Though overall levels remain high, the number of pedestrians killed by motorists in the US fell 10.9% over the first 6 months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024
Data from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) reveals how this was the single largest decline in pedestrian deaths since records began in 2015.
The 10.9% drop in pedestrian deaths from 2024 to 2025 (January-June) translates into 371 fewer fatalities, which as GHSA reminds us is more than just a number, but 371 friends, family, and loved ones that can still be hugged and cherished.
When measured by deaths per 100,000, the rate is the lowest it’s been this decade. If measured by deaths per vehicle miles traveled, its the lowest since 2019.
With some exceptions, there’s quite plainly a north-south divide, with states like Minnesota, Idaho, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts recording deaths per 100,000 residents at lower than 0.6, while Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia crest 1.0.
Previous GHSA data has shown that one of the biggest determinants to pedestrian traffic deaths is darkness, which is likely why the southern states, with their larger and poorly-lit rural areas, record more deaths than the northern states.
“Each pedestrian death is so much more than just a number. Each one is a family member, friend or neighbor that no one will be able to hug, see or share time with ever again. While we are pleased with the progress shown in the data, the only acceptable number of traffic deaths is zero,” said Jonathan Adkins, CEO of the GHSA.
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A blue and yellow macaw in Jurong National Park, credit - Luc Viatour, CC 2.0.
A blue and yellow macaw in Jurong National Park, credit – Luc Viatour, CC 2.0.
In Rio de Janeiro’s largest urban park, the tumult of the city can subside to the faintest murmur among the thick Atlantic Forest ecosystem remnant.
It’s here that ecologists have reintroduced the blue-and-yellow macaw through a captive breeding program. It’s a delight—a “dream come true” for residents of a city where the colorful macaw is used everywhere in logos, clothing, and souvenirs, but which hasn’t dwelt in the forested mountains by the famous city in 200 years.
Several conservation organizations have been prioritizing the return of animals poached from Tijuca, the 10,000-acre park mentioned earlier, or driven off by deforestation in the 19th century. These include howler monkeys, the red-rumped agouti, and the yellow-footed tortoise.
All these animals have brought excited visitors to the park’s trails, but none have enraptured the cariocos, (people from Rio) more than the macaw, four of which have been set free into the trees.
“They are so magnificent. It’s no surprise that all the visitors are constantly asking how they can see them,” Viviane Lasmar, director of Tijuca national park, told the Guardian. “For me, as the head of the park, it’s special. But even more so as a carioca. It’s a dream come true.”
The organization handling the release is called Refauna, and having released the birds for a period of 15 days earlier this year, they’ve rounded them back into the aviary with plans for a possible permanent departure in September when food is plentiful.
This is done for two reasons. The first is that these macaws were rescued from captivity, and so lack the powerful flight muscles they need to travel some 6 miles a day searching for food. The second is due to the need to acclimatize the birds to the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of their new home.
A point of national and local pride, the macaws’ presence may also help regenerate the Atlantic Forest biome in Tijuca and beyond, as this specific kind of forest has been reduced by 90% since the colonial period, and at its most productive harbors biodiversity that can rival the mighty Amazon next door.
The macaw’s sharp beak should allow it to break open nuts and fruits to help trees better disperse their seed, something virtually all trees in the park rely on to reproduce.
“The macaw really is a symbol of our efforts to bring life back to Tijuca,” Marcelo Rheingantz, the executive director of Refauna also told the Guardian. “My dream is that one day they will fly far away from here and we will be able to see them from all over the city.”
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Jaguar in Sierra del Merendón mountain –(cropped) Credit: Panthera-Honduras
Jaguar in Sierra del Merendón mountains – Credit: Panthera-Honduras
Just weeks ago, a jaguar was captured on camera in Honduras’ Sierra del Merendón mountain range for the first time in a decade as part of high-tech monitoring and conservation efforts from Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.
Taken among cloud forest at over 6,000 feet in elevation on the range’s highest peak, the images capture an impressively healthy male jaguar just two meters from the exact location of the park’s first-ever jaguar sighting—recorded 10 years and 2 days earlier.
They “cloud” moniker this cat has picked up in the media isn’t a reflection of speciation, such as the leopard and the clouded leopard, but merely because of its habitation atop the highest of heights in Honduras.
The discovery also marks the highest elevation at which a “cloud jaguar” has been documented in Honduras, with the species most commonly found below 3,000 meters, and provides rare evidence that jaguars are still moving through this high-elevation corridor between Honduras and Guatemala.
