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Laughter is one of the most natural impulses in humans. Most babies start to laugh out loud at around 3 to 4 months, far earlier than they are able to speak or walk. Expressing enjoyment or delight comes naturally to us, but we’re not the only creatures who communicate with giggles.

Researchers at UCLA have identified 65 species of animals who make “play vocalizations,” or what we would consider laughter. Some of those vocalizations were already well documented—we’ve known for a while that apes and rats laugh—but others may come as a surprise. Along with a long list of primate species, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, mongooses and three bird species are prone to laughter as well. (Many bird species can mimic human laughter, but that’s not the same as making their own play vocalizations.)

Primatologist and UCLA anthropology graduate student Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant shared their findings in an article in the journal Bioacoustics.

The authors explored various play vocalization sounds, recording them as noisy or tonal, loud or quiet, high- or low-pitched, short or long, a single call or rhythmic pattern.

But really, what we want to see is what animal laughter sounds like from various species, right? While the researchers said that it can be hard to document laughter in the wild, especially among animals with quieter vocalizations, we do have some examples captured on video.

Check out these foxes laughing like little kids:

Or maybe little kids on helium. How fun is that?

Ever seen a bonobo chimp laugh? Just as cute.

I’m not sure if tickling a baby bonobo is sweet or torturous, though these researchers surely know what they’re doing. It’s always delightful to see the instinctual playfulness of primates.

Laughter in some animals isn’t as audibly apparent as it is in these foxes and chimps, though. Researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin found that rats laugh when they are tickled—and appear to enjoy tickling, as they seek it out—but their vocalizations are ultrasonic, so it’s hard to hear them without special instruments.

The UCLA researchers shared that the study of laughter in animals can help us better understand our own evolutionary behavior.

“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said, according to UCLA.

“When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join,” Winkler said. “Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.”

Raise your hand if you just want to see a cow laughing for real now.

When Jimmy Kimmel takes to the street, you know you’re in for a good laugh at just how little we actually know about, well, seemingly anything. That goes for anatomy too. In this case, female anatomy.

In a segment called “What Do You Know About The Female Body?” men try—and hilariously fail—to answer even the most basic questions, like “does a female have one uterus, or two?” much to the amazement of some of their female partners.

Here are some of the very best bits of nonwisdom:

Woman have LOTS of fallopian tubes and ovaries, apparently.

When asked, “how many fallopian tubes does the average lady have?” one man prefaced with “I know I’m gonna be way off,” before answering “four.”

He was right about being way off, indeed. Women usually have one fallopian tube on either side of the uterus, making that two fallopian tubes.

Another guy guessed that a woman has not one, not two, but six ovaries. Which, in case you didn’t know, is three times more than the correct answer (two ovaries, one on either side of the uterus). Where would a woman keep four extra ovaries? Her purse?

A mammogram examines the stomach.

The interviewer also asked: “What part of the body does the mammogram examine?”

“The lower half…” replied one man. Yikes.

And when asked to demonstrate where exactly the “lower half” is, he gestured toward the uppermost part of his belly, seemingly avoiding the actual area a mammogram covers entirely.

PMS is all in the mind, but only annually.

The next question up was “What does PMS stand for?”

One man shyly answered, “Post…mental…syndrome?”

One outta three ain’t bad. But the correct answer is premenstrual syndrome.

And it definitely happens more than “once a year.”

An IUD is a “mammogram device.”

Oh, and a NuvaRing is a “pap schmear,” and a speculum is the actual “IUD.” Holy moly, if you thought IUDs were uncomfortable before…

Things really took a turn once the graphics came out.

And men were asked to point to where the cervix is. Plenty of things were pointed at—like the uterus. But sadly, no cervix findings.

Changing gears, the interview instructed the men to “point at something you know.”

To which one man replied (inaccurately) “uh…that’s a baby?”

Unless the woman is giving birth to a colon, that was incorrect.

Later in the video, a man is asked “where does the baby go?”

“In there,” the man answers after pointing to the ovaries. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go there. A fetus grows in the uterus, which this man thought was the cervix.)

His wife, a gynecologist no less, chuckled “I’m mortified…I’m apparently not a very good educator at home for my husband.”

Though this is just for pure fun, it is food for thought.

A woman’s autonomy over her own body has been the subject of much controversial discussion lately. And I can’t help but wonder how certain politicians/leaders would fare if given the same questions. Perhaps it is unwise to try to govern that which is not fully understood, just saying.

