The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

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OZEMPFLUENCER: WeightWatchers invited influencers to an Ozempic hype house to make content for WW’s new weight loss drug service. The company infamous for turning eating into a traumatic game received a lot of social media backlash for the event.

LIVE A YEAR ON FAKE MARS: NASA needs volunteers for a trip to the Red Planet…with a much shorter commute than the real thing. A four-person crew will spend a year in a Mars simulator—a 1,700-square-foot, 3D-printed enclosure at its hub in Houston—for researchers to learn more about what it’s like to live in space.

Personal

SURE, MARRY YOUR COUSIN: The Economist got ratio’d when it published a story with the super-convincing headline, “Cousin marriage is probably fine in most cases.”

KEEP YOUR MONEY: The Omaha Zoo’s white alligator Thibodaux had emergency surgery to remove 70 coins from its stomach. The zoo is asking visitors to stop throwing coins into bodies of water at the facility because all wishes will backfire if your quarter injures an endangered species.

For sale

DOOMSDAY MANSION: Billionaires are building bunkers and survival shelters to hide from the world—fine. But they’re going to be really bored during the apocalypse while we all go on journeys to fight the raborses (rabbit-horse creatures that nuclear waste runoff created that now terrorize our encampments).

PUBLIC RESTROOM PARADE: A ride-sharing company is offering “restroom enthusiasts” a four-hour tour of Tokyo’s public toilets. The guided trip provides sort of the opposite of a souvenir.—MM

Photo of the week

AI wishes it could create an image like this. Heavy rains in California over the past six months have transformed Death Valley National Park from one of the driest places in the world into a destination for splishing, splashing, and snapping incredible photos. A temporary lake dubbed Lake Manly has formed in the Badwater Basin, which is 282 feet deep and America’s lowest point (that’s geologically speaking; theatrically speaking, America’s lowest point is the Road House remake). But get there soon—the park says the ability to kayak may only last a couple more weeks, although the water could remain deep enough to create a reflection through April.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even never get lost again.

TV marathons are linked to nighttime pee breaks. That’s according to new research showing that adults who do more binge-watching are more likely to visit the bathroom at least twice after bed. Americans aged 20 and older who responded to national health surveys from 2011 to 2016 had a 48% higher risk of multiple late-night urinations (a condition called nocturia) if they watched television or other videos for at least five hours. The researchers say this could be explained by viewers having more refreshments or the fact that our legs retain fluid when we’re immobile for a while. Many of the people who reported nocturia, however, were older and less active, so that could also explain their bathroom habits. The study didn’t prove any causal relationships.

ADHD might be an evolutionary edge. Early humans may have developed traits characteristic of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder—like impulsivity, disorganization, and trouble with focusing—as evolutionary advantages in foraging, according to a new study. Researchers screened 457 people for ADHD symptoms and then had them play an online foraging game where the goal was to collect as many berries as possible. Participants who scored the highest in the game tended to 1) explore more berry bushes in different areas rather than exhaust the same patches and 2) report more ADHD-like symptoms. This tracks with similar research that showed nomadic societies that successfully branched out to new territories often had genes linked to ADHD.

You can improve your sense of direction by kinda just wandering around. Just about anyone can get better at knowing where to go in unfamiliar environments by learning from competitive navigators (known as orienteers), who have great spatial memory. To boost that ability, cognitive experts recommend devoting time to aimless roaming, which also helps alleviate wrong-way anxiety when strolling with purpose. In cities or suburbs, you can learn to navigate better by paying more attention to wind direction, the sun, and slopes in the ground. And one final tip for understanding which way you’re really facing: Change your phone’s map settings so that north is always at the top.—ML

Is the Google Search era over?

Try Googling, “Has Google gone downhill?”—you’ll notice that many people are convinced the answer is yes. The first blue link will take you to a collection of Reddit rants, full of complaints about paid ads and product-peddling spam sites that seem to frequently prevail among Google search results, according to the commenters.

Recent research suggests that the frustration isn’t just nostalgia for some mythical heyday of the 25-year-old product. A group of leading internet scholars from Germany found that Google struggles to keep sites with misleading product reviews out of its top results.

Google told Gizmodo that junk results mostly come up for queries about products and that it’s made improvements to clutter-proof its algorithms.

But while Google was found to perform better than search rivals Bing and DuckDuckGo, Google’s misfires are magnified, given that it commands over 90% of the world’s search market. But its current primacy doesn’t mean it should kick back and take it easy.

A fresh crop of AI-powered tools threatens to challenge its status as the go-to for anyone needing to know whether a rash around their belly button is serious.

• OpenAI, the ChatGPT-maker, is reportedly building its own search product and lending AI capabilities to Microsoft’s Bing.
• The Jeff Bezos-backed AI bot Perplexity summarizes info from the web and provides links to reputable sources. It’s valued at $520 million after a recent fundraising round.

Is Google “enshittifying”?

That’s what the inventor of the concept of “enshittification,” Cory Doctorow, thinks. The internet culture critic coined the term in 2022 to describe the decay of mature online platforms when they choose to juice profits at the expense of user experience.

Doctorow claims that Google’s top results have become “dominated by spam, scams, and ads.” He says it’s become too easy for sites pushing useless content to manipulate the guarded algorithm that ranks search results.

• Someone searching for the best nose-hair trimmers would likely be inundated with product review sites that are not as committed to educating people about the best nasal grooming options as they are to earning a fee for each visitor they route to e-commerce platforms who then buys something.
• Many review sites that don’t actually test the items they’re promoting are shown to Google users by including certain keywords on their pages.

Doctorow writes that the company became a search behemoth while assuring regulators that it would spend significant resources fighting spam. But he says instead, Google worked to ensure you choose its product without a second thought. It was recently revealed that Google paid the likes of Apple and Samsung $26 billion in 2021 to be their devices’ default search engine.

Tactics like these are part of why the Justice Department is suing Google for alleged illegal tactics to become a search engine monopoly, with a ruling expected in May. 

Is its search supremacy slipping away?

It’s been a year since Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told The Verge that he wants “people to know that we made [Google] dance” as he bragged about the glow up Bing is getting from OpenAI. Bing has since failed to win any new market share, according to The Information, while Google has been busting some moves to compete with OpenAI.

• Google rolled out its own AI chatbot Bard (now Gemini) shortly after ChatGPT went online, and it’s been experimenting with adding AI-generated summaries to search.
• It reportedly has been working with TikTok to embed search results into the app, among other plans that antitrust activists criticized as efforts to expand its search monopoly in a letter to the DOJ, the New York Post reported this week.

Zoom out: A Google spokesperson told the WSJ that its spam-fighting systems “help keep search 99% spam free” and that it frequently updates its search tool to weed out bad results. But it’ll need to keep providing value to users as AI threatens to upend the way people access information on the web.—SK

Place to be: The BT Tower in London

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

What’s British, been around for a long time, and getting a much-needed overhaul by Americans?

Stop guessing Premier League teams. We’re talking about London’s BT Tower, which was listed as one of the world’s most hated buildings by the New York Times in 2015. It’s being given a second life as a hotel after getting bought this week for $346 million by MCR Hotels.

• The 620-foot building was completed in 1964 and held the title of London’s tallest structure until 1980. It had a rooftop restaurant but was used primarily as a telecommunications tower eventually rendered obsolete by technological advancements.
• The BT Tower was the target of a suspected IRA bombing in 1971 and was closed to the public in 1981, except for special events and occasional tours.

While it was designed for function more than form, the BT Tower can boast that it had London’s first observation deck.

No need to rush to book a room just yet. It will be years before the transformation from useless tower → posh hotel is complete. But if you’re wondering what its new owners might have in mind, look to the TWA Hotel at New York’s Kennedy Airport—MCR opened the chic spot in 2019 and CEO Tyler Morse said he sees “parallels” between the TWA Hotel and the BT Tower.—DL

Crowd work

Last week, we asked you to share your scam stories. Here are our favorites:

• “On my first visit to NYC (2013), my friend and I spent a combined $23 on bootleg rap CDs in Times Square. That’s just about as ridiculous as the $50k in a shoebox.”—Matt from Savage, MN
• “I matched with a girl on Tinder. We agreed to meet, but she lived far away from my place and I didn’t want to go to her part of the city. I told her to call a taxi and that I would pay for it. I Venmoed her for the ride, and she proceeded to block me, unmatch me, and never talk to me again. So yeah, I had that scam coming.”—Robert from Miami, FL
• “I worked at a gas station outside of a theme park when I was 19 years old. One busy afternoon, a guy came up and paid for a 2-liter bottle of Hawaiian Punch with a $100 bill. This man also must have been David Blaine because not only did he leave with his $98 in change but he also left with his original $100. I had never seen or heard of a quick-change artist before, but he was just that: an artist. It was a magical scam. He technically didn’t even steal anything. I just gave him the money somehow out of the register. When I realized what had happened, it was too late and he was driving off. Needless to say, management wasn’t happy. I slammed some Twisted Teas in the cooler and got fired later that afternoon.”—Joe from Eureka, MO

This week’s question

Instead of a flag, what should the US leave on the moon to signify our visit?

Adam’s answer to get the juices flowing: Wacky waving inflatable tube man, the ultimate symbol of American soft power.

Share your response here.