It has become a social media sensation and even led to a run on glue sales. We’re talking slime — and not the green liquid Nickelodeon famously dumps on celebrities. And for many young people on YouTube, Instagram and Etsy, it’s a moneymaker.

Of the more than 5 million posts on Instagram tagged with #slime, most depict brightly colored stuff filled with glitter and pigments of all kinds. So the slime of today is far more viscous and elaborate than that green liquid on Nickelodeon. Slime has become so popular that the American Chemical Society recently published a fact sheet about it including a detailed scientific explanation for how the magic happens.

This gooey DIY toy is taking the Internet by storm, mostly in the form of Instagram videos showing only a set of hands squishing and stretching various types of slime.

Slime is also popular among YouTubers. In June, The New York Times did a profile on Karina Garcia, one of a handful of influencers considered to have started the trend. Known as the “slime queen,” Garcia has just over 6 million subscribers and makes as much as $200,000 a month from sponsorships on her various slime recipe videos.

Garcia’s is just one of hundreds of YouTube and Instagram accounts that have capitalized on the growing slime trend.

Many young slime lovers are also selling their slime online, on platforms like Etsy. These entrepreneurs, often as young as 10 or 11, are making thousands of dollars each month to put toward college or invest back into their slime business.

The owner of the Instagram page “slime.jewel“, an account with over 500,000 followers, says that when she started making videos last year she never imagined she would be making money off slime. “It was initially driven by passion to create,” says slime.jewel, who declined to give her real name. But when profits started rolling in she began investing in scents and glitters, which only increased her profits further.

Searches for slime on Etsy have soared since last October, the Timesreported, citing the company. The popular and often viral Instagram slime videos serve as marketing for individually owned slime businesses. Most slime batches sell for between $5 and $10, but range up to $25 for the largest batches. Thousands of Etsy shops sell slimes ranging from “Fruit Salad Clear Slime” to “Strawberry Champagne Metallic Slime.” These slimes are often brightly colored, and are filled with creative add-ins like Styrofoam balls and plastic beads that give slimes different textures and different sounds when played with.

The crackling, popping, and squishing noises associated with slime videos have earned slime a spot on the short list of another growing Internet trend, popular among adults. Along with whispering, scratching and tapping noises, and clips of Bob Ross (famous for his TV show The Joy Of Painting), slime videos have been identified as a common trigger of ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

ASMR, a term coined in 2010 on a Facebook group, refers to a sensation defined as “a combination of positive feelings, relaxation and a distinct, static-like tingling sensation on the skin,” according to one of a very few peer-reviewed studies on ASMR. The same study found that, although not all people experience ASMR, of those participants who did, 98 percent agreed that they used ASMR largely as an opportunity for relaxation. “I can only describe what I started feeling as an extremely relaxed trance like state, that I didn’t want to end,” one study participant said.

Emma Barratt, one of the authors of that ASMR study, confirms that slime videos fit well into the list of ASMR triggers. “Something about the predictable way in which these materials are moving or being manipulated can bring about the same sort of flow-like feeling created by ASMR videos,” she says. Barratt says the rise of the use of slime videos for ASMR “might be a useful avenue in helping us further untangle just what stimuli are needed to have an effective ASMR trigger.”

The growing popularity of the slime trend has created glue shortages in many craft stores around the country as kids and adults alike buy up bottles in bulk.

Elmer’s said it experienced a 50 percent jump in sales in December as a direct result of the slime trend. Subsequently, Elmer’s has been capitalizing on the slime trend, launching a new television commercial featuring “kid-friendly” recipes to make slime.

This “kid-friendly” aspect comes in the wake of concerns over the safety of slime. The most basic slime recipe consists of a PVA based glue (for most consumers that is Elmer’s), water and borax. A traditional slime recipe calls for the borax to be safely diluted in water, but when this laundry additive is touched directly it can lead to painful chemical burns. Although few kids have actually been hurt by the slime-making process, Elmer’s chooses only to post borax-free slime recipes, featuring alternatives like baking soda and contact lens solution.

