Smart Shelling

Some bottlenose dolphins have learned to use tools to help them catch fish, a clever technique that may be passed on from mother to calf. 

Scientists in Australia observed the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) chasing fish into empty seashells and carrying it to the surface before tipping the prey into their mouth. A young dolphin calf was also seen copying its mother by picking up a large shell in the same way. 

The behavior, known as shelling, is documented in a paper "Observations of Shelling Behavior and Potential Evidence of Vertical Social Learning by Bottlenose Dolphins in the Great Sandy Marine Park, Queensland Australia" published on August 08, 2026 in the journal Marine Mammal Science. The findings mark the first time evidence of tool use by dolphins was documented in video and suggest it may be more common behavior than previously thought. 

Scientists once believed that relying on tools separated humans from animals but research has shown that that’s not quite true. Chimpanzees use rocks to crack nuts and twigs to fish for termites, elephants use tree branches to swat flies, and crows even build their own tools by bending twigs into a hook shape to catch prey. 

It’s no surprise then that dolphins, being highly intelligent creatures, are no different. Tour guides near Queensland’s Great Sandy Marine Park in Australia have previously reported seeing dolphins engaging in shelling as far back as 2019, but it has so far gone undocumented. 

While studying dolphins on Australia’s east coast, the researchers behind the said study spotted two adult females using seashells as a fishing tool in July and October 2025. 

On July 06, 2025, an adult female dolphin named Stevie Nicks was seen lifting a shell out of the water. The researchers, however, did not see a fish slip out of the shell and could therefore not determine whether the dolphin’s attempt was a successful hunt.  

Later on October 01, 2025, another female, named Maserati, was spotted carrying a baler shell to the surface before a fish escaped out of it. The dolphin dropped the shell and chased after the fish, the researchers are not sure whether it ended up catching it or not. 

Remarkably, Maserati’s young calf, Bentley, was seen mimicking its mother’s behavior just moments after, surfacing with the same shell above the water. The footage shows a possible lizardfish poking out of the shell. Still, the researchers can’t confirm whether the dolphin got a meal out of it. 

Before the recent paper, shelling had previously only been reported in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Documenting the same behavior in Queensland, the researchers were able to show dolphins on opposite sides of Australia learning to use tools in the exact same way. 

This suggests that the same technique was developed by different dolphins independently of one another. Since shelling went undocumented for so many years, the researchers believe it is much more common among dolphins in Australia, as well as other parts of the world. 

Ultimately, these findings underscore how much we still have to learn about the hidden lives of marine mammals. By capturing shelling on video for the first time, researchers have opened a new window into the complex minds of dolphins, proving that their capacity for innovation and cultural transmission mirrors our own more than we ever realized.

The Accidental Box-Office Hit

A crudely animated, homemade movie about ​a baby cow has become China's most unlikely box-office smash, generating merchandise and memes and a national conversation about the joyful ‌rejection of slick marketing and artificial intelligence by a younger generation. 

Made on a shoestring budget and with hand-drawn posters and a reported cost in the thousands of dollars, "The Bull Comes", or 牛来 (pronounced Niú lái) – released on August 05, 2026 – grossed the equivalent of more than $4 million as of Thursday. 

In China's daily box-office rankings, it placed immediately behind "Spider-Man: Brand New Day", a Marvel Studios sequel that reportedly cost some $225 million to produce. 

"Niú lái", which tells the story of a newborn calf, his mother and a leopard cub, flopped in its first week, grossing just over $1,000, according to local media reports. 

Then, with a boost from social ⁠and local media, the movie's wonky animation, awkward storytelling and discussion of its unlikely creators – an amateur animator and his supportive mother – made the movie a viral sensation. 

At one recent packed screening in Beijing, bursts of laughter rang out even before the movie started! 

"I can't believe the theatre is full!" one audience member shouted, triggering cheers and laughter from the crowd. 

"Other than envying how much money this piece of junk has made, I have no complaints", said a popular movie blogger on Weibo, a social media platform. 

The embrace of the movie has become a kind of inside joke for the young, the blogger added. "And I say – let them laugh. There aren't that many things left that we can joke about". 

The DIY project tapped into a kind of rebellious mood of the moment, said Remo Zhu, a Chinese director. 

