Quote of the Day: “A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.” – Francis of Assisi
Photo by: Davide Cantelli
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As another weekend drew to a close and the Monday workday loomed, the manager of a New Zealand hardware store was opening for business when her staff came and told her the strangest thing.
Seals found in Bunnings tend to be for windows or pipes, and don’t typically come with whiskers or flippers.
At 6:30 am, a New Zealand fur seal wandered into the Bunnings location in Whangārei, on New Zealand’s north island, and was walking around the isles.
Coming in through the delivery yard, the Bunnings team quickly corralled the seal with heavy boxes of ovens, dishwashers, and other heavy appliances to create a makeshift pen.
“I’m so proud of my team as they troubleshot this very random Monday morning situation,” Sara Yates told Yahoo News Australia.
They then called the Department of Conservation to haul the intruder back to Reotahi marine reserve, where it could go back to eating fish, lounging on the beach, and steadily growing up to 278 pounds (126 kg).
Seals are often found in unexpected places in New Zealand said DoC science advisor, Laura Boren.
“Despite it happening every winter, it takes people by surprise,” she said.
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Out in the French countryside of Briey, massive planks of oak wood are being fitted together for a very, very special purpose.
They are forming the new spire for the resurrection of the Notre Dame, and by using a marriage of master woodworkers and expert computing, all the pieces of the spire’s central and chief component—the shaft—fit together perfectly.
The spire, which collapsed through the lead roof of the famous cathedral in the fire, was built in the 19th century by architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, and the drafts for its construction were kept. With them, the team has been able to remake all 60 feet of structure exactly as before.
For the 286 specifically carved pieces of wood needed to create the shaft, which really is the wooden heart of the spire, only the tallest and straightest oak trees were used, donated for posterity in use for the Notre Dame by private landowners and public forests, some of which were owned by past kings of France, or the Catholic church.
In late July, a crane lowered the final piece of the shaft into place where it stuck fast.
French Army Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, the man in charge of the project, said it was a very emotional time.
“The symbol of the fire was a crash of the spire, and people will be confident in the reopening of the cathedral when will we see again the spire of a cathedral in the sky of Paris,” he told NPR News.
LAST UPDATE ON THE NOTRE DAME: Notre Dame Cathedral Rises From the Ashes: Look at All They’ve Rebuilt Since the 2019 Blaze
“It will be exactly the same as it was by Viollet-le-Duc,” Georgelin told CBS News. “But we do that with the means of our time: We use computers… We have probably less genius, but more calculation, more certainty by using computers.”
Also speaking with CBS was Axelle Ponsonnet, an architect who said the project was unlike anything she had ever worked on before, not only because of its historic nature.
MORE PARIS NEWS: Paris District Declared the ‘Republic of Good-Neighbors’ Reviving Conviviality and Cutting Loneliness
“It’s not only the famous part of it,” she told CBS News. “Of course, I’m extremely proud to be part of this team and to rebuild Notre Dame. But it’s also a very interesting project, because it’s a very complex structure and today we are never building such structures, and what’s amazing is that we are really trying to be very specific in the way we rebuild it.”
At the moment, the cathedral of Notre Damn is on schedule for a 2024 reopening.
WATCH the story below from TODAY…
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Reprinted with permission from World at Large, an independent news outlet covering conflict, travel, science, conservation, and health and fitness.
With so many of the world’s charismatic tropical animals fighting for conservation dollars, it’s easy for a small primate to slip through the cracks of international attention.
The silvery gibbon (Hylobates moloch) has relatively few backers compared with other jungle primates, but it has attracted interest from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, who along with a generous donor in the Aspinall Foundation, are beginning to successfully rehabilitate silvery gibbons for release back into the wilds of Indonesia.
Classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, the gibbon can be found in protected areas and a group of slowly vanishing and isolated forests on the western side of the Indonesian capital island of Java.
Opening its doors in 2011, the Javan Primate Rehabilitation Centre (JPRC) located within Mount Tilu Nature Reserve has taken in 71 gibbons and managed to reintroduce 55 of them back into the wild.
Threatened by poaching for the illegal wildlife trade and deforestation, the population of silvery gibbons may be as low as 2,500, and with such levels of scarcity, every individual counts.
Animals taken in at the JPRC might have been repatriated from zoos in other countries, rescued from poachers, or found by humans after having wandered into civilization. Once on site, a gibbon will receive a medical check to ensure they are free from disease before being placed in large enclosures where they can practice all the gibbon skills they’ll need to survive in the wild.
The JPRC has a site within Mount Tilu where they release the gibbons, and it’s also the site of the beginning of a daily quest to locate the newly-released gibbons and monitor them. The monitoring team is responsible for observing and recording the general behavior of the gibbons, which includes mapping their daily movements, what they eat, how they interact with other gibbons, sounds and gibbon calling.
“I am happy to see that the rehabilitated gibbons have adapted well to the forest after being released into the wild and some of them have already given birth to new baby gibbons,” Yana, a monitoring and community forest ranger at the Mount Tilu NR, told the IUCN press.
The JPRC, the IUCN, and Aspinall Foundation see the program continuing on to better and better outcomes over the next few years.
Not all gibbons are so lucky, and other, even more local efforts to support these beautiful primates rely on borrowed time and the caring nature of certain individuals.
Tini Kasmawati, in the 141-square-kilometer Lengkong district, volunteers her time to deliver bananas to an isolated gibbon population that doesn’t have enough forest left to find sufficient food. The Wanicare Foundation, a Dutch, non-governmental and not-for-profit organization working in the area, is aware of Tini’s work, and while they told Reuters that her 8 years of self-funded efforts haven’t changed the gibbon populations, she may have helped them survive in certain fragmented areas.
Wanicare is one of the few organizations that support silvery gibbons, and the Cikananga Wildlife Center in Lengkong began its gibbon program in 2012 when the conservationists there received five of the animals that had been seized from poachers.
“We did a lot of research to see if we could find a solution in this area, for example with corridors and everything, to connect different forest patches so at least they could go around,” Willemijn Eggen, founder and board member of the Wanicare Foundation, told WaL. “In our opinion we should catch these gibbons and translocate them to another area”.
Establishments like the JPCR are exactly the sort of places that could help gibbons in isolated forest fragments like Lengkong find a more permanent home.
“In all Java, there are at least two good organizations that are working for the survival of the species,” says Eggen, but adds that Wanicare has to spread their budget over several different species, and that it’s difficult to isolate funding for the animal.
“For example with the Javan leopard, we call it a ‘sexy species’. It’s easy for a species like that to find funding then for example a slow lorry is [sic] not really sexy for most people, or a small bird, a lot of people are not interested in those species. An orangutan is interesting for people”.
In these cases, the best outcomes can often take place when the territory of one animal overlaps that of another which can drum up more international interest. WaL
Reprinted with permission from World at Large, an independent news outlet covering war, travel, science, conservation, and health and fitness.
In a fascinating star system 370 light-years from Earth, scientists studying with the James Webb Space Telescope have found water vapor hanging about at exactly the same distance from the system star as Earth sits from the Sun.
The discovery is being heralded as an important milestone in the understanding of how rocket planets come to contain water; perhaps the water is there in space while the planet is being formed, such as in the case of this star, PDS 70.
A K7-type star in the constellation Centaurus, PDS 70 boasts two large, dusty ‘accretion disks,’ a term that refers to the rings of gas and dust around young stars that will either be slowly expelled into space or will coalesce into planets. The space between these two disks is 5 billion miles, or very near the distance between Earth and Pluto.
This vast in-between contains two still-forming, Jupiter-like planets: PDS 70 b and PDS 70 c, but the major discovery was the presence of water vapor at 94 million miles from the star, almost exactly the distance from which Earth sits from the sun. Sometimes called the “Goldilocks Zone” for being not too hot and not too cold, it’s also the area that has the greatest chance known to scientists thus far of having a rocky, terrestrial world capable of supporting liquid water.
This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets.
