Quote of the Day: “There’s a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.” – Temple Grandin (turns 74 today)
Photo: public domain
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A pregnant Afghan woman who boarded a U.S. evacuation aircraft gave birth in the plane—and the baby girl was named ‘Reach’ after the C-17 that flew the family, and hundreds of other people, out of the Middle East to safety.
Medical support personnel from the 86th Medical Group met the Afghan mother aboard Reach 828, moments after she delivered the child in the aircraft upon landing at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
The mother went into labor on the flight and began experiencing complications due to low blood pressure.
The aircraft commander made the decision to descend in altitude to increase air pressure in the aircraft, which helped stabilize the mother and perhaps save her life.
Upon landing, Airmen from the 86th MDG came aboard and delivered the child in the cargo bay of the aircraft. The baby girl and mother were transported to a nearby medical facility and are in good condition.
“That child’s name will forever be ‘Reach,’ and as you can well imagine it’s my dream to watch that young child grow up to be a U.S. citizen…” said Air Force Gen. Tod Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command.
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Reprinted with permission from World At Large, a news website of nature, politics, science, health, and travel.
Clinical trials of a new precision, or functional medicine approach to targeting and reversing cognitive decline from Alzheimer’s has produced “unprecedented” and “far-reaching” results.
Called the MEND (metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration) Protocol, it’s based on the oft-ignored, though universally understood preference, going all the way back to Hippocrates, for treating the cause—not the symptom—of a disease.
Developed by Dr. Dale Bredesen, an internationally renowned expert in neurodegenerative disease, it works to fix and fortify the underlying biochemical profile that gives rise to Alzheimer’s, rather than simply targeting, as pharmaceutical companies have tried to do, the tau protein called beta-amyloid that brings about the hallmarks of the disease.
Neuroscientists have firmly established sleep as the only natural defense mechanism we have to protect our brain from the toxic beta-amyloid proteins that cause Alzheimer’s, but Bredesen has now shown in a series of human clinical trials that there is a panoply of conditions that must be met in order for a human to develop Alzheimer’s, and that if these conditions are corrected, even in the elderly, dementia can be reversed.
In the abstract of a study published in 2016, Dr. Bredesen explained that 10 patients with mild or subjective-cognitive impairment—what Bredesen describes as essentially the first two of a four-stage disease—underwent 5-24 weeks of the MEND Protocol.
“The therapeutic approach used was programmatic and personalized,” writes Bredesen. “Patients who had had to discontinue work were able to return to work, and those struggling at work were able to improve their performance. The patients, their spouses, and their co-workers all reported clear improvements.”
The time for science jargon must end, Bredesen stressed in a recent interview on Revolution Health Radio, because for patients struggling with Alzheimer’s, and for their families, it is a tragedy that can’t be adequately summarized in the language of a peer-reviewed paper. Anecdotal evidence may be enough to warrant action.
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One of the ten patients, aged 69, was advised that, given his status as an Alzheimer’s disease patient and his clear decline, he should begin to “get his affairs in order.” His business was in the process of being shut down due to his inability to continue work.
He began on the MEND therapeutic program, and after six months, he and his wife and co-workers all noted the improvement. He was able to recognize faces at work unlike before, was able to remember his daily schedule, and was able to function at work without difficulty. He was also noted to be quicker with his responses.
His lifelong ability to add columns of numbers rapidly in his head, which he had lost during his progressive cognitive decline, returned. His wife pointed out that, although he had clearly shown improvement, the more striking effect was that he had been accelerating in his decline over the prior year or two, and this had been completely halted.
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MEND case studies were complied into a paper of 100 little stories detailing people recovering from the neurodegeneration—not slowing, or stopping their cognitive decline, but of altogether reversing it. The 2018 case study is filled with small notations that highlight the significance to the patient and their family.
“Driver’s license returned…follows recipes again…speaking, dressing, dancing, biking, emailing, kayaking all returned…conversing again, dressing himself, calling grandchildren by name, working again.”
One nurse asked, “What happened?!”
From this method came the “Bredesen Protocol,” which recently produced the first clinical trial in history that involved a pre-examination for all the underlying factors that contribute to Alzheimer’s, before setting patients on a personalized, precision medicine approach.
Released on a pre-print server for studies awaiting peer-review, the study presented the hypothesis that what we call Alzheimer’s is a network dysfunction resulting from decades of assaults upon our physiology by the environment.
