Wild Feed

Conflict rarely arrives without warning. Animals that share a landscape with rivals often read the danger long before any clash actually begins.

New research shows that dwarf mongooses do exactly this. Dwarf mongooses change how they move, communicate and guard their territory in places where a fight feels likely, even when no rival is anywhere in sight.

Britain’s plans to ban social media for under-16s will push teenagers towards more harmful platforms, the world’s biggest technology companies have said as ministers push to enact the new restrictions by next spring.

Meta, YouTube and Snapchat have all criticised the ban, which was announced by Keir Starmer on Monday and would stop younger teenagers from using their services.

It’s spring in Prague and as I write my desk is covered in pollen. Morning bees browse around my window, foraging for materials. I was recently translating some verses of Virgil, Book IV of the Georgics, which is dedicated almost entirely to bees, the myth of Aristaeus (the minor, beekeeper deity) and the role they play in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Virgil recognized that bees had what we might call social being–co-dependent, organized, enterprising–and he praised them for having all the virtues of a Roman citizen: industrious, hardworking, loyal, and a willingness to die to defend the colony.

Scientists have a name for that accumulated wear. They call it allostatic load – the price the body pays for adapting to chronic stress again and again. Each adjustment is tiny. The bill is not.

The wear is measurable. Blood pressure sitting a notch high, stress hormones lingering, blood sugar creeping up, cell receptors going numb from constant signaling. None of it feels urgent, which is why it builds unnoticed.

A team of family medicine and physiology researchers at Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek (UNIOS) in Croatia gathered the scattered evidence.

Their argument is blunt. The load does not build the same way in everyone, yet medicine measures it as if it does.

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To chart how our brains change over the course of our lives, neuroscientists have focused largely on beginnings and endings: the rapid development and pruning of neural connections in childhood and adolescence, and the degeneration associated with old age. “We kind of skipped over middle age,” says Sebastian Dohm-Hansen, a bioinformatician at University College Cork in Ireland.

There are good reasons for that, not least that changes in brain structure and function are easier to spot with neuroimaging when they are at their most extreme. In the case of cognitive decline and dementia, “a lot of what we care about presents most dramatically after the age of 60”, says Dohm-Hansen.

But over the past few years, researchers have started to look more closely at the middle-aged brain, identifying a series of subtle but significant changes between the ages of 40 and 65 that mark it out as a vital time to identify problems that won’t manifest until later in life.

The word akathisia comes from the Greek words meaning "not sitting." The name is fitting because people experiencing akathisia feel an intense inner urge to move and are unable to remain still.

Patients often pace, rock back and forth, shift their weight repeatedly, or constantly move their legs. Many describe the sensation as unbearable.

Beyond physical restlessness, akathisia can trigger severe anxiety, irritability, agitation, and, in some cases, aggressive behavior.

Among antipsychotic medications, Haloperidol is one of the drugs most commonly associated with akathisia. Studies suggest that even a single dose can trigger akathisia. [1] Fortunately, akathisia typically resolves once the medication is discontinued.

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Inside a lab in Vienna, cells are dividing to form a hollow sphere. Although the fragile ball has all the characteristics of an early human embryo, it isn’t quite what it seems. It didn’t, in fact, begin with an egg meeting a sperm. Instead, it was created entirely in the lab.

The very first days of pregnancy have long been an enigma. Scientists are unable to peer inside the uterus during pregnancy, meaning we know little about why so many fail. This is now beginning to change, thanks to embryo models created from stem cells, which are lifting the lid on one of the great mysteries of human biology.

Climate scientists have spent years mapping the forces behind East Coast sea level rise. Melting glaciers, expanding warm water, and changes to the Gulf Stream – each adds something to the climb, and the accounting looked fairly complete.

A NASA-led team found something the accounting had missed. The dominant driver of the coast’s long-term rise, their work suggests, lies in a cold, remote stretch of ocean near Greenland – thousands of miles from any U.S. shoreline.

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China has launched its Shenzhou-23 mission in which an astronaut will spend a full year in orbit for the first time, a crucial step in Beijing’s ambition to send humans to the moon by 2030.

