For 6 years, Jessika Gauvin used alcohol and drugs as a way to escape life and ignore past trauma.
But in April 2018, Jessika wandered into her local woods, in Moncton, New Brunswick and found being around nature gave her a “new perspective” on life.
The Canadian is now five years sober and dedicates her time to finding natural ways to reduce stress and trauma through mushrooms and other wild edibles.
The full-time forager even uses blended-down black trumpet mushroom as a spice for all of her dishes due to its high levels of nutrients like protein and potassium, as well as a unique kind of fiber called beta-glucan.
Part of her full-time occupation is teaching other adults and children how to pick mushrooms safely.
“Mushrooms saved my life,” says Jessika simply. “I used to spend every paycheck on getting wasted. Now I’m debt-free and have discovered what mother nature can offer. I now use fungi to treat my trauma.”
Jessika began drinking at an early age with friends, but the dependence grew as she started a family.
In March 2012, her first son Noah, now 11, was born at Moncton Hospital, with a second son Jasper being born in the same hospital just one year later.
She suffered from post-natal depression that led to 6 years serious of substance abuse when she regularly felt “incredibly tired and lonely” trying to raise both children, and turned to drugs and alcohol to relieve stress.
As the children grew up, Jessika noticed her dependency on alcohol left her sad and anxious “every hour of every day.”
After finally becoming sick of her own behavior, Jessika took herself to Moncton forest for guidance and dug her bare feet into the soil to connect with nature. On that day, she recalls, she decided to tackle her problems head-on with nature as a guide.
It’s not a new idea; the Japanese have been ‘forest bathing’ for many years as a way to reduce anxiety, and ‘nature prescriptions’ have become a very common recommendation from physicians seeing depressed individuals.
She educated herself on fungi like Reishi mushrooms—which contain a high concentration of naturally sedative compounds that she says helped induce calmness.
Jessika reborn as a mushroom forager – SWNS
“Reishi mushrooms are incredibly beneficial to those with anxiety,” said Jessika, and in fact, they are often sold as a nootropic, or neuro-cognitive enhancing nutriceutical.
“My anxiety drastically reduced and it was all free. I was saving so much money every month,” she remembers.
Jessika soon fell ”completely in love” with mushrooms and spent day and night educating herself on how to safely pick and identify them. She now spends three hours in the woods every day and offers multiple classes on folklore medicine, herbal remedies, and mushroom identification.
White's seahorse released in Australia - Supplied- by Dr. .David Harasti
White’s seahorse released in Australia – Supplied to ABC News by Dr. David Harasti.
Australia continues to rehabilitate its populations of White’s seahorse, an “Australian icon” and the only such creature on the nation’s endangered list.
In May, GNN reported that hundreds of White’s seahorses were released into the waters north of Newcastle into specially-made “hotels” as part of the largest release of captive-bred seahorses in history.
Now, as part of another reintroduction, a tide pool north of Sydney Harbor in a place called Clontarf will become the latest release site for these tiny sea creatures.
The seahorses were bred at Sea Life Aquarium in Sydney, and the Aquarium’s curator Laura Simmons says the release is just one of several already done and several more planned for 2024.
Also known as the New Holland seahorse, these small animals display a number of very interesting characteristics, including ovoviviparous reproduction whereby the female creates the eggs and uses an ovipositor to place them in the male’s brood pouch where they are fertilized and carried until birth.
Simmons said this release at Clontarf is the sixth release this year, following up on previous successes at Chowder Bay in Sydney Harbour, Botany Bay, and Little Manly Beach totaling over 400 individual seahorses.
Swimmers at Clontarf may be able to see the seahorses clinging to the habitat net in the tidal pool, but are encouraged not to disturb the animals.
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In Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik, a local man known as the “bike whisperer” works to recover stolen bikes, but he never gets angry or calls the police on the thieves.
In fact, the police call him when someone comes to report a missing bike. In a country with only a single high-security penitentiary, Bjartmar Leósson is a shining example of criminal rehab over criminal justice.
For the self-confessed “bike nerd” it all started when his bike was stolen years ago and came to believe it and other thefts like it were centered around a Reykjavik homeless shelter. He would see police cars driving past what were obviously stolen bikes out front and doing nothing.
“I was very angry, they were angry. But then I started to think: OK, it doesn’t matter, I can scream until I’m blue in the face, nothing’s going to change,” Mr. Leósson told The Guardian. “So I decided to try to level with them and just talk to them.”
From that point, the one-time thieves at the shelter became accomplices in a city-wide bike theft bust, with the unhoused helping to track down stolen bikes and recovering them for people reporting their bike stolen on Leósson’s Facebook group, Bicycle stuff etc lost, found or stolen, which has over 14,000 members.
Reykjavik is no Amsterdam, and only single-digit percentages of trips are made on bikes by the city’s 140,000 residents. But a drop in bike theft from 569 to 404 over 2 years, and a government program to create off-thoroughfare cycling routes is seeing that number rise.
