Quote of the Day: “If you count all your assets you always show a profit.” – Wilson Mizner
Photo by: Andre Adjahoe
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Economists told CNN recently that Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is becoming such a massive phenomenon that it’s having demonstrable impacts on the US economy at large, but it’s not only stadium venues, record labels, and ticket vendors benefiting.
Everywhere she goes, Swift is making big donations to US food banks allowing them to feed hundreds of thousands of needy Americans.
The Eras Tour kicked off in Arizona, where she presented a hefty check to the Arizona Food Bank Network big enough to fill tractor-trailers with 40,000 pounds of fresh produce, and reinforce benefit programs for children who rely on school meals and seniors who rely on food stamps.
Based on the homelessness burden in Washington state, estimated as the sixth-highest in the country as a percentage of population, the Seattle-based non-profit Food Lifeline likely received a similar size gift from Swift, though they declined, according to CNN, to state how much.
Food Lifeline said it too would be using the money for fresh produce rather than canned or packaged food.
Second Harvest of Silicon Valley also received the Swift largesse, then Three Square Food Bank serving Las Vegas and southern Nevada, then Food Bank of the Rockies in Colorado.
MORE HELPING THE HUNGRY: English Footballer Marcus Rashford Donates Millions For Child Poverty, Becomes Youngest-Ever to Top ‘Giving List’
“It is really meaningful to get a gift from someone who, like Taylor Swift, has the ability to bring so much attention to our cause and to the work that we’re doing,” Beth Martino, CEO of Three Square, told CNN.
April saw the tour arrive in Houston, where Swift donated to the Houston Food Bank.
“I’m just so glad (Swift) supports food banks, because the need is high, especially with inflation now,” Amy Ragan, the chief development officer for the charity, tells TODAY.com. “Food banks are working hard every day. And you know, it’s been tough getting food donations at some points.”
MORE GENEROUS CELEBRITIES: Michael Jordan Donates $10 Million to Make-A-Wish for his 60th Birthday, Setting a Record
Swift also gave each of the 50-member-strong trucking team that has done the heavy lifting and the late nights that make her show possible, a $100,000 ‘life-changing bonus, leaving them all shocked and humbled.
With Florida, Louisiana, and Indiana left on the US leg of the Eras Tour, there’s still room for more charity if there’s room in Swift’s wallet, since there’s no doubt there’s room in her heart.
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It’s a wonderful time of the year in Britain, the time to honor the Isles’ Tree of the Year.
Organized by the Woodland Trust, one of the UK’s largest nature advocacy, conservation, and educational organizations, this years’ entries revolve around a theme of honoring ancients which dwell among us in towns and cities.
The Oak of Belton Lane—referred to in some places as the Grantham Oak, is believed to be 500 years old. It could be a favorite for the award, as it has already been nominated in previous years.
In centuries past, the top half of the tree was routinely pruned for fodder and firewood, a practice which incidently helps trees live longer. Trees cut in this way, called “pollarding” often develop bizarre shapes that seem completly out of sync with the surrounding woodland. Not a problem with this tree, since the neighborhood it sits in was built in an arch around the magnificent oak.
It’s facing stiff competition, as Sheffield’s Chelsea Road Elm demonstrates the resilience of trees even in the face of urbanism. Saved from the chop of a development company after it was discovered to host breeding habitat for the rare white-letter hairstreak butterfly, it also was one of a few hundred elm trees that survived the Dutch elm disease epidemic that killed about 60 million trees in Britain.
“Ancient trees in towns and cities are vital for the health of nature, people and planet,” said Woodland Trust lead campaigner, Naomi Tilley.
“They give thousands of urban wildlife species essential life support, boost the UK’s biodiversity and bring countless health and wellbeing benefits to communities.”
Another strong contender is the Crouch Oak of Addlestone, believed to have sheltered Queen Elizabeth I and her entourage as they had a picnic beneath its boughs.
The Crouch Oak in Addlestone is coming into leaf. Always fantastic to see such an elderly tree springing back into life @AncientTreesATF pic.twitter.com/0IQqBc5I6b
— Chertsey History (@ChertseyHistory) April 22, 2018
Previous winners have been a 100-year-old hawthorne tree bent over from the wind on the rugged Scottish coast, a 500-year-old yew tree from Waverley Abbey in Surrey, and an oak tree in Liverpool so old, it was used as the courthouse during Norman times.