More than anything, the 2026 images suggest that a decade’s dedication of anti-poaching ranger patrols, conservation technology investment, and prey reintroduction, including peccaries and iguanas by Panthera and partners—as well as Honduras’ vow to eliminate deforestation by 2029—are showing wonderful signs of success.
The sighting is particularly significant given Honduras has one of the highest deforestation rates in all of Latin America. Today, the Merendón range is a critical passageway within the Jaguar Corridor, which connects habitats from Mexico to Argentina and enables species to roam, find mates and maintain genetic diversity. Jaguars have already been lost from nearly half of their historic range and are Near-Threatened on the IUCN Red List.
Despite that, they may be the most successfully conserved member of the Panthera genus, thanks in no small part to the organization of the same name.
The original 2016 jaguar sighting was one impetus for Panthera’s launch of a binational conservation initiative between Honduras and Guatemala. Panthera hopes to further improve the jaguar’s odds of survival in working to establish new protected areas in Honduras in partnership with the Rainforest Trust and partners.
This news comes on the heels of the United Nations’ COP15 for the Convention on the Protection of Migratory Species in the Brazilian Pantanal where Panthera supported adoption of a unified international framework for jaguar conservation and habitat connectivity.
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Researchers have developed a solar-powered reactor to break down hard-to-recycle forms of plastic waste – such as drinks bottles, nylon textiles and polyurethane foams – using acid recovered from old car batteries.
The process then converts the waste into clean hydrogen fuel and valuable industrial chemicals.
The reactor was developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge and powered powered by the energy from the Sun, making it a potentially cheaper, more sustainable alternative to current chemical-based recycling methods.
The team say their method could create a circular system where one waste stream solves another. Their results are reported in the journal Joule.
Global plastic production exceeds 400 million tonnes per year, yet only 18% is recycled, Cambridge state in a press release on the discovery. The rest is burned, landfilled, or escapes into ecosystems. The researchers say that their method, known as acid photoreforming, could help address the global mountain of plastic waste.
In an “almost accidental” discovery, the photocatalyst they invented turned out to be robust enough to withstand the highly corrosive effects of acid, opening a world of possibilities in the process including the chance to make productive use of the acid inside spent car batteries, which is normally neutralized and discarded.
“The discovery was almost accidental,” said Professor Erwin Reisner from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, who led the research. “We used to think acid was completely off limits in these solar-powered systems, because it would simply dissolve everything. But our catalyst developed didn’t—and suddenly a whole new world of reactions opened up.”
“Acids have long been used to break plastics apart, but we never had a cheap and scalable photocatalyst that could withstand them,” said lead author Kay Kwarteng, a PhD candidate in Reisner’s research group, who developed the photocatalyst. “Once we solved that problem, the advantages of this type of system became obvious.”
The method developed by Kwarteng, Reisner and their colleagues, first treats waste plastics with the car battery waste acid, breaking the long polymer chains into chemical building blocks such as ethylene glycol, which the photocatalyst then converts into hydrogen and acetic acid (the main ingredient in vinegar) when exposed to sunlight.
In laboratory tests, the reactor generated high hydrogen yields and produced acetic acid with high selectivity. It also ran for more than 260 hours without any loss in performance.
The approach works for multiple types of plastic waste, even those that are currently tough to recycle, such as nylon and polyurethane. This offers a real advancement to current upcycling technologies that do not cover plastics beyond PET.
The approach works not just with new, laboratory-grade acid, but with the acid recovered from car batteries. These batteries contain between 20-40% acid by volume, and are replaced worldwide in huge numbers every year. The lead in these batteries is typically extracted for resale, but the acid creates extra waste once it is safely neutralized.
“It’s an untapped resource,” said Kwarteng. “If we can collect the acid before it’s neutralized, we can use it again and again to break down plastics: it’s a real win-win, avoiding the environmental cost of neutralizing the acid, while putting it to work generating clean hydrogen.”
The researchers say their method offers a potential order‑of‑magnitude cost reduction compared with other photoreforming approaches, largely because the acid enables increased hydrogen production rates and can be reused rather than consumed or wasted.
Kwarteng says that although challenges remain—such as ensuring reactors can withstand corrosive conditions—the fundamental chemistry is sound.
“These acids are already handled safely in industry,” he said. “The question now is engineering: how do we build reactors that can run continuously and handle real‑world waste?”
