Quote of the Day: “Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.” – E. Joseph Cossman
Photo by: Katherine Hood
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A former NFL great recently surprised a single mother and her daughter with a brand new home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but it was just one of 217 other such blessings that Warrick Dunn has managed to fund.
The collaborative effort by Warrick Dunn Charities, Habitat for Humanity, and Catholic High School where Dunn himself graduated, saw the house built, furnished, and stocked with food.
“Dominique and Miracle, single mother, first-time homeowner, I think it’s important to help change the community and the environment, create stability for a family that could potentially have good long-term positive impacts,” Dunn said, upon returning to his hometown to welcome the family.
Catholic High School raised $85,000 for the house.
“A new home, a new, fresh start, a new beginning—I’m totally blessed,” said Dominque after walking into the new home for the first time, worried dreadfully about her makeup running for all the crying she knew she’d be doing.
Sheets were already on the bed, and food was already in the fridge. The mortgage was there on the dinner table for signing, with Dunn’s charity alongside it to help with the down payment check.
MORE ATHLETES MAKING A DIFFERENCE: Watch the Magic When NFL Icon Leonard Fournette Dotes on Kids With Disabilities at Camp: ‘You’re the Real Champs’
Drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1997, Dunn launched Homes for the Holidays to honor his late mother’s dream of owning her own home that same year.
An extremely consistent performer, in 12 seasons Dunn missed only 10 games, made the Pro Bowl team on 3 occasions, and in all but two seasons accumulated over 1,000 all-purpose yards for the Buccaneers and the Falcons. When he retired, he ranked 14th in NFL history for all-purpose yards (15,306).
In 2005, Dunn was presented with the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. This award is the only NFL award that recognizes a player for his community service as well as for his excellence on the field.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Military Veterans Who Lost Limbs Receive Mortgage-Free Homes to Honor Their Service
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Dunn challenged all NFL players, except for those who play for the New Orleans Saints, to donate at least $5,000 to the effort. The effort received over $5 million in contributions.
According to Dunn’s website, which has become the home of all three of his charitable organizations, the program partners with local community organizations to reduce the burden on new, single-parent homeowners by fully furnishing their new house, providing downpayment assistance checks, and stocking the pantry with food.
WATCH the moment Dominque first walked into her home…
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Encouraging brain injury research—conducted in test tubes, lab animals, and a few small studies in people—points to the potential of psychedelic drugs to limit brain damage after injury, and even stimulate the birth of new neurons to replace impaired ones.
They can open the learning windows that allow the brain to acquire new skills.
One recent study, published in the journal Nature, found lab animals taking psychedelics adopted skills as adults that were previously limited to childhood.
This has been shown in psychedelic studies before when Johns Hopkins found that MDMA, also known as ‘ecstasy’ reopened “critical windows” of brain development typical of singular periods in life when the brain is more sensitive to environmental stimuli.
These critical windows are key to post-dose therapy sessions in states where psychedelic-assisted therapy is a legal medical practice. The brain is now open to new ideas and a skilled psychoanalyst can help patients recover from serious trauma in those key moments.
Much of this has been known for years, but now, Johns Hopkins is further opening these doors of discovery by identifying this critical window reopening can be induced by other compounds, such as psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms and LSD.
Furthermore, scientists at the famous institution have found that these critical window periods form naturally in humans following a traumatic brain injury or stroke, and psychedelics can keep that critical open for longer than would normally be the case.
The idea is that psychedelic therapy could keep the critical windows open long enough to recover far more function than would otherwise be the case.
MORE PSYCHEDELIC NEWS: People Who’ve Tried Psychedelics Have Lower Risk of Heart Disease and Diabetes
Another way in which some psychedelics seem to be able to help the brain recover from a traumatic injury is by controlling inflammation in the brain. Inflammation would be a natural and healing response to trauma, but so many Americans live lives of dysregulated inflammatory systems, which can be negatively influenced by poor diet, lack of exercise, stress, and exposure to household chemicals or air pollution.
As a result, the turning off of the inflammatory systems that would naturally follow their activation doesn’t occur, and can lead to neurons in the brain being damaged.
One way that psychedelics decrease inflammation is by binding to serotonin receptors called 5-HT2a, which display a dual role of controlling inflammation and also causing the hallucinogenic effect typical of psychedelics.
Glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor, a growth compound created in the brain that is responsible for the growth and recovery of injured neurons, also seems to be stimulated into existence by psychedelic influence.
MORE POSITIVE DEVELOPMENTS IN HEALING STROKES: Stroke Recovery Improved for 70% of Patients Taking Celery Seed Drug
National Geographic reports several labs are already testing dimethyl-tryptamine or DMT, for this very purpose of binding to 5-HT2a and stimulating the production of glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor.
“Rats slowly infused with low doses of DMT after a stroke had fewer damaged tissues and more extensive recovery,” they wrote. “Brain levels of anti-inflammatory compounds and sigma-1 proteins were abundant in the treated animals.”
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When you think of Spain, I’ll bet you probably picture bulls and bullfighters, rugged hills cloaked in olive trees, tapas bars, or the Alhambra, but I’ll bet you don’t picture cave paintings.
Actually, no country on Earth has more paleolithic cave art than Spain, and a new discovery merely adds to that position—110 paintings and engravings dating back 24,000 years.
They were found in a cave called Cueva Dones, a well-known site for adventurers, hikers, and spelunkers in Eastern Spain near Valencia. A 500-meter cave system that opens into a steep river gorge.
It wasn’t until 2021 that scientists from the universities of Zaragoza in Spain and Southampton in the UK, discovered rock art in three separate locations that seemed to depict extinct animals that would have roamed Paleolithic Europe.
“Although Spain is the country with the largest number of Paleolithic cave art sites, most of them are concentrated in northern Spain,” said Aitor Ruiz-Redondo, senior lecturer of prehistory at the University of Zaragoza. “Eastern Iberia is an area where few of these sites have been documented so far.”
CHECK THESE OUT: Newly Discovered Rock Art Panels Depict How Ancient Ancestors Envisioned Creation and Adapted to Change
Ruiz-Redondo and his co-authors in their paper describe the depictions of animals and shapes as the most important cave art site found in Eastern Spain because of the number, the variety of animals, and the diversity of motifs and artistic methods.
Horses, a red deer stag, seven hinds (female red deer), two auroch (an extinct wild bovine), and two indeterminate animals are depicted in both red clay finger paintings, and engravings.
There are also a variety of finger flutings on the soft cave ceiling, and some basic shapes.
“Once we began the proper systematic survey, we realized we were facing a major cave art site, like the ones that can be found elsewhere in Cantabrian Spain, southern France or Andalusia, but that totally lack in this territory,” said Ruiz-Redondo.
ROCK ART DISCOVERIES: 300 Epic Ancient Murals ‘Unique in the World’ Depict Creation Myths on Texas Rock: ‘Oldest Books in North America’
The Franco-Cantabrian region is home to more than 70% of all known Paleolithic cave art sites worldwide. Caves are unique places for artwork to survive the eons because of the relatively unchanging conditions of light, moisture, and temperature.
This kind of clay painting technique is only rarely found in Paleolithic cave art, the researchers note, yet it’s apparently the primary method used by the prehistoric painters of Cueva Dones where research will continue into the near future looking for better ways to date the art, and for more art that may still be hiding.
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NASA often brags about how innovation for space travel and exploration has provided the public with all sorts of downstream benefits, but they don’t typically mean that literally.
Now however, NASA is teaming up with ranchers in Idaho to monitor beaver rewilding projects on small rivers, streams, and other watersheds by adding remote sensing data to a suite of tools used to monitor beaver activities, track dam location and water dispersion, and determine ideal beaver reintroduction sites.
The project started when scientists Jodi Brandt and Nick Kolarik heard about “beaver fever.” Ranchers were beginning to actively restore beaver populations onto their land in states like Idaho and Utah.
Brandt, a human-environment researcher at the Univ of Idaho, Boise, leads a team using NASA’s Earth observation data to help quantify beavers’ impact on local ecosystems, funded by NASA Applied Sciences’ Ecological Conservation program. She works with Wally Macfarlane and Joe Wheaton, both at Utah State University, who developed the Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT).
NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing missions like Landsat and Sentinel, collects data across large areas of the world, often season by season. The data can be looked at either in real-time, or rewound to see how things were weeks, months, even years into the past.
The story doesn’t begin with NASA or Idaho ranchers, but with the haberdashery and fur-trapping industries of the 19th century. Beaver fur was used to make gentlemen’s hats, among other items like coats and gloves, necessitating more and more beaver pelts from the New World.
They were extirpated from most of the Wild West before long, but they are swiftly returning to waterways in part because landscape managers came to understand how valuable beaver damming can be to ecosystems.
When water is introduced into a prairie ecosystem, either through rain or melt water, it runs downhill into streams which run into creeks and rivers until it reaches the sea or some major lake.
When beavers dam riverways, that water lingers in the environment, enriching bird, plant, insect, and amphibian life along the water. It also replenishes aquafers and keeps the soil, grass, and trees wetter for longer.
MORE NEWS LIKE THIS: NASA Uses Supercomputers and AI to Count Earth’s Trees From Space for the First Time
“Prior to beaver trapping, beaver dams were just about everywhere in the west. So what we’re attempting to do is to bring beaver dam densities back to historic levels where possible,” said Macfarlane.
“In doing so, we’re building important drought resiliency and restoring stream areas. I think there’s a lot of foresight by NASA realizing how these things connect.”
Associate program manager Cindy Schmidt recently joined the team in Idaho to build beaver dam analogs—temporary, human-created structures that help beavers get established in an area. After seeing how the beavers benefited the land, “I became a beaver believer,” Schmidt said.
MORE BEAVER REWILDING: Beavers Saved From Euthanasia Transform and Replenish Rivers in the Utah Desert
“The real value of using satellite data for monitoring is that there are people on the ground working hard and implementing things like increasing water availability, increasing fish and species habitat,” Brandt said. “The more support we can give them, the more broadly these practices can proliferate.”
In total the project has developed 4 different applications using Earth observatory data from NASA and also the European Space Agency, and it’s allowing people, as Brandt mentioned, doing hard manual labor to know exactly where they need to work more, where their work is having the best effect, and where it isn’t.
WATCH a video below from NASA…
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Quote of the Day: “The object of the superior man is truth.” – Confucius
Photo by: Matias North
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Birders attend, a rare opportunity is presenting itself along the East Coast. Hurricane Idalia may have diverted dozens of flamingos from a path between Cuba and Mexico.
They are turning up along Mid-Atlantic states like North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and even Ohio, with 150 sightings already logged in birding apps.
The Washington Post spoke with the Audubon Society of Alabama, another state where the flamingos are being seen, and they say this may be a once-in-a-century level event.
“To my knowledge, which goes back like 50 years, never anything as spectacular as this [has occurred],” said executive director Scott Duncan. “This is jaw-dropping how many flamingos have been seen.”
“Drove down to Pea Island NWR this morning to look for American Flamingos,” wrote bird and wildlife photographer Jeff Lewis on Facebook. “As far as I know, these are the first wild flamingos ever seen in NC.”
Flamingos in the wild of the US occur rarely in Florida, and that’s pretty much it.
The Chesapeake Bay Magazine, reporting on the phenomenon, wrote that the last confirmed sighting in the state was in 1972 on Assateague Island.
MORE WILD BIRD SIGHTINGS: Rare Snowy Owl Shows Up in California–First in 100 Years (WATCH)
“However late last week a pair was found in a pond in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, at Long Lane Pond,” they wrote. “Franklin County is part of the geographically larger Chesapeake Bay watershed. These are the first confirmed wild flamingos ever seen in the Commonwealth.”
It’s believed that the birds’ inner thermostats will begin to coax them back to their tropical homeland as summer nights gradually give way to autumn, meaning the chance for a once-in-a-Big-Year sighting is for a limited time only.
WATCH some news coverage of the flamingos…
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A Costco employee as honest as the day is long is being celebrated after returning an envelope of $4,000 cash to a shopper.
John Sotelo had set himself a goal of working hard enough through August to make Employee of the Month, and thanks to his selfless act, he now has a plaque hanging on the wall of the store.
At the Costco on Shaw and Clovis Avenue in Clovis, California, Sotelo was putting away cases of bottled water when something on one of the pallets caught his eye. It was an envelope it seemed.
It contained $3,940, and Sotelo immediately notified his managers. Together, they tracked down the member who misplaced it using surveillance footage and her member ID.
“It was crazy because my manager walked me outside, and the member was right there,” Sotelo told KFSN ABC News 30. “So yeah, she told me like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m so glad you found this. That’s for my kids to go to school.’ I’m like, ‘Okay,’ you know, ‘well I’m happy to help.'”
In tough economic times, it’s inspiring to know there are people who will still choose to do the right thing when the opportunity for the wrong presents itself.
WATCH the story below…
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Netflix’s Stranger Things has won 12 Primetime Emmys, and tens of millions of fans over the course of its four seasons, but it may have ultimately achieved something even greater than that—it saved a man’s life.
A 12-year-old named Austen MacMillan was able to revive his behavioral therapist Jason Piquette after he partially drowned by using CPR that he learned while watching the television show.
