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2026-10-22

October 22, 2026

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Image: Frontiers
Nature

Young giant manta rays keep to Central American shallows until they are large enough to roam

A Frontiers in Fish Science study, the first to track giant manta rays across Central America at this scale, finds that young animals stay in shallow coastal water while most of the tagged adults travel long distances along the shelf break. From 2018 to 2025 the team worked at five sites, with acoustic tags on 59 rays, satellite tags on 12, and photographs to tell individuals apart. More than 12,000 detections showed mantas with a disc of about three metres or less remaining in nearshore refuges, close to food, hiding places, and reef cleaning stations, and away from open-ocean predators. Nine mature rays made those longer trips. One adult, nicknamed Mickey Mouse for the spots on his underside, returned to the same coastal shelf years after he was first tagged.

The shallows where young mantas linger are a different place to protect than the routes adults use once they are big enough to leave.

The pattern comes from tagged animals at five sites, not a census of the species. The authors also note that adult routes cross waters with fisheries and ship traffic.

Frontiers ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: BBC News
Joy

More than 100 choirs arrive in Derry, with singing in care homes and community halls

The City of Derry International Choir Festival, in its 14th year, has a record field this week. More than 100 choirs are taking part, with singers from Sweden, Estonia, France, Germany, the UK, and Ireland beside local voices of every age. Festival director Dónal Doherty said 60 of those choirs are in the community programme, spread through Derry, Limavady, Strabane, and Donegal, including pop-up performances, community centres, care homes, and concerts in Letterkenny. The festival opened Thursday at the Millennium Forum with the Ulster Orchestra and Festival Chorus under Anna Handler, conducting there for the first time, in a Beethoven programme with soloists Gemma Summerfield, Ryan Vaughan Davies, and Alex Birkus. Friday brings the ensemble Tenebrae to the Guildhall and a late concert at St Columb's Cathedral. Saturday is the Oak Tree of Derry competition, and Sunday closes with a gala and awards. Handler said a room of people singing is something headphones cannot hold. Doherty said visiting choirs now write Derry October into calendars two or three years ahead, and that the welcome has been the same message since the first festival in 2013, when Derry was UK City of Culture.

A festival that sends visiting singers into care homes and church halls is something a neighbor can walk to.

The festival runs through Sunday, so this is the opening, not a tally of who came. The record field and the count of community choirs are the organisers' figures.

BBC News ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: York Press
Spaces

A dozen volunteers planted a sensory garden in front of a York library in a day

Two long beds in front of Huntington Library on Garth Road in York had been left to grow over. Library manager Lee Barlow said last week's turnout turned them into a garden meant to greet visitors and feed wildlife. About a dozen people from GoodGym York, the library's own team, and the neighborhood worked with Rooted Gardening York. The planting plan is Kate Mathews's: purples, oranges, pinks, and white, chosen for sight, sound, smell, texture, and taste, and for pollinators, on clay that has to take both dry summers and wet winters. She said they kept plants they could and bought within a small budget. The money came from a Neighbourly grant that former manager Jo Shanks had secured. The library sits by a playground and across from a primary school. Barlow pointed to the crafts, reading groups, and Knit and Natter already inside, and the library is asking for volunteers to keep the beds going.

A neglected strip by the door is now a place to pause on the way in, between a school, a playground, and the books.

The article describes one work day and the planting plan. It does not say how the beds will look once a season has passed, or how many of the saved plants took. "Last week" is the library manager's timing, in a report published on October 22.

York Press ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: Science News
Science

A new study lines the stars in The Starry Night up with a July dawn in 1889

Astronomer Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim and colleagues report in Scientific Reports that the sky in Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night fits the hours just before dawn on 22 July 1889, over Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. They read the painted cluster as the Hyades, the sideways V in Taurus, and used a shape comparison called Procrustes analysis to score that match against other constellations. The moon in the painting is a sharp waning crescent, which does not match the waxing gibbous of 19 June, an earlier candidate. Venus sits in the same narrow view. Kim says he stood at the window in 2019 and saw the moon, the Hyades, and Venus of that July morning fall inside a drawing of the view. Art historians have long dated the canvas to mid-June, because van Gogh wrote his brother Theo on or about 18 June that he had a new study of a starry sky, and because he then fell ill and stopped painting for about six weeks. Donald Olson, an astronomer at Texas State who has worked on skies in paintings, says that letter is still the stronger evidence, and that the window frame the team used may not be the one van Gogh saw.

