Jessie Lee, a dog that had gone missing for two weeks, was recently discovered stranded on a precarious perch in the Pike’s Peak region of Colorado. While her owners diligently searched for her every day, they never could have imagined their lost pet would ever wind up in such a scary spot.
Animal Law Enforcement (ALE, a division of Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region) was first alerted to the pooch’s presence by a hiker who’d spotted her on a ledge about 50 yards up the cliffside bordering Fountain Creek.
Two officers, Johnson and Barker—how perfect is that name?—were quickly dispatched to the locale. Using binoculars, the pair pinpointed Jessie Lee’s location and launched a daring rescue.
“Our law enforcement team went out there…to assess the situation [and] make sure it was even a dog the person was seeing on the cliff because they were looking from a distance… We wanted to make sure we could come back and get the tools that were necessary to rescue the dog,” HSPPR Public Relations and Content Specialist Cody Costra told KOAA News 5.
After determining it was indeed a doggo at risk, the officers were able to borrow climbing equipment from a local resident. To implement the retrieval process, Officer Barker first secured a rope to a sturdy wooden fencepost atop the cliff, then rappelled down the side of the ravine, getting as close to Jessie Lee as she dared.
While it was clear from Jessie Lee’s wagging tail the pooped pup was certainly glad someone had finally come for her, with the ground crumbling beneath her paws as she inched toward Officer Barker’s outstretched arms, it was also apparent there wasn’t any solid footing to be had.
Using a catch-pole lowered to her by Officer Johnson, Officer Barker was luckily able to secure the pup around her neck and shoulders.
“This allowed Officer Barker to slowly pull the dog closer without the risk of losing her if she fell,” HSPPR reported. “Once the pup was finally in the arms of Officer Barker, Officer Johnson lowered a secondary rope which was securely tied into a makeshift harness for the dog. Officer Johnson quickly pulled up the dog and Officer Barker shortly after.”
With a “Woof!” of relief, the mission was declared a resounding success.
Jessie Lee was quickly whisked back to HSPPR, where she was easily identified by her microchip and name tag.
HSPPR immediately notified her relieved and grateful pet parents who showed up bright and early the next day to take their cherished fur baby home, bringing this episode of Animal Rescue: The Extreme Edition to its pawsomely happy conclusion.
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Following the recent flurry of tornados in Mayfield, Kentucky, it was “all hands to the grills,” as non-profits and individuals alike fired up their BBQs to feed people.
“I just figured I’d do what I can do,” said Jim Finch, a man who for no other reason than that people were in need, loaded his truck with food, water, and a barbeque grill, and drove to Mayfield to serve others.
The tornadoes destroyed thousands of buildings, knocked out power, and thereby refrigeration and restaurant services in the town.
A local reporter found Finch on a particularly devastated roadside, having driven half an hour to cook food for residents.
This was the scene right before Jim Finch, the man in the video, set up his grill. There was later Church service in that parking lot across from him. pic.twitter.com/RQBvb2y1Ao
“I know they don’t have no electricity, so that means they don’t have no electric, no restaurants, no running water, so I just figured I’d do what I can do,” said Finch. “Show up with some food and some water.”
Pitmasters to the rescue
Perhaps reflecting the societal value of barbeque in Kentucky, Finch wasn’t actually the only relief-pitmaster to arrive in Mayfield to help. Operation BBQ Relief offers free hot meals on a first-come, first-serve basis to those impacted by these disasters.
Operation BBQ Relief/Ole Hickory Pits
Multiple times per year, Operation BBQ Relief loads up 18-wheelers packed with commercial BBQ smokers by Ole Hickory pits and deploys to disaster areas to bypass the need for gas and electricity to serve up massive amounts of hot meals cooked by award-winning barbecue chefs.
Operation BBQ Relief are in Mayfield now, but they’ve previously assisted with Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and Missouri when they served a quarter-million meals.
They were at the unprecedented freeze in Houston last winter, and have on multiple occasions set up to feed frontline healthcare workers during the early days of the pandemic.
One of the first steps to hosting a barbecue is inviting your friends and family.
It’s a tradition borne of togetherness and generosity, of making sure people have enough to eat, and it’s no surprise perhaps that it’s a kneejerk reaction for those witnessing a disaster befall their fellow Americans.
A lunar rover has spotted a strange cube-shaped object and will alter its official course to check it out, needing 2-3 months to arrive.
Official observations suggest it could be rock thrust upward from the impact of an asteroid that clearly landed next to it, or a technological relic from previous human exploration, or hopefully, perhaps something that can’t be explained.
The infrequency with which we visit outer space, the extreme requirements of such travel, and the inspiration that are required to do so, make everything about it more intense.
The joys are more joyous, the achievements are more celebrated, and the mysteries are more intriguing.
The Chinese Yutu 2 lunar rover spotted a bizarre shape in its cameras while traversing a C-shape enclosure made up of ferocious impact craters on the moon’s far side.
“Under the dark and deep sky, a circle of winding mountains stood on the extension line of the sky and the moon. On the side, people can’t help but admire the extraordinary craftsmanship of the universe,” wrote Our Space, a Chinese-language blog affiliated with the national space agency.
