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Enlarge / A Sixgill Hagfish (Eptatretus hexatrema) in False Bay, South Africa. (credit: Peter Southwood/CC BY-SA 4.0) The humble hagfish is an ugly, gray, eel-like creature best known for its ability to unleash a cloud of sticky slime onto unsuspecting predators, clogging the gills and suffocating said predators. That's why it's affectionately known as a "snot snake." Hagfish also love to burrow into the deep-sea sediment, but scientists have been unable to observe precisely how they do so because the murky sediment obscures the view.

Dr. Cynthia Sweet has been a veterinarian for about eight years and loves her work, but is clear that the job is not just “playing with puppies and kittens all day.” Sweet has been on the staff at the Belcaro Animal Hospital in Denver for four years after moving to Colorado from Wisconsin.

Julie Baxter just faced the most agonizing decision a person with pets can face: whether to euthanize an ailing animal in the face of the overwhelming desire to keep a beloved companion alive. Baxter’s pain was made all the more acute as she and her partner wrestled with wanting to do all they could for their dog Roscoe, while realizing there was a limit to how much they could spend on tests and hospital stays.

These restrictions are affecting how young people think about voting, where they should choose to live, study and work, and how to control their fertility. Adolescence and young adulthood is a time of identity formation, when young people figure out who they are and who they want to be. One of the ways they do this is by considering the world around them, paying attention to social issues and starting to understand their society and their place in it.

A new study from talent agency UTA says creatives are increasingly using AI in their work, even while their feelings about it are mixed. Joe Kessler thinks AI is at an inflection point. As the global head United Talent Agency‘s research, data and strategy arm called UTA IQ, he believes the technology is past the point of inevitability—and he has the research to back it up.

Enlarge / Zork running on an Amiga at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed)) You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. That simple sentence first appeared on a PDP-10 mainframe in the 1970s, and the words marked the beginning of what we now know as interactive fiction. From the bare-bones text adventures of the 1980s to the heartfelt hypertext works of Twine creators, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience.