Leo DiCaprio just committed $200M to save 100 species from extinction

Happy Tuesday. If you're somewhere hot right now, you're not alone, it's been that kind of August. Today's lead story is one I've been waiting to share: Leonardo DiCaprio and the Bezos Earth Fund just committed $200 million to bring 100 species back from the brink of extinction. The list of species they chose is extraordinary.

We also have 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells with geometric carvings that reveal something remarkable about ancient human thinking, new evidence that full-fat cheese and dairy won't hurt your cholesterol, and a blind horse in Worcestershire who keeps winning dressage competitions by feel.

Dive in.

—Stephanie S

Leonardo DiCaprio's conservation organization Re:wild, partnering with the Bezos Earth Fund, has committed $200 million to the Phoenix Species Project, a sustained push to bring the 100 most imperiled species on Earth back from the brink. Each fund contributes $100 million. The 100 species span mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, plants, and invertebrates across 30 countries.

What makes this different is the structure. Most endangered species funding arrives in short bursts, leaving conservation teams scrambling between grant cycles. The Phoenix Species Project commits five years of sustained support per species, freeing scientists and local partners to do what recovery actually requires.

The list is extraordinary. The golden-crowned sifaka lemur. The bowmouth guitarfish, whose fins are among the most prized in the illegal trade. A tiny desert succulent called the fuzzy belly button. The Charco Azul pupfish, whose Mexican spring dried up in a drought. The night parrot of Australia's remote deserts, rediscovered in 2013 after nearly a century unseen.

"When we protect species, we also protect the forests, wetlands, and oceans they depend on," said DiCaprio. "We have the tools. We just need to mobilize the resources." See the full Phoenix 100 list.

More than 60,000 years ago, people in southern Africa were engraving ostrich eggshells with intricate geometric patterns. The shells were likely used as water containers. The carvings were known. What wasn't known — until now — was how organized they actually were.

A University of Bologna team analyzed 112 fragments from three archaeological sites in South Africa and Namibia and found that more than 80% of the configurations show coherent spatial regularities: angles close to 90 degrees, groups of parallel lines, grids, hatched bands, diamond-shaped motifs. The patterns weren't improvised. They followed recurring geometric rules — parallelisms, rotations, systematic repetitions — applied consistently across fragments and across sites.

"We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines, but organized them according to recurring principles," said Professor Silvia Ferrara, who coordinated the study. "A visual grammar in embryo." Her colleague Valentina Decembrini, the paper's first author, put it plainly: "Transforming simple forms into complex systems by following defined rules is a deeply human trait that has characterized our history over millennia — from decoration to symbolic systems to, ultimately, writing."

Published in PLOS One. Read the full story.

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For decades, dietary guidelines have steered people toward low-fat or fat-free dairy, on the grounds that saturated fat raises cholesterol and increases cardiovascular risk. A new University of Toronto study is adding to a growing body of evidence that full-fat dairy may not work the way the theory predicts.

The 12-week randomized study followed 74 overweight or obese adults across three groups: low-dairy with calorie restriction, three daily servings of full-fat dairy with controlled calories, and three daily servings of full-fat dairy without restrictions. After 12 weeks, researchers found no meaningful differences in weight, body composition, or cholesterol between the low-dairy and full-fat groups. The full-fat dairy group also had lower blood pressure and higher intake of calcium, protein, and vitamin D.

Professor Harvey Anderson points to what he calls the dairy matrix hypothesis: the physical structure of dairy, two proteins bound together with fat and nutrients, creates a slow and steady nutrient delivery system that behaves differently in the body than isolated saturated fat would on its own. "Those that had three servings of dairy didn't have adverse levels of blood cholesterol or lipids or evidence of insulin resistance." Published in The Journal of Nutrition. Read the full story.

Milo is a 15-year-old Appaloosa in Worcestershire, England. He went blind at 13 despite multiple operations, and for more than a year afterward, his owner Megan Share didn't ride him at all. She wasn't sure he could do it. Then she realized he could.

Milo navigates the dressage ring using what Megan calls equine braille: his hooves on different ground surfaces give him spatial awareness, his hearing has become sharper since losing his sight, and Megan communicates through constant, precise leg and hand pressure. "I became his eyes," she said. "We have a really good brother-sister relationship, and we developed a way to make it work." It is mentally demanding for both of them. Megan has to stay more alert on Milo than on any sighted horse, anticipating every turn and transition before it happens, so he always knows exactly where to go.

