Mashable

We're moving closer and closer to the Full Moon, and tonight the moon is more than half lit. This is due to where we are in the current lunar cycle.

The lunar cycle is a recurring series of eight unique phases of the moon's visibility. The whole cycle takes about 29.5 days (according to NASA), and these different phases happen as the Sun lights up different parts of the moon whilst it orbits Earth. The moon is always there, but what we see on Earth changes depending on how much is lit up.

See what's happening with the moon tonight, July 4.

As of Friday, July 4, the moon phase is Waxing Gibbous. According to NASA's Daily Moon Observation, 66% of the moon will be lit up and visible to us on Earth. This is also day nine of the lunar cycle.

Tonight, there is plenty to see with the naked eye, the most notable being the Mare Vaporum, Mare Fecunditatis, and the Tycho crater.

If you have binoculars, you'll also spot the Endymion Crater, the Clavius Craters, and the Alps Mountains/Alpine Valley

With a telescope, you'll see even more tonight, with the Apollo 17 and Apollo 11 landing spots becoming visible. You'll also be able to spot the Rupes Altai.

This month's full moon will take place on July 10. The last full moon was on June 11.

Moon phases are caused by the 29.5-day cycle of the moon’s orbit, which changes the angles between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Moon phases are how the moon looks from Earth as it goes around us. We always see the same side of the moon, but how much of it is lit up by the Sun changes depending on where it is in its orbit. This is how we get full moons, half moons, and moons that appear completely invisible. There are eight main moon phases, and they follow a repeating cycle:

New Moon - The moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter - Half of the moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-moon.

Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon - The whole face of the moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous - The moon starts losing light on the right side.

Last Quarter (or Third Quarter) - Another half-moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.

If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.

There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.

An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.

If you find yourself stuck at any step of today's Hurdle, don't worry! We have you covered.

Boredom.

ENNUI

To seize.

USURP

Alert.

AWAKE

Amazing.

GREAT

To leave quickly.

SCRAM

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Since its debut in 2022, The Bear has been a haunted show. The ghosts aren't paranormal visitors but a collection of regrets, fears, and traumas as diverse as the series' many characters. Each individual is trailed by a destructive shadow, ready to sabotage any progress toward being a less dysfunctional person.

Sometimes the haunting is an attempt at a pressure-relieving punchline; sometimes it's just a gut-punch. Either way, the way characters grapple with their never-quite-buried losses deftly teach the audience something about the trajectory of heartbreak, the punishing nature of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and what it takes to heal.

Still, Season 3 pushed the conceit of haunting to its limit, leaning into a repetitive emotional deadlock over the course of 10 episodes. The audience watched as chef Carmy Berzatto, played by Jeremey Allen White, remained stuck in his head, and mired in memories of working for an abusive boss.

But Season 4 delivers the audience from this psychological spiral, and not just for Carmy.

Beyond Carmy's determined effort to make space for other people's feelings — hell, even their existence — numerous characters get a meaningful chance to confront the ghosts that haunt them.

An avoidant Syd (Ayo Edebiri) makes the decision (and the phone call) she's been dreading. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) figures out his place in his own family as Tiff (Gillian Jacobs) marries Frank (Josh Hartnett). He also gets the chance to tell Carmy about the guilt he felt when Mikey (Jon Bernthal) died by suicide. Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) makes a tearful apology to Carmy for decades of parental neglect, among other regrets.

Opportunities like these become key to the characters' healing, masterfully revealing how recovery from addiction, trauma, and emotional damage is possible.

Kassi Diwa-Kite, a licensed marriage and family therapist at BetterHelp who has watched all four seasons of The Bear, told Mashable that the series' latest outing "absolutely" felt less haunted. She says that's primarily because the characters are slowly embracing their personal and professional identities, which requires self-awareness and emotional regulation they didn't previously possess. She adds that the characters develop a curiosity about themselves and the patterns they seek to break that ultimately empowers them.

As a result, "that hauntedness has to start sliding away because they're coming more into themselves," says Diwa-Kite.

Not every character goes on the same journey as Carmy, Syd, Donna, and Richie. Mashable's Belen Edwards makes the convincing case that Season 4 failed Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), who is mostly seen trying to cook a certain pasta dish in under three minutes.

Whether or not this makes for critically-acclaimed television is also a concern. Some critics felt Season 4 still stalled in terms of narrative momentum and lacked urgency, even if it was an improvement on the show's third installment.

Yet watching key players each chart a unique, if not straightforward, path toward happiness and redemption remains special to behold. It all happens in a world absent of therapy- and wellness-speak, too. There's nothing wrong with those conventions; they help countless people inch toward recovery every day. Still, there's something simple and relatable about Carmy's refrain throughout Season 4: "I'm trying."

After three seasons of focusing only on what he can accomplish in the kitchen, Carmy slogs through being fully present in his life, visibly uncomfortable with finding and saying the words people need to hear. He stutters and staggers, but manages to make progress.

Carmy shows up on Claire's (Molly Gordon) doorstep months after having literally ghosted her early in their romantic relationship. Pressed on why he became so fearful of intimacy, he finally blurts out an apology.

When Carmy realizes in a separate scene that it took weeks for him to meet his newborn niece, he more calmly summons an apology to his sister Sugar (Abby Elliott) for failing to show up.

Diwa-Kite particularly appreciated Carmy's arc in Season 4 because the character begins to make the connections that have long eluded him: He escaped to culinary school after growing up with an absent father and a mother addicted to alcohol, then found himself in an abusive professional relationship. Now that he wants a different future, it might not look pretty or feel easy.

