A Baillon's crake credit - I Am Birds as Poetry, via Flickr
A Baillon’s crake – credit, I Am Birds as Poetry, via Flickr
Every time a toilet in Melbourne flushes, the contents start a long trip from the metro area to a sewage treatment plant that has garnered a mythical reputation among birdwatchers.
Following the treatment process, the government allows it to retain certain excess nutrients that cause microbes and insects to flourish—anchoring the food web in an area of marsh and mudflats that birds just love.
300 different species of birds, including endangered species like the orange bellied parrot have been recorded in the Western Treatment Plant, on the shores of Phillips Bay, in Victoria state.
In the paddies, visiting birdwatchers can see the brolga, a crane common in the neighboring Queensland, but endangered in Victoria. Above, squadrons of seabirds and raptors ply the skies looking for food or nesting grounds, and shorebirds eagerly wade, hope, an skitter along man-made mudflats gobbling up tasty morsels.
50 billion gallons of sewage and wastewater flow through the plant’s 32 huge lagoons. Some are anaerobic, or oxygen deprived treatment lagoons where harmful bacteria are expunged and beneficial bacteria, which breakdown the sewage, matter are cultivated.
Oxygenated, or aerobic lagoons then work on the wastewater to reduce the levels of nitrogen—a compound common in human sewage that enriches harmful algae which can grow exponentially on the stuff if too much of it were to make it into the bay—the final destination of the water having passed through the other lagoons where it enriches the life.
“The water that goes out into the bay at the end result of the sewage treatment process does still have a lot of nutrient in it,” Cody McCormack, conservation and land officer with Melbourne Water, told the Guardian Australia on its visit to the Western Treatment Plant.
That nutrient is left over on purpose—to anchor the biodiversity at the site, but men and women like McCormack have the job of making sure it’s never so much as to cause an algal bloom. McCormack is a birdwatcher himself, and loves the shorebirds in particular.
“The nutrient in the water provides the food for the insects and for the vegetation to grow as well,” says McCormack. “It’s one of the most annoying things in my role, where I’m lowering these ponds to create these beautiful mudflats for shorebirds, but as soon as you expose the mud, there’s so much nutrient in the water that all the vegetation grows up.”
Birdwatchers can apply for access to a gate key on the active industrial site, and a few are given out to the community of Melbourne birders. A short flight over to Flickr and a search for “Western Treatment Plant” reveals the wealth of species these birders enjoy seeing and photographing.
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Landscape of Daqingshan- Copyright, Daqingshan Biosphere Reserve
Landscape of Daqingshan- Copyright, Daqingshan Biosphere Reserve
The United Nations has added an area the size of Bolivia to a network of special land and seascapes with the aim of ensuring they remain places where Man can anchor himself to his national and global ecosystem.
Much like the way UNESCO nominates places to become World Heritage Sites, the organization’s Man and Biosphere Program nominates UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. The network of these areas has now grown to 785 sites in 142 countries, totaling 5% of the planet’s landmass.
Again, like World Heritage Sites, each year new potential Biosphere Reserves are submitted as candidates by UN member states, and may be then added to the Reserve Network. With this year’s addition of 26 new sites, it means that one million km² of natural areas have been brought under protection just since 2018—equivalent to the size of Bolivia.
“With nearly thirty new designations this year, our World Network of Biosphere Reserves has reached a major milestone, now protecting 5% of the planet. Within these reserves, new ways of balancing nature conservation with sustainable livelihoods are being forged every day. UNESCO will continue to mobilize states, scientists, civil society, and local and Indigenous communities to continue this positive momentum,” said Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO.
6 countries received the designation of their first Biosphere Reserve this year, including Angola, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Iceland, Oman, and Tajikistan, while São Tomé and Príncipe becomes the first state to have its entire territory designated as a Biosphere Reserve.
In addition to these 6, new reserves have also been designated in Albania, China, Ethiopia, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mongolia, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden.
Since 1971, Biosphere Reserves have played a central role in UNESCO’s environmental mission. Alongside natural World Heritage sites and Global Geoparks, they contribute to protecting more than 13 million km² of terrestrial and marine ecosystems under UNESCO’s umbrella, advancing the global Kunming-Montreal target of conserving 30% of land and sea by 2030.
View of Arrabida, Portugal – Copyright, Camara Municipal de Palmela
They also safeguard some of the planet’s richest and most fragile ecosystems. They harbor a significant share of global biodiversity including more than 60% of terrestrial vertebrate species, 12% of mapped mangroves, 10% of salt marshes, and 8% of the world’s seagrass meadows.
Many iconic American landscapes are also Biosphere Reserves, including the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, the Southern Appalachians, and the Channel Islands.
They foster local and community initiatives and serve as learning grounds for younger generations, through educational program tailored to schools as well as to local and indigenous communities.