MacMillan was swimming with Piquette in his home’s pool when at a certain point the therapist wanted to see how long he could hold his breath underwater.
He racked up an impressive 6 minutes—though it’s unclear how many of those minutes were voluntary because what is clear is that at a certain point, he lost consciousness.
MacMillan quickly grabbed the man after realizing he wasn’t coming up, dragged him out of the water, and began running around the house screaming for help. When it didn’t come, he returned to Piquette’s side and performed CPR.
The whole ordeal was captured on a ring camera.
“I just saw it from a TV show—Stranger Things,” Austen told ABC News. “After I gave him CPR, he woke up a few minutes later.”
Piquette believes he lost consciousness about 30 seconds into his underwater attempt, but doesn’t know why.
MORE NEWS LIKE THIS: For 3 Hours Doctors Continued CPR on Toddler with No Pulse–Until Life Returned
“It was definitely a really proud mom moment. He’s really brave and courageous,” said Christina MacMillan, Austen’s mom.
It’s a reminder that movies and television aren’t a complete waste of time, and that if you happen to be planning a CPR scene for your production, make sure it’s the real technique—it could save a life.
WATCH the story below…
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Earlier this month operators at Webb identified a planet that may contain both a protective atmosphere and a surface covered entirely in oceans—also known as a Hycean world.
One of the main functions of the James Webb Space Telescope is to advance the search for life in the universe by being able to study exoplanets as no other observatory can, and using Webb’s spectrographs, scientists were able to determine that this Hycean world is the perfect place to search.
K2-18b lies 120 light years away from Earth in the constellation Leo, where it orbits the habitable zone of a red dwarf star called K2-18. Believed to be 8.6 times larger than Earth, the abundance of methane and carbon dioxide, and shortage of ammonia detected on the planet supports the hypothesis that there may be a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.
Life emerged under such conditions on Earth, and finding them elsewhere is our best bet to determining if we are not alone in the galaxy.
Promisingly, these initial Webb observations also provided a possible detection of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide (DMS). On Earth, this is only produced by life. The bulk of the DMS in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments.
The DMS finding needs to be further validated, say the researchers, who add that because of the light and glare of the host star, it’s extremely difficult to get detailed observations of an exoplanet.
The method used involves waiting until the orbit of the planet around the star takes it between the star and the telescope. The corresponding eclipse signifies the planet is there to be seen, and when it is, Webb can use its NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instruments to image the planet and determine within the wavelengths of light and color which molecules are there on the planet.
However with such a short window of opportunity, even Webb’s exceptional power remains limited.
MORE INTERESTING SCIENCE: On Distant Planets that Don’t Rotate, Life May Exist Under Skies of Permanent Dawn and Dusk
“This result was only possible because of the extended wavelength range and unprecedented sensitivity of Webb, which enabled robust detection of spectral features with just two transits,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the paper.
“For comparison, one transit observation with Webb provided comparable precision to eight observations with Hubble conducted over a few years and in a relatively narrow wavelength range.”
OTHER EXOPLANETS: NASA Detects Carbon Dioxide–the Building Block of Life–in Exoplanet’s Atmosphere for First Time
The planet is classified as a “sub-Neptune” meaning one which shares its characteristics but that is smaller than our neighbor. Such planets are believed in some circles to be the most common type of rocky exoplanet.
Analyses from other sub-Neptunes however have shown that they often preclude the possibility to host life, at least as we know it. Their mantles of high-pressure ice and thin atmospheres have almost always led to the ocean either being too hot or simply an ocean of water vapor.
Make A SPLASH On Social Media With This News Of An Ocean World…
Quote of the Day: “Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.” – Oscar Wilde
Photo by: Sigmund
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Down Under, there’s a massive campaign to connect 315,000 hectares, or 750,000, acres of coastal habitat for koalas in New South Wales into a single national park.
Now, a new logging ban to come into effect will protect 106 “hubs” across 8,400 hectares (21,000 acres) of forest where koalas in the wild are known to congregate in largest numbers.
It was a “historic step forward,” said Nature Conservation Council acting chief executive Brad Smith, describing the area as “the most important koala habitat in the world.”
The parcel is just one part, though key, of the 315,000 hectares that a coalition of conservation organizations is hoping to protect forever to ensure koalas can survive the eons.
Given the Moniker “Great Koala National Park,” the 315,000 hectares are currently split between conservation areas and state forest across an area the size of Yosemite. The GKNP would unify it all under a heavier level of protection.
