@FedorovMykhailo twitter social embed starlink ukraine
Elon Musk has sent a truckload of necessary equipment for his Starlink service to Ukraine, at the request of a government minister.
With the country’s telecommunications infrastructure under attack by the Russian air force, maintaining connectivity to the internet is challenging.
Starlink is a satellite internet service which Musk’s company SpaceX has pioneered to provide universal internet access to the world through saturating low Earth orbit with hundreds of tiny satellites.
The Starlink hardware includes a satellite dish that connects to a wireless router. All that is needed is a standard wall plug for power.
It took Elon just 10 hours following the request of Ukrainian Vice Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to ensure the service was active across all of Ukraine, and to prepare a shipment of additional Starlink terminals, which arrived on Feb. 28th.
A Danish visitor center has been cleverly built into a hill.
The Skamlingsbanken in Kolding—which resembles a Hobbit house or even the setting for Teletubbies—is located in a place of cultural significance.
Architects CEBRA explain the glacial landscape “holds a central place in Danish history, and over time it has been a setting for debates about democracy, the border country, and women’s suffrage.”
In the past, Skamlingsbanken—due to its undulating landscape with hollows and hills—was a natural gathering point sheltered from the wind, and many civil gatherings and festivals, therefore, took place right here.
Carsten Primdahl, partner and architect at CEBRA, says, “Skamlingsbanken connects the past with the present and the future, and one of the project’s main ambitions has been to actualize the place’s remarkable history and nature into a contemporary context.
“The new visitor center is a modern arena for democratic culture and recreates Skamlingsbanken as a setting for important debates and education about the things that concern us, e.g., climate change.
SWNS
“At Skamlingsbanken we have created a place where visitors will gain knowledge about our democracy and nature through a diversity of experiences.”
The center is designed as a natural and integrated part of the undulating landscape and from the overall design to the small details, visitors will experience an architecture that finds its origin in Skamlingsbanken’s unique nature and history.
It is located on the highest point in Southern Jutland and consists of an old grazing landscape. Several native species are rare, and during the development of the visitor center, it has been crucial to protect the site’s flora and fauna.
In collaboration with the biologist, Mette Keseler List from Kolding Municipality, a special grass mixture based on local species was developed and spread on and around the building.
The mixture provides optimal conditions for the local herbs, and together with the reuse of natural peat from the building site, the project thus supports the continued development of the unique local nature and biodiversity.
SWNS
“The visitor center is an architectural interpretation of the glacial landscape. It is not a destination itself, but part of an overall narrative. The building is a portal—to the significant history and the local nature—and forms a natural starting point for hikes in the area, where a network of paths flows through both building and landscape. From here visitors are guided into the landscape or inside the center to the exhibition, the teaching facilities, or the café,” says Carsten Primdahl.
CEBRA say, “The main attraction at Skamlingsbanken is nature itself. When visitors enter the exhibition space, they will experience moving through the hill and its many hidden stories. The corrugated back wall is plastered with clay, and the rest of the interior is characterised by local materials like wood, terrazzo with fieldstones and, calm, earthy colour tones.”
Skamlingsbanken officially opened in 2021. It is hoped an easing in pandemic restrictions will allow it to fully open in 2022.
CEBRA are currently working on a project that will further develop the experience for visitors with an exhibition project in the landscape surrounding the visitor center. The project is expected to be realized within the next few years.
It’s not all doom and gloom in the trenches in Ukraine—sometimes it’s head pats and belly rubs of gratitude.
That’s the scene for one platoon of Ukrainian troops that adopted a stray dog.
“We took him into our post, and he stayed with us,” one soldier told FreedomNews.TV. “We felt sorry for him. It was freezing outside.”
They decided to name him Rambo.
“He is security. That’s his job,” said one man, gesturing at an 8-inch tall puppy curiously hopping around, wondering what the camera crew was doing.
The soldiers said that little Rambo was so small when they found him that he fit right in the palm of their hand.
Beyond Rambo, a number of adult dogs also frequent the trenches. Warming themselves near the cabins at night and wandering about during the day, they all, the soldiers explain, can hear if a stranger is coming and give alert.
This isn’t the first time Ukrainian soldiers have been filmed taking care of stray dogs.
GNN reported last year on a BBC documentary about the guards that keep watch over the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and the dogs that live there. Over time, some have become the soldiers’ companions, offering that most ancient of deals between man and nature: food and shelter in exchange for excellent senses of smell and hearing.
“They give us joy,” said one of the guards. “For me personally, this is a kind of symbol of the continuation of life in this radioactive, post-apocalyptic world.”
(MEET Rambo in the video below.)
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Quote of the Day: “Sometimes life leaves a door a little open, and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key.” – Gayle Forman
Photo: Michael Barón
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Could covering California’s irrigation canals save it from the current drought? Some scientists and engineers think so, and they also believe it could meet the state’s entire renewable energy commitments.
A proof of concept and pilot project in Turlock Irrigation District called Project Nexus will cover a mile-long stretch of canal in five megawatts worth of solar panels that will hopefully demonstrate increased renewable power generation, water quality improvements, reduced vegetative growth in the canals, and reduced water evaporation.
This is building on a 2021 Univ. of California Merced and UC Santa Cruz research team study which estimated that covering all the state’s canals with panels could prevent 65 billion gallons of fresh water loss through evaporation.
Formed in 1887, Turlock was the first irrigation district in California, and provides irrigation water to 4,700 growers who farm about 150,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley. The project is due to break ground this year and finish up in 2024.
As GNN reported in 2021, this concept has already been proven to work in the Indian state of Gujarat, where the cooler temperature of the moisture beneath the panels cooled them down, resulting in a small but significant increase in power generation.
Roger Bales, part of the UC Merced paper, argued recently in the Smithsonian Magazine that covering the thousands of miles of California canals with panels would generate 13 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity: half of what the state would need to entirely decarbonize by its self-imposed 2045 deadline.
“California grows food for an ever-increasing global population and produces more than 50 percent of the fruits, nuts and vegetables that U.S. consumers eat,” writes Bales. “Building these [canal] solar arrays could prevent more than 80,000 acres of farmland or natural habitat from being converted for solar farms.”
Making sense on all levels, Project Nexus is tremendously exciting, and Bales explains that other similar projects are in the making.
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Andy Sproles_ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy no restrictions engineered microbe showm in light blue
Engineered microbe showm in light blue/Andy Sproles,ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Scientists have discovered a way to genetically engineer bacteria that will consume carbon oxide and carbon dioxide before converting them to two widely used chemicals, acetone and isopropanol, thereby turning the whole process carbon negative.
Used in a wide-vide variety of products from hand sanitizer to light bulbs, and almost always made of virgin fossil fuels, the global market for acetone and isopropanol is more than $10 billion, with acetone producing two metric tons of CO2 per ton of acetone. The bacteria the scientists removed came to 1.78 kg of emissions from the atmosphere per kg of acetone produced and 1.17 kg of emissions per kg of isopropanol.
Michael Jewett, a chemist at Northwestern University, partnered with the large bio-ethanol firm LanzaTech to pioneer this new method of green chemical synthesis.
He and his colleagues found previous industrially-utilized bacteria strains to engineer an individual strain of clostridium autoethanogenum, a kind of bacterial creature called an acetogen that feeds on acetate through fermentation.
By the end of their work, they had created an acetogen that consumed industrial emissions like CO2, converting it into acetone or isopropanol at a high efficiency of around 3 grams per liter per hour, with almost no alternative byproducts.
Using bacteria to ferment sugars is a common and less carbon-intensive production method for ethanol. The researchers took their unique acetone and isopropanol-producing bacteria strains and worked with LanzaTech’s ethanol production facility to test out whether their idea could work in the real world.
A new way
“Our vision for commercialization is to transform established ethanol-producing gas fermentation facilities that LanzaTech already operates into product flexible production plants,” Jewett told GNN via email.
“Specifically, LanzaTech is already successfully operating two commercial plants converting emissions from the heavy industry into ethanol, with to date over 30 million gallons of ethanol produced and over 150,000 tons CO2 avoided.”
“By swapping the ethanol-producing microbe currently deployed in our commercial gas fermentation facilities with a new microbe programmed for acetone or propanol production, we can instantly increase the range of products that an individual facility can make. This product flexibility will enable plant operators to make market-based decisions on which products to focus on at any time,” said Jewett.
