A kangaroo was saved after taking a dunk in the ocean off the coast of Australia by a rookie lifeguard.
Onlookers enjoying the surf and scenery on a rock shelf over-hanging the ocean in Bundjalung National Park were surprised to see an eastern grey kangaroo jumping across rock pools and tumbling into rough surf.
“My other workmate, Carissa and I, we were sitting on the tractor and she goes, ‘Oh my God, there’s a kangaroo jumping off the rocks!'” said 17-year old Lillian Bee-Young, a new lifeguard who had a surfboard nearby. “We were just figuring out what we should do… because we’ve never had that happen before.”
There were rough conditions that day on the north coast of New South Wales. Lillian believed the kangaroo was trying to avoid some fishermen and just “got wiped out by a set (of waves).”
Lillian told ABC News Australia that she didn’t quite know how to proceed as she paddled out with the rescue board. She didn’t know whether to try and get it onto the board, for example, or if that would put her in danger and stress the marsupial out even more.
It was just managing to keep its head above the water, but didn’t want to come ashore due to a gathering crowd.
Her friend Carissa cleared an avenue to allow Roo to feel comfortable, and after a few stumbles, it made it back onto dry land and immediately went off into the bushes.
“It was quite special. There were people cheering and clapping… and then [the kangaroo] was just sitting there up in the bushes, almost, I thought, as a thank you… It was really serene,” Lillian said.
(WATCH the video of the daring rescue below.)
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For the entire history of human civilization, entrepreneurs have found that the easiest way to sell a brand new technology is to adapt it into the existing ones: hence the evolution from solar panels to solar roofs.
GAF Energy
Now the largest roofer in America is taking that one step further, by turning a solar roof into solar shingles, installed with nothing more than a nail gun, and which costs the same as rack-mounted panels.
A normal family home can be shingled with solar-celled roof material that’s fireproof, waterproof, and tough enough to walk over, in just two days due to their similarity with regular shingles.
The producer of Timberline Solar Energy Shingle, GAF Energy, is owned by Standard Industries, the largest and longest-lived roofer in the country.
This familiarity with the business and access to resources allowed the company to use materials available only on a wide-scale, and avoid specialist components that are more expensive and harder to source.
“We’re half the cost of a Tesla solar roof,” said Martin DeBono, President of GAF Energy, to Fast Company. “But we are in line with traditional solar rack mounted solar. And this really makes the decision for a homeowner who is thinking about going solar very easy to get a solar roof—it’s a superior product.”
The aesthetics are much better than regular panels, as the shingles are smaller and lower, and can’t be seen close-up.
GAF Energy
However they generate just as much electricity as regular solar. GAF Energy has its own software to calculate where the sun will be and how much energy a roof can generate.
It’s won a whole bunch of awards, too, including Best of Innovation in “Smart Cities” at the Consumer Electronics Show, and is approved compliant, safe, and effective by one of the world’s largest third-party compliance testers, UL.
GAF Energy
Currently roofing and solar installation are different industries, but DeBono believes that by tapping into a market which sees five million roofs replaced every year, solar shingles have a chance to rapidly eclipse market share compared to the bulkier panels.
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Quote of the Day: “Let the root of love be within. Of this root can nothing spring but what is good.” – Augustine of Hippo
Photo: by engin akyurt
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?
When a good Samaritan took notice of a boy’s overt fondness for a particular guitar in a Colorado music store, he decided to buy the instrument for him as an anonymous gift.
J.B. Hart Music Co.
Fallon often came in to J.B. Hart Music Co. in Grand Junction, Colorado, with a request to play “the Pantera guitar” referring to a model made iconic by the guitarist for the heavy metal band Pantera.
“Fallon is impacted by Williams Syndrome and has an excellent knowledge and a love for music,” the music store wrote in a Facebook post. “His dream was to own this guitar.”
“Eight months ago, when he was in the store playing it, another customer took notice of Fallon. It moved this customer so much that he returned to the store later, and asked us to give the guitar to Fallon anonymously the next time we saw him.”
He purchased the $800 Dean “Dimebag” Darrell ML Guitar, and they waited for the boy to return, but Fallon didn’t come into the shop for eight months.