The winner of the Tree of the Year contest in the UK will go on to enter the European Tree of the Year contest.
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A team of scientists at the Salk Institute have found that a particular kind of immunotherapy was able to train the brain’s ‘invisible scalpel’ on an incurable form of brain cancer in mice.
Glioblastoma is the most common form of brain tumor, and while it’s also the most deadly, our brains come equipped with the immune cells needed to destroy them.
The problem is, cancer tumors have mechanisms that allow them to evade the detection of the immune system. That’s where immunotherapy comes in. While not universally effective, many tumors can be treated or even cured by immunotherapy, which helps the immune system see through these evasive mechanisms and destroy the cancer.
Professor Susan Kaech, director of the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, led a team to investigate whether immunotherapy could be used on glioblastomas by experimenting with an immunotherapy drug called anti-CTLA-4 and two specialized immune cells called CD4+ T cells and microglia respectively.
“There are currently no effective treatments for glioblastoma—a diagnosis today is basically a death sentence,” says Professor Susan Kaech, senior author of the paper published in the journal Immunity.
“We’re extremely excited to find an immunotherapy regimen that uses the mouse’s own immune cells to fight the brain cancer and leads to considerable shrinkage, and in some cases elimination, of the tumor.”
Both anti-CTLA-4 and CD4+ T cells have been overlooked or unfavored in clinical research on account of there being more effective alternatives identified in the early years of immunotherapy research.
MORE FROM SALK: Resetting Clock on Aging Cells Safely Reversed Signs of Decline in Mice
Regarding anti-CTLA-4, the more-effective alternative, PD-1, never worked in glioblastoma models. Anti-CTLA-4, however, does—by blocking cells from making the CTLA-4 protein, which, if not blocked, inhibits CD4+ T cell activity.
The researchers found that by allowing T cell activity to take place, CD4+ T cells secreted a protein called interferon-gamma that caused the tumor to throw up “stress flags” while simultaneously alerting microglia. A specially adapted immune cell for the brain environment, they started eating up these stressed tumor cells.
Each stressed-out cell the microglia ate led the tumor to create more interferon-gamma, leading to more consumption until the whole tumor was devoured.
MORE CANCER TREATMENTS: Immunotherapy Drugs So Effective that Tumors Disappear in Weeks for Head and Neck Cancer Patients in Landmark Trial
“We were stunned by this novel codependency between microglia and CD4+ T cells,” says co-first author Siva Karthik Varanasi, a postdoctoral researcher in Kaech’s lab. “We are already excited about so many new biological questions and therapeutic solutions that could radically change treatment for deadly cancers like glioblastoma.”
Next, the researchers will examine whether this cancer-killing cell cycle is present in human glioblastoma cases. Additionally, they aim to look at other animal models with differing glioblastoma subtypes, expanding their understanding of the disease and optimal treatments.
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Quote of the Day: “Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Photo by: Sander Weeteling
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Hula dancers swayed to the ocean waves on a South Carolina beach, all paying tribute to a hometown hero who died saving seniors in the midst of the Maui wildfire in Hawaii.
Joe Schilling had moved to downtown Lahaina recently, where he lived in an apartment building that was caught up in the fires which devastated the town last week.
“From what we know, when Joe started to evacuate, there were elderly people in his community who were stranded,” said Joe’s sister, Penny Schilling.
“He helped an elderly woman to escape and she is the one who verified what happened,” said Schilling.
Apparently, Joe had gone back into the building to help another 4 senior Maui citizens who were unable to leave. He collected them in his apartment where he sent a text message to Penny saying he was trying to keep the smoke out.
The luau on Surfside Beach, SC helped raise money for those impacted by the fires, and for Americans looking to chip in, there are several organizations that are doing work there including the American Red Cross, the Kākoʻo Maui Fund organized by The Hawaiian Way, and Hawaiian Community Foundation.
