My mother was right about the slouching

🔥 Most Enraging

The affordable electric car has been pushed back another year

Lucid was months away from selling a crossover under fifty thousand dollars, which for them counts as the cheap one. It has now moved to the second half of 2027. The new chief executive says the company missed commitments, launched products before they were ready, and responded too slowly when things went wrong, which is an unusually honest thing to say out loud. He has also cut nearly a fifth of the staff. The affordable version is always the one that slips.

😩 Most Exhausting

A French wildfire got big enough to build its own storm cloud

A fire in the Gironde in southwestern France burned forty-two thousand hectares, and on the twenty-fifth of July it threw up a pyrocumulonimbus, a thundercloud built from the fire's own heat, the first ever reported in that country. A fire in Avila was bigger still at about fifty thousand hectares, the largest ever recorded in Spain. Both came out of the same sequence: a wet winter that grew the fuel, a drought that dried it, then a forty-mile-an-hour wind. Weather used to be the thing that happened to a fire.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

A 97-year-old broke her own wing-walking record a year after a stroke

Betty Bromage of Cheltenham has been strapping herself to the top of a biplane since she was eighty-seven. On Tuesday, at ninety-seven and a year after a stroke that still affects her speech, she went up again and broke her own world record. The flight raised money for the stroke unit that looked after her. She told the BBC she would get bored otherwise, that she cannot drive or see well, so she does what she can. I have a list of things I can still do. I have not looked at it.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

Fourteen dogs entered a surfing contest and one of them is called Bradley Shortboard Cooper

The tenth World Dog Surfing Championships were held on a beach in Pacifica, where fourteen dogs were judged on length of ride, size of wave, confidence, balance and tricks. A labrador called Rippin Rosie took the big-dog category and also won the tandem paddleboard alongside her owner. The small-dog winner was a mixed breed named Bradley Shortboard Cooper. The categories were settled before the water turned too rough and the final round was called off. Larry will not walk on wet grass, and has never once been judged on confidence.

▸ One fossil holds a pterosaur inside an ichthyosaur bitten by a pliosaur — Fossil hunters in Queensland turned up a marine reptile about eighteen feet long with a flying reptile still inside it, and bite marks on the outside from something a good deal bigger, probably the largest pliosaur known. Three animals, one rock, one bad afternoon in the Cretaceous. It took seven years and a synchrotron scan to work out what was in there. The lead researcher says nobody knows the exact order of events, and that this is half the fun.

▸ A solar eclipse and the Perseids both land on August the twelfth — On the twelfth there is a total solar eclipse over northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, a strip of northern Spain and a corner of Portugal, with a partial one visible across much of the United States. That same night the Perseids peak, and because an eclipse can only happen at new moon there will be no moonlight washing the meteors out. Two things landing on one day, neither of which requires me to go anywhere.

▸ Flatworms have immune cells that detonate on contact — Researchers at Stanford found a cell in planarian flatworms that answers an intruder by rupturing itself within seconds, spilling everything toxic inside it over whatever is nearest. They are calling the cells ruptoblasts and the process ruptosis. It kills bacteria and foreign cells without harming anything further away. The senior author said they never expected that a cell could just explode. I have known people who operate this way.

Fine. Eddie Smith Jr. was born near the poverty line to a father who had been orphaned in the Depression, and Eddie was the first in his family to finish college. He then took on a nearly bankrupt boat builder called Grady-White and ran it for fifty-eight years, working eighty-hour and hundred-hour weeks. The company now turns over more than a hundred million dollars a year, and he was offered somewhere between four and five hundred million for it. After losing his wife and his son to ALS, he decided the company should be kept as it is rather than sold, and put it into a trust that sends the profits to charity. He said that being able to do it is a gift to him. I am going to go and be quiet for a while.