404 Media

2026-03-25 16:38:57

Why It's Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science

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Regular ejaculation — for example, by masturbation — produces higher quality sperm, a finding that has implications for fertility science and assisted reproductive technologies, according to a comprehensive new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It’s well-established that sperm quality in many animals can deteriorate as males age, but less is known about how the age of sperm cells independently impacts reproductive outcomes. To fill in this gap, scientists co-led by Krish Sanghvi and Rebecca Dean of the University of Oxford conducted a meta-analysis of more than 115 studies about human sperm storage that cumulatively involved nearly 55,000 men, as well as 56 studies of 30 non-human species.

“Krish and I have done studies previously on the effects of male aging on fertility and offspring outcomes,” said Dean in a call with 404 Media. “So we have this joint interest in well: can sperm get old? What happens when sperm gets old? Do we see changes in fertility? Do we see changes in offspring outcomes?”

“We are sperm biologists, so these sorts of questions have been interesting to us,” added Sanghvi in the same call.

The results revealed that stored sperm deteriorates over time, resulting in DNA damage, reduced motility, and other defects that can affect fertilization and embryo outcomes. The discovery has implications for optimizing sperm quality for fertility clinics and captive breeding programs in animals, while also raising new questions about the complicated evolutionary mechanisms that govern reproduction across species.

Sperm cells in humans, and many other vertebrates, can be stored for several days in males before they are released through ejaculation or reabsorbed by the reproductive system. Sperm can also survive for several days in the human female reproductive system. Meanwhile, some female animals have evolved to store sperm for extremely long periods in order to optimize the timing and conditions of fertilization; for example, female bats can store sperm for months, while ant and bee queens can store it for years.

“There's so much innovation within the animal world about how to maintain sperm and keep them alive and functioning,” said Dean. “In some species, the female is storing the sperm when the male who she's mated with has long since died, but she's keeping their sperm alive. It's quite incredible.”

The team found that across these species, older sperm was more likely to show signs of deterioration that can influence fertility and embryo outcomes.

“In the animal dataset, we found an effect on fertilized embryos,” Sanghvi said. “Stored sperm led to lesser viability, or embryos actually becoming an offspring, basically, which is an intergenerational, almost evolutionary effect, which I thought was quite surprising. It means that the storage of sperm or abstinence is not only having an effect on the sperm itself, but it's also doing something bad for the embryo at an early stage.”

“We found very weak effects in adult offspring, like offspring lifespan or offspring reproduction,” he added. “Those weren't significant. But at the embryo stage, there was a stronger effect.”

Interestingly, insects that store sperm for weeks or months were able to maintain sperm quality at only a slightly higher level than insects that store it for years, underscoring that these animals have evolved sophisticated adaptations for long-term sperm storage. These amazing techniques across nature could inspire new approaches for future assisted reproduction in humans.

“Recently, there has been a huge boom in research on female reproductive fluids, or ovarian fluids, which are the chemicals in fluids released by females in their sperm storage organs,” Sanghvi said. “They have a lot of proteins that help with DNA repair, or the motility of sperm. They also have a lot of antioxidants, and small RNAs that change how sperm are transcribing their genes.”

“Maybe we can learn: what are the cocktails or chemicals in female storage? And can we actually replicate these molecules?” he added.

The study also sheds light on the possible evolutionary origins of masturbation, which has been observed in humans (a lot) as well as dozens of other species including dolphins, elephants, lions, and many primates. Masturbation may have emerged as a way to avoid leaving sperm in the tank for too long. Indeed, even species that don’t masturbate in the traditional sense of self-stimulation have still been observed offloading sperm in a practice called “sperm dumping.”

Masturbation has “been a sort of mystery,” Sanghvi said. “Sperm are costly to produce. For many animals it involves a lot of fluids, maturation, time, and energy investment. So why just get rid of it? A longstanding hypothesis has been that sperm are deteriorating within males when they are stored.”

