For just $350,000, one lucky animal lover could become the new owner of a Florida zoo, according to a recent Craigslist ad offering up the Emerald Coast Wildlife Refuge Zoological Park.

According to the ad, the ten-acre park in Crestview, Florida, comes equipped with 90 different animals including multiple breeds of tigers, an African lion, a few wolves, baboons, patas monkeys, otters, some lemurs, and at least one sloth. You'll also get a gift shop, a tractor, a golf cart, and a fully trained staff of zookeepers so you won't have to recruit your friends and relatives to keep the animals in their cages.

According to the zoo's chairman and president, Bill Anderson, before the site became a refuge, it was a roadside attraction called the Sasquatch Zoo. But by 2013, the owners were having trouble maintaining the upkeep for 100 exotic animals. That's when new owners swooped in, cleaned the place up, and launched a major effort to make sure the existing animals were healthy. Now, they're in need of a new owner.

"We've spent an awful lot of time getting those critters happy and healthy, updating habitats and providing them with a quality place to live. I think our zoo is in the best shape it's ever been," Anderson told the Ocala Star Banner.

Although it's not entirely clear why the refuge went the Craigslist route, Anderson said he's not interested in handing over the zoo to just any old fat cat with the right funds.

"We're looking for somebody who shares our passion for the welfare of the animals at the zoo," he told the Verge. "We want somebody with the financial means to be able to keep the zoo on the upward trend. Not only in terms of animal healthcare, veterinarian care, but continual upgrade of habitats."

Whatever the reason, it just goes to show that you truly can find some seriously good deals online.

Roberto Pickering lost many friends as a sniper for the Marine Corps during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It marked the start of a war that would lead to thousands of deaths among US service members. But for those who did come home, their prospects were also grim. About 20 veterans commit suicide every day, and Pickering was almost one of them—until he started smoking weed again.

"I was at war and then I literally was in my parent's basement drinking myself to death for three years," recalls Pickering. "I was a mess."

An estimated 11 to 20 percent of the US veterans who invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The numbers are similar for those who served in the Gulf and Vietnam wars. The treatments available now are just not working for everyone. It's widely accepted among PTSD therapists and researchers that there's a need for novel solutions.

Continue reading on Tonic.

I'm sitting in the corner of Parlour, a restaurant in London's Kensal Green, with headphones on. The iconic theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey blasts in my ears and head chef Jesse Dunford Wood rolls foil across the table in front of me. As the track segues into "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Wood begins placing macarons, Arctic rolls, soufflés, cakes, and mousses on the foil between artful globs of sauce from a squeezy bottle—all in time with the music.

Sitting to my right and watching Wood's performance is Charles Spence, food scientist and professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford. He mimes for me to lift my headphones.

"This is similar to how the Italian Futurists threw dinner parties!" he says excitedly, pointing to the foil, which is now covered with brightly coloured treats and sauce.

But more on Wood's theatrical puddings and European anarchists later. I'm not here just to spoon chocolate mousse from the table, I'm meeting with Spence to talk about his new book, Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, and discover the science that explains why listening to music, watching a chef throw sauce around, or eating off foil can enhance flavour.

London chef Jesse Dunford Wood serves dessert on tin foil in time with music that plays over diners' headphones, a choreographed performance intended to enhance flavour. All photos by the author.

In the introduction to his book, Spence explains that gastrophysics "can be defined as the scientific study of those factors that influence our multisensory experience while tasting food and drink." Basically, if you take the food away from a dining experience, gastrophysics is how everything else—from descriptions of dishes on the menu and the restaurant's decor to plateware, cutlery, and music—affect our enjoyment of food.

Read more on MUNCHIES.

When Congress comes back into session on Monday, America's legislators will have five days to fund the government before it runs out of cash. For several years now, funding deadlines have been a source of primo political drama as diehards from one party or another engaged in high-stakes brinkmanship, trying to ram their priorities into funding bills by threatening to torpedo the process and shut the whole thing down. Yet the lead-up to next Friday's deadline has been shockingly muted, seemingly because Republican power brokers see value in a compromise with Democrats and only risk in a showdown. Unfortunately, no matter how conciliatory key players in Congress might prove to be, Donald Trump may (surprise, surprise) feel the need to throw a wrench into the deal-making works, leading America down a road of renewed chaos.

The country is back in this embarrassing place because the last Congress never reached a deal on a budget for fiscal year 2017, which runs from October 2016 to October 2017. Last December, they opted for a Continuing Resolution, allowing the federal government to run on 2016 funding levels until Friday. And Republicans, eager to show they can govern effectively after a spate of failures, have every reason to try to pass a new budget rather than another stopgap for the rest of 2017.

Trump and his allies made some bold requests for inclusion in their 2017 budget last month, like funding for his notorious proposed border wall and a military spending boost to be offset by substantial—some say brutal—cuts to domestic programs. (Wrangling over funding the rest of 2017 is not to be confused with the coming fight over Trump's 2018 budget, which calls for the elimination of many popular domestic programs that affect the environment, the poor, and plenty more.) Conservative Republicans also indicated they'd like to use the funding bill to defund their favorite nemesis, Planned Parenthood. But they need at least eight Democrats to pass their budget in the Senate—even after gutting the filibuster for Supreme Court appointments, it still applies for regular legislation. And Democrats made it clear they'd sooner force a shutdown than accommodate any of that stuff. Even though the public strongly opposes a shutdown, the Democrats believe blame would fall squarely on the ruling Republicans.

"Going back a few weeks, I thought the prospect of a shutdown was fairly high," said Rudy Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office director who's now a fellow at the Urban Institute, a moderately liberal DC-based think tank .

But after the failure of their attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last month, Republicans seemed to soften. House GOP leader Paul Ryan started urging his caucus to skip debates on Planned Parenthood and get something passed, while Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell openly vowed to work with Democrats to avoid a shutdown at all costs.

"I don't think they want another black eye," explained former Senate Budget Committee director Steve Bell, now a senior adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Capitol Hill scuttlebutt suggests bipartisan negotiations are moving toward allowing defense spending increases and money for border security, but not at the level of Trump's requests and explicitly not for any Mexico wall. That denies Trump sufficiently for Democrats to declare a win, while giving the Republicans functionality and some cash for their broad priorities.

It's unclear what will actually emerge from negotiations, of course. Ryan, whose deputies are reportedly loath to work with Democrats in the House, could lean too far toward placating arch conservatives supporting Trump's goals, alienating key Democrats. Or deficit or defense hawks could take issue with the sums included in any plan and raise hell. But as Molly Reynolds, a Congress watcher at the Brookings Institute, put it, "The idea of negotiating a large spending bill that gets some Democrats on board while also navigating the divisions within the GOP is something congressional leaders have done before.

"They have not done it with Trump in the White House," she added as a note of caution.

Watch our recent chat with Ex-Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi on VICE News Tonight.

Earlier this month, to try to force Democrats to deal with him on healthcare, Trump threatened to blow up a subsidy system vital for insurers to keep offering discounted plans to low-income people on the ACA marketplaces. This has inspired Democrats to try and use the upcoming funding bill to guarantee subsidy funding. "But it is hard to see how many Republicans would vote to 'prop up Obamacare,'" explained Case Western budget politics expert Joe White. "If the Democrats are hearing from insurers that the [subsidy] issue has to be fixed now, which is what I'm hearing," and Trump does not back down, "then it's hard to see how a major confrontation can be avoided."

