A spectacular new image has been released by NASA showing the ‘downtown’ of the spiral galaxy we live in.
The photography is a composite made up of 370 observations that were taken at the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory over the past couple of decades. It shows billions of stars and a seemingly endless number of black holes 26,000 light years from Earth, at the center of the Milky Way.
Much of the work that went into making this image was undertaken by Daniel Wang. An astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he spent his pandemic year working on the photo you can see above.
“What we see in the picture is a violent or energetic ecosystem in our galaxy’s downtown,” Wang said to Associated Press. “There are a lot of supernova remnants, black holes, and neutron stars there. Each X-ray dot or feature represents an energetic source, most of which are in the center.”
Well, we can’t deny that what Wang got up to over the last year sure beats our Netflix bingeing. We’re grateful for his work.
Quote of the Day: “To do more for the world than the world does for you—that is success.” – Henry Ford (unveiled first car 125 years ago)
Photo: by Dominik Lange
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?
Along with their devotion to one another, Marty Weber and his longtime partner Jeff Poissant shared many things in common. They owned a business together. Both loved nature. Both served in the U.S. Army, and both experienced firsthand some of the challenges military veterans can face.
When Poissant passed away four years ago from cancer, Weber could think of no better way to honor their 30-year union than by supporting military veterans in need.
In order to make that happen, Weber is donating 36 rural acres bordering New Jersey’s Pinelands National Reserve to be used as a rehabilitation center/retreat for mental illness and addiction. Its name? Jeff’s Camp.
Given that Weber turned down a $3 million dollar offer for the property, this is an extremely generous gesture.
Working with two already-established homeless outreach programs—Just Believe and New Life Addiction Services—Jeff’s Camp will feature an 8,000-square-foot facility incorporating a thrift store and a sober living residence providing treatment, rehabilitation, and vocational training—all in a serene, wooded setting.
“While (New Life) is working with them on the medical side, we can work on the rehabilitative/vocation side, getting them back into society, touching people, getting back into that public eye, and getting people what they need. That’s what the store is going to do,” Just Believe director Paul Hulse told NJ.com.
In an impromptu May 27 ceremony, Weber signed a letter of intent to deed over the land on which Jeff’s Camp will be built. Watching was a group that included New Jersey Congressman Andy Kim—whom Weber once ran against as a candidate for New Jersey’s 3rd district seat.
“If ever there was an issue that tries to unite our country it would be about supporting our veterans,” Kim told NJ.com. “So this is something where it should be all hands on deck. It should be a no-brainer to everybody.”
A no-brainer perhaps, and a fitting testament to two veterans who loved one another and their country.
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Unless a hardy wildflower is blooming from their depths, cracks in the sidewalks aren’t the most pleasing of sights, nor are potholes on anyone’s list of favorite things.
Unless you’re a French street artist with a delightful penchant for mosaics. Then, you mend those broken places with gorgeous colored tiles that lift the spirits of all who pass by.
Going by the name Ememem, he has dubbed his mosaic technique for repairing damaged streets ‘flacking’.
From his home city of Lyon, he’s taken his artistic talents on the road—to other European cities, including Paris.
Check out these Instagram gems below.
When street art looks like the walls of a grand cathedral…
Matt Stutzman was born in Kentucky without arms, and pretty much from the get-go he was in love with sports.
For years Matt played basketball using his feet, but he realized he wasn’t accomplished enough to make the big league. So he pivoted towards archery, and he’s never looked back.
A seven-year-old astronaut in training will become the first child ever to send something to the moon after impressing the world’s leading space pioneers.
Elizabeth Norman is obsessed with space and staged the launch of a massive homemade Vulcan Centaur rocket from her garden earlier this year.
Her enormous enthusiasm for all things lunar captured the attention of US experts currently prepping the real Vulcan Centaur for the first moon landing in nearly 50 years.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) has a miniscule space left on an upcoming mission to send the first ever private pod to land on the lunar surface.
