Quote of the Day: “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal.” – Rumi
Photo: by Ian Britton, CC license
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?
A mom’s photo was amusingly photobombed by a bemused stingray—pulling the exact same face as her baby daughter.
41-year-old Wendy Armstrong regularly takes her young daughters, two-year-old Aurora and six-month-old Daisy, for a day out to the Lake District Coast Aquarium in England.
During one visit, Wendy noticed a stingray was taking a particular interest in Daisy… and that both were pulling the same forlorn facial expression.
Nurse Wendy and her power plant worker husband, Mike Armstrong, said Daisy has been a very serious baby.
The mom-of-two from Workington in Cumbria said, “It is definitely up there as one of our favourite pictures that we have of our kids.
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“I had my phone out, and when I saw they were both pulling the same miserable facial expression I burst out laughing and took a photo. Thankfully Daisy is much happier now!”
Thanks for bringing a big smile to so many faces, Daisy.
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Black cats may have the reputation for being bad luck, but don’t tell that to the owner of one ebony feline who helped save her life.
Piran the kitty lives with his cat mom in a rural area of Cornwall, England. When the 83-year-old Bodmin woman went missing, neighbors launched a search party, scouring the nearby countryside, but she was nowhere to be found—until searchers caught sight of an agitated Piran, mewing loudly by a cornfield gate.
“The cat is very attached to her, and he was going back and forth in the gateway and meowing, so I decided to go and search the maize field,” searcher Tamar Longmuir told Sky News.
With the crop standing seven feet tall, the going was difficult. Keeping to the perimeter, Longmuir skirted the field, calling out her neighbor’s name. She’d reached the bottom of the field when she finally heard a faint response.
To Longmuir’s dismay, she realized the elderly woman had taken a tumble down a steep, 70-foot ravine, and after passing through some barbed wire, had finally come to rest in a stream.
Although Longmuir was able to make her way down to assess the situation, and thankfully, learned her neighbor lady had sustained no major injuries, it’s believed the octogenarian had been stuck there for several hours.
This afternoon Officers from Bodmin were tasked to conduct a search for a missing 83 year old female.
— Bodmin Police (@BodminPolice) August 14, 2021
The female was located by a member of the public who had spotted the female’s cat, meowing in the corner of a large maize field near to her home address. 1/3#onefamily pic.twitter.com/VYrwaAAAz8
Longmuir had to climb back up the ravine to get cell phone service, but she was able to contact emergency crews who soon arrived to extricate the stranded senior from the ravine.
After a concerted two-hour effort by almost 25 emergency personnel from the police, fire department, and air and water rescue services, the woman was airlifted to a nearby hospital for treatment.
“Whilst the lady concerned is still currently receiving care, she is in good spirits and is being well looked after,” Bodmin Police said in a Facebook post. “Piran the cat saved the day!”
Indeed, had Piran not sounded the alarm, the outcome might have been vastly different.
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“Without the cat waiting at the gate to that field, it could have been hours later that I or anyone else would have checked in there,” Longmuir told Sky News.
Grateful for Piran’s persistent vocal intervention in aid of his human, neighbors are pitching in to take care of her kitty while she recuperates.
In America, August 17th marks National Black Cat Appreciation Day, but considering Piran’s recent heroic deeds, we think an international show of appreciation for a tale that begins and ends with the cat’s meow would be just about “purrfect.”
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While youth is often a time of great promise and achievement, a life well lived can also be filled with any number of next chapters and second—or even third—acts that add depth, nuance, and meaning to our stories.
At 65 years old, Somerset native Carole-Ann Warburton experienced a plot twist that led to the fulfillment of a long-cherished dream she’d never even spoken of aloud.
After a debilitating illness incapacitated her, Warburton was left with the question of what to do going forward. During her convalescence, her daughter brought around some real estate listings for the sort of homes in which she thought her mum might best spend her golden years. Coincidentally, amongst the notices was an offering for a small barbershop with an above-stairs apartment.
For Warburton, although she admits “the place was awful,” it was love at first sight—and the perfect opportunity to do something she’d yearned to do for almost as long as she could remember—work in a bookshop.
Less than three months after coming to her decision, Warburton had handed in her retirement notice, sold her house, bought the store, and—using a personal inventory totaling between 8,000 to 9,000 titles—she launched her new venture, The Book Rest.
Warburton has been an avid book collector since she was a child. As an adult, she married a man with a similar avocation. The four-bedroom home she and her ex-husband shared with their children (much to their dismay) was “chock-a-block” with books.
Warburton admits learning to let go of her beloved tomes was a bit of an adjustment, but one she feels the better for making.
“It still feels, when a special book goes out, like a bit of a loss—as if some little part of me has been taken away,” she said in an interview with The Guardian. “And then I make common sense come back to me and say, ‘Let someone else learn from it.’ It’s a growing up, if you like, an acceptance.”
