A spray-on treatment for asphalt roads aims to curb both their contribution to the urban island heat effect, and stop them from breaking so easily.
Based on titanium-dioxide, it not only reflects and scatters away sunlight and ultraviolet light, keeping the surface of sidewalks and roads cooler, but it also creates a chemical reaction when exposed to sunlight that clears away airborne pollutants.
Even considering these two qualities, the product itself, while still in development, is being marketed as a “road rejuvenator” and is meant to help asphalt retain its flexibility and prevent it from cracking over its lifespan.
Pavement Technology has been trialing their titanium dioxide spray alongside Texas A&M University, to whom they’re sending samples of air quality taken alongside road core samples from asphalt treated with their spray.
Early results are promising, and the company claims a one mile-stretch of road treated with their road rejuvenator reduced levels of nitrogen oxide (NOx) by 30% to 40% in the surrounding air, or the equivalent of a 20-acre park.
Titanium dioxide is commonly found in sunscreens, as it’s effective at reflecting sunlight.
Black tarmac and concrete buildings all packed closely together creates the now-infamous urban island heat effect, where the sun heats these surfaces up during the day, and they in turn radiate that heat outward towards everyone and everything, and prevent cities from cooling down in the evening.
Depending on the size, density, and climate in the city, this can raise average daily temperatures by anywhere from 4°F in a city like Adelaide to 14°F in one like Singapore. As a compliment to green spaces and green rooftops which effectively disperse heat, the two could be used in tandem to largely cancel out the urban island heat effect.
Beyond that, the spray replaces maltenes in the road—compounds found in the black oily bitumen component of asphalt, which keeps the roads working for longer.
This not only reduces the emissions needed for road repairs and the heavy machinery they rely on, but also the emissions from traffic slowdowns related to roadwork, a boon which commuters into any metropolitan area can celebrate.
PHOTO CREDIT: Neil Kremer, CC License
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Quote of the Day: “People mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really what guides them is what they’re afraid of—what they don’t want.” – Khaled Hosseini (Afghan-American novelist)
Photo: by Ivan Bandura
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Oral squamous cancer cell (white) being attacked by two cytotoxic T cells (red) – Credit: NIH
Oral squamous cancer cell (white) being attacked by two cytotoxic T cells (red), NIH
From “positive trends in survival” to “completely eradicated,” the results from a phase III cancer trial has oncologists and patients in the UK excited.
An innovative combination of two immunotherapy drugs were shown to extend the life of patients with metastatic or relapsed head and neck cancer without forcing them to endure extreme chemotherapy.
Around 12,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with head and neck cancer per year, often at a late stage. In the U.S. in 2018, it was 46,000 and climbing.
While not baring statistically significant findings, the trial, funded by pharma firm Bristol Myers Squibb and conducted at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation, led to at least one miraculous recovery.
After 77-year-old Barry Ambrose, from Bury St. Edmunds, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2017, which had also spread to his lungs, he was told by his local hospital that palliative care was his only option. After hearing about the trial, he took part, and after eight months his cancer completely disappeared.
“When the research nurses called to tell me that, after two months, the tumor in my throat had completely disappeared, it was an amazing moment, Barry recounts in a statement. “While there was still disease in my lungs at that point, the effect was staggering. In fact, I was doing so well on the trial I was allowed to pause it in November 2018 to go on a Caribbean cruise with my wife.”
Kinder smarter treatments
The drugs nivolumab and ipilimumab didn’t always lead to cures like in Ambrose, but conferred upon late-state head and neck cancer patients on average three more months of side-effect free survival, when compared with traditional chemotherapy, a result that while not statistically significant, is clinically relevant by all measures.
The average survival time was 17 months, the longest ever-achieved in late-stage head and neck cancer patients.
“Our trial shows the immunotherapy combination achieved the longest median overall survival ever seen in patients with relapsed or metastatic head and neck cancer,” said Professor Kevin Harrington, a Consultant Clinical Oncologist at Royal Marsden who helped organized the trial.
“We will need to do longer follow-up to see whether we can demonstrate a survival benefit across all patients in the trial.”
Furthermore, the lack of extreme chemotherapy, and the often debilitating side-effects like nausea, tiredness, and difficulty breathing, means patients got to at least make a go of living their life to the fullest while they had the time.
“Immunotherapies are kinder, smarter treatments that can bring significant benefits to patients with advanced head and neck cancer—for example, by sparing them some of the difficult side effects of chemotherapy,” said Professor Kristian Hellin, Chief Executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, London.
“These are promising results and demonstrate how we can better select the patients who are most likely to benefit from immunotherapy treatment.”
“When I was told about the trial by Professor Harrington, I didn’t hesitate to join—what did I have to lose? It turned out to be a lifeline,” said Ambrose. “Although I had to make bi-weekly trips from Suffolk to the hospital for the treatment, I had virtually no side effects and was able to carry on as normal doing the things I love—sailing, cycling, and spending time with my family.”
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In a first for the Southern Hemisphere, researchers have shown a bacteria can successfully sterilize and eradicate the invasive, disease-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito which is responsible for spreading dengue, yellow fever, and Zika.
The breakthrough could support the suppression and potential eradication of Aedes aegypti worldwide.
The landmark trial involved releasing three million male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in Northern Queensland, sterilized with bacteria called Wolbachia, across three trial sites over a 20-week period during the summer of 2018.
The sterile male insects search out and mate with wild females, preventing the production of offspring.
Scientists returned the following year and found one of the trial sites, Mourilyan in Queensland, was almost devoid of mosquitoes.
The trial was an international collaboration between Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, University of Queensland (UQ), Verily Life Sciences, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and James Cook University (JCU).
CSIRO Chief Executive Dr Larry Marshall said the organization was proud to build on a 100-year legacy of protecting Australia and Australians.
“The creation of our Health and Biosecurity team back in 2016 meant we were prepared for COVID-19, and that preparation is paying off across other biosecurity threats like mosquitos which spread some of the world’s most serious diseases,” Dr Marshall said.
“Over 40 per cent of humans suffer from mosquito-spread diseases, so it’s an opportunity for Australia to develop environmentally-friendly mosquito control tools to tackle current and future mosquito incursions.
“By working with Australian and international partners we can tackle two of Australia’s greatest challenges at once—health and security—with breakthrough research translated into effective global export solutions.
“CSIRO is leveraging great Australian science to create new technologies to make this approach more cost effective and suitable for the climates of less developed countries that suffer most from mosquito-borne viruses, strengthening and protecting our region.”
JCU Adjunct Professor Scott Ritchie said the Wolbachia trial was a successful international collaboration which saw contemporary science working together with cutting-edge technology, to help eliminate the dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito.
“It was a hugely successful project. We reared the three million male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes needed for the trial in the insectary at James Cook University in Cairns,” Prof Ritchie said.
Verily Product Manager, Nigel Snoad, said community engagement was also essential to success of the project.
“It was a huge achievement by the joint team to setup and operate the mosquito rearing, sorting and release systems, and develop strong community engagement and support,” Mr Snoad said.
“We were proud of the work we were able to do in collaboration with the CSIRO, James Cook University and the local community. The ongoing suppression after releases stopped is an important result, indicating that sustained impact is feasible for this disease vector.”
CSIRO scientist and UQ Associate Professor, Nigel Beebe, said the trial—published in PNAS—demonstrates this technique is robust and capable of effectively suppressing mosquito populations.
“When we surveyed the sites the following year, we were very encouraged to see the suppression still in effect, with one of our most productive towns for Aedes aegypti almost devoid of this mosquito with a 97 per cent reduction across the following season.
“One year on, the mosquito population at the second trial site remained substantially suppressed, while the population fully recovered at the third site.
“We are currently investigating the differences observed in the following mosquito season as they are incredibly informative in further developing this technology and in modelling how we could remove this exotic virus-transmitting pest in other locations worldwide.”
The technique can also be used to remove the virus-transmitting Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, that has now established at Australia’s doorstep in the Torres Strait Islands.
Techniques from the trial are being used to support CSIRO-led mosquito suppression programs in French Polynesia and the Hunter region in New South Wales, Australia.
An equal parts comedy and tragedy in the Colorado mountains finally gave to an end, after a young bull elk who had a car tire dangling around his neck for two years was finally set free.
Tracking the elk for two years but never managing to get close enough to tranquilize the animal, Colorado Parks and Wildlife authorities cornered the four year-old bull at around 8:00 p.m. last Saturday.
Despite first seeing the animal two years ago, trail cam footage clearly showed the tire wasn’t affecting the animal’s ability to eat or drink. Still, fear of the tire becoming tangled in branches, or worse, in the antlers of another elk during the rut, continuously drove Parks and Wildlife staff to try and remove it.
Following a call from a resident who had seen the bull in their neighborhood, Wildlife officers Dawson Swanson and Scott Murdoch responded to what would be the last of four attempts to help the animal.
“I am just grateful to be able to work in a community that values our state’s wildlife resource,” Swanson said. “I was able to quickly respond to a report from a local resident regarding a recent sighting of this bull elk in their neighborhood. I was able to locate the bull in question along with a herd of about 40 other elk.”
The saga of the bull elk with a tire around its neck is over. Thanks to the residents just south of Pine Junction on CR 126 for reporting its location, wildlife officers were able to free it of that tire Saturday.
They had to get within close range to successfully find their mark with the tranquilizer. The ten-pointer, weighing over 600 pounds, regretfully had to lose one of his magnificent antlers in order to slip the tire off from around his neck, as the steel-bead reinforcements were too much for their small electric saw.
“We would have preferred to cut the tire and leave the antlers for his rutting activity, but the situation was dynamic and we had to just get the tire off in any way possible,” said Officer Murdoch. Inside the tire they found 10 pounds of debris which had fallen into the air crevice. While causing minimal impediment to the animal’s life, as observed from its size and health, the ring of the tire had begun to wear away on the elk’s neck.
“The hair was rubbed off a little bit, there was one small open wound maybe the size of a nickel or quarter, but other than that it looked really good,” Murdoch said of the bull’s neck. “I was actually quite shocked to see how good it looked.”
This bull elk has spent the past couple of years traveling back and forth between Park and Jefferson Counties. He would disappear for long periods of time, particularly in the winter, and was acting as expected from a wild animal, not wanting to be around human presence.
“The saga of this bull elk highlights the need for residents to live responsibly with wildlife in mind,” the Department stated in a news release. “Wildlife officers have seen deer, elk, moose, bears, and other wildlife become entangled in a number of man-made obstacles that include swing sets, hammocks, clothing lines, decorative or holiday lighting, furniture, tomato cages, chicken feeders, laundry baskets, soccer goals or volleyball nets, and yes, tires.”
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Stunning aerial footage has captured a school of fish moving through the sea in the shape of a perfect love heart.
The group of Crevalle Jack reflect the sunshine as they move together in a Cupid shape before morphing into a swirling ring.
The clip is reminiscent of the moonfish in Pixar’s Finding Nemo that make a series of swirling, ethereal shapes to talk with Marvin the clownfish.
Local restaurant owner, 47-year-old Paul Dabill spotted the fish while flying his DJI Mavic Air 2 drone just off Juno Beach in Palm Beach County, Florida.
Paul said, “I was looking for mullet, this time of year is the fall mullet migration.
“There were no mullet at the beach this day, however I found the school of Jack Crevalles instead.
Tom Cruise, MTV Live; CC license/Astronaut, Russia Channel One
Tom Cruise, MTV Live; CC license/Astronaut, Russia Channel One
Russia has a history of beating us Yankees into space, and along with being the first to send a dog, man, and woman into the arms of the final frontier, they just became the first nation to send an actress and film crew up there.
Slated for two weeks of filming aboard the International Space Station (ISS), actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko become the first humans to film part of a feature-length film in space, beating out poor old Tom Cruise, who since 2020 had made his intentions to film a movie aboard the ISS clear enough to NASA.
The Challenge will be a big-budget Russian blockbuster based on the story of a top surgeon (Peresild) who is called upon to ascend to the Russian-module of the ISS for an emergency procedure.
A Soyuz rocket departed the Earth at 4:55 a.m. on October 5th from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and arrived three hours later carrying Ms. Peresild, Mr. Shipenko and their experienced astronautical guide, Anton Shkaplerov.
After an automated docking procedure had to be aborted due to what a translator described deliciously as “ratty comms” to the New York Times, Shkaplerov brought the Soyuz craft in manually.
“I still feel that it’s all just a dream and I am asleep,” said Peresild, opening the hatch and floating into the space laboratory. “It is almost impossible to believe that this all came to reality.”
The pair will gather around 35 minutes of footage before departing on the 17th of October, leaving Shkaplerov behind to work.
After the film launches on Russia’s Channel One, an inevitable reality series is planned to follow.
Space filming
While many films certainly feature space, The Challenge will be the first feature-length fiction to be filmed on the ISS. Other filming for documentary purposes has been conducted before; just recently The Wonderful, which features a collection of the stories of astronauts aboard the ISS, was released worldwide.
In May 2020, former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced that he and NASA “are excited to work with Tom Cruise on a film aboard the Space Station,” adding that “We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers to make NASA’s plans a reality.”
NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality. pic.twitter.com/CaPwfXtfUv
In September 2020, it was announced that Cruise and Director Doug Liman had booked a flight on a SpaceX rocket headed for the ISS in October 2021. Ever eager for a space-race, Russian Channel One and a film studio called Yellow, Black, and White jointly announced with the Russian space agency Roscosmos their own plans for a space movie.
While Peresild and Shipenko will be set to come down soon, Cruise’s October launch plans are still up in the air. Universal Studies were reportedly ready to lay down $200 million to make the movie happen, but having only just finished filming Mission Impossible 7, it would seem a real impossible mission to make the SpaceX flight with everything ready for filming.
If Tom Cruise needs a bright side to look on, it’s that the last time Russia and the U.S. had a first-to space race, Russia got into space first, but the U.S. got to the Moon.
Mission Impossible 8 anyone?
(WATCH the Guardian video for this story below.)
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Quote of the Day: “The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.” – Paul Simon, Lyric from Train In The Distance (turns 80 today)
Photo: by Daniel Mirlea
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A Minnesota high schooler with a passion for disabled animals has made giving them mobility her mission. Two years ago, after studying some YouTube tutorials followed by a process of trial and error, 16-year-old Shaine Kilyun embarked on the enterprise of making hand-crafted pet wheelchairs for animals in need.
More than mere creature comfort, the mobility devices Kilyun manufactures in her spare time are changing furry lives for the better, and even saving animals that might otherwise be put down.
“I just love animals, and I wanted to make a difference somehow,” Kilyun told FOX-9. she said. “I’ve saved a few lives, and I really hope to save more.”
Since launching Wheelies Dog and Cat Wheelchairs that offers “custom, handmade, and low-cost wheelchairs for specially-abled dogs, cats & pets,” Kilyun has only charged for the cost of her materials.
The savings are often substantial—$300 for one of her creations, versus $1,000 for similar devices for large-breed dogs from more traditional sources.
To date, the tireless teen has put together close to a dozen front-support, full-support, and back-support models, depending on the animal’s particular needs and has designed mobility devices for everything from a tiny Chihuahua in Ohio to a Great Dane in Oregon.
In addition to dogs and cats, she’s also come up with a one-of-a-kind locomotion aid for a hedgehog. Next on her drawing board? A purpose-built duck-mobile.
