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Scientists have spent more than a decade trying to explain why dozens of Homo naledi skeletons wound up deep inside South Africa’s Rising Star cave system. Now, according to new research published in Cell and reported by Live Science , research conducted on the bodies has taken a weird turn toward the mysterious. Homo naledi is an extinct species of ancient human first discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star Cave system in 2013. Researchers analyzed the specimens’ ancient proteins preserved in the enamel of 23 fossil teeth from 20 individuals dating between roughly 236,000 and 335,000 years ago. One of the many things they look out for is AMELY, a protein linked to the Y chromosome that’s commonly used to identify biological males. They didn’t find it once. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the cave is an ancient all-female cemetery or that there were no males present. Scientists suspect that it’s possible H. naledi lost the gene at some point, or that...

We all have that one friend who seems to fall in love every other week, claiming to have found “the one” every time they go on a first date. For a while, I was this person, until I became so jaded that I required a six-month-long slow burn to even admit I had feelings for someone new. But I digress. While at times endearing, the behavioral pattern of falling in love quickly can be quite concerning and even detrimental. Without giving yourself the proper time to get to know someone , you set yourself and the other person up for failure. Wondering whether falling in love quickly is a red flag? In this article, I speak with a psychologist about the potential downfalls of and reasons for falling in love too soon. Is Falling in Love Quickly a Red Flag? When someone falls in love quickly, they often overlook potential incompatibilities and fill in any blanks with their imagination. Rather than allowing themselves to fully get to know the person, they become invested off ...

There is an arrogance to assuming that if conscious, sentient beings exist somewhere else in the universe , they’d probably look a lot like us. According to a new paper by philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Jeremy Pober of the University of Lisbon, if consciousness exists beyond Earth, it could take forms we can’t even imagine, and it might not even inhabit anything we’d recognize as a body. Their argument, which they lay out in a working paper , centers on an idea called “substrate flexibility.” It means that just because humans have consciousness doesn’t mean all consciousness would be contained in a vessel that looks or functions or is even made up of the same stuff as us. Flesh, blood, neurons, or even carbon-based life — none of that may matter. Consciousness, they theorize, could emerge from entirely different physical materials, just as long as the underlying system contains enough complexity to br...

To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership . A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.) It is not uncommon that something will make me think of Dizzee Rascal . Anything bumblebee yellow, the word “vexed.” Even telling someone I love them is a struggle without chopping up the “you-ou-ou” at the end. Reading behind the paywall of the VICE: Members Only area this week, I was reminded of the lyric: “All we care about is sex and violence,” a god-tier bar in what is otherwise the most aurally demented song released before the advent of Skrillex . As social media becomes an increasingly bizarre, polarized place, so too does society. Titillated as we are by a rolling broadcast of people crying, screaming, and showing hole, gathering up your mates and hitting the Pizza Hut buffet just isn’t cutting it a...

Players believe Xbox has taken a jab at PlayStation killing physical games with a post on social media. An official Halo Campaign Evolved tweet went viral after potentially taking a dig at Sony’s physical disc controversy. Microsoft might have Trolled Sony Over PS5 Physical Disc Controversy Screenshot: Xbox It’s only been a few days since Sony announced they are killing Physical Disc support for all PS5 games starting in 2028, and the industry is still reeling from it. Players have continued to flood social media to vent their frustrations, and Sony itself has gone into hiding. However, it now appears Microsoft has acknowledged the controversy for the first time in a social media announcement. The official Halo Campaign Evolved account recently made a post on X where they revealed all the game’s core features at launch. However, one of the main features they listed is “physical discs.” It immediately sparked a firestorm online with game enthusiasts. Many playe...

A long weekend is officially underway, and the sky is matching the energy — not with fireworks yet, but with something that feels like permission. The Neptune-Sun square wraps up today, stargazer, taking with it the week’s low-grade disorientation without much fanfare. What replaces it is a Friday that actually feels like one. Watch for Moon opposing Venus this afternoon, which might briefly pit what you want against what someone close to you wants — the usual Friday negotiation, only slightly amplified. Work through it before dark. Uranus and Mars hit exact tomorrow, and that conjunction has been building all week. Tonight is for loosening up. Tomorrow is when it actually goes. Read your horoscope for the week , and see what the stars have in store for your sign today.  Aries: March 21 – April 19 Tomorrow, Uranus hits Mars exactly, and the whole weekend is going to feel like a live wire. Tonight is the move, Aries — the last stretch before the energy p...