintain a stricter bedtime and bedtime routine. You know, all the stuff you’ve probably already tried. Hey, can’t hurt to try it all again.

The post There’s a New Type of Depression, and It Could Explain Why You Can’t Sleep at Night appeared first on VICE.

South Korea is ground zero for a lot of the hottest, and flat-out craziest, beauty trends of the past decade. There is a new one out there that its creators are hoping catches on in the US, which is a bit ironic considering that it’s made from the skin of dead people from the US.

According to a feature by Business Insider, American tissue banks have been shipping donated cadaver skin to South Korean biotech firms who are chopping up and processing this American skin to turn into injectable “skin boosters” like Re2O, an injectable and pricey treatment that turns your face dewy and smooth thanks to a puréed dead American.

It sounds dystopian and rather gross, and it’s a little of both. See, when Americans check the donor box at the DMV thinking that they’re going to help someone with kidney failure, they still might, but also, their skin might get shipped across the Pacific to a country like South Korea that lacks enough domestic donors. So, companies like L&C Bio snatch up all the American tissue they can from supply hubs in places like San Antonio and Florida.

A Bizarre New Korean Beauty Treatment Uses Skin Harvested From Dead Americans

Re2O made a ton of money in the first half of 2026 alone, raking in $17 million in sales. Broadly, skin-derived injectables are on track to hit $75 million in South Korean sales.

But what good is your product if you can’t sell it to Americans so you can unlock the achievement of selling their own dead skin back to them? like how Tyler Durden took pride in selling people’s liposuctioned fat back to them in a bar of soap? L&C Bio has signed a $60 million distribution deal to bring its human tissue-based beauty injectable into American med spas.

The company says Re2O is part of a broader family of products that don’t need FDA approval, but an FDA spokesperson told Business Insider that sometimes products that don’t actually meet that criteria still get sold. Who knows what will happen there.

It is all quite dystopian, especially if you are an organ donor and hope that, should you meet an untimely demise, your skin be used to help someone in desperate need of, say, a skin graft. The something so ignoble about the thought of your skin being turned into a smoothie that makes a rich person’s skin more supple.

The post This New Anti-Aging Beauty Treatment Is Made from Dead People’s Skin. Here’s How It Works. appeared first on VICE.

The weird subsection of Americans who think eating soy-based products somehow makes you weaker is really not going like this: a researcher used a variety of factors to determine which food was the best protein source. Tofu was the clear winner, and it wasn’t even close.

In a study published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Dr. Chris Macdonald created the BPI Score, a rating system that puts a variety of popular high-protein foods under the microscope to determine which one comes out on top after a variety of factors are taken into consideration.

The short version of the results is that plant-based proteins were all at the top and animal-based proteins were mostly at the bottom, with a couple of exceptions.

This, of course, raises the question of the criteria on which these 20 popular high-protein foods were judged. There are two primary BPI score categories: a People Score (focused on stuff like cholesterol content, saturated fat, sodium content, etc.) and Planet Score (considers the protein’s impact on climate change, land use, pollution, etc.).

Tofu Just Beat Meat in a New Study Ranking the Best Protein Sources

Tofu destroyed the competition, coming out on top in 36 out of a possible 40 points on the scale. At the opposite side of the spectrum was cheddar cheese, which scored a measly 13 points. Let’s all give cheddar cheese a polite round of applause for still being an odd but delicious complement to a crunchy Taco Bell taco.

To understand why tofu blew out the competition, you have to consider the whole, visually off-putting slab of white, gelatinous goo. The BPI score scales everything per 100 grams of protein, meaning beef emits about 100 times more greenhouse gases than tofu and uses way more land. Pair that with the fact that tofu is a fine source of protein, packing all nine essential amino acids and zero cholesterol, and it makes sense why, all things considered, tofu is the protein champion of the world.

Overall, plant-based proteins dominated animal-based proteins, with only chicken breast and tuna cracking the top 10, and even then they ranked in the back half, at numbers seven and eight, respectively.

There are some points of contention, like the study’s use of UK grocery prices, which makes sense since the researcher is from the UK and received funding from two UK universities, including the University of Cambridge. But since he didn’t even factor in ethical issues like farm animal welfare, it’s safe to say animal protein got lucky.

It could’ve been an even bigger blowout.

The post Scientists Just Found the Best Source of Protein on Earth (and It’s Not Meat) appeared first on VICE.

When some men got divorced in their 30s or 40s, they probably weren’t thinking about who would drive them to doctor’s appointments when they’re 80. Now, decades later, they’re finding out the kids they lost touch with aren’t really interested in picking up.

