Why bugs gross us out traces back 9,000 years, and neighbors saved a lake

What they found was a map of who ate bugs and who didn't. Neanderthals, it turns out, appear to have eaten insects fairly often. Modern humans across northern Eurasia mostly didn't, and the genetic fingerprint of that choice is still with us: mutations in the genes that break down chitin, the tough material in an insect's exoskeleton, took hold there roughly 9,000 years ago, right around when farming took over. Populations closer to the tropics kept the fully functional version of those genes, the ones that make a beetle actually digestible.

When people learned something that got flagged for consolidation during sleep, rather than staying awake, their brains showed a distinct 3 to 8 Hz theta rhythm right at the moment of learning. The strength of that theta signal predicted something specific: how tightly slow brainwaves and sleep spindles coupled together later that night, a pairing already known to matter for memory. And the tighter that coupling, the better people did on a memory test the next day.

Over and over, the people told to talk report feeling happier and more connected than they expected, and more connected than the people who stayed quiet. The catch is entirely in people's heads. Most of us assume a stranger would rather be left alone, or that the conversation will be awkward, and that assumption is usually wrong.

Postcards, petitions, and candlelight vigils got them almost nowhere for two years. So in June 2019, over 2,000 residents showed up with gloves and just started cleaning it themselves, week after week, until the sight went viral enough that the state couldn't ignore it. The following year, Tamil Nadu's then chief minister visited in person and sanctioned ₹25 crore, about $3 million, for a full restoration. Today the lake recharges the groundwater under the whole town, and people walk laps around it in the evening instead of waiting for a water tanker.

The Cachena had nearly vanished by the 1980s as farming shifted to industrial tree plantations, leaving decades of unchecked scrub and undergrowth, exactly the fuel a wildfire needs. Since 2023, the 140-member land collective managing 678 hectares of communal forest has been letting Cachena, goats, sheep, and horses graze it back down, eating the flammable brush before a spark ever gets the chance.

Punjab's government has now created the Punjnad Indus River Dolphin Sanctuary along 123 miles of the river, home to an estimated 440 of the animals, and crucially, it connects directly to an existing protected stretch in neighboring Sindh province. Together that's about 249 miles of continuous, legally protected river, roughly the length of New York State, where before there were three separated fragments.

The university disagreed. Baker took the dispute to Australia's Fair Work Commission without a lawyer, instead using paid AI tools, including ChatGPT Pro, to help assemble his case, chase down references, and anticipate the university's counterarguments. Last week the Commission ruled in his favor, in what's being called the first successful use of AI by a self-represented person in an Australian legal proceeding.

Its wide field of view will let it survey a billion galaxies, hunt rogue planets drifting through the Milky Way by watching them briefly bend starlight, and test coronagraph technology built to one day spot an Earth-like planet 10 billion times fainter than its own star 146.