In a rather unique story from Reuters, the Spanish olive oil market is profiled for what it can do to power Spain’s homes, not just its economy and kitchens.
Accounting for half the production of olive oil in the EU, growers are now getting to sell olive pits as a valuable ingredient for biofuel. Hundreds of thousands of tons of olive pits are now being consumed in Spain every year to heat homes, power oil mills, and even airplanes.
Pits make up between 8% and 10% of an olive crop by weight. During the pressing stage in the oil production process, the pits are squeezed out and separated before being washed and dried to create fuel similar to wood pellets used in certain domestic stoves, grills, and fireplaces.
In the past, cultivators didn’t have a good idea of what to do with the olive pits, says Pablo Rodero, an affiliate with the Spanish biomass association, Avebiom. Avebiom estimates that 400,000 tons of olive pits are produced every year in Spain. That’s a lot of material to not know what to do with.
“Now everything is used,” Rodero told Reuters. “Olives are like pigs: Nothing goes to waste.”
According to Reuters, the energy shock from the Russian invasion of Ukraine that caused domestic heating prices to soar led directly to a further development of the olive pit industry as a fuel product.
One-third of all pits are now refined to remove as much moisture as possible and sold for around 300 euros per ton, which equates to around 6 cents per kilowatt-hour for home heating.
The rest is used on the farms to drive the almazaras, or traditional olive mills, or sold to power industrial boilers.
Petro company Cepsa uses olive oil pits as the key ingredient in a sustainable aviation fuel blend that powered 200 flights out of Andalusia’s capital of Sevilla airport last year. Biofuels, usually made from old cooking oil, have been pioneered as more sustainable jet fuel in China and other parts of the globe.
It might seem strange to Americans who have to pay prime dollar for olive oil imports, but some farms and farming collectives pull in as much as a third of their revenue from pit sales.
FREE WILL ASTROLOGY – Week of September 28, 2024
Copyright by Rob Brezsny, FreeWillAstrology.com
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22):
On the morning of January 27, 1970, Libran songwriter John Lennon woke up with an idea for a new song. He spent an hour perfecting the lyrics and composing the music on a piano. Then he phoned his producer and several musicians, including George Harrison, and arranged for them to meet him at a recording studio later that day. By February 6, the song Instant Karmawas playing on the radio. It soon sold over a million copies. Was it the fastest time ever for a song to go from a seed idea to a successful release? Probably. I envision a similar process in your life, Libra. You are in a prime position to manifest your good ideas quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21):
You have passed the test of the First Threshold. Congratulations, Scorpio! Give yourself a kiss. Fling yourself a compliment. Then begin your preparations for the riddles you will encounter at the Second Threshold. To succeed, you must be extra tender and ingenious. You can do it! There will be one more challenge, as well: the Third Threshold. I’m confident you will glide through that trial not just unscathed but also healed. Here’s a tip from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “Those who do not expect the unexpected will not find it.”
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):
What development are you so ready for that you’re almost too ready? What transformation have you been preparing for so earnestly that you’re on the verge of being overprepared? What lesson are you so ripe and eager to learn that you may be anxiously interfering with its full arrival? If any of the situations I just described are applicable to you, Sagittarius, I have good news. There will be no further postponements. The time has finally arrived to embrace what you have been anticipating.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):
Capricorn screenwriter and TV producer Shonda Rhimes has had a spectacular career. Her company Shondaland has produced 11 prime-time TV shows, including Grey’s Anatomy and Bridgerton. She’s in the Television Hall of Fame, is one of the wealthiest women in America, and has won a Golden Globe award. As you enter into a phase when your ambitions are likely to shine extra brightly, I offer you two of her quotes. 1. “I realized a simple truth: that success, fame, and having all my dreams come true would not fix or improve me. It wasn’t an instant potion for personal growth.” 2. “Happiness comes from living as your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be.”
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18):
I have performed in many poetry readings. Some have been in libraries, auditoriums, cafes, and bookstores, but others have been in unexpected places: a laundromat, a bus station, a Walmart, a grocery store, and an alley behind a thrift store. Both types of locations have been enjoyable. But the latter kind often brings the most raucous and engaging audiences, which I love. According to my analysis, you might generate luck and fun for yourself in the coming weeks by experimenting with non-typical scenarios—akin to me declaiming an epic poem on a street corner or parking lot. Brainstorm about doing what you do best in novel situations.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20):
I have two related oracles for you. 1. During the unfoldment of your mysterious destiny, you have had several homecomings that have moved you and galvanized you beyond what you imagined possible. Are you ready for another homecoming that’s as moving and galvanizing as those that have come before? 2. During your long life, you have gathered amazing wisdom by dealing with your pain. Are you now prepared to gather a fresh batch of wisdom by dealing with pleasure and joy?