"It's a mood of... don't tell me what to do, to watch or eat - I'll decide that ‌for myself", ⁠he said. "In a packed theatre full of strangers, it becomes a genuinely interactive, immersive communal experience". 

The movie tells the story of a frail and exhausted newborn calf who struggles to stand up. It is a tale of friendship, courage and loss as the herd faces danger on its journey to find greener pastures. Spoiler: It also may – or may not – be a dream. 

The dialogue is slow. Action sequences are clunky. The animation is heavily pixelated. 

"It's not even a movie", said one reviewer on Weibo. "To call it bad is ⁠an insult to bad movies". 

Movie or not, it has become a cultural touchstone and sparked a frenzy of people trying to cash in on its unlikely appeal. There are Niú lái toys, Niú lái-masked robots, social media memes and yes, cosplays. 

Companies with the word "bull" in their names also saw an increase in their share prices on Monday, ​drawing an unusual ⁠warning from China's central bank against meme stock investing. 

"Going to the movies for a bit of fun is harmless enough, but... pinning one's hopes on the word 'bull' is not rationality – it is wishful thinking", a journal run by the People's Bank of China said on Tuesday. 

Methinks, replicating this low-budget movie's success will be a struggle for aspiring animators, as it was likely a unique, one-off event.

Math Behind the Music

Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species. 

However, an international research team has uncovered a previously undetected structure in the songs of Bengalese finches (Lonchura striata domestica) that matches the exact statistical patterns found in human speech. 

The findings suggest that some of language's most fundamental building blocks may not be uniquely human after all, but rather a universal feature of learned communication.

Published in Vol. 12, Issue 32 of the journal Science Advances on August 07, 2026, the study "Language-like statistical structure arises in learned signaling: evidence from birdsong" shows that these birds – famous for their complex, learned songs – organize their singing using a mathematical formula known as a Zipfian distribution. By analyzing song data collected from Bengalese finches in Japan, the researchers observed that the songs contained statistically coherent sequences of notes, the avian equivalent of "words." Within these sequences, a few words are used very frequently while others are used rarely. Furthermore, frequently used chunks of syllables tend to be shorter, while less frequently used chunks tend to be longer – a specific pattern known as Zipf's law. 

To understand how this structure develops, the team used methods inspired by how human babies discover words in speech. They collected data across various stages of the birds' development and found that the patterns were already present during their earliest attempts at singing. This suggests that the structures emerge naturally as part of the learning process. 

Young songbirds listen to the sounds around them to unconsciously learn the statistical patterns and organize their songs. This mirrors how human infants figure out where one word ends and the next begins by recognizing which sounds frequently occur together. This statistical process is thought to make language easier to learn, helping infants identify recurring "chunks" of speech within a continuous stream of daily sound.

"We have become used to the idea that language is unique in the natural world", said study co-leader Simon Kirby (left) of the University of Edinburgh. "But by using insights from how babies learn language we've been able to take a closer look at birdsong, and have discovered a surprising commonality between these species separated by more than 300 million years of evolution. Both humans and songbirds pass on their communication through culture, and this is what creates the patterns that language and birdsong share".

This cultural transmission – meaning they learn their communication systems from each other – is a critical piece of the evolutionary puzzle. The team's findings build on their own recent discovery, alongside Ellen Garland from the University of St. Andrews, that humpback whales also rely on a similar systematic structure. 

Together, these discoveries suggest that evolution may repeatedly arrive at the exact same statistical solution whenever complex communication must be learned and passed down across generations. While this does not mean human language isn't special in other ways, it brings science closer to understanding what our speech shares with the rest of nature.

"People often think language is what makes humans unique", noted Inbal Arnon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "Our findings suggest that some of the fundamental properties that make language what it is can emerge wherever communication is learned and passed from one generation to the next – and that this happens across evolutionarily distant species: humans, Bengalese Finches, and humpback whales".

For long-time researchers of avian behavior, the discovery opens up entirely new perspectives on familiar subjects. 

"I have studied Bengalese finch song for many years and thought I knew it rather well", added Kazuo Okanoya (right) of Teikyo University, Japan. 

"It was therefore a pleasant surprise to discover, through this international collaboration, that it shares yet another property with whale song and human language".

Tracking DR Congo's Deadliest Ebola Outbreak on Record

The ongoing Ebola outbreak in DR Congo has reached 5,000 cases, government data showed Wednesday, as responders warn it is spreading at an unprecedented speed outpacing efforts to slow it in one of the country's remotest regions. 

