Quote of the Day: “Against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.” – Arthur C. Clarke
Photo by: Morgane Le Breton
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Aside from teacups and rice bowls, China doesn’t do anything on a small scale. To wit, their recently-completed solar array in Ningxia Hui is gargantuan—capable of powering 1.5 million homes.
Billed as 1 million kilowatts of capacity, and capable of generating 1.8 billion kilowatt-hours per year, the Ningxia Hui array is the first of several giant renewable energy projects slated for construction in the arid western areas like the Gobi, Tengger, and Taklamakan deserts.
China Energy Investment Corp. says it is the first solar farm in the country to include an ultrahigh-voltage power transmission channel that will bring the electricity generated there to the central Hunan Province.
The transmission is a result of Hunan having a population of 66 million people, compared to Ningxia’s 7 million.
In their most recent Five Year Plan, the Chinese government outlined their intention to install 100 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2026; particularly solar and wind in the desert regions.
MORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Inspired by Marvel’s Mythical ‘Wakanda’, Ugandan Village is Built on Shea Butter and Solar Power
The National Energy Administration said installed capacity of renewable energy in China continued to expand in the first quarter, reaching 47.4 million kW, an increase of 86.5% compared with the same period last year.
Like most rural Chinese provinces, Ningxia, along with Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia—the provinces wherein rest the three deserts mentioned above, rely heavily on coal for electricity, and the major installations of solar and wind are hoped to accelerate economic development in these mostly-agricultural economies.
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Native gardening isn’t only beneficial to the animals in your environment, it’s also a lot less of a hassle because you don’t need to constantly fight the climate and conditions in your area.
To that end, a group of plant-lovers created a free native-plant garden planner that contains species lists which are tailored to 19 different US biomes.
Wild Ones, the nonprofit organization behind the online service, believes in “environmentally sound landscaping practices to preserve biodiversity through the preservation, restoration, and establishment of native plant communities.”
The eco-regions included in the planner are located in major metropolitan areas, including Boston, Chattanooga, Chicago, Columbia River Basin, Denver/Front Range, Grand Rapids, Greensboro, Lafayette, Las Cruces, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Princeton, St. Louis, Tallahassee, Toledo, Tucson, and Washington, D.C.
A plant list accompanies each design and provides a quick preview of the diversity and beauty of the native plants incorporated within each design. The nonprofit ensured the plans are formatted for printers so that users can have the plan in their hands while walking through their gardens.
“We can no longer leave conservation to the conservationists,” stresses Wild Ones Honorary Director Doug Tallamy. “We must now act collectively to put our ecosystems back together again.”
CHECK OUT GNN’s WEEKLY GARDENING COLUMN: Good Gardening
So many of the most used and coveted ornamental plants were, centuries ago, brought to Europe from China and the rest of Asia. Those traditions were passed onto gardeners in the young U.S. of A., along with species like the azalea and rhododendron, camellia and gardenia, hibiscus, peony, and chrysanthemum.
There are hundreds of attractive native ornamentals that will survive better, and attract more wildlife than these imported oriental species—and it’s just a matter of getting to know them.
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Listening to music or playing an instrument can delay cognitive decline as we age—by producing gray matter in the brain—a new study shows.
The researchers followed over 100 retired people who had never practiced music before. They were enrolled in piano and music awareness training for six months, which when finished resulted in an increase in working memory performance by 6% and a total reduction in gray matter loss in the piano playing group.
Taken altogether, the scientists believe that while musical interventions cannot rejuvenate the brain, they can prevent aging in specific regions, specifically in people with no musical background who start playing in their senior years.
As the brain ages, it loses a trait that everybody who wants to understand a little about their own neurology should remember—neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the measurement of the brain’s ability to flex and work on different tasks by enhancing neuronal connections and creating new ones to suit new tasks.
Key among neuroplasticity is working memory, which describes the kind of mental effort needed to remember a whole phone number long enough to be able to reach the pen and paper to write it down, or translate a sentence from a foreign language.
A team from the University of Geneva wanted to see how much the musical domain could prevent this loss of working memory associated with age-related cognitive decline.
‘‘We wanted people whose brains did not yet show any traces of plasticity linked to musical learning. Indeed, even a brief learning experience in the course of one’s life can leave imprints on the brain, which would have biased our results’’, explains Damien Marie, first author of the study.