Toxins like heavy metals, black mold, and air particulates, metabolites and biological detritus like the beta-amyloid targeted by dementia drugs, a lack of neuro-fortification arising from a sedentary lifestyle of the body and mind—all of these contribute to the conditions that give rise to neurodegeneration.
Logically it would follow that correcting this dysfunction would be the first step to targeting Alzheimer’s. And, that is exactly what happened in all 25 of the patients in the study, when they were assisted in addressing all 36 underlying biological dimensions in the Protocol.
While this is merely a news report, and is not to be construed as medical advice, those interested in the Bredesen Protocol can absolutely learn more and even enroll a loved one in the program.
(WATCH Bredesen speak in the TED video below.)
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“’Till death do us part,” obviously doesn’t translate into ancient Mandarin, if this archaeological discovery in China is any indication.
The skeletal remains of a couple locked in a tender embrace bears witness to the fact that in the Northern Wei Period of 4th century China, the expectation of love was that it went, quite literally, beyond the grave.
The lovers lay on their side, arms wrapped around each other’s waist, with the woman’s cheek nestled in the crook of the man’s shoulder.
Barring any phenomenal circumstances, archaeologists believe that the two were placed into their gravesite in this manner, reflecting “the desire for eternal love of the couple, and the respect to their love by people who buried them”.
As the South China Morning Post reports, the scene might conjure the end of the tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet.
With obvious signs of trauma across the male’s body, including an unhealed wound on his right arm, and a wound-less female skeleton, the archaeologists suggest the possibility that she ended her own life in a kind of sacrifice in order to be with her lover in the afterlife.
The discovery was made as part of an excavation that unearthed a cemetery in the city of Dadong, and the orientation of the grave suggests it was used by commoners.
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Another striking detail was the presence of a silver ring on the female’s finger—but the researchers don’t believe it had anything to do with marriage.
They think it was simply the cultures’ tendencies to think of “bringing things” with them, into the afterlife. The lack of gems or engravings meant “it probably didn’t cost very much.”
This Northern Wei period saw Chinese rulers in an abrasive relationship, like sandpaper, with the many nomadic tribes on their borders. The nomads, in this case the Tuobo People, conquered Shanxi, in the Taiyuan Province. Subsequent rulers cultivated Buddhism as a strong central faith, bringing a more concrete concept of the afterlife to the people.
“This funerary practice might have been influenced by the customs from the Western Regions and beyond through the Silk Roads,” write the authors in their corresponding scientific paper on the discovery.
“This discovery is a unique display of the human emotion of love in a burial, offering a rare glimpse of concepts of love, life, death and the afterlife in northern China during a time of intense cultural and ethnic exchange,” said co-author Qu Zhang.
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Quote of the Day: “Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.” – Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
Photo: by Rupert Britton
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A young Irishman has come up with his own “cool science-y method” to solve the microplastic pollution conundrum, winning Google’s international science fair in the process.
By mixing magnetized iron oxide and vegetable oil, he created a kind of liquid magnet that collects microplastics which can then be removed via magnetism, leaving only glistening water behind.
There’s nothing like growing up in a pristine environment to galvanize a person to its defense, and a feature on young Fionn Ferreira from the south of Ireland details how since the age of 12, he has been looking to find a solution for the hard-to-clean microplastics he knew accompanied the growing amount of plastic garbage that tended to wash up on the beaches he frequented during childhood.
“I was at our beach and I saw a rock and it had oil spill residue on it, and stuck to this oil spill residue were plastic particles,” says Fionn in a video presentation for the Plastic Soup Foundation.
“I asked myself why is this happening, and I found out that plastic particles are what we call non-polar, and oil is non-polar too. In chemistry likes attract likes, which means non-polar things attract non-polar things.”
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He heard of something called ferrofluid, which was a kind of magnetic water by combining vegetable oil with magnetized iron oxide powder. In the same video presentation, he shows that oil attracted the microplastics, and the immersion of a magnet sucked up the lot.
“I started out as a lonely inventor,” Ferreira told the BBC. “After the Google Science Fair, I could all of a sudden speak to scientists—they gave me credit for what I had done. My idea was no longer a toy invented by a child.”
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Indeed after 5,000 tests it was shown that his method could clean 87%-93% of microplastics from the water, despite the fact that the microplastics came from a variety of sources like car tires, plastic bottles, and laundry water.
He demonstrated his method at the 2019 Google Science Fair and won a $50,000 scholarship, which he used to go and study chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Fionn is now trying to fit his method into a device that can span the opening of a home waterpipe, or the pipes at a wastewater plant, allowing the ferrofluid to continuously clean water that moves through it, as well as a different machine that can be mounted on boats.
“He observed and tackled a problem he saw locally which has vast global significance,” Larissa Kelly, Ferreira’s former science teacher at Schull Community College told the BBC. “His invention, based on very simple components, is groundbreaking. It has powerful potential to provide solutions that will contribute to the worldwide effort to remove microplastics from the environment.”
(WATCH the Plastic Soup video for this story below.)
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When a much-loved aunt passes away, how do you pay homage? If you’re one Australian farmer, you involve your sheep in the most moving way.
Farmer Ben Jackson was stuck in lockdown in New South Wales. Unable to make the funeral of his aunty Deb after she lost her battle with cancer in Brisbane, he wanted to convey the impact she’d had on his life.
“Unfortunately, she didn’t make it,” Jackson said, according to the Guardian. “At those times of grief, you feel really helpless, you don’t know what to do, what to say.
Then, while out feeding his pregnant sheep some extra food, an idea came to him. He’d seen before that if he drew shapes in the land, the sheep would gather.
It took a few attempts, but the final resulting footage, taken by drone, is absolutely beautiful.
Ben and a mob of singles organised a tribute to his Aunty pic.twitter.com/R33SuN6YoK
— James Jackson (@guyrajack) August 24, 2021
“It was certainly something that she would have loved and absolutely cherished,” said Jackson.
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With the short film set to Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, you genuinely might want to get the tissues ready before pressing play on this one.
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The Chesapeake Bay has, despite massive setbacks, continued to return to something resembling a healthy estuarine ecosystem, in no small part because of the dedicated scientists who study it.
As the most extensively studied estuary on Earth, the Chesapeake’s 11,000 miles of coastline play host to a familiar story of competition between short-term economic interests, and long-term ecological ones.
There may have been a time when the two most important species, oysters and seagrass, would have ceased to exist if pollution continued as it had done, but regulation reduced the dead-zones and brought fish, oysters, and seagrass back into the bay.
Now teams of scientists are working to speed the recovery of these keystone species, often by hand, reasoning that as ecosystem engineers, oysters and seagrass can begin to do the scientists’ work for them if they can only propagate to the required numbers.
As the principal polluting agents were nutrient runoff from farms in the surrounding states, and pollutants flowing in from the cities, regulating storm drains and incentivizing farmers to reduce runoff resulted in a 316% increase in seagrass beds between 1984 and 2015.
Oysters, too, are recovering through the diligent work of people like Romuald Lipcius, professor of fisheries science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. He’s worked in the Bay for over 16 years—helping oysters recover, live longer, and perform more of their all-important filter feeding.
Using fossil oyster shells, safe artificial substrate, or concrete “oyster castles,” Lipcius and his colleagues are creating safe and optimal habitat for them to grow, and are seeing three-dimensional oyster beds as a result.
In Baines Creek, a tributary of the Elizabeth River in Virginia, oysters are reaching the age of five—once thought impossible due to the diseases that pollution made so commonplace in the Bay.
“All these oysters peeking above the water is a beautiful sight,” said professor of geology Rowan Lockwood at William & Mary College. “It is a glimpse of what the Bay was like 6,000 years ago.”
In the Rappahannock River, also in Virginia, a retired Naval officer had used oyster castles to cultivate millions of oysters that regularly reached the age of seven. Between five and seven is when the fecundity of oysters is highest, and they release the most larva.
Out in the Bay, his continued interest in restoring the oyster unveiled some “relict reefs” that had survived from pre-colonial times.
“The relict reefs and artificial reefs are telling us without a doubt that oyster restoration can succeed,” says Lipcius.
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“I have always believed that we know how to restore the oysters; we are just choosing not to,” adds Lockwood.
Oysters aren’t the only species that are getting a helping hand. In 2018, after the prolific rise of seagrass acreage in the Bay, record rainfall swept enormous quantities of sediment down off the surrounding farms. The nitrogen and phosphorus was lapped up by algae blooms which blocked the sun from reaching the seagrass, and as a result 38% of the eelgrass species was lost.
“Seagrass is one of the key foundation habitats in the Chesapeake Bay, and in shallow coastal marine systems worldwide,” says Chris Patrick, also at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. “It anchors the sediment, it clears the water, it allows small particles to drift down and become entrained.”
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Patrick and his team are looking to speed up the process of seagrass recovery by manually planting seagrass seeds, and harvesting the seed bearing shoots of two different species, eelgrass and widgeon grass, in May.
Filtering the sediment out of the seeds, they take the finest quality seeds and plant them in autumn. Compared to last year, it’s Patrick’s estimate that his planting operations will result in four times as much grass next year.
Patrick and Lipcius work hard for small gains, but fortunately for them the species they’re working to save are better at cleaning and protecting the Bay than even the most die-hard marine biologists, and for each blade of eelgrass or each happy oyster they add to the Chesapeake, they add one more dedicated worker to the project of restoring the Bay to its glorious and bountiful heritage.
(WATCH the PNAS video about this story below.)
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Singing lullabies can not only improve the health of premature babies during intensive care but can lift their anxious family too, according to new research.
Gentle music therapy slows down the heart rate of prematurely delivered infants—and also helps them to feed and sleep better, say scientists.
New research into live music helping new mothers and family members has shown rhythmic strings or humming helps with therapeutic or care procedures.
While playing sad songs may seem to be the antithesis of what scared parents may need at a time when their baby is in the intensive care unit, medical staff have said the impact of these songs were positive.
It is thought playing songs about death, heartbreak, or other difficult times helps parents process their feelings and a sign of life from outside the hospital, too.
Taru Koivisto, a doctoral student at UniArts Helsinki, said she worked with other professional musicians in hospitals and saw the playing of live instruments helped both mother and baby with healing—physically and mentally.
She said, “A moment of music can create an intimate atmosphere where the parents can forget about treatments, tubes, and machines and put their entire focus on their baby and truly see them.
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“For the parents, music was a sign of life from outside of the hospital and helped them understand that life will carry on even in hard times,” Koivisto says.
When a family’s premature infant goes into intensive care, their life may be changed permanently.
Ms Koivisto added, “Music moments were described as a break that allowed the whole family to metaphorically travel to another space or place.
“A shared musical journey together may have helped the family members create a new narrative for their life.
“In one of the example situations, a mother of a baby asked her own mother, the grandmother of the baby, whether the song she chose was too emotional for her.
“The grandmother said ‘no’. When they sang the song together, the grandmother started crying, but the mother of the child was content in her own way.”
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Other live therapeutic studies have shown gentle music therapy like singing lullabies can influence cardiac and respiratory function in newborns.
Previous research found babies who receive this kind of therapy leave the hospital sooner.
The findings were published in the journal Expanding Professionalism in Music and Higher Music Education.
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Reprinted with permission from World at Large, a news website of nature, politics, science, health, and travel.
The widest, and perhaps oldest single coral in the Great Barrier Reef has been discovered—and it’s in excellent health.
Those are the findings of a new paper published in Nature which reported the discovery of Muga dhambi, or “big coral” in the language of the Manbarra people, the traditional custodians of the Palm Islands, off of which the research team found the coral.
Discovered near Goolboodi (Orpheus Island) in March 2021, the hemispherical Muga dhambi measured 5.3 meters tall (17 feet) and 10.4 meters wide (34 feet), making it the widest and sixth-tallest coral in the 2,900 reefs that make up the barrier system.
“We were running a citizen science workshop… and were interested in exploring the North Coast of Goolbodhi which is a very remote area often restricted by weather,” Kaillash Cook, part of the workshop team and co-author of the new paper, told World at Large in an email.
“It was here Dr. Adam Smith found this breathtaking coral and instantly assigned people to take measurements, surveys, and coordinates for the coral.”
Belonging to the genus Porites, Muga dhambi is from one of 16 common coral species that form some of the largest and most important building blocks of nearshore corals, report Adam Smith and the rest of the team behind the research.
Nevertheless, after consultation with tribal elders, it was determined that the coral was completely unknown by the Manbarra people, who were asked to give it a name, being that it resided in their sea-country.
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Other enormous Porites have been found in the American Samoa, in the reef around the Green Island off the coast of Taiwan, and Sesoko Island, Okinawa.
Based on yearly growth models, Muga dhambi was estimated at between 421 and 438 years old, an astonishing age to live to amid an ecosystem that’s described as a canary in a coal mine for climate change.
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“For shallow water corals, 438 year-old corals are very hard to come by,” cook admitted. “Australian Institute of Marine Sciences has investigated 328 colonies of massive Porites corals on the Great Barrier Reef and the oldest they have found is 436 years old.”
“While the age is currently an estimate based on measurements of other corals we can safely say that Muga dhambi is one of the oldest structures on the Great Barrier Reef,” said Cook.
“After a torrid few years, the 2020-2021 long-term monitoring program of the Great Barrier Reef has found that while COVID ran rampant above, the reef’s own pandemic, coral bleaching, was hardly noticeable, and hard coral cover increased across all three regions of the reef over the last year.
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A review of the environmental events that have occurred in the past 450 years indicates that Muga dhambi may have survived up to 80 major cyclones and centuries of exposure to invasive species, perhaps 100 coral bleaching events, low tides and human activity.
The researchers report that Muga dhambi is in very good health with 70% consisting of live coral, the rest being covered with the green boring sponge, Cliona viridis, turf algae, and green algae.
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“We found that about 30% of the colony was dead which is a completely natural and healthy occurrence as it supported the growth of turf algae, turtle weed, and sponge which all play important roles in the ecosystem,” said Cook. “This diversity of benthos meant that lots of fish were attracted to hide in the coral structure, feed off the turf algae and turn Muga dhambi into a thriving microecosystem.”
“This field note provides important geospatial, environmental, and cultural information of a rare coral that can be monitored, appreciated, potentially restored and hopefully inspire future generations to care more for our reefs and culture,” write the authors proudly in the study.
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Quote of the Day: “Not what happens to you but how you accept it is of paramount importance.” – Sri Chinmoy (on the anniversary of his birth)
Photo: by Marcos Paulo Prado
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
This year’s American James Dyson Award winner, Gabe Tavas, takes on deforestation with his invention, Pyrus. His mission is simple: Make wood without cutting down trees.
By embracing a balance between nature and design, Gabe found a way to use bacterial cellulose—the main component of wood—to form an alternative material which imitates exotic woods found in the Amazon Rainforest.
Gabe claims his ambition for creating global change came from what he calls the “immigrant influence.”
His mother, now an immigration attorney, moved to the United States from Cuba as a small child and his father from the Philippines at age 17.
“I began considering entrepreneurship as a teenager and felt an urgency around solving global issues in sustainability,” Gabe says. Born and raised in Chicago, Gabe yearned for more time spent in nature and found his escape at the Saint Paul Woods in Morton Grove, IL.
“Growing up in the city, you don’t have many expressions of nature which can be stressful. Forests provide an escape. It’s my favorite place to meditate, and the thought of losing that because we were too short-sided pains me from a visceral level.”
Every piece of wood has two essential ingredients: Cellulose, which provides its basic shape and framework, and Lignin, which acts as a glue for all the other components. Some kombucha companies use microorganisms that produce coherent sheets of cellulose on top of the liquid.
To make Pyrus, these sheets of cellulose are blended to an even consistency and then embedded into a gel. As the gel dries, it hardens and is placed under a mechanical press to form a flat sheet of wood-like material. This material can then be sanded, cut, and coated with resins just like its tree-based counterparts.
While there are several companies creating wood alternative materials, many are using sawdust. Utilizing sawdust still involves the cutting down of trees and damaging the natural ecosystem, but it also poses serious health risks to those overexposed to it.
Sawdust is an irritant that can affect your eyes, nose, and throat, and in long-term exposures can even cause cancer.
With Pyrus, not a single tree is cut down and no dangerous oils are being used. Pyrus uses kombucha waste, which is both environmentally friendly and sustainably created, to create a cellulose making wood in a sustainable fashion. The end goal of Pyrus is to replace expensive and fancy wood products which are currently huge drivers of deforestation.
Over the past year, Gabe has produced 74 Pyrus wood samples in a variety of colors and textures. Pyrus has been tested on several pieces of equipment commonly found in woodworking shops and makerspaces, all with the guidance and consistently positive feedback of professional woodworkers. Maintaining the versatility of wood, Pyrus can be made into jewelery, guitar picks, and coasters.
Winning the national leg of the James Dyson Award will inject $2,600 into Gabe’s project. He plans to use the prize money to expand his production facilities and develop 3D printing processes. Ultimately, Gabe wants Pyrus to be made into various environmentally friendly products that meet consumer needs and are commercially viable.
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Three-time James Dyson Award judge and Technology Influencer Sam Sheffer had this to say about the award and this year’s winner:
“I’ve judged the JDA for several years and am always captivated by the inventions these young engineers put forward. The 2021 entries were some of the most competitive I’ve seen. Pyrus stood out because it’s solving a problem we can all relate to with waste from a product that the majority of us consume every day. I’m excited to see all the innovative ways Pyrus will evolve under Gabe’s imaginative and talented leadership.”
Pyrus will progress to the international stage of the James Dyson Award. The International shortlist will be announced on October 13 and the International winners on November 17.
(WATCH the video about this innovation below.)
