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Rejected by His Mother, a Rare Wild Asian Horse Foal Finds a New Mom in a Grieving Domestic Mare

Marat, a Przewalski's horse foal, rests with his adoptive mother Alice, a Pony of the Americas, at the Minnesota Zoo on June 26, 2025 in Apple Valley, Minn. (AP)
Marat, a Przewalski's horse foal, rests with his adoptive mother Alice, a Pony of the Americas, at the Minnesota Zoo on June 26, 2025 in Apple Valley, Minn. (AP)
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Rejected by His Mother, a Rare Wild Asian Horse Foal Finds a New Mom in a Grieving Domestic Mare

Marat, a Przewalski's horse foal, rests with his adoptive mother Alice, a Pony of the Americas, at the Minnesota Zoo on June 26, 2025 in Apple Valley, Minn. (AP)
Marat, a Przewalski's horse foal, rests with his adoptive mother Alice, a Pony of the Americas, at the Minnesota Zoo on June 26, 2025 in Apple Valley, Minn. (AP)

An endangered wild Asian horse foal is thriving thanks to an unlikely hero.

Marat, a Przewalski’s horse, fell critically ill soon after his birth at the Minnesota Zoo nearly two months ago. He survived thanks to intensive care. But his mother rejected him when he returned.

His future looked grim until Alice, a domestic Pony of the Americas who’d recently lost her newborn, accepted him as her own. Veterinarians say this is one of the first times this kind of surrogacy has been tried with Asian wild horses, and his caregivers couldn't be happier.

Zoo staffers picked the name Marat because it means "one who is brave," and he's had to be brave from such a young age

Przewalski's are considered the only remaining truly wild horse species. They were declared extinct in the wild in the 1960s, with just a few surviving in zoos. But they've since been reestablished on the steppes of Mongolia and China, with some in Russia and Ukraine. Since fewer than 2,000 exist today, each foal is critical to the species' survival.

"Being one of the true wild horses left in the world, behaviorally, they are a little bit different," said Kurt Heinzmann, the zoo's director of animal care. They've never been truly domesticated, and they're shorter and stockier than familiar breeds, he said.

Marat was born with some limb problems that made it hard for him to stand up straight, said Dr. Annie Rivas, the zoo's director of animal health.

"And because he was struggling to keep up with Mom in the herd, he was spending a lot of time lying down on the ground and unfortunately developed bacterial sepsis. So he was very, very sick," Rivas said.

The University of Minnesota's equine intensive care unit nursed him back from his pneumonia and wounds. But it wasn't unusual that his first-time mom, Nady, would refuse to take him back.

"That left us with, ‘What are we going to do with this foal?’" Rivas said. "We could hand-rear him, but we’re not going to be the ones who are the best at teaching them how to be a horse, especially a wild horse."

Fortunately, they found Alice, a gentle mare who was still grieving her own foal but immediately started nurturing Marat and allowing him to nurse.

"It was really kind of a perfect fairy-tale ending. ... They just bonded like that," Rivas said.

Integrating Marat into the complex social hierarchies of a wild herd will be the next challenge, she said, but Alice is helping Marat learn how to behave with other horses. They'll probably stay together for a few more months. They want him to join the zoo's adult Przewalski’s herd before he's too old.

"He is definitely a wild horse," Rivas said. "One, he is a stallion, so he’s already got a big personality from that. But he is also a little more wild than you would expect a domestic horse foal to be at this point in his life. And he is trying to show me that he’s the boss, he’s in charge, he’s dominant. So he’s trying to step up, kick, assert his dominance over me."

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CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool

CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool
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CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool

CIA Ends Publication of Its Popular World Factbook Reference Tool

Close the cover on the CIA World Factbook: The spy agency announced Wednesday that after more than 60 years, it is shuttering the popular reference manual.

The announcement posted to the CIA’s website offered no reason for the decision to end the Factbook, but it follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions, The Associated Press said.

First launched in 1962 as a printed, classified reference manual for intelligence officers, the Factbook offered a detailed, by-the-numbers picture of foreign nations, their economies, militaries, resources and societies. The Factbook proved so useful that other federal agencies began using it, and within a decade, an unclassified version was released to the public.

After going online in 1997, the Factbook quickly became a popular reference site for journalists, trivia aficionados and the writers of college essays, racking up millions of visits per year.

The White House has moved to cut staffing at the CIA and the National Security Agency early in Trump's second term, forcing the agency to do more with less.

The CIA did not return a message seeking comment Wednesday about the decision to cease publication of the Factbook.

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The Coming End of ISS, Symbol of An Era of Global Cooperation

The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
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The Coming End of ISS, Symbol of An Era of Global Cooperation

The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File
The International Space Station will be guided back to Earth in 2030, marking the end of its three-decade mission. NASA / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File

When the International Space Station comes back to Earth in 2030, it will mark the end of three decades of peaceful international cooperation -- and an era when space became central to our daily lives.

Since November 2000, there have always been several humans on board the football field-sized scientific laboratory, whipping around the planet at eight kilometers per second.

With a new crew of astronauts set to blast off for the station as soon as next week, some of those who have helped the station from the ground are nostalgic about its looming demise.

"The ISS is a cathedral to human cooperation and collaboration across borders, languages and cultures," John Horack, the former manager of NASA's Science and Mission Systems Office, told AFP.

"For more than 25 years, we have had people in space, 24/7/365," added Horack, who now holds the Neil Armstrong Chair in aerospace policy at Ohio State University.