They’ve offered to take something belonging to ‘Astro Liz’, and now a sticker carrying the name of her space blog will be part of the first ever lunar ‘time capsule’.
Her family, who are from Leicester in England, have even been invited to wave it goodbye on launch day in Florida at the end of 2021.
The schoolgirl is one of a handful of people in the world to include a personal item on the first ever mission of its kind.
And she’s already doing her own astronaut’s physical training routine to prepare for a future in space, to one day go visit the moon—and her sticker—in person.
Elizabeth said: “I can’t wait to see a video of the capsule with my sticker on the moon taken by the lunar lander.
“Astrobotic is making my space dreams come true and I’m so excited to watch the launch… I love science and space because there is so much to learn and I love exploring and doing experiments.” Her future goals? “To walk on the moon and to explore the highest mountain on Mars.”
Proud mom Jennifer Norman said: “None of us could believe it when we found out she would have the opportunity to make her mark on the Moon… For her to be included in such a historic moment is incredible and has shown anything is possible—her confidence and ambition have grown so much since she found out.
Elizabeth’s passion for space took off after watching coverage of NASA’s Perseverance Rover being sent to Mars in July 2020.
She threw herself into learning all about space—Elizabeth has already built a bionic arm to learn about robotics, and has just completed a five-week NASA program where she designed and carried out her own virtual mission to Mars.
Her work caught the eye of Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, and lunar lander manufacturer Astrobotic.
He watched the launch of her seven-foot cardboard version of the rocket he’s currently prepping for launch—as it sailed 30ft into the air, impressing Elizabeth’s neighbors.
So impressed, he reached out and asked if she could be part of the real launch of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander on board ULA’s Vulcan Centaur when it takes off later this year.
As part of the mission, space technology company Astrobotic is offering people and businesses the chance to buy space on the lander—known as a lunar payload: NASA is paying $79.5 million for 14 slots on the mission.
Elizabeth couldn’t be more excited about the upcoming launch—after all, if anyone knows the sky is far from the limit, it’s her.
Quote of the Day: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.” – Ayn Rand
Photo: by Ian Schneider
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?
Could you recognize all 50 U.S. states just by looking at the outline of their shapes? How about naming rapid-fire every element on the periodic table from glancing at the symbols?
Californian Kashe Quest can do all those things—plus a whole lot more—and she’s only 2 years old.
To top that off, with a lofty IQ of 146, Kashe recently became America’s youngest Mensa member. Since the international high-IQ organization admits only the elite top 2% of the intelligentsia to its ranks, that’s a pretty staggering achievement for someone of any age—much less a toddler.
Displaying advanced language skills far beyond the majority of her peers, Kashe’s parents Devin and Sukhjit Quest believed they saw early signs their daughter might be Mensa material. Her 18-month pediatric checkup confirmed their suspicions.
“She has always shown us, more than anything, the propensity to explore her surroundings and to ask the question ‘Why?’” Devin told CNN. “If she doesn’t know something, she wants to know what it is and how does it function, and once she learns it, she applies it.”
In order to be able to provide the most productive learning environment for Kashe, Devin and Sukhjit decided to have her IQ tested by a psychologist.
“I think the biggest takeaway from us doing it was we wanted to make sure we were giving her everything she also needed, in terms of her development and natural curiosity and her disposition—and we wanted to make sure we did our part in making that happen for her,” Sukhjit said to CNN.
The Quests admit parenting a brilliant child has been a real learning experience for them as well. Devin and Sukhjit say they’ve become extremely mindful of making the best language choices when speaking with Kashe, and believe their own communication skills have greatly improved as a result.
Although she’s gifted with a genius IQ, the Quests feel Kashe’s best interests will be served by continuing to let her interact with kids in her own age group. To that end, Sukhjit recently opened the Modern Schoolhouse preschool in their home. (A dozen students were enrolled in the inaugural class, and there are plans to expand to a larger facility.)
While it’s too early to know if they have a future Jeopardy! champion in their midst, right now, the Quests’ focus is on making sure Kashe has a happy, well-adjusted childhood. “She’s a toddler at heart and we want to keep that beautifulness as long as we can,” Sukhjit told 23-ABC.
And that sounds like some smart parenting indeed.
(MEET Kashe in the ABC News video below.)
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Despite their name, there’s no bumbling in a bumblebee’s movements. They are busy surveying your yard for the tastiest and richest supplies of nectar and pollen.
They’re also biting tiny chunks out of leaves as they go along, but are neither ingesting nor bringing the leaf fragments back to the hive. Instead, like so many gardeners with their pruning sheers, the bees are manipulating flowers into blooming earlier than normal, a discovery that has scientists buzzing.
Between the time of their emergence and the month of April when flowers are plentiful, buff-tailed bumblebees in a Swiss research lab were observed over several trials to prune the leaves of preferred plants while not in flower when the bee colony had been deprived of pollen. This was in contrast to the actions, both in the lab and on the building’s rooftop, of another colony that was not pollen-deprived.
Additionally, they had a profound effect on the plants they pruned. Their nibbling enticed flowers out of a tomato plant a whole month early, and black mustard plants two weeks early.
Continuing their rooftop research, the Swiss beekeeper/scientists found that over the course of early summer, wild bees of two other species began visiting and puncturing the leaves on non-flowering patches of plants.
A good sign and a fair bargain
Such a profound development in our understanding of a well researched insect is exciting, and a collection of biologists had a lot to say to National Geographic about the finding.
Some suggest it was an exceptional display of communication between not just different species, but different kingdoms, as the biting of the leaves might be the bee’s way of alerting the flower to its need for food and offering its services as a pollinator in return.
The question of why biting, and what is the mechanism that translates the sensation into early flowering, are still open to debate. The Swiss researchers punctured the leaves of their plants with tiny razor blades shaped like the bee-made puncture marks, and while this caused the plant to flower earlier, it didn’t happen as fast as when the bees made the marks.
This suggests there could be another piece of biological equipment the bees have that works in tandem with their mandibles, perhaps an odor or scent gland. If that mechanism could be figured out, it could be the largest development in agriculture since nitrogen fertilizer, as farmers would be able to fit a lot more into a single season, and for those maintaining orchards, control when bees visit for pollination.
Another hypothesis that has developed in the wake of the discovery is that if plant species change their flowering patterns in the effects of a changing climate, bees may still have the ability to manipulate their preferred plants into producing flowers in time to prevent starvation.
Neal Williams, a bee biologist at UC Davis, commented how wonderful it was that even in the year 2021, such a large discovery can simply come from observing an animal in its day-to-day activities.
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Six in 10 Americans have a carefully curated playlist to set the mood when taking a road trip, according to a new poll.
In a survey of 2,000 Americans, results revealed having favorite tunes ready to go is so essential that they may be the ultimate make-or-break for a successful road trip.
Not having access to a playlist was enough to constitute a U-turn for some: 35% of respondents would actually be willing to “turn the car around” if they don’t have everything they need to jam out to their music of choice.
What songs make an appearance on the best road trip playlists? Popular choices included Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd (39%), Hotel California by The Eagles (29%) and Life is a Highway by Tom Cochrane (27%).
In addition to the 59% who have a curated playlist, 47% said they have a road trip memory tied to a particular song.
When asked to describe these music-related mementos, one respondent said, “Moving to Colorado a few years ago, heard As We Ran by The National Parks for the first time and it [sort of] became an anthem to going west to start over.”
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Christian Brothers Automotive, the survey delved into the contents of Americans’ playlists—especially the differences between generations.
Forty-two percent of respondents said they “couldn’t stand” the music their parents played on road trips growing up, and 52% believe their generation’s playlist-making skills are superior to those of other generations, with millennials most likely to agree (61%).
When it comes to how respondents listen to music, enjoying albums straight through may be dead, as only 10% said they do this.
Nearly half (42%) prefer to hit shuffle on their entire library and let fate determine what they’re listening to, followed by 26% who like to have a set playlist of songs.
“As we began to see the number of COVID-19 cases decrease and more guests come to our stores to get their cars road-trip ready, we could feel their hope and excitement,” said Donnie Carr, President of Christian Brothers Automotive. “Their eagerness got us thinking about all the things that make car trips fun and at the top of that list is listening to great music as you drive.”
Carr’s comments echo what respondents indicated, as 78% feel comfortable taking a road trip in the coming months.
WHAT SONGS WOULD BE ON THE ULTIMATE ROAD TRIP PLAYLIST?
Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd 39%
Hotel California, The Eagles 29%
Life is a Highway, Tom Cochrane 27%
Take Me Home Country Roads, John Denver 26%
On the Road Again, Willie Nelson 25%
Old Town Road, Lil Nas X 25%
Shut Up and Drive, Rihanna 24%
Highway to Hell, ACDC 23%
Hit the Road Jack, Ray Charles 20%
Here I Go Again, Whitesnake 18%
Don’t Stop Me Now, Queen 18%
Go Your Own Way, Fleetwood Mac 18%
Ramblin’ Man, The Allman Brothers Band 17% (tied)
Paradise City, Guns ‘N Roses 17% (tied)
Route 66, Chuck Berry 17%
Drivers License, Olivia Rodrigo 16%
I’ve Been Everywhere, Johnny Cash 16%
A Thousand Miles, Vanessa Carlton 15%
Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen 15%
This Land is Your Land, Woody Guthrie 14%
I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), The Proclaimers 14% (tied)
Cruisin’, Smokey Robinson 14% (tied)
Everyday is a Winding Road, Sheryl Crow 13%
Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan 13%
Greased Lightnin’, John Travolta 13%
Drive, The Cars 12%
Made in the U.S.A., Demi Lovato 12%
Little Deuce Coupe, The Beach Boys 12%
Ride, Lana Del Rey 11%
Roll with the Changes, REO Speedwagon 11%
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Gen Xers are folks born between 1965 and 1980. There are roughly 65.2 million of them in the United States. Brood Xers are also native to America, but this year, you can expect a population of about a trillion or so of them to show up in backyards across swaths of the mid-Atlantic and Midwest.
Did we mention they’re insects?
Since this year’s huge batch of Brood X cicadas is of the 17-year variety—keeping mum underground for nearly two decades, lying in wait to emerge and mate, accompanied by an exuberant and sometimes ear-shattering chorus that would have made Beethoven proud—they’re grabbing quite a lot of media attention.
“This is a real treat. This is an unusual biological phenomenon. Periodical cicadas only occur in the eastern United States; they don’t occur anywhere else in the world,” entomologist Eric Day of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University extension told CNN. “It’s just going to be an amazingly big, big show.”
But the ubiquitous swarming insects aren’t just in the news, with a little help from some friends, they’re actually winning the Internet.
The Fairfax, Virginia-based father/daughter team of Scott and Ellie Kanowitz have come up with a series of increasingly complex humorous vignettes starring the media-happy bugs interacting with a variety of toy props.
Scott and Ellie Kanowitz
They admit the one drawback to gently using live bug actors was that they did not always take direction well.
“Posing and building more and more elaborate schemes trying to get them to stay still and learn about the cicadas was really exciting,” Scott told WTOP News. “I think one thing we learned was that they don’t like to ride on skateboards.”
Scott and Ellie Kanowitz
“It was fun to try to get them to stay still and pick them up,” 11-year-old Ellie added. “I want to put them on more cars, and more miniature things.”
It’s certainly the kind of family project to spark creativity, but its duration will be short-lived. The cicada’s above-ground life cycle lasts only a few short weeks.
Of course, team Kanowitz could always try for a sequel…
Coming soon to a device near you! The Locust Zombie Apocalypse 2021! “They’ll be back!” (Okay, in 17 years.) Be amused! Very amused!
Beyond the visual beauty of their protected landscapes, U.S. National Parks also contain natural soundscapes that have the potential to create desirable health outcomes in people.
This finding is part of a large, recently published meta-analysis examining the impact of natural audio on visitors’ biomarkers—which looked at dozens of different scientific papers on the subject.
When in 2018 this author arrived in Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, I saw a two-mile hiking loop called the Sound of Silence Trail. As I began walking, I took notice of the sounds, or lack thereof, around me. After just one minute of hiking over flat scrub desert, I turned back to regard my parked Nissan and watched a car pass along the road just beyond. Yet it produced no more sound than a wisp of wind in the trees—as if the desert was swallowing or buffering the outside audio from reaching me.
This is just my own personal example of how the U.S. National Parks Service curates arrangement of trails, parking lots, campgrounds, and more to preserve sections of auditorily significant landscape—a topic that drove Rachel Buxton, a conservation scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa, to break from her habit of examining the stress-responses from noise pollution to the healing effects of natural sounds.
In the introduction to her meta-analysis, Buxton references one study that measured how various factors like sleep loss and disease removed “healthy life years,” from society—an interesting metric, and found that 650,000 years of life in a healthy state are lost through noise pollution—1000% more than cardiovascular disease.
Auditory healing
Sounds cause reactions in every known vertebrate, and most animal and even plant life have evolved to perceive sound as an important way of navigating the environment, finding food and mates, and avoiding danger. Therefore the obscuring of sounds by noise pollution can cause a lot of detrimental neurological effects, such as an increase in cortisol secretion that can lead to negative health outcomes.
One prevailing theory over why natural soundscapes promote healing is that they usually don’t require directed attention, and can allow the sort of “switching off” of auditory focus, something that can almost never be done in the constant stimulation of an urban environment.
In her meta-analysis, Buxton examined 36 studies, which together produced an average of a 28% reduction in feelings of annoyance when listening to natural sounds like birds, wind, and water; perhaps unsurprising. Of traditional markers of health, such as blood pressure, heart rate, and perceived pain, all of which were most strongly reduced (23%) by geophysical sounds of water.
However most of the studies examined were conducted in a lab, and so in addition to a review of the literature, Buxton set out to measure the prevalence of sound in U.S. National Parks, in part to help inform park administrators—especially those in heavily visited parks—how to organize infrastructure to preserve areas of rich soundscape.
“In parks, noise degrades visitor enjoyment and health directly as an environmental stressor and indirectly by altering the number of sound-producing animals and thus decreasing the diversity of natural sounds,” she wrote. However when natural sounds were audible in combination with anthropogenic noise, the negative effects of the noise pollution were largely reduced.
Buxton et al. measured 221 audio recordings from 68 National Park Sites and found that 75% of them had high levels of natural sounds 75% of the time. The National Parks Service actively works to protect and maintain soundscapes. Sometimes they also work to restore them, such as in Muir Woods National Monument—where they put up signs asking visitors to “park quietly” near a particularly audio-rich area.
“For me these sounds are treasures,” Buxton tells Smithsonian. “They’re amazing natural resources, and how remarkable that they are also really good for our health and our well-being.”
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Quote of the Day: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” – John Milton, Paradise Lost
Photo: by Noah Buscher
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?
A generous couple has been secretly stuffing money into diaper boxes and under formula canister lids at local Targets in order to help out struggling families.
Krystal Duhaney is a registered nurse and the founder of Milky Mama. A soon-to-be mother of three, when she and her husband Patrick had their first child they realized just how expensive raising a family can be.
Now they’re in a better place financially, they can afford to give back to others—so they’ve stuffed about $1,000 in cash into various baby supplies around Los Angeles Target stores, and they’re not stopping any time soon.
“We recalled how hard it was for us as new parents to afford some of the basics and we could imagine how difficult it must be during this pandemic,” Krystal explained to TODAY.
“We hope that the parents that purchase these items have a brighter day when they find our gifts,” she wrote alongside an Instagram video showing just what the kind pair has been up to—check it out by pressing play below.
A new study has established that Intermittent Fasting is an effective means of improving long-term memory retention in mice, in what the researchers hope has the potential to slow the advance of cognitive decline in older people.
The study, from King’s College London, found that a calorie-restricted diet via every other day fasting was an effective means of promoting Klotho gene expression in mice. Klotho, which is often referred to as the “longevity gene” has now been shown in this study to play a central role in the production of hippocampal adult-born new neurons or neurogenesis.
Adult-born hippocampal neurons are important for memory formation and their production declines with age, explaining in part cognitive decline in older people.
The researchers split female mice into three groups; a control group that received a standard diet of daily feeding, a daily Calorie Restricted (CR) diet, and Intermittent Fasting (IF) in which the mice were fed every other day. The latter two groups were fed 10% less calories than the control.
Over the course of three months, the mice in the IF group demonstrated improved long-term memory retention compared to the other groups. When the brains of these mice were studied, it was apparent that the Klotho gene was upregulated, and neurogenesis increased compared to those that were on the CR diet.
Dr Sandrine Thuret from King’s said: “We now have a significantly greater understanding as to the reasons why intermittent fasting is an effective means of increasing adult neurogenesis. Our results demonstrate that Klotho is not only required, but plays a central role in adult neurogenesis, and suggests that IF is an effective means of improving long-term memory retention in humans.”
Dr Thuret’s previous work has demonstrated that calorie restricted diets in humans can improve memory function. That research showed that IF can enhance learning processes and could affect age associated cognitive impairment.
Dr Gisele Pereira Dias from King’s explained: “In demonstrating that IF is a more effective means of improving long term memory than other calorie-controlled diets, we’ve given ourselves an excellent means of going forwards. To see such significant improvements by lowering the total calorie intake by only 10% shows that there is a lot of promise.”
The researchers now hope to recreate this study, published in Molecular Biologyjournal, with human participants in order to further explore the effects of intermittent fasting—we’ll be sure to share their results as they come in.
A son has described how his mom’s Alzheimer’s disease improved as he took her traveling across the world in her final years.
44-year-old Sean O’Sallaigh initially just decided to take his mom Mary to Nepal to escape the harsh Irish winter. He was amazed when she started walking and talking again during their trip—even learning new words. So he decided to keep traveling with her for the next 18 months.
Mary got to enjoy a festival of color in the Himalayas, roam across mountains in Italy, and feel the sand beneath her feet at the tip of South Africa in her final years.
For Sean, it was the least he could do for the mother he loved so much—who had always given to others throughout her life.
He said: “She was the best thing in my life. Unconditional love is a thing you don’t get often, and she always gave it, even though she had a tough life.
“I thought Alzheimer’s was just a decline, but when we got to Nepal she started to regain capabilities. I couldn’t understand it and the doctor there told me it was all the new stimulation. Everyone wanted to talk to her and she loved it.”
Before their big adventure, Sean was living mostly in his apartment in Rome and traveling for work while Mary stayed back in Dublin where Sean had grown up.
He started to make more frequent visits back to Ireland to care for Mary following her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s back in 2013, when she was 77 years old.
With Mary’s condition slowly worsening over the years, her neurologist told the shocked and heartbroken family not to fear, telling Sean that “positive and happy people become more so as Alzheimer’s progresses.” In Mary’s case, he was right.
When the family began to discuss moving Mary into a care home by 2018, though, Sean felt very strongly it was not right for her. And that’s how the mother and son duo ended up in Nepal in February.
“It was warm and she was able to go out so much,” said Sean. “We would walk by this lake and watch the children playing. They would come and sit with us at cafes and talk to her all the time and she to them.
“I would take her hair brush out with us and the children would brush her hair. They called her Grandma, and she would say ‘namaste’ to everyone. We were there during a festival called ‘Happy Holi’, where they throw colored powder up in the air. They asked me if they could throw some over her and she loved it.”
SWNS
Then the pair went off to his apartment in Rome. There were favourite restaurants to visit and little churches she loved. And once the Italian capital got too hot? They moved to a pal’s house in the mountains of Umbria—where Mary found the cows and goats with bells around their necks “hilarious.”
“Everyone she met in Italy talked to her and wanted to give her a kiss,” says Sean, “she loved it.”
SWNS
Then, when they moved to South Africa, Sean had a carer named Gloria help out. “She used to put Mom’s hair in lovely little plaits which she loved,” he says. Mary passed away there of a chest infection, at the age of 83, in May 2019.
“I had to put my life on hold to look after her like that, but it gave me so much too,” Sean says. “People thought she would be a burden but she just never was. We had a really difficult time when I was young, and we only got through it because we had such an amazing mother.”
SWNS
“When I would put her into bed at night sometimes she would say, ‘you are good’ or ‘I love you’, and that was enough for me.”
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New research suggests that among bonobos, giving is seen as good—and they may just have given the trait of generosity to us.
Nautical Voyager
While chimps are hostile and competitive, bonobos, their lesser-studied ape relatives, share about the same amount of DNA as us—and live in the polar opposite society of the blood-and-guts chimp dominance hierarchy.
A recent paper—based on research conducted by Duke University researchers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—found that given a plate of prized fruit and the decision to eat it all on their own, bonobos preferred to unlock an unrelated bonobo from a room with a locked door in order to share the food.
While humans can be more like chimps this regard, sometimes perceiving strangers as not even of the same species depending on just how far outside their group the stranger is, this bonobo beneficence of treating strangers before in-group members can be found in certain Asian customs, or in the Roman writings on Germanic Tribes of Northern Europe like the Suebi, of whom, the historian Tacitus wrote:
“The host welcomes his guest with the best meal that his means allow… No distinction is ever made between acquaintance and stranger as far as the right to hospitality is concerned.”
NPR details that the bonobo sanctuary in DRC has produced 75 published studies, as the country is the only place on Earth where bonobos can be found in the wild. Here, just as in the wild, the leader of any social circle is the female. Females keep it that way by banding together to banish aggressive males.
When all is quiet, such as when it’s time to chow down, the hierarchy is enforced through sharing, cooperation, tolerance, and lots and lots of sex, in every capacity imaginable, though usually only for about 13 seconds.
Other similarities include the simple tendency observed in both bonobos and humans to yawn following the observation of another social group member yawning, which was suggested as being derived from empathy.
It’s likely humans’ early ancestors acquired many similar strategies, as we now share and cooperate on a massive scale to accomplish things no other species has been able to do— despite the fact that we left behind many of our chimp tendencies.
There are special caregivers in society who feel their place in the world is at the side of the bed of a dying person, helping to comfort and calm them and their family during a difficult time.
Alongside the rise in green funerals, these ‘death doulas’ are there to help in challenging, end-of-life moments—because making plans and doing research is often the last thing people can think to do at such a moment, and having someone to simply be present with a calming perspective, or to offer insight and information, can be a big relief.
“Being a doula and a giver, is reflective of what we do,” explains Suzanne O’Brien, founder of the International Doulagivers Institute. “We are non-medical holistic practitioners.”
Having trained over 100,000 people as doulagivers, she explains how the work “calls people forward.”
“They [doulagivers] have a comfort level with those at the end of life,” says O’Brien. “It’s a relatively new movement, but it’s really picked up steam in the last few years.”
Suzanne O’Brien; Instagram/@suzanneobrien
From ‘dead’ restaurant… to death doula
Newly qualified death doula Lindsay Laubenstein was working as a manager in a not-for-profit restaurant in Cincinnati, training people with traditionally high barriers to employment to get jobs in the hospitality industry.
“The restaurant industry is basically everything-proof, or at least we thought it was,” Laubenstein told me, but her place of work was ultimately impacted by the pandemic.
“One morning after all the shutdowns I said: ‘I’m going to look [death doula work] up, I’m going to see what’s going on,'” she said.
Laubenstein, who also described it as a “calling,” recently finished her level 1 training.
“I said, ‘This is it, this is what I need to be doing,'” She told me. “I’ve always felt called to death work, I’ve always felt called to the transitions in life.”
Tools of the trade
How does a doulagiver go about their work? It depends on the individual doula and the client before that relationship begins, says Laubenstein. O’Brien concludes that the most important aspect is being present, adding that while modern life tends to have us living in the past and the future, on our phones, and in the digital space generally, there’s nothing more present than watching someone fade away over the space of several hours.
“There are groups [like] the Threshold Choir where people go in and sing bedside to dying people,” says Laubenstein. “I could technically bring that in if someone wants me to sing to them, that’s something I could do.”
It’s a special kind of person that is comfortable voluntarily spending hours with a person in their last few moments of life, and then singing to them.
“Is dying a medical experience? It’s not: it’s a human one, and it’s only in the last 100 years that we’ve become so far removed from having death being a natural part of the lifecycle,” O’Brien chimes in to remind me.
“It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, and the most rewarding work I’ve ever done,” she told me.
O’Brien would go on to explain that she and her institution, and the practice of death doulas as a rule of thumb, tries to avoid hospital administration or the American health insurance marketplace altogether.
They prefer instead to build and resource doula programs at the community level, and harness individual doulas’ skills as private contractors, rather than lease their services to be included in a health insurance policy—as it would generally exclude lower-income families, who O’Brien feels are just as deserving of a pleasant end-of-life experience.
“We’ve trained in Thailand, Zimbabwe… We had people on from Japan, Singapore, and Australia. People stay up until the middle of the night to have this webinar,” she says, referring to her online training programs.
O’Brien sees this as a paradigm shift.
“Dying is so expensive, but we’ve literally removed what is most effective [from end-of-life care]. Your body knows what to do… and we forget that the end of life does not have to be an embalming, a $20,000 ring-a-ma-rang.”
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Childhood sweethearts have married in a real-life version of The Notebook after 22 years apart—he even proposed with the engagement ring he gave her when they were 15.
Helen Marshall and Graeme Richardson are both in their early forties. They met in school and admired each other from across the hallways before they fell head over heels in young love as teens.
Helen as a teen; SWNS
After nine months of romantic walks, school discos, and sneaking off for a wee kiss round the back of the bike sheds, young Graeme got down on one knee and proposed.
But their parents worried they were too young and the engagement never happened. Graham went off to college in 1994, and the pair drifted apart.
Just like the movie with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, their letters proclaiming their lost love never reached each other, and they got on with their lives separately.
Graeme as a teen; SWNS
Both went on to have long-term relationships and kids, and were even reunited from afar— catching glimpses of each other—when their children attended the same school.
When both split up with their respective partners, Helen reached out to her first boyfriend via Facebook, and they fell in love all over again 20 years later.
She discovered he had pined for her for years after their forced split, and got down on one knee again—proposing with the same ring he used more than two decades earlier, only this time they were vacationing together in Croatia.
SWNS
The smitten pair eloped and tied the knot last month. “We just feel so content now,” Helen said from the farm they’re now living on together. “We’re the other half of each other. I just feel like I’m home. Like I’m whole. He’s my soul mate, and I’m his.”
Graeme said, “Helen’s the other half of me. She’s the opposite to me; the extravert to my introvert. It just feels like the right ending. My friends have never known me as the happy and content man I am now.”
Clare Gelderd Photography via SWNS
A love story that was simply meant to be
In high school Graeme was popular with the girls, and the boys all liked Helen, but neither plucked up the courage to ask each other for a date.
One lucky day, a friend of Helen’s promised her a chocolate bar if she dared to ask Graeme out.
Romance blossomed from day one, and grew into true love as they walked in the Lake District and sat by picturesque waters.
They knew they wanted to be married, and Graeme worked hard at weekends for £3 an hour to buy her a diamond engagement ring.