“Bjartmar Leósson is doing a great job finding and collecting bikes that have been stolen,” said the Reykjavík police chief, Guðmundur Pétur Guðmundsson. “Police often guide victims of theft to various sales groups and his [Facebook] group just to increase the likelihood to find the bike a gain.”
In Leósson’s experience, bike thefts are primarily driven by addiction; people stealing them to try and afford to pay for drugs. According to the Guardian, he has helped some of these folks find pathways to recovery.
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Quote of the Day: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” – James M. Barrie
Photo by: Jamie Street
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As the sun rises, the ethereal song of a wood thrush echoes through Bourdon Maple Farm’s 55-hectare (135-acre) forest in Woodstock. A bright scarlet tanager wings about the canopy as hungry yellow-bellied sapsuckers drill into tree bark.
At the height of maple sugaring season, birds provide a comforting soundtrack for the farm’s head of operations, sales, and marketing, Meg Emmons.
“A lot of times, the birds are my only company out here in the woods,” she said, smiling at a nearby black-capped chickadee. But the forest’s most vocal residents are also some of its most vulnerable.
Forest birds thrive in diverse habitats that consist of young, middle-aged, and old-growth trees. Most trees in New England, however, are uniformly middle-aged after regrowth following widespread clearing for agriculture in the 1800s. Modern development pressure continues to convert woodlands into residential areas, parking lots, and other unforested landscapes, further reducing the amount of habitat available.
As a result, many forest bird populations have plummeted. Wood thrush populations, for instance, more than halved in 50 years due to forest loss that increased nest exposure to predators and parasites. Vermont’s Wildlife Action Plan identifies it as a high-priority “species of greatest conservation need.”
Wood thrush. Image courtesy of Michael Parr / American Bird Conservancy.
Recent technological advances have resulted in an explosion of the maple syrup industry over the past 15 years in the United States and Canada. But with the growth of production comes the temptation to favor sugar maple (Acer saccharum) trees at the expense of other tree species in the “sugarbush,” as a stand of tapped sugar maples is called.
Some maple producers operate with an “I tend to the trees I tap” mentality, prioritizing maples and minimizing competition among maple trees and other vegetation. But removing too many non-maple trees puts the health of the entire forest, and hence the sugar maples themselves, at risk. In extreme cases, producers remove all non-maples growing beneath the forest canopy.
The eponymous owner of Bourdon Maple Farm, Don Bourdon, once met a producer who regularly cleared his woods with a lawn mower, cutting any species seemingly getting in the way of his maples’ success. But when maples surpass 90% of the sugarbush composition, producers have effectively created a monoculture, experts say.
Calling a sugarbush a monoculture may sound strange, as the term is usually reserved for industrial agriculture, such as giant fields of corn, soy or wheat that now occupy what used to be diversified forests or prairies. By comparison, monocultures in the maple industry are less common and less harmful — sugarbushes tend to keep the forest intact, which is far better than clearing it to plant annual crops — but growing trees in a monoculture still limits the forest’s ability to support wildlife and withstand ecological disturbances.
Encouraging a diversity of species in tended fields or forests is a major tenet of agroecology, which treats agriculture more like a functioning ecosystem than a food factory. Encompassing an array of techniques from organic farming to integrated pest management and agroforestry, agroecology is also a top climate solution since it sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2022.
Bourdon Maple Farm’s flora exhibits a diversity of levels, from the forest floor to its mid-story and canopy. Image courtesy of Meg Emmons/Bourdon Maple Farm.
Along with a decline in crop or tree diversity, the diversity and abundance of birds decrease when, as in the case of maple monocultures, sugar maple trees exceed 75% of a forest. So, the conservation nonprofit Audubon Vermont focused on developing a solution and worked with the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association and the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation to launch the Bird-Friendly Maple Project in 2014. The program celebrates producers who safeguard and enhance forest bird habitats and provides a label that customers can look for when buying syrup.
For a maple producer to earn the bird-friendly label, they must commit to a management plan that ensures a future sugarbush composition of no more than 75% sugar maples. In addition to enriching tree species diversity, bird-friendly producers must improve the structural complexity of their sugarbush with management objectives that aim to have vegetation covering at least 25% of the forest’s understory (the zone comprising the first 5 feet above the forest floor, where flowers, ferns, and shrubs are likely to grow) and its midstory (trees and shrubs standing between 5 and 30 feet in height). Eventually, participating farms’ sugarbushes should look like a wall of green in summer, with vegetation providing optimal nesting and foraging opportunities from the ground to the forest canopy.