Some inside the administration also reportedly feel like they need more on their resume by their 100th day, which happens to be one day after the funding deadline. Trump proxy and director of the Office and Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney has recently called for any funding bill to include a provision to withhold federal grants from "sanctuary cities" and have some cash for the border wall as well. (Never mind the fact that no one's entirely sure how to define sanctuary cities as a concept, much less how to actually defund them.) Mulvaney's also been fairly glib about the prospect of a shutdown, claiming he thinks one can be avoided, but if it happened, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

"The president is the leader on this," said Bell. "Is he willing to make sufficient concessions [on his agenda] to get a bill that keeps the government open?… A win for the Republicans is just to keep the government running. A victory for the president may have to have the wall in there," because that project, while not actually vital for the nation, is thought to be key to his base credibility and outsized ego.

Penner's still hopeful. He thinks even some hardline conservatives realize there are only five months left in the fiscal year, so this might not be the best use of their pugnacious potential. Leadership can promise diehards that major issues will come to the fore later, and they're likely to move mountains to convince Trump not to interfere or threaten a veto of any potential compromise, either. In fact many observers seem to think Trump's all bluster here—that he'll back down and let cool heads prevail.

But Trump is also a notoriously unpredictable and a-strategic wingnut. "I know what they're fighting about on the Hill, but what I don't know is what the president is truly not willing to back down on," Bell said. "Until we get a better sense, probably by Monday or Tuesday, of what the president is really willing to accept," we won't really know what the actual risk of a shutdown is.

Even if things work out next week, and a compromise is reached that keeps Uncle Sam fed for five more months, all of these issues will just pop up again in the early fall, when the fight over the 2018 budget begins.

"This is an overture," Bell concluded. "The opera is really [fiscal year 2018.] That's when the real confrontation and conflict will come."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

There's nothing that screams "USA!" more than a burger, fries, and a shake, a combo on the same plane of mainstream Americana as baseball, apple pie, or a monster truck rally. But in recent years, fast food in the United States has gone from being merely a staple of the instant-gratification consumer age to an industry that, at least in many of its ads and promo materials, emphasizes salads, calorie counts, and natural ingredients.

Taking McDonald's as an example, the world's largest burger chain has seen four straight years of dropping customer counts at its US locations, and pushes to improve its burger patty meat mean we may soon see plugs for farm-to-table or locally sourced burgers on highway billboards.

But even as they change up their game domestically, fast-food conglomerates have found new customers for their old-school formula by turning toward other parts of the world, where the market is a bit less saturated—and the dangers of their product less well known. One of the most remarkable places where this has taken root in recent decades is the Gulf region of the Arabian Peninsula, which has some of the most affluent populations in the Middle East. Oil revenues have transformed the area drastically over the last half century, and with vast wealth and modernization came a flood of cheap burgers.

We caught up with economics professor Dr. Mohsen Bagnied, chair of the Department of Marketing at the American University of Kuwait, to get a better sense of how the trend of fast-food culture has taken over in Kuwait and in the Gulf states more broadly. Here's what he had to say.

VICE: When did American fast food first come to the Middle East?
Mohsen Bagnied: The first time hamburgers were introduced to Kuwait was in 1981 by Hardee's. And after that McDonalds came 13 years later, in 1994. And now every major fast-food chain, mostly from the US, is in Kuwait, whether it's McDonald's, Burger King, Hardee's, Johnny Rockets, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Nathan's, Pizza Hut, Subway, Domino's, Five Guys. Just name it—everybody's here.

What has the reaction been like culturally to this American fad?
There has been a cultural invasion in Kuwait by Western, especially American, culture since the Gulf War. Anything that symbolizes America—jeans, fast food, fast cars, liberal values—are all here by now. That does not mean that there has not been some resistance by some elements of society for several years.

How mainstream do you think fast food is in the culture in Kuwait and other Gulf countries?
Fast food has really taken over from local foods. It's not only the major chains, but now there are many local brands that are spreading too. People basically replaced domestic or local foods with Western or fast food, and it's a hamburger culture. Especially among young people, it's becoming very popular. They consider going to a fast-food restaurant a source of entertainment for the whole family. And the reason for that is that fast food is still in the growth stages of development.

People also think of it as tasty, clean, fun, and affordable. But many do not realize that a lot of calories are involved in this junk food, with little nutritional value and high saturated fat, high sugar, and little fiber. They don't think about it. They are starting now in schools, especially in foreign schools like American, French, English—they started educating the kids that you have to limit fast food. The government is also starting to introduce this issue.

Check out the trailer for the VICE on HBO segment about fast food of Arabia, and watch the full episode Friday, April 21, at 7:30 or 11 PM on HBO.

Can you talk a bit about the pace of growth here? Americans often read stories about the constant construction of new fast-food restaurants in, say, China. Is there a similar trend underway in places like Kuwait?
It's a booming industry. McDonald's, for example, they expect their sales to continue to grow by 11 to 12 percent per year. It's amazing, the figures they have for growth. And fast food in Kuwait has not yet reached a saturation point yet.

The first day it was something like 15,000 people going to McDonald's, with a seven-mile long [line] of cars waiting for the drive-thru. According to some of the reports I've seen, McDonald's makes $6 million dollars per day in the Middle East [and Africa] selling their products, and $2.2 billion annually. And they plan to increase that figure by 60 percent by 2020, which is only a few years from now.

What is the brand you see the most often? Arbys seems to be ramping up its presence, for example.
Now the most common are McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC—those are the most visible. But there are others—Domino's, Papa John's, Five Guys. I mean, here across from my window, I'm directly on the Gulf, I wish I could show you a picture of the beautiful Gulf from here, but Pizza Hut's in my face.

What's the demographic profile of people who eat fast food in Kuwait, which doesn't strike me as having the same problems with poverty, food deserts, and obesity that the US does?
There is a focus on young people. The youth are very much Americanized in their clothing, in the way they drive cars, the way they eat, the way they dress. I teach in the American University of Kuwait. I see all the latest models of everything that the students are adopting here.

Now, there is a very high divorce rate in Kuwait—it's almost the same level as the US. So many people are living alone, not in families as [often] it used to be. So many people find it easy to just go pick up fast food—not only going to restaurants. In fact, there is a booming business of home delivery. The home delivery businesses are reaching record profit levels, where you order by phone, and it comes to you at home. They don't even want to go there; they want to sit on the couch, being a couch potato as we call it, and get their fast food. At every fast-food restaurant, you can order the food to come at home.

How easy is it to open new franchise restaurants in Kuwait? Who owns them?
I had one of my students try to get a franchise for Chipotle. He contacted them, but he couldn't get it. He said they deal only with big families or big companies, and so they weren't ready to open here. But everybody else is here.

And I would say that here you have some big companies with tremendous financial resources, which makes it very attractive for franchises. But here they say it's like cars—there's only one Mercedes dealer or one BMW dealer for the whole country. We don't have multiple franchisers. That's one thing different from the US.