“The drivers zoomed in on the pictures, slowly admiring them one by one. Suddenly, an obtrusive cube on the northern skyline attracted their attention. This object pierced through the winding of the skyline, like a “mysterious hut.”
Right angles are unusual in nature, usually marking out something artificial if we see them through the gloaming of a forest. On the moon however, there’s not a lot of room for possibilities for a cube.
After some days, the camera produced an image to share with the world of their “mystery hut.” The blog post suggested it could be evidence of previous Moon missions, but noted the presence of a small impact crater next to the cube, which could have led to the upthrusting of rocks following the impact.
Popular Science magazine said it could simply be pixilation of the image, as it was taken from far away.
Yutu 2 landed with Chang’e-4, the first two spacecraft ever to land on the Moon’s far side. They’ve virtually had the place to themselves since they arrived in 2019.
They spotted the cube at the end of October, which means we should be getting some closer images and more details soon as the solar-powered rover draws nearer.
Yale University researchers have developed a novel vaccine that in guinea pigs offers protection against infection by the bacterium that causes Lyme disease and may also combat other tick-borne diseases.
Instead of triggering an immune response against a particular pathogen, the new vaccine prompts a quick response in the skin to components of tick saliva, limiting the amount of time that ticks have to feed upon and infect the host, the study shows.
The vaccine is delivered by the same mRNA technology that has proved so effective against COVID-19.
In the United States, at least 40,000 cases of Lyme disease are reported annually, but the actual numbers of infections could be 10 times greater, researchers said. In addition, other tick-borne diseases have also spread in many areas of the U.S.
“There are multiple tick-borne diseases, and this approach potentially offers more broad-based protection than a vaccine that targets a specific pathogen,” said senior author Erol Fikrig, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (infectious Diseases) at Yale and professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) and of microbial pathogenesis. “It could also be used in conjunction with more traditional, pathogen-based vaccines to increase their efficacy.”
The saliva of the black-legged tick Ixodes scapularis, which transmits the Lyme disease pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi, contains many proteins. The investigators focused on 19 separate proteins.
In search for the basis of the vaccine, the Yale researchers, in collaboration with a team led by Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed bits of mRNA that produce all 19 of the saliva proteins. A similar strategy was used in vaccines that effectively combat the SARS-Cov-2 virus. And in a series of experiments, they tested the vaccine on guinea pigs, which can be infected with the Lyme disease agent and have also been used as a model to study tick resistance.
Unlike non-immunized guinea pigs, vaccinated animals exposed to infected ticks quickly developed redness at the tick bite site. And as long as ticks were removed when redness appeared, none of the immunized animals developed Lyme disease. In contrast, about half of the control group became infected with B. burgdorferi after ticks were removed. When a single infected tick was attached to immunized guinea pigs and not removed, none of them was infected while 60% of control animals did become infected. If three ticks remained attached to the guinea pigs, however, protection waned even in immunized animals.
In addition, ticks attached to immunized animals were unable to feed aggressively and dislodged more quickly than those on guinea pigs in the control group.
“The vaccine enhances the ability to recognize a tick bite, partially turning a tick bite into a mosquito bite,” Fikrig said of the research, published in Science Translational Medicine. “When you feel a mosquito bite, you swat it. With the vaccine, there is redness and likely an itch so you can recognize that you have been bitten and can pull the tick off quickly, before it has the ability to transmit B. burgdorferi.”
Researchers did note a caveat in their findings: In similar experiments, mice, which are unable to acquire natural tick resistance after infection, were not protected against Lyme disease after vaccination. In fact, in contrast to guinea pigs, mice are a natural reservoir for I. scapularis ticks, suggesting that ticks may have evolved to develop ways to specifically feed repeatedly on mice. Another possibility may be that guinea pig skin, like human skin, is more layered than the skin of mice.
Fikrig said more study is needed to discover ways that proteins in saliva can prevent infection. Ultimately, human trials would need to be conducted to assess its efficacy in people.
Others are also researching treatments for Lyme disease, including the U.S. Department of Defense, which is funding research into development of a vaccine.
Quote of the Day: “Being afraid to take chances is scarier than actually doing things that challenge you.” – Simone Elkeles
Photo: by Samantha Sophia
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A fountain-of-youth pill could be on the horizon after scientists dramatically extended longevity in mice.
Injecting elderly rodents with a grape seed extract increased their remaining time by more than sixty percent.
It also boosted overall lifespan by nine percent—equivalent to more than a decade in a human.
Corresponding author Dr Yu Sun, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, said, “The plant chemical has high potential as a clinical intervention to delay, alleviate, or prevent illnesses.”
The flavonoid known as PCC1 flushes out ‘zombie’ or ‘senescent’ cells that have stopped dividing. They accumulate naturally as we get older—and release chemicals that cause inflammation.
Dr Sun explained, “Ageing-associated functional decline of organs and increased risk for chronic disease is driven in part by their accumulation.
“Here we show PCC1, a component of grape seed extract, increases the healthspan and lifespan of mice through its action on senescent cells.”