“A messy forest is a little harder to work in. As a sugar maker, it can be difficult to walk out and tap your trees if you’re working through brambles and snags — but it’s good for the wildlife,” said Aaron Wightman, lifelong maple producer and co-director of the Cornell Maple Program, where researchers also explore additional sugarbush diversification efforts such as growing nutrient-rich forest products like berries and nuts under the forest canopy, and the harvesting of alternative tree syrups. “Retaining at least 25% non-maple species and creating structural diversity in a sugarbush are powerful strategies for bolstering the populations of birds and other forest species,” Wightman told Mongabay.
With diversity comes resilience. In addition to better supporting wildlife, a bird-friendly forest is less susceptible to threats including pests, disease and extreme weather events, owing to a diverse community of trees and because birds are voracious predators that eat many bugs that may damage trees or spread tree diseases.
Audubon Vermont conservation biologist Steve Hagenbuch compares diversifying a sugarbush to navigating the stock market. “If you put all of your funds in one account, and something bad happens to that account, you’re in trouble. But if you diversify your portfolio and you have it spread out, then you can handle something negative hitting one part of your investment,” he said.
In August, Audubon Vermont, along with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and the University of Vermont (UVM), wrapped up a study launched in 2020 to quantify how forest bird communities respond to different habitat characteristics in actively managed sugarbushes. The data will be used to update and refine the Bird-Friendly Maple Project’s sugarbush management guidelines.
Preliminary results gathered in 2020 and 2021 from field surveys of breeding birds, foliage- and litter-dwelling arthropods, and vegetation across 14 active sugarbushes in Vermont—nine of which were enrolled in the Bird-Friendly Maple Project—suggest that the program’s current management guidelines need little modification. Cultivating diverse vegetation and structure in a sugarbush allows the landscape to better meet the needs of a wider range of forest birds, supporting bird diversity and abundance. For example, increases in low woody vegetation and sapling richness were linked to a significant increase in the abundance of three species that prefer to nest in saplings and shrubs: mourning warblers (Geothlypis philadelphia), chestnut-sided warblers (Setophaga pensylvanica) and black-throated blue warblers (Setophaga caerulescens).
Scarlet tanager. Photo by Jen Goellnitz via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Leaf litter depth proved to be one of a few especially important habitat features that benefit all forest birds. Many bird species rely on this rich carpet of organic material, whether for searching out insects and seeds, snagging twigs and leaves to build nests or camouflaging themselves among the debris to avoid nearby predators. Nonnative earthworms, however, can deplete this valuable leaf litter layer. Audubon Vermont will likely incorporate additional requirements into their bird-friendly management guidelines based on the study’s findings, such as paying attention to the presence and distribution of earthworms in the sugarbush.
UVM researchers gathered additional field data in 2022 and 2023 and continue to build upon the study’s evaluation of bird-friendly management practices. Liza Morse, a UVM Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation investigates the link between maple sugaring and sugarbush biodiversity and resilience, assisted with all four years of data collection and plans to interview participating sugar makers about their specific management approaches.
“Current bird-friendly targets are based on best practices for forest management in general, but the hope is that we can drill down on the drivers of change in a sugarbush and what they mean for birds,” Morse said. “Programs like the Bird-Friendly Maple Project are only going to improve as they are evaluated by research and continue to self-reflect.”
Bourdon Maple Farm’s Meg Emmons first reached out to Hagenbuch in late 2021 when she noticed the Bird-Friendly Maple Project logo on other producers’ websites. After conducting a thorough analysis of their 10,000-tap operation the following spring, Hagenbuch concluded that to be recognized by the program, they simply needed to add a bird-friendly focus to the forest management plan they had already been following for four decades.
Their forest is a work in progress — sugar maples still account for about 90% of the larger trees in the sugarbush — but their commitment to diversification earned their bird-friendly title. After all, maple producers work in “forest time,” meaning it takes years, even decades, to achieve change.
Emmons and Bourdon support birds and the rest of their forest ecosystem by thinning sugar maple density in their woods, fighting invasive plants like honeysuckle to encourage growth of native species, and leaving dead trees on the ground or standing upright for hole-nesting birds like woodpeckers to use. Between May and mid-July, they avoid thinning trees and other practices that could disturb birds during their nesting season.
While walking through the sugarbush, Emmons spotted a long, thick tree branch that had fallen on some tapping equipment. “We’ll leave that for the birds,” she said as she tossed it aside.
Bottles of Bourdon Maple Farm syrup bearing the bird friendly logo. Image by Nina Foster for Mongabay.
Mr. Bourdon is just one of 90 Vermont maple producers who enthusiastically joined the Bird-Friendly Maple Project, which is now being replicated in New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. Across all participating sugarbushes, there are now approximately 7,284 hectares (18,000 acres) of forest managed with birds in mind, thanks to the program.
And birds aren’t the only winners. Bird-friendly producers can brand their products with the program’s label showcasing the scarlet tanager (Piranga olivacea), a species that’s one of the effort’s big beneficiaries. This attractive logo is a visual recognition of their sustainable maple operations and attracts new customers and business opportunities.