Researchers at Spain’s University of Granada heard stories like this while interviewing older divorced and separated adults living on their own. Some fathers had moved away after their marriages ended, gradually losing contact with their children as the years passed. One 85-year-old hadn’t seen his kids since 2013. “That’s hard, but what can I do?” he said.

The mothers in the study had their own struggles. Many raised their kids with little financial support from their ex-husbands, but those same kids were still calling and coming around to visit. Money was another story. After years of working jobs with little pay, some women couldn’t afford to hire help around the house as they got older.

A New Study Reveals the Surprising Ways Divorce Affects Men and Women Later in Life

And this isn’t limited to Spain. A U.S. study found that after divorce past 50, fathers were less likely to have frequent contact with their adult children, while mothers’ odds of staying in touch doubled. Researchers in Germany found something similar, suggesting divorced fathers face a greater risk of growing old without much family support.

In a lot of families, Mom is the one making sure everyone stays in touch. She remembers the birthdays and calls to see how the kids are doing, while Dad gets to enjoy those relationships without doing much to maintain them. Sociologists call this “kinkeeping,” and divorce can be a rude awakening for men who’ve relied on their wives to do it for years.

Friends aren’t always available to fill that void, either. According to the Survey Center on American Life, the percentage of American men with no close friends increased from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021. And as people age, having nobody to help with everyday needs can become a serious concern.

Geriatrician Maria Carney calls older adults without available caregivers “elder orphans.” Her research estimates that nearly a quarter of Americans over 65 either lack someone to help them or are at risk of ending up in that situation.

There is some good news, though. Rutgers sociologist Jocelyn Elise Crowley found that fathers can reconnect with their adult children, even after years apart. Of course, that requires effort. If you’ve spent decades expecting someone else to maintain your family relationships, you might have to be the one who finally picks up the phone.

The post Why Some Divorced Men End Up Alone in Old Age, According to Science appeared first on VICE.

Brick, the company behind the $59 gadget that blocks you from using apps on your phone, has launched a new device that's designed to help you cut back on doomscrolling in bed. The $129 Brick Night introduces a location-based element: instead of requiring you to tap your phone against the device, like the OG Brick, this version uses Bluetooth to automatically kick in when you enter your bedroom (or any other room you put it in).

The Brick Night uses two CR2477 batteries, and you can set a location zone of up to 25 feet x 25 feet. Both this and the Brick allow you to select specific apps to block instead of rendering your entire phone inacces …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A new Texas-based defense startup has a plan to improve military and police dogs in the US: it's going to genetically modify them and equip them with Anduril's military technology. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal Biosciences (the company that says it's trying to resurrect extinct animals), and it's already secured $200 million in funding from investors.

Warhound plans to use Colossal's work in genetics, cloning, and animal biology to "produce healthier dogs with characteristics suited to demanding missions," with Anduril then equipping them with its "advanced cybernetic Augments." T …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that "many active buyers say they can't tell which items involve AI-generated content" and that sellers are "concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use AI in misleading ways," spurring the new policies and restrictions.

Under the new policies, every listing must include "at least one unedited photo of the actual item against a real background," and all photos must "accurately represent the item a buyer will receive." The photos that aren't the first one can be edited with softw …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on this week's earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don't actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager's phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the "crackdown," he called it a "routine improvement" instead:

This is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan. Family Plan has existed for a long while. It has been around for, I think it is now close to 12, 13 years in Spotify history, and it makes up a pretty signi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Monkeys, they’re just like us! Yes, we share a ton of genes, but socially, researchers recently found monkeys from groups that lived through a deadly outbreak became much more wary of tainted food afterward. Now you’re starting to see why Taco Bell is still trying to recover from that tainted lettuce scare.

As The New York Times described them, they’re basically “germaphobe monkeys,” an apt nickname for the Japanese macaques observed in a study published in Royal Society Open Science.

When a virus tore through a South Texas macaque sanctuary, three out of four monkey groups watched their neighbors suffer and die from a disease spread through bites and scratches. Once the epidemic faded, cognitive scientists from the University of California, San Diego set up an experiment, the results of which they detailed in a press release.

Offered they macaques two food choices, food on a clean surface versus food on a board covered in feces.

Scientists Discovered That Monkeys Become Germaphobes After Surviving a Deadly Outbreak

That’s an easy choice for you, but for the macaques, a little s—t on their food isn’t usually a deal breaker. Monkeys that hadn’t been exposed to the virus happily eat the poop-covered food 79 percent of the time. But macaques from groups that survived the outbreak and witnessed its horrors only ate the poop-covered food 47 percent of the time.