A decade on, The Book Rest recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Although the pandemic has slowed foot traffic, since Warburton’s driving motive isn’t monetary profit, but rather, something of a deeper, more idiosyncratic personal value, she has no plans to close up shop.
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Having achieved her own dream, Warburton sees every day in the bookstore as an opportunity to help others realize theirs as well.
“All the dreams are in the books,” she told The Guardian. “They are all there waiting to be picked up… Someone can walk in tomorrow and say, ‘I have been looking for that for an awfully long time!”
And as gatekeeper to her own small universe of literary wonders, Warburton says she plans to stay around as long as she can to ensure that they do.
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A smooth pebble, fired in a kiln from the ashes of a dearly departed, is the latest way Americans can choose to carry on the memory of a loved one.
Parting Stone is a startup looking to give people both a personal and portable way to remember someone they’ve lost, with one person’s ashes capable of producing a collection of stones.
As GNN has reported before, Americans as a whole don’t have the best relationship with death. While the cost of traditional casket burial funerals is reaching unsustainable levels, a sea of new companies are rushing in to help people find better, cheaper solutions.
Some have leaned towards the green funeral movement, with composting caskets made of mushrooms, or forest conservation funded by scattering ashes at the base of a tree. Others have moved into personalized ash-crafting, such as pressing a loved one into a vinyl record, a beautiful glass sculpture, or even an artificial diamond.
Parting Stone is a mixture of the two, sparing soils from the near-ammonia levels of pH found in human ashes, while also allowing people to quite discretely carry a small memory of the departed with them.
“It’s a canvas for the experience, not the experience itself,” explains founder Justin Crowe to Fast Company.
The ashes are milled into a really fine powder and mixed with water to create a clay-like base. This is placed into a kiln and fired into the stone which is then polished. Without knowing exactly why, the stones tend to vary in color, which Crowe hypothesizes could be due to physiological differences between the deceased, such as diet composition or medications.
Regardless, they can appear white, brown, faintly blueish-grey or green, lavender, or with a variety of speckled patterns. Weighing between 4-8 pounds, a family will typically get anywhere from 40-60 stones at the cost of $675 for a human and $300 for a pet.
Crowe explains that he came up with the idea after losing his grandfather in 2014, and wanted a better experience with his remains, which felt void of spirit, even in a decorative urn.
Of course, as Crowe points out, ashes usually come in a plastic bag before an urn is chosen. “We don’t accept this experience in any other part of modern life. Why are we accepting it for people we love?” he said.
He remembers how people felt around the stones at a business conference, when more than 200 people asked to hold them. Collecting small, beautiful or fascinating stones is something many of us do, especially in natural places like a waterfall or in a desert wash where interesting geological processes occur.
Holding a smooth stone that fits nicely in one’s palm, knowing it contains a piece of something you love, speaks to that very primal desire.
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Quote of the Day: “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.” – Albert Schweitzer
Photo: by Jason D
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?
There’s plenty a humorous tale to prove the adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” but when one Ohio family accidentally threw their grandma’s treasure into the trash, it was no laughing matter.
Unbeknownst to her relatives, the canny granny had stashed $25,000 in cold hard cash in her freezer. While tidying up the kitchen, her erstwhile kinfolk accidentally tossed out the tidy sum along with the outdated frozen veggies.
It was only after the fact that the elderly woman remembered to warn her family not to misplace the envelope with the money in it, but by then, it was too late. The garbage had already been collected and her nest egg was on its way to the city landfill.
Frantic, the family reached out to Republic Solid Waste Services to see if there was any way their grandma’s missing savings could be retrieved.
It would all depend, they learned, on whether or not the truck had already arrived at the landfill. Had the truck offloaded at the dumpsite, it would have been a lost cause.
“The bulldozers… immediately start smoothing it out, pushing it into the hill, dropping dirt on it and start covering up the process of the landfill,” Republic operations supervisor Gary Capan told Cleveland’s ABC News-5. “…We do that in a nonstop process [so] if it got dropped there, there’s no finding it anymore.”
Luckily, Capan was able to track down the driver who had yet to make the drop-off. The truck was diverted to a nearby recycling center where its six-ton cargo of garbage was disgorged on the tarmac, and a crew of 10 stalwart workers immediately began sifting through the mountain of refuse in search of the buried booty.
And find it they did—in record time.
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“[I] couldn’t believe it took 10 minutes and actually, I said, ‘Man, it looks just like that,’ pulled it off, opened it up and there was the package inside with the money. They (the family) were so happy, they were tearing up,” Dan Schoewe, operations manager at the recycling center told News-5. “It’s rare that we can find something for somebody, so this is like the biggest one I’ve seen in 30 years.”