How do fast-food brands advertise locally? Are there specific strategies that work in the Middle East that might contrast with those in the US?
There is tremendous heavy promotion in TV newspaper, billboards, social media. You see it on half the front page of the Kuwait Times and other newspapers about KFC, McDonald's Burger King, Pizza Hut, and others. They spend a lot of money on promotion. Social media is very popular here now. Everybody is walking with their smartphones—everybody's using it.

All you have to do is to drive along the major roads, and you see the huge billboards about different brands of fast foods.

How do these companies market to young people?
The most important thing they highlight is that we have halal meat. They say we only use vegetable oil, which really doesn't say much. But they focus on having pure meat, halal beef, no external ingredients. They try to focus on things other than the fat and sugar levels and the stuff that really hits you hard health-wise.

Do fast-food companies tweak their specific dishes to adhere to local tastes in the Middle East the way they do in China?
There is McArabia [a pita sandwich], and a few that use some Arabic names. They adjust their menu to the Arabic culture to some degree. But again, they focus on advertising halal meat.

How has fast food affected diet and health? Is Kuwait on the road to facing its own obesity crisis?
Oh, yes. That's why there are a lot of openings of health clubs here. You see, half of the year here, the weather is so hot it's very hard for people to have outdoor activity or walking. So that's one reason.

There has been recently excessive numbers of stomach stapling surgeries. I saw an article in Bloomberg in 2012 that said the number of surgeons performing such operations in Kuwait increased ten times over ten years earlier. In 2012, 5000 people were getting surgeries in Kuwait compared with 3,000 in [much more populous] Canada. Lots of my students have done this operation.

Of course, they are starting to diet and exercise, especially young people, but still at a limited scale. Kids here are so heavy. They have to start educating school children about the dangers of fast food, and educating families in schools by the government and even religiously, in mosques and churches—they should alert people to the dangers of excessive use. McDonald's and other fast-food places started producing salads and starting to have more healthy nutritional food, but they haven't reached any good level like what's happened in the US.

Fast food is on the decline in the US, but sales overseas are booming in most countries, because still there isn't much resistance to the dangers.

So wait, do you eat fast food?
I do, because I have son who's 12. So once in a while, he says, "Baba, let's go to McDonald's or Burger King."

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Check out our segment on Fast Food of Arabia tonight on VICE on HBO at 7:30 and 11 PM.

Follow Ibrahim Balkhy on Twitter.

On Friday, April 28, Dirty Dancing megafans far and wide will get their chance to bid on some of Patrick Swayze's earthly possessions in a Los Angeles auction, LA Weekly reports.

Julien's Auctions—the same auction house that sold off Truman Capote's ashes—is including some of Swayze's stuff in its "Hollywood Legends" collection. According to the Weekly, Swayze's widow, Lisa Niemi, has decided that it's finally "time to let go" of roughly 640 items, including much of his movie memorabilia, like the leather jacket he wore in Dirty Dancing, a silk shirt he wore in Ghost, and the custom surfboard he used in Point Break.

But nestled alongside many of the items Swayze made famous on film are some pretty personal belongings. For example, fans can bid to buy Swayze's "adult tooth," accompanied by "approximately 25 X-rays" taken from 1976 to 1997, starting at just $500.

As confusing as it is to peruse the bizarre list of Swayze's possessions, it's also enlightening. How else would one learn that in 1997, while shooting an obscure indie film called Letters from a Killer, Swayze was bucked from a horse and slammed into a tree, breaking his right leg?

Scrolling through all the entries, it becomes easier to create a broader image of the actor's life. The horse incident, for example, was just one that occurred amid Swayze's apparent love for equestrian activities. Also up for auction are Swayze's four saddles, eight cowboy boots, seven rifles, two pistols, and dozens of knives.

But on film, Swayze was truly a renaissance man, as evidenced from the diverse roles in which he was cast throughout his life. Not only can you purchase his Point Break surfboard, but the G-string he sported in Keeping Mum (2005) is up for grabs, alongside the sword he used as Nomad in Steel Dawn.

But the most compelling items Julien's is offering—by and large—are the ones left unexplained. Why, for instance, did Swayze maintain a collection of minerals and fossils? And what was Swayze's fascination with "new age spiritual items" like tarot cards, crystal wands, and something called a "scrying sphere"?

What may be the most heart-wrenching item a Swayze superfan could purchase is likely his teddy bear and "infant items," listed for a starting bid of just $100. The purchase even includes a two-page essay penned by the actor, detailing his deep bond with Teddy, the aforementioned (and aptly-named) bear.

"For many years Teddy was my only friend, he was the only person I could trust with my secrets," Swayze wrote. "He never laughed at my dreams, what I accomplished or aspired towards."

RIP, Patrick Swayze. You will live on forever in our hearts, our thoughts, and in the many peculiar emblems you've left behind.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

In early April, the Russian state media outlet Sputnik published a story suggesting Emmanuel Macron, centrist candidate for the French presidency, was "a U.S. agent" and possibly "acting in the interests of the U.S. financial market in France." Another article, published in French, claimed Macron's campaign was being financed by Saudi Arabia — and despite being completely inaccurate, it generated 10,000 likes, shares, and comments on Facebook.

The Russian fake-media machine has trained its sights on the French elections, and there are just two days to go in what has been a roller-coaster campaign. Opinion polls have the leading candidates, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, left-wing veteran Jean-Luc Melenchon, conservative François Fillon, and centrist, pro-Europe candidate Emmanuel Macron separated by the polling margin of error ahead of the Sunday vote.

But Russian state media has a clear preference: Stop Macron by any means necessary.

The effort to slow down Macron has been conducted by both state-owned Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik — both of whom set up French outposts in recent years — as well as less official channels like far-right blogs, Twitter bots, and troll farms, all of which are used to amplify the message from Moscow.

The surge of propaganda was triggered when conservative Fillon slipped in the polls as the result of a corruption scandal involving his wife. "When Fillon's poll ratings slumped and Emmanuel Macron, who is much more pro-EU and pro-U.S., surged, the Kremlin media jumped to broadcast attacks on Macron," Ben Nimmo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, told VICE News.

Disinformation spread by Russian state media outlets has been amplified on social media using a complex network of bots which the Digital Forensic Research Lab this week showed can be linked directly back to the Twitter accounts of both RT and Sputnik in France.

Read the full story on VICE News.

Welcome back to Can't Handle the Truth, our Saturday column looking back at the past seven days of fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.

In the same week that saw Bill O'Reilly fired from Fox News, some of the biggest names in badly-sourced, right-wing internet bluster found themselves in personal and professional turmoil too. Coincidentally, (or maybe consequently?) this week's conspiracy theories have been pretty boring. However, an extremely dark, but almost totally apolitical, YouTube debacle is picking up the slack. All in all the third week in April was a dark time for internet misinformation.

I'll start with the big story:

Alex Jones' Says He's Been Doing a Bit All Along

Alex Jones is a Texan, a radio and internet personality, some sort of human/volcano hybrid, and—there can be no doubt—a conspiracy theorist. But this week, he added an annoying wrinkle to the job of summing up his life by having his attorney claim in court that Jones is a performance artist.

