🦝 Evolution in action: pygmy raccoons have learned to... make paper balls Scientists observing pygmy raccoons on Mexico’s Cozumel Island noticed an unusual behavior: one female pulled paper from a trash bin, soaked it in water, crumpled it up, rolled it in sand — and turned it into a ball to play with. Soon, her sister started doing the same, apparently copying the technique. The raccoons then used the balls to play both by themselves and with other animals. And then comes the best character in the study: their mother also tried to make a ball, but failed. Scientists suspect the reason may have been the roughly 30 ml of Margarita she had apparently drunk shortly beforehand from a cocktail left behind by tourists. Science is still undecided on whether alcohol boosts creativity. This raccoon certainly didn’t help the case.show more

A Washington state woman had to flee her property... after 50 to 100 raccoons descended on it and were acting aggressively. The woman told deputies she started feeding a family of raccoons decades ago, but in recent weeks the number showing up went from a handful to dozens.show more

This batter hit a tapper back to the pitcher.... The pitcher fields the ball and runs to tag the runner from third trying to score at home. Umpire’s call is out! But on closer inspection, the pitcher takes the ball out of her glove and holds it in her hand but tags the runner with the glove. I say the runner should have been safe. You make the call.show more

#majmobers: Looks like some of the influencers had a... ball in Orlando at a Airbnb. A female was intoxicated and was steeling off on people. She got into a fight with a girl, then she got jumped. She also was getting pushed on by men. Her friend stated she was trying to de-escalate it. Other people was seen getting kicked in the head and much more. Thoughts?💭show more

In October we found Iris on a chain utterly... broken. She’d been used for puppies and then left to slowly stave. She was like a skeleton. After building her back up, today she lives on a farm and her family take her to see the sunset at the beach daily and play with their kids and other dogs. You love to see it ❤️show more

Middle infielders: I’m a believer in taking the throw... from in-front of the bag on a stolen-base attempt. The main reason why: Catchers aren’t always going to put the ball on the bag. A common miss is arm side, causing the throw to tail towards first base. When you're in-front, you have freedom to move toward a bad throw without the runner sliding underneath or into you. You can catch it, make the tag, and potentially keep a bad throw from getting into center field. If you straddle the bag, your range can become limited once the runner starts sliding in. In order to do this, you must LET THE BALL TRAVEL Don't reach out, catch it early, and then bring your glove back to the runner. You're wasting valuable time. Let the ball travel over the bag and make a quick tag. If he's out → quick tag If he's safe → tag and HOLD IT. Give him a chance to come off the bag. Get in-front Let the ball travel Catch it late Tag quicklyshow more

The Curiosity rover broke free from the "captivity" it... had found itself in just a few days earlier – on April 25th, after drilling into a rock, it literally "stuck" to the drill bit and refused to release. Instead of breaking apart during the drilling, the rock was pulled out of the surface in one piece and remained hanging on the drill bit as the robotic arm began to lift. And it wasn't just a small fragment. NASA estimates the rock was about half a meter wide, about 15 cm thick, and weighed about 13 kg. At first, the scientists tried to dislodge it by vibrating the drill, hoping the rock would shake off on its own. This didn't work. A few days later, they repositioned the robotic arm and turned on the vibration again. Sand fell off the rock, but it remained attached. Then, on May 1st, the engineers used a more aggressive sequence of actions: they tilted the drill bit more sharply, began rotating it, and simultaneously increased the vibration. It worked – on the first try, the stone finally broke loose, fell onto the surface of Mars and split.show more

Okay, this is seriously cool. A team from Google... DeepMind, including DeepMind Cofounder Shane Legg, published a paper "From AGI to ASI". In the paper, they include instructions for an AI agent to read along with you. You can open the paper in Codex's in-app browser and have GPT-5.5 read it with you and explain all the concepts. This is the future. AI agents will be part of the target audience, and help us to understand anything we want.show more

OK, I have a definitive word on the CJ... Abrams play from today's Pittsburgh Pirates at Washington Nationals game after talking with Elias Sports Bureau on this. This play will stay as a sacrifice fly. The originial ruling of NOT a sacrifice fly was for the exact same reason that I thought, which is that the infielder is not running into the outfield, which is year's past would have been correct As it was explained to me, in past years, an infielder had to be running almost in a straight line towards the outfield wall to be considered "running in the outfield". Here, since he is running, and he ends up further away from home (157 feet) than when he started (145 feet), this is going to count as a sacrifice fly. That definition is changing, in part from this play to help bring greater consistency, and to take some of the guesswork out of it (the argument that he is running into the outfield as opposed to more parallel). Now, folks all the time ask "why doesn't MLB publish the OS Manual" and I always say because it is a living document that can have the wording change, and the wording for this play will be modified to something like "more towards the outfield wall than towards home plate" to eliminate any confusion. The big key to this play is that he was running on a full sprint. Also, and this is helpful for me, but for all fly ball outs that score a run, Elias Saba reviews to ensure consistency. So, yes, it's a sacrifice fly, and now that I have that info from Elias themselves, that sort of settles this one. Sounds like the guidelines for this definition will be changing, either this season, or certainly for next season.show more