The study screened a panel of natural compounds in a model of cultured human prostate cells. It found PCC1 selectively killed senescent cells—leaving healthy ones alone.
In several mouse models of disease, including exposure to radiation, numbers were slashed and health boosted.
The therapy also improved the effect of chemotherapy in those whose immunity had been compromised.
What’s more, injections of PCC1 were administered to 91 male and female mice aged 24 to 27 months. In human years, it would be in the range of 75 to 90 year-olds, explained the researchers.
The regime appears to have been well tolerated. A safe dose needs to be established before further clinical trials can begin.
Dr Sun said, “Considerable progress has been made over recent years to develop specific agents to treat individual age-related conditions such as type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, fragility, and vascular dysfunction.
“However, the combined effect of these drugs in controlling morbidity and mortality has been modest.
“These diseases tend to occur in synchrony as multimorbidities—with prevalence increasing exponentially after 70 years of age.”
The findings offer hope for prolonging health and lifespan —and treating age-related conditions with a therapy derived from natural sources.
Dr Sun added of the study, published in Nature Metabolism, “The potential anti-ageing effects of PCC1 provide good support for further translational and clinical development with the overall aim of achieving a longer and healthier life.”
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In one Oregon town, kids at a local school noticed that a particularly nosey and brave crow seemed dead-set on getting into the classroom.
Sure enough. Finding an open window at Allen Dale Elementary School, the bird made its way into a fifth-grade classroom and started helping itself to some snacks—all the while adoring the attention from the kids, and being quite friendly.
Oh, and it began talking.
According to local reporting from The Oregonian, the crow was actually a rescued bird that was all grown up and had lived with a family in the community for years, since it was a baby. None of the students or teachers knew that however, and its calm demeanor and vocabulary left them stunned.
“It would say ‘What’s up?’ and ‘I’m fine’ and a lot of swear words,” said Education assistant Naomi Imel. “It was like a parrot. It was the weirdest thing.”
Then, it became “quite the production” when all the grades came out to see the attempt of animal control to try and remove the jolly jabberer from the classroom. Even though one officer fed the bird from his hand, ultimately they left the school empty-handed.
Imel said they decided it was “not in their jurisdiction to catch the crow.”
Little did the school in Grants Pass realize they were just the latest chapter in the strange talking crow story which had begun weeks earlier.
Cosmo frequents a child care center
Returning from an out-of-town Thanksgiving this year, resident JaNeal Shattuck was devastated to find her bird missing.
‘Cosmo’ had escaped, and then been captured by a neighbor, who evidently didn’t like the teasing—which Cosmo had a reputation for doing to those who were uncomfortable around birds—and so whisked the crow away to an animal sanctuary.
Not realizing, however, that the bird was something akin to a housepet, the sanctuary released him back into the wild. That’s when he found his way to the school to “hang out.”
Shattuck’s daughter, Daphnie Colpron, admitted that the corvid knows a lot of words—over 40 now. Cosmo also loves children—and frequents a child daycare center near their house.
“As soon as he found out what time the kids got there, he’d go over there and hang out,” Colpron told the Oregonian. “Sometimes he does use profanity.”
Over the years, reports of a talking crow have caused quite the stir around town.
At Planet Fitness, where JaNeal was working out, he would sit on top of the building talking to people who were going in.
Back at the school the crow’s owners swooped in to relieve Allen Dale Elementary of their new mascot, after learning the news that their bird was spotted.
It turns out that cats keep a mental map of their territory inside their heads which they can use to abstract out information. A recent study showed however that on the legend of that map, the largest icon is us: their owners.
Cats track where their owners are at all times, a study from the University of Kyoto demonstrated, and become deeply confused when we turn up where we shouldn’t be according to the cats’ mental maps.
Abstraction is a higher-order brain function that is the basis for trial and error and other kinds of learning, but also tool use, complex problem solving, hunting, and more.
One thing which abstraction allows is to be able to place objects and forces in and around the environment, even if they can’t be immediately perceived, for example the cat food in the cupboard, the mouse among the tall grass, or the owner in the next room over.
Dr. Saho Takagi conducted a study that placed 50 cats inside individual rooms, where their owner’s voice was periodically calling from outside.
Then either a stranger or the owner’s voice would be played from a speaker in a corner of the room. Observing individuals who didn’t know which voice was being played, ranked the appearance of shock on the cat’s face and body posture at the time the voice came from inside the room.
As per the authors’ predictions, the cats appeared the most surprised when, hearing and abstracting their owner as outside of the room, they suddenly appeared inside, coming through the speakers.
“A lot of what a cat has to interpret in its territory is an awareness of where other cats are. It is also important for hunting: how could a cat catch a field vole moving around beneath the grass if it couldn’t use clues, such as the occasional rustle, to see in its mind’s eye, where they are?” Roger Tabor, a biologist and BBC host of the TV show Cats, told the Guardian.
“A cat’s owner is extremely significant in its life as a source of food and security, so where we are is very important.”
Interestingly, the cats didn’t exhibit the same surprised response if the owner’s voice was replaced with a cat’s meow, or electronic sounds, reinforcing just how important our voices are to the day-to-day mental state of our cats.
