Elite athletes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6007722/2025/01/11/nhl-recovery-tips/">love their ice baths</a>, or "cold plunges." After sweating it out on the court or on the pitch, you slide into a tub of freezing cold water to keep the muscle cramps away.
Lately, the practice has gained popularity in wellness and bodybuilding circles — with the additional step of snapping a photo of yourself to signal that you belong to a higher echelon of physical specimen — but influencer gym bros especially. You know the type: selling you branded protein powders, a program for "INSANE" gainz, and form-fitting Gymshark tees.
But a <a href="https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/abstract/9900/post_exercise_cooling_lowers_skeletal_muscle.781.aspx">new study</a>, published in the journal Medicine &amp; Science in Sports and &amp; Exercise, throws some cold water on the purported benefits of the practice. And hilariously, it seems to produce the exact opposite effects you'd want as a person trying to build muscle.
"It looks like it's not a great idea" to soak in freezing water after lifting weights, lead author Milan Betz, a researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/04/cold-plunge-ice-bath-benefits/">told the Washington Post</a>.
Wait, you may ask as a person unfamiliar with the practice, why was microdosing hypothermia a thing in the first place? There are purported benefits, backed by limited science. The biggest upside that <a href="https://theconversation.com/ice-baths-are-popular-for-exercise-recovery-and-general-wellness-but-what-does-the-science-say-250649">research has shown</a> so far is that an icy dip can help with muscle soreness by reducing post-exercise inflammation and flushing out lactates.
That makes it more well-suited for aerobic athletes like runners, soccer players, and swimmers. But anyone training for strength? That's a different story.
As part of the study, the researchers had a dozen healthy young men perform a leg workout, and when they were finished, immediately submerge one leg in a bucket of warm water (80 degrees Fahrenheit), and another leg in a bucket of icy water (30 degrees), for 20 minutes. 
To wrap up, all of them were given a protein shake that contained a biochemical tracer, according to WaPo, allowing the researchers to see where the protein traveled in the volunteers' bloodstreams.
Much of that protein, it seems, may be going to waste. Ultrasound imaging revealed that blood flow in the cold-plunged legs dropped considerably compared to the warm leg — and stayed that way for hours. That constriction, as a result, cut off a lot of protein from reaching the strained leg muscles. Less protein, of course, means fewer gains.
Brad Schoenfeld, a noted exercise scientist at Lehman College in New York known for his bodybuilding advice, co-authored a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejsc.12074">2024 meta-analysis</a> which suggested that ice baths could harm hypertrophy. Responding to this latest research, Schoenfeld told WaPo that its findings "provide confirmatory evidence" that a reduction of protein uptake is responsible for these negative effects.
Still, it's not over for ice baths. This was a small study, and one which only focused on one specific approach. The participants plunged immediately after the workout — but most advice out there recommends waiting several hours. Immersion time could be a major factor, too. There could be psychological benefits, and if your personal experience suggests that to be the case, "there’s no reason to change your mind," Benz told WaPo.
That said, Betz recommends that if you're all about gains, you should pass on taking a plunge right after your workout.
More on fitness: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/another-bodybuilder-died-oil-injections">Another Bodybuilder Just Died a Horrible Death</a>

Chilling Effect

Developments

"It looks like it's not a great idea."

Scientists Just Found Something Hilarious About What Actually Happens When Muscle Bros Take Ice Baths

In Washington, projection of power is everything — and some cosmetic surgeons are providing it artificially to their political clientele.
As <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/06/05/dc-plastic-surgery-jawlines-trump-00380485?nname=playbook&amp;nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&amp;nrid=00000167-98b3-d568-a567-9afbf9bc0000">Politico reports</a>, the growing trend of stronger, squarer jawlines among the <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/hollywood-leading-men-plastic-surgery-chins-jawlines.html">Trump sons</a>, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14247631/plastic-surgeon-explains-matt-gaetz-new-look.html">Matt Gaetz</a>, and even <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13891147/elon-musk-plastic-surgery-chiseled-jaw.html">Elon Musk</a> coincides with an uptick in movers and shakers seeking to surgically define their chins and jawlines.
"Strong jawlines and prominent chins are de rigueur in Washington," explained DC dermatologist Tina Alster in an interview with the magazine.
Alster, whose office sits near the seat of power on Downtown Washington's storied K Street alongside lobbying firms, said that the percentage of male clients who come to her seeking stronger jaws has jumped from 20 to 50 percent in the past few years.
The urge, the doctor said, stems from a need to look strong and intimidating on social media and during cable news hits — regardless of whether the politicians in question are going on Fox or MSNBC.
"No one wants to look weak," Alster said, "on camera (or on stage)!"
Such jaw and chin procedures can take many forms, with implants among the most invasive and most noticeable. For others, discretion is key — and some cosmetic clinicians offer nonsurgical options, from hyaluronic acid fillers for extra definition to radiofrequency treatments that make skin look more taut.
"My patients expressly don’t want to leave my office looking transformed or obviously different," dermatologist Noëlle Sherber told Politico, "and seek me out for plausibly deniable results."
Sherber shares a practice with her husband, Ariel Rad, that's located near Alster's in Downtown DC. With the political set's eyes and smartphones always watching, the husband-and-wife duo's offices have an entryway located inside a nondescript skin care store, and for higher-profile clients, they even have a back entrance. Having a defined jawline, it seems, is one thing — but being outed as a cosmetic procedure client is another.
With all this focus on discreetly enhancing masculine features, one has to wonder how the growing prevalence of such chin and jaw procedures <a href="https://uk.news.yahoo.com/maga-republicans-wear-gender-affirming-162125454.html">squares with the anti-trans crusade</a> taken up by the GOP (and some <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/03/10/democrats-transgender-rights-dei">more centrist Democrats</a>, too).
"It’s ironic...that they’re so against trans-ness and gender-affirming care for trans people," opined New York dermatologist Dan Belkin, referencing transphobic conservatives. "Because, you know, they’re all doing their own gender-affirming care."
More on plastic: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-lip-psychology">Scientists Study Who Actually Likes Lip Filler</a>

Power Projection

"No one wants to look weak."

Male Politicians Are Getting Wild Plastic Surgery Procedures

A team of more than two dozen AI researchers from MIT, Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and other institutions have trained a large language model only using data that was openly licensed or in the public domain, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/05/tech-brief-ai-copyright-report/">Washington Post </a><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/05/tech-brief-ai-copyright-report/">reports</a>, providing a blueprint for ethically developing the technology.
But, as the creators readily admit, it was far from easy.
As they describe in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed <a href="https://github.com/r-three/common-pile/blob/main/paper.pdf">paper</a> published this week, it quickly became apparent that it wouldn't be computing power holding them back, but personpower.
That's because the text in the over eight terabyte dataset they put together, which they're calling the Common Pile v0.1, had to be manually cleaned up and reformatted to make it suitable for AI training, WaPo explains. Then there was the amazing amount of extra legwork that had to be done of doublechecking the copyright status of all the data, since many online works are improperly licensed.
"This isn't a thing where you can just scale up the resources that you have available," like access to more computer chips and a fancy web scraper, study coauthor Stella Biderman, a computer scientist and executive director of the nonprofit Eleuther AI, told WaPo. "We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people. And that's just really hard."
Still, Biderman and her colleagues did get the job done.
Once the painstaking odyssey of creating the Common Pile was over, they used their guilt-free dataset to train a seven billion-parameter LLM. The result? An AI that admirably stacks up against industry models like Meta's Llama 1 and Llama 2 7B — which is impressive, but those were versions released over two years ago. That's practically a lifetime in the AI race.
Of course, this was accomplished by a more or less ragtag team and not a corporation with billions of dollars of resources, and had to make up for this in scrappiness. One particularly resourceful find was a set of over 130,000 English language books in the Library of Congress that'd been overlooked.
Copyright remains one of the biggest ethical and legal questions looming over AI. Leaders like OpenAI and Google burned through <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-training-data-shortage">unfathomable amounts of data</a> on the surface web to get to where they are, devouring everything from news articles to stuff as invasive as your social media posts. And Meta has been <a href="https://futurism.com/meta-copyrighted-books-no-value">sued by authors</a> who allege that it illegally used <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-books-train-meta-ai-libgen">seven million copyrighted books</a> that it pirated to train its AIs. 
The tech industry has justified its rapacious data demands by <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/630079/openai-google-copyright-fair-use-exception">arguing</a> that it all counts as fair use — and more existentially, that it would be "<a href="https://futurism.com/openai-content-new-york-times-lawsuit">impossible</a>" to develop this technology without vacuuming everyone's content up for free. 
This latest work is a rebuff to that Silicon Valley line, though it doesn't obviate all ethical concerns. This is still a large language model, a technology fundamentally intended to destroy jobs, and perhaps not everyone whose work has ended up in the public domain would be happy with it being regurgitated by AI — if they aren't dead artists whose copyright has elapsed, of course. 
Even if AI firms are reined in and are made to only use works with permission or compensation — a big if — the fact remains that as long as these companies stick around, there will be significant pressure on copyright holders to allow AI training. 
Biderman herself doesn't have any illusions that the likes of OpenAI will suddenly turn over a new leaf and start being paragons of ethical data sourcing. But she hopes her work will at least get them to stop hiding what they're using to train their AI models.
"Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value and a moderate amount of scientific value," she told WaPo.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/meta-moderators-ai-lgbtq">If You Thought Facebook Was Toxic Already, Now It's Replacing Its Human Moderators with AI</a>