Jones's ex-wife Kelly is suing him for custody of their three children, and the custody battle, which went on all week in an Austin courtroom, would be at least a little funny if it weren't so sad. Kelly Jones told the Austin American-Statesman, "He's not a stable person," and that he "wants to break Alec Baldwin's neck," and "wants J-Lo to get raped." And according to author Jon Ronson, who has been tweeting from the courtroom, Alex Jones's psychiatric evaluator recommended a narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. Kelly Jones, it is alleged, also suffers from some form of mental illness.

But does all this mean Alex Jones isn't a conspiracy theorist? By implication, was he just kidding when he—to name one example—promoted the idea that the kids who died in the Sandy Hook massacre were actors planted by the CIA to bolster support for gun control laws?

The staff at Jones' venerable website InfoWars.com have offered up a sort of explanation(?) in the form of a supercut that shows Jones being an actor—because that's a hat that, yes, he clearly sometimes wears. For instance, the video shows him acting in an advertisement. He was also in a couple of Texan movie director Richard Linklater's films along with a handful of InfoWars comedy sketches.

So does his history of occasionally acting prove that it was always just a comedy bit when Jones sat there for years, screaming things into a microphone that have earned him the label "extremist" from the Southern Poverty Law Center? I guess that's for the courts to decide.

What the Hell Is Going on with DaddyOfFive?

This next one isn't easy to write about, because it involves allegations of child abuse—child abuse that is supposedly (fingers crossed!) fake.

On Monday, YouTuber Philip DeFranco released a vlog (above) about a family of YouTubers at a channel called "DaddyOfFive" who make prank videos. DeFranco drew attention to elements within the videos that seemed to go well beyond pranking, and bordered on evidence of child mistreatment.

In DeFranco's first example, the parents in the video screamed horrifying, obviously abusive things at their young son because of a mess he hadn't really made. But don't worry, they were (ostensibly) just kidding. The video begged the question, if they were just kidding, why did their son respond as if his parents' explosive overreaction was normal? DeFranco then took a deep dive, and found videos in which the kids looked like they were being shoved and wounded by their parents—though possibly not on purpose—and then teased until they sobbed on camera, and screamed for all the pranking to stop.

As DeFranco notes, the family's initial response video on YouTube was a justification, not an apology. "A lot of people apparently don't get it. A lot of people don't see the humor in it," the father says. The kids themselves, we're told, sign off on each video, and by implication, they're tough and strong-willed. Needless to say, the family's response left room for a lot of uncomfortable questions about the agency and decision-making competence of children.

When the internet wasn't satisfied with the family's first response, and apparently continued to hound them, they released a second video on Wednesday (which is linked above, but cannot be embedded) claiming that this controversy is tearing their family apart, and saying they need to come clean. Their videos are all fake, they claim. The kids are, they say, actors, hamming it up for the cameras. They apologize to their fans, and tell them they hope they'll stick around.

There's a whole lot to unpack here. All I can say is, if the kids really are actors, great! They are gifted, even superb actors. I very much hope the disturbing videos this family makes are truly fictional, and for now, I'll leave it at that.

Titans of Conspiracy Twitter Are Beefing

Meanwhile, in a twist I don't think anyone expected, seduction guru turned alt-rightster and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich suddenly despises Trump cheerleader and part-time conspiracy theorist Bill Mitchell (that Twitter guy who made a name for himself by accurately predicting the shape and outcome of Trump's rise). The substance of Cernovich's accusation, according to Mitchell, is that Mitchell is on the payroll of a neoconservative think tank, a claim Mitchell vehemently denies

According to the right-wing blogosphere, this is all tied to the new divide between Steve Bannon-style nationalists like Cernovich, and conservatives in more of the George W. Bush mold, like Mitchell.

Wherever this conflict is coming from, it's exactly like a rap beef: the resulting public fight, in which Cernovich attacks Mitchell's appearance, and Mitchell gets really mad, is entertaining, but it's also maybe a little dangerous. After all, in a video from Thursday of last week, Cernovich play-acted as a gangster, implying that someone, somewhere protects him from his enemies. "It doesn't end well, threatening my family's safety," Cernovich said, puffing on a cigar like Suge Knight.

The Latest Google Controversy

I'd be remiss not to mention what conspiracy theorists are promoting this week in terms of scandals. Unfortunately, they're not very salacious.

According to an InfoWars post from Tuesday, Google has been unjustly rating InfoWars as an untrustworthy site. Google has since acknowledged that an outside contractor gave low ratings to InfoWars, but Google has rescinded the move. After all, in Google's view, conspiracy fans are people who click ads, so they are valued users, and those people want InfoWars in their search results, so that's what they should get. Say what you want about InfoWars; it's not spam.

But of course, in 2016, Google began a push to eliminate hate speech from results. A lot of that hate speech comes from people in the alt-right. Naturally, when Mike Cernovich appeared on InfoWars, this was all supposed to be evidence of a malevolent conspiracy between Silicon Valley gazillionaires like Google's Eric Schmidt, and the government globalists they donate money to like Hillary Clinton.

#Photogate

Then on Wednesday, the New York Times tweeted two un-doctored, correctly attributed photos of White House visits by the New England Patriots after winning the Super Bowl. More Patriots were there to see Obama than Trump, and what's meant to be inferred is, ahem: "LOL."

President Trump, a seated president who always gets his panties in a bunch when there's any accusation of low turnout at one of his events, called the photo a lie. According to Cernovich, whose blog posts are now being republished at InfoWars itself, "#PhotoGate is yet another reason no one trusts the fake news media."

The photo is not a lie, but yes, context does rob it of all its lolz. You see, um actually: there were some other staffers there, according to the Patriots' Twitter account, but they weren't in the photo. But, um actually again: according to the Boston Globe, the number of Patriots staffers attending the White House visit declined from 2015 to 2017. But, um actually a third time: the paper goes on to say there are complicated, apolitical reasons why that could reasonably be.

In short: a funny tweet failed to convey nuance! So take that, you goddamn fake news media liars!

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Over the last 18 months, I've found myself in the strange habit of hanging out and interviewing English-speaking humanoid robots. I was able to chat with four machines, each which possessed some level of artificial intelligence. Even though none of them could fully carry on normal conversations, they all had something to say. And sometimes, what they say and how they say it, is a piercing glimpse into the future of humanity.

Three of the robots I talked to were mass-production models: Pepper, Meccanoid, and iPal. The fourth was Han, which was presented by AI expert Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. The various price tags of these bots range from $200 on Amazon, to potentially many millions of dollars for something like Han. The production robots are all between three to four feet tall and are mobile. Han is just an upper body, the torso of which rests against whatever he's placed upon.

Prof. Youngsook Park stands in front of the Han robot. Image: Zoltan Istvan/Motherboard

Han

What Han is lacking in body, though, he makes up for in intellect. He's the smartest of the bunch by a long shot. I first saw Han at the 2016 Global Leaders Forum in Seoul, South Korea. The event was organized by Futurist Professor Youngsook Park and hosted by Korean channel TV Chosun. Han was helping to formally open the event in front of hundreds of Korean onlookers. Everyone in the audience, including myself, was immediately impressed with the robot's sophisticated articulation and level of understanding.

On stage, Ben Goertzel asked, "Han, can you tell us a little more about this conference we're at?" Here's how the conversation followed:

Han: This year's Global Leadership Forum features six sessions: biology, artificial intelligence, creative education, virtual reality, and future government.

Goertzel: And out all these exciting sessions, which one interests you the most?