While we’re glad this story has a happy ending, a word of warning to the well-meaning de-clutters of the world: elderly people often have a habit of squirreling money and other valuables away in the oddest places, so if helping clear out a loved one’s residence is on your to-do list, be sure to proceed with caution.
Since “greens” from the U.S. Mint generally have no expiration date, it would be a sin to throw them out.
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An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice.
Scientists gathered unprecedented details of its life through analysis of a 17,000-year-old fossil from the University of Alaska Museum of the North. By generating and studying isotopic data in the mammoth’s tusk, they were able to match its movements and diet with isotopic maps of the region.
Few details have been known about the lives and movements of woolly mammoths, and the study offers the first evidence that they traveled vast distances. An outline of the mammoth’s life is detailed in the new issue of the journal Science.
“It’s not clear-cut if it was a seasonal migrator, but it covered some serious ground,” said University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Matthew Wooller, senior and co-lead author of the paper. “It visited many parts of Alaska at some point during its lifetime, which is pretty amazing when you think about how big that area is.”
Researchers at the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility, where Wooller is director, split the 6-foot tusk lengthwise and generated about 400,000 microscopic data points using a laser and other techniques.
The detailed isotope analyses they made are possible because of the way that mammoth tusks grew. Mammoths steadily added new layers on a daily basis throughout their lives. When the tusk was split lengthwise for sampling, these growth bands looked like stacked ice cream cones, offering a chronological record of an entire mammoth’s life.
“From the moment they’re born until the day they die, they’ve got a diary and it’s written in their tusks,” said Pat Druckenmiller, a paleontologist and director of the UA Museum of the North, in a statement. “Mother Nature doesn’t usually offer up such convenient and lifelong records of an individual’s life.”
Scientists knew that the mammoth died on Alaska’s North Slope above the Arctic Circle, where its remains were excavated by a team that included UAF’s Dan Mann and Pam Groves, who are among the co-authors of the study.
Researchers pieced together the mammoth’s journey up to that point by analyzing isotopic signatures in its tusk from the elements strontium and oxygen, which were matched with maps predicting isotope variations across Alaska. Researchers created the maps by analyzing the teeth of hundreds of small rodents from across Alaska held in the museum’s collections. The animals travel relatively small distances during their lifetimes and represent local isotope signals.
Using that local dataset, they mapped isotope variation across Alaska, providing a baseline to trace the mammoth movements. After taking geographic barriers into account and the average distance it traveled each week, researchers used a novel spatial modeling approach to chart the likely routes the animal took during its life.
Ancient DNA preserved in the mammoth’s remains allowed the team to identify it as a male that was related to the last group of its species living in mainland Alaska. Those details provided more insight into the animal’s life and behavior, said Beth Shapiro, who led the DNA component of the study.
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For example, an abrupt shift in its isotopic signature, ecology and movement at about age 15 probably coincided with the mammoth being kicked out of its herd, mirroring a pattern seen in some modern-day male elephants.
“Knowing that he was male provided a better biological context in which we could interpret the isotopic data,” said Shapiro, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Isotopes also offered a clue about what led to the animal’s demise. Nitrogen isotopes spiked during the final winter of its life, a signal that can be a hallmark of starvation in mammals.
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“It’s just amazing what we were able to see and do with this data,” said co-lead author Clement Bataille, a researcher from the University of Ottawa who led the modeling effort in collaboration with Amy Willis at the University of Washington.
Discovering more about the lives of extinct species satisfies more than curiosity, said Wooller, a professor in the UAF Institute of Northern Engineering and College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. Those details could be surprisingly relevant today as many species adapt their movement patterns and ranges with the shifting climate.
“The Arctic is seeing a lot of changes now, and we can use the past to see how the future may play out for species today and in the future,” Wooller said. “Trying to solve this detective story is an example of how our planet and ecosystems react in the face of environmental change.”
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A real-life Soprano went from New Jersey gang member to musical star after videos of him singing to patients at the hospital where he worked went viral.
28-year-old Enrique Rodriquez from Central Jersey, now works as a phlebotomist at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and is widely renowned for his musical talent.
He began posting videos on his TikTok account, which now boasts over 80,000 followers, of him singing and playing the piano for critically ill patients in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit.
He left behind a history of violence and crime to help people who are suffering after turning to religion.
He said of his turnaround: “I found God at an extremely troubling period in my life and he showed himself to me when I needed him most. I know that God wanted me to care for people just as he cared for me, and the hospital was the perfect place to do that.”
It was 2009 when Rodriguez first got involved with gangs after his eldest brother went to prison.
The loss of his brother to the jail system meant that Rodriquez felt disconnected from his loved ones, and he went out searching for what he called “the wrong kind of family.”
He became a ‘blood member’ of a local gang for three years after being misled by the idea of joining a strong brotherhood and making quick and easy money.