You can catch the full segment here:

U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, sparked considerable outrage on Wednesday when he compared proof of vaccination cards to the Gesundheitspass, a health pass that Nazis demanded people carry during Hitler’s reign of terror.

His tweet was a response to Washington, D.C.’s new mandate that anyone 12 and older will need to show proof of at least one vaccine shot before entering restaurants and other indoor venues.

Davidson tweeted an image of a Gesundheitspass along with the caption, “This has been done before” as a response to a tweet about the mandate from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. He then took things a step further by doubling down on his tweet with an explanation.

“Let’s recall that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people before segregating them, segregated them before imprisoning them, imprisoned them before enslaving them, and enslaved them before massacring them,” Davidson tweeted. “Dehumanizing and segregation are underway – and wrong.”

This has been done before. #DoNotComply https://twitter.com/mayorbowser/status/1480956796395216900u00a0u2026pic.twitter.com/pHeeNPVhlP

— Warren Davidson (@Warren Davidson)
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Dehumanizing and segregation are underway – and wrong.pic.twitter.com/8OAf54zDSU

— Warren Davidson (@Warren Davidson)
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By invoking the Holocaust, Davidson broke the first rule of politics, never compare anything or anyone to the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis. The only logical comparison that can be drawn between the Nazis and Washington, D.C. is that they both required people to present official documents with information about their health.

The city of Washington, D.C. is trying to keep people healthy by preventing the spread of a deadly disease. The Nazis were running a campaign of racial purity that would lead to the deaths of millions of people. The two aren’t remotely alike.

Davidson’s statement wasn’t just ridiculous, it was dangerous as well. It trivialized the unspeakable suffering that was caused by Hitler. When we downplay the seriousness of such an event, we embolden those who wish to see it happen again.

It also falsely turns those who are unvaccinated into victims when they are the people who are much more likely to cause the spread of the disease and put others’ health at risk. Davidson’s tweet is also playing up the idea that the unvaccinated are somehow righteous martyrs and victims of an authoritarian state. When people get a feeling of self-righteousness over their decisions, they are much less likely to change their minds.

Let’s face it, people who incorrectly believe they are standing up to people as bad as Nazis feel pretty good about themselves.

Davidson’s tweet was criticized by the Auschwitz Museum in Poland for “exploiting the tragedy.”

Auschwitz was the site of the Nazi’s most notorious concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people were exterminated.

Exploiting of the tragedy of all people who between 1933-45 suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany in a debate about vaccines & covid limitations in the time of global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 12, 2022

Davidson’s tweet was also condemned by Yad Vashem, which said he denigrated the “memory of victims and survivors.” Yad Vashem is Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. It is dedicated to preserving the memory of the Jews who were murdered and honoring Jews who fought against their Nazi oppressors.

Yad Vashem strongly condemns the use of the Holocaust to further agendas that are totally unrelated to the Holocaust. Manipulating the Holocaust in this way trivializes the horrific atrocities that were perpetrated & denigrates the memory of victims and survivors.

— Yad Vashem (@yadvashem) January 13, 2022

On Thursday, Davidson did something rather shocking in today’s political climate, he apologized for his tweet. It wasn’t a full-throated mea culpa, however, as he clung to the idea that there was some association between both health passes.

He started it with a quote from Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

“I had hoped to point that out,” Davidson wrote. “Bad things happen when governments dehumanize people. Sometimes, there is a next step – to systematically segregate them. Unfortunately, any reference to how the Nazis actually did that prevents a focus on anything other than the Holocaust. I appreciate my Jewish friends who have explained their perspectives and feel horrible that I have offended anyone. My sincere apologies.”

For my Jewish friends, and all others, my sincere apologies.pic.twitter.com/gyZm1onCOb

— Warren Davidson (@Warren Davidson)
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Davidson may have apologized for his comparison, but he doesn’t seem to understand the deeper error of his ways. We need politicians who represent large factions of unvaccinated people to speak to them honestly about the benefits of vaccination and the good it does for public health. Instead, he chooses to play to their self-righteous victimhood, which only exacerbates the pandemic and makes it necessary for governments to mandate vaccine passes in the first place.

