Unable to attract bees and other pollinators to its golden pollen, Cypripedium wardii, an orchid species native to Tibet and China, creates “fool’s gold” pollen, a sugary snack that entices insects among its petals whereby they become covered in real pollen.
Pseudopollen, as it’s called, has been observed in orchids before, a species whose true pollen is not edible. For many bees, pollen is a key source of protein—and while nectar is sweet, it can’t sustain them forever.
The beautiful Cypripedium family of orchids are known as “lady’s slipper” orchids, thanks to an upturned bowl-shaped petal arrangement lying at the bottom of their flowers.
This bottom flower contains small hairs that breakdown into a dust that appears like normal pollen.
Orchids are notorious grifters. Not only do some species make this pseudopollen, but others release pheromones that smell like receptive bee or fly females.
A lady’s slipper orchid/Orchi, CC license
It wasn’t known that they gave anything back at all to pollinator, as they don’t produce nectar. If they didn’t produce nectar or scents, and their pollen wasn’t edible, how did orchids reliably secure the service of pollinators?
In a study currently awaiting peer review, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences observed 12 solitary bee a hoverflies arrive at C.wardii in the mountains of Sichuan, and begin interacting with the pseudopollen. Later dissection revealed that the pollinators were consuming the fool’s gold for food.
An analysis of the pseudopollen showed they contained lipids, or fats, indicating their nutritional value to the bees.
Speaking with Scienceon the topic, one botanist thought the only ones deceived by the pseudopollen has actually been the botanists, and that the pollinators know full well the fool’s gold has a benefit to them.
PLANT This Fascinating Flower News in Friends’ News Feeds…
A pregnant mom is being hailed a hero after saving four kids from drowning.
27-year-old Alyssa DeWitt decided to take her kids to First Street Beach Pier at Lake Michigan on Tuesday afternoon.
“I almost didn’t, I sat in the van for about five minutes thinking the wind was really strong, and I didn’t really know if it was a good idea,” said the stay-at-home mom from Manistee, Michigan.
On the beach she noticed a group of girls, all under 15, going into the water and became concerned for their safety.
“I happened to look up and saw one of the girls waving her arms towards me and immediately knew something was wrong,” she said. “I got up, pulled my kids out of the water and ran out onto the pier.”
SWNS
She called 911 but, she says, “I didn’t know if [they] could hear me and I didn’t have time to wait and find out,” she said.
No-one else was on the beach. She was the only one who could help. Alyssa laid on her stomach, despite being five months pregnant, and began trying to pull the girls over the rocky and slippery pier.
“Every time I’d get one of them halfway up, a big wave would come smashing into us and knock them back down or almost pull me over,” she said.
“My turning point was when one of the little girls looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to die.’ That was it for me and I was like ‘I’m not going to let you die, I’m going to get you out of this water, I promise.’”
She managed to pull all three girls out of the water and over the pier before the group set off back towards the shore to rescue a fourth girl who had managed to get closer to shore but couldn’t stand because her leg was injured.
“I honestly do not know how I did it, it was pure adrenaline at that point,” Alyssa said.
“Right after I got everybody onto the beach, the ambulance and the police cars came flying into the parking lot.”
Alyssa sustained a swollen wrist but she and the baby were both fine when she went to the hospital to get checked out.
She said another hero of the day is her six-year-old daughter, who managed to keep her two-year-old brother safe during the ordeal.
“Between me screaming into the phone that I needed help and me screaming to the kids what I needed them to do to get them out, I was also turning around and screaming to my son not to come because it wasn’t safe,” she said.
“He was very scared and repeatedly tried to run to me on the pier.”
“My daughter would pick him up and take him back to the sand and she was so calm and I’m extremely proud of her, she did a great job.” This super-hero mom did extremely well too.
Quote of the Day: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off(premiered 35 years ago today)
Photo: The film’s Ferrari
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Inspired by techniques used to train deep neural networks, a neuroscience professor has argued for a new theory of dreams: the overfitted brain hypothesis.
The hypothesis, from Erik Hoel at Tufts University, suggests that the strangeness of our dreams serves to help our brains better generalize our day-to-day experiences.
“There’s obviously an incredible number of theories of why we dream,” says Hoel. “But I wanted to bring to attention a theory of dreams that takes dreaming itself very seriously—that says the experience of dreams is why you’re dreaming.”
A common problem when it comes to training AI is that it becomes too familiar with the data it’s trained on—it starts to assume that the training set is a perfect representation of anything it might encounter. Data scientists fix this by introducing some chaos into the data; in one such regularization method, called “dropout,” some data is randomly ignored.
Imagine if black boxes suddenly appeared on the internal screen of a self-driving car: the car that sees the random black boxes on the screen and focuses on overarching details of its surroundings, rather than the specifics of that particular driving experience, will likely better understand the general experience of driving.
“The original inspiration for deep neural networks was the brain,” Hoel says. And while comparing the brain to technology is not new, he explains that using deep neural networks to describe the overfitted brain hypothesis was a natural connection. “If you look at the techniques that people use in regularization of deep learning, it’s often the case that those techniques bear some striking similarities to dreams,” he says.
With that in mind, his new theory suggests that dreams happen to make our understanding of the world less simplistic and more well-rounded—because our brains, like deep neural networks, also become too familiar with the “training set” of our everyday lives. Hoel’s theory is laid out in a review in the journal Patterns.
To counteract the familiarity, he suggests, the brain creates a weirded version of the world in dreams, the mind’s version of dropout. “It is the very strangeness of dreams in their divergence from waking experience that gives them their biological function,” he writes.
Hoel says that there’s already evidence from neuroscience research to support the overfitted brain hypothesis. For example, it’s been shown that the most reliable way to prompt dreams about something that happens in real life is to repetitively perform a novel task while you are awake. He argues that when you over-train on a novel task, the condition of overfitting is triggered, and your brain attempts to then generalize for this task by creating dreams.
But he believes that there’s also research that could be done to determine whether this is really why we dream. He says that well-designed behavioral tests could differentiate between generalization and memorization and the effect of sleep deprivation on both.
Another area he’s interested to explore is on the idea of “artificial dreams.” He came up with overfitted brain hypothesis while thinking about the purpose of works of fiction like film or novels. Now, he hypothesizes that outside stimuli like novels or TV shows might act as dream “substitutions”—and that they could perhaps even be designed to help delay the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation by emphasizing their dream-like nature (for instance, by virtual reality technology).
While you can simply turn off learning in artificial neural networks, Hoel says, you can’t do that with a brain. Brains are always learning new things—and that’s where the overfitted brain hypothesis comes in to help. “Life is boring sometimes,” he says. “Dreams are there to keep you from becoming too fitted to the model of the world.”
A 3-D printed electronic nose has been developed that ‘sniffs out’ Covid in just seconds.
The device smells chemicals in infected individuals, opening the door to large-scale testing across the world.
Scientists say it could be used at airports, offices, factories, and even football, rugby, and cricket grounds.
Project leader Professor Noam Sobel explained: “The e-nose generates a pattern in every odour—it characterizes the smell of Covid-19.”
Rapid diagnosis is key to bringing the pandemic under control, said Sobel. It will enable people to attend mass gatherings and travel, as well as return to school or work.
The instrument, called Pen3, has been trained to identify VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in the inner nasal passage, rather than in the breath.
Experiments on 503 people—27 of whom were later deemed to have COVID-19—found it was up to 94 percent accurate.
They were recruited at a drive-thru testing station Tel Aviv, organized by Israel’s Red Cross.
Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, explained: “Every disease has an odor because they change metabolic processes. Metabolites have a smell.”
Pen3, which is designed to be 3D printed, has a gas unit and an array of sensors. A sampling valve connected to software fits snuggly into the nostril.
An electric lift on a wheelchair raised it to the level of each volunteers’ window. They did not even have to get out of the car.
Sobel further explained: “When a compound interacts with the sensors, this results in an oxygen exchange that leads to a change in electrical conductivity.”
Dogs can also use their noses to pick up Covid’s scent, but the scale of the crisis makes them an unrealistic tool, he said.
Those who took part in the initial tests were handed the sampling valve and instructed to hold it against a nostril opening for 80 seconds.
They were told to breath normally, but only through their open mouth. They then drove 30 feet to undergo the official PCR COVID-19 test.
“It was a shot in the dark,” said Sobel, “but the payback will be so huge… We get an answer in 80 seconds. We are obtaining meaningful data. We are actually measuring differences between people. We are gaining information that may open a path to rapid diagnosis.”
The peer-reviewed study in PLOS ONE shows there is a specific COVID-19 “body odor” that is detectable with Pen3.
“Given our current results,” said Sobel, “an optimized ‘eNose’ may be able to provide effective real-time diagnoses in locations such as airports, the work-place, and cultural events,” helping speed up both social and economic recovery. That’s hopeful news indeed.
The U.S. administration has announced it will be officially protecting 116,098 square nautical miles of the Pacific Ocean as critical habitat for three populations of endangered humpback whales.
The final rule could begin to help protect migrating whales from ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and oil spills.
The action was prompted by a 2018 legal victory by the Center for Biological Diversity, Wishtoyo Foundation, and Turtle Island Restoration Network—which sued over the federal failure to designate critical habitat as required by the Endangered Species Act.
“Pacific humpbacks finally got the habitat protections they’ve needed for so long. Now we need to better protect humpbacks from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear, their leading causes of death,” said Catherine Kilduff, an attorney with the Center in a statement. “To recover West Coast populations of these playful, majestic whales, we need mandatory ship speed limits and conversion of California’s deadly trap fisheries to ropeless gear.”