The participants were randomly assigned to two groups, regardless of their motivation to play an instrument. The second group had active listening lessons, which focused on instrument recognition and analysis of musical properties in a wide range of musical styles. The classes lasted one hour. Participants in both groups were required to do homework for half an hour a day.
MORE NEUROLOGY NEWS: Scientists Find Surge of Specific Brain Activity in Dying Patients that Could Help Explain Near-Death Experiences
‘‘After six months, we found common effects for both interventions. Neuroimaging revealed an increase in grey matter in four brain regions involved in high-level cognitive functioning in all participants, including cerebellum areas involved in working memory. Their performance increased by 6% and this result was directly correlated to the plasticity of the cerebellum,’’ says Clara James, another author of the study.
In the pianists, the volume of gray matter around the auditory cortex remained consistent; it didn’t shrink with age. For those in the musical analysis group, the gray matter did decrease at normal rates.
Also, a general pattern of brain atrophy was still observed in both groups, suggesting that complex interactions with music are limited in their effects on our most complex organ.
MORE MUSICAL SCIENCE: Revolutionary Music Therapy Helps Paralyzed Man Walk and Talk Again – It ‘Unlocked the Brain’
These results show that practicing and listening to music promotes brain plasticity and cognitive reserve. The authors of the study believe that these playful and accessible interventions should become a major policy priority for healthy aging.
SING ALOUD This Interesting Finding To Your Senior Friends…
Marine biologists restoring populations of seahorses off Australia’s east coast are ecstatic at the best efforts they’ve seen so far.
Hundreds of White’s seahorses, the only seahorse or seadragon species on Australia’s national endangered species list, were released into the waters north of Newcastle into specially-made “hotels.”
The project was conducted through a private-public effort consisting of the Sydney Aquarium and the Department of Primary Industries, (DPI) an agency that oversees hunting, agriculture, fishing, and forestry.
A generation ago, divers might see two dozen White’s seahorses at a time off Sydney Harbor at a refuge called Port Stephens, but coastal development and boat moorings have disrupted the habitat of these beautiful and strange creatures.
Sydney Aquarium has a very successful breeding program for the animal that uses individuals from Port Stephens as broodstock. The fathers raise the eggs of the next generation in a belly pouch—a feature unique in the entire animal kingdom—and are collected in large bags of seawater after they hatch.
They are then taken to the refuges and lowered down into their hotels. The hotels are essentially cages meant for much larger animals. They create plenty of nooks and crannies that serve as habitat for them and their prey species like crustaceans.
MORE AUSTRALIAN WILDLIFE: 29 Species Have Recovered Enough in Australia to be Taken Off Endangered List–a Milestone for Celebration
Recently, aboard a DPI boat off Nelson Bay, Dr. David Harasti, a scientist with the department, released 350 baby seahorses at one time.
“That was the best one we’ve ever done—350 baby seahorses sitting around in their new home,” he told ABC au, who filmed him doing the release.
“It’s great to see and I can’t wait to go back in a couple of weeks and see how they’re doing.”
MORE MARINE BIOLOGY: Scientists Discover Pristine Deep-Sea Coral Reefs in Galápagos Marine Reserve ‘Teeming With Life’
Harasti is planning to check up on his charges this coming October to see how they’re doing.
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Quote of the Day: “He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.” – Elbert Hubbard
Photo by: Sherman Yang
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For the first time, scientists have observed a surge of energetic activity in the brains of dying patients, a discovery that reveals that our consciousness can be active even as our hearts stop beating.
Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, found surges of brain activity in the form of gamma brain waves in the “hotspot” of conscious processing in 4 unresponsive patients who were taken off life-support with the permission of their families.
The surge, detected with electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, correlated to data Borjigin had seen previously in her career in the brains of dying rats, and suggests an increase in brain activity during cardiac arrest in the moments of death.
The data, which Borjigin described as about as good as it could possibly get in this remote field of study, could help shed light on the phenomenon of near-death experiences, described in Borjigin’s paper as “a biological paradox that challenges current understandings of near-death consciousness, which until now was widely believed to be non-functioning.”
Vice Media, reporting on the paper, said that it’s impossible to know exactly what the surge of gamma wave oscillations in the four patients’ brains would be like in terms of sensory experience, though a hypothesis was that there could have been audio and visual components to it.