He explained: “The gang lifestyle is pure manipulation. They make you feel like they care about you, that they’ve got your back that you’re family; but all they do is use you so they don’t have to get their hands dirty.”
The turning point for Rodriguez came when he hurt the “wrong person” and a rival gang came after his mother.
There were two attempts made on his mother’s life before the aggressors were arrested, and Rodriguez believes it is down to God that his mother is still alive today.
He added: “I have done a lot of bad things and mixed with a lot of bad people.
“I’m just grateful God looked out for me and my family. He has given me the opportunity to start a new life, and music is a huge part of that.”
Rodriguez began working in the hospital in 2012 as a housekeeper in order to get a job there as quickly as possible.
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A year later, he completed training to become a patient carer in the ICU, and now works as a phlebotomist ferrying COVID-19 and blood samples from different laboratories.
He has worked at the hospital for nine years now, and during his career, he discovered that he possessed a raw musical talent.
Unable to read sheet music, Rodriguez taught himself to play both the piano and the guitar, and practiced by playing in front of several patients on the ward.
Sadly, Barbara Freud, a cancer patient who was one of Rodriguez’s first listeners, passed away whilst he was on holiday, but he will always remember the musical bond they shared.
He now makes regular visits to patients’ bedsides and uses TikTok to live stream his performances to tens of thousands of viewers.
Rodriquez plans to grow his following by making more videos and spreading love and happiness through his music.
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He said: “I love what I do and I believe my purpose in this world is to help other people.
“When I’m singing to these patients I can feel the connection we have and it’s wonderful.
“There was a time where I was singing to a patient in a coma and he woke up for the first time in weeks.
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“It was a true miracle.”
Next week, Rodriguez will travel to Puerto Rico with his church group to give aid to disadvantaged children, and there’s no doubt his guitar will be making the trip too.
You can enjoy his musical talent on his TikTok channel @thesingingphlebotomist.
(WATCH the SWNS video of Rodriguez singing below.)
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There’s a lot of talk about rewilding in Europe, where so much wild country has been eliminated over the last 1,000 years, but it usually comes from radical farmers, not death metal musician-filmmakers.
That’s exactly who Randal Plunkett is: a living, working testament to the power of humanity to create change for a better future.
In the face of his lifestyle (as a steak-eating body-building, death metalhead) and under the weight of his heritage (as the 21st Baron of Dunsany Castle in Ireland’s County Meath) Randal decided to take action to restore the dwindling number of truly wild spaces on the Emerald Isle by converting his entire 650-hectare (1,600-acre) estate into Ireland’s most ambitious rewilding project.
First installed in Dunsany Castle in 1402, the Plunkett family is one of Ireland’s oldest clans of blue-bloods. A Plunkett was canonized after being executed by the Church of England in the 17th century, and another ancestor, Horace Plunkett, advocated on behalf of rural development and farming innovations during the early 20th century.
“I’ve never been a country bumpkin,” Randall told The Guardian. “I saw it as a burden, a life of servitude.”
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Now though, concerns about the climate crisis and his country’s native ecosystem destruction has led him to turn his estate over to nature, letting grasses grow tall, and animals to run wild—a clean break from his ancestor Horace’s ideas of agriculture.
“The reserve is pretty much left untouched, with natural processes left to reshape the landscape,” Randall, officially ‘Lord Dunsany,’ told the European Rewilding Network (ERN), which he recently joined. “There’s no drainage, and areas of grassland are left to be grazed by wild animals, such as deer.”
“Otters have returned—the first time the species has been seen on the estate in my lifetime. We have pine martens, stoats, hedgehogs, foxes, badgers and barn owls. Red kite and snipe have returned. We have seen a big increase in insects—with a massive surge in butterflies—and we now see many different bat species. Even endangered Irish species such as corncrakes have come back. Nature really is flourishing,” he added.
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With several small streams meandering through what is mostly unforested land, there’s room for natural processes to stretch out and create that marvelous chaos most ecosystems need to make substantial, resilient food webs and habitat.
Lord Dunsany doesn’t have much interest in opening the estate up to much more than small tour groups, but as a filmmaker, he does allow filming crews on to shoot, most recently for his own independent film The Green Sea, named for that most stunning shade of green that covers so much of Ireland, not least of which, his family estate.
Private estates like those owned by historically royal families are often some of Europe’s best places to experiment with rewilding.
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ERN details how places like Bunloit and Glenfeshie Estates in Scotland, and Ken Hill and Knepp Estates elsewhere, are often the only ones which have the large tracks of countryside that aren’t already deeply agricultural necessary to give rewilding a shot.
As GNN reported last year, Knepp is a success story—a broke descendant of lords who couldn’t farm his land anymore turned it into an English wildland safari, creating one of England’s most biodiverse areas and wiping out his debts at the same time.