The Center for Biological Diversity also sued the federal government in January for failing to protect endangered whales from speeding ships using California ports. The organization is also co-sponsoring the California Whale Entanglement Prevention Act (Assembly Bill 534), which would require the state’s commercial Dungeness crab and other trap fisheries to convert to ropeless gear (also known as “on-demand” or “pop-up buoy” gear) by the end of 2025.
One population of endangered humpback whales that feeds off California’s coast contains fewer than 800 individuals, leaving them vulnerable to threats from humans.
This rule is a win, as it designates a total of 224,030 square nautical miles for the two endangered and one threatened populations, but overlapping habitat means 116,098 square nautical miles will be protected.
Specifically, the rule designates 48,521 square nautical miles of critical habitat off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington for the humpback population that winters in Central America.
The Mexico population got 116,098 square nautical miles in the North Pacific Ocean, including Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska—regions that also made up the 59,411 square nautical miles listed for the Western North Pacific humpback population.
“Today is a good day for humpback whales and the ocean all living things depend on,” said Todd Steiner, executive director of Turtle Island Restoration Network. “Designating 116,000 square miles of critical habitat in the ocean is something to celebrate, but whales, turtles, and dolphins still need additional protection from industrial fishing and ship strikes to recover and thrive, so we won’t be resting on our laurels.”
Critical habitat protection will help safeguard ocean areas essential for migrating and feeding. The designation will ensure that federally permitted activities do not destroy or harm important whale habitat. Evidence shows that endangered or threatened species that have protected critical habitat are twice as likely to be recovering as those without it—and that’s good news indeed.
HELP Your Friends Out of Their Bad News Hump—Share This Positive Story…
Celebrating with alcohol may leave many suffering with the dreaded hangover. But according to a study published in the Journal of Food Science, the amino acids and minerals found in the extract of a specific vegetable may alleviate alcohol hangover and protect liver cells against toxins.
Researchers at the Institute of Medical Science and Jeju National University in South Korea analyzed the components of young asparagus shoots and leaves to compare their biochemical effects on human and rat liver cells. “The amino acid and mineral contents were found to be much higher in the leaves than the shoots,” says lead researcher B.Y. Kim.
Aphiwat Chuangchoem
Chronic alcohol use causes oxidative stress on the liver as well as unpleasant physical effects associated with a hangover. “Cellular toxicities were significantly alleviated in response to treatment with the extracts of asparagus leaves and shoots,” says Kim. “These results provide evidence of how the biological functions of asparagus can help alleviate alcohol hangover and protect liver cells.”
According to HowStuffWorks, in an informal trial the scientists also found that volunteers who imbibed a drink containing the extract reported fewer hangover symptoms.
Asparagus officinalis is a common vegetable that is widely consumed worldwide and has long been used as an herbal medicine due to its anticancer effects. It also has antifungal, anti-inflammatory, and diuretic properties.
So while a trial utilizing asparagus extract on human cells isn’t the same as you taking it upon yourself to eat a steamed plate of the greens before a night out, it can’t hurt to try?
While paddling the iconic Danube River, what this Hungarian couple wasn’t expecting to find was two rare white-tailed eagles, stuck together and at risk of drowning.
Likely the eagles were clasped in this way after fighting. Klaudia Kis and Richard Varga knew they had to take action.
They helped the pair out humanely, using a rope, before continuing their journey from the Black Sea near Romania to Germany’s Black Forest.
In a bit a dreamland research, animal behaviorists at the University of Arizona got to study how 375 golden and Labrador retriever puppies performed at human communication tests.
The study was done to examine whether human-canine communication, specifically pointing gestures, was an onboard biological ability, a learned trait through exposure to humans, and whether the skill was passed through genetic heritage.
Ever since the metaphorical first wolf came within the light of the campfire, humans have been selectively breeding canines as companions. The pointing to a piece of food, a shot duck, a thrown stick, or a means of passing an obstacle is a method of human/canine communication that works well, but is extremely rare in the animal kingdom.
Even chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, can’t understand pointing gestures. In contrast, this study showed that 8-week-old puppies could reliably follow pointing gestures as good as adult dogs.
Furthermore, their skill at following a human finger to a hidden treat did not improve over time, but stayed consistent at about a 67% success rate. This suggested to the authors that the puppies were born with the ability and didn’t have to learn it.
Puppy see puppy do
Service dogs have to be animal geniuses in order to help people with disabilities or blindness get around a complex environment like a city, while those raised to help trauma survivors have to have an extreme ability for empathy.
Discovering where these skills come from, can they be inherited, and whether they vary breed to breed and individual to individual is a key step towards being able to breed and raise the most effective service dogs.
The researchers teamed up with Canine Companions for Independence, a service dog breeding center that keeps records of genetic history of the animals going back decades.
At eight weeks old, the nearly 400 puppies, all with genetic breeding histories, spend all day with their siblings and mother—making them perfect for the study aims, Evan MacLean told Smithsonian Magazine.