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A diffuser which “smells like fear” could help keep pests off garden plants, according to a new study.
The special odor is made up of compounds produced by ladybugs, a natural predator of plant-eating insects which ravage gardens and crops.
Pests which catch a whiff of the stuff will change their behavior, thinking predators are nearby.
Plant-eating insects represent a major threat for gardeners and farmers’ crops around the world, especially as they can carry diseases and are becoming increasingly resistant to traditional pesticides.
Now, researchers at Pennsylvania State University have come up with a sweet-smelling solution.
Study author Dr Sara Hermann said, “It is not uncommon to use our senses to avoid risky situations. If a building was on fire, we as humans could use our senses of sight or smell to detect the threat.
“There is evidence for such behavioral responses to risk across taxa that suggest prey organisms can detect predation threats, but the mechanisms for detection aren’t very well understood, especially with insects.”
Aphids are highly destructive, and their ability to transmit plant diseases make them a persistent problem for growers.
They also happen to be a favorite food of ladybugs, which gardeners and farmers welcome as a kind of natural pest-control. That is because aphids and other plant-eating insects will steer clear of fields if they can smell predators nearby, the researchers found.
Smells given off by ladybugs signal aphids to stop reproducing as much and grow larger wings, both behaviors seen to avoid threats.
The research team identified and extracted the ladybugs’ “volatile odour” using gas chromatography, a technique which separates the different components of a smell.
Aphids were then exposed to each component individually to see which one got the biggest reaction.
The strength of their response was based on the signal picked up by an electroantennogram machine, which is specifically designed to test insects’ reactions to odors.
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Of the many compounds emitted by ladybugs, the strongest response was to a class of chemical compounds known as methoxypyrazines.
Specifically these included isopropyl methoxypyrazine, isobutyl methoxypyrazine, and sec-butyl methoxypyrazine.
A special odor blend, which can be placed in an essential oil diffuser to spread the scent over time across a garden or field, was then created.
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According to a statement, the researchers are now hoping to test their diffusers outdoors to see whether they produce the same results.
They are also looking to measure the diffusers’ dispersal area and see whether they could be applied to other pests, predators, and crops.
Study co-author Dr Jessica Kansman added: “Insects rely on olfactory cues to find food, mates, and places to live, so this is a great opportunity to investigate how to use these smells to manipulate their behaviour.”
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A self-proclaimed hermit who became unintentionally famous after losing his home to a fire is about to get new digs thanks to generous donations to a GoFundMe campaign—and one whopping big check from a philanthropist.
81-year-old ‘River Dave’, whose real name is David Lidstone, had been living off-the-grid in the same secluded New Hampshire location for almost three decades. He didn’t own the property where he’d built his modest A-frame cabin on the banks of the Merrimack River, but says he had permission from the site’s previous owner to stay there.
Citing environmental and zoning violations, the current owner, however, took steps to have him removed. On the same day that Lidstone appeared in court charged with civil contempt for refusing to vacate, his cabin burnt to the ground.
While the cause was most likely accidental rather than arson, the result remained the same. River Dave—along with his cats and his chickens—was out of a home.
Estranged from his wife and family, for most of his 27-year tenure on the 73-acre plot of timberland, Lidstone kept to himself. He did, however, occasionally befriend a passing kayaker or boater, and those ties proved strong enough to form an unexpected lifeline.
Prior to the legal contretemps, longtime friend Jodie Gedeon hoped the situation between the landowner and Lidstone would come to a peaceful resolution. The owner’s lawyers thought otherwise, but after the fire, the point became moot.
With Lidstone now homeless, Gedeon and friend Sharon Copello quickly organized a GoFundMe page to help River Dave get back on his feet. As word of his plight spread, donations and offers of places to stay began to roll in.
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While the response was staggering and the initial $15,000 funding goal was quickly met, no one could have predicted what came next.
On August 11, New Hampshire resident and billionaire CEO of Palantir Technologies Alexander Karp reached out to Lidstone and wrote him a personal check to the tune of $180,000 for living and future expenses.
“I hope each of you are sitting down and have a tissue or two next to you as what I am going to share is part of the happy ending to come and I can’t imagine a dry eye anywhere after you read this,” Gedeon posted to her Facebook page of the generous donation.
Lidstone needed a few hankies himself.
“How can I express myself and my gratitude towards something like that? I start to tear up whenever I think about it,” Lidstone told the Concord Monitor. “For an old logger who always had to work, for anyone to give you that type of money, it’s incredibly difficult for me to get my head around.”
The monies raised for River Dave are being put into a trust for him. For reasons of privacy, he’ll be staying at an undisclosed location over the winter, and sometime next year, at a building site as yet to be named, construction for his new home will begin.
“I feel about as good as I ever have in my life,” a grateful Lidstone told AP, although admitted the recent outpouring of kindness and support has been something of a revelation to him. “Maybe the things I’ve been trying to avoid are the things that I really need in life… I grew up never being hugged or kissed, or [having] any close contact…
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“I had somebody ask me once, about my wife: ‘Did you really love her?’ And the question kind of shocked me for a second. [I’d] never loved anybody in my life. And I shocked myself because I hadn’t realized that. And that’s why I was a hermit. Now I can see love being expressed that I never had before.”
Meanwhile, as the GoFundMe campaign winds down at the end of August, Gedeon hopes to keep paying the love forward.
“We feel we can help Dave build a good life now and will forever be thankful,” she posted. “We also know how many other charities and people are in need of help. At the end of the month, we’re asking that the spotlight be passed on to others to bring awareness and opportunities to spread the love and continue to be the change!
“The world is a better place with each of you in it and we simply can’t thank you enough.”
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The winners of the 2021 iPhone Photography Awards have been unveiled, and they’re truly stunning.
Founded in 2007, IPPAWARDS has been celebrating the creativity of iPhone photographers since the phone first began to inspire, excite, and engage users worldwide.
Every year since then, the very best shots among thousands of images submitted get chosen.
Congratulations to all the winners and their astute observations, sometimes moving and subtle, other times witty and surprising… always insightful. Here are GNN’s favorites from 2021.
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Manchester City are the reigning champions of the English Premier League, and now they’re championing the cause of landfill waste by offering edible coffee and tea cups at their 55,000 seater Etihad Stadium.
After suffering a reversal at the hands of London’s Tottenham Hotspur F.C. on the opening weekend, seven days later they played their first home match of the season, drumming Norwich City 5-0 while producing 0 pounds of disposable hot drinks cups—a plague in a tea/coffee loving country where a staggering 2.5 billion disposable cups are used every year.
“For the first time on Campus, an ‘edible coffee cup’ will also be introduced. This fantastic and innovative solution provides an amazing solution to waste, just eat your cup,” reads a statement from the Etihad Stadium.
The cup is made by a Scottish startup called BioBite, and is essentially a 100-calorie vegan biscuit in the shape of a cup. Made with wafer in much the same way as an ice cream cone, the cup will stay leak-proof for 12 hours, and even more amazingly, crunchy for a full 45 minutes, which for the American readers is exactly and always one-half the duration of a ‘football’ match.
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According to the company’s website, the cup is fully recyclable, but the taste of coffee-soaked wafer cup is actually delectable. The football club is also offering fully recyclable beer cups made of recycled paper and cardboard.
There are several problems with making a fully recyclable paper takeaway hot drinks cup, and it’s why there still isn’t one today in the largest beverage chains.
The combination of a heatproof inner lining and paper together make the cups very tricky to recycle, as the two very different materials must be separated.
Edible cups truly might be the best solution, provided firms like BioBite can bring the cost-per-unit down. 240 of their biscuit cups cost $111 before VAT, about 14 cents more than what Starbucks pays for the cup, the plastic lid, and the wood stirrer.
Other firms are closer to the mark, like Bulgarian edible coffee cup maker Cupffee, who make a 40 cent (including taxes) wafer cup with about the same properties as BioBites. For eco-conscious consumers, the lack of lid is not an issue provided they enjoy the coffee on foot. It’s well-suited to European city centers made for walking about, but rather inconvenient in most of America, set up as the country is for driving.
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Another limiting factor is that a wafer is not exactly the fuel of a healthy society.
If there were a company that could make the wafers out of some kind of vegetable fiber, something many western diets are nutritionally deficient in, then you’re talking about a real revolution.
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A pesticide that appears to damage the health of children and farm workers has been banned from future use in the U.S. by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after facing a slew of lawsuits.
Sprayed on apples, strawberries, citrus fruit, corn, alfalfa, grapes, cotton, almonds, walnuts, and broccoli since 1965, the organophosphate pesticide called chlorpyrifos has been linked to intellectual impairment, loss of working memory, and reduced IQ in children, as well as damage to the prenatal development of infants’ brains. It also impacts the health of farm workers.
In 2020, California, a major agriculture state, banned chlorpyrifos, but the EPA ruled that there was not enough evidence to do the same federally—until legal challenges resulted in a court judge ruling the onus was on the EPA to present indisputable proof that the pesticide did not cause harm in children.
As it could not do so, as of August 20th the agency banned producers from using chlorpyrifos.
The environmental-focused organization Earthjustice says it will continue its quest to ban all organophosphate pesticides from farms, even if they are used in non-food applications. One reason is because the spraying of the toxin is airborne and can drift to non-intended targets.
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For now, “Chlorpyrifos will finally be out of our fruits and vegetables,” said Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice. “Children will no longer be eating food tainted with a pesticide that causes intellectual learning disabilities,”
RELATED: Indian Region Just Won Top UN Prize for Being World’s First 100% Organic State With 66,000 Farmers
In 2017, more than half of the 10.4 million pounds of organophosphate pesticides sprayed on American soils were chlorpyrifos, meaning the ban will lead to the eventually decontamination of half of the total chemical burden—a huge victory for millions.
– Featured image: Lite-Trac, CC license
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Quote of the Day: “Don’t pretend you’re less powerful and beautiful than you are… Don’t act as if your unique genius is nothing special.” – Rob Brezsny
Photo: by Frank Uyt den Bogaard
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
These amazing pictures showing the movement of a diving kingfisher are the result of a photographer’s two-year wait for the perfect photo.
47-year-old Vince Burton used a slow shutter speed to capture the trail of the bird as it plunged into a pond at up to 25mph (40kmh).
The torpedo-like blue kingfisher can be seen hurtling beak-first towards the water as it hunts for fish to feed its young chicks near Norwich in Norfolk.
Accountant Vince used the latest photographic techniques to reduce his shutter speed and darken the background, capturing a striking image of the kingfisher’s dive without using photoshop.
He said: “I was working with this farmland site for four years. It’s taken me the best part of two years to get this shot.”
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“Normally one kingfisher holds the territory for a year and then welcomes a partner in from a neighboring territory.
“These images were taken while the kingfishers were raising their brood, which fledged a month later.”
Here at GNN, we’re so glad Vince got his perfect shots.
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There may be no force more powerful than maternal instinct. An Oklahoma mom, who’s come to think of some gifted Afghan girls as adopted daughters, has moved heaven and earth to help get the teens to safety since Taliban extremists retook Afghanistan.
Harvard graduate Allyson Reneau has 11 kids of her own, but there was still plenty of room in her heart for the members of Afghanistan’s all-girl robotics team, a.k.a. “the Afghan Dreamers.”
Reneau and the tight-knit group bonded back in 2019 when they met at a Washington D.C.-based Humans to Mars summit. (Having nine biological daughters probably helped.)
In the weeks building up to the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Reneau became increasingly concerned for the girls’ welfare. Unable to shake the fear the Dreamers were in imminent danger, Reneau became frustrated by the lack of cooperation at home in the U.S. to secure their safety.
Rather than wait, she decided to head to the sanctuary country of Qatar, hoping to use the connections she had there to help expedite a rescue. In conjunction with the Dreamers’ parent organization Digital Citizen Fund (DCF), and the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Reneau was able to pull some strings and get the exit process rolling.
Soon enough, 10 robotics team members between the ages of 16 and 18 were boarded on a commercial flight. (Some members of the team and the girls’ families have yet to leave Kabul. Efforts to secure their relocation are ongoing.)
After receiving word from the girls to say they’d made it out of Kabul, Reneau was overcome with emotion.
MORE: The Internet Raises $6 Million in One Day to Rescue Afghans Targeted By Taliban
“I got a text from one of the girls that just said: ‘We did it.’ All the emotion from two weeks of work and running into a wall constantly, and burying your feelings, and bearing your feelings for the girls, it just hit me all at once,” Reneau told Business Insider.
DCF board member Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown says that while it took the combined efforts of several entities to ensure the girls’ release, she credits their own grit and self-determination as a key factor in the successful outcome.
“Ultimately the girls ‘rescued’ themselves,” Brown told NBC News. “If it were not for their hard work and courage to pursue an education, which brought them in contact with the world, they would still be trapped. We need to continue to support them and others like them.”
Since arriving in Qatar, the girls have been inundated with numerous scholarships from several prestigious U.S. universities, and Reneau is confident they will make the most of those opportunities.
“For the first time in their life, I really believe they have the freedom to choose and to be the architects of their own destiny and their own future,” Reneau told Insider. “It’s the freeing feeling to me to know that they will be able to go somewhere and get educated wherever they want.”
And isn’t that what every loving mom wants for her kids?
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