The boy after he was found - credit: Mutsa Murombedzi X.
The boy after he was found – credit: Mutsa Murombedzi X.
A 7-year-old boy has survived nearly a week lost on the savannah in Zimbabwe.
Returning home to his rural village on New Year’s Eve, he avoided lions and ornery herbivores while using a clever trick to stave off dehydration. For food, he ate berries.
Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks) received notice of a missing boy on the evening of December 27th.
A statement from ZimParks explained that fellow villagers, police officers, and park rangers organized a search party, but were hindered by heavy rains. On December 30th, human footprints were found that eventually led rescuers to the boy in the early morning hours of the following day.
“Remarkably, it is estimated that he walked through the harsh terrain of the lion-infested Matusadona National Park for 49 kilometers (30 miles) from his village to the point where he was found,” ZimParks said.
“During this period, he survived on wild fruits and would dig a small hole along the dry river bank to access underground water to drink.”
According to the parliamentarian for the province in which Matusadona lies, the boy “was very frail when he was rescued” and “had to be put on [an IV] drip.”
“What saved him is the technique learnt from a young age in dry [and] drought prone areas of drawing water from a dry river bank — digging a mufuku,” the parliamentarian, Mutsa Murombedzi, wrote on X.
She thanked everyone in and around the community who lent their efforts to the search, calling it “a testament to the power of unity, hope, prayer and never giving up.”
Stretching 570 square miles, Matusadona is a vibrant ecosystem where much of the classic African megafauna live, breed, and die in peace. Populations of lions, rhino, buffalo, and elephants flourish, making it a real challenge to avoid encountering them, which as a small boy, one could only imagine the consequences.
His technique of digging a mufuku, sometimes called a “gypsy well” in English, was well remembered, and is a day-1 survival technique for getting uncontaminated drinking water if none is available.
The method is perfectly straightforward. Find a stream or creek where the bank is flat and beach-like. Measure about four hands-width from the water and dig a trench. Smooth down the sides as best as possible.
The river water will eventually seep through the hole, where the gravel, sand, and dirt will help to make the water safer from water-born parasites. The first liter or so of water will be brown and muddy. The more water one scoops out, the clearer it eventually will become.
CELEBRATE This Community Getting Their Little Fellow Back Home…
In a laudable civic accomplishment, all 411 buildings owned and operated by the City of Chicago now either run on renewable energy or offset their emissions through financing renewables across the country.
The news helped ring in the new year and marks three years since the city signed a major agreement to receive solar power from the largest solar farm east of the Mississippi.
Former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot signed an agreement to buy power from Constellation, an electricity supplier, in 2022.
Constellation Energy now furnishes the supply from the 593-megawatt Double Black Diamond solar farm in Sangamon and Morgan counties, about 30 miles from Springfield, which has been under construction since the same year.
Owned and developed by Swift Current Energy, the farm will deliver about 70% of the municipal buildings’ total electricity needs.
“Every Chicagoan interacts with a city-owned building, whether the cultural center, City Hall, Harold Washington Library, O’Hare and Midway (international airports) or your local library. To be able to achieve this milestone on behalf of city residents is exciting,” Angela Tovar, chief sustainability officer for Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune.
The move will reduce the city’s carbon emissions by around 290,000 metric tons—or around the same effect as taking 62,000 vehicles off the roads, according to Grist.org.
However, since 30% of the emissions totals are accounted for by financing for renewable energy rather than renewable energy itself, the move has attracted criticism.
Tovar explained the financing allows time for the city to explore alternative sustainable methods to eventually remove that remaining 30%, such as rooftop solar.
With the Double Black Diamond farm beginning to power the city this year, authorities have reportedly set a new goal of powering all buildings in the city limits with renewable energy by 2035, an ambitious goal that would make it the largest city in America to do so.
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A 53-year-old man was tearing down some old drywall this holiday season when he stumbled upon a time capsule.
It was a Christmas present, wrapped 46 years ago in vintage Disney paper from a bygone era. Meant for a stocking or to be placed under the tree, it was forgotten behind the wall all this time.
Tim King, who runs a construction business, was helping his parents with some home renovations when he found the package.
“Before we closed up the drywall on the wall, I was like, ‘I should probably look and see that there is nothing back there,’ and sure enough, there was a present,” King, from Lombard, Illinois, told KTLA 5.
“So when I pulled that out, it was super old wrapping paper, and then I was like, ‘Oh crap, that has my name on it.’”