“They’re adorable and it’s fun to work with them,” says MacLean. “But they’re puppies, they have short attention spans and they pee and poop on everything. At the start of this project, it was like, ‘Puppies!’ And by the end it was, ‘Puppies.’”
In contrast to the immediate success of pointing to a hidden treat under upturned cups, researchers also subjected the puppies to a 30-second script of praise in a high-pitched voice to see how long the puppies could keep their attention on the speaker’s face.
They averaged only 6 seconds, which was less than adult dogs, suggesting that while pointing is instinctive, facial contact is learned. Furthermore, when presented with difficult, or unsolvable tasks, such as getting to kibble in a locked container, the puppies might not look even for one second at the human’s face for help, which is behavior well-documented in adult dogs.
Comparing each puppy’s success in the four trials with those of generations past (thanks to those records at Canine Companions for Independence) found that the heritability of success at following human instructions was 40%—huge—according to geneticists speaking with Smithsonian on the topic.
About half of the dogs that enter the service program don’t become service animals, and this discovery, as well as a follow-up piece of research planned by MacLean and colleagues, could lead to much better programs, saving time and resources, and getting more of the most empathetic dogs into service programs to help people.
(WATCH the puppies playing for science in the video below.)
PAW This Fascinating Research Over to Pals on Social Media…
Quote of the Day: “The past is a place of reference, not a place of residence; the past is a place of learning, not a place of living.” – Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Photo: by Timothy Eberly
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Not Apple’s Siri, Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, or any other speech platform can hear or respond to a single African language, but as speech interaction gradually takes over basic functions from typing to touch, the non-profit Mozilla—which created the free web browser Firefox—is working to bring voice-integrated technology to the continent.
Mozilla’s Common Voice platform, which receives support from the German and UK governments, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is an open-source initiative that’s already creating voice datasets for Kiswahili—a language spoken in Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Ugana, Tanzania, and South Sudan.
As Remy Muhire details for the Mozilla Foundation, most voice datasets used in voice-activated software are siloed, meaning they are contained within a very small number of companies, stifling innovation.
Common Voice wasn’t started exclusively to serve Africa, it merely wanted to create an open-source platform to enable voice-activation tech in any of the 7,100 “living” languages currently spoken. To date they’ve recorded more than 9,000 hours of audio from 160,000 different speakers of 60 different languages, including Welsh, which should help people looking for directions to “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”
The Common Voice platform is incredibly simple, and as soon as you arrive on its homepage your voice is welcomed with open arms into the datasets if you only want to take a moment to record it.
The spirit of togetherness
The language of Kinyarwanda is spoken by about 12 million people in Rwanda. Last year, Common Voice hosted a hackathon in Kigali to create a starting dataset for Kinyarwanda. It’s now the fastest growing language on Common Voice, with over 1,700 hours of submission.
The response to the hackathon gave rise to an AI solutions startup called Digital Umuganda—which takes the name from Kinyarwanda word for a kind of cooperation and community.
The final Saturday of every month sees people take to the streets to pitch in on community projects like building or repairing roads—this is Umuganda, and the startup wants to take it to the digital space to create digital infrastructure.
They’ve created an AI-powered ChatBot named Mbaza that uses the Common Voice Kinyarwanda dataset to enable citizens to access information adn guidance while using the local language.
Mbaza provides text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality, removing the barriers of illiteracy from citizens accessing important information, such as getting in contact with local governments.
Just recently, Mozilla received a $3.4 million grant to expand the Common Voice platform across Africa, and Chenai Chair, Special Advisor on Africa explained that Kiswahili is just the beginning.
“The next steps are… building up the community engagements, and the community supports because Common Voice is about people donating their voice and we want to do it right,” Chair tells GNN. “We don’t want to do it in a way that we end up with the same issues that other technology platforms have.”
“We are initially starting off with the East African community… then we want to strategically build up those other communities of other African languages so they can make use of the Common Voice or the Common Voice toolset.”
Chair explains that traditional illiteracy is a problem in the agriculture sector, and is also highlighted within the female half of African populations. Potential Common Voice applications—such as interacting with the increasingly digital functions of government, or within the financial sector such as online banking—will be made much easier.
No language left behind
Language contains far more than a few unique words or concepts: it acts as the decoding tool for speakers to know their history; all their stories, fables, and culture.
UNESCO, for example, is promoting voice technology to document Indigenous knowledge, save Indigenous languages, and increase access to information.
Like the large voice datasets of Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Wikipedia contains a version of the historical, spiritual, cultural, and indeed linguistic record of the African continent, and here also, community-driven initiatives are working to bridge the divide in access to information—particularly in African languages.
The WikiAfrica Education Program, created by the Moleskine Foundation, is an effort to foster creativity and an interest in culture in African school curriculums by teaching students how to prepare, submit, and edit articles on Wikipedia—especially in their own languages.