UNESCO cannot designate Biosphere Reserves itself, and the job of policing and maintaining them falls on the nations that nominate areas—often national parks—to become reserves.
They are not created for the purpose of returning land to a wild state, or even from removing activities like agriculture, but are governed in a way that Man and the biosphere he needs to survive can do so for as long as we humans live on this planet—striking a balance between the needs of the land and the needs of the humans living on it.
The governance aspect combines activities in the natural and social sciences with a view to drafting management and development plans that will improve human livelihoods while safeguarding natural and managed ecosystems.
Partnerships with the private sector further strengthen these efforts. For example, the Amazonia Project, deployed across eight biosphere reserves with support from French conglomerate LVMH, has already supported more than 40 local initiatives, creating sustainable green jobs in agroforestry and regenerative agriculture, while strengthening forest and biodiversity protection against wildfires.
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The outline of a camel etched into stone near a seasonal water source.
Credit: Sahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project
The outline of a camel etched into stone near a seasonal water source – Credit: Sahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project
12,000-year-old engravings of desert animals like the dromedary camel were used by ancient Arabian tribes to mark where water could be found, a new discovery hypothesizes.
An international team of archaeologists discovered more than 60 rock art panels containing 176 engravings in three previously unexplored areas: Jebel Arnaan, Jebel Mleiha, and Jebel Misma, along the southern edge of the Nefud Desert in northern Saudi Arabia.
The engravings mainly depict camels, ibex, equids, gazelles, and auroch in 130 life-sized and naturalistic figures, some measuring up to three 10 feet long and more than two 6 feet high.
The researchers say the rock art dates to between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago, a period when seasonal water bodies reappeared in the region following extreme aridity.
They explained that the water sources, confirmed through sediment analysis, supported early human expansions into the desert interior and offered opportunities for surviving.
“These large engravings are not just rock art. They were probably statements of presence, access, and cultural identity,” said the lead author of a corresponding paper published on the discovery, Dr. Maria Guagnin from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
“The carvings would have been significant to the people of the region. Several of the etchings were found carved on top of older ones, indicating that they were maintained and updated over thousands of years.”
Unlike previously known sites where engravings were hidden in crevices, the researchers say the Jebel Mleiha and the Jebel Arnaan panels were etched onto towering cliff faces up to 128 feet high, in “visually commanding” locations. Jebel means mountain or hill in Arabic.
Co-lead author Dr. Ceri Shipton, from University College London said one panel would have required ancient artists to climb and work “precariously” on narrow ledges, underscoring the sheer effort and significance of the imagery.
“The rock art marks water sources and movement routes, possibly signifying territorial rights and intergenerational memory.”
The water source hypothesis is particularly compelling as the camels were depicted as males during the breeding season, which for camels corresponds with the rainy season. It seems a very deliberate detail for these ancient Arabians to add.
The research team say their findings, published in the journal Nature Communications and part of the Green Arabia project, highlight the pioneering role of human groups who lived in the interior of northern Arabia shortly after the hyper-arid conditions of the Last Glacial Maximum.
“This unique form of symbolic expression belongs to a distinct cultural identity adapted to life in a challenging, arid environment,” said Dr. Faisal Al-Jibreen, from the country’s culture ministry.
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Quote of the Day: “That which is… has already been, and what is to be…. has already been.” – Ecclesiastes 3:15 (the Bible)
Photo by: Rick Hatch
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101 years ago today, former President Jimmy Carter was born The 39th president of the United States from 1977–1981, is one of the few American presidents to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (for his Camp David Accords). He is also the first American centenarian president, perhaps a result of him only serving a single term, or because of his extensive charity work through various housing organizations like Habitat for Humanity. He pardoned all Vietnam draft dodgers and consciousness objectors, and pursued a second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets. READ about his charity work… (1924)
Founders Casey Lartigue and Eunkoo Lee at FSI headquarters in Seoul - credit, Andrew Corbley for GNN
Founders Casey Lartigue and Eunkoo Lee at FSI headquarters in Seoul – credit, Andrew Corbley for GNN
In South Korea’s capital, Seoul, there are now tens of thousands of North Korean refugees, all living with an intense emotional burden—and a US-founded organization is helping to alleviate it.
Freedom Speakers International (FSI) offers tuition-free and individualized mentorship for speaking in English and opportunities to engage with the international community through that most marvelous of personal development: public speaking.
They’ve since welcomed over 600 North Korean refugees to study English, public speaking, and career development at their office and at events around the city—and their work has landed one of the founders on the North Korean government’s official enemies list.
Casey Lartigue Jr., along with co-founder Eunkoo Lee, sat down with GNN in Seoul to discuss their life-changing refugee programs.
In 2013, FSI began connecting former English teachers from the totalitarian state known as North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) with mostly US volunteers to help them improve their skills, because they lacked the proficiency needed to teach in South Korea.