According to King’s best guess, since his parents weren’t able to remember anything about it, it must have fallen through a gap in the wall or floor since they used to hide his Christmas presents in the attic above and there have been several additions since then.
Documenting the discovery and unwrapping of the find, King’s Instagram videos accumulated 37,000 views.
Underneath the yellowed wrapping paper was a set of Matchbox Thunder Jets, which King said would have been a great gift since he was 6 when they were bought.
It can be agony for a kid to wait all 25 days to open a present, and if next year one of yours is bellyaching, try reminding them of Illinois’s Timothy King, who waited 46 years.
The elephants like to eat and throw them around - credit: Noah's Ark Zoo
The elephants like to eat and throw them around – credit: Noah’s Ark Zoo
A zoo in England is asking residents to donate their used Christmas trees to help enrich the lives of their residents, be they bear, elephant, or meerkat.
Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol is now in its 5th year of asking for Christmas trees, which are often tossed in landfills following the conclusion of the holidays. They’ve diverted 15,000 Christmas trees from contributing to landfill waste, but the real joy is the Christmas spirit it lends to their resident animals.
The zoo’s curator Chris Wilkinson, said the trees make a real difference in the animals’ lives. Some, like their elephants, like to eat them, while others like the spectacled bears and rhinos, like to forage in between them.
Still others like to rub up against the trees and enjoy the pine scent, while for smaller animals, they provide a paradise of play and exploration.
“These meerkats live as a mob, and they have a group structure,” explains Larry Bush, one of the farm’s wildlife biologists. “So when we create a new stimulation inside their space like these Christmas trees, they’re really curious, they’re foraging in the trees, they’re using all of their senses to explore this new enrichment.”
“For the elephants—their habitat is full of sand, which means we can bury the trees and stand them up to make a whole forest for them to come and explore,” Wilkinson told the BBC. “They’ll eat them a bit, they’ll throw them around, they’ll explore for the food we put in.”
This year they did the same for their spectacled bears, a small member of the species from the Andes Mountains. Planting a forest in their enclosure was an alternative to piling all the trees up in an enormous mass which they say the bears treat like a dog treats a pile of leaves in autumn.
Trees that are dying or too tall are then used as natural flood protection along the slopes of the Calder Valley, where small villages have been ravaged by floods for the last few years.
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Quote of the Day: “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” – Madeleine L’Engle
Photo by: Andrea Riondino
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?
The flag of Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea - public domain
46 years ago today, the Vietnamese army coalition FUNSK, or the Salvation Front, succeeded in storming Phenom Phen, Cambodia, ousting Pol Pot, and halting the Cambodian Genocide. The conflict began less than a decade after the Fall of Saigon, but the Vietnamese forces were still strong enough to reverse attacks on their southeast by the Khmer Rouge, invade the country, and topple its government. They succeeded in just two weeks, proving yet again their remarkable prowess on the field of battle. READ more of why this is good news… (1979)
Bear received his award from the Thin Blue Paw Foundation for locating a missing man while on a walk (Image Thin Blue Paw Foundation)
Bear received his award from the Thin Blue Paw Foundation for locating a missing man while on a walk (Image Thin Blue Paw Foundation)
In a story which reminds us that heroes never really hang up their capes, a retired police dog in the UK saved a missing person on a walk.
The 12-year-old German Shepherd named Bear received the lifesaver award from the Thin Blue Paw Foundation, a charity that helps police dogs and which had previously partially paid for one of Bear’s surgeries.
It happened that on November 28th during a walk aimed at rehabilitating Bear’s stamina following surgery to remove some tumors, Bear’s sense of heroism was rehabilitated as well.
His owners, both retired officers themselves, had taken him to the South Downs—the beautiful green hills of southern England, to celebrate the pooch’s 12th birthday. Julia Pope, Bear’s owner, adopted him after a long career as a general police dog ended in 2020.
“Bear found several people during his working life who probably wouldn’t have survived without him, but he and his handler never got any recognition at the time because they were simply doing their job,” she told the Argus.
During their walk Bear led Julia and her husband Ian into deep brush where a man had fallen down. Wet, immobile, and confused, authorities were already looking for him when Bear found him.
Either the Thin Blue Paw Foundation, or Sussex Police Department got word that one of their former canines had performed an additional rescue post-service career, and Bear was recommended for the Lifesaver Award which was presented during a ceremony at Sussex HQ, something which Julia said was “completely unexpected.”
“For him to get this award now, in his retirement, and for his former handler, Iain, to have been there too, is very special. We’re all super proud of him.”
