Proteins are made of building blocks known as amino acids. Human proteins are made of various combinations of 20 of these. A diet especially rich in one of them — arginine — appears to help the immune system. It can fend off infections and at least one type of cancer, finds a new study in mice.

Arginine appears to ramp up the immune system’s ability to spot danger. A high-arginine diet seemed to offer the rodents some protection against flu and COVID-19 viruses. It also quashed colon tumors, says Sohail Tavazoie. A doctor and cancer biologist, Tavazoie works at Rockefeller University in New York City.

His team shared the new findings July 30 in Cell.

“I don’t want the takeaway to be that everyone should be just consuming arginine all the time,” says Tavazoie. It’s just too soon, he says, to know if taking it as a food supplement could prevent or even treat these diseases in people. But he’s interested in launching human studies to test that.

The new data do make a compelling case for further testing, says Costas Lyssiotis. He had no role in the new study. But he is a cancer researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.

Might a high-arginine diet help the human immune system recognize tumors and target them for destruction? That’s not yet clear, Lyssiotis says. But, he adds, it’s something that is “super provocative and should be pursued.”

Not ‘essential’ — but beneficial

Research has been suggesting that arginine may play an outsized role in disease.

Nine amino acids are considered “essential” nutrients. That’s because our bodies use them but can’t make them; they must be acquired as part of what we eat. Arginine is not one of those. But because this amino acid can open blood vessels, some people do take arginine as a food supplement. The goal is to help their blood circulate.

Arginine also tends to be scanty in the lungs of people with influenza or COVID-19. It’s barely present, too, in the tumors that develop in people with colon cancer. What’s more, studies have shown that both cancer and viral infections can crank up the destruction of arginine.

Tavazoie’s team wondered what was so important about this amino acid that multiple diseases shut it down.

In the lab, his group tinkered with arginine levels in mouse and human cells. Cutting back on arginine reduced levels of key immune proteins, they found.

Take what’s known as MHC class 1 proteins. Riding on the surface of our cells, they tell the immune system what to watch out for. Like a police officer holding up a sketch of a criminal, they display snippets of viral or cancer proteins. But the immune system has trouble recognizing and rousting those outlaws when cells have fewer MHC-1 proteins than normal. 

A key player in immunity?

Tavazoie’s team then turned to mice at risk of colon cancer. When the researchers fed them a low-arginine diet, MHC-1 levels fell and the number of colon tumors rose. But add bonus arginine to the diet — what would be about 10 grams a day for humans — and the outcome flipped. Now MHC-1 levels rose and tumor-forming fell.

These data suggest dietary arginine can control MHC-1, a very important group of immune proteins, Tavazoie says.

Arginine-starved cells slowed their assembly of MHC-1 proteins. That may be because these proteins contain long stretches of arginine units. If there aren’t enough of these building blocks available, “there’s a supply-chain shortage,” he says. At that point, MHC-1 construction stalls.

The team observed a similar story in mice infected with the flu virus or the virus that causes COVID-19. Low-arginine diets led to them having low levels of MHC-1 proteins. They also had more viral proteins and inflammation in their lungs compared to mice eating high-arginine diets.

This suggests arginine was blunting the effects of infection. And arginine supplements given after flu infection boosted mouse survival, the team found. That points to it as a possible treatment one day. Tavazoie now wonders whether other amino acids may play similarly important roles.

There’s still much work needed to know if the mouse data predict effects in people, says Pierre Close. He’s a cancer researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium. He didn’t participate in the new study. But, he says, this research might one day lead to therapies that help the immune system better tackle disease. “We are all looking for new strategies.”

In September 2024, an entrepreneur named Justin Brown uploaded a YouTube video in which he argued that writers should be “scared right now” about the rise of AI.

“I think that one of the big dangers is that AI is going to take many people’s jobs,” Brown muses to the camera as he hikes through a national park in Australia. “This includes writers, by the way.”

What Justin didn’t mention in the video is that, along with his brothers Lachlan Brown and Brendan Brown, he runs a company called Brown Brothers Media — which, former insiders assure us, had just months earlier fired a stunning proportion of its own writers as it embraced generative AI.

Over the past few years, BBM has pioneered a remarkably cynical business model. First it buys online publications that have established themselves as offering a distinctive type of journalism, like coverage of space travel, parenting advice, or business news. Then it floods their websites with dizzying torrents of AI-generated content — many thousands of articles per month, by our count — in a bid to soak up as many readers as possible via Google and other platforms.

There are signs that this strategy has been extraordinarily successful, with BBM boasting in 2025 that its network of sites had surpassed 50 million page views per month. It’s difficult to verify a site’s traffic without access to its internal data, but the analytics service Similarweb corroborates the claim that BBM is pulling in vast audiences, estimating that over the past year its network of publications has attracted an average of 64.7 million visitors per month. According to a recent ranking, that would make it one of the 30 most trafficked English-language media enterprises on the web, with a total digital readership substantially higher than that of NPR, narrowly besting CBS News and Forbes, and just slightly behind the Washington Post.

A media organization like NPR or WaPo, though, employs hundreds or even thousands of journalists to gather and report news. BBM, as far as we can tell, has cut itself down to a skeleton crew of about a dozen employees, including its three founding brothers. To operate such a sprawling empire with such a tiny staff, former insiders told us, BBM uses AI to crank out content at a scale so immense that it’s difficult to comprehend.

Along the way, BBM has indulged in breathtaking acts of dishonesty — often in ways that seem specifically devised to manipulate platforms owned by Google, where Ahrefs data suggests that it sources the preponderance of its traffic. (Last year, BBM wrote in a press release that its enormous audience was “driven by organic reach through Google Discover and search.”)

One of BBM’s many unscrupulous practices, insiders confirmed to us, is that it has often invented entire fake personas for nonexistent writers — we found more than 50 spread across its dozens of sites — and published content under their names without revealing to readers that they weren’t real people.

In many cases, BBM has even outfitted these fictional writers with impressive-sounding bogus credentials as it uses their bylines to churn out AI-generated material.

The space news site Space Daily, for instance — one of BBM’s most successful publications, according to Similarweb data we reviewed, with an estimated average of 10 million page views per month over the past year — has published many articles under bylines it identified as scientists with distinguished résumés. There was “Dr. Katherine Chen,” for example, a supposed former “systems engineer” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory whose bio claimed she’d “spent fifteen years designing autonomous systems for deep space missions.” Publishing alongside Chen was “Dr. James Whitfield,” who was said to be an “aerospace medicine researcher at the European Space Agency.”

Yet beyond Space Daily, neither Chen nor Whitfield actually exist — not on social media, nor in press releases, nor as coauthors on research they would have conducted at two of the world’s premier space agencies. NASA’s site doesn’t make a single mention of Chen, and the ESA’s site has never once referred to Whitfield. And though NASA declined to comment on grounds that it “does not verify past employment or affiliations with the agency,” the ESA confirmed that “Mr. James Whitfield is not currently employed by the European Space Agency, nor do our records indicate that he has ever worked here in the past.”

BBM’s fraudulent experts aren’t limited to space. A tech site owned by BBM, Direct Message News, has run many articles under the byline of “Rachel Vaughn” that provided intimate advice about mental health concerns. According to her bio on the site, Vaughn is a Dublin-based psychologist with an “MA in Applied Positive Psychology from Trinity College Dublin” who is a “Certified Mental-Health First Aider” and an “associate member of the British Psychological Society.” The bio adds that Vaughn “regularly delivers evidence-based resilience workshops for Irish mental-health NGOs.”

But there’s no trace of a practicing psychologist in Dublin by Vaughn’s name. When we reached out to the British Psychological Society, it confirmed that it had no record of a member named Rachel Vaughn. What’s more, “Applied Positive Psychology” isn’t a degree — or even a course — that exists at Trinity College Dublin, the university told us. A reverse-image search further found that Vaughn’s headshot is a stock photo.

BBM has also created fake journalists, using them to commit bold acts of plagiarism and fabulism.

Consider an “investigation” about the recycling system in Los Angeles, attributed to another fake author named “Jordan Cooper” — depicted as a tattooed “pop-culture writer and vegan-snack reviewer with roots in music blogging” — and published this past February by VegOut, a vegan news and recipes site owned by BBM that pulls in an estimated 13.3 million page views per month.

In the piece, the Cooper persona claimed to have “bought a four-pack of Apple AirTags, super-glued them inside plastic containers, and sent them on their journey through America’s recycling system,” writing that “what I discovered over the next month made me question everything I thought I knew about those little triangular arrows.”

But the story included a purported photo of a plastic bottle containing an AirTag that featured a suspiciously garbled Apple logo — and numerous AI detectors flagged an overwhelming probability that the image was AI-generated.

As it turns out, the piece was a blatant ripoff of a 2024 story by a local San Diego TV station, CBS8. In that story, the station’s journalists describe a near-identical investigation in which they glued AirTags to four pieces of recyclable trash: a “water bottle, a yogurt container, an orange juice bottle, and a wipes container” — a list that Cooper’s piece seems to have lightly rephrased as a “water bottle, an orange juice jug, a yogurt container, and a cleaning product bottle.” (The Cooper piece never mentioned CBS8‘s work, instead framing the investigation as VegOut‘s original effort. An AI detector flagged BBM’s text as 100 percent AI-generated, with no sign of human involvement whatsoever.)

In another article, the Cooper character claimed to have “voted for Trump’s ‘America First’ promise,” but later regretted it because “that promise has been broken in just about every way imaginable.”

In addition to the fake domain matter experts and journalists, BBM provided many of its phony writers with elaborate backstories that made them seem like ordinary people, with identities that seem crafted to exploit the insecurities of readers struggling with loneliness and other life difficulties. It then used these relatable everyday personas to publish colossal numbers of emotionally manipulative personal essays in which the fake writers shared AI-generated anecdotes framed as deeply personal life experiences. 

On VegOut, for instance, a fake writer that BBM called “Marlene Martin” was identified as a “retired high school English teacher and longtime writer who draws on decades of lived experience to explore personal development, relationships, resilience, and finding purpose in life’s second act.”

“When she’s not at her laptop,” the bio continues, “she’s usually in the garden at dawn, baking Sunday bread, taking watercolor classes, playing piano, or volunteering at a local women’s shelter teaching life skills.”

BBM has used personas like Martin to pump out thousands of heartfelt personal essays that purport to draw on decades of memories and wisdom, often ruminating on topics like loneliness and lost feelings of purpose.

“When I retired at sixty-six after thirty-two years of teaching high school English, a colleague pulled me aside at my farewell party,” read an essay published under the Martin persona. “‘It must be bittersweet,’ she said, touching my arm gently. ‘All those years you could have been writing, traveling, pursuing your real passions. But you had to raise your kids instead.’ I smiled and nodded, not having the heart to correct her. The truth was more complicated, more beautiful, and took me decades to fully understand.”

In a bit of unintentional comedy, these AI-generated essayists have often bungled their own biographical details, resulting in bizarre continuity errors.

Remember that essay above, where Martin claimed she’d retired at age 66? In a different piece, she wrote that she’d stopped working at 64. In another, she said it was 61. 

Martin’s age is similarly inconsistent. In January of this year, she wrote that she was 68 years old. By February, she claimed she was “69 with two bad knees” — which would be possible if she’d had a birthday, except that by March she’d turned 71. By April, Martin was aging backwards, stating in a depressive essay about her loss of identity after the death of her beloved spouse — “my husband died and the caregiving that had consumed seven years ended overnight,” she lamented — that she was only 70.

These incoherent claims about writers’ life stories can be jarring. A fake “lead editor” and “clinical psychologist” identified as “Sarah Mitchell” at Silicon Canals — another BBM tech site, this one drawing an estimated 3.3 million page views per month, according to Similarweb data — published a sentimental essay earlier this year about how her baby’s first word was “Max,” the name of the family dog. Weeks later, she wrote in a piece about the psychology of dog owners that “I don’t have a dog.”

“I should probably admit that upfront,” the Mitchell persona conceded.

Martin wasn’t the only fake BBM writer whose confused narratives extended to deeply sensitive topics like grief and death. 

This past February, for instance, a VegOut author identified as “Adam Kelton” — his bio claimed he was a “writer and culinary professional with deep experience in luxury food and beverage” — published an essay complaining about his mother’s passive aggressive behavior regarding his vegan diet when they eat out at restaurants. In it, he writes about his mom in the present tense, describing a lunch with her as recently as the previous week.

Then, just two days later, Kelton bylined a piece about joining a “grief support group” to help him talk about his mother — who by then, he wrote, had been dead for nearly a year.

“My mother died eleven months ago. Pancreatic cancer. The last year and a half was a slow unraveling — her energy going first, then her independence, then her,” Kelton mourned. Later in the essay, Kelton adds: “I am thirty-six years old. I am a son who lost his mother. I am a former hospitality professional. I am a minimalist living in a bungalow in Austin who hosts dinner parties and reads novels and is still — somehow, after everything — the guy who once stood in front of a painting and forgot to check the time.”

Longtime readers of sites acquired by BBM have been appalled by the severe decline in quality after the transition.

“RIP Silicon Canals,” wrote a former fan of the BBM tech site in a LinkedIn post. “Never seen a brand destroyed this quickly. For years it was part of my morning routine… then Brown Brothers Media took over at the end of November 2025, and literally overnight the entire feed turned into pure AI slop.”

When BBM eviscerates a publication like this, it can be shocking to the community its human staff had built. After it bought VegOut last year, the site went from publishing reviews and food journalism to churning out formulaic pop psychology listicles and personal essays that often had no connection to plant-based eating. Readers quickly picked up on the shift, with one commenter fuming in a Reddit thread — titled “Anyone else tired of VegOut?” — that the site’s articles under BBM “reek of AI” being used to “pump out meaningless milquetoast garbage.”

“VegOut is clearly nothing more than [an] insipid content farm,” another angry reader chimed in, “that’s CLEARLY LOST ITS WAY!”

The VegOut transformation was so controversial that in May 2026, the magazine’s original founder, Maggie Ortlieb, took to social media to address it.

“If you’ve been in the vegan community for a while, you’ve probably heard of VegOut Magazine. It’s the company I founded when I was 24 years old. I ran it for about ten years and then sold it last summer,” Ortlieb said in a video, explaining that a combination of burnout and economic factors led to the sale. “Unfortunately, the new owners turned it into just another AI-written content website, so not really the direction I had in mind.”

What BBM has accomplished would be impressive if it wasn’t so dark. At a moment when legitimate news organizations are struggling to survive, it has raked in untold hundreds of millions of eyeballs — and likely formidable amounts of revenue via its advertisement-laden sites — by polluting the media ecosystem with noxious AI clickbait designed to do little else but trick Google’s algorithms. Every reader it steals in this way is prevented from supporting a real publication, and many may become turned off from engaging with the media in the future due to the abysmal quality of BBM’s work.

To help analyze BBM’s empire of spam, we reached out to Gisele Navarro, the managing editor of review site HouseFresh and an SEO specialist who has written extensively about the impacts that AI and changes made by Google have had on independent publishers.

Navarro told us that she was “shocked to see the growing number of websites in the network and the huge variety of the sites themselves — from cooking and space blogs, to small business and war news.” What surprised her the most, though, was how so many of the sites under BBM’s umbrella are effectively “indistinguishable from one another, publishing the same kind of first-person AI-generated stories around self-help topics aimed at people who are lonely.”

“Being an independent publisher in 2026 feels like an impossible task,” said Navarro, who helped us dissect BBM’s network and tactics. “We’re competing against our own content regurgitated by Google’s AI Overviews, having our information scraped without compensation by AI chatbots, battling with algorithms to reach our subscribers on social media platforms, and trying to build a relationship with an audience that is less likely to click and visit our websites.”

After we started reaching out to people connected to BBM this past May, the network abruptly deleted more than 50 fake writer profiles — and untold thousands of articles attributed to them — from across its many sites.

After months of ignoring our requests for comment, Justin Brown finally sent us a statement shortly before we published this story in September.

“Before May 2026, our publications used contributor bylines that did not identify real people, and some of those biographies included credentials that were not real,” the statement conceded. “That was wrong. In May, we stopped publishing under those bylines, began removing or correcting the older articles involved, and published network-wide and per-site editorial standards. That review is ongoing.”

What Brown’s statement didn’t mention: we kept digging after BBM’s massive deletion spree — and found that what it’s replaced the fake writers with has been, somehow, an even bleaker and more dishonest vision of the future of journalism than what it had been doing before.

***

The Brown brothers are Australian originally, but all three now live and work in Southeast Asia.

In a 2024 YouTube video, two of the brothers — Justin and Lachlan — enthuse about the region in a way that sounds strikingly extractive.

Vietnam was so “cheap” that it had been “essential while I was rebuilding the businesses,” Justin explained, adding that “there are a lot of economic opportunities in an emerging economy like Vietnam.”

“Saigon is an awesome place to come and reinvent yourself,” Lachlan cuts in, saying he had married a local woman after moving to Vietnam in the 2010s.

“There’s lots of opportunity here, especially if you want to make money, because of the developing economy,” Lachlan continues, encouraging others to set up shop in the area and “reap the rewards.” He adds that he’s been purchasing investment properties there that have “already risen in value.”

Southeast Asia may have been fertile ground for the Brown brothers, but for workers they’ve hired in the region, their entrepreneurial activities have been a wrecking ball. 

Back before the advent of generative AI, BBM relied largely on human writers in the Philippines and other lower-income countries to produce content for its network. One former contractor told us that she had always dreamed of being a writer, so she was delighted to get a gig at the company in 2022 — before the global AI explosion that would later consume BBM — because it was an opportunity to be paid for doing what she loved.

“I think a part of me always felt a sense of instability when I was working for [BBM], because the writers who were working for them, I think most of us were Filipinos and were not under a formal contract,” recalled the writer, who like others in this story spoke under condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the Brown brothers. “I was aware that they could let go of us any time they wanted.”

At first, it wasn’t clear what effect AI would have on the operation. After the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, former workers told us, BBM prohibited them from using the tech, warning that it was employing tools to detect AI and plagiarism.

That soon changed. Internal records obtained by Futurism show that in 2023, BBM started testing what the company called “robot” content. The same writer eventually found herself assigned to BBM’s “robot team,” where she was instructed to “generate articles using AI, and then… edit it so it sounds human-written.”

“More and more writers became robot writers,” the former contractor said, “until it came to a point where everyone’s just a robot writer, essentially.”

At first, she told us, the robot writers were scrambling to “create our own prompts” to feed into ChatGPT, or were provided with prompts that the writer understood to have been created by the Brown brothers. By 2024, BBM was so invested in the tech that it rolled out its own internal AI tool. It was built into the company’s WordPress backend, the former writer told us, where it could generate entire articles straight into the content management system — with a series of options that let staff quickly specify what type of piece the AI should spit out.

“They started developing this AI tool that generates articles in a couple of minutes,” the former writer explained. “You just select the topic it belongs under (like zodiac, love and relationship advice, etc) and then you’d select the tone (friendly, informative, etc) and it generates an article for you.”

The Brown brothers, particularly Justin and Lachlan, have personally bylined prodigious numbers of articles for their publishing empire, where they typically strike a tone of chin-stroking wisdom about topics ranging from life and spirituality to psychology and society. But according to another former contractor and internal documentation obtained by Futurism, their articles are AI-generated as well, and the company’s AI tool includes a dropdown menu that lets users select the voice of the author in which to generate a piece — including the Brown brothers themselves. (AI detectors corroborate the claim that prior to BBM’s embrace of AI, articles attributed to the brothers were human-written, but are now entirely AI-generated.)

After embracing AI, BBM conducted a series of sweeping layoffs. Some staff were explicitly told they were being let go because of AI, while others were simply informed that the company was changing “strategy.” (We obtained multiple emails in which Justin terminated workers personally, but are opting not to quote them directly out of concern that doing so could allow BBM to identify which former workers shared them.)

An internal BBM spreadsheet obtained by Futurism charts the cullings in granular detail. As of December 2023, it shows that BBM had upwards of 60 active writers. By May 2024, that number was down to around 40 — and by August, it was cut to about 20. By December 2024, the document only listed 12 writers, all of whom it said were using AI to generate content. Only three of the 60 writers once listed on the sheet, in addition to one person it identified as an editor, are still involved with BBM, according to publicly-available information.

