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Raccoon faces are instantly recognizable: their mask-like facial markings and habit of rummaging in trash bins has earned them the affectionate nickname “trash bandit.” New research shows that the face of the trash bandit is changing—literally! Biologists say urban raccoons now have shorter faces than their forest-dwelling peers, meaning they could be in early stages of domestication. In other words, they’re becoming tamer.

In the wild, raccoons will eat nearly anything they can from plants or animals. In an urban environment—meaning in a city or town—the easiest place to find food is in garbage cans.

“Wherever humans go, there is trash. Animals love our trash. All they have to do is endure our presence, not be aggressive, and then they can feast on anything we throw away,” said Raffaela Lesch, a biologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in the United States.

Some new vehicles are hitting the road in Zimbabwe—electric tricycles! These three-wheeled electric vehicles (EVs) are giving women in rural Zimbabwe some yearned-for independence.

In Zimbabwe’s rural areas, many women are disconnected from public transportation and economic opportunities. Some have to walk a great distance to hand-deliver crops and goods to sell at marketplaces so that they can make money for their families. The other option is to rely on family members to make time to drive them.

Bana Alabed has been using her voice to promote peace since she was 7 years old. Growing up amid a deadly civil war in Syria, a country in the Middle East, she drew attention to the plight of children in conflict by publicly documenting her childhood on social media.

Now 15 years old and a refugee living in Turkey, Alabed continues to advocate for children affected by war. Her tireless work is the reason Alabed is the 2025 International Children’s Peace Prize winner. Presented by the KidsRights Foundation and the Global Child Forum, the award goes to an outstanding young person “who courageously fights for children’s rights.”

Experts estimate that about 1 out of every 6 children around the world lives in an area affected by conflict. Alabed has been working to help reopen schools and reunite families torn apart in war. Her efforts have focused on children in Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan.

“Peace is not a luxury. The world must listen to us. Our childhood has been stolen due to wars and conflicts,” said Alabed when she was nominated. “We want peace, and to those children who are suffering in the wars, you are not alone.”

Here is more about the other two finalists for the 2025 International Children’s Peace Prize:

• Aeshnina “Nina” Azzahra Aqilani (17 years old, Indonesia): No one wants their home to be treated like a trash can, but unfortunately, many Western countries export their plastic waste to other places, like Indonesia. Aqilani has combined environmental and international advocacy to help ban this harmful practice and make the world a cleaner, more just place.

• Divyansh Agrawal (16 years old, United States): Proving no one is too young to give back to their community, Agrawal founded the Junior Philanthropists Foundation. This teen-led organization focuses on the way climate laws affect children’s rights. It has already helped pass 18 environmental bills in the state of California.

When you picture an archaeologist at work, you might think of someone digging through buried, ancient buildings. But what about sifting through vultures’ nests? Archaeologists in Spain have done just that, finding hundreds of years’ worth of archaeological treasures stashed in the cliffside nests of bearded vultures.

Bearded vultures like to reuse nests each year, so generations of vultures will use the same nests and slowly add layers over time. The species is locally extinct in southern Spain, allowing archeologists to look for interesting objects in the area’s preserved—but uninhabited—nests, which are tucked into cliffside caves.

To reach the nests, the scientists had to rappel down a cliff using ropes and harnesses. Treating the 12 nests as they would any other archeological site, the scientists carefully dug through each layer. Their work revealed hundreds of years’ worth of the birds’ history and the history of Spain itself.

When a dog makes adorable puppy eyes, it might seem obvious that the dog is begging for a treat. But it turns out humans may be barking up the wrong tree by misreading their pets’ cues.

To put human-dog interactions to the test, animal behavior researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne of Arizona State University conducted two experiments in which they asked people to interpret a series of dog videos. 

In the first experiment, Molinaro and Wynne recorded dogs in happy situations, like being offered a leash to go for a walk, and negative (less happy) situations, like being close to a loud vacuum cleaner. In each situation, the dogs showed body language that indicated whether they were excited or upset. They then asked people to describe the dogs’ emotions.

Then the researchers edited the videos to change the dogs’ reactions: the happy dogs were edited into a negative context (near the vacuum), and the upset dogs were edited into the happy context (seeing a leash). Viewers were asked to describe the dogs’ emotions in these contexts.

When shown the edited videos, people frequently misidentified the situation, ignoring the dog’s body language and behavior and instead focusing on the situation around the dog. They believed the (upset) dog was happy to see the leash, while the (happy) dog was upset to be around the vacuum cleaner.

On December 10, 2025, young Australians with accounts on TikTok and Snapchat will wake up and find their profiles gone. Australia has banned young people under age 16 from having social media accounts as part of its new social media usage policy. 

Australia’s government passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill about a year ago to protect Australian children and teens from the harmful effects of social media, such as cyberbullying and mental health struggles.

“We want our kids to have a childhood and parents to know we have their backs,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese after the policy was passed.

The law says young people cannot use the platforms even with parental consent. The government expects all platforms to deactivate user accounts for those under the age of 16 when the law goes into effect on December 10. This includes popular platforms YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as TikTok and Snapchat.

The law is going into effect just as a new study confirms that preteens who use social media struggle with reading, vocabulary, and memory more than peers who do not use social media. The research shows that even low levels of social media use negatively impact brain development.

One of the most exciting scientific ceremonies in the world begins with an odd tradition—the audience pelts the ceremony stage with hundreds of soaring paper airplanes! This is no regular awards night. The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate seemingly silly, yet very real, scientific research done around the world. This year’s award winners included a group of scientists who painted zebra stripes on cows and another who recorded lizards eating pizza.