“We’re not promising to fix the global plastics problem,” said Reisner. “But this shows how waste can become a resource. The fact we can create value from plastic waste using sunlight and discarded battery acid makes this a really promising process.”
The team plans to commercialize this process with the support of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s innovation arm, while the research itself was supported by a broad collective of trusts, institutes, and other funding sources which can be found in the press release.
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Quote of the Day: “Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts.” – Sam Harris
Photo by: Sara Oliveira for Unsplash+
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
79 years ago today, years before the Civil Rights Movement gained prominence in the news, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier becoming the first black player on any Major League Baseball team, debuting at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. “It represented both the dream and the fear of equal opportunity, and it would change forever the complexion of the game and the attitudes of Americans,” wrote Pete Levine. His talent earned him the Most Valuable Player award in the league two years later. In that fateful game, Robinson went hitless but did score the winning run. READ the conversation that preceded Robinson’s debut… (1947)
From New York comes the story of a restaurant owner who shelved his Easter plans to fulfill a dying man’s last wish.
Jokingly described as looking like “a big, bad biker guy” by his brother, 67-year-old father of 3 Frank Ozimek had a last wish as he approached his final hours: to repay some of the kindness he had received.
For 6 weeks, Ozimek had been undergoing cancer treatment at Niagara Hospice. With no success, and little time life, Frank asked his younger brother Ken for one final favor: he wanted to treat the nursing staff to a meal.
Ken Ozimek looked around on the internet but realized everywhere was closed for Easter. Eventually, Ken got through to someone: Tommy Milani, owner of Sub Delicious pizza and subs in Lockport.
“I said, ‘Absolutely, whatever you need, Ken,'” Milani told local news WKBW, adding of the hospice nurses, “They do an amazing job there. They’re all saints.”
Milani put his Easter plans on hold while he whipped up, flipped up, and delivered pizzas for the entire nursing staff.
Ken said that he was beyond grateful for Milani for helping his family at their time of loss.
“To me, it means the world to see that kindness, that greatness spread,” he told WKBW. “And I hope when people see this story, they take it and say, ‘Why can’t we do this and spread joy and kindness to each other?'”
Enriched by a close relationship with the Great Outdoors his whole life, Frank Ozimek was also a music lover who liked to attend the annual Niagara Falls Blues Festival. He is survived by his 3 children and 5 grandchildren.
WATCH the story below…
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Without any fanfare from either party, it was recently revealed that Mozambique cleared its entire $701 million debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The news comes as a meeting between the officials and the IMF was scheduled for August, which it had previously been presumed would include discussions about the outstanding debt becoming distressed.
Such a state would put billions in additional debts, current and future, for vital gas and infrastructure projects, at risk according to the World Bank.
Business Insider Africa reports that without any announcement, in the final days of march the IMF website updated Mozambique’s outstanding debt level to zero, while Fáusio Mussá, chief economist at Standard Bank in Mozambique, the local branch of Africa’s largest continental bank, disclosed that the country had settled.
The news makes Mozambique the latest in a small series of African country to get out from under internationally-held, aid-related debt.
The southeast African nation had built up all-time record foreign currency reserves of $4.15 billion, which have been reduced to $3.5 billion following the repayment.
The country ranks among the least-developed in the world along multiple lines of standard measurement, such as life expectancy and GDP-per-capita. It had been ravaged by a civil war until 1994 when it held its first multiparty elections had has remained mostly stable since.
Namibia and Nigeria are two other countries to have recently paid off large amounts of IMF debt. In October of last year, Namibia paid off $750 million to make it the second-lowest debtor to the organization in Africa, while in May, Nigeria paid back a $3.4 billion loan to cushion the impact from its government-mandated business closures and lockdowns while attempting to reduce the impact of COVID-19.
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Kelsey and Wes Dixon planted cherry tree 20 years ago
Kelsey and Wes Dixon planted cherry tree 20 years ago
It’s a simple story of well-rooted love, nurtured year after year, blooming, and producing fruit—but the latest chapter has social media entranced.
High school sweethearts Kelsey Dixon and her now-husband Wes Dixon planted a cherry tree together as teenagers in 2007 and have taken a photo with it every year since.
“It’s a good tradition and 17 million or so people on Instagram seem to think so too,” Dixon said on the platform, where a story she shared has been viewed something like 48 million times.
The two would go on to marry, but even after they moved 3,000 miles away, they’d return every year to take a photograph with the tree—including one with Dixon’s baby bump.
As if the team at GNN needed any more evidence that trees are connected to what’s going on around them, Dixon’s mother-in-law sent her a picture that left the couple stunned.