For Bourdon and Emmons, the label presents an exciting opportunity to keep up with the resurgence of interest in local, sustainable food products and to educate their customers about conservation efforts in maple production. On sugarbush tours, they distribute a maple bingo game with a prompt that encourages kids (and adults) to look and listen for birds. Emmons has met birders who are thrilled to learn that maple syrup producers like them are playing an active role in supporting wild bird populations.
“People really value it,” said Emmons. “They’re supporting environmentally friendly products and causes through socially conscious shopping.”
A Massachusetts mail carrier recently swapped delivering the Globe for saving lives after following his instincts at the sight of a meandering child.
The postal worker of eight years said he was in the right place at the right time after a child managed to somehow get out of a daycare facility in Salem, Massachusetts.
Police say the three-year-old was wandering around sidewalks for about a half-hour before David Moulton saw him, realized something was wrong, and called 911.
“I just scooped him up before he got into the street over there,” Mr. Moulton told CBS News, indicating to reporters the busy thoroughfare of Congress Street. “He’s got no shoes and no jacket on, it’s like, this isn’t right. I’m wearing four layers of clothing you know.”
“He ran past me this way first in the park. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, I thought he was playing with kids or something like that, and then all of a sudden, he zipped by me again, I thought ‘he’s heading to a busy street,'” said Moulton.
Salem Community Child Care runs a very busy operation, and neighbors who now routinely call Moulton a hero while he delivers the mail, also told CBS the facility is always busy.
As for Moulton, like all heroes without capes, he doesn’t take much note of the new title, and instead calmly considers that God works in mysterious ways.
WATCH The story below from CBS News… For those outside US, watch HERE…
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An Alabama Uber driver should be on track for a stellar 2024 after doing “something good” and returning $8,000 cash a hopeful teenager had left in his vehicle.
Esbon Kamau has been an Uber driver for 4 years on and off, and the father of five really connected with a young client Alex Tisdale.
“He told me how his dad is proud of him and how he’s also very proud of him. And he said something which makes me feel very good,” Kamau said.
His dad had given Alex $8,000 cash to buy a new motorcycle, the teen explained over the course of a 15-minute ride to John Hawkins Parkway in Hoover, Alabama.
Dropping off Alex, Kamau was heading to retrieve another rider when he noticed a red, Christmas-themed bag in the back of the car, which he realized was filled with “quite a lot of money,” but reported it missing through the Uber app immediately.
Meanwhile, a young Mr. Tisdale was frantically retracing his steps. Eventually, he also reported the cash missing, at which point the Uber app connected the two once again, and Kamau headed back over to Alex’s position.
For the pooches and purr-babies in the SPCA shelter of Adams County Pennsylvania, Christmas came early.
By Saturday two days before Christmas, every last one of them had found a new owner, leaving the kennels vacant on Christmas Day for the first time in 47 years of operations.
The staff says one stray cat arrived on Saturday night after the team took the photograph celebrating above.
“To say that we are beyond excited is an understatement! The staff and volunteers have worked VERY hard to take care of the animals in our care and to make sure they got adopted to the right home!” the team wrote on Facebook.
“This year we have adopted out 598 animals and reunited 125 strays with their owners!”
But this triumph isn’t just good for the dogs and cats who got to spend Christmas with their new moms and dads, but for dogs and cats whom the Adams County SPCA will now take off the hands of overcrowded shelters and kennels in the area—increasing every paw’s chance of landing in a new home.
“We will be pulling animals from other shelters in PA next week in hopes of relieving some of their stress,” the Adams County SPCA said in a Facebook post. “Right now, we are going to enjoy this accomplishment! Merry Christmas!”
Quote of the Day: “Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them by their attitudes.” – E. F. Schumacher
Photo by: Sylvain Mauroux
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Each child got a big bag to fill with toys at Maui Walmart
The Walmart in Lanoka Harbor where the event had originally been planned
A New Jersey man had the rather unorthodox idea of throwing a party at the Walmart self-checkout counter. Perhaps driven by rage and cynicism, a bit of his motivation can be found in the event description on Facebook, which reads” celebrating another successful year of picking, paying, and bagging your own groceries while actual employees just stand around and check receipts.”
When he saw that 21,000 people had marked the event as ‘interested,’ he decided to turn his cynicism into goodwill. Walmart was unwilling to host the event, but creator Andrew Delgado wasn’t going to give up so easily.
“While this started as a joke, it has me thinking. What if… I was to organize a big toy drive where we have a Santa Claus and then we all purchase toys from the store, pile them outside, and then donate them to whatever children happen to come to the store?” Delgado wrote on the Facebook event page.
“I genuinely believe that something good can come from this. Times are tough for a lot of people. I think this would be perfect.”