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“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball,” said Brad Pitt’s character in the film Moneyball—and this story unfolding last week on an Iowa farm is a great example.
For those lucky enough to have watched Kevin Costner’s enduring classic Field of Dreams as a young boy or girl signed up for little league, the sight of Costner and the real-life Yankees and White Sox walking through the corn stalks onto a regulation size baseball diamond to play an actual Major League Baseball game is, well, ‘perfect.’
The first-place Chicago White Sox faced the New York Yankees adjacent to the corn field in Dyersville, where the iconic film was shot—and it was the first MLB league game ever played in Iowa.
Appearing from a stretch of mature corn beyond the warning track in right field, Costner— who has a great baseball arm and threw his own pitches in movies like Bull Durham and Field—led the two teams onto the field in the video below, to rousing applause before throwing the first pitch at the game.
“Build it and they will come,” goes the famous line in the film, and indeed thousands of MLB fans from around the country showed up to watch on this perfect occasion.
Randy Peterson, writing for the Des Moines Register, recapped the thoughts of Yankees manager Aaron Boone after their team lost, 9-8.
“That’s probably the greatest setting for a baseball game that I’ve ever been a part of.”
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One of the fans commented, “I was in attendance and it was by far the best sporting event I ever attended. MLB hit a home run on this!”
“(The) coolest part was, in order to get to the game you had to enter through the corn in center field on the original Field of Dreams field”
“Everything was just so well planned out.”
James Earle Jones starred in the movie as author Terrance Mann, and, now 90-years-old, he honored the project by contributing his famous deep voice to read the Fox pre-game teaser.
Sports Illustrated detailed how refreshing it was to watch a ballgame without the endless inter-inning pageantry, advertisements on the jumbotron, constant requests to “make some noise,” and blaring music.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the Field of Dreams game will be back next year, likely featuring the Reds and the Cubs, cementing another special date in the MLB calendar, alongside the All-Star Game, Homerun Derby, and Post Season.
“It does feel like all the teams are going to want to touch this,” Costner told MLB. “There’s going to be hot competition to play here. There’s going to be records set here as a result of Field of Dreams. I hope it does happen.”
Maybe a record wasn’t set this time, but a riveting final inning delighted the crowd.
By the top of the ninth inning, Chicago was leading 7-4, after several home runs had sailed into the cornfields surrounding the park (pictured below, next to the smaller film site).
In a nightmare for the otherwise-stellar pitcher Liam Hendricks, he allowed New York to wipe out that 3-run lead after a single by Tyler Wade led to a home run by Aaron Judge—Judge’s second of the game. With just three outs left in the game, the Sox were only down by one run.
Seby Zavala made it to first base, and then Tim Anderson proceeded to hit a walk-off homer over the corn stalks where the teams had entered three hours earlier, sealing the win, 9-8.
It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. It was perfect; it was everything a baseball fan could want. A celebration of a simpler period in the history of America’s Pastime.
Is this heaven? Pretty much.
(WATCH the video introduction to the game below.)
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Quote of the Day: “Suffering and discomfort are the call to inquiry… You may even experience them as friends coming to show you what you have not yet investigated thoroughly enough.” – Byron Katie
Photo: by Nik Shuliahin
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?
In Kenya, a drive through the Central Highlands will sometimes reveal a landscape covered in a beautiful white-petaled flower with a lethal secret.
The yellow center of the Chrysanthemum cinerariifolium contains one of the world’s great natural insecticides, that as well as being totally harmless to plants, humans, and animals, supports the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of rural Kenyans who supply much of the world’s pyrethrum, the principle chemical in the flower.
Pyrethrum is becoming a major tool in the fight against mosquito-borne illnesses, as the toxin attacks the central nervous system of the insect, causing it to spasm around and drop still over a 30-second period.
It’s also an excellent natural pesticide, not only for gardens and crops but livestock, who can breath a sigh of relief from biting ticks and flies if a little pyrethrum is rubbed onto their neck, legs, and shoulders.
Simply growing Chrysanthemum cinerariifolium near any plants you wish to keep insect free is enough to protect them from most pests, such is the power of the pyrethrum therein.
“Pyrethrin is the most important insecticide in the world,” says Joel Maina Kibett, chief agriculture officer of Nakuru County in Kenya. “It is natural, organic, and it has no environmental effects. And it is user friendly.”
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As chemical insecticides are responsible for mass insect death around the world, declines in honeybees, and many other deleterious effects on animals, the need for mass-produced natural chemicals is high. Kenya is uniquely suited for the cultivation of the flower and the pyrethrum it produces, as its Central Highlands region provides perfect growing conditions for the flower which bursts out of the ground following Kenya’s two rainy seasons.