Adama Sanneh, Founder of the Foundation, has helped organize or been a part of community-driven events that have seen tens of thousands of entries on Wikipedia in different African languages. This proved particularly helpful, he told GNN, during the pandemic’s early days.
Adama Sanneh (far left)
“When we started the situation was very grim, there was only one article in Luba, or something like that,” said Sanneh in March.“We launched a campaign to ask people to translate… ten articles around COVID-19 that would allow the sparking of creative solutions.”
“In a couple of months we passed from one to more than 300 articles in more than 20 different African languages. That gave access to more than 300 million people when we look at the composition of the languages,” he said.
FOR the Love of Language—Share This Story on Social Media…
Love is wonderful the second time around, but it can be all the more special if you don’t remember the first time. For Peter Marshall, who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s, forgetting his past has meant a bittersweet chance to fall in love with his wife Lisa and ask her to marry him all over again.
Peter and Lisa have been married for 12 years. At 56, his illness has progressed rapidly, but no matter what turn his condition takes, Lisa remains steadfastly by his side because even if he can’t remember her name, he knows that he loves her and that she loves him.
“He doesn’t know that I’m his wife. I’m just his favorite person,” Lisa told NBC News 4 New York’s Ida Siegal. “I don’t need to have a label. I don’t need a name because our hearts are connected.”
Last winter, as the Connecticut couple sat on the couch watching a televised wedding, Peter had an inspiration. Not realizing they were already married, he proposed—and a surprised Lisa happily accepted.
And so a date was set. Vendors who knew Lisa’s event planner daughter donated their services to make the day perfect. Throughout the touching ceremony Peter beamed at his bride, while sometimes through tears, Lisa smiled back as she made her vows.
“It was so perfect. I couldn’t have dreamt for a better day. It was so magical,” Lisa told NBC. “I can’t remember seeing him so happy for so long… I’m the luckiest girl in the world. I [got] to do it twice.”
Though the ceremony took place only a few months ago, Peter has no recollection of the event, but what he’s not forgotten is the woman who’s never going to leave him; the women he loves who loves him back—and when hearts are truly connected, sometimes remembering love can be more than enough.
(WATCH the NBC video about this story below.)
SAY ‘I DO’ to Good News—Share This Story on Social Media…
With social distancing and limited face-to-face interaction, dating in the time of coronavirus has proved a challenge for everyone, but when Cupid’s dart struck one spirited pair of nonagenarians, they refused to say no to love.
When John Shults, a widower twice over, met Joy Morrow-Nulton who’d also lost two previous spouses, he knew he was smitten—and the feeling was mutual. Unfortunately, it seemed as if the pandemic was conspiring to keep the would-be lovers apart.
While it took some doing, the upstate New York couple continued to pursue their mutual attraction despite COVID-19’s shelter-in-place protocols. “She was worth it. It was a pain in the neck, though,” John quipped to CBS’s Steve Hartman during a segment of On the Road.
Eventually, after receiving their vaccinations, and with restrictions lifting, the pair was finally able to get back to the business of courtship. The more time they spent together, the stronger their bond grew until John, being an old-fashioned gentleman, finally proposed.
Joy accepted. When the couple wed in a recent ceremony, both the bride and groom were 95.
In traditional romance sagas, the hunky hero and the spunky heroine must face a gauntlet of obstacles before finally arriving at their happy ending. For John and Joy, it didn’t take being young or hunky to find true love, but being spunky sure paid off.
When asked what was the key to his dad and new stepmom’s successful romance, Shults’ son Pete had a ready answer: “Perseverance,” he told Hartman. “They’d call every day. They’d find a way to get together. They did whatever it took.”
Proving that if you have the courage to follow your heart, you’re never too old to say, “I do!”
U.S. prison populations are declining. This is not only attributable to the easing of drug laws across the country, but also in rising standards of living in previously poorer states.
The gradual shuttering of prisons in the U.S. has also led to a creativity boom in the form of redesigning old correctional facilities for other purposes.
Associated Press reports that the inmate population in Connecticut has fallen by about half from its peak of 20,000 in 2008, and that while one former prison now locks up only important documents for banks and law firms, others remain empty but unused.
Here are a few more of new uses for America’s jails.
GRACE Marketplace
Gainesville and Alachua County has a new homeless shelter, found within the converted Gainesville Correctional Institute. Shuttered due to budget cuts, locals found the building ideal for converting into a homeless shelter, and got straight to work planting trees and painting the walls bright colors.
Existing infrastructure like an industrial size kitchen and plumbing were already there, saving the organization money. Since 2009, GRACE Marketplace has served three quarters of a million meals, seen 1,500 residents rehoused, and serviced more than 15,000 homeless in the area while reducing chronic homelessness by 38%.
While offering medical care, financial, mental health, and domestic abuse services, they also have a garden, computer lab, and host cooking classes and even yoga.
