Quote of the Day: “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” – William James
Photo by: Joseph Pearson
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?
Out from the ash and flames of the wildfires that scorched Canada’s Jasper National Park comes the story of a heroic 18-year-old who saved over a dozen people.
Working as a volunteer firefighter and kitchen aide at a lodge, Colleen Knull received an evacuation order on a Monday in late July. Stepping outside she saw smoke rising up the mountainsides, and knew that there were people still camping in the area.
Alerting everyone at the lodge, she went out to gather the campers until 16 people were ready to evacuate. Darkness was falling, and getting out of the area meant a 4-hour hike across treacherous terrain.
Knull used her knowledge of the area and tracking skills to help navigate the 16 people down the trail. The group used head torches and phone flashlights to see in the darkness.
“I had previously rode up a horse up to that lodge on that same trail and throughout the way me and my employer, we had cut logs on the way up,” Knull told CTV News. “There were 67 logs, so there would be be 67 cut logs on the way down … So I used my tracking skills – following horse tracks, horse manure.”
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“There was more intense smoke, my eyes were burning, there was ash falling constantly,” said Rebecca Tocher, a hiker who was in Knull’s group. “She was an amazing leader and was just making sure that everyone was working together.”
Incredibly, all 16 hikers made it out ahead of the fires and successfully evacuated in the back of Knull’s pickup truck.
OTHER YOUNG HEROES: 12-year-old Uses Boy Scout Know-How to Rescue Lost Couple and Injured Dog on a Hike
The experience, Knull recounted, just reinforced her desire to become a full-time professional firefighter.
WATCH the story below from CTV News…
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“We’re a tourist attraction on Google Maps now,” local Londener Polly Barker told CBS News, gesturing to her garden hedge—trimmed immaculately so as to depict Henry Moore’s famous sculpture Reclining Nude.
CBS was in Barker’s neighborhood to talk to the sculptor himself: a man named Bushe.
Tim Bushe has been trimming hedges for 15 years. It’s his hobby, his artistic expression, a way to raise funds for his sister who has Down Syndrome, but most of all, whether it’s the locomotive-shaped hedge outside his house, or the cats across the street, it’s a way of memorializing his dearly departed.
“It is her legacy,” Bushe told CBS. Down a dead-end road in London’s Islington district, Bushe had been living for years with his wife Philippa. Meeting as teenagers in art school, they were together 47 years.
One day with her view from the sofa, Philippa asked Tim to cut a cat into the hedge of their home. She got a train instead, but it seemed that the electric hedge trimmer was an artist’s brush, and soon, Philippa suggested he do the neighbor’s hedge too.
The neighbor had physical limitations and couldn’t cut their own hedge, and it was they who eventually got the cat, so in the end Philippa had an even better view.
Bushe, who works as an architect when he’s not busy with a hedge, lost his wife 7 years ago to breast cancer, and continued to sculpt his neighbors’ hedges until the road was filled with elephants, hippos, fish, and other things.
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The hedges aren’t just for sightseers, however. With each commission, Bushe raises money for a trust that looks after his sister, and another that donates to environmental causes.
He currently has a GoFundMe called “Hedging Against Climate Change” and is raising money for the WWF, Greenpeace, Fridays for Future, and The Good Law Project.
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“If she was alive now, she would be fascinated, I think, by the way it’s taken off,” he told CBS News, adding that he intends to keep going, “until I fall off my ladder.”
You can keep up with Bushe on his Instagram—Hedgecutterman.
WATCH the CBS interview below… Note: Viewers Outside the US Watch on the CBS Website…
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A fossil hunter in Mississippi recently unearthed an intact mammoth ivory 7 feet long.
Believing it was the tusk of a mastodon, a far more common proboscidean in the area, Eddie Templeton was nevertheless ecstatic to find one that wasn’t fragmented.
But it was only after scientists arrived from the Mississippi Museum of Natural History and were able to examine it that the real former owner of the tusk became clear. It was the ivory of a Colombian mammoth—the largest mammoth in North America, and rarely documented this far south.
He has found mastodon teeth, jaws, saber-tooth cat gnashers, and other Ice Age treasures, but the size, majestic curl, and rarity of the ivory surely places it not only among the most remarkable finds of Templeton’s career, but among the most remarkable in the state’s history, as it’s the first time an intact tusk from this species has been found in the Magnolia State.
