She performed for 40 years. Now Portugal's last circus elephant has 1,000 acres to herself

Happy Monday. Today's lead story is about Julie, a circus elephant who spent 40 years performing in Portugal after being captured in Africa as a calf. She just became the first resident of Europe's first elephant sanctuary. I did not expect to feel this much about it.

We also have the first puffin chick born on England's south coast in 30 years, a 17th-century garden that reappeared under parched grass at Chatsworth House after being covered over in 1730, and why states are quietly ending tax breaks for data centers.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

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Julie was captured as a calf in Africa in the late 1980s and brought to Portugal, where she began performing in circuses in 1988. She spent the next four decades in the ring. In 2018, the Portuguese government passed a law banning wild animal performances by 2024, which was the right thing to do but left Julie with nowhere to go. Then Pangea Elephant Sanctuary reached out to her former owner.

Pangea is the first sanctuary of its kind in Europe, built specifically for working elephants who have no other home. It spans 1,000 acres in the Alentejo region of Portugal. While the sanctuary was still under construction, its team began planning Julie's move as the first elephant to be welcomed on site. On June 30, she completed a three-hour truck ride from the Víctor Hugo Cardinali circus grounds. By all accounts, she made herself at home immediately.

"There couldn't be a more fitting first resident than Portugal's last circus elephant," said Kate Moore, the sanctuary's managing director. "Our focus is now to give Julie the best possible quality of life in her time ahead." An English primary school had already adopted her before the move, donating £100 to support her transition. Later this year, she's expected to be joined by Kariba, a female African elephant currently living alone at a zoo in Belgium.

The sanctuary hopes to eventually house 20 to 35 elephants. Julie, for now, has 1,000 acres, a watering hole, and no more performances. Read the full story.

The last remaining puffin colony on mainland England's southern coast had been shrinking for years. By recent counts, only three breeding pairs remained at Dancing Ledge in Dorset's Purbeck area, down from more than 40 active pairs in the 1950s. The colony had dwindled so close to collapse that conservationists with the National Trust installed solar-powered motion cameras in the cliffs in March, hoping to understand why new chicks had stopped appearing.

What they found was more than they had hoped for. Volunteers from the Purbeck Natural History Forum logged 150 hours monitoring the ledges and recorded the first fish delivery into a nest on May 31. The last delivery was recorded on July 5, which puts the age of the puffling — the term for a baby puffin — at 38 to 40 days. The chick is expected to leave the cliff under cover of darkness soon, spend several years alone at sea, and potentially return to Purbeck at around age two, though puffins typically don't breed until they're four.

"Seeing the puffling was a great thrill," said Dr. Richard Caldow, who leads the project and has spent nearly 40 years researching and conserving coastal birds. "It's the first puffling that's been recorded in Purbeck for a long time. One puffling alone won't save this colony, but one is a whole lot better news than none." Read the full story.

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Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, home to the Devonshire family for 16 generations, has one of the most celebrated gardens in England. What nobody knew, until this summer, was that an entirely different garden had been hiding beneath the south lawn the entire time.

The Great Parterre was created around 1699 for the 1st Duke of Devonshire: an elaborate, perfectly symmetrical arrangement of flower beds and paths measuring 473 feet long and 227 feet wide, built along the south façade in the formal fashion of the day. It flourished for just 30 years before being covered over and replaced with a new design around 1730. For nearly three centuries, it lay undisturbed beneath the lawn, forgotten.

Then the heatwave arrived. Temperatures exceeded 30°C across May, June, and July, and July was exceptionally dry. The grass laid to replace the original flower beds and paths has shorter roots than the surrounding lawn, so it scorches faster under drought conditions. The difference in colour revealed the swirling symmetrical patterns of the 1st Duke's original design, visible from above for the first time in 350 years.

"The lawn was parched enough for history to reveal itself once again," said a spokesperson for the Chatsworth House Trust. Read the full story.

For years, data centers have benefited from generous sales tax exemptions designed to attract them to states hungry for tech investment. But as AI infrastructure has expanded rapidly, and communities have grown more vocal about the energy use, water consumption, and noise that comes with it, state legislatures have started asking a different question: why are we still subsidizing this?

Three states moved to answer it in recent weeks. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs signed a measure ending a sales tax exemption that had been in place since 2013, expected to generate $38 million in annual revenue. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed a law removing sales tax exemptions for future data center equipment, where hardware typically has a three-year lifespan due to the pace of semiconductor development. Pennsylvania's legislature passed a bipartisan repeal of incentives that had stood for five years, with a projected half-billion-dollar gain in public revenue over the next five.

