Stingless Bees Granted Legal Rights:
Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere.
It means that across a broad swathe of the Peruvian Amazon, the rainforest’s long-overlooked native bees – which, unlike their cousins the European honeybees, have no sting – now have the right to exist and to flourish.
Cultivated by Indigenous peoples since pre-Columbian times, stingless bees are thought to be key rainforest pollinators, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem health.
But they are faced with a deadly confluence of climate change, deforestation and pesticides, as well as competition from European bees, and scientists and campaigners have been racing against time to get stingless bees on international conservation red lists.
The world-first ordinances, passed in two Peruvian regions in the past few months, follow a campaign of research and advocacy spearheaded by Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, founder of Amazon Research Internacional, who has spent the past few years travelling into the Amazon to work with Indigenous people to document the bees.
Espinoza, a chemical biologist, first started researching the bees in 2020, after a colleague asked her to conduct an analysis of their honey, which was being used during the pandemic in Indigenous communities where treatments for Covid were in short supply. She was stunned by the findings.
“I was seeing hundreds of medicinal molecules, like molecules that are known to have some sort of biological medicinal property,” Espinoza recalled. “And the variety was also really wild – these molecules have been known to have antiinflammatory effects or antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant, even anti-cancer.”
The Best Of Cli-Fi (Climate Fiction):
As climate change has reshaped our physical world, raising temperatures, swelling sea levels and supercharging disasters, it has also crept into the fictional worlds of books, movies, TV shows and games.
But some — especially in the “solarpunk” subgenre — imagine more hopeful futures where people survive the coming chaos and thrive in societies built in tune with nature.
All these tales, with their sad and happy endings, can help us understand the messy human consequences of climate change on an emotional level that goes beyond dry academic literature according to Kate Marvel, a physicist who builds computer models of the Earth’s climate.
“Climate change does not happen just in those computer models. It happens in the real world. It happens to us,” she said. “There is no hellscape future that is locked in. We can choose what the future looks like to a huge extent, and we can choose how we react.”
Peruse the list in the article for suggested reading (or watching, or playing).
The Southern Accent Headed For Extinction? (And why can’t I think of that accent w/o recalling Hillary Clinton’s fake accent when she was First Lady of Arkansas?):
Margaret Renwick, an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins, has co-authored studies on changing accents among white and Black people in Georgia. The University of Georgia has a huge collection of old recordings and interviews from all across the South beginning in the 1960s. “Nobody had ever really looked at them with modern methods, so we dove in,” she told me. The study focused on four different “drawling vowels” that are part of what linguists call the Southern Vowel Shift—which, she discovered, is on the decline.
“The Southern Vowel Shift began in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, and the first thing that happened was that bide became bahd—so i to ah—like time to tahme,” Renwick said. You have to listen closely to hear it, but the accent treats long vowels and short vowels differently. With a long vowel (beat or bait), “you add a little uh sound before the original vowel” (buheat). But with the short vowels (bit or bet), the uh goes after the original vowel. (Can you hear it, just a little biuht?) “That’s where the drawl perception comes from,” she said, “because they kind of stretch out.” The paper found that the Southern Vowel Shift is becoming less detectable, particularly in urban areas such as Atlanta. Renwick also found that the accent has faded at different rates among Black and white Georgians. For white speakers, she told me, the peak southern accent was among “Baby Boomers born right after World War II.” For Black speakers, the accent was strongest among Gen X, and began to disappear only among Millennials and Gen Z.
55 Facts From 2025 To Blow Your Mind. Some of those that blew my mind:
The U.S. releases 100 million sterile flies in Mexico every week.
By one calculation, spending on AI accounted for 92 percent of America’s GDP growth in the first half of 2025.
During the late 1800s, baseball players experimented with four-sided bats.
Malibu has a flock of wild parrots that may descend from pets that escaped homes during a fire in 1961. (‘Awwk, another martini’)
A hawk learned how to use crosswalk signals as a cue to ambush its prey.
In Japan, you can buy soy sauce laced with ostrich antibodies.
You just learned something today. Cue Husker Du to sing us out:
