Quote of the Day: “You will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make a good use of it.” – John Adams (Happy Fourth of July!)
Photo: by Debby Hudson
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Words With Friends is collaborating with the Scripps National Spelling Bee, after the pandemic year that cancelled the Bee, to have fun around the highly anticipated 2021 finals on July 8.
In the eight days leading up to the contest, the Words With Friends ‘Word of the Day’ will be the winning word from each of the eight champions from the 2019 finals, which ended with an unprecedented eight-way tie.
This year, in addition to a new rule that launches a spell-off in case of a tie, Words With Friends will prepare us for the thrills and intensity of the Bee’s return by featuring an 8-day ‘Word of the Day’ takeover.
Underscoring the depth of language learned by these young spellers, four words had to be added to the Words With Friends dictionary for this initiative. As players click the ‘Word of the Day’ cell during this initiative, they can also access the word’s definition and a photo of the 2019 champion moment when each contestant turned into an historic champion.
The first word featured on July 1 was ‘auslaut’ (def: the final sound in any word), spelled correctly in 2019 by San Jose, California boy, Rishik Gandharsi.
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Yesterday, the featured word was ‘erysipelas’ (def: an acute bacterial disease)—the winning word of Erin Howard, of Huntsville, Alabama—pictured below.
The word for July 4th, will be ‘aiguillette’ (def: a shoulder cord worn by military aides), which was the winning word for Shruthika Padhy, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Closing out the program, and landing on the day of the 2021 National Spelling Bee Finals, will the word ‘odylic’ (def: related to the hypothetical force oddly or Od), spelled by Rohan Rajas of Dallas, Texas to round out the 8-way tie.
“The Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants spend years preparing for this linguistic contest of intellect and calm under pressure,” said Bernard Kim, of game company Zynga, which created Words With Friends.
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“Our Words With Friends players are also lovers of words and friendly competition, and I could not think of a better beacon of inspiration than these Spellers to encourage us to continue to learn, strive and achieve.”
“Games and play are powerful tools for learning, and we’re excited to work with Zynga to bring additional joy and attention to this year’s event through their Words With Friends community,” said Dr. J. Michael Durnil, executive director of the Bee.
The event will be televised on ESPN on July 8, with the winner taking home the Scripps Cup trophy.
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Walmart is seeking to bring “everyday low prices” to medical care.
They announced the launch of a version of insulin that will be less expensive to people who do not have health insurance or struggle to afford the cost of life-saving drugs.
“These products will save customers between 58% to 75% off the cash price of branded analog insulin products, which translates to a savings of up to $101 per branded vial or $251 per package of branded FlexPens,” said the company in a new release this week.
Starting this week, Walmart will be selling its own private-label version of analog insulin (a newer, more reliable form of the drug) to anyone who has a prescription. Called ReliOn NovoLog, it will also be available at Sam’s Club in mid-July.
The insulin will cost about $73 for a vial or about $86 for a package of pre-filled insulin pens.
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“We know many people with diabetes struggle to manage the financial burden of this condition, and we are focused on helping by providing affordable solutions,” said Dr. Cheryl Pegus, executive vice president, Walmart Health & Wellness. “We also know this is a condition that disproportionately impacts underserved populations.”
“With ReliOn NovoLog insulin, we’re adding a high-quality medication for diabetes to the already affordable ReliOn line of products and continuing our commitment to improve access and lowering cost of care.”
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ReliOn products include private label, lower priced versions of blood glucose monitors, lancets, and other diabetes management essentials.
According to CNBC, US lawmakers have scrutinized diabetes drug companies in the past, like Eli Lilly and the French company Sanofi, for increasing prices over the last two decades, leading Sanofi to roll-out a limited price reduction program.
Walmart worked directly with manufacturer Novo Nordisk to reduce costs.
“This price point, we hope, will improve and hopefully revolutionize the accessibility and affordability of insulin,” said Dr. Cheryl Pegus, Walmart’s executive vice president of health and wellness.
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Following a 70-year effort, China has been awarded a malaria-free certification from WHO—a notable feat for a country that reported 30 million cases of the disease annually in the 1940s.
According to the global health organization, every 2 minutes, a child dies of malaria, but now China has joined the growing number of countries that are proving that a malaria-free future is a viable goal.
“China’s tireless effort to achieve this important milestone demonstrates how strong political commitment and strengthening national health systems can result in eliminating a disease that once was a major public health problem,” said Dr Takeshi Kasai, Regional Director, WHO Western Pacific Regional Office.
Globally, 40 countries and territories have been granted a malaria-free certification from WHO, including Australia, Singapore, El Salvador, Algeria, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uzbekistan.
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Beginning in the 1950s, health authorities in China worked to locate and stop the spread of malaria by providing preventive medicines, reducing mosquito breeding grounds, and stepping up the use of insecticide spraying in homes in at-risk areas.
In 1967, the Chinese Government launched the “523 Project”—a nationwide research program aimed at finding new malaria treatments that involved more than 500 scientists from 60 institutions. It led to the discovery in the 1970s of artemisinin—the core compound of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), the most effective antimalarial drugs available today.
In the 1980s, China was one of the first countries in the world to extensively test the use of insecticide-treated nets. By 1988, more than 2.4 million nets had been distributed nationwide, which led to such a drastic reduction in the disease that by the end of 1990, the number of deaths was reduced by 95%.