Han: They are all exciting, but the one I'm most interested to see is what the speakers have to say on artificial intelligence.

Read the full story at Motherboard.

Check out Magdalena Rzepecka on Instagram and Tumblr.

Ask pretty much anyone and they'll tell you that eating salty foods makes a person thirsty. Alas, here's a reminder that just because a belief is held by basically everyone you can and will ever know doesn't mean it's actually true.

Now, a pair of studies, the results of which both appear in the current issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, has found that eating salty food doesn't actually make you thirsty in the long run—but it can make you hungry.

And all it took to find that out was a simulated mission to Mars.

A group of researchers—from institutions including the German Aerospace Center, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, and Vanderbilt University—put two groups of ten male volunteers into a sealed mock spaceship for two simulated flights to Mars. Group number one was examined over a period of 105 days, and group number two was studied over 205 days. The men all ate identical diets, except they were fed different levels of salt in their food.

The results showed that those who ate more salt had a higher salt content in their urine and produced a higher quantity of urine—no surprise there. What did surprise the researchers was this: The subjects who ate more salt did not actually drink more water—in fact, those who ate the saltier diets actually drank less water. In addition, the human "cosmonauts"—the scientists' term, not ours—who ate the saltier diets complained more about being hungry. So salt made the test subjects feel hungrier, but not thirstier.

Read the full story at Munchies.

A letter drafted by former Fox News Network employees suing their past employer alleges that black employees were forced to arm wrestle their white co-workers.

The seven former employees behind the letter are set to join a lawsuit that alleges "top-down racial harassment" is prominent behind the scenes at the popular news network.

The initial suit was filed by Tichaona Brown and Tabrese Wright in March and focuses on reported "top-down racial harassment." It is leveled primarily against Fox News comptroller, Judith Slater, and alleges racial discrimination and harassment against Brown, Wright and other marginalized employees.

None of these claims have been proven in court.

The letter, obtained by New York Magazine and initially sent to the network's lawyers, paints the picture of a dysfunctional and toxic work environment. The letter makes the claim that Slater demanded her black employees hold arm wrestling matches with white employees.

"Forcing a black woman employee to 'fight' for the amusement and pleasure of her white superiors is horrifying. This highly offensive and humiliating act is reminiscent of Jim Crow era battle royals," the letter reads, according to the New York article.

The lawsuit alleges that Slater also stated that all black men were "women beaters," that they wanted to hurt white people, and mocked the speech patterns of black employees. Slater's employment was terminated from Fox News after the allegations were raised. The lawsuit also extends to other employees who are also alleged to have engaged in the behaviour and allowed it to continue.

In a statement at the time of Slater's firing, the network stated that, "there is no place for inappropriate verbal remarks like this at Fox News."

The allegations come at a time where a magnifying glass is being placed on the work culture of the news network, after several high profile employees made disgraced exits.

Recently the network's shining star, Bill O'Reilly, was canned after reports emerged that he had settled numerous lawsuits that allege sexual harassment—action was taken after a large contingent of advertisers pulled their work from O'Reilly's show. Prior to that, long-time head of the network, Roger Ailes, took leave among accusations of sexual harassment.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Up north, tucked away in French Canada, exists gold in them trees—sweet, sticky gold!

Five years ago, thieves in Quebec tried to get their hands on that gold and, well, they actually pulled it off, at least for a little while. But now, Avik Caron, one of the men found guilty in the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist, has just been sentenced to five years.

Now, how did Caron get himself into such delicious trouble?

After the province's Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup rented a warehouse co-owned by his wife to store their auburn gold, Caron seized the sweet opportunity life had given him. The 43-year-old, who the court said was the instigator of the heist, organized a group of people to steal 9,571 barrels, each worth around $2,000 (13 times the price of crude oil!), with tractor trailers, bring them to a sugar shack, steal the all-valuable syrup, and fill the barrels back up with water.

For their troubles, the maple syrup thieves netted around $18.7 million of the sweet stuff—much of which was never recovered. The crew was crafty and only stole from the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup's global reserve so, at first, their plan went unnoticed. A year later though, the Maple Syrup Fed's noticed that some of their barrels were rusting, which raised suspicion.

Read more: Boiling Point: Inside Quebec's Maple Syrup War

For some, the theft was seen as a fuck you to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup who are disparagingly referred to at times as the "Maple Syrup Cartel." The organization is, essentially, a state sanctioned monopoly after all. The Federation has drawn the ire of many a Quebec maple syrup producer by fixing prices, forcing quotas, and stockpiling the rest in their reserve (much like OPEC.) One of the other heist masters reportedly wrote a letter, which was presented at trial, in which he called the Federation "A BUNCH OF A**HOLES, PART OF THE MAFIA."

Quebec police got involved and were able to work out what transpired. In the end, the investigation led to more than 200 witness interviews and 26 arrests. Crown Prosecutor Julien Beauchamp-Laliberté, speaking with the National Post at the time of Caron's guilty plea, praised the investigative work.

"It's no less serious because it's not cocaine or gold bricks," he told the National Post. "It's an economic crime and it affects people who work in the woods and literally give the sweat from their brow."

Quebec is Perfect: Maple Syrup Is Our Drug

Caron reportedly said that he was coerced into putting in his legal plea and tried to get out of it. When the judge didn't let it happen, he apparently threw a tantrum in court, swearing at the judge and getting into it with a guard who tried to restrain him.

Other people behind the heist have been found guilty and sentenced including Richard Vallières, another ringleader, and Étienne St-Pierre, a man who bought the stolen syrup and fraudulently sold it as New Brunswick syrup.

In addition to the five years, Caron was also fined $1.2 million, which, when converted to maple syrup, is around 600 barrels.

We're still waiting for the Jason Segel movie about the heist, however. Even Canadian justice runs quicker than Hollywood.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

The man Donald Trump is reportedly set to tap as America's next "drug czar"—officially, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy—shares Attorney General Jeff Session's passion for renewing the War on Drugs. At a hearing on the heroin problem last year, Congressman Tom Marino said he supports mandatory inpatient treatment for "nondealer, nonviolent drug abusers", and that he likes the idea of placing them in a "hospital-slash-prison" setting.

Let's set aside for a second that a plurality of drug arrests in America involve non-addicted pot smokers who do not need any treatment. What the public and the press typically fail to question in covering this issue is whether coerced treatment works at all—and if it does, if it is the best use of limited resources.

To the National Institute on Drug Abuse, this is a settled question: in its Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment, one of the key planks is that "treatment doesn't need to be voluntary to be effective." But some researchers who have recently reviewed the data came to the opposite conclusion, and in my own experience and reporting, I've found demonstrable negative effects when people are coerced into getting help.

A frightening report released last year by Massachusetts, for instance, found that, at least in their state, people who had been treated for addiction without their consent were more than twice as likely to die from an opioid overdose compared to those who had attended voluntarily. Meanwhile, according to the most recent data, around one third of patients in the addiction treatment system nationally are there under some sort of legal pressure—and in some programs, criminal justice referrals make up the overwhelming majority of patients. Drug courts, which are designed expressly to use coercion to get people into treatment, now include some 120,000 defendants annually.

Dan Werb, assistant professor of public health at the University of California—San Diego, recently reviewed the data on the "hospitals-slash-prisons" Marino is so high on. In these centers, participants don't have a choice: they are forced into treatment and not even given the option of a cell.

"The main finding is that there is so little evidence," he tells me. "There's much more robust evidence on the value of voluntary treatment." Of the studies that exist on compulsory treatment, the majority (77 percent) found either no clearly proven effect on drug use or crime—or that forced treatment actually made people worse by increasing their likelihood of arrest or relapse(22 percent).

Some of the included studies were conducted in countries where compulsory treatment is little more than forced labour (and some of it is torture). But even in the United States, there is plenty of forced rehab that doesn't actually do much good. One study of 506 defendants mandated to a Texas rehab for six months found no significant difference in recidivism between graduates, dropouts and people who weren't mandated to the program. Another study of over 2,000 American military veterans found that although those who were mandated into treatment initially seemed more likely to succeed, five years later they were no more likely to be in recovery than those who chose to be in treatment.

Oh, and there is a storied legacy of US treatment programs that featured unpaid labour and torturous practices, too.

David Farabee, professor of psychiatry at the University of California—Los Angeles, who has studied the effects of coercion on treatment for decades, notes that much of the data here is confounded by what scientists call a "selection effect." What this means, essentially, is that pre-existing differences between the groups being compared actually account for what look like treatment effects. In the case of addiction treatment, research has long shown that—up to a point—spending more time in treatment is associated with better outcomes.

That has led to the conclusion that a "higher dose" of treatment is more effective. But there's a massive problem with drawing that lesson from these data. That is: many treatment centers expel people for relapsing—and those who drop out are often doing so because rehab has not made them better at sustaining abstinence. In other words, those who stay longer are more motivated to recover, regardless of any effect of treatment. According to Farabee, research on legal sanctions to motivate people to stay in treatment shows that they do stay longer—but that doesn't mean that they actually have better outcomes.

Adds Farabee, "The more you dig, the more you see that the notion that coercion is a panacea is unfounded. The best thing you can say is that people are more likely to show up if made to do so."

Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom, is the author of a review of the data on people who are given a choice between treatment and prison. He found that in this case, legally-coerced patients do no better or worse than those who come voluntarily. But it's hard to tell what that really means. For one, people who were considered as being there "voluntarily" actually had other pressures on them. "His wife said he had to come, otherwise she'd leave, his boss said he'd lose his job—or someone is just bored of being arrested all the time," he explains.

Check out the VICE Sports explainer on weed in the NFL.

A bigger problem is the effects that coercion has on treatment quality and the programs themselves. Consider, for example, the fact that trauma and PTSD are highly linked to addiction, particularly childhood sexual abuse. Imagine trying to sincerely open up about these painful and highly personal experiences in a room full of people who are rolling their eyes and crossing their arms and are unlikely to maintain any type of confidentiality since they haven't really consented to the conditions of treatment.

Farabee has conducted focus groups with prisoners about addiction treatment during incarceration. "Every single time, generally older guys would say, 'I actually am sick and tired, I want to quit. Can you get rid of the guys who don't want to be here?' That was repeated in multiple focus groups over the years."

Another negative effect that coercion can have on treatment quality is less obvious, but perhaps more important. Research shows clearly that having a strong therapeutic connection between practitioners and patients is one of the best predictors of good outcomes. But this is difficult to do when patients see their therapist as just another agent of the government who will report them to the court when they fail.

Moreover, there's lots of evidence that a more respectful treatment environment—not a punitive or confrontational one—is way more effective. If programs have to work to attract people into attending—rather than having customers forced to accept their services—they are far more likely to create such spaces. This problem is further reinforced by the ideology of legal coercion: treatment failure results in incarceration or other punishment for the patient—not negative consequences or fewer referrals from the justice system for the program. When you don't hold programs accountable for how they treat patients and when treatment quality actually requires kindness and empathy, criminal justice coercion can be a seriously negative force.

There's also a basic fairness question here: Why should people who've been arrested have priority in getting healthcare over those who voluntarily seek help?

"It's generally widely accepted that addiction is a mental illness that should be treated through the public health system and through clinical protocols," says Werb. "That begs the question: what is the best deliverer of healthcare in addiction treatment? I think it would be very difficult to make the case that somehow the justice system is a better deliverer than the health care system."

Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

Ask any hardcore band what their influences are and Black Flag is bound to come up. After all, the band is instrumental to the evolution of hardcore, being the first act most people point to in explaining how punk went from the bubblegum pop of the Ramones to the destructive nihilism of hardcore. Their 1979 Nervous Breakdown EP took punk's snarling edge and ratched everything up. The songs were shorter, the production shittier, and the performances brasher. Where early punk records still sounded like music, Black Flag was a wall of noise.

But the lineup that produced Nervous Breakdown didn't last. Vocalist Keith Morris and drummer Brian Migdol left the band, with bassist Chuck Dukowski and guitarist/bandleader Greg Ginn soldiering on, finding new members to record with. But those new members would wash out just as quickly, establishing a pattern that would be repeated over and over again throughout Black Flag's history—even in the present day, with Ginn often asking strangers he meets at the grocery store to play bass.

By the time the band found itself on somewhat stable ground in the early 80s Black Flag's reputation had grown, for better and worse. Their shows in the southern California area often became full-on riots, making it hard for Black Flag to actually play music in a live setting. And though the group's first release established hardcore's ethos, it was the band's tireless commitment to touring that would establish the DIY touring network that so many young bands take for granted. Despite laying the groundwork for hardcore, and seemingly inventing an approach to touring that bands use to this day, Black Flag still had yet to put out a proper full-length album, even if the material was there. Long before their debut album, Damaged, was released, the band would be playing these songs across the country, giving new kids an idea of what was to come, but also the ability to build upon it.

Continue reading on Noisey.

"I'm not interested in increasing the distance between us and the world we live in," author Jeff VanderMeer tells me. "I'm interested in showing how there is no real gap and that if we don't realize that soon, other narratives are going to overtake us and replace whatever stories we're telling with their own. Most everything else is just bullshit."

We're discussing the 48-year-old Florida resident's eagerly anticipated novel, Borne, an insanely beautiful and beautifully insane story of a scavenger woman named Rachel who finds a strange creature in a post-apocalyptic landscape and raises it as a son. Oh, and also there are feral mutant children, biotech foxes, and a gigantic, venomous flying bear named Mord, who, along with his miniature Mord proxies, patrols and ravages the world.

VanderMeer is on the vanguard of sci-fi that engages directly with the Anthropocene, the current era where human interference is altering the planet's environment. But VanderMeer's fiction is not preachy by any means. Rather, it probes the mysterious of different lifeforms and highlights our human ignorance at the life around us. Recent Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead hailed Borne as an "investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel."

VanderMeer's best-known work is the Southern Reach trilogy, published in succession in 2014, about a government agency trying (mostly in vain) to understand a bizarre, alien-altered ecological system called Area X. The books were a big success, and the film adaptation of the first book, Annihilation, will hit theaters next year starring Natalie Portman with direction from Ex-Machina's Alex Garland.