“We’re the only homeless shelter in the universe that improved the property values when we moved in,” Jon DeCarmine, the executive director of GRACE told AP. “There were adaptations that were required to make it something that worked. But, overall the benefits for the community and people we serve have far outweighed any hassles of moving into a facility that had been used in a different way previously.”
In 2020, GNN reported on the “flipping” of North Carolina correctional facilities in an area where at-risk youth and veterans were driving up crime rates to worrying levels.
In converting old prisons to year-round-farming and education centers, Growing Change solves several problems at once. The program synergistically brings together young men on the edge of the criminal justice system and jobless wounded veterans returning from deployment.
Recruiting the discipline and leadership skills of the latter to teach and guide the former, Growing Change creates an environment whereby at-risk youth who need to fulfill long hours of community service can learn life skills, sustainable farming practices, and animal husbandry, with an opportunity to receive clinical therapy in an environment much more suited to young men.
Meanwhile, the veterans work toward university degrees in environmental sciences and sustainable agriculture. Together, these individuals young and old who may have been on the fringes of society work to rehabilitate abandoned brownfields (land that might be contaminated and must be cleaned before future use), and to keeo the prison property decaying into dysfunction.
The myriad societal benefits are augmented by the fact that the counties Growing Change operates in grow almost none of their own produce. The flipping of prisons into organic farms also increases the access to nutrient dense fruits and vegetables.
Orange is the new black
One prison, a former correctional facility on Staten Island, has actually been turned into a full-service movie studio by Broadway Stages. The 69-acre waterfront campus has already seen action in Hollywood, and was used in the filming of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, and the heist movie Ocean’s Eight.
The authentic prison set includes everything a director or screen writer could want; a gymnasium, visitor center, admission buildings, infirmary, kitchen, recreation yard, guard towers, and all of the housing blocks.
The facility now has 40 permanent employees, and every production arrives with hundreds of people.
“And to the extent that they can, they [the production] like to use local restaurants for food, local businesses for craft services—anything that they need,” said Samara Schaum, a spokeswoman for Broadway Stages. “That’s part of the identity of Broadway Stages. I know that it has had a positive impact on local businesses there.”
Just as an inmate one day has to prepare for life beyond the walls of a penitentiary, the United States is gradually getting used to life beyond the days when the simplest answer to any criminal problem was throw someone in prison.
The number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and local jails dropped from around 2.1 million in 2019 to 1.8 million by mid-2020—a drop of 300,000, or a 14% decrease.
Since 2011, 22 states have closed correctional facilities, amounting to 94 fewer state prisons and juvenile detention centers, and bags of creativity are needed to ensure these places are reclaimed by the community.
BREAK Your Friends Out of the Cycle of Bad News—Share the Hope, and This Story…
In a stroke of scientific genius, a German researcher enjoying a box of popcorn in a dark movie theater realized that the overpriced, butter-soaked concession had the exact same size and consistency as Styrofoam packing peanuts.
University of Göttingen
Considering Styrofoam is made from polystyrene, which requires fossil fuel extraction and takes centuries to break down into yet smaller bits of harmful micro-plastic, Alireza Kharazipour thought it was worth experimenting with puffed corn kernels as a replacement for them.
Annually, in the U.S. alone, around 3 million tons of polystyrene is produced, which is a lot considering it’s 95% air. It’s a popular choice because it has enabled packaging to take on very precise forms and provides excellent packing safety for fragile electronics on the move, for instance—while costing pennies to manufacture.
One of its worst qualities is that most recycling facilities don’t have the capability to process it.
“Our popcorn packaging is a great sustainable alternative to polystyrene which is derived from petroleum,” said Stefan Schult, Managing Director of Nordgetreide.
“The products are very light because popcorn granules are filled with air like honeycombs,” Kharazipour tells Fast Company. “When grain maize expands into popcorn, the volume increases by 15% to 20%.”
University of Göttingen
Taking corn waste products produced from making corn flakes, then filling them with steam creates what Kharazipour and his team at Gottingen University call “granulated popcorn.”
The popcorn packing can be made from any type of corn, and is completely biodegradable.
Large pieces can be compressed into shapes to hold different products, and can be easily sawed into pieces, either for cutting into precise shapes, or for shredding at the end of its life.
The brilliance of Kharazipour’s idea has landed him an exclusive licensing agreement with a medium-sized grain and cereal company in Europe called Nordgetreide for manufacturing various popcorn packing products.
Quote of the Day: “Be like the bluebird who never is blue. For he knows from his upbringing what singing can do.” – Cole Porter, Anything Goes (born 130 years ago today) LEARN more…
Photo: by Joshua J. Cotten
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
The lighted whisps in this image of a solar eclipse are just a tiny portion of the Sun's corona - credit: Drew Rae
It’s time to dig out the solar glasses from the back of the cupboard, because on the morning of June 10—that’s this Thursday—the Sun, Moon, and Earth will bring us a highlight of the summer stargazing season as a solar eclipse hits the Northern Hemisphere.