Kelsey Dixon with her new children’s book, partially about the tree
The cherry tree sprouted a clutch of basal sprouts, or suckers, from one of its roots—in the same year that Kelsey gave birth to two children.
Mrs. Dixon has now published a children’s book—Roots and Wings—about the events and tradition that inspired it, and partnered with a vivarium called The Sill on a line of trees perfect to plant for the same or similar reasons.
Love is so often about little things that become (or perhaps always were) big things, and the story of the Dixons certainly fits that paradigm. It’s beautiful in its simplicity, much like the cherry blossoms it was born under.
Young ‘Sun’ Caught Blowing Bubbles in X-ray and Infrared light. Credit for X-ray image: NASA/CXC/Johns Hopkins Univ./C.M. Lisse (Credit for Infrared image: NASA/ESA/STIS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)
Young ‘Sun’ Caught Blowing Bubbles in X-ray and Infrared light. Credit for X-ray image: NASA/CXC/Johns Hopkins Univ./C.M. Lisse (Credit for Infrared image: NASA/ESA/STIS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk)
For the first time, a much younger version of the Sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy, by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The bubble—called an astrosphere—completely surrounds the juvenile star. Winds from the star’s surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot gas as it expands into much cooler galactic gas and dust surrounding the star.
Our Sun has a similar bubble around it, which scientists call the heliosphere, created by the solar wind. It extends far beyond the planets in our solar system and protects Earth from damaging particles from interstellar space.
This is the first image of an astrosphere astronomers have obtained around a star similar to the Sun. It shows slightly extended emission, rather than a single point of light as seen for other such stars.
“We have been studying our Sun’s astrosphere for decades, but we can’t see it from the outside,” said Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study which was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal. “This new Chandra result about a similar star’s astrosphere teaches us about the shape of the Sun’s, and how it has changed over billions of years as the Sun evolves and moves through the galaxy.”
The star is called HD 61005 and is located about 120 light-years from Earth, making it relatively close. HD 61005 has roughly the same mass and temperature as the Sun, but it is much younger with an age of about 100 million years, compared to the Sun’s age of about 5 billion years.
Young Sun HD 61005 Blowing Bubbles – Credit: (X-ray) NASA/CXC/Johns Hopkins Univ./C.M. Lisse et al; (Infrared) Credit: NASA/ESA/STIS; (Optical) Credit: NSF/NoirLab/CTIO/DECaPS2; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk
Because it’s so young, HD 61005 has a much stronger wind of particles blowing from its surface that travels about 3 times faster and is about 25 times denser than the wind from the Sun. This amplifies the process of astrosphere bubble-blowing and mimics how our Sun was behaving several billion years ago.
“We are impacted by the Sun every day, not only through the light it gives off, but also by the wind it sends out into space that can affect our satellites and potentially astronauts traveling to the Moon or Mars,” said co-author Scott Wolk of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). “This image of the astrosphere around HD 61005 gives us important information about what the Sun’s wind may have been like early in its evolution.”
Astronomers have nicknamed the HD 61005 star system the “Moth” because it is surrounded by large amounts of dust patterned similarly to the shape of a moth’s wings when viewed through infrared telescopes. The wings are formed from material left behind after the formation of the star, similar to the Kuiper Belt in our own solar system. Observations of these wings with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showed that the interstellar matter surrounding HD 61005 is about a thousand times denser than that around the Sun.
(left) the Moth as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope
Since the 1990s, astronomers have been trying to capture an image of an astrosphere around a Sun-like star. Chandra was able to detect the astrosphere around HD 61005 because it is producing X-rays as the stellar wind runs into cooler interstellar dust and gas that surrounds the star.
The dense local galactic environment, combined with Chandra’s high-resolution X-ray vision, the strong stellar wind, and the star’s proximity, all helped create a strong X-ray signal, allowing discovery of an astrosphere around HD 61005.
The Sun not only likely passed through a phase of development similar to HD 61005 when it was younger, it also likely traveled through a denser region of dust and gas than where the Sun is currently located, strengthening the connection with HD 61005.
“It is amazing to think that our protective heliosphere would only extend out to the orbit of Saturn if we were in the part of the galaxy where the Moth is located, or, conversely, that the Moth would have an astrosphere 10 times wider than the Sun’s if it were located here,” Lisse said.
HD 61005 is not visible from Earth with the unaided eye, but it is close enough that skywatchers could see it using binoculars.