It’s sometimes said that cats don’t care about their owners as much as dogs, but knowing they have an invisible map of the house, with the owner always highlighted, soundly scuppers that theory.
Having been inspired by an introductory coding and computer science class at Berkeley, a young man from Zimbabwe is replicating his experience for talented students in his home country—launching their academic journeys into schools like Northwestern and Stanford.
Like many young Zimbabweans, Eric Khumalo didn’t have a lot of options, even for a curious mind like his. He found a breakthrough moment, however, in a U.S.-sponsored school near his home town of Bulawayo.
A fascination with coding merged with a desire for sharing knowledge, and a background in teaching that would end with Khumalo starting Emzini WeCode, an education program that has grown from teaching locals in Zimbabwe classrooms at the American embassy to hosting online classes for more than 1,000 students.
“I graduated high school in 2018, and within the government there was a shortage of STEM teachers, so I applied for a year and a half,” Eric told GNN. “I taught at three high schools and got accepted into UC Berkeley on a scholarship from the Mastercard Foundation.”
“I wanted to study so many things! I was going to go with chemistry, I was just like ‘okay, I really need to understand how these molecules behave.’”
Like so many successful students, it was the chance encounter with the fabled “good professor” that launched Eric’s computer science journey.
“I was just like asking questions, and then he told me just about his journey, about how when he was a kid he learned to code; he would make games, and for me I just admired the wonderful things he could accomplish with just code,” says Khumalo. “I found it interesting—this power to create, and this power to solve problems, or if you have a solution—scaling it is possible with computer science.”
Afro-tech
Emzini weCode
Interest in computer science and technology is squarely in the focus of young Africans, not least in those who have taken Eric’s classes at Emzini WeCode, like Nandi Siluma, a teaching assistant at Emzini, who is also a junior at Northwestern University.
“The end goal is to have every child in Zimbabwe, and Africa, knowing how to write, interpret, and manipulate code,” says Siluma.
“I do feel like I am part of a movement to reduce the knowledge gap between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; that is why I joined Emzini WeCode because I am passionate about sharing learning opportunities with others,” says Proud Npala, another teaching assistant, who took his own experience with Emzini and landed a scholarship at Stanford.
According to Adama Sanneh of the Moleskin Foundation ,who helps run the WikiAfrica Education Program, there’s more information on the city of Paris on Wikipedia, for example, than the entire African continent. Khumalo sees Emizini as a way to close that gap in tech-know-how.
“The main problem I wanted to tackle was job creation,” explains Khumalo, whose January classes are now open for enrolment online for 1,000 students.
“I’ve seen, mostly when I was teaching, that my students’ parents or relatives, mostly they all go to South Africa to work, and how they go there is usually… illegal,” he said. “Through Emzini WeCode at least my number one goal is to change the mindset, to tell more young people that they can create things, that they can have ideas that can scale, and to get jobs.”
“I have a vision that local universities here, having young people who are skilled with world-class knowledge, and they get hired to solve some of the problems that we have.”
Despite the growing popularity of his classes, he has kept his them free, or as cheap as possible, covering only the costs of buying the data necessary to stream in the other teachers from their quarters at whichever U.S. university.
“Usually, like two U.S. dollars a month,” says Khumalo. “The group that I usually target most is people who I know are facing challenges in the community. Because I know if I don’t do that… exposing them to this kind of content, how to code, if a young person doesn’t get some of these opportunities, the next thing they think of is ‘okay, I’ll just go to South Africa and work there.”
Owning the house
Emzini weCode
Emzini means the “house,” in Khumalo’s native language, making Emzini WeCode, “The House of Code.” The name reflects the teaching style, which Eric has modeled to emulate his first experience in computer science at Berkeley, mixed with culturally-relevant aspects.
His focus is broad in scope, avoiding a strict focus on any particular coding language, and opting instead to inspire students to see computer science and coding as a way to solve problems, in whichever career they focus on.
“’This information is good; if I could just take it and find a way of giving it to my people,'” said Eric. “It’s this knowledge I know they really want, but that they don’t have.”
Taking a semester off to return home in 2019, Eric was interested in teaching an introductory coding course at the Education USA program he took before Berkeley. However it wasn’t long before he realized this was not going to be possible.
“I thought people had some foundational knowledge on computer science, but after some time I realized ‘Oh they don’t, they need that course that I took when I was a freshman!’”
So he designed a course that was going to appeal to a wide group of people, with a focus on the foundational problem solving/solution-generating abilities of computer science. Banele Ndlovu took Eric’s coding class when he first set it up in Zimbabwe.
“Back home, at that time, coding wasn’t really a thing; especially for females,” Ndlovu told GNN.
“It has actually led me to the interest of tech as a whole, because now I found myself in a great place where I really love the intersection of business and tech,” she said. “I want to pursue product management, and that started from understanding the knowledge of tech which I learned at Eric’s class, so it really does have an impact.”
“He is very good with breaking down complex concepts into simpler, understandable statements,” Nandi adds. “He would use everyday examples that were relatable, sometimes even teach code in IsiNdebele! (our native language) I remember the first time he explained recursion, he used an example of how people pay their bus fares in Zimbabwe starting from the backseat.”