During the 1970s and ’80s, Kenya grew nearly all the pyrethrum in the world decades after the arrival of the chrysanthemum species from Japan along with British colonizers. It became such an economic driver that it was placed in the Kenyan coat of arms following independence.
After the rise of industrial agriculture and cheaper pyrethrum produced elsewhere, the entire pyrethrum farming industry in Kenya collapsed. The pyrethrum state monopoly only finished paying off debts to growers in 2018, a year after Kenya liberalized the market, encouraging competition, production, and innovation.
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In Kibett’s Nakuru County, 2017 saw 15,703 farming households receive C. cinerariifolium seedlings from the county government and half a dozen private companies. National Geographic reports that these are already generating income for more than 100,000 rural Kenyans.
“In total, we have given out 23.3 million seedlings since we started the revival of the sector,” Kibett told Nat Geo in a special feature on pyrethrum. “Most of us became what we are because of that flower. We remember seeing beautiful landscapes covered with white sheets of flowers. We have done it before, and the results were very good. And we have the knowledge. We have the existing infrastructure.”
Where before farmers sometimes had to wait months to receive payments for their deliveries, the private sector are settling up within a few days on a popular mobile payment app which in turn allows farmers to quickly pay for school and other things.
Much of the pyrethrum goes to making mosquito-killing incense: coils of pyrethrum produced from dried C. cinerariifolium that are popular insect repellents around the world.
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A University of Nairobi field study reported that pyrethrin-based insect spray managed to kill around 96% of a recent desert locust plague, a devastating phenomenon that creates unstoppable swarms of flying insects that can devour 300 million pounds of crops in a single day.
Since much of the world’s pyrethrum is grown in the Horn of Africa, where locusts are such a problem, it seems like the perfect solution.
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In the latest audio survey of kiwi bird populations on New Zealand’s North Island, many areas that were silent in 2016 now have airways filled to bursting with kiwi calls.
The male’s high shriek contrasts with the females low growl, but regardless of which sound it was—the early morning hours in December, when the last survey was made, were filled with stifled cries of joy from 150 volunteer bird conservationists.
The manual population survey, called the Kiwi Call Count, uses the human ear to record population numbers of the nation’s five kiwi species to assess the status of the birds in a given area. The same sites are used every year, and 2021 saw a 50% increase in the number of sites in which calls were heard, while not one site had become silent over the last year.
A complex kiwi-saving action plan to combat invasive species was implemented to protect the national bird in the early ’90s. Stoats, dogs, feral cats, and other introduced mammals have flourished on the easily caught kiwi chicks, a species that evolved with no native mammalian predators.
“To sit out there and hear how many kiwi there are and how close they are—it makes the effort put into trapping worthwhile,” Ayla Wiles, a biodiversity ranger for the Department of Conservation, told The Guardian.
This trapping has been hugely successful, and in 2017 two species of kiwi—the northern brown and the rowi, waddled off the Endangered designation on the IUCN’s Red List. Wiles told reporters that some areas are seeing more of a sprint than a waddle. A place called Whangerei Heads has gone from having 80 kiwi to more than 1,000 since the program began.
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As a nocturnal bird, the call of the kiwi is the most reliable way to track the animals. The calls are easy to discern in the darkness, and even have unique characteristics that allow conservationists to recognize the same birds year after year.
“You can be trapping, you know, week after week after week, in the hope that your kiwi are doing well,” said Ngaire Sullivan, an organizer at Kiwi Coast. “And then for four nights a year, for just those eight hours… You sit there and get to hear your outcome.”
Watch and hear the call of a kiwi below…
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If in mid-summer you went onto the top of the Grocery Outlet supermarket in Stockton, California, and placed your hand on the strange, glossy black panels you found there, you’d be shocked to find they were as cold to the touch as a basement fuse box.
Installed by a company called SkyCool Systems, they are the first of a new breed of cooling technologies that radiate heat out through the atmosphere, lowering nearby air temperatures by about 10°F.
Radiative cooling is what happens when the electromagnetic waves we call heat leave an object. It’s the phenomenon that puts you at risk for heat stroke in the desert during the day, and hypothermia at night; the absorbed heat evacuates the landscape at sundown, and without any moisture to trap it, leaves through Earth’s atmosphere into outer space.
A UCLA scientist reasoned that if a certain spectrum of warming rays is radiated out to the atmosphere during the day, it would cool whatever it left, potentially offering an alternative to traditional air conditioning.
An estimated 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated through cooling systems, both for homes and transport, but as global temperatures continue to climb, the use of cooling systems for homes and businesses is expected to triple over the coming years.
SkyCool’s radiative panels can absorb all the heat-producing light from the sun, and rather than sending it back into the swirling cauldron of gasses that are heating the planet, expels it out into space.
