A pelican named Percival learned something about the infertility game that many human couples go through—but this year he got some human help, and now he is the proudest pelican dad of all.
Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue/Facebook
For six years, his licensed handlers watched as the bird faithfully nestled atop eggs in a bid to see them hatch. He and his mate would share egg-sitting duty—but they never got to see any chicks emerge. It looked like the couple was simply unable to produce any eggs that were fertile.
Percival would look on, year after year, as other pelicans proudly trundled their feathered broods near the Queensland, Australia sanctuary called Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue. (The sanctuary’s owners, women who are twins, could almost hear him sigh.)
Unable to bear Mr. Percival’s distress for yet another mating season, they decided it was time to step in and help Mother Nature along.
Unbeknownst to Mr. and Mrs. P., they swapped a fertile egg from another nest into the one on which the pair so patiently sat in shifts, waiting for their little miracle.
After that, all anyone could do was cross their fingers, hope for the best, and wait. To everyone’s joy, the adopted egg hatched right on schedule.
An ‘eggstatic’ post to the Twinnies’ Facebook page proclaimed, “We are so proud of him, as we can see the baby pelican chick is growing beautifully.”
Twinnies Pelican and Seabird Rescue/Facebook
Finally, ‘just one of the dads’, Percival has taken up the task of feeding and raising his offspring with nothing less than total commitment.
The same quality can be attributed to Percival that Dr. Seuss wrote into his story about a determined pachyderm named Horton: “I meant what I said and I said what I meant. A pelican’s faithful one-hundred percent!”
The economic impact of the bushfires and then the COVID-19 pandemic has meant tough times for the whole country, but especially Twinnies bird sanctuary, a 24-hour rescue and rehabilitation center for sick, injured, and orphaned pelicans, seabirds, and native birds located in Landsborough.
If you’d like to help keep the pelicans and other native seabirds in fine feather, please help out by making a donation here.
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Quote of the Day: “There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir: We must rise and follow her, when from every hill of flame she calls, and calls each vagabond by name.” – William Bliss
Photo: by Rula Sibai
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?
Teachers saying hello by dancing and singing to the Jackson 5? The kids at at one Miami school have received just such a welcome this fall.
St. Agatha Catholic School
After seven months of virtual teaching, the faculty at Florida’s St. Agatha Catholic School wanted to greet their students back to school in the warmest way possible. So they created a fun video for all their pupils.
“Our middle school teachers were the ones that first came up with the idea,” Dr. Diana Gonzalez-Eastep, the school’s counseling psychologist, told GNN. “They wanted to select a song that was happy with a great beat.”
Literature teacher Mrs. Marisa Quesada suggested the Jackson 5 song, and the theme of “We Want You Back” was born.
The 1969 smash hit has been updated by the teachers for 2020, with lyrics like “Oh baby, give me one more chance (To show you that I love you)” being replaced with “Oh students time to grab your masks (And your sanitizer).”
As St. Agatha is a Catholic school, there are some faith-based lyrics thrown into the latter part of the song too.
The performance is sure to bring you a smile in these trying times, just as it did for the school’s students—and watch for the mascot that gets involved in the dancing, too.
(WATCH the video below and get ready to tap those toes.)
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A lonely otter has found love after being set up with a Tinder-style dating profile.
SWNS
Asian short clawed otter Harris had been left single after his partner of four years Apricot recently passed away.
His keepers desperately wanted to find him a new partner, so they set him up on “Fishing for Love,” a website created just for him.
Staff at Cornish Seal Sanctuary made the dating profile for Harris, highlighting all he has to offer and sent it out in the hope of finding his new perfect match.
The team were delighted to receive photos back from a female otter called Pumpkin who was also looking for love at Scarborough SEA LIFE after recently losing her elderly partner Eric.
The ‘first date’ has now been arranged, but the matchmakers said the introduction of Asian short-clawed otters can be nerve-racking and difficult to get right.
