A young Connecticut student is vowing classmates, students, and even state senators with her work designing cheap new air filters for classrooms.
Her name is Eniola Shokunbi, and before she reaches her goal of becoming President of the United States, she wanted to help keep classrooms free from cold and flu viruses circulating through the air.
In fifth grade, Shokunbi led some of her classmates in a design and build project at the Commodore MacDonough STEM Academy in Middletown, CT. Her idea was to create an air filter to clear the air of viruses circulating within aerosols through classrooms, which she managed with just a box fan, 4 furnace filters, duct tape, and cardboard.
With help from scientists at the University of Connecticut, she and her classmates tested and gathered results on the air filter’s potency and then took a field trip to the EPA, where the results were presented.
“This stuff is more effective than a lot of the commercial products on the market; it’s a lot cheaper and a lot more effective,” State Senator Matt Lesser told NBC CT.
Shokunbi was in the room when the Connecticut State Bond Commission unanimously approved $11.5 million for the assembly and installation of the air filter system for other schools in the state, which the now-sixth grader said furthered her goal of getting these filters installed in every classroom in America.
“I want them to go to school knowing that they’re safe, that they’re healthy, that they can learn,” Shokunbi said. “I really love explaining to people and seeing their faces, seeing them realize that this could change so many lives.”
WATCH the story below from NBC CT…
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Thomas Rice's pickup truck - credit, released by the family.
Thomas Rice’s pickup truck – credit, released by the family.
A man who visited Syracuse, North Carolina had his pickup truck stolen—along with his father’s ashes still lodged under the back seat.
Mr. Tom Rice had driven into town for his nephew’s wedding, and parked his blue Ford F-150 SuperCrew in a garage adjacent to the Courtyard Marriot on Fayette Street.
It was a beautiful mid-fall evening, and Rice, accompanied by his golden retriever Marshall, thought he’d walk the necessary blocks to the venue rather than drive.
After a night of fun and celebration, Rice woke up to a disaster—his truck was simply gone, along with his father’s ashes.
“I walked out and it was gone. I came in just to make sure it had [sic] been towed for some reason, and nobody knew anything, and I called 911,” Rice told WSYR, Channel 9.
His father had died on October 9th, nine days prior to the wedding. Rice had just been up to Connecticut where his father lived to retrieve the ashes before driving down to NC. He said that there was a space under the back seat where the box containing them fit perfectly, with no chance of them jostling around.
“It just hit me that everything was gone,” Rice said, adding that there were also Christmas presents and other memorabilia of his father’s. “My mom’s interred at the church down in North Carolina in a columbarium. That’s where dad is going to be interred, or was going to be interred. So we want to get those ashes back in any way we could.”
Fortunately, the truck was found over that weekend—abandoned on Onondaga Street in Syracuse. Either for reasons of decency or because they realized they weren’t of value, the thieves, who despite ransacking the contents of the truck, left the ashes behind along with many of his father’s other effects including his documents, and scale models of some of the planes he worked on as an engineer at Northrup Grumman.
Now that the ashes are recovered, Rice’s family plans to have his father’s service in November.
“We’ve got some pretty interesting stuff for his eulogy about all of these fantastic things he did in his life, all of these adventures,” Syracuse.com. “And even after he passed away, he had one more adventure in store.”
WATCH the story below from Local Syr Channel 9 News…
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Quote of the Day: “People often say, ‘I’m not interested in politics’. They might as well say, ‘I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms’.” – Martha Gellhorn
Photo by: Ronda Darby (cropped)
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Missing only a hand, a life-sized statue of a Roman citizen unearthed recently in Bulgaria is about as pristine as they come.
Found during construction work near the walls of the old fortress in the city of Varna, it depicts a middle-aged man holding a scroll and wearing a Roman-era toga—and thanks to a carved inscription, they even know his name.
The construction contractor, Georgi Kraychev, notified museum authorities after the shocking moment they came across the statue buried in the dirt.
Made of white marble, it had been remarkably well-preserved. Connected to both the Greek and Roman worlds, the city of Varna was once known as Odessos in antiquity.
Reflecting this heritage, the Roman individual was described on the base of the statue in Greek writing: “G(aius) Marius Hermogenes.”
Overly excitable fans of Roman history (including me) may wonder whether the statue bears some relevance to the Roman statesman, general, reformer, and seven-time consul, Gaius Marius—one of the most influential figures of the late Republican era.