“Mississippi was home to three Proboscideans during the last ice age: Mastodon, Gomphothere, and the Columbian mammoth. All three possessed ivory tusks,” the Mississippi Museum of Natural History wrote in a statement regarding the discovery.
“Mastodons are by far the most common Proboscidean finds in Mississippi as they were browsers, like modern deer, and inhabited a variety of different environments. Mammoths which were related to modern elephants are far less common finds in Mississippi as they were open grassland grazers and would have been at home in only a select few environments, particularly the prairie regions of Mississippi.”
The Columbian mammoth could grow 10 feet tall and weigh 15 tons, but despite this size advantage, the smaller wooly mammoth outlived them by about 6,000 years.
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The ivory was transported to the Museum of Natural History after being covered in tin foil, slathered with plaster, and wrapped in burlap—the technical procedure for exhuming a fossil from the ground.
Once the plaster jacket containing the fossil tusk dried, it was carefully lifted onto a makeshift gurney fashioned from an ATV ramp. The fossil specimen in the jacket weighed about 600 pounds.
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Stuck in the mud for over 10,000 years, the tusk is well preserved, but contact with oxygen can cause rapid deterioration, so once the covering is removed, a glaze rather like the kind used to laminate safety glass in car windows will be applied in order to put the ivory on display, slated for spring 2025.
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At the University of Maine, one of the world’s largest 3D printers is using sawdust from the state’s lumber industry to 3D-print cozy 600-square-foot wooden cabins.
It’s part of a move towards making 3D printing faster and more sustainable in a state where the housing shortage that has metastasized in most states around the country is dire.
It’s thought that 80,000 new homes will be needed over the next 5 years to keep pace with demand, and though it takes years for building codes to be changed, the technicians at the Advanced Structures & Composites Center (ASCC) at the Univ. of Maine hope their new toy can help address this need.
Guinness World Records certified the machine at ASCC as the world’s largest prototype polymer 3D printer, capable of creating an object that is 96 feet in length, 36 feet in width, and 18 feet tall—entirely out of bio-based material at a rate of 500 pounds per hour.
In 2022, it could print the walls, floors, and roof of the house in just 96 hours, but the ACSS has been refining the design with the hope of doubling the printing speed and getting it down to a 48-hour timeline.
“When they’re doing concrete, they’re only printing the walls,” Habib Dagher, the executive director of ACSS told CNN. “The approach we’ve taken is quite different from what you’ve seen, and you’ve been reading about for years.”
Indeed, GNN has reported on a fair number of 3D printing projects, but most if not all involve printing only the walls. One fantastical exception is an Italian firm that is 3D-printing domed, beehive-like, modular concept homes inspired by the Great Enclosure in Zimbabwe.
STAND-OUT 3D-PRINTING PROJECTS:
The ASCC is calling the house design the BioHome3D, and says it’s rare people who tour the concept version don’t ask when they “can have one up?”
The interior gives the feel of a modern Scandinavian wooden cabin, making it fit well with the Maine aesthetic. The ASCC is now doing work on how to incorporate conduits for wiring and plumbing “exactly where an architect would want them,” says Dagher.
WATCH a time-lapse video of the printer doing the job…
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Quote of the Day: “When one must, one can.” – Charlotte Whitton
Photo by: Alexei Maridashvili
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?
It may have been transported around the coast by sea, or by some sophisticated method the nature of which has not yet been revealed, but whatever the case, the 6-ton Altar Stone at Stonehenge came from Scotland, not nearby Wales.
Previous geological research suggested that the slab of sandstone probably originated from the Brecon Beacons in southeast Wales, approximately 50 miles from the site on the Salisbury Plain.
But a new study, led by Australian scientists, concluded that it actually hails from 460 miles away in northeast Scotland.
The Australian team used state-of-the-art equipment, including specialist mass spectrometers, to examine the composition of the Altar Stone.
Their findings, published in the journal Nature, also point to the existence of “unexpectedly advanced” transport methods and organization at the time of the stone’s arrival in Wiltshire around 5,000 years ago.