SWNS
Experts say to ensure the best chance of a new pairing getting off on the right foot, it’s best to introduce a new male into a female’s territory so that the male more easily submits to the female on first meeting.
For this reason, Harris will be moving up to Pumpkin’s enclosure to ensure it goes as smoothly as possible.
Tamara Cooper, curator at the Cornish Seal Sanctuary said “Harris came to us from the Welsh Mountain Zoo in 2016 after being rejected by his family.
“There was certainly something about Harris that ticked all the boxes for our female otter Apricot, and after a few days of careful introductions they settled in beautifully together.
Fabric cuttings and textile leftovers are a difficult class of waste to recycle, but in a fashion industry first—a door-to-door New York City recycling service meant exclusively for textile waste is helping the uglier side of fashion get a green makeover.
Fabscrap runs an internet store and a physical location that’s part second-hand shop, part recycling facility based around fashion industry waste collected from top brands like J. Crew, Nautica, and Macy’s.
Jessica Schreiber, the founder of Fabscrap, discovered while working at New York City’s Bureau of Recycling and Sustainability that many of the city’s iconic fashion industry names were ringing her office asking what to do with textile waste.
Being that NYC law requires the recycling of any material if it amounts to more than 10% commercial waste, she realized the problem represented an unfulfilled niche that would make a great business model.
She pitched her idea to “Project Runway: Fashion Startup” and was awarded seed money for her vision of a company that would pick up textile waste from fashion houses and find ways to reuse or recycle it.
Accumulating 20 clients in her first year, Schreiber now manages the waste of 434 different brands, and her work has seen 600,000 pounds of textiles and fabric spared from entering New York City’s landfill network, with each pound saved representing around 2.06 pounds of CO2.
A volunteer effort
The cutting room floor of a fashion brand’s studios is a messy place, and the bags of waste Fabscrap collects weekly must be sorted by hand. In the past year alone, 2,017 volunteers have helped out at the warehouse.
Separating the textiles by fiber—from cotton to wool and more, the people at Fabscrap will weigh and document each bag. The organization sells the fabric by the pound on their website and out of their retail headquarters in Brooklyn, and ships the unsellable waste to be recycled and turned into stuffing for furniture, or insulation for things like moving blankets.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, textile and fabric represents 5% of total landfill space, while a life-cycle analysis found that fabrics for all purposes account for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions— most of which is methane, a GHG that is 28 times more powerful than CO2.
Furthermore, the dyes and other chemicals used to treat clothing can contaminate groundwater sources.
New York City has very progressive recycling laws on the books for fabric and textiles. However, these laws are difficult to track or enforce since private companies haul away trash, and the waste of buildings tends to get mixed together.
For fashion brands that value sustainability over other corporate goals, Fabscrap represents the ultimate partner, and Schreiber has made several close connections with brands focused on reducing waste.
Schreiber hopes to expand to other cities and countries, notably Los Angeles, the center of the country’s largest cut-and-sew manufacturing facilities.
“I think opening in LA gives us a really good blueprint for how we might be able to franchise this to other major cities,” Schreiber said in an interview with the Sierra Club.
Stressful times call for stressless measures, and one of the most important ways to improve your ability to resist stress and anxiety is to get a good night’s sleep.
However, in our 24-hour, interconnected world, sleep is an illusive necessity that’s often the first thing to be sacrificed in a busy schedule. A reduction of regular sleeping hours has been linked with everything from Alzheimer’s to younger mortality rates.
Furthermore, with the presence of the coronavirus, it’s worth noting the results of two studies: the first finding that a night of sleep lasting less than 7 hours resulted in 70% fewer immune cells being produced the following day, and the second finding that a person sleeping less than 6 hours is four times more susceptible to the flu.
Fortunately, polysomnography sleep studies can offer us science-backed insights into better habits to improve the quality, if not the quantity, of the sleep we do manage to get.
According to renowned English sleep expert Dr. Matthew Walker, author of “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams,” every living thing on Earth is attached in some way to the day-night cycle, and spends at least part of the day in something resembling sleep.