Sure, if you knew someone who ate poop-covered food 47 percent of the time, you would think they were deranged. But again, these are monkeys, and 47 percent is crazy low.

What’s so fascinating here, and what’s so weirdly human about this phenomenon, is that the initial virus that wiped out so many of the monkeys wasn’t transmitted through food at all, and yet, like so many of us in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic who were furiously scrubbing down groceries in hopes of eliminating all traces of what would ultimately turn out to be an airborne virus, the monkeys that survived the outbreak turned into hypochondriac neat freaks, and justifiably so. They had undergone a severe trauma, and they were mitigating potential vectors of infection.

The researchers say that the psychological defense mechanism stems from something called the “behavioral immune system,” which triggers disgust in the brain to ward off perceived threats. When we went through a global pandemic that shut down the world, we went apes—t with the hand sanitizer. After the macaques went through their own tiny version of a pandemic, their sense of security was on high alert based on past trauma.

Strongly suggesting that avoidance of potentially disease-ridden stuff is a learned social behavior, potentially handed down from mother to baby, the researchers found that former pets and lab-reared monkeys were more willing to eat the dirty food. Poor things. They never had a mama to teach them not to eat food covered in poop.

The post These Monkeys Survived a Deadly Outbreak, Then Started Acting a Lot Like Humans appeared first on VICE.

ADHD can be bad enough on its own, and now we get news from a study published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at University College London and the University of Liverpool that a meta-analysis of nearly 16 million people across three continents found that people with ADHD have a 70 percent higher rate of death from all causes across the board…which significantly plummets when they get on medication.

Living with a brain that constantly refuses to fully hold onto ideas and actions is already an exhausting full-time nightmare and can leave people feeling like they don’t have full control over their own lives. And now, on top of that, tracking data across two decades reveals that having ADHD comes with a huge drop in life expectancy.

Suicide risk rockets by 90 percent, while injury-related fatalities jump by 55 percent. Even boring old dying of natural causes creeps up by 27 percent due to the link to physical issues like cardiovascular disease and the kind of erratic health habits you’d expect someone with attention deficit issues to have.

ADHD Is Linked to a 70% Higher Risk of Death, According to a Major New Study

With ADHD, impulse control glitches out, and ordinary situations that most people can tackle as effortlessly as they grieve can sometimes, for the ADHD mind, become dangerous. Think stuff like drifting off behind the wheel or forgetting to take pills that manage a chronic illness. In the United States, our healthcare system is such a tangled mess of unnecessary bureaucracy that it’s quite easy to imagine someone with ADHD giving up and forgetting about filing a claim or even getting on a healthcare plan to begin with.

It sounds quite depressing, that is, until the researchers found that all of that could be mostly eliminated if someone with ADHD remembers to regularly take ADHD medication. Among those diagnosed, participants taking ADHD meds saw their overall mortality risk drop by about 25 percent. The researchers note that this specific metric comes from a smaller subset of three studies, but the overall idea is that getting an accurate ADHD diagnosis and pairing it with the right medication can help you get your taxes done on time.

It will also help you remember to pay your rent, take out the trash, and maybe even finish that romantasy novel you’ve been working on, and may eventually help you live longer

The post Scientists Just Found a Disturbing Link Between ADHD and Early Death appeared first on VICE.

One of America’s best ideas was the National Park system. Ulysses S. Grant gets credit for creating the first national park—Yellowstone—in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt later expanded protected public lands during his time in office, essentially creating the public park system as we know it today.

Now, we have officially opened a new national park, the first in six years. Meet Chiricahua National Park, the nation’s 64th national park. President Trump has officially signed off on upgrading Arizona’s former Chiricahua National Monument into full-fledged National Park status following a decade-long bipartisan fight in Congress.

The U.S. Just Added Its 64th National Park, and It’s Absolutely Stunning

For some stupid reason, my brain wants to pronounce it “chihuahua,” even though that’s not the word. The actual word is pronounced, “cheery-cow-uh.” However you say it, the new national Park is a 12,000-acre “Wonderland of Rocks” near the Mexican border.

Huge volcanic eruptions from 27 million years ago gave it its gorgeous rock formations, which look like a series of pillars scattered throughout the landscape. It’s also packed with biodiversity, hosting a range of wild animals from ocelots to all four North American skunk species.

Now, this pristine, awe-inspiring land will receive the highest level of federal protection possible. You can visit the park during park hours free of charge.

The post America Just Got Its First New National Park in Six Years. Here’s What to Know. appeared first on VICE.

Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an announcement on Thursday.

Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social media posts and marketing content, it's also supposed to create realistic scenes, digital art, environmental imagery, and more. The model's two-stage sy …

Read the full story at The Verge.