56 years ago today, My Sweet Lord by George Harrison reached number 1 on the UK pop charts. It would hold the same position in the US, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, West Germany, Japan, and others. His first single as a solo artist, the song was the first number-one single by an ex-Beatle. It was also a worldwide call to abandon religious secularism by blending the Hebrew word hallelujah with a Vedic mantra in praise of the Hindu god Krishna. READ more… (1970)
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn
Quote of the Day: “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” – Jim Rohn
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18 Outdoor Dogs Rescued from Winter Storm–and One Gives Birth Safe and Warm Inside Shelter
In southeast Missouri, the nonprofit Animal Rescue Corps helped save a pregnant female dog along with 17 others from the snow and freezing temperatures that battered so much of the United States.
Safe and warm at their rescue center outside Nashville, the ARC staff helped her welcome a litter of 9 adorable puppies into the world.
According to ARC, following a call in Doniphan, Missouri, their responders found several adult dogs chained up and multiple litters of puppies roaming freely on the property.
This is not a criminal case, says ARC Executive Director and finalist for the CNN 2025 Hero of the Year award, Tim Woodward, as it was the property owners who took the initiative to ask for help when the winter storm was on the horizon.
“The people living on the property recognized that the number of dogs had grown beyond what they could manage and that they could no longer properly care for the animals,” said Woodward.
“These individuals also agreed to have their personal dogs spayed or neutered immediately at ARC’s expense.”
ARC team members traveled to the area on Thursday night, met with local rescuers on Friday morning and transported seven adult dogs and 11 puppies to its rescue shelter near Nashville, Tennessee later that day, KFVS 12 reported.
Described as a “situation of uncontrolled reproduction that got out of hand,” the property owners had only gotten hold of the first few dogs after volunteering to help a family member.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Veteran Inspired Drone Company Finds Lost Dog in Frigid Cold in Just 41 Minutes–Leading to ‘Cinematic’ Reunion
ARC doesn’t specialize in adoptions, but rather large scale rescues of multiple animals. Once mentally and medically recovered from the conditions they’re rescued from, and legal custody has been secured, ARC will work through their network of pre-approved 501(c)3 non-profit shelters and rescues where these animals will continue their journey to a loving home.
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Citizen Scientist Spots Earth-like Planet: Now Astrophysicists Will Focus Most Powerful Telescopes on it
In a story that proves you don’t have to be a star to find a star, astronomers are excited to train the next generation of telescopes at an Earth-like exoplanet discovered by a citizen scientist.
Alexander Venner, currently studying studying at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, picked his way by hand through the data collected by a now-retired NASA space-based telescope called Kepler, which was used to examine the sky for exoplanets during a survey of 500,000 stars that ended 8 years ago.
Datasets like these are huge, and often combed through with search algorithms, but the PhD student managed what others did not by rolling up his sleeves, so to speak.
“It was completely missed,” Mr. Venner told Science Magazine about his discovery, presented at the Rocky Worlds conference in Groningen. “The best way to detect it was to actually just look.”
The reason it was missed was because the exoplanet orbits a K-dwarf star designated HD 137010. At just 146 light years away, it’s close enough for Kepler to have recorded the presence of such a small planet, and for the most powerful telescopes of the day to record it in great detail.
Scientists look for exoplanets by centering a telescope on a distant star and waiting to see a dip in the star’s light, indicating there’s something orbiting the star large enough to reduce the light signal—a planet. This is called the transit method.
The first man to ever identify an exoplanet this way concluded shortly after there must be millions of them. Indeed, the number of known planets beyond our solar system has passed 6,000, yet those which are Earth-like in orbit and mass number merely a few dozen.
Most exoplanets are large and hot, making for easy detection because of the larger dips in light described earlier. Smaller, Earth-sized, rocky worlds orbiting within their star’s habitable zone are not only of the greatest interest to scientists, they’re also much harder to spot, since they’re cooler and smaller.
This is exactly why Venner was able to discover this planet, called HD 137010b. Search algorithms passed over its faint signal in the Kepler data. Venner came across the data through the Planet Hunters project which recruits citizen scientists and volunteer enthusiasts to search through data from Kepler and other planet-hunting telescopes to look for signals left behind by larger surveys.
Venner was thusly recruited during his time at the Planck Institute. Stumbling upon the signal dip from HD 137010, he and his colleagues determined that a planet—rather than a binary star—best explained the dip, and that by looking at the time between dips and the faintness of the signal, an Earth-sized world with about the same orbit as our planet fit the data.
STUDENTS LOOKING WHERE OTHERS HAVEN’T: The First Amateur Astronomer to Ever Discover a New Moon – And it’s Orbiting Jupiter
Venner and his teams’ findings were presented in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, and they propose that HD 137010b sits on the freezing edge of the habitable zone, attributable to HD 137010’s temperature of about 1,800°F lower than our Sun.
It’s doubly exciting because of the few dozen Earth-sized worlds known to science that orbit in what should theoretically be habitable zones—the not-too-hot/not-too-cold space where temperatures could support liquid water—many orbit M-type stars, which have a nasty habit of obliterating planetary atmospheres by spewing out high energy radiation.
MORE HABITABLE ZONE WORLDS: New Temperate Planet That Could Support Human Life Discovered in Pisces Constellation by UK Scientists
HD 137010b now presents as a really appealing target for two upcoming telescope missions: European Space Agency’s orbital PLATO telescope, a successor to Kepler due to launch in about 1 year, and the Isaac Newton Telescope on the Spanish island of Las Palmas, which is slated to begin the Terra Hunting Experiment in February.
“Many of these instruments are essentially proposing to observe particular stars, bright Sun-like stars, for many years,” in the hopes of randomly chancing upon a potentially habitable planet, Venner says. “The advantage of this star is that we already know there’s a planet with Earth-like properties.”
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Simple Amino Acid Identified as Perhaps the Difference Between Life and Death from Illness
Not all diseases are caused nutrient deficiencies, but they often do come with one.
A deficiency of vitamin D, for example, is found most cases of illness, from cancer to upper-respiratory tract infections to sepsis and osteoporosis.
Recently, researchers at the renowned Salk institute for Biological Studies have identified that a simple amino acid called methionine, one which we all get from our diets mostly through animal-sourced foods, plays a key role in ameliorating the risk of death from infections.
Ambitiously, the Salk team were investigating what’s known as “disease trajectory” which describes the process from which an infection is contracted, or injury sustained, to the point at which the patient recovers or dies. Salk scientist Janelle Ayres, PhD, has spent decades researching why some patients go down the former track and others the latter.
Inflammation, she presents, is a key decider, and that the kidneys play an underappreciated role in clearing inflammation from the body when it’s important role in the healing process is finished.
“Our study indicates that small biological differences, including dietary factors, can have large effects on disease outcomes,” says senior author Ayres.
“Our discovery of a kidney-driven mechanism that limits inflammation, together with the protective effects of methionine supplementation in mice, points toward the potential of nutrition as a mechanistically informed medical intervention that can direct and optimize the paths people take in response to insults that cause disease.”
Inflammation is the immune system’s response to any invader. Whether that is a pathogen inside you or a splinter in your finger, immune cells rush to the scene to facilitate the healing process. As those immune cells arrive, they amplify the invader alarms using proteins called pro-inflammatory cytokines.
“Pro-inflammatory cytokines are ultimately what leads to sickness and death in a lot of cases,” says first author Katia Troha, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Ayres’s lab. “The immune system has to balance inflammation to attack the invader without harming healthy cells in the body. Our job is to find the mechanisms it uses to do that, so that we can target them to improve patient outcomes.”
To understand how the body regulates its cytokine levels, the researchers used a mouse model of systemic inflammation induced by the pathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. The first thing they noticed was that the infected mice were not eating as much—a sign of likely metabolic changes. To asses nutritional status, the researchers looked at the levels of circulating amino acids, which are protein building blocks that support cellular health throughout the body.
Infected mice showed depressed methionine levels—an essential amino acid found in our everyday diets. Curious, Troha decided to feed a new batch of mice with methionine-supplemented chow, and surprisingly, these mice were protected against the infection.
ALSO CHECK OUT: Vitamin K Used in ‘Groundbreaking’ Prospective Treatment for Neurodegenerative Diseases
Further experiments showed that methionine reduced circulating cytokine levels by partnering with a surprising ally: the kidneys. Methionine increased the kidneys’ filtration capacity, improving blood flow and helping the body excrete pro-inflammatory cytokines through the urine. Importantly, this methionine-kidney effect cleared excess cytokines without hindering other key aspects of the immune response.