Proud agreed, saying, “I liked the introductory course CS7. It is an amazing course for anyone who wants to get into computer science,” he said. “It’s not too deep nor too shallow… which is why I found it well-structured for an intro course.”
“What Eric is doing is really cool and really humbling as well because being able to create a program like this especially at first directly to students from Zimbabwe… I really love that, I really love how it’s going,” said Banele.
Eric Khumalo feels a great deal of pride seeing the students taking his course moving on to other schools and other careers. He wants to expand the opportunities he gave to them to more people, and he’s currently designing a computer science curriculum for high schools.
“If one of my students can get into Stanford, then ten of my students should get into Stanford,” he said smiling.
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Quote of the Day: “Love is the only thing that we can carry with us when we go, and it makes the end so easy.” – Louisa May Alcott
Photo: by Patty Brito
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More than 2.5 million Americans have a chronic condition arising in early childhood that can negatively impact their education, job performance, and employability well into adulthood.
There is no known cure, and existing treatments are often minimally effective. Yet for those with persistent, developmental stuttering, there is new hope, thanks to groundbreaking research led by scientists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
In two papers published this week, Jennifer “Piper” Below, PhD, and Shelly Jo Kraft, PhD, describe a “genetic architecture” for developmental stuttering and report the discovery of new genetic variations associated with the condition.
The researchers said that these findings and studies like them have the potential to identify therapeutic directions that could improve outcomes for people who stutter.
“It’s clear that in populations, stuttering is polygenic, meaning that there are multiple different genetic factors contributing to and protecting people from risk,” said Below, associate professor of Medicine at VUMC. “That was something that had not been clearly shown before these studies.”
The new revelations will have a huge impact on people who stutter and on the parents of children affected by the condition, predicted Kraft, associate professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders and director of the Behavior, Speech & Genetics Lab at Wayne State University.
“It’s a piece of themselves that they can then understand,” she said, “instead of living a lifetime of experiencing this difference in their speech and never knowing why.”
With the help of colleagues in Ireland, England, Israel, Sweden, Australia, and throughout the United States, Kraft has collected blood and saliva samples for genetic studies from more than 1,800 people who stutter, including more than 250 families with three generations of stuttering.
But while that effort, called the International Stuttering Project, identified new genetic variations, or variants, associated with developmental stuttering, it was not sufficiently “powered” to reveal the complexity of the condition. There simply were not enough people in the studies.
That’s where Below comes in. She utilized a key VUMC resource, BioVU, one of the world’s largest repositories of human DNA linked to searchable, electronic health information. BioVU has enabled researchers to conduct GWAS, or genome-wide association studies to probe the genetic underpinnings of a wide range of diseases.
Stuttering, however, is a condition that is rarely mentioned or given a diagnostic code in the medical record. People aren’t hospitalized for stuttering. “We had to come up with some clever new ways to try to capture that missing code,” Below said.
From confirmed cases of developmental stuttering, the researchers constructed a “constellation” of diagnostic codes for other conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autoimmune reactions to infections that co-occur with stuttering more frequently than would be expected by chance.
Then, using machine learning techniques, they created an artificial intelligence tool that used the presence of these “phenotypes” recorded in the electronic health record to predict those who were likely to stutter, “even in the absence of having a direct note about their stuttering in their medical record,” Below said.
Supported by $3.5 million, five-year grant awarded in 2018 by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health, the researchers demonstrated that their stuttering prediction model positively predicted the presence of stuttering more than 80% of the time.
The research, published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, also turned up a stuttering-related gene implicated in autism-spectrum disorder, as well as genetic variants that affect the regulation of sex hormones. The latter finding may help explain why boys are more likely to stutter, and why women who stutter are more likely to recover.
Some correlations between traits may be spurious, Below noted. But if the researchers establish genetic connections between stuttering and other traits such as ADHD, those findings could open up avenues for treating both conditions at the same time, Kraft said.
Île Ronde island in Quebec by Claude Duchaîne:Nature Conservancy of Canada
Île Ronde island in Quebec by Claude Duchaîne/Nature Conservancy of Canada
Near to where the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers meet, a small island teeming with birds and turtles sits surprisingly untouched amid a suburban sprawl that has turned the surrounding waterline into concrete walls.
The island, called Île Ronde, was spared from this development by the dollars of one man back in the 1960s, who after decades of refusing to sell to real estate and property men, has just donated it to the Nature Conservancy Canada to be protected forever.
Thor Wikström immigrated to Canada from Sweden and built a house for himself, his newish wife, and their first son Hans, in a town called Laval on the shore of Rivière-des-Prairies.
Out of their window, the seven-acre Île Ronde sat offshore by a mighty stone’s throw. Wikström convinced the previous owner to sell it, and it was there that many childhood memories were made among migratory birds and turtles.
Now at 93 years of age, he’s at peace knowing the forests and marshlands, the little cabin and birdhouses he built, will all be protected forever.
“It’s just a good feeling in my heart. I know this will be there forever,” he told CBC News.
“Nature was more important than some stupid money in my pocket,” he added. “I said, ‘This is something [that’s] got to be preserved,’ and I kept my word.”