Koalas need a particular kind of forest biome, one that lies close to the coast where real estate is often coveted. In this case, the 21,000 acres were saved from logging, another activity in these woods.
MORE ENDANGERED SPECIES NEWS: Heroic Dog Gets Award for Saving Over 100 Koalas From Australia’s Bushfires
NSW government mapping of koala habitat confirms the GKNP proposal would protect the most important koala habitat in the region.
Koalas are the only living member of the Phascolarctidae family, which makes them totally unique on this planet.
MORE AUSTRALIAN NEWS: Woman Lost 8 Days in the Australian Bush Survives to See Her 4 Children Again ‘It is miraculous’
Currently, only 58% of the GKNP proposal is protected from logging, and the coalition acknowledges that this latest ban is merely a step in the right direction.
GKNP estimates that it would cost the state around $1.5 billion to buy all the land and set up the park infrastructure, while the worldwide fame of having a place to come and be practically guaranteed to see koalas in the wild would add handsomely to the already $20 billion made every year in the state of New South Wales from nature tourism.
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Wind turbine blades set to be landfilled or incinerated, are being turned into footbridges that can hold the weight of a 30-tonne digger.
Currently, there are around 11,000 wind turbines in the UK, and estimates suggest that 450 blades will be decommissioned in Ireland by 2030, creating tons of non-recyclable waste.
In a bid to avoid filling up the landfill, a transatlantic research network led by Queen’s University Belfast called ‘Re-Wind’ was set up to find new ways to repurpose the blades. Working together, geography experts, design architects, and engineers have discovered that by using just two turbine blades they can create a bridge.
Already, the team has successfully built two footbridges in Ireland—a 21-foot (7-meter) bridge in Draperstown, Northern Ireland, and a 15-foot (5-meter) bridge in Cork in the Republic of Ireland.
The bridges, which are made from two wind turbine blades, are known as ‘BladeBridges’ and passed rigorous testing in May. A third bridge is also underway in Atlanta Georgia.
Over the last 30 years, wind farm development has been scaled up globally, but this is now posing a major environmental challenge. The turbine blades, which are non-biodegradable, have a lifespan of just 20-25 years. After this, they are either landfilled or incinerated.
The researchers have also been looking at ways to use the blades to build bus shelters, barriers, street furniture, and telecommunications towers.
“It has been incredibly exciting and rewarding to work on this project,” commented Professor. Marois Soutos from Queen’s University. “As researchers, we like to push things as far as we possibly can in order to come up with the best solution available. In this instance, we’ve been able to create a footbridge from two wind turbine blades which is able to hold 30 tonnes—that’s the weight of a digger.”
“This could have a very positive impact for society going forward as we are only going to have more of these blades becoming decommissioned as the years go on.”
For the Draperstown bridge, computer-aided modeling was used to come up with the structural design, but the researchers had concerns that the bolts used might tear when weight was added. It was tested by loading it with 34 blocks, each weighing 1,100kg and the results were very positive—the bridge was able to take much more weight than expected.
MORE CREATIVE SOLUTIONS: Company Devises Ingenious Method of Repurposing Old Wind Turbines: ‘The perfect time’
“We designed the bridge to avoid failures and during testing there was no tearing, no failure at all,” said Kenny McDonald, Technical Manager in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University. “We kept loading these concrete blocks and we could not get the bridge to fail.”
“We’re continuing to work with the Network and our colleagues in the USA on the bridge in Atlanta. After this, we would like to see if more blades can be added to make it longer. We’d like to join two together and increase the length. We’re hoping to secure further funding to do this,” he said.
Part of the Network is University College Cork and Munster Technological University, and they’ve taken the project in a different direction and made a spinoff from the Re-Wind research, called BladeBridge. They’ve been looking at a variety of uses for the blades.
MORE WIND FARM NEWS: Lebanese Man Builds Wind Turbine from Recycled Plastic–Producing Electricity for his Family and Neighbors
“We are partnering with well-known designers here in Ireland to create a portfolio of durable and sustainable products, such as greenway furniture and bridges,” said BladeBridge co-founder Dr. Angie Nagle. “Our first customer was Mayo County Council, who recently installed a suite of our furniture on the greenway extension in Achill.”
The bridge in Cork was completed in January 2022 and funded under the Irish Department of Transport’s Project Ireland 2040 initiative.