Elmer’s has had a team of researchers and chemists focused on fueling the slime craze since it picked up major traction in the beginning of 2017, says Caitlin Watkins, a public relations manager at Newell Brands, which owns Elmer’s. “At this point, everyone who touches the business has made slime,” she says. “R&D experts have made it, marketing folks have made it, legal teams — even our CEO has made slime.”

According to Google Trends, searches for the word “slime” peaked at the beginning of August, but the general upward trend for the past year implies that the slime craze is far from over.

Ema Sagner is the NPR Treasury and Risk Management intern.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

In one of Megyn Kelly’s first episodes as the newest, brightest star on NBC’s Today show, a crewman audibly swore as he accidentally wandered into the path of the camera’s live gaze. And yet his meaningless misstep was far from the week’s most awkward moment.

In the space of just a few days, Kelly managed to alienate two celebrity guests — one of whom is a star in a sister NBC show. Otherwise, Kelly relentlessly pumped the network’s shows and leveraged human interest segments as vehicles for promoting corporate sponsors, and sought to stress her role as a working mom.

It’s fundamentally unfair to evaluate a show with any finality based on its first few episodes. Yet one should be able to get a sense of where it thinks it is headed. At the moment, the show is a bit of a jumble because of the profound transformation the host is attempting to make in the public eye.

There’s no reason why Kelly cannot ultimately evolve from cable news inquisitor to morning show companion. And her initial ratings have been adequate, though far from spectacular. Yet it’s not precisely clear yet why the audience will feel compelled to make it a habit to tune in.

Morning show hosts are typically ingratiating confidants, blending newsy segments, celebrity interviews and more personal obsessions. They tend to appeal to female viewers, and women of color often represent a disproportionate slice of the audience.

Kelly made her mark as the keenly focused former attorney drilling down on political matters on Fox News’s prime time. As a rule, Fox tends to drum empathy out of its biggest stars, except when useful for ideological or partisan purposes. Kelly tended to play to the right-leaning home team, but that said, she showed notable flashes of independence, especially when it involved matters of gender.

In August 2015, Kelly burst into total national consciousness with her tough-minded questioning of a presidential candidate at a Republican primary debate. Her question included this pungent lead-in: “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals …”

That candidate turned his ire on her for months — and is now president.

Kelly left for NBC and has been eager to proclaim a new chapter and to shed Fox News, where she alleged she had been harassed by the channel’s founder, the late Roger Ailes. (He had been privately advising Donald Trump during the primaries from his offices at Fox.)

In fact, Kelly recently declared she wanted to be done with politics. Yet it can be hard to draw clean lines, as we’ve just learned from White House attacks on NFL players’ protests over episodes of police brutality toward black citizens. (Kelly told an audience member that she felt, as an attorney, both the players and the White House should have the First Amendment right to say what they thought.)

NBC brought over Kelly with great fanfare and a big payday, reportedly well in excess of $15 million a year. She’s also fronting a Sunday night newsmagazine meant to compete with CBS’ 60 Minutes.

The appeal of the job, however, is found in her new plum role on NBC’s Today show franchise. She is now host of its 9 a.m. hour. This week, her first episodes duly whipped up her audiences for NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Will & Grace and the newest installation in the Law & Order juggernaut. The true-crime miniseries focuses on the Menendez brothers, who made national headlines for killing their parents a generation ago. Kelly gamely conducted a phone interview with one of the brothers from the prison in which he resides and asked whether he experiences joy in his life.

Not all her interviewees this week experienced joy.

Hollywood stars Jane Fonda and Robert Redford joined Kelly to talk about their new movie. It was, for once, not an NBC corporate promotion, just an old-fashioned celebrity interview. Given the longtime liberal activism of each of the actors, Fox News would have been unlikely to approve such a booking. And Kelly stayed away from politics. She seemed to be trying to connect as a professional woman, starting by praising Fonda: “You’ve been an example to everyone in how to age beautifully and with strength.”

And then it went off the rails, as Kelly inquired about Fonda’s plastic surgery: “I read that you said you felt you’re not proud to admit you’ve had work done. Why not?”

Fonda shot back, “We really want to talk about that?”