While the Southern Reach was an atmospheric horror—"layering a seething and tangled natural landscape to infringe on the characters and reader," in VanderMeer's words—Borne is quite a different beast indeed. "Borne [in] an ecological sense is about a seemingly lifeless place that you slowly come to realize has more life than you might think," he tells me. The novel opens with Rachel finding a weird creature on the fur of the aforementioned gigantic flying bear. She names the shape-shifting creature Borne. At first it resembles "a half-closed stranded sea anemone" but eventually grows—or distorts itself—into something roughly human-size and able to speak.

I'm not sure I've ever read a novel that so perfectly balances the intimate—the lives of Rachel, her partner Wick, and their quasi-child Borne—with the bizarre. In the background, a struggle ensues between the terrifying flying bear Mord and the Magician's army of mutated children. Both are products of biotech tests by a shadowy organization called the Company, which discarded experiments that now populate the land. A lesser writer would make that the story a kind of Godzilla meets Game of Thrones (not that I wouldn't have been thrilled to read that, too), but VanderMeer grounds the novel in the personal story of Rachel and Borne, allowing him to move us with emotion and introspection between bouts of flying-bear fireworks.

"It's all down to Rachel, and I don't think the novel would work without it being from her point of view," VanderMeer explains. "She foregrounds what's important to her, and because she's an old hand in the City, she doesn't spend overlong dwelling on the biotech and the other weirdnesses of this world. She lives in it, and its wonders and horrors are all in a day's work."

Both the imaginative elements and the intimate story of Rachel's odd family make the novel stand in contrast to the dour, post-apocalyptic novels that fill up the bookstore shelves each year. You know the ones: a plague kills everyone, or maybe turns them into zombies, and the last remaining people must murder each other in a desolate wasteland or rape, death, and decay.

Borne is set after an apocalypse, yes, but there is still life both inside and out.

"Sometimes we have misconceptions about kinds of habitat, like deserts, and since the city in Borne is semi-arid, that's one myth I wanted to dispel: that such places are lifeless. They're not," VanderMeer says. "The life might be nocturnal or sometimes underground, or pick its spots to bloom and then fade away for a time, but it's always there. Life on this planet is an endless source of ingenuity and wonder."

The colourful feeling of Borne's world comes from both the natural world and from visual media. VanderMeer lists Moebius, Jodorowsky, and Miyazaki as three strong influences on the book. "Miyazaki in Nausicaa and Princess Monomoke has such sophisticated and brilliant 'seeing' of ecology and of ecological devastation and mutation. The complexity of it all and the burgeoning of weird life in strange places."

Borne is set after an apocalypse, yes, but there is still life both inside and out.

Weird is a key word for VanderMeer's fiction. He's commonly associated with "The New Weird," a group of contemporary genre-bending authors that mix sci-fi, fantasy, and horror together with a healthy dose of the strange. But unlike the cold, nihilistic weirdness of H. P. Lovecraft's amoral alien gods, VanderMeer's fiction is pulled from our own strange, complex, and bizarre planet, as well as the organizations and systems that we humans have enclosed ourselves in.

When I ask VanderMeer what humans refuse to understand about our environment, he notes our strange belief "that somehow we're not part of this world but instead settlers of it, as if we're all astronauts who came from another planet." He points out that, "in fact, that attitude—and the idea that hidden costs aren't actual costs—is what's brought us to the brink. The idea that we must bend the world to our will instead of bend to it."

Of course, the world is not bending to our will so much as pushing back. Climate change is something that hovers behind VanderMeer's fiction, as it does over all of our lives, even if some politicians want to pretend it doesn't exist. Unsurprisingly, VanderMeer is no fan of the current administration. He recently published a short story in Slate about a Trump amusement park that you have to enter through Trump's anus.

"For me, there is no other topic, in a sense, in how it pulls all kinds of other themes and issues into it," VanderMeer says, noting how the interpretation of his work has changed in the decades he has been publishing as our understanding of climate change's dangers have. "It's hilarious to me, grimly, that often early on I was told my work was unrealistic. Well, sadly, it's more realistic now." He continued: "People today live in situations of ecological collapse and displacement. If you don't feel that in your bones, it is because you have been sheltered from it—literally by location or economics or because you wall out the images and reports coming in from other places."

In my own reading, I've noticed that a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction shows either humanity rebuilding hopefully or else revels in a cynical irony about the world being taken over by cockroaches. Borne is different. It provides a sense that human life might survive but also that other intelligent life, with its own aims and dreams, will take over. When I ask VanderMeer about this, he's hesitant to call the book hopeful.

"Does the novel have hope in it? Sure. It has the hope that's warranted—no more and no less. Especially in a context where we seem intent on commodifying 'hope' in the literary world, making it a code word for 'this is still entertaining even though it is dark. Don't worry—we shoved the hope into it, no worries there. Now buy my book.'

"That said, if you still trust me, I do see Borne as hopeful," he elaborated. "I think at this point any fiction that posits that some humans will survive is tilting toward the hopeful, but also it's how you survive. And that doesn't mean how many possessions you have, but how you conduct yourself, and how you manage to have empathy and engage in acts of loving kindness and trust regardless of your situation."

Follow Lincoln Michel on Twitter.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer is available in bookstores and online from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Follow Michael Kupperman on Twitter and buy his books online.

If you've ever wanted to see Brooklyn rapper Desiigner, supermodel Karlie Kloss, and someone dressed as a giant panda explain how climate change affects your daily life, then Bill Nye Saves the World is very much up your alley. The 61-year-old science educator (affectionately known to millions as the "Science Guy") has a new show on Netflix, nearly 20 years after the daytime TV show that introduced him to a legion of 90s kids, Bill Nye the Science Guy. But he's quick to note in the opening minutes of the show's first episode that it's not explicitly for kids, instead targeting "you grown-up kids all over the world" as a potential audience.

Bill Nye Saves the World indeed tackles issues that are on the minds of inquisitive adults and the ill-informed alike—from gender and sexuality, to vaccines, to conspiracies ranging from chemtrails to crop circles. Even if Nye doesn't end up, uh, saving the world with his new show, he's at the least taking a stab at making it more well-informed, which is an admirable and ambitious goal for anyone with a platform to have.

We talked with Nye about the show's aims, saluting Buzz Aldrin at New York Fashion Week (really), and how climate change is scarier than 9/11. During our conversation, he asked if he should put his phone "on stun," which is above all else an indication that trying to save the world doesn't mean you have to lose your sense of humour.

VICE: When this interview was confirmed, I was looking forward to talk about climate change with you. Yesterday, it was 70 degrees here in New York—today, there's 12 inches of snow.
Bill Nye: Nothing to worry about. It's just a little climate change. It's fine.

In the past, educational TV has traditionally been geared toward children.
Well, science TV shows are popular. Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Science Channel—those TV channels didn't exist before. [Educational TV] was just public broadcasting. When Bill Nye the Science Guy was on, there was a rule from the Federal Communications Commission that you had to have three hours of educational programming a week, so we were at the right place at the right time. People love to hate the Gores. But that was because of Tipper Gore. Now, people want to watch [educational TV] just because they want to watch it.

It's very obvious, though, that there are more people than ever who really don't know anything about science.
Or don't know enough. It's not that everybody has to be a scientist, but we want them to be scientifically literate—just to have an appreciation for it.