Curious whether methionine’s effect was present in other conditions, the researchers also looked at sepsis and kidney injury models. They found that methionine was also protective for these mice, supporting that methionine may be a useful tool in other inflammatory disease settings.
By supplementing their diets with methionine, Salk scientists were able to give infected mice entirely different disease trajectories. The amino acid boosted the animals’ kidney function and protected them against wasting, blood-brain barrier dysfunction, and death without hindering their bodies’ ability to fight and kill Yersinia pseudotuberculosis.
MORE NUTRITIONAL ANCHORS: Another Study Shows Daily Multivitamin for People Over 60 Slows Memory Decline That Comes With Aging
And the sepsis and kidney injury models show these effects extend to other infections and inflammatory conditions, too, making methionine a potentially useful tool for the treatment of infectious diseases, particularly in cases of kidney disease or failure, or for patients undergoing dialysis.
“Our findings add to a growing body of evidence that common dietary elements can be used as medicine,” says Ayres. “By studying these basic protective mechanisms, we reveal surprising new ways to shift individuals that are fated to develop disease and die onto trajectories of health and survival.”
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Scientists Hail Record Number of Sightings in January as Auspicious for Endangered Right Whales
As the Critically-Endangered North Atlantic right whale continues its long, slow journey back from the brink of extinction, there have been many joyful milestones worth celebrating.
With the year still so young, there’s already been another: a record-number of sightings taken by a single aerial survey flight when a local marine life organization flew over Cape Cod.
The Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) says observers on a plane spotted 33 North Atlantic right whales on Saturday, the most ever for a single day in January, a statement by the center read.
Saturday’s survey was particularly noteworthy because researchers also observed right whale EgNo 1050, a male that’s at least 45 years old and has only been documented one other time in the last 15 years, as well as the 2025 calf of whale 2460. That calf surprised researchers last season when it was documented for the first time ever during a survey of Cape Cod Bay.
The New England Aquarium, another organization monitoring North Atlantic right whales, said that during 2 of their research flights, 23 whales were spotted.
“All around us, we saw groups of whales rolling, splashing, and bursting out of the water,” scientist Kate Laemmle said. “Seeing these critically endangered right whales on our first surveys of the New Year is a great way to start the season and leaves us hopeful for more whales returning to the area.”
With current estimates of the population standing at 384, these surveys aren’t just interesting opportunities to observe baleen ethnology, but snapshots of more than a tenth of the entire living legacy of these once-numerous giants.
MORE WHALE NEWS:
- Gray Whale, Extinct for Centuries in Atlantic, Is Spotted in Cape Cod
- ‘Remarkable’ Right Whale Saga Continues as Vagrant Pair Become First Ever Seen in Bahamas
It’s arguable these whales receive more hands-on conservation work than any other of their race. Tuesday’s sightings by the NE Aquarium triggered the activation of a “slow zone” for boat traffic in the area they were spotted—just south of Nantucket.
Ship strikes and entanglement with derelict fishing gear are the largest of threats to these animals. Last year, GNN reported that 11 calves were born in 2025.
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“If you obey all the rules you miss a lot of the fun.” – Katharine Hepburn
Quote of the Day: “If you obey all the rules you miss a lot of the fun.” – Katharine Hepburn
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Good News in History, January 30
200 years ago today, a groundbreaking piece of civil engineering debuted– the massive Menai Bridge opened, cutting nine hours from the journey between Wales and London. A triumph for its designer and engineer Thomas Telford, it was the biggest suspension bridge in the world at the time. Sixteen huge chains held up 579 feet of deck, allowing 100 feet of clear space beneath for tall ships navigating the seaway underneath. READ more about its construction… (1826)
Spider-Inspired Design Makes Metal Tubes ‘Unsinkable’–A Breakthrough in Maritime Engineering
It’s been 113 years since the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic sank, and engineers still have hopes of someday creating unsinkable ships.
None more so than a team at the University of Rochester that recently present a new “superhydrophobic” design that could lead to more resilient ships, floating platforms, and renewable energy innovations.
The design is special for several reasons, not least of which being its use of normal aluminum tubes rather than some expensive alloy or material. The process also replicates how the diving bell spider traps air to breathe when hunting underwater, meaning it works off a proven concept.
By making little etchings along the interior of aluminum tubes, the research team at the University’s Institute of Optics in New York created microscopic pits on the surface that turn it superhydrophobic, repelling water and staying dry.