As was her hope from the beginning, Kilyun has expanded her outreach to include shelter pets. She met one of her latest clients, Scooter, a paraplegic pup who came to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia via the Home For Life Animal Sanctuary, an organization that offers a chance for life to pets that might be considered unadoptable.
Lisa Leverdiere, who works with the nonprofit, notes that in times like these when it’s difficult to raise money, Kilyun’s efforts are especially appreciated.
Kilyun is determined to keep up the good work, and while times may be hard, she says she’s thrilled by the generous folks who are still willing to contribute financial help to cover her costs. “A lot of people have reached out and donated, which is just incredible,” she told FOX-9.
If you’d like to help give a dog, cat (or duck) a new “leash on life,” donations can be made via Zelle to [email protected].
(WATCH the video for this story below.)
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Sometimes solving the most complex technology and engineering challenges, as you might have guessed, involves looking towards nature for solutions. Such is the incredible case with the Teslagram—a currently-unhackable security fingerprint created after studying a butterfly’s wing.
The wings of this most charismatic insect are cloaked in tiny scales—up to 200,000 of them, which contain a lattice-work of chitin ribbons unique to each scale. It was these scales which a Serbian technology student at the Institute of Physics, Belgrade, thought could serve as the ultimate form of security code or authenticity stamp.
Fingerprints, QR codes, bar codes, and more are all coming up against their best-by dates, according to the Teslagram inventor, Marija Mitrovic Dankulov.
In an interview with Free Radio Europe, she highlights the story of a hacker named “starbug” taking a photograph of the German Defense Minister, and managing to zoom in at a high-enough resolution to copy her fingerprint.
While analyzing butterfly scales under an extremely powerful electron microscope, a colleague of Dankulov’s, Dejan Pantelic, realized that a human fingerprint could not compare to the intricacies of the unique latticework within each scale.
Dankulov and Pantelic, along with some of their colleagues then came up with the idea of the Teslagram, named after the great Serbian inventor Nicola Tesla.
SecretDisc, CC license
A butterfly scale would be attached to a product, and the details upon it would be entered into a database like a fingerprint—only one which would be extraordinarily difficult to copy maliciously using known technology.
“Let’s say a museum wants to loan a very valuable art piece out to some gallery,” Dankulov tells FRE. “Currently, when that artwork is returned, the museum has to pay some specialist to ensure that what they got back was the original artwork.”
This is the same principle for other luxury goods like jewels, watches, or designer clothing, all of which lose millions every year in market sales to counterfeiters.
Along with being much harder to read, as they require an electron microscope, butterfly scales, as anyone who has ever been next to a child trying to catch a butterfly has reminded them, are extremely fragile, and any tampering with the Teslagram would make it unreadable.
Currently the Teslagram is being trialed by a Serbian company called Vlatcom, which is utilizing them for their security cards to enter and exit the buildings.
Another advantage of using butterfly scales are that almost all of the butterflies native to Serbia are in no danger of becoming endangered, and because a single insect can provide so many scales, very few of them need to kept in the lab. Currently Dankulov and her team have a small butterfly aviary where species are allowed to live their normal life-cycle.
Some technological challenges remain, such as how to affix the scale so it doesn’t become damaged through normal wear, and how to offer cheaper and more flexible reading technologies that don’t involve an electron microscope.
SecretDisc, CC license
Saying that, the group recently teamed up with a second firm called Quadra Graphic that have helped them build infrastructure for creating ID cards and readers to allow people to access the powerful Teslagram.
(WATCH the video for this story below.)
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Combining a vertical farm and office space into a single 51-storey concept out of Chinese mythology, an Italian architect is completing the Shenzhen skyline with a stunning “farmscraper.”
With a façade that features a vertical hydroponic farm extending the entire height of the building, the Jian Mu Tower was designed for a leading Chinese supermarket to be a place where tenants can grow, sell, buy, or consume produce in the same place they work.
Located in the south Chinese city of Shenzhen, the Turin-based Carlo Ratti Associati has unveiled plans to build a 650-foot (218-meter) tower in which 100,000 square feet (10,000 sq. meter) of the glass exterior is dedicated to producing food—590,000 pounds of it per year, which would also contain around a million square feet for office space, a supermarket, gardens, and food court.
Hydroponic gardening involves using a nutrient rich water vapor rather than soil, and allows plants to be grown in tubes stacked vertically.
Working with ZERO, an Italian-based company that specializes in innovative approaches to agriculture, Jian Mu’s farm is optimized to produce everything from salad greens to fruits to aromatic herbs, while remaining efficient and sustainable.
An AI agronomist would oversee most of the hydroponic systems, regulating water and nutrients, planning planting and harvest cycles, and other matters.
The building, designed as the new headquarters of supermarket chain Wumart, where the entire production chain can be “showcased in a clean, and technologically exciting way,” was named and designed after a mythical tree that separated heaven from earth in Chinese folklore.
According to traditional belief, the project page explains, heaven is round while the Earth is square. The skyscraper echoes this principle with its rectangular base that gradually morphs into a tubular form as it rises.
“The vertical hydroponic farm embraces the notion of zero food miles in the most comprehensive sense,” Carlo Ratti told Dezeen. “Crops cultivated in the tower are sold and even eaten in the same location, which helps us conserve a great deal of energy in food distribution.”