This is particularly relevant for two reasons. The first is that since these chemicals are used to make paint, nail polish remover, varnish, ketone supplements, resins, epoxies, paint thinner, terpenes, lens cleaners, sanitizing pads, rubbing alcohol, fuel additives, and in the processes of screening for lymph node tumors and DNA extraction, the market demand can change rapidly. A perfect example of this was the run on hand sanitizer in many nations during the first COVID-19 wave.
Secondly, the flexibility offered by fermentation allows the use of the same bioreactor infrastructure for multiple conversions—for example, ethanol, acetone and isopropanol—and stands as a key benefit over traditional chemical manufacturing where plants are typically purpose-built for a single conversion process, which means companies can save the millions normally spent on building new plants for new chemicals.
It’s the stuff of chemical engineering dreams, and Jewett’s work promises to be a boon to the emissions-heavy industry.
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A tiny new species of burrowing frog has been discovered after scientists were able to find it by its unique “beep” sound.
Identified by biologists in the Amazon, it has a pointy tapir-like nose and is less than an inch (1-2 cm) in size.
Researchers have called the dark brown new species Synapturanus danta—with danta being the Spanish for tapir—a mammal with pig-like features and an elephant-style trunk.
While locals in Peru have known about the tiny, burrowing frog due to its ‘beep-beep-beep’ sound it makes underground, the frog has remained elusive to biologists.
Local guides took researchers to peatland areas—wetlands carpeted with nutrient-rich turf made of decaying plant matter—and they searched at night when frogs are most active.
After three nights of searching, waiting for an adult to come out of the dirt, the scientists decided to dig in the peatland area expected to be teeming with the frogs they wanted to find.
After around 20 minutes of digging with their hands, the tiny brown frog was discovered and they were able to give it an official scientific name and description.
SWNS via Field Museum of Chicago
A healthy ecosystem
Researchers now say after analysis that the frogs’ presence could indicate healthy peatlands in Peru’s Putumayo Basin, where there is very little deforestation.
Dr Michelle Thompson, a researcher and ecologist at the Field Museum of Nature History, said, “These frogs are really hard to find, and that leads to them being understudied.
“It’s an example of the Amazon’s hidden diversity, and it’s important to document it to understand how important the ecosystem functions.
“It looks like a caricature of a tapir, because it has a big blobby body with this tiny little pointy head.”
“The frogs are tiny, about the size of a quarter, they’re brown, they’re underground, and they’re quick.
“You know these little frogs are somewhere underground, but you just don’t see them hopping around.
“We could hear them underground, going beep-beep-beep, and we’d stop, turn off our lights, and dig around, and then listen for it again.
“After a few hours, one hopped out of his little burrow, and we were screaming, ‘Somebody grab it.’”
Dr Germán Chávez, a researcher at Peru’s Institute of Herpetology, said, “Frogs of this genus are spread throughout the Amazon, but since they live underground and can’t get very far by digging, the ranges each species is distributed in are fairly small.
“Since we found this new species in Amazon peatland, it wouldn’t be strange for it to be restricted to this environment.
“Its body shape and general look seems to be adapted to the soft soil of the peatland, rather than the robust and wider shape of species in other environments.
“Our genetic analyses show this new species belongs to a group that evolved in the western Amazon, where the influence of prehistoric landscapes like the Pebas Lake might have created different wetlands, which originated the diversity we see in Synapturanus today.
“Beside the important role of this new species in the food chain of its habitat, we believe that it could be an indicator of healthy peatlands.
A former UK Royal Marine has loaded a 16-seater minibus with sleeping bags, pillows, and toys for refugees moving across the Ukrainian border into Poland, and pledged to drive 1,000 miles to personally deliver them.
31-year-old Tom Littledyke from Lyme Regis began his journey on February 28th, saying he was inspired to act after seeing pictures of “families broken and separated by the conflict.”
Setting up a fundraiser, it took Littledyke just twelve hours to fill his minibus with supplies and collect £4,000 in donations ($5,300) for the trip.
“Too often do we think that we have to do something grand and if it can’t be grand what’s the point,” he told the BBC. “It doesn’t matter what we do as long as it’s something in the right direction. There’s so many of us who want to help, it will all build to this gigantic thing.”