Writing to his local Elks Lodge community organization, which agreed to offer their Lacey Township location as a drop-off site, the stage was set to see how many of those 21,000 people, a number which by that point had grown even larger, would show up.
The groundswell of support, and coverage from local news, became so great that Delgado had to reiterate twice on the event discussion section that it was absolutely not going to be held at Walmart, despite the original description.
The turnout was stunning, with over 7,000 people participating and trucks of presents, food, pet food, and other donations flooding the Elks Lodge. (SEE the Video here on Facebook.) At least one local store got involved, and the news of the event made it all the way onto USA Today.
Delgado posted regular updates, in which he estimated the gifts would make it to over 1,000 families in the Lacey area of New Jersey.
“Well, our journey has finally reached the official end. We rolled over to Popcorn Park Zoo to deliver the last of their donations and then stopped at Lacey Food Bank to drop off the literal SHIPMENT of boxes full of food and toys to them as well,” Delgado wrote on the ‘final update’.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of time to plan this but we did an amazing job nonetheless.
Also, the manager of the local Walmart store drove a truck to the event and unloaded a ton of toys food etc. He’s actually a really great guy and I really appreciate him coming through for us,” he said, adding as a postscript to the whole bonanza, “I don’t actually hate self-checkout.”
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There’s nothing like a good story of destiny, and in a time when three continents are engulfed in war, CBC News brings a story of reunion by two star-crossed soldiers.
The Iran-Iraq War became the longest conventional war of the 20th century and claimed over 1 million casualties, but this inspiring tale of former foes Najah Aboud from one side, and Zahed Haftlang from the other, is unforgettable.
“I didn’t know much about Iran. I knew it was a neighboring country. And that they were people next door to us,” Najah Aboud, an invading soldier from Iraq told CBC’s show Ideas. “We enjoyed their music. They enjoyed ours. They were just like us.”
A conscript assigned to a tank unit, Aboud was told to occupy a bunker in the city of Khorramshahr which the Iraqis had captured. Shortly after he got there, the bunker was cleared out in a massive take-no-prisoners counterattack by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their militia support, in which Zahed Haftlang was assigned as a medic.
Haftlang was ordered to go into the bunker and treat his wounded countrymen, and that’s where he came upon Aboud, lying with injuries to the head, back, and chest. While each worried that the other might do them violence, it eventually happened that Haftlang found a picture of an infant son and woman in Aboud’s breast pocket: his family.
It was at that moment when the Persian, who couldn’t speak Aboud’s native language of Iraqi Arabic, decided to save him, even against the will of his comrades.
In some cases he had to physically fight his barracks mates off, with one Iranian soldier hitting the prone Aboud’s face with the stock of his rifle. Against all odds, Haftlang got Aboud to a field hospital and asked the attending doctors to treat him—which they didn’t want to do at first.
Even they relented though, and Aboud was successfully saved before being dumped in a POW camp for 17 years. Haftlang visited him one time, but the two men could only communicate with gestures—the kissing of a hand.
The war took everything the two men had. Aboud was eventually released and returned to his home in Basra to find his fiance and his son long gone. Haftlang spiraled into years of depression and violent jobs before jumping ship in Vancouver after getting into a scrap with the Iranian sailors on board.
After a brief stint in homelessness, Haftlang ended up in a halfway house where he would try to commit suicide. But in an incident indicative of fortune, some coworkers came in, rescued the poor Iranian, and recommended he visit a hospital for mental health crises. Haftlang relented.
It was there in the waiting room that Haftlang saw an obviously Middle Eastern fellow about his age come into the same mental hospital. The two opened a conversation, and the Iranian found that the newcomer spoke his language.
“I was a prisoner of war,” the newcomer replied, explaining how he had come to know Farsi.
“I remember taking an Iraqi to a field hospital. His teeth were broken,” Haftlang recounted to Ideas, before mentioning that he hadn’t finished speaking before he saw that the man’s teeth were in fact broken.
“He’d mentioned that he’d been captured in Khorramshahr. In a bunker. And I asked him, ‘Which bunker, where?’ And then I said to him, ‘Did you keep a photograph of your family in your pocket?’ and he said, ‘Yes, how did you know that?’ And I said, ‘I’m the guy! I’m the soldier who was with you, caring for you!'”
In the most unbelievable coincidence, the two men had immigrated to the same country, and visited the same hospital on the same day at the same time. Their joy—their hugs and kisses, caused the staff of the mental hospital—who are probably easily triggered by raised voices, to come rushing in, only to burst into tears alongside the former soldiers turned friends after hearing their story.
Without family and without their homes, the two men admitted that their friendship is the most precious thing in the world to them.
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2023 featured a proposed update to the COPPA, or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act which included limitations on the nudging of kids to stay online and reductions in the data collection of children while using their parent’s devices.
The last update was in 2013 and dealt with social media and mobile devices (how quaint). This one will feature additional protections to ensure that children are not targeted by their online behavior.