The Long March 2-F rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan launch centre in north-western China on Sunday, carrying three astronauts to the Tiangong space station.

The mission marks the first spaceflight ever undertaken by an astronaut from Hong Kong: Lai Ka-ying, 43, who previously worked for the territory’s police.

For fans of the art of Japanese animation and lovers of puns, May is an important month. That's because it's "Ani-May!" And what better way of celebrating than looking back on one of the most influential franchises in anime and manga? Sailor Moon became a global phenomenon and brought anime to the world stage.

Sailor Moon is the story of a fourteen-year-old girl, Usagi Tsukino, and how her life changes when she learns she is the reincarnation of a princess from the Moon Kingdom. She and her friends use their powers to protect Earth and the galaxy from evil threats. It's been 35 years since Sailor Moon first debuted in a manga series, and she has spread her message of justice and love throughout the world.

Cognitive dysfunction is a core trait of bipolar disorder. That's a short assertion bursting at the seams with nuance and caveat. For starters, what causes this core trait? The consensus had been that manic episodes progressively damage the brain, causing cognitive dysfunction, and eventually leading to dementia for some. Now we're not so sure.

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In early April, shortly after Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security, he floated an idea on Fox News that wasn’t taken seriously; it sounded, in fact, like a proposal from someone very new on the job: Mullin threatened to cut federal screening of international passengers and cargo at airports in cities with “sanctuary” policies, which limit cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Such a move would trigger flight cancellations to airports in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other major cities and force airlines to reroute to other destinations. Mullin’s proposal seemed more like a wild swing than a real plan.

Introduced in the spring of 2026, Bill C-22, also known as the Lawful Access Act, is designed to give law enforcement broader tools to investigate crimes.

However, privacy advocates warn that the legislation is a surveillance nightmare. If passed, it would force digital services to record and retain user metadata for a full year.

JERUSALEM, May 21 (Reuters) - Western governments voiced outrage on Thursday after Israel’s far-right security minister posted a video of himself taunting Gaza-bound flotilla activists being pinned to the ground, ​with two later alleging they were physically assaulted in detention. The activists' treatment by police officers under the direction of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also drew a rebuke from ‌Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and from the United States, Israel's staunchest ally.

Now, as my old essay goes on to describe, I may have been scared back into the closet by the combined pressures of scary transgender literature and the punishing demands of Alabama’s healthcare system (it is left to the reader to guess which of those exerted greater pressure), but I did, of course, eventually transition.

I failed to say this in that essay, so I’d like to say it here, because I still believe it deeply: the point of trans literature is not to make transition easier.

Scientists have found that DNA polymerases can write long, structured stretches of new genetic material without any template to copy.

That finding reframes a long-known but overlooked behavior as a potential way to build DNA at lengths that standard chemistry still struggles to reach.

Federal agents have raided the homes of three southern California immigration activists in what the activists allege is the latest escalation in a Trump administration campaign to harass a volunteer-led advocacy group that organizes neighborhood ICE-watch patrols.

A livestreaming website started in Calgary that helped influencers monetize hateful content says it is shutting down — removing a revenue stream for dozens of neo-Nazis and white supremacists — following an investigation by CBC’s the fifth estate.

Entropy allowed users to create and livestream videos or donate to their favourite streamers, but now, the website has stopped processing payments and the owners say they’re closing down.

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Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

Three people have been jailed for insurance fraud after claiming their cars were damaged by a bear - only for the assailant to be somebody dressed in a bear costume.

The trio used a bear suit to stage the fake attacks inside a Rolls-Royce and two Mercedes in an effort to get their paws on $141,839 (£111,788) in insurance payouts.

Once the realm of science fiction, human-AI relationships are becoming normal aspects of daily life. While generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have become common tools for many users, a new wave of AI apps, such as Replika, Character.AI, and dozens more, are specifically designed to simulate human companionship. The essential distinction between the assistant chatbots—which are sometimes used as digital friends—and companion AI chatbots is that the latter have been specifically designed to initiate and maintain romantic relationships.