Quote of the Day: “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” – Paraphrase from the Bible
Photo by: Vignesh Moorthy
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?
Morris Township is your typical New Jersey town: There’s a fire department and a police department; there’s a medical center, and fun stores, and lively restaurants.
Thanks to the work of a super creative girl—since the pandemic hit in March, frontline staff in the area have been finding some very special items outside such places of work.
These ‘Flags of Gratitude’ are all made by 11-year-old Callie Danysh.
She paints the image for every flag or tile herself, and adds inspirational messages of support and appreciation on each one—so essential workers can know just how grateful we all are for the work they’re doing.
Callie has been leaving no stone unturned in her bid to ‘honor a hero.’
Around Morristown, Morris Plains, and Morris Township, staff and volunteers at local businesses and organizations have all been finding Flags of Gratitude dedicated to them.
So far, Callie has made an incredible 2,000 flags to encourage and uplift others—all of which can be seen on the Flags of Gratitude Facebook page.
The list of heroes Callie is honoring with her art continues to expand.
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This November 11, with a little help from some Sharpie markers and paint pens, she’s been honoring former service personnel by making special flags to place outside the Veterans of Foreign Wars site in Morris Plains.
Last month, she also made flags for Morristown’s Army and Navy Recruiting Center.
As part of her project, Callie is raising money for others: In July, she made $1,000 for HelpMorrisNow, which helps get food and clothing to local people in need.
MORE: Girl Who Challenged Dave Grohl to Drum Battles Is Now Co-Writing a Song to Perform With Foo Fighters
Now she’s raising money for Good Grief, an organization that helps families going through loss, and Hubert’s Animal Welfare. Essentially, she’s doing whatever it takes to give back to the community.
“It makes me feel really good because I enjoy spreading kindness to people,” says Callie.
Her designs are being printed on 9-inch photo tiles so people can donate to the charity and have a keepsake that will last forever.
Head to the Facebook page to see how you can get involved—perhaps by buying one of Callie’s beautiful tiles?—and help this astonishing youngster in her bid to lift up others, one artwork at a time.
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Together, we can pay off the debt of those we’re forever indebted to.
Today is Veterans Day, and on November 11, every time a person tweets “Thank you for your service,” Veterans United is contributing $25 to paying off the home loans of deserving former military personnel.
This amazing campaign is being marked by the hashtag #MakeItMeanMore, because, although they appreciate our gratitude, veterans deserve more than just a quick ‘thanks’.
Follow the progress throughout the day and watch as Veterans United Home Loans—the nation’s largest VA mortgage lender—posts videos of the life-changing surprises on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
A live ticker of the number of tweets (71,000 and counting) with the amount of contributions (nearly $2 million so far) can be followed on MakeItMeanMore.com.
Hank Bolden just received the news that his mortgage was being totally paid off. An Atomic Veteran who served in California, he was given just a few years to live after being exposed to radiation while serving. Now he’s a jazz saxophone student at the University of Hartford—and he’s on track to complete his degree at the amazing age of 83.
Watch the moment where the octogenarian finds out he no longer has to worry about his home loan.
In preparation for the campaign, the lender contacted Academy Award-nominated actor Gary Sinise to surprise Navy veteran Bill Day with the news that his entire mortgage had been paid off.
“Me?” Exclaims Bill, a single father of four based in Albany, NY. He looks astonished as he says, “I don’t deserve this.”
“You’ve served your country, you’re taking good care of your family there and you’re working hard. We want to do a little something for you,” Sinise replies, smiling.
The shock on Bill’s face is obvious as he responds, “My son is at school right now, he’s severely autistic, we’re having so many issues, this is just going to… You guys have no idea what you’ve just done for me,” he tails off mid-sentence, in tears. “Thank you, that’s all I can say.”
Log onto Twitter now and send out your tweet. All it needs to say is five simple words: “Thank you for your service.” That’s it.
All done? You’ve just helped pay off a deserving person’s home loan.
Remember to check out the new videos of veterans being surprised on YouTube throughout the day—and bask in the collective power one simple, heartfelt tweet can have in changing people’s lives.
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A 98-year-old D-Day veteran has recreated a photo taken with a Belgian boy whose family took him in 76 years ago.
George ‘Bunny’ Avery was a sapper in the Royal Engineers and part of the second wave of troops to land on Normandy’s Sword Beach beaches on D-Day, 6 June 1944.
On that fateful day, he was dropped close to the shoreline by his landing craft, and as he made his way to the beach he said he “just kept running.” In his mind, he was telling himself, “Keep your head down boy!”
George advanced through Nazi-occupied Europe, building portable bridges which allowed troops and vehicles to travel at speed across rivers and canals.
During his wartime journey across the continent, George stayed at a bakery in the Belgian town of Peer with a family who gave him board and lodgings.
It was 1944 and George and some other soldiers were building bridges nearby.
While staying with the town bakers, George made good friends with the 6-year-old boy of the household.
That boy’s name was Urbain, and when the family had their photo taken to remember their time with George, he and Urban were were pictured hugging.
George’s daughter Kathryn recently discovered photos of the bakery, with a Belgian address written on the back. She began doing some research. Before long she’d managed to contact Urbain. He said yes to meeting-up in his childhood town with Kathryn and her dad.
Kathryn and her father often return to France, Holland, and Belgium to take part in liberation commemorations, but this meeting was particularly special.
When they met, Urban was holding a photo showing him being carried by George, who was just 23 at the time.
George now lives with dementia and can’t remember his meetings with Urbain, but his Belgian pal still remembers those special times with his soldier friend, and spoke to Kathryn of his joy at playing with George as a child.
75 years after they first met, George and his Belgian had their photo taken in the very same spot where they were first photographed.
We’re sure Kathryn will treasure such a special moment being captured forever.
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A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) published on Tuesday says almost 90% of new electricity generation in 2020 will be renewable, with just 10% powered by gas and coal—unbelievable growth figures from major countries like India, China, and the U.S, even as their economies struggle with COVID-19.
Spurred on by long-term contracts, a slight 5% dip in global energy demand, priority access to power grids, and continuous installation of new renewable power plants, worldwide growth in renewable energy will reach 7% by the end of 2020.
To say that the period from January to October of 2020 has been economically uncertain would be an understatement, but that hasn’t stopped an evidently unhaltable stream of investment going into of renewable energy installation the world over.
This period has seen a 15% increase in auctioned-off renewable energy when measured against the same period last year, and compared with 2019, the 2020 average share price of publicly traded solar power companies has more than doubled.
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Other measures of increase are a healthy 4% growth in new installations of renewable infrastructure and plants, amounting to around 200 gigawatts in the U.S. and China, with a 30% jump in the production from wind and PV solar power sources.
The forecasts for 2021 are even sunnier. India and the EU will lead a big drive that will, according to estimates from the IEA, result in a record setting 10% expansion in renewables by the end of 2021.
“Supply chain disruptions and construction delays slowed the progress of renewable energy projects in the first six months of 2020,” reads the IEA report. “However, construction of plants and manufacturing activity ramped up again quickly, and logistical challenges have been mostly resolved with the easing of cross-border restrictions since mid-May.”
“Despite the challenges emerging from the Covid crisis, the fundamentals of renewable energy expansion have not changed.”
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Already the cheapest forms of new energy installations around, PV solar panels and wind farms, generate the cheapest costs of electricity in history, something South Australia got to enjoy last month.
“Total installed wind and solar PV capacity is on course to surpass natural gas in 2023 and coal in 2024. Solar PV alone accounts for 60% of all renewable capacity additions through 2025,” the IEA predicts.
By 2025, coal could seem relatively pointless, as not only is renewable energy the cheapest in history, but it will be on track to supply the majority of the world.
Furthermore, reductions in costs are projected to triple the market investment into renewables to over 15% during the same period. This is spearheaded by investment companies like BlackRock, whose CEO Larry Fink, responsible for managing trillions of dollars in private capital, guides investment decisions now principally on companies’ capacity for climate-conscious strategies.
There’s virtually nowhere a person can look and not see incredible prospects for renewable energy taking over the global energy market in the next decade. These fundamentals, if proven true, are staggering, and represent outcomes that climate change activists could only dream of eight or ten years ago.
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When 95-Year-old WWII veteran Johnnie Dimas lost his full-time caregiver and wife of 67 years, there didn’t seem to be many options, other than to move out of his house and into a nursing home.
But, he and his late wife had always vowed that they would never go into a home—so his grandson Roger Gilbert devised a plan.
He moved Grandpa Johnnie from Illinois to live with Roger and his wife Jo, in Sedona, Arizona two years ago.
And, last October they decided to embark on an epic journey around the USA in their motor home, visiting all of the places on their grandfather’s bucket list.
Knowing that time was limited, the unlikely trio explored and experienced as much as they could together—from Mardi Gras to Las Vegas, to an encounter with a camel named Roger at a dairy farm on the Mexican border, where he was completely enamored with the animal.
Most importantly, they got to visit several World War II museums where Johnnie was “treated like a rock star.” He was also fortunate enough to meet a fellow WWII vet there.
“I think it was deeply cathartic for Grandpa to be able to process everything that had happened at such a young age,” Jo told GNN.
Johnnie enlisted in the U.S. Marines at the age of 17—and due to his young age, his father had to sign him up. He served in Guam where he was wounded and was sent back to the States to recover in a V.A. hospital. He had severe PTSD and was treated with electric shock therapy—until he “witnessed a friend and fellow soldier being carried out on a stretcher.” Afterward, he discharged himself from the hospital and went home.
Before loading his wheelchair into the motorhome for their trip, they dubbed their vehicle the ‘Sweet Mary Bus,’ for Johnnie’s late wife.
“I can honestly say that caring for Grandpa was the hardest and most rewarding thing we have ever done,” Jo says. “Caring for someone 24/7 is a very difficult job, but it also teaches you to be selfless.”
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“Grandpa taught us both so many things,” says Jo. “With the joy and contentment he felt in sitting by a campfire, or the sweet moments spent feeding popcorn to the ducks, he taught me that the simple times, the quiet moments in life are the ones to value.”
“It was such an honor to see how people respected his service in WWII, and how fascinated they were by him and his stories. As we walked down the street people would stop Grandpa, shake his hand and thank him for his service. They didn’t often stop long enough to see how Johnnie would always well up with emotion and gratitude for their kind words, it touched him so deeply every time.”
At a WWII aircraft hangar-turned-museum in Texas, the young lady who helped run the place was so delighted to meet someone who’d lived through WWII that she gave Johnnie a personal tour and a tee shirt.
“She was thrilled to take photos with him, and before we left she said that meeting Grandpa had made her year! It was here that Grandpa also got his favorite mug: It simply said in big red letters “To hell with Hitler” and made him laugh every morning without fail when he drank his coffee.”
The 96 year-old passed away this year on August 16th. Their next planned trip was to visit Graceland, the home of his biggest idol—Elvis. He was so excited to go, but his deteriorating health wouldn’t allow for it. But in a final “sweet kiss from God”, Roger and Jo realized that Grandpa died the same day Elvis did, 43 years later—and he would have been tickled by that.
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Quote of the Day: “Honor to the soldier and sailor, who bravely bears his country’s cause. Honor, also, to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field and serves, as he best can, the same cause.” – Abraham Lincoln (for Veterans Day)
Photo by: Moira Dillon
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?
Two people who’ve been having quite a bit of fun during lockdown are Dave Grohl and a 10-year-old girl named Nandi. Since August, they’ve been taking each other on in the most epic drum battle. Now? The pair are getting ready to jam on stage some day.
Nandi Bushell lives with her family in the pretty town of Ipswich in England. A superlative drummer, she’s been playing since she was five-years-old.
She kicked things off with Dave in summer when she posted a video where she drums to the Foo Fighters’ hit song Everlong.
Nandi wasn’t expecting one of the world’s biggest rock stars to respond to her fun tweet. But before long, Dave Grohl was posting from the Foo Fighters’ account and matching her rendition beat for beat.
He then one-upped his new pal, suggesting they battle to Them Crooked Vultures’ Dead End Friends. She matched the rock star’s beats, and then some. “You got me,” Dave had to concede.
From there, Grohl penned a song just for Bushell. The accompanying video is incredible, with his young daughters, hereby known as “the Grohlettes,” joining him as back-up singers.
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Nandi was overjoyed. She penned Dave a brilliant song right back: called Rock and Grohl. Because there’s no end to her talents, for her accompanying music video she sang and played the guitar, bass, and the keyboard.
Turns out, Grohl was more than a little impressed by his new friend’s ability to create an electric original tune.
He responded on Twitter, “I’m down, BUT I’M NOT OUT. Your epic song will definitely be hard to beat, but I think I know just what to do…”
Yesterday, in a video call hosted by the New York Times, the pair met for the first time.
“I get to meet a rock star, oh my god!” Dave said to Nandi. Of course, she couldn’t stop laughing.
The pair had a good chat about drumming, music, and making life fun. Then Dave started to look nervous. He said to Nandi, “I have a question… When the Foo Fighters finally come back to the UK, do you think you would get up on stage and jam with us?”
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Nandi’s reply was immediate: “Yes! Definitely! A hundred percent!”
“Okay,” said Grohl, “but it has to be at end of the set, because you’re gonna steal the show…. Or we should make a song together?”
Cue furious head nods from Nandi and an emphatic, “yeah!”
The pair are now planning on creating a “fast” and “rocking” tune.
So how did Nandi feel about her chat with her new BFF? As ecstatic as you can imagine.
BEST DAY EVER!!! Meeting #davegrohl was one of the most incredible experiences of my life! I can’t believe Dave asked me to write a song with him, join him and the @foofighters on stage AND he is still working on his comeback!!! #EPIC!!! @nytimesmusic pic.twitter.com/szlKXn6U6D
— Nandi Bushell (@Nandi_Bushell) November 9, 2020
(WATCH the awesome pair meet up in the New York Times video below.)
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At age 80, having performed to great acclaim with celebrated orchestras in the United States and abroad, Brazilian piano maestro João Carlos Martins has had a stellar career.
Unfortunately, until recently, a combination of degenerative disease and a series of injuries had all but stilled his talented hands.
No longer able master the piano, Martins turned to conducting. However, thanks to an ingenious invention of some “bionic gloves,” he’s back at the keyboard, making music again.
“To be able to use all 10 fingers again more than 20 years later is a miracle for me at the age of 80,” Martins told Reuters.
The black neoprene “extender” gloves, inspired by Formula One racing technology, were the brainchild of industrial designer Ubiratan Bizarro Costa. Costa made the original prototypes using a 3-D printer at a cost of about $125.
Martins had lost almost the entire range of motion in his fingers. The gloves, fitted with a system of spring rods that draw the fingers back up as notes are depressed on the keyboard, restored his ability to play.
“I did the first models based on images of his hands, but those were far from ideal,” Costa said in an AP interview reported by the Chicago Tribune.
Costa first showed his invention to Martins after a concert in the Sao Paulo countryside. While the prototypes weren’t fully functional, they were promising enough that Martins invited Costa to his home to continue development.
“I just created this as a gift to him,” Costa told CGTN America. “It’s not really part of my main line of work. It was something for him to have fun with… I wasn’t expecting all this interest.”
While the gloves have allowed Martins to resume playing, he doesn’t expect his full abilities to come back overnight, if ever. “I might not recover the speed of the past. I don’t know what result I will get. I’m starting over as though I were an 8-year-old learning,” Martins admitted.
Even so, Martins has the will and the discipline to keep working toward making the most of the second chance he’s been given. He’s even set himself a goal.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Martins was slated to celebrate the 60-year anniversary of his first appearance at New York’s famed Carnegie hall this coming October by conducting a commemorative performance there. For the encore, he’d planned to play one of his favorite keyboard selections.
While coronavirus protocol will likely determine whether or not the show goes on, Martins has already overcome his biggest obstacle. He believes the lesson he’s learned on his road to recovery—to never give up—can serve as inspiration to others.
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“It’s a kind of hope I can give to people who think maybe they can’t do anything more after 80 or so,” he said to CGTN. “At the age of 80, I think I can have a beginning again.”
And for that, he deserves a standing ovation.
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If you lurch into the event horizon of a black hole, will you ever come out? According to a series of new calculations which just solved a 50-year old problem even Stephen Hawking couldn’t figure out, the answer is yes.
It’s being described as a landmark calculation—the biggest thing to happen in the field since the work of the famous British physicist established the problem in the first place.
Since the 1970s, physicists have been grappling with a logical contradiction in calculations surrounding a black hole called the “black hole information paradox.”
Hawking would use his “semiclassical” quantum/general-relativity hybrid-explanation of the physics of a black hole to describe what happens to matter in and around it.
He discovered that quantum uncertainty causes small amounts of radiation to emanate from a black hole called “Hawking radiation.” This eventually causes it to lose mass and evaporate into nothingness. If the black hole loses mass and eventually disappears, then what falls in must appear again somewhere. The question is: where/how/why does the information escape?
The authors of the new calculations, including scientists from UC Santa Barbara, have uncovered additional effects permitted by general relativity but that Hawking didn’t include, which describe a strange situation in which information that falls into a black hole will eventually come out, and that this phenomenon happens at the same time, and is partially to blame for the evaporation of a black hole.
The way in which it works is through quantum entanglement, a phenomenon which simply means that particles of matter can be linked on the quantum level, and display patterns and reactivity to each other even though they could be separated by thousands of miles.
Don Page, a physicist at the University of Alberta, was a graduate student whose studies of black holes were key in helping his advisor, Stephen Hawking, make his realization that black holes emit radiation. In 1980, Page broke with Hawking and argued that information must be released or preserved in black holes, causing a schism among physicists at the time.
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Page would go on to establish a timeline of a black hole’s lifespan—shaped like an upside-down V known as “Page time” or the “Page curve”—it described how information which fell into the black hole would escape through emitted Hawking radiation until the black hole was no more. This was called “entanglement entropy,” and set up physicists for a 30-year lay up to make a slam dunk calculation.
“Over the past two years, physicists have shown that the entanglement entropy of black holes really does follow the Page curve, indicating that information gets out,” explains George Musser writing for Quanta Magazine.
The slam dunk was started in October 2018 by Ahmed Almheiri at the Institute for Advanced Study when he used quantum computing to create a universe in which a simple black hole system located at the center of space began emitting radiation as per Hawking’s theory.
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The system begins to radiate as one entangled particle enters and another one leaves. This process continues, and the number of entangled particles increases, increasing the level of entanglement entropy.
If one imagines the black hole as the contents of a snow globe, and the glass of the globe as the event horizon (the edge of the black hole where the laws of physics begin to break down), Almheiri found that as the entangled entropy grew within the system, a “quantum extremal surface,” formed on the glass of the snow globe, just inside the event horizon.
Everything inside the quantum extremal surface is not part of the black hole, but rather like a collection of entangled particles which no longer contribute to the entropy in the system. Furthermore, the innermost particles in the simulated black hole became likewise detached from the black hole, forming something which Almheiri called “the island.”
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At this point, non-entangled radiation begins to be emitted, and the black hole breathes itself out of existence.
In demonstrating that entanglement entropy of black holes followed the Page curve, Almheiri and his friends confirmed that black holes do in fact release information, though it comes out in such disorder as to appear like an encrypted password.
By now if one’s brain is still working after all this, Almheiri’s research amazingly includes theoretical tools that would allow researchers to “decrypt” the scrambled entangled particles in the quantum extremal surface, and figure out what they are and where they came from.
Last year, having just solved a 50-year puzzle and proved Page’s life’s work, the team decided to focus on the mysterious “island” of particles that were in—but not “of” the black hole. The island is part of the radiation, but hasn’t flown out or been transferred to the extremal surface.
READ: Star-Gazer Reveals Stunning Pictures of Space He Takes From His Back Garden
This disconnect is theorized as being part of the reason why black holes go down the other side of the Page curve, and if solving the black hole information paradox seemed hard, Musser described the issue of the mysterious island as causing the team to “look off into the distance, momentarily lost for words.”
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A team of French Muslims recently spent the night standing outside their town’s cathedral to symbolically protect it and show solidarity with Christian churchgoers.
When Elyazid Benferhat heard about a deadly attack on Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice at the end of October, he was sickened. Three people had died. He started thinking about what he could do to help.
He talked to a Muslim friend, “and we had this idea,” Benferhat told the Associated Press. “We needed to do something beyond paying homage to the victims. We said, we will protect churches ourselves.”
He and his pal gathered together other young Muslims from among their friend group, as well as through the soccer club Benferhat coaches.
On All Saints’ holiday weekend—in coordination with local police—the group guarded their local church in Lodève on Saturday night and again for Sunday Mass.
The parish reverend, Luis Iniguez, said their symbolic gesture gave him hope in a difficult time.
When a local paper published a photo of churchgoers having their picture taken with their new Muslim guards, Iniguez even hung the image up in 13th-century Saint-Fulcran Cathedral.
As for Benferhat and his group? They say they’d like to make a symbolic act of protection for the cathedral again for Christmas. They think it’d be great if the movement caught on elsewhere, with other towns following in Lodeve’s footsteps.
RELATED: Church Opens Up Its Doors to Muslim Worshippers So They Can Have a Place to Pray During Quarantine
Whatever Benferhat gets up to next, he told the Associated Press, “it will come from the heart.”
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Clues as to the fate of the 115 men, women, and children of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, the first English settlement in the New World, have been unearthed by archaeologists digging in a North Carolina field.
Teams of local as well as British archaeologists are working in several areas around Roanoke Island on a mystery that is one of the oldest in North American history.
Sir Walter Raleigh led an expedition of middle-class Londoners across the ocean to arrive at Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina in 1587. Shortly after they arrived, governor John White returned to England for supplies and to recruit more colonists, but a naval war between England and Spain prevented his immediate return.
When he did get back he found the settlement in ruins and the people gone. All that he had to begin his own search was a single word, “Croatoan,” carved on a wooden post in the middle of town.
Croatoan were names given to the place and people of modern-day Hatteras Island, about 50 miles south of Roanoke Island off the Outer Banks.
Governor White also wrote that the settlers intended to move 50 miles inland, close to native tribes they had befriended. A map drawn by White had a cloth patch over an area around 50 miles towards the interior on the shore of Albemarle Sound, with the outline of a fort drawn in invisible ink.
So we have settlers, mysterious names carved on posts, maps with hidden symbols, native tribes: no wonder it’s one of the great archaeological mysteries of the colonization of the Americas.
In 2015, a team led by archaeologist Nick Luccketti excavated the site of the invisible ink-scrawled fort on White’s map, aptly-called “Site X,” and found two dozen shards of broken English pottery which he and his team maintain belonged to the Lost Colonists.
In January 2020, Luccketti returned to excavate about two miles north of Site X in a field which they called “Site Y,” and found English crockery in much greater amounts, suggesting that—as has been observed in many colonial scenarios—order broke down for some reason, and colonists went their separate ways—evidently some moving just outside their Indigenous neighbors’ village of Mettaquem.
Some archaeologists are skeptical that broken pottery shards are a good tool for dating the movements of the Lost Colony.
For example, Jacqui Pearce, a ceramic expert at the Museum of London, admits it’s possible the shards could come from pottery made from the late 16th century and could have belonged to the colonists, but this English pottery’s make and style carried on a long time, and it’s just as possible they belonged to traders from Jamestown, settled two decades after the collapse of Roanoke.
Meanwhile, on the Island of Hatteras, or Croatoan as it was called in the Lost Colonists’ day, European artifacts have been discovered in the remains of a Native American village, suggesting that between the three sites, it’s very likely that some colonists, as White said, went 50 miles inland towards Site Y and X, and others went to Croatoan as scarred into the wooden post, as White also discovered upon his return.
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William Kelso, the archaeologist who led the effort to discover the colony at Jamestown, says the three sites together “solve one of the greatest mysteries in early American history—the odyssey of the Lost Colony.”
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Quote of the Day: “The words ‘I am’ are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you’re claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.” – A.L. Kitselman
Photo by: Hasan Almasi
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?
On Election Day, voters in Nebraska voted to put significant limits on the interest rates payday lenders can charge.
A 400% interest rate on small-dollar loans is the average across the States. Now that 83% of Nebraska’s voters have approved Initiative 428, that won’t be the case in this Midwestern state: Payday lending interest rates will soon be capped at 36%.
Nebraska, in addition to D.C, is the 17th state to implement such a cap. Other states to have pushed such a measure in recent Sweden Colorado, Ohio, Montana, and South Dakota.
According to the Nebraskans for Responsible Lending coalition, which helped put the initiative on the ballot, the average interest rate for a payday loan in Nebraska has been 404%.
In Sweden, before 2016, payday lenders charged up to 574% interest. According to loans research by Sambla, the volume of payday alternative loans offered by credit unions grew considerably when the state voted to cap interest rates at 36% in the last major Swedish political event.
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The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), a consumer advocacy group that supports expanded regulation of the industry, said to Market Watch, “There is just something wrong with triple digit interest rates and trapping people in cycles of debt.”
Federal Advocacy Director at the CRL, Ashley Harrington, stated, “This transcends political ideology.” She continued, “Everyone should be able to get behind safe, affordable consumer loans that don’t have triple-digit interest rates.”
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Before the invention of text messaging—which makes it super-easy to send a note to a friend—and before there were telephones in every home that could connect you instantly with a loved one, there were letters. Sure, you might need to wait a few days or weeks for the postman to deliver it, but the special feeling it contained made it worth the wait.
Although a letter offers no instant gratification, handwritten correspondence were always highly anticipated and savored. Their stationery, envelope, and stamp were saved as mementos to be read and re-read—and treasured.
In the face of worry over the coronavirus pandemic and all the stress it has placed on New Yorkers, a Brooklyn-based performance artist and English professor Brandon Woolf came up with the idea of reviving the letter-writing tradition as a means to reach out and comfort one another.
Knowing that people have lost loved ones, jobs and businesses, and given up simple pleasures like hugs from a friend, Woolf began to ponder how to help people make meaningful connections.
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His answer was to take a page from history.
“When interpersonal connection is risky, what are other ways where we can be together?” Woolf pondered in an interview with The Park Slope Scribe. “What is a better experience than getting a piece of mail in your mailbox from somebody you didn’t expect to hear from?”
Using a vintage portable typewriter and seated on a folding chair alongside a mailbox, his sign says, “Free Letters for Friends Feeling Blue.” Woolf spent several hours, a few days a week for four weeks, typing letters for his Park Slope, Brooklyn neighbors.
The 37-year-old New York University teacher dubbed his “post-dramatic” street performance “The Console”—short for consolation.
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“Let’s not mourn our mailboxes
Maligned
As vessels of civic futility,” he wrote on Facebook in a poem, as a project manifesto.
“But make renewed use of them.
To sit together (at a distance)
And console one another. And those we love.
Posting letters from the edge
I’ll be at the mailbox all month—with paper and stamps and hand-sanitizer—ready to serve as you’re your medium, your console.
Together, if you’d like, we can take a moment to type a note of consolation, a blue-edged missive to a friend you think could use it.”
By the project’s end, Woolf had typed more than 50 missives. While some letters were dictated, his favorites were the collaborative efforts between himself and the letter-writer, tweaking the intentional prose while forming a unique emotional bond between sender and scribe.
That definitely gets our stamp of approval.
(WATCH one of Brandon’s letter performance in the video below – or visit his website)
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Early results were announced today for clinical trials involving 43,538 volunteers that showed a robust 90% success rate for protecting people against coronavirus.
As part of the Phase–3 trials launched in July by developers Pfizer and BioNTech, the participants from diverse backgrounds in six countries—in the US, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Turkey—received two injections spaced 21 days apart.
The analysis compared the number of cases of COVID-19 among volunteers receiving the vaccine with an approximately equal-sized group of volunteers who got a placebo jab, instead. The researchers reported no contraction of the disease in over 90% of the vaccinated group, so far, with immune protection achieved 28 days after the first dose of the 2-dose schedule.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set a minimum effectiveness bar for COVID-19 vaccines at 50% for drugs seeking approval. This is the first COVID-19 candidate vaccine to produce data exceeding that mark.
The data presented is only an early look into how the new vaccine seems to be performing. Further safety and efficacy data continue to be collected.
Relying on an independent Data Monitoring Committee to analyze the results, Pfizer and BioNTech say they are continuing to accumulate safety data and estimate that a median of two months of such data following the final dose—the amount of safety data specified by the FDA in its guidance for potential Emergency Use Authorization—will be available by the third week of November.
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Based on their current projections, Pfizer would be ready to manufacture globally up to 50 million vaccine doses at the end by the year and “up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the USA’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described the trial results as “extraordinary” in an interview with the Washington Post, and said—given the US firm Moderna uses similar technology in its candidate vaccine—it, “gives you hope we might even have two vaccines.”
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The Texas state capitol of Austin is getting ready for a public transit revolution, with a $7 billion plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestions by providing a variety of different transportation options and infrastructure to the citizens of one of the fastest growing cities in the country.
Along with a new rail system featuring 31 new stops, there will be four high-speed bus routes, neighborhood shuttle services that will take people to and from the stations, and new park and ride areas to encourage city motorists to use the new infrastructure.
“There were three main arguments that were made,” says Austin mayor Steve Adler. “One was congestion. One was climate change. One was mobility equity in our city.”
Proposition A, as it was voted on during the 2020 US Elections, also includes a $450 million plan for adding cycling and walking infrastructure—such as pedestrian bridges, bike lanes, sidewalks, and urban parks—all of which will be put together under the moniker of “Project Connect” that will feature experts in community planning, construction, and engineering, as well advisors from the CapMetro board. Together they will assemble on Jan 1st to work out the details of the program.
The new train stops will service North and South Austin, the airport, downtown, and Colony Park, and a map of the proposed service lines is available on the Capitol Metro website.
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Two previous ballot initiatives involving new transit programs had failed to pass, and Adler says this was a result of “intense public scrutiny and engagement.” The estimated number of cars removed from the streets that plague Austin city drivers with about 107 hours a year of heavy traffic, is currently around 250,000, enough to bring all forms of transport into better harmony with each other.
“It’s going to be a very liberating experience to access more of the city than you could before,” Adam Greenfield, a community, public space, pedestrian, and bicycle advocate based in Austin told Fast Company.
“Austin is a very car-oriented and car-dependent city. More and more people, and more and more leaders, are realizing that we actually need transportation choices.”
According to Peters, around 50% of motorists drive alone in Austin, a figure which the city government would like to see reduced.
Funding is to be raised by a new property tax and by federal carbon-reduction funding programs which will cover around 45% of construction costs according to multiple report.
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Curious Austinites can see a comprehensive list of the new transit services here at the Austin Chronicle.
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Panera Bread has announced that it will update its menus with a series of climate-friendly designations designed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) that helps inform consumers about how their food choices affect global climate change.
The “Cool Food Meals” sticker will appear next to some favorites on Panera Bread’s menu like the Chipotle Chicken Avocado Melt, Fuji Apple Chicken Salad, and Broccoli Cheddar Soup, to signify that the carbon dioxide used to create the ingredients—including from the land used, the energy used in transportation, and in the supply chain—is low enough to be in line with research published by the WRI that aligns agriculture and food-related emissions with the reduction in CO2 emissions needed to meet the 2030 Paris Agreement on climate change.
Just like recommended calories per day, WRI has established a maximum recommended daily carbon footprint for a person’s diet, which is 38 percent smaller than the current average. For breakfast in the United States it amounts to 3.59 kg CO2e/portion and for lunch or dinner it is 5.38kg CO2e/portion.
“People are becoming more aware of climate change and its effects, but many still don’t know what they can do about it. Cool Food Meals helps people understand that taking action is as simple as what we eat,” said Daniel Vennard, Director of Sustainable Diets at WRI.
“A busy parent or a college student—absolutely anyone—can now go into [Panera] and by choosing a Cool Food Meal, they are part of a growing group of people who are building a climate-friendly lifestyle.”
In some ways, more consumers are looking for more climate-oriented eating strategies than in years past according to a small survey of 1,000 Americans aged 18-80, though taste and healthiness are far stronger deciding factors.
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59% of those surveyed said it was important to them that their food be produced in a sustainable manner, though things like carbon emissions, land-use, and water-use were not found to be very important. Overwhelmingly it was pesticide use and affordability.
Most of them ate protein more than any other category (38%), and 58% of participants said they tried to stay away from carbohydrates and sugar. Not exactly the picture of Panera Bread’s menu by any stretch of the imagination, but the WRI hopes more franchises will join in adding their Cool Food stickers to menus—and they’ve had some great success already.
Through WRI’s Cool Foods Initiative, various cities and universities have signed on to the Cool Foods Pledge to try and transform civic food service bodies into ones that reduce the amount of CO2 in the supply chain.
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According to a press release from WRI, preliminary data for 2019 show that Cool Food Pledge members have already reduced their food-related emissions by 3% collectively, which is beyond the course to reach the reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement.
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Quote of the Day: “Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.” – George Bernard Shaw
Photo by: Dollar Gill
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?
Fresh off their recovery from the Endangered Species List, gray wolves are getting another bit of support to ensure their continued recovery, this time from the voters in Colorado.
On Tuesday Coloradans voted to reintroduce wolves into the Northwestern part of the state—and it was a historic proposition because never has a state delegated such a significant wildlife management decision to its citizens.
By a narrow margin of 20,000 votes, it was agreed that the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department should establish a suitable population west of the Rockies’ continental divide by the end of 2023
A big focus of the reintroduction authorities will be to implement the initiative while working alongside the ranchers and homeowners who voted against the resolution.
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Cattle poaching by wolves is being looked at as a problem that could be solved with an insurance program—and wolf-conflict prevention programs are being suggested to help other food producers like farmers avoid unpleasant interactions.
Wolves that were reintroduced into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) in Wyoming—after being hunted to near extinction—have occasionally roamed south into Colorado, which has led some scientists to suggest that a natural expansion down into Colorado will be good for the genetic diversity of the species.
Joel Berger, a wildlife ecologist at Colorado State University, suggested to Nat Geo that 25 years since wolves were reintroduced to the GYE, only one complete pack has ever crossed down into Colorado, and that at that rate it could take a century to see the populations fully recovered.
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Quite contrary to most other animals, like efforts to save the black-footed ferret in Wyoming for example, public opinion on wolves is extremely fiery, with urban voters captured by the animal’s charismatic symbolism as an icon of the wilderness, but who never had to live with them, opposing ranchers, hunters, and rural dwellers seeing them often as destructive pests.
Ecologists hope to dampen some of the mistrust of rural Coloradans by pointing out some of the ecological benefits of having wolves on the landscape. Overly-large herds of elk and mule deer can overgraze fields which leads to soil erosion and stream bank collapse, as well as poorer genetics and greater spread of diseases.
Apex predators like the wolf can mitigate ungulates’ occasional destructive forces, and support other carnivores like wolverines, stoats, eagles, foxes, and more, by leaving kills behind. The plants benefit from this more balanced ecosystem, as well.
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Finally, a presence in the flatlands on the western side of the southern Rocky Mountains will link the northern-dwelling wolves with gray wolves living alone on the border in Mexico, creating an unparalleled opportunity for genetic diversity.
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