Earth is riddled with H2O, and it’s also dispersed throughout other rocky and icy worlds in the solar system, such as Mars. How it got there is still up for debate. Common considerations are that frozen water arrived on Earth and other bodies onboard comets or much larger objects called planetesimals which we know collided as often as perhaps once every day in the earliest period of Earth’s history as an already-formed rocky planet.
This new discovery, made possible thanks to the MIRI, or Mid-Infrared Instrument, onboard the James Webb Space Telescope, unveils a third theory—that water was available as a floating reservoir in space that formed concurrently with Earth and other planets.
“We’ve seen water in other disks, but not so close in and in a system where planets are currently assembling. We couldn’t make this type of measurement before Webb,” said lead author Giulia Perotti of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany.
Two riddles remain unsolved however. The first is how the water got there in the first place, and the second is how has it survived so long.
The water could literally be forming spontaneously, as hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine in situ, or frozen dust found its way on a course towards the inner disk where gradually it separated from the dust particles.
PDS 70 is a K-type star that’s about 5.4 million years old—very young for a star, but long in the tooth for one which maintains its accretion disks. At just less than 100 million miles from the star, ultraviolet radiation and radiated heat would create temperatures and conditions hostile to the water vapor—potentially 300°C at any time, while the UV would normally be breaking the bonds of the water molecules. The team, which included astronomers at Radboud University, The Netherlands, offered up a hypothesis that the dust in the inner accretion disk could be thick enough to shield the water from the worst of the star’s rays.
Several components, most notably silicates, were detected in the inter-disk media, suggesting that a rocky planet could form there, and if it did, it would have a ready supply of water floating around to benefit from.
The team will continue to use the JWST to survey PDS 70 and hope to learn more about the strange star system. WaL
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Quote of the Day: “Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.” – Rabindranath Tagore
Photo by: Robert Murray
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One day in the Bronx, a first-grade teacher sat down in a barbershop for a trim and one of his students walked in, sat down, and started looking antsy.
He thought to himself that it was a perfect opportunity to practice reading, a thought that changed Alvin Irby’s life, and in five years’ time, he’s filling dozens of barbershops around the country with free books to trim back childhood illiteracy.
His non-profit, Barbershop Books, has delivered 50,000 free books to more than 200 barbershops in predominantly black neighborhoods in 24 states, leveraging the fact that in Black American communities, barbershops are like community centers where people congregate naturally.
“Barbershop Books inspires Black boys and other vulnerable children to read for fun,” Irby told CNN, which recently honored the man as a CNN Hero. “We install a child-friendly reading space in the barbershop.”
Key to the reading spaces are bookshelves that display the covers of the books rather than the spines, helping kids who may be interested in reading seize the opportunity for themselves, whether they’re in the barber’s chair or they’re waiting on their dad or friend.
Irby teaches the barbers in all the shops how to help encourage kids to read, such as by asking if they like to read, or what they think about one of the books in the shop. The barbers are key for another reason as well.
“We are putting books in a male-centered space,” Irby told CNN. “Less than 2% of teachers are Black males and many Black boys are raised by single moms. Black boys don’t see Black men reading.”
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At heart, the idea is not just about enriching a child’s mind but improving their proficiency in school, where Irby who teaches kindergarten and first grade says is pretty much the only place kids see reading happening. He says that if the only time a kid practices piano is at the piano lesson, his progress is going to be really, really slow.
At the moment, he’s developing a school curriculum addition to help students identify their own reading preferences. Keeping the theme within Black culture, the program is called “Reading So Lit.”
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Helping pre-K to 5 students explore, understand, and articulate their reading preferences increases self-awareness and social awareness, and Reading So Lit uses self-assessments and AI to generate actionable, strengths-based data about the reading content and conditions that students find personally meaningful and engaging. It’s already been successfully trialed in schools.
As sophisticated as the program is, Irby’s passion is still derived from interactions like the one which started it all—the kind that take place in the barbershop.
WATCH the story below from localish…
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Reprinted with permission from World at Large, an independent news outlet covering conflict, travel, science, conservation, and health and fitness.
Conducted by two private companies beyond the scope of universities, hospitals, or government agencies, the world’s first trial of pure cannabinol (CBN) revealed a wealth of information on the benefits and limitations of this cannabis-derived sleep aid.