Was that in the back of your mind when you decided to do this show?
Well, who doesn't want to have his or her own talk show? It's a talk show with a scientific perspective about issues that affect all of us in society. For the first 13 episodes, we chose issues that have a scientific aspect to them—climate change, vaccines, human sexuality. Those all are informed by the process of science. I hope we get renewed. I don't know if we will.

I saw a clip from the show where you were conducting an experiment. When I watched you on TV as a child, it was one of the only places outside of the classroom where you could see someone conduct a science experiment. Now, there's YouTube.
The trouble is, you can fake those demonstrations. If you watched popcorn get popped with cellphones—phones don't pop popcorn. Sorry. There was one where a human slingshot throws a guy across most of a football field, and he lands in a tank of water. It didn't really happen. Sorry. The skill we want to imbue in students—and everybody in society—is what I call 'filtering,' where you have to learn to think critically about stuff that you see online or read. That's part of the mission of the show: to save the world.

There's a notion that being on Netflix, and being untethered from broadcast TV, means you have more creative freedom. What does that mean for you?
We have no commercial breaks. The show can have a more organic quality, and it can be as long as it needs to be. That's big fun. It's about the same as making a regular television show, except it's officially rated PG-13 rather than G. The topics that are discussed might have a little more sophistication or experience from the audience.

Would you say it's still kid-friendly?
Well, yeah. It's PG-13—it's "kid-fascinating." People of all ages want to talk about sex. For Bill Nye the Science Guy, we talked a lot about having a show about sex. It never happened, but we did a show about flowers, which was basically the sex show with different nouns—eggs and pollen, instead of eggs and sperm. Pretty much the same show, really.

Over the past few years, it seems like there's been a resurgence of interest in who you are and what you do.
That's because I'm so interesting. I don't know, though. People who watched the show came of age, I guess.

It's interesting, because America's always had a fickle relationship with science.
Everybody likes space exploration, and everybody still talks about landing on the moon. People still have tremendous respect for astronauts, but everyone runs around terrified of genetically modified foods. Forty acres of land was intended to raise food for a family of four with a little bit of surplus. Now, 40 acres raises food for more than 100 people. That's through science.

Sometimes it seems like we don't talk enough about global warming and climate change just because there's so much other shit that's going on right now.
The trouble with climate change is, viscerally, it takes too long. It's in slow-motion. Its a problem far more serious, in the biggest picture, than 9/11—but because it happens so slowly, people don't need to take it as seriously in the short term. But we're trying to get people excited about it! And addressing climate change is going to be all about science and technology.

I saw pictures of you and Buzz Aldrin walking the runway at New York Fashion Week. How did that happen?
A couple of years ago, I met Nick Graham, the designer who invented Joe Boxer. We started talking about making a line of bow ties, and then he asked me to be in his fashion show. It was cool, big fun. He wanted to have a space theme, and we got Buzz Aldrin to show up.

When you're doing something like that, do you have mentally prepare for it in a different way than when you're working with science?
It's a performance. You're a performer. I actually did quite a bit of talking at that show. The high point, for me, was saluting Buzz Aldrin. It was cool, because he just saluted back—it's deeply wired in his military soul. I've spent a lot of time with Buzz over the years. I'm the CEO of the Planetary Society, which advances space science and exploration. Buzz Aldrin is a big part of the history of space, and he's a big advocate [of going back]. He has a slogan: "Get your ass to Mars." That's one of his big things. He wants to go be on the moon.

Do you think that's going to happen in our lifetime?
What we're doing is advocating to the incoming people at NASA and the administration writ large that if they want to leave a positive, great legacy—and who doesn't want to leave a great legacy?—they need to advance Mars exploration. That involves robotic exploration, the Mars sample return mission, looking for a suitable landing site, working out the arrangements that have to be made with the Planetary Protection Office, and getting people in orbit around Mars. In 2033, you can do that without increasing the NASA budget. You could do it in 2028 if you threw a little money at the problem. We're talking about orbiting first and landing in subsequent years, which is how we explored the moon. Apollo 8 orbited the moon before people landed and walked there.

Right now, there's no business case for going to Mars—you're not going to go to Mars and sell stuff. You might sell a few tickets to people who claim they don't want to come back, but that's a very small market. You can do it without increasing the NASA budget if you just decided to commit to it—as well as by retiring NASA's current enormous commitment to the Space Station in 2024, when the contracts run out. Somebody else can fund the Space Station's happy microgravity experiments, and meanwhile the federally funded missions would go out to Mars.

Follow Larry Fitzmaurice on Twitter.

Last week, two Harvard researchers released the findings of a monumental, National Treasure–worthy discovery—the pair had located the only other handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence known to exist, the Harvard Gazette reports.

Researchers Emily Sneff and Danielle Allen made the discovery back in 2015, when Sneff saw an archival office in West Sussex, England, had a listing of a "Declaration in Congress of the thirteen United States of America," on parchment. After nearly two years of pouring over the document, they determined it's a copy of the original 1776 declaration (the one kept in the National Archives) but written sometime in the 1780s.

The second copy, which Sneff and Allen have named the Sussex Declaration, contains a few key features that differentiate it from the original. Both documents are the same size, but the Sussex document is oriented horizontally, rather than vertically. All 56 signatures are also there, but they're all the same size and not separated by state. The original Matlack Declaration had signatures of all different sizes, and were arranged by the state that signee was representing. According to the researchers, the signatures on the Sussex document signify that it came from a unified group of people, rather than a collection of separate states.

"This parchment manuscript illuminates in one stroke how the Federalists and anti-Federalists debated the question of whether the new republic was founded on the authority of a single, united sovereign people or on the authority of 13 separate state governments," Allen said.

According to Gizmodo, Allen and Sneff aren't sure how the document got all the way to England, but they believe it was originally drafted in the States and commissioned by prominent nationalist James Wilson. It then wound up in the hands of Charles Lennox, an English duke who supported American independence.

Now, having concluded the document came from a tumultuous period in American history, Allen and Sneff want to find out more about Lennox and uncover why he wanted the document.

"Victory was not sweet [after the Revolutionary War]," Allen said. "There was financial disaster, the Articles of Confederation were not working...so the 1780s were a period of great instability, despite victory. And this parchment belongs to that decade."

Two years ago, a 19-year-old Florida teen posted a call for advice in the subreddit askgaybros. In the post, he said he met a guy on Grindr and went back to his place to hook up. When the guy asked to have sex without a condom, the teenager explicitly said no. But during the encounter, he discovered his partner had removed the condom. Panicking and unsure of what to do, the poster said he endured the experience, "already fucking crying in my head."

It was only his sixth sexual encounter, he wrote, and he felt "ruined."

The reddit post sheds light on a common, although rarely discussed, form of gender-based violence: the practice of a man removing a condom during sex without his partner's knowledge or consent. A new study published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law last week goes more in-depth on this phenomenon, also known as "stealthing."

Alexandra Brodsky, a legal fellow at the National Women's Law Center and author of the study, spoke with a number of people, mostly women, who have experienced nonconsensual condom removal. While every survivor's experience is different, Brodsky pointed to two common themes that appeared in her conversations: "The first is that, unsurprisingly, survivors fear unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections," she writes. "The second is that, apart from these specific outcomes, survivors experienced nonconsensual condom removal as a clear violation of their bodily autonomy and the trust they had mistakenly placed in their sexual partner."

Continue reading on Broadly.