The audience laughed, but it masked a withering look from Fonda. Fonda later told Entertainment Tonight Canada that she was a little shocked by the question — wrong time, wrong place.

Will & Grace star Debra Messing told a fan on Instagram she regretted participating in interviews on Kelly’s show, because of Kelly’s joke that a superfan had become gay after watching the gay-themed show.

Let’s not overlook the elephant in the room.

Ghosts of Fox News and its ideology hover over Kelly. That heritage is in some way part of her appeal to NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack. He is mindful of sister station MSNBC’s liberal leanings and wanted to ensure that red state America would feel comfortable watching NBC News’ most profitable program.

Yet in TV, as in Faulkner, the past is never quite dead.

Kelly infamously insisted both Jesus Christ and Santa Claus were white.

And she found other ways to play to Fox’s die-hard viewers. In 2010, she devoted hours of coverage to the threat posed by a tiny black hate group over voter intimidation that did not appear to intimidate any voters.

When Trump attacked her over the August 2015 debate, she became a lightning rod for criticism by conservatives, too. Now both sides are smacking her down for various elements of the week. Liberals snarked online over what they contend was a gaffe for her remarks on the Will & Grace fan. A conservative site founded by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, The Daily Caller, denounced her for being insufficiently impressed with America’s progress on gender equity. (Rather than a political stance, Kelly’s remarks came off as an effort to connect with her predominantly female audience.)

From a television standpoint, however, the questions involve authenticity, connection and the logic of the show itself.

“It’s been very exciting. It has been educational. I have been so delighted at the media response — no,” Kelly said, stopping herself as the audience laughed. “But the viewer response has been awesome.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Updated at 10:10 p.m. ET

Millions of people in Puerto Rico need fuel, water, food and medicine. More than a week after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, major infrastructure is still down. Stores have trouble filling their shelves. Families are running low on the supplies they stockpiled before the storm, and across the island, many residents say they haven’t seen any aid deliveries.

Meanwhile, at the port in San Juan, row after row of refrigerated shipping containers sit humming. They’ve been there for days, goods locked away inside.

It’s one thing to get supplies to Puerto Rico. But officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which administers FEMA, say moving goods around the island is the bigger challenge.

Diesel is short. Drivers are scarce. And authorities say some roads are still impassable, although local officials dispute that explanation.

These containers were brought to the island by Crowley, a maritime shipping company. The company started unloading shipments on Saturday. By Friday, it will have received more than 4,000 loaded crates.

Most of the containers coming in have never left. Crowley says it has more than 3,400 commercial containers at its terminal now. That’s just one shipping company, at one port. Several other ports are accepting shipments, and stranded crates total an estimated 10,000.

“These containers are full of food, these containers are full of water, full of medicine … full of construction materials,” says Vice President Jose Ayala, who notes a barge a day has arrived since the port opened on Saturday. “It has reached Puerto Rico. The problem is we can’t get it on the shelves.”

Ayala says it’s frustrating: “People are out there under so much need, and there’s this cargo here.”

“Plenty of vessels can get cargo to the island,” agrees Mark Miller, Crowley’s vice president of communications. “But the real difficulty is getting the goods to the people via trucks.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been delivered to the airport by commercial airlines, and the Department of Defense and FEMA have also been bringing in deliveries by air. Everybody — the government, aid groups and private firms — is having trouble moving those goods around.

Hundreds of refrigerated containers here posing an extra problem. Stores without fuel for their generators can’t accept goods that need to be kept cool.

The Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration tells NPR that the government is working with the truck driver’s union to find a solution for driving with downed power lines and damaged roads, and the Department of Defense says it has sent teams to work on clearing blocked streets.

Not everyone believes roadways are the problem. Roberto Ramirez Kurtz is the mayor of Cabo Rojo in southwestern Puerto Rico, which is about as far away from San Juan as you can get on the island — a 2 ½ to 3-hour drive.

He says more than 5,000 homes were completely destroyed in his town, and people are running out of water and insulin. But aid and resources, “they’re staying in San Juan,” he says.

