The Wild

A black bear climbed into a Juneau, Alaska, family's unlocked Subaru around 12:30 a.m. Monday and got shut inside, Alaska's News Source (KTUU) reports. A neighbor heard the horn going off, saw the bear sitting on it and called 911.

Officers woke the family for the keys, but the bear had ripped out wiring and the doors would not unlock, so Juneau police pulled a door open with a rope. The family said the bear was out within five to 10 minutes and ran off unhurt. Owner Michael Wilson said the seats, door panels and back seats were torn apart and metal was bent.

The family said the bear got into three cars that night. They blamed a bad bear year on more than 200 inches of snow and a late spring that left fewer berries and fish. The damage is not covered: they had liability insurance only. Wilson's advice: lock your doors and leave no food or candy in the car.

Dwarf reedsnakes of the genus Pseudorabdion can roll across the ground to escape danger, reaching peak speeds of 1.72 to 3.69 meters per second, about four times their top slithering speed, according to a Toho University release on ScienceDaily.

Filming the snakes from several angles, researchers found that they alternate between rolling on one side and swinging a curved part of the body down beside the head, a move they call a "stroke." The rear of the body spins while the head stays pointed forward at a nearly constant height. The snakes held a 20 cm-wide racetrack, so the rolling is controlled rather than tumbling.

Rolling is hard for animals because, unlike a wheel, they have no axle to separate a spinning body from the head and senses. The researchers say the snakes manage it through coordination alone.

People in Southwest China and the northern Philippines who eat certain wild mushrooms raw or undercooked report seeing tiny human figures walking around them, a so-called Lilliputian hallucination. University of Utah researchers used DNA sequencing to pin the effect on one species, Lanmaoa asiatica, according to a university release on ScienceDaily. The study by doctoral student Colin Domnauer and mycologist Bryn Dentinger is published in Mycologia.

Mushrooms known locally as Jian shou qing in Yunnan and Sedesdem in the Philippines turned out to be the same species, which scientists had thought grew only in China. The team found no known psychoactive mushroom compounds, including psilocybin, suggesting an unknown substance.

The puzzle dates to 1934 reports of "mushroom madness" in Papua New Guinea. Even Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD, could not find an active ingredient in samples tested decades ago.

Dimensional, a San Francisco startup based in the Dogpatch neighborhood, posted an ad this month in a Bay Area jobs group on Facebook offering $20 an hour to walk robot dogs for four to six hours at a time, according to a New York Times report republished by The Star. The ad, since deleted, warned that walkers might have to carry an overheated robot, about 33 pounds, back to the office.

Founder Stash Pomichter, 26, said the company is building an open-source operating system that lets AI agents control robots. The human walkers steer the robots by remote while cameras and sensors record "ground truth" for navigating city sidewalks. The dogs are roughly $2,000 machines from China's Unitree; Pomichter said Dimensional has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots.

Comparing walks under human and AI control, he said, showed that "agents are still very bad at controlling hardware."

Several dozen people gathered outside Liberty Mutual's headquarters in Boston's Back Bay on Sunday, Oct. 25, calling on the insurer to stop running ads with its fuzzy yellow "Liberty Biberty" mascot, The Boston Globe reports.

The protest was organized by Connor Harvey, a 19-year-old YouTuber from Wilmot, N.H. He told the Globe it "initially started out as a joke" in a video called "Death of Mascots"; his follow-up "official announcement" drew more than 600,000 views and briefly topped YouTube's most-hyped list. The mascot, which debuted this summer, had already drawn mockery on Reddit, TikTok and late-night TV, including an Oct. 11 Last Week Tonight segment in which John Oliver said, "I hate this thing."

Protesters carried signs such as "Liberty from Biberty," and Harvey called it "the next Boston Tea Party." He said they would leave if asked. Liberty Mutual did not immediately respond to the Globe.

Researchers at the University of Bonn found that the Australian jumping spider Portia fimbriata has two distinct sleep stages, one resembling human REM sleep, with eye movements and muscle twitches, according to a university release on ScienceDaily.

The team watched spiders in 12 cm dishes with infrared cameras, used sound to test how quickly they responded, and deprived them of sleep to check for "sleep rebound." The release calls this the first comprehensive experimental confirmation that spiders have genuine, regulated sleep rather than just resting.

The researchers stress that REM-like movements do not show that spiders dream. Portia is a coin-sized hunter of other spiders that lures prey by faking the vibrations of trapped insects. Next, the team plans to compare species, study sleep and learning, and test how artificial light at night affects arthropod sleep.

Samba, a one-year-old capybara who escaped her temporary enclosure at Marwell Zoo near Winchester, Hampshire, on 17 March, less than a day after arriving, has been filmed for the first time in months, LBC reports. Her sister Tango was recaptured quickly.

Samba was last seen in August. Grainy footage from wildlife cameras, captured on private land earlier this month, gave keepers further evidence of where she is. The zoo, which has also used thermal drones and camera traps, called the recovery "a gradual and carefully managed process" and said frightening her could make her harder to catch. It is keeping her exact location confidential.

Luceros y Penumbras ("Starlight and Shadows"), a pop-up book in the rotunda of the Los Angeles Central Library, is officially the largest pop-up book of all time, Guinness World Records announced. It was made by Los Angeles artist Daniel González for the library's centennial, with paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart.

The cover measures 15.41 by 20.01 feet and opens into a scene about 31 feet wide, with designs up to 11 feet tall. It weighs 1,800 lbs and uses ordinary book materials: paper, adhesive and fabric. Turning a page takes a team of 10 people with extra-large sticks. Its two spreads show the library emerging from the night sky and a "Tree of Wisdom." A team of 35 built it, in sections so it would fit through the library doors. It is on free display.

Manassas Park, Virginia, police found a sheep grazing in a backyard near Nancy Street in the Blooms Crossing neighborhood on Oct. 28, WJLA reports. In a Facebook post, police said a "food pursuit" had led the animal into the yard and that it was taken into custody "safe and sound."

Officers joked that the sheep was "less than cooperative" but in good spirits, and that no charges have been filed despite a few outstanding "baaa-violations." The owner had not been identified, and police asked anyone missing a sheep to call the department.

A shipwreck in shallow water off Kekova, west of Antalya, Turkey, may be the oldest in the world, writes Karin Sowada of Macquarie University in The Conversation, republished by ScienceDaily. The team, led by Hakan Öniz of Akdeniz University, tentatively dates it to around 2700 to 2400 BCE based on its pottery cargo. The previous record holder, off Dokos in Greece, is about 4,200 years old.

Nothing of the ship's timber remains. Divers spent four months freeing large two-handled storage jars, many with a raised clay "belt," from a barnacle-covered slope. Some may come from Jordan Valley clays, and their contents could be products such as olive oil, wine or resin.

The findings are preliminary and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal; Sowada says earlier or later dates remain possible.