Individuals who have experienced near-death visions have remarkably similar stories: of distant lights, a sense of levitation, and a highlight reel of life’s memories. The aching question inherent in Borjigin’s discovery is whether or not those experiences are generated during this surge in gamma brain waves.
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More research is needed to establish any connection between this and near-death experiences. For example, a weakness in Borjigin’s study was that it included only 4 people, and of them, only 2 had surges in gamma waves in the moments leading up to death.
Furthermore, both of these patients were susceptible to seizures, though neither had had one within the four hours leading up to their deaths.
A strength of the study was that it showed how rats experienced surges in a wide scale of brain activity, while in human brains it was concentrated in gamma waves.
MORE BRAIN MYSTERIES: Revolutionary Music Therapy Helps Paralyzed Man Walk and Talk Again – It ‘Unlocked the Brain’
“What excites me most is to probe the role of the brain in cardiac arrest from these studies,” Borjigin told Vice. “Our data reveals that the dying brain is far from hypoactive. Then, why would a dying brain be activated? What is the function of brain activation at near-death?”
“Producing an internal state of consciousness (NDE) cannot be its sole function when survival is truly at stake,” she concluded. “Much of my future research will focus on the role of the brain in cardiac arrest, including covert consciousness.”
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There are all kinds of ways to make people smile. You can tell jokes, offer free hugs, or, if you’re this guy, you build the world’s only road-legal wheelie bin.
Taxed and registered, the electric motor can propel the creation along England’s roads at 8 miles per hour.
Inventor Kevin Nicks says part of the reason he does what he does is “just to make people smile.”
“There’s a lot of negativity in the world one way or another at the moment, but what I try to do is bring some fun to people,” says the almost 60-year-old inventor.
He often drives with the lid open for safety reasons, although a series of mounted cameras allow to him drive with the lid closed for a real shock to passersby.
He had originally set out to make the world’s fastest lawnmower, but discovered that A: it had already been done, and B: the record was 140 miles per hour.
Setting his sights instead on the world record for fastest motorized wheelie bin, he discovered the record was held by a man who did it in honor of his friend who had terminal cancer.
So he decided to let the record stand and outfitted a slower model.
WATCH him driving his wheelie bin…
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An international study of people on five continents has found that humans help each other with small things about every 2 minutes, and acquiesce to calls for help overwhelmingly more often than reject them.
For sociologists, understanding the root of any kind of human behavior first requires them to attempt to parse out how much influence on it comes from nurture, and how much from nature.
Kindness, generosity, anger, curiosity—how much are these expressions amplified or tamped down by the culture a person grows up in, and how much is built-in to the human animal?
Attempting to tackle kindness and cooperation, a team of researchers at UC Los Angeles conducted a study of observing everyday interactions between strangers and relations to see how often they helped each other.
Previous literature was, in hindsight, aiming a little too high in attempting to answer this question.
For example, the UCLA press room states in a report on the paper, that while whale hunters of Lamalera, Indonesia, follow established rules about how to share out a large catch, Hadza foragers of Tanzania share their food more out of a fear of generating negative gossip.
In Kenya, they continue, wealthier Orma villagers are expected to pay for public goods such as road projects. Wealthy Gnau villagers of Papua New Guinea, on the other hand, would reject such an offer because it creates an awkward obligation to reciprocate for their poorer neighbors.
While these are valuable insights into human social organization, they are dealing with complex phenomena with consequences, such as how to divide a whale kill among dozens of people, or financing road construction.
Instead, UCLA sociologist Giovanni Rossi aimed a bit lower. His team analyzed over 40 hours of video recordings of everyday life in towns in Italy, Poland, Russia, Aboriginal Australia, Ecuador, Laos, Ghana, and England.
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“Cultural differences like these have created a puzzle for understanding cooperation and helping among humans,” said Rossi, the paper’s first author. “Are our decisions about sharing and helping shaped by the culture we grew up with? Or are humans generous and giving by nature?”
They registered signals for help, such as asking if someone could pass them the water at a dinner table, or a visual signal of help such as struggling to lift a heavy object into a truck, and identified more than 1,000 such requests.
They found that people complied with small requests seven times more often than they declined, and six times more often than they ignored them. Rejections of help came at a rate of 11% at most, but 74% of all rejections came with an explanation as to why the rendering of help wasn’t possible.
