NASA wants samples of moon dirt for its lunar base plans and wants companies to compete on getting them and handing them over.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Thursday the agency was opening up a solicitation to commercial companies to propose how they would collect such lunar regolith, provide images and locations of it to NASA and eventually deliver it to the agency.

Restaurants are trying to keep customers safe from COVID-19 – by wearing masks, serving outdoors and disinfecting from top to bottom – but a new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests it might not be enough.

Adults with confirmed COVID-19 are twice as likely to have dined out at a restaurant in the 14 days before becoming sick than those who tested negative, according to the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report issued Thursday.

Positive patients were also more likely to report going to a bar or coffee shop when the analysis was limited to those without close contact to people with known coronavirus.

As the new sex and relationships curriculum comes into place across England, Kantar conducted a study into attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community.

The study asked 2,363 people, aged 16 or over, living in the United Kingdom about their opinions toward LGBTQ+ people being in certain roles.

Although the study found high levels of comfort toward LGBTQ+ people being teachers, 91% in favour for gay men, lesbians and bisexual people and 77% for trans people, it still found that nearly four in ten people (38%) thought it “inappropriate” for a 6-year-old to be taught that being gay is fine.

The number of coronavirus cases linked to an indoor wedding in Maine earlier this month has risen to 123, state health officials confirmed to CBS News.

The Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said early this month that a total of 24 people had contracted COVID-19 linked to the wedding. That number progressively increased to 53, then 87, and now 123 linked infections.

The wedding has also been linked to one death last week from the virus so far.

The Aug. 7 reception was attended by about 65 people, surpassing the state’s 50-person limit. Officials are also investigating if the venue, Millinocket’s Big Moose Inn Cabins and Campground, was in compliance with state health guidelines.

A new study led by Ekin Ok at the University of British Columbia has found people who signal virtue and victimhood are more likely to have dark triad personality traits.

The dark triad comprises narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism). People with dark triad traits can be seductive.

A study led by psychologists at the University of Durham found that women rated the same man as more attractive when he had dark triad traits. The dark triad man was about one standard deviation more attractive than an ordinary man.

In psychologist Justin Lehmiller’s book Tell Me What You Want, he reveals the most fantasized-about superhero among women is Batman. In contrast, gay men preferred Superman and Captain America. One possible reason that women like Batman is because he would score higher on dark triad traits compared with other superheroes.

When pressed, many Americans will acknowledge what research has proven to be true: The hiring system is broken, and white people have a historic, systemic advantage over other races when it comes to getting a job.

In a new HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted this August of 1,000 U.S. adults, almost half said that people of color are treated less fairly than white people during the hiring process in the U.S. Seventy-nine percent of Black Americans and 69% of Latinx Americans said that racial employment discrimination was at least somewhat of a serious problem in the United States. (HuffPost/YouGov did not highlight results for Asian respondents due to small sample sizes.)

Hiring discrimination can be especially insidious, because candidates rarely get insight into what recruiters and hiring managers are thinking. A person may never find out why exactly a given company never called them back, but that doesn’t mean discrimination is not occurring.

“I was once told that my long hair and beard had to go and that I must state that I was a Christian.” — multiracial man, 64

While I personally don't like public displays of affection, they're a very peculiar phenomenon. Why is it that some couples can't help but touch each other obsessively, while others don't? And what's the motivation behind these physical urges?

Our parents have everything to do with the way we view and judge public affection.

"There can be an element of exhibitionism to it, which revs up your physiological system: Your heart races, your body gets hotter. And if your partner is also enjoying it, it can be mutually exciting."

And usually, a man reaching out to touch his partner in public will make her feel regarded as his prized possession.

"To some women, this can feel completely thrilling,"

But, if one partner likes the attention and the other doesn't, PDA can turn into a power struggle, which can be another type of turn-on. The physical touching actually becomes a form of ownership or domination of your partner.

MACDUFF: What three things does drink especially provoke?
PORTER: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes. It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.

Turns out Shakespeare knew a thing or two about the phenomenon known as “whiskey dick,” or alcohol-related erectile dysfunction. But since Macbeth doesn't offer an explanation for why a dude goes soft when it matters most, we had sixth-year urology resident Dr. Ashley Winter give us the scoop!

What’s going on here? Why do men have erectile problems after drinking?

Winter: Well, the first idea is that the alcohol is directly affecting the penis. Alcohol causes your blood vessels to dilate, which is why people’s faces get flushed. It affects the way the blood moves in and out of the penis, which is, obviously, important for erectile function.

The tuatara is old. 250 million years old. That was when this bizarre creature shared its last common ancestor with other reptiles before it evolved further and diverged. It used to be one of of several Rhynocephalia species that crawled across the antediluvian continent of Gondwana, but is now the only one that remains. Its genome links it not only to reptiles (which it most obviously resembles), but also birds and yes, mammals like humans. DNA from this living relic could also be the elixir of life.