The sun will help the crops to grow, which in turn will shade the interior offices from the sun, reducing the air conditioning load, while the moist sub-tropical China air would aid in supplying moisture to the plants.
“Small-scale urban farming is happening in cities all over the world – from Paris to New York to Singapore. Jian Mu Tower, however, takes it to the next level,” writes Ratti, who is also a professor at MIT.
“Such approach has the potential to play a major role in the design of future cities, as it engages one of today’s most pressing architectural challenges: How to integrate the natural world into building design.”
The concept reveal video below is nothing short of utopian science fiction, as deserves a watch.
On a prison yard 70 miles away from Cal State LA’s campus, the university celebrated its newest graduates.
25 incarcerated men received bachelor’s degrees during a commencement ceremony at California State Prison, Los Angeles County in Lancaster last Tuesday, marking the culmination of a unique and powerful journey.
“Today, an education to me, means freedom, redemption, and opportunity,” graduate Dara Yin said during his student address at the ceremony. “The freedom to create better lives. A redeeming quality in the sense that we can step out of an identity that was destructive and into the person our mothers always meant for us to be. The opportunity to show that we are not our worst decisions, that we crave to be a part of the larger society so that we can put to use our unique combination of lived experience and education.”
Cal State LA’s Prison B.A. Graduation Initiative is the first in-person bachelor’s degree completion program for incarcerated students in California. It was started in 2016 with support from President Barack Obama’s Second Chance Pell federal pilot program and is also supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Through the program, the students earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communication, with a focus on organizational communication.
The graduates wore black caps and gowns over their blue prison uniforms at the October 5 outdoor ceremony on the yard of the prison’s progressive programming facility (PPF). PPF is a voluntary program that houses men who demonstrate good conduct and a dedication to personal growth.
Friends and family of the graduates gathered with officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and Cal State LA faculty, staff, and administrators to celebrate the graduates.
“I am struck by the resilience and dedication you have demonstrated as you embarked on your educational journey,” Cal State LA Provost and Executive Vice President Jose A. Gomez said to the graduates. “You didn’t give up, you didn’t quit. I speak for everyone at Cal State LA—the faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and our community—when I say that we are so proud of you.”
Robert Huskey/Cal State LA
Professor David Olsen, chair of the Department of Communication Studies, served as emcee for the ceremony, which featured moving student speeches and performances, as well as remarks from CDCR leaders.
“This program is so unique—it is one of the only of its kind in the country and the nation has been watching you,” said Brant Choate, director for CDCR’s Division of Rehabilitative Programs. “Because of your efforts, you have set the stage and example that this works. This opportunity is going to be available to thousands in the future in California and across the country. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
During the ceremony, five of the graduates performed a piece they wrote, directed, choreographed, and rehearsed under the guidance of Cal State LA Professor Kamran Afary.
Titled When I Becomes We [Ubuntu], the men used spoken word, rhythmic language, and movement to explore their personal transformations and experiences completing their degrees during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Afary watched proudly from the audience as the graduates performed. “I am overjoyed and so emotional today,” said Afary, who is one of the 15 faculty members in the Department of Communication Studies who taught the students during their time in the program. “It’s been a wonderful journey and an honor to have been able to watch them grow.”
Drawing on expertise from across the university, Cal State LA’s pioneering prison education initiative is a collaboration between the university’s Center for Engagement, Service, and the Public Good, the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Arts and Letters, and the College of Professional and Global Education.
In July, the first nine graduates from Cal State LA’s Prison B.A. Graduation Initiative were able to participate in commencement ceremonies on the Cal State LA campus. All had their life sentences commuted by Gov. Jerry Brown or Gov. Gavin Newsom, or were released due to changes in the law.
Several attended Tuesday’s ceremony, returning to Lancaster to watch their friends and former classmates earn their degrees. It was Tin Nguyen’s first time stepping foot on the yard since he was released on a rainy December morning in 2019. When he entered the prison’s gates again on Tuesday, he said he felt like throwing up.
But his anxiety quickly turned to elation. Under bright sunshine and blue skies, Nguyen felt joy seeing his friends achieve their accomplishments.
“Look at us now,” Nguyen said. “We are transformed men—assets to society both in here and out there. I am proud of them and so amazed at how far we have come.”
Cal State LA’s B.A. program has equipped the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students with critical thinking capacity, public speaking abilities, and writing skills and experiences that have fostered personal transformations.
“Other schools prepare you to execute a task,” said Samuel Nathaniel Brown, one of the graduates who received their degrees this week. “This school prepared us to change the world.”
Brown co-founded, with his wife Jamilia Land, the Anti-Violence, Safety, and Accountability Project (ASAP), which aims to dismantle systemic racism and end the cycle of violence in communities.
After being incarcerated for over two decades, Brown will soon become the thirteenth student in Cal State LA’s prison education program to be released from prison.
During the ceremony, Brown and his fellow graduates crossed a stage in their caps and gowns with their heads held high as their names were read. Gomez congratulated the Class of 2021 and instructed them to turn their tassels from the right to the left, marking their symbolic transition to university graduates. Of the 25 names called, two were not present at the ceremony because they had been transferred to another facility.