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In Bordeaux, a British powerlifter with Down Syndrome is a walking, pressing, squatting inspiration to all who watch him compete, and he’s just bagged the 5th gold medal of his career.
At just 127 pounds (57 kg) Dan MacGauley took first place in the European Bench Press Championship, posting 154 lbs. (70 kg) classic, and 198 lbs. (90 kg) equipped—meaning with a weight belt and gloves—which was a new personal best.
The 33-year-old who was told he’d “never achieve anything,” was already a world champion, four-times Commonwealth champion, and British champion before his European debut earlier this month in Bordeaux.
Dan, who has autism and is deaf in his left ear, underwent two rounds of open-heart surgery when he was a toddler. He’s overcome as many obstacles as one could imagine to take home the double gold for classic and equipped.
“Loads of people have said to us that they go to work and come home after a long day and it’s an effort to go to the gym,” said his mother Judith, who’s also a powerlifter. “But that they see Dan there, smiling and laughing despite all his problems, and it gives them the motivation they need.”
Dan was temporarily wheelchair-bound and first got into powerlifting more than ten years ago when he visited the gym to lose weight. He won his first gold medal at an international competition during the Powerlifting Commonwealth Championship back in 2015 in Vancouver.
McGauley’s personal best (equipped) is 733 lbs (332 kg) with 256 in the deadlift, 286 in the squat, and 198 in the bench.
MORE INSPIRING LIFTERS: 78-Year-old Iron Woman Is Powerlifting Champion Who Does 400 Squats and Holds 19 World Records
“When he’s powerlifting he likes carrying out the same routine over and over again—it comes naturally to him,” said Judith. “When he’s underneath the bar, that bar doesn’t know him from anyone else. There is no distinction made because he’s got problems.”
“He is just a brilliant person. He loves the sport and everyone around him support him doing it.”
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On July 19th, Specialist Rene J. Rodriguez, an El Paso native and Army combat medic, was recognized for his heroic actions during a Soldier’s Medal award ceremony for saving a woman from a brutal assault.
Leaving Schofield Barracks that afternoon, Rodriguez was heading to the North Shore for the weekend, when he noticed a woman being violently assaulted outside of a coffee shop in Wahiawa.
It wasn’t only the violent act he saw, but a crowd of bystanders and onlookers doing nothing to stop it.
With complete disregard for his own safety, he made the decision to intervene. Putting himself between the attacker and the woman, Rodriguez took the brunt of the attack, shielding the woman while encouraging her to climb into his vehicle.
“He [the attacker] comes back around, opens my door, opens the passenger door and pulls the lady out, and begins to beat her again. I run out of my driver’s side, I go the passenger side and I push him, he pushes me back,” Rodriguez recalled in an interview.
His pushing and shoving allowed the woman to get back in the car.
“I am about to sit down,” the Army Specialist continued, “and this is when he punches out the window and attempts to pull out. So I look to the side. And I see that he’s trying to unlock the car. At this point. This is when I started my car, I put it in drive. I just drove away.”
Introduced in July 1926, the Soldier’s Medal is the highest Army individual decoration honor a Soldier can receive for an act of valor in a non-combat event. Over 18,500 Soldiers have received the decoration since its inception.
MORE HEROES LIKE RENE: Waffle House Hero Sees Outpouring of Support After Raising Money For Victims He Defended
Of the 18,500 soldiers that have received the award, only 241 in the regular Army have been so honored—or around about 1/20th of 1% of all soldiers on active duty.
“Receiving the Soldier’s Medal is a humbling experience that reminds me of the values we hold dear as soldiers: courage, selflessness, and dedication to the greater good,” Rodriquez said in a statement.
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People all around the world are drawn to creating and consuming art, and human emotions are often a central subject in visual artworks as well as in music and performance art.
However, the mechanisms underlying the feelings that art evokes remain poorly characterized.
Now, a new study reveals how viewing visual art affects our emotions. The research subjects viewed different kinds of artworks and described the feelings that the art stimulated in their bodies.
The researchers recorded the subjects’ eye movement while they viewed the art. In addition, the subjects assessed what kind of emotions they felt looking at each piece of art.