“Crabs do something similar,” he continued. “Every time they moult, some crabs will just get rid of all their sperm. So again, why waste all of this? One reason could be that it's getting rid of the stored old sperm.”

In addition to yielding new insights into the evolutionary tradeoffs of sperm storage, the study can inform the best approaches to assisted reproduction in humans, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

For example, the World Health Organization currently typically recommends that men undergo two to seven days of abstinence before donating semen in order to boost the number of sperm in the samples. However, the new study suggests the benefits of high sperm quantity should be weighed against sperm quality linked to the age of the sperm, which has implications for human fertility, as well as captive breeding programs for livestock and other animals.

To sum up, to ensure high sperm quality, avoid keeping too much spunk in your junk and regularly evacuate the ejaculate.

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Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Study: Why we’re searching for the evolutionary origins of masturbation – and the results so far

Dr Matilda Brindle (UCL Anthropology) shares her new study in The Conversation on the evolutionary origins and advantages of auto sexual behaviour across the animal kingdom.

^{UCL News}

404 Media

2026-03-25 14:15:58

Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood

Barely three months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would be bringing user-generated AI slop to Disney+ as part of a landmark $1 billion investment into OpenAI that would allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters. The announcement was so important that Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both championed it in a press release that is full of the kind of cope that Silicon Valley AI boosters and some Hollywood executives suggest would unleash a new era of moviemaking and storytelling powered by AI that is cheaper than making movies with human workers.

“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,” Iger said.

“Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees,” the press release stated. “Under the license, fans will be able to watch curated selections of Sora-generated videos on Disney+, and OpenAI and Disney will collaborate to utilize OpenAI’s models to power new experiences for Disney+ subscribers, furthering innovative and creative ways to connect with Disney’s stories and characters. Sora and ChatGPT Images are expected to start generating fan-inspired videos with Disney’s multi-brand licensed characters in early 2026.”

Tuesday was a disastrous day for that future, and the complete and utter failure of both Sora and Disney’s dalliance with AI garbage suggests AI slop is indeed not the future of Hollywood. Disney did not even get to the point here it allowed people to build anything with Disney characters before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor and its investment.

Sora is dead. May the memory of its four-month existence as a copyright infringement machine that was also used to make videos of men strangling women and ICE arresting undocumented immigrants be a blessing.

Disney is pulling out of its billion-dollar investment in OpenAI entirely. Other efforts to slopify Hollywood look underwhelming, appear to have been quietly shelved, or have utterly failed to gather any audience whatsoever. This news does not bode well for OpenAI and it likely does not bode well for Paramount’s megamerger with Warner Brothers, a deal whose financial terms and the debt involved only make sense if you can believe in a future in which the cost of creating blockbuster movies is drastically reduced by AI via huge numbers of people losing their jobs.

At the time of Disney’s announcement with OpenAI, it was hard to imagine why Disney would infect its flagship paid streaming service with content from a service whose viral videos consisted of users turning Pikachu into a felon and SpongeBob into Hitler. It was not clear why Disney would want AI slop made by randos to live next to, say the $200 million Toy Story 4 or any number of Disney’s masterpieces. It was also hard to imagine why a company that has so aggressively enforced its copyright would suddenly say all bets are off for Sam Altman’s plagiarism machine. The only thing that made any sense is that Hollywood executives, like Silicon Valley executives, hate paying for human labor so much that they have convinced themselves that their customers would happily consume AI slop if it was shoved down their throats.

After Sora’s initial novelty wore off, it became clear that people do not actually want this, and that the people using Sora were using it at great financial cost to OpenAI in order to largely take videos off-platform to spam other social media sites. The Sora subreddit has been basically dead for months outside of people attempting to figure out how to get it to create nudes or people complaining about content violations. When I scrolled Sora Tuesday evening I almost exclusively saw videos that had few or no likes or comments. I saw very little Disney content, though I did see a lot of South Park, Peppa Pig, and SpongeBob videos, none of which were very good.