The CUJU app uses AI vision to scout football... players. Developed by a German sports agent (Roger Wittman), the app was built to bypass traditional scouting networks and let anyone showcase talent. Over-13s film themselves doing 8 drills and the footage is scored for speed, agility and ball control. Top scoring players are invited to camps. Over 160,000 users have tried it and when the app opened in Brazil, it instantly had 80,000 sign-ups. “Cuju” is a play on a Chinese word meaning “kick ball”, an ancient Chinese sport with a leather ball from 2,000 years ago that FIFA recognizes as origin for the sport.show more

‘I was screaming’: Scientists shocked as dolphins filmed using... shells to trap prey for the first time | New York Post Researchers are shell-shocked at the latest marine discovery. Dolphins have been filmed using shells to ensnare their prey off the coast of Australia, marking the first time this clever tactic has been caught on camera, per a bombshell paper in Marine Mammal Science. “The second I saw that shell in the air, I immediately knew what was happening,” the study’s head author, Alexis Levengood, a marine mammal biologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, told ScienceAlert. Levengood said she and her team were on a research vessel off Hervey Bay when they spotted a female Pacific bottlenose “dolphin raising something large out of the water,” the BBC reported. She instantly recognized the behavior as “shelling,” when dolphins flush prey into a large empty seasnail shell. Then, the impromptu fish trap to the surface and drains the quarry into their mouths like a fishy oyster shooter. In the dramatic clip captured in 2025, the brainy cetacean can be seen holding a shell aloft, and then dropping it in the water, before snatching up a fish that escaped its calcified prison. “I was screaming to the students that were on the boat with me in excitement, because I was just so excited that we were actually witnessing this here on the east coast,” exclaimed Levengood. While the behavior had been observed in 2013 in Shark Bay, Western Australia, this was the first video evidence of the ingenious prey-snatching method. And this wasn’t some fleeting party trick, either. In another clip from Hervey Bay, a mother and a calf could be seen shelling together, demonstrating that the behavior is passed down from generation to generation and not between peers as previously believed. “We saw the mother surface with a shell, the fish inside escaped and the dolphin dropped the shell to chase the fish,” said Levengood. “Then, minutes afterwards, the dolphin calf picked up the shell and held it the same way as its mother.” While it’s yet unclear if either was successful in their trapping efforts, the scientist said the “footage provides the first potential evidence of maternal social transmission — a process by which offspring learn behavior by observing the actions of their mother.” When coupled with the observations from 2013, this eye-opening footage demonstrates how populations of dolphins learned to use tools in the exact same manner despite being thousands of miles apart. “They may have both invented this or innovated this independently of one another, or it’s even possible that there might be some populations up north that are doing this that we don’t even know about yet,” Levengood told Science Alert. She concluded that either way, “these findings highlight just how smart, clever, and innovative dolphins are.” On a larger scale, shelling could also help shed light on how humans evolved to use tools as well. “But better understanding of shelling and other tool use in non-human animals will continue to teach us more about ourselves and how and why we evolved the way we did,” said Levengood.show more

I have learnt to understand that golf is about... minimizing your misses. On the tee, I aim up the right and I do everything to hit a draw. It gives me confidence knowing that I then have the entirety of the fairway to play with. If I hit a small draw, I end up on the right side of the fairway. If I hit a big draw, I end up on the left side of the fairway. If you aim up the middle, you double your room for error. Lesson is to learn the way you shape the ball and then make it work for you. #PXGTroopsshow more