Free Range

Well, look at that.

The Tech Industry Said It Was "Impossible" to Create AI Based Entirely on Ethically-Sourced Data, So These Scientists Proved Them Wrong in Spectacular Fashion

You've heard of how mighty supernovas are, or of the ungodly amounts of energy released by <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/universe/gamma-ray-bursts-harvesting-knowledge-from-the-universes-most-powerful-explosions/">gamma ray bursts</a>.
But astronomers have just discovered a type of cosmic blast that puts all those to shame. They're called "extreme nuclear transients" (ENTs) — and they're quite literally the most powerful explosion witnessed since the dawn of time.
What produces ENTs is appropriately catastrophic: a star, at least three times as massive as our Sun, being obliterated by a supermassive black hole.
"We've observed stars getting ripped apart as tidal disruption events for over a decade, but these ENTs are different beasts, reaching brightnesses nearly ten times greater than what we typically see," Jason Hinkle, lead author of a<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt0074"> new study</a> published in the journal Science Advances, and a researcher at the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy (IfA), said in a <a href="https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/06/04/biggest-explosion-since-big-bang/">statement</a> about the work. 
"Not only are ENTs far brighter than normal tidal disruption events, but they remain luminous for years, far surpassing the energy output of even the brightest known supernova explosions," Hinkle added.
The first clues emerged when Hinkle and his team were trawling through public data collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, a vast three-dimensional map of over two billion stars and counting. Amid this stellar sea, they noticed flares of light, including one recorded in 2016 and another in 2018, that inexplicably lasted for several years. Most cosmic explosions, for comparison, only shine for several weeks.
"When I saw these smooth, long-lived flares from the centers of distant galaxies, I knew we were looking at something unusual," Hinkle said.
He wasn't the only one on the scent. Back in 2023, another team of astronomers <a href="https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2023/05/largest-cosmic-explosion-ever-seen.page#:~:text=The%20explosion%2C%20known%20as%20AT2021lwx,by%20a%20network%20of%20telescopes.">reported</a> a similar detection with the Zwicky Transient Facility in California. Following-up on these findings, Hinkle conducted additional observations with other telescopes, including the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and linked these phenomena together.
The most formidable ENT, assigned the screenname-esque moniker of Gaia18cdj, unleashed 25 times more energy than the most powerful supernova ever detected. In one year, it radiated energy equal to all the energy our Sun will produce in its entire lifetime across billions of years — times one hundred. Typically, a supernova produces "just" one Sun's worth of energy.
To produce such a tremendous blast, a star has to undergo a brutal, slow death. That's what sets these apart from when a star falls into a black hole in a typical tidal disruption event, which culminates in a powerful but brief flash. An ENT draws out the torture, forming a disk of the star's shredded entrails that glows for years. 
This aspect of a supermassive black hole's diet could tell us a lot about how they grew to their monstrous masses  — a mystery that has <a href="https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/black-hole-mystery">long haunted astronomers</a> — and how they stamped their name on a crucial period of the universe's history.
"By observing these prolonged flares, we gain insights into black hole growth when the universe was half its current age and galaxies were busy places — forming stars and feeding their supermassive black holes ten times more vigorously than they do today," said coauthor Benjamin Shappee, an associate professor at IfA, in a statement.
"These ENTs don't just mark the dramatic end of a massive star's life. They illuminate the processes responsible for growing the largest black holes in the universe," Hinkle added.
More on astronomy: <a href="https://futurism.com/mysterious-object-radio-x-ray-pulses">Scientists Spot Mysterious Object in Our Galaxy Pulsing Every 44 Minutes</a>

Always a Bigger Bang

Behold: extreme nuclear transients.

