Feeling happy about getting older can reverse a common type of memory loss, according to a new study from Yale.
Older people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were 30 percent more likely to regain normal cognition if they were upbeat versus those who were down-and-out about aging.
Moreover, a cheerful approach to the silver years allowed participants to recover their cognition up to two years earlier than the others.
The Yale School of Public Health study is reported to be the first of its kind to link a cultural factor—a positive attitude towards aging—to MCI recovery.
The research was based on 1,716 participants over age 65.
Those who started the study with normal cognition and a happy attitude toward aging were less likely to develop MCI over the next 12 years than those in the negative-thinking group, regardless of physical health or the age they joined the cohort.
Professor Becca Levy, lead author of the study, said: “Most people assume there is no recovery from MCI, but in fact half of those who have it do recover.
“Little is known about why some recover while others don’t.
“That’s why we looked at positive age beliefs, to see if they would help provide an answer.
“Our previous research has demonstrated that age beliefs can be modified; therefore, age-belief interventions at the individual and societal levels could increase the number of people who experience cognitive recovery,” she said in a statement.
Her research published this week in JAMA Network Open was spurred by her previous discovery that older people who felt positive about their age experienced improved cognitive performance.
The latest development was funded by the National Institute on Aging.
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Quote of the Day: “Don’t despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.” – John Burroughs (naturalist and author)
Photo by: Ryan Hutton
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Out in the ultra-rural jungles of eastern Madagascar, something is happening that all climate-conscious philanthropists and investors should take note of.
A few intrepid locals have created a 6-year, work-for-knowledge program that’s turning jobless country folk into passionate, skilled, forest management agents and entrepreneurs, ready to show the world that they themselves have the power to restore the glory of Madagascar’s stunning biodiversity.
Organized by a Malagasy woman and her Wall Street ex-pat husband, Green Again Madagascar is unlike any other tree-planting nonprofit around.
“It’s really exemplary of bottom-up restoration,” Leighton Reid, assistant professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech, who conducted research for the group, told WaL.
Tree planting has become all the rage as a way for corporations and international aid and development agencies to help alleviate poverty and prevent climate change by offsetting carbon emissions. Huge issues—largely unreported, go along with this activity, however.
Studies have shown that carbon sequestration in the roots of trees planted by hand is often overestimated. Incentives and aid handouts to communities for tree planting have been shown to primarily create monocrop agriculture forests of rubber or other commodities, rather than native forests, that are easily destroyed.
One study in Chile found that landowners simply clear-cut the forests on their land and replanted them just to get the government handout.
If William Easterly’s groundbreaking 2006 book White Man’s Burden is any indication of the lack of success of internationally-imposed development in poor countries, Green Again Madagascar is the cure for such failures—the ultimate bottom-up operation of development and accountability.
Green Again is planting dozens of native tree species to create diverse and complex reforested ecosystems, all while putting faith and function into some of the poorest people on the continent.
Retirement
In 2013, Leighton Reid was working for the University of Missouri’s botany programs in Madagascar when he came to meet Matt Hill, a retiree to Madagascar in 2011 after a 15 year-career on Wall Street.
“That works well for 4 or 5 months then it gets old—drinking and partying,” Hill told WaL, describing his island life.
Between 2011 and 2013, Hill regularly found the motivation for individual projects that interested him, where he could apply his skills in data collection as well as his retirement money to make a difference.
“A way of describing Green Again is not that we plant trees at all, because we don’t—Green Again plant zero trees. What we do is run an eco-school that’s a 6-year training program to take illiterate farmers who want to reforest their own family land,” Hill said. “What we do is we’re a tree-planting entrepreneurial launching”.
Typically, Green Again’s recruits are any rural inhabitants that live around a 60-90 minute walk from the tree nursery. They spend 2 years learning how to work in the nurseries and in the field planting trees, then—and only if they so choose—they can move onto the next level of training where they learn data collection and data entry; crucial to ensuring large companies buying carbon offsets or tree-planting credits like GMO Captial, one of Green Again’s contracted clients, can be accountable to their own aspirations.
“That [tree nursery] crew is paid and owned and managed and officed by another local Malagasy person that has graduated from our eco-school,” said Hill.
