Vanilla is the salt of the dessert world—it enhances the flavors of all the other ingredients that go into a dish. No wonder it’s such a staple in every baker’s cupboard.
Credit: Vanilla Feeds Tomorrow
A 14-year-old baker in Tennessee remembers adding vanilla to brownies just after watching a COVID-19 news segment about long lines for food banks across the States. It wasn’t right, he thought. People shouldn’t be hungry.
William Cabaniss was making his chocolatey mix, when he suddenly had a big idea. He could raise funds for his local food bank—Second Harvest Food Bank of East Tennessee—by making and selling every baker’s best friend: vanilla extract.
Since then, William has made over $9,000 dollars in profits, providing over 27,000 meals for those in need.
He says, “If I can only help one person, I will be satisfied that I have made a difference. However, I would like to do this for as many people as I can. No one should have to worry about hunger. This is my goal for Vanilla Feeds Tomorrow.”
It Takes A Village
Setting up your own legal, 501(c)(3) nonprofit isn’t easily done alone. It takes a village. In fact, it takes a special family like the Cabaniss’s.
Since May, William has been creating his own website, designing his own labels, and researching how to make and ship vanilla. He’s also been running the Vanilla Feeds Tomorrow Instagram and Twitter accounts.
His grandmother helps with keeping up with the Facebook page. His dad helps with legal and financial matters. His mother drives him around to make deliveries, and even his younger brother and sister help by making boxes.
“Proud mom” Jillina Cabaniss told GNN, “William is working so hard trying to help fight hunger in his community.”
In between spending time with friends, running cross-country and track, and the occasional video game, William is preparing to continue making and selling vanilla from premium Madagascar beans when he heads back to Farragut High School in a couple of weeks.
Buying a 8 oz. bottle of homemade Pure Vanilla Extract from William and his family means providing 42 meals for people who are hungry. The website is here if you’d like to buy some or make a meal donation. Happy baking.
(WATCH this kind teen’s story below.)
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The northern white rhino of Africa could come back from the absolute brink of extinction as a third round of 10 eggs were successfully extracted from the last two surviving members of the subspecies.
Credit: Zoë Reeve
The eggs were taken from two females, Najin and Fatu, who are unable to carry a baby to term, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
“The ovum pick-up went smoothly and without any complications,” the team from Germany and the Czech Republic said in a statement.
They eggs were flown immediately to Italy to be artificially inseminated with frozen sperm collected from white rhino bulls, of which none remain on the planet.
The scientists hope to create viable embryos that could be carried to term by surrogate females.
The most likely candidate would be a southern white rhinoceros, thousands of which roam the plains of sub-Saharan Africa, but it would depend on the rapid perfection of in-vitro fertilization, as well as keeping Najin and Fatu alive.
The last male northern white died in 2018, in Sudan. One year later, those involved in the project successfully created two viable embryos before freezing them in liquid nitrogen.
The Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya was founded to try and save the subspecies from extinction, with the last surviving two males and two females flown in from a zoo in the Czech Republic in 2009.
These stunning pictures show inside a ‘forgotten’ sea cave that is thought to have special healing powers.
Credit: SWNS
The multicolored grotto was once one of Britain’s most mysterious sites and attracted huge numbers of visitors during the 17th and 18th centuries.
In those days, pilgrims and the sick would make their way to the cave to drink healing waters from the “holy well.”
But in recent decades it has become largely secluded and unknown.
Most tourists now visiting Holywell in Cornwall, England are unaware of its hidden wonders.
The site, known as St Cuthbert’s Cave, creates mineral deposits leaving its stones red, green, blue, and yellow.
The spring water it creates was once described as the “elixir of life” in writings from the 19th century and were said to contain “life healing” minerals that trickled through the cave’s natural limestone.
John Cardell Oliver’s ‘Guide to Newquay’ from 1877 gave a detailed description of the cave from a bygone era.
Credit: SWNS
He wrote, “The legend respecting the well is, that in olden times mothers on Ascension Day brought their deformed or sickly children here, and dipped them in, at the same time passing them through the aperture connecting the two cisterns; and thus, it is said, they became healed of their disease.