The first hints of X-ray emission from the Moth’s central star were based on a brief, one-hour-long Chandra observation of HD 61005 in 2014. In 2021, astronomers observed HD 61005 for almost 19 hours, which allowed the detection of the extended astrospheric structure.
WATCH the story below from Chandra’s Social Media Team…
Quote of the Day: “Because of a great love, one can be courageous.” – Lao Tzu
Photo by: Oksana Zub
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
87 years ago today, John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath was published, a story he wrote after interviewing displaced migrants who escaped the Dust Bowl (a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology of the Midwestern prairies during the 1930s and the Great Depression). The book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and soon after was made into a celebrated Hollywood film starring Henry Fonda. WATCHa video… (1939)
Helmet of Cotofenesti - credit Radu Oltean, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia
Helmet of Cotofenesti – credit Radu Oltean, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia
A golden helmet belonging to an ancient Romanian culture holding “inestimable value” was recovered after it was stolen in January from a Museum where it was on loan.
A museum director sought to demonstrate the value of Romanian history by loaning the national treasure to a Dutch museum as part of a 6-month-long exhibition, but disaster struck when thieves broke into the museum, stole the helmet, and a trio of golden bracelets.
The theft shocked the European art world and caused a diplomatic incident, with incensed Romanian officials breathing down the neck of Dutch police, urging them to stop at nothing to recover it.
Called the Helmet of Coțofenești, it was manufactured out of gold during the Dacia civilization in the decade around 450 BCE. Dacia left no written history, so only finds like the Coțofenești Helmet bear witness to their capabilities and identity. Embossed with mythical scenes and studs atop the cranium, a panel covered the eyes meant to shield the wearer, it’s believed, from bad luck.
On April 3rd in the city of Assen, police and officials at the Drents Museum unveiled the helmet, alongside 2 of the bracelets, which they said they recovered through a plea deal reached with 3 suspects arrested shorty after the January break-in.
“We are incredibly pleased,” Corien Fahner of the prosecution service told reporters. “It has been a roller-coaster. Especially for Romania, but also for employees of the Drents Museum.”
It was originally feared that if the thieves’ aim was for money, the helmet would be melted down, since its iconic design would have rendered it unsalable. Fortunately, it seems that either wasn’t the aim of the perpetrators, or their quick arrest interrupted the plan.
The Guardian, one of many outlets reporting on the theft and recovery, reported that Dutch authorities made several attempts to convince the suspects to reveal the location of the treasures under enormous pressure from the Romanian government.
It’s unclear which terms were agreed to in the plea deal, but one offer may have included a halving of their eventual prison sentence, while an undercover officer may have tried to buy the items outright for €400,000.
The National History Museum of Romania received €5.7 million as part of an insurance claim on the loss, some if not all of it, the museum may have to pay back now that the objects have been recovered.
One of the 3 stolen bracelets is still missing, while the helmet suffered a dent during the theft. Romanian authorities are confidant the third can be located, and said they will stop at nothing to bring the final treasure back to Bucharest.
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Archaeologists in barrow, a prehistoric burial mound in Norfolk, England –Credit: RWE energy company
Archaeologists in barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, in Norfolk, England –Credit: RWE energy company
Preparatory archaeology work at an English wind farm development site has turned up two incredible discoveries.
The first was a Roman villa and bathhouse, and the second was a Neolithic burial mound. These were discovered by a team of archaeologists who fully believed they weren’t going to find anything.
The team works for Headland Archaeology, which was employed to preform surveys along a 40-mile underground cable path for a new wind power project from RWE.
The team had consulted historical maps and records, and performed a magnetometry survey, with the end point being that they didn’t find anything of interest. Their ultimate surprise came during trench digging to examine large areas at once when they began to pull a lot of roof tiles out of the Norfolk earth.
This occurred back in 2021, and the subsequent excavations revealed a long-utilized farming estate that dates back to the local society of the Iron Age and forward to the Roman Empire.
“There’s a lot of evidence for growing and processing food,” Headland Archaeology’s Jessica Lowther told local news, “so we think it was quite a large farming estate.”
The walls and foundations of several additional structures, including a Roman road and a bathhouse were also uncovered. Many items reveal the daily life of the inhabitants: nail cleaners, hair pins, and jewelry, as well as a military belt and the bones of dogs and cats believed to have been kept as house pets.