Once modified, the tubes should theoretically stay afloat no matter how long they are forced into water or how heavily they are damaged, and indeed tests demonstrated just this.
“When the treated tube enters water, the superhydrophobic surface traps a stable bubble of air inside the tube, which prevents the tube from getting waterlogged and sinking,” said Chunlei Guo, lead author of the study presenting the technology in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
“Importantly, we added a divider to the middle of the tube so that even if you push it vertically into the water, the bubble of air remains trapped inside and the tube retains its floating ability.”
Guo and his team first demonstrated superhydrophobic floating devices in 2019, but he says the current tube design “simplifies and improves” the technology in several key areas.
ENGINEERING AT SEA: The First Cargo Ship Running on Green Methanol Weighs Anchor Amidst Merchant Shipping Decarbonization
The disks that the researchers previously developed could lose their ability to float when turned at extreme angles, but the tubes are resilient against turbulent conditions such as those found at sea.
“We tested them in some really rough environments for weeks at a time and found no degradation to their buoyancy,” he commented to his university press. “You can poke big holes in them, and we showed that even if you severely damage the tubes with as many holes as you can punch, they still float.”
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Intricate Feather Patterns of an African Bird Inspires New Water Bottle Design
Multiple tubes can be linked together to create rafts that could be the basis for ships, buoys, and floating platforms, while the technology could be easily scaled to the larger sizes needed for load-bearing floating devices, such as the moorings of an offshore wind turbine.
“The mechanism is similar to how diving bell spiders trap an air bubble to stay buoyant underwater or how fire ants form floating rafts with their hydrophobic bodies.
WATCH the story below from the Univ. of Rochester…
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Homeless Woman Sleeping on Late Husband’s Grave Visited by an ‘Angel,’ with a Tiny Home
When a Syracuse police officer got the call that there was someone living among the dead at Oakwood Cemetery, you’d forgive them for perhaps being a little on edge.
But what they found wasn’t anything out of a horror film. Instead, it was 55-year-old widow Rhea Holmes, sleeping under a winter sky on the cold ground of her husband’s grave.
Holmes enjoyed 26 years of wedded bliss with her husband, Eddie. Together, by 2024, they had collected enough money to buy a small home in Syracuse. It wasn’t much, but it was their dream.
Offer accepted, they must have been preparing to sign on the dotted line, when Eddie suffered a fatal heart attack the very same day.
In shock, Holmes took the down payment and spent it on a grave plot, headstone, and bench incised with his name where she could come and reminisce. However, without her beloved Eddie by her side, she slipped into a depression, lost her job, and got evicted.
Rudderless, directionless, and alone, Holmes decided to go to the only place in the world where she felt she belonged: the slab of marble where Eddie Holmes lay in eternal rest.
Too proud to sleep at a shelter, she would volunteer at a food kitchen where she too could eat, and then, with night as her cloak, would slip into the cemetery to sleep under the stars—which she did from May of 2025 to this month.
“I assumed that I was going to die there,” Holmes said of the cemetery, but then “along comes an angel.”
Syracuse Police Officer Jamie Pastorello was informed of Holmes’ presence by a retired colleague, and went to investigate.
HELPING HANDS TO THE HOMELESS: Retired Cop Rehabs Bus into Mobile Laundry: He Now Washes Clothes for the Homeless
“First, he paid for a hotel room for Holmes,” wrote CBS News’ Steve Hartman in his “On the Road” segment. “Then he connected her with the president of LeMoyne College, who let Holmes stay on campus while the students were on winter break.”
Lastly, he connected her with a nonprofit called A Tiny Home for Good, which got Holmes her own tiny home at an affordable price.
THE LAST STREET JOURNAL: Boy Who Offers Tombstone Cleaning Services Wins National Attention And Donates Profit to Funeral Charity
“It was just the right thing to do,” Pastorello told Hartman. “And I wasn’t going to let Rhea sleep outside again. A complete turnaround, you know, in 20 days, she went from sleeping on the cold, hard ground in a cemetery, to her own home.”
He visits her from time to time, and all at once, the warm, confident character that’s easy to see how Eddie Holms could have fallen for emerges, and one gets the feeling, writes Hartman, she won’t go back to sleeping in a graveyard for a fair few years still.
WATCH the story below (tissues recommended)…
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Farmers Enjoy Record Spring Harvests Despite Drought Thanks to Mixture of New and Old Methods
Farming adaptations have seen Canada’s farmers turn out record harvests in the middle of a 5-year drought.
Truly unsavory conditions, like oppressive rainfall followed by an immediate return to drought, would typically have left the wheat on Simon Ellis’ fields shriveled and worthless.
Instead, plump grains were ready to be scooped up by his combine. He contributed the extra grain—almost all of which will be exported abroad to developing countries—to a national harvest total that tops any on record despite a drought that started in 2020.
Spring wheat yielded 58.8 bushels per acre this year, according to a government data release. That’s a gain of 77% from 30 years ago, based on a three-year average, according to Reuters.
“We are constantly making little tweaks,” Ellis told the outlet. “That’s how we’re going to be able to keep fighting the changing climate.”
His farm in Wawanesa, Manitoba, has been the sight of some of those constant tweaks, including an underground system to prevent flooding, slow-release fertilizer, and more precise weedkilling.
But a huge effect will have come from the zero-till method of farming the 4th-generation farmer is employing. Today, 75% of farmers in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta don’t till the soil before seeding.
The reason being that ripping up the ground exposes the whole of the soil microbiome to the annihilating rays of the Sun. It also reduces the need for weedkiller and pesticide spraying, because weeds grow rarely and more slowly in an already-grown field. Rip up the clover, grasses, and forbes, and invasive or pioneer weed species have free-rein.
This microbiome is a key part of robust plant health, as the interrelations of bacteria, fungi, and other microscopic life anchors the crop’s immune system, just as it does our own.
Zero-till agriculture is one of the key strategies of what is generally called regenerative agriculture, which means that from the time of the harvest to the next planting season, the fields become even more rich and fertile than the previous harvest. This is often accomplished by a combination of zero-till seeding and running animal herds over the fields before planting.
TECH ON THE FARM: Genetic Mutation Could Pave the Way for Self-Fertilizing Cereal Crops and a Revolution in Agriculture
Other strategies, like intercropping—growing multiple crops at the same time—and cover cropping—growing a harmless plant like clover after harvests to protect the soil from the Sun—as well as self-guided tractors and “tile drainage,” mean that in conditions that would have once produced crop failures, farmers are growing more food than they could in the best conditions two decades ago.
Conditions in the Western Canadian Prairie are notoriously difficult to farm, and would be more difficult still under current changing climatic patterns if not for the incredible success in farming technology. Grain-growing regions in Australia face similar challenges, Reuters reported, but is seeing similar successes thanks to a similar suite of farming advances.
FARMING IN THE FUTURE: This Year’s Nice Rice Price Marks an 18-year Low Amid a Doubling of Per-Acre Yield
At the front end, many of these innovations are really expensive. A smart combine or high-speed-data-enabled tractor/seeding drill can run more than a million dollars, even without insurance. Tile drainage, a system of pipes that takes water and channels it into an underground network rather than letting it pool atop the field, is expensive as well.
At the backend, however, these also save sizable amounts in annual fuel, fertilizer, pesticide, water costs.
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‘DC Snow Heroes’ Shovel Neighbors Out of Trouble After Winter Storms
After low winter temperatures battered multiple regions of the country with snow, heroes in Washington, DC, stood up to be accounted for.
With major thoroughfares taking priority for District plows and employees, the ‘DC Snow Heroes’ hit the blocks, shovels in hand, to clear sidewalks for the elderly, the young, the disabled, or even just the overwhelmed.
Organized by the mayor’s office, Serve DC is a volunteer program that includes a special segment whose mission it is to shovel snow and clear ice—both of which had accumulated in the District at the start of this week.
“As a community, we have to stick together, we have to do what we can do for one another, and it’s a lot of people that [are] unable to do things, so that’s where we come in,” David Ford, one of the Snow Heroes, told DC News Now.
“Service is the gateway to all success,” remarked another volunteer when asked why he volunteers his time shoveling snow.
The storm had dumped mounds of dry snow 10 inches high on Sunday, which promptly refroze over the evening, making it treacherous to walk on.
Volunteers cleared both the snow and the ice in front of homes like that of Shirley Thomas, a DC resident who needs a crutch to get around.
“It’s not too many people in the world like that,” she said watching the Snow Heroes do their heroics.