By the end of fall, 37 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students in Cal State LA’s B.A. program will have earned their bachelor’s degrees. Some have enrolled in master’s degree programs in communication studies and counseling, others have started businesses or are giving back to their communities through nonprofits. All want to strive to make the world better.
At the closing of his remarks, Yin challenged his fellow graduates to consider their degrees as just the beginning.
“Imagine what else we could do? Find the answers to poverty? Homelessness? Help rebuild our K-12 schools? Put an end to kids joining gangs,” Yin asked. “Impossible? Not if you ask us.
Imagine if those answers are here among the incarcerated—among those that have changed and reclaimed their positive standing in society. Imagine that it starts today.”
Established during Obama and Clinton, shrunk in some places and expanded in others by Trump and by Congress, and now restored to their original size, the whirlwind journey of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments seems to have come to an end.
Another national monument which escaped widespread attention at the time, Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Monument (NCS), also had protections returned to it that had been been reduced under the Trump Administration.
In what was the largest reduction in federally-owned land for purposes of recreation and conservation in the nation’s history, the shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante (GSE) ruffled more then a few feathers.
Investigative reporting revealed a flurry of mining and fishing rights claims, lawyers from environmental groups and Tribal Nations filed suits, local Utah residents argued the legality of suddenly locking them out of more than 60% of their entire county, and Patagonia clothing even got involved.
However it didn’t even take 24 hours for Biden to put the decision under review, and after what was likely a largely for-show tour of the areas to gather opinions, Biden signed a proclamation restoring the monuments to their original size following Sec. of the Interior, Deb Haaland’s, recommendation.
“By restoring these national monuments, which were significantly cut back during the previous administration, President Biden is fulfilling a key promise and upholding the longstanding principle that America’s national parks, monuments, and other protected areas are to be protected for all time and for all people,” the White House stated.
In Bears Ears, an area characterized by “deep sandstone canyons, broad desert mesas, towering monoliths, forested mountaintops dotted with lush meadows, and the striking Bears Ears Buttes,” the total conserved area now includes both the original boundary, and the 11,000 acres which were not originally included but which Trump added, to a total of 1.36 million acres.
GSE, which wasn’t protected under Obama, was in 1996 described as “a geologic treasure” and the last place in the Lower 48 to be mapped. There one can find bold plateaus, multihued cliffs, narrow slot canyons, and 600 species of bees. It has been restored to 1.87 million acres following a 47% reduction by Trump.
Lastly NCS, a unique marine environment that serves as a breeding ground for Blue Whales off the coast of New England, and which was not shrunk at all, had commercial fishing restored in its 5,000 square miles. Under Biden-Harris, the only Atlantic Ocean national monument will be restricted to very limited fishing rights once again, with crab and lobster catch phased out by 2023.
“The President’s action will ensure that our children, and our children’s children, will be able to experience the wonder, history, and beauty of these extraordinary public lands and waters as we do today,” Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, Brenda Mallory, said.
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Quote of the Day: “Often, the best explanation for ‘the good old days’ is a bad memory.” – Steven Pinker
Photo: by Milivoj Kuhar
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What does one do on seeing an animal in distress? If you’re former Aussie rugby player Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins, you go right to its aid.
In the viral video—which now has more than 16 million hits on Twitter—Nick switches on the emergency lights of his car, then jumps out and runs to help a black and white sheep entangled in a barbed-wire fence.
The sheep is having difficulty freeing itself, so Nick calms the distressed animal, then works at separating its horns from the wire.
The sheep is free. Now Nick just has the not-so-easy task of getting the animal away from road traffic and back in its field.
“Usually, they go into a sort of hypnotized state when you have them like this,” Nick says to his friend as he holds onto the sheep’s hooves.
A dementia suffering pianist whose spontaneous composition went viral last year has fulfilled a lifelong dream of conducting a symphony orchestra—which played his own songs.
81-year-old Paul Harvey became well-known last September after his son Nick had recorded him improvising a two-minute piece from four notes—F natural, A, D, and B natural—and posted the footage on Twitter.
Nick posted the clip online to show how musical ability can survive memory loss ,and Paul captured the hearts of the British nation when he played the piano from his home in Sussex live on the television.
It was recorded by BBC Philharmonic orchestra as a single, with proceeds going to the Alzheimer’s Society and Music for Dementia, which campaigns for people with the condition to have free access to music as part of their care.
To mark a year since he played his composition on breakfast tv, Paul was invited to conduct the BBC Philharmonic orchestra playing two of his compositions at the studio in Salford.
SWNS
He spent an emotional afternoon with the orchestra, during which he conducted both Four Notes, while his son Nick played the piano, and an older composition of his called Where’s the Sunshine.
Paul, a former music teacher and classical pianist, said, “It was magical, it was very, very special to work with such wonderful musicians.
“It made me feel alive, I couldn’t believe that an orchestra was playing my music and I was standing in front of it conducting them.
“I hadn’t conducted in such a long time before this, it was a real thrill.”
Paul was born in Stoke-on-Trent and studied piano at the Guildhall School of Music.
He became a composer—his Rumba Toccata is still used in grade 6 piano exams—and a concert pianist, appearing on the BBC Home Service in 1964.
But he decided to become a music teacher shortly before his eldest son Nick was born.