"Recovery from trauma is going to be clumsy," Diwa-Kite says, noting that she appreciated how the show depicts Carmy's process. "Just let it be messy. That's where the healing is happening."

While Season 4 is full of moments in which characters makes more fulfilling, grounded choices, there is perhaps none as beautiful as the scene that unfolds when Richie and Tiff's daughter, Eva (Annabelle Toomey), hides under a large table during the celebration of her mother's marriage to Frank.

Afraid to dance with Frank in front of an audience of adults, she refuses to come out. Soon every major character — and some minor ones, too — find themselves under the table with Eva, sharing their fears, one-by-one. Carmy admits that his is the "opposite of chaos," and math. Richie gets a chuckle by saying his fear is artificial intelligence, specifically the Singularity. Frank confesses that he's afraid of heights.

On it goes like that, as many adults with a history of trauma reassure a little girl about whom they care deeply that it's normal to feel fear.

"There was so much healing that you could see among all of those adults," Diwa-Kite says.

The episode, entitled "Bears," is an unexpected bookend to Season 2's "Fishes," which depicted another family gathering that couldn't be more different.

"Fishes" was a tense hourlong observation of family dysfunction and the toll that it takes on everyone it touches. "Bears" demonstrates how loving relationships, even when they're imperfect, can sustain people who otherwise feel broken, and can possibly achieve generational healing.

"If this were a real girl, imagine the core memory that was created for her in that moment," Diwa-Kite says of Eva. "She will remember that forever. She will draw on that experience forever."

The impromptu community that came together for Eva during that scene echoes an overarching theme of Season 4: People heal in community and through the relationships they've built, Diwa-Kite says.

None of this means that Season 5 will be easy-going for any of the characters.

Indeed, the final episode of Season 4 was fraught as Carmy, Syd, and Richie spent a half-hour arguing, in close-ups, over Carmy's imminent departure from the restaurant. Carmy says he wants to learn who he is when he's not trying to escape his pain. Richie and Syd, though, suspect he's running away — again.

Whether or not Carmy will truly find himself might seem like a gamble. But, then again, Carmy spent the season repairing the relationships that matter most to him rather than severing those ties, and seems more than ready to instead walk away from his proverbial ghosts.

Viral racist and antisemitic TikTok videos appear to be made with Google's new AI video generator Veo 3, according to a new report from Media Matters.

The nonprofit research organization found that some of the hateful videos had racked up hundreds of thousands or millions of views.

A TikTok spokesperson told Mashable that the platform has firm policies against hate speech, and that it uses comprehensive technologies and moderation processes to implement them.

"We proactively enforce robust rules against hateful speech and behavior and have removed the accounts we identified in the report, many of which were already banned prior to the report publishing," the spokesperson told Mashable in an email.

One TikTok, labeled "Average Waffle House in Atlanta," featured a restaurant setting overrun by monkeys that throw watermelon and carry buckets of fried chicken. It had been viewed more than 622,000 times when Media Matters took a screenshot of the video.

Some of the commenters affirmed the video's racist stereotypes. One person said, "all their mannerisms…to the T…"

A different TikTok uploaded in mid June, with at least 835,000 views, came with the prompt, "i asked ai: 'average spirit airlines experience." The video featured monkeys as well, climbing all over the plane.

Media Matters said the videos it identified ran a maximum of eight seconds, the length of Veo 3's publicly available text-to-video clips. The videos were also labeled "Veo" in the corner, or used hashtags, captions, or usernames related to Veo 3 or AI. They also included errors, distortions, and nonsense text common to AI-generated videos.

Media Matters published a compilation of the clips it identified to its own YouTube account.

Mashable contacted Google for comment on the Media Matters report but hadn't received a response at the time of publication.

While Media Matters focused on videos that appeared on TikTok, some of the same objectionable clips have also been posted to YouTube and Instagram.

However, the examples Mashable viewed had far less engagement, sometimes receiving only a few hundred likes and a handful of comments, suggesting they have not been as widely viewed as the content that went viral on TikTok before it was removed.

In general, videos created with Veo 3 that feature hateful or racist content have become popular on other social media platforms, including Instagram.

When Veo 3 was released in late May, Mashable tech editor Timothy Beck Werth described its realism as both "impressive" and "scary." Google told Werth that Veo 3's safeguards against misinformation include digital watermarks, and that it employs AI safety guidelines.

The AI-generated videos identified by Media Matters included anti-Black stereotypes about criminality, food preferences, and absent fathers. Some featured police encounters with Black people, including one in which a white officer shoots a "Black one" from his car. That clip had been viewed more than 14 million times.

The clips also portrayed racist imagery against Asian and South Asian people, and depicted antisemitic stereotypes, including Jewish men chasing after a gold coin.

One clip, viewed a million times, featured a gaunt man standing in front of a crematorium, vlogging while at a Nazi concentration camp. "Well everyone is having a great time here," the man says. It's unclear if the minute-long video was made with Veo 3.

Another style of AI-generated videos seemed to focus on acting violently toward immigrants and protesters defending them.

The videos appear to violate Google's hate speech policies. Google's generative AI policy forbids users from generating or distributing content that facilitates hatred or hate speech; harassment and abuse of others, and violence or the incitement of violence.

TikTok prohibits hate speech and hateful behavior that "includes attacking, threatening, dehumanizing or degrading an individual or group based on their protected attributes."

UPDATE: Jul. 3, 2025, 1:02 p.m. PDT The story was updated to include a statement from TikTok.