“Viewing the art evoked many different kinds of feelings and emotions in people,” said Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the Turku PET Centre at the University of Turku, Finland.
“Even though many of the pieces handled sad or scary topics, the emotions that the people experienced were mainly positive. The bodily sensations evoked by art also contributed to the emotions: the stronger the body’s reaction was to the artwork, the stronger were the emotions experienced by the subject,” he said.
Altogether 1,186 people from different countries participated in the study and they assessed the emotions felt while engaging with over 300 artworks. The research was conducted with online surveys and eye movement recordings in the laboratory.
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Viewing visual art pieces evoked a wide range of emotional experiences that formed five broad clusters: aesthetic dimensions, positive emotions, negative emotions, touching feelings, and feelings of surprise and effort.
Empathy, anger, fear, and elegance evoked experiences almost everywhere in the body, whereas liking, beauty, amazement and effort elicited sensations mainly in the head area.
The Finnish authors of the study published in the journal Cognition & Emotion also revealed that it was the human face and figure that got the most attention.
MORE EMOTIONAL RESEARCH: If Anyone Needs to Stay Positive, Just Validate Their Feelings—Study Says
“In the artworks, human figures were the most interesting subject and were looked at the most. People have a tendency to empathize with each other’s emotions and this is probably also the case when we view human figures in art,” said team member Riitta Hari from Aalto University. “The human emotions presented in art pieces can be absorbed by the viewer unnoticed, through so-called mirroring.”
Dr. Nummenmma suggests that this research could be useful in mental health therapies.
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A large hexagonal step pyramid has been discovered in the most unlikely place: the grassy steppes of Kazakhstan.
While typical of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Nubian, and some South and East Asian cultures, the nomadic horse tribes of the steppe are not known for monumental stone pyramidal architecture.
Nevertheless, dating back 4,000 years ago to the Bronze Age, the step pyramid (or is it a steppe pyramid) is 500 square meters in area, and is described by a national team of archaeologists as a “sophisticated and complex structure.”
Located in a place called Kyrkungir near Toktamys village in the Abai region of Kazakhstan’s far east, interest in the site arose in 2014 when funerary mounds were discovered there containing burial goods of ceramic vessels, food offerings, bronze beads, and other jewelry.
Announced recently by the Archaeology and Ethnology Department of the Eurasian National University, the pyramid has been under excavation for some time, and is the first to ever be found on the Eurasian steppes.
“The steppe pyramid is built with great precision, it is hexagonal. There are thirteen meters and eight rows of stones between each face,” said Ulan Umitkaliyev, head of the department, in a statement.
A much larger black stone with a flat top was arranged in the corner of each face.
“It is a very sophisticated complex structure with several circles in the middle. The exterior walls of the structure of this complex are dominated by images of various animals, especially horses.”
These decorations have led the team to believe that the pyramid may have been a worship center for a horse cult. Thought to have occurred sometime between 1,000 and 200 years before the construction of the pyramid, the domestication of the horse changed the lives of steppe peoples, from the ancient Saka and Butai cultures to the Mongols of the Middle Ages, forever.
MORE ARCHAEOLOGY: Pre-Incan ‘Floor of Thunder’ Found Where Ritual Dances Atop Stone Platform Made Booming Footsteps Like Thunder
With six sides, each measuring 13.8 meters in length, the total footprint of the structure would span around 500 square meters, or around 5,300 square feet—the same as a luxurious American home with a 3-car garage. It’s unclear how high the pyramid would have been.
Long appreciated in the historical record for their roles as conquerors, warriors, and traders, it seems there is still more to be learned of the people of the steppe.
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Quote of the Day: “There is no limit to the power of loving.” – John Morton
Photo by: Alok Verma
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Ms. Cassidy Beach was recently the latest in a long chain of people to be walking along a beach or a harbor and see a dark green bottle with a letter in it.
This one she found on a beach in the archipelago of the Turks and South Caicos Islands, in the Caribbean north of Haiti. Dated September 20th, 2004, it was cast adrift by Mr. Pennel Ames, a commercial fisherman from Nantucket.
Between 2000 and 2006, Ames threw hundreds of these bottles off his boat into the Great South Channel. They have washed up and been found in Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Florida, all over the Caribbean, and the Canary Islands.