Data from the country's Ministry of Health showed the outbreak had so far recorded 5,021 cases, including 2,378 deaths as of Sunday, as it rages in some of the most challenging conditions imaginable fueled by insecurity, displacement and intense population movements.

And it has become the deadliest in the country’s history, with the number of fatalities surpassing the toll recorded during the last major epidemic in eastern DR Congo.

That outbreak, declared on August 01, 2018 and brought to an end in June 2020, resulted in 3,323 confirmed cases and 2,299 deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It was the world’s second-largest Ebola contagion on record. 

The current outbreak has reached that grim milestone far more quickly. The DR Congo declared an Ebola outbreak on May 15, marking the country’s 17th recorded outbreak since the virus was first identified there in 1976. 

A recent genetic study published in Nature Medicine also found that the Bundibugyo virus behind the illness is genetically distinct from variants detected during previous Bundibugyo outbreaks in the region, suggesting it likely emerged through a new animal-to-human transmission. The animal source has not yet been identified. 

The latest government figures show the virus has now spread across 55 health zones in six provinces: Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uele, Bas-Uele, and Tshopo. Ituri, the epicenter of the outbreak, remains by far the hardest-hit province. 

Malaysian women's doubles pair Pearly Tan-Thinaah Muralitharan's hopes of defending their 2026 World Championships silver medal came to an abrupt end after they were knocked out by Indonesia's Febriana Dwipuji Kusuma-Meilysa Trias Puspitasari in New Delhi on Thursday. 

The fifth seeds fell 20-22, 21-18, 21-12 to the 13th seeds in their women's doubles last-16 clash. 

It was only Pearly-Thinaah's second defeat in seven meetings against the Indonesians, having entered the contest with a dominant 5-1 head-to-head record. Their most recent encounter had gone firmly Malaysia's way, with Pearly-Thinaah winning 21-9, 21-18 in the All England quarter-finals in March. 

The result brought a premature end to their attempt to reproduce last year's historic campaign, when they became the first Malaysian women's doubles pair to reach a World Championships final.

A massive letdown! 😖😖😖

The $40 Trillion Suicide Note

The United States of America has officially crossed the Rubicon into fiscal insanity. 👏👏👏

The Treasury Department’s quiet admission on Wednesday that the national debt has breached $40 trillion at the close of business on Tuesday afternoon, August 18, 2026, is not just a statistic; it is a financial suicide note signed by a decades-long bipartisan coalition of cowards, gridlocked politicians, and economically illiterate leaders.

For years, Washington treated the national balance sheet like a fantasy novel where deficits don't matter and math is optional. Now, reality is collecting its debt.

The Treasury's latest daily cash and debt balances statement showed total public debt outstanding at $40.047 trillion on ‌Tuesday, a total that includes Treasury securities held by the public of $32.266 trillion and intra-governmental debt holdings of $7.782 trillion. 

The math is as brutal as it is undeniable. The US is trapped in a classic economic doom loop. The country now spends more money paying off the interest on its past debts than it does on protecting the country through national defense. Let that sink in. It is mortgaging its children's future not to build roads, cure diseases, or fund schools, but to pay rent on money it already squandered. Every tick of the debt clock asset-strips the middle class, transfers wealth to institutional lenders, and edges the US closer to a sovereign default. 

The path the United States is walking is fundamentally unsustainable, and the $40 trillion threshold marks the point of no return.

The "Less" Century

Ahmad Fakhri forwarded this to the WSD Community Whatsapp group on Tuesday. It's a quick breakdown of our modern reality. 

I think it is well worth a moment of our time to reflect on:

Welcome to the century of the intangible reality, where convenience is absolute and substance is optional. 

After being knocked out of Europe's premier competition at this stage by Kazakh side Kairat Almaty last year, the champions of Scotland returned with fresh faces and a point to prove. 

They were up against Linzer Athletik-Sport-Klub, commonly known as LASK, in their play-off round qualifier yesterday, which they decisively won 3-0.

Kieran Tierney crossed the ball in, and after a poor clearance by LASK, Benjamin Nygren unleashed a powerful 26th-minute left-footed volley from 20 yards into the top corner. 

Camilo Durán scored a near identical goal twelve minutes later, firing into the same top corner from the same spot after Tierney’s cross was headed out.