How many English-speaking refugees—or refugees at all for that matter—could there really be? Surely not enough to run a sustainable non-profit.
“The way I’ll put it is until the late 1990s only a handful of North Koreans escaped each year, a lot of them were part of the elite,” Lartigue told GNN. “But starting around 1998, about 1,000 North Koreans were escaping every year to South Korea.”
Since then, around 34,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea, mostly before 2020. “So, 34,000 is hard for them to punish,” he noted, addressing the commonly held belief that to flee the country meant certain punishment for family members who remain behind.
“When we first started, it was tutoring them in English, but I was on a different track,” Lartigue said. “I had a personal interest in North Korean refugees who wanted to tell their stories and then we merged those—so we had both the English tutoring and the public speaking. In 2015 we had our first speech contest because we had refugees who wanted to tell their stories; they wanted to speak out.”
Refugee Songmi Han and Casey Lartigue at FSI headquarters in Seoul – credit, Andrew Corbley for GNN
There were interesting parallels between Lartigue’s former work at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., where he helped parents to advance school choice policies through public speaking, and his recent goals of giving North Koreans public speaking skills: the need to communicate the value of freedom is the same for both groups.
Their main projects these days, however, have narrowed to public speaking courses, which they can do in groups—a metamorphosis that occurred out of necessity, as COVID measures limited their in-person English tutoring—and also through publishing books.
“There are 5 main reasons that they tell us they want to engage in public speaking, and number 1 is just to raise awareness about what is going on in North Korea.”
“Second is advocacy: they want something done at North Korea—sanctions. Third is storytelling. There are people in North Korea who they know might have been tortured or executed by the DPRK, so they want to tell their stories.”
An example of this third motivation came when FSI hosted a speech contest with the topic being the stories of North Korean women, and two of the speakers were men. “One wanted to the story about what happened to his sister; the other wanted to tell the story about what happened to his mother,” Lartigue said.
“Fourth is healing hearts. They have something inside that they want to get out, maybe PTSD. Fifth is to build confidence in themselves.”
Some of FSI’s published books – credit Andrew Corbley for GNN
When it comes to the books published by these brave souls, it’s about 11 years on average from the time they arrive to the publication date. Most come and have long adjustment periods. It’s only after they settle down, Lartigue said, that they begin to feel the need to speak out.
In the case of Songmi Han, she escaped in 2011 and published her book Greenlight to Freedom, in 2022.
“I didn’t know how dangerous it would be, but since my mom started sending brokers to rescue me, I started awakening,” the spritely youth, who only a month prior joined the FSI team, told GNN.
“One of my neighbors was living for 10 years in China, but then she got captured and sent back to North Korea. At the time, every day we’re just looking for food, but she would say in China she said she never had to worry about her next meal.”
Saving lives
“That’s when I decided that in North Korea, there’s no future: I cannot see it, it’s so dark, but I’m sure others have their own reasons. My mother decided to escape because she wanted to make money. She would go to China, make money, and come rescue us from North Korea.”
Some of the things that FSI handles are straight out of a Russian book like The Gulag Archipelago. In one case, FSI published a book in English in 2022 that was written by a North Korean man who had been executed by the government, but not before he got a manuscript to a Japanese reporter that published the book in Japanese in 2002—the proceeds from which paid for the extraction of his two children from the country.
While one might think that South Koreans would be the most likely volunteers, Lartigue said that for a long time, and still today, they’ve been staffed mostly by Americans, who are passionate about the project as befitting the free citizens from the self-styled leader of the Free World.
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Danny Sauter, District 3 Supervisor - credit, Sauter
Danny Sauter, District 3 Supervisor – credit, Sauter
After small businesses became frustrated with San Francisco permitting laws, a district supervisor has stood up to try and strike it down.
His proposed ordinance—filed after a dozen small business owners reached out to explain they were being harangued by regulations—would remove the “prior use” requirement, as well as those preventing businesses from uniting storefronts and moving into adjacent, empty spaces.
The story began as CBS news found it, in the hills of southern India, of all places.
Himanshu Bhaisare and his wife Milana Ram sell coffee beans from her family farm in a lovely hilly area of Karnataka ten thousand miles away in the farmer’s markets of San Francisco.
They rent time at a roastery in Berkeley, but their passion for the coffee of India saw them locate an old dry cleaners on Lombard Street near to their home, and plan to convert it into a roastery and cafe.
Just as they arrived on the last dot of the dotted line of a lease agreement, there was a problem. The property contained a “prior use” requirement, which necessitates future owners to use the building as it was already permitted.
“I went to two or three more offices in the same department asking ‘Is this really true?’ Because it made no sense to me,” Bhaisare told CBS Bay Area.