Astronomers Astonished by Largest Explosion Since the Big Bang

A key artificial intelligence pioneer is concerned by the technology's growing propensity to lie and deceive — and he's founding his own nonprofit to curb such behavior.
In a <a href="https://yoshuabengio.org/2025/06/03/introducing-lawzero/">blog post announcing</a> LawZero, the new nonprofit venture, "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+godfather+yoshua&amp;sca_esv=87b41ab4477c98ab&amp;rlz=1C1GCEU_en&amp;sxsrf=AE3TifOpdpyhnnBRNVeEplMJ3dl-iso-ag:1749217783798&amp;ei=9_FCaNK7MJOgptQPrIa-qAk&amp;start=10&amp;sa=N&amp;sstk=Ac65TH5p2aWHP705A-9GFpnfJ3_Yv7AtMw51AKM5nnZPYDGbQPxBBOxdkpwRcJ0iNjVwUvKOviL-mHvvjA2l8SH1YE7lufZZrRVb9w&amp;ved=2ahUKEwiSk42F-NyNAxUTkIkEHSyDD5UQ8NMDegQIBRAW&amp;biw=2327&amp;bih=1163&amp;dpr=1.65">AI godfather</a>" Yoshua Bengio said that he has grown "deeply concerned" as AI models become ever more powerful and deceptive.
"This organization has been created in response to evidence that today's frontier AI models have growing dangerous capabilities and [behaviors]," the world's <a href="https://research.com/scientists-rankings/computer-science">most-cited computer scientist</a> wrote, "including deception, cheating, lying, hacking, self-preservation, and more generally, goal misalignment."
Of all people, Bengio would know. In 2018, the founder of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) was <a href="https://www.acm.org/media-center/2019/march/turing-award-2018">presented with a Turing Award</a> alongside fellow AI pioneers Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton for their formative roles in machine learning research, and he was listed as one of Time magazine's "<a href="https://time.com/collection/100-most-influential-people-2024/">100 Most Influential People</a>" in 2024 thanks to his outsize impact on the ever-accelerating technology.
Despite the accolades, Bengio has <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/16092371-does-yoshua-bengio-regret-helping-create-ai">repeatedly expressed regret</a> over his role in bringing advanced AI technology — and its <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-inventor-regret">Silicon Valley hype cycle</a> — to fruition. This latest missive seems to be his most stark to date.
"I’m deeply concerned," the AI pioneer wrote in his blog post, "by the behaviors that unrestrained agentic AI systems are already beginning to exhibit."
Bengio pointed to recent red-teaming experiments, or tests that push AI models to their limits to see how they'll act, showing that advanced systems have developed an uncanny tendency to keep themselves "alive" by any means necessary. Among his examples was a <a href="https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad13df32ed995.pdf">recent report from Anthropic</a> detailing how its Claude 4 model, when told it would be shut down, <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-email-affair">threatened to blackmail</a> an engineer with incriminating emails if they followed through.
"These incidents," the decorated researcher wrote, "are early warning signs of the kinds of unintended and potentially dangerous strategies AI may pursue if left unchecked."
To put such behavior in check, Bengio said that his new nonprofit is building a so-called "trustworthy" model, which he calls "Scientist AI," that is "trained to understand, explain and predict, like a selfless idealized and platonic scientist."
"Instead of an actor trained to imitate or please people (including sociopaths), imagine an AI that is trained like a psychologist — more generally a scientist — who tries to understand us, including what can harm us," he explained. "The psychologist can study a sociopath without acting like one."
A pre-peer-review paper Bengio and his colleagues published earlier this year explains it a bit more simply.
"This system is designed to explain the world from observations," the <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15657">paper reads</a>, "as opposed to taking actions in it to imitate or please humans."
The concept of building "safe" AI is far from new, of course — it's quite literally why several OpenAI researchers left OpenAI and <a href="https://time.com/6980000/anthropic/">founded Anthropic</a> as a rival research lab.
This one seems to be different because, unlike Anthropic, OpenAI, or any other companies that pay lip service to AI safety while still bringing in gobs of cash, Bengio's is a nonprofit — though that hasn't stopped him from <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/yoshua-bengio-launches-lawzero-a-nonprofit-ai-safety-lab/">raising $30 million</a> from the likes of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others.
More on creepy AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-model-sabotage-shutdown-code">Advanced OpenAI Model Caught Sabotaging Code Intended to Shut It Down</a>