If you’re in the Lower 48 you’ll want to be in the northeast, or in parts of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, to glimpse a surreal sunrise where the sun has ‘solar horns’. Maine will see 78% coverage of the sun; in Washington, D.C. it will be 55% covered—creating a fascinating crescent shape.
If you’re in Ontario, Nunavut, or Quebec in Canada, if the skies are clear you’ll see an impressive ‘Ring of Fire’ solar eclipse a little after sunrise—but only if you’re north of Lake Superior (sorry, Torontonians.)
Drew Rae
If you’re further in the west of Canada or the U.S? You may as well have a lie-in, as the eclipse will begin and end its show before sunrise hits.
The Weather Network has great maps containing more info on what you’ll see, and when, in your location in North America.
So how do solar eclipses work? According to NASA, “A solar eclipse happens when the Moon moves between the Sun and Earth, casting a shadow on Earth, fully or partially blocking the Sun’s light in some areas.
“During an annular eclipse, the Moon is far enough away from Earth that the Moon appears smaller than the Sun in the sky. Since the Moon does not block the entire view of the Sun, it will look like a dark disk on top of a larger, bright disk. This creates what looks like a ring of fire around the Moon.”
P.S. It’s not just up in the direction of the sun you’ll want to look at during Thursday’s spectacular sunrise. Look on the forest floor, according to The Washington Post, and you could see crescent-shaped patches of light tucked among the trees’ shadows as the sun’s image gets projected on the ground.
(WATCH NASA’s visualization of Thursday’s eclipse in the video below.)
GET Your Friends’ Ready for the Solar Eclipse—Share This Story…
In it, he begins to try and unravel our natural born prejudice towards anything with more than two legs, and shows that many of the most well-established intelligence tests we use for mammals and birds can also be passed by bugs and cephalopods.
In a Literary Hub excerpt, he argues that this should at least leave us revisiting whether these tests prove intelligence as such, or if we need to reexamine the concept of animal intelligence at large.
Let’s take a look at just how intelligent invertebrates really are.
Bees
Bees are known to have a mind-bogglingly complex sensory interconnectivity through the use of pheromones that allows them to seemingly move as if controlled by a single mind.
And yet individual bees can recognize individual human faces. They understand the concepts of something “same” and something “different,” which was demonstrated in tests with shapes and colors.
Honeybees seem to know they know things as well: One cited study suggested bees would not participate in tasks that were very difficult if failure meant receiving a bitter tasting liquid at the end. Researchers took this to mean the bee would only participate in tasks it knew it was capable of finishing.
Low on the sting-o-meter, paper wasps score high on other tests, such as the ability to recognize individual members of their colony by the distinct marks on their little heads. By digitally altering features of a colony-member’s face, researchers were able to observe that they would choose their comrade’s face over the doctored image.
Tool-use, a generally accepted form of higher intelligence, is found in digger wasps, who, after paralyzing their prey, bury it underground and use flat stones to tamp down the dirt they moved in order to disguise it from other insects that have learned an easy meal lies within the borrow.
One of the distinguishing features here is that they selected flat stones in particular, and not any such hard object, such as a nut, that might have been lying around.
Ants
Ants can recognize themselves in a mirror.
We’re not kidding. In what Balcombe describes as his favorite insect intelligence test, Brussels researchers found ants behaved differently when looking at their own face in a mirror than colony mates viewed through a pane of glass. This “MSR” test was the same one that caused a scientific reevaluation in the ’70s when chimpanzees were found to do the same.
When a blue dot was applied to their forehead, the ants, upon seeing themselves in the mirror, and like so many humans before going out in public, busily scrubbed away until the pesky stain was removed. This preening wasn’t observed if the blue dot was placed on the back of their head where they couldn’t see, or if it was applied and they were not given a mirror to gaze into.
Since 1970, just apes, dolphins, elephants, magpies, and as Balcombe points out, a type of cleaner fish, have passed this test.
This animal has garnered a lot of attention recently through a string of now-iconic videos on YouTube, as well as from several experts talking to the eclectic mind of America’s biggest broadcaster: Joe Rogan.
An octopus can open child-proof containers and untie knots, is a master of escape, has emotion, and demonstrates play behavior. They even have unique personalities, and can actually learn skills by watching others.
This has led researchers to suggest that, given the evolutionary distance between mammals and octopuses, consciousness was first developed by the eight-legged curiosities, and that therefore, consciousness has evolved on Earth on two separate occasions at least.
Spiders
We saved this species for last so that arachnophobes who may not enjoy hearing that spiders are more intelligent than we thought can leave having enjoyed the rest of the article.
Object permanence was found in various jumping spider species when researchers observed them moving out from behind a rock if a prey species passed out of sight behind it. They knew the prey was still there, it’s just that something was blocking its view.
Spiders, again the jumping variety, were also found to display very advanced methods of approach, and would back away from its prey if it thought it had a better chance of approaching undetected elsewhere.