The 1,000 mile (1,600 km) drive will take him and his cargo through England, France, Germany, and Poland before arriving at the border with Ukraine, where an alleged 500,000 refugees have fled. After unloading the supplies, he plans to utilize the bus to give rides to people who have a place to stay.
While it is said that war is hell, Good News Network knows that during times when the capacity for human malevolence is greatest, the capacity for compassion is greater.
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Quote of the Day: “Nature exults in abounding radicality… If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn’t believe the world existed.” – Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
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Dave Hosford, CC license
Simple social cooperation psychology can be as effective as the harshest policing strategies in reducing crime, a new study has found.
Disadvantaged communities in New York City were given the name of a neighborhood police officer, their contact info, and some simple information like favorite food or sports team, and found that over the three-month field test the crime rate reduced 5-7% in and around the community.
The secret to this major result is its exploitation of the simple fact of our species being a social one. If we know something about a stranger, we inherently feel, albeit erroneously, they know something about us in return, even if they don’t know we exist.
69 eligible New York City Housing Authority community developments were split into control and treatment groups. The treatment groups were mailed flyers containing the information of a Neighborhood Coordination Officer (NCO), a key member of the NYCPD that acts as a bridge between law enforcement and residents. The NCOs answered what they felt comfortable answering, and included a contact number. 30 developments didn’t receive any flyers, even though the NCOs were present.
The developments contained 1.5% of the city’s population, but accounted for 3.5% of its total criminal activity, and the authors hypothesized that because humans display this information symmetry, they would feel that because they knew a little about their NCOs, residents capable of engaging in criminal acts would feel more likely to be caught doing so, imagining falsely that the NCO knew something about them.
Indeed, crime was reduced 5-7% in the treatment area, but not in the control area, during a two-month follow up. This reduction fell away eventually, which the authors attribute to the limited scope and light touch of the intervention, and that more sustained contact would result in more sustained reductions in crime.
Putting these results in context, the authors write, a recent meta-analysis of “hotspot” or “proactive” policing policies, show that these heavier-handed strategies have about the same reduction in crime as the information symmetry tactic with the NCOs.
Furthermore, they also tended to diminish in effectiveness rather rapidly, despite being vastly more expensive.
They add that door-to-door visits by police officers have a greater effect on crime reduction than other components of neighborhood policing like a neighborhood watch, for example.
“The possibilities of such findings are potentially exciting, because the work implies that a police officer who is perceived as a real person can prevent crime without tactics such as the New York City police department’s ‘stop, question and frisk,’ policy, which tended to create animosity between community members and the police,” said Elicia John & Shawn D. Bushway at the RAND Corp, commenting on the findings in Nature.
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WD-40 can by ajay_suresh, CC license; and Church of St. James, Grimsby Minister by David Wright, CC on Flickr
(L) WD-40; Ajay_Suresh, CC license/(R) Church of St. James, Grimsby Minister; David Wright, CC license, Flickr
Grimsby is a large port town in Lincolnshire where a 14th-century church clock has been stuck at two-past-twelve for twelve years.
Recently, when the church minister decided to see about getting it repaired, a pair of clock engineers gave quotes that wouldn’t look out of place next to the ‘for sale’ sign beside a brand new BMW.
One of the engineers has worked on the Big Ben restoration, and said that the Grimsby Minster tower would need scaffolding to repair external damages. He said they would need £40,000 – £50,000 ($53,000 – $67,000) to do the job.
Fortunately a pair of locals—47-year-old cheesemaker Rick Haywood and 15-year-old student Jay Foley—decided it couldn’t possibly hurt to take a look themselves.
“We found various dead pigeons gumming up the bearings; some of the bearings were very dry,” Haywood told the Sun. “We gave it grease and WD-40 and managed to get it running,” spoke the truest of DIY practitioners.
They used their phones to set the correct time on each of the hands, which worked on their own mechanisms.
“We saved them at least £40,000 so I am hoping for a [church] meal invite,” Haywood joked, while the church warden said that the colossal savings were hugely appreciated and that now they wouldn’t have to launch a fundraising appeal.
Owning a pet, like a dog or cat, especially for five years or longer, may be linked to slower cognitive decline in older adults, according to a preliminary study.
“Prior studies have suggested that the human-animal bond may have health benefits like decreasing blood pressure and stress,” said study author Tiffany Braley of the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. “Our results suggest pet ownership may also be protective against cognitive decline.”