Expert Warning

"I’m deeply concerned by the behaviors that unrestrained agentic AI systems are already beginning to exhibit."

Godfather of AI Alarmed as Advanced Systems Quickly Learning to Lie, Deceive, Blackmail and Hack

The standard model of cosmology may be the best explanation we've got for why the universe is the way it is and how it all came to be. But it's not the only explanation.
Enter black hole cosmology. It's a radical idea which proposes that the Big Bang — the rapid unraveling of an infinitely dense point, believed to have given birth to the cosmos as we know it — actually took place in a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/star-grinder">black hole</a>, which itself formed inside a larger "parent" universe. 
Ergo, all of us — and every star, planet, galaxy, and internet rando — are living inside one of these mysterious singularities.
Enrique Gaztanaga, lead author of a <a href="https://jo">new study</a> published in the journal Physical Review D and a professor at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, isn't the first to propose this controversial idea. But his team's research offers a new model for imagining how this hypothetical scenario took place.
"Our calculations suggest the Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole — followed by a bounce inside it," Gaztanaga wrote in an <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-if-the-big-bang-wasnt-the-beginning-our-research-suggests-it-may-have-taken-place-inside-a-black-hole-258010">essay</a> for The Conversation. 
Certainly, there are a lot of holes you could poke in the standard model. Why is there more matter than anti-matter, when the universe should be uniform? Why did the universe undergo a period of "cosmic inflation" in which it expanded at faster than light speeds, then stopped? And why does its present day rate of expansion <a style="font-weight: 400;" href="https://futurism.com/precise-measurements-universe-wrong">appear to be different</a> depending on how we measure it?
Gaztanaga's main gripe seems to be with our current understanding of a singularity. To him, the idea of the universe starting as a point of infinite density is immensely unsatisfying. 
"This is not just a technical glitch; it's a deep theoretical problem that suggests we don't really understand the beginning at all," he wrote.
Gaztanaga also takes aim at other convenient cosmological constructions like <a href="https://futurism.com/force-universe-changing">dark energy</a>, which is intended to explain why the universe's expansion is mysteriously accelerating. This hypothetical force is thought to make up 68 percent of the universe but is completely unobservable, leaving room for different-minded scientists to call its existence into question.
Rethinking singularities could neatly resolve many of these conundrums. We return to Gaztanaga's paper.
"Gravitational collapse does not have to end in a singularity," he wrote for The Conversation. "Our maths show that as we approach the potential singularity, the size of the universe changes as a (hyperbolic) function of cosmic time."
This is a bold claim. The consensus is that gravitational collapse — like a star imploding into a black hole — must result in an infinitely dense singularity. What Gaztanaga is arguing happens instead is that the collapse not only halt short of completely crushing the matter, but reverses course — a "bounce," in his terminology.
"What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own," Gaztanaga explains. "Even more surprisingly, the rebound naturally produces the two separate phases of accelerated expansion — inflation and dark energy — driven not by a hypothetical fields but by the physics of the bounce itself." 
It's a fascinating explanation, but there's a lot that remains to be proved. It relies on discounting some very well-established physics behind singularities. The standard model may not be perfect, but it's the standard for a reason. It'll take a lot more to dethrone it, and Gaztanaga is optimistic that future missions like the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS, which will study invisible structures of dark matter to test the model, could reveal the answers we're looking for.
More on cosmology: <a href="https://futurism.com/galaxies-pointing-at-us">Astronomers Confused to Discover That a Bunch of Nearby Galaxies Are Pointing Directly at Us</a>

The Big "Bounce"

And we're still trapped inside it.