However, the Sophia Globe reports that the statue likely dates to the 3rd century when the Roman Empire was still unified between East and West—and very much included Bulgaria.
Photo by Varna Regional History Museum
This would have been nearly 400 years after Marius’ death, and Roman naming customs can be frustratingly repetitive. For example, Gaius Marius’ son was also named Gaius Marius.
The Varna Black Sea Regional History Museum said that the statue is awaiting cleaning and restoration.
Recently, GNN reported that excavations in the sewers of the classical city of Heraclea Syntica, also in Bulgaria but near the border with Greece, turned up another remarkably well-preserved marble statue.
Marble statue of Greek God Hermes found at Heraclea Syntica – Photo from Archaeologia Bulgaric Facebook (cropped)
That one depicted not a human, but the messenger god, Hermes, and therefore was probably connected with Alexander the Great, the king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon.
Evidently, Bulgarian soils are part-sand and part-marble wonders.
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An international team of neurosurgeons and organ transplant specialists recently discovered that a brain can be revived 50 minutes after being removed from the body if connected to a liver.
It was a bit of a ghoulish experiment, but the results could be vital to improving common resuscitation methods in cases of ischemic heart attack, one of the most common causes of death worldwide.
It’s generally the case that a brain can survive in an ischemic state for no more than 5 to 8 minutes. In a model of cardiac arrest, when blood isn’t reaching the brain, first responders have mere minutes to act because the brain is so heavily dependent on oxygenated blood. The neurons can die without it in the time it takes for an ambulance to arrive.
Even in cases where victims of ischemic cardiac arrest are resuscitated, the minutes without oxygen can lead to severe brain damage.
Researchers at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou used a life support system to try to restore neural activities in pigs’ brains 50 minutes after removing them from the body.
The goal was to test conditions in which that 5 to 8-minute window might be expanded.
The following report contains descriptions of a somewhat gory procedure on an animal that some readers may find distressing, and therefore discretion is advised.
Aged pigs already set to be put to sleep had their brains and livers removed and connected to an artificial heart and lungs by a German/Cleveland/Chinese study team.
The researchers designated their method of approach “ex vivo brain maintenance technology” in other words, a system whereby if a person’s heart fails, their brain is kept alive on an artificial one long enough for a heart transplant to occur, a situation that may happen to someone awaiting a transplant.
They called the specific procedure they carried out on the pig a “liver-assisted brain normothermic machine perfusion (NMP).” They found that the connection of the liver to the artificial heart greatly improved the condition of the brain post-resuscitation, increased activity in the cortex, and increased survival rates in the neurons.
Brain waves returned 50 minutes following removal from the body in the brains treated with NMP with the liver compared to those without.
According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, this study is the first to reveal the crucial role of the liver in repairing brain damage after cardiac arrest.
An analysis revealed that the mechanism responsible for this may be the liver’s crucial role as the producer of ketones in the body, a key nutrient for brain metabolism produced in the liver from the oxidation of fat.
“The ex vivo liver-assisted brain NMP model provides a unique platform for further investigating the maximum ischemic tolerance of the brain, and the roles of other organs in post-CA brain injury,” He Xiaoshun wrote in a corresponding paper on the discovery, who also told Xinhua that their work would help improve or at least better inform transplant and heart attack medicine.
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Artists come from all corners, in all shapes and sizes, and from every race and religion; John Pavart and his painted coconuts are a perfect example.
The former opal miner turned painter from Australia’s state of New South Wales has been painting coconut husks for years, leaving them around the beaches of Magnetic Island for tourists and travelers to find.
It’s become one of the chief charms of the island, even though Pavart started it on a lark.
“I just happened to have a bit of art gear on me and thought I’d pick one up and paint it,” he said, detailing the phenomenon’s remarkably simple origin. “I put it down and someone picked it up and they seemed to like it, so I just kept doing it.”
They often depict sea life and beachscapes, and by now the thin “grey nomad,” a term used to describe Australians in their 50s who move around for months out of the year, believes he’s painted over 750 of them.
“Lots of people have found one and it puts a smile on someone’s face,” Mr. Pavart told ABC News Au. “I’ve got them in Brazil, Spain, England—they’re all over the world.