MORE KINDNESS NEWS: The Top 10 Acts of Kindness in 2022 Warmed Our Hearts and Restored Our Faith in Strangers and Neighbors
In other words, only 2.5% of all help signals were denied without explanation.
“While cultural variation comes into play for special occasions and high-cost exchange, when we zoom in on the micro level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible,” Rossi told the UCLA press.
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By Derek Maiolo
Ten years ago, a clumsy but enthusiastic Great Dane named Walter was out with his owners on public land near Rangely, Colorado, when he stopped near a strange-looking rock.
His owners investigated and found what experts say was a 74 million-year-old fossil. After painstaking work, scientists uncovered a nearly complete specimen of a hadrosaur duck-billed dinosaur.
Now, the Cretaceous-era fossil proudly carries the name of its paleontologist pooch: Walter.
The same year Walter was found, Colorado’s coal production hit a 20-year low; the town of Craig’s power plant and coal mines in the county are scheduled to shut down by 2030. Numerous businesses have closed, and Ms. Johnson dreams of turning one of those empty buildings into a dinosaur museum to attract tourists.
Rewind time just a bit, and it was near the cypresses and ferns of a brackish swamp that an aging dinosaur strained its arthritic body to drink. It was about as long as a school bus, with a bony lump on its nose and an old wound that had become infected.
Perhaps it died there, or maybe it was still lumbering about when a flood or landslide struck and sediment buried its body, along with the surrounding cypress and ferns. Heat and pressure compacted the vegetation into coal. But the dinosaur, encased in a sarcophagus of mud and sand, remained intact.
Hadrosaurs—the “cows of the Cretaceous”—once grazed in herds across prehistoric North America and Eurasia. Walter is a remarkably complete specimen, and researchers believe that this fossil represents a new species.
As the scientists, volunteers, and students excavated, they found more fossils: a Daspletosaurus tooth, chunks of what may be dinosaur skin, and imprints of ancient plants like screen prints on the rock. The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act says that such discoveries must go to approved repositories, typically at government or museum facilities in cities like Denver and Washington, D.C.
MORE DINOSAUR NEWS: ‘Impossible Fossil’ Preserves the Exact Moment the Dinosaurs Died: ‘It’s Absolutely Bonkers’
But Liz Johnson, a paleontologist at Colorado Northwestern Community College, wanted to change that.
“This is northwest Colorado history. It should stay in northwest Colorado,” she said. Fortunately, that was also in the federal government’s interest, so the Bureau of Land Management worked with the college to make it happen, short-circuiting a process that can take years, if not decades. Walter and the other finds will stay in Craig.
MORE FOSSIL NEWS: Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Our Planet Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms
The town of Craig loves Walter; the county visitor center sells replicas of Walter’s tooth. Students and community volunteers worked for five summers to help uncover Walter’s remains. The most dedicated volunteers still spend weekends and holidays meticulously cleaning fossils.
In 2021, visitors to Dinosaur National Monument, about a hundred miles to the west, spent $24.3 million. That’s a lot of money, but tourism doesn’t pay as well as mining. Still, as Craig scrambles to attract investors and new industries, Walter’s fans hope paleo-tourism can add fresh appeal. “This place used to be a swamp. Now it’s high desert. Change is constant,” Johnson said. “We have to change, too.”
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Reprinted with permission from High Country News.
Quote of the Day: “Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.” – William Shakespeare
Photo by: Clement Souchet (Meteora, Greece)
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When the Ancient Egyptians were still leaving offerings to Amun in their temples, a faith from more than 4,000 miles away was already turning up at the docks of the Pharaohs.
A 28-inch long (71-centimeter) statue of Gautama Buddha was found in excavations of the Egyptian port of Berenice on the Red Sea, dating back to the Roman Era.
Evidently, ships laden with goods from India and offshore islands were, even at this early stage of history, already capable of crossing the Indian Ocean routinely on trading missions, bringing spices, jewels, and religion with them.
A Polish-U.S. archaeological mission discovered the statue “dating back to the Roman era while digging at the ancient temple in Berenice.”
The find holds “important indications over the presence of trade ties between Egypt and India during the Roman era”, the head of Egypt’s supreme antiquities council Mostafa al-Waziri said.
The statue depicts Buddha with a halo around his head and holding a lotus flower in his hand.
Known as the Maritime Silk Road, the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean were plied for thousands of years, connecting the wealth of China to that of India and the Spice Islands, back to the Arab World and North Africa, through to Constantinople and Europe beyond.