The study looked at cognitive data from 1,369 older adults with an average age of 65 who had normal cognitive skills at the start of the study.
A total of 53% owned pets, and 32% were long-term pet owners, defined as those who owned pets for five years or more. Of study participants, 88% were white, 7% were Black, 2% were Hispanic, and 3% were of another ethnicity or race.
Researchers used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a large study of Medicare beneficiaries. In that study, people were given multiple cognitive tests. Researchers used those cognitive tests to develop a composite cognitive score for each person, ranging from zero to 27. The composite score included common tests of subtraction, numeric counting, and word recall.
Researchers then used participants’ composite cognitive scores and estimated the associations between years of pet ownership and cognitive function.
Over six years, cognitive scores decreased at a slower rate in pet owners. This difference was strongest among long-term pet owners. Taking into account other factors known to affect cognitive function, the study showed that long-term pet owners, on average, had a cognitive composite score that was 1.2 points higher at six years compared to non-pet owners.
The researchers also found that the cognitive benefits associated with longer pet ownership were stronger for Black adults, college-educated adults, and men. Braley says more research is needed to further explore the possible reasons for these associations.
“As stress can negatively affect cognitive function, the potential stress-buffering effects of pet ownership could provide a plausible reason for our findings,” said Braley. “A companion animal can also increase physical activity, which could benefit cognitive health. That said, more research is needed to confirm our results and identify underlying mechanisms for this association.”
A limitation of the study was that length of pet ownership was assessed only at one time point, so information regarding ongoing pet ownership was unavailable.
The study will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 74th Annual Meeting being held in person in Seattle, April 2 to 7, 2022 and virtually, April 24 to 26, 2022.
Imagine reliving your entire life in the space of seconds. Like a flash of lightning, you are outside of your body, watching memorable moments you lived through. This process, known as ‘life recall’, can be similar to what it’s like to have a near-death experience. What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries. However, a new study suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and after the transition to death, and may even be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal.
When an 87-year-old patient developed epilepsy, Dr Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu, Estonia and colleagues used continuous electroencephalography (EEG) to detect the seizures and treat the patient. During these recordings, the patient had a heart attack and passed away. This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever.
Findings ‘challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends’
“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,” said Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US, who organised the study.
“Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.”
Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks.
“Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,” Zemmar speculated. “These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation.”
A source of hope
While this study is the first of its kind to measure live brain activity during the process of dying in humans, similar changes in gamma oscillations have been previously observed in rats kept in controlled environments. This means it is possible that, during death, the brain organises and executes a biological response that could be conserved across species.
These measurements are, however, based on a single case and stem from the brain of a patient who had suffered injury, seizures and swelling, which complicate the interpretation of the data. Nonetheless, Zemmar plans to investigate more cases and sees these results as a source of hope.
“As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times. It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members,” he said.
“Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Quote of the Day: “The great opportunity is where you are. Don’t despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.” – John Burroughs
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My goodness—Guinness is going green. The Irish brewery is launching an agricultural program to make its stouts more sustainable.
It’s already tapped 40 Irish farms to join its pilot regenerative agriculture project, which involves working with the natural environment to put back more than it takes out. Soil management and crop production experts and suppliers are also on board.
The initiative intends to reduce the carbon emissions of its barley production—a key ingredient in each black and white pint.
The regenerative agriculture project has key goals, including improving soil health and its carbon sequestration potential; aka having the soil itself store carbon before it becomes carbon dioxide gas, and enhancing biodiversity—or the natural soil fertilization, nutrient recycling, erosion control, and crop/tree pollination that keeps the ecosystem healthy.
This project will also see the use of fewer synthetic fertilizers, which can hurt the environment by killing beneficial bacteria in soil, or contaminating the nearby plant life and water supply that people and animals eat and drink, and improving water quality, which also makes for a healthier environment and healthier crops.
It will also help enhance farmer livelihoods, which can lead to better quality of life and boost the economy.
This program is intended to expand to more farms in Ireland and beyond. “We will openly share the results from the pilot program so that other farms can learn and adopt practices that have demonstrated the highest potential impact from an environmental and farm profitability standpoint,” said John Kennedy, president of Diageo Europe, which owns the Guinness brand, in a statement. “Like the Irish farming community, we are ‘all in’ for the long haul—for our people, products, partners and planet.”