Kurtz was in San Juan to ask for help, and having made the trip himself, he doesn’t believe that road conditions are an obstacle. “The roads are open,” he says. “I’ve been able to come here. So why haven’t we used this to [transport goods] west?”

Meanwhile Juan Carlos Garcia, the mayor of Coamo in the south of the island, says the only aid his town has received is five pallets of water. “The state never came to provide diesel to the hospital,” he says. People are running low on food supplies and hysteria is growing, he says.

He, too, says the roads are clear — and that he’s in San Juan to ask why no aid has reached his town.

Along with road conditions, authorities and shipping firms also say diesel shortages are to blame. Long lines for gas are persistent all over the island. Distributing fuel across Puerto Rico is FEMA’s number one priority, the Department of Defense says, to help alleviate the issue.

Richard Darmanin, the vice president of Capitol Transportation Inc., says import paperwork is having to be done manually, which is also slowing down the process. And standing outside the port earlier this week, looking at the rows of containers, he said an even bigger problem is the lack of drivers.

You have a shortage of drivers who have lost a lot during the storm,” he says. “You may have a huge fleet but they ain’t moving themselves.”

“Whatever driver shows up, we put him to work,” he says.

The governor of Puerto Rico has issued an appeal for anyone with a commercial license to help distribute gas, Darmanin says.

Delivering goods by air isn’t an automatic solution either, says Nino Correa, the director of search and rescue for Puerto Rico. He’s also been tasked with coordinating drops of food and water from helicopters to aid stranded residents.

“It’s difficult because of the make-up of our island,” he says. “It’s very mountainous and it’s very dangerous for air operations to be taken to certain places,” he says — risky not just for the air crew, but for people on the ground.

The government is carrying out drops as best it can, he says.

“This is the first time in our island that we have received a hurricane that has impacted us like this,” he says. “And we know that if life is difficult during an emergency, during a disaster it’s a lot more difficult.

“We’re working very hard for this,” he says. “There are a lot of people working hard to build [Puerto Rico] back up.”

Angel Valentin, Adhiti Bandlamudi and Jose Olivares contributed to this report.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Facebook is under increasing pressure to scrutinize its advertising content after it discovered that at least 3,000 ads on the site had been placed by a Russian agency to influence the 2016 presidential election. The revelations about the ads came after months of denial by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook played any role in influencing voters.

As has been widely reported, the pressure on the company began shortly after the 2016 election. But Zuckerberg rejected the idea that fake news on the network had any impact on voters. He called that a “crazy idea” and said “voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

But at a conference in Lima, Peru, shortly after the election, then-President Barack Obama pulled Zuckerberg aside and made a personal appeal to him to take the threat of fake news seriously because it wasn’t going away and would return again to haunt the next election, The Washington Post reported. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., also had conversations with the company trying to push Facebook to look carefully at activity on the site leading up to the election.

For months, Zuckerberg hclaimed that security experts at Facebook had found no evidence of Russians involved in fake news. Then, last week Facebook said it would turn over the content of ads to Congress it said had been placed by a Russian agency.

Members of a hacking group connected to Russia’s military intelligence unit, the GRU, began creating fake Facebook accounts as early as June 2016 to amplify stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, the Post reported.According to the Post, some of those ads specifically sought to deepen disagreements about Muslims and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a live video, Zuckerberg announced a series of reforms meant to guard against international agents trying to influence voters. He announced changes to the way political ads would be placed. Advertisers will be required to disclose who sponsored their ads. Users will be able to see an advertiser’s webpage, who is behind an ad, what other ads they’ve sponsored and who else is being targeted. This should enable users to understand the deeper motivations of an advertiser. The company is also adding 250 employees to focus on election integrity and security.

However, Zuckerberg also admitted, “I wish I could tell you we’re going to be able to stop all interference, but that wouldn’t be realistic.”

It is especially hard to catch bad actors because of the way that Facebook’s advertising model works. Before the Internet, there were human salespeople who sold ads and did the placements. Now, the process is automated. An advertiser signs up online and pays money to target a specific kind of user — say, someone who lives in a certain area and is interested in leather shoes. That makes it much easier for bad actors like Russia to outsmart the computers.