“It’s things like that that are really frustrating, especially when we have someone who wants to bring their business to San Francisco and we have all these barriers that are preventing them from opening up,” said Danny Sauter, SF’s District 3 supervisor, and author of a bill that will be up for consideration early in October that would remove the prior use requirement and other stifling regulations.
“We’ve already had about a dozen different small business owners reach out to us and tell us that without this legislation they could literally not open what they want to open.”
What CBS News didn’t follow through on were some of the other ways Sauter was tackling overburdensome regulations. To name those they forgot to mention, it’s illegal in the neighborhood of Knob Hill to open a business in the arts, such as a dance studio. It’s illegal on Polk street to open medical businesses such as a dentistry practice or acupuncture clinic.
It’s also illegal to open two businesses under a single roof, and how does that make any sense when the only thing better than a friend to have a coffe with is a new book? Perhaps bought at a bookstore?
Ram is hopeful the bill will be passed with support from so many small business owners and prospective owners, and that Lombard Street and the surroundings can taste true Indian quality coffee.
WATCH the CBS story below…
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A diagram of the Brenner Base Tunnel - credit BBT SE CC 4.0. BY SA
A diagram of the Brenner Base Tunnel – credit BBT SE CC 4.0. BY SA
In mid-September, a boring machine defeated the last meter of rock 4,500 feet under the Brenner Pass in the Alps to connect the world’s longest tunnel dug for railroad track.
Envisioned as an important connecting vein that will one day see trains running from Helsinki, Finland, to Palermo, Sicily, it will slash commuter times across Europe.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker were present when the tunnel was completed, which is hoped to shift large amounts of freight onto rails and off the roads in Italy’s crowded north.
The Brenner Pass Tunnel is one of a series of EU railroad projects that the bloc hopes will reshape travel and freight maps by seriously incentivizing rail travel between Italy and the surrounding countries.
The Benner Tunnel will run from Austria’s town of Tulfes through Innsbruck to the region of Trentino Alto Adige, and will reduce rail commutes between Munich and Verona by two-and-a-half hours.
The second consists of tunnels and high speed rail that will connect Genoa, one of Italy’s largest port cities, with Milano via the city of Tortona, while another running through Valle d’Aosta will reduce the transit time between fashion capitals Milan and Paris by 30%, with stops in Lyon and Susa.
“In the end, there is no project that is too big to be tackled, there is no project too big for us to bet on,” Meloni said at the ceremony.
A diagram of the Brenner Base Tunnel – credit BBT SE CC 4.0. BY SA
Lagging somewhat compared to peer nations, Italy’s railroads haven’t seen a major upgrade since the Roma-Milano high speed line in 2008, and these works should allow goods and passengers to flow much more freely in and around the country.
In particular, AP reports, the Brenner Pass sees more than $800 billion in goods cross the alps on board trucks every year. The tunnel will be the world’s longest rail tunnel, and will take thousands of the more than 2 million trucks that cross the pass every year off the roads.
It currently takes 7 hours to get from Milano to Paris, and the Lyon-Turin High Speed Line is estimated to reduce that down to four-and-a-half. All are expected to be finished in the early 2030s, with the Genoa-Tortona line already almost completed.
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For 50 years, the state of Maine has drawn worldwide attention for its efforts to restore a puffin colony, an effort that has brought controversy, hope, and a cottage industry you have to see to believe.
Featured recently on the PBS News Hour, it’s a story that begins back in 1973 when a young ornithologist named Stephen Kress thought he could try to restore the puffin populations of the US Mid-Atlantic after overhunting eliminated them locally in the 1800s.
Stephen Kress holding a puffin chick – credit, VOA, public domain
“People caused them to leave,” the career puffin-ologist said. “Maybe people can help bring them back. That was the notion. I had no idea that that notion was going to be my life’s work.”
Indeed the young scientist suffered the slings and arrows for his trouble, but his years of work were a success.
Back then, Kress believed that if he could hand-hear puffin chicks on Eastern Egg Rock Island, the last place they were found in the US, they might return to nest there after fledging. Importing some chicks from Canada to the criticism of the general ornithological community, he worked with the Audubon Seabird Institute to start Project Puffin.
The Audubon team led by Kress built nests for the puffin chicks out of a natural material called sod, and stayed on the island for hours at a time bringing fish for them to eat. Kress and the others at Audubon also needed to find a way to bring other puffins to the colony, or at least to entice those they had reared to return.
Yet again facing criticism, they began putting out mirrors, puffin decoys, and playing the recorded sounds of puffin calls. The birds are highly social and dependent on colonial structures.
The chicks gradually grew to fledge, and in 1981, 4 years after he began Project Puffin, adult puffins were seen returning to Eastern Egg Island with fish in their mouths: a sure sign that there were chicks on the island.
Today, hundreds of puffins inhabit the colony at Eastern Egg, though not without a little help from their longtime friend. Kress has been involved in protecting the puffins every step of the way, which has included tackling new threats. It turns out convincing them to lay eggs there was just the first challenge.