GNN has previously highlighted the incredible complexity of global trade even in the earliest periods of civilization.
MORE ARCHAEOLOGICAL NEWS: Archaeologists Uncover ‘Complete Roman City’ From 1,800 Years Ago in Luxor–Including Pigeon Towers
Last year, cutting-edge analysis of tin isotopes has shown that tiny tribes of pastoral nomads from modern-day Uzbekistan supplied a third of all the precious tin needed to make the bronze that fueled ancient Mediterranean commerce.
Getting the tin from Uzbekistan to the Med involved a vast multi-regional, multi-vector trade network that bears comparison with our own time—3,500 years after it was developed.
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Describing access to the sea as an inalienable human right, Greek tourism authorities are retrofitting 287 beaches across the country with self-operating wheelchair ramps.
Self-operating means that wheelchair users can operate it by themselves without assistance from a friend or employee, offering a flexible freedom rarely found in difficult terrain such as beach sand.
So far, work crews have already installed the Seatrac system on 147 beaches, where disabled people can enjoy swimming in the country’s famous blue waters.
The scope of the project goes beyond beaches and has seen the Acropolis of Athens equipped with a wheelchair elevator, and many other sides receive renovations to make wheelchair-bound visitors more welcome, including bathrooms, sidewalks and walkways, snack bars, and other amenities.
“People with disabilities and people with limited mobility can engage in activities such as swimming that contribute to their physical and mental health,” Vassilis Kikilias, Greece’s tourism minister, announced at a press conference.
“Seatrac does not provide only independent access to the sea,” Ignatios Fotiou, who helped develop the technology, to the Washington Post. “It provides dignity and independence to people with mobility issues that want to enjoy swimming. They can choose where to go and ask their friends to join them, not the other way around.”
The government of the country created a website for all the info needed to plan a wheelchair-included trip to the beaches of Greece, including a map of all the beaches nearby equipped with the Seatracs.
WATCH the beach joy in their video…
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A group of middle-aged dads formed a dance crew to perform at their kids’ school but become unlikely social media stars with over 300k followers—one of which is Hugh Jackman.
The ‘Outta’ Puff Daddys first came together in 2012 in Brighton for a surprise performance at their children’s annual dance show.
Now the viral TikToks and Instagram Reels of their synchronized dancing have their kids cheering them on alongside a six-figure following.
Having never danced professionally before and ranging in age from 42 to 60, the dads were taught by their kids’ street dancing teacher for the surprise performance and received such a good reception they decided to carry on permanently.
Paul Jukes, 48, the group’s leader and artistic director, says dancing together has helped the members through bereavement, unemployment, and depression, reminiscent of the classic British comedy The Full Monty.
“The irony is that even though I’m the leader, artistic director, and choreographer of the group, I’m not normally the most confident [guy],” said Jukes, whose crew name is ‘Jukebox’, obviously. “If we’re in a party situation we’re off at the side but when we’re together those inhibitions are lost, and we just embrace life to the max.”
Jukebox remembers the moment they surprised their kids at the dance show.
“We performed at the Brighton Dome which seats 2,000 people so for your first live dance performance it was quite something. We literally took the roof off,” he said. “The noise was phenomenal and of course, the kids in the audience were like, ‘hang on a second, that’s your dad.’”
“Most people would assume our kids are going to be embarrassed by us but none of us in the crew have that. All our families and kids are really supportive and really love it.”
“And of course, it has been deemed cool by them to have the following we have with over 300,000 followers on Instagram and videos that get over one million views.”
“We all have crew names and one of our members is called Wolverine, and recently received a comment from Hugh Jackman giving him a massive thumbs up.”
MORE DANCING STORIES: One-legged Woman is a World Class Salsa Dancer and Inspiration to All (WATCH)
The group actually began performing around the country at festivals over the last 3 years. Jukes experienced a period of depression in 2017 and he credits the group for playing a key role in his recovery.
“I believe everyone should be constantly underpinning and supporting their mental health— as we all do with our physical health—so that when those moments arise, we immediately have strategies in place,” he said.
“One of those is making sure I absolutely attend our weekly dance sessions because they are so integral to my mental health.”
The group is having to adapt to its members’ changing bodies as they get older, but that has not stopped them from continuing to dream big.
