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The Mr. Beastification of entertainment
Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. Mr. Beast, at the 2023 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. | Michael Tran/AFP via Getty Images The most popular YouTuber in the world is going Hollywood. A helicopter drops Mr. Beast and his friends onto the roof of an abandoned hotel, resting on the water’s edge of a Mediterranean resort town. They’re about to spend the next seven days there, trying not to die, all in service of a recent YouTube video called “I Survived 7 Days in an Abandoned City.” “This once beautiful city was bombed and abandoned because of war,” Mr. Beast’s voiceover explains. Which city? What war? It’s not yet clear, and at no point in the rest of the 17-minute video does MrBeast (as it’s styled on his channel) — age 25, real name Jimmy Donaldson — explain where he is. Outside of a half-second appearance of a postcard with the town’s name (Kupari), the location and its history as a casualty of the Croatian War of Independence in the early 1990s goes unacknowledged. Why he’s there, however, is obvious to anyone familiar with his oeuvre. Mr. Beast is a YouTube creator whose approach to video production is far less interested in what is on screen than in what will make the numbers in the bottom left corner go up. What matters is more views, longer watch times, and more subscribers, and nothing in a Mr. Beast video is not in service of this goal: not the creepily airbrushed thumbnails, not the titles with an ever-increasing number of zeros (“Last to Leave Circle Wins $500,000,” “If You Can Carry $1,000,000 You Keep It!,” “$1 vs $100,000,000 House!”), not the watch time (usually around 20 minutes, or roughly the length of a meal), not the total lack of politics, current events, or extraneous details like, say, the complex aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Since starting his YouTube channel in 2012 at age 13, Donaldson has been a devoted student of virality, shirking basically everything else in his life in service to the YouTube algorithm. It worked; at 244 million subscribers, his is currently the second most popular channel in the world, second only to T-Series, an Indian record label. (Cocomelon, the beloved of iPad babies, is third.) His enormous fanbase, largely made up of children and teenagers, doesn’t mind that he is, as the New York Times magazine put it, “not particularly funny or well spoken or physically striking,” nor that he’s a socially awkward introvert who is “not really good at keeping friends.” They care about him because Donaldson has figured out what makes a perfect YouTube video, how to capture young people’s dwindling attention spans by giving them nonstop visual stimulation with just enough real human drama and glimpses of the American dream that they can feel good about watching it. Now, with a just-announced deal — rumored to be worth as much as $100 million — to host an Amazon reality competition show with the biggest single prize in TV history ($5 million), he’s coming for Hollywood, too. If your first thought is that this sounds a little icky, you’ve probably aged out of the Mr. Beast demographic The Mr. Beast origin story, as recounted in profiles in Time, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg, and the New York Times, goes like this: After a Crohn’s disease diagnosis halted his baseball career in his sophomore year of high school, he turned his focus to his YouTube page, where he already had a presence making gaming content. Over time, his channel filled up with the standard fare of a teenage boy experimenting to see what sticks: There are bait-y headlines about “HOW TO UNLOCK ANY IPHONE,” Bee Movie memes, silly stunts (he counts to 10,000 and later 100,000 in one sitting, then watches fellow YouTuber Jake Paul’s terrible music video, “It’s Everyday Bro” for 10 hours straight), and letters to his future self (naturally, they are all about how many subscribers he hopes to have). After dropping out of community college midway through his first semester, his mother kicked him out of the house. Luckily, he’d also just scored his first brand deal and used the money in a video called “Giving A Random Homeless Man $10,000” in which he does just that. Its success was the beginning of a cycle in which the more money he’d give away, the more attention it got, the more money he’d make from sponsorships, and the more money he’d be able to give away next time. It’s a cycle that’s continued to this day, where a typical Mr. Beast video might pit a hundred people against each other to win $500,000 (the last to leave a certain designated area wins the money; at one point the contestants were forced to stand still for 24 hours straight and the last 10 remained in the circle for a full 12 days), or, in his most popular video ever, creating a real-life version of the dystopian Korean Netflix series Squid Game. On his charity-focused channel, Beast Philanthropy, Donaldson films himself and his team rebuilding a school in Cameroon, paying for kids’ cleft palate surgeries, and giving away $30 million worth of food. If your first thought is that this sounds a little icky, you’ve probably aged out of the Mr. Beast demographic, who have grown up less on traditional film and television created by adults but on videos created by influencers not much older than themselves. Last year, when Donaldson advertised his video “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time,” the lawyer and popular TikToker Alex Clavering tweeted, “There is something so demonic about this and I can’t even articulate what it is.” 81,000 people liked the tweet, drawing the stark differences between the kind of people who watch Mr. Beast videos and (presumably older) people who use Twitter. While many have criticized Donaldson for white saviorism, poverty profiteering, and exploitation, Clavering made clear that it wasn’t Donaldson’s individual acts of philanthropy that felt off, it’s the implication that “a single rich guy paid for life-changing surgery for us, and it’s easy to do this.” In response to such criticisms, Donaldson has tweeted, “I already know I’m gonna get canceled because I uploaded a video helping people, and to be 100% clear, I don’t care.” As with any celebrity as famous as Mr. Beast, with every bit of criticism, the comments and replies are filled with his defenders. In part, this is because Mr. Beast’s viewers, like any fans, feel as though they know him, even if it’s mediated through a screen. His videos almost always feature his clique: employees-slash-friends Karl Jacobs, Chandler Hallow, Tareq Salameh, Nolan Hansen, and Kris Tyson, the latter of whom came out as transgender last year. In the face of fans’ harassment, Donaldson defended Tyson in a tweet, writing “All this transphobia is starting to piss me