In fact, Mr. Hill is not just the only non-Malagasy working at Green Again, but he’s the only person at all that wasn’t born or doesn’t live within that 60-90 minute communal radius.
“So that’s why we get the buy-in from locals; they’re really [skeptical,] like, ‘I don’t know about someone coming on my land, oh wait, it’s Jimmy John? Oh I was there when he was born’”.
Trust is a major issue in developing economies since there’s very little ability for people to seek recourse against those who violate simple business contracts and agreements. Green Again gets around this critical problem in top-down development aid projects by recruiting people who live right in the area where a nursery and tree business is working in.
Growing people growing trees
By the end of 6 years and 12 exams worth of material, the Malagasy leaders at Green Again have learned to produce cash flow projections, manage their own banking, and do their own taxes, some of whom start without the ability to read, or even to properly hold a pencil.
Riding the first wave of graduates was Catherine Sangotra Hill, CFO of Green Again, the first regional office manager for the nonprofit in Tsarasaotra village, as well as owner and operator of the LLC Tamerina Ala Maintso Malagasy, which plants dozens of rainforest acres (slowly over 60 months) in the extremely remote upper Fanandrana river basin.
Green Again has used local knowledge to augment the number of species planted to 64, compared to 5 which is what most reforestation projects can manage.
In addition to her work at her LLC and Green Again, Catherine is a mother of 2 and mentor of many, including Marcellin Velo, another of the graduates from Green Again’s eco-school who runs his own business, became the first person in his family ever to own land, and works as another of the regional office managers for Green Again.
In late December Catherine found herself in the middle of an ecosystem crime trial when a rural man had accidentally burned a large section of village forest after poorly planning a controlled burn on his own land. Mediating on the perpetrator’s behalf, Catherine showed him how to properly restore forests, while working off his debt to the village in Catherine’s crew.
Mr. Hill notes that all kinds of people who enter adulthood with no prospects whatsoever, end up being driven towards Green Again by older folks people with a nostalgia for forests the way they used to be in Madagascar.
“It’s kind of odd, but initially it ends up that their grandmas are pushing them into it,” said Hill. “So grandma and grandpas often see their grandchildren kind of sitting around kind of not working hard, and they say ’well you could do something good for yourself, you could do something good for the family and earn something and chip and, and you could do something good for all our farms, the environment, and Madagascar; why don’t you go sign up at Green Again?”
“I would say, probably 70% of our people who we’ve never seen before who sign up; it’s because one grandma talked to another grandma”.
Workers start off at 120% of the normal daily rate for laborers in that part of the world, and for every level of the course they complete they get what amounts to around a 15% pay raise. By the time the man or woman completes the whole course, they’re making about 50 times more than when they started.
A mandatory 20% savings rate is required of all payroll which is set aside toward whatever goal it is that the individual has chosen for themselves, which could be the purchase of land, the construction of buildings on family property, or collateral as a loan to launch a business.
All this has the added benefit of creating a highly-motivated workforce, who by their own entrepreneurial vision, their sense of responsibility to their community, base greed, or the urging from their family members, are creating the highest-quality native reforestation in a part of the world where nearly three-fourths of all known plant species grow exclusively there.
Part 2 of this story will be released later this month…
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Bosco the "HeroRAT" from the APOPO Program in Siem Reap, Cambodia - Credit Mx Granger - CC 0
Bosco the “HeroRAT” from the APOPO Program in Siem Reap, Cambodia – Credit Mx Granger – CC 0
Let’s face it, rats aren’t the most popular animal. From the Black Death to the Netflix documentary on New York’s rodent problem, they may be the least-liked mammal on Earth.
But down in Kenya and Tanzania, they are utilizing rats to cure disease rather than cause it, and to be a member of society, rather than an outcast.
The APOPO Project has already trained rats to smell landmines—one of the most tragic and long-lasting consequences of warfare, but now scientists are training them to sniff out tuberculosis, and they’re proving more sensitive than microscope testing.
African giant pouched rats, also known as Gambian pouched rats, were also able to detect the olfactory characteristics of TB independent of a person’s HIV status, something which disrupts existing TB testing.
“That is, they can easily identify tuberculosis in people living with HIV, keeping in mind that these people living with HIV, it is very difficult to be diagnosed by the standard test, including Genexpert in microscopes,” Joseph Soka, program manager for TB at APOPO, told Africa News.
Tuberculosis still unfortunately kills millions worldwide, and in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, the APOPO rats have now replaced normal testing in 21 different health clinics.
“So, the conventional laboratory techniques can take anywhere from two hours to even 14 days per sample, depending on what technique you use,” said Dhaval Shah, veterinary pathologist at Pathologists Lancet Kenya.
“While the rats will be able to complete testing of fifty samples within two hours and this would be ideal in far places or remote places like Mozambique or places in Mozambique which are rural.”
Bosco the “HeroRAT” from the APOPO Program in Siem Reap, Cambodia – Credit Mx Granger – CC 0
The TB project is going better than the landmine clearance. Provided the ground is free of vegetation and lined with paths for the handlers to walk on safely, each rat is capable of searching up to 400 m2 (4,300 sq ft) per day as part of a team including conventional equipment.
They ignore old screws, nails, coins, and other materials that can make manual mine clearance with metal detectors incredibly slow and tedious.
However it takes around $6,500 to train the rats, and APOPO is the only organization in the world that uses rats, perhaps pointing to the reality of their ability as minesweepers.
WATCH the rats in action on Africa News…
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When Lowe’s employee Dave Urban came across the Getty family in the PVC aisle, he thought he would be helping them find the right fittings or something like that.
It was after he heard what was being built, and who it was being built for, that he took the time to do more than just help.
The Getty family was building parallel bars to help their son William practice walking.
“He was born very prematurely, just 23 weeks, so as a result, he has quadriplegic spastic cerebral palsy and one of our goals for William is to get him walking,” mom Jessica Getty told local news.
So inspired by young Will, Dave ended up spending half an hour cutting and fitting the PVC right there in the store, ensuring that everything was perfect to help Will get started finding his feet in the world.
“Then came the test. Will got up, out of his wheelchair and grabbed a hold of those bars. I think you saw that courageous smile of his. Sense of pride, ah, it keeps getting me,” Urban said, holding back tears.
The whole family saw how much it meant to Dave, and quickly made a lasting friend out of the man, who himself said the experience rewarded him “100 times back.”
WATCH the story below from Fox 29…
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In Covington, Georgia, a 30,000-ton-per-year recycling facility for batteries and battery scrap just switched on the disassembly line for the very first time.
Inside its walls, a Massachusetts-based startup will be harvesting lithium carbonate, cobalt, manganese, and other battery minerals and selling them back to the market, circumventing the huge challenges that come from opening new mines.
Ascend Elements hopes to take advantage of massive government spending on electric vehicle production by dotting the Carolinas, Georgia, Tenessee, and the Midwest with recycling facilities within an hour’s drive from new automotive plants.
The Covington location can take apart around 70,000 electric vehicles worth of batteries, while allegedly providing enough free cash flow to allow Ascend to pay car manufacturers a little for their old batteries to make doubly sure they don’t end up in landfills.
Once they arrive on site, the batteries are shredded and sieved into “black mass” which is sorted by mineral type.
As well as selling raw minerals, Ascend upcycles some of this black mass into cathode precursor and cathode active material at an R&D center in Massachusetts. They are currently building another facility in Kentucky to bring this operation closer to the “Battery Belt” states mentioned above.
“Those two facilities represent the investment that we are making in key infrastructure to recover these batteries, retain these critical elements in the United States and return them into the supply,” said Ascend CEO Mike O’Kronley.
WATCH how they do it in a corporate video below…
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An Endangered abalone whose blood could hold a cure for cancer has been crowned “International Mollusk of the Year.”
Though it’s not much to look at, the Chilean abalone, a large, carnivorous limpet with a heavy shell, got more than 40% of the public vote, conferring them the grand prize—a full genome sequencing.
Chilean abalone Juan Diego Alvarez accepted the prize on his species’ behalf at the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt where voting partially took place, calling the victory “one shell step for man.”
All kidding aside, the cultural, ecological, and potentially medicinal value of the species is hoped to have been amplified by the news of the award. The abalone’s numbers were drastically diminished in the late 20th century due to overfishing.
A component in its blood has been shown recently to be effective against bladder and prostate cancer, and in its natural habitat, it’s a top predator that’s important for keeping its own little food web in balance.
“…A component of its blood, the oxygen transporter haemocyanin, also shows an immunotherapeutic effect against some types of cancer,” said competition judge Dr. Carola Greve, lab manager at the LOEWE Translational Biodiversity Genomics Centre, where the abalone’s genome will be completely mapped out.
“So, the genomic analysis can not only help to explore adaptation strategies and different populations in the large distribution area, but also to discover new molecules with pharmaceutical importance.”
Although mollusks form the second largest animal phylum after arthropods (insects), the genomes of only a few mollusk species have been completely sequenced so far.
Accordingly, little is known about the genomic basis for the diversity of the species, their adaptive abilities, or the natural products they produce.
This abalone, Concholepas concholepas, is actually not an abalone at all, the chief difference being that abalones are herbivores and this one is a carnivore that belongs to the family of Murex snails.
The competition received a total of 4,309 votes from all over the world, the Chilean abalone received the most with 1,798 votes.
It is followed in second place by the wavy bubble snail, Micromelo undatus with 970 votes, the giant deep-sea oyster Neopycnodonte zibrowii, and the thick-horned nudibranch Hermissenda crassicornis.
“Together, we are getting closer to our goal of publicly showing the enormous biodiversity of mollusks and arousing enthusiasm for these often underestimated organisms, many of which perform important tasks in their respective ecosystems,” said Professor Julia Sigwart, Section Head of the Department of Malacology at the Senckenberg Research Institute.
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Quote of the Day: “To be looking everywhere for miracles is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.” – Abraham H. Maslow
Photo by: McKinley Corbley
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Kuttamperoor River–Before and After (YouTube screenshots) Credit: Budhanoor Grama Panchayat
Kuttamperoor River–Before and After (YouTube screenshots) Credit: Budhanoor Grama Panchayat
A once-biologically dead river in southern India has been revived to the fullest extent thanks to local dedication and government involvement.
A tributary of the Pampa and Achencoil rivers, the 4-mile-long Kuttamperoor River has for centuries been a source of life and drinking water for rural communities in Kerala.
Irrigating more than 2,000 acres of rice paddy, and providing a lifeline for 500 fishermen families, the Kettamperoor River played a huge role in the local community.
However, over three decades of a mixture of misuse and neglect led to the river becoming biologically dead; choked with weeds, and polluted with trash.
Floods, once rare, became a common occurrence, and by 2005 the sorry state of affairs on the Kettampreroor led even to the contamination of groundwater sources.
Those days are gone—thanks to a collaborative effort between the Kerala state government, the Budhanoor village council, and the participation of locals along the banks, the Kettamperoor has been resurrected.
A large number of workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme took to the shallows to scoop out the tangled masses of aquatic weeds and trash.
7,000 villagers from the three communities donated around 30,000 man-hours of work to finish the initial clean up in just 2 months.
Volunteers on Kuttamperoor River -(YouTube screenshot) Credit: Budhanoor Grama Panchayat
After that, the state government in Kerala on the southwest tip of India took over and created the conditions for life to return. They worked alongside the denizens of the river, who offered off up some of their land for a planned expansion of the river’s banks.
Kuttamperoor River cleanup (YouTube screenshot) Credit: Budhanoor Grama Panchayat
Five years and around $1.5 million (₹13 crore) later, fish and other animals were back in the river, whose flow width had grown from a few dozen feet to around half a football field in length.
The Hindu reports that the success has become literally a textbook example of restoration, and made national headlines when Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned it in a national radio address, known as a Mann Ki Baat.
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In Alaska, amazing animals are simply part of the scenery—even, as it turns out, in the hospital.
Fancying a snack from the foliage in Anchorage’s Providence Alaska Health Park’s cancer center, it was last Thursday that a moose decided to walk into the building.
Its hooves were no impediment to the motion-activated door, and soon, the security staff had to get on the intercom to warn visitors, patients, and staff that a moose was on the loose.
However the announcement served mostly to draw people in to see the moose, which wasn’t the first to ever enter the building, nor has it only been members of the deer family. Providence has also had bears try to enter their facilities.