He reminds us of our evolution, and that if sleep was not an absolutely necessary trait in animals, it would strongly be selected against during natural selection: as sleeping animals cannot reproduce, search for food, or protect themselves from predators.
Indeed, time spent sleeping proved to be more valuable—for all cellular life, than these three most critical activities which it could have otherwise been engaged in.
Here are 10 good habits, tips and tricks, and scientific findings to help you sleep better tonight, and in all the nights to come.
1) Keep your room like outer space: cold and dark
The Mayo Clinic, along with the CDC and others, suggest creating a cold, dark sleeping environment (around 60-67 Fahrenheit).
This has to do with our history as hunter gatherers, who were exposed to the elements and the day/night cycle. Drops in temperature and light perception signals to our brain that the hour of sleep is nigh, and a bedroom that reflects those changes is typically ideal.
2) Clean up your room
All kinds of strange things can affect sleep performance, including serious clutter. A study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that people at risk of hoarding disorder scored significantly higher on several categories in two different academic scales meant to measure sleep performance.
What you see before you go to sleep could potentially be preventing you from entering the deepest reaches of sleep cycles, thereby withholding the most powerful restorative effects.
3) Avoid blue light
Brooke Cagle
Most devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers come with built in blue-light filters, and those that don’t will have access to the internet or an app store where you can download a filter.
Blue light is the prominent spectrum present in daylight, while the red or orange light spectrum is the one experienced during the setting of the sun. Most of us are able to stay up far later because cool-white, blue-spectrum rays from our indoor lighting tricks our brains into thinking it’s still the day.
Therefore, put orange light filters on your devices so you correctly begin to feel the effects of melatonin secretion in response to the perception of the red light spectrum.
4) Find your extra-special mattress
One of the most significant technological advances in the last two decades has been in mattress technology. In our parents’ time, you had to wait until a public holiday to get a good deal and avoid paying $2,000 for a queen size mattress.
Now, you can go on Amazon and use their buying guide—which helps you find mattress of different firmnesses, made for back, side, and stomach sleepers—and it will be sent rolled up in a box to your house for less than $400.
Daylight exposure, physical exercise, and a day totally void of naps will all take you a little bit further towards a good night of sleep, and a simple Google Scholar search can reveal studies examining these activities and their consequences — especially sunlight exposure, in every aspect of circadian biology.
6) Take note of your coffee consumption
Gaelle Marcel
The biological half-life of a molecule of caffeine is between 3-7 hours, after which it has another half-life to burn before the psychoactive effects are finally finished.
Caffeine, normally consumed in coffee, has many health benefits. However, most sleep experts would recommend calling it curtains on coffee consumption by noon: that way very little of the caffeine molecules are left in your bloodstream by the time you lay down to sleep.
One cup of coffee in the evening is enough to disrupt sleep by 20%, according to Dr. Matthew Walker.
7) Stick to a sleep schedule
Another of the CDC and Mayo Clinic’s suggestions for sleep quality is to try and stick to a schedule, going to bed and waking up at the same time every day.
Obviously this can be difficult, especially on the weekends, but it’s a very powerful acclimatizer for the brain’s sleep hardware.
The popular mediation and mental wellness app Headspace adds this to the list of things that can disrupt sleep: checking emails before bed.
They note a study done at Virginia Tech from 2018 which found that the mere expectation of checking work email after hours can cause anxiety and stress, not to mention expose your eyes to the blue light of your tablet, phone, or computer screen.
9) Make your bedroom the most quiet room in the house
Lillie Kate, CC license
Returning to Dr. Walker’s commentaries on sleep, the Englishman notes in a radio interview that a study found the brain can detect noise while sleeping, which rather than causing us to wake up, can actually cause it to lift itself out of the deeper, more restorative cycles of sleep, and into shallower, less-restorative ones.
The host, Rhonda Patrick Ph.D., suggests that street noise, such as cars honking or doors slamming, could be enough to cause this shift, however the study mentioned was done only with ambient tones in a sleep laboratory.
