Quote of the Day: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
Photo by: Andrea Leopardi (self portrait taken in Patagonia, Argentina)
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?
In one of the poorest countries in the world, an American entrepreneur is empowering women and girls to stay in school and become household earners.
Employing women as seamstresses with a generous benefits package to sew school uniforms—one of the highest financial barriers to entry into the school system—two generations of females benefit.
The not-for-profit socially-minded enterprise is called Style Her Empowered, acronym SHE, and was founded by Payton McGriff who began her journey as a senior at the University of Idaho seeking a place in the market to start a business for a class project.
Remembering a book she had read two years earlier, called Half the Sky, which looked at rates of female enrollment in primary school around the world, she was inspired to find market solutions to the problem of over 100 million girls worldwide stuck in their society’s educational dereliction.
As it happened, a professor she knew at University was from the West African country of Togo, and he encouraged McGriff to travel to his hometown of Nôtse on a scouting mission over spring break.
She learned that not only do 69% of households live under the poverty line, but most of the household chores fall upon women and girls. On top of this, the cost of buying new school uniforms made it almost impossible for a child in this part of the world to make it all the way from first to twelfth grade.
“Every girl stood up and raised her hand so high and, not only that, told a very expressive story about how she had been shamed out of school because she didn’t have her uniform,” McGriff, now a 2024 CNN Hero, recalled to the news outlet, explaining how she surveyed schoolgirls for the largest challenges to staying in school.
“I realized, ‘Okay, this is a place to start.’”
The dresses made at SHE are simple, culturally appropriate, and come with extra fabric tucked into the hem that can be quickly released to elongate the dress up to 6 sizes. cords running down the sides of the dress allow it to be adjusted to fit any body shape.
ENTREPRENEURS MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE:
SHE operates two factories in Togo where seamstresses make 75% more than the minimum wage, and enjoy a comprehensive Western-style benefits package. McGriff manages the business from Idaho, but her early collaborators make up all the middle managers, ensuring that the people reacting to the environment and needs at ground zero are those who were born into the social and cultural environment.
“The vision for starting SHE was always for it to become locally led because local women understand the challenges and the solutions far better than I ever could,” McGriff told CNN. “I may have struck the original match that started SHE. But what I’m so beyond inspired by is watching our team carry the torch.”
Today, SHE serves Nôtse and 20 other rural villages, and because there’s no trash service to any of these places, all leftover textile scraps are recycled into menstrual pads to address another major barrier to entry for students.
At the moment, SHE has an ongoing GoFundMe that’s seeking to raise $25,000 in donations to enroll another 500 girls in its program, for which a $50 donation provides a full year of education for a girl in one of the villages, including school uniform, supplies, and tuition.
WATCH the mini-doc on SHE below from CNN Heroes…
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American billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg has announced that a series of grants worth $600 million will be presented to five historically Black colleges and universities.
The donations are being channeled specifically to the universities’ medical colleges, and Mr. Bloomberg’s philanthropic organization said it hopes they will sprout greater representation in the medical sector, where Black doctors make up just 6% of the national labor force.
According to CNN, $175 million will go to Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College, and Morehouse School of Medicine.
Charles Drew University of Medicine & Science will receive $75 million, while Xavier University of Louisiana, which is opening a new medical school, will also receive a $5 million grant.
Xavier was not counted by CNN as an HBC, but they describe themselves as such.
The donations will more than double the size of three of the medical schools’ endowments, Bloomberg Philanthropies said, relieving hundreds of thousands in student medical school debt at least, but at present other uses of the money have not been decided on.
LATEST ON AMERICAN PHILANTHROPY:
The announcement comes just weeks after Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $1 billion gift to Johns Hopkins Medical School, one of the largest single donations in the history of American philanthropy.
In 2020, Bloomberg donated $100 million to four of these five schools, with most of the money going to reducing the debt load of enrolled students, based on a campaign promise made during Bloomberg’s brief stint in the 2020 Democratic Primaries.
Last year, the former mayor of New York donated over $3 billion to charity, making him one of the most prolific American philanthropists that year.
SHARE This Latest Earmark In America’s Storied History Of Private Philanthropy…
It’s one of the best things an archaeologist can hope to find: a hoard of gold coins. One was dug up recently in a terracotta pot, meaning that, if one sustains the pun, they found a pot of gold.
They didn’t find it at the end of a rainbow, however, but it was at the ‘end’ of something—Asia—as the Ancient Greeks would have considered it.