His family had moved to Texas, but when they were back in Colorado they popped into the store, and were shocked by the surprise that awaited them..
“His mom burst into tears, and Fallon beamed with excitement. It was a special moment,” they wrote. “There are still good people in this world.”
That special moment drew the attention of the remaining members of Pantera themselves, seeing as it was the guitar made famous by the dearly departed “Dimebag” Darrel, whose music Fallon was so admired.
Not only that, according to the music store, band manager Kim Davis contacted the family with news that Pantera’s Philip Anselmo and Rex Brown would be sending him a rocking care package.
WATCH his reaction moments after receiving the gift…
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At the headquarters of China’s most powerful nuclear fusion reactor, Chinese scientists rang in the new year by setting a world record for the longest-sustained operation of such a reactor, beating a world record they set last year 10 times over.
China’s record-breaking Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Heifei managed to heat plasma to 120 million Fahrenheit, or 70 million Celsius, for around 17.5 minutes—the longest any nation has ever been able to contain a super-heated plasma.
The relevance is two-fold. First, the longer the plasma can be contained in the reactor, the more electricity is produced, and the greater the volume of these successful tests around the world, the more the case for nuclear fusion power grows. Second, the jump in magnitude between the record set by EAST in July of 2021, and that of December 2022, shows just how fast this technology is advancing.
“We achieved a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in an experiment in the first half of 2021. This time, steady-state plasma operation was sustained for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a solid scientific and experimental foundation toward the running of a fusion reactor,” said Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Plasma Institute.
How it works
Nuclear fusion reactors are often called “artificial suns” in the media, as they replicate the way stars form and continue to generate matter. A heavy ionized gas called plasma, that makes up most of the stars in the universe, is formed in the reactor by different methods for different reactors. Currently there are many institutions pushing different models of fusion power.
EAST fires a supercharged laser at heavy hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium. If ice is hydrogen in a solid form, water is liquid, and vapor is gas, plasma is what happens when you really turn the heat up. The plasma would normally dissipate and rapidly cool, but superconducting magnets replicate the intense gravitational pressure at the center of the sun to keep it contained.
Once contained under this pressure, which is tens of thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s, the atomic nuclei of the hydrogen atoms overcome their magnetic resistance and push against each other under the heat to fuse, hence the name fusion.
In order for this process to generate electricity, four hydrogen atoms must fuse together to create a helium atom. Energy is released during this process which in the sun is bled off into the solar system, but in the confines of the reactor is collected for energy.
Considering the gravity and price tag of these experiments it seems valuable to question why. Nuclear fusion power generates no emissions expect for helium. Most operators are preparing to adapt seawater as a fuel source rather than uranium or plutonium, as seawater contains a bit of deuterium and tritium. Furthermore the output is extraordinary, with one liter of seawater expected to generate the same amount of electricity as 300 liters of oil.
“It’s probably the last energy source we’ll ever tame,” Dennis Whyte, a Canadian scientist who is director of plasma science fusion center at MIT, told the Financial Post last year.
“I think of the trajectory from taming fire and it finally completes in fusion, because we’ll have tamed the energy source of the stars.”
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“With loyalty, I will endeavor to aid the physician in his work, and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.”
Every day, nurses take these words from the Florence Nightingale oath to heart, striving to ensure their patients’ welfare—but some, like registered nurse Jennifer Smith, take that commitment to care a step further.
Last November, Smith got a panicked call from John Burley, one of her patients from the adult day health care program at Rome, New York’s Grand Rehabilitation and Nursing Center. He’d been hospitalized with pneumonia, and with no nearby family to step in to help, his dog Boomer had been taken to an animal shelter.
“I came into work the Monday after Thanksgiving to the phone ringing at 7 a.m.,” Smith recalled in an interview with CNN. “John was calling from his hospital room saying, ‘Boomer is in the pound! Boomer is in the pound!’”
Aware that the 12-year-old dog he’d had since it was a pup meant the world to him, when Burley asked Smith if she would take care of Boomer, her immediate response was a resounding, “Of course, I will!”
The first thing Smith had to do was track Boomer down, finally finding him at the Rome Humane Society. The following day, she drove to the shelter and put the adoption in motion, letting Burley know Boomer was doing well and he’d be coming home soon.
Smith was given the green light to bring Boomer to work with her. She says that knowing his beloved canine companion was safe and they’d be able to see one another made a huge positive impact on Burley’s recovery.
Grand Healthcare
During his stay in the rehab wing, Smith brought Boomer to visit his doggy daddy several times a day. The cute pooch soon became a favorite with staff and patients alike.
To Smith, keeping 60-year-old Burley and Boomer together is just a natural extension of her life’s goal of helping people. “There are just so many worries in the world right now. If I can take one worry away from John, that’s the least I can do,” she told CNN.
“I can’t cure diseases. I’m not a miracle worker [but] I made a promise to John to take care of Boomer. I will take care of him as long as he needs me to. John knows that. Right now the focus is on John getting better and taking it one day at a time.”
Burley has speech issues as a result of his illness, so sometimes it can be difficult for him to put his thanks into words. However, there’s one sentiment he’s managed to express loud and clear: “I love Jennifer,” he’s declared.
We’re sure Boomer seconds that emotion with a hearty, “Woof!”
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The Flame Nebula, captured in radio waves. Photo Credit - ESO/Th. Stanke & ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2.
The Flame Nebula region as seen in infrared with APEX and VISTA;ESO/Th. Stanke & ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA
There’s an adage in astronomy about how there’s always something new to find in the constellation of Orion—well, astronomers just found his fireplace.
In a new series of images, the aptly-named “Flame Nebula” located in Orion appears like a raging inferno, as radiation released by young stars causes clouds of gases and dust to glow.
The spectacular image was snapped by the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment at the European Southern Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the perfect place for professional stargazing due to it being very far from any light pollution and located at a very high altitude.
It’s a composite image, with instruments that view in radio waves providing the blazing oranges, and a second infrared spectrum telescope providing the precise background.
Optical light can’t make it through the dense nebulae, but infrared light can, so using both allows scientists to have an unobstructed view.
Orion is one of the most famous regions in the sky, and the image contains the iconic Horsehead Nebula in the top right in addition to the Flame Nebula. The lighter colored swirl in the middle-right is the reflection of another nebula NGC 2023. The team even discovered one new nebula, a small object, remarkable because of its almost perfectly circular appearance, which they named the Cow Nebula.
“As astronomers like to say, whenever there is a new telescope or instrument around, observe Orion: there will always be something new and interesting to discover!” ESO Thomas Stanke said in a statement.
The Flame Nebula, captured in radio waves.; ESO/Th. Stanke & ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2
Nebulae are often referred to as cosmic nurseries, and are areas in which clouds of gases and dust coalesce into stars. This makes them extremely photogenic places, and the clouds in the image are known as the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.
Located between 1,300 and 1,600 light-years away from Earth, they contain the most active stellar nursery in the Solar System’s neighborhood.
Unlike what the “fire” of this image might suggest, these clouds are actually cold, with temperatures typically just a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.
“The different colors indicate the velocity of the gas,” ESO officials wrote in the statement. “The Flame Nebula and its surroundings are moving away from us, with the red clouds in the background receding faster than the yellow ones in the foreground.”
WATCH ESO stack their images atop one another in the video below.
Quote of the Day: “The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life.” – Amelia Earhart
Photo: by Alexander Krivitskiy
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?
If an overwhelming sound of buzzing is coming from the siding on your house, or from an old trashcan or other enclosed space, you’ve got a bee problem and will need a professional.
Photos by Texas Beesworks
If you live in Austin Texas, your beekeeper may arrive without so much as a protective glove on her hand.
After quitting her office job in 2019, Erika Thompson, founder of Texas Beeworks, became a fulltime beekeeper with a mission to increase the population of bees and hives in the Lone Star State.
So, every day she travels to rescue errant bee swarms from harm. She carefully preserves their old hive, cutting it into sections to transfer to a new hive that she has brought. Then she carries the hive to her truck and brings them to her land where they can recover.
Erika is like a bee whisperer. When she arrives on the scene, she can discern from their behavior whether the bees are likely to sting her. She will use protection for those broods, but mostly she works in harmony with them.
With the tenderness of Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin who would kiss the nose of a ‘problem croc’, Thompson will scoop out bees that have invaded trash bins or house siding with her bare hands and a gentle smile.
All the while, she’ll be explaining on camera, for her TikTok or YouTube channels, how kind, soft, and orderly, bees really are.
“How come they aren’t stinging you?” is the number one question posed to Erika, who says the key is reading the bees’ mood.
“After we remove the bees, they are relocated to one our 25+ bee sanctuaries in the Austin area so that the bees can continue their important work in a place that is both safer for you and for them,” Thompson writes on her website.
While it could cost a $100 or more to have an established hive removed from your property, Thompson is encouraging people to protect bee populations by offering free swarm removal. Swarms are errant balls of hiveless-bees, which sometimes don’t have a queen, and are thusly aimless.
Out of respect for the bee’s toil, Texas Beeworks does not sell any honey from her hives, but rather makes a living exclusively through bee removal and beekeeping classes.
WATCH more mind-boggling, bare-handed hive removals in the incredible video below…
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Most millennial cat owners will be familiar with the phrase “If I fits, I sits,” used so often to caption delightful online images of cats attempting to squeeze into a box, drawer, bag, bowl, or other container.
But if no such object were there, would cats still try to inhabit, say, inside a picture of a box drawn onto the floor?
Well, a researcher has found that, in their unquenchable desire to sit in boxes, cats are susceptible to being fooled by optical illusions.
He launched a recent citizen science project that recruited cat owners to try to pull the fur over the eyes of their kitties with the ‘Kanizsa contour illusion.’
Six Kanizsa images were randomly assigned to 30 cat owners, who for 30 days placed them on the floor to see how their cat interacted with them. The owners wore sunglasses to prevent eye contact influencing the cat’s behavior.
The Kanizsa image was of a square, delineated only by four “Pacman” shapes forming the corners of the square. Just this was enough to bring seven cats consistently to the perfect Kanizsa square, and eight cats to another Kanizsa square in which the Pacman mouths were pointing outward. Just two chose to sit in a misshapen square.
“To the best of our knowledge, this investigation is the first of its kind in three regards: a citizen science study of cat cognition; a formal examination into cats’ attraction to 2D rather than 3D enclosures; and study into cats’ susceptibility to illusory contours in an ecologically relevant paradigm,” author Gabriella Smith, an animal behaviorist at Hunter College NY, wrote in the study.
— Gabriella E. Smith M.A. (@Explanimals) May 4, 2021
Essentially cat eyes are primed to detect enclosures; so much so that they can find them even if they are only mildly delineated in a 2D environment. It’s safe to say they’re box-seeking missiles, and it’s no wonder they’re so attracted to them.
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No-one likes paying taxes, but truly no-one likes paying for a tax service. Fortunately there are a number of free online services for quickly navigating you through the 2,600 pages of the American Tax Code.
Thinking about the extent of your taxes early will give you a head start towards getting them done in an orderly and beneficial manner. Leaving them until April 1st practically guarantees that an inexperienced filer will pay too much or not notice deductions or possible credits.
FreeTaxUSA is a well-loved service that offers free federal tax returns for all situations. That means even if you generate revenue through more complex situations like farming or renting, if you’re self-employed, if you own a house, a business, or contract freelancers, you won’t pay a dime to file.
With many filing services, state returns come at a premium because they involve navigating through 50 separate tax codes. FreeTaxUSA charges $15 for a state return, but in a love-train of comments on a recent Reddit thread about free tax software, one Redditor claimed they will set you up with a physical state return so you only pay the price of a stamp.
“Always impressed with the level of support they have for a free service,” another commented.
“Their service is excellent, and so easy to get through even if you don’t know what you are doing,” said another. “But also easy to use if you do know what you’re doing!”
OLT.com, short for Online Taxes, is another mostly-free filing service which seems, based on the Redditors’ reviews, to be very similar to Turbo Tax—a service which as of this year pulled out of the IRS Free File Program, and therefore no longer offers a free option.
OLT’s state return is $9.99 while all federal returns of all filing situations are free. They keep all of your information to port over for the following year’s taxes, so for filers with a single W-2 source of income, it seems incredibly expedient.
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A real-life Lassie saved the lives of two men who had overturned their Ford pickup truck and were lying injured in the cold.
Reports are saying she is being treated to venison and back-scratches—a fitting reward for the faithful canine who braved the cold and high-speed traffic to save her owner.
Tinsley, a Shiloh Shepherd, attracted the attention of the police as she was loitering on an embanked stretch of I-89 connecting New Hampshire to Vermont. Trooper Sandberg and other officers of the Lebanon Police Department made attempts to corral her and get close, but she kept running away, eventually leading them to a damaged section of guardrail.
“They were trying to get the dog off of the highway to keep it safe,” NH State Police Lt. Dan Baldassarre explained to local news. “The dog stood at the top of the embankment and looked down.”
When they followed her lead they saw a badly damaged overturned pickup truck with two injured occupants nearby who had been ejected from the vehicle.
At the scene, Trooper Sandberg and the Lebanon Police Officers called for medical assistance and found the two men to be suffering from hypothermia. It was then they learned that the German Shepard, named Tinsley, belonged to one of the injured occupants of the truck.
“It quickly became apparent that Tinsley led Trooper Sandberg and the Lebanon Police to the crash site and injured occupants,” NHSP said on their Facebook page.
“This was almost like a real-life Lassie situation,” Baldassarre said. “It’s really quite remarkable. This dog definitely saved their lives. I don’t think they would have survived the night given the temperatures.”
A Facebook commenter agreed, citing the heroics as proof we don’t deserve dogs.
“She’s my little guardian angel,” said Cam Laundry, her owner. “It’s a miracle that she had that kind of intelligence to do what she did.”
(WATCH the WPTZ video for this story below.)
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Quote of the Day: “Only two things can reveal life’s great secrets: suffering and love.” – Paulo Coelho (Aleph)
Photo: by Allef Vinicius
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?
Lewiston Police Department officer Jonathan Smith - SWNS
Lewiston Police Department officer Jonathan Smith – SWNS
This is the tense moment a police officer bolts onto a frozen lake to rescue a puppy that had fallen through the thin ice.
Officer Jonathan Smith, 30, was called to Bond Lake near Lewiston, New York, after receiving reports of a Labrador that had fallen in about 50 yards from the shore.
In this heart-in-mouth footage captured by a fellow officer’s bodycam, the brave cop throws off some equipment before dashing out onto the ice, without any caution for his own safety.
The owner had been walking the 10-month-old pup around the lake on January 5 when Kona spotted a distant flock of geese landing on the water and bolted towards them.
Horrified, Kona’s owner watched as the dog fell into the freezing water at the edge of the ice.
In an email to Lewiston Police Department, the owner wrote: “Although she is a strong swimmer, there was zero chance of her getting back out onto the ice and she began to panic and tire quickly.”
Frantically they called 911, and 15 minutes later, Officer Smith and two other officers from the Police Department arrived.
Without hesitation or rescue equipment, the officer removed his vest and gun belt and hustled over the ice towards an exhausted Kona.
When he got close enough to her, Officer Smith grabbed the 75-lb. pooch and pulled her from the water so she was able to run back over the ice to her owner.
“Kona and I and everybody that loves her are extremely grateful for his selflessness and courage,” the owner wrote. “His professionalism and bravery should be applauded.”
Officer Smith was also honored recently for pulling a woman from a burning building in November, and has been working at Lewiston Police Department since July 2020.
WATCH the outstanding rescue below…
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Centaurus A elliptical active galaxy with black hole filmed at several wavelengths–Connor Matherne Louisiana State University and Ben McKinley ICRAR/Curtin
Astronomers have produced the most comprehensive image of radio emission from our nearest actively feeding supermassive black hole.
Centaurus A, a giant elliptical active galaxy and its black hole with a mass of 55 million suns – photographed at radio wavelengths, revealing vast lobes of plasma that reach far beyond the visible galaxy. The dots are not stars, but radio galaxies much like Centaurus A, at far greater distances. Credits: Ben McKinley, ICRAR/Curtin and Connor Matherne, Louisiana State University
The emission is powered by a central black hole in the galaxy Centaurus A, about 12 million light years away.
As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing ‘radio bubbles’ to grow over hundreds of millions of years.
When viewed from Earth, the eruption from Centaurus A now extends eight degrees across the sky—the length of 16 full Moons laid side by side.
It was captured using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia.
The research paper was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Lead author Dr. Benjamin McKinley, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the image reveals spectacular new details of the radio emissions from the galaxy.
“These radio waves come from material being sucked into the supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy,” he said.
“It forms a disc around the black hole, and as the matter gets ripped apart going close to the black hole, powerful jets form on either side of the disc, ejecting most of the material back out into space, to distances of probably more than a million light years.
“Previous radio observations could not handle the extreme brightness of the jets and details of the larger area surrounding the galaxy were distorted, but our new image overcomes these limitations.”
Centaurus A is the closest radio galaxy to our own Milky Way.
“We can learn a lot from Centaurus A in particular, just because it is so close and we can see it in such detail,” Dr. McKinley said.
Not just at radio wavelengths, but at all other wavelengths of light as well, as seen in the photo below.
Centaurus A elliptical active galaxy with black hole filmed at several wavelengths–Connor Matherne Louisiana State University and Ben McKinley ICRAR/Curtin
“In this research we’ve been able to combine the radio observations with optical and x-ray data, to help us better understand the physics of these supermassive black holes.”
Astrophysicist Dr. Massimo Gaspari, from Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, said the study corroborated a novel theory known as ‘Chaotic Cold Accretion’ (CCA), which is emerging in different fields.
“In this model, clouds of cold gas condense in the galactic halo and rain down onto the central regions, feeding the supermassive black hole,” he said.
“Triggered by this rain, the black hole vigorously reacts by launching energy back via radio jets that inflate the spectacular lobes we see in the MWA image. This study is one of the first to probe in such detail the multiphase CCA ‘weather’ over the full range of scales”, Dr Gaspari concluded.
Dr. McKinley said the galaxy appears brighter in the center where it is more active and there is a lot of energy.
“Then it’s fainter as you go out because the energy’s been lost and things have settled down,” he said.
“But there are interesting features where charged particles have re-accelerated and are interacting with strong magnetic fields.”
MWA director Professor Steven Tingay said the research was possible because of the telescope’s extremely wide field-of-view, superb radio-quiet location, and excellent sensitivity.
“The wide field of view and, as a consequence, the extraordinary amount of data we can collect, means that the discovery potential of every MWA observation is very high. This provides a fantastic step toward the even bigger SKA.”
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A family in Maryland wants to publicly thank a stranger for going above and beyond—just in time to bring a Happy New Year.
“What a great human!!” That’s how Laura Degnon began her email to GNN, hoping we would share the story of a good Samaritan touching their lives with kindness.
Her son, Jake, realized on Friday that he had lost his wallet Thursday night.
It snowed a couple inches in Rockville overnight which made it challenging for them to find anything outside around his car, or at the last store where he stopped to buy a snack.
“We shoveled so many places looking for it,” she recalled.
They were very motivated, too, as his wallet was unusually full of “quite a bit of Christmas money, college money, and of course his school ID, license, debit, and credit card.”
But they couldn’t find it anywhere.
Laura was up early on Saturday saying goodbye as Jake headed back to the University of South Carolina, and started cleaning up around the house, when the doorbell rang about 8:00AM.
“Much to my surprise a wonderful man by the name of Juan was standing there asking if Jake lived here.”
“I started to cry right away, and asked if he found his wallet, by chance.”
Juan had been up early, going to work on a Saturday morning, when he found Jake’s wallet in the parking lot of the store where he bought the snack—and he drove to their house to return it.
Everything was in tact, with nothing missing.
“What a great human!! Juan made my son’s day, and mine, more than he will ever know!”
After their premature baby was hospitalized for weeks, this gorilla family had a delightful reunion that was captured by caretakers.
The tiny western lowland gorilla, nicknamed Baby G, was born October 26 at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo in Ohio.
Baby G was hailed with quite the fanfare in the city last Autumn, because it was the first baby gorilla to be born at the zoo in its 139-year history.
But they were in for a roller coaster ride of health issues.
When its 23-year-old mother Nneka did not show appropriate maternal care, the troop’s eldest female, Fredrika, 47—who herself has raised four infants elsewhere—instinctively took over looking after the newborn.
Baby G weighed only about three pounds at birth, and later contracted pneumonia, so he had to be separated from his family, in order to be treated.