For starters, businesses would have to set behavioral advertising as disabled by default, unless they were to get parents’ separate verifiable consent to disclose information to third parties, including third-party advertisers.
System operators and businesses will not be able to send push notifications to encourage kids to use their services or games more often. Operators using kids’ information to send these push notifications would also be required to flag that use in their COPPA-required direct and online notices.
Most importantly, whether parents understand it or not, the 2023 proposed update would “strengthen COPPA’s existing standards by making it clear that operators can hold on to kids’ personal information only for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected—and they for sure can’t hold on to it indefinitely or use it for any secondary purpose.”
Cybercrime has become the largest loss of money due to private criminal activity on Earth, causing an estimated $10 trillion in damage from identity theft, data breaches, and so forth in this year alone.
To this end as well, the new COPPA rules would require separate, written data security policies for the handling and storage of kids’ information.
Since it’s enforced by a federal regulatory agency and not a Congressional action, there was an open comment period, during which the FTC received almost 200,000 comments, demonstrating at least to some degree the urgent desire for more stringent controls on childhood data handling by the American public.
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Among all the things that the James Webb Space Telescope has taught us, one of the most surprising for the layman has probably been that all the outer planets have rings.
The rings of Saturn are well known, but Webb has already shown that the ice planet of Neptune sports rings as well, and now, Uranus has been shown shining like a bright blue eyeball.
When NASA’s spacecraft Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, the planet appeared to be a nearly featureless, solid blue ball. Webb used its infrared view to show that it’s much more dynamic and intriguing. Rings, moons, storms, and a bright, north polar cap grace these new images.
Because Uranus is tipped on its side, the polar cap appears to become more prominent as the planet’s pole points towards the Sun and receives more sunlight—a time called solstice. Uranus reaches its next solstice in 2028, and astronomers will watch for changes in the planet’s atmosphere.
Uranus also spins on its side at a tilt of about 98 degrees, giving it the most extreme seasons in the solar system. For nearly a quarter of each Uranian year, the Sun shines over one pole, plunging the other half of the planet into a dark, 21-year-long winter.
With Webb’s unparalleled infrared resolution and sensitivity, astronomers now see Uranus and its unique features with groundbreaking new clarity. These details, especially of the close-in Zeta ring, will be invaluable to planning any future missions to Uranus.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
One day on Uranus is about 17 hours, so the planet’s rotation is relatively quick. This makes it supremely difficult for observatories with a sharp eye like Webb to capture one simple image of the entire planet—storms and other atmospheric features, and the planet’s moons, move visibly within minutes. This image combines several longer and shorter exposures of this dynamic system to correct for those slight changes throughout the observing time.
Uranus can also serve as a proxy for studying the nearly 2,000 similarly sized exoplanets that have been discovered in the last few decades. This “exoplanet in our backyard” can help astronomers understand how planets of this size work, what their meteorology is like, and how they formed. This can in turn help us understand our own solar system as a whole by placing it in a larger context.
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Quote of the Day: “We live in the world when we love it.” – Rabindranath Tagore
Photo by: Natasha Reddy
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By Christine Daniloff for MIT, Courtesy of CDC (CC-ND)
By Christine Daniloff for MIT, Courtesy of CDC (CC-ND)
Using a type of artificial intelligence known as deep learning, MIT researchers have discovered a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year.
In a study appearing this week in Nature, the researchers showed that these compounds could kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) grown in a lab dish and in two mouse models of MRSA infection. The compounds also show very low toxicity against human cells, making them particularly good drug candidates.
A key innovation of the new study, could help researchers design additional drugs that might work even better than the ones identified by the model.
“Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date,” says James Collins, from MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering.
Severe cases of MRSA can lead to sepsis, a potentially fatal bloodstream infection.
Over the past several years, Collins and his colleagues at MIT have begun using deep learning to try to find new antibiotics. Their work has yielded potential drugs against Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium that is often found in hospitals, and many other drug-resistant bacteria.
These models sifted through millions of compounds, generating predictions of which ones may have strong antimicrobial activity.
These types of searches have proven fruitful, but one limitation to this approach is that the models are “black boxes,” meaning that there is no way of knowing what features the model based its predictions on. If scientists knew how the models were making their predictions, it could be easier for them to identify or design additional antibiotics.
“What we set out to do in this study was to open the black box,” Wong says. “These models consist of very large numbers of calculations that mimic neural connections, and no one really knows what’s going on underneath the hood.”
The deep learning model generated this training data by testing about 39,000 compounds for antibiotic activity against MRSA, and then fed this data, plus information on the chemical structures of the compounds, into the model.
“You can represent basically any molecule as a chemical structure, and also you tell the model if that chemical structure is antibacterial or not,” Wong says. “The model is trained on many examples like this. If you then give it any new molecule, a new arrangement of atoms and bonds, it can tell you a probability that that compound is predicted to be antibacterial.”