Hilaria Baldwin, wife of Alec Baldwin, is best known for pretending to be Spanish and having a tendency for being tone deaf. Her latest online antics are a clear example of the latter. As Mediaite reports, Baldwin posted a series of wildly disparate photos to her Wednesday Instagram story, two of them featuring her husband staring at the camera blankly and holding up two very strange pictures, which the Oscar nominee apparently drew.

As Sarah Rumpf writes for Mediaite:

In the middle of Baldwin’s Story, there were two photos of Alec. In both of them, he is standing against a wood-paneled wall, staring glumly at the camera as he holds up a drawing. In the first drawing, a frowning man says “Hello!” and a woman in a bikini replies “May I help you?” In the second, the man is lying down, saying “Oh, God. Please help me. I’m dying,” as the woman replies, “Do I know you?”

Hilaria posted these two photos with the captions “ALEC AND HIS DRAWINGS OF HIM AND ME” on the first and “NOT DRAMATIC AT ALL…” on the second, along with a small video figure of herself sarcastically clapping.

Ummm… what?

Journalist Emily Miller saw the photos and wondered “Is Alec Baldwin taunting the sheriff investigating him?”

While the meaning behind them will likely not be revealed, the timing behind the cryptic (and rather childlike) drawings is odd. Earlier today, the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office—which is still investigating the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed when a gun Baldwin was holding on the set of the Western Rust accidentally fired—said that the actor has yet to comply with their search warrant for his cell phone, while Baldwin has been telling a very different story.

Last week, Baldwin posted a video to Instagram in which he claimed to be cooperating with authorities. But just today, authorities denied that was the case, saying that the actor has yet to comply with a search warrant issued nearly a month ago requiring him to hand over his phone to investigators.

It’s not the first time that Baldwin has seemed to be at odds with the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office. In December, the district attorney handling the case was apparently unhappy with Baldwin’s decision to sit down with George Stephanopoulos to give his first public interview since Hutchins’ October 21, 2021 death.

(Via Mediaite)

Being a successful actor in Hollywood might seem like it’s all VIP treatment and red-carpet events, but it takes more than just talent to find that level of fame. It also takes serious grit and determination and, on occasion, the ability to survive what could have been a very gruesome bear attack. Just ask Neve Campbell.

Campbell, who first rose to fame in her early twenties as the eldest daughter on the hit Fox drama Party of Five, is currently making the rounds to promote the latest entry in the meta-horror Scream franchise. Titled simply Scream, the movie marks her fifth outing as Sidney Prescott, who we first met back in 1996 as a high schooler who had a habit of attracting serial killers.

While Campbell has logged plenty of screen time as a scream queen, it was an earlier project that could have turned into a real-life horror movie. As Variety reports, Campbell sat down with Kelly Clarkson earlier this week to discuss her new movie, when talked turned to a project she worked on when she was 17 years old, where she and a bear she was acting opposite didn’t quite hit it off.

“I was playing this role where she’s ‘one with the animals’ and there was a scene where I was getting chased by a bear,” Campbell explained. “They brought this bear on set and they first gave me this big bottle of Coke to feed it. [Then] they said, ‘Dip your hand in honey and just run. And when you get to the tree over there, turn your hand out and feed the bear.’”

Ever the dutiful actor, Campbell did as she was instructed. “I dipped my hand in honey and I run to this rock, and I turn around and I put my hand out and the bear is not slowing down and he’s not coming for my hand,” Campbell explained. “He grabs me by the leg and he pulls me through the forest. My mother was visiting set and she’s screaming. The whole crew is frozen because nobody can believe what’s happening. All I can think to say is, ‘He’s biting me,’ like it’s not obvious.”

It took a bear wrangler throwing rocks at her ursine co-star to pull the bear’s attention away from Campbell, who escaped relatively unscathed. Looking back on the event today, Campbell sees it all as kind of silly. “We get asked to do silly things,” she said.

You can watch the full segment above. Scream arrives in theaters on January 14, 2022.

(Via Variety)

If you’re ever searching for a new doctor, you might want to find out the names of Glenn Beck’s physicians—and avoid them at all costs. As The Independent reports, the former Fox News host, and proud anti-vaxxer, is currently in the midst of his second battle with COVID… and it doesn’t sound like things are going so well.

On Wednesday, Beck called into fellow right-wing host Mark Levin’s radio show and, when asked how he was doing, replied that “despite having COVID and seeing the destruction of our country, I’m doing great.” [insert record scratch]

In between throat clears, Beck confirmed that he was dealing with his second go-around with COVID. “It’s a lighter case, but it’s now started to go into my lungs today, and a little disturbing,” Beck said, but assured Levin that “I’m on all the medications and treatments and everything else, so we’ll see. It’s all good.”

