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This article originally appeared on 11.04.15

You’re probably familiar with the literary classic “Moby-Dick.”

But in case you’re not, here’s the gist: Moby Dick is the name of a huge albino sperm whale.

(Get your mind outta the gutter.)

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There’s this dude named Captain Ahab who really really hates the whale, and he goes absolutely bonkers in his quest to hunt and kill it, and then everything is awful and we all die unsatisfied with our shared sad existence and — oops, spoilers!

OK, technically, the narrator Ishmael survives. So it’s actually a happy ending (kind of)!

Basically, it’s a famous book about revenge and obsession that was published back in 1851, and it’s really, really long.

It’s chock-full of beautiful passages and dense symbolism and deep thematic resonance and all those good things that earned it a top spot in the musty canon of important literature.

There’s also a lot of mundane descriptions about the whaling trade as well (like, a lot). That’s because it came out back when commercial whaling was still a thing we did.

In fact, humans used to hunt more than 50,000 whales each year to use for oil, meat, baleen, and oil. (Yes, I wrote oil twice.) Then, in 1946, the International Whaling Commission stepped in and said “Hey, wait a minute, guys. There’s only a few handful of these majestic creatures left in the entire world, so maybe we should try to not kill them anymore?”

And even then, commercial whaling was still legal in some parts of the world until as recently as 1986.

And yet by some miracle, there are whales who were born before “Moby-Dick” was published that are still alive today.

What are the odds of that? Honestly it’s hard to calculate since we can’t exactly swim up to a bowhead and say, “Hey, how old are you?” and expect a response. (Also that’s a rude question — jeez.)

Thanks to some thoughtful collaboration between researchers and traditional Inupiat whalers (who are still allowed to hunt for survival), scientists have used amino acids in the eyes of whales and harpoon fragments lodged in their carcasses to determine the age of these enormous animals — and they found at least three bowhead whales who were living prior to 1850.

Granted those are bowheads, not sperm whales like the fictional Moby Dick, (and none of them are albino, I think), but still. Pretty amazing, huh?

This is a particularly remarkable feat considering that the entire species was dwindling near extinction.

Barring these few centenarian leviathans, most of the whales still kickin’ it today are between 20 and 70 years old. That’s because most whale populations were reduced to 10% or less of their numbers between the 18th and 20th centuries, thanks to a few over-eager hunters (and by a few, I mean all of them).

Today, sperm whales are considered one of the most populous species of massive marine mammals; bowheads, on the other hand, are still in trouble, despite a 20% increase in population since the mid-1980s. Makes those few elderly bowheads that much more impressive, huh?

Unfortunately, just as things are looking up, these wonderful whales are in trouble once again.

We might not need to worry our real-life Captain Ahabs anymore, but our big aquatic buddies are still being threatened by industrialization — namely, from oil drilling in the Arctic and the Great Australian Bight.

In the off-chance that companies like Shell and BP manage not to spill millions of gallons of harmful crude oil into the water, the act of drilling alone is likely to maim or kill millions of animals, and the supposedly-safer sonic blasting will blow out their eardrums or worse.

This influx of industrialization also affects their migratory patterns — threatening not only the humans who depend on them, but also the entire marine ecosystem.

And I mean, c’mon — who would want to hurt this adorable face?

Whales might be large and long-living. But they still need our help to survive.

If you want another whale to make it to his two-hundred-and-eleventy-first birthday (which you should because I hear they throw great parties), then sign this petition to protect the waters from Big Oil and other industrial threats.

I guarantee Moby Dick will appreciate it.

This story originally appeared on 05.20.16

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey had only been with the Food and Drug Administration for about a month when she was tasked with reviewing a drug named thalidomide for distribution in America.

Marketed as a sedative for pregnant women, thalidomide was already available in Canada, Germany, and several African countries.

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It could have been a very simple approval. But for Kelsey, something didn’t sit right. There were no tests showing thalidomide was safe for human use, particularly during pregnancy.

When Chemie Grünenthal released thalidomide in West Germany years earlier, they called it a “wonder drug” for pregnant women. They promised it would treat anxiety, insomnia, tension, and morning sickness and help pregnant women sleep.

What they didn’t advertise were its side effects.

Because it crosses the placental barrier between fetus and mother, thalidomide causes devastating — often fatal — physical defects. During the five years it was on the market, an estimated 10,000 babies globally were born with thalidomide-caused defects. Only about 60% lived past their first birthday.

In 1961, the health effects of thalidomide weren’t well-known. Only a few studies in the U.K. and Germany were starting to connect the dots between babies born with physical defects and the medication their mothers had taken while pregnant.