As she described her experience with BBM, one former writer began to choke up. “It’s just really difficult… I still really love writing,” she said through tears. “With the current economy, it’s just been really difficult.”

“People need to know that writers and artists are being replaced with AI,” she added.

Asked about the ethical implications of firing writers in the developing world and replacing them with a cornucopia of AI-generated personas that were overwhelmingly presented as white and living in Western countries, BBM didn’t respond.

“I mean, I’m from Southeast Asia,” said a former BBM writer in the Philippines. “I think them hiring from here was always a cost-cutting effort.”

But the firings were “still shocking,” a different Filipino writer added. “And of course, it felt a little dystopian, honestly, to have your writing used to train AI, and then to have that AI replace you.”

***

As BBM leaned full-throttle into AI while slashing its staff, its publishing empire grew dramatically. Records show that its portfolio mushroomed from fewer than a dozen sites in 2023, to around 17 in 2024, to at least 24 in 2025 as it acquired properties including VegOut, Silicon Canals, and Direct Message News. 

BBM has continued to purchase new sites throughout 2026, adding titles including The Law Dictionary, Science Blog, and the sprawling Space Media Network, through which it acquired Space Daily and more than 20 sister sites including Mars Daily, Solar Daily, and Nuclear Power Daily. (In yet another dubious editorial move, BBM republished many thousands of extremely old Space Media Network articles as if they were current events that had just happened, resulting in surreal headlines like “iPhone 5 Rollout Draws Big Crowds Worldwide,” posted in June of this past summer about an Apple product released in 2012.)

The Brown brothers also appear to be involved with several AI companies that have marketed AI “scaling” techniques as a service, using language suggesting that they may produce similar content for other media ventures.

Two of these startups, Mosquito Fleet and Tippa Fleet, have United Arab Emirates business addresses and claim on nearly–identical sites to “specialize in using artificial intelligence to improve and scale content production for our partner websites.”

Another company linked to the Brown brothers, Cognitive AI Systems Limited, is registered in the British Virgin Islands. A version of its site archived in February 2025 marketed “state-of-the-art AI technologies to scale content responsibly,” emphasizing that potential partners could “tailor AI capabilities to fit your content production needs, whether you publish daily or by the minute.” By earlier this year, however, that language was gone, with the site’s homepage instead declaring that “Cognitive AI Systems Limited owns a portfolio of digital publications operated by Brown Brothers Media.”

Currently, Cognitive AI Systems’ site seems to mainly serve as an enticement for people in the media business looking to sell a struggling news site.

“We buy specialist digital publications and hold them,” it reads. “If you are considering a sale, we are interested in sites with a defined audience, an editorial identity that still means something, and economics we can underwrite.”

“After close we favour continuity,” it continues. “The brand keeps its name and character. We invest in the next chapter rather than stripping the thing that made it valuable.”

Do you know anything about the Brown brothers’ business activities, including partnerships with other media companies? Reach out: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

***

In early May, shortly after we started reaching out to people connected to BBM to report this story, the company abruptly embarked on an awe-inspiring deletion spree, in what seemed like a clear effort to cover up evidence and avoid penalties from Google.

We watched as it suddenly scrubbed what appeared to be many thousands of articles, as well as the fake authors that had bylined them — including Katherine Chen, James Whitfield, Rachel Vaughn, Marlene Martin, Sarah Mitchell, and Adam Kelton.

In some cases, it even pulled down entire publications. Bible Scriptures, a site where BBM had published content attributed to a roster of fake Christian theologians, hosted an AI-powered Jesus, and sold a $97 e-book supposedly penned by a made-up Franciscan scholar clad in a traditional robe — a curious choice, given that Franciscans famously take vows of poverty — has been locked behind a password since May. (BBM sold several other e-books attributed to fake writers on its site Hack Spirit; those volumes are still being sold, but they’ve now been altered so that the author is listed as Lachlan.)

Even Justin’s YouTube video in which he discussed AI replacing the jobs of writers was delisted during the rushed erasure.

Any remotely credible media company would feel immediately compelled to explain such a titanic expunging of content and entire authors, but BBM issued no such justification as the material vanished.

It did make some changes to the editorial guidelines listed on its various sites, we noticed. In the new guidelines, the company claimed that while it does use AI to “assist with research, drafting, source discovery, and editorial review,” it doesn’t use the tech to “fabricate quotes, invent sources, or present AI-generated content as first-hand reporting from real individuals” — which is confusing, since it sounds exactly like what BBM was doing with its battalion of fake writers.

BBM also published an exceptionally strange blog post in the wake of the mass deletion, bylined by Justin and titled “How Brown Brothers Media works: our editorial framework.”

The document is full of head-scratching claims, and feels as though it was sculpted in an unconvincing attempt to explain away the exact types of concerns we’d been asking around about.

In it, Justin describes BBM’s AI process as supplemental, writing that “AI tools assist” with its editorial process and that “editors are responsible for final publication decisions.”

Seemingly in reference to the many fake writers, Justin claimed that BBM “sometimes” uses “pen names for contributor bylines,” which “might be a real member of our editorial team or a freelance contributor writing under a chosen name.” Or, he continues, a “pen name” might “be an editorial device for personal-essay format content where a consistent voice serves the piece. Where a pen name is used as an editorial device, the byline page says so plainly. We don’t present fabricated personas or attach false professional credentials to bylines.”

Those claims felt stridently dishonest, especially because of the fabricated personas we found that had clearly been outfitted with fraudulent credentials. We also couldn’t find a single instance in which BBM provided readers with a disclaimer explaining that a writer was using a pen name.

And even more fundamentally, inventing an entire artificial character — whether it be a NASA scientist or a senior citizen dealing with loneliness in retirement — isn’t a “pen name.” It’s manipulative fabulism, deployed in a tactical attempt to scale the production of inauthentic content, in what seems to have been a highly successful strategy to exploit Google and other online platforms for profit.

In the statement it provided as we were preparing to publish this story — the same one that admitted it had used fake writers, further contradicting Brown’s “editorial framework” — BBM told Futurism that “today, AI tools assist with research and drafting” and “human editors are responsible for reviewing and approving articles before publication.”

“Collective editorial work is published under the publication’s editorial-team byline,” the statement continued. “Named bylines identify real contributors who take responsibility for that work. We disclose our use of AI in our editorial policies and investigate and correct errors when they are identified.”

***

But the reality is that nothing substantive has changed about BBM’s operation after its deletion bender. 

Since the purge, it’s continued to post massive amounts of material that’s still clearly being produced by AI with minimal to no human oversight. Though AI detection technology isn’t perfect, we ran 30 recent BBM articles through Pangram, and every single one came back as 100 percent AI-generated, with zero signs of human editing — a near statistical guarantee that BBM’s publishing apparatus is still automated. As a reality check, we also tested ten stories bylined by Justin and Lachlan that were published between 2020 and 2021, before the release of ChatGPT; every single one came back as 100 percent human-written.

The only real change is that now, instead of publishing all this AI sludge under the names of fake writers, BBM’s strategy has shifted to be more dishonest and evasive than ever.

A lot of the dreck now appears under generalized bylines like “VegOut Editorial Team” and “Space Daily Editorial Team.” This can lead to BBM articles that read in a perplexing way, since these unspecified bylines have often been used to publish personal essays that were clearly written from the point of view of a fictional character.

“It happened at a dinner party,” reads a gloomy piece published under the “Space Daily Editorial Team” byline, which provides no hint as to who the person attending the supper was actually supposed to be. “Someone I’d just met asked me, the way people do when you’re a woman in your fifties without children, whether I’d ever wanted them.”

“For thirty-eight years I had been three things,” reads another somber authorless essay, this one run under the “VegOut Editorial Team” account. “A reliable employee. A dependable parent. A dutiful spouse. Each of those roles had a job description. Each one had clear expectations. Each one came with a set of tasks I was good at and that other people thanked me for.”

Even more egregiously than the general bylines, BBM has also started publishing large numbers of articles under the names of contributors who, as far as we can tell, are actual living humans. As with the general bylines, Pangram indicates that this material is entirely AI-generated. The implication is bleak: BBM appears to now be using these real people as the publishing version of “meat proxies” — affixing their names to fully AI-spun pieces not because they actually wrote them, but instead as a deceitful attempt at plausible deniability, presumably intended to bamboozle Google and other online platforms that discourage the scaled production of inauthentic content.

One such person who now publishes across multiple BBM sites does so under the name “Daniel Moran,” though a LinkedIn account previously linked in his BBM bio suggests that his actual name is Daniel Mabanta.

Regardless of his real name, Daniel is spectacularly prolific, grinding out articles for BBM publications ranging from Space News to the Scandinavian Standard, a publication formerly dedicated to news and culture in Northern Europe. In a single week, we counted, his name appeared on at least 85 separate articles published on BBM sites — a total of more than 90,000 words, which is longer than George Orwell’s “1984,” and nearly twice the length of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” (The actual amount of material Daniel published that week was likely even higher, because large amounts of his work were inexplicably deleted from several BBM publications including VegOut before we could tally it.)

This isn’t just an inhuman number of words to produce, needless to say, but an impossible amount to effectively quality-control given BBM’s skeletal remaining staff.

Further undermining the notion that BBM is now conducting any type of meaningful scrutiny of its work, its “real” employees like Daniel have continued to publish articles with the same baffling continuity errors that the fake ones did. Back in May, Daniel claimed in a Silicon Canals piece that he was 11 years old in 1995, which would make him about 42 years old today. Yet he’s consistently claimed in other articles published this year that he’s currently 38. In another piece, he inexplicably referred to himself as a “daughter.”

Another writer whose name has frequently appeared on BBM articles since the mass deletion is Graeme Brown, the father of the Brown brothers. (Graeme is currently listed as the editor-in-chief of multiple BBM publications.)

Content bearing Graeme’s name has also contained BBM’s hallmark continuity flubs. On May 8, for example, Graeme bylined an article for Expert Editor — a BBM site pulling in an estimated 5.8 million page views per month — in which he declared that he was 77 years old. By May 11, however, he’d aged in reverse, repeatedly stating in another piece for the same site that he was 75. (These have since been deleted.)

Sometimes it appears that BBM has been so sloppy that it’s affixed the wrong name to a piece generated for a different author. Though Lachlan has written extensively about being married to a woman and having a young daughter, for example, the BBM cofounder recently bylined a May Expert Editor article — titled “10 Signs a Man Is Trustworthy and Has Good Intentions” — in which he mused that “in my personal experience, I knew my now-husband was a keeper when he bravely voiced his insecurities and fears about his career early into our relationship.”

At times, it’s difficult to believe that any human at BBM is taking a single look at drafts before they’re published, or even afterward. Another BBM property, Eluxe Magazine, seems to have accidentally published a pair of articles attributed to Lachlan this summer which consist of nothing more than a few lines of garbled computer code — where they remain pinned to the top of the publication’s home page at the time of this story’s publication.

In another piece, BBM appears to have accidentally left AI copy in the final version that was written from the point of view of a chatbot generating the article.

“Now I have all the verified sources I need,” reads the first sentence of a Space Daily article attributed to Lachlan Brown, who is listed as that publication’s editor-in-chief. “Let me write the article with exactly 4-5 inline hyperlinks to real, verified URLs.”

***

BBM often uses its armada of staff bylines and meat proxies to pump out ceaseless variations on a single idea that are essentially copies of each other, drawn from no original reporting and with no time peg to a current event or any explanation of why the ancient news is now relevant again.

Since May, for example, BBM has published more than 100 articles dedicated to sentimental trivia about the Voyager spacecraft launched by NASA in the late 1970s. More than 40 of these dozens of articles have had no discernible thesis except to remind readers that the spacecraft are operational but very far away. Many more have endlessly rehashed various items onboard on the probes, including four separate pieces, published just weeks apart, about how they carry recordings of Carl Sagan’s wife Ann Druyan’s brainwaves (one is currently Google’s top result for the query “Ann Druyan’s brainwaves.”) Two pieces published the same exact day by Science Blog are virtually identical word soup about the well-established fact that Voyager 1’s plutonium power source will fail sometime in the 2030s.

Another evergreen topic at BBM is pop psychology. Endless washes of articles relitigate the psychology of over-apologizing, the psychology of people who are happiest in their 60s and 70s, the psychology of people who reach their 60s without close friends, the psychology of people who are “genuinely good” or “genuinely nice” but have “no close friends“; and how “psychology says the loneliest people in life aren’t the ones nobody likes — they’re the kind, helpful people everyone appreciates but nobody thinks to check on.”

Everywhere we looked, there were more niche topics on which BBM had published reworded but essentially identical articles ad nauseam — about tardigrades, the microscopic organisms that can survive in space, about people who replay conversations in their heads, about the Antikythera mechanism that divers found in a Roman-era shipwreck — and countless other highly specific keywords clearly designed to draw Google traffic.

The strategy is clear: flood the zone with regurgitations of the same piece — and when something hits, just keep churning out more.

BBM didn’t respond to specific questions about this tactic. But after we asked about the practice, it quietly altered the headlines of many of these stories.

The implications for the health of the media ecosystem are grim. Navarro, the SEO expert and managing editor of HouseFresh, pointed out that BBM has often purchased older publications with “domains registered in the 90s or the early 00s” — properties that already have a strong, established foothold with Google, in other words — before replacing their handcrafted human content with page after page of AI-generated dross.

BBM buys “old, established websites with real audiences only to replace most (or all) of their content with AI slop before plastering the sites with ads,” Navarro said. “The same articles are republished across websites, moving through cycles where hundreds of pages are taken down from one site only to appear in another soon after.”

“This makes it all the more disheartening to see content farms luring millions of readers with AI slop,” she added. “How many people will be put off from clicking on new stories surfaced by Google Discover or Google News after landing on ad-ridden slop sites like these?”

***

Google’s response to BBM’s empire of schlock doesn’t inspire confidence for its future as a steward of the media ecosystem.

In theory, the tech giant prohibits site owners from engaging in what it calls “scaled content abuse,” which it describes as “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users.”

Examples of scaled content abuse, according to Google’s guidelines, include “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users,” as well as “creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content” and “creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords.”

In other words, if what BBM is doing — using the corpses of reliable publications to create a twisted, AI-powered imitation of a conventional media company, built on fake writers and redundant or incoherent content that appears to be garnering more traffic than many actual journalism enterprises — doesn’t count as scaled content abuse, it’s hard to imagine what would.

“Based on what I’ve seen, many of the websites acquired by Brown Brothers Media can rank on Google Discover and Google News,” Navarro told us. “This, combined with their capacity to quickly generate and publish dozens of pages about trendy topics, has allowed them to drive thousands of people to their AI-generated, ad-packed articles. They have now scaled this operation across multiple websites, some of which have been seen to publish hundreds of articles per week.”

“If this isn’t scaled content abuse,” she added, “I don’t know what is.”

But Google hasn’t taken any lasting action against BBM. After we sent detailed questions about this story, the tech giant initially deindexed several BBM sites, including VegOut and Silicon Canals. Weeks later, they appeared back in its search results.

“Our policies for Google Search and News are clear: we prohibit producing low-value content at scale to game ranking,” Google told us in a statement back in May. “While we generally don’t comment on individual sites, we act on policy violations to keep 99 percent of Search visits spam-free.”

As of when we published this story, articles by BBM are still appearing prominently on Google’s platforms. Reached with multiple followup questions about BBM’s vast scale, its presence in Google News and Discover, and the manipulative tactics it continues to employ, Google didn’t respond.

***

Earlier this week, we pressed BBM on its editorial practices in a detailed followup message, including specific questions about its failure to inform readers about the nature of its mass deletion.

“We use AI tools in our editorial work, and disclose that use in our published editorial standards. Under our current process, members of our editorial staff review and approve articles before publication, and Brown Brothers Media retains editorial responsibility for what we publish,” the company said in an additional statement. “When we identify errors or work that falls short of our guidelines, we correct it or withdraw it from publication. We believe AI tools can be used responsibly under human editorial judgment. We stand behind the editorial standards now in place and the work published under them.” (The company also updated the “editorial framework” it had first issued amid the mass deletion to echo that language.)

With the publication of our story now imminent, BBM issued a wave of scattershot corrections.

Most striking was a Direct Message News piece bearing the name of Justin Brown — currently listed as the site’s editor-in-chief — that was replaced by a retraction notice admitting, in disarmingly euphemistic terms, that its reporting had been fabricated.

“DMNews has withdrawn this article,” it reads. “Published in April 2025 under Justin Brown’s byline, it presented interview anecdotes and quotations as original reporting that could not be substantiated. A correction on 15 September 2026 removed that material; on further review we concluded the article should be withdrawn rather than corrected, consistent with how we treat unsupported first-person reporting elsewhere in the network. The article text has been removed. We regret that it did not meet our editorial standards, which are set out in our editorial policy.”

At any normal publication, the implications would be stupifying. Imagine if the chief editor of Business Insider or Axios — both publications, according to data we reviewed, that draw far less traffic than BBM — had published an article under their own byline in which they claimed to have conducted extensive interviews, and then subsequently retracted the piece while admitting that its first-person descriptions of conversations with sources “could not be substantiated.” If the reaction to Stephen Glass at the New Republic or Jayson Blair at the New York Times is any indication, it would be one of the most explosive journalism scandals of all time.

But BBM isn’t the New Republic or the New York Times. Justin’s brain-melting retraction notice doesn’t seem to have drawn any attention online, both because BBM didn’t publicize it and, more fundamentally, because BBM is a media organization that’s carefully designed to look robust and trustworthy, but is only a façade — a reality that quickly becomes apparent the more time you spent digging through its vast archives of meaninglessness.

***

It’s hard to know what to make of the Brown brothers. We asked if they’d be willing to sit for an interview, but Justin repeatedly declined the offer when he sent the company’s statements.

Perhaps the brothers have been operating their blundering AI empire for years without even reading what they publish, ignorantly believing in their own vacuous promises about their company’s “commitment to high editorial standards” and “honest information.” 

But the more likely explanation — especially after watching their machinations to hide their journalistic sins and remain in Google’s good graces by deleting content and employing human shields to byline AI-generated content — is that they know exactly what they’re doing and just don’t care.

Their trainwreck-laden funhouse mirror of a respectable media company has masqueraded as a purveyor of genuine news and information, enjoying enormous success at capturing reader eyes and attention through platforms that actual journalism relies on — while publishing oceans of trash that would get a real journalist fired immediately, and responding to questions with empty and contradictory platitudes about transparency, accountability, and responsible AI use.

In any case, BBM’s zombie content mill flounders onward. It recently started promoting a new site called Sentient Blogs, which positions itself as a publication dedicated to human authorship in an era of shoddy AI content.

“A platform dedicated to supporting and promoting the work of human bloggers that create human generated content, not AI,” reads its about page, with its FAQ further promising that “we are confident that between our amazing authors who are writing on this platform because they share the same initiative and our [quality assurance] measures, the likelihood of AI content is very very low.”

To kick it off, Lachlan bylined a piece about his touchingly human experiences with fatherhood, writing that a “thousand dinners become a family culture. Repeated school runs become the background of a child’s childhood. Years of quiet effort become a marriage, a friendship, a body of work or a sense of being useful to other people.”

A disclaimer at the bottom, dissonantly, says it was “produced with AI assistance.” According to Pangram, it was 100 percent AI-generated.

More on AI: Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry

The post How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month appeared first on Futurism.

Conventional gym etiquette involves carefully wiping down the surfaces of any machines or equipment after using it. Businesses usually provide customers with wet wipes, or simple sprays and towels, to keep faux leather padding and other public surfaces pristine and sanitary.

But during professional events, that level of cleanliness isn’t always guaranteed. Organizers of a recent Hyrox competition in China, the spiritual successor of the Crossfit craze, have been accused of allowing participants be exposed to a trail of human waste — left behind, memorably, by the athlete who went on to win the competition.