Summer signing Kasper Høgh delivered a neat flick-on to spark a quick exchange between Durán and Nygren. After carving through the LASK defense inside the penalty area, the Colombian forward cleanly stroked the ball home in the 67th minute to seal his brace and cap off a dominant Celtic victory.

The Austrian champions showed enough to suggest this tie is not quite done, but Celtic have put themselves in a fantastic position to take their place back among Europe's heavyweights. 

LASK will welcome the Scottish champions to Linz, Austria next Tuesday with the winners qualifying for the Champions League. What a wonderful start for Celtic!

Philippines on the Brakes

The Philippine economy grew just 2.3% in the second quarter of 2026, its weakest quarterly expansion since 2021, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). 

In the first half of the year, its economy experienced a weak 2.6% growth rate. This slowdown happened because overall investments dipped by 9.2%, total construction projects slumped by 14.8%, and everyday consumer spending barely grew at 2.8%.

The deceleration marks a sharp drop from the 7.6% growth recorded in 2022, with annual growth easing to 5.5% in 2023, 5.7% in 2024 and 4.4% in 2025. 

Ultimately, reversing this sharp macroeconomic downturn requires looking beyond domestic interest rate cuts and infrastructure backlogs. To prevent sinking into a deeper malaise, the Philippines must urgently resolve its public investment crisis while simultaneously building structural resilience against imported energy shocks, climate-driven agricultural risks, and cooling overseas remittances. For strategic investors and business leaders, navigating this prolonged slowdown demands a defensive pivot toward energy-resilient sectors and high-yield fixed income until consumer purchasing power and broader structural growth stabilize. 

Moreover, this economic drag is heavily compounded by the Marcos Jr. administration’s severe underspending and bureaucratic bottlenecks, which triggered a 32.4% collapse in public construction due to disruptive project reviews and corruption probes. 

At the BWF World Championships 2026 in New Delhi, India, fifth-seeded Malaysian women's doubles pair Pearly Tan and Thinaah Muralitharan – who received a first-round bye – faced Türkiye's Bengisu Erçetin and Nazlıcan İnci yesterday, beating their second-round opponents 21–16, 21–13 in 34 minutes.

While pleased to clear their opening hurdle, Thinaah accepted that there was still plenty of room for improvement. 

"Definitely happy that we won our first match, but there are still things that we need to work on and improve", she said. 

More encouragingly, Pearly declared herself injury-free after enduring a difficult few months which disrupted the pair's training and combination. The 26-year-old said they had only two weeks after the Taipei Open to work seriously on rebuilding their partnership ahead of the world meet. 

I expect they will do better in their next match.

Donald Trump Threatens to Bomb the Sh*t out of Oman

US President Donald Trump has threatened to “bomb the sh*t out of” Oman if it strikes a separate deal with Iran on control of the Strait of Hormuz, despite Oman’s key role as a mediator between Washington and Tehran. 

In addition to brokering talks between the US and Iran, Omani negotiators have been conducting parallel negotiations with Tehran aimed at establishing a safe route for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran reportedly wants to charge fees for safe passage of the strait after an interim period, and Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters on Monday that Iran had reached an “understanding” with Oman on the matter. 

Asked about these Omani-Iranian talks, Trump told Fox News that “if Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them”! 

The US rejects any agreement that would involve Iran collecting tolls, and Washington has signaled that it will not lift its blockade on Iranian ports unless Tehran relinquishes this demand. 

Speaking in New York on Friday, Trump claimed that the Islamic Republic was “very badly defeated”, and that he would soon “be declaring the Strait of Hormuz a territory of the US”. 

A memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Iran in June set a 60-day window to bring the conflict to an end and reopen the strait. The memorandum effectively collapsed after fighting restarted last month and the agreement officially lapsed on Monday. 

A senior Iranian official told Reuters that Iran is prepared “to escalate tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and wider region” if diplomacy fails, and to launch “timely and precise strikes” to break the US naval blockade if necessary. 

Trump did not reply directly to this threat in his comments to Fox News, but demanded that Iran “raise the white flag of surrender”.

😂😂😂

The Painted Rump

Out on the fringes of Botswana's Okavango Delta, several hundred cattle once wandered around with enormous eyes painted on their backsides, and not one of them got eaten by a lion. 

