Start the day with what went right.

Saitoti Petro Lorkuta, 35, spends his mornings on a motorbike threading through Maasai pastures east of Tanzania's Tarangire National Park, reading paw prints in the dust 296. He's one of more than 160 men in the "Warriors for Wildlife" program run by the charity African People and Wildlife, which has spent two...

Pictureda Maasai warrior on a motorbike scanning the savanna at dawn · chris clark (via Pexels)

At Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, a baboon named Kalamata sat at a touchscreen for up to three hours a day, thousands of trials in a row, matching shapes by symmetry, parallel lines, and right angles 17110. Carnegie Mellon researchers ran four rhesus macaques through the same kind of test and then compared all...

Pictureda baboon · Praveen PA (via Pexels)

Mark Scotch, 64, struck up a conversation with a stranger named Hugh Smith in a Louisiana bar in 2020. Smith mentioned he spent ten hours a night on dialysis.

Pictureda surgical team in an operating room · DΛVΞ GΛRCIΛ (via Pexels)

Lightning Dock, a geothermal plant in New Mexico, was cooling fast when the startup Zanskar bought it in June 2024: water flowing into the turbines had dropped 50 degrees Fahrenheit over five years, five times the normal rate of decline, leaving it well short of the 310°F it needed to run 250. Zanskar's modeling...

Pictureda geothermal power plant · Mumtaz Niazi (via Pexels)

Every monsoon, Bengaluru floods its streets while several of its lakes stay dry, a contradiction that bothered retired Army Captain Santosh Kumar enough to go looking for the reason 301. He tracked down British-era maps from 1923 showing the raja kaluves, a five-century-old network of channels laid out under city...

Pictureda lake in Bengaluru, India · Sandip Bhattacharya (Wikimedia Commons)

Researchers at Chongqing Normal University had 48 volunteers hold a chili-infused gelatin cube in their mouths, then hit their hands with a high-intensity heat laser 157. Holding the spicy cube measurably calmed people's physical reaction to the worst of the laser pain, though it did nothing for milder heat.

Pictureda bowl of fresh red chili peppers · Jana Ohajdova (via Pexels)