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, SWNS
Two weeks later, the now-healthy gorilla who weighed nearly seven pounds was reintroduced to his surrogate mother.
Cleveland Metroparks Zoo-SWNS
Keepers at the zoo put the baby in a makeshift nest to get him used to how it would feel to be in the gorilla troop.
They then exited the enclosure and let in Fredrika who, after sniffing him for a few minutes, picked him up and has barely let go of him since.
The baby’s surrogate mother continued to impress the zoo’s staff by bouncing Baby G and displaying all the maternal instincts she had before he was removed.
Quote of the Day: “Don’t accept a life of mediocrity when you hold such infinite potential within the fortress of your mind. Dare to tap into your greatness.” – Robin Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams and Reaching Your Destiny)
Photo: by Nikola Knezevic
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?
Illustration by Jill George / NIH Image Gallery -CC license
Fat—it is vital for life but too much can lead to a host of health problems. Studying how fat tissue, or adipose, functions in the body is critical for understanding obesity and other issues.
Illustration by Jill George / NIH Image Gallery -CC license
But structural differences in fat cells and their distribution throughout the body make doing so challenging.
“Fat cells are different from other cells in that they lack unique cell surface receptors and only account for a minority of the cells within fat tissue,” said Steven Romanelli, Ph.D., from the Department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Michigan.
In a new paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Romanelli, Ormand MacDougald, Ph.D. and their colleagues describe a breakthrough using CRISPR-Cas9, a tool that has transformed molecular biological research, but whose use in the study of adipose tissue had been elusive.
It’s a gene editing technique comprised of an enzyme called Cas9, which can break strands of DNA, and a piece of RNA that guides the Cas9 enzyme to a specific site in the genome for editing. The tool has been successfully used to study heart, liver, neurons, and skin cells, to name a few, but never a certain type of adipose cells known as brown fat.
Using the technique, the team was able to successfully target brown fat, a specialized adipose tissue used to generate heat and protect core body temperature.
Using their adeno-associated virus CRISPR-Cas9 components, they knocked out the UCP1 gene that defines brown adipose and enables it to generate heat, in adult mice. They observed that the knockout mice were able to adapt to the loss of the gene and maintain their body temperature in cold conditions, hinting at other pathways involved in temperature homeostasis.
“The biggest challenge in terms of adipose research to date has been that if you want to study a gene’s function, you have to commit a considerable amount of time, resources and money into developing a transgenic mouse,” said Romanelli.
The traditional way of developing mouse models involves breeding mice with a desired mutation to delete or introduce certain genes of interest, which can take more than a year and tens of thousands of dollars.
CRISPR-Cas9 has revolutionized this process.
“What we’ve been able to do is take that whole process and distill it into anywhere from two weeks to a month to generate a transgenic mouse, reducing the cost to less than $2,000. Not only does it reduce time and cost, it democratizes the research so that any lab that is familiar with molecular biology techniques can adopt this method and do it themselves,” said Romanelli.
They were also able to use this method to delete multiple genes simultaneously, a fact that could help researchers better understand important molecular pathways.
Though these results are exploratory, the breakthrough represents an important step forward in studying fat.
(Source: Michigan Medicine, University of Michigan – by Kelly Malcom)
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Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue- IG; and Betty White by David Shankbone CC license
Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue- IG; and Betty White by David Shankbone CC license
For years, television star Betty White had donated to the Peaceful Valley Donkey Rescue in San Angelo, Texas.
Now, upon her death on December 31 at the age of 99, the animal sanctuary has introduced an adorable baby donkey as her namesake.
“This beautiful little jennet was born on Christmas Day but we were unable to come up with the perfect name until New Year’s Eve,” the rescue donkey group wrote on Facebook.
Ms. White has supported the group since 2006, and to honor her memory, Peaceful Valley is also naming their newly constructed nursery in her honor.
“Betty White was a tremendous voice for animals both here in the US and around the world.”
“She would be over the moon ❤️,” commented Kristan Marie Cobb.
Most remembered for her television roles in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, and Hot in Cleveland, White won 7 Emmy awards—and, at 88 years old, an eighth Emmy for her hosting of Saturday Night Live.
