Health

Spicy chatbot startup Joi AI says it’s hiring 10 “masturbation consultants” to test new “daily audio-guided sessions” with an AI-generated voice. If you fancy trying your hand, you’ve until the end of the week.

Randomized trial results of the experimental GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon drug shows that it may be too effective, while causing a whopping 11% of participants at the highest dose to drop out because of the severity of the side effects. In Optimizer, Victoria Song covered TikTok influencers pushing grey market knockoffs of “Ratatouille” and attempted to find out what was actually in them. (Please don’t buy shady “Retatrutide” from the internet.)

Turns out one of Trump’s top infectious disease officials is a former penile implant specialist, which is odd considering some of the administration’s other policy positions.

Single-use vapes were banned last year, but that hasn’t stopped the deluge. Six million vapes and vape pods are being thrown out there every week, and the sheer volume is proving impossible to keep up with. Plus, the lithium-ion batteries inside are causing fires. According to The Guardian:

Sometimes the entire story about Trump and RFK’s attitudes towards public health is right there in the headline. CNN reports:

App analytics firm Kochava and its subsidiary, Collective Data Solutions, will be prohibited from “selling, licensing, transferring, sharing or disclosing” sensitive location data without express consent from consumers. The ban settles the FTC’s lawsuit alleging that Kochava sold sensitive geolocation details that could track people seeking or performing abortions.

Instead, President Trump said he’s nominating Dr. Nicole Saphier for surgeon general. While Saphier doesn’t appear to be running the wellness grifter playbook and does, in fact, have a current medical license, she’s also a Fox News commentator with a MAHA-derate stance on vaccines. When will my suffering end?

Gwyneth Paltrow doesn’t seem to know what a peptide is, which might not entirely surprise you.

RFK Jr. has declared that AI could make the FDA “irrelevant,” with entirely predictable effects on The Verge’s long-suffering health and wearable expert Victoria Song.

Kennedy’s remarks come from congressional hearings today. He claims AI, while “very dangerous” has the opportunity to “develop new drugs and personalized medicine for every citizen.” Please, a moment of silence for my sanity.

I don’t make a habit of featuring Verge writers in the comment of the day, but since Nilay’s testosterone levels were the impetus for Victoria Song’s latest Optimizer column, on Whoop’s hunt for new health metrics, it only felt fair to air his response.

In a recent Optimizer, I wrote about how influencers use viral trends to undermine trust in medical science and profit. Well, here’s an example of the consequences in this STAT op-ed penned by a doctor: people are starting to trust untested peptides peddled online over drugs with decades of evidence.

Not because they’re so ugly, it’s because Garmin wearables that track skin temperature during sleep — like the Fenix 8 and Forerunner 970 — can now feed that data to the FDA-cleared Natural Cycles birth control app to show the wearer’s daily fertility status.

They’re hyping up next-generation reactors as a way to meet data center energy demand. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has lost more than 400 people, largely those working on safety.

The phrase is being used to describe the horizontal lines or wrinkles that naturally develop across your neck, and may be exacerbated by constantly looking down at your phone. It sounds like yet another way to sell cosmetic treatments to people by making them feel bad about themselves.

Econ writer Kyla Scanlon notes that a lot of society’s current obsessions — peptide stacks, prediction markets, the manosphere — have all the hallmarks of people coping with feeling out of control. “The reason we can’t solve our problems is not lack of tools or information — it’s that the dominant method (add, optimize, measure) is the wrong method for the problem (figure out what’s poisoning you.)”

The WSJ reports that Means needs the support of every Republican senator to become surgeon general — and she doesn’t have it. The reasons are plentiful, but if you want a rundown, I detailed how Means expertly uses the wellness grifter playbook to spread hokey ideas and sow distrust in health institutions.

The team is constructing the Human Flatus Atlas, bringing modern wearable monitors to bear on digestive health, measuring the frequency and intensity of farts. The team even had to create an artificial butt that could pass gas on command while developing the prototype. According to the Wall Street Journal: