Mr. Pickles with baby –Credit: Jackelin Reyna / Houston Zoo
Mr. Pickles with baby –Credit: Jackelin Reyna / Houston Zoo
Mr. Pickles, a 90-year-old radiated tortoise and the oldest animal at the Houston Zoo, became a father for the first time last week.
Mr. Pickles and his 53-year-old partner, Mrs. Pickles, welcomed three hatchlings that could live for up to 150 years if well taken care of.
Native to southern Madagascar, radiated tortoises are Critically Endangered and rarely produce offspring, Houston Zoo officials said.
“The new hatchlings came as a surprise when a herpetology keeper happened upon Mrs. Pickles as the tortoise was laying her eggs at closing time,” the Houston Zoo blog reported.
“The animal care team quickly went to work uncovering the eggs and getting them to the safety of the Reptile & Amphibian House. The soil in Houston isn’t hospitable to the Madagascar native tortoises, and it’s unlikely the eggs would have hatched on their own if the keeper hadn’t been in the right place at the right time.”
3 Baby Pickles – Credit: Jackelin Reyna / Houston Zoo
Arriving in 1996, Mrs. Pickles has lived at the Houston Zoo alongside Mr. Pickles ever since. The kids have been named Dill, Gherkin, and Jalapeño.
The new parents have been key to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan for this exquisite reptile that has unfortunately fallen afoul of the illegal animal trade.
In 2018 10,000 radiated tortoises were found in a private home in Toliara, Madagascar. Rescuers transported them to Le Village Des Tortues (“Turtle Village”), a private wildlife rehabilitation facility in Ifaty, 18 miles north of Toliara.
Preventative measures for insuring against the extinction of the reptile has been the establishment of breeding colonies on the Reunion Islands and Mauritius where the conditions are similar to its home in Madagascar.
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Quote of the Day: “Wildness is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.” – Gary Snyder
Photo by: Droid Gingerbread, CC license
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A “mind-blowing” discovery in the early stages of photosynthesis has been discovered by scientists that could help improve the efficiency of renewable energy technologies.
While trying to figure out if it were possible to extract electrons from a known process in the early stages of photosynthesis, the scientists instead found an entirely-new electron transfer pathway, which for those who remember their biology 101, is the metabolic method that extracts the most energy from food.
The study’s authors believe this new understanding of photosynthesis could create new and more efficient ways of harnessing the process’s power to generate biofuels.
The research team, comprised of scientists from across the globe, first set out to understand why a ring-shaped molecule called a ‘quinone’ is able to steal electrons from the photosynthetic process
Quinones, which are common in nature, are able to easily accept and give away electrons.
Using a technique called ultrafast spectroscopy, the study team observed how quinones behave in photosynthetic cyanobacteria which obtain energy via photosynthesis like plants and algae.
Observing the process at an incredibly fast timescale of a millionth of a millionth of a second, the researchers found that the protein scaffold where the initial chemical reactions of photosynthesis take place is leaky, enabling some electrons to escape.
This leakiness could help plants protect themselves from damage from bright or rapidly changing light.
The researchers say that being able to extract electrons at an earlier point in photosynthesis could come in handy when manipulating the photosynthetic pathways to create clean, renewable fuel from the sun.
For the same reasons, they think the ability to regulate photosynthesis could also enable crops to become more tolerant to intense bouts of sunlight.
“We didn’t know as much about photosynthesis as we thought we did, and the new electron transfer pathway we found here is completely surprising,” said corresponding author Dr. Jenny Zhang from Cambridge
“…we thought we were just using a new technique to confirm what we already knew. Instead, we found a whole new pathway, and opened the black box of photosynthesis a bit further.”
“At first, we thought we’d made a mistake: it took a while for us to convince ourselves that we’d done it,” said Dr. Zhang. “The fact that we can steal them at an earlier process is mind-blowing.”
Photosynthesis is a wholly natural process, and scientists have been studying ways in which we can harness it to address the climate crisis.
For example, scientists have been looking for ways to mimic processes to generate clean fuels from sunlight and water.
Dr. Laura Wey, who is now based at the University of Turku in Finland, added told Cambridge Univ. Press that since the electrons from photosynthesis are dispersed through the whole system, more of them can be accessed.
“The fact that we didn’t know this pathway existed is exciting, because we could be able to harness it to extract more energy for renewables,” said Dr. Wey.
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President Da Silva with the Yanomami - CC 2.0. Palácio do Planalto
President da Silva with the Yanomami – CC 2.0. Palácio do Planalto
When President ‘Lula’ da Silva took office this year in Brazil, many environmental and indigenous rights groups hoped he would fulfill campaign promises of better protection for the Amazon rainforest and the people who live there.
Nearly four months into his tenure and early signs are that Lula was telling the truth, as Brazilian police have evicted dozens of illegal gold miners from the Yanomami Reserve, an area the size of Portugal inhabited by around 35,000 tribesmen.
Illegally-mined gold accounts for around half of all the country’s exports, and a new Environment of the Amazon division of the federal police is seeking international assistance in building a first-rate structure for targeting the outside funding toward and sales from illegal gold mining.
Reuters says that so far, the new division has ousted nearly all miners from the area, including overseeing the destruction of 250 mining camps and 70 low-tech boats used for dredging. 48 planes and helicopters for smuggling the gold out of the reserve have been seized as well.
The police hope to use radioisotope technology and methods to be able to pinpoint the exact mineralogical makeup of illegally mined gold as a way of targeting it in the market even after it’s melted into ingots.
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They also plan to remove miners from 6 other Amazon reserves this year, while setting up a permanent, floating police station on a river in the Yanomami Reserve.
At the moment, the Lula Administration is considering the best set of laws for tackling the problem. While 804 miners have been arrested in the raids, all were let go, and many others fled in the police advance.
Humberto Freire, from the new Amazon division, told Reuters he and his department hope to create a sophisticated electronic tax receipt for any transactions of precious metals to help pinpoint sales and distribution of suspected illegal bullion.
WATCH the story below from Reuters…
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Arist's rendition of a tidally-locked exoplent CC 2.0. Beau.TheConsortium (Copy)
Artist’s rendition of a tidally-locked exoplanet CC 2.0. Beau.TheConsortium
In a new study, astronomers describe how extraterrestrial life has the potential to exist on distant exoplanets inside a special area called the ‘terminator zone.’
Despite its frightening-sounding name, it’s better thought of as the “ending zone” and can be found on planets that have one side which always faces its star and one side that is always dark.
In these perpetual dawn/dusk zones, conditions would be perfect year-round for liquid water, and therefore life.
It’s wild to think about a planet that doesn’t turn—when daylight shines down on one half for all eternity, and another sits in perpetual darkness. However, exoplanets in this paradigm are likely more common than not since they’re found around M-dwarf stars, which make up about 70% of all the stars we can see.
“This is a planet where the dayside can be scorching hot, well beyond habitability, and the night side is going to be freezing, potentially covered in ice. You could have large glaciers on the night side,” Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Irvine who led the new work, which just published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Lobo’s modeling work is believed to be the first of its kind that demonstrates the conditions and scenarios that show how life on these worlds would be possible.
She relied on similar methods to those used on Earth to calculate the climate here to find that a rocky world with water present would harbor ideal and relatively unchanging conditions for life in the terminator zone.
“Ana has shown if there’s a lot of land on the planet, the scenario we call ‘terminator habitability’ can exist a lot more easily,” said co-author Aomawa Shields, UCI associate professor of physics & astronomy. “These new and exotic habitability states our team is uncovering are no longer the stuff of science fiction—Ana has done the work to show that such states can be climatically stable.”
In her paper, Lobo explains that if her models are correct, future observations of the atmospheres of exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars should be conducted around the terminator belt where every moment of every day is like the hour just before sunrise.
Spirit Mountain summit area - credit Stan Shebs CC 3.0. SA
Spirit Mountain summit area – credit Stan Shebs CC 3.0. SA
Last week President Biden continued the bipartisan executive tradition of conserving historic and scientifically significant lands by designating Spirit Mountain—Avi Kwa Ame, in Nevada as a National Monument.
Sacred to several Native American tribes, principally the people of the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation, Spirit Mountain sits at the confluence of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts at the southernmost point of Nevada.
The designation covers 506,000 acres, one of the largest tracts of land to come under federal protection since Biden took office, and will conjoin with the existing Ireteba Peaks National Wilderness.
Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, herself a native of the Pueblo peoples, held roundtable talks with the Mohave and other tribes in September of last year to discuss the need to conserve the area.
The slopes and flatlands around Avi Kwa Ame are dotted with important sites dating to modern Indian times but also back as far as the neolithic period. Rock Shelters, petroglyphs, and sacred sites will all be sheltered under the National Monument designation.
Spirit Mountain – credit Stan Shebs CC 3.0. SA
“Avi Kwa Ame is the point of Mojave creation; it’s a very important and integral part of our history and belief system,” Ashley Hemmers, the tribal administrator for Fort Mojave, told CNN. “For us, that mountain is a living landscape; it’s like a person. If something were to happen to it, it would be like losing a loved one.”
Beyond the irreplaceable value of the landscape to the Mohave, Gila monster, desert bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, and centuries-old Joshua trees are among the species that can be found on this diverse desert landscape.
The monument includes all of the Spirit Mountain, South McCullough, Wee Thump Joshua Tree, Nellis Wash, and Bridge Canyon. It borders Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Mojave Trails National Monument, Mojave National Preserve, and Castle Mountains National Monument thereby creating a much larger contiguously protected area of the Mojave Desert, and opens the door to an eventual conversion of the whole area, perhaps one day, to a National Park.
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Quote of the Day: “It’s important to be skeptical, but if you don’t have hope, you’re defeated before you start.” – Gloria Steinem
Photo by: Diana Parkhouse
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A Delhi-based engineer has designed a replacement for polystyrene packaging out of “rice stubble” the dead stalks left over after the rice season in India, millions of tons of which are burned every year.
They say wisdom oft comes from the mouths of babes, and Mr. Arpit Dhupar was at first left scratching his head when his young nephew drew a picture of the world with a grey sky.
Everything else was normal, green grass, yellow sun, white and brown mountains; why was the sky grey? It dawned on him that his nephew was drawing the sky as he saw it every year when the rice stubble was burned: grey.
“We shouldn’t live in a world where we have to explain to kids that the sky should be painted blue. It should be a given,” he told The Better India.
So he launched a new business venture called Dharaksha Ecosystems in order to tackle the rice stubble problem. Essentially, the farmers need it cleared off their land asap after harvest. Its high moisture content means it’s not useful for stove fuel, so they burn it in massive pyres.
In his factory, he turns 250 metric tons of rice stubble harvested from 100 acres of farmland in Punjab and Haryana into packaging, while paying the farmers a rate of $30 per acre for something they would usually burn.
Dhupar originally wanted to use mushrooms to rapidly biodegrade baled stacks of rice stubble, but found that the fungus left behind a metabolite that wasn’t biodegradable—in other words, he’d have to create a waste problem to solve a waste problem.
Over time he realized that the filaments that make up the subterranean structure of the mushrooms, called mycelium, were acting as a sort of binding agent, turning the baled stubble into something durable.
“This wasn’t a waste material but could be a usable one,” said Dhupar. “Through bio-fabrication, we could use the stubble waste to create a material similar to [polystyrene], but one that was biodegradable.”
There are a lot of these sorts of sustainable packaging ideas floating around, invented by people who rarely have experience in markets and commerce. This is not the case with Dhupar’s stubble packaging.
Rice stubble burning seen from space – credit NASA Earth Observatory
He has already prevented over half a million pounds of polystyrene from entering landfills since launching his product, which has numerous, exceptional properties.
Baked in the oven, the mycelium-bound stubble becomes hard and fire-retardent, allowing it to be laser engraved. Further, the product can tolerate high moisture content and is also anti-static.
Released by Panthera / Department of National Parks, Senegal, by Kris Everatt
Reprinted with permission from World at Large, an independent news outlet covering conflict, travel, science, conservation, and health and fitness.
In a thrilling sign of recovery for the Critically-Endangered West African lion, camera trap footage and photos of a West African lioness and her three cubs playing, nursing, and feeding in Senegal’s Niokolo Koba National Park (NKNP) were released by the conservation outfit Panthera.
The high-definition videos and photos feature Florence, a 9 to 10-year-old GPS-collared lioness that scientists believe has now given birth to three litters, totaling nine cubs, since 2021.
Now considered the matriarch of Niokolo Koba, this lioness has contributed approximately one-third of the park’s lion population which has grown slowly from a razor’s edge pride of 10 to 15 individuals in 2011 to perhaps as many as 40 today.
Just 120-374 West African lions are estimated to remain in the wild today, with their historic range having shrunk by 99%. They are part of the Northern lion subspecies, which used to range across North Africa.
When WaL reported on NKNP’s lions last year, Panthera West and Central Africa Regional Director Dr. Philipp Henschel said that the lions had hunkered down in a tiny core area, about 10% of the park’s massive 9,000 square kilometers.
Since then, the lions have become more adventurous, and have slowly been exiting that core.
“We covered the entire park in camera traps last year and that also provided evidence of lions in areas where we didn’t know resident lions existed,” Dr. Henschel told WaL on Wednesday. “And so overall if we add that up we’re at about over a third, so about 35% or so of the park occupied by lions and it might be more, it’s not always a given that you’ll detect them”.
Lions being pride animals, some of this territorial expansion seems to be the early stages in the creation of new prides, since the camera trap arrays have picked up a coalition of pride-less males roaming around the park, all of whom might be Florence’s offspring.
“These animals we detect ranging quite widely out of this core area, and now we’ve also picked up a number of females leaving this core area,” says Dr. Henschel. “As these lions fill in the landscape the females breed and this leads to the establishment of new prides in new areas that we’re currently documenting”.
Lions at one of the road crossings in the park – Panthera, Department of National Parks, Senegal, by Kris Everatt
Against all odds
Henschel and his colleagues from Panthera arrived in Senegal’s largest national park, and the second-largest in West Africa, in 2011 when the situation was dire and uncertain.
Along with a “commendable” team of under-equipped rangers, they managed to collar Florence in the dead of night last year.
“They were never collared before so we know almost nothing about these cats,” Henschel told WaL a year ago in May.
“They were never seen. Back in the days in 2011 when we did the first survey there, I had a team of 4 people all part of the park’s staff, and of them, nobody had ever seen a lion. One of them, a driver, had already worked in the park for 10 years; he had never seen a lion”.
Now the work of restoring the lion populations is going about as well as anyone could have dared hope for. There’s much more interest from the government, which has been able to finance, train, and maintain 3 armed ranger squads that last year covered almost 9,000 kilometers of ground on their patrols, or about 35% of the park on foot.
There’s a commitment from the Park’s lead conservator who has given the green light to equip and hire 3 more ranger teams, which Henschel describes as “no small feat for the government,” which pays for real paramilitary training, and “a good salary”.
Perhaps the largest danger to the lions now is a population bottleneck, something that just comes with the territory when restoring a species from such a tiny number.
“Even when I carried out the first ever lion surveys in 2011, I did intensive searches for lion scats, lion droppings, and we already have a snapshot from 2011 when the population was extremely low at 10-15 animals, and it still looked alright,” said Dr. Henschel.
“The geneticist reassured me that the genetic diversity was still quite high and that with a possible recent collapse of the lion population but [sic] that still has intrinsic diversity within it”.
“When the geneticists looked at the lion genetics, what they found was the Senegal population contains haplotypes that cannot be found in any other lion population in the world. So these are really unique to the Senegal population. Ideally, we would leave this genetic unit intact, but it depends on the results of our genetic analysis,” said Dr. Henschel.
The analysis is expected next year, but the central government and parks department are keen to take advantage of the lions for tourism revenue. The park is truly enormous; the same size as Yellowstone in the US, and contains other rare species like leopards, and the only remaining population of West African wild dogs.
“Compared to when we started the lions are so much more visible,” says Dr. Henschel. “There’s a new lodge in the park. I spoke to the lodge manager last month and they’re now fully booked for the game viewing season, and things are moving in that direction”.
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In York, a seemingly normal apartment was hiding a historic secret for centuries until a kitchen remodeling exposed it to the light of day.
29-year-old Luke Budworth received a call from the men putting a new kitchen into his apartment. It read “did you know there was a painting behind here?”
It wasn’t a painting, nor a bit of leftover Victorian wallpaper as Budworth had originally suspected, but rather a frieze dating back hundreds of years ago depicting a Biblical scene
The kitchen remodeling was finished before Budworth could see for himself, but after doing a little investigation in the open-plan living space he discovered another frieze. He contacted Historic England, the largest historical preservation society in the country, to see if they were able to make sense of the discovery.
Over time, Budworth came to learn that York had once been encircled by a wall, and his second-floor apartment was built using some of this wall. The ground floor is taken up by a cafe and charity bookshop which is listed as being a Grade II Georgian building from 1747.
released by Luke Budworth
Yet his discovery dates even further back. Historic England gave him and his partner a full-size replica of the frieze to hang on the wall, and Budworth used the Biblical imagery as a reference and managed to find a picture exceedingly similar from a book called Emblems written in 1635 written by the poet Francis Quarles.
Historic England explained that pictures such as those in the frieze fell out of fashion by the year 1700, so the work was done between those two dates, potentially placing it nearly 400 years old.
“They raise various questions about the ages of the buildings in this row of historic homes and the history of Micklegate itself,” Historic England told CNN. “Finds like this tell us that our historic homes have many secrets and we’ve been pleased to work with this homeowner on looking after these murals for the future.”
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Europe’s love of train travel is about to transform the continent’s solar energy production as the Swiss are set to begin installing solar panels in between train tracks.
The startup called Sun-Ways is waiting for a sign-off from the Federal Office of Transport to start installing their panels between the tracks near Buttes Station in the west of the country.
With the Swiss national railway network stretching beyond 2,000 miles of track, estimates place the amount of power generation at potentially beyond 1 terawatt hour or 2% of the entire gross annual consumption.
“There are over a million kilometers of railway lines in the world,” co-founder Baptiste Danichert tells SWI Swissinfo. “We believe that 50% of the world’s railways could be equipped with our system.”
A great way to incorporate solar panels into an economy is to find a place where flat ground is used by other industries, like canals, pastures, or warehousing.
Sun-Ways’ invention uses a specialized train car to lay down solar panels as if it were unrolling a carpet to save on labor costs.
At the moment, the idea is facing some pushback, including concern that the reflection of the sun off the panels could distract drivers, and that in areas with heavy snowfall, the panels would be a large waste of money.
Dust, debris, and damage from the vibrations of the rails could all potentially interfere the panels, but Sun-Ways have said they are taking all of this into account with the design and materials of the panels. For dust, they added that brushes could be attached to the undersides of trains to clean the panels as they drive by.
Quote of the Day: “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” – Gustave Flaubert
Photo by: Eugene Chystiakov
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Fluorescent microscopy done with smartphone - credit Hines Neural Development Lab
Fluorescent microscopy done with smartphones – credit Hines Neural Development Lab
Researchers looking to help students at school have used low-cost materials like theater lighting filters to turn regular smartphone cameras into fluorescent microscopes.
The resolution they say is around one-thousandth of a millimeter, but the cost reduction could literally be hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
Called the “Glowscope” a team at the biology department at Winona State University, Minnesota, designed the configuration to help with STEM outreach and education.
In a study published in Nature, the Winona team showed that 10-micrometer resolution could be achieved with the Glowscope, which allowed them to perform detailed fluorescent microscopy on zebrafish.
“The resolution and sensitivity of modern smartphone and tablet cameras surpass the capabilities of many scientific cameras still being used for research applications,” the authors explain.
In testing whether a clip-on macro lens, theater and stage lighting filters, and hunting and fishing flashlights could combine with a smartphone to do microscopy, the researchers found that Glowscopes were sensitive enough to detect green and red fluorophores well, and were capable of detecting changes to heart rate and rhythmicity in embryonic zebrafish.
It was mostly new smartphones and tablets that were tested, from both Apple and Samsung models, with timelapse viewing done at resolutions of 1080p and 120 fps.
The team listed the Amazon.com product links for all components, which totaled between $30-$50.
Last year, GNN reported on a $2.00 microscope called the ‘Foldscope’ made out of paper invented for similar reasons.
Stanford University bioengineer Manu Prakash saw in his team’s $50,000 microscope a serious contradiction. As well as being bulky and ridiculously challenging to transport to remote locations, it needed training from skilled technicians to know how to use it. It also had to stay well out of the weather and other environmental impacts.
So he invented a portable one. Costing $1.75, the Foldscope has a 140x zoom, which is a small enough field to see a malaria parasite inside a cell.
Brady Lowry and Kendall Cummings – @bachsmania, Facebook
It takes bravery to compete in college wrestling, and sophomore NJCAA wrestler Kendall Cummings needed every ounce of it when he decided he was not going to let a mamma grizzly bear maul his friend to death.
Last year, Cummings was out with his friends Brady Lowry, Gus Harrison, and Orrin Jackson in the Wyoming woods looking for shed antlers from elk, moose, and mule deer, which along with being a fun way to pass time in the woods, can also earn a college kid a few hundred dollars for a big pair of antlers.
The four buddies were out on the Bobcat-Houlihan Trail, which sits on the outskirts of Yellowstone when in the late afternoon, they decided to split up to cover more ground and meet back together on a large rock at the top of a hill.
Ryan Hockensmith at ESPN, detailing what would become a gruesome encounter, wrote that Brady turned around to warn Kendall not to step in this fresh pile of bear scat when what was likely a female grizzly bear, which can weigh around 500-pounds, slammed into him.
The impact from the bear knocked the young man over dozen yards, and she continued to swat at him as he rolled, “dribbling him” like a basketball, Hockensmith wrote.
Kendall was not about to let it happen, and after trying to use his voice to scare her away, he jumped on her back to distract her after she had managed to pin Brady up against a tree.
Then Kendall ran; as fast as he could. Grizzly bears can sprint over 30 miles per hour, and it wasn’t even a few seconds before she had turned around and lept on top of him instead.
“I can’t even express how grateful I am for him,” Brady told Cowboy State Daily. “I don’t know what I’m going to pay him back [sic], I don’t. I owe him everything.”
Female Grizzly Eating Grass – Terry Tollefsbol / NPS
Grizzly bear attacks are extremely rare—8 in the last 150 years, with a risk rate of around 1 in 2.7 million.
Hunters and others who work in the wilderness say the only way to survive an attack like this is to play dead, which is exactly what Kendall did as soon as he realized he could do nothing else.
Kendall suffered horrific injuries, but Brady, who had had the better of it, managed to escape the scene, call 911, and meet up with their two friends who were unaware of what was happening. Eventually, the bear lost interest in the limp body of Kendall who stumbled to his feet and back down the trail where he met up with Brady and the others. The two were eventually medically evacuated by helicopter.
At a trauma center in Billings, Montana, surgeons stitched and reconstructed Kendall’s face and head, which the bear had repeatedly bit. Brady was taken to a less-equipped hospital in Powell, Wyoming, but was eventually transported to Billings, and to the same room as Kendall.
Brady’s father Dallas drove all the way from Utah to Billings to marvel at the 21-year-old sophomore who was prepared to give all he could to rescue his son.
“You saved my son’s life,” he told Kendell.
“I would have rather died than have gotten away and known I could have helped,” Kendell told him.
100 days after the attack, last January, Brady competed in an NJCAA wrestling meet while Kendall, not yet medically cleared to go back to the mat, cheered him on.
With friends like these, am I right?
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San Quentin Prison, California CC 2.0. Jitze Couperus
San Quentin Prison, California CC 2.0. Jitze Couperus
San Quentin State Penitentiary, one of the most notorious and harsh prisons in the US, is the stage for a radical new method of treating the incarcerated population; new for America that is.
That’s because SQ has adopted Scandinavian methods of rehabilitation that aim to protect the California public by turning convicts into neighbors.
Whether one believes prison should serve as a punishment or as enforced rehab, the reality of the matter is that most inmates will eventually rejoin society. In fact, 30,000 prisoners re-enter society every year in California alone.
The question as Governor Gavin Newsom saw it, was what kind of people does one want rejoining their society from incarceration?
As a statement, “Little Scandinavia,” a project to turn prisons into places that allow criminals the opportunity to turn themselves into good neighbors, isn’t taking place in some small out-of-the-way penitentiary where a policy trial could be closely studied without impacting the state prison bureaucracy, but in the biggest, baddest, and saddest prison in the state.
Opened in July 1852, San Quentin is the oldest prison in California. SQ’s death row for male inmates is the only one in the state, and the largest in the US where until Newsom’s tenure, it was equipped with a gas chamber. Charles Manson, along with dozens of other notorious criminals were housed there.
Governor Newsom hopes to replicate changes that recently took place at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Chester, where the entrance to the prison ward called Little Scandinavia is painted with colorful murals.
Inside, inmates have clean box showers with doors. A communal kitchen with skillets, pots, and even a bright blue Dutch oven, serves 54 people who are responsible for cleaning it after use. On the ground floor of the bloc, sofas colored green like unripe limes are arranged close together as part of Little Scandinavia’s emphasis on congeniality.
Green semi ottomans, by no means out of place in an Ikea showroom, sit below rows of wall-mounted phones. Chester has job training programs that can work with inmates on instructions in 6-figure salary careers if they have a background, while other professions such as plumbing and electrical work are also taught there.
“Do you want them coming back with humanity and some normalcy, or do you want them coming back more bitter and more beaten down?” Gov. Newsom asked rhetorically, echoing the sentiments at Chester.
In a feature piece previewing the changes taking place at SQ, the LA Times went to Chester to interview the prison staff at Little Scandinavia and found they had been changed almost if not moreso than the inmates.
“I never once thought, as a correctional officer, I had the ability to change somebody’s life. Never dawned on me whatsoever,” Michael Tompkins, an officer at Chester, told the Times. “And that’s when a lightbulb went off in my head… You recognize that when you have the ability to help someone, it feels good.”
The epiphany for Tompkins came on a trip to Norway to learn about the prison system there. A Norwegian corrections officer asked him what a good day on the job was like, to which Tompkins answered, the ones when he can go home to his family safe and unassaulted.
The Norwegian replied that his good days on the job were when he was able to make a difference in someone’s life.
This Scandinavian model and others like it have been adopted in heavily-blue California, deeply-red North Dakota, and always-purple Pennsylvania, and if it will work in SQ, it can work anywhere.
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Imagine being able to draw moisture from the air through your fingertips and create an electrical current as a result—that’s pure comic book superhero stuff right?
Not so, since researchers have been able to use a bacterial enzyme that conducts hydrogen to create electricity, literally out of thin air.
The discovery promises to open up a new field of clean energy that would take on all kinds of sci-fi forms.
Recent work by the team at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University, Australia, has shown that many bacteria use hydrogen from the atmosphere as an energy source in nutrient-poor environments.
“We’ve known for some time that bacteria can use the trace hydrogen in the air as a source of energy to help them grow and survive, including in Antarctic soils, volcanic craters, and the deep ocean,” said Monash Univ. Professor Chris Greening. “But we didn’t know how they did this, until now.”
In their discovery paper published in Nature, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current.
“Huc is extraordinarily efficient,” notes co-author Dr. Rhys Grinter. “Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”
Laboratory work performed by Ph.D. student Ashleigh Kropp showed that it’s possible to store purified Huc for long periods.
“It is astonishingly stable,” she said. “It’s possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 degrees Celsius, and it retains its power to generate energy. This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments.”
The bacteria that produce enzymes like Huc are common and can be grown in large quantities, meaning humanity could potentially have access to a sustainable source of the enzyme. Dr. Grinter says that a key objective for future work is to scale up Huc production. “Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy.”
“This is a really exciting discovery that could be a game changer in addressing climate change. It speaks to the strength of Monash research in developing smart solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. A big congratulations to [the team] what a fantastic achievement,” said Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Rebekah Brown, who was not involved in the study.
WATCH an explainer video below…
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Quote of the Day: “Nothing ever seems impossible in Spring, you know.” – L.M. Montgomery (Happy first day of Spring!)
Photo by: Anton Darius
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?
Jay Branson, a self-taught architect, started building a round barn in rural Oklahoma to process his grief.
Its beauty draws strangers off the highway in Oklahoma, and a gentle kind of obsession mixed with down-home prairie demeanor saw the barn turn into something more like a cathedral.
The story begins decades ago when Branson went to visit a friend in Washington D.C., where he stood under the dome of the US Capitol and wanted dearly forever after to build a round structure with a dome.
Growing up a chiseled farmhand turned handyman, Branson is entirely self-taught in architecture and home-building, and built houses in the tiny decaying town of Marshall, Oklahoma. When his first wife Julie passed away, he needed a project to keep his mind going.
Settling on a round barn to park his motor home, his neighbor suggested he turn it into a wedding venue, which struck him as a good idea.
After completing the large main area using interlocking concrete-filled foam and rebar blocks that fit together like LEGOS, he began to imagine what a dome might look like, and produced a sketch of the interlocking octagons and diamonds that would form the arched ribs of the dome to be built with poplar wood.