“This well has Nature only for its architect, no mark of man’s hand being seen in its construction; a pink enamelled basin, filled by drippings from the stalactitic roof, forms a picture of which it is difficult to describe the loveliness.
Credit: SWNS
“What wonder, then, that the simple folk around should endow it with mystic virtues?”
The spring water has been described as tasting like cereal milk and forms shallow pools within the basins, before trickling out from the cave and on to the outside beach.
Unlike other so-called ‘holy wells’ in the UK, the spring water in St Cuthbert’s Cave is washed out twice every day, when the tide comes in and floods the cavern.
Credit: SWNS
Its popularity was also recorded by William Hals in his “History of Cornwall”, which he compiled from 1685 until 1736. In his book he wrote, “The virtues of this water are very great. It is incredible what numbers in summer season frequent this place and waters from counties far distant.”
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Credit: Concept designs by Yves Béhar and fuseproject
Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of legendary oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, is raising money for what would become the International Space Station of the oceans.
Credit: Concept designs by Yves Béhar and fuseproject
Inspired into action by the limitations observed after a month-long stay in the only remaining underwater research station, the Aquarius Reef Base off the coast of the Florida Keys, his new project would create the first modern undersea research base in over 30 years.
Called Proteus, it would be 4,000 square feet—a space ten times that of Aquarius, and one where biology and oceanography research would blend with climate and even pharmaceutical sciences to help create a more modern understanding of our oceans.
Fabien is every inch his father and grandfather. An oceanographer, environmental advocate, and “aquanaut,” he learned the invented trade of his grandfather—scuba diving, when he was only four years old. Yet Fabien, now 52, is fed up with the limits of scuba as a research tool.
Confronted with the restrictions of time and depth, he sees Proteus as a chance to ”have a house at the bottom of the sea, [where] we’re able to go into the water, and dive 10 to 12 hours a day to do research, science, and filming.”
Proteus, named after the old Greek god of rivers and oceans, would sit 60 feet down off the coast of Curaçao, the island in the Lesser Antilles. Architect and industrial designer Yves Béhar and Fabien are looking to raise $135 million for construction.
”It will be a platform for global collaboration amongst the world’s leading researchers, academics, government agencies, and corporations to advance science to benefit the future of the planet,” reads the introduction to Proteus on the website for Fuseproject, Béhar’s design firm.
Inspired by Jules Verne, Béhar envisioned that the station would consist of two large disks, one atop the other, connected by a spiral ramp. The edges of the disks would be lined with pods where bedrooms, bathrooms, and laboratories could be added.
At the center would be a social space above what Jacques Cousteau called a “liquid door” also known as a moon pool—a pressurized chamber where resident aquanauts could more rapidly set out for a dive.
The outside would be covered with artificial reef material to encourage habitation by neighborly sea-dwellers, and Fabien imagines a full-scale video production facility so that he, like his grandfather, can educate the world about the oceans’ depths in real time; offering an unparalleled opportunity to educational institutions world-wide.
Understanding another world
According to some estimates, only 80% of the ocean’s territory has been mapped. Furthermore, the 20% that is recorded is often so unspecific as to miss the spires of undersea volcanoes, or airplane wreckage.
With Proteus, Fabien would be able to map a certain radius of the surrounding area to a resolution of a quarter inch, allowing scientists working there to study the changes in a rich marine environment in extreme granularity.
According to scientists speaking with Smithsonian Magazine about Proteus, one of the problems aquanauts and oceanographers have had to face over the histories of their professions is that the ocean often changes faster than they can make record of it.
“Studying the historical responses of ecosystems like coral reefs to past changes in climate provides a useful guide,” says Brian Helmuth, a professor of marine and environmental sciences and public policy at Northeastern University, to Smithsonian.
“It [Proteus] would allow scientists to study the undersea environment by becoming a part of it, rather than working as casual interlopers.”
Finally, as humanity begins working towards a new relationship with the planet, one of total command, yet total respect, undersea laboratories can help discover new species, understand how climate change affects the ocean, and allow for testing of green power, aquaculture, creating a picture of how humans might create, what Jacques Rougerie, a French underwater architect described as a ”blue society.”