Pavart’s coconuts are now so in demand he occasionally has to leave Magnetic Island for Queensland, the nearest continental shoreline, to look for more.
Some of the coconuts have made it all the way to Spain – credit John Pavart, supplied to ABC News.
Once painted, he will leave a picture as a clue on a Facebook page he started to trigger a free treasure hunt, which routinely attracts many of the kids in the island’s town.
A philanthropic Texan is currently charting a 1,500-mile trail that covers all of his home state tip to tail.
From the bayou to El Paso, he envisions it as a trail worthy to be counted among America’s current collection of long-distance routes like the Appalachian Trail and Continental Divide Trail.
Describing it as “rugged, rural, remote, and romantic,” Charlie Gandy, a retired community designer and state representative, announced plans for the trail next month, calling it the XTX, or Cross Texas Trail.
Gandy has partnered with the non-profit advocacy and fundraising group Bike Texas to plan a route across the state that crosses parks, follows rural gravel roads, skirts the cities, and passes through all the terrain shades that Texas has to offer.
“As a native Texan, I’m a 66-year-old guy who likes to challenge myself to big, hairy goals and adventures—and it seemed to me like it was time for Texas to have its own Pacific Crest-type adventure route,” Mr. Gandy told Fox News Digital.
The current working route starts on the eastern border of the state near Beaumont before launching through bayous in a more-or-less flat decline from the hills north of Houston through a gap between San Antonio and Austin coupled with a loop above New Braunfels.
Completing the detour, the trail starts to climb slightly north through the desert before plunging down into Big Bend National Park in a large horseshoe curve that eventually leads directly north to the highest peak in the state, and westward to El Paso and the finish line.
Gandy is attempting to gather sponsors for the creation of an organization that will provide all the needed digital and hard-copy literature and publicity for the launch of the trail, as well as find people willing to set up water stations in desert areas.
On the way, Gandy and Bike Texas have been inundated with enthusiastic Texans offering their own opinions of where the route should take—often directly through their own land. 96% of Texas is privately owned, and some landowners want to link their properties to the legacy of the next great American trail.
Devils River, the half-way point of the XTX – credit, mlhradio, CC 2.0 via Flickr.
While Gandy is in it for the adventure, Robin Stallings, executive director of Bike Texas, is working to ensure the trail can be easily accessed by cyclists.
“It’s convenient to Houston. It’s convenient to San Antonio and Austin. And of course, it ends up in El Paso. So I think that’s a real opportunity for all these urban Texans to get out there,” Stallings told Fox News Digital.
The route is currently still being formulated but, Gandy is ensuring it passes through historic towns like La Grange and Chicken Ranch, and that the whole route is passable on horseback.
He points out that both the Pacific Crest Trail, running from Mexico to Vancouver, and the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, started as one man’s passion project. He hopes that he will be remembered as one of these crazy hiking enthusiasts who had a dream and forced it to become a reality.
The estimated completion date of the route will be spring 2025.
WATCH a short video of the first 300 miles…
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Quote of the Day: “It is not length of life, but depth of life.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Photo by: Azrul Aziz
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This is Daniel Kinsella, a 16-year-old Liverpudlian who recently rescued three separate groups of paddleboarders in the family’s dinghy.
North Wales Live in the UK suggested it may have felt to young Daniel like he was settling up for a bill he owed—his own life having been saved twice as a victim of childhood cancer.
His love of the sea—the passion that saw him get certified as a junior yacht pilot—was developed through repeated trips to the sea on the Welsh island of Anglesey; a way to try and salvage some part of his childhood from being remembered solely by trips to chemotherapy appointments.
The story started at Christmas in 2012, when at just four years old, bruising, yellowed skin, and rashes saw Daniel rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with leukemia. A long spell of chemo awaited Daniel, and as part of the treatment plan, the hospital doctors at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital recommended a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter).
Daniel’s parents Mike and Michelle were hesitant. Picturing their family’s tradition of weekend summertime trips to go camping next to Trearddur Bay on the Isle of Anglesey, they couldn’t bear to imagine Daniel staying dry because of the PICC while his friends and cousins splashed around in the water.
Instead, they insisted on getting a Portacath—a small plastic chamber surgically implanted under the skin that allows its users to go swimming.