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The death of Sora is a good time to check in on how other attempts to slopify Hollywood are going. In December 2024, I wrote about Chinese television giant TCL’s attempt to make an AI-generated movie studio called TCL Film Machine, which was pitched as a “key pillar of TCLArt, an important brand initiative of TCL to make art more accessible and inspiring worldwide.” I went to the premiere of a series of short films that were pitched as a new way of making movies faster and cheaper. At the time, I asked Chris Regina, TCL’s then Chief Content Officer and a leader of the TCL Film Machine project what the plan was.

“If you can imagine where we might be a year or 18 months from now, I think that in some ways is probably what scares a lot of the industry because they can see where it sits today, and as much as they want to poke holes or be critical of it, they do realize that it will continue to be better,” he said, 14 months ago.

Regina and another TCL executive on that project now have other jobs. TCL itself has released the five shorts I saw, as well as an 11-minute, widely mocked romcom film called Next Stop Paris, and a four-minute film called Memory Maker. Memory Maker was released 13 months ago and has 1,771 views on YouTube. Next Stop Paris has 10,000 views on YouTube. Comments have been turned off for both movies. The “applications” page for prospective TCL Film Machine projects is now just a static page, and TCL hasn’t mentioned AI films in any of its press releases in roughly a year; many of its recent announcements have to do with releasing reruns of shows from the 80s and 90s.

Meanwhile, much-hyped “AI movies” or “AI special effects,” including the Brad Pitt-Tom Cruise AI fight scene that the New York Times boldly declared “spooked Hollywood” have been wildly overhyped, still have various continuity errors and an uncanny feel, or are simply not movies in any meaningful sense.

This is not to say that AI will have no role in Hollywood or that people are not making money from AI slop. Hollywood studios are using AI behind the scenes for editing, storyboarding, scratch voiceover, and a handful of other things. But the wild hype of AI slop as a direct threat to human storytelling and AI tools as a replacement for talented humans in Hollywood has not come to pass and it’s not clear if it ever will. The AI movies at AI film festivals continue to suck and the people who show up to them are largely people involved in making them or invested in having them work out. AI slop is effective on social media, meanwhile, not because it is good or because people like it but because these platforms are flooded with it, because social media companies are invested in making generative AI tools, and because their algorithms are wildly broken. It turns out when you try to serve slop on a product people pay for, no one wants it.

And the end of Sora does not mean there is no demand for AI video generators, but it does mean that the overwhelming use case for AI video generators continues to be what it has always been: people making porn, nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation, and low-effort slop at scale. The people making this type of content do not want to deal with guardrails or limitations and so have largely flocked to open source and Chinese models. When you take away those use cases, it turns out there’s basically nothing left.

Ben Affleck Quietly Founded a Filmmaker-Focused AI Tech Company. Netflix Just Bought It.

The streaming giant is acquiring InterPositive, which develops proprietary AI tools to help filmmakers and creatives, with the actor and director also joining Netflix as a senior adviser.

^{Alex Weprin (The Hollywood Reporter)}

404 Media

2026-03-25 13:47:39

The People Left Behind by the Metaverse

When Meta announced its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds last week a lot of us laughed.

Social scientist Dr Ruth Diaz was not one of them.

Diaz worked for Meta as a VR community design developer in the early days of the Horizon Worlds project and left in 2022. After Meta’s announcement last week, Diaz wrote a post on LinkedIn attempting to articulate her feelings. “I cannot overstate the scale of institutional betrayal this represents,” she said in her post. “Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta to claim transformation. What he has actually done is strip-mine the trust and labor of every creator who took that promise seriously. That should sit on his record permanently. I feel horror. Rage. Grief. Shame. The specific shame of having believed.”
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Diaz said she fell in love with VR after her brother lent her a PC virtual reality setup and she collaborated on art with people spontaneously in a virtual world. “VR puts us into a very disinhibited state where we can open our hearts and try on new identities,” she told 404 Media. “It's an equalizer of identities, some because of the anonymity, but some because we all choose our own skin. That creates an even footing of sorts.”