With a 20-year lifespan, there will be around 8.6 million metric tons of blades being decommissioned worldwide by 2042. Innovative solutions have to be found to keep them out of landfills, but it’s worth the effort as most blades are made from fiberglass, an expensive material to buy and shape.
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A sketch of Dover Harbor, created by British landscape artist John Constable on a sailing trip in 1803, was found within a smashed frame in a house in Leeds recently.
It came to light during a house clearance, and those responsible for cleaning and restoring realized the celebrated artist was responsible for the work when they found ‘J Constable’ written by hand on the back while examining it.
It’s one of 130 drawings that the landscape artist made during the month-long trip from London to Deal, although less than 50 are known to be left in existence.
A letter that Constable sent to his friend informs art historians that the sketch was made on the last day of his trip.
“I came on shore at Deal, walked to Dover (about one and a half hours) and the next day returned to London,” he wrote in April 1803.
Constable had been aboard an East India boat called Coutts, which was captained by his father’s friend Robert Torin. His notes indicate he left in a hurry after Torin decided to sail to China.
The sketch was made from the deck of the Coutts and contains a broad view across the harbor and the wharf buildings. Above the harbor on a high hill sits the kingly Dover Castle.
“Actually, it was only by the greatest good fortune that any of them survived,” said Dominic Cox, from auctioneers David Duggleby who will be selling the artwork. “Constable had to get off the ship in a hurry when the decision to depart for China was taken and he left his carefully wrapped parcel of drawings behind.”
“Luckily they were recovered before they ended up in the Far East.”
OTHER ATTIC ARTIFACTS: A Thrift Store Shopper Joked She’d Found a Famous Artist’s Work for $4 – and Actually She Really Had
John Constable was born on the River Stour and grew up amid corn fields, canals, and villages which became both subjects of his artistic attention and, later, famous under the moniker “Constable Country.”
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and hence why this one is predicted to sell for as much as $150,000.
Mr. Cox said the painting was identified as an original Constable following the house clearance of the property of Leeds.
It is thought a handwritten note on the back of the picture may have been penned by a family member when they later sold off his works.
MORE LOST AND FOUND WORKS: The Painting Paid for Grilled Cheese Sandwiches 50 Years Ago – Now Earns the Restaurant Thousands
“That is an old inscription, perhaps added when members of his family sold off drawings and sketches after his death in 1837. It is not Constable’s signature,” Mr. Cox Clarified.
“The backing of the framed drawing bears the label of The Little Gallery of Kensington Church Walk in London, a gallery that was in business in the early 1970s and specialized in the sketches and drawings of big-name artists that were far more readily available at that period than they are today.”
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Maine’s rivers are the only ones left in the US where Atlantic salmon can return to spawn, and the most productive of these rivers is having one of its most productive years.
After the removal of the Bangor Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River, ocean-going/river-spawning fish began to return in large numbers.
As of late July, an estimated 1,489 salmon have passed by a fish lift at a place called Milford, the most that have been counted since 2012 when the dam was removed.
“We are up to 1,455 salmon. It’s been a good year thus far,” Jason Valliere, marine resource scientist for the Maine Department of Marine Resources told the Bangor Daily News (paywall). “Let’s hope they keep coming and we see another good push this fall.”
Maine is the only remaining state in the union where wild Atlantic salmon run up river, but fishing for them is prohibited.
It’s thought that higher-than-normal spring and summer rains swelled rivers to greater masses and kept them cooler, which led to greater numbers of cold-water fish returning to spawn.
Other taxa that run up the Penobscot are alewives and blueback river herring, of which 5,490,195 had run up the Milford lift by July 22, shattering by more than double the year-to-date record for the period up to the 22nd.
MORE NEWS LIKE THIS: Pacific Salmon Will Regain Access to Hundreds of Miles of Spawning Grounds as Historic Dam Removal Gets Green Light
Maine’s Department of Marine Resources writes that alewives are important to the ecology of freshwater environments in the state because they provide an alternative prey item for osprey, eagles, great blue heron, loons, and other fish-eating birds at the same time juvenile Atlantic salmon are migrating downriver.
Alewives provide cover for upstream migrating adult salmon that may be preyed on by eagles or osprey, and for young salmon in the estuaries and open ocean that might be captured by seals.
THE FISH RETURNING: Salmon Spawning for the First Time in 80 Years in the Upper Columbia River
Across the United States, 69 river dams were removed from American rivers in 2020, opening up 624 miles of waterways to flow freely and helping connect populations of salmon species like Chinook, coho, and pink, as well as steelhead, cutthroat, and bull trout, Bartram’s bass, greater redhorse, longnose dace, and northern brook lamprey—the latter three of which are threatened or endangered in the U.S.
