A new Pew Research Center poll released Monday revealed that a majority of Republicans think that colleges have a negative impact on the country. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans now say that colleges "are having a negative effect on the way things are going in the country," while just 36 percent think colleges positively affect the country, Pew reported.

This marks a drastic shift from just two years ago in 2015, when a majority of Republicans (54 percent) rated universities' effect as positive and just 37 percent said that it was negative. While younger Republicans still think more positively of colleges' impact than older Republicans, the poll found that positive views of colleges among Republicans under the age of 50 sunk by 21 percentage points from 2015 to 2017.

Democrats, on the other hand, continue to overwhelmingly view colleges' impact as positive. Seventy-two percent say that colleges are good for the country, while just 19 percent say they're bad. On the whole, the majority of the public (55 percent) say colleges have a positive impact on the U.S.

The poll was taken by phone from June 8-18 among 2,504 adults. Its overall margin of error is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points. Becca Stanek

President Trump's hardline stance on Qatar emerged not long after his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner's attempt to score a "half-billion dollar investment" from a Qatari billionaire fizzled, The Intercept reported Monday.

Trump in recent weeks has accused Qatar of funding terrorist activities and taken credit for the ongoing blockade several Gulf nations have imposed on Qatar. Kushner has reportedly "played a key behind-the scenes role in hardening the U.S. posture toward the embattled nation," The Intercept reported.

But before Kushner was involved in these talks, he was reportedly in negotiations with former Qatari prime minister and billionaire Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani to secure an investment as he worked to refinance the Kushner family's stake in a building on New York City's Fifth Avenue. The Intercept noted that Kushner and his family are "severely underwater" on the property, located at 666 Fifth Avenue, and that "it is difficult to overstate just how important to Kushner the investment ... is for him, his company, and his family's legacy in real estate."

The deal between Thani and Kushner hasn't panned out, with some saying it's dead and others saying it's simply "on hold as the deal's mix of loans and equity was reconsidered." Either way, the existence of this deal and Trump's subsequent stance on Qatar raises serious questions, The Intercept contended:

If the deal is not entirely dead, that means Jared Kushner is on the one hand pushing to use the power of American diplomacy to pummel a small nation while on the other his firm is hoping to extract an extraordinary amount of capital from there for a failing investment. If, however, the deal is entirely dead, the pummeling may be seen as intimidating to other investors on the end of a Kushner Companies pitch. [The Intercept]

Read the full story at The Intercept. Becca Stanek

If you think about it, in the grand scheme of the cosmos, 2020 is just around the corner. So what better time than now to register a political committee with the Federal Election Commission to Draft The Rock?

A recent Public Policy Polling survey actually showed that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson would beat President Trump in the 2020 election, 42 percent to 37 percent. But "three and a half years is a long ways away," a less cosmically-minded Johnson told Jimmy Fallon recently. "So we'll see."

The clock is ticking. Kanye, hop to it. Jeva Lange

America's top grossing movies saw an 80 percent increase in on-screen tobacco use from 2015 to 2016, sparking concerns that a surge in underage smoking could follow. "We've known for a while that the more you see smoking on screen, the more likely you are to see youth smoking cigarettes in real life," CDC analyst and the author of the report, Michael Tynan, told CNN. "There's a causal relationship between the two."

While movies have been blamed for everything from increasing violence to disappointing undershirt sales, others have cautioned against reading too much into the new report. "I don't want to downplay what they're saying," said Dan Romer, the director of the Adolescent Communication Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. "I think it's important to point out there's still a lot of smoking in movies. But it's hard to know from their study if it's the kind of movies that have a high viewership in adolescents."

In 2016, 26 percent of the top movies rated G, PG, and PG-13 showed tobacco use. For R-rated movies, that number was higher, 67 percent. And while tobacco use was featured in 41 percent of the total top-grossing movies in 2016, down from 50 percent in 2015, on-screen usage was actually up 80 percent, with 1,743 recorded instances in 2015 compared with 3,145 in 2016.

Smoking, both on screen and off, is down across America, though. In 2015, 15 percent of adults said they smoked cigarettes and 20 percent of high school students in 2016 said they used some kind of tobacco product. Jeva Lange

Plants have a sneaky and sadistic trick to prevent caterpillars from munching on their leaves, a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution revealed. Researchers have discovered that plants secrete a chemical that makes them taste less delicious, leaving herbivorous caterpillars with the tough choice of eating less appealing foliage — or each other.