At the outset, that wasn’t what concerned Kelsey. She’d looked at the testimonials in the submission and found them “too glowing for the support in the way of clinical back up.” She pressed the American manufacturer, Cincinnati’s William S. Merrell Company, to share research on how their drug affected human patients. They refused. Instead, they complained to her superiors for holding up the approval. Still, she refused to back down.

A sample pack of thalidomide sent to doctors in the U.K. While more than 10,000 babies worldwide were born with thalidomide-related birth defects, FDA historian John Swann credits Dr. Kelsey with limiting the number of American babies affected to just 17.

Over the next year, the manufacturer would resubmit its application to sell thalidomide six times. Each time, Kelsey asked for more research. Each time, they refused.

By 1961, thousands of mothers were giving birth to babies with shocking and heartbreaking birth defects. Taking thalidomide early in their pregnancy was the one thing connecting them. The drug was quickly pulled from shelves, vanishing mostly by 1962.

Through dogged persistence, Kelsey and her team had prevented a national tragedy.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy honored Kelsey with the Federal Civilian Service Medal. He thanked her for her exceptional judgment and for preventing a major tragedy of birth deformities in the United States:

“I know that we are all most indebted to Dr. Kelsey. The relationship and the hopes that all of us have for our children, I think, indicate to Dr. Kelsey, I am sure, how important her work is and those who labor with her to protect our families. So, Doctor, I know you know how much the country appreciates what you have done.”

But, she wasn’t done yet. Later that year, the FDA approved new, tougher regulations for companies seeking drug approval, inspired in large part by Kelsey’s work on thalidomide.

Reached via email, FDA historian John Swann said this about Kelsey’s legacy: “[Her] actions also made abundantly clear to the nation the important public health role that drug regulation and FDA itself play in public health. The revelation of the global experience with that drug and America’s close call indeed provided impetus to secure passage of a comprehensive drug regulation bill that had been more or less floundering during the time FDA was considering the application.”

Kelsey continued to work for the FDA until 2005. She died in 2015, aged 101, just days after receiving the Order of Canada for her work on thalidomide.

Bureaucratic approval work is rarely thrilling and not often celebrated. That’s a shame because it’s so critical.

People like Kelsey, who place public health and safety above all else — including their career — deserve every ounce of our collective respect and admiration.

Lady Gaga is the latest artist to have an old song revived, thanks to TikTok. Her 2011 hit “Bloody Mary” is at the center of online dance trends after it was in the viral show Wednesday. It’s likely that this resurgence played a role in this new milestone she just achieved.

Pop Crave shared today that all of Gaga’s solo studio albums have reached one billion streams on Spotify. This includes The Fame, Born This Way, Artpop, Joanne, and Chromatica.

Meanwhile, fans are hoping that Artpop, which is a decade old as of this year, is getting a part two soon. One of the producers of that record, DJ White Shadow, spoke about it in an interview.

“She has feelings (like any other normal person), and this ‘era’ was a hard time for her too,” he said. “I am sure she will be okay with revisiting it one day and building on it when the time is right. I will continue to push for those songs you want so badly that LG and I did, and I hope you will get to hear them. Don’t let them die. Continue to get your message to the people in charge. You have the power, don’t give up.”

Kali Uchis is in full album rollout mode. As the singer prepares for the release of her upcoming album, Red Moon In Venus, next month Kali Uchis isn’t holding anything back. Having already released the lead single from the project “I Wish You Roses” a month ago, Kali took to Instagram to share that a second single will be dropping this Friday, February 24.

With the caption, “Moonlight this Friday, from my third album,” the musician shared a lipstick-stained lyric card along with a images of herself. On the lyric card are three stanzas. The first stanza reads, “Forget the small talk / The surface level ain’t much that I cafe for / Putting on my lipgloss / I saw you stare from my peripheral / Yea baby it’s been a helluva day / But I know a place we can escape / Find out how it feels to let go of everything / Be free / To truly know peace.”

True to the, “Love is the message,” nexus of the album Kali expressed, based on the lyrics shared the upcoming song titled “Moonlight,” will fix perfectly amongst the rest of the album’s tracklist.

Fans will surely eat the track up when Kali Uchis and RAYE hits the road for the Red Moon In Venus Tour beginning in April.

Red Moon In Venus is out 3/3 via Geffen. Pre-save it here.

This article originally appeared on 11.29.17

Think about the illustrations you’ve seen of men and women of the Bronze Age who lived thousands of years ago.

