Lovstuhagen

In June, dozens of biodegradable pods fell from the sky over the forests of Hawaii. Each one, delivered by drone, contained about 1,000 mosquitoes.

These weren’t just any mosquitoes — they were non-biting, lab-reared male mosquitoes carrying a common bacterium that results in eggs that don’t hatch when the males mate with wild females. The hope is that they will help to control the archipelago’s invasive mosquito population, which is decimating native bird populations, such as rare Hawaiian honeycreepers.

The birds, which are key pollinators and seed dispersers and also play a central role in Hawaiian culture, are in dire straits. There were once more than 50 known species of honeycreepers in Hawaii, but today there are only 17 left, most of which are endangered.

Last year, the ‘akikiki, a small gray bird, went functionally extinct in the wild, and less than 100 of the yellow-green ʻakekeʻe are estimated to remain.

Development and deforestation have had an impact, but according to Dr. Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director for the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), the “existential threat” is avian malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes.

A daughter is opening up about the chilling way she learned that her mother traveled to Switzerland to end her life without their family’s knowledge.

On July 8, Maureen Slough — a 58-year-old from Cavan, Ireland — told her family she was going on vacation to Lithuania with a friend. However, she confided in two friends that she was actually traveling alone to Switzerland.

The following day, her daughter Megan Royal was contacted by one of her mother’s friends with concerns about her real plans.

“A close friend of hers messaged me on the Wednesday night, possibly at like 10 p.m. I was in bed with the baby,” Royal, a mom of two, recalled to the Irish Independent. “He just replied like, ‘Your mom’s in Switzerland.’ He’s like, ‘You have a right to know. I was sworn to secrecy. She’s there and she wants assisted suicide.’ I was so scared in that moment.”

Royal said she immediately called her dad, who tried to contact her mother in Switzerland. She said Slough ultimately promised that she would return home. However, the following day around 1 p.m. she received a text message on WhatsApp informing her that her mother had died.

“What was worse was not only did I get the text on WhatsApp, they had advised me that her ashes would be posted to me in 6-8 weeks,” she said. “In that very moment, because I was alone, I just sat there with the baby and cried… I just felt like my world ended.”

Royal explained that the text message came from Pegasos, an assisted dying nonprofit organization in Liestal, Switzerland. She learned that Slough had quietly filed an application and paid £15,000 to end her life.

Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1942, according to Dignity in Dying, a British organization. ​​It's different from euthanasia — which is illegal — because the patients themselves administer prescribed drugs to end their lives, rather than a doctor.

Following Slough’s death, her family is now looking for answers as to how the assisted suicide happened without their knowledge.

Royal described her mother as a “fiery, smart and dedicated woman.” However, she told the outlet that Slough had a long history of mental illness and even had a past suicide attempt while struggling to cope with the deaths of her two younger sisters.

A funeral director who took babies’ bodies home with her has been banned from maternity wards and morgues in Leeds.

Amie Upton, 38, placed one deceased infant in a baby bouncer in front of her TV so he could ‘watch cartoons’, according to one traumatised mum.

Zoe Ward, 32, said the sight of her son, Bleu, who was just three weeks old when he died of brain damage in 2021, propped up at Ms Upton’s home was ‘terrifying’.

Another couple who learned their stillborn daughter’s body had been taken home by Ms Upton said: ‘It was just crazy. If I told somebody of this story… they’d think it was a horror film.’

Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust banned Ms Upton from all its mortuaries and maternity wards earlier this year, a BBC investigation revealed.

Zoe said she contacted Ms Upton’s baby loss support and funeral service, Florrie’s Army, to arrange Bleu’s funeral.

Florrie’s Army says it supports bereaved parents and offers free handprints, photographs, baby clothing and a dedicated funeral service.

Speaking to the BBC, Zoe described speaking with Ms Upton and coming away confident that the service would be ‘brilliant’.

But when it came to meeting face to face, she said she was ‘terrified’ to find him positioned in front of the television in Ms Upton’s living room.

‘She [Ms Upton] says: “Come in, we’re watching PJ Masks”,’ Zoe said.