A digital rendering of what the Roman villa might have looked like – credit, RWE
Additionally, the handle of a bronze vessel molded into the shape of a strange creature was discovered, that somehow earned the nickname “Norfolk Nessie” referring to its appearance hearkening back to that famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster.
That wasn’t the last time the archaeologists’ assumptions about the cable route being clear was proven wrong. Further along they found a very large Neolithic burial mound with an underground chamber filled with pottery and stone tools.
Yet further, Smithsonian Magazine writes that they uncovered a burial site from the Bronze Age, and later the remains of a medieval village that they were able to confirm once stood there thanks to the Norman’s Domesday Book: a seminal, 11th century survey of land holdings carried out after the end of the Anglo Saxon period.
GNN once reported that when major underground discoveries are made in Greece, developers will often obscure them to prevent interruption of the project. Not RWE, which seems to have become very involved in the discoveries genesised by their wind project.
“The archaeological campaign has revealed a remarkable story about how this landscape has changed over time,” project director Jon Darling says in a RWE statement. “Careful archaeological work sits alongside responsible infrastructure development, helping to protect and record Norfolk’s heritage while supporting the transition to renewable energy.”
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Tree in Tongass National Forest- USDA Forest Service
Tree in Tongass National Forest- USDA Forest Service
An Alaska district court judge has ruled against a coalition of logging interests looking to get their saws on Tongass National Forest’s old growth timber stands.
As the nation’s largest national forest, and the world’s largest temperate rainforest, Tongass acts as a superb stronghold for many species, such as the bald eagle, sperm whale, Steller’s sea lion, Chinook salmon, brown bear, mountain goat, and the Endangered Haida ermine, an all-white relative of the weasel.
The logging interests consisted of Alaska Forest Association, Viking Lumber Company, Inc., and Alcan Timber Incorporated, which together sued the US Dept. of Agriculture and its secretary, and the US Forest Service and its director, last March. Two local townships and several environmental groups joined the suit on the side of the defense.
Judge Sharon L. Gleason granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss, and did so ‘with prejudice,’ meaning that the plaintiffs can never sue the same parties for the same reasons again.
Prejudice is usually invoked in cases deemed frivolous, when the plaintiffs have improperly served legal notice, or if the judge determines that the plaintiff’s case as it was thusly brought was deceitfully put together.
Whatever the reason, it means that the old-growth forests in Tongass will remain erect for the Haida ermine, the bald eagles, and the rest of the woodland wildlife.
“This ruling is a big victory for the Tongass’ old-growth forests. I’m relieved the court squarely rejected the logging industry’s rash attempt to force large-scale logging,” Marlee Goska, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Alaska attorney, said in an email to GearJunkie.
“This lawsuit had no legal basis, and the court was right to dismiss the case outright. We need to leave the Tongass standing for the sake of wildlife, climate, and local communities.”
The lawsuit revolved around two regulations passed by the USDA in 2016 and 2021, and a 1990 law called the Tongass Timber Reform Act (TTRA). The TTRA lays out a requirement to provide the timber industry with areas to log in order to meet “market demand.”
The 2016 Forest Plan, contingent on the TTRA’s requirement, outlined that logging interests could buy 46 million board feet of timber from Tongass, 34 million of which could come from old growth and 12 million from young growth. Then, in 2021, the USDA announced the “Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy,” (SASS) which provided for an end to old-growth logging in Tongass except for tribal reasons.
The plaintiffs argued the totals able to be logged over the last few years have been far below 34 million board feet, and also far below “market demand.” They also claimed that since the SASS was a ruling, it should have undergone a comment period, which it didn’t.
The defendants argued that neither the 2016 Forest Plan nor the TTRA set out quotas or requirements, but merely outlined a broad objective as well as an upper limit. Furthermore, they argued that the SASS was simply a continuation on the 2016 Forest Plan, not a whole new ruling. Judge Gleason sided with this argument, and agreed that the 2016 plan’s language does not set up a goal of logging 34 million board feet of old-growth trees, but rather a cap.
She dismissed the case with prejudice. In the preparatory materials on the day when Judge Gleason heard the arguments for the request to dismiss the case, the Center for Biological Diversity quoted a Viking Lumber company officer stating in a company release that absent sales of new old-growth lumber, the company will likely go bankrupt.
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With the Earth having welcomed the month of April with a full Moon, several celestial events will follow that promise to provide a perfect reason to get out into the shortening spring nights.
Chief among these will be the opportunity to see the Lyrid meteor shower safe from the light of the Moon during the peak night of 22/23 April.