Excavations among the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey, turned up the foundations of a house dating to the Achaemenid Persian Empire buried under another house built from the Hellenistic Period, or about 180 years later.
“The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Christopher Ratté, lead archaeologist on the project, told the New York Times. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”
The coins are known as darics, which stems from the name of the Emperor Darius I, or from ‘dari-‘ the root word for gold in the Persian language. Dating to the 5th century BCE, it was a time of great upheaval as Greek city-states fought against each other, against Persia, and sometimes on behalf of Persia against other Greeks, when mercenary soldiers made up key components of many major armies in Asia Minor.
The running hypothesis as to the coins’ provenance is that they were buried with the full intention of recovering them later. They probably represented savings, as each daric would be around one month’s pay. However, the fact that they were never dug up from their little hole in the corner of the house suggests the worst.
Greek soldiers shunned archery, so their share of the fighting was done at the tip of a spear. Furthermore, mercenary troops were even more likely to die than state troops, because the more of them that died during battle, the fewer people a ruler had to pay in the aftermath. As a result, they were often placed in the most precarious or dangerous positions on the battlefield.
“This is a find of the highest importance,” said Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the project. “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.”
Coins, or more specifically the designs stamped into them, are one of the great chronometers of ages past, and are routinely used to place the birth and decline of empires and states that used their own calendars onto our own measurements of time.
They also demonstrate what the most important elements of symbolism for the rulers of a state were. In his book Empires of the Steppes, author and numismatist Kenneth Harl routinely uses the images on minted coins as a way of judging whether a particular conquering band of Central Asian nomads sought to integrate themselves into the cultures they conquered or remain true to their nomadic heritage.
HIDING UNDERNEATH OUR FEET:
Is the king depicted with a sword or a bow? Is he wearing a crown or a felt cap? Are they stamped with agricultural imagery or hunting scenes? The answers can offer critical clues to historians as to how a civilization’s rulers saw themselves and wanted themselves to be seen by others.
In the case of the gold darics, they depict Darius I, the third emperor of the Persians (referred to by his subjects as the ‘shopkeeper’) kneeling and holding a bow and a spear.
Darics are very rare among ancient coins owning to Alexander the Great’s orders to melt them all down and re-stamp them into ones bearing his image after he conquered the Achaemenid Empire.
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A story coming from Maryland celebrates the depths of a young girl’s talents, as a 12-year-old fishing enthusiast received honors from the state.
Dubbed the “black belt of angling” Lucy Moore was awarded the Master Angler Award after a year of chasing rare catches with her dad.
Moore has been interested in fishing since age 3 when she earned the nickname the “Blue Gill Queen,” owing to an early childhood knack for catching the species. She loves exploring the outdoors and learning about the fish she’s chasing.
However, it’s much more than a recreational pursuit for her, and she’s darn good at it.
Reporting on Moore’s award, the Washington Post recounts a story of a fishing trip in the rain and fog on a lake in Kentucky as the girl and her father, Nick Perez, sought a rare and peculiar fish called a Musky.
On the last of 3 days of fishing, in the rain and muck, a tug on her line led Moore to reel in a 24-inch, or “trophy size” musky, one of the 60 different species one can seek to catch to become certified as a Master Angler in the state of Maryland.
“It was all that hard work: We’re talking almost 30 hours of fishing for that one fish and she was the one to catch it, which made it extra special,” Perez told the Post. “There’s guys I know that are 60 years old who have never caught one. And at the time she was almost 9.”
The FishMaryland program from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources manages the Master Angler certification as a way of celebrating the freshwater diversity of Maryland’s rivers, streams, and lakes. To earn the award, one must catch a trophy-size fish of 10 different species.
“Typically, people focus on two or three species and she’s got 10 that are all trophy size so it’s doubly impressive,” said Erik Zlokovitz, the recreational fisheries outreach coordinator for the Department of Natural Resources, who described the Master Angler Award as the “black belt” of fishing. “She’s probably outfishing many adults that are older and more experienced. It’s definitely more species of fish than I’ve caught over the past few years.”
INSPIRE YOUR KIDS: West Virginia Boy Celebrates Perfect Attendance from Kindergarten Through High School Graduation
Her award was presented during a ceremony at Bass Pro Shops, the beloved American outdoors outlet that presented Moore with custom fishing gear, a $250 gift card, and an opportunity to feed the fish in the tank—something she especially enjoyed owing to her desire to become a marine biologist.
She is an official advocate at Kids Can Fish, a non-profit founded by another young girl who believed it should be encouraged more among children.
MORE CHILD PRODIGIES: Look Out World: 12-year-old ‘Prodigy’ Finishes High School and Heads to College for Double Major
Driven in everything she does, Perez says, the honor roll student has already scoped out top marine biology programs in the US, and has her eyes set on the University of Miami.
SHARE The Story Of This Incredibly Talented And Driven Girl…
Quote of the Day: “When facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” – John Maynard Keynes
Photo by: Abdulla Faiz (CC license)
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?
A fourth-generation Black American farmer is bringing 21st-century agriculture into the lives of youth from marginalized communities, teaching them how to grow and sell nutritious food to the people who need it.
Marcus Carpenter is the founder of Route 1, an organization that focuses on introducing farming to people, and farmers to the people, through a variety of educational and business programs with a focus on addressing the challenges facing the poorest communities in Minnesota.
Carpenter grew up on 180 acres of farmland in Arkansas, bought by his great-grandmother Sally in 1914, who worked the land down a dirt road in a country house with 13 children.
Route 1 was the name of that old dirt road, but its approach to agriculture is anything but old.
The programs and facilities include the “Freight Farm” where hydroponic gardens grow a variety of food inside shipping containers equivalent to 4 acres of farmland. It includes the Emerging Farmers Institute, offering intensive virtual coursework on the fundamentals of farming, while also including sessions aimed at tackling the most commonly faced mental stressors of working in agriculture.
Additionally, Route 1 offers the Seeds to Success Youth Academy, where youth struggling in school can pursue agricultural excellence.
One such success story is Anthony Rasmussen—born into a low-income family, and raised by a single mom. Route 1 had made itself known inside the school district, and Rasmussen was enrolled in the academy.
He was part of the team that helped grow part of the 7,000 lbs of produce that Route 1 recently delivered to two local community organizations.
This experience sparked Rasmussen’s interest in pursuing a career in agriculture. He realized that farming is not just about being outdoors, which he loves, but also about helping people and making a difference.
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In Minnesota, 1 in 15 people experience food insecurity. The situation is worse for communities of color, with Black residents facing a staggering rate of 1 in 4. The Seeds to Success program wraps up on August 14th; most of the 7 students in the program come from these disadvantaged backgrounds.
Addressing this, Carpenter has incorporated a small variety of African crops that can tolerate Minnesota’s soil and weather, adding a cultural component that he believes helps drive home the point that working the land and reaping the rewards is the birthright and benefit of all mankind.
MORE INITIATIVES LIKE THIS: African Forest Farming Initiative Making A Difference to Thousands with Tree-Planting and Microlending
Route 1 also diligently supports a new sustainable business model known as “community-supported agriculture,” or CSA, by helping farmers in the Route 1 network access local businesses like restaurants and large-scale cafeterias to sell their produce.
SHARE This Innovative Approach To Ending Food Security In Minnesota…
The most prolific meteor shower of the year will be at its peak on the morning of August 12th, when 150 shooting stars can be seen per hour in the Northern Hemisphere.
The meteors are called the Perseids because they appear from the general direction of the constellation Perseus, but in more modern times have shifted to radiate on the border between Cassiopeia and Camelopardalis.
According to Valerie at Space Tourism Guide, the Perseids Meteor Shower is caused when the Earth passes through a stream of debris left by the Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.
Special conditions permit us to see the debris every August, even though the comet has a 133-year orbit around the Earth.
In a slight case of misfortune, there will be a quarter Moon in the sky that night, meaning in already light-polluted areas with few stars in the sky, the Moon will make it slightly more difficult to see the meteorites.
However if one can position themselves in a rural-enough area with dark skies and plenty of visible stars, our solitary satellite won’t dampen the meteor shower too much at all. In fact, it might even make for a spectacular image.
There are a few other additional events in the night sky this month, such as a close approach of the Moon and Mars on August 27th. They will appear just 5° apart, and both be present in the skies surrounding the constellation Taurus.
For those interested in learning more about their cosmic environment, or as a great crash course for little ones on how to find the Red Planet in the sky, this is a great opportunity.
On the YouTube channel Learn the Sky, there’s a great guide for how to find Taurus in the night sky. Convenient to this article, it’s just under Perseus where the meteor shower will arrive from this month. Also included in the Taurus sector is a famous deep-space object known from ancient times called the Pleides, also known as the Seven Sisters.
SHARE This Great Stargazing Opportunity With Your Friends On Social Media…
From Kansas comes the story of a quick-thinking rescue that hauled a 14-month-old toddler from a would-be tomb at the bottom of a drain pipe.
The terrifying ordeal was caught on camera and saw a Moundridge Police Department officer build on the spot a makeshift catchpole typically used for pulling varmints out of hard-to-reach places.
Secured under his shoulders, the loop of rope at the end of the catchpole was able to haul the boy, named Bently, out from where he was trapped 10 feet down a section of 12-inch-wide PVC pipe that had been buried vertically.
In certain fits of frustration, it’s entirely possible, especially in the South, that a parent should refer to a rambunctious and recalcitrant 2-year-old as a varmint. Fortunately for Bently, he was still the size of a varmint, and so the varmint-catching tech proved lifesaving.
The parents said they called 911 just before 2 p.m. when they realized Bently had fallen into the PVC hole.
“Looking down at him as he was screaming, he wanted out of there, he wanted help and you can’t do anything. Just complete helplessness,” Blake, the boy’s father, told the local news station covering the rescue. “It’s horrifying, it’s haunting, to feel so helpless knowing that your child is in serious need of help.”
When police, fire department, and EMS arrived at the family’s home in Moundridge, about 40 miles northwest of Wichita, Officer Ronnie Wagner had an idea. He obtained a long thin section of PVC from the paramedics, threaded a rope through the length of it, and tied a knot on one side.
GOD BLESS OUR FIRST RESPONDERS:
He was making a tool typically used by animal control officers and thought it would serve the same purpose here.
In dramatic footage of the rescue, the officers can be seen negotiating the loop of rope at the end of the pole around the boy before gently lifting him to safety after a 15 to 20-minute ordeal.
“We are relieved to report that the child, while understandably shaken, was unharmed,” the department said. Police thanked “all the first responders for their swift and effective action, which transformed a dangerous situation into a successful rescue.”
WATCH the rescue below…
SHARE This Dramatic Rescue With Your Friends On Social Media…
This year, GNN has featured a variety of stories showing how viral posts on social media do a world of good, all around the world.
Yet another entry in the series comes now from the Netherlands, where a 24-hour live stream of a seal rehab center went viral on social media 8 time zones away in Japan.
The Zeehonden Center in Pieterburen is one of the premier seal hospitals in Northern Europe. They take in sick or injured seals, and handle them in such a way as to maximize the chances of preserving their wild instincts.
This includes rehabilitation from injuries, and fit to purpose, the center has a large pool for young seals to swim in safely. The center set up a 24-hour live stream—a recently popularized tool in the zookeeper and conservationists toolkit to help with outreach and education.
Last Thursday, the Japanese X account @hokahoka_times shared the livestream of the Pieterburen Seal Center with the text: “Let’s all watch a seal sanctuary in the Netherlands for 24 hours.”
That message has now been shared 30,000 times and reached 14 million people.
On the first day, hundreds of additional viewers tuned into the live stream, and donations flooded into the recuse center.
“It was convenient that the seals were just fed, so that viewers in Japan could see that their donations were going well,” says Marco Boshoven, spokesperson for the Seal Center, in a translated statement.
THINK SOCIAL MEDIA IS A NET NEGATIVE?
Boshoven told Nu.nl that the center received in a single day as many donations as they typically receive in a month, so the digital outreach team got to work trying to cater to the Japanese, who by the next day were arriving digitally to watch the seals by the thousands.
“We are answering their questions via a translation program, so there’s an educational side to it as well,” Boshoven said.
わちゃわちゃアザラシ幼稚園🦭 https://t.co/4AKkVXDnef pic.twitter.com/bmM5UH2CIu
— 楠葉さわ🐹🐭 (@kusunohasawa) August 2, 2024
As with many viral events on social media, the popularity of the seals took on a life of its own, with some visual artists quickly sketching up some fan art of the seals.
Boshoven learned that the Japanese affectionately refer to seals in their country as “tea leaves.”
“One of the people we spoke to told me a tea leaf floating upright in the water is a symbol of good fortune.”
“When seals are upright in the water they look a bit like that,” he said, explaining the connection.
HERE’s the live stream…
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Quote of the Day: “Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aesop
Photo by: Jairph
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?
A doctor who treats children in Ecuador is currently facing a 30-year prison sentence for creating explicit content involving minors—and his prosecution is thanks to Rosco, the electronic sniffer dog.
Not a robotic dog, but a dog trained to detect the chemicals applied onto the surfaces of data storage devices, even SD cards no larger than a pinky nail.