As The Guardian reports, Australian world record holder Joanna Wietrzyk used shared stations, including rowing machines, sleds, and medicine balls, while “faecal matter” was “visibly running down her legs,” a horrifying incident vaguely reminiscent of one of the most infamous and reviled videos in internet history.

The incident drew an outburst of disgust across social media.

“I guess I’m never doing a Hyrox event,” one user wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Oh my god.”

“Saw a big Hyrox poster at the gym and all I thought of was that lady shitting herself,” another tweeted. “That’s their brand now.”

“This should result in a hard stop for the competitor because the public health risk is more important than the medal,” one user argued. “Hyrox has way too many shared touch points and surfaces to let this continue.”

Others used the opportunity to poke fun.

“A s****y situation for all parties and tough for Hyrox to save faeces,” another joked.

Organizers were criticized for allowing the competition to continue despite having clear bio-contaminant rules in place.

“Protocols designed for elite competition and mass participation became blurred, creating ambiguity in how they were applied and understood,” Hyrox World wrote in an statement, in one of the more acrobatic euphemisms we can recall.

Hyrox cofounder Moritz Fürste issued an apology on Instagram as well.

“Hyrox made a mistake by not reacting immediately during the race,” he wrote. “In the end it is my job to foresee these potential incidents — and I did not.”

“Of course, we started improving event processes,” Fürste went on, “plus making rulebook changes immediately.”

The shocking incident highlights the fact that professional endurance athletes soiling themselves isn’t as rare as it may seem. Long distance runners, for instance, are known to suffer from “runner’s diarrhea,” like Paula Radcliffe, who had to relieve herself in full view of the public during the 2005 London marathon.

Radcliffe still won with a time of 2:17:42 — albeit with a little less dignity than she started.

More on athletes: They Held a New Olympics Where Athletes Can Take as Many Drugs and Steroids as They Want, and the Funniest Possible Thing Happened

The post Spectators Horrified as Hyrox Athlete Recreates “Two Girls One Cup” at Live Competition appeared first on Futurism.

Scientists are exploring new ways to regain control of overactive nervous systems including humming, tapping on the skin and cold-water immersion.

Here’s a hazard you probably didn’t expect from too much screen time.

Two doctors in the UK reported in the journal BMJ Case Reports the bizarre case of a young boy whose laptop literally toasted his skin over weeks and maybe even months of using it. Thankfully, the kid’s fine and was never in any real pain, so we can dive into this medical oddity without feeling too guilty about it.

According to the eyebrow-raising paper, spotted by Ars Technica, the boy was first brought into an emergency department with reddish markings over his abdomen in a lace-like pattern. Nurses first described it as “spontaneous bruising,” but they didn’t find skin abnormalities anywhere else on his body. The boy also wasn’t in any pain, and didn’t have any history of trauma or illnesses that could explain the markings.

When doctors did a chest x-ray, they found some kind of build up in his lung, though it was unclear what it signified. The boy admitted that he got pushed into a chair while play-fighting with his siblings a week ago, leading the doctors to search for signs of a traumatic injury. But after a CT scan, they didn’t find any. They weren’t completely sure of what was going on, but the doctors discharged him with antibiotics for a suspected lung infection.

The boy was back several weeks later, though — and the rash was even worse. Parts of his abdomen were pinkish, exhibiting clear signs of skin breakdown, the doctors wrote, with mottled patches of dark brown. (You can view a photo, at your own peril, here, via Ars.)

That’s when the doctors began to suspect some kind of heat damage. But when they asked the boy about heat sources, nothing turned up. 

Then, as they continued to question him, the boy mentioned something crucial: he was home-schooled and did most of his assignments on his laptop, sometimes for eight hours a day, often while charging. And of course, he usually rested the laptop on his torso while lying down.

This supported a diagnosis of a erythema ab igne (EAI), also known as “toasted skin syndrome.” It’s caused by repeated, close exposure to low heat, which slowly damages the skin over time. Patients often get it from heat pads and space heaters, but a warm laptop can cause it, too. It causes a distinctly lace-like rash, which explained the boy’s symptoms.

EAI is benign, and in most cases, its rashes disappear on their own once exposure to a heat source is stopped, taking weeks to months to heal. Once properly diagnosed, the boy’s rash was dressed, and he came back to the hospital several months later to confirm that he had fully healed. Now that he’s okay, he might try studying at a desk instead.

More on medical oddities: Man Announces That He Has Synthesized a New Schizophrenia Treatment in His Garage, Based on a Formula Devised by ChatGPT

The post Laptop Toasts Boy appeared first on Futurism.

The myriad horrors of the US healthcare system have spawned generations of medical tourism from the wealthiest country on Earth to the periphery: Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, Turkey, and Thailand, to name just a few.

Now, Shanghai is quickly rising as one of the top destinations for cancer patients, as China’s biotech sector has spun an experimental treatment developed in the US into a standalone industry.

New reporting by the Wall Street Journal took a look at this fast-growth industry, centered around chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T for short.

CAR-T is essentially a personalized form of immunotherapy, in which a patient’s own white blood cells are engineered to identify and attack specific proteins found in cancer cells. Though the process was first developed by US biotech giants, their inability — or unwillingness — to lower the cost and increase supply of the treatment has led to shortages throughout the country.

That’s where China comes in. As director of the CAR-T program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston Sairah Ahmed told the WSJ, this therapy can cost around $150,000 to $230,000 in China — still a life-altering bill, but a sizeable discount compared to an insurmountable $550,000 to $850,000 in the US.

This, Ahmed says, is why she advises some patients to seek out treatment in the People’s Republic.

“China has basically done to CAR-T cell therapy the same thing that it’s done to other industries, which is, they’ve industrialized it,” Ahmed explained.

China’s CAR-T services aren’t just cheaper, either. They’re also faster, and come with a host of complimentary after-care treatments, the WSJ notes. As MD Anderson Cancer Center’s explainer on CAR-T therapy advises, the process of extracting and bio-engineering a patient’s cells to fight cancer can take over three weeks in the US. Compare that to China, where the WSJ reports labs near Shanghai can “crank out” the therapy in just a matter of days.

An important caveat here is that CAR-T cell therapy isn’t a catch-all for every type of cancer, and it’s typically only administered after other treatments have failed. It’s not exactly a walk in the park, either, requiring months of recovery and check-ups from a range of physical, neurological, and psychological health specialists. Still, if you had to go through with it, your first step should clearly be pricing out some flights to China.

More on healthcare: Bougie Health Startups Offering Full-Body Diagnostic Scans for Rich People While the Rest of Us Suffer a Crumbling Healthcare System

The post America’s Health Care System Is So Screwed That Patients Are Flying to China for Cancer Treatment appeared first on Futurism.

As far as completely pointless ways to kill time on your phone, this is certainly one of the weirdest on record.

Behold the all-new invention of so-called “dopamine sites” — digital domains where you can browse and hunt for deals on nonexistent wares and services. Clothes, food delivery, you name it: you can pretend-shop for it all. 

You don’t actually buy anything, crucially. You’re just pretending to have money to buy the things you want. It’s window-shopping reimagined for the age of doomscrolling.

But it’s also a little more than that. These cleverly-built sites simulate the experience down to checking out and “tracking” your shipment or delivery, and their absurdly realistic rituals can help people become more conscious of their spending habits. Supposedly. 

The trend, according to the New York Times, originated in South Korea this spring, when Park Seohyun, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student in Seoul, created a fake food-delivery site called “Food Never Arrives.” (It’s now an app).

Originally intended as a joke, she says, it lets you not only order nonexistent food, but provides you an estimate of the money and calories you saved by skipping on the real thing. 

In a wintry economic climate, it became an unexpected hit.

“People began sharing it online and discussing whether it actually helped them resist ordering food,” Park told the NYT.

A wave of imitators followed. This summer marked the launch of “FakeHaul,” a dopamine site built by a Microsoft engineer that convincingly imitates shopping on Temu. Two developers in India inspired by Park’s site, Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma, created “Food Never Comes,” which simulates food deliveries but provides real recipes for the food you didn’t actually order. Parmar and Sharma told the newspaper that their site had more than 2.7 million views since launching in June.

Whether these dopamine sites provide anything more than fleeting, empty pleasures is something experts are more skeptical about. Ravi Dhar, director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights, told the NYT that the “element of looking forward brings a lot of the pleasure, and we often crash after an event or feel let down.” Lingguo Xu, a behavioral economist studying anticipatory utility, warned that the dopamine tricks could quickly get old. And by simulating consumption, you risk developing “stronger cravings.”

Some take the original idea beyond getting high on simulated shopping. Ko Seojin, another South Korean developer, created a website for taking virtual smoke breaks called Damta World. You click to start smoking an animated cigarette, which starts burning on screen. You can “whisper” disappearing messages to other smokers on break, while a counter keeps track of the number of cigarette butts that have been tossed on the office rooftop each day.

Ko told the NYT that 150,000 people visit each month, and she says that some users have become real-life friends after meeting on the website. Those friendships, we hope, are something that’ll last longer than any fake-shopping dopamine hit.

More on your brain on tech: Psychologist Says AI Is Causing Never-Before-Seen Types of Mental Disorder

The post Bizarre New Websites Are Designed Specifically to Spark Dopamine in Your Brain appeared first on Futurism.

GLP-1 weight loss drugs are changing lives in more ways than one.

In a new piece for The Guardian, the newspaper’s readers share how the weight loss journey that drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro have set them down on have drastically affected their interpersonal relationships — sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. 

Many of the GLP-1 users seem to harbor a sense of shame, hiding their use of the drugs. In their minds — and perhaps in the minds of those around them — they undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with losing weight the old fashioned way, instead feeling that they “cheated” or are “being dishonest” about how they achieved their goals. 

One parent wrote of how their 20-year-old daughter felt “worried, angry, and jealous” after she discovered they were hiding their use of Wegovy from her. “We had discussed weight, identity and GLP-1s, but I was so ashamed of going on it that I didn’t want to tell anyone,” they wrote, noting how food was a “huge part of our family life.” They wondered to themselves: “What kind of signal am I giving her and her brothers?” 

Though they feel “mostly positive” about losing nearly thirty pounds using the drug, they added, they also can’t shake the feeling that they’re “cheating.”

“So much of my insecurity about my weight and appearance is offloaded on to an injectable pen,” they added.