To figure out how the model was making its predictions, the researchers adapted an algorithm known as Monte Carlo tree search, which has been used to help make other deep learning models, such as AlphaGo, more explainable. This search algorithm allows the model to generate not only an estimate of each molecule’s antimicrobial activity, but also a prediction for which substructures of the molecule likely account for that activity.
Potent activity
To further narrow down the pool of candidate drugs, the researchers trained three additional deep learning models to predict whether the compounds were toxic to three different types of human cells. By combining this information with the predictions of antimicrobial activity, the researchers discovered compounds that could kill microbes while having minimal adverse effects on the human body.
Using this collection of models, the researchers screened about 12 million compounds, all of which are commercially available. From this collection, the models identified compounds from five different classes, based on chemical substructures within the molecules, that were predicted to be active against MRSA.
The researchers purchased about 280 compounds and tested them against MRSA grown in a lab dish, allowing them to identify two, from the same class, that appeared to be very promising antibiotic candidates. In tests in two mouse models, one of MRSA skin infection and one of MRSA systemic infection, each of those compounds reduced the MRSA population by a factor of 10.
Experiments revealed that the compounds appear to kill bacteria by disrupting their ability to maintain an electrochemical gradient across their cell membranes. This gradient is needed for many critical cell functions, including the ability to produce ATP—molecules that cells use to store energy. An antibiotic candidate that Collins’ lab discovered in 2020, halicin, appears to work by a similar mechanism but is specific to Gram-negative bacteria (bacteria with thin cell walls). MRSA is a Gram-positive bacterium, with thicker cell walls.
“We have pretty strong evidence that this new structural class is active against Gram-positive pathogens by selectively dissipating the proton motive force in bacteria,” Wong says. “The molecules are attacking bacterial cell membranes selectively, in a way that does not incur substantial damage in human cell membranes–and is not toxic against human cells.”
The researchers have shared their findings with Phare Bio, a nonprofit started by Collins and others as part of the Antibiotics-AI Project. The nonprofit now plans to do more detailed analysis of the chemical properties and potential clinical use of these compounds. Meanwhile, Collins’ lab is working on designing additional drug candidates based on the findings of the new study, as well as using the models to seek compounds that can kill other types of bacteria.
“We are already leveraging similar approaches based on chemical substructures to design compounds de novo, and of course, we can readily adopt this approach out of the box to discover new classes of antibiotics against different pathogens,” Wong says.
Left the new species of fanged frog. Right the frog’s eggs, laid on a leaf - photo credit, Sean Reilly.
Left the new species of fanged frog, Limnonectes phyllofolia. Right the frog’s eggs, laid on a leaf – photo credit, Sean Reilly.
In a new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers have described a new species of fanged frog: the smallest one ever discovered.
In general, frogs’ teeth aren’t anything to write home about—they look like pointy little pinpricks lining the upper jaw. But one group of stream-dwelling frogs in Southeast Asia has a strange adaptation: two bony “fangs” jutting out of their lower jawbone.
There are over 70 species of these Dracula frogs, and they use these fangs to battle with each other over territory and mates, and sometimes, incredibly, even to hunt tough-shelled prey like giant centipedes and crabs.
In collaboration with the Bogor Zoology Museum, a team from the McGuire Lab at Berkeley found the frogs on Sulawesi, a rugged, mountainous island that makes up part of Indonesia.
“It’s a giant island with a vast network of mountains, volcanoes, lowland rainforest, and cloud forests up in the mountains. The presence of all these different habitats mean that the magnitude of biodiversity across many plants and animals we find there is unreal—rivaling places like the Amazon,” said Jeff Frederick, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago and the study’s lead author.
“This new species is tiny compared to other fanged frogs on the island where it was found, about the size of a quarter,” says Frederick.
“Many frogs in this genus are giant, weighing up to two pounds. At the large end, this new species weighs about the same as a dime.”
While trekking through the jungle, members of the joint US-Indonesia amphibian and reptile research team noticed something unexpected on the leaves of tree saplings and moss-covered boulders: nests of frog eggs.
Frogs are amphibians, and they lay eggs that are encapsulated by jelly, rather than a hard, protective shell. To keep their eggs from drying out, most amphibians lay their eggs in water. To the research team’s surprise, they kept spotting the terrestrial egg masses on leaves and mossy boulders several feet above the ground. Shortly after, they began to see the small, brown frogs themselves.
“Normally when we’re looking for frogs, we’re scanning the margins of stream banks or wading through streams to spot them directly in the water,” Frederick says. “After repeatedly monitoring the nests though, the team started to find attending frogs sitting on leaves hugging their little nests.”
This close contact with their eggs allows the frog parents to coat the eggs with compounds that keep them moist and free from bacterial and fungal contamination.