It draws the gaze up to an oculus where natural light floods the space and regularly causes visitors to shed a tear.
For 7 years Jay Branson has been all alone out there on the plains, although he occasionally got help from his new wife and always has the company of his dog. But for the most part, this quiet, self-deprecating man has built one of the most impressive structures in the county, all by himself.
Jay Branson – YouTube
“I just started cutting,” Jay told his great-niece, Hailey Branson-Potts, reporting for the LA Times. “You know, if you figure the circumference of any structure that’s round, and divide it into segments, there’s a way. You’ve just got to make it even, get it exactly right, and just start building.”
Round barns have a fascinating history. They were considered by early ranchers as more economic because feeding the animals becomes a continuous motion around the edge. They were also believed to be spiritually superior since the “devil couldn’t hide in the corners,” and the round shape doesn’t provide a flat wall to be knocked over by a tornado.
Branson is currently fighting a battle against recurrent prostate cancer, and is attempting to design demonstration-sized pieces for several unfinished areas like the bridal suite, so in case something should happen to him there is some evidence for someone else to understand how to move forward.
WATCH the stirring documentary report by the LA Times below…
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We bring you the uplifting moments when five students in war-torn Ukraine received the life-changing news that they will receive an all-expenses paid college education to study at a college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, thanks to the incredible generosity of philanthropist Sam Rose.
In addition to tuition for all four years, the Sam Rose ’58 International Scholarship will cover the costs of textbooks, dining and living expenses including support for travel, health insurance, and other basic needs through the academic year in addition to support during summer and winter breaks.
The five students were overwhelmed with emotion upon hearing the news from Dickinson College president, John Jones.
“Thanks to Sam’s incredible generosity, we are able to offer these students a world-class education away from the war in Ukraine,” said Jones, who placed a series of calls to Ukraine so he could personally share the scholarship offer with each student.
“We are excited to meet and learn from our new Ukrainian students, who will help us build a more interesting and engaging campus community.”
Dickinson has a long history of supporting students around the world facing strife, including through the Conflict Zone Student Support Fund, which assists international students whose demonstrated financial need has increased because of extreme violence or war in their homeland.
More than 1,800 students are currently being supported through scholarships and grants, and more than 3,642 donors have contributed to make this possible, with gifts of all sizes helping to change lives through Dickinson. Including the establishment of the new scholarship, Rose has contributed $17.5 million to the Campaign for Scholarships.
Watch the priceless reactions of each of the scholarship winners…
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Out in the wilds of Indonesia, zebra sharks are extremely rare. Overhunted, these striped bottom dwellers were at risk of going extinct.
Now though, an international consortium of 44 aquariums in 15 countries is banding together to create a huge captive-breeding-and-release program that aims to reintroduce 500 sharks to their native waters.
Such an effort has never been undertaken before, and rewilding is typically reserved for mammals and other terrestrial species.
Protections of sharks and rays around Raja Ampat in Indonesia, one of the richest tropical marine environments known to man, have already allowed populations of these ancient creatures to rejuvenate.
The zebra shark seemingly hasn’t benefited, at least in Raja Ampat, from these protections. Oceans are difficult places to rewild. It’s extremely difficult, almost possible, to control territories, limit comings and goings, and keep track of threats.
Recently, the aquarium team, called ReShark, released their first eggs into the waters of Raja Ampat—90 miles from the nearest town, surrounded by limestone pinnacles hovering on the turquoise seas.
“It’s such a milestone,” Nesha Ichida, an Indonesian marine scientist helping manage this work for ReShark, told Nat Geo. “This is such a hopeful, momentous moment.”
Most sharks give birth to live young, but because the zebra shark lays eggs, that look like strange, gnarled, tree nut casings, they are much easier to breed in captivity for the aim of reintroduction.
“Conservation groups, local communities, local government, and the large public aquaria together in a coalition that has never really happened before, the potential is really amazing,” said Dr. Mark Erdmann, Vice President of Asia Pacific Marine Programs for Conservation International.
“And obviously we’re going to recover zebra sharks in Raja Ampat, but this is just the start I mean the potential to do this with other endangered shark and ray species all around the world is immense.”
WATCH the first eggs arrive in Raja Ampat…
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