In most cases, dams were built long ago to fortify industry, or to supply fresh water and irrigation. As technology and population densities have changed over the decades, a surprising amount of dams are powering or assisting nothing, and instead act as irrelevant tax leeches.
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Quote of the Day: “Out on the edge, you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of-things.” – Kurt Vonnegut
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If even half of the lithium that’s estimated to exist in the McDermitt caldera is mined, it would change the world. Full stop.
Early this year, GNN reported that massive lithium reserves totaling 5.9 million metric tons were discovered in the Indian mountains near Kashmir which put them among the highest known lithium reserves on Earth by country.
The McDermitt caldera reserves are almost 700% larger—40 million metric tons, 13 million more than the known reserves of every lithium-producing mine on Earth.
With every manufacturing nation running around for lithium to make batteries and computer chips, any additional source is highly anticipated.
Up until now, large deposits have been found all around the world, but Bolivia is believed to hold the highest at between 16 to 21 million metric tons. However, political turmoil and low development rates have interfered with getting their reserves out of the ground.
“If you believe their back-of-the-envelope estimation, this is a very, very significant deposit of lithium,” Anouk Borst, a geologist at KU Leuven University, told journalist Anthony King. “It could change the dynamics of lithium globally, in terms of price, security of supply, and geopolitics.”
A new analysis of the in situ lithium reveals that the sediments of the McDermitt caldera include a unique claystone composed of the mineral illite that could contain as much as 2.4% lithium by composition, which is higher than the more widely extracted magnesium smectite.
The claystone formed after incredible amounts of alkaline magma, about 1,000 times more magma than Mount St. Helens in 1980, was blasted out of the volcano, located on the border with Nevada and Oregon. Cooling down, it formed ignimbrite, which eroded away at the crater floor to produce lithium-rich particles.
After which, a lake formed in the crater which collected the lithium in mineral-rich clay at the bottom before another eruption mixed in a lithium-containing alkaline brine.
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Mining at the deposit is likely to begin in 2026, having been now thoroughly surveyed by the Lithium Americas Corporation.
As well as securing a supply line of this valuable mineral to US manufacturing, it allows for quality control concerning both environmental and labor practices.
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With so few available lithium suppliers, manufacturers often don’t have the luxury of being able to ensure their supply chains are free of practices like debt slavery, child labor, environmental pollution, or other problems that have been known to plague mineral supply chains like cobalt.
With a concentrated supply from Nevada-Oregon, manufacturers can avoid supporting exploitative operations elsewhere.
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This little nugget went through quite the ordeal after falling down a storm drain near Port Jefferson Station on Long Island, NY.
After someone heard mewing coming from the opening of the storm drain, rescuers were called to the scene. Strong Island Animal Rescue then worked with local police to move a 5,000-pound concrete slap atop the drain that would allow them to reach the kitten.
Using large jacks, and then a hydraulic rescue tool called “the Jaws of Life,” they were able to reach the young one 30 feet down.
“The feeling we had while getting him out was similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark when they removed the slab from the well of the souls to get the ark. Well getting this kitten felt the same way when were moving the slab to get a treasure as well this little kitten!” the rescue foundation wrote in a Facebook post.
They added that the kitty, whom they have named Lawrence, is coming along very quickly after being taken to Jefferson Animal Hospital, and that they will have him ready for adoption in no time.
WATCH the rescue below…
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From Australia comes a story of corporate responsibility in the face of personal tragedy as an elderly national bank depositor had nearly AUD$500,000 returned to him out of the bank’s own pockets.
He had been tricked by scammers into revealing his banking information, which an inquest at ANZ bank found was something they should have been able to detect and stop before the scammers pilfered every last cent of the depositor’s life savings.
78-year-old Alex Shaw was recently diagnosed with dementia, something that wasn’t a big surprise to his son Victor. The news came just a few days after he had gone in with Alex to their local branch of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) and were told that Alex had been the victim of a scam, and that the roughly AUD$460,000 amassed throughout his working life had been taken.
Victor understood it was generally known that scam victims are rarely reimbursed by banks who have a responsibility to protect depositors against fraudulent withdrawals. If the Shaws were to have any hope of recovering the money, they would have to understand whether or not the withdrawals were something that the bank should have prevented.