“Knowing what Daniel was facing, we wanted him to continue to have relative normality,” said Michelle. “He loves going there and he loves the water, and we didn’t want him sitting on the sidelines as all his friends had fun. We knew life was going to be hard enough for him anyway without him being deprived of his friends and the sea.”
Daniel went on to receive three years of chemo at Alder Hey, and it seemed to be going well. He would eventually be declared cancer-free in 2016, but not before suffering a life-threatening case of pneumonia during a springtime trip to Anglesey. He was rushed to the hospital in Bangor, Wales, and put on oxygen, to be released after a week’s long stay with scarred lungs.
Though the trip to Anglesey may have put Daniel in the grave, his parents’ perseverance in upholding the family tradition planted roots of interests and character that are now sprouting as their boy gradually becomes a man.
His love of the sea developed into a passion for tackling plastic pollution, and the local paper of his home city, the Liverpool Echo, reported that just after cancer remission at age 8, he had already become a vocal proponent of curbside recycling in his community.
At Anglesey, Michelle’s stepdad Paddy, an accomplished yachtsman and angler, taught his stepgrandson all he knew about tides, charts, and navigation. Along with passing all his SATs despite missing two years of school due to his chemotherapy, he mastered the Royal Yachting Association basics for sailing and powerboats—allowing him to drive his family’s rigid inflatable dinghy.
Daniel, post cancer – credit Kinsella family, released
“Mike and I have tried to give Daniel the best, because he had so much of his childhood taken away from him,” Michelle said. “We’ve tried really hard to compensate, I suppose.”
Returning to present day, on a recent trip to Anglesey Island, Daniel was piloting the dinghy with some family and friends aboard when he picked up a distress call on Channel 16—the radiofrequency for all maritime emergencies in the UK. A family of paddleboarders had been stuck on some rocks after a strong near-shore wind carried them much farther out than they ever intended to go.
Complying with child-adult passenger ratios (part of the Royal Yachting Association rules) he turned back to drop off his friends before returning to rescue the family, who were just one of three groups of paddleboarders who Daniel rescued that day; all victims of the near-shore wind.
“I was super proud of him for going to people’s aid and the way in which he navigates our boat,” said Michelle. “It was a nice sunny day but that can be deceptive. The wind can blow you out and you can’t get back. It might be warm on the beach but the water is freezing.”
His love of the sea is matched only by his fascination for the skies, and the Daily Post reports that his dream is to join the RAF.
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Dreamt of since the Roman Empire, the men and women, taxpayers and taxspenders of the Italian Peninsula are preparing for an engineering project unrivaled by any in the nation’s history.
Set to begin in the waning days of 2024, a suspension bridge linking Sicily with the mainland across the Messina Strait would be the longest in the world if completed.
The country’s highly-popular Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose coalition took power in 2022, revived the idea for the first time since the early 2,000s. Meloni has asked the EU for assistance in funding the project, estimated to cost €4.6 billion.
The Romans had often suggested the idea of linking Sicily with the mainland, and may even have built a temporary soft bridge out of barrels. Monarchs including Charlemagne and Roger II also had ideas of building a bridge across the strait.
Dictator Benito Mussolini shared the dreams of the Romans, but it wasn’t until Meloni’s coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi’s administration that the dream took shape into something resembling a project.
Berlusconi, who passed away earlier this year, also succeeded in getting the EU on board, and in 2009, a contract for the construction was awarded to the Messina Strait Company.
During the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, then-Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti canceled the project over austerity measures.
The bridge is proposed to be both a rail and road bridge with a central span of 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) which would make it the longest in the world, passing Turkey’s bridge over the Dardanelles by a whole kilometer in distance. The bridge would be part of the Berlin–Palermo railway axis (Line 1) of the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T).
If you want to go to Sicily, you can fly, take a boat, or take a train that’s carried by a ferry. These methods severely limit the commerce of the island, and unsurprisingly the economy of Sicily has stagnated for years.
“Starting work on the construction of the Strait Bridge is one of my goals,” Matteo Salvini, leader of the North League party that forms part of Meloni governing coalition, told Italian broadcaster RAI last month. “The transshipment of ferries, in addition to pollution and time wasting, costs people more in a year than it would cost to build the bridge.”
Not only would it allow direct shipment of goods on trucks and trains from the mainland, but imports arriving through the Suez Canal could offload directly onto Sicily, saving time and money in lengthy sea voyages up to Genova or Venezia, and allowing Scilian exports to be loaded at home—rather than being shipped up to northern cities first.