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Smokey the Bear admonished that only you can prevent forest fires, but what if Smokey had some high-tech backup?
A team of scientists at Michigan State University has developed a remote forest fire detector and alarm system powered by nothing but the movement of the trees in the wind.
As detailed in their new study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the battery-free device generates electrical power by harvesting energy from the sporadic movement of the tree branches from which it hangs.
Believed to be the first of its kind, the device, which is the size of a soup can and costs just $20 to produce would likely be much cheaper than manned patrols searching from fire watch towers, and more reliable than satellite monitoring which may be hindered by weather or fire smoke.
“The self-powered sensing system could continuously monitor the fire and environmental conditions without requiring maintenance after deployment,” said lead author Changyong Cao, a mechanical engineer who directs the Laboratory of Soft Machines and Electronics at MSU.
For Cao and his team, the tragic forest fires in recent years across the American West, Brazil, and Australia were driving forces behind this new technology. Cao believes that early and quick response to forest fires will make the task of extinguishing them easier, significantly reducing the damage and loss of property and life.
The traditional forest fire detection methods—satellite monitoring, ground patrols, and watch towers—are highly labor intensive, expensive, and somewhat inefficient.
Current remote sensor technologies are becoming more common, but primarily rely on battery technology for power.
“Although solar cells have been widely used for portable electronics or self-powered systems, it is challenging to install these in a forest because of the shading or covering of lush foliage,” said Yaokun Pang, co-author and postdoc associate at Cao’s lab.
TENG technology–short for multilayered cylindrical triboelectric nanogenerator—converts external mechanical energy, such as the movement of a tree branch, into electricity.
The simplest version of the TENG device consists of two cylindrical sleeves of unique material that fit within one another. The core sleeve is anchored from above while the bottom sleeve is free to slide up and down and move side to side, constrained only by an elastic connective band or spring. As the two sleeves move out of sync, the intermittent loss of contact generates electricity.
The MC-TENG stores its sporadically generated electrical current in a carbon-nanotube-based micro supercapacitor. The researchers selected this technology for its rapid charge and discharge times, allowing the device to adequately charge with only short but sustained gusts of wind.
“At a very low vibration frequency, the MC-TENG can efficiently generate electricity to charge the attached supercapacitor in less than three minutes,” Cao said.
The researchers outfitted the initial prototype with both carbon monoxide (CO) and temperature sensors. The addition of a temperature sensor was intended to reduce the likelihood of a false positive carbon dioxide reading.
Cao and the study’s co-authors hope to field test a production device to monitor forest environmental conditions and test scenarios, making use of materials that mimic a real fire. The team also aims to add additional functionality, allowing the device to be adapted for the weather and environmental conditions where it is deployed.
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Quote of the Day: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, and rest this afternoon.” – Charles M. Schulz
Photo: by Annie Spratt
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It’s not easy being a cow living among African lions in Botswana. After all, there’s always the threat you could soon be a big cat’s meal.
UNSW conservationists have found an effective, low-cost way to protect cattle from their predators and help lions coexist with livestock and farmers.
In a piece of “psychological trickery,” scientists have trialled painting eyes on local cattle butts.
The idea is that the intimidating eyes will trick the lions into thinking they’ve been spotted, causing them to abandon the hunt.
“As protected conservation areas become smaller, lions are increasingly coming into contact with human populations, which are expanding to the boundaries of these protected areas,” says Dr Neil Jordan, a conservation biologist from UNSW’s Centre for Ecosystem Science.
The lions eat livestock, such as cattle, which negatively impacts the livelihood of the subsistence farmers living in these rural areas. With no non-lethal way to prevent the attacks, the farmers often turn to deadly force, shooting or poisoning the lions in retaliation.
Dr Jordan says these human-animal conflicts have resulted in populations of African lion—a threatened species—“draining away.”
Dr Jordan’s idea of painting eyes onto cattle rumps came about after two lionesses were killed near the village in Botswana where he was based. While watching a lion hunt an impala, he noticed something interesting:
“Lions are ambush hunters, so they creep up on their prey, get close and jump on them unseen. But in this case, the impala noticed the lion. And when the lion realized it had been spotted, it gave up on the hunt,” he says.
A Strategy Derived From Nature
Credit: Ben Yexley
In nature, being ‘seen’ can deter predation. For example, patterns resembling eyes on butterfly wings are known to deter birds. In India, woodcutters in the forest have long worn masks on the back of their heads to ward-off man-eating tigers.
Jordan’s idea was to hijack this mechanism. Last year, he collaborated with the BPCT and a local farmer to trial the innovative strategy, which he’s dubbed “iCow”.
The researchers stamped painted eyes onto one-third of a herd of 62 cattle, and each night counted the returning cows. The effectiveness of the eyes essentially comes down to relative survival rates: are painted cows less likely to be attacked and killed than unpainted cows?
In mid-July, he’ll return to Botswana for three months to further test and validate the tool. He’s raised more than A$8000 on the science crowdfunding platform Experiment.com to purchase 10 cattle GPS loggers, and one GPS radio collar, which will be fitted to a wild lion under anaesthetic.
Dr Jordan’s team, involving a UNSW PhD student and researchers from the BPCT, will paint roughly half the cattle in a herd of 60. They’ll use the GPS devices to monitor the movements of cows and lions, and to determine when and where they meet.
“This will give us information about the exposure of painted and unpainted cows to predation risks, and where the conflict hotspots are,” says Dr Jordan.
If the tool works, it could provide farmers in Botswana–and elsewhere–with a low-cost, sustainable tool to protect their livestock, and a way to keep lions safe from retaliatory killing. That’s good news all around.
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Yoga could be a lifesaver for people with the most common type of irregular heart beat, according to new research.
A study of 538 patients has found the ancient Indian form of exercise almost halved the number of symptoms among people with Atrial fibrillation (AF).
Lead author Dr Naresh Sen said, “Our study suggests yoga has wide-ranging physical and mental health benefits for patients with atrial fibrillation and could be added on top of usual therapies.”
The participants attended 30-minute sessions—involving postures and breathing—every other day for 16 weeks.
They were also encouraged to practice the same movements and other routines at home on a daily basis.
This gentle form of exercise led to dramatic improvements, in all areas. For example, when not doing the exercises participants experienced an average of 15 symptomatic bouts of AF.
This was reduced to eight during yoga. Their average blood pressure also fell significantly.
Dramatic Improvements In AF
Credit: Aziz Acharki/Unsplash
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a potentially fatal condition that causes palpitations, breathlessness, dizziness, fatigue, chest pain, and a racing pulse. One in four middle-aged adults in Europe and the US will develop AF. It causes up to 30 percent of strokes.
Dr Sen, of Hridaya Ganesha Sunil Memorial Super Speciality Hospital in Jaipur, India, said, “The symptoms of atrial fibrillation can be distressing.
“They come and go, causing many patients to feel anxious and limiting their ability to live a normal life.”
The participants were enrolled between 2012 and 2017 and served as their own controls. For 12 weeks they did no yoga.
Patients completed an anxiety and depression survey and a questionnaire assessing their ability to do daily activities and socialise, energy levels and mood. Heart rate and blood pressure were also measured. The researchers then compared outcomes.
Last year another study by Dr Sen of 2,500 heart attack patients found those doing yoga were 16 per cent less likely to die over the next five years.
His latest findings were presented at a virtual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology.
That such dramatic improvements in symptoms could occur for those with AF is great news for those with the condition. For those who have never practiced yoga before, and who might be nervous about trying the exercise, yoga doesn’t necessarily involve terrifying body twists and endless Sanskrit chants. It can be as simple as setting aside twenty minutes, putting on a ‘gentle stretches’ Yoga With Adriene video on YouTube, being gentle with yourself, and having a go.
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Credit: Sawyer County Sheriff's Department/Facebook
This sweet toddler has a lot to smile about: after 24 hours lost in the Wisconsin woods near her home, she’s been found safe and sound with her trusty dog Peanut—thanks to one big community effort to find her.
Credit: Sawyer County Sheriff’s Department/Facebook
Sawyer County Sheriff’s Department reported that little Abigail Ladwig went missing in the Winter, Wisconsin area at 6:45 p.m. on Sunday evening, August 9. She was known to be with her pet cocker spaniel.
Before long, hundreds of local residents, led by the Department of Natural Resources, went out looking for a brown dog and a little girl known to be barefoot with a flowery shirt on. Others brought food, water, and supplies to help those out searching.
Just over a day later, at 7:20 p.m. the three-year old was found, having wandered through the woods into a nearby yard a little ways from her home.
Abigail had ”minor scratches, insect bites and dehydration during her 24 hours of being lost in the woods,” and was sent to a local hospital for a check-up before being released.
Pat Sanchez, a coordinator of Sawyer County Search and Rescue, said, ”Thank you to all responders, volunteers who came out to search for Abby and the donations of food and water. It’s amazing how in times of need, we all come together for such an amazing outcome.”
The restaurant industry is one of the hardest-hit by COVID-19 and no one’s felt the financial pinch more than the servers who earn their livelihoods when people dine out.
Credit: Instagram/@therealdjmurph
Unsurprisingly, waiter Peter Murray was eager to get back at work at Lucille’s Smokehouse—a longtime local favorite in Concord, California—hoping to make up for lost time and wages.
Unbeknownst to him, fate was about to hand him a once-in-a-lifetime gratuity.
Enter Brian Murphy—a.k.a. DJ Murph—a restaurant fan participating in a viral “Venmo Challenge.” The objective was to collect micro-donations via social media—as little as 50 cents—to reach a preset goal. Once the goal is reached, the patron passes the money along to a worthy server in the form of a tip.
When Murphy hit his $1,000 benchmark he chose Lucille’s, recently re-opened after a three-month pandemic-related hiatus, as the place to pay his goodwill forward.
Peter, randomly assigned to wait on Murphy’s table, was stunned by the generous gesture, and was practically speechless as Murphy counted out the tip to the cheers of restaurant-goers and thrilled members of Lucille’s staff.
Later, after he’d had time to digest his amazing luck, an extremely thankful Peter was able to reflect on his good fortune. In an interview with KPIX 5, he said the unexpected windfall was something of a godsend.
“Now I don’t have to worry about paying rent next month,” Peter said, “and I can put some money aside… Words can’t describe how grateful I am for what Brian, DJ Murph did for me… I’m just so grateful.”
But Murphy’s generosity didn’t stop there. Having managed to raise $400 more than his original goal, the big-hearted DJ gifted the balance of his challenge earnings to the restaurant host.
Thrilled by the outcome, Murphy has already begun another challenge and plans to surprise other unsuspecting servers with over-the-top tips each time he reaches his $1,000 goal.
That said, while very few of us have the means to tip $1,000 after a meal, when and if you do decide to dine out one of these days, we hope you’ll remember to tip your server generously. It just might make their day.
The picturesque Mount Rainier National Park is once again home to wolverines, as a nursing mother and two kits were recently spotted by camera stations within the park.
Credit: NPS
They are the first wolverines to establish residence in Mount Rainier in over 100 years, and their discovery is purported as good news for wildlife management within the park, and for the ecosystem surrounding it.
“It’s really, really exciting,” said Mount Rainier National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins. “It tells us something about the condition of the park—that when we have such large-ranging carnivores present on the landscape that we’re doing a good job of managing our wilderness.”
The nursing mother, called Joni, and her kits were discovered by scientists from the Cascades Carnivore Project, (CCP) who were responsible in 2018 for setting up the camera stations which led to the sighting of the three fur balls scampering across a meadow into a forest in a video posted on the NPS Twitter account.
With confirmed sightings in the adjacent area and suitable wilderness habitat in Mount Rainier National Park, the CCP believed wolverines may start returning to the Washington state park.
The CCP works to raise awareness about less understood carnivores of North America’s forests, such as fishers, lynx, and wolverines.
“Many species that live at high elevation in the Pacific Northwest, such as the wolverine, are of particular conservation concern due to their unique evolutionary histories and their sensitivity to climate change,” Dr. Jocelyn Akins of the CCP said. “They serve as indicators of future changes that will eventually affect more tolerant species and, as such, make good models for conservation in a changing world.”
A fierce, hungry, yet skittish predator
Credit: Vincent van Zalinge/Unsplash
The wolverine is the largest member of the mustelidae, or weasel family. A cold weather expert, they possess small ears, a short snout, and large paws that allow them to run in the snow without sinking down into the drifts. Their scientific name is gulo gulo, Latin for ‘the Glutton’, as they will eat just about anything dead and actively hunt animals much larger than them like deer, and even predators like lynx.
They have a ferocious reputation as an animal that will try and defend their kills even from bears or wolves.
However wolverines are extremely rare in the United States, and even in regions of prime habitat, the National Parks Service estimates their density to be about one individual per 100 square miles, leading to a total of between 300 and 1,000 in the lower 48 states.
The locations of the Mount Rainier wolverine den and camera stations have not been released in order to protect the wolverines from potential harm or accidental disturbance, but there are still ways for visitors to help monitor wolverine recovery.
“Backcountry enthusiasts, skiers, snowshoers and snowmobilers can help us monitor wolverines and contribute to studying their natural return to the Cascade ecosystem,” said Dr. Tara Chestnut, a park ecologist.
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Quote of the Day: “The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake.” – Nelson Boswell
Photo: by Abigail Keenan
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?
Sean Hepburn has been photographing birds, like gannets and ravens, flocking on the Isle of Portland, Dorset for the past six years. But there is nothing like mumuration of starlings to inspire awe in any who watch them.
Sean Hepburn – SWNS
The amateur landscape photographer from nearby Weymouth took an interest in starlings after being amazed by the birds flocking habits.
Murmurations are the flocking movements of starlings, which can involve thousands of birds flying in complex aerial formations, seemingly in sync.
To create his interesting photos, the 55-year-old uses multiple exposures, taking around 200 pictures in just five seconds.
His pictures, which include the Portland Bill Lighthouse and the scenic the Jurassic Coast, show eye catching spiral shapes as the birds’ flight path is captured.
“I focus on starlings because they make quite spectacular pictures,” said the grandfather-of-three.
Sean Hepburn – SWNS
However he claimed it takes coordination and can be quite tricky to get his shots right.“I’ve been a landscape photographer for 20 years and wanted to get these images with landmarks in the background.
EMT paramedics have always been frontline heroes every day—well before the pandemic hit neighborhoods across the world. And now this Virginia ambulance worker has an American Doll made in her image to prove it.
RAA
April O’Quinn was one of five national winners in the “Heroes with Heart” contest run by American Girl Dolls, following a nationwide call for nominations.
Of the thousands of nominations the Mattel company received, the one sent in by April’s niece was chosen to represent the best of the COVID-19 frontline heroes who have been risking their lives to help others.
Young Lacey lives in Texas, and she is always telling people about her Aunt April, who works for the Richmond Ambulance Authority (RAA).
Lacey told American Girl that her Aunt contracted the coronavirus—but even after her long recovery, she chose to return to RAA.
“She didn’t hesitate for a moment,” Lacey wrote on her contest submission, which was published by American Girl.
April got a phone call last month from Lacey with the exciting news.
“Lacey was on the other side screaming that we had won! I was in shock,” April told WTVR news. “I had no words. I ended up crying because I couldn’t say anything.”
She got to watch via video chat as the girl opened her new doll after it came in the mail—and the likeness was pretty remarkable.
RAA
“The stars and brightness in her face and eyes were amazing,” said April.
The winners received a one-of-a-kind custom doll and outfit in their hero’s likeness and a $250 gift card.
“It’ll be something that neither one of us will ever forget. It’s a bond that I’ll hold with her forever,” April said of her niece Lacey.
In June, American Girl started selling an outfit for their dolls that inspires admiration for all the medical workers. Called the ‘Scrubs Outfit’, it includes pink scrub pants, a colorful nurses top, slip-on shoes and a matching fabric face mask.
WATCH the WTVR video below…
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Quote of the Day: “When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey.” (Arab proverb)
Photo: by Matthew T Rader
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The streets of Santiago, Chile may be a long way from Gotham City, but among its citizens dwells a true superhero. Far from being a fictional crime-solver, he’s a real-life hunger fighter who distributes food to the city’s homeless population on a regular basis.
With his Batmobile—or in this case, white SUV—fully stocked with a cargo of hot meals, he dons a shiny black costume complete with a cape and two masks (one with pointy comic book ears and eye slots; the other, for COVID-19 protection).
The self-proclaimed “Solidarity Batman” is doing his part to make life during Chile’s months’ long lockdown more bearable for some of those hardest hit by the current pandemic.
But this Batman’s do-good mission is about more than simply delivering food. Knowing that sometimes all it takes to nourish the soul is a little humor or a few kind words, he aims to feed people’s hearts as well as fill their stomachs.
He chose the Batman outfit to cheer people up, and it fosters a feeling of togetherness.
“Look around you, see if you can dedicate a little time, a little food, a little shelter, a word sometimes of encouragement to those who need it,” he told Reuters.
And, like Bruce Wayne, this modest caped-crusader prefers to keep his identity anonymous.
Yet, no matter who the man beneath the mask is by day, the message he delivers along with his meals is clear. As Simon Salvador, one thankful beneficiary of Batman’s compassionate outreach told Reuters, “It is appreciated…from one human to another.”
I stood at the sink washing out my paint brush. The self-critic in my head was giving me a stern lecture about taking in yet another homeless cat.
My Aunt had passed away a few months earlier and we were in the process of cleaning out her house. Between that and my other responsibilities, I felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.
The cat had been living in a friend’s garage. She couldn’t afford to take him to the vet, so I offered, thinking it would be a checkup, some shots, and we would find him a home.
But after meeting with the vet I realized what I had gotten into. He had numerous issues, the worst of which, his eye had been injured and was now infected and would need to be surgically removed.
Hence, the reason the critical voice was giving me a lecture: On top of everything else I was now responsible for this pitiful looking, malnutrition, one eyed cat wearing a blue plastic collar, now named Willy.
Willy
And Willy wasn’t too happy about it all either. He was mad and liked to bite me when I tried to do anything to help him.
‘I’ll never be able to find him a home,’ I thought.
Then, I looked down at the dirty old paint covered utility sink and there she was. An angel looking back at me.
She was just a weird arrangement of paint and drain, but that didn’t diminish her message. She spoke loud and clear.
It’s been years since Willy showed up here at my work. We never found him a home because we all fell in love with him and his quirky personality.
He’s fat and happy and has adjusted very well to being an adorable spoiled one-eyed cat.
And, the angel is still in the sink.
Even though years of paint and water have washed over her, she’s just sitting there to remind me that we are all angels sent here to look after one another.
Auroral beads seen from the International Space Station - SWNS
They never had the computing power to figure it out before. But now, a NASA mission has unlocked some answers around the phenomenon of space auroras and how they form across the galaxy.
Auroral beads as seen from the International Space Station – SWNS
A special type of aurora, draped east to west across the night sky, like a glowing pearl necklace, is helping researchers better understand the science of auroras and their powerful drivers out in space.
Known as auroral beads, these lights often show up just before large auroral displays, which are caused by electrical storms in space called substorms.
They are atmospheric phenomenons made up of bands of light caused by charged solar particles following the Earth’s magnetic lines of force.
If a planet has an atmosphere and magnetic field there is usually an aurora.
Previously, scientists were not sure if auroral beads are somehow connected to other auroral displays as a phenomenon in space that precedes substorms, or if they are caused by disturbances closer to Earth’s atmosphere.
But powerful new computer models combined with observations from NASA’s THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) have provided the first strong evidence of the events in space that lead to the appearance of these beads and demonstrated the important role they play in the space environment around Earth.
By providing a broader picture than can be seen with the three THEMIS spacecraft or ground observations alone, the new models have shown that auroral beads are caused by turbulence in the plasma—a fourth state of matter, made up of gaseous and highly conductive charged particles—surrounding Earth.
The results will ultimately help scientists better understand the full range of swirling structures seen in the auroras—and learn how to better protect satellites orbiting our planet. (WATCH a NASA video about the beads below…)
“Now we know for certain that the formation of these beads is part of a process that precedes the triggering of a substorm in space…an important new piece of the puzzle,” said Professor Vassilis Angelopoulos, principal investigator of THEMIS at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Auroras are created when charged particles from the Sun are trapped in Earth’s magnetic environment—the magnetosphere—and are funneled into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where collisions produce the glow in hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms and molecules.
By modeling the near-Earth environment on scales from tens of miles to 1.2 million miles, the THEMIS scientists were able to determine the details of how auroral beads form.
Dr Evgeny Panov, lead author on one of the new papers and THEMIS scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, said, “THEMIS observations have now revealed turbulences in space that cause flows seen lighting up the sky as of single pearls in the glowing auroral necklace.
“These turbulences in space are initially caused by lighter and more agile electrons, moving with the weight of particles 2000 times heavier, and which theoretically may develop to full-scale auroral substorms.”
As streaming clouds of plasma belched by the Sun pass Earth, their interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field creates buoyant bubbles of plasma behind Earth.
Like a lava lamp, imbalances in the buoyancy between the bubbles and heavier plasma in the magnetosphere creates fingers of plasma 2,500 miles wide that stretch down towards Earth, scientists said.
Signatures of these fingers create the distinct bead-shaped structure in the aurora, experts say.
“We have only recently gotten to the point where computing power is good enough to capture the basic physics in these systems,” said Dr David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
It requires very sophisticated algorithms and very big supercomputers.
Now that scientists understand the auroral beads precede substorms, they want to figure out how, why and when the beads might trigger full-blown substorm, the researchers said.
At least in theory, the fingers may tangle magnetic field lines and cause an explosive event known as magnetic reconnection, which is well known to create full-scale substorms and auroras that fill the nightside sky, experts said.
Since its launch in 2007, THEMIS has been taking detailed measurements as it passes through the magnetosphere in order to understand the causes of the substorms that lead to auroras.
In its prime mission, THEMIS was able to show that magnetic reconnection is a primary driver of substorms. The new results highlight the importance of structures and phenomenon on smaller scales – those hundreds and thousands of miles across as compared to ones spanning millions of miles.
After the initial success of the new computer models, THEMIS scientists are eager to apply them to other unexplained auroral phenomena, they added.
(The findings were published in the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.)
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72% of Americans in a new poll said that they are more likely to find “little joys” during the summertime—and that’s especially true this year.
83% of respondents agreed: it’s the little things in their day that bring the most joy—and just as many say these little things have become even more important to them in the past few months.
Luckily, the average respondent experiences four of these small things every day.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Bubbies Ice Cream, the survey found many of the little things respondents look forward to relate to nature and the great outdoors. The third most-popular ”little joy” was ‘feeling the sun on my face’
Listening to rainfall or a thunderstorm while inside, the arrival of a blue-sky sunny day, and the smell of the ocean, all made it into the top 30.
But it was family and friends that were a key factor in a third of the top ten “little joys”. Not surprisingly in 2020, seeing a loved one after being apart was #1.
Sleeping in a freshly made bed, having time to myself, and getting something for free rounded out the top five answers. Who doesn’t love finding money? That was also mentioned.
For many, who look forward to something in the kitchen, the smell of freshly-made baked goods and the first sip of coffee in the morning was a favorite answer.
“We’ve seen the joy that comes from these indulgences and know that celebrating the small moments in life is critical when it comes to navigating stressful times,” noted Katie Cline, Vice President of Marketing at Bubbies Ice Cream.
AMERICANS’ TOP 10 “LITTLEJOYS” 1. Seeing a loved one after being apart for a while 40%
2. Sleeping in a freshly made bed 39%
3. Feeling the sun on my face 39%
4. Getting something for free 39%
5. Having time to myself 35%
6. Hugging a loved one 33%
7. Finding money I didn’t know I had 32%
8. The first sip of coffee in the morning 30%
9. The clean feeling after a shower 30%
10. Receiving an “I’ve been thinking about you” type text 28%
What are your favorite little joys? Would sunshine and a freshly made bed make your top five?
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He’s fat and happy and has adjusted very well to being an adorable spoiled one-eyed cat.
