A big-hearted woman has helped three nonagenarian veteran pilot chums go on their dream “last hurrah” boys’ trip—without costing them a dime.
Julie Pflaumer got a call from veteran and former pilot Jack Henderson to help him and two friends—also veterans and pilots—go to the Reno Air Races in Nevada.
90-year-old Jack was calling from an Oregon assisted living facility, where he’s become best buddies with David Crawford and Dick Snider.
“They happened to be former pilots too, so we got together rather quickly,” said Jack, who served in the Navy as a Petty officer first class (PO1) and later became a civilian pilot.
93-year-old David—a radio operator in the Navy before becoming a civilian—and 90-year-old Dick, who served in the US Army before getting his wings, do everything together.
But when travel agent Julie did some research on tickets, she found they wouldn’t be available until later in the year, which instantly saddened Jack, who thought, “Well, I might not even be around by the time they’re available.”
Julie decided that she had to find another option for the buddies. Then she hit on something: AeroLegengs Biplane Rides offers bi-plane experiences in the town where the three pals live. She could give them a day up in the skies, for free of course.
Julie posted her idea in a travel agents group on Facebook. Donations soon began pouring in, raising over $1,100—well over the $600 needed to fly all three men up.
“I don’t deserve all the credit here, this was merely an idea on my part and the only reason it turned into what it was was because everybody chipped in,” Julie said.
Whe the former pilots were given their gift certificates for the bi-plane excursion this March, “Most of us had to go change our britches,” Jack joked. “It was such an unexpected, pleasant surprise.”
Julie learned that Dick had actually planned on flying with the company before—to spread his late wife’s ashes—but hadn’t got around to it yet. Now he had the chance.
“The biggest thing for me is being able to bring that happiness to people of being able to do something they didn’t think they could,” she said. That’s a beautiful sentiment indeed.
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As daffodils and cherry blossom mark the onset of spring across London lawns, one famous residence in the English capital is readying itself to welcome picnickers for the first time—with the Buckingham Palace gardens opening to the paying public.
The Royal Collection Trust has announced that a self-guided route through the gardens, and around its grand 3.5-acre lake, will this summer be open to those who’d like to explore.
The trust states: “You will be free to wander around the garden’s winding paths at your own pace and experience the beauty and calm of this walled oasis in central London. Among the many features to discover are the 156-metre Herbaceous Border, the Horse Chestnut Avenue, the Plane trees planted by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the famous lake with its island that is home to the Buckingham Palace bees.”
Royal Collection Trust/John Campbell
Perhaps more importantly? Picnics in the grass can be experienced as part of the visit.
Of course, enjoying scones and clotted cream on a sweeping royal lawn might be a difficult ask when there’s so much else to see and explore.
According to the Royal Collection Trust, the garden is a rich biodiverse habitat, with more than a thousand trees, the National Collection of Mulberry Trees, and 320 kinds of wildflower and grass.
Among its 29 acres, there’s also a Rose Garden, a summer house, a wildflower meadow—all of which can be visited on daily guided tours through the summer from July 9-September 18.
Royal Collection Trust/John Campbell
If you’d like to sign up for a royal visit? Just head here.
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This mind-bending picture of the Moon with inverted colours shows where it once flowed with magma.
California-based astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy—aka Instagram’s @cosmic_background—has altered the image of the lunar surface to highlight the things the human eye cannot see.
His reason for doing so? “Our eyes are quite incredible, but sometimes it’s cool seeing what things could look like with superhuman vision.
This picture was created by processing the image with an inverted luminance layer to enhance the lunar texture.
SWNS
Andrew explains that the brighter regions show where the moon once flowed with molten rock, saying: “In this version the colors show how the composition changes where the magma once flowed, as well as how impacts striking the surface add an additional splash of color.
“The colors are real, and represent the hidden geological history of the Moon.”
Check out some of Andrew’s other work in the images below.
For centuries, people in Baltic nations have used ancient amber for medicinal purposes. Even today, infants are given amber necklaces that they chew to relieve teething pain, and people put pulverized amber in elixirs and ointments for its purported anti-inflammatory and anti-infective properties.
Now, scientists have pinpointed compounds that help explain Baltic amber’s therapeutic effects and that could lead to new medicines to combat antibiotic-resistant infections.
Each year in the U.S., at least 2.8 million people get antibiotic-resistant infections, leading to 35,000 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We knew from previous research that there were substances in Baltic amber that might lead to new antibiotics, but they had not been systematically explored,” says Elizabeth Ambrose, Ph.D., who is the principal investigator of the project. “We have now extracted and identified several compounds in Baltic amber that show activity against gram-positive, antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
Ambrose’s interest originally stemmed from her Baltic heritage. While visiting family in Lithuania, she collected amber samples and heard stories about their medicinal uses.
The Baltic Sea region contains the world’s largest deposit of the material, which is fossilized resin formed about 44 million years ago.
The resin oozed from now-extinct pines in the Sciadopityaceae family and acted as a defense against microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi, as well as herbivorous insects that would become trapped in the resin.
Ambrose and graduate student Connor McDermott, who are at the University of Minnesota, analyzed commercially available Baltic amber samples, in addition to some that Ambrose had collected.
“One major challenge was preparing a homogeneous fine powder from the amber pebbles that could be extracted with solvents,” McDermott explains. He used a tabletop jar rolling mill, in which the jar is filled with ceramic beads and amber pebbles and rotated on its side. Through trial and error, he determined the correct ratio of beads to pebbles to yield a semi-fine powder. Then, using various combinations of solvents and techniques, he filtered, concentrated, and analyzed the amber powder extracts by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS).
Dozens of compounds were identified from the GC-MS spectra. The most interesting were abietic acid, dehydroabietic acid, and palustric acid—20-carbon, three-ringed organic compounds with known biological activity.
Because these compounds are difficult to purify, the researchers bought pure samples and sent them to a company that tested their activity against nine bacterial species, some of which are known to be antibiotic resistant.
“The most important finding is that these compounds are active against gram-positive bacteria, such as certain Staphylococcus aureus strains, but not gram-negative bacteria,” McDermott says. Gram-positive bacteria have a less complex cell wall than gram-negative bacteria. “This implies that the composition of the bacterial membrane is important for the activity of the compounds,” he says.
McDermott also obtained a Japanese umbrella pine, the closest living species to the trees that produced the resin that became Baltic amber. He extracted resin from the needles and stem and identified sclarene, a molecule present in the extracts that could theoretically undergo chemical transformations to produce the bioactive compounds the researchers found in Baltic amber samples.
“We are excited to move forward with these results,” Ambrose says. “Abietic acids and their derivatives are potentially an untapped source of new medicines, especially for treating infections caused by gram-positive bacteria, which are increasingly becoming resistant to known antibiotics.”
The researchers presented their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society, which is being held through April. As scientists study the active properties in other traditional medicines from around the world, it’ll be exciting to see what other findings come up.
Like the four cardinal elements of yore, or the four cardinal directions, there are also four forces of nature—the ones which cause particles to move in different ways, like gravity and electromagnetism.
Through discoveries made while working with a fundamental particle called the muon, physicists working in Chicago have recently made the case for a fifth force of nature, something that would turn physics on its head.
Called the Muon g-2 experiment, conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi Laboratory, the results could either point to an undiscovered particle, or a completely new force acting in the universe—which would be far more exciting.
While smashing atoms together in a particle accelerator, an international team of researchers found that some particles were “wobbling” in ways that couldn’t be explained by the current theory of four forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear forces: the strong force and the weak force.
A muon is about 200 times as massive as its cousin, the electron. Muons occur naturally when cosmic rays strike Earth’s atmosphere.
“This quantity we measure reflects the interactions of the muon with everything else in the universe. But when the theorists calculate the same quantity, using all of the known forces and particles in the Standard Model, we don’t get the same answer,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager in an official press release.
Several mysteries pervade astrophysics that could be attributable to a force of nature as yet undetected, such as why galaxies spin faster than mathematical calculations suggest they should.
Professor Mark Lancaster at the University of Manchester told BBC News: “Clearly, this is very exciting because it potentially points to a future with new laws of physics, new particles and a new force which we have not seen to date.”
Nevertheless, for now the experiment currently carries a “1” instead of a “0” in the column labeled “chance this may have been nothing but a fluke.”
The BBC reports that other experiments in Japan, the U.S., and at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe have all produced experiments of a similar nature, though, and GNN can only imagine that physicists everywhere will be revving up their particle accelerators again to find out more about this 5th force mystery—and potentially bring the discipline into a new epoch.
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Quote of the Day: “Knowing Is Not Enough; We Must Apply. Wishing Is Not Enough; We Must Do.” – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Photo by: Cameron Venti
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The new image of the region around the supermassive black hole at the core of the galaxy M87, from the Event Horizon Telescope. Lines show polarization of the radio emission from the area closest to the black hole/EHT Collaboration
The new image of the region around the supermassive black hole at the core of the galaxy M87/EHT Collaboration
A new view of the region closest to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy has shown important details of the magnetic fields close to it—and hints about how powerful jets of material can originate in that region.
A worldwide team of astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) measured a signature of magnetic fields—called polarization—around the black hole. Polarization is the orientation of the electric fields in light and radio waves, and it can indicate the presence and alignment of magnetic fields.
The new images allowed scientists to map magnetic field lines near the edge of Messier 87’s (M87’s) black hole, and are a key to explaining how the black hole, 50 million light-years from Earth, can launch energetic jets from its core.