He spent 20 years teaching at the Imberhorne school, a comprehensive in East
Grinstead whose former pupils include Cutting Crew’s Nick Van Eede, famed for his hit ballad (I just) Died in Your Arms.
Five years ago, Paul moved into sheltered accommodation as part of his dementia care.
SWNS
Nick, who joined Paul on the trip—organized by Music For Dementia—said he had seen his dad “come alive again” since the video of him playing piano went viral.
And he supported calls for music to be a key part of dementia sufferer’s care.
He said, “It moved dad and me and my two brothers beyond compare.
“It was a dream come true for dad to conduct and play with the an orchestra of that calibre as an 81 year old. It’s what dreams are made of.
“It was like an out-of-body experience.
“My dad is still reeling, he was having memories of what had happened over the last few days.
“His short term memory is generally shot to pieces but when big events like this happen it’s like a branding iron on his brain.
“From my experience with dad, the right piece of music at the right time can be absolutely incredible.
“You don’t have to be a talented musician to enjoy it though. Just listening to music, it starts to trigger memories of the past and gives people that connection.
“Dad was having a particularly bad day at the time. It was fascinating how getting dad at the piano at that time brought dad back to me.
“For the first time in years he has got active again. It really brought him back to life again. He’s playing the piano more than he has in the eight years.”
They’ve famously survived the vacuum of space, and even returned to life after being frozen for decades in Antarctic moss. But as hard as it is to kill the bizarre microscopic animal, the tardigrade, it’s harder to find one fossilized. In fact, only two have ever been discovered and formally named—until now.
Lead researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology and Harvard University have described just the third fossil tardigrade on record—a new genus and species Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus gen. et sp. nov. (Pdo. chronocaribbeus), which is fully preserved in 16-million-year-old Dominican amber from the Miocene.
Measured at just over half a millimeter, the specimen has been identified as a relative of the modern living tardigrade superfamily, Isohypsibioidea, and represents the first tardigrade fossil recovered from the Cenozoic, the current geological era beginning 66 million years ago.
Researchers say the pristine specimen is the best-imaged fossil tardigrade to date— capturing micron-level details of the eight-legged invertebrate’s mouthparts and needle-like claws 20-30 times finer than a human hair. The new fossil is deposited at the American Museum of Natural History Division of Invertebrate of Zoology.
“The discovery of a fossil tardigrade is truly a once-in-a-generation event,” said Phil Barden, senior author of the study and assistant professor of biology at New Jersey Institute of Technology. “What is so remarkable is that tardigrades are a ubiquitous ancient lineage that has seen it all on Earth, from the fall of the dinosaurs to the rise of terrestrial colonization of plants. Yet, they are like a ghost lineage for paleontologists with almost no fossil record. Finding any tardigrade fossil remains is an exciting moment where we can empirically see their progression through Earth history.”
“At first glance, this fossil appears similar to modern tardigrades due to its relatively simple external morphology,” said Marc A. Mapalo, lead author of the study and graduate student at Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. “However, for the first time, we’ve visualized the internal anatomy of the foregut in a tardigrade fossil and found combinations of characters in this specimen that we don’t see in living organisms now. Not only does this allow us to place this tardigrade in a new genus, but we can now explore evolutionary changes this group of organisms experienced over millions of years.”
Tardigrades, or water bears, are renowned for their unusual appearance and self-preservation abilities—certain species are known to survive extreme conditions by curling into a dehydrated ball and entering a state of suspended animation where their metabolism is virtually paused, known as cryptobiosis.
Rare tardigrade fossil finds such as Pdo. chronocaribbeus, the team suggests, could provide new molecular estimates that offer fresh insight into major evolutionary events that have shaped the more than 1,300 species found across the planet today, such as the miniaturization of their body plan into one of Earth’s smallest-known animals with legs.
Perhaps the greatest challenge in unearthing tardigrade fossils, however, is their size.
“It’s a faint speck in amber,” said Barden. “In fact, Pdo. chronocaribbeus was originally an inclusion hidden in the corner of an amber piece with three different ant species that our lab had been studying, and it wasn’t spotted for months.”
Barden says tardigrades’ microscopic non-biomineralized bodies are also uniquely suited to preservation in amber derived from plant resin, which is capable of safely enveloping and preserving organisms as minute as water bears and even individual bacterium.
“This particular mode of fossilization helps explain the patchy fossil record,” explained Barden. “Fossil amber with arthropods trapped inside is only known from 230 million years ago to the present… that’s less than half of the history of tardigrades.”
Placing the discovery on the Tardigrade Tree
While it is estimated that tardigrades diverged from other panarthropod lineages before the Cambrian 540 million years ago, only two definitive tardigrade fossils have formally been described, both from Cretaceous fossil deposits in North America.
To explore Pdo. chronocaribbeus andits place on the tardigrade ancestral tree, Mapalo used high-powered laser confocal fluorescence microscopy to finely image the specimen. The team then compared it across a range of morphological features associated with major tardigrade groups alive today—including key identifiers such as body surface, claws, buccopharyngeal apparatus, and egg morphology.
“The fact that we had to rely on imaging techniques usually reserved for cellular and molecular biology shows how challenging it is to study fossil tardigrades,” said Javier Ortega-Hernandez, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. “We hope that this work encourages colleagues to look more closely at their amber samples with similar techniques to better understand these cryptic organisms.”