MORE RIDICULOUS DADS: Watch the Love Between Men and Their Cats in New Film Purr-fect for Home Viewing With Your Pet
“There are a few arthritic knees in the crew, so we nurture and support each other to make sure what we do is achievable,” said Jukes. “One of our crew members is 60 years old now and he’s just incredible.”
“We joke about it as a crew but hey, let’s go to Vegas and Hollywood. An Outta Puff Daddys residency – why not?”
WATCH the daddys in action below…
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Imagine a Classics department at a University where the historians never bothered to learn the Greek or Latin of the original texts and you’ll have some idea of what the study of North American antiquity has been like.
Take for example Timucua, a dead language spoken by peoples native to Florida and Georgia, unrelated to nearby native languages, but was the most widely used tongue of any in that part of the world by the time of the Spanish Colonization.
An interesting thing happened during the predictably tragic story that followed: some Franciscan priests worked to apply the Spanish-Latin alphabet to the Timucua, in order to advance education and conversion to Christianity, which gave us a written form of a Native American language from the 16th century—a rare thing.
Now, years after a pair of scholars took on the task of translating those writings, they’ve managed to create the largest database of Timucua words in history, and put the Latin and Greek back in the Classics department, to speak allegorically. They’ve also made some startling discoveries about the mental capacities of these vanished people.
Aaron Broadwell, a linguistics professor at the University of Florida, and his colleague historian Alejandra Dubcovsky, have found that the Timucua had a rather more active role in the translation of their language into Spanish than other native peoples.
“The traditional understanding of the way this works is that the missionary appears and learns the language and then translates the stuff himself,” Broadwell told the Smithsonian. “But if we look closely at the text, we can see that it didn’t happen that way.”
The Spanish texts read more like a phrasebook than a dictionary—specifically a phrasebook for priests looking to encourage the godliness of the Timucua. As a result, and much like a phrasebook written today, there are a lot of questions—however, they have more to do with implying the Timucua traditional practices are sinful than facilitating honest communication.
MORE LINGUISTIC DISCOVERIES: Ancient Grammatical Puzzle That Has Baffled Scientists for 2,500 Years Solved by Cambridge University Student
“Did you make incantations over the lake before fishing in it?” reads one.
“Do you engage in the devilish practice of whistling to the wind to make the storm stop?’” reads another.
This is where the Timucua were clearly more intelligent than the Spanish believed, because the reverse translations, as Broadwell puts it, are “considerably less judgy.”
For example, the Timucua translation to that question is “did you whistle to the wind to make it stop?” and the translation of “have the man and a woman been joined together in front of a priest?” is “did you and another person consent to be married?”
“It’s very hard to learn these languages, and Native people don’t want to share everything. And those translators aren’t given any credit,” Dubcovsky also told the Smithsonian, noting that the priests probably couldn’t understand enough of the language to double-check the translations the Timucua were making, hence why potentially ‘devilish’ practices are included in the text.
It also implies to some degree that the Timucua probably did most of the work.
MORE NATIVE AMERICAN NEWS: The ‘Sioux Chef’ Brings Indigenous Food Back to the Forefront of American Diets
Broadwell and Dubcovsky worked together on a paper examining and elaborating these findings in 2017. Broadwell also founded and curates the Timucua Dictionary, the largest and pretty much only available database on the native language.
The details that have emerged show that while unique, Timucua bears some resemblance to the Choctaw language spoken by groups nearby, and that Timucua was a complex language capable of thoroughly addressing all manner of topics.
As to the question of why Timucua didn’t have a written alphabet, Broadwell points out that for as many people as there are on the Earth, scant few have ever developed a writing system.
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Quote of the Day: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” – Graham Greene
Photo by: Chris Burgett
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Just in time for Mother’s Day, this week’s Miracle Monday column showcases a heartwarming family reunion for a woman who had been living on the streets for 28 years, and finally got the chance to return home to Wisconsin.
“We waited 28 years. Every year, every day, every hour, just wondering where she was and if we were ever going to find her—afraid of that phone call that something happened to her and no one knew who her family was,” said Angie, Linda’s younger sister, when they all gathered at the backyard picnic table.
Her life was about to change when Linda met Gabby, who worked for Miracle Messages in South Florida.
Gabby had spoken with her several times before, but on a Tuesday night in January, Linda finally decided to share one of her dreams: although she felt scared and apprehensive of what might happen, she would like to try to reconnect with her mother and children.