Researchers from Curtin University in Perth studied the age and chemistry of mineral grains within fragments of the Altar Stone, which is a 50 cm (19.6 ins) thick sandstone block measuring five meters by one meter (16 ft x 3ft), that sits at the center of Stonehenge’s iconic stone circle.
Study lead author Anthony Clarke explained that analysis of the age and chemical composition of minerals within fragments of the Altar Stone matched it with rocks from Scotland, while also clearly differentiating them from Welsh bedrock.
“Our analysis found specific mineral grains in the Altar Stone are mostly between 1,000 to 2,000 million years old, while other minerals are around 450 million years old,” Clarke said. “This provides a distinct chemical fingerprint suggesting the stone came from rocks in the Orcadian Basin, Scotland, at least 750 kilometers away from Stonehenge.”
Given its Scottish origins, the findings raise fascinating questions considering the technological constraints of the Neolithic era.
“Transporting such massive cargo overland from Scotland to southern England would have been extremely challenging, indicating a likely marine shipping route along the coast of Britain,” said study co-author Curtin University Professor Chris Kirkland.
“This implies long-distance trade networks and a higher level of societal organization than is widely understood to have existed during the Neolithic period in Britain.”
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“We have succeeded in working out, if you like, the age and chemical fingerprints of perhaps one of the most famous of stones in the world-renowned ancient monument,” added co-author Professor Richard Bevins, of Aberystwyth University, Wales.
“While we can now say that this iconic rock is Scottish and not Welsh, the hunt will still very much be on to pin down where exactly in the northeast of Scotland the Altar Stone came from.”
Clarke said the discovery holds a special sentiment to the course of his career, as Stonehenge played a large role in him determining his academic path in life.
“I grew up in the Mynydd Preseli, Wales, where some of Stonehenge’s stones came from,” he said. “I first visited Stonehenge when I was one year old and now at 25, I returned from Australia to help make this scientific discovery—you could say I’ve come full stone circle.”
Despite its worldwide reputation, major discoveries on Stonehenge are rather more frequent than one might imagine. Evidence of a 110-meter (360 ft) stone circle at Waun Mawn near Mynydd Preseli was identified in 2021 and sparked a theory that many of Stonehenge’s bluestones were actually recycled from earlier circles.
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Oregon has recently become the first state in the US to offer free nurse visits to new mothers and fathers statewide.
No one can deny that the United States and its citizens have an array of problems and are facing major challenges, but one which isn’t well reported on is the high rates of death among infants and new mothers compared to other high-income countries.
Oregon’s home visit program called Family Connects is based on a successful model deployed in Durham, North Carolina, and involves a nurse visiting the home of a mother who has just given birth, whether to her first child or her fifth, up to three times in the first month.
Family Connects is an opt-in program that comes at no cost to the family, and the nurse is empowered to ‘connect’ the family with any additional service they may need, whether that’s counseling, psychiatric care, financial assistance, or even, as NPR reports, a hearing aid for a grandparent who’s looking after the child.
State Senator Dr. Elizabeth Steiner championed the program. A family physician, Dr. Steiner wasn’t in charge of creating it or setting policy, but advocated for it in the government. She remembers developing severe post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter, and thought that if one of the Family Connects nurses had visited her, it would have been an enormous help.
To wit, a study of Family Connects mothers found that those who availed themselves of a nurse visit were 30% less likely to develop post-partum anxiety or depression. Undoubtedly one reason for this is the opportunity for the new parents to ask the nurse anything they want.
Additionally, the program’s early data witnessed a reduction in Child Protective Services interventions and investigations among families who had nurses visit them during the first few weeks of life.
The reasons behind these improvements are simple: “Babies are just hard,” Dr. Steiner told NPR.
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One of the nurses in the Oregon state program, Barb Ibrahim, has to drive sometimes as long as 30 to 40 minutes to visit new parents: exactly the reason that Dr. Steiner believed the program was best suited to the state government, as there are many people who live far from any major medical centers.
This isn’t a problem limited to Oregon, where so much of the eastern reaches of the state are very rural. Zero to Three, an early childhood advocacy group, estimates that just 3% of the nation’s babies are in range of existing home visiting programs.
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This question of distance is also partially why the program’s initial cost estimates have long been exceeded. But, if there was ever a reason to overpay it would be for the security and support for the next generation of mothers—and the next generation of Americans.
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Businesses like to talk about the concept of a closed loop or circular economy, but often they’re trying to close small loops. Releaf Paper takes dead leaves from city trees and turns them into paper for bags, office supplies, and more—which is to say they are striving to close one heck of a big loop.
How big? Six billion trees are cut down every year for paper products according to the WWF, producing everything from toilet paper to Amazon boxes to the latest best-selling novels. Meanwhile, the average city produces 8,000 metric tons of leaves every year which clog gutters and sewers, and have to be collected, composted, burned, or dumped in landfills.
In other words, huge supply and huge demand, but Releaf Paper is making cracking progress. They already produce 3 million paper carrier bags per year from 5,000 metric tons of leaves from their headquarters in Paris.
Joining forces with landscapers in sites across Europe, thousands of tonnes of leaves arrive at their facility where a low-water, zero-sulfur/chlorine production process sees the company create paper with much smaller water and carbon footprints.
It is said of the city of Kyiv that one can walk from one side to the other without ever leaving the shade of horse chestnut trees. Whether Ukrainian founders Alexander Sobolenko or Valentyn Frechka of Releaf Paper ever lived or worked in Kyiv, perhaps this preponderance of greenery influenced their thinking while the pair were coming up with the idea in university.
“In a city, it’s a green waste that should be collected. Really, it’s a good solution because we are keeping the balance—we get fiber for making paper and return lignin as a semi-fertilizer for the cities to fertilize the gardens or the trees. So it’s like a win-win model,” Frechka, co-founder and CTO of Releaf Paper, told Euronews.
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Releaf is already selling products to LVMH, BNP Paribas, Logitech, Samsung, and various other big companies. In the coming years, Frechka and Sobolenka also plan to further increase their production capacity by opening more plants in other countries. If the process is cost-efficient, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a paper mill of this kind in every city.
MORE CIRCULAR ECONOMICS: Spanish City is Squeezing Green Electricity From Leftover Oranges
“We want to expand this idea all around the world. At the end, our vision is that the technology of making paper from fallen leaves should be accessible on all continents,” Sobolenka notes, according to ZME Science.
WATCH the production process below from Reuters…
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In China, a landscape architect is reimagining cities across the vast country by working with nature to combat flooding through the ‘sponge city’ concept.
But just as the Chinese Communist Party famously describes its policies as “Socialism: China style,” Yu Kongjian has put a decidedly Middle Kingdom spin on this concept which has taken root across Holland as well.
Through his architecture firm Turenscape, Yu has created hundreds of projects in dozens of cities using native plants, dirt, and clever planning to absorb excess rainwater and channel it away from densely populated areas.
Flooding, especially in the two Chinese heartlands of the commercial south and the agricultural north, is becoming increasingly common, but Yu says that concrete and pipe solutions can only go so far. They’re inflexible, expensive, and require constant maintenance. According to a 2021 World Bank report, 641 of China’s 654 largest cities face regular flooding.
“There’s a misconception that if we can build a flood wall higher and higher, or if we build the dams higher and stronger, we can protect a city from flooding,” Yu told CNN in a video call. “(We think) we can control the water… that is a mistake.”
Yu has been called the “Chinese Olmstead” referring to Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of NYC’s Central Park. He grew up in a little farming village of 500 people in Zhejiang Province, where 36 weirs channel the waters of a creek across terraced rice paddies.
Once a year, carp would migrate upstream and Yu always looked forward to seeing them leap over the weirs.
This synthesis of man and nature is something that Turenscape projects encapsulate. These include The Nanchang Fish Tail Park, in China’s Jiangxi province, Red Ribbon Park in Qinghuandao, Hebei province, the Sanya Mangrove Park in China’s island province of Hainan, and almost a thousand others. In all cases, Yu utilizes native plants that don’t need any care to develop extremely spongey ground that absorbs excess rainfall.
He often builds sponge projects on top of polluted or abandoned areas, giving his work an aspect of reclamation. The Nanchang Fish Tail Park for example was built across a 124-acre polluted former fish farm and coal ash dump site. Small islands with dawn redwoods and two types of cypress attract local wildlife to the metropolis of 6 million people.
Sanya Mangrove Park was built over an old concrete sea wall, a barren fish farm, and a nearby brownfield site to create a ‘living’ sea wall.
One hectare (2.47 acres) of Turenscape sponge land can naturally clean 800 tons of polluted water to the point that it is safe enough to swim in, and as a result, many of the sponge projects have become extremely popular with locals.
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One of the reasons Yu likes these ideas over grand infrastructure projects is that they are flexible and can be deployed as needed to specific areas, creating a web of rain sponges. If a large drainage, dam, seawall, or canal is built in the wrong place, it represents a huge waste of time and money.
The sponge city projects in Wuhan created by Turenscape and others cost in total around half a billion dollars less than proposed concrete ideas. Now there are over 300 sponge projects in Wuhan, including urban gardens, parks, and green spaces, all of which divert water into artificial lakes and ponds or capture it in soil which is then released more slowly into the sewer system.
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Last year, The Cultural Landscape Foundation awarded Yu the $100,000 Oberlander Prize for elevating the role of design in the process of creating nature-based solutions for the public’s enjoyment and benefit.
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Quote of the Day: “Only the educated are free.” – Epictetus
Photo by: ©GWC
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?
Why did the tortoise cross the road?
Or better yet, how did the tortoise outpace its keepers for 3 miles before crossing the road?
These are no doubt questions that a local ostrich ranch in the Arizona town of Picacho will be asking after state troopers called and asked if they were missing a large desert tortoise.
The charade began on July 30th when a Department of Public Safety trooper received a call from a concerned citizen that a sulcata tortoise as big as a Thanksgiving turkey was trying to cross Interstate 10 between Casa Grande and Tuscon.
DPS Sgt. Steven Sekrecki arrived on the scene and located the large reptile who was at that point still unharmed.
On its shell, the Sergeant noticed the word “Stich” written in pen, and assumed it was held by a facility near by.
According to the Arizona Republic, a local ostrich range confirmed Stitch was one of their resident tortoises and had recently escaped from his habitat.
The speedy tortoise had managed to wander 3 miles from the ranch before it made itself known on the highway.
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The sulcata, or African spurred tortoise, is actually an endangered species of reptile and is native to the Sahara Desert, not North America.
Approximately 9,000 tortoises were taken from the wild for the illegal pet trade between 1990 and 2010. It makes for a good pet because it’s incredibly docile and not territorial, while also being the third-largest species of tortoise in the world, behind the Aldabara giant tortoise and those of the Galapagos.
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Suddenly, Sergeant Sekrecki’s reptile rescue became one of tangible value to global wildlife conservation, and for that we salute him.
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A pair of high schoolers invented a unique water filtration device that uses a wall of sound to hold back microplastic particles from running water.
In lab tests, the acoustic force from the high-frequency sound waves removed between 84% and 94% of the suspended microplastic particles in a single pass, and they are using the reward money from a prestigious prize to attempt to scale up their invention.
Without beating a dead horse, microplastic particles are everywhere on Earth—raining down from the jetstream, blowing up to the summit of Everest, and located at the deepest points of the ocean. Once ingested by humans they have been found to infiltrate every organ that has so far been examined for them.
It’s a monumental challenge to address this pancontaminant, but high schoolers Justin Huang and Victoria Ou of Woodlands, Texas, may just have a clever solution.
Using ultrasonic sound waves that move through water freely, the teens have managed to capture as much as 94% of microplastic contaminants by pushing them away from the water’s outflow point.
Their device is no bigger than a pen, and improves on other designs that have tried to use ultrasonic waves to address microplastics in wastewater and drinking water.
“This is the first year we’ve done this,” Huang told Business Insider backstage after receiving their award. “If we could refine this—maybe use more professional equipment, maybe go to a lab instead of testing from our home—we could really improve our device and get it ready for large-scale manufacturing.”
Ou and Huang presented their work at last week’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Los Angeles, during which they won the Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations worth $50,000.
They also picked up first place in their Google-sponsored category, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
THE ISEF WINNERS AS REPORTED BY GNN:
“This is a pretty new approach. We only found one study that was trying to use ultrasound to predict the flow of particles in water, but it didn’t completely filter them out yet,” said Ou, who has known Huang since elementary school.
In developing their device, the pair visited wastewater and sewage treatment plants near their home and asked how they regulated microplastics. The answer they received was somewhat of a surprise: the plant had no such regulations in place. For starters, there isn’t a cost-effective means of doing so, and also the United States EPA doesn’t have regulations for microplastic contaminants in the water.
Ou and Huang believe their technology could be used in wastewater treatment plants like the one they visited, as well as industrial textile plants, and rural water sources. On a smaller scale, it could filter microplastics in laundry machines and even fish tanks.
WATCH Justin and Victoria explain their device…
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The US Women’s Gymnastics team has won 8 medals—which may be down to the excellence of the effervescent Simone Biles, although it may have furrier explanations.
All throughout the games, Beacon the golden retriever has been within petting distance of any one of the five members who may feel some pre-performance jitters.
The topic of mental health in gymnastics has never been far from stories about the US Olympic team after Biles decided to withdraw from the Tokyo games in 2020 to focus on her own mind state.
At the time, news of the scope of sexual harassment and exploitation of Olympic gymnasts by former team doctor Larry Nassar had already been in the news for two years.
Beacon has been with the team since it was undergoing Olympic trials in Minneapolis. With so many hopeful young gymnasts sitting jittery on the sidelines waiting for their turn, what could have been better for their nerves than a big oafish golden retriever walking by and sticking it’s big blonde schnoz into their hand?
Beacon followed the team to Paris where he has become a hit among rival teams as well.
Tokyo Olympic all-around champion Suni Lee posted a picture of herself with the shiny-nosed pooch from the trials. “Thank god for Beacon,” read her caption, helping launch him to stardom.
He is a professional stress dog and therefore of course has an official Instagram account. His trainer is the former rhythmic gymnastics coach Tracey Callahan Molnar, who says the dog has incredible powers of intuition and empathy. He will find exactly which member of the team is the most nervous and go offer his services as a comfort dog, should they accept it.
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Molnar’s previous golden was Tulsa, who passed away in 2019. Molnar went to the exact same Michigan breeder to adopt Beacon, such was Tulsa’s excellence at his job.
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Over 11,000 small donors have managed to raise £245,000 ($270,000) to repair a library in Liverpool that was set partially ablaze during a spate of violent acts of disorder that took place in England and Belfast last week.
Called Spellow Hub, the library had recently been transformed into a community space with job training and outreach activities for some of the most disadvantaged parts of Liverpool, but the rioting left the whole of the ground floor badly burned.
“I always loved to read as a child and seeing a library and community space destroyed broke my heart,” the fundraiser’s organizer, 27-year-old Alex McCormick told the Guardian. “I felt helpless and wanted to do something to help and thought fundraising would be a nice way to replace some of the books lost in the fire.”
McCormick described herself as being “overwhelmed with the response and the sense of community,” and by the time she had spoken with the British paper the fundraiser already accumulated £120,000.
An update posted on Monday announced that work had already started to restore the Spellow Hub to its former joy.
The riots were described as the worst instances of their kind in 13 years. The deaths of three young girls and the injury of 10 others when an assailant attacked a Taylor Swift-themed dance and yoga class shook the nation.
SIMILAR COMMUNITY-LED INITIATIVES: When Builders in Maui Constructed Tiny Homes for Man’s Family, it Grew into Crowdfunded Rehousing Project
Two false claims: first that the killer was on an MI6 watchlist, and the second—that he was a Muslim asylum seeker, quickly flooded social media in the wake of the stabbings. He was actually born to Rwandan parents in Cardiff.
With immigration long being a contentious political issue, it triggered a wave of destructive vandalism against Muslim neighborhoods.
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However, communities have largely rallied together, including in Southport where the stabbing occurred, when after a mosque was vandalized in the wake of the attack, local bricklaying companies rushed to rebuild the exterior wall in scorching temperatures.
SHARE This Story With Anyone You Know From Britain’s Northwest…
Quote of the Day: “To love abundantly is to live abundantly.” – Henry Drummond
Photo by: Tyler Nix
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 new study found that adding honey to yogurt helps the beneficial bacteria in the yogurt survive longer in the hostile environment of the GI tract.
It’s just another reason to value the wisdom passed down to us from the classical Greeks, who recognized honey as a medicinal food over 2,000 years ago.
Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus, two genera of microorganisms that are present in fermented milk products like yogurt, form one of the foundational parts of a healthy gut microbiome. Both kinds have been found to improve bowel function in all stages of digestion from breakdown to absorption to defecation.
It’s never been more important to disseminate this information, since the honey-yogurt study reports that between 10 and 25% of the American population report unsatisfactory bowel function. In other words, for as many as one in every four people in the room, trips to the bathroom are miserable.
“As yogurt with honey is a common food pairing, and honey supports probiotic survival in vitro, we aimed to determine if this functional food combination would enhance probiotic abundance and improve functional outcomes in vivo,” the authors write.
The study had a randomized, controlled, single-blind, crossover design with two 2-week intervention periods. Yogurt beverages were consumed twice daily during each intervention period, with one group consuming theirs with sugar, and the other with clover honey. There was nothing special about the yogurt, and it was in fact a pasteurized, name-brand product with natural vanilla flavoring.
While almost none of their study outcomes were met, it was clear from the results that the in vitro effect reported above carried over in vivo as there was a greater abundance of Bifidobacterium animalis in the stools of those who consumed yogurt with honey rather than just yogurt or yogurt with sugar.
The study also failed to produce evidence that yogurt with honey improved any digestive function, but the authors noted that most of the participants had predominantly normal bowel functions during the trial period, and they suggest that those with dysfunctional activity arising from constipation, IBS, or other complications should be included in future studies on the topic.
“Plain yogurt is fantastic for gut health thanks to its probiotic content,” wrote Chris Kresser MS, co-founder of the California Center for Functional Medicine, who wasn’t involved with the study. “I’m not surprised by these results. Honey (especially raw) is a remarkable food with numerous healing properties. It is truly one of nature’s most potent superfoods.”
NATURE’S WONDER FOODS:
If you go to any Greek restaurant, and you finish polishing off that plate of souvlaki or moussaka, you’ll notice the first two dessert items are always yogurt with honey and walnuts and baklava.
According to a Greek honey shop in Belgium (take that for what it’s worth) Hippocrates, who was a little like the father of Western medicine, “prescribed honey for fever, injuries, and for wound treatment.” Honey was a panacea as far as he was concerned. During the ancient Olympic games, honey became the testosterone of the day, with athletes doping on it to regain their strength between events.
Before expounding on what he learned from his teacher Plato, or what Plato had learned from his teacher Socrates, Aristotle actually wrote his first book on beekeeping.
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Welsh news media described it as a “blockbuster” arrival at a local movie theater—no not Deadpool 2—a beautiful baby girl whose mom gave birth in the lobby.
Sarah Vincent was 39 weeks-pregnant when she went to the Cinema World in her hometown, near the capital city of Cardiff, with her 3-year-old son Liam and her parents when, 20 minutes into the screening of Sing 2, she began to feel discomfort.
Adjourning to the restroom, the discomfort grew until she had to lay down in the lobby and that’s when her water broke. The cinema staff were quickly there to help, and help they did—calling an ambulance and assembling screens to block the sight of passersby.
On the instructions of the paramedic who picked up the phone, cinemagoer Amy Screen, and the manager on duty at the cinema Jacey Howcroft, arrived to help should the baby be unwilling to wait for the ambulance.
And it’s all a good thing too, because Lowri, the newborn baby girl, did not in fact wait for the ambulance.
With Screen and Howcroft’s assistance, Lowri Miles was born 7 pounds just 10 minutes from the point at which Vincent had gone into labor.
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Missing the momentous occasion, father Gareth Miles was working in Cardiff when he got a call from Vincent’s dad explaining what was happening. He rushed down to the cinema to find his baby girl waiting for him.
“The staff were great,” he said. “Jacey was the staff member who went to get Sarah’s parents from the cinema and helped with delivery, Andrew at Cineworld rang the ambulance and talked with paramedics on phone to help with the birth, the rest of the staff were great at putting up screens, also one member of the public, Amy, helped with delivery as well.”
He told Wales Online that Liam, their son, was also born extremely quickly but in a car rather than a movie theater.
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“It’s one we’re never going to forget. I thought the car was bad enough, and we’ve got the cinema story to tell as well now!”
Mo Williams, the General Manager of the Cinema World, said his staff were understandly proud of their teamwork during the unexpected emergency. He added that little Lowri is now an honorary Cinema World Member for life, and will never have to pay for a movie ticket as long as she lives.
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Just off the Pacific Coast Highway, a line around the block heralded the presence of an exciting new spot in Long Beach—the state’s first sports bar dedicated to the women’s game.
Watch Me is not only the first such location in the state, but just 1 of 5 in the whole world, according to local news.
Resting on the 6500 block of Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach, Mean Eddy and her partner Jax Diener opened the bar after months of laboring.
“We look at the sea of people and realize the need is here,” Eddy told NBC 4. “It’s been a labor of love. We’ve put our heart and souls into it for months and months.”
“It’s an exciting moment,” said Rex Richardson, Long Beach Mayor, who attended the opening with his wife and two daughters. “I just wanted to be here because it’s so important and it’s important to me personally as a dad of two athletes—two girl athletes.”
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Live reporting from NBC 4 shows the bar packed to the gills, with a line to get a table stretching around the adjacent corner yoga studio, evidencing an interest in women’s sports among the community.
At the moment, Watch Me is operating on a special 9 to 9 schedule for the Paris Olympics, but will return to normal operating hours when the games conclude.
WATCH the story below from NBC 4…
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Buddhist nation Nepal and a drone manufacturer in majority Buddhist China, have signed an agreement to supply Mount Everest’s Buddhist authorities with heavy lift drones that will help clear trash off Everest’s holy slopes.
Dealing with trash on the world’s highest mountain is a complex and multifaceted operation, but the drones, piloted by the same Sherpa porters who for decades have been clearing trash on foot, will allow them to work in the most dangerous areas without risk to their lives.
Da Jiang Innovations, the largest drone manufacturer in China, will supply the equipment to a drone operator, who signed a memorandum of understanding between the rural municipality where Everest is located, and the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC) for the use of drones in cleaning the sacred mountain.
“After a successful test in April, we plan to use drones commercially in the Everest region,” said Jagat Bhusal, chief administration officer of the rural municipality Khumbu Pasang Lhamu.
The SPCC works to ensure as much pollution of trash and dead bodies as possible is removed from the slopes every year. Along with hiring Sherpas to pack out trash from higher altitudes, and using helicopters to recover bodies, every climber who plans to reach Everest Base Camp must return back down with 8 kilograms (17.2 pounds) of garbage or lose a $4,000 deposit put down to ensure compliance.
If the climber goes to Camp I, or Camp II higher up the slopes, they must return with lower and lower weights of trash to ensure they aren’t overburdened in the low oxygen.
Reporting from Mr. Sangam Prasain at Kathmandu Post details the dangers of crossing the Khumbu Icefall during the first part of the climb from Everest Base Camp to Camp I. A river of ice 0.6 miles long, it’s one of the most dangerous features on Everest, as the rays of the Sun cause the ice to melt, shift, become unstable, and trigger avalanches, or crevasses to open up.
According to statistics cited by Prasain, from 1953 to 2023, nearly 50 Sherpa porters lost their lives on the Khumbu Icefall, which is typically crossed during the early morning or late evening after the ice has cooled back down.
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“Yes, there are concerns that the machines may actually cut jobs. But our sole purpose is to reduce potential deaths in the Khumbu Icefall, the danger zone,” said Bhusal. “We will train Sherpas, as drone operators cannot handle tasks at the higher camps. In the future, all work will be done by Sherpas.”
Based on trial data, the heavy lift drones could carry 30 kg, or over 60 pounds of material from Camp I, but as the altitude increased, the load capacity reduced, down to just 18 kg at Camp II at 6,400 meters above sea level.
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As warmer summers melt snow and ice on Everest, garbage and bodies from decades past are uncovered and risk polluting meltwater which feeds streams and rivers all over the valleys around the mountain.
The SPCC is conscientious of this, and is working hard to try and remove these potential contaminants from one of the holiest mountains in Buddhism.
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