Rosco hails from Rogers County Oklahoma, where he and his partner Lieutenant John Haning work in the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
Another K9 in the task force, a black Labrador named Ruger, last year sniffed out a laptop loaded with evidence hidden under the cushion of a sofa.
“If you overlook one cell phone, one computer, micro-SD card, or one hidden camera somewhere in the room, that could lead to another victim or that could lead us to put this perpetrator away for a long period of time,” said Haning.
While typically handling cases in the US, their reputation for success has earned them calls to catch child predators internationally. In the Ecuador case, they were asked to join a big police raid, and Officer Haning told local news that whenever called upon, they answer.
“When they called up and said ‘Hey we need your help.’ We have a high-profile doctor in Ecuador who’s hands-on in creating content that he’s sharing on the internet internationally,’ We jumped at it,” Haning told KJRH News.
On Jan 19th, 23 the FCSO Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force assisted the Fairfield CO Sheriff’s Office in the execution of a search at a home during a child exploitation investigation. Franklin County K9 Ruger located a laptop hidden under the cushion of a sofa. pic.twitter.com/7em6IWU6Ha
— Franklin County Sheriff’s Office (@OHFCSO) January 20, 2023
After police kicked down the doors, Rosco and Haning followed up looking for any hidden storage devices.
OTHER POWERFUL NOSES: K9 Officer Rescues Lost Non-Verbal Child by Following the Boy’s Scent in Reverse to Find His Home
Then, Rosco’s secondary training—being a support dog—kicked in.
A 15-year-old girl with special needs was present in the house, and was completely out of control and crying. Suddenly, a big blonde pooch walked over to comfort her and the girl calmed down almost immediately.
OTHER CANINE HEROES: Dog Named Hero Saves Owner’s Life for Days, Fighting Off Cold and Coyotes and Getting Help
Rosco also provides comfort to Haning and his fellow officers who admit they’re forced to deal with really ‘heavy’ work. So, when the 80-pound blondie wants to get in their laps, it lightens their loads, too.
It’s a story that reinforces the notion that not all heroes wear capes, as well as introduces the notion that among those heroes who don’t wear capes, some don’t even need to catch bad guys—they just need to sniff out a motherboard.
SHARE The Story Of These Heroic Hounds And Their Ability To Gather Evidence…
Is the above image the future of medicine? In it, Dr. Luo Qingquan uses a sophisticated control center to guide a set of robotic surgery tools to remove a tumor from a patient’s lung 3,000 miles away.
Dr. Luo was seated in the Shanghai Chest Hospital on China’s Pacific Coast, while the patient was anesthetized on a bed inside a hospital in Kashgar, Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
The Chinese-made 5G Medbot allowed Luo to transmit his precision and decades of experience instantaneously across three time zones, ushering in an era of telesurgery that may save thousands in rural areas where lack of expert medical staff may have been a death sentence in previous years.
According to Shanghai Daily, the Shanghai Chest Hospital is the nation’s first medical facility carrying out robot-assisted surgery, and it is also the facility carrying out the largest quantity of such surgeries in China.
The global shortage of specialist surgeons is a major impediment to medical advancements in low and middle-income countries. With just over 1.1 million surgeons, but only half as many anesthesiologists, there really are shortages in high-income countries as well, but one review from the Lancet calculated that for every 100,000 people in low and middle-income countries, there are just 0.7 specialist surgeons, compared to 5.5 in high-income countries.
A surgeon in China successfully removed a lung tumor from a patient while being 5000 km away. The doctor operated the machine remotely from his office in Shanghai, while the patient was in Kashgar, located on the opposite side of the country. The entire operation was completed in… pic.twitter.com/8VQrpnvtS0
— Naresh Nambisan | നരേഷ് (@nareshbahrain) August 2, 2024
48% of the world’s population enjoys the service of just 20% of the global surgical workforce, the paper continues.
MORE MEDICAL MIRACLES:
It takes over a decade to become a trained surgeon, but a robot can be shipped and installed in just a few months, allowing surgeons in richer countries to perform certain surgeries in poorer countries, or surgeons in richer areas to perform operations in poorer areas in the same country. In either case it’s a truly revolutionary development.
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England was rocked recently by a spate of riots, vandalism, and violence partly targeting Muslims, but one man went viral on social media for proving that such deplorable behavior is the exception, not the rule, in Jolly Olde England.
The mosque in Southport was burned down last Tuesday, but local Bricklayer Tony Hill has been labeled a “legend” for helping the Southport community rebuild it, laying bricks in blazing heat with astonishing speed and efficiency.
In a video clip on X that went viral, Hill can be seen sweating and smearing mortar while attempting to explain his motives. The quote below is edited to reflect his thoughts, which may have been difficult for US readers to understand
“We spoke to the company we work for, and the [other building crews] were coming down, so we just joined them. And yeah, just try and get it done before someone comes back.”
“We just really want to get this up so that the community is safe,” he told a person on the scene interviewing him. “It’s just a community isn’t it? You can tell by… just looking at everyone here, it’s quite diverse.”
The mosque was burned down after three young women were stabbed to death on Monday.
“Rioters in Southport had been triggered by an avalanche of misinformation on social media, in particular after a website falsely claimed that the killer of the young girls was a migrant from a majority Muslim country on the MI6 watchlist,” according to the London Economic.
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Despite the racial charge to the issue, Bricklayer Hill was generous and diplomatic. When asked if he had a message to those who tore the wall down, he replied sympathetically, “Get your facts straight before you start doing stuff. Facebook’s a dangerous thing.”
Hill hoped to have the wall finished in the next few hours, and said if he had to rebuild it again, he wouldn’t hesitate.
Viewed 5.4 million times on X, commenters celebrated Hill demonstrating what “being British is all about.”
The Conservative MP Saqib Bhatti called him a “legend”. The director of Islamic Relief UK, Tufail Hussain, agreed with that description, saying that “Tony Hill and all that have turned up today to support the local community in Southport are absolute legends.” Another X user remarked that “we should all be a bit more Tony Hill.”
WATCH the viral video below…
Spare a thought for Tony Hill who has been working at break neck speed in blazing hot sun to rebuild the Southport mosque wall before the far right can return.
— Barney Davis (@BarneyDavisIND) July 31, 2024
He said: “And if we have to build it again afterwards we will do just that.” pic.twitter.com/e0IplQreGQ
SHARE This Inspiring Community Response To Tragedy And Brighten Up Social Media…
In 2019, GNN reported that country star Brad Paisley had broken ground on a free grocery store that would allow residents of Nashville suffering from food insecurity to ‘shop’ with dignity and variety.
Now, after five years of unexpected challenges, Pasiley is looking to expand by building another location in North Nashville.
“We’re going to open another location as soon as we get all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted,” Paisley told the invited guests at last month’s CEO Roundtable awards, according to Nashville Business Journal.
“It’s groceries with dignity,” Paisley said. “We’ve all seen the situations where people are willing to go get a handout in a brown bag from the back of a truck. We envisioned something completely different, where all of the sting of the indignity, that comes with really your kids seeing you in this precarious position.”
On March 12th, 2020, The Store by Brad Paisley opened its doors, only to face immediate and unprecedented challenges. Just ten days before its opening, Nashville was hit by a deadly tornado outbreak, leaving over 70,000 residents without power and marking it as the sixth costliest tornado in U.S. history. Amidst this chaos, The Store, though working at limited capacity, sprang into action to assist those affected.
Days after the tornado, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a nationwide shutdown, including Tennessee’s shelter-in-place order. This necessitated an urgent pivot from The Store’s initial model. Brad, his wife Kimberly, and the team developed a pandemic program overnight, offering curbside pickup and home delivery services, particularly to the elderly, operating in this manner for the next 17 months.
Despite the challenges, it fulfilled Brad and Kim’s ideal of introducing their children to the idea of service.
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“We’ve got to get them into service and get them out of their bubble, and help them understand that there are hungry people in the world,” Kimberly Williams-Paisley shared on The Store’s website.
The Store gradually expanded and expanded, including comprehensive wrap-around solutions such as counseling, budgeting, cooking classes, and even literacy, pet care, back-to-school support, and music therapy.
MORE MUSICAL PHILANTHROPY: Coldplay’s New Album Is Made of Plastic Collected from Rivers by The Ocean Cleanup
In November 2023 it added a toy store just in time to help stock the Christmas trees of the 400 families the Store routinely serves.
“The emotional aspect of being able to give your child something your child wanted versus just something to sort of get you through the holidays, that’s such a load off the minds of somebody who maybe didn’t think they were going to be able to do that,” Paisley said.
WATCH The story below…
SHARE The Paisleys’ Incredible Efforts Of Giving Back To Their Community…
Quote of the Day: “Psychology regards all symptoms to be expressing the right thing in the wrong way.” – James Hillman
Photo by: Jr Korpa
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?
Woe betide anyone who plans road construction in Rome.
In late July, news headlines brought the world up to speed regarding ongoing excavations of the previous center of the Catholic Papacy—the Patriarchio, a palace of Papal authority dating back to the late Roman Empire.
Discovered during roadwork in the plaza in front of the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, a series of walls are believed to represent defense works that protected the Patriarchio in the heart of the Eternal City.
Finished in 313 and known as the Lateran Palace, the site served as the seat of the papacy following Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan that promoted religious tolerance of Christianity across the Empire.
The complex of religious and administrative buildings gradually expanded outward until a comparatively brief period when the Papacy moved to Avignon in France.
“This is an extraordinarily important find for the city of Rome and its mediaeval history, as no extensive archaeological excavations have ever been carried out in the square in modern times,” the Italian Ministry of Culture, Gennaro Sangiulliano said.
“Every single stone speaks to us and tells its story: thanks to these important discoveries, archaeologists will be able to learn more about our past,” he added later.
2025 will herald a year-long pilgrimage event in Rome known shorthand as the Jubilee, and the excavations in the plaza in front of St. John Lateran were part of major renovations for the event, during which the city expects 30 million visitors.
WHAT LIES BENEATH THE ETERNAL CITY:
By the time the Papacy returned to Rome, the Lateran Palace was in disrepair and had suffered from fires and earthquakes. The defensive walls were ordered to be knocked down, and Pope Gregory XI moved the site of the palace to the Vatican where it remains today.
In the 16th century, Pope Sixtus VI arranged for the palace to be restored, and today it blends easily into the historic Roman cityscape. Three monuments survived and were incorporated into the building built by Domenico Fontana in 1589 opposite St. John Lateran. These monuments are the Scala Santa and the Chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum.
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In winter of 2022, Maine was accorded the honor of a visit from a Stellar’s sea eagle, a truly incredible raptor with an 8-foot-wingspan that may have been diverted from its migratory path as far away as Russia.
Now, it’s the turn of this strange, long-necked “devil bird,” to send the state’s birdwatching community into a flurry of activity, as it’s the first-ever sighting in Maine’s history.
Related to the double-crested cormorant, this is an anhinga, a piscivorous bird native to South and Central America. Its breeding range extends into Florida, the Gulf Coast, and even as far as the Carolinas.
The out-of-place creature started making waves on July 23, when a woman posted a photo of it in a local Facebook group after seeing it loitering near a pond in Somerville, about 70 miles north of Portland.
Tabatha Holt did her own research and cleverly concluded it wasn’t a cormorant, as some in the comment section had suggested, but rather an anhinga “a little out of her usual range.”
At least 80 people were able to go and take a look at the anhinga, including Doug Hitchcox, staff naturalist for the Maine Audubon Society.
BIRDING STORIES TO PERK UP YOUR FEATHERS:
“Climate change is a big driver in northward expansion of bird ranges, and this fits within that pattern,” Hitchcox tells the Portland Press Herald. “It is definitely a factor, but it’s hard to know with a sample size of one. A lot of these waterbirds have weird expansions and retractions.”
Indeed, Hitchcox described this time of year as the “rarity season” when “just about anything can show up,” he said, this time to Bangor News Daily.
Their name comes from the Indigenous Tupi people of Brazil, according to Sarah Kuta of Smithsonian, who called them “devil birds” or “evil spirit of the woods.” Their no doubt striking appearance has also led to them being dubbed “water turkeys” and “snake birds” because of the way their long, black, serpentine necks seem to move like snakes through the water.
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At Georgia Tech, an incredible piece of biotechnology has cured one lucky child in a groundbreaking new treatment for a rare birth defect of the windpipe.
Partnering with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the invention is a 3D-printed tracheal splint, which has allowed 4-year-old Justice Altidore to leap into preschool with all the gusty enthusiasm of a normal child.
About 1 in 2,100 children like Justice are born with tracheomalacia (TM), the most common inherited birth defect of the windpipe, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
TM occurs when cartilage in the trachea, or windpipe, is weak or floppy, causing the windpipe’s walls to collapse and restrict breathing. Treatments are by no means a sure thing, and much of a child’s early life with TM involves labored breathing and being put on a ventilator.
The Georgia Tech splints are made of bioabsorbable material, and hold the trachea in place like a medic would splint a bone. The cartilage eventually develops, and the splints are ultimately absorbed.
Children’s pediatric cardiologist Dr. Kevin Maher and Dr. Steven Goudy, a pediatric otolaryngologist, oversaw Altidore and three other children receive custom tracheal splints for an FDA-approved expanded access trial.
All four have seen substantial improvements in their respiratory capabilities, and the unprecedented results suggest a new era of care for the narrow field has arrived.
It’s not the first time that 3D printing has been used to help tracheal recovery.
CHILDREN’S DISEASE CURED: Teen with Incredibly Rare Genetic Condition is Cured in World First By British Doctors
In March, GNN reported that a biotech company had become the first and only one in the world to produce a bio-3D-printed windpipe that was successfully transplanted into a human body.
Nasal stem cells and cartilage cells were obtained from other patients who underwent other procedures, and these were replicated and combined with polycaprolactone (PCL) for structural support as well as a special ink made from living cells to make the windpipe, or trachea.
MORE INCREDIBLE BIOTECH: Incredible Internal Cochlear Implants on the Way as Massachusetts Engineers Overcame All Obstacles
The transplant procedure was performed at St. Mary’s Hospital in Seoul on a woman in her 50s who lost part of her own trachea during thyroid removal surgery. The one-of-a-kind 3D printer, designed with over a decade of research and testing, was provided by the company T&R Biofab.
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A team at Northwestern University has come up with the term “dancing molecules” to describe an invention of synthetic nanofibers which they say have the potential to quicken the regeneration of cartilage damage beyond what our body is capable of.
The moniker was coined back in November 2021, when the same team introduced an injection of these molecules to repair tissues and reverse paralysis after severe spinal cord injuries in mice.
Now they’ve applied the same therapeutic strategy to damaged human cartilage cells. In a new study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the treatment activated the gene expression necessary to regenerate cartilage within just four hours.
And, after only three days, the human cells produced protein components needed for cartilage regeneration, something humans can’t do in adulthood.
The conceptual mechanisms of the dancing molecules work through cellular receptors located on the exterior of the cell membrane. These receptors are the gateways for thousands of compounds that run a myriad of processes in biology, but they exist in dense crowds constantly moving about on the cell membrane.
The dancing molecules quickly form synthetic nanofibers that move according to their chemical structure. They mimic the extracellular matrix of the surrounding tissue, and by ‘dancing’ these fibers can keep up with the movement of the cell receptors. By adding biological signaling receptors, the whole assemblage can functionally move and communicate with cells like natural biology.
“Cellular receptors constantly move around,” said Northwestern Professor of Materials Sciences Samuel Stupp, who led the study. “By making our molecules move, ‘dance’ or even leap temporarily out of these structures, known as supramolecular polymers, they are able to connect more effectively with receptors.”
The target of their work is the nearly 530 million people around the globe living with osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease in which tissues in joints break down over time, resulting in one of the most common forms of morbidity and disability.
“Current treatments aim to slow disease progression or postpone inevitable joint replacement,” Stupp said. “There are no regenerative options because humans do not have an inherent capacity to regenerate cartilage in adulthood.”
In the new study, Stupp and his team looked to the receptors for a specific protein critical for cartilage formation and maintenance. To target this receptor, the team developed a new circular peptide that mimics the bioactive signal of the protein, which is called transforming growth factor beta-1 (TGFb-1).
Northwestern U. Press then reported that the researchers incorporated this peptide into two different molecules that interact to form supramolecular polymers in water, each with the same ability to mimic TGFb-1.
The researchers designed one supramolecular polymer with a special structure that enabled its molecules to move more freely within the large assemblies. The other supramolecular polymer, however, restricted molecular movement.
ALSO EXCITING: How Lizards Regenerate their Tails Could Lead to Arthritis Treatments: Key Cartilage Cells Identified
“We wanted to modify the structure in order to compare two systems that differ in the extent of their motion,” Stupp said. “The intensity of supramolecular motion in one is much greater than the motion in the other one.”
Although both polymers mimicked the signal to activate the TGFb-1 receptor, the polymer with rapidly moving molecules was much more effective. In some ways, they were even more effective than the protein that activates the TGFb-1 receptor in nature.
“After three days, the human cells exposed to the long assemblies of more mobile molecules produced greater amounts of the protein components necessary for cartilage regeneration,” Stupp said.
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“With the success of the study in human cartilage cells, we predict that cartilage regeneration will be greatly enhanced when used in highly translational pre-clinical models,” Stupp said. “It should develop into a novel bioactive material for regeneration of cartilage tissue in joints.”
“We are beginning to see the tremendous breadth of conditions that this fundamental discovery on ‘dancing molecules’ could apply to,” Stupp said. “Controlling supramolecular motion through chemical design appears to be a powerful tool to increase efficacy for a range of regenerative therapies.”
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