2026-10-24

October 24, 2026

The morning file for this date: Today's Five, then the wider set. Headlines open the original article.

Today's Five picks filed on this morning

Image: BBC News

Retired hens in Hereford are heading for garden homes, and one street already sells their eggs

The British Hen Welfare Trust is holding an adoption day on Sunday at Rotherwas Industrial Estate in Hereford, one of about 50 similar events across the UK. Fifty-seven hens there are looking for gardens. The birds leave commercial egg farms at about 18 months, when laying slows, an age when many used to go for slaughter. Since 2005 the trust says it has rehomed more than a million hens, including 40,682 this year, and it estimates the year will finish above 50,000. James Bartlett, a volunteer in Belmont, and his wife Charlie already keep eight. Charlie sells the eggs from a stall in the front garden for a donation, and she says children knock to ask for them. Carol Wall, in Tenbury Wells, calls hers pets and says she can lose hours watching them scratch. Would-be adopters are asked to register ahead. The trust says the scheme depends on farmers, planning, and biosecurity.

A hen that would have been culled at a year and a half can spend the rest of her life scratching in a garden, and the eggs become a reason for neighbors to stop and talk.

Sunday's Hereford event has not happened yet. The figure of hundreds of hens finding homes this weekend is the scale of the national round of events, not a count of birds already placed. The million-hen total, this year's 40,682, and the year-end estimate above 50,000 are the trust's figures.

BBC News ↗· Oct 23, 2026

Image: BBC News

Community2

Fifteen teddy bears are hidden around Guernsey to start conversations about fostering

Guernsey's Family Placement Service has put 15 teddy bears in businesses around the island for a hunt called Hidden Bears Hidden Heroes, starting Saturday. Each bear carries a card with a short story and information about fostering. People are asked to find them, photograph them, and tag Guernsey Foster Care and Adoption. Clue sheets are at Beau Sejour, the Guille-Alles Library, and Mim's Kiosk at Cobo, or on the service's Facebook page. The bears come down on 1 November. Vicky Tellen of the service said the island will keep needing foster carers, and that the cost of living can make people assume it is not for them. She said the point of the hunt is a first phone call, and that some form of care could fit more households than people expect.

A bear in a shop window is a small way to let someone ask about fostering before they have decided it is too hard.

This is the start of an awareness hunt, not a report of new carers approved. The article does not say how many children on Guernsey are waiting for a placement.

BBC News ↗· Oct 23, 2026

Nature3

A mother cougar and three kittens are leaving tracks again in northern Minnesota

Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Greg Stanley went into the woods north of Orr with Tom Gable of the University of Minnesota's Voyageurs Wolf Project. In late March a GPS-collared deer turned up cached under leaves, the way a cat hides a kill. Cameras over the carcass recorded about four hours of a female cougar and three kittens eating, growling, and being groomed. John Erb of the state Department of Natural Resources estimated the kittens at seven to nine months, born in late summer 2025, so they had already lived through a winter. The project and the department then set about 100 more cameras around that site. After a quiet stretch, July footage showed the family again, with a male of more than 120 pounds nearby. DNA from scat pointed to a father related to Black Hills cougars in South Dakota and a mother related to a small population in northwestern Nebraska. Mark Elbroch of Panthera put each journey at more than 700 miles. Two of the three kittens tested as male. On the August trip the paper describes, after a long day of empty cameras, one animal too small to be the adult male walked the road, and a clear print sat in mud from the night's rain.

A cat that was hunted out of the state can find enough deer and quiet woods to raise young, without anyone trucking animals in.

The Minnesota DNR first released the March footage on April 30. This October feature adds the genetics and later sightings. It is one family, not a counted population. Erb has said the kittens might still be lost, and the state has not yet set out how it will handle livestock conflicts. Cougars are protected in Minnesota, and ranchers may not shoot one that threatens stock.

Minnesota Star Tribune ↗· Oct 23, 2026

Science4

An experimental drug stalled most treatment-resistant solid tumors in an early trial

The first human trial of invikafusp alfa, called invika, is reported in Nature Medicine by researchers at the National Cancer Institute, Mass General Brigham, and Memorial Sloan Kettering. The protein is built to stir only two narrow groups of tumor-infiltrating T cells, rather than T cells across the board. Most of the people enrolled had solid tumors that had already done poorly on immune checkpoint drugs such as pembrolizumab. In phase 1 the team varied the dose, given every two weeks. Flu-like side effects showed up and were generally handled with extra medicine and supportive care. At the dose they then carried into phase 2, 16 of 27 people had no further progression, and 4 of the 27 saw targeted tumors shrink by more than 30 percent. Two of those four had metastatic colorectal cancer and were on invika as a seventh treatment. Another had stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer that had already turned away several drugs. People on lower doses did not show a clear benefit. The authors tied the four shrinkages to the biggest shifts in the T cells the drug is meant to reach, and they note that immune activity did not always become a measurable change in the cancer. The sponsor, Marengo Therapeutics, has an FDA Fast Track designation for the drug in certain solid tumors after checkpoint therapy. The trial is still enrolling.

For someone whose tumor has already outlasted standard immunotherapy, a drug aimed at a smaller set of T cells is another thing to test, with the side effects so far looking more like a flu than a broad immune collapse.

These are early phase 1 and phase 2 results in 27 people at one dose, not a cure rate. Sixteen without progression is not the same as sixteen in remission. The trial is ongoing, and the authors say the next questions include combining invika with other treatments.

National Institutes of Health ↗· Oct 23, 2026

Image: York Press

Spaces5

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

Also that morning

Image: Roger Williams Park Zoo

Nature

Nantucket's reintroduced burying beetles produced a record late-summer count

Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence says this is the fifth year it has sent American burying beetles from its breeding program back to Nantucket. With wild beetles trapped for the work as well, the team provisioned 320 animals with carrion so they had a carcass to bury and raise young on. When researchers dug up 30 percent of those pairs, they counted 1,274 larvae. Later in the summer, over four nights, they processed 490 newly emerged beetles and 191 they had seen before, which the zoo calls a record for the project. Partners include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy's Block Island office, which supplies wild founders. Volunteers came from the Nantucket Land Bank, the Maria Mitchell Association, and the Linda Loring Nature Foundation. The beetle is federally protected. It buries small dead animals, which the zoo describes as returning nutrients to the soil and keeping flies and ants from taking every carcass. The same season includes new research on how much carrion is available and how climate affects breeding. The stated aim is a population that can continue without being restocked.

A beetle that buries the dead is a sign the island still has the quiet food chain those beetles need.

The counts and the word "record" come from the zoo that runs the breeding. The larvae figure is from 30 percent of the provisioned pairs, not every nest. The release does not show that the island population can hold without further releases.

Roger Williams Park Zoo ↗· Oct 23, 2026

Joy

A photograph of pin mould and hibernating bats wins Europe's wildlife photo prize

Hungarian photographer Imre Potyó is European Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026, named by the German Society for Nature Photography from more than 26,000 entries in the 26th year of the contest. His picture, Hidden Worlds, was made in a restricted mine tunnel in Hungary's Börzsöny Mountains during a controlled count of lesser horseshoe bats. He has been photographing hibernating bats in those tunnels for 13 years. The bats sometimes wake, hunt insects that come into the dark, and leave droppings that build into a dark layer. In a torch beam a whitish pin mould shows on that layer. Potyó put the mould in sharp focus with a macro lens and left the bats soft behind it. He says the long exposure, with a shift of focus, was made without disturbing the animals. Jury member Tom Gilks said the frame holds a relationship most people never see, among bats, fungi, and the smaller life around them. The same announcement includes the category winners, among them a nighttime portrait of urban beavers by Jan Wieczorek that also took the Rewilding Europe award.

A prize for mould on a cave floor is a reminder that a careful look, taken without waking the bats, can make a hidden place matter to people who will never go in.

PetaPixel's introduction calls the mould bioluminescent. Potyó's own account, quoted in the same article, describes a whitish pin mould seen by torchlight during a controlled count. The entry total is the competition's figure.

PetaPixel ↗· Oct 23, 2026

Image: Good News Network

Mind & Wellbeing

A Haysville first grade ends the day by saying they are kind and can do hard things

At Rex Elementary in Haysville, Kansas, first-grade teacher Tyler Richards has his class say a few plain sentences before they leave, including "I am kind" and "I can do hard things." Principal Shane Paulus, speaking to KSN News 3 in an account carried by Good News Network, said he loves the practice because the children leave feeling welcomed. Richards said the hope is that the day ends in a safe, positive place, whether the next stop is home or another activity. Paulus said other teachers have started versions of their own, and that children are offering ideas for how to keep it going. Richards said it is one way the students feel more connected to the adults at school.

A few sentences at the door can send a child out of the building with a kinder line to take home.

This is Good News Network's report of a local television interview. It does not say how many classrooms joined, how long the practice has run, or whether anyone measured a change in how the children feel.

Good News Network ↗· Oct 23, 2026