Gennaro Tomma in Smithsonian Magazine:
Between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, a now-extinct population of wolves evolved into dogs, with a little help from humans. Today—at least in Italy, which hosts one of Europe’s largest wolf populations—genes are flowing in the opposite direction. Recent genetic testing suggests that, particularly in the country’s central and southern regions, nearly half of the wild wolves (Canis lupus) are actually wolf-dog hybrids.
That represents a massive shift from the 1970s, when Luigi Boitani, now the chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, discovered the country’s first known wolf-dog hybrid.
The 1970s were a period of transition for Italy’s wolves. At the time, the population was coming out of a tailspin. New laws and conservation efforts were designed to encourage wolves to recolonize habitat from which they’d been extirpated. But the landscape, and its inhabitants, had changed. Wild countryside had given way to rampant urbanization, and Italy’s central and southern regions—where wolves began recovering first—hosted high numbers of free-ranging dogs. It didn’t take long for the wolves to begin rubbing shoulders (and more) with the local canines.
More here.
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Around one in 500 women don’t have a functioning womb, needed to carry a pregnancy. This condition, called absolute uterine factor infertility, occurs when a woman is born without a uterus, has had to have it removed or has a defective organ.
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Sometime in the 2000s, the producer Lindsay Doran asked her doctor for a book recommendation. “I’m reading that book everybody’s reading,” the doctor replied. “You know, the one about the shepherd who’s murdered and the sheep solve the crime.”
There’s a common mantra in the outskirts of AI policy thought: driven by market pressures and overheated capital markets, AI tokens will soon be abundant—and the future belongs to those who can use them best. The further you get away from San Francisco, the louder this mantra grows. It reaches a fever pitch in the peripheries, the many middle powers of the world still caught up in a plan to navigate the AI revolution on the basis of merely good-enough models. That view requires important AI capabilities to be widely accessible: defenders have access to models before attackers do, firms in all domains compete based on access to the same AI capabilities.
Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s remarks, she feels the rumblings of anxiety rising in her mind and body. Psychology research suggests that Gigi feels anxious because she interpreted her boss’s remarks as something threatening that perhaps she can’t handle.
New York City Mayor
A sweeping analysis of sleep duration and signs of ageing in half a million adults has pinpointed a sweet spot — about six to eight hours of 
“The museums are full of uprooted pictures,” Pierre Bonnard once said. The artist was anxious for his pictorial seedlings. They might be thrust out into galleries in which they would struggle for survival among alien life forms and in which the climate might prove too chill—above all, the light too bleak. In the light of the South of France, he said, everything is sharp and your painting shimmers. Take it to Paris and the blues turn to grey. And therefore, you can never paint violently enough. You must be violent with your colour; you must heighten the tones in order to counteract this problem of pictures dwindling away in their impact as they are transposed from one place to the other.
Each lover of Lawrence’s poems will have his own story of first contact with a new and unique consciousness. Lawrence was the first entirely modern poet I was presented with and, except for what I had picked up from films – the accidental influence, in Hollywood movies of the late thirties and early forties, of German Expressionist theatre and décor and, on the soundtrack, German contemporary music – the first modernist sensibility. I was twelve, going on thirteen, in my first months at Brisbane Grammar. As the bright Latin form, we were skilled at the sort of analysis and parsing that in those days was regular drill in Queensland primary schools, so we did nothing in our English class but read. The Lawrence poem in our class anthology was ‘Snake’, and it was like no other poem I had ever heard – I say ‘heard’ because poetry always began for me in those days as a reading aloud. I did with it immediately what I had been encouraged to do with any poem that in some way stuck me, or which puzzled or eluded me. I got its music into my head (_prima la musica_), and its logic or lack of logic, by learning it off by heart. Like many poems learned by heart at that time, it is still with me.
There is a distinctive, deeply uncanny horror to the way Jimmy Fallon 
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obstacles could not be surmounted.
This brief examines the drivers of health spending and differences between the U.S. and its peers – other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations that are similarly large and wealthy. In 2021, the U.S. spent nearly