He turned down dozens of offers to sell the property over the years, good news for the northern map turtle, a species the Canadian government designates as “special concern,” and one which no longer has access to much of its previous habitat due to development along the river.
Île Ronde also hosts a unique tree species called the shagbark hickory, and many migratory bird and game bird species like widgeon, gadwall, and wood ducks.
“The Vikström family has taken great care of it, and with this very meaningful act we are protecting the natural diversity of this unique habitat for the benefit of the animal and plant species that live there, but also for future generations,” said Annie Ferland, project manager for the Montreal Greenbelt at the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
The Lesson: What we believe about the world decides the fate of our thoughts and actions. Two conditions to that belief: That one is good, and has the power to shape the life they want, and that the universe is good, and will help make that life contribute profoundly to providing a space of ‘un’conditional happiness, rather than happiness as determined by outside conditions. It’s not that some people are lucky in life, it’s that some people are looking, or in other words, people don’t believe things when they see them, they will see them when they believe them.
Notable Excerpt: “Most people have to be somewhere, with someone, or do something, to really feel good about themselves and their life and to be happy. And that’s a problem. That makes happiness totally ‘conditional,’ but there is another way. There’s a lens you can look at the world with, where you see yourself, and the world you live in, as good and powerful. And it’s that lens that starts making your joy and your peace free of any conditions.”
The Speaker: Moshe Gersht is a spiritual teacher, Rabbi, Wall Street Journal bestselling author and emerging thought leader. Before spending 15 years studying the Torah, mediating, and researching philosophy, psychology, and theology, he actually dropped out of high school and was the singer songwriter for a pop punk band in Los Angeles.
The Book: Gersht is the author of two books, Succos Inspired and his most recent It’s All The Same To Me, which Deepak Chopra called “a contribution to the world’s enlightenment.”
(WATCH Moshe Gersht speak at TEDxDupreePark below.)
Monarch butterflies are famous for their annual long-distance migration, which takes them over several thousand kilometres from the north of the USA to their overwintering habitat in central Mexico. On their migration, the conspicuously orange-black-white colored butterflies use sun information as main orientation reference.
But how is sun information processed in the butterfly’s brain? Previous studies have already described cells that process the solar azimuth. “However, we didn’t know these cells encode the sun during flight,” says Jerome Beetz from the Biocentre at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany.
Until now, it was assumed that the sun compass always works—irrespective of whether the insects sit, walk or fly.
A team led by JMU researchers Jerome Beetz and Basil el Jundi shows that this is not the case and that the compass is established at the onset of flight: “Surprisingly, the nerve cells change their coding strategy during flight, so that the neural network represents the heading direction of the butterflies relative to the sun in a similar way to a compass. This only happens when the animals can control their own direction of flight.”
Butterflies in a flight simulator
How was this gap in knowledge closed? The team led by Beetz and el Jundi measured for the first time the neural activity in actively flying monarch butterflies and examined the influence of the animal’s orientation behaviour on the processing of sun information. Such measurements had previously only been carried out in restrained butterflies.
The JMU researchers took advantage of a technical trick: “We tethered the butterflies to a freely rotatable rod in the centre of a flight simulator, which enables the butterflies to actively choose a flight direction. The sun was mimicked with a green light spot. While the tethered butterfly was flying, we monitored the brain activity with ultra-fine microelectrodes.”
The experiments, published in in the scientific journal Current Biology, prove: Active movement of the butterflies is necessary to process sun information as compass information in the butterfly brain during migration.
“Our results emphasize the importance of performing neuronal recordings in actively moving animals in order to understand how the brain solves complex orientation tasks,” says Beetz, who is first author of the publication in Current Biology. Other researchers from the Biocentre as well as from the universities of Lund (Sweden), Bielefeld and Texas were involved in the project. The work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Brain the size of a grain of rice with amazing abilities
Beetz admires his research subjects: “Our publication uniquely demonstrates that even a brain with the size of a grain of rice is a highly complex organ that enables insects to perform such amazing behaviors. With their brain, monarch butterflies manage the enormous migration by using an efficient internal compass. Such a long-distance migration without using modern navigation devices is hard to imagine for us, humans and this is one major reason that drives my fascination for these enigmatic butterflies.”
Next, Jerome Beetz and Basil el Jundi plan to investigate how the butterflies’ sun compass operates when the butterflies have access to the natural sky than when simply using a light spot as reference for orientation. To do this, the neural recordings must be carried out in open air flight simulators.
Quote of the Day: “Wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.” – Stephen Fry
Photo: by Bill Williams
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utland mosaic released Steven Baker_Historic England Archive
University of Leicester Archaeological Services
Archaeologists have unearthed the first Roman mosaic of its kind in the UK.
The initial discovery of the mosaic was made during the 2020 lockdown by Jim Irvine, son of landowner Brian Naylor, who contacted the local council archaeological team.
The remains of the mosaic measure 11 meters by almost 7 meters (36×23 feet) and depict part of the story of the Greek hero Achilles—to form the floor of what’s thought to be a large dining or entertaining area.