CELEBRATE This Elderly Dog Who Rescues Elderly People…
The Danjiang Bridge - credit: negativ.com via Zaha Hadid Architects, released
The Danjiang Bridge – credit: negativ.com via Zaha Hadid Architects, released
2025 will see the completion of some amazing buildings, but few will hold the eye as well as the prestige of the Danjiang Bridge in Taiwan—one of the last projects ever overseen by the legendary Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.
Dubbed “The Queen of Curves,” Hadid died in 2016, a year following the completion of the bridge’s design plans. It will be the longest single-span, single-mast, cable-stayed bridge in the world.
– credit: negativ.com via Zaha Hadid Architects, released
With the aim of reducing congestion along another bridge across the Tamsui River, the Danjiang Bridge will host dedicated pedestrian, cycling, and roadways, with room to expand a light rail network across its 3,000-foot-long deck.
The bridge seeks to minimize its visual impact on the still-natural estuarine surroundings by using a single concrete mast erected as slenderly as possible. Rising 200 meters—or around 620 feet, it will bear the strain of two separate lines of cables stretching along the span which will wrap around one side of the mast.
This is referred to as an asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge, and the mast’s placement has been selected to avoid interfering with views of the sunset, while also reducing the impact on both the sensitive estuary ecosystem and boat traffic.
– credit: negativ.com via Zaha Hadid Architects, released
According to the late Hadid’s architectural firm, the Danjian Bridge will reduce through traffic by 30% on an existing bridge upriver, helping to improve Taiwan’s northern coastal traffic network while also enhancing accessibility throughout the region with the Port of Taipei and Taoyuan International Airport.
Personally overseen by Hadid herself, it will be one of the last glimpses of her genius revealed to the world, before she enters fully the annals of the profession’s history.
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Traditional dance in El Salvador, an activity that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago - credit: President of El Salvador, via Flickr CC 1.0.
Traditional dance in El Salvador, an activity that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago – credit: President of El Salvador, via Flickr CC 1.0.
GNN has reported several times since the end of 2023 about falling violent crime rates across American cities. But the latest homicide statistics coming out of neighboring El Salvador are truly something to celebrate.
Put simply, the Bukele Administration has turned the country from the most murderous in Latin America to the safest, across a single 5-year term.
With a rate of 1.9 per 100,000 inhabitants and a total homicide count of 119 during 2024, El Salvador is safer than many major cities in America.
It represents a 98% drop over 9 years.
President Nayib Bukele took power in 2019 and has enjoyed the backing of a friendly legislature and supreme court that has granted him extraordinary executive powers to combat paramilitary-like street gangs that controlled parts of the country.
Since 2022, the country has been under a state of emergency, during which time 83,000 arrests were made, and national policing forces took the fight to the gangs. Constitutional rights were suspended in some cases, and many were charged and imprisoned without due process of law, something the administration has been criticized for.
It’s difficult to argue with the results, however, since in 2015, El Salvador witnessed 6,656 homicides, placing it among war zones as one of the most dangerous countries on the planet.
Residents of the capital San Salvador told AP News that they can safely walk the streets again, where before the gangs controlled the movement of people in and out of neighborhoods.
Riding an enormous wave of popularity, Bukele won his February 2024 reelection campaign at a canter.
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Everyone loves to watch hummingbirds—tiny, brightly colored blurs that dart about, hovering at flowers and pugnaciously defending their ownership of a feeder.
But to the scientists who study them, hummingbirds offer much more than an entertaining spectacle. Their small size and blazing metabolism mean they live life on a knife-edge, sometimes needing to shut down their bodies almost completely just to conserve enough energy to survive the night—or to migrate thousands of miles, at times across open ocean.
Their nectar-rich diet leads to blood sugar levels that would put a person in a coma. And their zipping, zooming flight sometimes generates g-forces high enough to make a fighter pilot black out. The more researchers look, the more surprises lurk within those tiny bodies, the smallest in the avian world.
“They’re the only bird in the world that can fly upside down and backwards,” says Holly Ernest, a conservation ecologist with the University of Wyoming. “They drink pure sugar and don’t die of diabetes.”
Ernest is one of a small number of researchers studying how hummingbirds cope with the extreme demands of their lifestyles. Here’s some of what scientists have learned about the unique adaptations of hummingbirds.
Put in the work
For years, most researchers had assumed that hummingbirds spent only about 30% of their day engaged in the energy-intensive business of flitting from flower to flower and guzzling nectar, while resting most of the other time. But when physiological ecologist Anusha Shankar looked closely, she found they’re often working a lot harder than that.
Shankar, now of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Hyderabad, India, tried to figure out how broad-billed hummingbirds in Southern Arizona spend their days. Using a mix of experimental methods, she measured the birds’ metabolic rate during various activities and estimated their total daily energy expenditure. Adding in previous published data, Shankar was able to calculate the per-minute energy cost of perching, flying, and hovering—basically a bird’s three options for spending time.
She then inferred how much time the birds must have spent feeding versus perching over the course of a day.
“We ended up finding that it’s super variable,” Shankar says. During the early part of the summer when flowers are abundant, birds could meet their daily energy needs with as little as a few hours of feeding, spending as much as 70% of the day just perching, she found. But when flowers became scarcer after the arrival of the summer monsoon rains, birds at one site perched just 20% of the time and used the rest of the day for feeding.
“That’s 13 hours a day!” Shankar says. “There’s no way I can spend 13 hours a day running. I don’t know how they do it.”
Seriously chill
Hummingbirds have a trick to help them eke out their energy reserves. When a bird is in danger of running out of energy, it may go torpid at night, dropping its body temperature nearly to that of the surrounding air—sometimes just a few degrees above freezing. While in torpor, the bird appears almost comatose, unable to respond quickly to stimuli, and breathing only intermittently. The strategy can save up to 95% of hourly metabolic costs during cold nights, Shankar has calculated. That can be essential after days when a bird has fed less than usual, such as after a thunderstorm. It also helps birds save energy to pack on fat before migration.
Shankar is now studying which parts of their physiology hummingbirds prioritize during torpor, by looking to see which gene products they can’t do without. “If you’re a hummingbird functioning at 10% of your normal metabolism, what is that 10% that’s keeping you alive?” she asks.
One set of genes that the birds seem to leave untouched are those responsible for their internal clock. “It’s important for them to do things at the right time when they’re in torpor,” Shankar says. To be ready to meet the day, for example, the birds begin to rouse from their torpor about an hour before sunrise, well before visible light cues.
A hummingbird hanging upside down – credit Matt Cummings CC 2.0. via Flickr
Deal with the sugar
To fuel their sky-high metabolic rate, hummingbirds suck down about 80% of their body weight in nectar each day. That’s the equivalent of a 150-pound person drinking nearly a hundred 20-ounce Cokes daily—and nectar is often much sweeter than a soda.
The human gut is incapable of absorbing sugar that fast, which is one reason why consuming too much soda or Halloween candy upsets the stomach, says Ken Welch, a comparative physiologist at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. Hummingbirds cope with the onslaught by having leaky guts so that sugars can enter the bloodstream between gut cells instead of only through them. This gets sugar out of the gut quickly, before it can cause upset. That rapid transport, and probably other adaptations as well, allows hummingbirds to reach blood sugar levels as much as six times higher than those seen in people, Welch says.
That much sugar in the blood leads to serious physiological problems in people. It causes more sugar molecules to glom onto body proteins, a process known as glycation; in the long run, excess glycation causes many of the complications of diabetes, such as nerve damage. It’s still unclear how hummingbirds avoid the problems of glycation, Welch says, but clues are beginning to emerge. One study, for example, found that bird proteins contain fewer of the amino acids most prone to glycation than mammal proteins, and those that remain are often tucked deep within the protein where they’re less exposed to circulating sugars.
Other, as yet unknown strategies to cope with high blood sugar may one day yield practical benefits for managing diabetes in people. “There could be a gold mine in the genome of the hummingbird,” says Welch.
Do a metabolic flip
By the end of its nightly fast, a hummingbird has nearly depleted its sugar stores—which poses an opposite metabolic challenge. “How does it wake up and fly?” Welch asks. “There’s nothing but fat available to burn.”
Hummingbirds have evolved to be remarkably nimble at switching their metabolism from sugar-burning to fat-burning, he has found. “This requires an enormous shift in the biochemical pathways that are involved,” Welch says—and it happens in mere minutes, far more quickly than other organisms can manage. “If we could have that kind of control over our fuel use, we’d love that.”
Sugar isn’t the only challenge posed by a nectar-rich diet. After all, nectar is mostly water—and birds that drink in so much liquid must get rid of most of it, without losing electrolytes. As a result, hummingbird kidneys are highly adapted to recapture electrolytes before they are excreted. “They pee almost distilled water,” says Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecophysiologist now retired from the University of Wyoming.
But that brings a further problem: If a hummingbird kept producing dilute urine overnight, it would die of dehydration before morning. To avoid that, hummingbirds shut down their kidneys every night. “They go into what, in a human, would be considered acute renal failure,” says Martinez del Rio. “Hummingbirds have to do this, or they would [pee] themselves to death.”
Fly higher—gradually
The metabolic demands on a hummingbird are tough enough at sea level. But many species live at high elevations, where thin air contains less oxygen and offers less resistance to push against when hovering. Consider the giant hummingbird, the world’s largest, which can live in the Andes Mountains at elevations over 14,000 feet—higher than many helicopters can fly. To cope with these conditions, the birds have evolved more hemoglobin-rich blood, says Jessie Williamson, an ornithologist at Cornell University.
But some of the birds face an even steeper challenge, as Williamson found. Giant hummingbirds are large enough that researchers can attach satellite tracking tags, as well as smaller geolocators. So Williamson and her colleagues decided to fit the birds with trackers. After thousands of hours spent trying to capture birds with netting, the researchers managed to attach trackers to 57 birds using custom-made harnesses of elastic jewelry cord.
Though they recovered tracking data from only eight birds, even that tiny sample had a big surprise: Some of the birds lived in the high Andes year-round, while others—which turned out to be a separate, hitherto unrecognized species—migrate to the Andes annually from breeding grounds along the coast of Chile. That means they face not only the obvious challenges of a long migration—a round trip of roughly 5,000 miles—but also the need to adapt to thinner air as they travel.
Their secret? Do it gradually. “It looks a lot like how human mountaineers summit something like Mount Everest, with bursts of climbing and pauses to acclimatize,” Williamson says. “The journey takes months.”
As tracking technology becomes lighter and cheaper, researchers like Williamson hope to follow smaller hummingbird species as well. That, together with other progress in research technology, may offer plenty of new surprises about the biology of these tiny, amazing birds.
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Quote of the Day: “Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Photo by: Kevin Delvecchio
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?
62 years ago today, Mutual of Omaha’s ‘Wild Kingdom’ was first broadcast on NBC. Hosted by American zoologist Marlin Perkins and filmed by Jim Fowler, the program won 4 Emmys for Outstanding Program Achievement during its original runnings on NBC every Sunday. ‘Wild Kingdom’ brought the wilds of the Amazon River, the Serengeti, and more into the living rooms of millions of Americans. Just recently, GNN reported on the successful launch of a third reboot of the show, hosted by Perkins’ eventual replacement, Peter Gros. WATCH an episode below… (1963)
People wanting to learn a new language should make sure they get plenty of sleep, suggests a new study.
Shut-eye is critical for all sorts of reasons, but an international team of scientists has discovered a new incentive for getting eight hours of sleep every night: it helps the brain to store and learn a new language.
The study, led by the University of South Australia, revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain “significantly” improves our ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules.
In an experiment with 35 native English-speaking adults, researchers tracked the brain activity of participants learning a miniature language called Mini Pinyin that is based on Mandarin but with similar grammatical rules to English.
Mini Pinyin contains 32 verbs and 25 nouns, including 10 human entities, 10 animals and five objects. Overall, the language contains 576 unique sentences.
Half of the participants learned Mini Pinyin in the morning and then returned in the evening to have their memory tested.
The other half learned Mini Pinyin in the evening and then slept in the laboratory overnight while their brain activity was recorded. Researchers tested their progress in the morning.
The results showed that the act of sleeping “significantly” aided the learning of the new language. Those who didn’t sleep between their lessons and their test performed much worse that the group who got to sleep after lessons, according to the findings published in the Journal of Neuroscience
Lead researcher Dr. Zachariah Cross says sleep-based improvements were linked to the coupling of slow oscillations and sleep spindles—brainwave patterns that synchronize during NREM sleep.
“This coupling likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage,” said Dr. Cross, who did his PhD at the University of South Australia but is now based at Northwestern University in the US.
“Post-sleep neural activity showed unique patterns of theta oscillations associated with cognitive control and memory consolidation, suggesting a strong link between sleep-induced brainwave co-ordination and learning outcomes.”
University of South Australia researcher Dr. Scott Coussens says the study underscores the importance of sleep in learning complex linguistic rules.
“By demonstrating how specific neural processes during sleep support memory consolidation, we provide a new perspective on how sleep disruption impacts language learning.
“Sleep is not just restful; it’s an active, transformative state for the brain.”
The researchers say their findings could also potentially inform treatments for people with language-related impairments—including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and aphasia—as these patients experience greater sleep disturbances than other adults.
Research on both animals and humans shows that slow oscillations improve neural plasticity, the brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to experiences and injury.
“From this perspective, slow oscillations could be increased via methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation to accelerate aphasia-based speech and language therapy,” added Cross.
Ramnaresh Dubey finds two diamonds in his field – via SWNS
Ramnaresh Dubey finds two diamonds in his field – via SWNSge
A poor Indian farmer has seen his fortunes change in the blink of an eye after he found two diamonds worth almost $50,000 in his field.
Ramnaresh Dubey had been sifting through dirt at a shallow depth for the past six months—and his luck finally paid off with the remarkable find.
The two valuable stones—one weighing an astonishing 8.30 carats—were found in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
Mr. Dubey took the diamonds to be assessed by Indian government officials, who valued them together at $46,841 (£37,261).
Videos show the gleaming diamonds displayed on a tray at the diamond office, with the proud Mr. Dubey looking on.
Officials claimed both of the farmer’s diamonds were off-color, decreasing the market value. The small one weighed a little less than one carat.
The resident of the village called Ramkhiriya in the Panna district had to obtain permission to mine gemstones on his farmland—well worth the paperwork.
The 2 diamonds found in Indian farmer’s field – via SWNS
He intends to use the proceeds from the diamonds to buy land and open a shop, whilst continuing to mine for more gems.
Diamond officer Ravi Patel confirmed that the diamonds would be auctioned in an upcoming sale, with a royalty fee of 11.5 percent deducted from profits.
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Here’s an idea: get a jump on holiday decorating next year by dumpster-diving for brand new Christmas items headed for the landfills.
Melanie Diaz recovers the magic of the holidays from behind department stories, saving tons of money while helping the environment.
The dumpster diver says she has saved thousands of dollars by retrieving gifts, seasonal toys, wreaths, artificial trees, and ornaments from the trash bins behind Michaels and TJ Maxx.
A resident of Tampa, Florida, she’s spent the past two years dumpster diving in December and January to uncover discarded holiday treasures that would otherwise go to the landfill.
“It is my favorite time going dumpster diving at the end of the year because they start throwing out a lot of Christmas stuff,” said the 22-year-old.
“I love saving everything so I can put it in my house and decorate it for the next year.”
She also visits the dumpsters behind popular retailers like Burlington, Jo-Ann Stores, Pop Shelf, and Home Goods.
SWNS
Some of her biggest jackpots happen in January, when stores begin clearing out their leftover holiday inventory.
“I went dumpster-diving at the TJ Maxx store, and I found a lot,” Diaz explained. “It was full to the top.”
SWNSMelanie Diaz / SWNS
From ten wreaths salvaged at Michael’s—worth approximately $400—to $500 Christmas trees, Diaz has curated a festive collection.
She’s also retrieved puzzles and dog toys from TJ Maxx, saving around $200, and countless other holiday staples, including advent calendars and stockings.
The abundance was so overwhelming, Diaz had to enlist help. “I even had to bring my family to help me because it was too much,” she recalled.
“I remember we took everything into cars, and the next day we did a garage sale. We also kept most of the stuff. It was incredible.”
Play-Doh advent calendars – Melanie Diaz / SWNS
Her discoveries also include festive clothing and kitchenware.
And it’s not just about saving money and helping the environment. Diaz enjoys sharing her finds with others: “I love giving stuff to my friends and to my family.”
Quote of the Day: “Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt
Photo by: Nick Fancher for Unsplash+ (cropped)
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?
The Large Staircase of The Garnier Opera, in Paris - credit CC 3.0. BY-SA Benh Lieu Song.
150 years ago today was the inauguration show of the Garnier Opera in Paris, one of the most famous of its kind in all Europe. Built by Charles Garnier at the behest of Napoleon III, it was renamed the Palais Garnier for its extraordinary opulence, a characteristic demonstrable by the 91 photographs of its exterior and interior on its Wikipedia page, double the number of images for the Wikipedia page of Africa. It was the primary theatre of the Paris Opera and its associated Paris Opera Ballet until 1989 when it was replaced by the Opéra Bastille. READ more about this famous building… (1875)
Artist’s illustration of a neutron star emitting radio beam from its magnetic environment that splits into multiple paths and looks like flickering from a distance – Credit: Daniel Liévano / MIT News
Artist’s illustration of a neutron star emitting radio beam from its magnetic environment that splits into multiple paths and looks like flickering from a distance – Credit: Daniel Liévano / MIT News
Mysterious radio bursts from outer space first discovered in 2007, last only a millisecond but can carry an enormous amount of energy—enough to briefly outshine entire galaxies.
Since that first fast radio burst, or FRB, astronomers have detected thousands more, whose locations range from within our own galaxy to as far as 8 billion light-years away—yet, exactly how these brief and brilliant explosions were launched had remained a highly-contested unknown.
Now, astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have pinned down the origin of at least one of these cosmic radio flares using a novel technique that could do the same for other FRBs.
In their new study, published this week in the journal Nature, the team focused on a previously discovered fast radio burst that was detected from a galaxy about 200 million light-years away.
They zeroed in to determine the precise location of the radio signal by analyzing its “scintillation,” which is similar to how stars twinkle in the night sky.
The scientists studied changes in the FRB’s brightness and determined that the burst must have originated from the immediate vicinity of its source, rather than much further out, as some models have predicted.
The fleeting fireworks known as FRB 20221022A exploded from a region that is extremely close to a rotating neutron star, up to 10,000 kilometers away—less than the distance between New York and Singapore.
At such close range, the burst likely emerged from the neutron star’s magnetosphere—a highly magnetic region immediately surrounding the extremely compacted star.
The team’s findings provide the first conclusive evidence that a FRB can originate from the magnetosphere immediately surrounding an ultracompact object, such as a neutron star or possibly a black hole.
“In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce,” said the study’s lead author Kenzie Nimmo, a postdoc in MIT’s Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “There’s been a lot of debate about whether this bright radio emission could even escape from that extreme plasma.”
“Around these highly magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnetars, atoms can’t exist — they would just get torn apart by the magnetic fields,” says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT.
“The exciting thing here is, we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, is twisting and reconfiguring such that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across the universe.”
Detections of FRBs have soared since 2020, thanks to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME).
The radio telescope array comprises four large, stationary receivers, each shaped like a half-pipe, that are tuned to detect radio emissions within a range that is highly sensitive to fast radio bursts.
The exact physics driving the FRBs have remained unclear. Some models predict that they should come from the turbulent magnetosphere immediately surrounding a compact object, while others predict that the bursts should originate much further out, as part of a shockwave that propagates away from the central object.
To determine where FRBs arise, the MIT team considered scintillation, the effect that occurs when light from a small bright source such as a star, filters through some medium, such as a galaxy’s dense gas.
As the starlight filters through the gas, it bends in ways that make it appear, to a distant observer, as if the star is twinkling. The smaller or the farther away an object is, the more it twinkles.
The light from larger or closer objects, such as planets in our own solar system, experience less bending, and therefore do not appear to twinkle.
The team reasoned that if they could estimate the degree to which an FRB scintillates, they might determine the relative size of the region from where the FRB originated. The smaller the region, the closer in the burst would be to its source, and the more likely it is to have come from a magnetically turbulent environment. The larger the region, the farther the burst would be, giving support to the idea that FRBs stem from far-out shockwaves.
To test their idea, the researchers looked to FRB 20221022A, a signal that lasts about two-thousandths of one second, which is average for FRBs, in terms of its brightness.
Collaborators at McGill University in Canada found that it exhibited one standout property: The light from the burst was highly polarized, with the angle of polarization tracing a smooth S-shaped curve.
The pattern is interpreted as evidence that the FRB emission site is rotating—a characteristic previously observed in pulsars, which are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars.
This is a first for FRBs, suggesting that the signal may have arisen from the close-in vicinity of a neutron star.
The MIT team realized that if FRB 20221022A originated from close to a neutron star, they should be able to prove this, using scintillation.
Dr. Nimmo and her colleagues analysed data from CHIME and observed steep variations in brightness that signalled scintillation — in other words, the FRB was twinkling.
They confirmed that there is gas somewhere between the telescope and FRB that is bending and filtering the radio waves.
The team then determined where the gas could be located, confirming that gas within the FRB’s host galaxy was responsible for some of the scintillation observed. The gas acted as a “natural lens” – allowing the researchers to zoom in on the FRB site and determine that the burst originated from an extremely small region, estimated to be about 10,000 kms wide.
“This means that the FRB is probably within hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the source,” said Nimmo. “That’s very close. For comparison, we would expect the signal would be more than tens of millions of kilometers away if it originated from a shockwave, and we would see no scintillation at all.”
“Zooming in to a 10,000-kilometer region, from a distance of 200 million light years, is like being able to measure the width of a DNA helix, which is about 2 nanometers wide, on the surface of the moon,” Dr. Masui said.
The findings prove for the first time that FRBs can originate from very close to a neutron star, in highly chaotic magnetic environments.
“These bursts are always happening, and CHIME detects several a day,” Masui added. “There may be a lot of diversity in how and where they occur, and this scintillation technique will be really useful in helping to disentangle the various physics that drive these bursts.”
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Sophie the cat reunited after 7 years with Glenn Stupar's daughter – Photos by Glenn Stupar
Sophie the cat (before and after) was reunited with Glenn Stupar’s daughter 7 years later – Photos by Glenn Stupar
All his 14-year-old daughter Keisha wanted for Christmas was a cat. So in 2014 her dad Glenn Stupar adopted a beautiful calico from a local animal rescue in Edmonton, Canada.
The family renamed her Sophie and she lived happily in the their apartment for three years, until the fluffy feline escaped from the balcony.
It was days before Christmas, and they searched and searched but never found her.
Now, 7 years later—and days before Christmas—the family, including Keisha’s fiance, were sitting around reminiscing about the cat when they received a phone call from Community Cats Edmonton.
Sophie had been found living outside a car wash just 3 miles from their home.
Car wash employees and a couple living nearby, had been feeding the cat for more than a year—and the nonprofit group had spent months attempting to capture the wily creature. Finally they succeeded.
They checked to see if the cat had a microchip—the existence of which the family was unaware—and they soon were all reunited after thinking their fur-ball was gone forever.
World Plogging Championship 2023-By Stefano Jeantet (press release)
World Plogging Championship 2023-By Stefano Jeantet (press release)
An eco-friendly fitness trend that started in 2016 is now growing in popularity with its own world championship competition in Italy.
Originating in Sweden, when Erik Ahlström began picking up litter while jogging in Stockholm, the term is a combination of the Swedish word plocka, which means “to pick up”, and the English word “jogging”.
The activity of picking up litter while on your outdoor jog, has spread to other countries, and now an estimated 2 million people ‘plog’ regularly in over 100 countries.
The workout adds bending, squatting, and stretching to the main action of running—with ‘pliking’ being the latest offshoot for hikers who want to clean up the trail.
The third annual World Plogging Championship in 2023, resulted in approximately 6,600 pounds of litter (3,000 kg) removed from the environment around the city of Genoa.
Later this year, a British team will be traveling to the competition with the goal of running the farthest and picking up the most rubbish.
World Plogging Championship 2023
Claire Petrie recently kick-started her training with community events in her hometown of Bristol.
“I love that you help the environment, the planet and meet new people,” said the 48-year-old personal trainer who became passionate about combining health and the environment.
“We want to grow plogging in as many cities as possible.”
Claire Petrie trains for plogging on the Great Britain team –via SWNS
The four members of the Great Britain team include Cherrelle Amo and Luke Douglas-Home, from London, and Chris Broadbent, from Devon, who have launched their training with community events in London and Exeter.
Supported by environmental organizations, A Future Without Rubbish and Planet Earth Games, the team is encouraging members of the public to get involved, regardless of their fitness levels.
“We advertise it all on Facebook where we tell everyone where to meet,” Claire told SWNS news.
“We run 2k and then we stop and litter pick a certain area and then we leave all the bags by the bins–and then we run back,” said Claire, who then contacts the local council to collect the bags.
“It is very enjoyable and we make sure everyone is welcomed.”
During the past year, Claire’s group, which plans to expand into other areas in Bristol but currently has an average of 9 people joining in, collected 220 pounds of trash (100 kg).
Since 2021, the World Plogging Championships have taken place on paved paths and roads according to the principles of trail and mountain running. After their 2023 event, they reported keeping 6 million grams of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere by correctly separating and recycling the waste they collected.
Luke, who is founder of A Future Without Rubbish, has been plogging for many years, covering the UK’s coastline and canals.
Claire Petrie plogging group in Bristol England – via SWNS
“Collecting rubbish and putting it in the bin is a tiny action – something we can all do, and it’s this idea of working together than has such an impact,” said Luke. “It’s not just about running; it’s about making a tangible positive long-term impact on our planet.”
Chris, who founded Planet Earth Games, hosts monthly plogging events and confirms that the British team will keep the competition as green as possible by avoiding air travel and, instead, taking the train to Genoa.
“People are looking for a way to contribute to a healthier environment and plogging is the perfect activity to make an immediate impact and support your own physical and mental wellbeing with like-minded people.”