off.” Donaldson has admitted he isn’t good at keeping friends and that “all my friends revolve around work.” In recounting his first meeting with his now-girlfriend, South African esports caster Thea Booysen, Donaldson said on a podcast that he had to pepper her with specific questions before dating because “I don’t really get along with women if they don’t love learning, they’re not obsessive, they don’t have a hobby.” His perfect idea of a date, he said, is the two of them taking an IQ test and then studying to see if they can beat their scores. Donaldson currently employs 500 people, 300 on his production team and 200 at his snack company, Feastables, which reportedly accounts for about 70 percent of his total revenue. They’re based in Greenville, North Carolina, where he’s transformed the town into a creator economy paradise, complete with a five-home cul-de-sac locals call “Beastville” where he and his crew live and work. He’s now a citywide hero, acting as something between Santa Claus and Willy Wonka: Kids reportedly crowd around wherever he goes, dreaming of being in one of his videos. Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for MrBeast Burger Mr. Beast at the opening of the first Mr. Beast Burger restaurant at the American Dream mall in New Jersey. The more immediate issue with producing the world’s most-viewed YouTube videos is what it takes to make them: Not only are they expensive (the Squid Game video reportedly cost $3.5 million), but former employees have accused the Mr. Beast company of fostering dangerous and exploitative conditions. One editor said that Donaldson berated him almost every day, called him offensive names, and described a workplace of favoritism and toxic perfectionism. Another former employee said that he believed he was let go because he was the only one campaigning for better safety protocols; in response, a Mr. Beast spokesperson told Time that “the company has high standards for performance and not everyone is best suited for this work.” Because of Donaldson’s reputation for giving money away to subscribers, scammers have used his likeness to promote AI giveaways and referral schemes (Donaldson has also been accused of misleading his followers by promoting a cryptocurrency that tanked in 2021). Despite pulling in around $600 million to $700 million per year, according to his own estimate, Donaldson’s production company does not make a profit and does not expect to be profitable this year. Instead, he reinvests the money into his charity channel and his other videos, or his numerous other business ventures. Primary among them is Feastables, the snack brand that once included a chocolate bar called “Deez Nuts” (they’re no longer allowed to use the name after a company called Dee’s Nuts won a lawsuit against it). He’s currently planning Mr. Beast-branded games and apps, and has a deal with the collectible toy company Moose Toys. Though he briefly ran a ghost kitchen burger chain, last year Donaldson sued the operating company, calling the burgers “disgusting” and “inedible”; they then countersued. “The more I suffer, the more you guys watch” There’s a solid chance that, if you’re reading this, you find Mr. Beast’s whole thing rather distasteful and/or a grim signifier of the state of children’s entertainment: uninterested in quality and only making bigger, louder, more attention-grabbing and easier-to-consume content for kids to get addicted to and form misguided parasocial relationships with. These interpretations may be true, but what’s at least a little bit interesting about Mr. Beast is that the man behind it doesn’t appear to be enjoying himself. Watch enough of his videos and you’ll have seen Donaldson spend 50 hours buried alive (and later a whole week), 50 hours in Antarctica, 24 hours trapped in ice, 30 days without food, seven days alone in a white padded room (a video that made me feel deranged by the end of it), and a full week on a small raft in the middle of the ocean. (Which ocean? C’mon, we’ve been through this.) He has paid assassins, bounty hunters, the FBI, and US military members to try and hunt him and lost money in the process. After consuming enough Mr. Beast content, it’s hard not to wonder who’s actually having fun here and to think how much you’d rather watch a behind-the-scenes documentary about the grunt work that goes into each video. “The more I suffer, the more you guys watch,” he says on day four of being trapped at sea. Later, as a storm approaches and he and his crew attempt to build a waterproof structure that will last the night, he delivers an upbeat scripted ad for Shopify. (The structure does not hold and they all have to sleep under soaked-through towels; one of his crew members describes it as “the worst experience I’ve ever had in my entire life.”) Some of his former employees have spoken out against these kinds of stunts and brainless stimulation for clicks; one director of a Mr. Beast video told Time, “These algorithms are poisonous to humanity. They prioritize addictive, isolated experiences over ethical social design, all just for ads. It’s not MrBeast I have a problem with. It’s platforms which encourage someone like me to study a retention graph so I can make the next video more addicting. At Beast I did that on steroids.” By exploiting YouTube’s algorithm, Mr. Beast has created a modern-day arena for influencer-gladiators to torture each other and where average Joes can compete for a piece of the spoils. It’s Jackass if the Jackass dudes read self-help books and idolized Elon Musk. This is a strategy that legacy entertainment companies are looking to mimic. With his Amazon competition show, Donaldson is the latest in a long list of digital native influencers who’ve attempted to go Hollywood, usually with floundering success. That’s because famous influencers are in large part one-person shows who deeply understand their followers, and studio executives and traditional film and television producers have different goals and different audiences to attract. It hasn’t stopped them from trying to harness the popularity of influencers, of course, but the pivot doesn’t always land. What’s easier to imagine than Mr. Beast becoming, say, a late-night talk show host or TV presenter is the entertainment industry continuing its current race to the bottom of what’s profitable in the attention economy. By leaning harder into algorithmically generated recommendations and lowest-common-denominator programming, they’re mirroring the Mr. Beast philosophy of creating content totally devoid of complexity and point of view in the hope that it’s addicting enough that people will pay $10 a month for it. Unfortunately for the Netflixes and NBCs of the world, however, they’re up against a guy who says he wants to give all his money away — just as long as you “like” and subscribe.
vox.com
Can we protect and profit from the oceans?
