So, South Park did it again. They made fun of Trump, calling him a big stupid idiot with a tiny penis. Apparently, it hurt his feelings a lot. The White House even had to respond. Just another day of satire hitting where it hurts – in his tiny, shriveled ego. The whole thing feels kind of predictable and, honestly, a bit boring now. #SouthPark #Trump #Satire #Ego #Comedy

Three former executives at the French video game company Ubisoft used their position to bully or sexually harass staff, leaving women terrified and feeling like pieces of meat, a French court has heard.The state prosecutor Antoine Haushalter said the trial of three senior game creators for alleged bullying, sexual harassment and, in one case, attempted sexual assault was a “turning point” for the gaming world. It is the first big trial to result from the #MeToo movement in the video games industry, and Haushalter said the case had revealed “overwhelming” evidence of harassment.In four days of hearings, female former staff members variously described being tied to a chair, forced to do handstands, subjected to constant comments about sex and their bodies, having to endure sexist and homophobic jokes, drawings of penises being stuck to computers, a manager who farted in workers’ faces or scribbled on women with marker pens, gave unsolicited shoulder massages, played pornographic films in an open-plan office, and another executive who cracked a whip near people’s heads. The three men deny all charges.Haushalter said “the world of video games and its subculture” had an element of “systemic” sexism and potential abuse. He said the #MeToo movement in the gaming industry had allowed people to speak out.“It’s not that these actions were not punished by the law before. It’s just that they were silenced, and from now on they will not be silenced,” he said.Ubisoft is a French family business that rose to become one of the biggest video game creators in the world. It has been behind several blockbusters including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and the children’s favourite Just Dance.The court in Bobigny, in Seine-Saint-Denis, heard that between 2010 and 2020 at Ubisoft’s offices in Montreuil, east of Paris, the three executives created an atmosphere of bullying and sexism that one member of staff likened to a “boys’ club”. One alleged victim told the court: “The sexual remarks and sexual jokes were almost daily.”Tommy François, 52, a former vice-president of editorial and creative services, is accused of sexual harassment, bullying and attempted sexual assault. He was alleged once to have tied a female member of staff to a chair with tape, pushed the chair into a lift and pressed a button at random. He was also accused of forcing one woman wearing a skirt to do handstands.“He was my superior and I was afraid of him. He made me do handstands. I did it to get it over with and get rid of him,” one woman told the court.At a 2015 office Christmas party with a Back to the Future theme, François allegedly told a member of staff that he liked her 1950s dress. He then allegedly stepped towards her to kiss her on the mouth as his colleagues restrained her by the arms and back. She shouted and broke free. François denied all allegations.Another witness told the court that during a video games fair in the US, François “grabbed me by the hair and kissed me by force”. She said no one reacted, and that when she reported it to her human resources manager she was told “don’t make a big thing of it”.The woman said that later, in a key meeting, another unnamed senior figure told staff he had seen her “snogging” François, “even though he knew it had been an assault”.She said François called her into his office to show her pictures of his naked backside on his computers and on a phone. “Once he drew a penis on my arm when I was in a video call with top management,” she said.The woman said these incidents made her feel “stupefied, humiliated and professionally discredited”.François told the court he denied all charges. He said there had been a “culture of joking around”. He said: “I never tried to harm anyone.”Serge Hascoët told the court: ‘I have never wanted to harass anyone and I don’t think I have.’ Photograph: Xavier Galiana/AFP/Getty ImagesSerge Hascoët, 59, Ubisoft’s former chief creative officer and second-in-command, was accused of bullying and sexual harassment. The court heard how at a meeting of staff on an away day he complained about a senior female employee, saying she clearly did not have enough sex and that he would “show how to calm her” by having sex with her in a meeting room in front of everyone.He was alleged to have handed a young female member of staff a tissue in which he had blown his nose, saying: “You can resell it, it’s worth gold at Ubisoft.”The court heard he made guttural noises in the office and talked about sex. Hascoët was also alleged to have bullied assistants by making them carry out personal tasks for him such as going to his home to wait for parcel deliveries.Hascoët denied all the charges. He said: “I have never wanted to harass anyone and I don’t think I have.”The former game director Guillaume Patrux, 41, is accused of sexual harassment and bullying. He was alleged to have punched walls, mimed hitting staff, cracked a whip near colleagues’ faces, threatened to carry out an office shooting and played with a cigarette lighter near workers’ faces, setting alight a man’s beard. He denied the charges.The panel of judges retired to consider their verdict, which will be handed down at a later date. #harassment #ubisoft #executives #left #female

Vaginal health shouldn’t be something to hide. #039it039s #radical #inversion #penis #envy039

Image by Getty / FuturismCancerOn Sunday, The New York Times reported that former president Joe Biden, 82, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.What, exactly, does that mean? A bunch of Americans have apparently been trying to figure that out.Google search queries for the phrase "what is a prostate" drastically spiked following news about the former president's cancer diagnosis, as flagged on Bluesky by The Onion writer June Sternbach.The trend suggests that the sad news about America's 46th president didn't just spark inquiry over prostate cancer and what it means, but that a surprising number of US citizens are unclear on what a prostate even is, which may unfortunately be a glaring indictment of American health education.Because many citizens are clearly looking for some answers, we shall provide them. The prostate, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a "gland about the size of a chestnut" that sits below men's bladders and above their pelvic floors. It's a component of the male reproductive system, and a key function includes providing an essential fluid used by the male body to create sperm.Doctors recommend that men, especially as they age, get regular prostate exams. As men get older, most will experience prostate enlargement, which may cause some irritation to the bladder. Prostate cancer, meanwhile, is the leading cancer for men, according to the American Cancer Society, and is most common in patients over the age of 65.As NPR noted this week, prostate cancer can be effectively treated, and has a five-year relative survival rate of about 97 percent. Those odds go down, however, if the cancer spreads to other parts of the body, as Biden's has. His cancer has progressed to Stage 4 and has metastasized to the bone.The former president "has a very bad version" of prostate cancer, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine urologist Ben Davis told NPR, "probably the worst version you can get."Still, Davies added, advancements in treatment mean that "it's not all doom and gloom, to be honest.""He can easily live ten years with this disease," the urologist continued.Biden's team has said that the former president's cancer "appears to be hormone-sensitive," which may make it more manageable, per the NYT.It's an unfortunate situation for Biden — whose son, Beau Biden, died in 2015 of brain cancer at the age of just 46 — and his family.So, maybe, now that we all know what a prostate is, if you have one: please consider getting it regularly checked out, and all of us should tell our loved ones to consider doing the same.More on the male reproductive system: Microplastics Found in Human PenisesShare This Article #far #too #many #americans #googled

May 18, 2025Accidental Alchemy, Flamingo Food Tornado, and Kosmos-482 LandsKosmos-482 crash-lands, physicists turn lead to gold and animals show some clever behaviors. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyHappy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Allison Parshall filling in for Rachel Feltman. Let’s kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.First, an update on that doomed Soviet-era spacecraft Rachel mentioned last week. After spending more than half a century orbiting Earth, the Kosmos-482 probe made a crash landing on May 10. According to a post on the app Telegram from Russian space agency Roscosmos, the spacecraft crashed into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Space.com reports that other space agencies have estimated different landing spots for the probe, from locations on land in South Asia to stretches of the eastern Pacific. We may never know exactly where Kosmos-482 finally came to rest. In any case, we haven’t heard any reports of falling space junk causing harm to humans, so it seems likely the object crashed somewhere out of the way.Now for some accidental alchemy. Despite the wishes of medieval scholars, there’s no way to turn lead into gold, right? Wrong. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider apparently did just that—very briefly, but still. The scientists published a description of this magical-sounding transformation earlier this month in the journal Physical Review C. On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Here’s how it worked: Scientists at CERN use the Large Hadron Collider to study the early universe by firing lead nuclei at one another at nearly the speed of light. Instead of smashing head-on, the nuclei usually pass very close to one another. In these near-misses, the powerful electric field from one nucleus can shake up the other. If the field is strong enough, it can knock out three protons from an incoming lead nucleus. Since gold has three fewer protons than lead, this transforms the lead into gold.The researchers estimate that 89,000 gold nuclei are produced per second during these experiments. That means that between 2015 and 2018—the accelerator’s second run, which is when the scientists collected this data—the collider produced 29 trillionths of a gram of gold. Unfortunately for any prospectors at CERN, those atoms tend to get obliterated in about a microsecond. Nature reports that another CERN accelerator also observed this alchemical reaction during a 2002 to 2004 run. But because that experiment used less energy, less gold was produced.In public health news, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released last Wednesday indicates a massive drop in overdose deaths between 2023 and 2024. In the 45 years that the CDC has collected equivalent data, the biggest one-year dip seen previously was 4 percent in 2018, according to the Associated Press. Deaths dropped from about 110,000 in 2023 to roughly 80,000 in 2024, which represents a nearly 27 percent decrease. The AP reports that experts mentioned several possible factors behind the drop, including the increased availability of naloxone for treating overdoses.It’s important to note that, while this is promising news, we still have a long way to go. Overdose deaths are still higher than they were before the COVID pandemic, and overdose remains the leading cause of death for people in the U.S. between ages 18 and 44. If you don’t already carry naloxone with you in case you encounter someone experiencing an overdose, consider looking into what resources your state and county offer for training and distribution. You can check out GetNaloxoneNow.org to find more information.We’ll wrap up with a couple of fun animal stories.Let’s start with flamingos. They’re not exactly known for being very active. You’re probably picturing the birds standing calmly in crystal clear water. But according to a study published last Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they’re surprisingly busy just beneath the surface.Similar to the way spiders use webs to trap prey, the study authors say, flamingos create little water tornados to coax food straight into their mouths.First, the birds use their feet to churn sediment up. Then they jerk their heads up, turning those small whorls of sediment into vortexes. Meanwhile, the animals chatter their beaks to create even more water movement, pulling the swirling sediment into their mouths. From there, the flamingos can filter out tiny prey such as brine shrimp—but it seems like this filter feeding is a lot less passive than it looks.In other animal news, it turns out that chimps use leaves for everything from first aid to bathroom hygiene. In a study published Tuesday in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, researchers describe their observations of two different communities of chimpanzees in Uganda. The researchers identified numerous instances of “self-care” using leaves, from dabbing wounds to packing them with chewed-up plant matter. The chimps sometimes offered this care to others, too. That’s similar to behavior other researchers reported last year in orangutans over in Indonesia. Orangutans have also been seen applying juice made from saliva and the leaves of a plant with anti-inflammatory properties all over their bodies, which scientists suspect they might be doing to relieve joint and muscle pain.Plants seem to be part of a larger wellness routine for chimps, too: the scientists also saw them using leaves to clean themselves up after pooping or having sex. The researchers even described one instance of what they called “prosocial postcoital penis wiping,” which means one chimp leant another a hand with intimate personal hygiene.While these aren’t the first documented cases of first aid in nonhuman animals—or even in chimps, who have been seen putting smashed insects in their wounds, possibly for medicinal purposes—scientists are excited to see evidence that medicinal plant use might be more widespread than expected among our close relatives. That could suggest that wound care goes way, way back in our evolutionary history.That’s all for this week’s news roundup. Rachel will be back on Wednesday.Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by me, Allison Parshall, and edited by Alex Sugiura. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Allison Parshall. Have a great week! #where #did #kosmos482 #land #one

Watch a Giant Snail Lay an Egg From a Pore in Its Neck in First-Ever Footage Captured in New Zealand Conservation rangers took a video of an endangered, captive snail laying a large egg, revealing insight into the creature’s reproductive process Rangers witnessed a captive Powelliphanta augusta snail lay an egg from its neck, and they managed to catch it on video for the first time ever. New Zealand Department of Conservation A small, white orb emerges from the body of a slimy creature in footage shared by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. Though this scene might not look like much, it’s an extremely rare moment that scientists just captured on video for the first time: a mysterious Powelliphanta augusta snail laying an egg from a pore in its neck. The snail is one of New Zealand’s most threatened invertebrates, named for its natural habitat along the Mount Augustus ridgeline in the country’s West Coast. But now, that site has almost entirely been destroyed by mining activity. To protect the snails, the DOC brought a number of them into captivity in 2006, and experts have been tending to the population ever since, keeping them in chilled containers that mimic the creature’s preferred environment. “It’s remarkable that in all the time we’ve spent caring for the snails, this is the first time we’ve seen one lay an egg,” DOC ranger Lisa Flanagan, who took the video, says in a statement. “We caught the action when we were weighing the snail. We turned it over to be weighed and saw the egg just starting to emerge from the snail.” Scientists knew very little about Powelliphanta snails before they began caring for the captive population. “This moment gives us a glimpse into the fascinating reproductive lives of these threatened snails,” according to a DOC Facebook post. Powelliphanta augusta snail laying an egg Watch on Powelliphanta are some of the largest snails in the world. They’re carnivorous, dwell on land and feast on worms and slugs. Like many other snails, they’re hermaphrodites, meaning individuals have both male and female genitalia. Powelliphanta snails thrive in moist habitats and are thus mostly found in New Zealand’s high-altitude forests and wetter western regions, where they occasionally emerge from leaf piles at night to mate and search for food. Many snails lay eggs, though some—like the marine species Littorina saxatilis—birth live baby snails, as reported by Live Science’s Pandora Dewan. The P. augusta snail, meanwhile, has a genital pore—akin to the vagina in mammals—just below its head. While this might seem like an unusual position, it allows the snail to poke out its head for mating and laying eggs, while the rest of its soft, vulnerable body remains protected by the shell. “It extends its penis out of this pore and into its mate’s pore, and its mate does the same, simultaneously exchanging sperm,” DOC senior science advisor Kath Walker explains in the statement. Though, as hermaphrodite “carnivores, which have to live at relatively low density, being able to occasionally self-fertilize must help with survival of the species.” What probably doesn’t help, however, is that P. augusta snails don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re 8 years old. While some of the snails in the DOC’s care are between 25 and 35 years old, they only lay about five eggs per year, which can take more than a year to hatch. That’s in stark contrast with non-native, invasive garden snails in New Zealand, which live short lives but lay thousands of eggs annually, according to the statement. When P. augusta’s habitat began to be threatened by mining in the early 2000s, the DOC relocated about 4,000 of them to other areas and took another 2,000 into captivity, per the Associated Press’ Charlotte Graham-McLay. It’s been a bumpy ride, however—the snails returned to the spotlight in 2011, when a faulty fridge accidentally froze 800 of them to death. “Keeping our wildlife in fridges is obviously not how New Zealanders would like to care for native animals found nowhere else in the world,” Nicola Toki, a conservationist who is now CEO of the New Zealand nonprofit Forest & Bird, told the BBC at the time. “It’s a sad fact that this has been the best option for them.” Nevertheless, the captive program has both saved the species from extinction and allowed scientists to learn more about the mysterious snail, per the DOC’s Facebook post. As reported by the Associated Press, the captive population had risen to 1,900 snails and almost 2,200 eggs by March of this year. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday. #watch #giant #snail #lay #egg