The team’s analysis places Pdo. chronocaribbeus in one of three core classes of tardigrade, Eutardigadra, and makes it the first definitive fossil member of the superfamily called Isohypsibioidea—a diverse species that today inhabits aquatic and land environments and is typically characterized by their distinct claws that vary in size leg-to-leg.
“We are just scratching the surface when it comes to understanding living tardigrade communities, especially in places like the Caribbean where they’ve not been surveyed,” said Barden. “This study provides a reminder that, for as little as we may have in the way of tardigrade fossils, we also know very little about the living species on our planet today.”
The French firm that has taken an enzyme found in decomposing leaves and tweaked it, so it can decompose plastic instead, has now opened a demonstration plant where they are showing their recycling process can achieve the goals they predicted 18 months ago.
Photo by Carbios
Several obstacles have prevented humanity from getting control of the plastic pollution problem. Mechanical recycling is expensive to run, while market demand for costly recycled plastic is low. Plastic collection around the world is still under 25%, and some plastic polyesters remain without a recycling method.
As GNN reported in 2020, the technology from Carbios solves many of these problems, and they’re confident their demonstration plant will win the support of corporations like PepsiCo, L’Oreal, and Nestle.
At the new Carbios plant in Clermont-Ferrand, a reactor about the size of a cargo van has the capacity to process around 100,000 ground up plastic bottles in just 10-16 hours—that’s around two tons of ground-up PET (polyethylene terephthalate), the most common form of plastic bottle.
It breaks down the polymers—long complicated molecules, into monomers—smaller, simple building blocks, separating the two major components of polyethylene glycol from terephthalic acid, in a matter of hours; exactly as they predicted in 2020.
One major advantage this enzymatic method offers over mechanical recycling is that the end product of plastic monomers is actually far closer to the original material manufacturers use with petroleum to make new bottles, than if they bought chopped-up plastic.
Using the experience gained at this plant, Carbios will improve the upcoming industrial-size plant forecasted to open 2025.
While their recycled plastic monomers cost more than mechanically-recycled plastic, the method can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, thanks to a reduced reliance on heavy industry, which is attractive to corporations that need to demonstrate their environmental responsibility.
As enzymatic recycling advances as a technology, a chance for more complex plastics like polypropylene, or those found in artificial clothing could eventually be tackled.
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An iconic fixture in any London street scene for decades, the black taxi cab and their extraordinary cabbies are the focal point of a new expedition into Alzheimer’s research.
Cabbies have an incredible knowledge of London streets that seems to confer some protection against Alzheimer’s Disease—this could be be clinically relevant to struggling patients, or those seeking to mitigate their risks.
For those on the outside, it may seem that behind the wheel of the black cabs are just regular people who help move us along to our destinations bit by bit. But hidden within their brilliant brains is a map of London’s streets that for decades has put GPS technology to shame.
“The Knowledge,” as it’s called in the cabbie exam, was established for horse and buggy cabbies in 1865.
It stands among the hardest mental examinations one could ever undergo, as it involves the repeat retrieval from memory of minute details from between 25,000 and 56,000 London streets, depending on who’s reporting, from Trafalgar Square to the tiniest residential lanes.
University College London and Alzheimer’s Research UK are coming together to study the brains of these cabbies, as it’s found that the hippocampus, master of the brain’s short-term memory and spatial memory systems, is enlarged in the brains of cabbies.
Brain-gain
For Alzheimer’s disease, the hippocampus is the first and principal victim of its effects. Furthermore, cabbies’ hippocampi continue to enlarge the more years they put into the job, presenting the hypothesis that perhaps there’s something we can do to replicate the effect in the general population.
“Maybe there’s something very protective about working out your spatial knowledge on a daily basis, like these guys do,” said Research lead, Prof. Hugo Spiers according toEuro Weekly News.
“It may not necessarily be spatial, but just using your brain rather than Google Maps might actually help—in the same way that physical fitness is important.”
At UCL’s department of experimental psychology, Spiers was part of the team which 20 years ago found that, like birds and squirrels, cabbies’ hippocampi gradually got bigger.
Indeed research has found for years that any animal that requires a detailed spatial knowledge of their territory experiences growth in the hippocampus, from voles to pigeons.
Alzheimer’s Disease results from Tau proteins, in particular amyloid-beta, building up around the neurons in the hippocampus. Over time and in layman’s terms, a brain drain occurs as the proteins interfere with the firing of neurons, leading to loss of brain tissue, and a breakdown in the critical functions of the hippocampus.
Spiers and his team hope to study the “brain gain” which occurs from putting one’s powers of memory through the rigors of The Knowledge.
To glean more information on the mechanisms that cause these gains, Spiers has recruited thirty of London’s cabbies to drive around on their routes hooking up to MRI machine that will allow the researchers to gather real-time observations of the workings within the hippocampus.
“It’s been a joy to help [the research team] with this work and feel that I’m able to use my brain to help scientists combat dementia,” said Robert Lordan, taxi driver, and author of the book The Knowledge: How to Train Your Brain like a London Cabbie.
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Quote of the Day: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt (born 137 years ago)
Photo: by Mateus Campos Felipe
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?