‘There was another [dead] baby on the sofa. It wasn’t a nice sight.’

She said she called her own mum ‘screaming’ before another funeral director was asked to come and collect Bleu’s body.

Zoe said the ‘weird’ experience made her ‘upset and angry’.

The funeral industry in England and Wales is unregulated, with no legal requirements on how bodies should be stored or qualifications required to become a funeral director.

Earlier this year, an inquiry urged the government to introduce statutory regulations to protect the ‘security and dignity’ of people after death.

Published in PLOS One on Wednesday, researchers at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin documented complex social behaviours in a wild group of Vampyrum spectrum for the first time.

Following a family of four, they found the bats greet each other when returning to the nest, share prey, co-parent their young and sleep in tight huddles, among other behaviours.

Lead author Marisa Tietge says she came across a roost by chance in a hollow tree, while studying a different bat species in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. She installed a motion-activated camera in the base of the tree to capture two parents and two pups over three months.

One noteworthy behaviour was a "hug-like" greeting, Tietge says, where bats in the nest would leave their spot to welcome a family member back.

"There's kind of a short wrapping of its wings around the other, like a short hug, then letting go, and then both or all of them go back to the main roosting spot," she said.

Tietge theorizes the hug helps them identify each other based on smell and builds necessary social bonds for survival.

It's over, guys.

(Christina Urso) Silicon Valley is dumping over $100 million into a network of political action committees (PACs) and various organizations to advocate against regulation of artificial intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI President Greg Brockman are “among those helping launch and fund Leading the Future, a new super-PAC network focused on AI.” Other backers of the network include Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Ron Conway from Perplexity.

The new Pro-AI PAC network, “Leading the Future,” will use campaign donations and digital ads to promote candidates who advocate for favorable AI regulation, and to oppose candidates whose policies the network thinks will stifle the industry. The PACs are led by former staffers for Sen. Chuck Schumer, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and former Sen. Mitt Romney.

The network has taken inspiration from the pro-crypto super PAC network Fairshake, which helped President Trump secure his victory in 2024.

A probationary firefighter at a rural fire department in Missouri had a unique experience when responding to her first fire on Monday.

The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District, located in the very small town of Doolittle, said it has one vegan, and that happens to be Jenna Ulrich – a new firefighter whose father is also a firefighter.

Ulrich was working on Monday morning when the department received a call reporting a tractor-trailer on fire on Interstate 174 eastbound.

The catch? The truck was carrying 40,000 pounds of ribeye steaks.

Ulrich was stationed on the hose line during the ordeal and can be seen spraying water on the beefed-up inferno in the video posted online by the department.

Her dad, Glenn, was working alongside her.

"Nothing says ‘welcome to the fire service’ like sending the probie to put out 40,000 pounds of flaming ribeye!" the district joked on Facebook.

To verify their discoveries weren’t just artifacts of their methodology, the researchers applied their model to data from other species—bats, dolphins, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The results varied considerably, with some species showing little evidence of ancient structure while others showed completely different patterns. This variation across species strengthens the credibility of the specific pattern found in humans.

The researchers also examined which genes had unusually high or low amounts of ancestry from the minority population. Genes rich in minority ancestry often had functions related to neural development, including neuron cell connections, startle response, and neurotransmitter transport.

Conversely, genes with little minority ancestry were often involved in RNA processing, cell structure organization, and immune functions. These patterns hint that the two ancestral populations may have adapted to different environments before reuniting, with certain genetic variants from each population offering advantages for specific biological functions.

This discovery joins other recent findings showing human evolution is more complex than we once thought. Rather than populations simply splitting from one another in a tree-like pattern, human evolution increasingly appears to involve repeated separation and remixing of populations.

The admixture event identified in this study is much older than previously detected interbreeding events, such as those between modern humans and Neanderthals or between modern humans and a proposed “ghost population” in West Africa. Unlike these more recent events that affected only certain human populations, the ancient admixture event described here is shared by all humans.

“The fact that we can reconstruct events from hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago just by looking at DNA today is astonishing,” says Scally. “And it tells us that our history is far richer and more complex than we imagined.”