With the return of the puffins came laughing gulls—something of a nemesis—which steal the food they bring to their chicks.
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Project Puffin, long since concluded, has now morphed into a new effort to battle the gulls with the help of terns—a ferociously territorial bird.
“I was hoping that the terns alone would be enough to protect the puffins,” Kress admitted. “Now we know that the terns alone aren’t enough to protect the puffins. The terns and the puffins need our help.”
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Their solution was more decoys: hundreds of them, of varied species such as those the gulls don’t want to mess with. This response prompted the Audubon team to create a robust decoy-production facility, where hundreds of birds of 48 different species are made every year, causing an international demand that has seen them used in over 800 seabird conservation efforts.
The production is overseen by Susan Schubel, the Seabird Institute’s outreach educator, who said that by using decoys they can send clues and signals to different species about where it’s safe to nest.
WATCH the story below from PBS News Hour…
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Quote of the Day: “It is the dawning moon of the mind that dispels the torment of disturbing thinking.” – Shantideva, Buddhist philosopher and poet
Photo by: Pramod Tiwari for Unsplash+
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
A page from the libretto, 1886, of The Pearl Fishermen from La Scala in Milan - pub domain
162 years ago, George Bizet’s famous opera Les Pêcheurs de Perles, The Pearl Fishermen, debuted at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris. Set in ancient times on the Island of Sri Lanka, it tells the story of how two men’s vow of eternal friendship is threatened by their love for the same woman, whose own dilemma is the conflict between secular love and her sacred oath as a priestess. The friendship duet “Au fond du temple saint,” generally known as “The Pearl Fishers Duet”, is one of the best-known in Western opera. READ a bit more and listen to the duet… (1863)
An illustration of a habitable zone planet orbiting the star called TRAPPIST - credit NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)
An illustration of a habitable zone planet orbiting the star called TRAPPIST – credit NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI)
One of the major things that the mightily impressive James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to reveal has now potentially been revealed.
Groundbreaking new research from the University of St. Andrews has identified signs of a possible atmosphere surrounding an Earth-sized exoplanet located 40 light years away, raising excitement that habitable conditions beyond our solar system might be detected for the first time.
In two separate papers published in early September in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have shed new light on an exoplanet, TRAPPIST-1e, where liquid water, in the form of a global ocean or icy expanse, might exist on its surface.
Located in the red dwarf star system TRAPPIST-1, the planet orbits firmly within the star’s habitable zone. Planet 1e is of particular interest because the presence of liquid water is theoretically viable, but only if the planet has an atmosphere.
The initial results indicate several potential scenarios, including the possibility of an atmosphere on TRAPPIST-1e. These findings are a significant moment in the search for habitable conditions beyond Earth, as they would present the readings typical of a planet with an atmosphere, and then could be applied when searching others.
We currently search for life not by looking for it, but looking for what it does: compounds linked with metabolism, for instance. In that sense, an atmosphere is a vital signal to hone in on when looking for evidence for metabolism.
“TRAPPIST-1e has long been considered one of the best habitable zone planets to search for an atmosphere,” explains Dr. Ryan MacDonald, Lecturer in Extrasolar Planets in the School of Physics and Astronomy at St. Andrews. “But when our observations came down in 2023, we quickly realized that the system’s red dwarf star was contaminating our data in ways that made the search for an atmosphere extremely challenging.”
The researchers aimed the JWST’s powerful NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument at the system as planet 1e passed in front of its star. Starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere, if there is one, will be partially absorbed and the corresponding changes in the light spectrum that reaches the JWST tell astronomers what chemicals are found there.
The team spent over a year carefully correcting the data for the star’s contamination before they could zero in on the planet’s atmosphere.
Dr. MacDonald, who contributed to the analysis of TRAPPIST-1e’s spectrum, added that the research conjures “two possible explanations.”
“The most exciting possibility is that TRAPPIST-1e could have a so-called secondary atmosphere containing heavy gases like nitrogen. But our initial observations cannot yet rule out a bare rock with no atmosphere.”
The researchers are now obtaining further JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1e to enable a deeper search for an atmosphere. With each additional transit, that is, every additional viewing as it passes in front of the TRAPPIST star, the atmospheric contents become clearer.
“In the coming years we will go from four JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1e to nearly twenty, we finally have the telescope and tools to search for habitable conditions in other star systems, which makes today one of the most exciting times for astronomy,” said MacDonald.
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Bozena and Dr. Chandra in the Northwestern clinic - credit, Northwestern Medicine
Bozena and Dr. Chandra in the Northwestern clinic – credit, Northwestern Medicine
A woman in Illinois has become the first to undergo a unique cancer treatment that allows chemotherapy drugs to be delivered directly to the liver, reducing side-effects.
Chemotherapy drugs can shrink cancer tumors, but if administered generally can affect many other organs and tissues in the body. Via a Hepzato Kit, however, oncologists were able to isolate the supply of blood to her liver, and infuse the drugs directly to the tumor site.
Detailed in a news release by Northwestern University, the woman, 66-year-old Bozena Wojtach, was diagnosed with uveal melanoma last year after her optometrist identified a mass behind her right eye that was causing light flashes in her vision.
Uveal melanoma is a rare kind of eye cancer which typically metastasizes in the liver via tumors which can’t be removed surgically. Between 1975 and 2020, just 5,563 cases of the cancer were reported in the US.
On April 3rd, the Polish immigrant, pilot, retired nurse, and mother of two sons, is now the first to undergo Hepzato Kit treatment at Northwestern Medicine.
“This type of therapy has been shown to prolong survival for patients while also offering a very tolerable side effect profile, which are two things we want to prioritize,” Dr. Sunandana Chandra, medical director for melanoma and cutaneous oncology with the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at the university hospital, said in a news release.
– credit, Northwestern Medicine
“It’s especially meaningful to have a therapy that helps us maintain a good quality of life for patients as we navigate a cancer that can be quite challenging to treat.”
Through a series of tubes, the blood supply to the liver is isolated from the rest of the body while chemotherapy drugs are administered for half-an-hour, after which the blood supply is filtered. This means that 80% of the drugs can be removed, preventing them from wrecking havoc on neighboring tissues.
Wojtach, who during her career as a nurse in Chicago, cared for the infirm that included oncology patients, had her tumors reduced in size by 50% after just two courses. Her oncology team, which included another Polish-American Dr. Robert Lewandowski (not to be confused with the famous striker of Bayern Munich and Barcelona) has recommended another 4 courses.
“I have energy. I have no pain. I don’t have any nausea or vomiting like other patient has,” said Wojtach. “I feel like I’m healthy—like I have no cancer at all.”
She is looking forward to returning to her garden and traveling more, as well as spending time with her two sons.
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England’s coveted Tree of the Year award, on which GNN reports yearly, was won this year by a Scottish ash tree 75 feet-tall.
Towering above sandstone row houses, the tree on Argyle Street, in Glasgow has survived a recent ash tree plague, as well as the Clydeside blitz, and recent urban development.
It was described, the Guardian reports, as “quite the most graceful ash” by a local historian and writer, words which sit bracketed above the bar in the pub across the street from the tree.
Legend has it that it grew from an ash seed hidden within the roots of primrose brought back by a family on holiday.
The UK’s Tree of the Year competition is organized by the Woodland Trust, one of the country’s most active and influential woodland conservation group. Each year’s winner is then nominated to the European Tree of the Year contest the following year.
“Trees really matter to people, and this is clear from the response we’ve seen to the Argyle Street ash,” Adam Cormack, the head of campaigning at the Woodland Trust, said in a statement.
“Trees inspire us to write stories and create art, whilst connecting us to cultural legacies and a sense of place. We encourage people to notice and enjoy the trees around them, and learn more about how they benefit us—from boosting biodiversity and wellbeing, to mitigating the effects of climate change.”
Other locals, including government officials and musicians, co-nominated the tree, which wins for Scotland for the second year in a row following last year’s triumph of the Skipinnish oak.
The Skipinnish Oak – credit, Woodland Trust
Other nominations this year which were perceived as strong favorites were the Beatles’ Ceder at Chiswick House, London, a tree which they climbed in a music video, and the “King of Limbs”—a particularly wide-armed oak tree in Wiltshire that inspired the name and iconography of the eponymous Radiohead album.
GNN is a sucker for big old trees, and often reports on the winners of the European Tree of the Year as well, which for several years running has been won by Poland, thanks in no small part to the country’s aggressive campaigning for its trees.
Incredibly, not only has Poland won back to back titles, but with the same tree: a color phase beech tree.
It would be fascinating to see how a contest like this could be organized in the US.
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An example of the HM and OLEDs at work together - credit, University of St. Andrews
An example of the HM and OLEDs at work together – credit, University of St. Andrews
Until now, holograms have been created using lasers, but now researchers have used a new ensemble of components that could unleash this technology on the market.
With their ubiquity in science fiction, and carrying the potential to transform smart devices, communication, gaming, and entertainment, holograms would be a major technological advancement, if we could find an easier way of projecting them.
A team at the University of St. Andrews have found that ‘Holographic Metasurfaces’ (HMs) and Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) give a simpler and more compact approach that is potentially cheaper and easier to apply, overcoming the main barriers to hologram technology being used more widely.
Organic light-emitting diodes are thin film devices widely used to make the colored pixels in mobile phone displays and some TVs. As a flat and surface-emitting light source, OLEDs are also used in emerging applications such as optical wireless communications, biophotonics, and sensing, where the ability to integrate with other technologies makes them good candidates to realize miniaturized light-based platforms.