ARIES (March 21-April 19):
Here comes the Hating and Mating Season. I want to help you minimize the “hating” part and maximize the “mating” part, so I will offer useful suggestions. 1. To the degree that you can, dissolve grudges and declare amnesty for intimate allies who have bugged you. 2. Ask your partners to help you manage your fears; do the same for them. 3. Propose to your collaborators that you come up with partial solutions to complicated dilemmas. 4. Do a ritual in which you and a beloved cohort praise each other for five minutes. 5. Let go of wishes that your companions would be more like how you want them to be.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20):
Many fairy tales tell of protagonists who are assigned seemingly impossible missions. Perhaps they must carry water in a sieve or find “fire wrapped in paper” or sort a heap of wheat, barley, poppyseed, chickpeas, and lentils into five separate piles. Invariably, the star of the story succeeds, usually because they exploit some loophole, get unexpected help, or find a solution simply because they didn’t realize the task was supposedly impossible. I bring this up, Taurus, because I suspect you will soon be like one of those fairy-tale champions. Here’s a tip: They often get unexpected help because they have previously displayed kindness toward strangers or low-status characters. Their unselfishness attracts acts of grace into their lives.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20):
You are in a phase with great potential for complex, unforeseen fun. To celebrate, I’m offering descriptions of your possible superpowers. 1. The best haggler ever. 2. Smoother of wrinkles and closer of gaps. 3. Laugher in overly solemn moments. 4. Unpredictability expert. 5. Resourceful summoner of allies. 6. Crafty truth-teller who sometimes bends the truth to enrich sterile facts. 7. Riddle wrestler and conundrum connoisseur. 8. Lubricant for those who are stuck. 9. Creative destroyer of useless nonsense. 10. Master of good trickery. 11. Healer of unrecognized and unacknowledged illnesses.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Tanzanite is a rare blue and violet gemstone that is available in just one place on earth: a five-square-mile region of Tanzania. It was discovered in 1967 and mined intensively for a few years. Geologists believed it was all tapped out. But in 2020, a self-employed digger named Saniniu Lazier located two huge new pieces of tanzanite worth $3.4 million. Later, he uncovered another chunk valued at $2 million. I see you as having resemblances to Saniniu Lazier in the coming weeks. In my visions of your destiny, you will tap into resources that others have not been able to unearth. Or you will find treasure that has been invisible to everyone else.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22):
Marathon foot races are regularly held worldwide. Their official length is 26.2 miles. Even fast runners with great stamina can’t finish in less than two hours. There’s a downside to engaging in this herculean effort: Runners lose up to six percent of their brain volume during a race, and their valuable gray matter isn’t fully reconstituted for eight months. Now here’s my radical prophecy for you, Leo. Unless you run in a marathon sometime soon, your brain may *gain* in volume during the coming weeks. At the very least, your intelligence will be operating at peak levels. It will be a good time to make key decisions.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):
Golf courses are typically over 150 acres in size and require huge amounts of water to maintain—not to mention their vast tracts of grass being doused with chemical pesticides. There are 67 million golfers in the world who play the sport, so let’s use the metaphor of a wasteful golf course as we analyze your life. Are there equivalent questionable uses of resources and space in your day? Now is a favorable time to downsize irrelevant, misused, and unproductive elements. Re-evaluate how you use your space and resources.
WANT MORE? Listen to Rob’s EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, 4-5 minute meditations on the current state of your destiny — or subscribe to his unique daily text message service at: RealAstrology.com
Quote of the Day: “The good man is the friend of all living things.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Photo by: Getty Images for Unsplash+ (cropped)
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?
One of ancient Greece’s most hallowed sites has been uncovered thanks to a determined Swiss archaeologist, a chatty local, and the stroke of luck that brought them together.
The story begins with Strabo, a Roman geographer who gave history’s first account of the Sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia, near the Greek city-state of Eretria on its island of Euboea. (Eretria was one of the earliest city-states and a prolific colonizer of the Mediterranean.)
Several miles from the walls of the city, a magnificent temple complex was built for the worship of Artemis, goddess of the hunt. It was one of the most important sites for ancient Greek religious activities. But, despite its fame and Strabo’s precise location described as seven stades—around 8/10 of a mile—from Eretria’s walls, a flurry of excavation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries uncovered nothing.
Gradually, even the belief that there was such a place called the Sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia came to be questioned, and the quest to find its hallowed walls diminished.
Enter a young doctoral student in classics named Denis Knoepfler, who joined a Swiss archaeological team working in Eretria in the 1960s. By then, efforts to try and find the sanctuary had been ongoing for seven decades, and Knoepler, who told Archaeology Magazine’s contributing editor Jason Urbanus that he had been interested in the history of Eretria for years, decided a new approach was needed if this famous building was ever to be found.
He started by investigating any structure in the surrounding countryside that had reused marble blocks from earlier periods and zeroed in on a 13th-century church built like a patchwork quilt of marble in a town called Vathia. Nearby, earlier excavations had yielded artifacts that depicted Artemis’s form and name, and Knoepfler believed the site of the sanctuary would have been near the sea on a hill called Paleoekklisies, or Old Chapels.
14th C. church in the Euboea town of Vathia built with ancient stone blocks – Courtesy Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece
In 1969, he filed a report with the Swiss Archaeological Mission in Greece (ESAG) stating he believed as a result of investigations that the sanctuary “must be” at the foot of that Hill.
So thoroughly did archaeologists working in Eretria believe in Strabo’s account that Knoepfler’s report was largely ignored and never even got published until 6 years ago. However, Knoeplfer continued following his hunch. In the following decades, he demonstrated how medieval monks translating Strabo’s Greek into Latin may have confused the number 7 with 60, because of how Ancient Greek used letters to represent numbers.
Kato Vathia and the Paleoekklisies Hill lay 60 stades away from the walls of Eretria.
As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, a construction boom began at the base of Paleoekklisies Hill, and because nobody had yet found the Sanctuary of Artemis Amarysia, Knoepfler managed to galvanize his department in Switzerland to take his theory seriously and apply for surveying permits before the imagined treasure was buried by modern villas.
In 2006 they began to excavate on the Paleoekklisies Hill only to find 5,000-year-old artifacts, rather than 2,800-year-old artifacts. The trail seemed to have gone cold, wrote Urbanus in a wonderful feature article for the September edition of the magazine—but in literally the last hours of Knoepfler’s allotted time at the site, a lead materialized from the most unlikely source.
An artist depiction of the sanctuary as it looked – Courtesy Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece
“A local resident approached in a car, rolled down his window, and pointed to a construction site near the base of Paleoekklisies Hill,” writes Urbanus, recounting Knoepfler’s colleague Sylvian Fachard, director of the ESAG who was there at the excavation. “‘You should have a look at that villa that they’re building over there. You’ll find interesting stuff,’” Fachard recalled, quoting the motorist who then drove away.
Among a big pile of pottery, they found a substantial marble block cut with sharp precise angles, which Fachard said was a sure sign the sanctuary must be there, as this sort of masonry is seen only in the most substantial Eretrian structures.
When the two men returned the next day the block had vanished, likely a result of the modern construction ethos throughout Greece, whereby ancient discoveries are often reburied to avoid government confiscation of the land. Knoepfler and Fachard secured another permit to dig nearby and found nothing.
But, much the way the motorist gave them hope when all else had seemed hopeless, the closing stages of their second excavation revealed another clue.
A big hunk of dirt dislodged itself from their excavation trench, and that’s when ESAG archaeologist Thierry Theurillat saw part of a large marble block protruding from the trench wall, nearly seven feet underground.
“It was a second stroke of luck,” Fachard said “If we had put our trench just four inches away, we never would have found a thing.”
16 years later, we now know the Sanctuary of Artemis was found on that day. ESAG bought more than a dozen properties to remove the restrictions on excavating imposed by the private landowners, and many important discoveries of the ancient Greek cult were uncovered.
Three colonnaded structures made up the sanctuary, including one that was 225 feet long. In 2017, the first evidence of a temple was uncovered—a terracotta roof tile with the tantalizing word “Artemidos,” meaning “of or belonging to Artemis” embossed in ancient Greek. The next discovery was a makeshift staircase permitting the descent into a nearby well that had been assembled from ancient markers and statue bases, one of which bore an inscription of an agreement made between the city-states of Eretria and nearby Styra “at the Sanctuary of Artemis at Amarynthos.”
Courtesy of the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece
Amarynthos was a Theban word for sanctuary.
Bingo. The 120-year-old mystery had been solved, and as the years of joyful excavating rolled on, ESAG found the temple foundations in 2020 and began exhuming artifacts.
“It’s an unimaginable discovery that impressed us all,” ESAG archaeologist Tamara Saggini told Archaeology Magazine, “on the one hand because of the state of preservation and, on the other hand, because of the size of the deposit, its exceptional variety, and the rareness of many of the objects discovered.”
The working hypothesis is that many of the artifacts were buried in the foundations of the sanctuary after an enormous fire destroyed much of the temple in the 6th century BCE. The builders erected a new temple atop the ruins, sealing all the votive offerings underneath like an ancient time capsule.
The dizzying number of treasures include ceramic and bronze vases and vessels of every description, remnants of weapons and armor, jewelry in gold, silver, bronze, amber and ivory, small terracotta figurines, and even the remains of a trunk filled with textiles that were amazingly preserved.
Another standout find was a 16-inch limestone statue of a woman holding a fawn, which might depict a woman offering a sacrifice, or Artemis herself, who is often depicted with deer due to her association with hunting.
“It was a window of literally just a few hours,” Fachard said, thinking back to the tip-off from the motorist. Without that moment, the sanctuary would likely have been lost forever.
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Instagram began alerting teens that it will automatically place them in more private, restrictive settings starting next week, released Meta
Instagram began alerting teens that it will automatically place them in more private, restrictive settings starting next week, released Meta.
Concerns over the well-being of teenage users of Instagram have led to its parent company Meta creating the most insulated form of the app seen so far: the Teen account.
All accounts registered with teenage users (up to age 15) have automatically been changed to the teen mode, which applies many of the more than 30 parental supervision and underage safety features that Meta has added to the app in the last 2 years.
The new teen accounts feature the strongest degree of moderation of sensitive content, while users can only be messaged by accounts they already follow, and the app will automatically stop sending push notifications after 10:00 p.m.
The accounts are private by default and there are “nudges” from the app to encourage teens to stop using it after 1 hour of use time in a day.
“With parents, we know from speaking to them, three of their top concerns with teens’ online safety are who can contact them, the content that they’re seeing, and time spent,” said Kira Wong-O’Connor, Meta Youth Safety Policy Manager.
Any adjustments to these restrictions require the permission of a parent or supervisor which the teen account has to connect with. Once connected, parents can monitor their teen’s social media usage, set app-use time limits, see who has recently messaged their children, and approve or deny certain alterations to the content moderation settings.
Social media use among teens, particularly teen girls, has been suggested to be a strong driver of the rapid increase in mental health disorders among young people in the United States.
Anyone who has followed famous television psychologist Dr. Phil Mcgraw’s post-television career will know he is very passionate about this topic. If Dr. Phil isn’t your cup of tea, best-selling author and professor at NYU Jonathan Haidt has the same thing to say.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg has been grilled in front of Senate subcommittee hearings on this topic, where he was accused of ignoring warnings for years about harm to teens on his platforms.
Going over exactly how the new restrictions are set in place, one quickly realizes that lying will still allow teens with unobservant parents to circumvent these restrictions, as Meta doesn’t conduct ID checks outright.
There’s nothing stopping a teen from asking a friend to create an account with a date of birth decades older than them and setting this fraudulent account as their parent in order to deactivate the teen account mode. Confronted with this fact, Wong-O’Connor told CNN that any changes to existing accounts that fall within the teen and parent age ranges will require an ID check.
Additionally, anyone looking to register as the parent of a teen account will have to fall within a certain expected age range, meaning no post-hoc alterations to existing accounts can succeed in pulling the wool over Meta’s eyes.
Sure, teens and their friends can simply collaborate to create a fake email address to register a fake Instagram account, but at a certain point, parents should be expected to monitor or involve themselves a little in their teen’s device usage. Blaming Meta for utter parental negligence is much like the pot calling the kettle black.
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Morocco 2023 (left) and 2024 following the recent extratropical storm (right) - credit, NASA Earth Observatory
Morocco 2023 (left) and 2024 following the recent extratropical storm (right) – credit, NASA Earth Observatory
Bountiful rains are greening parts of the Sahara that haven’t had a good soak in years.
An extratropical cyclone pushed across the northwestern Sahara on September 7th and 8th and drenched large, treeless swaths of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
At the same time, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a line of rainfall that floats between a few degrees latitude on either side of the equator between July and September, has pushed farther north than normal, soaking Niger, Chad, and Sudan according to data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
As a result, these portions of the Sahara Desert are anywhere from twice as wet to more than six times wetter than they normally are.
“When you get these really exceptional rainfall events, the dunes become these just incredibly verdant and flowered fields where the plants will just instantly grow for a short period of time to take advantage,” Peter de Menocal, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told ABC News.
Images from NASA’s MODIS Satellite have revealed some of this greening, while at the same time showing that lakes which have long been dry are now filling up, such as one in Morocco’s Iriqui National Park.
Moshe Armon, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Earth Sciences and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a statement that between 2000 and 2021, Sebkha el Melah, a salt flat in central Algeria, has only filled six times. He suspects this month’s rains will be enough to make that seven.
Sahara Flooding map -credit, NASA Earth Observatory
11,000 years ago and beyond, the Sahara looked a lot more like the savannah of Kenya and Tanzania than the world’s largest non-polar desert that we see today. Evidence of this is all over the northern half of the continent, from thousands of fossilized lighting bolts found embedded in soil all over the Sahara, to evidence of rainfall erosion on the body of the Sphinx in Egypt, to the prehistoric footprint of Lake Chad, which is tens of thousands of square miles larger than the current water level.
The rains this year it must be said have resulted in some ghastly flooding, displacing thousands of people, destroying homes, and costing hundreds of lives.
While rich in species diversity, natural beauty, and cultural heritage, living in a desert often means living in poverty, and droughts, which are predicted to increase in severity in the coming years, will strain desert resources all the more. Because so much of desert life and culture is adapted to making the most of freak rainfall events like this one, the water will help preserve delicate livelihoods for months, even years to come.
WATCH the story below from ABC News…
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The oldest traces of fermented dairy ever discovered were recently found in western China’s Tarim Basin, dating back 3,600 years.
A DNA analysis shows that rather than being cheese, as the physical profile of the sample suggested, it was actually solidified kefir.
Kefir is a type of fermented milk that offers a great way of fortifying the gut microbiome, but because the name kefir comes from the Turkish word “keyif” which refers to the “good feeling” a person gets after drinking it, kefir has long been thought to originate from the Russian steppes and the Caucasus Mountains.
But this new revelation suggests it hails instead from China.
The ancient cheese samples were found alongside the famous Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating from the Bronze Age around 3,600 years ago. Found in the 20th century, these mummies helped provide a genetic bedrock to underpin scholarship on the great genetic and linguistic melting pot of Central Asia.
The analysis of the cheese sample was carried out at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and published in the journal Cell. It suggests a new origin for kefir and sheds light on the evolution of probiotic bacteria.
“This is the oldest known cheese sample ever discovered in the world,” said corresponding author Professor Qiaomei Fu. “Food items like cheese are extremely difficult to preserve over thousands of years, making this a rare and valuable opportunity.”
“Studying the ancient cheese in great detail can help us better understand our ancestors’ diet and culture.”
Archaeologists discovered mysterious white substances smeared on the heads and necks of several mummies found in the Xiaohe cemetery in China’s Tarim Basin around 20 years ago. The mummies date back about 3,300 to 3,600 years ago.
At the time of the discovery, researchers thought the substances might be a type of fermented dairy product, but they couldn’t identify exactly what kind. Central Asian nomads of all sorts relied on dairy as a food source, and fermented mare’s milk was the chief item in the famously revolting Mongolian diet, according to Chinese sources.
Now, after more than a decade of advancements in ancient DNA analysis, a team led by Professor Fu has unraveled the mystery. The Chinese research team successfully extracted mitochondrial DNA from samples found in three different tombs at the cemetery.
They identified cow and goat DNA in the cheese samples.
Fu said the ancient Xiaohe people used different types of animal milk in separate batches, a practice differing from the mixing of milk common in Middle Eastern and Greek cheesemaking.
The researchers also managed to recover the DNA of microorganisms from the dairy samples which confirmed that the white substance was in fact kefir and not cheese.
They found that the samples contained bacterial and fungal species, including Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Pichia kudriavzevii, both commonly found in present-day kefir grains.
Kefir grains contain multiple species of probiotic bacteria and yeast, which ferment milk into kefir, much like a sourdough starter. Being able to sequence the bacterial genes in the ancient kefir gave the researchers the chance to track how probiotic bacteria evolved over the past 3,600 years.
They compared the ancient L. kefiranofaciens (from the kefir) with the modern-day species and found that the ancient sample was more closely related to strains identified as the origin of the species which hail from Tibet—challenging a long-held belief that kefir originated solely in the North Caucasus mountain region of present-day Russia.
The Russian L. kefiranofaciens is the most widely used globally, including in Europe, the United States, and Japan, for making yogurt and cheese.
“Our observation suggests kefir culture has been maintained in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region since the Bronze Age,” said Fu.
The study also revealed how L. kefiranofaciens exchanged genetic material with related strains, improving its genetic stability and milk fermentation capabilities over time.
These genetic exchanges helped Lactobacillus become more adapted to human hosts over thousands of years of interaction, as compared with ancient Lactobacillus, modern-day bacteria are less likely to trigger an immune response in the human intestine.
“This is an unprecedented study, allowing us to observe how a bacterium evolved over the past 3,000 years,” said Professor Fu. “Moreover, by examining dairy products, we’ve gained a clearer picture of ancient human life and their interactions with the world.”
“This is just the beginning, and with this technology, we hope to explore other previously unknown artifacts.”
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Quote of the Day: “You can find peace amidst the storms that threaten you.” – Joseph B. Wirthlin
Photo by: Getty Images 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?
VERT at the Chelsea College of Arts - Credit Ed Reeve courtesy of London Design Fest
VERT at the Chelsea College of Arts – credit, Ed Reeve, courtesy of LDF, released
Now at the London Design Festival, a nifty piece of “street furniture” allows for rapid urban greening with little effort and maximum impact.
“Vert” is a simple polygonal assembly of boards, nets, and ropes that will allow climbing plants to scale quickly and easily, bathing an area of exposed concrete in shade and moisture.
The idea behind Vert is to provide cities with solutions to combat the Urban Heat Island effect, a thermodynamic phenomenon in which cities heat up and retain heat faster and longer than more natural environments.
“This structure is, in a way, constructed like a street furniture,” Stefen Diez, Vert’s lead designer, told Reuters. “It’s like a shelf that you put onto a place or on the street so the cars can still pass underneath, the bicycle can go underneath and the people can still walk, but they can also sit and rest.”
One of the main drivers of the heat island phenomenon is that flat-faced buildings which easily absorb heat radiate it out onto other, flat, heat-intolerant buildings or black asphalt. In this way, the radiation from the Sun has no place to go, and continues to bounce around all day.
Go touch the side of a tree on a hot summer’s day and see how warm it is compared to sun-bathed concrete, or street paving compared to the soil in an open field. Vert’s plant arrangement helps combat this by adding moisture, shade, and uneven green surfaces for radiative heat to bounce onto.
Designers Stefen and Carlotta in the Diez Office in Munich – Petr Krejci, released.
Devised in a three-way collaboration between Stefan Diez’s industrial design studio Diez Office, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), and urban greening specialists OMCºC, Vert was unveiled at the Chelsea College of Arts at the London Design Festival.
The AHEC recommended Diez use boards of American red oak, as it grows fast, absorbs a lot of carbon throughout its lifetime, and has the appropriate mechanical properties for the structure.
The VERT design team sitting on the structure’s swinging benches at the Chelsea Design College – credit, Ed Reeve, courtesy of LDF, released
Vert’s triangular shape is fundamental to the structure’s performance, allowing for a robust construction that uses minimal materials while being capable of resisting wind from all angles and absorbing the weight of the plants.
The triangle also lends itself to modularity, allowing for the system to be extended or to change in direction to suit different settings, without affecting the resistance of the structure. It also provides the perfect scaffolding to hang these nifty benches of netting.
WATCH the story below from Reuters…
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Regular coffee or caffeine consumption may offer a protective effect against developing multiple cardiometabolic diseases like coronary heart disease and stroke, the most common killers in human society today.
Detailed in new research published in the Endocrine Society, three cups of coffee per day were associated with those in the study cohort who had a lower profile for a novel risk marker called “new-onset cardiometabolic multimorbidity.”
Cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM) refers to the coexistence of at least two cardiometabolic diseases, and the prevalence of individuals with CM is becoming an increasing public health concern as populations age around the world, notes the study.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that the burden of co-morbidities in high-income countries means that swaths of the population are at all times especially vulnerable to novel infections, particularly upper respiratory tract infections.
Coffee and caffeine consumption could play an important protective role in almost all phases of CM development, the researchers from China and Sweden found.
“Consuming three cups of coffee, or 200-300 mg caffeine, per day might help to reduce the risk of developing cardiometabolic multimorbidity in individuals without any cardiometabolic disease,” said the study’s lead author Chaofu Ke, M.D., Ph.D. at Suzhou Medical College of Soochow University, in Suzhou, China.
The study found that compared with non-consumers or consumers of less than 100mg caffeine per day, consumers of a moderate amount of coffee (3 drinks per day) or caffeine (200-300 mg per day) had a 48.1% or 40.7% reduced risk for new-onset CM.
Dr. Ke and his colleagues based their findings on data from the UK Biobank, a large and detailed longitudinal dietary study with over 500,000 participants aged 37-73. The study excluded individuals who had ambiguous information on caffeine intake.
The resulting pool of participants included a total of 172,315 individuals who were free of any cardiometabolic diseases at baseline for the analyses of caffeine, and a corresponding 188,091 individuals for the analyses of coffee and tea consumption.
The participants’ cardiometabolic diseases outcomes were identified from self-reported medical conditions, primary care data, linked inpatient hospital data, and death registry records linked to the UK Biobank.
Coffee and caffeine intake at all levels were inversely associated with the risk of new-onset CM in participants without cardiometabolic diseases. Those who reported moderate coffee or caffeine intake had the lowest risk, the study found. Moderate coffee or caffeine intake was inversely associated with almost all developmental stages of CM.
“The findings highlight that promoting moderate amounts of coffee or caffeine intake as a dietary habit to healthy people might have far-reaching benefits for the prevention of CM,” Ke said.
Numerous epidemiological studies have revealed the protective effects of coffee, tea, and caffeine consumption, some of which GNN has reported on before.
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credit - Guillaume Blondel, Archaeological Service of the City of Eu
credit – Guillaume Blondel, Archaeological Service of the City of Eu
A team of student archaeologists in France received an amazing surprise while working on a site dating to Gaulic times.
Carried out under the direction of Guillaume Blondel, director of the municipal archaeological service of the city of Eu, the excavations delivered, among other things, a moving and very special testimony from the past.
Located in a previously investigated section of the site, a message was discovered in a small glass bottle from the 19th century accompanied by two coins: a “time capsule” buried almost 200 years ago, a statement from the service read.
“P. J. Féret, a native of Dieppe, member of various intellectual societies, carried out excavations here in January 1825. He continues his investigations in this vast area known as the Cité de Limes or Caesar’s Camp.”
The message in a bottle had been carefully placed in a ceramic pot dating to a much earlier century so that future archaeologists would be sure to find it.
“It was an absolutely magic moment,” Mr. Blondel told the BBC. “We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago… it was a total surprise.”
credit – Guillaume Blondel, Archaeological Service of the City of Eu
“Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses. But it’s very rare in archaeology. Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work!”
Local archives indeed place P. J. Féret in the area as a historical excavator at the time the letter was dated.
credit – Guillaume Blondel, Archaeological Service of the City of Eu
The work was funded and carried out in partnership with the Regional Archaeology Service to preserve archaeological sites that are endangered with the decline of the coastline. Already a part of the ‘oppidum’ or fortified Gaulic camp, has fallen away with the crumbling of the coastal hillside on which it was perched.
The Gauls were a series of interconnected feudal (at best) and tribal (at worst) societies that shared societal, cultural, and warrior practices, and who inhabited most of central and western Europe during the time of the Roman Republic.
Cameras on Wild Duck Island captures out-of-control feral deer numbers – Supplied by Australia Department of Environment
Cameras on Wild Duck Island captures out-of-control feral deer numbers – Supplied by Australia Department of Environment
In Australia, wild deer that were destroying sea turtle habitat on an island near the Great Barrier Reef have been eradicated.
The result is that Australia’s largest flatback turtle rookery is now a safe haven for these ocean-goers once again.
Wild Duck Island near the Great Barrier Reef – credit AU Department of Environment
It’s just the latest in a string of high-profile success stories from islands all over Australia’s territorial waters, where conservationists are achieving their goals of returning these isolated ecosystems back to how they were before Europeans arrived.
Bringing goats, deer, rats, cats, foxes, rabbits, and other European wildlife along with them, they greatly disrupted sensitive sub-tropical biomes on islands like Macquarie, Lord Howe, and Middle.
Wild Duck Island sits off the northeastern coast between Rockhampton and Mackay in the state of Queensland. Here, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service believes that Rusa deer were introduced illegally in 2003 to create a hunting population, but with no natural predators, they quickly multiplied until they began to threaten other species.
“The deer were down in among the dunes when the turtles were coming up and trying to nest … up until they start laying, if anything disturbs them, they will return back to the water,” Southern Great Barrier Reef principal ranger David Orgill told ABC News AU.
They were also trampling the eggs and nests themselves: something which became apparent as late as 2018. Understanding the gravity of the situation, as the flatback turtle has the smallest range of any sea turtle, meaning there aren’t many other places these reptiles nest, conservationists started to use thermal imaging cameras and trail cams to track the deer population.
By 2023 they had removed over 270 deer, and earlier this year, a camera trap survey recorded no signs of the Rusa deer on Wild Duck Island.
A flatback turtle nesting in the twilight – credit AU Department of Environment
48 islands make up Broad Sound Islands National Park, and others remain infested with invasive species. The combination of thermal and night vision cameras used on Wild Duck is believed to be suited to other islands as well.
GNN reported earlier this year that the greatest conservation success story never told was the progress humanity has made in returning islands back to their natural state. Wild Duck joins a list of hundreds of islands, as famous as the Galapagos, and as obscure as Redonda.
The work has preserved or returned habitat for thousands of species on hundreds of islands in all four oceans, many of which act as important nodes of shelter and food for migrating seabirds and undersea life as well.
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Quote of the Day: “Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.” – Rumi
Photo by: Ben Blennerhassett (cropped)
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The Raghati river runs through the middle of the biosphere - credit, Rajaji Raghati Biosphere
The Raghati river runs through the middle of the biosphere – credit, Rajaji Raghati Biosphere
It’s being called India’s first private biosphere—a 32-acre forest haven bursting with life and inspired by James Cameron’s Avatar.
Environmentalist and clean air activist Jai Dhar Gupta dreamt of a place like Pandora, the fictional planet in the film—a luscious Darwinian playground of evolution vibrant with sound and color.
For the entrepreneur’s 50th birthday, he teamed up with renowned Indian rewilding expert Vijay Dhasmana to make his dream come true.
Gupta had by then plenty of reason to want to build a haunt in nature—years of competitive running in Delhi had left him with bronchial asthma from the polluted air of the city.
Following extensive activism and private-public collaboration to improve air quality, he decided to ring in the second-half of his life with a new project.
In 2021, he discovered a stunning piece of land nestled between the Rajaji National Park and Tiger Reserve and the Raghati River. It was stunning because of its potential, but at the time Gupta and Dhasmana found it, it was a degraded shadow of its formerly wild self.
“It had been previously flattened, eroding natural contours and leading to severe soil erosion. Moreover, since monoculture agro-forestry with non-native eucalyptus trees was practiced on the land, it deteriorated the ecosystem’s health further,” Dhasmana told The Hindu. “Thousands of non-native eucalyptus trees were removed within days of acquiring the land. Subsequently, the land was contoured to retain water, prevent erosion, and promote groundwater recharge.”
Once this foundational change had been made, the duo and their teams conducted extensive forest surveys to observe how the mixture of plants and shrubs is naturally distributed around the landscape.
“We collected seeds, established a seed bank, and collaborated with biodiversity parks to germinate and cultivate saplings of trees such as haldu, rohini, mala, saal, jamun, pangana, etc., which were then planted across the biosphere,” said Gupta.
A biosphere, he told The Better India, is a micro-environment. “It’s a zone of life. We’ve got the tiger reserve next to us, but it’s not pure, due to the invasion of non-native species like eucalyptus trees. We are working on creating a pure environment, growing only what nature intended for in this particular area,” he says, adding, “I’m chasing what we saw in that movie Avatar.”
Following this monsoon season, they plan to introduce another 30 to 40 species of plants into the park which sits along the borders of the National Park and agricultural land.
Because the whole landscape is privately owned by Gupta, he decided to ban all motor vehicles from entering it. The now incredible panoply of life lives as undisturbed as possible amid the forest.
This includes leopards, sambar and cheetal deer, elephants, monitor lizards, hornbills, serpent eagles, and white-throated kingfishers.
The 132 species of native plants are protected by strict rules barring visitors from bringing any single-use plastic, and any seed-containing foods. A single electric farm utility vehicle that doubles as a safari jeep is present in the biosphere.
There are two small, pre-fabricated homes for overnight stays, but nothing about the RRB is designed for eco-tourism. Instead, it’s a living manifesto—a propaganda tool to give an inspirational glimpse, to those who are curious, about what a rewilded plot of land can look like in the subcontinent.
“The rule in this biosphere is that nature comes first, not humans,” says Gupta.
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Jillian Sherman, colorblind participant, Pocahontas State Park - credit, Virginia State Parks
Jillian Sherman, colorblind participant, Pocahontas State Park – credit, Virginia State Parks
In preparation for leaf-peeping season, Virginia State Parks have equipped all 43 managed properties with special viewfinders for the colorblind.
The lenses in the viewfinders allow those with red-green Color Vision Deficiency (CVD) to experience the full breadth of color inherent in the autumnal leaf displays that Virginia is famous for.
Red-green CVD is the most common form worldwide, affecting around 300 to 350 million people, and 13 million Americans. While people with normal color vision see over one million shades of color, those with red-green CVD are estimated to see about 10% of hues and shades.
To them, colors containing red and green can appear dull, washed out and indistinguishable—rendering fall forests with all their luscious reds, delicious oranges, and mellow yellows one big sepia mass.
The viewfinders, made by SeeCoast Manufacturing, are equipped with special lenses from another firm called EnChroma designed to help those with CVD experience an expanded range of visible color.
“This initiative underscores Virginia’s commitment to enhancing outdoor experiences for all visitors and sets a new standard for state parks nationwide,” said Matt Wells, director of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, which manages Virginia State Parks. in a statement. “We’re proud to play a role in opening up a world of vibrant color for colorblind individuals to experience nature like never before.”
The installation began in 2023 in Natural Tunnel State Park, an initiative that was led by Chief Ranger Ethan Howes who is himself colorblind. The other 43 parks would receive their viewfinders this year, which started on July 26th with a ceremony at Pocahontas State Park in which 6 colorbind Virginians were invited to try them out.
“You all see this every day, huh?” said Bryan Wagner, one of the participants. “Everything’s not the same green. The colors are more vibrant.”
Smithsonian Magazine, covering the topic, detailed how color blindness is dependent on the X Chromosome, and that the condition is nearly 10-times more common in men than women.
Fall color phasing is much richer in varitation in the temperate zones of the world where mountains run north to south—such as the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains, and as such Virginia, containing one of the most biodiverse sections of Appalachia, is noted for its gorgeous fall colors.
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Kenji "Flash" Bowen - retrieved from Facebook via Columbus County News
Kenji “Flash” Bowen – retrieved from Facebook via Columbus County News
A North Carolina youth bravely rescued a man and woman from drowning just before their truck slid into deep floodwaters.
First reported by Columbus County News, Kenji “Flash” Bowen, a former standout baseball and football player in high school, was driving home last week with his girlfriend and their baby near Wilmington after a near-tropical storm flooded parts of the state.
Nicknamed “Flash” by teammates at East Columbus High School because of his speed, he needed every bit of it when, after being turned back by flooding on a secondary road, he saw a pickup truck inching along towards the torrent on the opposite side of the road. According to Flash, it looked a lot more like the opposite side of a river.
“We turned down Woodyard Road, and got to the place where it was flooded,” Bowen told Columbus County News. “There was no way I was going through that with my family, so I got ready to turn around.”
“There was a truck pulling into the water from the other side, and I tried to flash my lights at him to tell him to stop, but I guess he didn’t see me.”
Though the man from nearby Kelly realized he couldn’t make it through the water, he was too late, and his tires began to spin while reversing as the water gradually shifted the car to the side. The truck started to float towards a ditch on the side of the roadway where the water was much deeper—then began to sink.
The young father then lept into the water and moved as fast as he could towards the truck. “That water was flowing stronger than anything I had ever seen. I got to the truck and grabbed hold, then started working toward them,” he remembered.
Inside the cab, the man and woman began making the mistake of trying to open the doors, which can’t be done once the car is partially submerged. Bowen helped the woman crawl out through the window, where Bowen’s girlfriend Caitlyn was waiting to help her make it up the grassy bank to dry land.
Bowen then went back to rescue the man and his dog—both through the window as the car was sinking.
Though a standout athlete, Bowen has no interest in swimming, and generally doesn’t like deep water, he said laughing.
In such situations, the faster one realizes the car is a coffin, the greater their chances for survival. As soon as your car hits the water, immediately unbuckle your seatbelt and try to get out through the window as it can often still be rolled down.
The door won’t open if it’s even partially submerged as the water pressure is too much to push through. The best place to kick a window that won’t open is near the top of the window pane, and the metal prong of the headrest can provide a tool that might help break it.
If the window isn’t opening or breaking, the door can be opened only when the whole car is submerged and filled with water. Steady your breathing, but don’t try to get out immediately—Mythbusters demonstrated that even after the driver is fully underwater, the equalization of the pressure in the car needed for the door to be openable took 1 minute and 51 seconds.
Fortunately, for the couple and their dog, “Flash” Bowen was faster than the surging water.
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Original copy of the US Constitution – Credit: Brunk Auctions
Original copy of the US Constitution – Credit: Brunk Auctions
An incredible piece of US history has been found, and is expected to bring $20 million at auction.
In the lead-up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, 100 copies of the US Constitution were printed, but only 8 of them were signed by Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, for the official purpose of being brought to each state for the delegates therein to deliberate on.
One of those 8 copies was just discovered inside a house in North Carolina, making it the only privately owned signed copy or the Constitution in the country. It’s now going up for auction at Brunk Auctioneers, and the opening bid of $1 million has already been met.
The family that found the historic document had been stewards of the Hayes Plantation in Edenton, on a property formerly owned by Samuel Johnston, who was North Carolina’s Governor from 1787 to 1789, and was the individual who ratified the document in the state.
