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Cows using tools
A cow using a stick to scratch an itch.
For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined pastures. And when she has an itch, she scratches it — by expertly wielding a stick.
Now, in a new study, Veronika has demonstrated even more advanced scratching skills, deploying different ends of a wooden broom to target different parts of her body. It is, scientists say, an example of flexible tool use, a behavior that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology on Monday, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle, which have not traditionally been celebrated for their smarts.
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Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers
The saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” In Florida, Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers.
About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments.
“That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”
The seniors were aware of something that is only beginning to dawn on the rest of the country: that in addition to the aggressive immigration enforcement operations underway in Minnesota and elsewhere, the Trump administration has moved to cancel Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from a handful of countries once deemed too unsafe to return to.
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Cryptocurrencies are dying
Cryptocurrencies are dying as joke coins and pump and dump schemes burn out.
With that in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) says the crypto reaper has been unusually busy lately. Looking at its own records from as far back as 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens had been placed on the market, and that the majority—53.2%—have ceased active trading. They’re dead.
What’s more, 11.6 million of the token failures recorded by CoinGecko—86.3%—happened last year. In other words, 2025 was a mass die-off.
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Spray-On Powder That Seals Life-Threatening Wounds
Pretty cool, a powder that stops bleeding:
KAIST scientists have created a fast-acting, stable powder hemostat that stops bleeding in one second and could significantly improve survival in combat and emergency medicine.
Severe blood loss remains the primary cause of death from combat injuries. To address this challenge, a research team at KAIST that included an active duty Army Major set out to develop a faster and more reliable way to stop bleeding.
Their work led to a next-generation powder-type hemostatic agent that can halt bleeding within one second when sprayed directly onto a wound, offering a potential breakthrough for saving lives on the battlefield.
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John Mellencamp’s exclusive Indiana Stadium box
John Mellencamp supported Indiana football long before their recent championship rise, donating funds during “the down years.” In return, the school built an exclusive shack on top of the stadium just for him.
Not that Mellencamp always minded. What he got in exchange for his support was not a championship run but a curious sort of VIP treatment. He had started going to Hoosiers games as a kid, when he lived in Bloomington and his brother was enrolled at the university, and in the years since had come to appreciate a perk of the sparsely populated contests: He was able to indulge his cigarette habit in the mostly empty stands.
In recent years, the school gifted the Rock and Roll Hall-of-Famer a wooden shack affixed to the top of the stadium. There, Mellencamp—a self-described “anti-social guy”—could take in a game exactly the way he wanted to.
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Intrusive, needy software
With the ubiquity of Internet connections and cheap storage and data costs, software applications have become intrusive, almost needy in how they interact with users.
So the problem isn’t that software ever teaches, asks, or informs. The problem is that once a company builds the machinery to do it, that machinery becomes cheap to reuse, and the incentives gradually pull it away from “help the user succeed” toward “move the metric.”
What starts as an occasional heads-up becomes a permanent layer of UI exhaust. What starts as support becomes a funnel. What starts as a reminder becomes a habit-forming system.
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The scale of Minnesota resistance
Half the street corners around here have people–from every walk of life, including republicans–standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.
I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.
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David Erlich’s 2025 movies supercut
Every year, David Erlich creates a music video supercut of his top 25 movies. Superbly edited, it celebrates movies with wit and verve.