“The Providence Health Park had an extra-special visitor today, as a moose decided to come inside and check out the plants in the lobby,” the hospital wrote on Facebook.
Security managed to corral the animal before it could damage anything beyond the plants.
“Finally, I think it had enough of everybody watching him, watching him eat,” said Randy Hughes, the hospital’s director of security.
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An aperiodic monotile never repeats a formation, no matter how long the pattern. Photograph David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, 2023
An aperiodic monotile never repeats a formation, no matter how long the pattern. Credit: David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, 2023
Mathematics is full of difficult problems, and one that had been outstanding for several decades has finally been solved.
Is there a shape that could interlock with itself ad infinitum without ever replicating a pattern? Turns out, there is.
A 13-sided shape called “the hat” and another one called “the turtle” have both been found to create irreplicable designs regardless of how many shapes are interlocked, whether 100, 400 quadrillion, or something equally ridiculous.
Such a shape is known as an ‘aperiodic monotile’ or an “Einstein shape”, using both the German wording for ‘one shape’ and the name of a certain famous physicist.
The discovery was largely the work of an Englishman named David Smith who lives in the East Riding, Yorkshire. Once he made his discovery using an online geometry program, he shared it with a professor of computer science and mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Dr. Craig Kaplan.
Kaplan then engaged a team of colleagues to work on Smith’s shape—Dr. Chaim Goodman-Strauss, a University of Arkansas mathematician, and Dr. Joseph Myers, a software developer in Cambridge, England.
It was these three that begin tinkering with “the hat” to see if it could be, in fact, an aperiodic monotile that had no limit. The New York Times reported the team found that not only was there “the hat,” and “the turtle” but that these two shapes were linked to a whole family of Einstein shapes.
“The miracle is that this little tile disrupts order at all scales,” Goodman-Strauss told the Guardian. “These tiles are just sitting next to each other and somehow have these effects at any length scale: miles, 10 miles, 100bn light years, these little guys are somehow causing effects at these arbitrary long distances.”
The discovery won’t likely yield any breakthroughs in theoretical physics or anything of that nature, but the implications of the shape for art, interior design, and architecture are exciting: materials made in the hat or turtle shapes guarantee irreplication when tiled onto a floor, a building facade, or a painting.
“I’ve just been blown away by the outpouring of interest and people making their own tiles, their own drawings—somebody made cookies in the form of this thing—and quilts,” Goodman-Strauss said.
“To me, the human aspect of this is really incredibly gratifying, that there’s all these people coming together and enjoying this thing, and it really means that this thing is gonna live for quite a long time.”
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A Kenyan high school teacher is using your old laptop batteries to turn petrol-powered bikes into electric ones.
There’s no shortage of MacGyver-like innovations in Africa, and Paul Waweru is a perfect example of that ingenuity, turning second-hand electronics destined to become waste products into something useful.
The batteries can cost as little as 0.50 Kenyan shillings, which Waweru then cannibalizes for the cells that still can hold a decent charge. Once he has enough, he configures them into battery packs to replace the internal combustion engines of existing scooters and bikes.
“Nobody was selling electric bikes in Kenya, so I had to import one,” he told African News.
The imported bike didn’t last long, so he used his own innovation to create the product his society needed. African News reports he founded a company called Ecomobilus which is already selling well, especially to couriers who love that they can avoid the high costs of gasoline.
“Ecomobilus bikes are more advantageous compared to other gasoline-powered bikes. Number one, because of the cost of maintenance,” Waweru explains. “Ecomobilus bikes require zero maintenance because there are no mechanical parts that need to be repaired every often [sic], we give it at least two years for services because the engines are no longer there, we are dealing with motors.”
A full charge on the laptop battery pack is around 60 miles, (100 kilometers), and it can fully charge in 45 minutes for less than half the cost of a full tank of fuel.
Many African cities are choked with air pollution, especially during the dry seasons, and some are seeing electric bikes as the perfect solution to quickly and effectively improve on this vital issue.
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Quote of the Day: “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” – Marcus Aurelius
Photo by: Gavin Allanwood (cropped)
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A church destroyed in France during The Somme has regained its holy crucifix lost in the battle.