When Levin, clearly surprised by this development, pressed about what exactly what “all the medications” meant, Beck—sounding like a Donald Trump clone (or at least a 2020 Donald Trump clone)—read off a laundry list of meds, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. In other words, an anti-malaria drug and a non-FDA-approved paste given to horses to rid them of parasitic worms. But Beck seems convinced that this is the cocktail that’ll cure him. “My doctors are hitting it really hard,” he said of their recommended regimen.

Beck has been dealing with the virus for about a week now and didn’t seem totally sure whether he was actually feeling any better. “I’m not going downhill,” he said. “I mean, I think I’m feeling better. It’s just getting into my lungs … you will want to avoid that.” (No sh*t, Sherlock.)

Of course, Beck has only himself to blame for his second bout with COVID—not because he refuses to get vaccinated but, as he says, because he’s a “fatty-fat-fatso.” Yes, that must be it.

(Via The Independent)

Anna Marie Tendler, victorian lampshade maker, bulldog owner, and ex-wife of John Mulaney, opened up to Harper’s Bazaar about her “surreal” year in the aftermath of her sudden divorce from the comedian last spring. “Everything that has transpired has been totally shocking and I think surreal,” Tendler told Harper’s Bazaar. “In a way, I feel like, well, it can only go up from here, because I reached the depth of where I could go.”

The artist now lives in a house she and Mulaney had bought together in 2020, though she has only lived there alone. Instead, Tendler made the house into her own art project, filling the rooms with her delicate lampshades and art as she finished up a master’s degree last year.

Tendler opened up about her work, saying it was the months of isolation that helped her dive into her art: “I feel so lucky that so much of my work is this mundane, detail-oriented handwork. I’m working with a needle and thread, and it’s like, if I’m not on it, I’m going to prick myself with a needle and f*ck something up.” That intricate work is shared heavily on her TikTok, which has gone viral with several videos of Tendler speaking candidly about art and heartbreak.

As for Mulaney, who spoke infamously about not wanting children when he was with Tendler, the comedian just welcomed a child with actress Olivia Munn last month. When asked if she’s reconsidered her desire to have children, Tendler claims she’s considering freezing her eggs. “There were things I never even thought about before because that was just a closed door. So now that it feels like not as much of a closed door, it’s something that I ruminate on a lot.”

Read Tendler’s full interview here.

Earlier this week, Britney Spears’ sister Jamie Lynn Spears stopped by Good Morning America to discuss her and Britney’s relationship and to promote her upcoming book Things I Should Have Said. Jamie Lynn’s appearance was a tearful one as she declared her love for Britney, but the singer herself isn’t buying it. In a recent post to both Twitter and Instagram, Britney shared a lengthy message in response to her sister’s GMA interview, one she says left her “disgusted.”

Britney began and said that she watched the interview while dealing with symptoms of a 104-degree fever. “It was actually kind of nice having a fever so high cause I had to surrender to not caring,” she wrote. She went on to say that two things from Jamie Lynn’s GMA interview bothered her, with the first being her claim that Britney’s behavior was out of control. “She was never around me much 15 years ago at that time,” Britney wrote. “So why are they even talking about that unless she wants to sell a book at my expense [thinking and book emojis] ??? REALLY ???” Britney then mentioned the second thing she did not appreciate from the interview.

“Then where the lady mentioned why did she accuse you of doing remixes to her songs,” she added. “I know it may sound like a silly thing to most people but I wrote a lot of my songs and my sister was the baby. She never had to work for anything. Everything was always given to her !!!! If you were me, you might understand asking for 13 years for remixes to go into a small venue show and on tours !!!!”

“Hope your book does well, Jamie Lynn !!!!” Britney wrote later on in the message. She added, “I won’t be doing Instagram for a while. The media, this business has always been extremely hateful to me. I’ve given enough … MORE than enough. I was never given back ever what I want … They say in the the Bible “ask and you shall receive” …. uhhhhh not in my life.” Towards the end of Britney’s lengthy post, she wrote, “My family loves to pull me down and hurt me always so I am disgusted with them !!!!”

You can view the post from Britney above.

