In 1991, researchers from Monterey Bay Aquarium were watching a wild sea otter mother who had lost her pup and was still swimming around the area calling for him, which was already heartbreaking enough, but at almost exactly the same time the aquarium happened to have an orphaned male pup named Elwood who was also spending a significant portion of his day calling for a mother he didn’t have. So at some point the researchers found themselves in the extremely specific situation of having one sea otter desperately looking for a baby and one baby desperately looking for a sea otter mom, and apparently someone said the scientific equivalent of “okay, this might be stupid, but hear me out.” They brought Elwood out to the bay, found the female still there, put him into the water and waited to see what would happen. She swam over, inspected this random baby the humans had just delivered to her… and adopted him... The next morning they were still together, and researchers continued seeing them together for months. And because apparently “what if we give the sad baby to the sad mom?” can occasionally be a legitimate contribution to conservation science, this accidental little family helped inspire Monterey Bay Aquarium’s later surrogate-mother program for orphaned sea otters. I love wildlife rehabilitation because sometimes it involves years of research, specialized veterinary medicine and extremely complicated protocols, and sometimes somebody just looks at two animals and goes, “I have an idea.”

The rehabilitation of the UK bond market took another step forward as Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s debut budget reassured investors this week, sending yields to a five-week low

🇸🇩 | A children's rehabilitation center in Sudan has reopened. The facility is located in Khartoum but still has no running water and no power. Dar Shesher is treating children for the first time since the war shut it down. The centre operates two days a week, staffed entirely by volunteers and funded by individual donors. Its residential wards and school unit remain out of service. "If they are lying down, we help them get up; if they are sitting, we help them stand and walk." Says Mansour Sulaiman, who runs it. "All these aids are manufactured by us." On 26 July, Health Minister Haitham Mohamed Ibrahim said 75% of hospitals and primary healthcare facilities were operating again. Khartoum state claims over 85%. In April, WHO found 37% of health facilities non-functional across 18 states, and 21 million people cut off from care. Much of that recovery has been carried out by Sudanese doctors, volunteers and diaspora physicians, not the state. Volunteers led by Dr Mai Mohamed Youssef reopened Al-Tijani Al-Mahi psychiatric hospital, which the Ministry of Health had ordered demolished. Officials attended the ribbon-cutting when Ahmed Qasim Hospital reopened in January. At Dar Shesher, Sulaiman says, no state support has arrived.

Breaking News: Senator Mitch McConnell said he was discharged from a rehabilitation facility after a nearly eight-week medical absence, announcing in a statement that he would continue recovering at home.

In the jungles of Indonesian Borneo, a rehabilitation center is taking in more orangutans as the country’s worst wildfires in a decade sweep through the forest home of the critically endangered animals

In the jungles of Indonesian Borneo, a rehabilitation center is taking in more orangutans as the country's worst wildfires in a decade sweep through the forest home of the critically endangered animals

South Korean courts ease crypto debt relief while seizure rules tighten Three new rehabilitation courts now exclude crypto and stock losses when setting court-supervised repayment plans, easing the burden on indebted traders in a country where household debt tops 90% of GDP. Other arms are tightening: the @FSC_Korea cut debt forgiveness for aid applicants with crypto holdings in June, while proposed Supreme Court rules targeted for October 1 would let creditors seize and freeze debtors' wallets.