"It is a testament to how we can 'figure it out' rather than 'fight it out' when we wish to interact with each other."

The ISS was first proposed in the aftermath of the Cold War, illustrating a newfound spirit of cooperation between space race rivals Russia and the United States.

While many ties between Russia and the West have been severed over Moscow's war in Ukraine, cooperation has continued on board the space station.

"The history of human spaceflight is first and foremost the space race," Lionel Suchet of France's space agency CNES told AFP.

"This is a very interesting moment in the evolution of space exploration," said Suchet, who coordinated several early ISS projects after witnessing its predecessor, the Mir space station, de-orbiting in 2001.

Back to Earth

However, the ISS is getting old and its equipment is outdated.

NASA announced last year it had selected Elon Musk's SpaceX to build a vehicle that can push the station back into Earth's atmosphere in 2030, where it will break up.

"This large rocket engine will slow down the ISS, and enable it to have a precise re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, far from land, people or any other potential hazards," Horack explained.

Several spacecraft and telescopes -- including Mir -- have met a similar fate, splashing down at an isolated spot in the ocean called Point Nemo.

After 2030, the only space station orbiting Earth will be China's Tiangong.

For the future, the US is focusing more on space stations built and operated by private companies.

"We are moving into an era where space stations have a much more commercial dimension," similar to what has already happened with rockets and satellites, Horack said.

National space agencies would then need to pay these companies to stay on board.

Several companies, including Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin and Axiom Space, are already working on plans to build the first commercial space station.

Suchet emphasized that "the business model will still be largely institutional because countries are always interested in sending astronauts into low-Earth orbit".

Scientific research and exploration also remain an "objective of all humanity", he added, pointing to treaties that govern how nations are supposed to act in space.

Whether these treaties will hold once humans make it to the Moon -- the US and China both have plans to build lunar bases -- remains to be seen.

'Quite sad'

For Horack, the end of the ISS could be seen as "quite sad".

His children "had a lifetime of going out into the backyard to watch the ISS fly over".

But the end of this era will mark the opening of another, he added.

"We must grow as humans in our space-faring capacity, in our exploration of space, and in the use of space to generate social, economic, educational and quality of life outcomes for all people everywhere."

He finished by quoting the former head of the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Varieties

NASA's Juno finds Jupiter is a tiny bit smaller than previously thought

An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS
An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS
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NASA's Juno finds Jupiter is a tiny bit smaller than previously thought

An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS
An enhanced-color image, using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, shows the planet Jupiter, with a shadow of its moon Ganymede on the left, released by NASA on April 21, 2022. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Image processing by Thomas Thomopoulos/Handout via REUTERS

Jupiter, without a doubt, is the biggest planet in our solar system. But it turns out that it is not quite as large - by ever so small an amount - as scientists had previously thought.

Using new data obtained by NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft, scientists have obtained the most precise measurements to date of Jupiter's size and shape. This is important information to gain a fuller understanding of this gas giant, including studying its complex interior structure.

The Juno observations showed that Jupiter has an equatorial diameter of 88,841 miles (142,976 km), which is about 5 miles (8 km) smaller than previous measurements had indicated. The observations also showed that Jupiter's diameter from north pole to south pole is 83,067 miles (133,684 km), about 15 miles (24 km) smaller than previously estimated, Reuters reported.

The planet, like our own, is not a perfect sphere, but rather a bit flattened - and, based on the new data, slightly more so than previously known. Jupiter is about 7% larger at the equator than at the poles. For comparison, Earth's equator is only 0.33% larger than its diameter at the poles.

The previous measurements of Jupiter were based on data gathered by NASA's Voyager and Pioneer robotic spacecraft in the late 1970s. Juno, launched in 2011, has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, transmitting raw data back to Earth. NASA extended the Juno mission in 2021, giving scientists the opportunity to carry out the type of observations needed in order to fine-tune the measurements of its size and shape, including traveling behind Jupiter from Earth's point of view.

"When Juno passed behind Jupiter from Earth's perspective, its radio signal traveled through the planet's atmosphere before reaching Earth," said planetary scientist Eli Galanti of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"Measuring how the signal changed due to Jupiter's atmospheric composition, density and temperature allowed us to probe the atmosphere and determine the planet's size and shape with high precision. Interestingly, this geometrical configuration did not occur during Juno's prime mission, so these experiments were not originally planned," Galanti said.

Earth, which is the third from the sun among the solar system's eight planets, is a relatively small rocky world.

Jupiter, fifth from the sun, is so immense that all the other planets could fit inside it, including more than 1,300 Earths. Jupiter is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, with traces of other gases. Strong winds seen as stripes and a few storms dominate Jupiter's colorful outward appearance.

Juno has been collecting data about Jupiter's atmosphere, interior structure, internal magnetic field and magnetosphere, the region around the planet created by its internal magnetism.

Precise new measurements of Jupiter are helpful to scientists because its radius - a measure that is half its diameter - is a fundamental reference used in models of the planet's interior and its atmospheric structure.

"Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and contains most of its planetary mass, so understanding its composition and internal structure is central to understanding how the solar system formed and evolved. Jupiter likely formed early, and strongly influenced the distribution of material, the growth of other planets and the delivery of volatiles to the inner solar system, including Earth," Galanti said.

Volatiles are substances like water, carbon dioxide and ammonia that evaporate easily. The delivery of these to the inner solar system, where the four rocky planets reside, was essential because volatiles, Galanti said, "supplied Earth with water and key ingredients for its atmosphere and for life."