They had kept the plantation for 7 generations, but in the process of passing it into the hands of the state to become a historic property, a massive cleanout of generations of items had to be undertaken. It was during this process that the signed copy was found.
“It wouldn’t surprise us for it to go for $20 million dollars, could be less could be more; another copy of the Constitution sold at Sotheby’s for $42.3 million,” said Andrew Brunk, the auction house’s CEO, in an interview with CBS News.
One page of the U.S. Constitution document – Released by Brunk Auctions
The document was preserved pre-cut, so the 8 pages remain on two sheets, with the famous preamble starting with “We The People” located in the top right. Also attached is a resolution from the (Articles of the) Confederation Congress to send the document to the states to ratify, explaining what it is, what’s to be done with it, and what the drafters think the state governors and congresses should do.
“Let’s hear it for a discovery that gets us thinking about the amazing set of ideas that make us a country,” exclaimed Lauren Brunk in an email to GNN from her boutique auction house in North Carolina.
WATCH the interview from CBS News… For Those Outside the US, Watch HERE…
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Quote of the Day: “Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” – Sophocles
Photo by: lucas Favre
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?
Walking to school in England - Inbal Marilli, Unsplash
Walking to school in England – Inbal Marilli, Unsplash
London has the largest ultra-low emissions zone in the world, and it’s causing children to walk or bike to school much more than their peers in other cities, a new study has shown.
In London, a charge of $16.00 is required to enter and exit the city in a car that isn’t low emissions or electric, but it wasn’t always so. 6 years ago, only certain parts of inner London were considered low emissions zones.
Researchers at Queen Mary’s and Cambridge universities saw that the zone was going to be extended to encompass the whole of metropolitan London, and wanted to take the opportunity to study how this change would affect the health of children.
The study was launched in 2018 and measured inner London and Luton, a smaller city to the north. Children between the ages of 6 and 9 were given questionnaires about their habits, and were also occasionally examined for their pulmonary health, with researchers expecting that the drop in emissions would lead to better lung development.
Several papers will be published on the collected dataset, and the first one has shown that because of the reduced traffic congestion in the London ultra-low emissions zone, children are more likely to walk, bike, or ride a scooter to school.
2 out of every 5 London students in the study had switched from “passive” to “active” forms of getting to school—in other words, 2 out of every 5 London students used to be driven to school, but are now walking, biking, or riding a scooter.
This was more than in Luton, where only 1 in 5 had switched to biking or walking during the study period.
“Physical activity in general is vital for preventing obesity,” said Christina Xiao, an epidemiologist affiliated with Cambridge University and lead author of the paper. “There’s strong evidence that shows that it prevents weight gain, and also has benefits in terms of children’s physical development and mental health as well.”
The study was limited in that it didn’t examine why the switch had been made. Was it because there was less traffic and so parents felt more comfortable navigating streets with their kids, or because it actually cost money for parents to drive their kids to school?
The authors of the first study hope that such details, along with the effect of less air pollution, will be parsed out in future studies.
There are 300 or so low emissions zones across Europe where, in general, walking and biking are more common ways to get around, but no such legislative emissions zone exists in the US.
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Luis Armando Albino (R), now 79, was finally reunited with his long-lost brother Roger, 82 credit - Alida Alequin
Luis Armando Albino (R), now 79, was finally reunited with his long-lost brother Roger, 82 credit – Alida Alequin
A 6-year-old boy who was kidnapped from a California playground more than 70 years ago has finally been found thanks to his determined, and unknown, niece.
Making headlines all over the English-speaking world, Luis Armando Albino was reunited with lost family members when they discovered he was living on the East Coast thanks to a DNA test match with his niece, who had never given up hope of finding him.
The story begins in 1951 when Albino and his brother Roger were on a playground in West Oakland. A woman in a red bandana arrived in a van and said in Spanish that she would buy Luis some candy. Instead, she kidnapped and flew him to somewhere on the East Coast, where a family raised him as if he were their own son.
This diabolical plot succeeded in spades for the kidnappers, and despite Albino’s mother never giving up hope of seeing him again, 73 years passed with the breadth of the whole country separating them, and she died in 2005.
AP, which first broke the story, wrote that Oakland Tribune reports from the time said that his brother Roger had been interrogated by the police several times, and his story was always the same regarding the woman in the bandana. As a result, a massive search party was organized up to and including the military, but Albino was long gone.
The first inkling that Luis Albino might be alive was picked up by 63-year-old Alida Alequin—Albino’s sister’s daughter.
“Just for fun,” she took a commercially available DNA test, and found she matched 22% with an individual on the East Coast. AP declined to stay where. Trying through the limited contact options offered through the kit database, Alequin received no response, but her hope and curiosity had been piqued.
Going to the Oakland police, she convinced them the new lead was substantial, and she even managed to find a photo from the library of an Oakland Tribune story on the kidnapping of Luis and Roger side by side to use in the investigation.
A new missing persons case was opened. The FBI got involved, and prescribed DNA tests to Albino and Alequin’s mother.
On June 20th, investigators went to her mother’s home, Alequin said, and told them both that her uncle had been found.
“We didn’t start crying until after the investigators left,” Alequin told AP. “I grabbed my mom’s hands and said, ‘We found him.’ I was ecstatic.”
Luis was able to travel to Oakland with the help of the FBI where he met his brother Roger, his sister, and niece Alequin—whom he embraced first—saying “thank you for finding me.”
A lifetime had passed since Luis had seen his brother. Luis had joined the Marine Corps, served in Vietnam, and was a retired firefighter. He wasn’t only a father as well, but a grandfather.
Luis later flew out for another 3-week visit in August, after which Roger passed away, living to just within 4 months of being able to see his long-lost brother again.
Alequin hopes the story is an inspiration to other families going through something similar. Her message: “don’t give up.”
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