That is a literal accounting, not a gag. Across four field seasons between 2015 and 2018, a team near the village of Shorobe in the northern part of the country painted 683 cattle with big two-tone eyespots on the rump, gave 543 more a simple cross, and left 835 alone. 

Lions and leopards killed 15 of the unmarked animals and four of the cross-marked ones. Eyespot cattle killed: none. 

Cameron Radford, Neil Jordan and their colleagues published the tally in Communications Biology – "Artificial eyespots on cattle reduce predation by large carnivores" (2020), and it remains one of the stranger results in livestock protection. 

Jordan got the idea, watching a hunt collapse. He was in Botswana, a lion was stalking an impala, and the impala looked up at the wrong moment for the lion. 

“Lions are ambush hunters, so they creep up on their prey”, he told UNSW’s newsroom. Once the cat clocked that it had been seen, it quit. Behavioural ecologists call this pursuit deterrence, and it turns up everywhere. 

Brown hares stand up and face approaching foxes. Guppies that swim over and inspect a predator get attacked less often than the ones that stay put. Butterflies carry fake eyes on their wings for the same reason. 

No living mammal has evolved eyespots, which is presumably why nobody had thought to bolt them onto a cow. Fourteen herds took part, from six animals to 110, all belonging to farmers who had recently lost stock. Cattle there are penned overnight where possible, then graze unattended across the bush all day, and that is where most of the trouble happens. 

Painting happened at dawn as the animals filed through the crush, with acrylic paint and foam stencils glued to a plasterer’s float. Marks stayed sharp for roughly 24 days, so the crew returned monthly and redid them, 49 sessions all up. Annual spending on paint and supplies came to about a fifth of the price of one cow. 

A sceptic would object that the painted cattle simply got lucky, or stayed closer to home. So the researchers fitted GPS loggers to animals from all three groups. No meaningful difference in nights spent outside the enclosure, none in how far they roamed. 

Here is where the tidy story wobbles. Cattle wearing a plain painted cross also survived better than their unmarked herdmates, which is not what a pure eye-recognition effect predicts. 

Jordan flagged it as a genuine surprise in UNSW Sydney’s summary of the findings, noting that “novel cross-marks were better than no marks at all, which was unexpected”. 

Two explanations survive. Lions may be reading the eyes as a face turned towards them, or they may simply be wary of any bold, unfamiliar pattern on something they were planning to eat. The paper treats both as live options and rules out two rivals: that the marks divert attacks to other parts of the body, or that they mimic another predator. 

Anyone inclined to feel superior to the lions should know it works on humans too. Researchers at Newcastle University mounted signs featuring a pair of staring eyes above bicycle racks that had been suffering repeat thefts, and reported in PLOS ONE, "Cycle Thieves, We Are Watching You’: Impact of a Simple Signage Intervention against Bicycle Theft", Nettle D, Nott K, Bateson M (2012), that thefts at those racks fell by 62 percent. Thefts elsewhere on campus went up by 65 percent. 

The eyes did not abolish the behaviour. They relocated it. Which is precisely the uncomfortable question hanging over the cattle. Only about a third of each herd carried eyespots. Lions always had unpainted alternatives standing right there, and Jordan conceded in 2020 that he did not know whether the trick would hold once those easier targets were gone. 

Painting every animal in a herd has not been tested. Nor has the wet season, when the crew stayed out of the field and predators turn to livestock as wild prey disperses. 

Nineteen predation events are a thin base for a strong claim, in one landscape, with one set of predators. Eighteen of those kills were lions. A spotted hyaena took one animal from each group, which fits the theory rather than dents it, because hyaenas chase prey down instead of ambushing it and lose nothing by being seen early. 

One paper is one paper. The farmers themselves were not immediately convinced. 

“At first they thought it was a joke”, Radford told Atlas Obscura, before adding that they became glad to see the crew arrive. He also mentioned something more telling: informal copies had already started for leopards in India, jaguars in South America and predators in Nepal, back in 2020. No replication on the same scale has landed since. 

Cheap ideas travel faster than the evidence for them, and a bucket of acrylic paint travels faster than most. 

For the Botswana livestock, the lesson was clear: you don’t need to outrun the lion, and you don’t even need to outsmart it – you just have to stand there, look ridiculous, and let your unpainted herdmates do the dying for you! 😜