She Lived to 117. Scientists Studied Her for Months.... Her Secret Cost $2. Maria Branyas Morera ate three yogurts a day. Every single day, for as long as anyone could remember. She mentioned this to anyone who asked about her longevity, which was often, and it was the kind of advice people receive with a warm smile and then immediately discard, because we prefer our longevity secrets to involve something more exotic than a supermarket dairy aisle. Maria died in Barcelona in 2024. She was 117. Then scientists actually looked inside her, and the smiling stopped. Her gut was packed with Bifidobacterium, a bacterium almost never found in people past 110, and far more commonly associated with infants. Her body had, in the most literal biological sense, not been informed of her actual age. It was operating on entirely different assumptions. Her DNA suggested she was somewhere between 100 and 110. She was 117. Seven years younger on the inside than the calendar insisted, which at 117 is not a rounding error. That is a extraordinary number. But to appreciate why any of this matters, you need to understand what kind of person we are talking about. Maria was born in San Francisco in 1907, the year before the Model T Ford, when Theodore Roosevelt was still in the White House and most of humanity died of things we now treat with a Tuesday afternoon at the pharmacy. Her Catalan father had come to America to make something of himself, and for a while it worked beautifully. He founded a Spanish-language magazine in New Orleans, one of the most chaotic, beautiful, swampy, and gastronomically unhinged cities on the continent, a place that has always operated on the reasonable philosophy that life is uncertain and the gumbo is excellent. Then the family got on a boat back to Spain. Maria fell on deck and permanently lost the hearing in one ear. Her father died of tuberculosis before the coast of Catalonia came into view. He was 37. She was eight. Her mother arrived in Europe with five children, no husband, and presumably very little appetite for what came next. Maria managed. She nursed soldiers in the Spanish Civil War. She outlived Franco, which required considerable patience. She raised three children. She played piano until she was 108. At 113 she caught COVID-19 and dispatched it, which at that point resembles less a medical event than a statement of intent. Then she joined Twitter. Her bio read: “I am old, very old, but not an idiot.” Her last request, before she died peacefully in her sleep, was three words: “Please study me.” The geneticists obliged with considerable enthusiasm, and their subsequent paper in Cell Reports Medicine runs to forty pages of scientists explaining, in the careful and hedged language that science requires, that this woman was remarkable in ways they had not previously encountered and were not entirely sure how to explain. The yogurt, it turns out, had been doing quiet and serious work for over a century. Nomadic peoples of Central Asia were fermenting milk 8,000 years ago, long before germ theory, before microscopes, before anyone had the faintest idea what a bacterium was. They didn’t need to understand it. Their guts understood it. The knowledge was older than writing. Maria understood it too. She didn’t publish a paper. She didn’t launch a wellness brand. She just ate her yogurt every morning and got on with the extraordinary business of being alive. Gandalv / Gandalv ✦ AI-generated image. Not the actual person. Full story:show more

One of the greatest keys to power and consistency... in the golf swing is learning how to properly rotate through the ball. Initiating the downswing is one of the most important tools in consistent golf. It is something I have worked on virtually every day of my life, from hitting balls as a young boy in South Africa to competing against the best players in the world. GP #PXGTroopsshow more

Women in one of the top football leagues in... Sydney, Australia, have been banned from protesting against a “trans-inclusive” team that has been known to have up to 5 male players. Trans-identified male athletes on The Flying Bats FC have repeatedly injured female players. In 2022, The Flying Bats FC was presented with a Fair Play award, the same year that a female player had her leg broken in two places by a male player for their team. She was "screaming in pain". Her teammate was penalized for "transphobia" because she was upset about it.show more

Fun content technique- break the fourth wall This video... succeeds by bring the viewer into the content, and doing it in a way that is inherently commentable and shareable It's also an excellent subtle call to action Excellent work from Mad Rabbit... who have a lot of bangers on Reels (and who i've used for skincare for my last few tattoos, great product to boot)show more

Contact in the desert was the biggest ever this... year and so was the sky watch. We witnessed dozens of orbs. With 5 minutes left before the hotel turned the lights on, I told more than a 1000k people present why pointing my laser in a certain direction that the phenomenon may give us a grand Finale and it may be an orb with wings. Within seconds a glowing orb with wings appeared and flew past the crowd. No it’s not a bird if you If you want to learn something about the phenomenon and 20 years of research with scientists and not speculation , join us on one of our adventures you will never be the same. We have this on several cameras from full spectrum to cell phones to Two types of night vision. Also scientists from NASA and Lockheed the NSA and The CIA were standing next to me during the filming of this orb and has witnessed this many times.show more

While cleaning up her youngest daughter’s room, she noticed... a small unfamiliar toy mixed in with the dolls and stuffed animals. It didn’t look like something she had ever bought, and it definitely wasn’t age-appropriate. Her heart dropped as she tried to figure out where it came from. Moments like that can shake any parent. It’s a reminder of how important it is to stay aware of what comes into your home and to have open, calm conversations instead of jumping straight to panic. Was it a mix-up from a party favor bag… something accidentally left by an older sibling… or something more concerning?show more