This is a problem not only at Facebook but at most tech companies — including Google and Microsoft. In fact, lawmakers are beginning to think these companies need more government oversight around political advertising, which has been true for other media for decades. A company like Facebook is virtually a monopoly. Close to 70 percent of Americans use the social network.

Senate Democrats have been crafting legislation that would require Internet companies to disclose the names of individuals and organizations that spend more than $10,000 on election-related ads.

Undoubtedly, the fear of being regulated is part of why Facebook is trying to take the lead now on the issue of fake news on the site. Google and other tech companies are likely to lobby hard against any regulations. However, congressional deadlock could be on their side since Congress hasn’t been passing much of anything lately.

(Facebook pays NPR and many other media companies to create video content on the site.)

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

With more than 1 million autos damaged in recent U.S. hurricanes, car rental firms have had to move vehicles quickly into affected areas. The ability to manage large fleets involves artificial intelligence and data — tools that are keys to a future of self-driving fleets.

Often even before the first rain falls in a hurricane, rental cars are on the way.

Lisa Martini, with Enterprise Holdings, the nation’s largest car rental company, says that in anticipation of this hurricane season, the company started getting ready to send cars. “For example, in Texas we started anticipating the replacement vehicle need … . We brought in about 17,000 vehicles in Texas and that was part of that recovery process,” she says.

First responders, officials, volunteers, residents and reporters need cars in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, Martini says. “We really just understand where the demand is highest and, especially when a disaster hits, we just move those vehicles where they’re needed,” she says.

Enterprise, which also owns the Alamo and National Car Rental brands, has 6,400 locations throughout the U.S. As peak vacation season ended, just before the hurricanes, cars came from as far away a Green Bay, Wis., Seattle and Cape Cod.

That shift could have had an effect on vehicles in, say, Washington state. Martini says that for a couple of days, renters who didn’t have an insurance claim might have had to wait a little bit longer. “The Mustang might have not been where you would have hoped it would have been,” she says.

Chris Brown, executive editor of the trade publication Auto Rental News, says preparing for natural disasters is a part of the DNA of the rental car companies. Moving the 2.1 million vehicles in the rental fleet around the country is a microcosm of what’s to come.

Rental cars may appear low tech on the surface, but Brown says the companies “have the ability to use artificial intelligence now, big data, combined with the collective wisdom of people that have been in the industry for 30 years to understand a customer’s wants and needs.”

Despite their low-tech image, car rentals are the wave of the future. Getting you the car you want, when you want it, for the time you want it will be increasingly important skills to have as cars become autonomous.

Fleet management admittedly is not something the average consumer is likely to think about. We just expect that the Mustang we wanted will be there.

Brown says fleet management is paramount to a successful operation. “But more than that, it only gets more important moving forward into this era of autonomous vehicles,” he adds.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Facebook will provide the contents of 3,000 ads purchased by a Russian agency to Congress. The political ads ran during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The move comes amid growing pressure on the social network from members of Congress to release the ads.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg live-streamed a statement in which he said that his company was “actively working” with the U.S. government in the ongoing Russia investigations.

Zuckerberg also announced a series of rule changes on the site that he hoped would help guard against interference with elections in the future.

Users have been able to look up the company behind an ad they see, but now they will also be able to see who else was targeted by that company. A move that might give people get a sense of the motivations of the advertiser.

Other steps Zuckerberg announced include stronger policies for review at the company for political ads and it will add another 250 employees to focus on election integrity and security.

In a nod to Facebook’s failure previously to guard against state actors using the site to interfere with elections, Zuckerberg said, “It’s a new challenge for Internet communities.” But, he said, “If that’s what we must do then we are committed to rising to the occasion.”

However, Zuckerberg said it wasn’t likely that Facebook will be able to catch all bad content.

“We don’t check what people say before they say it,” he said. “And frankly, I don’t think our society should want us to.”

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been seeking to bring Facebook executives before their committee since the company first revealed the existence of the Russian backed ads two weeks ago. But, some critics say the site should go even further and reveal to specific users whether they were targeted by foreign governments.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)