Joe Gough for Vox What the UN is missing with its plan to save the seas The ocean is home to most animal life on Earth. It’s also vital to human survival, regulating the climate, capturing 90 percent of the heat caused by carbon emissions, and producing 50 percent of the Earth’s oxygen. But most of the ocean is poorly regulated, amounting to a free-for-all of resource extraction — from commercial fishing to drilling for oil — that severely damages the marine ecosystems we all depend on. Now, world governments are inching closer to the most decisive step ever to safeguard the ocean’s future. The United Nations High Seas Treaty, which was drafted last March and will take effect once 60 countries ratify it, aims to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. It particularly focuses on the part of the ocean that is currently least protected, the high seas, which make up about two-thirds of the ocean and are defined as any area beyond 200 nautical miles off of a country’s coast. The treaty intends to create “marine protected areas,” or MPAs, a legal designation that would regulate and limit the kinds of extractive activities that can happen within the high seas. Once ratified, participating governments would designate MPAs — ideally prioritizing protecting areas rich in biodiversity — and compliance would be monitored by a central body formed under the treaty. Yet MPAs are also highly limited. Though they sound like a kind of Yellowstone in the sea, they can perhaps be better thought of as “protected in name only,” as Vox’s Benji Jones put it last year, because commercial fishing, oil drilling, and mining will still happen in these areas. Instead, MPA regulations hope to prevent the worst injustices against humans and animals, while the revenue generated from permitted activities — which could range from recreational diving and fisheries to mining and drilling — would then partially pay the management fees for these zones. Another major goal of the UN High Seas Treaty is promoting the equitable sharing of ocean resources, such as new genetic discoveries that can help advance medicine, between high- and low-income countries. It also aims to create a more regulated ocean economy, with some nations able to pay off national debt if they agree to protect certain areas. Some management is better than the usual way of doing business in the high seas — a lawless place where nations do not have jurisdiction, horrors like slavery on industrial fishing vessels are common, and ocean trawlers catch and often kill billions of pounds of bycatch (unintentionally captured creatures like dolphins, whales, and turtles) every year. A deeper look, however, into the proposed management in Marine Protected Areas complicates its image as a conservation solution. The crux of it all is the trade-off between making a profit and fully protecting the ocean. We can’t have both. There’s a lot of money to be made in exploiting the ocean in the short term. But thinking solely of short-term profit will cost us more down the line, even in purely economic terms. The ocean economy — encompassing industries like fishing, maritime shipping, and oil drilling — generates nearly $3 trillion of global GDP every year, and its worth is estimated at $24 trillion. Its stability depends on making conservation a priority now, rather than extracting more from the ocean than it can bear. The High Seas Treaty’s 30 percent target for turning the ocean into protected areas is just a starting point if we want to conserve oceans and the future of life on Earth. But proposed regulation needs teeth. Figuring out what activities should and should not be allowed in MPAs is a broad and tough conversation about what we think the true value of the ocean is. What is a marine protected area? The concept of a marine protected area goes back centuries. “Taboo,” or tabu, as historically practiced in the Pacific Islands, has contemporary resonance as a conservation strategy. To this day, it keeps certain areas of the ocean off-limits to fishing. MPAs, as we think of them today, have been in the global conversation since at least 1962, when the limits of the ocean’s resources were discussed at the World Congress on National Parks, the international forum for creating protected natural areas. Then, at the UN’s 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders agreed on a target to turn 10 percent of the ocean into MPAs by 2020, but this goal was not met. Today, just 2.9 percent of the ocean is fully or highly protected from fishing impacts. A shuffle of different targets and conversations then ensued, culminating in the 30 percent by 2030 goal set by the UN High Seas Treaty last year. Even that ambitious target represents the bare minimum needed to adequately protect the ocean, experts told me, and the agreement may take years to come into force. That’s time we do not have. Jenna Sullivan-Stack et al | Frontiers in Marine Science The size and scope of MPAs can vary widely: The largest is in the Ross Sea region near Antarctica, where 1.12 million square kilometers have been protected since 2016. The smallest MPA is Echo Bay Marine Provincial Park in Gilford Island, between Vancouver Island and British Columbia, which has just 1 acre of protection. The UN High Seas treaty, for the first time, sets out a process for states to set up marine protected areas in the high seas, outside of any nation’s direct jurisdiction. In their proposals, states must show what area they intend to protect, the threats it faces, and plans for its management. In exchange, countries could create a range of economic benefits from the ocean, like debt restructuring (as was the case with the Seychelles), benefiting fisheries, and even selling blue carbon credits. Beyond marine protected areas, the High Seas Treaty lays out a framework for the use of marine genetic resources and what fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from discovery would look like. Currently, developed nations are far outpacing developing nations in finding and commercializing marine genetic resources, such as the anti-cancer drug Halaven, which is derived from a Japanese sea sponge and has annual sales of $300 million. There’s still a lively debate in ocean politics over whether an MPA should fully protect a region of the ocean, or whether it can also be used for commercial purposes like fishing, mining, and oil extraction. Critics of the MPA approach go so far as to call them “paper parks” (or parks in name only) because, as they exist now, they allow a number of exploitative activities within protected areas. Groups like the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s premier conservation organization, have proposed supplementary guidelines for MPAs that would ban extractive activities, especially at industrial scales. The UN High Seas Treaty as it stands now does not limit what existing fisheries, cargo ships, and deep-sea mining organizations can do in open waters. “We need to remove perverse incentives, and we need to rewire the world in a different way,” said Dan Laffoley, an ocean conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The IUCN also advocates for an ecosystem-wide approach to conserving the ocean rather than single species protections, and for protecting species as they migrate across the ocean over time, rather than solely in one static location. Additionally, IUCN guidelines point to the fluctuating nature of the ocean and its inhabitants that travel across large distances; because of this, they suggest that there should be temporal protections in migratory paths and spawning locations. The