"We're giving these sales tax exemptions to companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet — companies that have net incomes in excess of $100 billion a year," said Pennsylvania Representative Greg Vitali, the bill's primary sponsor. "This is not needed." Read the full story.

🐬 Mexico: Scientists have used digital photogrammetry to create the world's most detailed 3D images of the vaquita porpoise, the world's most critically endangered marine mammal, preserving vital biological data that could support future conservation and potential recovery efforts.

🎸 UK: A Beatles tour bus happened to pull alongside Paul McCartney while he was on a video call with Ringo Starr, the moment captured on camera and shared widely as a reminder that some coincidences are simply too good to be planned.

🐝 UK: A wildlife expert has corrected the widespread sugar-water myth about helping bees in hot weather, explaining that moving struggling bees to shade near flowers is almost always the right approach during drought.

♻️ Australia: A four-year study of 2,778 Australians found that personal climate habits like recycling and taking public transport do not reduce people's support for systemic climate action, directly challenging the argument that small individual choices distract from bigger reforms.

🦍 USA: In a world first, surgeons from UC San Diego Health and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park performed a mastoidectomy on Mizani, a 12-year-old critically endangered western lowland gorilla, treating a severe skull infection using techniques adapted from human surgery. He's recovering well.

On July 27, 1921, University of Toronto surgeon Dr. Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best successfully isolated insulin for the first time, demonstrating that it produced normal blood glucose levels when injected. Before the breakthrough, people with type 1 diabetes rarely survived more than a year or two after diagnosis. By 1923, insulin was being mass produced, and Banting was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. Charles Best, being a graduate student, was not included in the Nobel committee's decision, but Banting immediately shared the prize money with him.

What makes the story even more remarkable is what Banting did next. He and his colleague John Macleod were reluctant to patent the insulin process on ethical grounds, fearing any pharmaceutical company gaining a monopoly. They did secure a patent, but only to prevent that outcome. They then published their research freely so anyone in the world could use it. Within two years of that July afternoon in Toronto, insulin had become widely available internationally and millions of people were alive who otherwise would not have been.

Other notable July 27 events:

1940: Bugs Bunny made his screen debut in an animated short called A Wild Hare, 86 years ago today, voiced by Mel Blanc and supervised by Tex Avery. Bugs emerged from his hole, looked at Elmer Fudd's gun, and said "What's up, Doc?" — a line that reportedly brought down the house in every movie theater it played in.

1866: The first permanent Transatlantic Telegraph Cable was successfully pulled ashore at Heart's Content, Newfoundland, 160 years ago today, after two failed attempts. It was towed 1,600 miles by Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Eastern and permanently connected Europe and North America for the first time.

1953: The Korean War ended when the US, China, and North Korea signed an armistice agreement, 73 years ago today, three years after North Korea's initial invasion.

1999: Tony Hawk became the first person ever to land "The 900," spinning two and a half full rotations on a skateboard, 27 years ago today at the X-Games — a trick widely considered the most technically demanding in the history of vertical skateboarding.

— Emily Dickinson

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:

🧬 Rewriting Entire Populations: Gene drive technology can spread a desired genetic trait through a wild population within a few generations, offering a potential tool to eliminate malaria-carrying mosquitoes or manage invasive species without pesticides or mass culling.

🔬 A Lab in Your Pocket: Microfluidic diagnostic devices the size of a credit card can now run complex medical tests in minutes using a single drop of blood, bringing laboratory-quality analysis to remote areas with no specialist equipment required.

🔭 Astronomy Meets Medicine: Researchers are applying the mathematics of gravitational lensing, originally developed to study distant galaxies, to reconstruct detailed 3D images of the brain and heart from non-invasive scans with resolution previously only possible through surgery.

🌱 Growing Forests With Fungi: Scientists are deploying symbiotic fungal networks alongside tree planting programs, dramatically improving seedling survival in degraded landscapes by reconnecting new trees to the underground nutrient and communication systems that make forests resilient.

🌊 Mapping the Ocean's Hidden Noise: Researchers have created the first comprehensive maps of sound pollution across the world's oceans, identifying the shipping lanes causing the most disruption and showing that targeted noise reduction produces measurable recovery in whale communication within months.

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