From Big Sky Country comes a rescue story so cliche that even Hollywood scriptwriters would pass it over.

A 14-year-old obsessed with roping cattle rescued a man who'd fallen into a river Indiana Jones-style, catching him around the neck and arm with his lasso.

Jory Thomas was spending 4th of July weekend at his grandparents house along the Yellowstone River near Greycliff, in Sweet Grass County, when he heard someone screaming for help.

4 people, in a raft and paddle board, had struck a bridge pier and fallen in. 3 managed to get to shore, but a 4th clung helplessly to a cooler, silently and swiftly moving downriver.

Thomas didn't think twice, he later admitted. He emptied his pockets, took his lariat and waded out up to his chest. What he had planned was straight out of a western movie.

That year, the "ranch kid" Thomas had become fixated with roping, or catching cow calves with a lasso.

"I actually started really getting into roping this year. I went to brandings and started

On this day 96 years ago, at the conclusion of the inaugural FIFA World Cup, La Celeste, or Uruguay, won the trophy. Rarely considered as favorites in the tournament's editions these days, Uruguay was on a tear by the time the first World Cup kicked off in Montevideo, Uruguay's capital. They had won the 1924 and 1928 Olympic football tournaments. Beating Argentina 2-1 in the '28 Olympics, they beat their cross-border rivals again, 4-2, to win the World Cup. READ about the history of the competition… (1930)

After their victory, Uruguay boycotted the following two editions of the tournament and didn't return to the competition until 1950, but the twenty-year break and a changing of the generations hardly disrupted this early dominance. Against Brazil in the final, Uruguay claimed its second title. This feat became an integral part of Uruguay's football identity and a source of inspiration for upcoming footballers with each passing generation.

Apart from 1942 and 1946, the FIFA World Cup has been organized every four years, with the original editions supposed to be alternated between South American and European hosts.

A sprinkle of crushed basalt rock has turned out to be the fairy dust that newly planted forests need to develop faster and absorb more carbon.

That's what scientists from Imperial College London are reporting in a new study from the largest field experiment studying how "enhanced weathering" and soil microbiome enrichment can potentially improve new forest establishment.

Forests are being planted in mass all around the world, with billions of trees at the same stages of life all rising in unison with the hopes that they will absorb extra CO2 emissions and restore wildlife habitat.

One of the biggest challenges is ensuring these juvenile forests develop in a way that sees them survive long enough for their carbon storage potential to meaningfully affect the current carbon cycle, and it's well documented that mass tree-planting can go hand in hand with mass tree die offs.

In Wales, the Glandwr Forest Carbon Study is being carried out in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Carbon Community, Imperial College London, and the University

For the 3rd consecutive year, global hunger as measured by malnourishment among continental populations has fallen.

It's also the first time that the malnourished as a share of global population has fallen below 8% since the government-enforced business closures and supply disruptions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The reduction is driven by a steep, 5-year decline of malnourishment in Asia, and a lesser decline over the same period in the Caribbean and Latin America.

On a 3-year time horizon, Oceania also saw a drop of 0.4%. Africa remains the world's most undernourished continent, with averages above 20% in some regions, with the worst being located in conflict zones.

Presented in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report, 7.8% of the global population is considered malnourished.

It's a huge improvement since 1970, when undernourishment afflicted nearly 35% of the population living outside Europe and North America.

GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME: 

Since 2010, inspiring declines have been witnessed particularly in Southeast Asia and Central

A woman was able to help a partially disabled airport worker retire after she witnessed him hobbling across the tarmac on a flight out of Los Angeles.

Heartbroken watching him limp up to the plane she was sitting on, she captured a video of the man for her TikTok account and posted it with a caption asking if anyone knew who he was.

The footage went viral, and soon, a fundraiser did to.

James Blair is a Navy veteran, working in the military between 1980 and 1990 before reentering civilian life as a fuel mechanic. Since 2006 he's worked at John Wayne Airport despite hardly being able to walk from a pair of deteriorated knees.