80 people have taken the time to remove the artificial corks, read the letter inside, and write back.
Together with his wife Sharon and their two daughters, Pennel Ames perfected the techniques for preserving penned paper inside glass, and have every once in awhile enjoyed pulling a strange letter out of the mail and reading where their bottles have arrived.
“You get your mail and you kind of know your bills and the familiar people who send stuff to you,” Mrs. Ames told The World. “But then, all of a sudden, you get an envelope and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I don’t know that person. That’s a bottle letter.’”
Sometimes they’re in English, but often they’re in Spanish, owing to the Canary Current bringing their bottles down to countries like Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
The currents of the Atlantic Ocean keep all the bottles north of the Equator, moving in a big ocean “gyre” in a clockwise motion around the North Atlantic.
OTHER SIMILAR STORIES: Family is Reunited by Message in Bottle Written By Their Late Son Decades Ago
Still living in Nantucket, they have scrapbooks of all the letters and envelopes, photographs, postcards, news articles, and printed emails from everyone who has found a bottle and written back. They have a whole book for France alone, a nation special to the Ameses because of an incident where a Frenchmen found one, and then his son also found one years later.
Ms. Beach was working for the NOAA on acoustic data from harbor porpoises and dolphins and wrote to the Ameses that this would bring her to Massachusetts, not far from their house.
MORE CUTE PROJECTS LIKE THIS: The Inspiring and Playful Hidden Message in the Mars Perseverance Rover’s Parachute
The World reported that she stopped in to deliver their letter, and her reply, personally.
“As soon as I walked in the cottage, they had a whole dining room table full of letters and books,” Beach said. “They had one book dedicated to France alone. And it was just really cool.”
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Humans are hardwired to feel good when performing acts of kindness towards others, an imperative trait in any animal that evolves to live and hunt in social groups.
This is such a truism that performing random acts of kindness for other people was more effective in reducing symptoms of depression than specifically planning activities for the sake of enjoyment, a new study found.
The study sought to test methods of cognitive behavioral therapy, a non-pharmaceutical treatment for depression and anxiety that’s proven to work through confronting patterns of thought and behavior that lead to depressive or anxious thoughts, and consciously moving away from them by retraining one’s brain.
The methods included random acts of kindness, such as buying a stranger’s coffee at Starbucks or baking cookies for the mailman, as well as planning fun activities twice a week and “cognitive reappraisal,” which coaches people with depression or anxiety to record triggering thoughts, and actively contemplate what would make the resulting stress diminish.
The participants would record a variety of feelings as measurements before the study, during the study, and five weeks after its conclusion. These included feelings of social isolation, self-consciousness in public, or life satisfaction.
“We did think that, if there was going to be an advantage of one group over another, it might be the thoughts record group, since that’s such a tried-and-true way of addressing depressive [and anxiety] symptoms,” coauthor Jennifer Cheavens of Ohio State University, told the Greater Good Magazine.
“But the kindness group did as well or better, and that group also had increases in social connection that didn’t happen in the other two groups.”
Indeed, all three groups experienced improvements in the measurements. The random acts of kindness group had a much bigger impact on positive cognition and emotions early on which tapered off as the study period advanced. The thoughts records, or cognitive reappraisal group had the opposite effect, where it started off negative, but became stronger and stronger over time.
MORE HOLISTIC HUMAN HEALTH: A New Holistic Patch Is Cutting Anxiety Successfully – Without Drugs
Another surprise was just how easy it was for the random acts of kindness group to perform the kind acts.
“I was surprised it was not a particularly hard sell,” Cheavens continued. “The people in the acts of kindness group had better uptake in some ways than the people in other groups.”
MORE NEWS LIKE THIS: Kava Plant Used for Centuries in Traditional Medicine Now Studied for PTSD Treatment
The kindness acts is a particularly important finding because it necessitates a connection with other people. Social isolation is a high-risk factor for survival; the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Cheavens felt that as well as being a powerful therapeutic strategy, random acts of kindness can be “add-on therapy” to pretty much most mental health disorders, reasoning that anytime we can get out of our own heads, it seems to be of benefit to our well-being.
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The year was 1998, and Malaysian lawyer Ahmad Zaharil was a bit confused when he saw a distressed Indian-Malaysian woman in her 50s being brought into a courtroom to be charged with shoplifting.
Zaharil felt compelled, he explained in a TikTok video, to ask her what her case about, to which she replied that it was because she stole a pencil box worth 18 Malaysian ringgit, or just over 5 American dollars, from a supermarket.
She had promised, she told Zaharil, that she would give her son a pencil box if he finished first in his classroom exams. He was in fourth grade and passed his exams with flying colors.
The lawyer and father of five asked for the case to be postponed while he went to gather evidence of the case, reasoning that if she were to be jailed, no one would be at home to care for her son. The teacher confirmed that indeed her son was the top student, but upon offering double the value of the pencil box to the owner of the supermarket in exchange for the case to be dropped, the man declined.
Zaharil took up the case for free and managed to get jail time and fines waived in exchange for a 1-year good behavior promise.
“Before she left, we passed the hat around and collected a couple of hundred ringgit contributed by court staff, policemen, and me. We handed over the money to the woman,” Zaharil, 57, told The Star. “She left after expressing her gratitude and I never saw her again.”
In 2018, 20 years later, a young lawyer approached Zaharil one day in court.
“Hello, Sir. You may not know me,” he began, “but I am the son of the cleaner you helped 20 years ago. Remember the pencil box case?”
“I almost fainted when he told me who he was,” said Zaharil. “It was heart-warming and one of the happiest moments in my life.”
Malaysia is a fascinating country, with several major ethnic groups living under a parallel legal system of civil law for non-Muslims, and Sharia court for cases in which all parties are Muslims.
Zaharil, a Malay, said that it was this spirit of national unity and brotherhood that led him to help the woman, an Indian by origin, get out of a jam. He maintains contact with the family and visits them for the Hindu festivals Diwali, and Hari Raya.
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Exploration and mapping of deep-sea life has come on in leaps and bounds over the last two decades, and the discoveries have been worth their weight in gold—like this new finding from the Schmidt Ocean Institute of life beneath undersea volcanic vents.
At a well-studied undersea volcano on the East Pacific Rise off Central America, an international team of marine biologists and oceanographers have discovered ecosystems of worms, snails, and bacteria living underground, under the seafloor.
Using an underwater robot, the science team overturned chunks of volcanic crust and discovered these narrow cave systems. Animals enter and exit them freely, adding a new dimension to hydrothermal vents, showing that their habitats exist both above and below the seafloor.
“On land we have long known of animals living in cavities underground, and in the ocean of animals living in sand and mud, but for the first time, scientists have looked for animals beneath hydrothermal vents,” says the institute’s executive director, Jyotika Virmani.
“This truly remarkable discovery of a new ecosystem, hidden beneath another ecosystem, provides fresh evidence that life exists in incredible places.”
Hydrothermal vents are fascinating underwater hotspots of life. As corals are the foundational creature of reefs, tube worms are a foundational species on the vents. However, their young have never been seen on the vents themselves, leading some scientists to hypothesize that they travel beneath them to reproduce.
To determine if the worms or other animals travel through vent fluids, the science team used Schmidt Ocean Institute’s underwater robot, ROV SuBastian, to conduct experiments by gluing mesh boxes over cracks in the earth’s crust. A non-toxic red pigment was released into the mesh box that colored all the animals inside.
When the boxes were removed after several days along with the crust they saw that animals living below the surface in hydrothermal cavities emerged and could be seen uncolored.
The discovery is reminiscent of other surveys of life in the deep places of the sea to which few people travel.
Undersea volcanoes off of Australia’s Cocos Keeling Islands were recently surveyed for life, and all manner of wild and wonderful species were discovered there.
Deep sea coral reefs are not well understood, and one was recently found 2,000 feet down in the Galapagos Islands marine protected area that was teeming with life.
In 2020, the British Antarctic Survey sent a submersible down beneath the Antarctic shelf and instantly counted 36 species new to science living on a single boulder.