Plucked from the mud in 1916 by a British reverend, it was brought back to Britain and has proudly sat on the altar of All Saints Church in Tinwell since 1936.
The crucifix will is due for a return to its rightful home this June after some All Saint’s parishioners discovered the church in Doingt-Flamicourt had been rebuilt only a few years after the war’s end.
A group of ten churchgoers will set out on a pilgrimage to reunite the crucifix with the church on a 297-mile trip to the village in northern France in what will be the 107th year since the battle.
Doingt and its church were almost completely destroyed during the Battle of the Somme. The village and its church were rebuilt following the armistice and the crucifix is seen as a precious link between its devastation and restoration.
“A village once destroyed is rebuilt; where there was trauma and death in 1917, today there is life and community,” said Reverend Olwen Woolcock from Tinwell. “The crucifix is like the last piece of the jigsaw in that restoration.”
The crucifix, which is in the French style with a shortened top with a gilded metal figure of Christ, was later used as a replacement for a small altar cross at All Saints.
SWNS
Tinwell resident Katharine McDevitt formed the plan to reunite the lost relic back with its French village after she learned in 2018 that Doingt Church was rebuilt in 1925.
“I wrote a letter to the mayor of Doingt-Flamincourt and asked Katharine to translate it into French,” said Rev. Woolcock. “After several months we sent another letter and this time got a response from the deputy mayor who put me in touch with a member of their historical society.”
“They said they would very much like their crucifix back so we started to organize the trip.”
The trip has taken four years to arrange and required special dispensation from the Chancellor of the Peterborough Diocese to remove the figure of Christ on the cross from the church.
“When we received the email, I was very surprised and moved,” said Hubert Boizard, a member of the local history group, Mémoire de Doingt-Flamicourt. “I look forward to meeting our English friends to remember the past when their country defended France and freedom.”
“The region is sensitive to the fate of all the young British soldiers who died on our soil. The return of the crucifix symbolizes the friendship between our two nations…”
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In a national first, the Food and Drug Administration has given Intellia Therapeutics the go-ahead to begin testing a drug that uses CRISPR gene editing in vivo.
In biology, in vivo means within an organism, rather than in something like a petri dish, and Intellia’s offering is the first time ever that the FDA has approved such testing.
Their drug would prevent swelling attacks in people with a genetic condition called hereditary angioedema.
Typically, treatments and drugs that utilize CRISPR take place outside the body. Cells or tissues are removed and altered ex vivobefore being re-introduced inside the patient. In the case of Intellia’s drug, the edited media finds its own way to the liver rather than being injected there.
The advantages are huge if such a drug could be proven to work well—a lack of hospital and laboratory procedures would save a patient thousands, and potentially open up the class of drugs to the lower and middle classes, or to those who are uninsured.
“This is an important milestone for Intellia as it is the first-ever (investigational new drug application) cleared by the FDA for in-vivo gene editing,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Luca Issi said in a report on Inetllia’s stock, which rose following the announcement.
The company plans to file the papers for another such drug later in the year, which would help tamp down on an abnormal protein that builds up in the heart.
Other Western countries have already approved several and even many in vivo CRISPR treatments for testing, among which are New Zealand, The Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and France.
Some West Midlands cat lovers are planting roots of good merit through a beautiful and unique rescue operation.
Shropshire Cat Rescue in Shrewsbury takes in homeless, stray, abandoned, and unwanted cats and kittens and organizes veterinary care for feral felines in the area.
But particular to this charity is that it has 17 cats, all of which have been given up or found stray in what should be their golden years, who are now safe and comfortable in Moggies Retirement Village.
The cats enjoy the cushy life with volunteers taking time to look after them and even getting local kids to read to them once a month.
A video of the gated community shows a series of mini cottages surrounded by well-kept gardens where the cats are housed. Each cottage contains a bed, a litter tray, food and drink bowls, and various toys for up to two cats.
The clip also shows Moggie’s Mansion, a larger house with bigger toys and beds where the cats can hang out together.
“The shelter was intended to create an area for cats who were too elderly or had ongoing health conditions that needed regular treatment and monitoring to live out their days in comfort,” explains volunteer vet Susie.