Aaswath Raman, a materials scientists at the University of California LA, discovered that radiative cooling technologies like panels and special reflective paints had been investigated before but then abandoned as impossible.
The idea was that if something could radiate heat even in broad daylight, it could save thousands in refrigeration costs. Raman decided to submit a funding proposal to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, a branch of the Department of Energy.
Despite the quilt of material and all the water vapor and CO2 that make up the atmosphere, infrared radiation between 8 to 13 micrometers in length passes through it as if it weren’t there, so Raman aimed to creative a film that reflected visible light, and which radiated the infrared light which can leave the atmosphere, ensuring the heat he disperses doesn’t become someone else’s problem.
With colleagues from the Stanford engineering department led by Shanhui Fan, he created an ultra-thin film, which he says could be produced in rolls a meter long by two-meters wide, made of silica, glass, and hafnium dioxide, a coating agent used in the optics industry.
Placed on a rooftop, they found their prototype panel became warmer when shaded from the sun’s rays—a counter-intuitive reaction to what one would expect, because the radiation was impeded by the material generating the shade. Furthermore, under the blazing summer sun, the panel was cool to the touch.
If placed on the hood of a car, the film would not only reflect any light from the sun, but radiate away some of the heat from the engine; if placed above where water pipes run through a building, it would cool the water therein, reducing the load on air-conditioning systems.
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After a trip to Mumbai in India revealed the speed at which the home A/C market is growing, Raman needed to ensure the panels and film would be cheap enough to be employed in developing countries near the tropics, where they’re needed most.
In Stockton, the Grocery Outlet supermarket spent $40,000 on refrigeration per year between their freezer isles and the deli. SkyCool panels placed on the roof and is now saving about $5,800 in costs per year.
Washington Post reports that Raman and SkyCool Systems have gone in search of grant money to replace all the air conditioners in a school as part of a project to see if their special film can itself be the principle cooling agent of a building, while National Geographic adds that some scientists have created models that suggested if only 1.5% of the world were covered in these panels, and that they could be maintained over a long enough period, it would reflect all the additional heat created by the climate crisis.
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Although it may not number amongst the seven ancient wonders of the world, the 4,600-year-old solar boat belonging to Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu is an amazing marvel of the ancient world nonetheless.
Last week, King Khufu’s reassembled solar craft was moved intact to its new permanent location, the Grand Egyptian Museum, where it’s sure to become a feature attraction among the museum’s reported 100,000 artifacts when the venue opens to the public later this year.
Under the supervision of a team of engineers and archeologists, after being secured in a specially built, shock-absorbing container, the craft was ferried via a remote-controlled all-terrain vehicle for the five-mile, 10-hour journey from Giza to Cairo.
King Khufu ruled Egypt during the Fourth Dynasty (circa 2613 to 2494 BCE). In 1954, Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh uncovered the remains of the cedar-wood barque buried outside Khufu’s royal tomb in the Pyramid of Cheops (a.k.a., the Great Pyramid), the largest of the three pyramids at Giza.
The craft itself was no longer intact when el-Mallakh made the discovery, however, having rested for centuries in a tightly sealed chamber, the wood from which it was built remained in surprisingly good condition.
Archaeologists toiled more than 20 months to painstakingly excavate the boat’s 1,224 component fragments. Using methods as historically accurate as possible to those by which the ship was originally built, it was almost another 10 years before a crew of researchers and restorers were able to piece the puzzle back together.
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Solar boats containing burial chambers were patterned after the mythical Barque of Ra, the Egyptian god revered as the embodiment of the Sun as it sailed the heavens from dawn to dusk each day.
While historians are unclear whether this particular boat was part of Khufu’s working fleet or was built to facilitate the pharaoh’s ascension from the mortal to the immortal plain, it was common practice to outfit Pharaohs’ tombs with what the Egyptians believed to be the essentials of the afterlife—including transportation.
As reported by Reuters, The aim of the recent transportation project was “to protect and preserve the biggest and oldest organic artifact made of wood in the history of humanity for future generations,” Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement.
And while that might not exactly be immortality, it’s still a pretty fine legacy indeed.
(WATCH the video for this story below.)
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Quote of the Day: “Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.” – Wendy Wasserstein
Photo: by Toa Heftiba
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Most of us remember a time when we could eat anything we wanted and not gain weight. But a new study suggests your metabolism—the rate at which you burn calories—actually starts its inevitable decline much later than we all assumed.
Additionally, we tend to think of our teens and 20s as the age when our calorie-burning potential hits its peak. But the researchers found that, pound for pound, infants had the highest metabolic rates of all.
Duke University associate professor Herman Pontzer joined an international team of scientists to analyze the average calories burned by more than 6,600 people ranging in age from one week to 95 as they went about their daily lives in 29 countries worldwide.