A painting people treat as pure dream may also be a careful look out of a hospital window, taken down to one morning.

This is one team's reconstruction, published on 22 October, and a specialist in the field disagrees. The June letter is van Gogh's. The fit is described as close, not perfect. The article does not claim the date of the painting is settled.

Science News ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: Smithsonian Magazine
Nature

Arizona's Wonderland of Rocks is a national park, a century after it became a monument

Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona is now Chiricahua National Park, the 64th national park in the United States and the first new one in six years, after West Virginia's New River Gorge in 2020. The 12,000-acre site has been a monument since 1924. It sits in the Chiricahua Mountains, a sky island about 120 miles from Tucson where the Rockies, the Sierra Madre, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert meet. About 27 million years ago a volcanic eruption laid down ash that hardened into rhyolitic tuff. Wind, rain, and frost have since cut that layer into spires and balanced rocks, the Wonderland of Rocks. The Chiricahua Apache lived across a territory that reached into New Mexico and northern Mexico until the U.S. government forced their removal in the late 19th century. The same ground later held Buffalo Soldiers, homesteaders, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews. Smithsonian Magazine says nearly 200 bird species have been recorded, along with deer, javelina, bears, and coatis, and that the park has 17 miles of trail. In 2025 the monument counted 70,406 visits. Local businesses and outdoor groups hope a national-park name brings more.

A maze of stone that already had a century of protection now has the name that makes a person pull off the highway and walk into it.

The change reported here is a redesignation of land protected since 1924, not a new boundary. The hope of more visitors is a hope. The bird count and the 2025 attendance figure are the ones Smithsonian Magazine cites. The article does not say staffing or the budget changed with the name.

Smithsonian Magazine ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: Positive News
Community

A cocoa farmer on Ghana's Atewa hills grows her trees in the shade and keeps the forest standing

Positive News reported on 22 October on Susana Afrifa Ankrah, 62, a cocoa farmer, mother, and grandmother on the Atewa Range in south-eastern Ghana. She told the magazine the forest cools the land, brings the rain the crops need, shelters fish along the banks, and supplies local herbalists. She is vice-chair of the management board for the Atewa hotspot under the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme, run by the Forestry Commission and the Cocoa Board, which trains farmers to raise cocoa without clearing new forest and pays for measurable progress against forest loss through World Bank climate finance. She joined soon after the programme began in 2019. She said her village had already looked after the forest, and that the change she can point to is what she calls circular farming: they used to clear and burn, and now they compost and use organic fertiliser so the same land yields more beans. Hybrid seed grows under a canopy. She plants African mahogany between the cocoa, along with mango, avocado, and coconut, and says her plants do better out of the full sun. Asked how much her margins improved, she paused and said about 80 percent. With advice from the programme she has also opened a daycare and a bakery that employ 17 people. The programme has supplied tools, from cutlasses to boots. The piece is one portrait in a series, and it also describes rangeland work in southern Kenya, mangrove restoration in Senegal's Saloum Delta, and a World Food Programme project in southern Zambia that are not her farm.

Cocoa left under the canopy is a harvest that does not begin by cutting the hill bare.

The 80 percent and the 17 jobs are Susana's own account to the reporter, not an audit. The programme launched in 2019, so this is a portrait of work already underway, not a new result published this week. Positive News notes the series was supported by a storytelling grant from Jamma Conservation & Communities, and that the views are the writer's. Shade-grown yields "as good or better" are the article's general claim about the method, with Susana's plants as her own experience. Some farmers, the piece says, remain sceptical.

