‘I’m naturally skeptical’: I receive 10 calls a day offering me $15,000 loans at 8% interest. Is this a scam?

Most invasive species are introduced into the areas where they become damaging. That's part of why they tend to be so successful in taking over new environments and causing billions of dollars in damage. But what if species that we thought were introduced by humans arrived naturally? In our recent research paper, we made a startling discovery about one of North America's most ecologically and economically damaging invaders. The spiny water flea, also known by its scientific names Bythotrephes longimanus and Bythotrephes cederströmii, may have been in North America for centuries longer than believed. Our finding has implications for how governments and conservation organizations approach invasive species management. Millions of dollars are spent to control the spread of invasive species, but for native species that benefit from environmental change, this strategy may misplace limited funds. Read more: How the invasive spiny water flea spread across Canada, and what we can do about itRewriting historyThe widely accepted history of the spiny water flea is that it was introduced unintentionally from Europe into Lake Ontario by trans-Atlantic cargo ships in the early 1980s.

In this week's Wealth Wise column, a 65-year-old couple was pitched $500,000 in life insurance to cover nursing home care. Financial experts weigh in on the catch.

“Computer science isn’t the ticket to the American dream like people thought it was.”

Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the world’s largest publicly traded corporate Bitcoin holder, bought $22.1 million of the crypto last week while spending nearly nine times as much repurchasing its STRC preferred stock. Strategy bought 267 Bitcoin at an average price of $82,900 between Oct. 12 and Oct. 16, bringing its holdings to 848,517 BTC, worth $64.02 billion at purchase cost, according to a Monday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Strategy also bought back 1.94 million shares of its Stretch (STRC) preferred stock for $193.1 million. The latest purchase follows Strategy’s acquisition of 250 Bitcoin for $21.5 million during the week ending Oct. 9, when it also spent $192.4 million repurchasing STRC shares. The company said its board increased the authorization for its digital credit securities repurchase program to $3 billion from $2 billion, leaving $1.16 billion available as of Sunday. The company funded its BTC purchases primarily through $22 million in proceeds from selling 140,872 shares of its common stock, MSTR. It used existing cash to fund the STRC repurchases.