Having recently turned 64, and therefore not far from social security and presumably a military pension, he cannot retire as his income helps support his elderly mother's hospice care.

Knowing none of this, Thackery proceeded to watch as comments piled up asking her how someone might be able to help the poor man, until finally a commentor identified him as Blair, at which point she was able to get in

It's been almost 20 years since Argentina launched what was at the time the world's first attempt at reintroducing the giant anteater to a landscape it had disappeared from.

19 years later, and the initiative has been nothing if not successful, with the local population growing from 0 to around 200 individuals.

La Fundación Rewilding Argentina initiated the project in 2007 in the Iberá Wetlands, in the province of Corrientes.

The species, locally known as yurumí, had disappeared from Corrientes in the mid-20th century due to poaching, fires, and habitat degradation.

Over the course of the operational stage of the project, 110 giant anteaters were rescued or rehabilitated for release into the wilds of Corrientes. These individuals might have been orphaned, or rescued after having wandered too close to civilization.

Of those 110 individuals, many procreated, leading to steady population growth and multiple generations of wild-born, wild-raised animals well suited to the wetlands. There are now 200 anteaters living wild there.

The Fundación said that the methodology applied

240 years ago today, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, the National Poet of Scotland, was published in Kilmarnock. It was a hit, and catapulted him to Scottish Stardom. Among the collection is one of his two most famous poems, To a Mouse, which is actually called To a Mouse, on turning up her nest, with the plough, November. Of Burns' reputation as the "ploughman poet" who writes about rural life, this title is typical, but not as dramatic as The auld Farmer's new-year-morning Salutation, to his auld Mare, Maggy, on giving her the accustomed ripp of Corn to hansel in the new year. READ some of these poems… (1786)

To a Mouse includes the famous line "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry." In the poem about Maggy the mare, he opens in his classic rhyming pattern, this one in Scotts:

A Guid New-year I wish thee, Maggie!
Hae, there's a ripp to thy auld baggie:
Tho' thou's howe-backit now, an' knaggie,
I've seen the day
Thou could hae gaen like ony staggie,
Out-owre the lay.

Other poems include To a Louse, proving there is no "beastie" so insignificant as to

The rapid adoption of heat pumps in the United States is becoming little short of a revolution, such that these clever HVAC devices in a few years will effectively replace previous systems.

Indeed of all new homes built last year, 46% were completed with heat pumps, just 1% below other more recognizable systems like water boilers, gas furnaces, and air conditioners.

Heat pumps use the process of changing a liquid to a gas and back again to cool and heat air that's pumped into the house or building they service. They generate substantially fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a gas furnace or burning heating oil, and because they rely on electricity, can take advantage of renewable energy.

Previous generations relied on the kinds of refrigerants that were 2,000-times more capable of creating a greenhouse effect than CO2, but modern EPA regulations are seeing that previous fluid exchanged for ones with lower global warming potential, or even propane.

In the first quarter of this year, there were 32% more heat pump sales in the US than older home heating systems, according to a new

Miraculously, all 11 souls walked away with their lives after a seaplane both crashed and caught fire in the Puget Sound.

Operator Kenmore Air said in a statement that one of its planes, a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter, was on route out of Seattle with 10 passengers and a pilot when "an accident" saw the seaplane go down at 5:15 p.m. local time last Thursday.

Going down on the water, the plane also caught fire, and had already sunk in the frigid water by the time the US Coast Guard first responders arrived on scene.

Again, as if by a miracle, all 11 souls on board were rescued alive; some having sustained injuries like broken bones, lacerations, and head injuries.

"The pilot probably did a really good job to set it down gently enough to give everybody a chance," Coast Guard Lt. Commander Marshall Burtt told CBS Evening News. "A lot of things went right to get everybody out of the plane."

3 air ambulances arrived to rush the injured, including one who was in critical condition, to safety.

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