Mosaics were used in a variety of private and public buildings across the Roman Empire, and often featured famous figures from history and mythology.
However, the Rutland mosaic is unique in the UK in that it features Achilles and his battle with Hector at the conclusion of the Trojan War and is one of only a handful of examples from across Europe.
The room is part of a large villa building occupied in the late Roman period, between the third and fourth century AD.
The villa is also surrounded by a range of other buildings and features revealed by a geophysical survey and archaeological evaluation, including what appear to be aisled barns, circular structures, and a possible bath house—all within a series of boundary ditches.
The complex is likely to have been occupied by a wealthy individual with a knowledge of classical literature.
Fire damage and breaks in the mosaic suggest that the site was later re-used and re-purposed.
Other evidence uncovered includes the discovery of human remains within the rubble covering the mosaic.
These burials are thought to have been interred after the building was no longer occupied, and while their precise age is currently unknown, they are later than the mosaic but placed in a relationship to the villa building, suggesting a very late Roman or Early-Medieval date for the repurposing of this structure.
Their discovery gives an insight into how the site may have been used during this relatively poorly understood early post-Roman period of history.
A remarkable find
Evidence recovered from the site will be analyzed by ULAS at their University of Leicester base, and by specialists from Historic England and across the UK, including David Neal, the foremost expert on mosaic research in the country.
Steven Baker/Historic England Archive
The villa complex was found within an arable field where the shallow archaeological remains had been disturbed by ploughing and other activities.
Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive of Historic England, said, “To have uncovered such a rare mosaic of this size, as well as a surrounding villa, is remarkable.”
“Discoveries like this are so important in helping us piece together our shared history. By protecting this site we are able to continue learning from it, and look forward to what future excavations may teach us about the people who lived there over 1,500 years ago.”
Jim Irvine, who first spotted signs of something fascinating beneath the earth on a ramble last year, said, “This archaeological discovery has filled most of my spare time over the last year. Between my normal job and this, it’s kept me very busy, and has been a fascinating journey. The last year has been a total thrill to have been involved with, and to work with the archaeologists and students at the site, and I can only imagine what will be unearthed next!”
National Human Genome Research Institute - CC license
National Human Genome Research Institute – CC license
You are playing such an intense video game and are focused so intently on getting to the next level that you don’t know what is going on around you. You have no sense of time passing. You feel great. You are “in the zone.” You are experiencing flow.
You are running a marathon, and you are so focused on the finish line that you barely experience any pain or tiredness until you are done. You are experiencing flow.
“Flow is a state of peak enjoyment that occurs when you are doing something that is difficult and you are highly skilled at,” explained Richard Huskey, a University of California, Davis, assistant professor of communication and cognitive science and author of a new paper on flow.
Flow is said to be good for our well-being—and there is evidence that it can ward off depression, prevent burnout and make us more resilient. We seek it out, but we don’t understand how the brain enables flow very well, Huskey said.
Looking at flow in media use
In an effort to see what the brain does during flow, Huskey led research looking at how people experience flow while playing a video game. In a paper, which was published in the Journal of Communication this month, more than 140 participants played a video game. Some took part in an experiment while playing a game and self-reported their experiences. Others also subjected themselves to brain imaging so that researchers could look at how their brain functioned during flow.
Flow happens, Huskey said, when activities are engaging enough to fully involve someone to the point of barely being distracted, but not so difficult that the activity becomes frustrating.
Similarly, a video game designed for a child will probably not keep an adult in flow. There must be a balance, he explained. When there’s a balance, the person experiences an intrinsic reward. Things like getting to the next level or earning points matter, but they become secondary. Simply playing the game and experiencing flow is rewarding in and of itself.
Flow requires a high level of attention. To measure this, researchers distracted the players at various points in the game with a probe—a red circle accompanied by a tone — which appeared on the screen in one of the game’s four corners. Participants were asked to respond to the probe as quickly as possible.
Previous research has shown that when people focus their attention on one task, they become slower to respond to these probes. Therefore, if flow requires a high level of focused attention, then people should be slowest to respond when the game’s difficulty and the player’s ability are in balance. This is exactly what the researchers found, and it may explain why people are able to focus on tasks during flow while ignoring distractions.
How the brain processes flow
Very few regions in the brain are responsible for just one cognitive process. So, there is no “flow” region in the brain. Instead, flow results from networked interactions between multiple brain regions. When several brain regions are densely connected with each other but sparsely connected with other regions, this is called a “modular” network configuration.
Importantly, modular network organization is energetically efficient. Research shows that during complex tasks, this modular configuration often reconfigures by connecting different brain regions into a new modular organization. This reconfiguration is called “flexibility,” and it is thought to help people adaptively respond to difficult tasks.
“In our study, we showed that flow is associated with a flexible and modular brain-network topology, which may offer an explanation for why flow is simultaneously perceived as high-control and effortless, even when the task difficulty is high,” Huskey said.
In other words, the brain in flow is pretty darn efficient.
“Imagine looking for your keys in the morning,” Huskey added. “If you don’t know where your keys are, you’ll need to visit every room in your home and turn on every light. This will require a lot of energy. But if you remember where your keys are, even if you leave them in a different room each day, you can efficiently travel to the right room and turn on only the necessary lights. In many ways, this is similar to the brain during flow — only the necessary brain structures are networked together in an energy efficient way.”