The black hole at M87’s center is more than 6 billion times more massive than the Sun. Material drawn inward forms a rotating disk—called an accretion disk—closely orbiting the black hole.
Most of the material in the disk falls into the black hole, but some surrounding particles escape and are ejected far out into space in jets moving at nearly the speed of light.
“The newly published polarized images are key to understanding how the magnetic field allows the black hole to ‘eat’ matter and launch powerful jets,” said Andrew Chael, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science and the Princeton Gravity Initiative in the U.S.
The scientists compared the new images that showed the magnetic field structure just outside the black hole with computer simulations based on different theoretical models. They found that only models featuring strongly magnetized gas can explain what they are seeing at the event horizon.
“The observations suggest that the magnetic fields at the black hole’s edge are strong enough to push back on the hot gas and help it resist gravity’s pull. Only the gas that slips through the field can spiral inwards to the event horizon,” explained Jason Dexter, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and Coordinator of the EHT Theory Working Group.
View of the M87 supermassive black hole and jet/EHT Collaboration, ALMA
To make the new observations, the scientists linked eight telescopes around the world to create a virtual Earth-sized telescope, the EHT. The impressive resolution obtained with the EHT is equivalent to that needed to measure the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon.
This resolution allowed the team to directly observe the black hole shadow and the ring of light around it, with the new image clearly showing that the ring is magnetized. The results are published in two papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
As the EHT collaboration continues to do more work on what’s just happening around us in space, we’ll be sure to let you know their latest findings.
He may be best known for his delightful rooftop dance moves while playing a chimney sweep in Mary Poppins, but Dick Van Dyke hasn’t quietly slipped into retirement since his breakthrough 1964 role.
In fact, the 95-year-old has been caught doing all sorts of good deeds over the years.
His latest kindness? Last week, the actor showed up at Los Angeles’ Malibu Community Labor Exchange—and began handing out cash to job seekers waiting in line outside the non-profit.
Tip your hat to one of the good guys: Dick Van Dyke, 95, hands out wads of cash to people in need in Malibu https://t.co/ObsWGnXwQq via @MailOnline
Helping others has been an important part of Van Dyke’s life for decades. He’s known for spending over 20 years volunteering at LA shelter The Midnight Mission. He’s also served as a spokesperson for the Cell Therapy Foundation and the National Reye’s Syndrome Foundation.
The last time we shared the good news relating to this Hollywood legend? It was to report on Van Dyke dancing with his real-life wife, Arlene Silver, in the most joyful music video ever for bluegrass group Dustbowl Revival.
Oh, and then there was the time he treated diners at a Santa Monica Denny’s to a spontaneous performance of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with his a cappella group Vantastix.
The secret to ageing gracefully? It seems it may just be taking a step out of Van Dyke’s shoes, by giving to others, and dancing and singing whenever we can.
For proof, just watch this video of Van Dyke dancing in a department store.
Few things are better thn 93 year old Dick Van Dyke dancing at a dept store............ pic.twitter.com/Pk5NwBebc3
For four days and three nights this past February, a dog stranded on an ice floe in the frigid waters of the Detroit River between the U.S. and Canada struggled to stay alive. Even though the situation was desperate, the dog held out for a miracle—and finally got one.
First spotted by a wildlife photographer shooting images on the Michigan bank of the river, soon enough, concerned parties on both sides of the border were struggling to find a way to save the imperiled pup, but the extreme elements were against them.
After tapping numerous resources, it seemed no one could help, but determined rescuers refused to give up. “We had to fight for him,” Patricia Trevino of the River Rouge Animal Shelter (RRAS) told WXYZ-Detroit. “It was a level of frustration I’d never felt because this was a life; it was out there in front of us. We could all see it.”
That’s when Jude Mead and his son, who own a marine construction company in Windsor, Ontario, took the helm of the lifesaving operation—literally.
Setting off in an airboat loaned to them by the BASF Corporation, the pair were able to pilot their way across the ice, finding and securing the dog with relative ease.
After having spent such a prolonged period in sub-zero temperatures—much of the time under the stressful threat of prowling coyotes—the poor pooch was in pretty rough shape.
Once ashore, he was immediately taken to Woodhaven Animal Hospital for evaluation. The diagnosis confirmed the young dog suffered frostbite, dehydration, and pancreatitis as a result of his ordeal, however, the veterinarians speculated that the dog’s badly matted fur was likely a blessing in disguise, keeping him from further harm.
“I feel like what saved him out there is the fact that he wasn’t groomed and his coat was pelted,” Woodhaven vet Dr. Lucretia Greear told The Detroit Free Press. “He had literally like a layer of insulation that protected him from the water and the ice and it protected him from freezing to death—but he’s a miracle.”
After successful treatment and recovery, the lucky pup, who’d been going by the name Alonso, was aptly renamed ‘Miracle’ and put up for adoption.