The charity has been rescuing and rehoming cats in the Shropshire area since 1989. Cats in the sanctuary are usually in their later years, but there are others as young as three.
“It also opened the door for people who had elderly cats and were going into a nursing home and couldn’t take them with them. It gives a different option and eases a stressful upsetting time by finding somewhere the cats could live out their final days.”
Being that old cats, much like old humans, tend to be set in their ways, their arrival at the retirement community is often a little stressful, and so they’re locked in a cottage for about two weeks to become accustomed to the new environment.
Moggies Retirement Village
“The retirement village cats are weighed weekly and monitored for weight changes or indications something isn’t right and they are highlighted for a vet check,” Susie said. “If there are any cats who are a concern beforehand, they get taken straight down or booked in asap.”
The volunteers work around the clock, 365 days a year to make sure that these cats are able to live their best life.
FYI to the non-parents out there, it takes at least 15 pairs of shoes for a child to grow from a toddler to a teenager—that’s a lot of trips to the Footlocker.
Fortunately, an Indian entrepreneur from Pune has designed a line of shoes that slowly uncurl as the child ages, intuitively solving the problem and reducing unnecessary manufacturing waste.
Called Aretto, the shoes were designed by Satyajit Mittal and his childhood friend Krutika Lal. Their innovative knitted uppers are designed with all the qualities a parent would want their kids’ shoes to have—durability, flexibility, and washability.
“Children do not wear the right shoes for the first ten years of their lives,” Mittal, who designed the Aretto shoes with consultations with concerned childhood podiatrists, told The Better India.
“Between zero and three years of age, children’s feet size changes every three months, and you need roughly 15 sizes between zero and nine, before attaining final foot size at 13 years. We figured out the problem that while feet grow, their shoes do not.”
What the podiatrists explained to him was that children have a broader footprint than adults, due to their not having worn shoes for most of their lives like adults. Tens of thousands of nerve endings provide the feedback needed for children to understand how to use the miraculous musculature in their feet to walk and run.
Most infantile and childhood shoes don’t consider this, and based on the frequency at which parents need to buy new shoe sizes, proper foot function is probably never even taken into account, and the occasional stuffing of toddler feet into shoes too small or too large, can disrupt this critical muscle development.
“We wanted to give children the right fit for all cycles. We chose one shoe to cover three sizes that allow 18 mm growth. We took inspiration from how a flower blooms from the bud stage to the fully-flowered stage. The transition happens organically every day. We applied this concept to the shoe,” said Mittal.
“We started working on a shoe that flexes as per the feet. Simply put, as and when the feet grow either from the front or back or sideways, and when a child wears this shoe, it expands accordingly and takes the shape and contour of their feet. That’s why children feel comfortable wearing such shoes,” he adds.
The shoes are priced between Rs 1,800 and Rs 2,600, ($22 – $31) and are available internationally as well, provided that international buyers have either an Indian bank, or Google Pay, Amazon Pay, or WhatsApp Pay.
The shoes are fairly new on the marketplace but have already generated 21 lakh, or Rs 2.1 million ($25,000) in revenue.
Quote of the Day: “Enlightenment is gaffe upon error upon blooper.” – The Zen poet Ikkyu (1394-1481)
Photo by: Ryoma Onita
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A couple gave up life on land to live on a houseboat—and doing so saved them $27,500 every year.
Sarah Spiro and her boyfriend, Brandon Jones, spent $23,000 to buy a one-bedroom houseboat and moved in two years ago on Fontana Lake, North Carolina.
Sarah said it was a “no-brainer” to move, and the duo pays $2,500 a year to be able to live there compared to their $2,500 each month for rent on separate two-bedroom properties.
After living atop the water for two years, the couple has started renovating a bigger houseboat, with plans to rent the smaller residence to vacationers.
“We were always spending all our free time on the lake,” said Sarah, a 27-year-old mountain guide. “We were always boating; it was our favorite thing to do.
“It’s been a long-standing dream of ours—and it is so cheap, too. Here we only have one yearly fee. It is a huge step for us.”
The self-described ‘water rats’ bought the boat in March 2021 and spent two months renovating it, spending $23,000.