Amniote vertebrates—which either hatch from eggs or develop from an egg in the placenta—are thought to have first appeared 312 million years ago and then branched off into two groups. Synapsids included early mammals and now-extinct reptiles with mammalian characteristics. Sauropsids were once dinosaurs and other reptilian ancestors that have since died out and were replaced with or evolved into birds or lizards, snakes and other extant reptiles. The tuatara has baffled scientists for so long because of synapsid and sauropsid features that could reveal what we never knew about amniote evolution.

DNA from an unknown ancient ancestor of humans that once bred with Denisovans still exists among the genomes of people today, a study has revealed.

The different branches of the human family tree have interbred and swapped genes — a processes known as 'introgression' — on numerous occasions.

DNA sequencing of Neanderthals and Denisovans have provided insights into the nature of the interbreeding events and the moment of ancient humans.

Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely dismissed as meaningless, hypocritical, opportunistic, or all three. But there’s reason to believe that such vocal calls for change from corporations could actually be worse than meaningless—and in fact damage the chances that corporations will follow through on meaningful change in the months and years ahead.

Why? Less than a year ago, nearly 200 CEOs signed a solemn pledge, issued by the Business Roundtable, to stop caring primarily about their shareholders and to serve the needs of their workers, communities, and country too. The Wharton management professor Tyler Wry has been compiling data on the signatories’ behavior since. “We were interested in whether these statements were worth the paper they were printed on, or just symbolic,” he told me recently. “When COVID hit, it was a natural experiment and a chance to see if companies were living up to their word.”

The results have startled him. As COVID-19 spread in March and April, did signers give less of their capital to shareholders (via dividends and stock buybacks)? No. On average, signers actually paid out 20 percent more of their capital than similar companies that did not sign the statement. Then, as the coronavirus swept the country, did they lay off fewer workers? On the contrary, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Wry found, signers were almost 20 percent more prone to announce layoffs or furloughs. Signers were less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to offer customer discounts, and less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. “Signing this statement had zero positive effect,” said Wry. Why, though, would it produce a negative effect?

Starting the day with a cup of coffee may be as much a part of your morning ritual as checking your phone for new texts. The jolt of java delivers an eye-opening boost of caffeine. The warm beverage can lull you slowly from your slumber. Plus, coffee is rich in antioxidants and beneficial chemicals.

But for roughly a third of coffee drinkers, that morning cuppa jump-starts more than just their day — it revs up their stomach, too. For these people, going to the bathroom straight after they've finished their first cup is also part of their routine (and for some, purposefully so). Others may even choose to drink coffee for this very reason.

So why does coffee make you need to poop? And is that good or bad?

New research suggests that sexual promiscuity negatively impacts social responses toward both gay and straight men. The study, published in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, found that women are more likely to seek to avoid gay men described as promiscuous compared to gay men who are not described as promiscuous.

“Perceptions of masculinity, and stereotypes toward gay men, are multifaceted,” said study author Corey Cook, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University.

In the study, 354 heterosexual undergraduate students were randomly assigned to report their social attitudes towards either gay men, straight men, gay men who are sexually promiscuous, straight men who are sexually promiscuous, gay men with very feminine qualities, straight men with very feminine qualities, gay men with very masculine qualities, or straight men with very masculine qualities.

To assess their attitudes, the participants were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I would like for a member of this group to work in the same place as I do” and “Members of this group are the kind of people that I tend to avoid.”

Two Disney World fanatics who live-streamed their trip to the Orlando theme park's reopening over the weekend are receiving intense backlash for vacationing amid a pandemic and continuing to explore the park after one fell ill.

YouTuber Tonya Blakey, known as That Crazy Disney Lady to her 9,500 subscribers, streamed over 10 hours of footage of her trip to the Magic Kingdom on Friday and Saturday. In the videos, she and her friend, Robin, wandered the grounds, rode Splash Mountain, and experienced a brief health scare.

You know them when you see them – the phonies in your life. Maybe they are sycophants. They laugh too loudly at unfunny jokes. They say things you know they don’t believe, because they think that then, other people will like them. Or the “right” other people will like them, the ones they are trying to impress. They are trying too hard.

You probably don’t like being with people who seem inauthentic. It’s uncomfortable. Well guess what? They don’t like spending time with themselves either. That’s one of the costs of phoniness – it is no fun being alone with yourself.

In contrast, people who are authentic have a great big advantage: they like their own company. Spending time alone doesn’t scare them. They don’t worry about being lonely. Their alone time is something they value. It is important to them and they benefit from it.