Another wrote that despite their friends feeling pleased about their weight loss, they’ve kept their GLP-1 drugs secret for nearly two years. Their partner, they believe, “has felt insecure at times because of my glow-up.”

“I don’t want people to think I’ve cheated. I guess there is still fat shame somewhere,” they wrote.

Others don’t feel this guilt, but are frustrated that their spouses don’t realize how transformative the drugs have been for them. One complained that their husband was so unsupportive of their use of GLP-1s that they no longer could share their experience with him.

“This has been a life-changing drug so far, and I can’t share it with the person I’m closest with,” they lamented. 

Though they’ve struggled with obesity their whole life, their “husband scoffs at characterizing obesity as a chronic and recurring disease” and “thinks people should just make better lifestyle choices and stop making excuses — which tells me a lot about how he views me, too.”

These downsides aren’t unique to GLP-1s. Significant weight loss has long been linked to divorce, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone who’s slimmed down is now feeling their oats. Weight loss can come with dramatic changes to a person’s lifestyle — from the food they eat and the exercise they do to how they socialize — and that can be a lot for someone close to them to adjust to.

“Relationships tend to develop a sense of equilibrium and predictability over time,” Lindsey Berisha, a clinical psychologist who’s worked with patients using GLP-1s for over a decade, told The Guardian. “When one partner undergoes a significant change, it can shift that equilibrium, and even positive change can create uncertainty for both partners.”

GLP-1s, of course, have made achieving this kind of significant weight loss much more accessible, which is why we’re now starting to hear about “Ozempic divorces.”

More on GLP-1s: GLP-1 Drugs Appear to Prevent Cancer, New Research Finds

The post GLP-1 Users Are Being Cruelly Shamed by Their Own Families appeared first on Futurism.

The anniversaries come and go, but the physical and mental health of workers and survivors is still being affected by September 11, 2001.

Historic data and predictions suggest cases will rise in East Africa and southern regions, while the threat may ease in West and Central Africa.

These days, large language models are pushing the line between schizophrenic break and reality closer than ever before.

In a wild new post that’s going viral on X-formerly-Twitter, an enterprising young biochemist named Douglas Yao showcased a new drug he’s been developing with the aid of ChatGPT. He’s not employed by any pharma company, and his drug lab is setup on a couple folding tables in his garage.

Specifically, Yao enthuses about a new drug he calls “PAC-3310,” which he says is meant to treat schizophrenia. “It was designed by ChatGPT,” Yao explains, “and I synthesized it in a chemistry lab I built in my garage.”

The result is a small vial of yellow powder — the first sample of 3310, apparently — which Yao says is modeled after the recently-authorized antipsychotic Cobenfy, “but improved.”

This vial contains a new drug called PAC-3310. It was designed by ChatGPT, and I synthesized it in a chemistry lab I built in my garage.

PAC-3310 is a new selective M4 muscarinic receptor agonist for treating schizophrenia – similar to the recent breakthrough drug Cobenfry, but… pic.twitter.com/o7z6iLR50T

— Douglas Yao (@DouglasYaoDY) September 8, 2026

On his GitHub page, Yao boasts that he’s used AI to “design several thousand new small molecule drugs” over the past year, including a “new Alzheimer’s drug,” which he’s developing in addition to the schizophrenia treatment.

“I then taught myself synthetic chemistry, built a chem lab in my garage, and synthesized a hundred of them,” he continued. “I’m now testing these compounds in cell lines and mice.”

But whatever the one-man pharma lab hopes to accomplish is difficult to say. Yao references the fact that “drug developers typically spend tens of millions of dollars generating pre-clinical efficacy evidence for a new drug,” saying that “my approach can do this at 1/1000 the cost.” This seems to suggest dreams of someday manufacturing the various drugs on a massive scale for human consumption — a process that would take years of grueling and expensive work for a well-resourced drug lab, let alone a solo entrepreneur using a box fan as a fume hood.

For instance, to even approach the Food and Drug Administration’s “New Drug Application” — itself a costly 12-month process requiring inspection of the facility where the drug will be manufactured — one first has to conduct rounds of preclinical testing followed by three phases of clinical trials. Forget “tens of millions,” as Yao mentions; this is a process that can easily cost several billion.

Even then success is far from guaranteed, as only 13.8 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials go on to obtain full approval from the FDA.

While Yao might have been right at home in the free-wheeling research landscape of the 1970s, we no longer live in a world where a mad genius can synthesize hundreds of new drugs a year from a private lab. For one thing, the regulatory environment is much more demanding, as outlined above, to say nothing of the fact that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked from the vine decades ago.

When it comes to Yao’s ChatGPT-generated Alzheimer’s treatment, the landscape is particularly fraught. As one 2019 study found, no new drug has been approved to treat Alzheimer’s since 2003, and not for a lack of trying: as the study notes, over 200 proposed substances meant to treat the disease have either failed in clinical trials or been abandoned by their creators.

The graveyard of failed Alzheimer’s treatments is so vast that the renowned organic chemist Derek Lowe has built a blog on drug discovery which routinely features after-action reports on failed substances designed to treat the neurodegenerative disease. Simply put, to think that ChatGPT alone is enough to overcome these scientific and institutional hurdles is delusional.

Replies to Yao’s post were quick to point out the irony here, of using ChatGPT — which is well-known for leading vulnerable users down dangerous breaks from reality — to synthesize drugs to treat cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

“Hello schizophrenic, take this medicine that chatgpt made for you,” one poster quipped on X.

Another replied that “believing you single-handedly cured schizophrenia on a commercial laundry folding table in a garage is, ironically, a classic symptom of schizophrenia.”

More on ChatGPT: Man Obliterated When Court Obtains His ChatGPT Transcripts

The post Man Announces That He Has Synthesized a New Schizophrenia Treatment in His Garage, Based on a Formula Devised by ChatGPT appeared first on Futurism.

Shingrix, the same vaccine that protects people from the blistering shingles rash, might also lower risk of heart disease.

For seafood lovers, there are few things more appealing than a simple slab of raw tuna — a fish whose fatty, savory, and tender muscle tissue has been a delicacy for thousands of years.

Unfortunately for those foodies, fresh raw fish comes with the distinct possibility of parasitic infection. Off the coasts of southern Brazil, that risk is rising, as hauls of the common skipjack tuna come with the near certainty of parasitic contamination.

That’s not an exaggeration. According to a new report published in the journal Ocean and Costal Research and flagged by ScienceAlert, a whopping 96 percent of a recent load of tuna was infested with gut-busting worms.

Out of 53 skipjack, marine researchers counted over 1,600 worms infesting nearly every organ of every fish hauled in from the ocean. Only the kidneys and hearts of the tuna remained worm-free, the researchers noted. Everything else, including the muscle tissue we humans eat, was festering with flatworms and roundworms.

Though most preparation methods will kill the parasites, the images are pretty off-putting. As the researchers explain, the sheer volume of parasitic infection is alarming.

“These results highlight the importance of sanitary inspection and emphasize the importance of immediate evisceration to avoid the migration of larvae from the viscera to the musculature,” the authors write.

Still, parasitologists say the worms aren’t all bad. Though increased presence of worms also comes with more risk of infection, University of Washington parasitologist Chelsea Wood told ScienceAlert in a prior story that they can actually be a sign that the fish is well-sourced.

“Everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry,” Wood said. “But the anisakid [roundworm] life cycle integrates many components of the food web. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem.”

More on food: Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies Because That’s the Future We Deserve

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After health officials in Pennsylvania found that two young children died from measles, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is refusing to count their deaths as being caused by the deadly virus.

“This week’s measles outbreaks update will not include the two measles-associated deaths reported by the Pennsylvania Department of Health on Aug. 25,” the CDC posted on its website, in a high unusual announcement.

It’s a precedent shattering action. The New York Times called it an “extraordinary move for the CDC,” breaking with the agency’s long-standing procedure of accepting data shared by states.

The challenge by the CDC comes amid a political showdown between health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who oversees the CDC, and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro.

At a news conference last week, Shapiro announced the deaths of the two children from measles and condemned Kennedy for spreading vaccine misinformation, saying that “there’s real life consequences for spreading misinformation.”

RFK Jr responded on social media by accusing Shapiro of taking “giddy delight” in their deaths and even suggested he may even “fabricated” them. The CDC’s own announcement that it would not be counting the deaths as measles related came just days after the public spat.

According to the latest reporting, one of the deceased was a newborn with a ruptured spleen, and the other was a child of unknown age. Both were unvaccinated and tested positive for measles, the Pennsylvania Health Department said, per the NYT. They came from Lancaster County, the center of a measles outbreak where 242 people have been infected with the disease so far, the most in the state.

Conflicting information over the children’s deaths gave rise to the heated controversy.

Though the state’s health department said both deaths were due to measles, Lancaster County coroner Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican, said that his office’s pathologist determined that the newborn — which was born infected with virus which it inherited from its mother — died of a ruptured spleen, not measles.

But some top medical experts have pushed back against Diamontoni. Measles can enlarge a baby’s spleen and make them prone to rupturing during birth,  wrote Paul Offit, a renowned vaccine and pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in a widely reported essay on Substack. Once the spleen ruptures, it’s difficult to determine if it was enlarged after the fact.

Offit called on Diamontoni to provide more details surrounding the newborn’s death — and that, if it wasn’t measles, to offer an alternative explanation for the baby’s ruptured spleen. Since ruptured spleens in newborns is exceedingly rare and can be caused only by a handful of disorders or infections, he said, if one of those conditions wasn’t found in the child, then the “only obvious cause left would be measles.”

None of this explains why the CDC also refused to count the other child’s death, few details on whom have been released ot the public.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, defended its decision in a statement.

“The two measles-associated deaths announced by Pennsylvania have not been confirmed based on the information currently available to CDC,” it said, per the NYT.  “The information currently posted reflects the best available information and our commitment to transparency and telling the American people the truth — a foundational principle of the Trump administration.”

More on viruses: Authorities Alarmed When Person With Measles Spends Entire Day Frolicking Around Universal Studios

The post The CDC Is Now Denying That Specific Children Died From Measles, in a Scandal Potentially Beyond Anything in Its History appeared first on Futurism.

