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A rare observation of a humpback whale mother remaining beside her dead calf is offering researchers a closer look at how these animals may respond to loss. The encounter, documented by researchers from Griffith University and Sea World Foundation, raises the possibility that humpback whale mothers may experience grief when a calf dies. In 2025, a female humpback whale was observed off the southern Gold Coast with an escort whale after apparently giving birth to a deceased calf. The mother stayed near the calf for several hours and may have remained with it for days. [See link to video below…

A recent study documented 98 northern pygmy slow lorises living in the wild in Guangxi, China, roughly doubling the country’s known population of the endangered species.The species was previously thought to live almost exclusively in Vietnam and Laos.The northern pygmy slow loris was only identified as a separate species in 2023; physically, it’s plumper, fuzzier, and has a flatter nose than the southern species.Like all lorises, northern pygmy lorises are threatened by habitat loss and hunting for the wildlife trade and for use in traditional medicine.See All Key Ideas Plump, fuzzy and venomous, with wide eyes, a button…

The number of food recalls reported by the federal government have decreased in recent years.Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported 1,500 food recalls, according to federal data. That was one of the lowest totals over the past decade, and this year is on track to be even lower — through mid-September, the FDA has reported about 950 recalls.While the figures are down, individual outbreaks can be severe, and the Trump administration’s staffing and oversight cuts may worsen the situation. This year, thousands of people fell sick after eating lettuce tainted with cyclospora, a parasite that causes violent…

As leaders and diplomats from around 130 countries gather in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) high-level week, one of the biggest topics of discussion is the risk posed by artificial intelligence and the U.N.’s role in mitigating that risk. The summit comes amid troubling instances in recent months of rogue AI models hacking companies and AI executives warning that they need more guardrails around a technology they worry they can no longer contain. Amandeep Singh Gill has spent years thinking about these issues in his role as the U.N. undersecretary-general and special envoy for digital and…

After French President Emmanuel Macron said France was providing two-thirds of all intelligence to Ukraine on Jan. 15, 2026, a rumor gained traction that this was because Ukraine had given false intelligence to the U.S., which the United States then leaked to Russia, revealing the U.S. as an unreliable intelligence partner for Ukraine. The rumor continued to circulate in September 2026. Snopes could find no evidence confirming the rumor Ukraine had shared false information with the U.S. Instead, this part of the claim came from an apparent misunderstanding of a Jan. 16, 2026, interview on a French news television channel. …

As the United Nations searches for its next leader, diplomats say there are key qualities they would like to see in the next secretary general. They seek someone who proactively puts the U.N. at the center of resolving global conflicts and enforces cost-cutting and reform.The topic of who will succeed António Guterres when he steps down in December is expected to be hotly debated this week behind closed doors in diplomatic meetings during the annual U.N. General Assembly in New York. The conversations “will drive a lot of the candidates’ fortunes and separate contenders from pretenders,” said Daniel Forti, the…

Donald Trump has praised Andy Burnham as a “natural businessperson” and said the UK was “more up” than under Keir Starmer. But he berated the UK for its decision to give up the Chagos Islands.In their first face-to-face meeting, Trump gave a warm assessment of the relationship, saying he thought Burnham had a “lot of assets on his side” and would be a “great prime minister”, adding: “We talked about everything from Rolls-Royce to energy to immigration – we covered a lot.”At a joint press conference after their talks at the UN general assembly in New York, Burnham said he…

Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET ZDNET’s key takeaways Claude Opus 5.5 could be a big win for power users. Developers may see faster coding with fewer steps. Anthropic says the upgrade is safer, cheaper, and less wordy. Less than two months after the release of Claude Opus 5, Anthropic is back with Opus 5.5. The big pitch for Opus 5 was that it had “near Fable” performance at half the price. This time, the headline is that the workhorse AI Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance for most work and costs about 40% less to run. “Our customers use Box AI on…

A new Windows malware named ClosedQuorum uses Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral AI models to autonomously determine the actions to take during post-compromise stages of an attack. The Go-based malware acts with no commands from a human operator, using reconnaissance information and a voting system to decide its next step on infected hosts. When votes are tied, DeepSeek has priority at making the final call, based on the option it considers most appropriate, followed by Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. Cisco Talos researchers analyzing ClosedQuorum say that the models are restricted to a predefined set of decisions, including: steal —…

European asset manager 21shares has launched the region’s first exchange-traded product tied to Zcash, extending the privacy coin’s reach into regulated markets following its strong performance over the past year.On Tuesday, 21shares listed its physically backed Zcash ETP on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam, allowing investors to gain exposure to ZEC through brokerage accounts without holding the cryptocurrency directly.The asset manager also introduced an ETP tracking ETHFI, the governance and utility token of Ether.fi, a decentralized finance protocol that offers staking and other crypto-based financial services. The ETHFI product is physically backed and trades on Euronext Paris and Amsterdam.Both ETPs carry…