Scientists Calculate That the Entire Big Bang Must Have Taken Place Inside a Black Hole

Attention, Americans! Next time you fly, the folks at the Transportation Safety Administration have a simple reminder: no, your Costco Membership is not a valid form of ID.
The bizarre reminder came days ago, amidst a renewed flurry of web traffic — and presumably some attempts at the security checkpoint — checking whether the almighty wholesale retail pass will get you to past the gate and onto your flight.
"We love hotdogs and rotisserie chickens as much as the next person, but please stop telling people their Costco card counts as a REAL ID because it absolutely does not," the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CGzQJ7R3a/">TSA implored</a> on social media.
The TSA is a <a href="https://www.theverge.com/c/23311333/tsa-history-airport-security-theater-homeland">legendarily flawed organization</a>, notorious for subjecting untold millions of travelers to cumbersome security theater while <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security">accomplishing very little</a>, but in this instance it was unquestionably correct: a Costco card will emphatically get you nowhere near an airplane at a US airport, and presenting it to airport security may well result in a situation that makes you wish you'd stayed home in the first place.
The agency's truth bomb comes a month after the federal government finally carried out its years-long threat of <a href="https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification">requiring a REAL ID</a> — a state ID authenticated along with legal proof of residence — to board even domestic flights. The looming mandate was established all the way back in 2005, and has consistently been <a href="https://slate.com/business/2025/05/real-id-delayed-again-why.html">pushed back</a> by the government, at least until Trump's <a href="https://votingrightslab.org/report/trump-executive-order-sends-message-to-state-allies-to-implement-upheaval-of-election-laws/">Project 2025-fueled crackdown</a> on voting registration.
The Costco debacle, on the other hand, has its roots in a nebulous internet rumor dating back to at least August, 2021. Among the earliest known claims that a Costco card can get you through TSA comes from immihelp.com, an immigration-assistance website with occasional blogs on travel advice.
A post titled "Costco Cards, and 11 Other IDs That Can Get You through Airport Security" — published on August 16th, 2021, according to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250606213823/https://www.immihelp.com/costco-cards-and-11-other-ids-that-can-get-you-through-airport-security/">metadata</a> — lists the almighty piece of plastic as an acceptable supplement when going through airport security.
"It is a photo ID, and can help you get through a TSA check," the blog advises. It's true that Costco cards have their owners' photos printed on them, but they are absolutely not an official form of ID, at least anywhere except Costco. "Costco is a reputed name, and everyone has heard of its membership program." (To be fair to immihelp.com, the blog does caveat that "perhaps the Costco card alone is not enough.")
The vague rumor only spiraled from there, with years' worth of <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Costco/comments/135gd6l/costco_card_as_photo_id_at_airport/">social media posts</a> piling up into a <a href="https://www.chowhound.com/1864716/costco-card-acceptable-id-airport-tsa/">disinformation tornado</a> on the topic.
Now with dozens of local media outlets circulating the <a href="https://wsbt.com/news/offbeat/costco-card-does-not-qualify-as-real-id-tsa-transportation-airlines-flying-identification-travel-federal-security-safety-gold-star">TSA-Costco debacle</a>, maybe it's only a matter of time before some clever <a href="https://futurism.com/therapy-chatbot-addict-meth">AI chatbot</a> gets in on the fun.
More on retail: <a href="https://futurism.com/target-ai">After Disastrous Experiments Into AI, Target Pledges to Pile on Even More AI</a>

Does Not Fly

"We love hotdogs and rotisserie chickens as much as the next person."