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In 2020, after reporting 4 consecutive years of zero indigenous cases, China applied for an official WHO certification of malaria elimination. Members of the independent Malaria Elimination Certification Panel travelled to China in May 2021 to verify the country’s malaria-free status as well as its program to prevent re-establishment of the disease.
Effective multi-sector collaboration was also key to success. In 2010, 13 ministries in China—including those representing health, education, finance, research and science, development, public security, the army, police, commerce, industry and information technology, customs, media and tourism—joined forces to end malaria nationwide.
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Quote of the Day: “It’s the children the world almost breaks who grow up to save it.” – Frank Warren
Photo: by Fonzie‘s cousin on Flickr, CC license
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
How did Sherlock Holmes solve The Case of the Missing Sheepdog? By using simple logic. What do sheepdogs do? They herd sheep. So, if a sheepdog were to suddenly vanish, where might one expect to find him? Herding sheep, of course.
All right, for all you sticklers, we’re aware that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote a story called The Case of the Missing Sheep Dog, but when Tilly, a 2-year-old border collie/red heeler mix recently went AWOL after his humans and their truck were involved in a traffic accident, he was later located practicing his herding skills on a flock at a nearby farm.
Tilly (named for Gonzaga University basketball player Killian Tillie, currently on the roster of the Memphis Grizzlies) was thrown from the Oswald family’s GMC Yukon when it collided with a Buick LeSabre late last Sunday morning on Idaho State Highway 41 near Rathdrum. Ejected through a broken window, a frightened Tilly ran off through the fields.
A search was mounted almost immediately. Strangers stopped their cars near the site of the crash to help Mike and Linda Oswald look for their lost fur baby.
After 10 hours of hunting with no luck, the Oswalds called it a night and headed home, but not before posting a picture of Tilly to Facebook and asking for folks to be on the lookout for their precious pooch. Their plea was shared more than 3,000 times.
The following Tuesday, Tyler Potter noted something peculiar going on with one of the dogs on their family farm: an Aussie Shepherd named Hooey looked a bit off—like his fur was darker. She mentioned it to her brother, Travis.
But it was only later, when another brother, Zane noticed Hooey behaving strangely—rather than coming when called, the normally obedient hound ran in the other direction—the Potters began to suspect something unusual was afoot.
When the siblings finally put two and two together, they realized what they had on their hands wasn’t Hooey not being Hooey, it was, another doggo altogether. Having been privy to the Oswalds’ Facebook post, they knew immediately the counterfeit shepherd was none other than the absconded Tilly.
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By pure coincidence, a Sheriff’s deputy, who happened to be scouting for signs of Tilly, was passing by just as the Potters reached their stunning conclusion. They relinquished custody of the sheepdog impersonator to the peace officer and did not press charges against Tilly for herding without a permit (even though they were fairly certain his enthusiastic but untrained attempts had gone awry and sent several flock members out of the pasture and onto a nearby road embankment).
Linda Oswald confirmed the Potters’ suspicions. “He’ll herd anything,” she told the Spokesman-Review. “When I go to the dog park, he tries to herd the people into one group.”
On Tuesday morning, Tilly was reunited with his joyful family. Unhurt and relieved to be home, the only lingering effect of his two-day adventure was a tremendous thirst (which he unceremoniously assuaged by lapping up huge quantities of water from the commode).
Linda Oswald admitted she’d been heartbroken over the loss of her beloved pet and couldn’t thank everyone who kept up the search enough. If pandemic-related social isolation has an upside, Oswald believes it’s inspired folks to try to reconnect any way they can.
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“All of a sudden, I think people saw a time to really jump out and help, even if it was just a small thing like finding a dog,” she told Spokesman-Review. “There’s a lot of kind people out there.”
And so, The Case of the Missing Sheepdog is happily closed… without a single “Elementary, my dear Watson” exclaimed.
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Turn back the clock to 1926. Imagine yourself a teenager, your whole life ahead of you, shining with possibility. It’s your birthday. As a gift to yourself, you toss a message in a bottle into the local river and watch it float from sight—never knowing if or when the bright-eyed boy you are now will reconnect with the man you’ll someday become.
While that may not have been the exact scenario, 95 years later, the message—if not the bottle—has finally found its way home.
Jennifer Dowker, who captains Michigan-based Nautical North Family Adventures, spends her summers scuba diving and conducting shipwreck tours from her boat, the Yankee Sunshine. An avid collector, she was performing underwater maintenance on the glass-bottom window when she found a curious curio on the riverbed.
The bottle’s unusual antique shape and green glass were what first caught Dowker’s eye, but on closer inspection, she realized the find was something more. Though damaged and slightly water-logged, she and her crew learned the note inside the bottle had survived an amazing nine-plus decades in the water.
Dated November 1926, it read:
Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?
After posting a picture of the long-missing missive to Facebook, word spread like wildfire. More than 100,000 shares and 6,000 comments later, one curious reader managed to locate Morrow’s daughter, Michele Primeau (who “doesn’t do Facebook”) to tell her the story and give her Dowker’s contact information.
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Morrow passed away in 1995, but Primeau recognized her father’s handwriting. With a habit of secreting small notes away in unlikely places, she said that sending a message in a bottle was very much in keeping with his sentimental character.
“I can just see him going out and doing that because it was his birthday,” Primeau told CNN. “I don’t know for sure. But it just sounds like something he would have done.”
Though initially, Dowker told Primeau she’d forward the mementos to her, after sleeping on the idea for a night, Primeau decided a policy of “finders keepers” would better serve her dad’s memory.
“I thought the right thing to do would be to give it to her,” Primeau told CNN. “She found it and that would keep my dad’s name living on.”
Indeed, Dowker plans to put the souvenirs on prominent display and pass the story behind them along, preserving Morrow’s legacy. Primeau has planned a September visit to view the family keepsakes in person.
Now, perhaps it was purely coincidence, but this whole episode happened on Father’s Day weekend. Even if it wasn’t George Morrow’s way of letting his little girl know he was still watching over her all these years later, she says it brought back a boatload of wonderful memories.
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It turns out there are people in the world who, during a dive, choose to swim towards a 26-foot-long pink tube coming right for them. Thank goodness for that, because if there weren’t humanity wouldn’t have gotten the video below.
Videographer Steve Hathaway and his friend Andrew Buttle were diving off the coast of New Zealand in 2019 when they happened to cross paths with a pyrosome—a sometimes-giant, pink, translucent worm-like creature that was so big they could swim through it.
What would normally cause most people to get the heck out of the water was something the two men recognized immediately as totally harmless, and actually a rare spectacle.
Pyrosomes are free-flowing colonies known as tunicates, which consist of thousands of tiny creatures called zooids that come together to form a sort of frame.
Zooids filter feed by pumping water through their bodies and chowing down on plankton, poo, or detritus. This has earned them envious nicknames like “sea squirts” or “cockroaches of the sea.”
In total the divers spent 4 minutes swimming around it, an experience that “was pretty incredible,” Buttle reports to National Geographic. “We could see hundreds of thousands of tiny creatures right up close.”
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These creatures and their cousin the salp are actually very common—it’s just that they’re normally a few centimeters long.
They feed by swimming vertically up to the ocean’s surface at night, and diving back down into the blackness when the sun comes up, a behavior theorized as a necessity for avoiding predation—as the ‘sea squirt’ has no defenses of any kind and is essentially a sort of all-you-can-eat buffet for a fish lucky enough to find one of that size.
One scientist told National Geographic such an event would be as if a human could simply hand on to the back of an elephant whilst eating it.
The marine creatures “reproduce” both sexually and asexually (they are also known for their bioluminescence, or ability to glow) but how they form their large colonies is not understood.
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Hathaway, who spotted the translucent form off of Whakaari Island, 30 miles from the New Zealand coat, says the rich volcanic waters attract all kinds of sea life in summer, something that’s allowed him to have an 11-year career as a videographer filming animals like mantas and whales.
(WATCH the amazing video from National Geographic below.)
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It must have been a shock when Emily Roycroft’s computer began telling her the mouse that has been recorded as extinct for over 100 years was alive and sitting on her very desk.
“I was quite surprised, extinction usually doesn’t offer second chances,” Roycroft admitted to ABC Australia.
The nation has the highest rates of endangered mammals on Earth, but Australia’s endemic rodent population is still more diverse that anywhere else in the world. However many species became endangered or extinct after colonists, or rather the animals onboard their ships, arrived from England.
Gould’s mouse was once thought to be such a casualty, and it was a simple investigation into how this came, or was supposed to have come, to pass that revealed the error.
Using a variety of different specimens from museums and close living relatives, Dr. Roycroft and her colleagues began examining the genetic record of the shaggy-haired, black-eyed mouse and other extinct rodents to see how genetically diverse the populations were at the time before their extinction.
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A genetically-diverse record would suggest that they died off suddenly, as a result of a disease or natural disaster, while a poor genetic record would suggest overhunting by predators like cats and foxes. The pace of the change would also indicate how many years the decline took.
It was the latter that proved the case for Gould’s mouse, but something else appeared in the data collected by Roycroft, and that was the fact that the DNA of the Shark Bay mouse was not similar, but identical to that of Gould’s mouse.
This was a double surprise, first that the two were the same, and secondly because the Gould’s mouse specimen was collected from a museum in New South Wales, 4,000 kilometers (2,800 miles) from Shark Bay island. The hypothesis was that before it became an island, it was part of the continent, and as sea levels rose they trapped the mice there thousands of years ago.
ABC added the two-cents of Dr. Euan Richie, who wasn’t involved in the research, but who works as a wildlife ecologist at Deakin University and considered it “fantastic news.”
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“Given this species occurs in such an isolated and single location, establishing captive breeding colonies and additional wild populations should be a priority,” he said.
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Quote of the Day: “The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.” – Louisa May Alcott
Photo: by Jack Wilson
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Despite a few national governments continuing to keep their coal and oil projects afloat, market demand and private entrepreneurship is driving what can only be described as a revolution in renewable energy.
These latest achievements might have been thought unbelievable when global climate change was first being discussed as a serious threat, but today each successive development of renewable energy, nuclear fusion, and electric cars, makes subsequent developments cheaper and easier to scale.
Just six months into 2021, we have already seen some amazing progress in wind, solar, and EVs.
A half million people living in the Northern DR Congo cities of Gemena, Isiro, and Bumba, are in for a surprise, as a trio of UK, French, and Spanish solar power companies look to close deals to supply the region with reliable renewable energy.
Citizens from the DRC suffer from the lowest rates of reliable electricity in the world, and the solar power plants are set to help this problem with 18 months of construction commencing.
In West Africa, the Senegalese cities of Kael and Kahone will find 60MW of solar power available to them in the coming months as a variety of institutions offer the government financing for sustainable energy. Senegal is a heavy net energy-importer, placing enormous financial burdens on people, and thus the imports have generally been cheap i.e. brown coal and oil.
Lastly in Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest economies, the Solar Power Naija program is looking to equip 500,000 homes with solar panels, generating electricity for 25 million Nigerians over the next few years.
The community of Jangefe has already tasted the start of the mammoth green electrification, with 1,000 homes already equipped with rooftop solar panels.
2021 was the single best year on record if you are a firm who manufactures wind turbines, or an institution that finances them, with 93 new gigawatts added—equaling a 53% increase since 2020. The 2021 Global Wind Report is a jaw-dropper, and it’s enough to quote the executive summary.
“Through technology innovations and economies of scale, the global wind power market has nearly quadrupled in size over the past decade and established itself as one of the most cost-competitive and resilient power sources across the world.”
“Today, there is now 743 GW of wind power capacity worldwide, helping to avoid over 1.1 billion tons of CO2 globally—equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of South America.”
Data assembled back in March from Germany’s largest automotive industry review produced a startling statistic for anyone who’s ever looked at a full long-term airport parking lot—that 1 in 5 cars made in Germany can be plugged in.
The Schmidt Automotive Research Center found that 74,000 of the 373,900 cars that left German assembly lines were either electric or hybrid vehicles.
That was the story for the supply side, and on the demand side things are just as rosy. Germany is the fourth largest auto market in the world, and electric car registrations—that’s bought and driven EVs—grew from a 4% national market share in December 2019, to a whopping 26% market share just 12 months later. 24% of these EVs were made by Volkswagen.
Hybrids also jumped from 3% to 13%, meaning that there are more hybrids and EVs on German roads than gasoline-powered cars.
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This is just in the background of a global surge in EV purchasing that climbed 40% during 2020, when most markets were suffering from COVID-related issues.
As the holders of the largest state-controlled pension fund on Earth, the South Korean monetary authorities released a statement in May that the $771 billion National Pension Fund will cease all investments related to coal power both at home and abroad.
The fund also announced that they would revamp guidelines for investment strategies to ensure a more sustainable pattern emerges in the future.
Back in mid-May, the Spanish legislature announced it would be phasing out all oil, coal, and gas production by 2042, and that all carbon-emitting vehicle sales would be banned by 2040.
In the short term, the Spanish lawmakers want 74% of the national energy consumption to be entirely renewable by the end of the decade. They are quite close to that goal already, as the month of May saw 50% of the nation’s energy demand fulfilled by green energy.
Romania also joined the effort, alerting the EU that through its National Recovery and Resilience Plan the country would cease all coal production by 2032, at which time it hopes to have installed 34% renewable electricity to take over the baton.
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G7, the world’s seven largest developed economies, all agreed to stop coal financing by the end of the year, leaving the big African emitters, India, and China as the last remaining holdouts now that Japan, part of G7, has got on board.
All is not business-as-usual in the boardrooms of some of the world’s largest petroleum producers.
In a landmark court decision, a judge in the Netherlands ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut emissions by 45% after 17,000 people brought a lawsuit that suggested Shell’s rather large footprint on the greenhouse gas situation merits a significant investment in CO2-slashing as a debt to society.
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Elsewhere in Europe, the Italian oil company Eni became the first European oil company to launch a corporate bond that is linked to sustainability.
The €1 billion 7-year bond is linked to two key performance indicators: “Increasing renewable installed capacity to 5GW by the end of 2025; and halving the net carbon footprint of its upstream business to 7.4 million tons of CO2-equivalent by the end of 2024 from 2018 levels,” reports Dow Jones.
Lastly, Engine No.1, a shareholder group of ExxonMobil, managed to get two of their candidates elected to the American company’s board on the argument that the company’s long-term business strategy didn’t take into account all of the value loss potential from climate change, both from shareholders jumping ship, and potential damages from extreme weather events.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $8.6 trillion in private capital, and whose sustainable investment strategies GNN has reported extensively on, ensured the Engine No.1 candidates got the positions by utilizing their vote as large shareholders.
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From Everglades to Okefenokee, Florida legislatures just created one of the biggest wildlife corridors in the developed world with a $400 million funding seed.
The Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, signed into law by Gov. DeSantis, ensures that animals can travel—without seeing a car or a human, from the Everglades Estuary to the borders with Georgia and Alabama—while protecting existing and new conservation areas, securing natural resources, and more.
Between the beach-bustle of Miami, Daytona, Fort Lauderdale, and elsewhere, and the lazy waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the western coast lies a mosaic of swamps, pastures, rivers, farmland, and forest. Among these varied ecosystems, 700 imperiled species live in habitat that may be owned privately, as state recreation areas, and as federally-protected wilderness.
The total bipartisan support the bill received, typical of American conservation legislation, has seen $300 million secured to protect these varied ecosystems, as well as to buy new conservation areas or to secure conservation easements—a subsidized incentive to conserve a particular feature on private acreage.
Another $100 million was earmarked for the general conservation program called Florida Forever, the largest state-controlled pubic land acquisition program of its kind in the U.S.
For many species this will be a windfall, especially for the iconic Florida panther, which must roam wide and far in search of food, and to secure genetic stability.
The endangered cats almost went extinct during the 1970s until Texas provided an infusion of genes from their mountain lions. The last remaining sub-species of the puma in the Eastern U.S. is maybe the most endangered big cat on Earth.
National Geographic reports that a panther in 2016 was found north of Lake Okeechobee for the first time in 43 years, suggesting the species is reclaiming some of its previous habitat in the more northern areas of Florida. The further north panthers in the south can travel, the better for the species’ genetics, which have been damaged heavily by inbreeding.
The Florida Wildlife Corridor Commission—a conservation non-profit that was engaged for years in developing the idea of the Corridor and how to define it and write it into law—was set up in large part by dedicated photographer Carlton Ward Jr. and some of his friends.
For those who want to truly understand the magnitude of importance for Florida wildlife which the secured Corridor represents, they need only watch the excellent 17-minute documentary The Last Green Thread produced by the Commission, which highlights the journey up the Corridor by Ward Jr. and his biologist friends Joe Guthrie and Mallory Dimmitt.
Ward Jr. also set up the Path of the Panther, a conservation initiative supported by National Geographic to try and save Florida’s state animal.
Path of the Panther highlights the dangers posed to the cat including genetic isolation and traffic collisions, and gathered priceless data on population numbers and movements through camera trapping.
In his documentary, Ward Jr. at one point explains that moving up the headwaters of the Everglades to the I-4 highway, there is a moment when the Corridor narrows to perhaps 200 meters before being stopped dead in its tracks northward by the I-4, forcing any migrating animals to trace the highway’s east-west path for miles before finding a possible crossing point.
The new Florida Wildlife Corridor Act specifically designates doing all of the following: “maintaining wildlife access to the habitats needed to allow for migration of and genetic exchange amongst regional wildlife populations,” as well as “preventing fragmentation of wildlife habitats,” and “providing for wildlife crossings for the protection and safety of wildlife.”
“This gives me a lot of hope for the future of land conservation in Florida,” Ward Jr. told National Geographic.
For those who want to learn more, hop over to the Commission’s website, watch their documentaries, and pour over their extremely detailed maps of the Corridor.
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Sewing is a craft that’s been passed down through the ages from mother to daughter and from father to son. Traditionally, it’s also served as one of the few consistent sources of income for women, especially marginalized ones.
Margaret Jankowski learned to sew from her mom. As an adult, rather an avocation than a vocation, it wasn’t something she pursued full-time, but she enjoyed it enough that she taught sewing classes and created clothing for her first child.
In 2004, in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka, the story of a woman whose dream of becoming a tailor was dashed after spending years saving up to buy a sewing machine struck a chord that resonated with Jankowski.
“I could easily make a living without my sewing machine,” Jankowski told the Christian Science Monitor. “That wasn’t true of this woman.”
Inspired, Jankowski made a spur-of-the-moment decision to find a way to get some machines to Sri Lanka. Her original thought was to simply get hold of a few used machines and send them on, but when she outlined her plans on the local news, the project took on a life of its own and donated machines started rolling in.
In 2005 the first shipment of 25 boxes containing toys, medical supplies, fabric, and a sewing machine were distributed between five orphanages in India and Sri Lanka. In addition to creating clothing, the machines were used as learning tools to teach the children an occupation they could put to good use later in life.
Since then, The Sewing Machine Project has re-homed 3,350 sewing machines to recipients facing a variety of socio-economic challenges resulting from a variety of causes from war conflicts to natural disasters to generational poverty.
After Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of machines were delivered to New Orleans’ Mardi Gras costume makers. They’ve also found their way to Guatemala, Kosovo, and closer to home at immigrant training facilities and halfway houses for women trying to overcome drug addiction.
As valuable as learning to sew can be as a source of livelihood, whether you’re sewing to make something new or repair something old, creating something beautiful or something strictly utilitarian, being able to say, “I made this!” is an affirmation of self-esteem that can be life-changing.
Nowhere is that more true than in a pilot program in Rankin County, Mississippi, that the Sewing Machine Project serves.
Inmates at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility began turning out backpacks filled with reusable menstrual pads and undergarments for girls in countries who often found themselves unable to attend school due to lack of sanitary items.
Since its inception, director Renee Smith has seen a definite shift in the participating inmates’ attitudes. “They know they’re making a difference in the life of someone else,” she told CSM. “To me that’s huge.”
The Sewing Machine Project, which is based in Madison, Wisconsin, accepts sewing machines of every brand. The only caveat is they must be in working condition. The Brother Sewing Machine company recently donated 500 machines, 25 of which went to Zaman International—a Detroit area nonprofit serving serving marginalized women and children, many of whom are immigrants and refugees.
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Jankowski currently fields 10 to 15 emails every week from international groups looking to receive sewing machines. Having started the program almost on a whim, she initially had no idea just huge the demand would be. She says the funds aren’t available to supply everyone who asks at the moment, but she hopes in future the program will be able to expand to meet the growing need.
As with many charitable programs, the parameters of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a shift in the way The Sewing Machine Project operates its outreach. But here, Jankowski is especially hopeful.
“One of the many gifts I’ve received in leading The Sewing Machine Project is the opportunity to see not only the need that exists all around us but also the creative ways in which people and organizations work to address that need,” she said in their newsletter.
RELATED: Syrian Refugee Saves Ontario Wedding With Master Sewing Skills
“Resiliency—bending and swaying in the face of challenge—shows up everywhere. We adapt and we look to one another for support. Together—all of us—are working to meet the needs of those who can benefit from the healing power of sewing.”
And while the transition may not be seamless, the Sewing Machine Project plans to continue its mission to make the world a better place, one stitch at a time.
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Despite the amount of cuts, poo, and “flipper bashing,” New Zealand veterinarians are enduring it all to keep an endemic penguin species alive on their beautiful South Island.
An endangered species, and one of the rarest penguins in the world, the yellow-eyed penguin, or “Hoiho,” which means “noise shouter” in Māori, numbers between 4,000 to 5,000 birds.
For years a pair of facilities in Dunedin near the extraordinary Otago Peninsula, The Wildlife Hospital and Penguin Place, have been treating and releasing birds back into the wild.
“When I see the difference we’re making, especially for the hoiho, it’s a species I’m so passionate about and just being able to work with these birds and get them back into the wild, that’s actually the best part of the job,” says Dr. Lisa Argilla, a veterinarian at the Wildlife Hospital, to BBC Travel.
4,000 to 5,000 isn’t so low, but when one considers there are only 265 known breeding pairs, the fact that 95% of injured hoiho that arrive in the hospital recover to be released again highlights the two teams’ extraordinary contribution to national Kiwi conservation.
“If Penguin Place wasn’t here, I could almost guarantee that the population would be functionally extinct,” said Jason van Zanten, conservation manager at Penguin Place, again to the BBC.
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Before the Wildlife Hospital opened in January of 2018, injured penguins found by Penguin Place, which has been operating since the ’90s, had to be shipped to the North Island for care. The immediate proximity with which hoiho can be treated has drastically helped the population.
However as the world’s first entirely tourism-funded conservation reserve, Penguin Place suffered greatly during the COVID-19 measures imposed by the government, and now has only enough residual capital to survive the next few months. With the return of warmer weather, Penguin Place needs a simultaneous return of tourists, or it will be forced to shutter its doors and leave the penguins to their own devices.
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It’s not a bad trip to be fair. The Otago Peninsula’s wild coastlines, towering headlands, and sheltered fjords are home to a rich variety of natural scenery and animals, much of which remains conserved due to tourist dollars.
Until the tourists return for tours of the coastal reserve, Penguin Place has turned to donations, which you can contribute to on their website along with planning a tour.
(MEET a few of these Kiwi penguins in the video below.)
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Quote of the Day: “You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Photo: by Gaelle Marcel
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Reprinted with permission from World At Large, a news website of nature, politics, science, health, and travel.
Norway is dismantling their last Arctic coal mine piece by piece and turning the area it sits in into a national park twice the size of Grand Teton in Wyoming.
The goal is to turn the Svalbard Archipelago, in particular the Van Mijenfjord, into a howling wilderness once again—the best managed wilderness in the world where polar bears, seals, and countless other Arctic species can thrive in what experts say will be one of the most resilient areas under threat from climate change.
Seeds aren’t the only thing famously stored underground on Svalbard. Coal has been mined there under state monopoly for 100 years. Despite climate change pressures mounting throughout the 21st century, it wasn’t until 2016 that a government white paper announced a moratorium.
Seven national parks, 15 bird sanctuaries, one geopark, and six reserves dot two-thirds of the 23,500 square mile (61,000 square km) archipelago of islands, fjords, mountains, and glaciers. 3,000 polar bears inhabit the area, and during the late summer more than 20 million birds of 80 different species nest on Svalbard.
The Van Mijen Fjord has sea ice year round, and as such is an important hunting ground for bears. At the throat of the fjord, Svea Mine has loaded ships with coal for generations, but is now being dismembered rather than abandoned to ensure the area returns to a pristine natural state.
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A June press release by the Norwegian government announced they were expanding the existing Nordenskiöld Land National Park to encompass the fjord, creating an additional 1,125 square miles (2,914 square kilometers) of wilderness called Van Mijenfjorden National Park.
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“Our goal is for Svalbard to be one of the best-managed wilderness areas in the world. That requires us to implement measures to deal with climate changes, and pressure caused by increased traffic. The protection of the Van Mijen fjord and surrounding area is a direct response to this,” says minister Sveinung Rotevatn in the same release.
The borders of the new park lie atop the existing Sør-Spitsbergen National Park, making it easy for visitors to see both.
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Legend has it that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned gray overnight just before her beheading in 1791.
Though the legend is inaccurate—hair that has already grown out of the follicle does not change color—a new study from researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons is the first to offer quantitative evidence linking psychological stress to graying hair in people.
And while it may seem intuitive that stress can accelerate graying, the researchers were surprised to discover that hair color can be restored when stress is eliminated, a finding that contrasts with a recent study in mice that suggested that stressed-induced gray hairs are permanent.
The study has broader significance than confirming age-old speculation about the effects of stress on hair color, says the study’s senior author Martin Picard, associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hairs to return to their ‘young’ pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” Picard says.
“Our data add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human aging is not a linear, fixed biological process but may, at least in part, be halted or even temporarily reversed.”
“Just as the rings in a tree trunk hold information about past decades in the life of a tree, our hair contains information about our biological history,” Picard says. “When hairs are still under the skin as follicles, they are subject to the influence of stress hormones and other things happening in our mind and body. Once hairs grow out of the scalp, they harden and permanently crystallize these exposures into a stable form.”
Though people have long believed that psychological stress can accelerate gray hair, scientists have debated the connection due to the lack of sensitive methods that can precisely correlate times of stress with hair pigmentation at a single-follicle level.
Splitting hairs to document hair pigmentation Ayelet Rosenberg, first author on the study and a student in Picard’s laboratory, developed a new method for capturing highly detailed images of tiny slices of human hairs to quantify the extent of pigment loss (graying) in each of those slices. Each slice, about 1/20th of a millimeter wide, represents about an hour of hair growth.
“If you use your eyes to look at a hair, it will seem like it’s the same color throughout unless there is a major transition,” Picard says. “Under a high-resolution scanner, you see small, subtle variations in color, and that’s what we’re measuring.”
The researchers, whose study was published June 22 in eLife, analyzed individual hairs from 14 volunteers. The results were compared with each volunteer’s stress diary, in which individuals were asked to review their calendars and rate each week’s level of stress.
The investigators immediately noticed that some gray hairs naturally regain their original color, which had never been quantitatively documented, Picard says.
When hairs were aligned with stress diaries by Shannon Rausser, second author on the paper and a student in Picard’s laboratory, striking associations between stress and hair graying were revealed and, in some cases, a reversal of graying with the lifting of stress.
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“There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,” Picard says.
To better understand how stress causes gray hair, the researchers also measured levels of thousands of proteins in the hairs and how protein levels changed over the length of each hair.
Changes in 300 proteins occurred when hair color changed, and the researchers developed a mathematical model that suggests stress-induced changes in mitochondria may explain how stress turns hair gray.
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“We often hear that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, but that’s not the only role they play,” Picard says. “Mitochondria are actually like little antennas inside the cell that respond to a number of different signals, including psychological stress.”
The mitochondria connection between stress and hair color differs from that discovered in a recent study of mice, which found that stress-induced graying was caused by an irreversible loss of stem cells in the hair follicle.
“Our data show that graying is reversible in people, which implicates a different mechanism,” says co-author Ralf Paus, PhD, professor of dermatology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “Mice have very different hair follicle biology, and this may be an instance where findings in mice don’t translate well to people.”
Reducing stress in your life is a good goal, but it won’t necessarily turn your hair to a normal color.
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“Based on our mathematical modeling, we think hair needs to reach a threshold before it turns gray,” Picard says. “In middle age, when the hair is near that threshold because of biological age and other factors, stress will push it over the threshold and it transitions to gray.
“But we don’t think that reducing stress in a 70-year-old who’s been gray for years will darken their hair or increasing stress in a 10-year-old will be enough to tip their hair over the gray threshold.”
Source: Columbia University Irving Medical Center
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A karmic war chest will be waiting for one Buddhist monk who’s spent decades rescuing stray dogs in Shanghai and bringing them to his monastery to live in peace and comfort, or to find a new home.
Since 1994, Zhi Xiang has rescued over 8,000 homeless pooches from the streets of the Chinese mega-city, caring for all of them.
In Buddhism, the highest goal is to reach the fourth stage of consciousness, whereby the trappings of reality fall away as the practitioner realizes life is merely an illusion. Yet the holiest of monks, the Bodhisattvas, don’t choose this path, and instead, like 51-year old Xiang, remain in this world to try and help people stuck in the cycle of life to escape.
With help from volunteers and his own Bao’en Temple workforce, Xiang currently cares for hundreds of cats and dogs. Costing nearly $2.5 million every year in labor and supplies, Xiang tries to get as many of them as he can into family homes overseas, using social media to reach out to perspective pet owners.
So far 300 dogs have been adopted by families in Canada, the United States, and Germany.
Zhi Xiang is no ordinary animal rescuer: he is a Buddhist monk and has given nearly 8,000 dogs a new life, either at his ancient monastery or at a shelter he runs in Shanghai.
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) June 22, 2021
He already has nearly 8,000 dogs to feed and care for pic.twitter.com/1eWMOn5qu9
Not a trained vet, Xiang loves and cares for the animals he saves as if he was, and while many are too sick, the younger or healthy ones move on to adoption shelters, or straight into the arms of new owners.
“I think they’re very happy so I feel it’s worthwhile,” he told ABC Australia. “But of course I miss them.”
“I have a dream that one day, when I have some free time, I want to go abroad and visit them, take photos with every dog that I rescued,” he said. “So when I get old and can’t walk, I have these photos to look at.”
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If indeed Karma rewards those who sacrifice their own time and wealth to help alleviate the suffering of animals, that which Xiang awaits in his afterlife is greater than anyone can imagine, and rightly so.
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Turns out there are simpler methods than air-conditioning to keep a room or house cool and save you a ton of money.
That’s handy, given that depending on your temperature preference and frugality, running an A/C unit can cost anywhere from $14 to $211 per month.
Here in Italy, ground floor units don’t even have A/C, as all the buildings are made of block-and-concrete, and the windows all have wood-slat shutters to let the breeze in and keep the sun out.
If installing brown wood-slat shutters isn’t an option, try with pieces of brown cardboard; cutting small mail slots out to shed light into the room, or change to darker curtains.
Beyond that, here are some innovative, and sometimes ancient ways to keep cool and save money.
Ever heard the story about how kitchens, hotels, and even towns would have giant blocks of ice brought in on train cars for refrigeration purposes before electricity existed? That still works today, and it’s cheaper than A/C.
If you live in a 1-bed, 1-bath or studio apartment, try soaking a couple of towels, coiling them into C-shapes, and freezing them. Once they’re frozen solid, place them on your head like a crown, around your neck like an airplane pillow, or around the femoral arteries in your thighs. This will cool you right down.
Alternatively, you can freeze water into a large block by putting a bowl or plastic bottle of it in the freezer, (which will also save you money by keeping the freezer cooler and reducing the time it needs to re-freeze) and place it on a table in front of a fan. The air blown by the fan will be chilled as it runs across the ice.
If you leave your windows open for the breeze in the summertime, soak your curtains in water. The breeze will evaporate the water, cooling it to a lovely temperature, before blowing it around your house.
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Sleeping under a damp bed sheet with a fan over you will work as well as any A/C unit: As the water soaks into your skin and then evaporates, it will supercool you. A damp t-shirt would act similarly.
As strange as it sounds, there is a reason why spicy food all comes from hot places. No one’s cooking vindaloo curry in Latvia or Harbin, and that’s because the capsaicin chemical within spicy foods is an irritant that causes us to sweat. Sweat in a frigid Arctic wind will kill you, but in warmer climes it will cool you down.
Hot beverages are also great for this, particularly hot mint tea, as the mint will feel cool and refreshing, while the heat from the tea will cause you to sweat. Drink in front of a fan for maximum benefit (though note that if you’re in a humid area, this hack won’t work so well as the sweat can’t wick properly from your body).
Finally, salty and or rich foods are proven to make the core body temperature rise. To combat this, eat smaller meals more often, ditch salt and hot protein (a cold cut sandwich isn’t bad) for fruits and vegetables, and leave that oven and stove off to reduce the heat radiation into your house (saving you more money while you’re at it).
Honorable mention goes to whoever got the idea to leave one’s moisturizers in the fridge. Imagine needing to rehydrate your skin, and it being nearly freezing cold at the same time!
RELATED: Five Million Years of Climate Change Found Preserved in One Location
Some ceiling fans are able to switch the direction they turn. In the winter, clockwise is better, but during the summer, counter-clockwise is where it’s at, pushing the hot air around the level of our head and shoulders down towards the floor and circulating the cold air—which naturally sinks—up towards the ceiling.
Cold shower anyone?
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Some people may say they’re dedicated to their jobs but others don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk—literally.
To make it to his shift as a Buffalo Wild Wings cook, Donte Franklin was leaving for work three hours early each day and trekking more than eight miles on foot to arrive on time. At the end of the day, the 20-year-old Oklahoman reversed his journey to walk home.
Franklin credits his amazing work ethic to his late mom, who passed away four years ago. “I really don’t care if it gets tiring. I just have to keep pushing,” Franklin told FOX News, “I walk just to make my family proud.”
Whether or not he’s got a guardian angel keeping tabs on him, Franklin’s life recently got an amazing and unexpected lift thanks to a stranger’s random act of kindness.
Michael Lynn was out running errands when he saw a young man—Franklin—walking in the sweltering summer heat. On his way back, he noticed the same young man—still walking—and decided to offer him a ride.
When Lynn learned more about Franklin’s 17-mile work pilgrimage, he couldn’t help but be more than a little awed. He decided to share the details of Franklin’s story on Facebook—where it was quickly shared more than 1,000 times.
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One of the people who saw it was Kerri Collins. She and her husband are the driving forces behind a biker charity group called My Riding Buddies Oklahoma and Bikers for Elves (MRBO).
“Anytime I see something posted concerning anybody anywhere in Oklahoma, I immediately jump in and we do whatever we can as a group,” Keri Collins told KOCO. “It just touched me that this man is only 20 years old and is walking to two different jobs with nothing in the heat. It opened my heart because kids his age don’t do that.”
In appreciation of his extraordinary efforts, MRBO gifted Franklin with a brand-new bike prior to his next shift. His commute had just gotten a whole lot easier, but Franklin’s good luck was just beginning.
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Inspired by the young man’s grit and determination, a GoFundMe page was set up in his name so he could buy a car. So far, close to $52,000 has been raised.
Franklin, who’s studying to be a welder, doesn’t have a driver’s license yet. While he plans to purchase a car eventually, in the meantime, he’ll be using the funds to help his family and taking his bike to work.
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Donte Franklin says he considers everything that’s happened to him to be a blessing and believes that he and Lynn were fated to become friends. It’s something Lynn believes as well.
“As long as he wants to, I want to keep him in my life and I want to be in his life,” Lynn told KOCO. “… I told him, if the Lord opens the door for you, walk through it… I think it’s open for him and the rest is up to him.”
And we suspect, that’s not just talking the talk.
(WATCH Dante’s story in the KOCO video below.)
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