Testing CBN versus both melatonin and a placebo, the study revealed that not only does CBN work better than melatonin for reducing sleep disturbances, but that CBN is dose-dependent along a U-shaped curve.
The findings are vital to the understanding of how to use CBN, just one of many cannabinoids believed to have therapeutic effects.
Over 1,000 participants from across the US formed the study group. They received doses of melatonin, placebo, or a CBN product called TruCBN.
The trial was carried out by a for-profit clinical research company called Radicle Science which uses crowdsourcing and machine learning to carry out placebo-controlled trials that bypass some of the worst aspects of scientific research. More on that later.
With 50 milligrams of TruCBN, participants experienced significant sleep improvements, many of which were described as “critical”. The melatonin group also reported substantive sleep improvements, but not to the level of the CBN group.
Only marginal improvements were seen in people taking either 25 or 100 milligrams, hence the U-shaped curve.
Radicle Science’s co-founder and CEO, Jeff Chen, MD/MBA, lauded the discovery, especially of the dose-response curve. Dr. Chen has spoken to WaL before, when his Radicle Science carried out the world’s largest real-life evidence study on the effects of commercial CBD products, about the artificial nature of most medical research that is nevertheless considered the “gold standard.”
“If you’re a pharma company, and you’re doing your pivotal trials, that’s an expensive process—tens sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars and 3-5 years; that’s one shot-able,” Dr. Chen told WaL back in 2021. “You need to make damn sure that the people in your study are going to have the best odds of having effectiveness with your drug, and the least amount of odds of having a bad side effect”.
If, Chen explains, the trial is one of the one-shot opportunities, and the drug in question is one for insomnia, the exclusion criteria might be as high as 1,000 to 1. People with low income, who drink coffee, who have depression or chronic pain, or maybe who haven’t had success with Ambien, a common insomnia drug, all would be excluded to better the odds of the trial’s success despite the fact that they are the people who would need a sleep aid the most.
“Study groups are really artificial,” says Chen. “They’re selecting an artificial population that doesn’t look like anybody in America. You conduct the study in a very artificial setting; hospitals, doctors, you very strictly dose people, you dose them to a very regimented schedule”.
“At the end maybe you see a benefit, but this data doesn’t actually represent how the drug will work in the real world. In the real world, people look very different than those in the clinical trial, doctors’ behavior in prescribing the drug can look very different, and consumers using the drug have a very different relationship to it—they might skip doses, they might double up on doses,” he said.
FloraWorks, the company that produces and sells TruCBN, claims that 60% of Americans report having disrupted sleep. Dr. Matthew Walker, the famous sleep-science communicator and author of Why We Sleep, claimed on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast that it took just a few weeks for the sleep aid drug Ambien to make as much money from sales in America as the Star Wars franchise made in 40 years of movies and licensed products.
Dr. Susan Hewlings, PhD, RD, vice president of research affairs at Radicle Science, highlighted the importance of the study’s discovery by noting the recent FDA scrutiny towards melatonin dosage, which does come with side effects as it is a signaling hormone for many biological processes, not just sleep.
Cannabinol is just one of several active compounds from the Cannabis sativa plant, alongside cannabidiol (CBD), and cannabigerol (CBG) that are being studied for medicinal qualities.
In a win for holistic medicine, the nation that discovered penicillin is now opting to use food ingredients as a wound cleaner in hospitals.
The UK is trialing, and seeing major success, with using a combination of medicinal-grade honey and food-grade vinegar to clean wounds rather than antibiotics or antiseptics.
Known as oxymel, the mixture has been written about in the medical literature of at least Classical Rome, and likely older civilizations as well.
“In our survey of pre-modern recipes we noticed a pattern of combining honey and vinegar to wash or dress wounds and swellings, and this inspired us to focus on that combination in our analysis,” said Dr. Erin Connelly, a researcher on the study.
Today at Warwick University, Connelly and her team of researchers at the British National Health Service were looking to see if bacterial concentrations could be reduced when ensconced within the protections of a biofilm.