“Gabby sat with me on the ground that night, and it was cold. She took down my information. I will never forget that,” Linda recalled.
“Gabby. I love you. You are going to be part of this family forever.”
Struggling with addiction and chronic illnesses, Linda was living unsheltered under the 14th Street Overtown bridge in Miami. She asked Gabby and Miracle Messages to help her reconnect with her mother and her kids, who she hadn’t seen since they were small children, and who were now in their 30’s.
Gabby explained to her how the Miracle Messages reunification program worked, and asked Linda if she had a message that she would like us to pass along to her kids if we were able to find them. Her message to them was, “I miss you. I love you.”
In less than a week, an internet sleuth who volunteers for the team found her mother, Darlene, who immediately said she wanted to reconnect with Linda. She called the rest of her family to let them know Linda had been found.
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“The only way I can explain it is that it’s a miracle,” Darlene told Gabby. “I never gave up hope [of finding her].”
Linda’s children, Evelynn and Marcos, hadn’t heard any updates from their mom in over two years when they got the call from Miracle Messages and immediately booked a flight to Miami.
Gabby drove the siblings around the neighborhood where she had last talked to Linda. Even though they struggled to find her, the day was full of hope—and soon Linda was located and agreed to go back home with them.
Shortly after arriving in Wisconsin, Linda enrolled in a treatment program.
A few months later, Linda’s family invited Gabby to a family reunion to thank her for bringing their family back together—and Miracle Messages captured an emotional video that was posted on YouTube.
During the reunion, Gabby had the opportunity to ask Linda what she missed most while she was away.
LAST WEEK’S MIRACLE MONDAY: MIRACLE MONDAY–A New Weekly Column: Homeless Uncle Inspired Him to Reunite the Unhoused with Families Before it’s Too Late
She responded, “Being together with my sisters and my mom. I am so grateful. There are not words to describe it. I didn’t know how they were going to respond. Thank you, Gabby and Miracle Messages.”
“There’s always been a missing link in this family and Linda brought us back together,” said Angie, Linda’s sister. “I feel like we are whole again.”
Miracle Messages is an award-winning 501(c)3 nonprofit that helps people experiencing homelessness rebuild their social support systems and financial security, primarily through family reunifications, a phone buddy program, and basic income pilots. Volunteer today!
Christian Bowers has Down Syndrome, but likes to do normal guy stuff like go bowling and play video games.
Making friends was never hard for the young man, now 24, until he finished school and found, as many people without Down Syndrome do for that matter, it’s not as easy and straightforward to maintain a social life.
Bowers’ mother, Donna Herter, watched her son sink further and further into the dumps because he didn’t have any friends to visit him.
Eventually, Herter put up a post on Facebook asking if any local guys near Rochester, Minnesota, would be interested in coming to hang out with Christian for two hours, a service for which she was willing to offer $80,00 in compensation.
A nurse on the night shift, she put the post up at 4:00 AM before ending her workday and going to sleep. When she woke up, it had amassed 5,000 comments.
“I was freaking out. My hands were shaking, I was sweating. I was just looking for some local guys, I didn’t want to invite like the entire world into our house,” she told CBS News.
Her friends encouraged her to calm down and take a closer look at the comments, in which she found parents offering suggestions and others volunteering to help.
She eventually found 7 fellows from Wentzville, Minnesota, who visit Christian once a week on a rotating schedule. Herter says her son goes to sleep with a smile on his face now, and is excited about life in general, and of the future as well.
Friendships are important for people born with Down Syndrome, and associations urge parents to plan for the eventuality of their child exiting school and needing to take a more precise attitude towards socializing.
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Christian occasionally attends gatherings and groups of other special needs men and women his age, but craves friendship with the rest of the population as well.
“And I’ve never asked him, but I assume because it kind of makes him feel normal, just for an hour or two. ‘Hey, somebody who doesn’t have Down syndrome wants to hang out with me,'” she said.
One of the 7 friends, James Hasting, said he felt terrible that Herter had reached the point where she was trying to pay people to visit her son. Hasting, who volunteers with special needs folks, said hanging out just for a few hours to watch a movie or play video games with Christian has changed the way he looks at the world.
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If someone asked you what Rick Fox was famous for, you would have to say the three NBA Championships he won with the Lakers, but the next generation might know him instead as the face of sustainable concrete.