Caterpillars sometimes choose cannibalism. "When the chips are down, eating another caterpillar may not be a bad decision, [and] it turns out that the chips can be down if you find yourself on a plant that is heavily defended," said John Orrock, a co-author of the research.

The researchers tested this phenomenon by coating tomato plants in four different sprays — one containing only detergent and the others containing different amounts of methyl jasmonate, the substance given off by plants — and then siccing eight beet armyworm caterpillars on the plants:

After 52 hours, about 7 percent of caterpillars were cannibalised on leaves sprayed with either no methyl jasmonate or the lowest concentration, while around 16 percent of caterpillars had been eaten on leaves sprayed with either of the more concentrated methyl jasmonate sprays.

Most revealing was that more than five times as much plant matter was left on plants sprayed with the highest concentration of methyl jasmonate compared to those sprayed only with detergent — the latter were almost completely stripped of leaves. [The Guardian]

Orrock said that while scientists knew herbivores "were sensitive to plant defenses," they didn't realize that plants' defenses might cause herbivores to make "the choice of eating another herbivore." "From the plant defense perspective, making yourself so nasty that you are suddenly not the best thing on the menu works pretty well," Orrock said. Becca Stanek

To be added to the list of things that sound like good ideas but definitely do not work: umbrella sharing.

Sharing E Umbrella, a Chinese company that modeled its umbrella-sharing concept after the country's successful bike-sharing programs, is learning that the hard way. For a 19 yuan deposit, or about $2.80, the company allows customers to use their smartphones to check out an umbrella and pay less than a nickel for each half hour of use.

But as anyone who has ever tried not to lose an umbrella might have suspected from the start, the company lost almost all of its 300,000 umbrellas in just weeks, Shanghaiist reports:

While Sharing E Umbrella gave out their umbrellas at train and bus stops, they soon realized that getting users to return the umbrellas would be a problem. "Umbrellas are different from bicycles," [CEO Zhao Shuping] said. "Bikes can be parked anywhere, but with an umbrella you need railings or a fence to hang it on."

The [South China Morning Post] reports that Zhao concluded that the safest place for an umbrella would be at the customer's home, where it would be safe and undamaged. But, apparently, customers have skipped the final step of then returning the umbrellas, simply keeping them for themselves. [Shanghaiist]

Additionally, there are problems with running a rain-fueled business. Chief among them: What happens when it isn't raining? Moreover, Shanghaiist reasonably points out that "in regions with frequent rain, people are more likely to just buy their own umbrellas," which eats up Sharing E Umbrella's ideal user base.

Zhao doesn't plan to give up just yet, though. Shanghaiist adds he plans to release 30 million more umbrellas before the end of the year. Jeva Lange

A chief criticism of the GOP's various plans to repeal and replace ObamaCare is how many Americans lawmakers could leave unwillingly uninsured — but a new survey finds uninsurance rates are edging up even under ObamaCare.

Results of the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index were released Monday, showing some 2 million U.S. adults lost insurance coverage this year alone. The uninsurance rate grew from 10.9 percent at the end of 2016 to 11.7 percent in the second quarter of 2017, a change analysts determined is statistically significant despite its small size. This decline comes after five years of coverage increases stalled within the last 12 months.

Lack of coverage primarily increased among young adults and those who buy their insurance in the ObamaCare marketplaces instead of receiving an employer plan, The Associated Press reports. A now-familiar litany of problems is in play: Premiums are spiking ever upward and many insurance markets offer consumers little to no choice of what plan to purchase. Bonnie Kristian

Canadians are not exactly fans of President Trump and their disdain has reportedly left the Trump Hotel Toronto at a mere 15 to 45 percent occupancy since the project opened in 2012. The hotel, which held the bragging rights of being the first five-star establishment in the city, will now be converted into a St. Regis following the Trump Hotel's announcement of bankruptcy late last year, travel blog One Mile at a Time reports.

"[Trump Hotel Toronto] looked great at the time because it was such a novelty for the city. Trump was a big, big name, it looked like it would be a huge success," former Toronto Star real estate reporter Susan Pigg told NPR. "But the whole thing was doomed to failure." One Mile at a Time added: "It'll be interesting to see how taking the 'Trump' name out of the hotel impacts occupancy."

The Toronto hotel fell under scrutiny this spring when it was revealed that a partner of President Trump's financed the hotel using hundreds of millions of dollars received from the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB. At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat on VEB's supervisory board. Jeva Lange