He has won the Royal Windsor Horse Show eight years in a row, including last year while completely blind. He is now preparing for the qualifiers for the Horse of the Year Show and the London International. "People are shocked that this could even happen," Megan said. "I'm extremely proud of him." Read the full story.

🦅 Ireland: White-tailed sea eagles, absent from Ireland for more than a century, have produced another rare chick in a continuing comeback for Europe's largest bird of prey, following years of reintroduction work across the island.

🐢 USA: Georgia's beaches have recorded the highest number of loggerhead sea turtle nests in 37 years, reflecting decades of conservation efforts, reduced beach lighting, and improved nesting habitat protection.

🦛 Canada: Toronto Zoo is celebrating the birth of a critically endangered pygmy hippopotamus calf, one of fewer than 2,500 left in the wild, with video of the newborn already going viral for being exactly as adorable as you'd expect.

💪 Global: A Harvard T.H. Chan School study tracking 147,000 adults for 30 years found that 90 to 120 minutes of strength training per week was linked to a 13% lower risk of early death from any cause, with no additional benefit from doing more. Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

🧘 Global: UC San Diego researchers found that a seven-day meditation retreat triggered measurable changes in brain efficiency, neuroplasticity, immune signaling, and natural pain relief, with brain patterns resembling psychedelic-like states, achieved entirely without drugs. Published in Communications Biology.

On August 11, 1919, newspaper editor George Calhoun and a young local athlete named Curly Lambeau founded a football team in Green Bay, Wisconsin, naming it after their sponsor, the Indian Packing Company. What they built over the next century became something genuinely unusual in American professional sports: a team owned not by a billionaire or a corporation, but by more than 360,000 ordinary shareholders, most of them Green Bay area residents. The Packers are the only major league professional sports team in the United States organized as a nonprofit community-owned entity, and league rules have since been written specifically to prevent any other team from replicating the model.

They have won 13 league championships, more than any other franchise in NFL history. Curly Lambeau, the co-founder whose name adorns the stadium, is credited with inventing the forward pass pattern. Vince Lombardi led them to five championships in the 1960s including the first two Super Bowls, for which the trophy is now named. Brett Favre's number 4 jersey was retired. Aaron Rodgers holds the all-time NFL record for pass completion percentage. And at the center of it all: a team with no owner who can move it, sell it for personal gain, or relocate it away from the city that built it.

Other notable August 11 events:

1956: Elvis Presley released "Don't Be Cruel" backed with "Hound Dog," 70 years ago today, the first double-sided single to reach number one and number two simultaneously. The record spent 11 weeks at the top of the charts and set a record that would not be broken for 36 years.

1944: Canadian and British troops liberated Florence from Nazi occupation, 82 years ago today, ending a period of German control that had threatened one of the world's greatest concentrations of art and architecture.

1972: The last US ground combat unit departed South Vietnam, 54 years ago today, marking the formal end of direct American military involvement in the war after more than a decade of fighting.

1858: The Eiger in the Swiss Alps was ascended for the first time, 168 years ago today, by Charles Barrington accompanied by guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren, who climbed the West Face of one of the most feared mountains in the world.

— J.B.S. Haldane

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Cancer Vaccines Built From Your Own Tumor: Personalized mRNA vaccines constructed from a patient's unique tumor mutations are entering Phase 3 clinical trials for melanoma, training the immune system to recognize and destroy that specific person's cancer rather than targeting a generic shared marker.

🔬 Seeing Atoms for the First Time: Cryo-electron microscopy, which fires beams of electrons at biological samples cooled to near absolute zero, can now resolve the three-dimensional structure of proteins at atomic resolution, revealing the machinery of life with a clarity that was impossible a decade ago and dramatically accelerating drug discovery.

🌊 Power From the Ocean's Temperature: Ocean thermal energy conversion uses the temperature difference between cold deep water and warm surface water to generate continuous electricity, offering tropical island nations a renewable power source that works 24 hours a day, every day, regardless of clouds or wind.

🔭 Looking for Life Among the Stars: The James Webb Space Telescope is now sensitive enough to detect chemical combinations in exoplanet atmospheres that could only be maintained by living organisms, including mixtures of oxygen, methane, and carbon dioxide that thermodynamics alone cannot explain.

🌱 Forests Are More Connected Than We Knew: Scientists mapping the underground fungal networks that link trees in forests have found that older trees actively share carbon and nutrients with younger neighbors through these systems, suggesting that forests function less like collections of competing individuals and more like cooperative communities.

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