Laughter is one of the most natural impulses in humans. Most babies start to laugh out loud at around 3 to 4 months, far earlier than they are able to speak or walk. Expressing enjoyment or delight comes naturally to us, but we’re not the only creatures who communicate with giggles.

Researchers at UCLA have identified 65 species of animals who make “play vocalizations,” or what we would consider laughter. Some of those vocalizations were already well documented—we’ve known for a while that apes and rats laugh—but others may come as a surprise. Along with a long list of primate species, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, mongooses and three bird species are prone to laughter as well. (Many bird species can mimic human laughter, but that’s not the same as making their own play vocalizations.)

Primatologist and UCLA anthropology graduate student Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant shared their findings in an article in the journal Bioacoustics.

The authors explored various play vocalization sounds, recording them as noisy or tonal, loud or quiet, high- or low-pitched, short or long, a single call or rhythmic pattern.

But really, what we want to see is what animal laughter sounds like from various species, right? While the researchers said that it can be hard to document laughter in the wild, especially among animals with quieter vocalizations, we do have some examples captured on video.

Check out these foxes laughing like little kids:

Or maybe little kids on helium. How fun is that?

Ever seen a bonobo chimp laugh? Just as cute.

I’m not sure if tickling a baby bonobo is sweet or torturous, though these researchers surely know what they’re doing. It’s always delightful to see the instinctual playfulness of primates.

Laughter in some animals isn’t as audibly apparent as it is in these foxes and chimps, though. Researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin found that rats laugh when they are tickled—and appear to enjoy tickling, as they seek it out—but their vocalizations are ultrasonic, so it’s hard to hear them without special instruments.

The UCLA researchers shared that the study of laughter in animals can help us better understand our own evolutionary behavior.

“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said, according to UCLA.

“When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join,” Winkler said. “Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.”

Raise your hand if you just want to see a cow laughing for real now.

When Jimmy Kimmel takes to the street, you know you’re in for a good laugh at just how little we actually know about, well, seemingly anything. That goes for anatomy too. In this case, female anatomy.

In a segment called “What Do You Know About The Female Body?” men try—and hilariously fail—to answer even the most basic questions, like “does a female have one uterus, or two?” much to the amazement of some of their female partners.

Here are some of the very best bits of nonwisdom:

Woman have LOTS of fallopian tubes and ovaries, apparently.

When asked, “how many fallopian tubes does the average lady have?” one man prefaced with “I know I’m gonna be way off,” before answering “four.”

He was right about being way off, indeed. Women usually have one fallopian tube on either side of the uterus, making that two fallopian tubes.

Another guy guessed that a woman has not one, not two, but six ovaries. Which, in case you didn’t know, is three times more than the correct answer (two ovaries, one on either side of the uterus). Where would a woman keep four extra ovaries? Her purse?

A mammogram examines the stomach.

The interviewer also asked: “What part of the body does the mammogram examine?”

“The lower half…” replied one man. Yikes.

And when asked to demonstrate where exactly the “lower half” is, he gestured toward the uppermost part of his belly, seemingly avoiding the actual area a mammogram covers entirely.

PMS is all in the mind, but only annually.

The next question up was “What does PMS stand for?”

One man shyly answered, “Post…mental…syndrome?”

One outta three ain’t bad. But the correct answer is premenstrual syndrome.

And it definitely happens more than “once a year.”

An IUD is a “mammogram device.”

Oh, and a NuvaRing is a “pap schmear,” and a speculum is the actual “IUD.” Holy moly, if you thought IUDs were uncomfortable before…

Things really took a turn once the graphics came out.

And men were asked to point to where the cervix is. Plenty of things were pointed at—like the uterus. But sadly, no cervix findings.

Changing gears, the interview instructed the men to “point at something you know.”

To which one man replied (inaccurately) “uh…that’s a baby?”

Unless the woman is giving birth to a colon, that was incorrect.

Later in the video, a man is asked “where does the baby go?”

“In there,” the man answers after pointing to the ovaries. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t go there. A fetus grows in the uterus, which this man thought was the cervix.)

His wife, a gynecologist no less, chuckled “I’m mortified…I’m apparently not a very good educator at home for my husband.”

Though this is just for pure fun, it is food for thought.

A woman’s autonomy over her own body has been the subject of much controversial discussion lately. And I can’t help but wonder how certain politicians/leaders would fare if given the same questions. Perhaps it is unwise to try to govern that which is not fully understood, just saying.

You can catch the full segment here: