Quote of the Day: “There’s something about taking a plow and breaking new ground. It gives you energy.” – Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest)
Photo by: Dan Meyers
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?
895 years ago today, Zhu Xi, a revolutionary Confucian scholar of the Song Dynasty, was born. His shifting of the emphasis from the I Ching to the Four Books reshaped the Chinese view of the world, which is not an easy thing to do. His commentaries and perspectives formed the basis for the Chinese civil service exam from his day to 1905. READ more about the great thinker… (1130)
A farmer has treated her herd of dairy cows to a live jazz band in the hope the music will boost milk production.
The Dixiebeats performed to both the Jersey and Holstein cows at Smithills Open Farm in Bolton, the UK, last Sunday.
The six-piece combo was invited to play after owners had read that jazz music can increase milk production by up to 4% and wanted to experiment.
Their 30-minute set consisted of fast and slower compositions which staff said was “moosic to their ears.”
“The cows took a little warming up to but they seemed to really enjoy it,” said 25-year-old farmer Caitlyn Horrocks. “They all took turns coming to the front to see what was going on.”
“One of them called Peggy loved it, she stayed right at the fence for the entire performance.”
At first the farm simply played jazz music to their cows on a speaker. A video of the cows’ reactions posted to their TikTok account smithillsopenfarm went viral with over 266,000 views. The farmers then figured the real thing could only be more popular, and, if the claim about milk production true, more efficacious.
WATCH the performance below…
@smithillsopenfarm Dixie Beats very kindly played some tunes for our girls this weekend! Do you think they liked it?🎷🎵🎺 #cows #funnyanimals #jazzmusic #fyp #farmlife ♬ In the Mood - Glenn Miller
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Worms, plankton, water fleas, sedges, algae, and cattails—the foundations of the food web in Toronto’s Don River ecosystem, simply woke up again after 130 years of entombment, stunning scientists.
The Don River was tamed and turned into a canalized, industrial waterfront at the turn of the century, and was recently the focus of one of the largest wetland rewilding efforts in North America.
As the bulldozers removed layer after layer of weeds, dirt, gravel, and industrial debris, they suddenly started digging up native reeds and cattails. Scientists combing through soil samples began seeing life—and lots of it—munching or lounging around as if nothing had ever happened.
Seeds and pollen from centuries past—from extinct trees—were turned up, and the whole restoration suddenly took on a very different countenance: one of assurity and celebration.
The Don River Restoration program was first launched in 2007 after it was determined that the concrete embankments that narrowed the river’s flow through one of the biggest cities in North America was at the root of the area’s flooding problems.
It was after the returning of the river’s flow to a meandering track that a new island was created, and the century-old life started to be found.
“When the project started, it was like being on the Moon. The space was so just barren, so awful, dusty. It was bereft of any life,” said Melanie Sifton, a horticultural expert who was on site at the time the cattails and sedges were spotted. “To find what we did—it was like finding buried treasure.”
Sifton was part of a team that selected 50 individual clods of dirt for microscopic analysis in the labs of Toronto, and it was in these clods that scientists began to witness something that seemed impossible.
Life had either just carried on all the same after being buried, or it had entered some state of suspended animation, like a form of hibernation, where all it took was a little sun or water to wake it all up again.
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And that’s exactly what happened: water fleas from a soil strata dating to the 1800s just picked up where they left off once water flooded the soil samples. More recent soil layers contained tiny worms munching away on algae.
“The soil was ready to turn on. And that’s what I love so much about it,” said Shelby Riskin, a soil expert at the University of Toronto. “The microbes, the nutrients, all of those pieces that are so small and outside of the human scope of vision, that we don’t totally understand as well, were ready to make the soil into a thriving ecosystem.”
MORE RIVER RESTORATION PROJECTS: Birds Sing Anew After Residents of New Orleans Ninth Ward Restore 40-Acre Wetland to Historic Glory
And that’s exactly what happened. The Don River and the fateful island with its cattails and water fleas are now a 24-acre wildlife refuge where snowy owls, eagles, muskrat, and beaver can be spotted. During heavy rains, the meandering course does its job and slows the flow of the water on towards the Great Lakes while dispersing the extra in marshy areas along the banks. No flooding, no millions in damages.
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A creative solution from up north for how to stop crows and geese from leaving droppings all over a school playground has left several residents in a dreadful fright.
The story comes from the city of Menlo Park in California, where a pair of “coyotes” are scarring these birds and the neighbors too. Local news outlet InMenlo reached out to a school district spokesman, who explained what all the fuss was about.
“There are coyote statues at Encinal and Laurel Lower Campus,” said spokesperson Parke Treadway.
“They were an idea that came from Encinal Principal Sharon Burns’ father, who lives in Canada. She was talking to him about Encinal’s population of Canadian geese on the field and the droppings they leave behind. He mentioned that in Canada they use fake coyotes in parks to deter geese (and relieve the goose poo issue).”
“Principal Burns thought it might work for crows, too, and it does! The coyotes have been a brilliant solution as other crow deterrents haven’t worked and [the school’s] custodial teams were constantly washing crow droppings off the lunch tables and surrounding ground. Now with the coyote statues our play areas are cleaner and water use is down.”
“Laurel School was facing a similar dilemma with its geese, so they also purchased two coyote statues which have been named Oak and Sequoia. The fact that the coyote statues deter both geese and crows is wonderful.”
MORE DETERRENCE STRATEGIES: Farmers Use Bees to Deter Elephants from Romping Over Crops–a Win-Win for All
“Principal Linda Creighton of Laurel Lower Campus also reports that ‘We have had over a dozen worried passersby call to warn us about the ‘coyotes’ on campus and they all get a good chuckle and breathe a sigh of relief when they learn that they are just Oak and Sequoia, our coyote statues.’”
Coyotes have historically worked so well for this purpose, GNN reported that airports in Alaska have even employed robotic dogs “dressed” as coyotes to keep loitering birds off runways.
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Measuring no more than 2 feet long from nose to tail, a newly-described crocodilian nicknamed “Elton” likely lived its entire life on land where it lounged in the Cretaceous Montana sunshine, eating plants and insects.
Elton was about the size of a big lizard, according to Montana State University professor of paleontology David Varricchio, whose former Ph.D. student Harrison Allen managed to spot the 1.9-inch-long skull of the animal on an excavation trip in 2021.
Had it lived to be fully grown, Elton would have measured no longer than 3 feet, far smaller than most members of the crocodilian family known today or to have ever lived. Adapted to live on land, it probably ate both plants and insects or small animals with its assortment of differently shaped and specialized teeth.
Its unique anatomy singles it out as belonging to a new, previously unrecognized family of crocodyliforms endemic to the Cretaceous of North America.
During a dig in the summer of 2021 in the Blackleaf geological formation on US Forest Service land near Dillon, Montana, Allen noticed a fossil the size of the tip of his pinkie with a “weird texture on it.”
“I brought it to Dr. Varricchio and knew it must be something good, because he said, ‘Take me to where you found this,’” said Allen, who is now studying croc paleontology as a doctoral student at Stony Brook University in New York.
Four years and hundreds of hours of study later, he is the lead author of a paper published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that describes the morphology and scientific significance of the creature whose remains he found in the Blackleaf Formation.
“We have found dinosaurs (in the Blackleaf) before, but this was the second known vertebrate animal we’d ever found in this formation,” he told his university press.
The extinct animal, which Allen and his co-authors later named Thikarisuchus xenodentes for its strange, sheathed teeth, has provided new information about the patterns of evolution in the croc family tree.
It also provided the ultimate undergraduate research project for Allen, who delved into the painstaking process of excavating, sifting and reconstructing the Thikarisuchus remains with the help of some fellow students.
“As an undergraduate student new to research, I nervously went up to Dr. Varricchio and asked if I could study this specimen,” Allen said. “It led me down the rabbit hole into this amazing world of prehistoric, extinct crocs and their evolutionary niches.”
The day after Allen recovered the first piece of skeleton, he and his classmates scooped up several bags of sediment from the mound where it was found. Back in Bozeman, Allen and his friend Dane Johnson spent between nearly 20 hours sifting out fine particulate matter and dirt, eventually recovering dozens of tiny pieces of the Thikarisuchus skeleton that collectively fit into the palm of Allen’s hand.
As they worked, they listened to music, including Elton John’s 1970s hit “Crocodile Rock.” The nickname “Elton” stuck, long before the specimen was assigned the scientific name that reflects its physical traits.
Allen and Johnson recovered bits of bone from almost all areas of the animal’s body, including its limbs, vertebrae, jaw, and skull. Because the fragments were tiny and exceptionally fragile, the students didn’t attempt to physically reassemble them. Instead, they took them for a series of CT scans before coloring the digital, 2D segment slices that the scans produced, a process necessary to visually distinguish the bones from the rocks they were embedded in.
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“Harrison worked super hard to digitally reconstruct the animal, and it came out beautifully,” said Varricchio of his former student.
During the process, Allen discovered that the bones of Thikarisuchus were densely concentrated and organized in a manner consistent with fossils of organisms found in burrows in the Blackleaf Formation and the nearby Wayan Formation in Idaho. He said this suggests that Thikarisuchus was likewise preserved within a burrow.
The specimen also presented clues about Thikarisuchus’ newly named family group Wannchampsidae and a similar group found in Eurasia known as Atopasauridae. Both groups were tiny and terrestrially adapted, and they shared certain cranial and dental features found in another more distantly related group from the Cretaceous of Africa and South America.
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“It suggests that during the same time period, we’re seeing convergent evolution between two distantly related groups due to similar environmental conditions, prey availability and who-knows-what that prompted crocs on opposite sides of the planet to develop similar features,” Allen said.
“The majority of diversity of crocodyliforms is in the past. There were fully marine crocs, fully terrestrial crocs, herbivorous crocs, omnivores, and some that cracked shells,” he said. “That amazed me and made me want to get into this more specific realm of paleontology.”
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Quote of the Day: “Zeal will do more than knowledge.” – William Hazlitt
Photo by: Greyson Joralemon
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?
165 years ago today, the Open Championship, also known as the British Open, was first played in Scotland, at the Prestwick Golf Club in Ayrshire. The oldest golf tournament in the world, and one of the four prestigious majors, it rotates between a select group of coastal UK golf courses. READ more about its history… (1860)
Reprinted with Permission from World at Large…
What if there were a way that didn’t involve CRISPR to give your offspring a natural talent for athletics?
Well that’s totally possible as it turns out, because scientists just demonstrated it in mice, and it didn’t even involve so-called “good genes”.
It involved a modern and exciting field of genetic biology called epigenetics: a term that refers to adaptations to genetic expression in response to life stressors. Here, the actual nature of the DNA doesn’t change, but adaptations packaged in the similarly important RNA made their way into sperm cells, the embryo, and the offspring.
The story of this fascinating innovation begins in Nanjing University, where lead investigator on the study Xin Yin used to notice during his time as an undergraduate that the children of athletes seemed to possess a natural talent for sports. The reproductive biologist didn’t really see the sense in it; certainly, genes coding for larger lung volume would increase a child’s ability to run, but what could explain having a ‘knack’ for what takes months and years of training to master? There’s no gene that codes for having a knack.
This curiosity led Yin to launch a research project with a fellow reproductive biologist at Nanjing to see whether a male mouse’s mastery of treadmill running could somehow imprint onto his offspring. Together with his co-authors, Yin subjected male mice to treadmill work everyday for 2 weeks before breeding them with female mice who did not exercise.
What they found was remarkable. The mice thusly born possessed more oxidative muscle fibers, could run for longer on treadmills, and were more resistant to weight gain from a high-fat diet, than the offspring of sedentary male and female mice. During the study period, Yin and his team sequenced the microRNA snippets in the sperm cells and the fertilized egg, and after observing the significant athletic adaptations, went back to see what might be causing it.
Exercise boosts the levels of a protein called PGC-1 alpha in muscle cells, where it activates genes that build more mitochondria, the organelles responsible for cellular energy and metabolism. PGC-1A is suppressed by another protein called NCoR1. In the exercised mice, sperm-bound microRNAs which proliferate under conditions of exercise target, once inside the mouse embryo, NCoR1. In effect, these RNAs released a natural, cellular brake on the development of metabolic power and muscle function.
To triple check whether or not classic genetic transfer was behind this adaptation for countering NCoR1, the researchers looked through 10 of the microRNAs that seemed most likely confer the exercise benefits, selected one in particular, and injected it into embryos fertilized by untrained fathers. Just that action alone, a single, non-DNA molecule, was enough to reproduce the endurance benefits seen in trained fathers.
Biologists commenting on the study to Science Magazine said they were “surprised” that a single RNA could have such an impact.
With that in mind, and to investigate whether similar effects were at work in humans, the team collected sperm from 8 men who trained regularly and 24 others who didn’t. An examination revealed that the equivalents of 7 of the 10 miRNAs seen in the mouse model were elevated in the sperm of trained men.
It’s the first study to show that RNA can pass down the benefits of exercise, commented Colin Conine, an epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the work but who called it “really a novel paradigm”. It probably suggests that the lifestyle choices of fathers need to be looked at with more scrutiny than in the past, he said.
Caveats included that the endurance/exercise benefit was only seen in male offspring, suggesting the sperm microRNAs only make it through the paternal germline. Grandchildren never received the benefit their parents did.
Yin’s study couldn’t go so far as to investigate the mechanism behind the transfer: why and how did exercise affect sperm? How did the microRNAs pass through the blood-testes barrier? How did they reach the epididymis, the tubes where sperm cells mature? They had time and data to present two hypotheses: that exercise codes for the creation of small-extracellular vesicles which themselves have the capacity to bring microRNA through the testes-blood barrier, or that within the blanket hormonal response of exercise, steroids and thyroid hormones may alter microRNA expression in sperm directly, without relying on the blood stream.
The authors are now extremely curious to know what other effects microRNAs packaged in sperm cells are having on the father’s offspring. WaL
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From the restaurant scene in Miami to the fan-powered boats of the Everglades, people are really excited about oysters.
Can you imagine—the bivalve so associated with cold waters in places like Brittany, Sydney, Galway, or California, being grown in the muddy, tropical Everglades?
If your first instinct was to swear never to eat one, maybe you should listen to what Josh Wilkie and Fabio Galarce are saying, as they harvest dozen after dozen for Michelin-starred Miami restaurants.
“We have to focus on educating and combating this stigma or as we like to call it, prejudice,” Galarce told the Miami Herald. “We’re finding that the oysters love it here. People think of the Everglades as just a muddy swamp, but it’s actually a beautiful tropical paradise.”
Galarce and Wilkie are the co-founders of Everglades Oysters, a company that provides artisanal oyster supplies to restaurants around Florida from a 74-acre nursery sandwiched between 10,000 Islands National Wildlife Refuge and one of the Gulf of Mexico’s most productive bull shark nurseries.
In this “tropical paradise,” lined with mangroves and teeming with wildlife, 200,000 oysters are raised in baskets connected to a floating flip-farm system. Strung out in a long black line that appears almost like a gangplank, the swaying of the baskets below help cultivate the prized cup-like shape of a good restaurant oyster.
The animals are filter feeders, and rather than filtering the sea, as is the case with so many oysters one will eat at restaurants, these bivalves get their flavor from the drainage of Lake Okeechobee running through the glades.
Why, you might ask, would anyone want to eat a filter feeder who filters a swampy freshwater lake? Easy answer, as it turns out: they’re delicious.
Just ask five-time Michelin-starred chef Michael White, whose restaurant Mirabella in Miami Beach said that Everglades Oysters harvest at the moment of order, and ship them in a jiffy—fresher than any oyster they could ever hope to get from colder waters.
Jeremy Ford, another Michelin-starred chef, this time at Miami’s Stubborn Seed restaurant, used to import oysters from as far away as the Pacific Northwest. But always on the lookout for Florida produce, Ford said Galarce and Wilkie’s oysters “ticked all the boxes.”
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The Herald did outline that eating oysters from warm climates comes with a risk of vibrio, a nasty bacterial pathogen that can cause severe illness and even death. Restaurants that serve oysters in Florida have to alert their customers as to this very risk, and Everglades Oysters will harvest in response to orders, not in anticipation of them, in order to reduce this as much as possible.
Galarce and Wilkie are looking to do so much more than run a profitable business, or even create a culture of southern oysters. Florida’s historic oyster reef coverage has been decimated by oil spills, storms, coastal development, water pollution, and erosion.
Oyster reefs provide significant benefits to people and wildlife. When large enough, they help to dampen storm surges, and each little oyster can filter 50 gallons of water per day, making them ideal for keeping water quality along the coast in top condition. To help build these reefs back up, Everglades Oysters and other small oyster farmers collect spent shells from restaurants and pile them back into the water to give oyster larvae something to glom onto.
MORE OYSTER STORIES: World’s Largest Oyster Restoration Is Big Success – Fulfilling Virginia’s Promise to Chesapeake Bay Rivers
Ancient Native Americans actually built islands from oyster shells, and it’s that kind of tradition and harmony with nature that Everglades Oysters is all about.
“If we grow more oysters, we clean more water. If you sell more local oysters, you help the local farmers. You consume more oysters, people are getting sustainable protein,” Galarce told Miami Herald. “You return it to the water, we build more reefs.”
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Stretches of land, now hidden beneath the sea, may have given early humans a way to move between what is today Turkey and Europe, according to groundbreaking new research in this little-studied region.
The recently published study reveals the first evidence of Paleolithic activity in Ayvalık, and may reshape how scientists understand our species’ journey into Europe.
The prehistoric peopling of Europe has long been documented as occurring in waves from the western edge of Eurasia. For decades, experts believed that Homo sapiens reached Europe mainly by traveling through the Balkans and the Levant, moving from Africa into the Middle East.
However, the discovery of 138 stone tools spread across 10 sites within a 200 km² area suggests a different possibility.
According to a study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, long before Ayvalık became known for its olive groves and seaside scenery, this part of the northeastern Aegean coast (now in Turkey) may have served as another key passageway for ancient humans exploring a shifting prehistoric world.
“It was a truly unforgettable moment for us, holding the first tools in our hands was both emotional and inspiring,” explains Dr. Göknur Karahan, from the Department of Archaeology-Prehistory, at Hacettepe University, in Turkey, who was part of a fully female team of expert archaeologists from the country.
“And each find from there on was a moment of excitement for the whole team. Our archaeological discovery has unveiled that this now-idyllic region once potentially offered a vital land bridge for human movement during the Pleistocene era—when sea levels dropped and the now-submerged landscape was briefly exposed.”
“We are very excited and delighted with this discovery. These findings mark Ayvalık as a potential new frontier in the story of human evolution, placing it firmly on the map of human prehistory—opening up a new possibility for how early humans may have entered Europe,” Karahan added. “It feels like we are adding an entirely new page to the story of human dispersal.”
During the Ice Age, sea levels dropped more than 300 feet, revealing vast coastal plains that are now underwater. At that time, the modern islands and peninsulas of Ayvalık would have formed a single stretch of land, creating a natural bridge that linked Anatolia to Europe.
The artifacts found in the new study were discovered along the present-day coastline, providing evidence that people once lived and traveled across these now-submerged landscapes.
Until now, environmental conditions and deep sediment layers had made it difficult to detect or preserve traces of early human activity in the region.
“In all these periods, the present-day islands and peninsulas of Ayvalık would have formed interior zones within an expansive terrestrial environment,” explains co-author Professor Kadriye Özçelik, from Ankara University.
The region’s shifting geology and active coastlines in the North Aegean made preservation difficult and the number of items uncovered “limited,” however this research team managed to uncover Levallois-style stone cutting technologies from various Paleolithic periods, as well as handaxes and cleavers.
Among the most significant finds include Levallois-style flake tools, sophisticated implements often associated with Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens.
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“These large cutting tools are among the most iconic artifacts of the Paleolithic and are instantly recognizable even today, so are a very important find,” explains Dr. Karahan.
“The presence of these objects in Ayvalık is particularly significant, as they provide direct evidence that the region was part of wider technological traditions shared across Africa, Asia, and Europe.”
“Holding these objects—after walking across landscapes where no one had ever documented Paleolithic remains before—was unforgettable.”
MORE PALEOARCHAEOLOGY: Scientists Use Stones to Build Canoe Like Their Ancestors and Sailed it 140 Miles Across Dangerous Waters
The authors collectively recommended further research in the area that would integrate absolute dating, stratigraphic excavation, and paleoenvironmental reconstruction to better clarify the the time periods when the tools were used.
“Multidisciplinary approaches will help illuminate the region’s role not as a peripheral landscape, but as an active corridor of Paleolithic interaction and innovation.”
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Cambridge University archivists are leading an important project to extract and conserve valuable information from floppy disks before they become unusable.
The initiative began when the archive received a box of 5.25-inch floppy disks from a DOS-formatted computer that belonged to none other than physicist Steven Hawking, who was able to use early computers despite his disability from ALS.
The challenges a group of archivists encountered when they attempted to read the disks helped them realize how vulnerable this funny, briefly adopted technology which predate compact disks is to the ravages of time, and how a clock was ticking to get important information off them before they became unusable.
It spawned a project, aptly named in our current pop-culture environment: “Future Nostalgia.”
Before the term was chased from the historical lexicon with torches and pitchforks, “the Dark Ages” were used to describe the period in European history when primary source writings are particularly scant—between the fall of Rome and the Middle Ages.
The Future Nostalgia project presents the case that the late 20th century may form a sort of dark ages when historians in the future look back on our time and see a big hole in early computer writings. Certainly books and magazines and newspapers are available a-plenty, but if floppy disks and other early technologies aren’t kept in good order, early computer writings may seem sparce to future historians.
Floppy disks present numerous challenges to archivists, among which were the multiple formats they were built and coded for.
“There wasn’t one system that dominated the market,” explains Leontien Talboom, a member of the Cambridge University Library’s digital preservation team who is leading the project.
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That means that as many as a dozen different early computing systems are needed to read the full spectrum of floppy disk formats, and it’s not always straight forward finding these machines.
Nor is it straightforward that the disks themselves are readable. They may be moldy, if stowed away in an attic for example. Iron oxide on the surface of the plastic may corrode material away. It can also lose its magnetism, preventing it being from read entirely.
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That is why Talboom and her team are urgently trying to acquire collections of noteworthy writers or authors—like Hawking—and further digitize them from their early floppy disk format. So far, in addition to Hawking, they’ve uncovered abstract lists by the poet Nicholas Moore, articles from a society of the paranormal, and more.
“Most of the donations we get are from people who are either retiring or passing away,” Talboom told the BBC. “That means we’re seeing more and more things from the era of personal computing.”
Not only are donations coming from those retired or passed, but so is a lot of information on how to use different formats. An example comes from the archivists’ work with a set of floppy disks that contained speeches and letters with constituents of Neil Kinnock, a UK labor party leader in the 1980s.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Volunteer for the National Archives to Translate Cursive Handwriting for Modern Newbies
“They were written on the Diamond Word processor,” explained Chris Knowles, a participant in the Future Nostalgia project.” There’s not much information about that system out there. There are lots of fan communities around any system that had games, and archivists often borrow their tools. But where that doesn’t exist, it’s more awkward.”
Work continues, and Talboom is more and more eager to have the public’s involvement with the project. She sees it as a win-win partnership: owners of floppy disks get to see what kind of materials their old colleagues or family members wrote onto them, and Future Nostalgia gets more material, but also more knowledge and practice about how to access and preserve floppy disk formats and the material they contain.
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Quote of the Day: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, poet
Photo by: Darius Bashar (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?
56 years ago today, New York’s underdog baseball crew ‘The Miracle Mets’ won the World Series in just 5 games, a romantic triumph over a heavily-favored Orioles team. In the seven previous seasons, the Mets had never finished higher than ninth place and consistently lost one hundred games. Yet, starting in May, the Mets delivered an astonishing record of 82–39. They won 38 of their last 49 games, finishing eight games ahead of the Cubs—one of the largest turnarounds in MLB history. WATCH a tribute… (1969)
A new technology utilizing coffee and plastic waste is designed to capture carbon dioxide from industrial processes before it’s released into the atmosphere, and has been patented by scientists.
The highly novel and detailed method with promising potential to reduce environmental pollution utilizes a blend of spent coffee grounds, polyethylene terephthalate, (PET) and potassium hydroxide, a strong alkaline chemical.
The components together form an effective material for CO₂ adsorption, say the research team based in the United Arab Emirates.
Globally, an estimated eight million tons of spent coffee grounds are discarded annually, mostly ending up in landfills where they emit methane and other greenhouse gases. PET is a member of the polyester family and widely used in consumer packaging.
Potassium hydroxide serves as a powerful activating agent in the process, enhancing the material’s ability to trap carbon, and the researchers at the University of Sharjah combine the three to create activated carbon—a common component in many consumer and industrial products, which when used would trap the carbon.
“What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” boasted study leader Dr. Haif Aljomard.
She says the process operates at an activation temperature of 600 °C, much lower than conventional thermal recycling methods for plastic, and emphasized that the patent presents “significant” findings in the synthesis of activated carbon from waste materials, and the waste-to-resource approach that underpins the technology.
SIMILAR STORIES TO THIS: Concrete Made 30% Stronger by Adding Waste Coffee Grounds–Cutting Emissions and Mining in the Process
“This invention repurposes two abundant waste streams—coffee and plastic—into a high-performance adsorbent,” Dr. Aljomard added. “The resulting activated carbon shows strong potential for capturing CO₂ from fossil fuel-based energy systems, contributing to the reduction of air pollution.”
Activated carbon is utilized in a broad spectrum of industrial and consumer product, including gas purification and drinking water filtration, as well as swimming pool, aquarium, wastewater, and sewage treatment systems.
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Scientists have used the root system of mushrooms to create a composting toilet that is odor absorbing, while creating over 2,000 liters of fertilizer and soil a year.
Separating solids from from liquids and processing each in different ways using fungal mycelia, the toilet can currently be found in the University of BC botanic gardens.
Called the MycoToilet, it was developed by Steven Hallam, a professor of microbiology at UBC, and Joseph Dahmen, the project’s lead and an associate professor at the university’s School of Architecture.
Together, they hope to rethink a product and system that many people take for granted, starting with their students, most of whom were unable to answer the question: what happens to human waste after the toilet is flushed, said Dahmen.
“We wanted to turn a daily routine everyone knows into a pleasant experience that reminds us of our connection to ecological cycles.”
The waterless toilet separates liquid from solid human waste, with the solids ending up an a mycelia-lined compartment where laboratory tests say 90% of the odor-causing compounds are eliminated. The feces are then converted, slowly but surely, into soil, 600 liters of which can be generated in a year of use, with the liquid waste creating some 2,000 liters of liquid fertilizer.
Not all wastewater treatment plants in the US or the world can produce fertilizer from the waste they collect. In many instances, it’s merely sanitized within the regulatory limits, and dumped into the sea or rivers in the form of one of the least-pleasant words in the English language: ‘effluent.’
NO MORE WASTING WASTE: A Melbourne Sewage Farm Has Become a Haven for 300 Species of Birds
“Waste is a function of our values, and if we can rethink what we value in this context, there’s lots of useful material in these effluents, and we can recover that, then we’re adding value back and creating a more circular model for the economy and our lives,” Hallam told CBC.
MUSHROOM STORIES: Packet of Fungi Inside New Diapers Breaks Them Down in Landfill Turning it to Mycelium
Hallam and Dahmen will be evaluating the performance of the various species of fungus they’ve used in the compartments to see which is able to compost or odor-eat the best during the 6-month trial run in the campus botanical garden where it looks right at home amid the woods with its ceder panels.
Mushrooms have been theorized as a way to break down virtually anything in our society, from nuclear waste to our own bodies, as the organisms work symbiotically with the whole soil microenvironment to disassemble even the most complex of molecules.
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Swiss researchers have pioneered a method of cultivating metal out of water-based gel, an innovation that promises valuable applications in energy technology.
The concept aims to power the production of unique sensors, biomedical devices, or energy conversion and storage components.
Scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, have created dense, high-strength structures by injecting hydrogel with metal salts of various minerals like iron and copper. Early results show materials 20-times stronger with much less shrinkage than earlier methods.
As novel a concept as “cultivating metal” sounds like, it’s actually been done before, but challenges presented themselves which could not be overcome in these previous experiments.
They involved vat photopolymerization—a type of 3D printing that sees pouring a light-reactive liquid resin into a container and then solidifying specific areas with a laser or ultraviolet light to create a shape. However, because this method only works with light-sensitive polymers, its practical uses are limited.
Daryl Yee, who leads the Laboratory for the Chemistry of Materials and Manufacturing at EPFL’s School of Engineering, said these earlier approaches have major flaws.
“These materials tend to be porous, which significantly reduces their strength, and the parts suffer from excessive shrinkage, which causes warping,” he told his university press.
To address these issues, Yee and his team have introduced a new approach described in their paper published in Advanced Materials. Instead of hardening a resin already mixed with metal compounds, the researchers first 3D print a framework using a simple water-based gel known as a hydrogel. They then soak this “blank” structure in metal salts, which are chemically converted into tiny metal-containing nanoparticles that spread throughout the gel. Repeating this process multiple times allows them to create composites with very high metal content.
After 5–10 of these “growth cycles,” the remaining hydrogel is removed through heating, leaving behind a dense metal or ceramic object that precisely matches the shape of the original printed gel. Because the metal salts are added only after printing, the same hydrogel template can be used to make a variety of different metals, ceramics, or composite materials.
“Our work not only enables the fabrication of high-quality metals and ceramics with an accessible, low-cost 3D printing process; it also highlights a new paradigm in additive manufacturing where material selection occurs after 3D printing, rather than before,” Yee summarizes.
For their study, the team fabricated intricate mathematical lattice shapes called gyroids out of iron, silver, and copper, demonstrating their technique’s ability to produce strong yet complex structures. To test the strength of their materials, they used a device called a universal testing machine to apply increasing pressure to the gyroids.
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“Our materials could withstand 20 times more pressure compared to those produced with previous methods, while exhibiting only 20% shrinkage versus 60-90%,” says PhD student and first author Yiming Ji.