IUCN guidelines also call for greater protection of the entire water column, from the top to the bottom of the seafloor. The UN High Seas Treaty, on the other hand, would exempt deep-sea mining operators from submitting environmental impact assessments on their proposed activities on the ocean floor. Pallava Bagla/Corbis via Getty Images These black polymetallic sea nodules form naturally in the deep sea. There’s something fishy about extracting buckets of money from the ocean in order to save it Getting world leaders to agree to these terms is the challenge. Scientists and activists want full protection of the oceans now, while business interests argue that there’s too much money to be made by continuing extractive activities. The challenge for ocean advocates is to create economic incentives for conservation that can outweigh the enormous incentive to continue to allow business-as-usual pollution and exploitation of marine ecosystems. “Giving a different value to nature is one of our biggest challenges,” said marine biologist and explorer Sylvia Earle in a panel at the UN World Oceans Day conference last June. “Our continued existence — that needs to be on the balance sheet.” This conversation plugs into a long-running debate over whether economic incentives and market forces can promote effective stewardship of nature. The 1970s saw the emergence of the idea of “ecosystem services”: the benefits we get from functioning ecosystems. It started as a way for biologists to highlight the life support systems that keep the Earth habitable, but ecosystem services later started to be used by economists to create analyses of the monetary value of ecosystems. While these monetary valuations could be used in conservation advocacy by translating the benefits of ecosystems into the dollars-and-cents language of policy, they’re inherently incomplete and reductive. Critics of putting a price on nature have argued that this approach would put financial incentives before sound ecological measures. Environmental journalist George Monbiot has written that treating nature and its benefits as “ecosystem services” that can be paid for will make them seem fungible and make it easy for companies to destroy ecosystems by claiming they can build technological replacements that can do the same thing. And, by expressing the value of nature only in economic terms, the ecosystem services framework could consolidate decision-making power in the hands of those who have money. When it comes to conservation, practicality can be the cloak under which cynicism hides. We’re still in the early stages of knowing whether financial approaches to conservation can align with the well-being of oceans. There are some promising case studies: Following the example set by the Seychelles, for example, could let countries restructure their debt into protection of the ocean by creating MPAs. In 2015, the Seychelles sold $22 million of its debt to the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit, in exchange for protecting its oceans by creating 13 marine protected areas across 30 percent of its national waters. The country has banned or restricted fishing, development, and oil exploration in these zones — regulations that are enforced with steep penalties, including imprisonment. The risks outweigh the rewards when the bait for conservation is money The High Seas Treaty’s vision of conserving 30 percent of global oceans would allocate more protection for marine ecosystems than the world has ever seen, but it has to be approached thoughtfully, conservationists say. Tessa Hempson — chief scientist at Mission Blue, a global coalition founded by Earle to support a network of global MPAs — thought of the questions we should first be asking. “Are we targeting the really essential areas that we need to be focusing on?” Hempson told Vox. “Do we know enough to make sure that we are targeting those areas correctly? And then also, you know, it’s all good and well having those areas demarcated on a map, but are they actually effectively conserved?” It’s not the first time these tensions (and their corollary benefits and consequences) have been highlighted. The idea of a “blue economy” first emerged at a 2012 UN conference, aiming to bridge the gap between conservation and treating marine ecosystems as a fungible asset. At the time, Pacific Island nations saw how the ocean could be their gateway to be included in global “green” development by highlighting the importance of the ocean and coasts to their livelihoods, culture, and economy. The blue economy, in turn, would help bolster equitable sharing of benefits between developed and developing countries. In the years that followed, the agenda of equity fell through the cracks. Framing of the blue economy turned to prioritizing growth and promoting “decoupling” — an idea that the economy can keep growing without consequences to the environment. Decoupling separates nature and economy in an intellectualized way in which the effects of capitalism and consumption can continue undeterred. Though the concept of the blue economy began with intentions of global equity and fair distribution of benefits from the use of ocean resources, we’ve landed in a wayward place where endless growth models don’t truly respect the limits of nature. The ocean stands to be mined for all it is worth unless MPAs start to guarantee meaningful protection. The high seas were long held as global commons; expressions like “plenty of fish in the sea” reflected the impression that the ocean held infinite resources for the taking. Now, it’s clearer than ever that this model won’t work anymore. If overfishing continues, we can expect a global collapse of all species currently fished by 2050 — though the lead author of the study, Boris Worm, wrote in 2021 that putting forth ocean protections could give us reason for hope. In any case, the collapse of fish stocks will have ecosystem-wide consequences, like the mass extinction of large ocean creatures, sharks, whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. Another major threat to the ocean looms on the horizon: mining. Deep-sea mining is not yet occurring on an industrial scale, but it’s a major issue of discussion in the marine space because of its implications for the global renewable energy transition. Firms are hoping to mine the ocean bed in search of polymetallic nodules containing cobalt and nickel for use in renewable car batteries. Last year, the International Seabed Authority, the body that regulates the ocean floor, postponed a decision on whether to start allowing mining, citing the need for more time to understand what science-backed guidelines should be in place before moving forward. But many believe it’s only a matter of time before companies are granted licenses to begin mining the ocean floor — unleashing a drilling bonanza that could have consequences we don’t yet understand because the deep ocean has barely been explored. Arguably, the only thing we should be extracting from the ocean is knowledge. Indeed, the knowledge we have of the ocean pales in comparison to the knowledge we have of outer space, with funding for space exploration exceeding that of ocean exploration more than 150-fold. People have been debating for a long time whether greed will be the end of humanity, or whether financial incentives can be used to create protections. When it comes to the oceans, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As Sylvia Earle said at the June UN conference, “The most important thing we take from the oceans is our existence. If you like to breathe, you’ll listen up.”