Perhaps there’s one you recall from your elementary school text book — in which men are probably depicted hurling bronze spears and strangling lions with their bare hands, while the women are most likely pictured leading children around, sifting through grapes or weaving tiny reeds into baskets (presumably to hold the fruits of their husbands’ labor).

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It’s an idealized image for some. Men and women, dividing labor according to their relative physical strength. Women did important work, but entirely in the domestic sphere, in part because they were less equipped to handle difficult manual labor. Each gender in their natural place. A comforting image of the way the world is “supposed to be.”

And according to new research, it’s an image that’s totally wrong in a major way.

According to a groundbreaking new study, Bronze Age women were jacked.

Armed with a small CT scanner and a group of student guinea pigs, University of Cambridge researchers discovered that the arm bones of Central European women of the era were roughly 30% stronger than those of modern women — and 11% to 16% stronger than those of modern women on the the world champion Cambridge women’s crew team, who spend multiple hours a day training to rowing a 60-foot boat as fast as humanly possible.

“This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women,” explained Alison Macintosh, research fellow at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, in a news release.

The paper was published in the open-access journal Science Advances.

Agriculture, it turns out, is hard work. Work that Bronze Age women handled on the reg.

Particularly grinding grain into flour, which requires the use of ludicrously heavy stones.

Based on evidence from societies that still produce bread products this way, the researchers determined the prehistoric women likely spent up to five hours a day pulverizing the edible bits so their villages could actually eat food while the men were derping around trophy hunting hyenas.

“The repetitive arm action of grinding these stones together for hours may have loaded women’s arm bones in a similar way to the laborious back-and-forth motion of rowing,” Macintosh said.

In addition to grinding grain, researchers speculate ancient ladies got up to a range of other muscle mass-building activities…

…including hauling food for livestock, slaughtering and butchering animals for food, scraping the skin off of dead cows and deadlifting it onto hooks to turn it into leather, and planting and harvesting crops entirely by hand.

And, while punching bears and ceremonially tossing boulders at the sun weren’t on the researchers’ specific list, it’s at least possible the women were doing that too.

“We believe it may be the wide variety of women’s work that in part makes it so difficult to identify signatures of any one specific behavior from their bones,” Macintosh said.

Study senior author Jay Stock said the results suggest “the rigorous manual labour of women was a crucial driver of early farming economies.”

“The research demonstrates what we can learn about the human past through better understanding of human variation today,” he added.

If nothing else, the findings should complicate the way we think of “women’s work” going back centuries. Since the dawn of time, mankind has had boulders to grind. Animals to wrangle. Big, heavy things to lift, and arm muscles to build. And some woman had do it.

Due to the tragic disaster created by Cyclone Gabrielle, New Zealand is in the midst of trying to rebuild. Musicians are offering their help with a relief concert called ŌTAUTAHI 4 AOTEAROA this Friday, February 24. The roster includes Lorde, Marlon Williams, L.A.B, Neil Finn, Lee Mvtthews, PRINS, and Supergroove.

Yesterday (February 19), Lorde made an Instagram Story in order to cancel previous shows she had in New Zealand, according to NZ Herald. “Over the past week, I’ve been following the ongoing devastation in Hawke’s Bay. In line with advice from the venue, the police, and our promoter, I think the right thing to do is to postpone our Hawke’s Bay shows,” she wrote. “This is a postponement, not a cancellation at this stage – I’m working on something, and you’ll hear from me soon.”

She continued, “I would love to be there with you right now, but I can also read the room, and taking precious resources away from those who need them right now is not it.”

All proceeds from the event will go to The Red Cross New Zealand Disaster Fund. The show will be taking place on Friday, February 24, at The Christchurch Town Hall. Ticket information can be found here.

Iggy Azalea’s 2014 chart-topping single isn’t the only thing fancy about her. Apparently, the “Dance Like Nobody’s Watching” rapper has a few impressive articles of clothing that she wants others to get a good look at. As the musician continues to receive criticism after she decided to join the subscription-based platform, OnlyFans, which has allegedly been quite lucrative, the Australian recording artist is sharing a message to both her haters and any potential love interests.

While teasing an unreleased track, Iggy uploaded a few risque thirst trap photos that could certainly go against Instagram’s community guidelines. In one image, Iggy is seen boarding a private plane wearing a white long-sleeve crop top shirt, a red thong panty, and the inescapable red AstroBoy-inspired MSCHF boots. Due to the distance between Iggy and the photograph, the lettering on the panty isn’t legible.

To ensure her following receives the message, the rapper uploaded a few close-up images. Iggy’s two-toned drawers reads, “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” The image is uploaded along with the caption, “only accepting the best for myself .”

Although Iggy didn’t directly specify who the message was directed at, some of the platform’s users have begun to speculate that it could be a sublime message toward her ex-boyfriend, Playboi Carti, who made the news just days earlier after he’d been arrested for allegedly assaulting his pregnant girlfriend.

Either way, one thing’s for certain, Iggy Azalea has set her sights on big and better things. After announcing a new album is on the way and selling her music catalog in an 8-figure deal, Azalea has a lot of reasons to let loose.

Fans of Chlöe x Halle are in for a treat. Chlöe is stepping out on her own for her new album, In Pieces, her debut as a solo artist.

“I have been the rawest, the most vulnerable, and the most open I have been in my entire life with this album,” she said in a statement, adding, “I used to believe the way I love so hard without question, was a curse. Only to find out it’s been my greatest gift all along.”

So far, the record’s rollout has not been without excitement and controversy. Find the details about the album below.

Release Date

In Pieces is out 3/31 via Parkwood/Columbia. Pre-save it here.

Tracklist

The full tracklist has not yet been revealed. However, based on the album’s listing on Apple Music, the album will include a total of 14 tracks. Although previously shared singles “Treat Me” and “Have Mercy” didn’t make the final cut, “Pray It Away” has.

Features

This is where the controversy comes in. The only feature Chlöe has confirmed so far is Chris Brown for the song “How Does It Feel.” His history of harassment, battery, sexual assault, and more prompted fans to take to social media to call out Chlöe. The track arrives on February 24.

Artwork

The album’s cover art features the singer confidently staring directly into the camera dressed in a form-fitting red latex gown.

Singles

The lead single is “Pray It Away,” a powerful song about overcoming a breakup with spirituality: “God knows my heart, I’m wildin’, wildin’ / So close to doin’ somethin’ / Maybe I should go and take it to church / And wash it away,” she sings.

She also revealed that none of her previous singles like “Have Mercy,” “Treat Me,” “Surprise,” or the Latto-assisted “For The Night” will be on the album.

SZA isn’t the only alternative R&B singer looking to make a triumphant return to music this year. 6lack (real name Ricardo Valdez Valentine Jr.) took to social media to tease that a new project from him titled, S.I.H.L., is coming soon.

Thanks to the assistance of Atlanta’s Water Boyz, the singer got the word about his musical return by having them hand out red roses with a brief note, “See you soon, Love 6lack,” attached.

Not much is known about the album, only that the album is slated to drop sometime next month, thanks to the cover image posted on his label’s website. 6lack took a page out of Kendrick Lamar’s promotional book by creating a dropbox folder with bits and pieces of his forthcoming album. However, his upcoming album is hidden behind a password.

The songwriter’s last album, East Atlanta Love Letter, was released in 2018, just two short years after his critically acclaimed debut studio album Free 6lack in 2016. Although the Atlanta native hasn’t completely stepped away from music. Since dropping his sophomore album, 6lack has made guest appearances on several songs, including “Forever” by Jessie Reyez, “Miss My Dawgs” by Kaash Paige, “Nothing More To Say” by Calvin Harris, and “Lately” by Eli Derby, to name a few.

S.I.H.L. is set to be released in March 2023 via LVRN/Interscope. To pre-order, click here.

Latto has unleashed a lot of fiery singles lately. From “Lottery” with Lu Kala to the provocative “Another Nasty Song,” which successfully got people talking. However, it looks like she’s got even more material coming. Although she only unveiled her last LP 777 in March of last year, she’s already talking about her next one.

On Twitter, a fan posted a list of artists they wanted Latto to work with on her next album. The list included a long list of music acts, including Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Summer Walker, Chris Brown, Don Toliver, SZA, Lil Nas X, Lizzo, Kim Petras, and Doja Cat. Latto quote-tweeted, saying that “1 of these already done.” Then, she added, “Wait, I read the list again… *2.”

Fans are frantically guessing on social media. Many are expressing hope that it’s not Chris Brown, who has a song called “How Does It Feel” arriving with Chlöe soon, which upset many of her fans due to his alleged history of harassment, assault, and more.

In November, Latto dealt with 130 of her songs being leaked. While this would’ve easily devastated any other artist, she proved to be unbothered, posting a spicy TikTok of her twerking in a hot tub with the caption, “POV: Dancing to ur leaked music for ur man.”

So far, Latto hasn’t shared any further information about the forthcoming project.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.