A complex, slimy agglomeration of microbes, biofilms can cover wounds thanks to a property that allows them to bind very close to flesh. Inside, bacteria can escape traditional topical antibiotics.
Applying a variety of doses and mixtures, they found that a combination low dose acetic acid (the active ingredient in vinegar) and medicinal honey dramatically reduced microbial count.
“These doses are lower than those that wound care nurses currently use on patients. But when we put these low doses together, we saw a large number of bacteria dying which is really exciting,” Dr. Freya Harrison of Warwick University told the London Times.
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Following up, the team found that whole vinegars like pomegranate vinegar worked even better than the acetic acid alone.
Medicinal honey can be effective for more than just wound cleaning. Manuka honey for example, can clear bacterial infections that plague those with cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease.
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Why stop at a 4×4 when you can spring for an 8×8?
Finnish company 18 Wheels say they have developed and produced a unique patented suspension for the so-called “eco ATV” that utilizes 18 wheels so as not to overly disturb the soil underneath it.
“Our ATV does not destroy the soil, is safe for nature, and has a significantly better dynamic performance and cross-country ability than any ATV,” said the company, ensuring any doubters that this machine is not a party piece.
The first prototype device was built last year to test the hypothesis and suspension on different soils.
18 Wheels say that prototype featured a suspension system that provides a special trajectory of movement and is equipped with an independent electric motor inside, the same as some electric or hybrid performance cars which can calculate how much power to send to each wheel in order to improve cornering speed and stability.
“After six months of testing, we designed the second prototype already in the public design and are now building it,” 18 Wheels report.
The company says a “tentative presentation date” is October 2023, with a plan to start sales next spring.
A preliminary estimated price of around $20,000 has been announced.
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“We plan to organize a test drive and invite everyone who wants to test drive it,” they add.
18 Wheels’ website lists the benefits of the system as including the ability to overcome obstacles higher than 8 inches without loss of speed, the ability to apply to different equipment and adapt to different tasks, and the versatility to tackle all soils, temperatures, and seasons.
WATCH the video below if you’re not convinced…
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Quote of the Day: “Hope is patience with the lamp lit.” – Tertullian
Photo by: Vladimir Fedotov
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
It’s not every day one reads that a young black man’s day was made after police officers are called to the scene.
That boy’s day might have been ruined in the Georgia town of Hapeville, where the unnamed lad was going door to door asking if there were any yard work that needed doing.
His hope was to save up money mowing lawns and trimming hedges to be able to afford a PlayStation 5.
One of the neighbors had other ideas—specifically, picking up the phone and calling the police, and asking for him to be removed from the area.
Officer Colleran of the City of Hapeville Police Department was dispatched to the area where he quickly made contact with the boy.
“The young man was polite, respectful, and truthful,” wrote the department on Facebook. “He was in the area because he wanted to do yard work: pulling weeds, cutting grass, and trimming hedges to save up for a PlayStation.”
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“Officer Colleran, a gamer himself, was impressed with the young man and thought he would help him reach his goal.”
Driving back to the neighborhood and meeting up with the boy, he surprised him with a PS5 right in the back of his squad car, one that he bought after getting his fellow officers all to pitch in around $400-$500.
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“Officer Colleran and some of his friends were able to not only get this young man the video game system but a gift card to pay for the membership so he could play immediately.”
Before leaving the man to enjoy his console, Colleran ensured he knew how to contact him over the PS5 network so they could play together.
WATCH the priceless reaction when Colleran opens his trunk…
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Sometimes, nature just throws you a curveball that leaves you scratching your head.
Take a look at the video below and ask yourself, is this a bear, or a man in a bear costume?
At first it seems bear-ly believable, but by the end of the video you’re likely not sure what to think.
Whether man or beast, the object of our focus is (allegedly) a sun bear, an ursid from Southeast Asia and the world’s smallest true bear. While not endangered, the animal is considered Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List.
They are the most arboreal of all bears as well, perhaps because of their smaller stature. They spend a lot of time sleeping in trees. They get their name from the orange-colored patch of fur on their breast.
WATCH the video and decide for yourself…
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City of Hope today announced that the first patient to receive its novel, promising cancer medicine AOH1996 is doing well.