MORE SNOW STORM HEROICS: Man Saves Boatloads Of ‘Stunned’ Animals After He Spotted Shadows in the Waves
Organized by the mayor’s office of Muriel Bowser, anyone living in the area looking to be a hero, as David Bowie said, just for one day, can go to the Serve DC website here.
“It is outstanding… This is really neighbors helping your neighbors showing the kind of community and love that the mayor thrives off that we are building, and making sure that we sustain a district,” said Lamont Carey, Director of Community Affairs for the Mayor’s Office.
WATCH the story below…
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“The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” – Alfred Adler
Quote of the Day: “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” – Alfred Adler
Image by: Felix MacLeod
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?
Good News in History, January 29
181 years ago today, Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic poem The Raven was first published. Printed in the New York Evening Mirror, it made Poe a household name almost immediately, and turned the writer into a national celebrity. The narrative poem depicts a mysterious bird’s midnight visit to a distraught lover. READ a short excerpt… (1845)
Guatemala Opts Out of Oil Extraction in Favor of Protecting Jaguars and Macaws in Mayan Biosphere
Guatemala has opted out of renewing a lease agreement on a 7,000-acre oil field in order to use the land for better protection of the surrounding Laguna del Tigre Biosphere Reserve.
An 830,000-acre component of the greater Mayan Biosphere Reserve which allows Mesoamerican wildlife to roam freely between the country and neighboring Belize and Mexico, it’s one of the world’s most important protected areas.
As such, the presence of an oil field inside its borders was controversial, even as the revenues provided critical GDP growth for the developing country. Now, a combination of pollution from the oil operations, sustained low oil prices, and illegal activities within the biosphere has led the government to determine that it is no longer profitable, and chose not to renew the extraction agreement with the Anglo-French developer Perenco.
Instead, the wells will be closed and the land will be turned over to the Guatemalan military for purposes of keeping a closer eye on the giant green emerald that is Laguna del Tigre.
“This marks the beginning of a process of taking control of a vast portion of the national territory that has long been open to all kinds of actors who often exploit it for illicit activities,” President Bernardo Arévalo said during a speech about the new facility.
Laguna del Tigre is one of the most-often exploited parts of the Mayan reserve, with thousands of acres lost every year to illegal cattle ranching, farming, and logging.
The Ministry of National Defense and the National Civil Police will occupy the Campo Xan for the purpose of cracking down on these illegal activities and incorporating a more collaborative cross-border policing program with Mexico and Belize.
TREES OVER OIL: Rainforest Oil Exploration Stopped as Court Rules Uncontacted Tribes Have Right to Remain in Isolation
Critics have suggested the taking over of Xan Oil Fields is more of a political show than anything tangible, and that the reserve already has a security component—rendered inefficient by rampant corruption, Mongabay reports.
However, President Arévalo ran on a platform of ecological integrity, environmental protection, clean energy, and indigenous rights, so at the very least there is a mandate to put an end to these exploitative activities.
MORE CENTRAL AMERICAN NEWS: Newly-Found Metropolis with Pyramids Shows We’re Not Even Close to Discovering Every Mayan City
Environment and Natural Resources Minister Patricia Orantes said the government is trying to do a “180-degree” shift on many management decisions, with a special focus on the Mayan Biosphere.
“We must conserve [the Maya Forest] for the good of Guatemalans and for the world,” Orantes said. “Protecting the climate is our responsibility, and that is what we’re aiming for.”
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Astonishing 916% Increase in Breeding Birds Seen at England’s Premier Rewilding Project
Birdwatchers can’t believe what’s been appearing through their binoculars on a small landholding in West Sussex, England, where the nation’s premier rewilding project continues to compound on its already staggering achievements.
The Knepp Estate has increased the number of breeding birds from just 55 individuals of 22 species in 2007, to 559 individuals of 51 species in 2025, a recent survey determined.
More than a dozen of these species are threatened with extinction nationally, and the tiny estate is now home to 1% of the entire British nightingale population.
The Knepp Estate stretches across a measly 3,500 acres of once-fallow farmland 41 miles outside of London, where owners Charlie Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree decided in 2000 to take radical action after years of failed crops.
The rewilding project at Knepp has created one of the most biodiverse areas in all of Britain, and it was achieved by “taking our hands off the wheel,” Tree said, in 2021. The estate grounds act as home to nearly all English megafauna, as well as the rarest mammal in Europe, the barbastelle bat.
Rare birds such as turtle doves, peregrine falcons, white storks, and all five species of owls found in Great Britain inhabit the grounds, while one summer the Butterfly Conservatory counted 87 male purple emperor butterflies, an exceptional number for anywhere in England.
At the heart of the Knepp Estate is the River Adur, which was restored to a natural state in 2011 with help from the British government by removing four separate weirs and filing in agricultural drainage canals.
The restored wetlands surrounding the river’s natural meandering path play host to wading birds, amphibians, water insects, sea trout, and other fish, and important endangered wetland plants like the black poplar.
For Charlie and Isabella, their monetary problems disappeared like their once-fallow fields, and along with controlling the herbivore population with free-range organic wild meat, the estate offers camping and “glamping” in a shepherd’s hut, nomad’s yurt, and tree houses. They also offer safari tours of the grounds, fishing, photography workshops, and rewilding courses.
OTHER REWILDING SUCCESSES:
- Kazakhstan Efforts to Restore Last Wild Equine Species Receive Huge Boost of 150 Horses
- England’s Largest Bird Sanctuary Grows by 30%: ‘It’s incredible, the place just swarms with birdlife’
- Inspired by Avatar and His Asthma, Indian Man Creates ‘Biosphere’ to Connect Adjacent Land to National Park
Having just completed their quarter-century of management, this recent bird richness review provides a lovely postage stamp moment for the couple, who have demonstrated that even a small pocket of land, when restored to a wild, native habitat, can have an outsized impact on the overall conservation landscape.
Insects have gotten a boost too. Earlier were mentioned purple emperor butterflies, well in 2025, a single day’s counting recorded 283 individuals. Dragonflies and damselflies showed an 871% increase between 2005 and 2025, with species diversity up 53%. Red-eyed damselflies alone surged 2,000% over five years.
Visitors routinely describe seeing wild encounters with nature, such as a white-tailed eagle getting mobbed by kites, and beavers bumping into wading storks on the River Adur.
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AI’s Latest Trick Is Pulling Valuable Commodities Out of Our Trash
As prices of recycled paper, plastic, and aluminum increase, waste management firms are seeing an unexpected return on investment from their installations of AI-powered robotic trash sorters.
Certainly with any robotic system, the ROI is expected to come from labor saving, but due to a variety of factors such as tariffs on aluminum, pulp mill closures, and others, the price of our trash is becoming intriguingly high.
Republic Services, the nation’s second-largest waste management company, now have AI-powered robotic sorters in one-third of their 79 facilities. These machines, as GNN has reported previously, are trained on thousands of varieties, colors, and states of common trash.
They make thousands of decisions a-minute according to an object’s quality, integrity, and other characteristics, and use claw arms or puffs of air to blow trash this way and that to ensure it arrives in the correct bales.
Take for example AMP’s Delta sorting machine, which can pick out 80 separate items from waste streams per minute while recognizing billions of different shapes, sizes, granular specifics, colors, logos, and even SKU numbers among the garbage that would often remain hopelessly entangled.
“There really is value in a lot of recyclables and garbage,” Matanya Horowitz, founder and chief technology officer at AMP, told the Wall Street Journal. “The problem has been that the cost of pulling those materials out is similar to or greater than the actual value of those materials.”
AMP has recently signed a 20-year agreement to operate a materials recovery facility (the technical term for a recycling facility), for Virginia’s Southeastern Public Service Authority, which had an appalling recycling rate of just 7%.
Finished 2-years ago, AMP will get a $50 fee for every ton of waste it takes, and agree to pay damages to the Authority when it fails to divert 50% of the received contents from the landfill, something it so far has never failed to do.
MORE ROBOTS LIKE THIS: $16 Million Investment Will Expand Production of Superior Trash Sorting Robots for Recycling Facilities – (WATCH)
At Republic Services, the advent of air-blowing machines was a real sea change, as it substantially increased the speed at which even the machine could sort trash. What few workers remain merely guard the start of the conveyor system against dangerous or bulky items.
“Because of the speed, because of the throughput capabilities, we’re starting to see these economies where these are very good investments,” Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, told the Journal. “And that’s not about labor; that’s about recovery rates, value extraction, purity and quality.”
GOOD WASTE STORIES: Inspired by Asthma Attack, New Delhi Teens Recycle 2 Million Pounds of Waste Across 14 Indian Cities
The Journal’s Ryan Dezember reports that the nation’s largest waste management firm, the aptly-named Waste Management, has spent $1.4 billion on trash sorting robots for their facilities. Their third-quarter profits rose 18% on higher quantity and quality of sales of recycled material.
Job loss is often presented as a drawback to AI-driven automation, but as many outlets have reported, most people don’t want to work at a recycling facility; and should we as a society really want them to either?
SHARE This Advancement With Your Friends Frustrated About America’s Recycling Habits…
Harpoons Carved from Whale Bones Confirm Ancient Whaling Culture 5,000 Years Ago
How do you hunt a whale when your boat is made of logs lashed with vines and your harpoon is carved from animal bone?
That’s what Spanish researchers were left wondering when they discovered evidence from a museum in southern Brazil that indigenous people 5,000 years ago were hunting large baleen whales like the humpback before they’d discovered sailing, and before metallurgy.
A study presenting the analysis of the museum artifacts proposes that groups inhabiting the area greatly prized not only whales as game animals, but the activity of whaling as an important, potentially sacred event.
That evidence comes from the site where the artifacts were discovered. In the area around Brazil’s Babitonga Bay, hundreds of man-made mounds of shells, refuse, bones, and marine remains called “sambaquis” were disassembled during coastal development between 1940 and 1960.
Archaeologists recovered some 9,000 artifacts from the shell mounds, and stored them in a local museum. Among the trove were whale bones buried in the mounds next to human skeletons.
Many years later, according to Smithsonian Magazine, a team of researchers from Spain and Brazil examined the artifacts more closely, and as soon as André Carlo Colonese saw the whale bones, he realized he was looking at something special.
“The curators went in back and brought out dusty boxes with whale bone artifacts inside,” Colonese tells Science. “The moment they took them out, I said, ‘Guys, these are harpoons.’”
Using state of the art techniques, the study co-author from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and his colleagues identified the harpoons as being carved from the bones of southern right whales, humpback whales, sei whales, and even the largest whale on Earth, the blue whale.
With the size of their quarry and their bones, it’s not surprising that the bone-carved harpoons were quite long; longer than lead author Kristina McGrath’s forearm.
“The data reveals that these communities had the knowledge, tools, and specialized strategies to hunt large whales thousands of years earlier than we had previously assumed,” McGrath, said in a statement.
Indeed, it’s believed whaling began among postglacial societies in North America about half as many years earlier. The Sambaqui builders were previously believed to have carved their tools from dead whales that had washed up on the beach—the most rational explanation considering the force required to spear one from a raft in a time before iron.
Living off so much marine life as they did, one can imagine the taking of a whale to be a monumental event; an invaluable resource worthy of celebration.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Scientists Use Stones to Build Canoe Like Their Ancestors and Sailed it 140 Miles Across Dangerous Waters
“You can imagine a big feast where everyone eats a lot of meat and blubber, and at the same time they collect oil,” Colonese tells National Geographic. “You can store the oil for a very long time, you can use it as fuel. And then you have all the bones… A whale is very valuable.”
The results also offer important ecological insights. The abundance of humpback whale remains suggest that their historical distribution extended much further south than the current main breeding areas off the coast of Brazil.
ANCIENTS THAT IMPRESS: This Bronze Age Ship Replica, Made from Reeds and Goat Hair, Just Sailed 50 Nautical Miles
“The recent increase in sightings in southern Brazil may therefore reflect a historical recolonization process, with implications for conservation. Reconstructing whale distributions before the impact of industrial whaling is essential to understanding their recovery dynamics,” Marta Cremer, co-author of the paper, said in a statement.
SHARE This Impressive Discovery And Even More Impressive Feat Of Ancient Hunting…
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Quote of the Day: “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Good News in History, January 28
And, 68 years ago today, the son of a Danish carpenter and successful toymaker named Godtfred Christiansen, walked into a patent office and filed for a design of interlocking plastic bricks that would go on to become the world’s most successful toy company. Meaning “play well,” LEGO, as we know it today, was born when Godtfred began to realize the capability which plastic had for replacing wood in children’s toys. It took five years to find the right material for the brick which that patent still produces today. It’s made of ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) polymer, and 600 billion have been made to date. READ more about the famous toy system… (1958)