Sarah Spiro and Brandon Jones – SWNS / @KeepingAfloatWiththeJoneses
“It is so peaceful here. You still have your day-to-day trends like doing the dishes and laundry but you get to do it all in this phenomenal view at all times. Whatever the time, whatever you are doing you are surrounded by peace and serenity—it is paradise.”
Their biggest challenge is the cold winter, with temperatures on ‘most nights’ dipping below freezing. They did add a small fireplace in the corner of the room.
“You do have to make sacrifices convenience-wise. You can’t get food delivered, the grocery store is 40 minutes away. You have to be more intentional about planning the things you need but I wouldn’t change it for the world,” added Sarah, who parks their car at the marina, a five-minute boat ride away.”
Most importantly, Sarah said that living on the houseboat has improved their mental and physical health.
@KeepingAfloatWiththeJoneses / SWN
“It is the sensation of being out in a nice open space. It has benefitted our nervous system. I wear a Fitbit watch and it is crazy to see how my heart rate has decreased living here.
“I love the freedom it has given us: It has freed up our wallets, and given us all the things we love right on our doorstep.
“It is also an affordable and more sustainable way to live.”
Currently, the pair are renovating a new cabin to move into and hope to start renting their current cabin out to holiday makers.
Have a look inside the residence with the video below, and get updates on renting the houseboat on their YouTube channel or on social media (@KeepingAfloatWiththeJoneses)…
FLOAT This Fantastic Housing Option to Friends and Family on Social Media…
Hybrid micro-robot simulation courtesy of Tel Aviv University / SWNS
Hybrid micro-robot simulation courtesy of Tel Aviv University / SWNS
A tiny controllable robot acts as a real-life ‘Pac-Man’—identifying and gobbling up damaged cells in living things.
Scientists say the minuscule robot, which is seven times smaller than the width of a human hair, can identify, capture, and transport cells.
Another benefit is that it can be navigated and controlled both magnetically and electrically. It can also distinguish between different types of cells, identifying whether they are healthy or dying.
Scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel say their new micro-robot could be used to administer drugs—and even identify and treat cancer.
The innovative technology was developed by Professor Gilad Yossifon and his team of researchers in the School of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Biomedical Engineering.
The microbots, also known as ‘micro-motors’ or ‘active particles’, are tiny synthetic particles the size of a biological cell that can move around and perform actions either automatically, or by being controlled by an operator.
Prof. Yossifon says the idea to make tiny robots able to move autonomously was inspired by ‘biological micro-swimmers’, such as sperm.
To demonstrate the ability of their robot, the team used it to capture single blood and cancer cells, and a single bacterium.
The results, published in the journal Advanced Science, proved the microbot had the ability to distinguish both between cells that are healthy and those damaged by drugs, and between those dying unnaturally and those dying in a natural process.
After successfully identifying the desired cell, the micro-robot then captures and escorts it to where it can be further analyzed.
Another important feature is the robot’s ability to identify target cells which aren’t labelled or pointed out as being noteworthy. It can self-identifying cells and their health conditions using an internal sensing mechanism based on the cell’s electrical properties.
“In addition, the micro-robot has an improved ability to identify and capture a single cell, without the need for tagging, for local testing, or retrieval, and transport to an external instrument,” said Yossifon.
“This research was carried out on biological samples in the laboratory for in-vitro assays but, the intention is to develop in the future micro-robots that will also work inside the body—for example, as effective drug carriers that can be precisely guided to the target.”
The researchers add that the hybrid nature of the microbot will be beneficial in physiological environments such as tests carried out in a liquid, where electrical guidance techniques are less effective.
“This is where the complementary magnetic mechanism come into play, which is very effective regardless of the electrical conductivity of the environment.”
Lauding the success of his team’s groundbreaking study, Prof. Yossifon hailed the microbot’s future usage in diagnosing and treating diseases:
“Among other things, the technology will support the following areas: medical diagnosis at the single cell level, introducing drugs or genes into cells, genetic editing, carrying drugs to their destination inside the body, cleaning the environment from polluting particles, drug development, and creating a ‘laboratory on a particle’—a microscopic laboratory designed to carry out diagnostics in places accessible only to micro-particles.”
This innovative area of technology is developing rapidly, a promising tool for a wide variety of fields, including the environment and research.
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