While there were many contenders for the role of new pet parent, when the man who’d plucked him from the ice stepped forward to lay his claim, the shelter staff agreed that nothing could feel more right than reuniting them.
“Today the story came full circle. Today the little Miracle dog was placed into the hands of the hero who saved his life. That’s right—this dog who defied ALL THE ODDS will now live happily ever after with the man who saved his life,” Friends of the RRAS announced.
“Miracle could not ASK for a better or more ideal family to love him! We are all so grateful for this happily ever after ending to this AMAZING story… Congrats Jude and family on the addition to your family! Happy life, Miracle!”
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North Carolina-based writer Judy Cole has a new rom-com murder mystery debuting at Amazon: And Jilly Came Tumbling After (from Red Sky Presents).
Across America, small parcels of forested land are being bought from private owners by a conservation group called Better Place Forests.
With the intention of providing the roots, trunk, and branches of a tree as the site of a loved one’s final resting place, the group is also ensuring that by law the forest will remain preserved forever.
They own and maintain “memorial forest preserves” in Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, Arizona, Minnesota, and soon Illinois. These preserves feature heritage sugar maple stands, California redwoods, quaking aspen colonies, views out across the Pacific or the Twin Lakes, and every tree is up for grabs for just a few thousand dollars.
“There’s this moment when you choose your tree, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever expected,” says Sandy Gibson, the CEO of Better Place Forests. “It’s this moment as you choose it, and you’re looking around and you realize this is what forever looks like.”
“This is where you’re going to be, and it’s a beautiful image: you’re in a beautiful place, you can hear the wind blowing through the trees, and it’s something we’ve heard from all of our customers after they choose their tree is that this feeling of peace, of knowing what the end of the journey looks like,” he adds.
Every year the funeral industry consumes 20 million feet of hardwood, 64,500 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and 5 million gallons of embalming chemicals.
“One of the most popular reasons to choose cremation is the idea that [people] want to take up less space, also to reduce the burden on the Earth,” says Gibson. “The environmental aspect of what we do is incredibly important to our customers.”
A healthy alternative
Fletcher Studio/Better Place Forests
As the cost of traditional casket-service-cemetery funerals continues to rise ever higher in the U.S., it’s estimated that 80% of the Baby Boomer generation will chose cremation.
“If you wanted a 10 to 20 person family plot anywhere near a major city, I’d be incredibly surprised if you could find that for less than $200,000,” says Sandy, adding that despite the shift towards cremation, Americans haven’t lost the desire for place or ritual with their families.
“Our customers are drawn to Better Place Forests because they love the idea of being in nature, and leaving a legacy of nature. For those who are very religious, for them nature is the place they felt closest to God.”
The choice of cremation and the subsequent scattering-of-ashes ceremony releases the bereaved from the constraints of the traditional funerary service which is typical planned without much time and under duress of grief.
But in a funny way, that freedom creates a significant complication for some, in that what is perceived as a very important detail in one’s life story—their funeral, has to be imagined from within a far greater realm of possibilities. This, Sandy said, can create a sort of funerary writer’s block, which Better Place Forests helps people overcome, especially those who are environmentally minded.
“Part of it is this legacy of conservation; knowing that you contributed to the protection of a beautiful forest and then it’s protected for future generations because of something you did. When you walk on these forests that’s when it makes sense; we choose properties that are incredibly beautiful, trying to find properties that are iconic to each region.”
Very North American
Fletcher Studio/Better Place Forests
“Our costs are derived from buying forests and protecting them forever,” says Sandy in response to how he manages to undercut the cost of a traditional funeral.
While legal fees soak up the majority of the cost, part of the expense also includes customizable services either indoors or in the forest. Each tree can host several ash scattering ceremonies, and the cremation techniques employed ensure the ashes are optimally and rapidly turned into nutrients, merging spirit and soil for eternity.
One might say that Americans are uniquely suited to this sort of internment, as our connection with nature, particularly with our forests, changed the world. In 1872, we became the first ever nation to create a national park, and by 1906, we had created five others.
In the 19th century, Canada and the United States attracted all manner of Europeans to join in the timber industry, and immense forests containing magnificent trees quickly became iconic images of the New World.
Fletcher Studio/Better Place Forests
There was the era of the Mountain Man, the Gold Rush, the conservation movement sparked by Field and Stream Magazine, the Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club—all cultural epochs centered around extraordinary American landscapes, while throughout the 20th century our commitment to the protection of forests may have surpassed those of any other nation.
“One of the beauties of this job is we get to go around the entire United States and see what the different forests and landscapes look like everywhere, and they are very unique, and you see why people are connected to their woods,” says Sandy.
“What’s amazing is every region has their iconic tree. In Arizona people love aspens. It’s something magical; the idea that that aspen grove could be alive 8,000 years and keep sprouting new trees over time, it’s kind of an amazing thing to think about. On the east coast it’s chestnuts.”
“There’s a new forest we’ll be announcing soon where we’ll be able to plant some giant sequoias,” he adds excitedly. “How cool is that, to get to be a part of a reforesting of regional sequoias?”
Environmentalists of all stripes, from climate warrior activists to permaculture farmers, often talk about having a better relationship with nature. Our physical relationship with nature is very one-sided, but maybe changing our attitudes towards it could start with our eternal placement, namely one borne from a desire to give back, and not to be lodged stubbornly in a concrete burial vault within a chemically treated coffin.
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A jolt of coffee in the morning sets the world’s workers right, but a new study shows that for trees, a bit of caffeine is just as good.
Tropical forests can regrow much faster when running on the caffeine from coffee pulp, a waste product from coffee production.
This was found in a direct case-control study of degraded tropical land in Costa Rica, where scientists from the University of Hawai’i and ETH-Zurich spread 30 dump truck loads of coffee pulp over a 35 x 40 meter plot of land.
Pulp being applied to the Costa Rica forest/Dr. Rebecca Cole
They designated an equal size plot of the same land just next to it as a control plot.
People who drink coffee that also start composting in their homes often find that coffee grounds make up the majority of their weekly biomass. But coffee grounds are naturally acidic, with a pH of less than 5, and therefore aren’t always nutritious for some houseplants or decorative flowers.
Tropical soil on the other hand, traditionally containing very poor nutrient profiles, can tolerate the coffee’s acidity, it being acidic itself, and contains a variety of plants and microorganisms that thrive in low pH environments.
“Our results show that soil carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous were substantially elevated in the coffee pulp compared to control treatment after 2 years,” write the authors in their study led by Dr. Rebecca Cole. “Coffee pulp addition significantly altered the ground cover characteristics, eliminating pasture grasses, facilitating establishment of herbaceous plants, and increasing the percent area covered by leaf litter.”
Indeed, a report from the British Ecological Society claimed the area treated with pulp became a small forest, with 60% greater canopy coverage reaching 4 times as high than the non-treated area, which mostly remained filled with invasive grasses and weeds.
3 years after coffee pulp was applied to a forest area in Costa Rica/Dr. Rebecca Cole
It’s a significant finding, since coffee is grown mostly in tropical climates, tropical soil tolerates coffee’s acidity, tropical forests are cut down at rates faster than any others, and tropical forests sequester more carbon and contain greater biodiversity than arboreal ones.
Normally heaped into storage lots and left to decompose, coffee pulp—which consists of the husk, skin, and pulpy interior—is rich in nutrients and also represents more than half of the weight of the coffee harvest. The authors cite one study that figured there are 218,000 tones of pulp that must be managed for every one million bags of coffee sent to market.
It’s a brilliant solution—to enrich tropical lands as countries produce a cash crop. It’s cheap, it’s local, the nutrients match, it gives animals more habitat and pulls more carbon from the atmosphere, and best of all, we can keep drinking that lovely cup o’ joe.
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Quote of the Day: “Don’t Let Yesterday Take Up Too Much Of Today.” – Will Rogers
Photo by: Luke Stackpoole
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Jaxson Dempsey and his sister, PA News-YouTube/John Cena, CC license
Jaxson Dempsey and his sister, PA News-YouTube/John Cena, Gage Skidmore, CC license
In moments of peril, superheroes don’t hesitate, they leap into action. And so, it seems, do little boys if their baby sister’s life depends on it.
When 8-year-old Jaxson Dempsey realized his 20-month-old sister Lelia was choking on a chicken nugget, he didn’t panic. Instead, he calmly directed his dad to pull over the car they were driving in and proceeded to dislodge the obstruction from Lelia’s airway.
Jaxson said he’d learned the lifesaving technique from watching WWE superstar John Cena perform the maneuver on an episode of the Nickelodeon show The Substitutes.
Jaxson’s father Matt has nothing but gratitude for his son, whose quick thinking staved off a potential tragedy.
“I couldn’t hear her because she was choking. She wasn’t coughing; she wasn’t panicking. She just had no air going through; she wasn’t breathing,” Dempsey told WNEP-News. “Thank God Jaxson was there because, without him, I don’t know if Lelia would be here.”
While kudos were the last thing on Jaxon’s mind for doing what came naturally when his sister needed him, they’ve been rolling in nonetheless ever since.
The first big “Well done!” came from none other than John Cena himself, who sent a personal message via video after learning of the boy’s heroics.
“I heard a story about you, and it really touched my heart,” Cena said. “A story that in a time of crisis, you were brave enough to take action… Usually, when bad things happen, one of the toughest things for all of us to do is to take action. You jumped right in, helped out the best you could. [By] doing so, you saved your sister’s life. I really want to say thank you for being you, Jaxson. Thank you for being an inspiration; thank you from all of us.”
Cena’s tribute was high praise indeed, but the accolades didn’t stop there. On March 31, Jaxson’s hometown of Hazleton, Pennsylvania fêted him with his very own parade featuring more than a dozen fire trucks, sirens blaring and lights blazing, all in honor of a pint-sized hero who turned out to be the best big brother a little sister could have.
(WATCH the PA video and meet Jaxson below.)
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North Carolina-based writer Judy Cole has a new rom-com murder mystery debuting at Amazon: And Jilly Came Tumbling After (from Red Sky Presents).
Sand martins, copyright David Tipling for Surrey Wildlife Trust
Conservationists realized they needed more than a bucket and shovel to build a 400-ton sand castle large enough to be an attractive home for sand martins to roost in England.
Sand martins, copyright David Tipling for Surrey Wildlife Trust
To help the tiny birds they needed big machines—and building a sandbank large enough for them to build their nests in required the help of a sand-sculpting firm.
The sand martin The smallest English members of both the martin and the swallow family—the birds were finding fewer and fewer places perfect for boring their nests, as so much development had replaced their previous nesting habitats with infrastructure.
The martins return annually from wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa. Burrowing into the side of high riverbanks means that sand martins are choosy homemakers—but the Surrey Wildlife Trust, acting as real estate developer, is building an enormous artificial sandbank for them in the Spynes Mere Nature Reserve.
Enlisting the help of a specialist construction and landscaping firm named ‘Sand in Your Eye’, it took weeks of filling in a mold, getting the water content right, and packing down the sand before they were able to remove the wooden supports.
Copyright Surrey Wildlife Trust
James Herd, project manager at Surrey Wildlife Trust, said in a video about the project: “Sand martin numbers have plummeted twice in the last 50 years as a result of droughts in their wintering grounds in Africa. In the bank here we’re giving them a long-term sustainable home to nest in for the future.”
“The design is similar to building a sandcastle on the beach, but rather than buckets and spades we were using nine-ton excavators and dumper trucks,” he added.
The petite passerines, which arrive in England around mid-March and depart in September, use their claws to dig nesting holes up to a meter deep into the bank. At the end of the tunnel a small chamber is created where between four and eight eggs get laid in a nest of feathers and vegetation.
Over time, layers of sand on the face of the bank will be scraped away by the Trust to remove nest parasites.
Spynes Mere Nature Reserve, copyright Surrey Wildlife Trust
The returning martins will dig new nests—and every six years or so the bank will be restored to its original size, ensuring their home remains intact for years to come.
(WATCH the Surrey Wildlife Trust video about this initiative below.)
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Ashis Dhakal, Facebook/Mark Cuba, Gage Skidmore CC license
Ashis Dhakal, Facebook/Mark Cuban, Gage Skidmore CC license
Anyone who’s experienced poverty knows firsthand how hard finding a pathway out can be. For some lucky enough to have made the transition, the desire to lift up those who are still struggling can become a huge part of their lives.
When 18-year-old Ashis Dhakal arrived in Utah from a refugee camp in Nepal, he knew he’d been given a tremendous opportunity. Though he was bullied at his Salt Lake City school, the tenets of service and giving that are integral to his Hindu faith became the cornerstone of a long-term goal to pay his good fortune forward.
A few years ago, while he was bussing tables for his job at KFC, Dhakal met a homeless man for whom he felt a great deal of empathy. Understanding only too well the difference in life between “the haves” and “the have nots,” once he’d learned the man’s history, he was inspired to help.
One of the most obvious needs Dhakal observed while talking with the man was for clean, serviceable clothing. With that in mind, he launched his first clothing drive Ashis Collects Clothes, in 2019.
Dhakal’s good works won him the attention of The TODAY Show’s Hoda Kolb, who took the teen on as a mentee.
“My biggest ‘why’ in my life is that as a young child, going through poverty, I was in the same shoes as they were in right now,” he said, explaining his drive to Kolb in a recent interview. “I have a house. I have a computer now. I have a phone. But think about it: Those kids are still suffering. What I can do is better others so that, you know, they can give back to their community.”
Recognizing Dhakal’s keen entrepreneurial spirit, it seemed natural for Kolb to hook her protégé up with one of his all-time heroes, Shark Tank’s billionaire philanthropist Mark Cuban. During their online meeting, Cuban gave Dhakal a challenge: Collect 575 coats for folks in need.
While the task was initially daunting, Dhakal parlayed some of Cuban’s networking advice into a winning strategy. After partnering with the Utah outreach organization Serve Refugees, Dhakal was able to chalk up 3,000 coat donations in a matter of days (for which TODAY parent company NBC offered matching donations).
Cuban was suitably impressed, telling TODAY: “You’re setting an example, Ashis, that it’s not about connections… It’s all about how hard you’re willing to work to getting something done.”
Dhakal is certainly willing to do whatever it takes to build a better world. Wherever his entrepreneurial spirit takes him in the future, helping others is sure to drive him along the way.
(MEET Dhakal in the TODAY video below.)
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North Carolina-based writer Judy Cole has a new rom-com murder mystery debuting at Amazon: And Jilly Came Tumbling After (from Red Sky Presents).
California’s air pollution control standards have drastically dropped the amount of diesel particulate matter in the air, and cardiopulmonary deaths attributable to air quality.
Scientists at UC Berkeley are hailing the state’s diesel engine standards and other measures imposed over a number of years, even in the face of loosened environmental regulations in recent years.
If one has never seen the pictures of the city of Los Angeles before the Clean Air Act, they look like something out of the movie Escape from L.A. But encouraging shifts away from high-sulfur fuels, and replacements of diesel ships with electric ones, has gradually scaled the horror show back—despite the fact that still today there are more cars registered in the state of California than any other state.
“Our analysis of mobile-source DPM (diesel particulate matter) emissions suggests that many California sector-based policies have been highly effective relative to the rest of the US,” write the authors of the paper published in Science.
They found that from the period between 1990 and 2014, the amount of DPM in the California skies fell by 78%, while cardiopulmonary and cancer deaths linked to diesel pollution dropped by 82%.
The largest fall came from tractor-trailers, which is unsurprising given the fact they often run on diesel and cover many miles. Reductions were also observed in passenger and construction vehicles, as well as from the marine sector.
California’s overall consumption of diesel actually increased over this period, which suggests that mandates to move to more refined fuels and retrofitting existing vehicles with pollution filters are highly effective strategies (both are recommended for implementation in other states by the Berkeley scientists).
Moves towards electric public and private transportation, such as Governor Newsom’s executive order to ban the sale of fossil fuel vehicles beyond 2035, should clear California’s skies substantially more—and will be a momentous accomplishment from one of the country’s largest economies.
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By working with its suppliers, Tesco managed to permanently remove one billion pieces of plastic from its UK stores in 2020.
Customers at Britain’s largest grocery store chain now see much less plastic when they do their shopping, including there being no more plastic shrink wrap on multipacks of soups, corn, and other tinned items including Heinz baked beans.
Shoppers are also no longer seeing secondary lids on products like yogurts and cream. There are no small plastic bags available for packing vegetables, pastries, and loose fruit; there’s no unnecessary plastic in holiday products like crackers, and no more plastic covers on no-label and branded greetings cards from companies like Hallmark—this last move alone is already saving 44 million pieces of plastic from being used a year.
Tesco’s decision to remove a billion plastic pieces from its packaging is part of a larger strategy to tackle plastics through its ‘4Rs packaging strategy’: To remove it where it can, reduce where it can’t, reuse more, and recycle what’s left.
The strategy has seen a business-wide program of change that assesses every piece of packaging and removes all unnecessary and non-recyclable material.
Tesco Quality Director, Sarah Bradbury, said in a statement: “Our own-label and branded suppliers have had a lot to contend with in 2020, so removing a billion pieces of plastic is fantastic progress. Our work to Remove, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle will continue into 2021 —there is no place for unnecessary or non-recyclable packaging in our business.
Paula Chin, Sustainable Materials Specialist, at the World Wildlife Fund, lauded Tesco’s moves to reduce plastic pieces from its stores, saying, “Plastic pollution continues to be one of the most visible symptoms of the environmental crisis we’re currently facing.
“Businesses, governments, and households have all got an important part to play, so it’s encouraging to see Tesco delivering against their commitments to significantly reduce the amount of plastic we use.”
Last year, Tesco met with 1,500 suppliers to let them know packaging will form a key part of its decision-making process which determines what products are sold in stores—with the retailer making it clear it reserves the right to no longer stock products that use excessive packaging or hard to recycle materials.
The company reports that, since the launch of the 4Rs strategy in August 2019, and in addition to removing a billion pieces of plastic, Tesco has reduced the size of its annual packaging footprint by 3,480 tonnes.
Tesco has also made good progress improving the recyclability of its packaging. Since it asked suppliers to use a defined list of easy-to-recycle materials and formats in 2018, it has removed over 11,000 tonnes of the hardest-to-recycle materials. That’s good news indeed.
(WATCH Tesco’s video about their move to ditch plastics below.)
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Quote of the Day: “Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that their price is too high when, in reality, the value communicated is too low.” – Seth Godin
Photo by: Katie Harp
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The hummingbird is named after its pleasant humming sound when it hovers in front of flowers to feed. But only now has it become clear how the wing generates the hummingbird’s namesake sound when it is beating rapidly at 40 beats per second.
Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology, Stanford University, and Sorama meticulously observed hummingbirds using 12 high-speed cameras, six pressure plates, and 2,176 microphones. The team of engineers succeeded in measuring the precise origin of the sound generated by the flapping wings of a flying animal for the first time.
They discovered that the soft and complex feathered wings of hummingbirds generate sound in a fashion similar to how the simpler wings of insect do. The new insights could help make devices like fans and drones quieter.
The hummingbird’s hum originates from the pressure difference between the topside and underside of the wings, which changes both in magnitude and orientation as the wings flap back and forth. These pressure differences over the wing are essential, because they furnish the net aerodynamic force that enables the hummingbird bird to liftoff and hover.
Unlike other species of birds, a hummingbird wing generates a strong upward aerodynamic force during both the downward and upward wing stroke, so twice per wingbeat. Whereas both pressure differences due to the lift and drag force acting on the wing contribute, it turns out that the upward lifting pressure difference is the primary source of the hum.
The difference between whining, humming, and wooshing
Professor David Lentink of Stanford University said, “This is the reason why birds and insects make different sounds. Mosquitoes whine, bees buzz, hummingbirds hum, and larger birds ‘woosh’. Most birds are relatively quiet because they generate most of the lift only once during the wingbeat at the downstroke. Hummingbirds and insects are noisier because they do so twice per wingbeat.”
To arrive at their model, the scientists examined six Anna’s hummingbirds, the most common species around Stanford.
One by one, they had the birds drink sugar water from a fake flower in a special flight chamber. Around the chamber, not visible to the bird, cameras, microphones, and pressure sensors were set up to precisely record each wingbeat while hovering in front of the flower.
During a follow-up experiment, six highly sensitive pressure plates finally managed to record the lift and drag forces generated by the wings as they moved up and down, a first.
The researchers finally managed to condense all their various results in a simple 3D acoustic model, borrowed from the world of airplanes and mathematically adapted to flapping wings. It predicts the sound that flapping wings radiate, not only the hum of the hummingbird, but also the woosh of other birds and bats, the buzzing and whining of insects, and even the noise that robots with flapping wings generate.
Making drones quieter?
Although it was not the focus of this study—published in March in the journal eLife—the knowledge gained may also help improve aircraft and drone rotors as well as laptop and vacuum cleaner fans. The new insights and tools can help make engineered devices that generate complex forces like animals do quieter.
This is exactly what Sorama aims to do: “We make sound visible in order to make appliances quieter. Noise pollution is becoming an ever-greater problem. And a decibel meter alone is not going to solve that. You need to know where the sound comes from and how it is produced, in order to be able to eliminate it. That’s what our sound cameras are for. This hummingbird wing research gives us a completely new and very accurate model as a starting point, so we can do our work even better,” concludes CEO and researcher Rick Scholte of Sorama, a spin-off of Eindhoven University of Technology.
A new recycling plant under construction in England features technologies that can break down any kind of plastic polymer into its constituent elements for recycling.
According to Forbes, wildlife filmmaker Sir David Attenborough appeared in a video alongside other naturalists and the owners of the new plant that uses superheated steam to obliterate the chemical bonds holding the monomers together.
Owned by Mura Technology, the process is known as HydroPRS, and it’s particularly special due to its ability to break down plastics normally destined for landfills or incineration. It can even remove biological material like food scraps clinging to the plastic, an aspect that can sometimes prevent plastic from being recycled—instead being used to power the boilers fueling the recycling.
What’s left are oils and chemicals ready to be re-sold to manufacturers to make into new products.
“What’s so tragic about plastic pollution is that it is so totally unnecessary,” Attenborough says in the video, released by U.K. recycling firm Mura Technology. “The plastic in our oceans should never have found its way there in the first place.”
Plastic pollution is a huge problem, and there are tons of smart technologies, many of them emerging, for recycling and biodegrading plastic.
Further still, plastic is being pulled out of rivers and the ocean with ever more intelligent designs and committed organizations. Yet the problem is set to get worse for the oceans, as more of the developing world enters the consumption-heavy prosperity and security of modern life.
Mura says the materials produced during their recycling process can be used again and again without ever becoming chemically unstable, and so it’s not surprising then that the British government is backing the project to the hilt as the plant in Teesside, England, ramps up to 1,000,000 tons of plastic recycling annually.
“The Government is committed to both clamping down on the unacceptable plastic waste that harms our environment and ensuring more materials can be reused instead of being thrown away,” said Rebecca Pow, the U.K. under-secretary of state for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs.
“By investing in these truly ground-breaking technologies, we will help to drive these efforts even further, and I look forward to seeing them develop and deliver real results.”
(WATCH the video about Mura Technology in the video below.)
Featured image: Plastics, Antoine Giret/David Attenborough, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Australia
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