Believing that tropical storms are becoming more intense due to carbon content in the atmosphere, Fox went all in and became the co-founder and CEO of Partanna which manufactures concrete that absorbs more carbon from the air than it contributes during manufacturing.
It all happened back in 2019 when Fox received a call from his manager just after Hurricane Dorian smashed into Fox’s home on the Bahamas, the country where he grew up. His manager, who was also displaced by a natural disaster—the fires in California in 2018, said she had met an architect called Sam Marshall who was developing carbon-negative concrete.
Fox, whose post-NBA career has included dozens of acting credits, as well as production work, and even the sponsoring of an esports team, was nevertheless able to find time to team up with Marshall to launch Partanna. The firm just received $12 million in seed funding from Cherubic Ventures.
“I’ve been a part of a lot of amazing journeys and industries, from entertainment to movies and TV. I’ve been on sets with Oscar-winning actors and directors, and I’ve been on championship NBA teams. There’s been nothing more rewarding for me in my life than to be a part of this team where we’re leaving something behind,” Fox told TechCrunch+, reporting on the funding announcement.
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Every part of the concrete process is designed to reduce its environmental impact.
Instead of using Portland cement, which is a major source of carbon emissions, they use a special mixture of natural and recycled ingredients that’s cured at ambient temperature rather than the high temps that make concrete and cement responsible for the largest share of the manufacturing emissions pie chart.
The binder components consume CO2 as they cure, which means they actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. They use a brine activator that’s found in natural pozzolans, which helps avoid using the energy-intensive clinkering process.
What this means for the bottom line is that a 1,250 square-foot home made with Partanna absorbs 22.5 tons of CO2, rather than emitting 77 tons, which is what a house that large would otherwise do.
Fox sees Partanna as offering the most to those in disaster-prone areas—such as his native Bahamas, where Partanna and the Government of the Bahamas announced their intent to develop the world’s first carbon-negative affordable housing development.
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“Convincing the industry that Partanna is a viable alternative to cement—we hope that the successful delivery of homes in The Bahamas, and our growing project pipeline, will help to evidence the strength of our technology,” Fox said in a statement.
Because the company captures carbon in their buildings, they started selling carbon credits—a product that companies can buy to offset the emissions from their operations. In this case, the credits are buildings for poor people in the Bahamas or Saudi Arabia—where they recently signed an agreement with development company Red Sea Global to build a manufacturing facility on Saudi’s Red Sea coast.
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A European firm is hoping to revive the dream of commercial hypersonic travel with a prototype that will reduce flight times by 75%.
Unlike several other supersonic startups that have come and gone, this is their third prototype, with two others having already succeeded in test flights, proving critical systems can work on a design that would allow one to travel from Frankfurt to Sydney in around 4 hours 15 minutes, or Memphis to Dubai in 3 hours 30.
Headquartered in Switzerland, but with a team of over 100 people working across several European countries, Destinus has received tens of millions from private and public funds looking to fund renewable innovation.
Destinus is now preparing its third prototype—the one meant to test the fuel systems, since for their design, sustainable hydrogen is the only reasonable option.
This isn’t due to a question of emissions, but a question of weight. Kerosene is much heavier than hydrogen, and if the machine is hoped to be able to reach across oceans with room for luggage and passengers, it needs to be as light as possible.
The design of the jet itself is very standard, and can be seen on the Concorde jet and hypersonic cruise missiles used in the large militaries of the world—a shape known as the “Waverider” because of its ability to “ride” the “waves” of the breaking sound barrier.
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In the lead-up to their third test flight, slated for takeoff in late 2023, the company is understandably tense.
“This is a pretty massive vehicle,” Martina Löfqvist, Destinus’ business development manager, told CNN. “It’s about the same size as the previous prototype in terms of being around 10 meters (long), but it’s 10 times heavier, and probably 20 times more complex as well, in terms of the structure and in terms of the propulsion system.”
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Last month, Destinus acquired Dutch company OPRA to become their in-house hydrogen department—Destinus Energy. This has also allowed them to raise more money for the project by selling OPRA’s already-marketable gas turbines for hydrogen fuel.
The timeline for the growth of this bold attempt is to have a smaller-scale version ready for commercial flight in the 2030s, that could hold around 25 passengers, and full-scale versions ready in the 2040s.
WATCH a company explainer below…
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