In the experiments, researchers showed that a balance between game difficulty and individual ability results in high self-reported flow, high levels of motivated attention, and a flexible and modular brain network topology.
People’s flow observed
Of the 140 people studied at two universities, 35 were observed in a functional MRI where they held the game controls, a button box and track ball close to their body while the MRI machine functioned. The others were at a desk, operating the computerized game with a standard desktop computer.
In flow, people recognize the task’s demands and proceed without requiring excess amounts of energy, Huskey said. Flow could, then, relieve the stress of competing demands in our lives, such as pandemic stresses, an overwhelming task at work, a family problem, or all of the above.
More research is needed outside the lab setting. But this work, published in Journal of Communication, is a good start toward looking at how the body can be resilient, Huskey said. Researchers should examine linking measures of well-being with neural responses.
That could inform researchers on developing certain treatments, or even media interventions, to improve people’s flow for their own well-being, Huskey said.
Hermitage_cat cc license wikimedia commons http-__fotki.yandex.ru_users_ewwl_view_325997
Fotki Yanders, CC license
Like the building itself, the cats which roam freely around the basement of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg have endured through changing fortunes.
Originally brought into the massive Baroque building by Empress Elizabeth I to catch mice, the 65 felines have outlived and even replaced the Tsars which adopted them.
Treated like royalty down in the “Cat’s Quarters,” they enjoy 24-hour veterinary care, feeding, and freedom from the adoring public thanks to their own press secretary.
Catherine the Great reportedly called them the “Guardians of the Galleries.” Though they aren’t allowed into the galleries of what was once the Winter Palace and what has become the largest museum in the world, and most people don’t know they exist.
However it’s not rare for a visitor outside the building to come across a feline lounging in the sun.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many in St. Petersburg could no longer afford to feed and care for their cats, and so the Hermitage, which had been open to the public for more than 100 years, decided to adopt some of the strays to add to the descendants of the original cats brought from the city of Kazan 100 years before that.
Now as then, the Hermitage will take in stray cats that find their way into the museum’s underbelly, perhaps by befriending one of the furry staff members. These are given a new life and kept fed and healthy, mostly through staff and visitor contributions.
“If mice would pass close to our cats—they will catch,” Maria Haltunen, the official spokeswoman for the cats, told CNN. “They do their job very well.” Haltunen told ABC News that most of the time the cats need not kill anything, as their smell serves to keep most mice away.
Many of the cats’ ancestors have been immortalized for their service to the state in paintings on the very walls of the museum they defended.
It’s all part of the rich tapestry of history the building, with its art, architecture, history, and its feline guardians, has woven through some of the most devastating and destabilizing events in human history.
(WATCH the CBC video for this story below…)
PAW This Fascinating Feline History Over to Chums…
Researchers in California recently captured footage of one of the most striking sea creatures you’ll ever see: Stygiomedusa gigantea, aka the giant phantom jellyfish.
Seen only nine times by the researchers over the span of thousands of dive trips to the lightless depths of the ocean, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) unmanned submersible encountered what scientists described as a “billowing crimson curtain,” and a “ghostly giant.”
Never has a creature been so accurately depicted, and rarely has there been a name so befitting its owner, as the giant phantom jelly, with a three-foot-long head, or bell, and four thirty foot-long tentacles, could substitute a stage curtain in an abstract photo and no-one could tell the difference.
The first specimen ever collected was in 1899, and it’s been seen about a hundred times since. As rare and special as the giant phantom jelly is, it’s widely distributed, capable of living in all oceans bar the Arctic, and at all depths, though it’s typically found between 3,200 and 12,000 feet, in a zone known as the bathypelagic where light can’t reach and the underwater pressure is immense.
Scientists know very little about this amazing animal, but they assume it feeds on plankton or small shrimps. During this particular dive the MBARI’s submersible, called Doc Rickets, spotted a small fish called a brotula hover above the bell of its host and swim in and out of the jelly’s voluminous arms.
Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)
“The wide-open waters of the midnight zone offer little shelter, so many creatures find refuge in the gelatinous animals that are abundant in this environment,” the researchers write.
Previously, deep sea specimens could only be studied via trawl net, which has its uses for sturdier creatures like the colossal squid, one of the method’s most famous entanglements, but jellies turn to an unidentifiable mush in a net.
“High-definition—and now 4K—video of the giant phantom jelly captures stunning details about the animal’s appearance and behaviors that scientists would not have been able to see with a trawl-caught specimen.”
Someone had the bright idea to put ominous piano music over the footage, setting Stygiomedusa gigantea in an audio landscape befitting its name and beauty.
Other animals of stunning make and model were captured on the dive, and MBARI put the photos together in a slideshow and shared the video below that will make your jaw drop.
SHOW Your Friends Some Awe –Share The Mesmerizing Images on Social Media…
Quote of the Day: “It’s not that some people are lucky, it’s that some people are looking.” – Moshe Gersht
Photo: by Dim Hou
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