He added that the Guinness brewery at St. James Gate is only 263 years into its 9,000-year lease (that’s not a typo), and the stout maker “will never settle in pursuit of a more sustainable future.”
A new way
Guinness isn’t the only beer maker looking to cut the carbon footprint of its pours. Some producers in particular are looking into packing, distribution and the carbon footprint throughout the supply chain, which tackles the toughest aspects of “green” ambitions.
Industry consultants Decarbonate estimates that almost half of the carbon footprint of beer drinking is associated with storage and service, especially at a venue like a restaurant where temperature matters.
Anheuser-Busch—the Belgium-based brewer of Budweiser and Corona—set some ambitious sustainability goals back in 2018 for 2025.
These include making 100% of its packaging from returnable or majority recycled content; purchasing 100% of its electricity from renewable resources; as well as cutting its CO2 emissions by 25% across its value chain. Also, electric-vehicle maker Nikola partnered with Bud on a hydrogen-powered beer run at this year’s Super Bowl.
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A brazen cat burglar and his crew of accomplices recently pulled off a bold caper in broad daylight but they didn’t steal anything… except a few million hearts.
That’s because the culprits weren’t hardened criminals—they were actual cats—and the whole thing was caught on tape.
When Silvestro, the leader of the notorious “Kitty Gang” found himself shut out of the home he and two dozen other felines share with humans Antonio Bosco and his mom on the Italian island of Sicily, he leaped into action—literally.
Launching himself at the door, the prodigious puss managed to snag the handle and spring it open, allowing himself and his cohorts to breach the perimeter and stampede inside.
Bosco, who is well-attuned to Silvestro’s antics, captured the straight-out-of-Looney-Tunes stunt on video and posted it to social media. Soon, the exploits of TikTok’s “most wanted feline” had racked up more than 3.5 million likes.
Like many a legendary bandit before him, Silvestro has earned a nickname worthy of his derring-do. To those in the neighborhood, he’s known as “Kungu l’eroe,” which Bosco explains is a combination of “King Kong and Hero.”
With the recent addition of a stray Siamese, Silvestro and company currently number 25 cats in all, but according to Bosco, the black and white tomcat is definitely in charge. “Silvestro the smart cat is also the undisputed leader and protector of our cats,” Bosco told The Daily Mail.
It seems that Silvestro’s inherent bravado is aided and abetted by a keen sense of intuition. After performing an especially fine feat, Bosco reports Silvestro knows he’s going be rewarded with extra loving and treats. “He understands when he’s done something special,” Bosco said.
A recent worldwide investigation into human goodness and thoughtfulness found that, delightfully, it’s broadly distributed across cultures even in difficult times. Far from being monopolized by benevolent-seeming social democracies, the degree to which humans will reach out a helping hand is strong no matter where one lives.
Using data from the World Giving Index, the World Bank, The Charities Aid Foundation, proprietary surveys, the Global Philanthropic Index, the WHO, and more, the postcard courier service MyPostcard has created the Most Thoughtful Societies Index.
In the ranking for overall private charitable contributions, the most thoughtful society is Indonesia, while coming in at number 2 is Australia.
In terms of international charitable contributions, i.e. the amount that people from one country donate to another as a percentage of gross national income, the United States’ philanthropists gave the most.
The U.S. is also the most compassionate society, as determined by measures of how much people feel they support one another. Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria follow before any other nations.
The amount of hours spent volunteering, perhaps a clearer picture of compassion, is also highest in the United States. Once again, Indonesia in close third, is never far from the top.
While many east Asian countries are close to the top, elderly support from family members is highest in the Gulf monarchies, with Saudi Arabia in first place, and the UAE in second. This was determined by medical info from the WHO, and census data of elderly people living alone vs with their children.
It’s not every day that a municipal waste department spends more time thinking about saving things than dumping them. In Hamburg in Germany, however, there’s money to be made in the second-hand market, and who better to capitalize on that than the people who haul the city’s trash?
Stilbruch is the “IKEA of used goods,” and every day, collections from private individuals—or from trash collectors on their routes—brings goods which will all get cleaned up, repaired, and re-sold to support a more circular economy in the country’s second-largest city.