TSA Begs Travelers to Stop Presenting a Costco Membership Card Instead of a Passport

A little-known change to the tax code during Donald Trump's first presidency just might be the driving factor behind all those tech layoffs over the past few years.
As <a href="https://qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-code-trump-section-174-microsoft-meta-1851783502">Quartz reports</a>, a 2017 change to a 70-year-old tax law governing business spending didn't go into effect until 2022 — and three years after it finally did, we can see how harmful the move was.
Back in 1954, the <a href="https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accounting/section-174-considerations/">Internal Revenue Service enacted Section 174</a>, a rule that let companies deduct 100 percent of their research and development (R&amp;D) spending, including salaries for the people involved in it. As Quartz notes, companies like Microsoft and Apple were built upon a tax system that rewarded R&amp;D by allowing all such expenditures to count as write-offs — a system that Trump quietly dismantled at the start of his first stint in the White House.
The president's <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-failed-to-deliver-promised-benefits/">Tax Cuts and Jobs Act</a> (TCJA) of 2017 was perhaps most infamous for slashing corporate taxes from 35 percent to 21. To offset the money lost from those massive cuts and comply with the Senate's budget rules, Congressional Republicans quietly added various rate hikes to the bill that wouldn't kick in until later, and nixing Section 174's 100 percent R&amp;D write-off was one such tactic.
Under the TCJA, companies began in 2022 to be forced to amortize, or spread out, their R&amp;D deductions over a period of five to 15 years rather than doing so all at once. Tech companies that once were able to write off their developers' salaries wholesale were suddenly forced to foot them. According to <a href="https://layoffs.fyi/">Layoffs.fyi</a>, more than 500,000 tech workers lost their jobs since 2023 — and that rule change, Quartz notes, is likely the biggest reason why.
While one would think that such an impactful change to the tax code would be well-publicized, the move inspired little more than cricket sounds as <a href="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-leaders-regret-ai-driven-layoffs/">artificial intelligence</a> and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/07/03/from-overhiring-to-overhauling-the-tech-industrys-talent-paradox/">over-hiring</a> during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic took the blame.
"I work on these tax write-offs and still hadn’t heard about this," one chief operating officer told Quartz. "It’s just been so weirdly silent."
Earlier this year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers launched, <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2673">for the second time</a>, a bill to reverse the TCJA's amortization rule. The so-called <a href="https://larson.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/larson-estes-reintroduce-bipartisan-bill-restore-immediate-research">American Innovation and R&amp;D Competitiveness Act</a>, which was co-sponsored by nearly 70 members of Congress and backed by a <a href="https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startups/">wide swath of tech industry types</a> ranging from crypto bros to CFOs, seeks to change Rule 174 back before year's end in hope of reversing the damage from the TCJA addendum.
Regardless of the new bill's chances of passage, however, it's already too late for the hundreds of thousands of tech workers who lost their jobs due to the rule change — or to undo the <a href="https://aimresearch.co/market-industry/the-great-tech-layoff-lie-and-the-convenient-ai-scapegoat">AI pivot</a> that it may well have inspired.
More on tech labor: <a href="https://futurism.com/computer-science-majors-high-unemployment-rate">"Learn to Code" Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment</a>

Laid To Rest

Why didn't we know about this before? 

There’s a Fascinating Hidden Reason That So Many High-Earning Tech Workers Are Getting Laid Off Now