From a dark sky area, far from city lights, observers can spot up to 15 shooting stars per hour, which manifest to our eyes as streaking fireballs in the night sky. Far from being stars, they are actually fragments of the comet C/1861 G1 Thatcher.
Every year, the Earth passes through the comet’s orbit as if it were the wake of a motor boat. As the comet hurtles through the solar system, it sheds material like ice and dust, which burn up in Earth’s atmosphere during the special period we pass through that debris trail.
The Lyrids are one of the most active spring meteor showers, and with the Moon setting before midnight, it promises to be particularly showy this year.
Even though they originate with the comet Thatcher, they’re called the Lyrids because the point in the sky where it appears they originate from is found near the constellation Lyra. To find Lyra, all one need do is find the second-brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere: Vega.
Vega is so bright, it was the first star ever to be photographed: with a daguerreotype plate in 1850.
A few days before the Lyrids peak, a New Moon occurs on April 17th and presents as the perfect time to drive to a dark sky area and observe the Milky Way’s galactic core, which is highly visible during this month’s pre-dawn hours.
A truly dark sky, not only lacking a Moon, but any kind of significant light pollution from street lighting, is needed to see the galactic core, but the reward for making the drive out to such a rural area will be millions of stars and the beautiful band of white and grey across the sky: the perfect introduction to a young boy or girl to the true scope of the cosmos.
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Quote of the Day: “Love yourself as if you were a rainbow with gold at both ends.” – Aberjhani
Photo by: Typhaine Braz
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Hive hanging from tree; and Varroa mite on honeybee larvae – Credit: Boris Baer and Genesis Chong-Echavez at University of California-Riverside
‘Southern California is home to a black-and-yellow flying treasure’, wrote scientists giddy over good news about bee populations—and our food supply.
Commercial honeybee hives across the US have been collapsing for years, under attack from deadly parasites—but now a unique hybrid bee found only in the southern part of California has demonstrated the ability to survive.
Varroa mites feed on honeybees’ fat body tissue, resulting in weakened immune systems, reduced body weight, and shorter lives. (The fat body is a bee’s organ which performs similar functions to a liver, pancreas, and immune system). The mites also spread deadly viruses.
Beekeepers have relied on chemical treatments that can lose their effectiveness against the mites over time, but a new study from researchers at the University of California–Riverside offers hope.
Published in Scientific Reports, it is the first paper to show that a locally adapted population of honeybees can naturally and consistently suppress the mites.
“We kept hearing anecdotally that these Californian honeybees were surviving with way fewer treatments,” said Genesis Chong-Echavez, a UCR graduate student and lead author of the study. “I wanted to test them rigorously and understand the driving force behind what the beekeepers were seeing.”
Alongside entomologists from UCR’s Center for Integrative Bee Research (CIBER), Chong-Echavez monitored 236 honeybee colonies for three years.
Honeybees entering hive – Credit: Damien TUPINIER
68% fewer mites and 5x healthier
The Californian bees were not entirely immune to the mites. However, colonies headed by locally-raised Californian hybrid honeybee queens had 68% fewer mites on average than colonies headed by commercial honeybee queens.
They were also five times less likely to require chemical treatments.
The bees in the study are a mixed population of genetically diverse honeybees established in Southern California—often feral colonies living in trees. Recent research shows they are a hybrid population with ancestry from at least four honeybee lineages, including African, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Western European bees.
To more fully understand the bees’ resistance to the mites, the researchers also ran laboratory experiments with developing honeybee larvae. Varroa mites must enter brood cells to reproduce, so the team tested whether mites were equally drawn to larvae from commercial and Californian hybrid honeybee colonies.
They were not.
Mites were less attracted to the Californian hybrid honeybee larvae, especially at seven days old—the stage when mites are normally most likely to invade.
The findings suggest that the secret to bees fending off mites lies in early development, before any adult worker behaviors come into play.
“What surprised me most was the differences showed up even at the larval stage,” Chong-Echavez said in a media release. “This suggests the resistance mechanism may go deeper than some kind of behavior and may be genetically built into the bees themselves.”
The findings could have implications beyond Southern California. Honeybees pollinate crops worth billions of dollars and are under growing pressure from multiple environmental stressors. The research suggests that part of the answer to improving honeybee health may lie in the biology of these bees.
The researchers hope to learn which traits help these honeybees keep mite levels lower, and whether those traits could support future breeding programs or reduce dependence on chemicals.