She said she signed on with Meta after being impressed by an early version of their Horizon Worlds toolkit. After joining the company, she spent some of her time getting employees into headsets and showing them around the virtual worlds people had made. “And many times, I had them in tears by the end because they finally understood what was possible,” she said. “And I don't think any other social app has ever built a tool that had that combination of simplicity and hands on learning how to create.”

In a follow up post on LinkedIn, Diaz shared some of these worlds including the interactive biography of an amputee named Lacey and an Underground Railroad experience from a woman named Bizerka. She pointed out that Alcoholics Anonymous holds meetings in Horizon Worlds and shared a church that meets on Meta’s platform every Sunday.

Diaz’s fears were allayed somewhat on March 18 when Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth backpedaled on shutting Horizon Worlds down completely. During an AMA posted to Instagram, he told fans that the company would keep Horizon Worlds accessible for “the foreseeable future.” But Meta is capricious and it’s impossible to know exactly how far into the future its imagining.

“I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll work, but I think it could, because it’s very unusual for them to flinch,” Diaz told 404 Media. “They usually just kind of hunker down and pretend they don’t see it and go full PR.”

She said that Bosworth’s promise to keep Horizon Worlds running wasn’t a big enough promise. “The way they have behaved here is profoundly harmful and I would deem it a type of psychological torture from corporate neglect,” she said. “But the horror of this is ongoing, because [Bosworth] came out and said: ‘we’re going to keep it for now,’ that doesn’t reassure anybody, that doesn’t help anybody. That makes people feel foolish for being upset but also completely uncertain about their futures.”

Wagner James Au, author of Making a Metaverse That Matters andthe blog New World Notes, told 404 Media that he’s sympathetic. He also noted that building the type of community she did without the support and infrastructure of a company like Meta is difficult. “A common mistake is to assume the Metaverse should be a non-corporate open source project. Those have been tried and they've all failed to gain traction,” he said.

In the end, the social connections Diaz fostered will remain even as the spaces fade. “Metaverse communities are what's important and permanent, not any particular 3D space they're associated with,” James Au said. “User communities create, congregate, and socialize around 3D spaces, but those spaces age over time and lose their luster. What's important is that they helped foster social connections which can be resilient beyond any one platform. It's why so much metaverse activity happens outside the immersive space on Bluesky, Reddit, etc.”

Like Diaz, James Au doesn’t trust the Zuckerberg. “Meta has consistently failed in its responsibilities to users, so I'm not sure it's realistic for Horizon Worlds users to expect anything from it now,” he said.

Meta’s Metaverse was doomed from the start but that doesn’t mean the idea itself is bad or even Meta’s underlying technology. Diaz and others found community there. “Despite the ups and downs and branding and ‘Metaverse is dead’ and whatever, all these twists and turns, the tools [themselves] have incredible merit. And that’s the only message I’ve ever tried to bring, and I’m just heartbroken that it got attached to these companies,” Diaz said.

Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings Are Held Every Day In Virtual Spaces

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are being held every day inside Horizon Worlds, VRChat, and even Resonite.

^{Ian Hamilton (UploadVR)}

404 Media

2026-03-25 13:32:29

Podcast: The Company Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into Podcasts

This week we start with Emanuel’s crazy story about WebinarTV, a company that is secretly recording Zoom meetings and turning them into AI-powered podcasts. It’s nuts. After the break, Joseph tells us about the eccentric billionaire who tried to become a cocaine kingpin. In the subscribers-only section, we lament the lose of the metaverse.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
youtube.com/embed/79SIwINKY0E?…
1:06 - ⁠This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts⁠

25:58 - ⁠An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire’s Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin⁠

Sub's Story: ⁠RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}