If you look just right, the Sun appears to be opening its mouth and laughing at us. (We <a href="https://futurism.com/musk-groveling-trump-good-graces">can't imagine why</a>.)
As <a href="https://www.sciencealert.com/a-giant-mouth-has-opened-on-the-sun-and-even-it-looks-surprised">ScienceAlert reports</a>, this colossal gash forming the mouth is what's known as "coronal hole," which occurs when the star's magnetic field opens up and allows a gust of charged solar wind to rush out, leaving the area it just left much cooler and giving it that gaping look. As for the eyes, those are smaller sunspots to the hole's north, giving this solar face a look of surprise.
When looking at the Sun from Earth — which we recommend only doing with <a href="https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Safety_tips_for_observing_the_Sun">special glasses or instruments</a>, by the way — you won't notice its wide grin unless viewing it on the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum. From that wavelength, a different picture emerges: one with a wide, open mouth that laughs at our little lives back on terra firma.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
SO COOL! We just observed the creation of a coronal hole, which have been populating our Sun like crazy recently! Here how it happened in this <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/spaceweather?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#spaceweather</a> deep dive 💡
Coinciding with material filaments that have a higher density than their surroundings are &quot;magnetic ropes&quot;.… <a href="https://t.co/yvWbhp4kQc">pic.twitter.com/yvWbhp4kQc</a>
&mdash; Stefan Burns (@StefanBurnsGeo) <a href="https://twitter.com/StefanBurnsGeo/status/1930782011863757127?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
A fairly regular occurrence, coronal holes like this one can cause strong geomagnetic activity and even the kind of "storms" that send out bursts of charged particles towards Earth, often resulting in <a href="https://www.space.com/stargazing/auroras/aurora-alert-incoming-solar-storm-could-spark-auroras-as-far-south-as-new-york-and-idaho-this-weekend">beautiful auroras</a> or communication systems failures. Space weather reports indicate that this latest coronal hole is indeed causing such a storm, though it's unclear whether <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/thai-network-outage-caused-power-032421910.html">any tech glitches</a> will follow in its wake.
The images we're seeing of the Sun's cheeky grin don't do justice to just how huge it is. As ScienceAlert notes, this coronal hole is as wide as five Jupiters lined up side-by-side, which would put it at about 434,000 miles across.
Interestingly, this is not the first time a five-Jupiter-width geomagnetic chasm has opened up to form a creepy grin on the Sun.
Almost exactly 18 months ago — not long before the so-called "<a href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14683">solar maximum</a>," or period when the Sun's geomagnetic activity is at its peak, in October 2024 — a slightly <a href="https://www.space.com/sun-coronal-hole-earth-auroras-dec-2023">more devilish smile was seen on our star</a> as it blew out its ultracharged breath towards Earth.
In that instance, as in this one, the geomagnetic storm associated with the coronal hole wasn't all that strong, resulting in little more than <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/an-obstreperous-sun-triggers-dazzling-northern-lights-as-seen-from-space">glittering auroras</a> and a <a href="https://www.boredpanda.com/gaping-hole-in-the-sun-bigger-than-60-earths-blasts-solar-wind/">bit of social media panic</a>.
More on the Sun: <a href="https://futurism.com/sun-pink-new-images">New Imaging Technique Makes the Sun Look Like a Swirling Pink Liquid</a>

Hole In One

Why so serious?

Giant Crude Face Appears on Sun

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) moved fast and broke things in Washington — and now Donald Trump's administration is left to clean up the mess.
As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/06/doge-staff-cuts-rehiring-federal-workers/">Washington Post reports</a>, federal employees who were fired rapidly by DOGE cuts are now being rehired to their old positions or asked to join different departments amid Musk's departure from government.
From the Food and Drug Administration to the Department of Housing and Urban Development to at least six other agencies, workers fired during the unelected billionaire's federal firing frenzy are being asked by officials from Donald Trump's administration to come back to work — but not everyone is interested in returning.
Workers of retirement age who were fired during DOGE's halcyon days have been reluctant to come back on board, leading the Trump administration to find workarounds to refill so many necessary positions. Folks who worked at the US Agency for International Development before it was kiboshed early in Musk's reign of terror were asked, for instance, if they wanted to come back to the government and work at the State Department.
"I was like, well, I definitely don’t want to work for this administration, but, yes, I need a job, so put my name down," one former USAID worker told the newspaper. "Why not? I have nothing to lose."
Over at the FDA, where <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/01/g-s1-57485/hhs-fda-layoffs-doge-cdc-nih">at least 3,500 people</a> lost their jobs as DOGE set its sights on the body that governs our food and drug safety, the vibes were somehow even worse.
"They wanted to show they were gutting the government, but there was no thought about what parts might be worth keeping," explained one fired and rehired FDA staffer. "Now it feels like it was all just a game to them."
Others still have returned only because they haven't yet found alternative employment. Another FDA employee who had been fired under DOGE's mandate was informed that she was expected to go back to work — and begrudgingly, she complied.
"Being back feels like a funeral," the second FDA worker said. "Morale is terrible. Everyone is stressed and feels the absence of our colleagues."
"I’m looking for another job," she added.
As federal employees return in fits and starts, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-musk-feud-leaves-doge-staffers-worried-futures/story?id=122573423">ABC reports</a> that DOGE staffers themselves are now worried about their futures as their departed leader feuds with the president — a laughable concern, given that they signed up to do such dirty work.
More on Elon and Trump: <a href="https://futurism.com/mars-society-expert-elon-musk-ruining">Elon Musk's "Hubris and Arrogance" Are Ruining Our Chances of Actually Getting to Mars, Says Leading Expert</a>