The scientists say their technique is especially interesting for the fabrication of advanced three-dimensional forms that must be simultaneously strong, lightweight, and complex. For example, metal catalysts are essential for enabling reactions that convert chemical energy into electricity. Other applications could include high-surface area metals with advanced cooling properties for energy technologies.
3D PRINTING ADVANCES: 3D Printed Aluminum Alloy Sets Strength Record on Path to Lighter Aircraft Systems
Looking ahead, the team is working on improving their process by further increasing the density of their materials. Another goal is speed: the repeated infusion steps, while essential for producing stronger materials, make the method more time-consuming compared to other 3D printing techniques for converting polymers to metals.
“We are already working on bringing the total processing time down by using a robot to automate these steps,” Yee says.
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In Maine, ownership of 4 large dams has been transferred to The Nature Conservancy in a sale it hopes will return the river they operate on into prime habitat for salmon for the first time in a century.
Operated by Brookfield Renewables, the dams along the lower Kennebec River prevent ocean going, freshwater fish like salmon from accessing ancestral spawning grounds upriver.
On September 15th, 2025, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Brookfield signed a purchase and sale agreement for the four dams totaling $138 million.
The Kennebec River is fed by Sandy River in the heart of Maine before running down to the Gulf of Maine past the towns of Skowhegan and Waterville. The Weston, Shawmut, Hydro-Kennebec, and Lockwood dams are located in intervals along this stretch, called the lower Kennebec.
The federal regulatory process for decommissioning a dam, as seen in the recent parallel in California, where four dams were removed to make way for salmon, needed more than 5 years from start to finish. As a result, TNC will look to gather another $30 million in funding to create a nonprofit that will manage and oversee the decommissioning process, during which the dams could continue to generate power for 5 to 10 years.
That would include working with Sappi North America, whose Somerset Mill, located between the town of Skowhegan and the Shawmut dam, to find a solution to the company’s long-term water needs, which are currently met by this dam.
Their twin goals in the decommissioning project are to return free-flowing conditions to the lower Kennebec River to support regionally-endangered North Atlantic salmon, while doing so in collaboration with existing stakeholders in the dams’ activities, Sappi included.
“TNC and its partners are 100% committed to developing a solution with Sappi that fully addresses the Somerset Mill’s long-term water system needs,” the organization wrote in a statement. “We understand the vital role of the Somerset Mill for the forest products industry and the state’s economy.”
Atlantic salmon are considered near-threatened worldwide, but certain stocks in the North Atlantic have almost completely disappeared. Access to Sandy River via the lower Kennebec would open up hundreds of miles of prime habitat for spawning and coming of age.
Brookfield maintains dams higher up the river, but these areas are considered to be of poor habitat quality. Those dams also happen to produce substantially more electricity than the dams along the lower stretch of the river—those set to be removed.
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The Maine Monitor reports that fishing advocacy groups have argued for the dam’s removal for “decades.” River herring, the federally-protected Atlantic sturgeon, and American eel, all rely on Maine’s freshwater rivers to either spawn or feed before swimming out to sea.
The current predicament finds around one-twelfth of the historic spawning population of Atlantic salmon returning to the Kennebec via the gulf, where they’re captured at Lockwood Dam and actually trucked up the roads past the next three dams to spawn. During the reverse journey many do not survive the journey to the gulf past the industrial infrastructure.
MORE SALMON CELEBRATIONS: Before and After Photos of World’s Largest Dam Removal in Calif. Will Have You Cheering for Team Salmon (LOOK)
The removal of the Klamath River dams this time last year produced incredible results immediately, with fish finding their way back upstream far past the farthest dam to spawn within a single season, proving that ancestral instincts can remain intact despite generations of fish not being able to act on them.
But examples also lie closer to home, with dams removed years past along another Maine river, the Penobscot, resulting in long-term economic and environmental improvements.
WATCH a video report below from TNC…
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Quote of the Day: “The bluebird carries the sky on his back.” – Henry David Thoreau
Photo by: Misty Ladd
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?
28 years ago today, NASA and ESA’s Cassini Mission, meant to gather data on Saturn and its moons, was launched from Cape Canaveral. The Flagship-class robotic spacecraft comprised both NASA’s Cassini space probe and ESA’s Huygens lander, which landed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Cassini was active in space for nearly 20 years, with 13 years spent orbiting Saturn and studying the planet and its system after entering orbit on July 1, 2004. READ about what it found… (1997)