If you sometimes wake up feeling weak and disoriented, and the windows of your bedroom face the street you live on, try relocating to a different room to prevent yourself from being partially woken in the night. Ear plugs may also help.
Walker concluded the same radio interview by suggesting Ambien and other sleep aids are not sleeping pills, but sedatives. As such, they don’t place the brain in the same level of restorative sleep as natural sleep does.
If you feel you need help, there are several natural chemicals you can try, these include melatonin, aka “the Sleep Hormone,” or tryptophan, one of the essential amino acids—it’s a primary precursor to melatonin production.
One can also acquire tryptophan from their diet. As an amino acid it is most abundantly found in meat, but bananas, nuts, and seeds are also sources of tryptophan.
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Quote of the Day: “The leaves are changing; I feel poetry in the air.” – Laura Jaworski
Photo: by Stephen Ellis
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 that long ago, LaShenda Williams was living in her car and wondering where her next meal was coming from. Raised in the foster care system, Williams never had a stable home life.
WKRN-TV
“I spent my life moving from foster care to foster care, dealing with child abuse and things like that,” Williams told CNN. “In the end, nobody wanted me, and I stayed in the system until my senior year [of high school].”
In addition to the abuse she suffered in foster care, Williams was hampered by a learning disability that made finding jobs more difficult. But even so, she never stopped trying.
Whether it was luck or fate that led her to the parking lot of an East Nashville, Tennessee Kroger grocery store, Williams’ life was about to change for the better.
By day, she became a store regular, striking up conversations and making friends, even when she couldn’t afford to buy food. At night, she’d move her car to a new location, hoping that the staff wouldn’t realize she was living in the parking lot.
When associate store manager Jackie Vandal heard Williams mention her goal of working at the store one day, she told her about an upcoming job fair.
Impressed by Williams’ can-do, upbeat people skills, Vandal made sure she made the cut from candidate to new hire, helping Williams with her application and even tweaking her résumé.
It only took Williams a month to get her first promotion, from part-time cashier to full-time checkout associate. Soon after, she was able to afford a new place to live. As it turned out, it was the very first apartment she’d ever had with her name on the lease.
When Kroger customer V.L. Williams (no relation) learned his favorite sales associate was getting her first place but didn’t have anything to furnish it with, he looked to social media for help. “She is always trying to help someone always trying to be a light in a world that may seem very dark,” V.L. told WZTV Nashville.
His post to the East Nashville Facebook group got more than 200 responses. Furniture, small appliances, and just about anything you’d need to furnish a home started pouring in.
“You don’t know how good this feels. I’ve been through a lot. Thank you… this means the world to me,” an emotional Williams told her benefactors.
Thanks to the life-altering chain of events that started in a Kroger parking lot, Williams now considers her co-workers and her customers—whom she calls “her babies”—to be her true family.
“When I was hungry, they fed me. When I needed a pair of gloves, they gave them to me. These workers that I work with, they are my family,” she told Good Morning America.
The feeling is more than mutual, with manager Jackie saying, “I wish we had 120 of her!”
With her indomitable spirit, welcoming attitude, and warm as sunshine energy, happily for Williams, sometimes what goes around really does come around—and nowhere has it been more well-deserved.
(WATCH LaShenda Williams’ uplifting story on Nashville’s WKRN-TV.)
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Nearly six in 10 Americans have a new appreciation of nature during quarantine, according to a new survey.
The poll asked 2,000 Americans about how they’re keeping their moods up in light of social-distancing measures.
58% of respondents shared they didn’t appreciate nature as much as they should have before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation and their Get on Board campaign, the survey showed three-quarters of respondents are starting to feel a boost in their moods thanks to spending more time outdoors—with 66% sharing they’re doing more outdoor activities close to home.
Six in 10 shared they’ve been able to finally take the time to explore their local communities, with local parks, trails, and lakes topping the list of new-found areas.