Positive News ↗· Oct 22, 2026

The edition Today's Five, then the rest of the file

This morning's file includes stories published earlier in the week. Headlines open the original article. Open the issue page.

Image: BBC News
Joy1

A 22-year-old and a 76-year-old church friend now spend a weekend together every month

Iona Leaf was a student at the University of Gloucestershire when she noticed Judith Chapman, a church warden in Cheltenham, and started inviting herself over for tea so she could see Judith's cat. Iona is 22 and now lives in Manchester. Judith is 76. About 130 miles separate them. They still meet for a weekend each month, and they have just come back from a holiday in the Scottish Highlands. They cook, talk through ordinary life, and trade stitches: Iona crochets, and Judith has been teaching her to knit. Judith says the visits nudge her to keep walking and to show up for Pilates. This Christmas, Judith, who does not have children of her own, will spend the day with Iona's family.

A standing weekend with someone from another generation can be as ordinary, and as steadying, as tea and a knitting lesson.

How the friendship feels is Iona and Judith's account, told to the BBC. The cat who started the visits has since died.

BBC News ↗· Oct 21, 2026

Image: BBC News
Community2

Stonehouse takes the top Britain in Bloom prize for a town-wide tree trail

Stonehouse in Gloucestershire was named overall winner of the Royal Horticultural Society's Britain in Bloom competition, after a gold in the small-town class. Judges singled out a community arboretum that counts every tree inside the town boundary, on public land or private, as one collection. Residents and volunteers have planted 49 trees. A walking trail stops at 21 of them, including a London plane on the green that came from the Bishop's Palace in Ely, with sibling trees at Sandringham and Kew. Treasurer Debbie Curtis said many of the people planting will not live to see the trees fully grown. The group's aim is 30 percent tree canopy by 2040.

A town planting for a canopy it will not see yet is leaving shade for people who are not here to thank them.

The tree and trail counts come from the local group, as reported by the BBC. The 30 percent canopy figure is a 2040 target, not a measure of cover today.

BBC News ↗· Oct 21, 2026

Image: Frontiers
Nature3

Young giant manta rays keep to Central American shallows until they are large enough to roam

A Frontiers in Fish Science study, the first to track giant manta rays across Central America at this scale, finds that young animals stay in shallow coastal water while most of the tagged adults travel long distances along the shelf break. From 2018 to 2025 the team worked at five sites, with acoustic tags on 59 rays, satellite tags on 12, and photographs to tell individuals apart. More than 12,000 detections showed mantas with a disc of about three metres or less remaining in nearshore refuges, close to food, hiding places, and reef cleaning stations, and away from open-ocean predators. Nine mature rays made those longer trips. One adult, nicknamed Mickey Mouse for the spots on his underside, returned to the same coastal shelf years after he was first tagged.

The shallows where young mantas linger are a different place to protect than the routes adults use once they are big enough to leave.

The pattern comes from tagged animals at five sites, not a census of the species. The authors also note that adult routes cross waters with fisheries and ship traffic.

Frontiers ↗· Oct 22, 2026

Image: Penn State
Mind & Wellbeing4

Head Start children who practiced naming feelings reported an easier life at 22

Penn State researchers followed children from 44 Head Start classrooms in three Pennsylvania counties into their early twenties. Some classrooms had added REDI, two lessons a week on sharing, recognizing feelings, staying calm, and the words to use those skills, with teachers who practiced the same ideas when real arguments broke out. At 21 or 22, the 192 young adults from those classrooms, compared with 164 from ordinary Head Start, reported less loneliness, fewer depressive symptoms, fewer conduct problems, more empathy, more emotional support, more healthy days, and higher life satisfaction. The healthy-day gap was almost two days a month. Four of the eleven measures, including hyperactivity and a sense of belonging, did not clearly differ. The paper is in American Psychologist.

A few lessons a week at age four can still be visible in how someone describes their life eighteen years later.

The answers are self-reported, from one randomized Head Start trial. Gains showed on seven of eleven measures, and the study does not show the same lessons would land the same way in every preschool.

Penn State ↗· Oct 19, 2026

Image: University of Twente
Science5

A transplanted Wadden Sea marsh lost only millimetres of ground under two-metre waves

Teams from the University of Twente, Deltares, Wageningen, NIOZ, Delft, and other labs moved intact salt marsh from the Peazemerlannen reserve on the Frisian Wadden Sea coast into the Delta Flume in Delft, a channel built to make very large artificial waves. They rebuilt more than 300 square metres of marsh and ran waves for about 29 hours, up to two metres high. After 21 hours the surface had dropped by about seven millimetres on average. Plants added a little extra calming: at 75 centimetres, 6 to 22 percent, and at two metres no more than 6 percent. Across species chosen to stand in for marshes elsewhere, about 30 percent of the plant material was lost, and at least a third of the plants were still standing. The papers are in Nature and Communications Sustainability. Where storm waves over a marsh stay near a metre, the team estimates plants can add more than 10 percent of the reduction, and in places up to 50 percent.

A marsh that holds its ground in a storm is a living edge a coast can keep, alongside the walls people build.

This was one transplanted marsh in a laboratory flume, not a storm on a living coast. The plants were damaged, and their extra help faded as the waves grew.

University of Twente ↗· Oct 21, 2026

Image: The Guardian
Nature

Orangutans reached more often for food they had heard paired with laughter

In a Biology Letters study, Erica Cartmill and colleagues worked with six captive orangutans at two zoos. The apes learned to search bowls for a treat hidden under moss, sawdust, or a similar filler. Just before each search, the team played either the sound of orangutans laughing at play or ordinary outdoor noise such as wind, matched to whichever filler covered the food that day. On the test day both bowls held a treat. Taken together, the apes chose the filler that had come with laughter, and four of the six showed a clear preference. Cartmill said the laughter may have left them in a better mood while they were learning which bowl was worth the search.

A better mood at the moment of learning may change what an animal later treats as the good choice, even when both bowls hold the same prize.

Six captive orangutans, not wild ones, and four of the six drove the preference. Any suggestion about human classrooms is the researchers' idea, not a result of this experiment.

The Guardian ↗· Oct 21, 2026

Image: Good News Network
Kindness

Visitors started a fund so an 86-year-old can move the boat he has built since 1987

Dale, 86, of Mineral Wells, Texas, has been welding a 62-foot steel boat in his front yard since 1987, with Alaska as the hoped-for end of the trip. The hull has four cabins and is described as about three-quarters finished. He can no longer do the work alone, and a steep hill sits between the boat and the road. Three visitors from England, including Laurence Benson, stopped in unannounced, listened to him talk through the project, and watched him climb a ladder onto the deck, something he had not done in years. They opened a fund for the remaining work, the machinery to get the boat down the hill, and a haul to a place it can be launched. Within days the fund had passed $41,000, from more than 1,500 people, toward a $45,000 goal. Benson has said closer to $50,000 is what it will take to reach the water.

A project that has lived in one yard for almost forty years can still move when strangers take on the last hard part.

The boat is not in the water. The size, how finished it is, and the fundraising totals are the visitors' account, as reported by Good News Network. The article gives Dale's first name only.

Good News Network ↗· Oct 21, 2026

Image: designboom
Spaces

Shanghai's new opera house opens a roof stair anyone can climb without a ticket

Snøhetta's Shanghai Grand Opera House opened on October 17 on the Huangpu River, from a design chosen in 2016. The building covers 146,786 square metres and holds three halls with 4,200 seats between them, plus rooms for rehearsal, teaching, and exhibitions. A white roof rises in a spiral from the waterfront. The stair to the top is meant as a lookout and a place to gather, and designboom reports that climbing it does not require a ticket. The first season runs through February 20, 2027, with 82 performances of 47 productions.

A hall this large still offers a walk up to the roof for someone who only came to see the river.

The size, seat count, and season figures come from the architecture report. The article describes the opening, not how many people have used the roof since.

designboom ↗· Oct 17, 2026