“The discoveries made on each Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition reinforce the urgency of fully exploring our ocean so we know what exists in the deep sea,” said Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of Schmidt Ocean Institute. “The discovery of new creatures, landscapes, and now, an entirely new ecosystem underscores just how much we have yet to discover about our Ocean–and how important it is to protect what we don’t yet know or understand.”
WATCH the great video footage from the survey below…
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Quote of the Day: “Marriages, like careers, need constant nurturing—the secret of having it all is loving it all.” – Joyce Brothers
Photo by: Morgan Rovang
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Lizards have the ability to shed their tails to escape predators, after which they will regrow in around 60 days’ time.
Although it looks like a normal tail, the original bone is actually replaced by softer cartilage.
Now researchers at the Keck School of Medicine in the University of Southern California have identified key cells that facilitate that cartilage regeneration.
They believe their discovery could unlock ways to rebuild cartilage damaged by osteoarthritis, a crippling degenerative disease for which at present there is no cure, and which affects 10% of all Americans.
Lizards are among the only higher vertebrates capable of regenerating cartilage that does not harden and are the closest relatives to mammals that can regenerate.
The team has published in the journal Nature Communications the first detailed description of the interplay between the two cell types that allow lizards to regenerate their tails.
“Lizards are kind of magical in their ability to regenerate cartilage because they can regenerate large amounts of cartilage and it doesn’t transition to bone,” said corresponding author Thomas Lozito, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery and stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
“The dream is to find a way to translate that process in humans because they cannot repair cartilage. This represents an important step because we need to understand the process in great detail before we can try to recreate it in mammals.”
Fibroblasts are the critical cell type that builds cartilage, and their research found that changes in gene activity that took place among certain fibroblast cells enabled de novo cartilage building.
They also discovered that a type of immune cell called a septoclast plays an important role in inhibiting fibrosis, or scarring, allowing the process of regeneration to take place.
MORE HUMAN REGENERATION: Regenerative Medicine Breakthrough: Cellular ‘Glue’ Heals Wounds, Potentially Regrows Nerves and Tissue
“Those two cell types working together laid the foundation for the beginning of the regenerative process,” explained Dr. Lozito. “A major difference between humans and lizards is that human tissue tends to scar and that scarring prevents tissue regeneration.”
Remarkably, the researchers were able to induce cartilage regeneration in the limbs of lizards, which do not regrow like their tails.
They now hope to test whether they can induce cartilage building in mammals, beginning with mice, using the techniques they employed in their experiments on lizard limbs.
MORE HUMAN REGENERATION: World’s First ‘Tooth Regrowth’ Medicine Moves Toward Clinical Trials in Japan
It opens an interesting avenue of imagination—of regenerating joints of all sorts in a non-invasive procedure. It’s the kind of thing a football coach dreams about.
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Editor’s note: This story has had its image changed to reflect the correct reptile species.
Citing a profound civic responsibility in the tech-heavy city of San Jose, CEO of Apple Inc. Tim Cook created a corporate fund to advance affordable housing projects in the city four years ago.
Now, $1.5 billion has already been spent, and it’s resulted in the creation of thousands of housing units across the city and county, and more.
As one might expect from the world’s largest company by market cap and revenue, the funding has been targeted, strategic, and effective, thanks to a plan to plug critical gaps in existing housing projects or innovate when necessary.
“We really look for projects and programs where not only do we have a deep impact, but we actually see the impact fairly quickly,” Kristina Raspe, Apple’s vice president of worldwide real estate and facilities, told Fast Company.
“That’s why we’ve chosen to focus on funding projects that need that last tranche of funding in order to be built, as opposed to projects that are still in the conceptual phase.”
Raspe and Apple have achieved that by relying on affordable housing non-profit partners like Housing Trust Silicon Valley, which provides Apple with lists of apartment and housing units that already went through planning and approval, but which hit last-minute snags.
MORE FORTUNE 500 FUNDING: IKEA Buys 11,000 Acres of U.S. Forest to Keep It From Being Developed
For example, Apple’s housing fund was able to get a 94-unit apartment building called the Villas at 4th Street in San Jose’s Japantown unstuck and open for chronically-unhoused senior citizens. Housing Trust Silicon Valley has also managed to secure the completion of another 82-unit building in San Jose on 333 Page Street, and a 30-unit building in the nearby city of Pittsburgh.