“Day to day, he’s kind of fine,” Victor told ABC News AU about his father’s dementia. “But that higher-level paperwork kind-of-stuff [like] managing finances… was just really beyond him. Getting the straight narrative as to what had happened… I couldn’t really work it out.”
In a stroke of fortune, Alex had been taking meticulous notes while in conversation with the scammers. He recorded the process almost to a tee, noting that the scammers asked him to buy some Apple store gift cards and send the serial numbers to a phone number in Thailand, or click on some links that were supposed to offer thousands in grant money.
Throughout Alex’ notes, there were references to something called “AnyDesk,” which Victor later learned was a program that allowed scammers to remotely access devices. From that moment on Alex was compromised, and several lump sums of between $10k and $25k were lifted from his account.
ANZ’s fraud detection system blocked the account following these transfers which went to an unknown offshore bank account. However the scammers managed to coach Alex into getting his account reactivated, at which point the rest of his money was taken.
Submitting a complaint, Victor didn’t have much hope, and the representatives from ANZ explained that it’s usually impossible to get much money back in these circumstances.
Then, three months after his father had lost everything, Victor got a response in the mail.
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“Following our review of this matter… ANZ recognizes that it could have done more to support Mr. Shaw given his history with scams,” the bank stated. “Considering Mr. Shaw’s vulnerability and the impact the scam has had on him, we will reimburse the scam transactions totaling $460,174.04.”
Victor told ABC that not a single person he knows, and as an Anglican church rector he has quite the Rolodex, has ever heard of such a thing happening.
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Bank representatives speaking with ABC used the opportunity to encourage the children or relatives of those with dementia or cognitive decline to take steps to ensure greater security around financial management. Victor set up power of attorney over the account, for example, but other measures can be taken.
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On Scotland’s Isle of Arran, national archaeologists are abuzz that a new ‘cursus’ has been found that is proving to be the most complete and best-preserved monument of this kind ever found in Britain—greater even than Stonehenge.
A cursus is not a stone circle, but rather a massive earthwork, and this one found at a place called Drumadoon was built by Neolithic farmers around 3,500 BCE, and it stretches 0.6 miles.
These kinds of landscape monuments were given the name ‘cursus’ after the Latin word for ‘course,’ and in fact the cursus at Stonehenge was at one point believed to be an ancient chariot racing track.
Their purpose is difficult to divine, and their shape and size differ from place to place, but essentially they take the form of a processional course that leads past other monuments like barrow mounds, stone circles, burial cairns, and standing stones. Indeed if stone circles are the Neolithic equivalent of the Roman Colosseum, then the cursus is the equivalent of the Roman Forum.
Sometimes the boundary structure of the cursus is a trench, like at Stonehenge, and other times it’s a raised mound, like at Drumadoon, or at Dorset in England. These mounds would have been exceptionally difficult to build when accounting for a lack of surveying equipment and digging implements like a shovel.
“The Isle of Arran is well known for Machrie Moor with its Prehistoric stone and timber circles; standing stones and burial cairns but the discovery that these may be part of a much larger complex which included this enormous cursus elevates this into a region of global significance on a par with other ceremonial landscapes like Stonehenge,” said Dr. Emma Jenkins, Associate Professor at Bournemouth University who co-led the landscape geoarchaeology and environmental science work in a statement.
As glorious as standing stone circles are—and there is a very glorious one near the Drumadoon excavation site called the Machrie Moor stone circle, they can’t reveal details about societal organization like a cursus can.
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Constructing the monument would have involved staggering amounts of labor, transforming the entire local landscape in the process.
“I have been fortunate to be involved in the excavations of several cursus monuments over the last 30 years, but this is by far the most significant,” said Dr. Kenny Brophy, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow who co-directed excavations at the cursus.
“The survival of the monument means that the potential it has for shedding light on early Neolithic farming and social organization is incredibly exciting. These sites are almost all ploughed flat so to be able to stand on near intact cursus bank is very rare.”
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Prehistoric field boundaries, clearance cairns, and circular houses, at least some of which may be contemporary with the monument, have also been found in the same landscape, all preserved within peatland, sealing the archaeological layers.
Ancient soils representing the original Neolithic land surface, together with cultivated soils from the Bronze Age period, provide an unparalleled opportunity to understand how contemporary farming practice and settlement interacted with the cursus monument and how early farmers transformed Drumadoon.
Drumadoon is currently ensconced in a protected area called the Arran Geopark, but the site is privately owned by a Mr. David Bennett, who is currently in the process of rewilding much of the land; the discovery of the cursus will “inform” the rewilding strategy.
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