Some 400,000 objects are processed through two giant cavernous warehouses every year; everything from well-worn teddy bears to refurbished laptops and kitchen counters.
Launched in 2001 as an initiative from the sanitation department, Stilbruch has gone from having one full-time employee to 70, and from being a largely non-profit orientation to bringing in €300,000 to €500,000 ($330,000 to $550,000) per year in profit.
“These things are useful. They really aren’t rubbish,” Roman Hottgenroth, operations manager at Stilbruch, told The Progress Network. “Used is the new sexy… We are trying to stop throwaway culture and wastefulness. There’s so much value in what we treat like trash.”
Stilbruch contracts technicians and craftsmen who ensure that all used furniture is given a thorough beautification, and all electronics can be sold with a 1-year warranty.
The warehouse is part of a wider EU movement to try and cut back on all waste streams, but especially home furnishings and electronics. Chief among these efforts is restoring the “right to repair,” to consumers, 70% of whom it’s thought would prefer to repair items than replace them.
Instagram/@stilbruch.hamburg
Stilbruch has been heralded by EU and German legislatures and think-tanks as a pioneering model that could be replicated by most municipalities.
Even small towns which don’t have the populations required to fill up a warehouse like Stilbruch can manage weekly flea-markets.
Quote of the Day: “Ask questions from your heart, and you will be answered from the heart.” – G. K. Chesterton
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Flames from the Bobcat Fire - credit: Eddiem360, CC license, via Wikimedia.
European shepherds and ranchers are taking the lead in forest fire prevention, by leading their animals to clear away pervasive underbrush that allows fires to grow too big.
Laws once prohibiting such practices are being bent, or rescinded, as rural communities begin taking a key role in forest management.
Square among the proponents for this practice is GrazeLIFE, a publicly-funded science effort seeking to clarify the best way grazers, both domestic and semi-wild, can help increase biodiversity and prevent forest fires.
In flatter or thinner forested areas, large herbivores were found in a 2021 Grazelife study to be significantly effective in reducing forest fire risk.
“In general terms, it is clear that wild and semi-wild herbivores such as horses and bison can reduce wildfire risk through their grazing,” says Julia Rouet-Leduc, lead author of the study. “Such herbivores can be particularly effective in remote and inaccessible areas, where careful management can prevent wildfire and benefit wild nature in other ways.”
Smaller animals like goats and sheep are ideal for areas that lack natural predators. There are virtually no large carnivores in all of Italy, and without the risk of losing an expensive herd animal, the eating habits of these smaller livestock make them perfect for clearing woody shrubs and things which larger herbivores can’t stomach.
A different animal
Even though a forest in Europe today might look like a place of pristine and natural beauty, in realty it’s no longer a natural ecosystem. European forests have experienced human alternations through forestry and livestock grazing since time immemorial, and natural equilibrium simply doesn’t exist in most forests any more.
When climate change regulations limited the shepherd’s ability to work in woodlands, it was part of a continent-wide effort to scale back deforestation—and it worked well, with total forest cover in Italy increasing by 75% since the 1960s.
However it was likely the first time many forests, such as those on the mountains of Montiferru on the Italian island of Sardinia, had experienced any prolonged period without grazing animals among their trunks.
Since natural numbers of roe and red deer, and other native herbivores, have long since disappeared from European forests, the loss of sheep and goats meant that nothing prevented woody shrubs from dominating the understory, turning brushfires into destructive infernos.
Eddiem360, CC license
This was the scenario that caused shepherds on Sardinia to write a letter to the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, not only asking to allow forest-dwelling shepherds to allow their animals to graze within the woods again, but to create a restoration project of rural areas in Montiferru, where Italy’s worst wildfire in 40 years recently burned its way from the mountain tops to the sea.
Their plan is to bring in more shepherds to better control the fires, and encourage eco-tourism in the area, to incentivize the shepherds to stay.
This is already seeing success through both private and public incentives in Catalunya, Spain.
In 2016 the Fire Flocks Project started by figuring out where the fires most often started and became the fiercest, before creating a line of premium brand meat and dairy products produced by 22 shepherds, half of them new to the job, who graze sheep, goats, and bovines in 600 fire-prone areas.
It makes sense that those most invested in the forests’ survival would be the biggest allies in helping to save them, which goes for both the shepherds and the animals.
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