The rail and road connections on the bridge would also ease the pressure on the overcrowded ferry services, which not only deal with people, cars, and trucks, but also whole trains.
It’s not all sunshine and dollar signs though, massive challenges exist in building the Messina Strait Bridge, as it would not only be the world’s longest, but sit in a famously active seismic zone.
Currently, firms from 6 different nations have been contracted for the build, including IHI Infrastructure Systems Co., Ltd. from Japan which oversaw the third-longest suspension bridge in the world in Japan, and Danish firm COWI A/S which built the Øresund Bridge, the second-longest bridge in Europe.
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In a Belgian town where the residents are nicknamed “pumpkin eaters,” celebrations are ringing out that a local claimed 1st prize in the European Pumpkin Championship.
At 2,539 pounds, (1,152 kg) Mario Vangeel grew the biggest pumpkin of the year.
His pumpkin had to be transported from his hometown of Kasterlee to Ludwigsburg in Germany for the competition; not so easy when your gourd weighs as much as a 2007 Honda Civic.
Vangeel took first place in the Belgian Pumpkin Championship in 2019, and second place in the European Championship back in 2021. This year, as he strapped down his pumpkin, he thought he had a chance.
“I was hoping yes, but I didn’t think I was going to win,” the 50-year-old tractor driver tells Euronews Green.
Vangeel hails from the town of Kasterlee, which is known as the town of the pumpkin eaters, as his wife, Bieke, explained.
“They found papers from the 1600s saying that because they had poor land, they couldn’t grow a lot of food. But pumpkins did very well here. And that’s where it started.”
Kasterlee boasts a giant pumpkin-growing club of 50 members, some of whom were set to challenge Vangeel at the European Championship until disaster struck: snails.
It was a rainy growing season all throughout Europe this year, and some growers lost their prized pumpkins to snails. One gentleman had managed to grow a pumpkin over 1,000 kg, but days before he was to transport it to Ludwigsburg, a snail made a little hole in it, and before long rot had set it and it couldn’t be moved.
Most of the pumpkins grown at the competition will be turned into boats for a silly canoe event. The gourds are hollowed out and used as boats for Kasterlee’s Pumpkin Regatta—a race that now attracts 5,000 visitors to the town to watch members of the Kasterlee Kayaking Club—and international competitors too—race down a river in hollowed-out pumpkins.
Bieke is proud of her husband, but admits that between herself and the gourd, her man found time to love only one of them. She told Euronews she’s thankful he’s no longer sleeping in the greenhouse, so to speak.
As for Vangeel, his next plan is to compete at next year’s World Pumpkin Championship, where he hopes to break the record held by Travis Gienger, of Anoka, Minnesota. Gienger holds the record for the world’s heaviest pumpkin at 2,749 pounds (1,296 kg.)
You’re on Vangeel!
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Plants around the world absorb 37 billion more metric tons of carbon than was previously thought, a new study has demonstrated.
It means every tree planted to try and prevexnt the worst of climate change goes 31% farther than earlier models on Earth carbon systems have calucated, and it’s believed the research will help contribute to more accurate predictions in the future as the climate changes.
The Earth has several major carbon systems that are well understood. There is a carbon system between the atmophsere and the oceans, and another between the atmosphere and the vegebiome. This is designated Terrestrial Gross Primary Production, or GPP.
GPP is typically measured by petatons per year. One petaton is 1 billion metric tons, and since the 1980s it’s been believed that GPP is around 120 per year.
A team of researchers Cornell University, with support from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, altered two key approaches to estimate GPP, which provided them with the updated figure.
The first is high-resolution data from environmental monitoring towers instead of satellite observations which can be interefered with by cloud cover, especially in the humid and rainy tropics. The second was measuring photosynthesis in plants by tracing the path of the molecule carbonyl sulfide, or OCS.
OCS, like carbon dioxide, enters the leaf tissue and is moved into chloroplasts, the engines where photosynthesis occurs. However, unlike CO2, OCS is easier to track and measure.
The team used plant data from a variety of sources to get a picture of how effeciently different genera of plants conduct photosynthesis while tracking OCS. One of the sources was the LeafWeb database at Oak Ridge Labs. The database contains photosynthesis observations from scientists all around the world.
“Figuring out how much CO2 plants fix each year is a conundrum that scientists have been working on for a while,” said Lianhong Gu, co-author and staff scientist in ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division.
“The original estimate of 120 petagrams per year was established in the 1980s, and it stuck as we tried to figure out a new approach. It’s important that we get a good handle on global GPP since that initial land carbon uptake affects the rest of our representations of Earth’s carbon cycle.”
“We have to make sure the fundamental processes in the carbon cycle are properly represented in our larger-scale models,” Gu added. “For those Earth-scale simulations to work well, they need to represent the best understanding of the processes at work. This work represents a major step forward in terms of providing a definitive number.”
One of the biggest aspects of the revision was how much carbon was stored by tropical rainforest. The rainforest-born data from the OCS observations were corroborated by ground measurements and showed that tropical forests store more carbon than previously estimated—reflected the influence of clouds mentioned before.
Understanding how much carbon can be stored in land ecosystems, especially in forests with their large accumulations of biomass in wood, is essential to making predictions of future climate change, the researchers conclude.
Quote of the Day: “Fortune befriends the bold.” – Emily Dickinson
Photo by: Andre Gaulin
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 birth of four tiger cubs at the Wrocław Zoo had to be kept a close secret—such was the scale of the news and the impact it would likely have on the zoo-going public.
Nuri, the cub’s mother, carried four healthy babies to term on July 22nd, and with the unlooked-for care and attention of their father Tengah, these Critically-Endangered cubs were raised in seclusion.
credit – Wroclaw Zoo, released.
Now the news is out—one of the most endangered subspecies of tiger has four healthy new members, and you can go see them explore their world at the Wrocław Zoo.
The Indonesian island of Sumatra is one of the most intact in terms of rainforest in the country. It has allowed the Sumatran tiger to live on while other Sunda subspecies like the Javan tiger have gone extinct.
It is roughly estimated that they number 400 and falling, meaning that the four cubs at the Wrocław Zoo, which are now 3 months old, represent about 1% of the total wild population.
“The birth of four Sumatran tigers is the greatest breeding success in recent years and an unprecedented event—a true global sensation. I applaud the efforts of the zoo’s staff, especially the carnivore keepers, whose work ensures the young develop healthily and contribute to the conservation of this endangered subspecies,” said Wrocław’s Mayor, Jacek Sutryk.
They number 3 males and 1 female, which could represent a boon to Sumatran tiger breeding programs across Europe as currently the females significantly outnumber the males.
50 zoos are currently safeguarding this animal from extinction as Sumatra works to protect forests and eliminate poaching.
“What’s interesting is that Tengah, the cubs’ father, has been involved from the start, which is unusual for tigers. He has been calm, gentle, and even helped Nuri care for the cubs, learning how to ‘handle’ the young. Currently, the cubs weigh over 8 kg, are growing well, and show no health issues,” explained Paweł Sroka, Curator of Carnivores at ZOO Wrocław.
Proceeds from the zoo go to a poacher patrol program in Sumatra’s Kerinci Seblat National Park, which has seen 70 poachers arrested and funded local education initiatives about alternative livelihoods.
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credit - Consulate General of France in New Orleans
credit – Consulate General of France in New Orleans
A program that has seen French language teachers working in American immersion schools in the state of Louisiana has been extended another 4 years.
Organized by the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL), the southern city has enjoyed the fruits of the partnership for nearly 60 years and every scholastic year invites teachers from French-speaking countries around the world to teach in Louisiana to preserve the city’s unique heritage.
According to Peggy Feehan, its executive director, CODOFIL already has 155 teachers working in 14 parishes and more than 40 schools across Louisiana.
They come from not only France, but Senegal, Ivory Coast, Belgium, and Cameroon.
“It means the world to us to have a longstanding relationship with France since the beginning,” Feehan told NOLA. “Without that cooperation, that’s a lot of kids that wouldn’t have a French teacher.”
Senator Jeremy Stine (R – LO) recently returned from Paris where alongside Ronnie Morris, president of Louisiana’s state board of education, and Rodolphe Sambou, director of education for the Ministry of Education at the Consul General of France in Louisiana, the state extended France’s participation for another 4 years.
Many of the state’s parishes do not have immersion schools, but in Calcasieu, Lafayette, and Orleans, parents can enroll their children, Pre/K through 12, in schools that teach French alongside English.
Saint-Landry, Baton-Rogue Est, Assomption, Saint-Martin, Iberie, Jefferson, and Evangeline counties offer Pre/K through 8, and Terrebonne, Vermillion, Lincoln, and Caddo counties offer Pre/K through 5.
A full register of the immersion schools can be seen here.
KRVS, 88.7 FM, reports that the new school in Terrebonne Parish is the first Indigenous French immersion school in the state, and possibly the country.
Mr. Sambou said that about 250,000 people in Louisiana speak French or the French dialects spoken by some of the state’s Cajun, Creole, and Indigenous communities. Sambou added that the fact that France continues to send teachers despite teacher shortages across the country shows their commitment to the long-standing partnership.
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Inside the Alaska State Capitol - Provided by Chick-fil-A at Springwoods Village
Bill and Becky, center, pose with family and Chick-fil-A Market – Provided by Chick-fil-A Market at Springwoods Village
A Houston Chick-fil-A recently went far above and beyond the typical customer service to surprise a terminally-ill regular with a bucket list experience… of sorts.
Bill and Becky decided 20 years ago as they approached retirement they’d set out to visit every state capital, but as the years went on they never found a good time to visit, Juneau, Alaska.
Now carrying a terminal cancer diagnosis, Bill and his partner Becky of more than 50 years had all but accepted this bucket list adventure would end on a dour note.
But when the Springwoods Village location of Chick-fil-A found out about Bill’s unfulfilled dream, they decided, in honor of the two longtime regulars, to contact a location in Juneau and concoct a plan.
“Bill and Becky mean so much to our team and we wanted to do what we could to help them complete their bucket list,” said Mike Magdaleno, local Chick-fil-A owner-operator. “We loved channeling a spirit for adventure from Alaska to Texas, and were honored to play a small part in helping them achieve this incredible milestone.”
The Juneau Chick-fil-A team got a hold of a photograph from Bill and Becky’s wedding day, blew it up into a cardboard cutout, and began placing it in front of iconic Juneau sites, including the state capitol building, and the Mendenhall Glacier, where a visual artist used their wedding photo as inspiration to draw them sitting comfortably in front of the Glacier as if they had visited in their twenties.
Inside the governor’s office – Provided by Chick-fil-A Market at Springwoods Village– Provided by Chick-fil-A Market at Springwoods VillageInside the Alaska State Capitol – Provided by Chick-fil-A at Springwoods Village
The team then took all these photos and made a scrapbook, placed it in a basket with some souveniers, and mailed it to the Houston Springwoods Village location as a surpise.
As an extra touch, the touring Chick-fil-A team members signed Bill and Becky’s names in the capitol building visitor’s log.
– Provided by Chick-fil-A Market at Springwoods Village
Lone Star Live reports that Bill and Becky met in 1972 at a telephone company. They live surrounded by loved ones with the company of 5 children, 17 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.
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Northeast Frontier Railway / Supriya Sahu, Tamil Nadu’s Health and Environment department
Northeast Frontier Railway / Supriya Sahu, Tamil Nadu’s Health and Environment department
In India’s wildlife capital of Assam State, the driver of a train was alerted to the presence of a herd of elephants crossing the tracks ahead.
The alert came from a safety system powered by an AI that can identify wildlife and convey that information to trains in the area.
Driver J.D. Das and his assistant Umesh Kumar of Kamrup Express were able to apply the emergency break in time to avoid hitting or startling the elephants.
East Central Railways claim their AI system has prevented 800 potential collisions with elephants crossing tracks in the states of Tamil Nadu and Assam.
They plan to install monitoring stations across their entire jurisdiction to make certain that no elephant corridor is without AI-assisted surveillance.
AI is an emerging force in wildlife conservation, especially in the realm of reducing human-animal conflict.
Incredible sight ! A big shout-out to Loco Pilot Das and Assistant Loco Pilot Umesh Kumar of the 15959 Kamrup Express for their swift and heroic action on 16th October in saving a herd of about 60 elephants crossing the railway tracks between Habaipur and Lamsakhang by applying… pic.twitter.com/otfQ3nwjDJ
Positioned on the side of the road, if the device detects both cars and deer in the vicinity, it emits high-frequency pulses and animal sounds to deter the deer from attempting to cross at that moment.