A time to bond
Robert Pearce
Just over half of respondents have also gone fishing during their time in quarantine, and 27% have specifically done so to boost their mental health. That this activity can be done while adhering to social distancing guidelines is also a boon for many. A quarter of those who go out with a rod also said a perk of the activity is the bond they can share with their loved ones.
With a plethora of options for outdoor activities, nearly four in 10 respondents have actually become more physically active during their time in quarantine. In fact, 32% of respondents are participating in more outdoor activities than ever.
One of the joys of this newfound appreciation of nature? It brings many people right back to happy childhood memories of being out in the open air with family.
It looks like few want to stop with their nature-based activities anytime soon: 69% of respondents are planning to incorporate more outdoor activities into their lifestyle even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.
“We can all use a little mood boost these days,” said Stephanie Vatalaro, RBFF’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications. “The outdoors has lots of activities to pick from, so there’s something for everyone.”
TOP OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES THAT BRING AMERICANS’ BACK TO CHILDHOOD
Fishing – 37%
Camping – 34%
Going to the beach – 31%
Going to a lake – 31%
Outdoor cycling – 28%
Running – 24%
Going to a river – 23%
Boating – 23%
Flying a kite – 23%
Hiking – 22%
Gardening – 21%
Bird watching – 17%
Outdoor rock climbing – 11%
Kayaking – 10%
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The construction of an electric road will make Tel Aviv the first city worldwide to institute the large-scale rollout of a technology that can charge vehicles as they drive.
Guy Yechiely
Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, in partnership with ElectReon and Dan Bus Company, has launched a pilot to install wireless electric roads for charging public transportation in the city.
The project will be carried out between Tel Aviv University Railway Station and Klatzkin Terminal in Ramat Aviv—a two-kilometer route including 600 meters of electric road.
According to a statement, the project will enable specially equipped electric buses, capable of being charged directly from under-road electric infrastructure, to travel on the route.
This means the buses won’t need expensive, heavy batteries. They won’t need to go to charging or gas stations. When traveling along the necessary infrastructure, they’ll actually have unlimited journey times.
Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality
Following the completion of tests and integration of the technology, a Dan Bus Company electric bus will commence regular journeys on the route, serving passengers traveling to Tel Aviv University.
From there, the city will evaluate the possibility of additional electric transportation: including distribution trucks and private and autonomous vehicles.
The execution of the pilot project forms part of a wider municipal policy that attaches great importance to electric vehicles and reducing air pollution in the city.
The electric roads will also aid municipal efforts to reduce noise pollution in order to improve quality of life for residents and visitors to the city.
Meital Lehavi, Deputy Mayor for Transportation at Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, said, “We have no doubt that, if the wide-scale experiment is successful, it will not only benefit the public, but also save resources, improve the operational efficiency of public transportation, and maybe even a new world-class method of electrification will emanate from Tel Aviv-Yafo.”
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It’s not often you hear good news about the health and prosperity of bee colonies in the United States or globally for that matter, but recent data collections released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that some states are experiencing growths in colony numbers of 70% or more.
Matthew T Rader
Not only was there a 14% increase in the number of honey bee colonies from the period of January 2019 to January 2020, but the states experiencing the broadest increase in colony growth—Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Maine—added tens of thousands of colonies.
Maine, the number one state for thriving bees, grew colony numbers by 73% since 2018, while Michigan also saw a 50% increase over the same period.
Between January and June 2020, Texas saw its bee population grow by 38%; between 2018-2019, it added almost 100,000 colonies, roughly totaling another 33% overall increase.
Indeed, in the first half of 2020, the United States as a whole added roughly 420,000 more colonies to its bee populations than were lost.
The New York Bee Sanctuary offers gardening and landscape practices to maintain nearby bee populations, as pollen and nectar from flowers are an important source of food for bees who could be out foraging and in need of energy.
Good News Network also describes in this article how there are plants—dandelions for instance—that are often treated as weeds but which also offer bees important nectar and pollen supplies. Time to start thinking about next spring’s planting?
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A California company is employing ocean microorganisms to convert methane into physical material in order to make a line of single-use straws and cutlery.
Newlight/Restore Foodware
Newlight hopes their revolutionary technology, which Popular Science called “the most important innovation of the year,” will go a long way in removing the burden of single-use plastic straws and other takeaway food components from the ocean.
The manner in which the material, that Newlight calls “Air Carbon,” is made, comes straight from the example of nature—taking in a greenhouse gas is something co-founder and CEO Mark Herrema notes happens every day in the form of photosynthesis in plants. Since 2003, the company has been wondering if it were possible to harness that action.
Underwater, however, microorganisms don’t merely dine on CO2, but more powerful greenhouse gases like methane as well.
Harvesting methane from an abandoned mine in California, engineers at Newlight add the gas to a tank containing 15,000 gallons of seawater and millions of microbes.
The microbes consumed the methane and turned it into a meltable energy source inside themselves, which Newlight promptly extracted and dried into a fine white powder that’s dishwasher-safe, carbon-negative, and ocean-degradable.
Form and Function
Newlight has been able to generate a line of hyper-sustainable products; the aforementioned flatware and straws, but also fashion products.
Covalent makes a line of wallets and sunglasses out of the same Air Carbon material, neutralizing the greenhouse gases associated with the production of leather and synthetic materials with the special carbon-negative ocean-born material, eliminating greenhouse gasses in every stage of the value chain.
Meanwhile, Restore Foodware, dissolves in seawater like cellulose, which actually provides food to everything from microorganisms to fish.
Their line of cocktail and jumbo straws along with takeaway flatware won Technology Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum.
The cutlery and fashion items are available for pre-order—with shipping estimated to begin by October 30 as production ramps up at a new facility in Southern California.
The people at Newlight feel that the unique way in which Air Carbon is made infuses a bit of the earth and humanity into our day-to-day lives, and can represent the circular economy in a meaningful way.
The methane born of human productivity goes to feed nature’s microbes that create a product which we can then use in our homes again; the cycle concludes after it returns to the ocean, whose waters it and ourselves also emerged from, to breakdown and feed the life which produces the material once again.
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Quote of the Day: “Stubbornness usually is considered a negative; but I think that trait has been a positive for me.” – Cal Ripken, Jr. (‘Iron Man’ of baseball)
Photo: by SwapnIl Dwivedi
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?
In “The Mandalorian,” Baby Yoda (a.k.a “the Child”) has a habit of popping up in places where grown men fear to tread and facing danger head-on with a wisdom beyond his years.
Perhaps it was the outsized courage of the diminutive Disney hero that inspired one big-hearted little boy to tap the foot-tall green toddler from a galaxy far away for a perilous but crucial assignment.
When Carver and his grandmother, Sasha Tinning, were putting together supplies to send to first responders battling California’s latest outbreak of wildfires, the 5-year-old spotted a solitary plush toy Baby Yoda sitting on a shelf.
Whether he truly understood the exhausting emotional toll tirelessly fighting the devastating infernos was taking on fire crews, the 5-year-old’s course of action was immediately clear.
That’s because, like Baby Yoda, Carver is also wise beyond his years. “I have always wanted to help and uplift anyone that’s around me. And this really was a bright spot in a dark time I wanted to share with everyone,” he told KSAT.
Along with his grandmother’s help and a handwritten note that read:
“Thank you, firefighters. Here is a friend for you, in case you get lonely <3 Love, Carver”
Carver sent Baby Yoda on a mission of comfort and care to the front lines.
Sporting a jaunty stars-and-stripes headband, the alien mascot has since traveled to the sites of numerous West Coast hot spots, bringing solace to the brave women and men battling the blazes there.
Highlights of his exploits have even been chronicled on his own ‘Baby Yoda fights fires’ Facebook page.
While Star Wars fans may be most familiar with Yoda’s famous refrain, “a Jedi’s strength flows from the force,” the astute Jedi Master also believed, “truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.”
If you’ve ever had dreams of going into space, you might just want to apply for the upcoming reality show “Space Hero.”
The grand prize? A seat on a 2023 mission to the International Space Station.
NASA
According to a statement from Space Hero Inc., the US-based production company developing the unscripted show, the premise is to “search the entire globe for an everyday citizen with a deep love for space exploration.”
“Budding astronauts will be put through rigorous testing and procedures, challenging their physical, mental and emotional strength,” explains Hypebeast.
The winning candidate will receive full training from Axiom Space Inc.—a full-service human spaceflight mission provider and manufacturer of the world’s first privately funded commercial space station—before lifting off to to spend 10 days alongside professional astronauts traveling at 17,000 miles an hour while orbiting the Earth 16 times a day.
The production company is currently in discussions with NASA for a potential partnership including potential STEM initiatives. And anyone from any background is invited to become the “first globally-elected space explorer to take part in a mission to the International Space Station.”
Chairman of Space Hero Inc. Marty Pompadur said: “Space Hero is about opening space up to everyone – not only to astronauts and billionaires.”
Creator and Founding Partner, Thomas Reemer, added, “We see the world changing in front of our eyes. In times like these we yearn to look up to people for the right reasons, so it’s time to look amongst ourselves to find the heroes that will inspire a bright future.”
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A landmine detection rat, whose work in Cambodia has transformed the lives of the country’s citizens, has been awarded the gold medal from a UK charity for his life-saving bravery and devotion to duty.
PDSA
Magawa is an African giant pouched rat, trained to detect landmines by the international non-profit APOPO.
He has discovered 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance to date, making him the charity’s most successful ‘hero rat’.
During his career he has helped clear over 141,000 square meters of land (the equivalent of twenty football pitches), making that land safe for local people again.
Magawa was formally presented with his miniature Gold Medal from veterinary charity The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) via a live link between Cambodia and Great Britain last week.
He is the first rat in the charity’s 77-year history of honoring animals to receive a PDSA Medal—joining a line-up of brave dogs, horses, pigeons, and a cat.
PDSA Director General Jan McLoughlin, gave a statement as to why Magawa won the award: [His] work directly saves and changes the lives of men, women and children who are impacted by these landmines. Every discovery he makes reduces the risk of injury or death for local people.
HeroRAT Magawa was trained in Tanzania by APOPO to detect the chemical compound within explosives and alert human deminers to its presence.
So how are rats like Magawa trained to do such important work? The same way you might train a puppy: through clicker training. Christophe Cox, CEO of APOPO, explained: “During training [the rats] hear a ‘click’ and receive a tasty food reward for finding the correct target scent.”
Because Magawa completely ignores any scrap metal lying around, he is much faster at finding landmines than the conventional method of using a metal detector.
Magawa can search the area of a tennis court in thirty minutes—something that would take a human with a metal detector up to four days to achieve. That’s impressive indeed.
Elon Musk, the enigmatic CEO of Tesla announced at the company’s annual shareholder meeting that they would begin manufacturing their own battery packs in order to drive the cost down sufficiently to be able to sell a Tesla car for no more than $25,000.
Tesla S
Musk said the car would come to market in about three years following the ramp up in production of its new battery and cell, and that it would be “fully autonomous.”
The cost of lithium-ion batteries has already gone down a huge amount in recent years. According to BloombergNEF, the inflation-adjusted average price of battery packs for Tesla cars has dropped from $1,160/kWh in 2010 to $156/kWh in 2019. That means batteries are already around 87% cheaper than they were a decade ago.
Saying that, the Model 3, currently Tesla’s cheapest car, still starts at $38,000, limiting its appeal to those concerned about cutting emissions but without such levels of disposable income.
Speeding the transition from fossil fuels in cars won’t be possible until the lower price brackets of the automotive sector are reached, which in turn can’t be done until battery technology becomes that bit cheaper.
Well-loved by owners and driving enthusiasts, Tesla’s success with its range of electric cars recently catapulted it past several milestones, including producing the most sold electric car in history, and one of the world’s most valuable automotive stocks.
Musk’s Grand Plan
As an article in Wired describes Musk as one to “never over-promise or under-deliver,” the 2023 deadline for a $25,000 Tesla is possible, but it’s forcing him to reduce costs of battery production everywhere he can find them.
Market forces, such as supply and demand and laissez faire trade policy, can quickly drive down the cost of products. Classic examples of these forces in action can be found in our memories from when we were younger, when plasma TVs cost $4,000 and mobile phone calls ran up $2 per minute.
The same effects have driven the costs of producing electric car batteries down over recent years, as makers invest in research and development to satisfy consumer demands for common complaints like range and charging time.
To drive costs down even further, Musk is bringing battery production home from Japan and China, where Tesla’s battery packs and cells are currently made, by opening a lithium and cathode plant in North America.
In a recent phase 2 clinical trial, the cancer drug bexarotene was found to regenerate the myelin sheath—the target of the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, or MS.
A protective lipid layer around nerves in the brain and spinal cord, the myelin sheath is targeted by immune cells incorrectly in patients with MS, resulting in the disease’s symptoms of neurodegeneration and disability.
The trial showed that bexarotene was able to effectively “remyelinate” the damaged nerves, placing scientists on the path towards a possible treatment.
Professor Alasdair Coles from the University of Cambridge said of the research, funded by a £250,000 grant for the MS Society UK, “The lessons we’ve learned are incredibly exciting, as we now have further concrete evidence that remyelination in humans is possible.
“This discovery gives us confidence that we will stop MS, and will swiftly be taken forward into further studies trialling other potential new myelin repair treatments.”
The reason new myelin repair treatments would be necessary is because the drug, normally meant for cancer patients, created some serious side effects, like elevated blood lipids and thyroid disease and therefore cannot be used as a treatment.
Geralt, CC license
Co-investigator Professor Siddharthan Chandran from the University of Edinburgh felt this is a step forward, first because myelin repair is now confirmed as possible, and also because the properties of bexarotene could be examined to find future drug candidates that don’t have serious side effects.
“We now understand much more about myelin repair and are in a significantly better position to measure remyelination in clinical trials,” said Chandran. “While this work was taking place, further lab research identified new and more tolerable treatments that could repair myelin, and we look forward to these being tested in trials imminently.”
Around 100,000 people in the UK live with MS, and in the U.S. that number is closer to one million, so the MS Society is not relying on just the bexarotene trials, but is also launching a Phase 2 clinical trial based on 2019 research demonstrating that a combination of the diabetes drug Metformin and an antihystamine called Clemastine also led to regeneration of a myelin sheath damaged by MS.
“Metformin is one of the most exciting developments in myelin repair we have ever seen. Our findings last year shed light on why cells lose their ability to regenerate myelin, and how this process might be reversed,” said Professor Robin Franklin, also from Cambridge, who led the 2019 study. “We’re very proud to have done this work and thrilled to see our discovery taken forward so quickly.”
The new Metformin/Clemastine trial will be led by Franklin and Coles—a dynamic duo of MS researchers; their work will hopefully lead to the MS Society’s goal of developing a verified treatment of the disease by 2025.
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Quote of the Day: “The more one judges the less one loves.” – Nicolas Chamfort
Photo: by C.Valdez
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Iceland’s flagship airline Icelandair is welcoming visitors back to the island nation with a breathtaking aerial look at some of the country’s most awe-inspiring spots.
The videos, which include scenes of fjords, canyons, and a green volcano, are accompanied by audio narration that describes the geology and wonder.
With the Aurora Borealis spotting season running from October-April in Iceland, the airline is keen to provide inspiration for your next vacation—or just for those who are looking for some escapism from the comfort of their own homes.
Below, check out the haunting vision of a green volcano—our favorite among the videos.
“Casting a striking figure against a barren black sand desert, moss-covered Mælifell is a crowning jewel in the Icelandic highlands. Its iconic cone is covered in grimmia – a moss that grows specifically on cooled lava.”
The the mountain is at its emerald-colored best the morning after a rainy day, as it was on the day of filming.
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