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Could a gambling “error” cost you March Madness?
March Madness is here. And that means the biggest mainstream sports betting event of the year is, too. | Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images Sports betting is about the odds, but sports books decide whether the odds are fair. The 2024 NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments are here. That means it’s time to fill out a bracket, to suddenly become the biggest fan of a school you’d never heard of before this week, or to coat your body in team colors before every game (depending on your obsession level, of course). For many Americans, it’s also time to place some bets. This is “the most mainstream betting event of the year,” says David Forman, vice president of research at the American Gaming Association (AGA). “It used to be office pools and squares contests.” Now, with the explosion in legalized gambling across the US, he says, “people in almost 40 states have the ability to bet on the tournament legally, and we think they’re going to bet about $2.7 billion on the men’s and women’s tournaments.” If that estimate has you staggering, you obviously don’t watch all that much live sports. Because if you did, you would have already heard from a slew of celebrities, like Jamie Foxx and Rob Gronkowski, selling you on the virtues of major sports books like BetMGM, FanDuel, and DraftKings. You also must’ve missed the headlines around the Super Bowl last month, when the AGA estimated that 67.8 million Americans would bet roughly $23.1 billion. Sports betting is bigger than ever, and 2023 was the biggest year yet. But as more states legalize gambling, effective regulation hasn’t always kept pace. And it’s left some bettors wondering whether their bet will be honored. Tournament betting is going to be wild One of the reasons March Madness is such a big-time event for sports betting is the number of games being played — sometimes at the same time. In just the first four days of the tournament, there will be 48 games. “The thing that makes it very bettable is the structure of the tournament,” says Jack Andrews, co-founder of Unabated Sports, a subscription service that purports to help sports bettors increase their chances of winning. “On the East Coast, the tournament starts at noon on Thursday [March 21]. And then you have game after game after game after game after game. It’s basically a betting bonanza for sports bettors from noon to midnight.” In-game betting and prop bets are other forms of wagering that are very popular during the tournament, “especially betting the over/unders,” says David Vinturella, an instructor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who developed and taught the school’s first ever semester-long course in sports betting this year and who previously worked for a major sports book. He explains over/under bets like this: Betting the over is wagering that a team will score more than sports books’ predicted figure. Betting the under is the opposite. Another well-liked prop bet Andrews describes is betting on the first team to score 15 points. “That is hugely popular in Vegas,” he says. “That’s not really betting on the game, you know — instead you’re just betting on which team gets off to a hot start.” If you win, will your bet be honored? With millions of people expected to place bets with sports books throughout the tournament, can bettors be sure they’ll be paid out if their long-shot bet wins big? The answer to that question was a bit murky in the days before legal sports betting, when offshore sports books were the only game in town, says Andrews. “That’s the difference between the US and offshore sports books. If you have a problem offshore, the offshore sports book says, ‘I’m judge, jury, and executioner, and you’re out.’ Whereas in the states with regulated sports betting, [regulators] are supposed to make sure it’s a fair bet.” Still, there have been stories recently about sports books in the US voiding bets that would’ve paid out big to bettors. The sports books use a clause in the fine print of their regulations saying that if there’s an obvious error with the odds in the bet (a.k.a. “palpable error”), they can cancel your bet. Critics say this is unfair because the sports books have multiple chances to prevent a soon-to-be-voided bet from ever happening. “The bet is offered by the sports book, the bettor offers a wager to the sports book, and then the sports book accepts the wager,” says Andrews. “They had three chances to stop the bet from ever happening.” Vinturella says that voided bets definitely happen, but that they are rare. “The process of getting a license and securing the license for a mobile sports betting company is not easy or cheap. So sports books don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize that license.” Andrews agrees that most bettors will never have an issue with a sports book over a palpable error. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, sports books just eat the loss,” he says. But Andrews thinks regulators often have a “pro-operator” approach because “they’re funded by the operators,” and “they don’t want DraftKings to lose $1 billion because of something that should have never been out there.” That’s why regulators should have clear sets of rules for determining what is and isn’t a clear mistake. A good example is New Jersey, where the Division of Gaming Enforcement has a two-step process for deciding whether the error was palpable. Step one: Was the bet legal to begin with? If so, good. If not, the bet doesn’t count. Step two: Was there a risk of losing? If so, the wager stands. If there’s no risk, then the bet is voided because it must’ve been a mistake. It’s that sort of easy-to-follow process that will let bettors trust regulators and confidently participate in the fast-growing billion-dollar industry — ultimately benefiting the sports books, too. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. 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17 astounding scientific mysteries that researchers can’t yet solve
Getty Images What is the universe made out of? How should we define death? Where did dogs come from? And more! pThree years ago, Vox launched Unexplainable, a podcast about unanswered questions and what we learn when we explore the unknown. There’s a line I think about all the time from our very first episode. “Whatever we know is provisional,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist, told us about research on dark matter. But the sentiment also applies to science overall. “It is apt to change. What motivates people like me to continue doing science is the fact that it keeps opening up more and more questions. Nothing is ultimately resolved.” Unexplainable isn’t about how scientists don’t know anything. Science is a process of narrowing a gap between the questions we have and the capabilities of our tools and know-how to answer them. In many cases, that gap appears closed. No one doubts, for instance, the existence of gravity. But even then, it is a scientist’s job to have intellectual humility, or at least to be open to the idea that there’s still a piece missing — as there is with gravity — knowing the results could just end up confirming what they thought in the first place. Really, science is about a big question: How do we know when we’ve completely learned something? What this series has taught us is that answering the question is a journey. Sometimes the stories on that journey are exciting — like what happenswhen NASA launches a staggeringly powerful observatory into space. Sometimes they are frustrating, especially when answers to a question are held back by powerful forces like scientific funding, perverse incentives, or stigma. Most often, though, the stories are deeply human: We ask questions because we’re trying to understand our imperfect bodies, our beautiful but fragile world, and our place in the universe just a bit better. We’re drawn to questions becausethey are optimistic. They invite us to dream of a better world in which they are answered, where the gaps between questions and our capabilities to answer them are smaller. Scientific knowledge is a gift we can give the future. It’s worth getting right. Here are some of the questions that astounded us the most. 1) What is the universe made out of? NASA Shown in blue on the image is a map of the dark matter found within a galaxy cluster. If you go outside on a dark night, in the darkest places on Earth, you can see as many as 9,000 stars. They present as tiny points of light, but in reality, they are massive infernos. And while these stars seem astonishingly numerous to our eyes, they represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stars in our galaxy, let alone the universe. All the stars in all the galaxies in all the universe barely even begin to account for all the stuff out there. Most of the matter in the universe is unseeable, untouchable, and, to this day, undiscovered. Scientists call this unexplained stuff “dark matter,” and they believe there’s five times more of it in the universe than normal matter — the stuff that makes up you and me, stars, planets, black holes, and everything we can see in the night sky or touch here on Earth. It’s strange even calling all that “normal” matter because, in the grand scheme of the cosmos, normal matter is the rare stuff. But to this day, no one knows what dark matter is. So, how might scientists actually “discover” it? Further reading:Dark matter holds our universe together. No one knows what it is. 2) How did life start on Earth? DeAgostini/Getty Images Even single-celled organism can be incredibly intricate. So how did the first one form? For decades, scientists have been trying to re-create in labs the conditions of early Earth. The thinking is, perhaps if they can mimic those conditions, they will eventually be able to create something similar to the first simple cells that formed here billions of years ago. From there, they could piece together a story about how life started on Earth. This line of research has demonstrated some stunning successes. In the 1950s, scientists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller showed that it’s possible to synthesize the amino acid glycine — i.e., one of life’s most basic building blocks — by mixing gases believed to have filled the atmosphere billions of years ago and adding heat and simulated lightning. Since then, scientists have been able to make lipid blobs that look a lot like cell membranes. They’ve gotten RNA molecules to form, which are like simplified DNA. But getting all these components of life to form in a lab and assemble into a simple cell — that hasn’t happened. So what’s standing in the way? What would it mean if scientists succeeded in creating life in a bottle? They could uncover not just the story of the origin of life on Earth, but come to a shocking conclusion about how common life must be in the universe. Further reading: 3 unexplainable mysteries of life on Earth 3) How did dogs evolve from wolves? Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images A young wolf stands in its enclosure at Eekholt Zoo in Germany. Wolves and dogs are nearly genetically identical, sharing 99.9 percent of their DNA (and are more similar to each other than we are to our close animal relatives, like chimps), yet they behave differently. Wolves “still have all of their natural hunting behaviors which dogs don’t have,” Kathryn Lord, a scientist who studies the evolution of behavior, says. “In the wolves, everything you greatly fear seeing in a dog pup is totally normal.” Scientists still don’t know what precisely caused wolves and dogs to diverge from one another some 20,000 years ago. There are two main hypotheses. Either we humans domesticated wolves through a painstaking and dangerous process (possibly involving breastfeeding wolf pups!), or the wolves, essentially, domesticated themselves by venturing closer and closer to our trash (i.e., food). The answer is more than just trivia. “A better understanding of how this might have happened long ago might give us a better understanding also to how animals and plants and such today might be able to — or not able to — adapt to us,” Lord says. And to find out, Lord has been playing with some puppies: Further reading: How gray wolves divided America 4) Can animals feel grief? Olivier Morin/AFP via Getty Images An orca chases herrings on January 14, 2019, in the Reisafjorden fjord region, near the Norwegian northern city of Tromso in the Arctic Circle. In 2018, a mother orca carried the carcass of her dead calf for 17 days, covering thousands of miles of ocean. The journey inspired many media reports, but also, one big question: Was this mother orca grieving? Similar stories have popped up across the animal kingdom: of a dog refusing to leave its deceased owner’s grave, of elephants apparently convening in “mourning,” of geese that appear to grieve the loss of a mate and refuse to eat. Though it’s easy to look at these behaviors and assume these animals experience a human-like version of grief, the science of studying animal emotion and death behaviors is much trickier. Some scientists suggest it’s not possible to know the interior life of an animal. Others say there’s a lot to be learned about the evolutionary history of grief if we go with the assumption that this is grief. “There’s a principle in science of parsimony that was to say if something evolved in one species, it’s very unlikely that, you know, it didn’t also evolve in other species,” says Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist. On Unexplainable, Pierce and two other researchers help us think through this thorny question: What can we learn from animal reactions to