Next, the team plans to investigate the genetic, behavioral, and chemical signals that may make the larvae less attractive to mites.
His songs are born inside the imagination of a three-year-old girl.
But thanks to her music-teacher father, the songs—like, Purple Bear Princess—are enjoying a long life on social media, becoming viral sensations whenever Stephen Spencer transforms his daughter’s musings into full-blown melodies.
“I’m always inspired by the strange and beautiful things that my 3-year-old daughter comes up with,” the music lecturer at Hunter College in New York City told the Huffington Post.
The collab began soon after his daughter could talk. Spencer would express his musical whimsy by singing things back to her, making impromptu songs about whatever she just said.
Eventually, he turned these musical moments into ‘real’ songs, sitting at his piano to mix his daughter’s words with notes and chords and catchy beats.
“I try to strike a balance between taking the craft seriously—producing a radio-ready song that sounds polished and professional—and keeping the whole process playful and spontaneous, the same way the stories came to me in the first place.”
This is the tune that started it all… ‘Wigglin’’ (Click the speaker at the bottom of the video to listen.)
Spencer’s social media followers surged from 34 to 340,000, with more than 30 million people playing his songs.
Commenters are flooding his pages with positive feedback and clamoring for a full album of songs. Clearly, his daughter’s words and Spencer’s stringed instruments are pulling on some heart strings, too.
One Instagram commenter whose daughter is all grown-up now, gushed over a performance about a grown-up purple bear princess: “Pardon me while I go into her old room and have a good cry.”
“I’ve been amazed by the reaction online,” Spencer added. “Seeing so many people connect with something that started as a silly family moment has been really heartwarming, and motivates me to keep creating.”
(Watch his appearance on Good Morning America, below…)
A full-length album might be arriving soon. You can keep an eye on his Spotify account here.
Top row: tawny owl, southern white faced owl, barn owl, milky eagle owl Middle row: ashy faced owl, lesser horned owl, great grey owl, African spotted eagle owl Bottom row: Chaco owl, Tengmalm’s (or boreal) owl, Eurasian eagle owl, African wood owl – Courtesy of Scottish Owl Centre
Beautiful portraits are showcasing the twelve species of hand-reared birds that are being touted among the largest collection of owls in the world—over 150 raptors in total.
Ranging in age from 1-19 years-old, they were photographed at their home in the Scottish Owl Centre in Bathgate, 23 miles outside Glasgow—and, as the founders are nearing retirement, you could be the next owner.
The youngest is an Ashy-faced owl named Opia (far left, middle row). The oldest—and also the largest bird at the center—is a Eurasian eagle owl (pictured in bottom row, third from left), majestically named Zeus.
The zoo’s head keeper Trystan Williams trains all the owls for daily flying displays—teaching the chicks at a young age to get used to human contact, and rewarding them with small pieces of chicken by hand.
“These are the birds that people meet here at the centre and that they’ll see in our flying displays,” he said. (Listen to them in the video at the bottom…)
Of the birds pictured, the one that’s been flying in the shows the longest is the Eurasian eagle owl, Zeus, a rescued bird that arrived at age five. One of the largest of the owl species, eagle owls have a wingspan of well over six feet.
“It’s hard to have a favorite when they’re all so fantastic, but the big owls are spectacular, so Zeus is a favorite of lots of the staff and visitors,” said Trystan.
TOP ROW: Chaco owl, Eurasian eagle owl, Tengmalm’s (boreal) owl, southern white faced owl MIDDLE row: African wood owl, great grey owl, lesser horned owl, ashy faced owl BOTTOM ROW: African spotted eagle owl, milky eagle owl, barn owl, tawny owl – Scottish Owl Centre photos by Katielee Arrowsmith
“I love seeing them in flight,” said the trainer. “I also enjoy talking to people about them and sharing my passion with others too.”
Looking for a new purpose aligned with owls?
The Center, which first opened to the public 20 years ago, was founded and is owned by Rod Angus, a life-long ornithologist, and his wife Niccy.
As they approach retirement, they’re keen to find new owners who align with the Center’s educational mission and concern for the welfare of owls and their conservation.
Their award-winning zoo is profitable, too, attracting 22,000 visitors in 2024.
“We are committed to a smooth handover and would provide any necessary training and phased support after the sale, ensuring continuity for staff, visitors and the owls in our care,” they wrote on their website, where you can find more information.
“Owning and managing the 150+ owls of the Scottish Owl Centre would be a unique work of love and life-style choice for anyone interested in wildlife education and conservation.”
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