The reason this was found in jumping spiders and not those that rely on ambush, like trapdoor or web-weavers, could be the same reason that wolves and leopards are smarter than crocodiles.
Actively seeking and stalking requires complex sensory and mental arrays to parse information from the environment in order to avoid detection, whereas a camouflaged lizard or spider need only wait until something wanders close enough to its mouth.
In his book, Balcombe quotes Jane Goodall’s professor in the moments after he learned of her documenting of advanced tool use in chimps: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Late 19th and early 20th century fiction was filled with visions of a brave new world where science, technology, and machinery would come together to build metropolises under the sea, floating in the air, or out in space.
Now a Dutch planning and architecture firm is working with the Maldives to create a 200-hectare floating city. It’s modeled on the structure of coral reefs and powered by green energy to help fortify the nation against climate change.
Averaging less than 1 meter above sea level, the Maldives, a collection of 25 atolls in the Indian Ocean, is the lowest-lying nations on Earth and at a real risk of becoming uninhabitable as the planet warms.
Fortunately, with 300 years of Dutch know-how on controlling their wet environments, Dutch Docklands is working with the Maldives government to create a solution.
Planned to drift upon a 200-hectare warm water lagoon just a 10-minute boat ride from the capital of Malé, the Maldives Floating City (MFC) will be built along a flexible grid and surrounded with larger islands to act as wave and water breaks.
“Up top, traditional Maldivian architecture sets the tone of MFC’s design plan, supported down below by the most eco-friendly construction possible,” state Dutch Docklands. “MFC offers an approachable, scalable, sellable solution for truly sustainable water-front development.”
Rendering, Maldives Floating City
“As a nation at the front-lines of global warming, the Maldives is perfectly positioned to reimagine how humankind will survive—and, indeed, thrive—in the face of rising seas and coastal erosion.”
Rather than industry or agriculture, the Maldives is powered by tourism, and the hexagonal, modular building segments are inspired by the rich corals that attract the visitors that fuel the country’s economy.
The plan also includes the building of artificial coral structures in and around the neighborhoods to attract sea life, and further protect the town from storm surges.
“Our adaptation to climate change mustn’t destroy nature but work with it, as the Maldives Floating City proposes,” said Mohamed Nasheed, former president of the Maldives and speaker of parliament. “In the Maldives, we cannot stop the waves, but we can rise with them.”
The housing modules will be connected by a series of canals and flexible bridges, while docks will allow people parking and access to services and shops. Construction is slated to begin next year, and finished in five.
A school and hospital will be added, a renewable energy grid will power the city, and prices for homes are said to be set to accommodate all income brackets.
(WATCH the project launch video for Maldives Floating City below…)
SHARE the Innovative News With Pals on Social Media…
Canopy's Executive Director Nicole Rycroft standing on a huge stack of waste wheat straw/Canopy
Pack4Good, a campaign by the NGO Canopy, is one of the fastest growing corporate responsibility platforms in America for ensuring paper packaging is not coming from virgin, endangered, or valuable forests.
Canopy’s work in auditing supply chains and providing recycled or sustainable packaging solutions has attracted 750 brands across all its campaigns, including e-commerce giants Amazon, fashion empires like Gap, H&M, Marks and Spencer, and others, and publishing and media firms like Mansfield Press, Penguin, and the New York Times.
Only 18 months since launching Pack4Good, and the campaign has welcomed 29 new brands from food and beverage products, to the printing, fashion, and e-commerce sectors.
“The companies that are joining Pack4Good are the out of the box thinkers we need—leaders ready to transform paper packaging supply chains and scale up solutions to save forests and our climate,” stated Nicole Rycroft, Executive Director of Canopy. “We have so many solutions just waiting to be implemented, it’s time to take them from the margins to the mainstream.”
Pack4Good’s selection of solutions for companies looking to reduce their forest impact are varied. They help connect companies to providers of waste pulp material like wheat straw that can be turned into fibrous packaging, while their stamp of approval—Ancient Forest Friendly—denotes the highest adherence to supply chain practices, and that the certified material contains no endangered, controlled, or ancient wood.
90 million tones of rice straw is burned every year in India, which in the fields surrounding Delhi accounts for 40% of the air pollution in the metropolitan area. Canopy wants to take take that rice straw and put it in the hands of recycled-paper mills, flooding the market with supply and adding a little more income to farmers. A win-win.
Canopy’s Executive Director Nicole Rycroft standing on a huge stack of waste wheat straw/Canopy
Pack4Good claim these solutions are everywhere, it’s just a matter of helping business get started down the road to sustainable paper supply chains.
Some modern investing strategies, like those recently implemented by BlackRock, target companies based on their degree of sustainability. The logic is that polluting companies will be pushed out of the market by conscious investors and squeezed by government regulations.
As more corporations look for ways to reduce their impact on the world environment, it’s up to groups like Canopy to ensure their energy is directed.
SHARE This Good Green News With Friends on Social Media…