death? Further reading: Breakups really suck, even if you’re a fish 5) What will animals look like in the future? Amanda Northrop/Vox It’s impossible to completely predict how evolution will play out in the future, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Reporter Mandy Nguyen asked biologists and other experts to weigh in: What would animals look like a million years from now? The experts took the question seriously. “I do think it’s a really useful and important exercise,” Liz Alter, professor of evolutionary biology at California State University Monterey Bay told Nguyen. In thinking about the forces that will shape the future of life on Earth, we need to think about how humans are changing environments right now. Further reading:The animals that may exist in a million years, imagined by biologists 6) What’s the secret to a great romantic relationship? Getty Images/Westend61 Scientists grapple with the same relationship questions matchmakers, romance authors, poets, and anyone who has ever been single do. “The big mystery is — do you really know who you want?” says Dan Conroy-Beam, a University of California Santa Barbara psychologist who studies relationship formation. Single people often have an imagined perfect partner, but is this person really the one who will make them happy? The question seems simple, but it’s not trivial. A lot of time, energy, and heartache goes into finding solid relationships. “In a lot of senses, who you choose as a partner is the most important decision you’ll ever make,” Conroy-Beam says. “That’s going to affect your happiness, your health, and your overall well-being.” Scientists don’t have all the answers, and they often disagree on which answers are even possible. But I found that their hypotheses — along with some advice from matchmakers and relationship coaches — can help us think through how love starts and how to maintain it once it’s found. Further reading:What science still can’t explain about love 7) Where the heck does our moon come from? HUM Images/Universal Images Group This view from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising above the moon’s horizon. Before the moon landings, scientists thought they knew how the moon came to be, assuming it formed a lot like other planets did: Debris and dust leftover from the formation of the sun essentially clumped together to form rocky worlds like Earth and the moon. But then, Apollo astronauts brought samples back from the lunar surface, and those rocks told a totally different story. “Geologists had found that the moon was covered in a special kind of rock called anorthosite,” Unexplainable producer Meradith Hoddinott explains on the show. “Glittery, bright, and reflective, this is the rock that makes the moon shine white in the night sky. And at the time, it was thought, this rock can only be formed in a very specific way: magma.” The indication there was magma means the moon must have formed in some sort of epic cataclysm: “Something that poured so much energy into the moon that it literally melted,” Hoddinott says. Scientists aren’t precisely sure how it all played out, but each scenario is a cinematic story of fiery apocalyptic proportions. Further reading: How Apollo moon rocks reveal the epic history of the cosmo 8) How does sound become hearing? Getty Images/iStockphoto Sound enters our ears, light enters our eyes, chemicals splash up in our nose and mouth, and mechanical forces graze our skin. It’s up to our brains to make sense of what it all means and create a seamless conscious experience of the world. In the 1970s, psychologist Diana Deutsch discovered an audio illusion that made her feel like her brain was a little bit broken. “It seemed to me that I’d entered another universe or I’d gone crazy or something ... the world had just turned upside down!” Deutsch recalls on Unexplainable. Like the visual illusions that trick our eyes into seeing impossible things, the audio illusion Deutsch discovered in the 1970s fooled her ears. Sometimes illusions make us feel like, as Deutsch says, something is off with our minds. But really, these misperceptions show how our brains work. Illusions teach us that our reality isn’t a direct real-time feed coming from our ears, eyes, skin, and the rest of our bodies. Instead, what we experience is our brain’s best guess. But how do our brains do this? And how can scientists use that information to help people, invent new tools, or understand ourselves better? Further reading: What science still doesn’t know about the five senses 9) Why don’t doctors know more about endometriosis? Sudipta Das/NurPhoto via Getty Images In people with endometriosis, a disease in which tissue similar to what grows inside the uterus grows elsewhere in the body. It’s a chronic condition that can be debilitatingly painful. Yet doctors don’t fully understand what causes it, and treatment options are limited. Worse, many people with endometriosis find that doctors can be dismissive of their concerns. It can take years to get an accurate diagnosis, and research into the condition has been poorly funded. Vox reporter Byrd Pinkerton highlighted how frustrating it can be to suffer from an often-ignored, chronic condition. “It’s just so, so, so soul-crushing to just live in this body day in and day out,” one patient told Pinkerton. Further reading:Menstrual fluid’s underexplored medical treasures 10) Is there anything alive in the human poop left on the moon? NASA A bag of astronaut detritus left on the moon in 1969. During the Apollo moon missions, astronauts went to the moon and, to save weight for returning to Earth, they dumped their waste behind. Across all the Apollo missions, astronauts left 96 bags of human waste on the moon, and they pose a fascinating astrobiological question. Human waste — and in particular, feces — is teeming with microbial life. With the Apollo moon landings, we took microbial life on Earth to the most extreme environment it has ever been in. Which means the waste on the moon represents a natural, though unintended, experiment. The question the experiment could answer: How resilient is life in the face of the brutal environment of the moon? And for that matter, if microbes can survive on the moon, can they survive interplanetary or interstellar travel? If they can survive, then maybe it’s possible that life can spread from planet to planet, riding on the backs of asteroids or other such space debris. Further reading: Apollo astronauts left their poop on the moon. We gotta go back for that shit. 11) Was there an advanced civilization on Earth before humans? Science Photo Libra/Getty Images Illustration of the supercontinent Gondwana, a landmass that was fully formed by around 550 million years ago and began to break up about 180 million years ago. Many scientists have long wondered: Is there intelligent life out in the deep reaches of space? Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and astrophysicist Adam Frank have a different question: Was there intelligent life in the deep reaches of Earth’s history? Could we find evidence of an advanced non-human civilization that lived perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago, buried in the Earth’s crust? This is not strictly a “solar system” mystery, but it is cosmic in scope. At the heart of it, Schmidt and Frank are asking: How likely is an intelligent life form on any planet — here or in the deepest reaches of space — to leave a mark, a sign that they existed? And for that matter: Hundreds of millions of years from now, will some alien explorers landing on Earth be able to find traces of humans if we’re long, long gone? Further reading: The Silurian hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? 12) What is the definition of “life”? Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images A king vulture, native to the jungles of Central and South America, on display at the Los Angeles Zoo on October 6, 2014. We know life when we see it. Flying birds are clearly alive, as are microscopic creatures like tardigrades that scurry around in a single drop of water. But do we, humans, know what life fundamentally is? No. “No one has been able to define life, and some people will tell you it’s not possible to,” says New York Times columnist and science reporter Carl Zimmer. It’s not for a lack of trying. “There are hundreds, hundreds of definitions of life that scientists themselves have published in the scientific literature,” he says. The problem is, for every definition of life, there’s a creature or perplexing life-like entity that just sends us right back to the drawing board. Further reading: What is life? Scientists still can’t agree. 13) How should we define death? Getty Images Death used to be fairly self-evident. Someone stopped breathing, their heart stopped beating — they were dead. But new technologies have forced us to ask: When is someone actually dead? Now, new research is raising a further question: Might it even be possible, in some instances or for just a brief moment, to reverse death? It sounds outlandish, but researchers at Yale University describe how they were able to partially revive disembodied pigs’ brains several hours after the pigs’ death. If this technology progresses, could it redefine death? Further reading:There’s a surprisingly rich debate about how to define death 14) What did dinosaurs sound like? Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A life-size dinosaur model is seen on display at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California. What would it be like to be near a dinosaur? From fossil evidence, scientists can get a decent sense of what these ancient creatures looked like. But they still don’t know what they would have sounded like. Whereas hard tissues like bone can fossilize and leave us information about dinosaur stature and shape millions of years later, soft tissues — like the muscle and cartilage that help generate sound — do not fossilize as readily. Many Hollywood depictions of dinosaur roars are not based in scientific reality (the T-Rex roar in Jurassic Park is partially based on an elephant. A mammal! Dinosaurs were reptiles!). So where do scientists start in trying to imagine realistic dinosaur noises? They look to dinosaurs’ closest relatives alive on Earth today. Further reading:What did dinosaurs actually sound like? Take a listen. 15) Is there such a thing as perfect internet encryption? Getty Images Today’s internet is built on a series of locks and keys that protect your private information as it travels through cyberspace. “Encryption is basically like this cloak that wraps your private information,” Unexplainable’s Meradith Hoddinott says on the show. If someone intercepts your message as it travels around the web, “it just looks like random static” But there’s a fear: With increases in computing power, it’s possible that one day all these locks can be broken. So cryptographers are trying to probe deep, complicated mathematical theory. They want to know: Could a perfect, unbreakable “lock” even exist? Further reading: Inside the quest for unbreakable encryption at MIT Tech Review 16) Is it safe to use weed during pregnancy? Getty Images/fStop There is really good research out there that shows that if a parent drinks too much alcohol during pregnancy, it can have clear consequences for the child, affecting everything from their weight and size to their cognitive abilities, vision, and hearing. There is also good evidence that smoking cigarettes can harm a fetus. As Vox reporter Keren Landman found in recent reporting, by contrast, the consequences of cannabis use are less obvious. The studies that have been done have had mixed results. Researchers aren’t entirely clear on whether cannabis use affects birth weights, and while there are some connections drawn between cannabis use in pregnancy and attention, hyperactivity, and aggression in kids, these results are also not clear-cut. In spite of these mixed results, Landman found that cannabis use in pregnancy is still heavily penalized in states across the US — even in states where the drug is legal. Pregnant parents sometimes use cannabis to help them cope with morning sickness or other pregnancy symptoms, but in many states, they can have their children taken away by child protective services, or even be arrested and jailed. Why is there such a mismatch between the science and the policy? And how can we improve both, and make parents feel safe discussing cannabis use with their providers? Further reading: Is weed safe in pregnancy? 17) How will everything end? NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO The first image released from the Webb space telescope. In the early 1900s, Henrietta Leavitt, a Massachusetts-born “computer” who worked at the Harvard College Observatory, published a discovery thatmay sound small but is one of the most important in the history of astronomy: She found a way to measure the distance to certain stars. Over time, scientists kept building on Leavitt’s ruler to measure the universe. As they used these measuring tools, their understanding of the universe evolved. They realized it was far bigger than previously thought, there are billions of galaxies, and it’s expanding: Those galaxies are moving farther and farther away from one another. Astronomers also realized that the universe had a beginning. If galaxies are moving away from one another now, it means they were closer together in the past — which led scientists to the idea of the Big Bang. It also led them to realize that the universe may, eventually, end. Further reading:How scientists discovered the universe is really freaking huge There are more than 100 episodes of the Unexplainable podcast. Find the complete archive here.
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