The register wants my phone number to sell me batteries

🔥 Most Enraging

A great white shark was filmed for the first time in Rhode Island waters, feeding on a whale

Researchers off Rhode Island filmed a great white shark for the first time in the state's history, calmly eating a whale. So they're up there now too. I've spent my whole life not going in the ocean, and every year the ocean hands me another reason to feel right about it. The one decision I never second-guess.

😩 Most Exhausting

A family husky chased a bear away from a boy in Connecticut and nipped it on the rear

A bear wandered up to a boy playing in his Connecticut driveway and the family husky ran it off with a bite to the rear. The dog saw a bear and picked a fight, on purpose, and won. Larry once barked at a bear for three seconds and then hid behind me, and I don't hold it against him, because that is exactly what I would have done.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Italian students set a world record with a paper airplane that has a 65-foot wingspan

Engineering students in Italy built a paper airplane with a sixty-five-foot wingspan, named it after the boy who flew too close to the sun, and threw it a hundred and ninety feet for a world record. All that schooling and they made the world's biggest paper airplane. I fold one and it turns left and lands in the sink. Good for them, honestly.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

An officer rescued a family of baby quail from a storm drain and reunited them with their mother

An officer in California spent his afternoon fishing a family of baby quail out of a storm drain and handing them back to their mother, and not one of them was hurt. Somewhere a grown man in a uniform got down on the pavement to rescue eight ounces of confused bird. I'm glad someone has the time, and I'm glad it wasn't me on that pavement, because I would still be down there.

▸ Astronomers witnessed the birth of a magnetar for the first time, from a 'chirping' supernova — Astronomers heard a distant supernova 'chirp,' rising in pitch, and worked out they were listening to a magnetar being born a billion light-years away. They can hear a star being born across the entire universe. I can't hear the waiter list the specials from two feet away. We are not the same.

▸ 5,000-year-old bones show people were keeping actual wolves, rewriting the dog's origin story — Scientists dug up five-thousand-year-old bones on a remote island and found people were keeping actual wolves, not dogs, which means somebody looked at a wolf and thought, that one, I'll keep that one. The whole history of the dog started with a spectacularly bad idea that happened to work out. Most of mine just stay bad ideas.

▸ Scientists mapped the deep-sleep brain circuit that builds muscle and repairs the brain — Scientists found the deep sleep your body uses to build muscle and repair the brain runs on a circuit most of us stopped using years ago. Turns out the good sleep does everything, and I gave it up around the time my knees did. I get up four times a night now, and not one of those trips is building muscle.

Fine. After earthquakes leveled part of Caracas, a three-year-old boy was pulled out alive from under a collapsed building six days later, by rescue crews who flew in from other countries to dig for strangers. Six days he was under there, and people who'd never heard his name got on planes to find him. Say what you want about people. Some of them show up.