In 2022, 6,100 traffic collisions, or 15% of the total number in the state, involved deer, an incident ratio that left 500 people injured.
AI has also been used to help prevent shark attacks. The developers of a shark attack forecast app took advantage of a deep learning algorithm to compartmentalize over a hundred years of shark attack data to create a forecast for beaches around the US with an 89% accuracy.
Called SafeWaters.AI, they hope not only to save lives—their primary objective—but to help reduce persecution of sharks in response to attacks on humans.
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Quote of the Day: “Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependent upon popular opinion?” (Let’s hope not.) – William Lloyd Garrison
Photo by: Getty Images for Unsplash+
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?
A plant-derived compound was shown in a recent study to kill strains of tuberculosis that were resistant to existing therapies.
The compound was found in a plant native to North America, and was not only able to suppress dormant TB bacteria from resurfacing but also didn’t damage the gut microbiome.
Tuberculosis is the second-leading killer of humans from an infectious disease worldwide, and has been developing resistance to many of the antibiotics previously used to treat it.
Caused by a species of bacteria that invades the respiratory system called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, it can also affect the heart, brain, and spinal column.
A new study published in the journal Anti-inflammatory Nutraceuticals and Chronic Diseases, found that sanguinarine, a derivative of bloodroot, a wildflower found in North America, could combat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MRTB) after being genetically modified to reduce its natural toxicity.
TB is treated with multiple medications over a 6-month period, exposing the human organism to substantial weakening. By contrast, the sanguinarine selectively targeted the bacteria responsible for MRTB, leaving harmless and beneficial bacteria intact.
However, in its natural form, sanguinarine is toxic to human cells, so Dr. Jim Sun, senior author and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology, led a team to genetically reduce the toxicity of the phytochemical while increasing its potency as a tuberculosis killer.
This resulted in the creation of 35 new derivatives, two of which—BPD9 and BPD6—showed over 90% inhibition of 8 different forms of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, 3 that were particularly virulent, and 5 that were resistant to existing drugs.
“TB treatment takes six months because the bacteria can ‘hibernate’ in your lungs until reactivated. Most antibiotics work best against actively growing bacteria, but BPD9 seems to be able to stop dormant bacteria from coming back to life,” explained Dr. Sun.
It took just 8 days to significantly reduce the quantity of MRTB and other TB strains in mice treated with BPD9, delighting the research team, who nonetheless say that more work needs to be done to lower the compounds’ toxicity and conducting additional tests on drug-resistant strains of TB-causing bacteria.
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Cairo on the Nile - Photo by Jack Krier on Unsplash
Cairo on the Nile – Photo by Jack Krier on Unsplash
Egypt, one of the world’s 15 most populous nations, has been certified malaria-free after a ‘pharaonic’ effort that began 100 years ago.
Killing nearly 600,000 people every year, almost all of whom dwell in Africa, the malarial transmission chain has been interrupted for three years in a row, proving that the Egyptian health authorities can ensure it remains a negligent public health burden.
“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to mark the occasion.
The WHO praised “the Egyptian government and people” for their efforts to “end a disease that has been present in the country since ancient times,” and added that Egypt and her 114 million inhabitants were now the second country declared malaria-free in the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region.
Malaria has been traced as far back as 4,000 BCE in Egypt, with genetic evidence of the disease found in Tutankhamun and other ancient Egyptian mummies. With most of Egypt’s population living along the banks of the Nile River, malaria prevalence has been recorded as high as 40%.
The statement detailed how Egyptian health advocates first took action to combat the spread of malaria in 1923 when the government prevented agricultural cultivation near settlements.
Only 44 countries in the tropical belts where malaria spreads have been declared malaria-free since the creation of the WHO. Near-neighbors UAE, and far neighbors Morocco, have also won the designation.
“Receiving the malaria elimination certificate today is not the end of the journey but the beginning of a new phase,” said Egypt’s Health Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar.
“We must now work tirelessly and vigilantly to sustain our achievement through maintaining the highest standards for surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment.”
Malaria diagnosis and treatment are provided free of charge to the entire population in Egypt regardless of legal status, and health professionals are trained nationwide to detect and screen for malaria cases including at borders. Egypt’s strong cross-border partnership with neighboring countries, including Sudan, has been instrumental in preventing the re-establishment of local malaria transmission.
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