Closer examination of the amphibian parents revealed not only that they were tiny members of the fanged frog family, complete with barely visible fangs, but that the frogs caring for the clutches of eggs were all male.
“Male egg-guarding behavior isn’t totally unknown across all frogs, but it’s rather uncommon,” says Frederick.
Frederick and his colleagues hypothesize that the frogs’ unusual reproductive behaviors might also relate to their smaller-than-usual fangs. Some of the frogs’ relatives have bigger fangs, which help them ward off competition for spots along the river to lay their eggs in the water. Since these frogs evolved a way to lay their eggs away from the water, they may have lost the need for such big imposing fangs. (The scientific name for the new species is Limnonectes phyllofolia; phyllofolia means “leaf-nester.”)
“It’s fascinating that on every subsequent expedition to Sulawesi, we’re still discovering new and diverse reproductive modes,” says Frederick. “Our findings also underscore the importance of conserving these very special tropical habitats. Most of the animals that live in places like Sulawesi are quite unique, and habitat destruction is an ever-looming conservation issue for preserving the hyper-diversity of species we find there. Learning about animals like these frogs that are found nowhere else on Earth helps make the case for protecting these valuable ecosystems.”
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A man will once again taste one of his mother’s home-baked mince pies this Christmas—21 years after she died.
Richard Newson discovered a batch of 47 pastry treats in the bottom of his mum’s freezer following her sudden passing in December 2002.
Now, every Christmas, he defrosts one of the small pies and scoffs it down in memory of his mum Marlene.
Marlene used to bake hundreds of festive treats and dish them out to shops, businesses, and friends in Fleetwood, near Blackpool, England, for no other reason other than to spread Christmas cheer.
“She used to bake hundreds of them and had started to bake them, storing in the freezer before she died,” explained Richard. “I decided to take them home and eat one every single year in her memory.”
He lamented that this year’s tin did taste like a 21-year-old mince pie, but he dug in anyway.
“The pastry is still great—short and crumbly—but the mincemeat did have a funny taste this year. But it wasn’t too bad!”
Richard allows the pies to defrost naturally and then warms them slightly before the main event. It has become a family tradition and heralds the start of their family Christmas.
Quote of the Day: “We are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder
Photo by: GWC
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
A dog was just 12-weeks-old when he was brought into an animal hospital with signs of abuse, but now he gets to celebrate his ‘first proper’ Christmas with the veterinarian nurse who helped save him.
Terry the Whippet arrived at the Hull PDSA Animal Hospital in East Yorkshire, England, where he was treated by nurse Rachel Coombes.
The 42-year-old fell in love with the puppy and told her colleagues that she would adopt him, and later brought him into her home.
“I just felt a connection as soon as he was brought in, as he was in such a state.”
“He hasn’t looked back since—and is having the best of life right now. He enjoys running around the garden and going to the beach.
“He has formed a close bond with my son Stanley and will always be there by his side.”
After Terry was brought into the vets in November 2021, the vet discovered the white of his left eye and his lips were both bruised. Three of his upper incisors were missing and another tooth was broken.
Due to his suspicious injuries, RSPCA Inspector Laura Barber was asked to investigate. She said, even though he was in a sad state, he was very trusting’.
“He was really quiet and withdrawn when he was with people,” said Inspector Barber. “I remember him coming over to me and putting his head on me and being so trusting.”
Terry’s owner appeared in court, where he admitted causing unnecessary suffering to a dog and was handed a five-year ban on keeping animals.
Emily Lomas, an animal care assistant at the RSPCA’s Hull branch, says she was ‘thrilled’ when she found out Rachel had adopted him.
“He was overwhelmed when he came to us so we had to really show him there was nothing to be scared of and that he was now safe,” she recalled. “We took him to the socialization room and I remember him falling asleep on my legs.”
“He was so lovable so it’s great to see he has the home he deserves with such a lovely family.”
A woman raises her hands in the air as the sun sets on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury, the UK's greatest cultural event of the year. Photo by Tom Wren – SWNS Pictures of the Year 2023
“A great news photograph can be many things, but its core quality is that it tells you a story and lives on in your memory,” says picture editor Jon Mills, who prepared a list of the best photos from this year.
Many of our favorite 2023 pictures are stunning images of the natural world. Some show moments of intense emotion.
But these dozen photos chosen by GNN are guaranteed to uplift your spirits—or your curiosity—as we look back on the past year.
All these images were licensed to GNN by SWNS—Southwest News Service–a partnership for which we give endless thanks.
Happy Holidays to the folks at SWNS and to all our loyal readers of good news…
Sunset at Glastonbury Festival – Photo by Tom Wren
Tom Wren / SWNS Pictures of the Year 2023
Rebecca and Chris Got ‘Best Ever’ Wedding Shots When Northern Lights Appeared – By Michael Carver