If you’re one of the many people chowing down on melatonin gummies to help get to sleep, you may want to check out this study.

A new piece of research published by the American Heart Association made an alarming discovery about long-term use of melatonin supplements, an over-the-counter sleep aid used by tens of thousands. Basically, those who use melatonin over a year or more had a 90 percent higher risk of developing congestive heart failure over a five-year period.

Before you go flush your gummies down the toilet, there are a few caveats. For starters, the findings weren’t based on a clinical trial, but on data from a large database of anonymous health records. Researchers drew from data on chronic insomniacs, specifically, splitting them into two groups: those who have dosed the sleep-regulating hormone over a period of 12 months or more, and those who suffer without.

Still, the results are clearly worrisome. Overall, the study found that 4.6 percent of the melatonin group went on to develop heart failure, compared to 2.7 percent for the control group.

That wasn’t the only data point suggesting it may be time to wean off the ‘tone. A secondary analysis performed by the researchers found that melatonin users were nearly 3.5 times more likely to be hospitalized for heart failure than those in the other group, with hospitalization rates of 19.0 and 6.6 percent, respectively.

“Melatonin supplements are widely thought of as a safe and ‘natural’ option to support better sleep, so it was striking to see such consistent and significant increases in serious health outcomes, even after balancing for many other risk factors,” Ekenedilichukwu Nnadi, the study’s lead author and chief resident in internal medicine at SUNY Brooklyn, said in a press release.

While more in-depth research is needed to confirm the study’s results, the early findings indicate that melatonin use comes with some serious risks in the long-term.

“Melatonin supplements may not be as harmless as commonly assumed,” as Nnadi explained. “If our study is confirmed, this could affect how doctors counsel patients about sleep aids.”

More on health studies: The Hectic Modern World Is Shredding Your Little Cave Man Brain, Scientists Confirm

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A new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month concluded, after surveying hundreds of studies on AI in medicine, that not only is AI already an indispensable tool that supports doctors, but that it’s in many ways surpassing them, and will soon be able to care patients on its own better than a human physician could.

“In cognitive medical functions, AI-alone medical care is likely to be better than physician-only or physician-AI hybrid care,” the authors, the widely renowned bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, flatly declare.

But many physicians aren’t having it, Wired reports. One of the paper’s chief critics is the CEO of the American Medical Association himself, John Whyte. According to Whyte, some of the studies it surveyed are simulations, instead of blinded experiments, the gold standard of medical studies. And some contradict the author’s conclusions, such as a Nature article from February that found that most patients had a hard time talking to AI chatbots to get the expertise they needed, he argued.

“The AMA does see the potential in these tools, but they have to be utilized in the context of a care plan that’s governed by a physician,” Whyte told Wired.

The controversial study cites the rapid progress of LLMs since being publicly introduced in November 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. In spite of the tech’s relatively young age, the paper claims it already surpasses doctors at five fundamental tasks, which include: eliciting relevant medical information from patients, diagnosing the patient and conducting diagnostic testing, and managing chronic diseases. 

This gap between physicians and AI will widen because AI is “rapidly improving,” it predicts, while human doctors have their own capabilities diminished, or are “deskilled,” by becoming dependent on the very same AI models.

“We’re making a prediction for four years from now,” Emanuel told Wired. “You don’t think that [AI is] going to be way more advanced than a doctor?”

Taking this to its logical endpoint, the paper makes another bold claim: human physicians are better off not getting in AI’s way, finding that human-AI hybrids “actually degrade performance compared with AI alone.”

“Thus, as AI improves, having humans in the loop will likely worsen patient care,” it adds.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. AI-deskilling is already happening, with senior doctors warning of how med students are already heavily relying on AI tools. To be fair to the med students, though, so are actual doctors: internal data from OpenEvidence, an AI chatbot specifically designed for clinicians, suggests that around two thirds of physicians in the US are using the tool.

New ground in AI in medical applications, meanwhile, is being broken seemingly every day. Last week, a team of neurosurgeons in the UK announced that they’d used an AI tool that guided them as they performed surgery to remove a tumor from a patient’s brain.

Robert Wachter, head of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (and a friend of Emanuel), cautions that AI and humans together are better for now, but that in the future, there “will be times when humans will muck up the performance,” he told Wired.

Still, he emphasized that human doctors will always be irreplaceable. He called the idea of AI automating doctor’s jobs an example of the “doorman fallacy”: the fear that doormen would be made obsolete with the introduction of automatic doors. Doormen stuck around, accepting packages while also providing an air of hospitality that a robotic door can’t. The idea that highly trained doctors who spend years of their life honing their craft will become a bougie novelty like the doorman, somehow, is meant to be comforting.

In any case, it’s common to hear highfalutin claims to come from advocates of AI technology, and nearly as common to see holes poked in them. Advocates of AI in education declared victory when a much-hyped study concluded that ChatGPT can have a “large positive impact on improving learning performance,” for instance, but the study was later retracted by the publisher Springer Nature after it found major discrepancies in its analysis.

More on AI: Alarming Study Suggests That Using AI Is Turning Humans More Robotic

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Ever seen the guy online who eats raw liver? What about the podcast by the guy who only eats meat and a little spinach? Unlike tigers or sharks, people aren’t carnivores. But you’d never know that if you went on social media.

A lot of influencers on social media and podcasts promote diets with as much protein — and as few carbohydrates — as possible. Some diet influencers talk about carbohydrate-rich foods, such as potatoes and bread, as though they’re poison, not a source of nutrients.

Even the U.S. government has gotten on the low-carb bandwagon.

For more than 100 years, government agencies have helped people decide which foods to eat. Past guidelines often looked like a pyramid. The biggest section at the bottom — the foundation — comprised those foods that people should eat the most.

These images and guidelines changed over time as scientists learned more about how our bodies respond to food. But until 2026, the guidelines always promoted eating lots of bread, rice, cereals, fruits and veggies. These foods all have one important thing in common: carbohydrates. These foods are high in sugars, starch and fiber.

The latest food guidelines have now turned that pyramid upside down, literally.

In January, the U.S. government released its new version. The food pyramid now points downward, and carbohydrates make up just its tip. The image, and accompanying guidelines, suggest that people shouldn’t eat many carbs.

Scientists and doctors have worried that too many sugary treats can promote weight gain and poor health. And carbohydrates tend to be a big component of cookies, candy and soft drinks. Based on that, some people trying to promote health will suggest we eat as few carbohydrates as possible. There are even people who try to eat mostly meat and fats — and go on social media trying to get others to do the same.

But carbohydrates aren’t evil. Often, they’re exactly the burst of energy our bodies need.

Carbs come in many different types. Some provide quick energy for our brains and muscles. Others feed our gut bacteria or help us poop. Too many carbohydrates from sugars can be harmful in the long run. But cutting them from our diet isn’t the answer. Carbs can be an important — and delicious — part of healthful eating.

How to build carbohydrates

All living cells contain carbs. The word “carbohydrate” points to what these molecules are made of: a mix of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. (Carbo refers to carbon. Hydrate points to their hydrogen and oxygen atoms.) Which carbohydrate they are will depend on how many atoms come from each element and how they are arranged.

Every carbohydrate is built from sugar units called saccharides (SAK-uh-rydes). The smallest building block — a monosaccharide (MON-oh-sak-uh-ryde) — denotes that it has just one saccharide.  

Glucose is a monosaccharide. Its chemical formula — C₆H₁₂O₆ — denotes that it has 6 carbon atoms, 12 hydrogens and 6 oxygen atoms. This molecule is important to health. It provides energy for our cells, including our muscles and brain. The term blood sugar refers to the amount of this glucose circulating in our blood.

Other monosaccharides your body might encounter include fructose (FROOK-tose), galactose (gah-LACK-tose) and xylose (ZY-lose).

Sucrose, sometimes called table sugar, sweetens a lot of candy and baked goods. It’s a disaccharide (die-SAK-uh-ryde), meaning made of two sugar units — in this case, a glucose hooked onto a fructose molecule.

Then there are the polysaccharides. These “are usually long chains of multiple glucose molecules joined together,” explains Michael Gleeson. He’s a sport nutritionist at Loughborough University in England.

Although there are many types of polysaccharides, our bodies encounter three most often. One is glycogen. Animals use this molecule to store sugars as energy. “We find that in our muscles and our liver,” Gleeson says. The second, or starch, is “a storage form of energy in plants,” he explains. The third type is fiber, which our bodies can’t turn into energy.

When scientists talk about carbohydrates in food, they call monosaccharides and disaccharides “simple” sugars. These are common in processed foods. Polysaccharides such as starch are “complex” carbohydrates and more commonly turn up in less-processed foods, explains Kimber Stanhope. She’s a nutrition researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Rice and wheat and oats and corn — those foods are mostly starch,” she notes.

From food to fuel

Foods we classify as “carb-rich” often contain a mix of different carbohydrate molecules. For example, a cookie will have plenty of sucrose. But it also has flour, which contains starch. Whole-wheat bread will have starch and some sugar, as well as fiber. Vegetables, such as carrots, are made of cells that contain starch, sugars and fiber. 

Our bodies can use glucose molecules right away. Other carbohydrate molecules must first be broken down.

Complex carbohydrates “are relatively large molecules,” Gleeson explains. The gut can’t directly absorb them. They must be digested — their polysaccharide chains broken apart — to release their glucose units.

That digestion starts in the mouth, Gleeson explains. Saliva contains enzymes — molecules that speed up chemical reactions. “Your spit contains some enzymes, which break down the long-chain carbohydrates into disaccharide units,” he says. Those much simpler sugars head to the stomach. But, he adds, little carbohydrate digestion goes on there. Why? “The enzymes that are coming [in with] the saliva,” he explains, “are inactivated by [stomach] acid.”

After the stomach, “you’ve mixed everything up into a nice sort of soup-like consistency,” called chyme (KYME), Gleeson explains. “That’s sort of squirted, almost, into the small intestine. And there we secrete enzymes into the small intestine from the pancreas.”

Those enzymes finish the job, splitting disaccharides into monosaccharides such as glucose. Our blood then absorbs the glucose and moves it around the body.