A holographic metasurface is a thin, flat array of tiny structures called meta-atoms—the size of roughly a thousand of the width of a strand of hair. They are designed to manipulate light’s properties, and can make holograms and their uses span diverse fields, such as data storage, anti-counterfeiting, optical displays, high numerical aperture lenses, optical microscopy, and sensing.
This, however, is the first time both have been used together to produce the basic building block of a holographic display.
Researchers found that when each meta-atom is carefully shaped to control the properties of the beam of light that goes through it, it behaves as a pixel of the HM. When light goes through the HM, at each pixel, the properties of the light are slightly modified.
Thanks to these modifications, it is possible to create a pre-designed image on the other side, exploiting the principle of light interference, whereby light waves create complicated patterns when they interact with each other.
This technical explanation from the university perhaps doesn’t capture the gravity of the development. Professor Graham Turnbull, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at St. Andrews, offered his version in a release from the university press.
“OLED displays normally need thousands of pixels to create a simple picture. This new approach allows a complete image to be projected from a single OLED pixel!”
Until now, researchers could only make very simple shapes with OLEDs, which limited their usability in some applications. However, this breakthrough provides a path toward a miniaturized and highly integrated metasurface display.
“Holographic metasurfaces are one of the most versatile material platforms to control light,” said Andrea Di Falco, professor in nano-photonics at the School of Physics and Astronomy. “This breakthrough will enable a step change in the architecture of holographic displays for emerging applications, for example, in virtual and augmented reality.”
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Quote of the Day: “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, attributed to the religion of Bokononism)
Photo by: Faraz Ahanin
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?
29 years ago today, the Nintendo 64 video game console was released in North America. Critically acclaimed as “quite simply, the fastest, most graceful game machine on the market”, the N64 was one of the first gaming consoles to have four controller ports and could handle a 4-player split screen without significant slowdown. Named after its 64-bit microprocessor, which had power comparable to Pentium processors in desktop computers, its advanced 3D graphics allowed textures to render smoothly, rather than pixelated. READ more about this childhood icon… (1996)
Previous studies into regions of the world where people tend to live longer has shown that having a sense of purpose in life may help people live longer.
Now, new research from the University of California in Davis shows that having a sense of purpose in life may have another benefit as people age: reducing the risk of dementia.
The new study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, followed over 13,000 adults aged 45 and older for up to 15 years.
Researchers found that people who reported a higher sense of purpose in life were about 28% less likely to develop cognitive impairment—including mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
The protective effect of having a purpose was seen across racial and ethnic groups. It also remained significant even after accounting for education, depression, and the APOE4 gene, which is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our findings show that having a sense of purpose helps the brain stay resilient with age,” said Aliza Wingo, senior author and professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “Even for people with a genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease, sense of purpose was linked to a later onset and lower likelihood of developing dementia.”
Participants were not specifically asked about the activities that gave their life purpose. However, previous studies on aging have found a wide rang of activities give older adults a sense of life purpose (sometimes referred to as “ikigai”).
A Sense of Purpose Can Include:
• Relationships: Caring for family, spending time with grandchildren or supporting a spouse or friend.
• Work or volunteering: Continuing professional work, mentoring or contributing to community causes.
• Spirituality or faith: Religious beliefs, spiritual practices or involvement in faith-based communities.
• Personal goals: Pursuing hobbies, learning new skills or setting and achieving personal milestones.
• Helping others: Acts of kindness, philanthropy, caregiving or advocacy work.
Purpose delays onset of cognitive decline
Researchers also found that people with higher purpose tended to experience cognitive decline later than those with lower purpose. On average, the delay in onset was very modest — about 1.4 months over an eight-year period, after considering the effects of age, education, depressive symptoms, and genetic risk. However, it is meaningful when compared to current treatments.
“While medications like lecanemab and donanemab can modestly delay symptoms of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease, they come with risks and costs,” said Nicholas C. Howard, first author and public health researcher at UC Davis.
“Purpose in life is free, safe and accessible. It’s something people can build through relationships, goals and meaningful activities.”
Participants in the study were part of the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey funded by the National Institute on Aging. All had normal cognitive health at the beginning of the study.
Researchers used a seven-item survey from the Ryff Measures of Psychological Well-being. Participants had six possible responses (from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”) for statements such as: “I am an active person in carrying out the plans I set for myself” and “I have a sense of direction and purpose in my life.”
Their answers were scored and averaged to obtain a well-being number between 1 and 6, with higher values indicating a strong sense of purpose in life. Their cognitive health was also tracked using a telephone-based test every two years.
The findings support the idea that psychological well-being plays a key role in healthy aging, said Thomas Wingo, a co-author of the study and a professor and neurologist at UC Davis Health. Wingo hopes future studies will explore whether purpose-building interventions can help prevent dementia.
“What’s exciting about this study is that people may be able to ‘think’ themselves into better health. Purpose in life is something we can nurture,” he said. “It’s never too early — or too late — to start thinking about what gives your life meaning.”
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New findings could reshape the treatment for an estimated 113 million children worldwide who have asthma, following this side-by-side comparison of two types of asthma inhalers.
In the first randomized controlled trial to investigate the use of a combination inhaler as the sole reliever for children aged 5 to 15, an international team found the 2-in-1 treatment to be more effective than salbutamol—the current standard for asthma symptom relief in children.
The results show that using an inhaler that combines 2 treatments—the inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) budesonide and the fast-acting bronchodilator formoterol—reduced children’s asthma attacks by an average of 45%, compared to the widely-used salbutamol inhaler.
Asthma attacks in children may be life-threatening and reducing their frequency and severity should be a public health priority.
The 2-in-1 budesonide-formoterol inhaler is widely recommended as the preferred reliever treatment for adults, but children are still usually prescribed salbutamol.
Researchers say the findings, published today in The Lancet, provide the evidence needed to bring children’s global asthma guidelines into line with adults’.
The CARE study (Children’s Anti-inflammatory REliever) was designed and led by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, in collaboration with Imperial College London, University of Otago Wellington, and the University of Auckland. It recruited 360 children across New Zealand who were then randomly assigned to use either budesonide-formoterol or salbutamol for on-demand symptom relief.
The trial lasted a year and the budesonide/formoterol reliever resulted in a lower rate of asthma attacks than just salbutamol, with rates of 0.23 versus 0.41 per participant per year.
This means that for every 100 children with mild asthma who are switched from salbutamol to a 2-in-1 budesonide-formoterol inhaler, there would be 18 fewer asthma attacks per year. Importantly, the study also confirmed the safety of the combined-inhaler approach, with no significant differences in children’s growth, lung function, or asthma control between the two groups.
“For the first time, we have demonstrated that the budesonide-formoterol 2-in-1 inhaler, used as needed for symptom relief, can significantly reduce asthma attacks in children with mild asthma,” said Dr Lee Hatter, lead author of the study and Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the the Institute.
“Implementing these findings could be transformative for asthma management on a global scale,” said senior author Prof. Richard Beasley in the media release.
The latest study builds on previous studies in adults led by MRINZ researchers which contributed to the recommended use of the 2-in-1 ‘ICS–formoterol reliever’ inhaler as the preferred reliever treatment for adults.
“Having an asthma attack can be very scary for children and their parents,” commented Prof. Andrew Bush, from Imperial College London, a respiratory pediatrician and co-author of the CARE study.
“I’m so pleased that we’ve been able to prove that an inhaler that significantly reduces attacks—already a game-changer for adults—is safe for children with mild asthma as young as five.”
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A lost iPhone survived for an incredible two-and-a-half months submerged in a river, and it still works.
Faizan Choudhry lost his iPhone 14 Pro Max on July 4th while tubing on the Delaware River along the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border.
What seemed like a lost cause took an unbelievable turn when, on September 19, the Edison, New Jersey native received a phone call from a woman, who told him she had found his phone.
He met her the following day and was amazed to see it powering on for the first time after being submerged in water for months.
The 24-year-old has been using it now, with only a slight flaw in the camera operation.
“Believe it or not, it works perfectly fine,” Choudhry said.
“I do have a little bit of a problem with the camera—it’s a little bit blurry when it gets light, and it’s not able to catch the light properly.”
His photo collection survived intact; the whole outcome being stroke of luck.
Early this month, Maddy Wells, a retiree from Bluffton, South Carolina, who was visiting the river with friends for a canoeing trip, spotted the Apple device.
“We circled back and picked it up, brought it home dripping wet, and tried plugging it in,” Ms. Wells told SWNS news service.
“We got it to power up, and my friend showed me how to get the emergency contact information. “When it finally lit up, it actually said July 4th.
“I was shocked. That means the phone was in the water for two and a half months.”
The phone displayed a “lost phone” message with Choudhry’s contact number, which allowed Wells to call him on September 19 and arrange for the device’s return.
Because he had switched to a new phone but kept the same number, Wells was able to contact Choudhry directly, and leave a voicemail.
“Hi, good evening, my name is Maddy, and I have managed to find an Apple phone on the Delaware River,” Wells said, “and it actually still works.”
She gave Choudhry her number, adding she “would love to get this phone back to you somehow”.
After receiving Wells’ voicemail, the young man was initially skeptical about the legitimacy of the call.
“I was sketchy about it a little at first, thinking that I might be getting scammed or something,” he said. But he changed his mind when Wells sent him a text with a picture of his phone.