The Annals of Improbable Research, a science magazine, awards the Ig Nobel Prize (also called the Igs) to scientific achievements “so surprising that they make people laugh, then think.” Each year, 10 prizes are awarded to achievements that seem unusual and imaginative.

Japanese scientist Tomoki Kojima and his colleagues won an Ig this year for their research experiment painting cows with black and white zebra stripes. The experiment showed that the zebra pattern reduced the number of biting flies landing on the cows. The results suggest farmers who don’t want to use pesticides could instead use this unusual method to deter flies.

“When I did this experiment, I hoped that I would win the Ig Nobel. It’s my dream,” Kojima said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Clarence “Taffy” Abel skated into hockey history multiple times in his life as an Olympian and professional ice hockey player in the early 1900s—but part of his legacy wasn’t fully recognized until after his death. That is because Abel had kept his Ojibwe identity a secret.

Abel was born in the hockey-loving town of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, a city on the U.S.-Canada border. This area is also home to many Indigenous communities, including the Chippewa nation (now called Ojibwe) that Abel’s mother belonged to.

Around the age of 24, Abel represented his country at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, as a member of the U.S. Olympic hockey team. He carried the American flag during the opening ceremony parade, becoming the first Native American to be the flag bearer at the Olympics. The U.S. hockey team went on to win the silver medal.

What nobody knew at the time was that Abel was Ojibwe. Abel grew up at a time when Native Americans faced severe discrimination, so he and his family downplayed his heritage so that he could have more opportunities.

“Taffy would have never got into the 1924 Winter Olympics if he would have [come] right out and said, Hey, I’m Native American,” George Jones, Abel’s nephew, told NPR.

Abel went on to have a successful career in the U.S. National Hockey League. He played for the newly formed New York Rangers and helped them win the Stanley Cup, hockey’s championship trophy, in 1928. He repeated the feat in 1934, this time while playing for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Abel became more open about his heritage once he retired from professional hockey. He died in 1964 and was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame nearly a decade later. He was inducted into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame in 1989.

The U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame web page dedicated to Abel said: “He left an indelible imprint in pro and amateur circles as a player, coach and manager. Taffy Abel was a name beloved by hockey followers across the continent.”

What animal wraps up its food like a mummy and then kills it with toxic puke? The feather-legged lace weaver spider!

It may sound like a spooky riddle, but it’s completely true. This small spider species doesn’t use a venomous bite to kill its meal—it uses deadly barf instead. 

The feather-legged lace weaver is a flattish, brown spider that is about half the size of a pea and preys on insects. Though the spider is common across the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, its unusual predation behavior caught scientists’ attention only recently.

Researchers from Switzerland, Germany, and Belgium just published a study detailing the lace weaver’s throw-up-and-then-eat method for feasting. While the spider does have fangs, it cannot produce venom like other spider species do. Instead, it creates a toxin in its digestive system. So, when the spider catches a fly in its web, it wraps the meal in spider silk and then throws up all over it. The venom-like barf kills the insect. Now the spider is ready for lunch. 

Though the lace weaver’s food preparation style was first documented in a 1931 scientific paper, it wasn’t until now that researchers confirmed the spider evolved away from a venomous bite.

Since the lace weaver has fangs but no venom, scientists concluded that the species lost its ability to kill with a simple chomp but has kept its toxicity in its digestive juices. For the lace weaver, spider sense really is a gut feeling!

Celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall has died. She was 91. Best known for her groundbreaking discoveries about chimpanzee behavior, Goodall dedicated much of her career to causes like environmentalism and animal welfare.

Goodall’s interest in animals began at an early age. She first observed wild animals and took notes about them as a child in England. It wasn’t long before she decided on a career in animal behavior. In 1960, when Goodall was 26, she was hired by the anthropologist Louis Leakey to study wild chimpanzees in what is now the African nation of Tanzania. 

Goodall’s chimpanzee observations led to several discoveries. For example, she observed a chimpanzee named David Greybeard removing the leaves from a stick and then dipping the stick into a termite mound to capture the insects. This was the first time a scientist noted an animal using a tool. 

“The reason why this was so exciting was because, at that time, it was thought by Western science that only humans used and made tools,” Goodall once explained. Scientists have since observed several other animals using tools.

Goodall found that each chimpanzee had its own personality and that chimps have complex emotions. This observation surprised some scientists, but Goodall later said she wasn’t surprised because she had noticed complex emotions in her childhood dog, Rusty. 

“We all know that [dogs] can be happy, sad, fearful and that they’re highly intelligent,” she pointed out. Goodall’s discoveries led to a new understanding of chimpanzees and strengthened support for protecting their natural habitat. 

Goodall, who became world famous, was at the forefront of the animal welfare and conservation movements. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to help promote conservation and, until her death, traveled the globe to talk about the importance of protecting the natural world. 

Goodall’s tireless work for the planet and all living things made her a hero to people of all ages. After her death, tributes poured in from scientists, politicians, actors, and many more. 

“Jane Goodall was the first to prove that an investigating scientist and a great ape living in the wild could become true friends,” said British scientist and broadcaster David Attenborough. “In doing so, she came to transform our understanding of chimpanzees.”

“Goodall’s legacy is not only in science but in the global movement she helped spark to protect nature and give hope for a better world,” said Will McCallum, co-executive director of the environmental group Greenpeace.

Click through the slideshow for photos from Jane Goodall’s life and career.