The Phase 1 clinical trial testing the safety of a potentially cancer-stopping therapy in people with reoccurring solid tumors is expected to continue for the next two years. The investigational pill has been effective in preclinical research treating cells derived from breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin, and lung cancers.
Linda Malkas Ph.D., pioneer of AOH1996 at City of Hope’s Department of Molecular Diagnostics & Experimental Therapeutics, began her research 20 years ago, believing that proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), which plays an essential role in the replication and repair of cells, would be a less toxic cancer therapy that targets mutated cancer cells while leaving normal cells alone.
The new treatment has been shown in preclinical research to target PCNA and inhibit the growth and spread of a broad range of human cancer cells.
The research protocol notes that AOH1996 is not toxic to healthy cells and that treatment with this medicine both pauses cell DNA synthesis and inhibits DNA repair, leading to a type of cell death known as apoptosis in the cancer cells.
“Imagine cancer as the water filling up a bathtub. Left unchecked, the tumors or water will eventually overflow and damage other parts of your home. The treatment my team at City of Hope created is akin to a watchful homeowner who shuts the water off — stopping the spread of tumors to other parts of the metaphorical house — and then drains the tub, eliminating the cancer,” said Malkas.
“No one has ever targeted PCNA as a therapeutic because it was viewed as ‘undruggable,’” said study co-author Dr. Long Gu. “We discovered that PCNA is one of the potential causes of increased nucleic acid replication errors in cancer cells.”
“Now that we know the problem area and can inhibit it, we will dig deeper to understand the process to develop more personalized, targeted cancer medicines,” he said.
MORE GOOD CANCER STORIES: Cancer Screening Could Predict Tumors Decades Before They Start Growing Thanks to This Discovery
The Phase 1 clinical trial is open at City of Hope Los Angeles. Its objective is to determine the maximum tolerated dose of the investigational pill, AOH1996, and to evaluate the medicine for preliminary efficacy.
Eligible patients include adults with solid tumors who have not found standard treatments effective. Participating patients will be asked to take the medication in pill form twice a day.
Malkas said other targeted therapies, like checkpoint inhibitors, that inhibit the growth and spread of cancer have helped innumerable cancer patients, adding that perhaps one day AOH1996 will be a U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved inhibitor that could be used in combination with existing therapies to both enhance cancer-killing effects as well as decrease side effects related to lifesaving cancer treatments.
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AOH1996 is named after Anna Olivia Healey, a young girl born in 1996 who unfortunately was not able to beat cancer. AOH1996 is exclusively licensed by City of Hope to RLL, LLC, a biotechnology company that Malkas co-founded.
With the infrastructure and support of City of Hope, Malkas was able to commercialize her basic research, moving her promising laboratory discovery into a clinical trial for people who need the therapies of tomorrow today.
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When Emily Dickerson lost a ring containing a jewel made of her father’s ashes, an unlikely set of heroes emerged to return it to her.
The 17-year-old was out in San Antonio performing with her school choir, when at the end of the week the organizers decided to take some 200 singers and bandmembers to the beach at Corpus Christi.
At the time, Dickerson was wearing four sentimental rings: the cremation ring, one from her boyfriend, and two from her family members. Not wanting to lose them in the water, she hid them in a place where no potential thief idling by would think to look—in the empty box from the Subway lunch Dickerson had just eaten.
But in a case of out of sight out of mind, during the hustle of departure, she forgot about the Subway box, and it ended up in a dumpster with 200 others just like it.
“I realized where I had left them, and I was in a complete panic,” Dickerson told local news. “I called my mom and told her the situation. I was a mess.”
Dickerson’s father died when she was just 7 years old. She wears the ring continuously, knowing that he is always there with her.
Dickerson’s mom Tina Koch contacted the Dept. of Parks and Recreation in Corpus Christi, but it was by then 8 pm on a Friday. Leaving a desperate voicemail, Koch hoped without much hope that something might be done.
Enter Laura Perez, the parks operation supervisor, who listened to the voicemail first thing on Monday morning. Perez, according to the Washington Post, makes every effort to track down lost items, but she knew chances were slim.
All the beach trashcans would be collected and deposited into a 40-yard dumpster slated for pickup at 8:00 am; it was already half-past the hour.
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Nevertheless, she called the staff cleaning up that section of beach and was shocked to hear the dumpster was still there, at which point she ordered horses to be held, and rushed for a little Monday morning dumpster diving.
Jesse Martinez and Robert Trevino joined Perez in combing through the trash left baking over the weekend’s nearly 100°F heat. They searched for hours until they came upon a big with the Subway boxes, and methodically began opening them one by one until, at last, a purple jewel shined in the morning light.
“It was in the last bag we went through,” Perez told the Post. “I was so excited to let her know.”
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Ring Lost Down Toilet 13 Years Ago is Discovered at Wastewater Treatment Facility 1,000 Feet From Her Home
“We’re talking about four rings in a hot, nasty dumpster,” Koch told the Post in the aftermath. “I’m blown away. I don’t have enough praise for these people.”
As it happened, they only found the cremation ring first, but despite Koch’s pleadings, they kept on searching until half an hour later they had turned up all three.
WATCH the story below from KRIS…
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Quote of the Day: “All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope.” – Alexandre Dumas
Photo by: Soheb Zaidi
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The glory days for some of the most debilitating pathogenic diseases may be numbered thanks to a new class of immunizations that change the gut microbiome of ticks and mosquitoes.
Rather than targeting the pathogen that causes a disease, the vaccine targets the microbes that the pathogen requires to survive, and a new study investigating a vaccine that did just that demonstrated it was remarkably successful in mice.
While human use for a vaccine typically takes 8-10 years of tests and development, a similar vaccine could be prepared for animals such as dogs, cats, and livestock much sooner which would have the potential to save pet owners hundreds in veterinary bills, and ranchers tens of thousands.
Lyme disease needs little introduction: it’s a debilitating condition caused by the Borrelia genus that can leave a human or animal weak and bedridden for a decade. It’s been previously discovered that Borrelia pathogens can alter a tick’s gut microbiome
A new study found that by immunizing mice with a harmless E. coli bacteria as a Trojan horse, it elicited an immune response within the tick’s gut that greatly reduced the amount of Escherichia-Shigella, a common bacterial taxa found within the guts of mice and humans.
The authors report that this greatly decreased the ability of Borrelia afzelii, one of the pathogens that cause Lyme disease, to survive within its tick host, and protected the mice as well.
This immunization is part of an emerging class of drugs called anti-microbiota vaccines, and the same concept is being applied to malaria, and the family of pathogens called Plasmodium that cause it.
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Early last year, scientists demonstrated that a vaccine targeting Enterobacteriaceae injected into domestic canaries worked with similar effectiveness. Southern house mosquitoes which fed on these birds demonstrated a gut microbiome that proved hostile to the Plasmodium relictum malaria strain.
“These antimicrobiota vaccines are interesting for other pathogens because they specifically target the vector microbiota,” Dr. Alejandro Cabezas-Cruz, an infectious disease researcher and author on both the tick and mosquito papers, told Newsweek.
“As the microbiota is essential for many vector-borne pathogens, this approach could be used to target a wide range of diseases, whether caused by viruses, parasites, or bacteria.”
MORE VACCINE SCIENCE: After 8 Years of Research World-Changing Malaria Vaccine Approved in Africa
It’s a lot to think about, since mosquitoes and ticks spread far more than just Lyme disease and malaria. It also shows, yet again, just how critical the gut microbiome is to the health of all organisms.
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All of last weekend, Callie Clemons was crawling in and out of storm drains and manhole covers in the Houston heat, searching for abandoned puppies.
Saying the area is infamous for “puppy dumping” as she refers to it grimly, she says won’t rest until all three of the black labrador-terrier mutts are located.
Clemons, whose name comes from her marriage with the son of Yankee pitching legend Roger Clemons, received a call from a concerned citizen Wednesday night that three stray puppies had fallen down a storm drain in the neighborhood of Spring Branch.
By Friday, Clemons, a dedicated group of volunteers, and her own dog Gizelle, had found two of the abandoned puppies, and she was already going back down on Saturday night to find the last one.
Clemons says in her 7 years of rescuing animals, she’s never lost one.
While she told Britain’s Daily Mail that the city of Houston was supportive—unlocking drains and moving manhole covers, she told the New York Post that her work stems from a lack of action on the part of the city and county, or the ASCPA who are too swamped with phone calls to stay on site more than an hour.
“There’s no way the puppy can get out by itself so it’s up to us and I have no shame to go down and get it,” the five-foot-tall woman told the Mail.
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While Houston animal control did little to help, the city was able to provide Clemons with blueprints of the Spring Branch sewers to help her map her way through the cockroaches and fetid water.
“I’m not stopping, I mean, I already told my mom, “I think I’m going to keep this dog if I find it,’ I’m so invested,” said Callie.
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Clemons additionally told the Post that she had been down in storm drains crawling around for around 8 hours into the small watches of the night.
WATCH the story below from Fox 26…
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TikTok users tuning into a viral video got to see a brief glimpse into the special relationship between a young woman and her grandmother, with the former teaching herself to sew in order to bring to life fashion sketches made by the latter over 60 years ago.
Julia, (@boringbb on TikTok) a content creator with a passion for fashion, said she was so inspired by the sketches she decided to start making some of them herself.
She started by watching YouTube videos on various techniques of sewing and stitching, and playing around with different items she would thrift until she had something like what she saw in the sketches.
Her grandmother dropped out of fashion and design school in the 1940s to support her family financially and never returned to the career she fancied.
“It’s one thing to see it in a drawing but it’s—when you’re putting it together and I see it in real life it kind of makes me want to cry a little bit,” her grandmother said in the video with about 20 million views, after Julia unveiled a black and blue “Moulin Rouge” ballet dress.
While that was just one moment on TikTok, Julia has been doing this for years, and imagined erroneously that people would get bored after the third or fourth dress. People have continued to enjoy the videos in large numbers.
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Regardless, the brief spurt of social media stardom isn’t what Julia is after. She thoroughly enjoys making the dresses as a way of connecting with her grandmother—both to her Depression-era fashion sense and to who she is today.
“Now, she talks to me more about fashion and her interests, more of an adult sort of friendship relationship that we have now,” Julia told GMA. “I think that she’s now able to not only see me as her granddaughter but also see me as a friend.”
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Palm Beach County has already shattered the record for the number of turtle nests recorded during a single nesting season on Juno Beach, with three months of counting still to come.
By Sunday, the 9.5-mile Juno Beach in the northern part of the county had seen 21,872 mostly-loggerhead sea turtle nests, compared to an end-season total of 18,132 nests last October.
“We are so excited to break this all-time nesting record and can’t wait to see if each sea turtle species breaks its individual record,” Dr. Justin Perrault, vice president of research at Loggerhead Marinelife Center, said in the news release.
The overwhelming majority, around 15,000 of the nests, belong to the loggerhead species, but green and leatherback sea turtles also nest there. All of these species are considered vulnerable or endangered.
“Ocean conservation efforts that have been practiced for decades are finally coming to fruition, and we need to make sure that we continue to protect these animals and their ecosystems,” he said.
The counting was done by the Center on Juno Beach, Jupiter-Carlin Park, and Tequesta.
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Joyously, it’s not only Florida that is having a bumper crop of turtles.
On the beaches of Baldwin County in Alabama, experts believe they are on pace for a banner year. Unlike Florida, the end of August heralds the end of the nesting season, and the 13 nests of loggerhead, Kemp’s ridley, and green sea turtles are already 2 more nests than the whole of the 2016 and 2017 nesting seasons.
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“Those were our benchmarks and being ahead of that already at this point, it’s very exciting,” said the program director for Share the Beach, a volunteer organization that stakes and marks out turtle nests.
In recent years, some US Gulf Coast and Atlantic states have seen record increases in turtle nests, projecting an image of the United States as a turtle sanctuary since any turtle that hatches there will return year after year to lay their eggs on the same beach they were born on.
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