When that blood reaches the liver, an enzyme grabs glucose from it. Called glycogen synthase (GLY-koh-jen SIN-thays), this enzyme links up the glucose molecules to form glycogen. Glycogen then gets stored in the liver and muscles. Fat cells also store glucose in the form of triglycerides (Try-GLIH-sur-ides). The body will draw on these sources when it needs more energy.

This liver-enzyme reaction has turned carbs from food into a stored fuel. The liver turns off this enzyme when it determines that it has made enough glycogen.  

Sugar’s not always sweet

The body aims to keep blood glucose levels fairly constant. So when cells draw down this sugar, the liver begins breaking down some stored glycogen, releasing its glucose into the blood.

That’s especially important during exercise, as your muscles burn through glucose to power activity.

It’s a different story for fructose. This monosaccharide pairs up with glucose to make sucrose. But it’s also found on its own in fruits, vegetables and honey. Manufacturers have also sweetened many sugary foods and drinks with this sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup.

In the liver, an enzyme called fructokinase (Frook-toh-KY-nase) sets off the first step in turning fructose into glycogen. But unlike the enzyme that processes glucose, fructokinase “doesn’t seem to get turned off — ever,” explains Stanhope at UC Davis.

So if you’re drinking a sugary soft drink, “86 percent of all the fructose you’re consuming in that … drink goes into the liver,” Stanhope says. “The liver does the best it can with all this fructose, but now it’s overloaded.” The liver will now turn any excess into fat, she explains.

Too much fat can hamper how the liver reacts to hormones such as insulin. As a result, the organ stores even more sugars as fat. “You just keep going around in circles and making the situation worse,” Stanhope explains.

That’s why eating too much fructose can be a problem. The issue isn’t fructose from fruits and vegetables, though. Consider a sweet fruit, such as grapes, Stanhope says. “They basically average around 16 percent of their weight as sugar.” But fruits and veggies also contain fiber and other complex carbohydrates, as well as vitamins and other nutrients.

Most of the sugar in our diet doesn’t come from fruit but from sweetened baked goods and drinks. Oreos, for instance, are 38 percent sugar, of which fructose is half.

Many sweets have even higher levels of fructose than that. Some highly processed foods — not only soda but also canned soups and some sauces — can contain a type of corn syrup that is 55 percent fructose (five percent more fructose than in table sugar), Stanhope says.

What really worries her are some corn syrups where the share of fructose is higher still. One 2014 study tested sodas and juices containing high-fructose corn syrup. Many of these drinks contained 60 percent fructose — some even close to 70 percent. That’s a lot for the liver to handle.

Too much sugar, not enough fiber

While our bodies can break down starches and sugars for energy, other carbohydrates are tougher. Consider fiber.

Fibers are polysaccharides found in plants. Our bodies cannot fully break these down. Fibers include the cellulose that makes plant cell walls stiff. They include the pectins (PEC-tins) that firm up fruits. You’ll find them in whole fruits, vegetables, beans and whole-grain products (such as whole-wheat bread).

Our bodies can’t convert fiber into energy. But our bodies still find it useful, notes Leslie Cho. A cardiologist, or heart specialist, she works at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Fiber comes in two types. Soluble fiber, as its name suggests, dissolves in water. This type shows up in foods such as apples, bananas, avocados, citrus fruits, carrots, beans and oats. By acting like a sponge, Cho says, “it helps you lower your cholesterol and glucose.”

Cholesterol (Ko-LES-ter-ol) is a fatty material that drifts in our blood. Over time, it can collect in blood vessels and increase someone’s risk of heart attack or stroke. By soaking up cholesterol, soluble fiber helps eliminate it.

That sponge-like fiber can also trap glucose so that it takes longer for those sugar molecules to enter the blood stream. If you eat a lot of sugar and no fiber, Cho explains, “you absorb glucose very quickly and you tend to get hungry again.” Soluble fiber keeps you feeling fuller longer. And it’s especially helpful for people with high blood sugar, such as those with type 2 diabetes.

The other fiber — the insoluble type — “doesn’t dissolve in water, and it helps you with your stomach and your intestine,” Cho says. Vegetables, whole-wheat bread, potatoes, beans, nuts and seeds all contain this type.

This fiber even helps you poop; it’s one of the ways your body takes out the trash. How? Insoluble fiber adds bulk and pulls water into your stool. That keeps you pooping just often enough for comfort.

Soluble and insoluble fibers also serve as an important food for the bacteria in your microbiome. Those are the bacteria that live in your gut, Gleeson explains. “They have a big influence on your immune system and on your health.”

Bacteria can break some fiber down into molecules that affect our immune and other systems. These bacteria “also produce chemicals that can communicate with the brain,” Gleeson says. In this way, “They influence your mood and your sleep.”

Most people eat too little fiber, Gleeson says. Diets with lots of simple sugars don’t have enough fiber to keep our microbes happy. We’re talking about meals that contain lots of white bread or rice, cookies and cakes — and too few fruits, vegetables, beans or whole grains.

Carbohydrate controversy

Like proteins and fats, carbohydrates are an important macronutrient. But do people need them?

The body needs certain fatty acids and amino acids to build cells and operate effectively. That’s why we need to eat fats; they provide some essential fatty acids that our bodies can’t make, notes Gleeson. And, he adds, “Protein is absolutely essential, because there are [also] amino acids in those proteins” that we can’t make on our own.

But technically speaking, he says, you can live without eating carbohydrates.

Glucose is an essential fuel for the brain, Gleeson explains. Fortunately, the body can make it from fats, amino acids and water. Getting glucose this way wouldn’t be a very tasty life, though. And people who live on extremely low-carb diets can miss out on fiber, vitamins and other nutrients.

But for some carbs, reducing how much of them you eat isn’t a bad idea. We don’t need nearly as much sugar — especially soft drinks, candy or cake — as we eat, observes Stanhope at UC Davis.

“There is simply no doubt,” she says: “Evidence shows sugar is detrimental to our health when consumed at high levels.” The problem: “We just don’t know for sure how high ‘high’ is.”

Because of worries about too much sugar, some people try diets with as few carbohydrates in them as they can manage — eating mostly meat and a few veggies. But such low-carb diets won’t necessarily result in a healthy body, Gleeson points out.

Living the low-carb life tends to be high in fats and protein. Long term, all that fat and protein can put people at risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes and problems with their kidneys (the organs that produce urine). People on low-carb diets who don’t eat enough fiber also don’t poop enough, suffering constipation. 

And if you’re an athlete, your body definitely needs carbs. Athletes perform their best with carbs, Gleeson has shown in his research. Complex and simple carbohydrates are the easy energy our bodies use to work hard.

“As soon as you start doing hard running, sprinting as fast as you can, performing any all-out efforts, then you’re going to be using carbohydrate,” he says.

“There is no food group that’s bad,” Cho adds. “You can’t eliminate one whole thing and think you’re doing a good job.” Although high doses of simple sugars can cause problems, other carbohydrates don’t. “We often [confuse] ‘good’ carbohydrates with ‘bad’ carbohydrates,” she notes. And unfortunately, that can give important nutrients a bad rap.

The trick is eating enough carbs — and a diverse mix of them — to give us energy and a great-tasting diet. Just don’t overdo it.

“Moderation is important, even though these things taste good,” Cho says. And much as cookies, soda and candy are delicious, they don’t contain fiber or other nutrients. “Instead of having five chocolate bars, maybe you can just have one.”

Editor’s note: The enzyme used to transform glucose to glycogen was originally misreported as phosphofructokinase. This was corrected to glycogen synthase on September 9. In addition, fat stores glucose not as glycogen, but as triglycerides.

The biggest fibromyalgia genetics study yet zeroed in on 26 genetic risk factors for the pain disorder, including one in the Huntington's disease gene.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation looks almost unrecognizable under director Kash Patel’s leadership.

The agency’s head has been embroiled in a seemingly endless list of controversies, from allegations of excessive drinking to buying up location data on everyday American citizens to furthering of harebrained conspiracies.

Patel lacked virtually any degree of relevant working experience for the job before the Senate confirmed him — and now, the agency is opening the doors for even more highly questionable hirings.

As inside sources told CBS News, the FBI has quietly lowered standards of its background checks for potential federal agents and other personnel. The bureau is now officially looking the other way when it comes to prostitution, for instance — as long as recruits didn’t hire sex workers over three times.

Even more eyebrow-raising is that the FBI is even allowing the consideration of candidates who engaged in bestiality or animal cruelty, according to CBS‘ sources. However, any such incidents would’ve had to have taken place before the candidate turned 18.

The broadcaster’s sources also said there was no distinction between candidates who were forced into sexual activity with animals or if they did so willingly. An FBI spokesperson claimed that eligibility requirements were limited to a “narrow set of circumstances, such as in cases where a person was sexually abused with animals as a child.”

Experts, however, were appalled at the news, arguing that the FBI is undermining its responsibility in vetting applicants by changing background check standards.

“Bestiality is clearly a potential indication of a more serious emotional issue, and even in a circumstance where it is not, the pool of candidates should be extensive enough that the criteria should certainly not be eliminated,” former FBI agent James Davidson told CBS.

Before the changes, which were reportedly implemented earlier this summer, the FBI’s webpage was clear about automatically disqualifying special agents who engaged in “prostitution or bestiality.”

Both current and former FBI employees told the CBS that the bureau could now be hiring “people with questionable backgrounds,” allowing them to undermine the integrity of the service. Others warned that the news was evidence of a major “recruiting problem.”

Considering the fact that the agency is being helmed by a personality as controversial as Patel, these changes shouldn’t come as too much of a shock.

While he hasn’t personally acknowledged the latest changes, Patel has frequently called for new hiring standards at the bureau, arguing that “we are losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear” in a July interview with former FBI agent John Nantz.

Patel’s motivation for lowering standards could be to bring in his closest associates. As ProPublica reported in November, his personal assistant didn’t clear their polygraph test and required a waiver, claims the FBI has since denied.

More on Patel: The Head of the FBI Just Admitted Something Moderately Horrifying

The post FBI Now Allowing History of Bestiality Among New Recruits appeared first on Futurism.

Three species preferred different people based on their skin odor and bacteria. The findings could help make new microbe-based repellants.