MORE CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: Airbnb Will Chip In for Its Hosts’ Green Upgrades
In the Bay Area, Destination: Home, another of Apple’s partners, have been able to secure some of the fund’s money to build thousands of “extremely-affordable” homes in the county, as well as provide limited financial support to 24,000 people at the highest risk of losing their homes.
Apple has also traded 5 acres of land in Cupertino, where the company is headquartered, with the county to facilitate the construction of affordable housing for teachers near the schools where they work. The county will give Apple a smaller parcel of land elsewhere.
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With a heart of gold and nerves of steel, an officer in Arvin, California vaulted over a fence and worked amid blazing heat to save a chained dog from a raging fire.
Chained just outside a burning mobile home, Officer Calderon comforted the dog with kind words before eventually using hedge clippers to free the pooch, all the while protecting the dog with his own body.
Hearing about Calderon’s heroics, recorded in a 6-minute section of body cam footage, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) decided to present the man with their Compassionate Action Award.
“His actions were truly heroic. And we want to reward him to recognize that and also because we hope that it will inspire more people to be heroes for animals,” said Ashley Byrne, PETA’s director of outreach communications.
The process of freeing the dog started after Calderon used his strength to clamber over a rickety 6-foot fence. The dog was frightened and ran away from Calderon at first, but he pulled it close to him via the chain while struggling to try and find some way to disconnect it.
At first, he tried to bend a pin holding two sections of chain apart, but it wouldn’t budge. Then, coaxing the dog to hide behind a large horizontal kitchen or bathroom sink in the yard, he breached the friendship barrier and was able to scratch the pit bull or bull terrier behind the ears.
MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Stranded Dog Wags His Tail With Joy as Fire Crews Rescue Him From Sheer Cliff Face–WATCH
Calderon pushed the sink closer to the wooden fence behind it, creating a shield to protect the dog from the heat of the fire while trying to break through the fence and allow the dog to go into the adjacent property.
The smart pooch understood what was happening, and when a passageway had been made it went through. In the neighbor’s yard, Calderon found a pair of hedge clippers which allowed him to finally free the dog from its bonds.
MORE ANIMAL RESCUES: A Dog Rescued From a Ledge 50 Feet Above a Colorado Creek Had Been Missing for Weeks
“My back was already on fire. Whenever I was able to shelter the dog, my back was burning, and at one point I thought I was going to have to give up,” Calderon said in an interview with Eyewitness News.
“A wall of fire and scorching heat didn’t stop Officer Calderon from fighting to save this terrified, trapped dog, and we salute him,” said PETA President Ingrid Newkirk.
WATCH the raw footage below BUT beware of profanity…
According to officials speaking with Reuters, India has reduced her greenhouse gas emissions by one-third since 2009.
The climate triumph was achieved by increased renewable energy production and increased forest cover, leaving the world’s-most populous country on track to meet all her current emissions targets.
The measurement of emissions in the report is referred to as “emissions intensity” which describes a measure of greenhouse gases emitted against a ratio of GDP.
According to the report, which is the third official report submitted to the UN’s Convention on Climate Change, India has increased her annual reductions of emissions to 3% annually in the period 2016-2019, from just about 1.5% in the preceding period of 2014 to 2016.
Forest cover and tree cover in India, according to the nation’s 2019 State of the Forest report, increased by 2,000 square miles, between 2017 and 2019. This is credited with increasing the total carbon stored in the soils of India by 42.6 million tonnes.
Recent estimates of India’s electricity mix show that renewable energy accounted for 25.3% of India’s total power generation along with nuclear.
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India relies heavily on coal for power, and the officials speaking with Reuters said by demonstrating that a mixture of traffic management, renewable energy utilization, and forest management can meet the nation’s emissions targets, the government won’t need to practice widespread decommissioning of coal-fired power plants.
India has already invested heavily in future coal projects. Abandoning them would not only cause massive losses for the state’s coffers, but also a significant loss of confidence in Indian capital markets, and in state governments’ ability to manage taxpayer money.
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