Focusing on puberty, menopause, and other phases of life, Pontzer, the study’s co-author was surprised. “What’s weird is that the timing of our ‘metabolic life stages’ doesn’t seem to match those typical milestones.”
Previously, most large-scale studies measured how much energy the body uses to perform basic vital functions such as breathing, digesting, pumping blood—in other words, the calories you need just to stay alive. But that amounts to only 50% to 70% of the calories we burn each day. It doesn’t take into account the energy we spend doing everything else: washing the dishes, walking the dog, breaking a sweat at the gym, even just thinking or fidgeting.
To come up with a number for total daily energy expenditure, the researchers relied on the “doubly labeled water” method. It’s a urine test that involves having a person drink water in which the hydrogen and oxygen in the water molecules have been replaced with naturally occurring “heavy” forms, and then measuring how quickly they’re flushed out.
Scientists have used the technique—considered the gold standard for measuring daily energy expenditure during normal daily life, outside of the lab— to measure energy expenditure in humans since the 1980s, but studies have been limited in size and scope due to cost. So multiple labs decided to share their data and gather their measurements in a single database, to see if they could tease out truths that weren’t revealed or were only hinted at in previous work.
Pooling and analyzing energy expenditures across the entire lifespan revealed some surprises, including the data showing that babies have the highest metabolic rates of all.
During the first 12 months of an infant’s life, their energy needs shoot upward, such that by their first birthday, a one-year-old burns calories 50% faster for their body size than an adult.
And that’s not just because, in their first year, infants are busy tripling their birth weight. “Of course they’re growing, but even once you control for that, their energy expenditures are rocketing up higher than you’d expect for their body size and composition,” said Pontzer, author of a book on the science of metabolism, Burn: How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy.
An infant’s gas-guzzling metabolism may partly explain why children who don’t get enough to eat during this developmental window are less likely to survive and grow up to be healthy adults.
“Something is happening inside a baby’s cells to make them more active, and we don’t know what those processes are yet,” Pontzer said.
After this initial surge in infancy, the data show that metabolism slows by about 3% each year until we reach our 20s, when it levels off into a new normal.
Despite the teen years being a time of growth spurts, the researchers didn’t see any uptick in daily calorie needs in adolescence after they took body size into account. “We really thought puberty would be different and it’s not,” said Pontzer.
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Midlife was another surprise. Perhaps you’ve been told that it’s all downhill after 30 when it comes to your weight. But while several factors could explain the thickening waistlines that often emerge during our prime working years, the findings suggest that a changing metabolism isn’t one of them.
In fact, the researchers discovered that energy expenditures during these middle decades—our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s—were the most stable. Even during pregnancy, a woman’s calorie needs were no more or less than expected given her added bulk as the baby grows.
The data suggest that our metabolisms don’t really start to decline again until after age 60. The slowdown is gradual, only 0.7% a year. But a person in their 90s needs 26% fewer calories each day than someone in midlife.
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Lost muscle mass as we get older may be partly to blame, the researchers say, since muscle burns more calories than fat. But it’s not the whole picture. “We controlled for muscle mass,” Pontzer said. “It’s because their cells are slowing down.”
The patterns held even when differing activity levels were taken into account, according to the research, which was published August 12 in the journal Science and funded by the National Science Foundation and IAEA.
For a long time, what drives shifts in energy expenditure has been difficult to parse because aging goes hand in hand with so many other changes, Pontzer said. But the research lends support to the idea that it’s more than age-related changes in lifestyle or body composition.
“All of this points to the conclusion that tissue metabolism, the work that the cells are doing, is changing over the course of the lifespan in ways we haven’t fully appreciated before,” Pontzer said. “You really need a big data set like this to get at those questions.”
(Source: Duke University) – File photo by Emma Simpson
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A serendipitous series of events turned an 11-year-old boy into a stalwart hero, after a dying man gave him a tent.
Last year, just before the pandemic reached the UK, Max Woosey’s parents were helping to care for a neighbor, Rick Abbott, who had terminal cancer.
They came to appreciate how vital it was that the local hospice in North Devon was able to help their neighbor remain in his own home, which was his final wish.
Just before he died, Abbott gave Max a gift.
“My friend Rick gave me his tent before he died and made me promise to go have an adventure.”
Max realized that most of the fundraising for the hospice was cancelled and services were closed due to COVID-19, so on March 29th, 2020, he began sleeping in his new tent pitched in the backyard, hoping to raise £100 for the hospice.
With his plush stuffed animals to keep him cozy, he posted updates on his fundraising page, while waiting for the pandemic to be over.
As lockdown restrictions dragged on, and warm summer nights turned into chilly autumn frost, Max refused to come in from the cold—and donations poured in.
On October 12, he wrote, “Thank you so much for all the donations. I can’t believe how much I have raised. I have decided to camp out for a year to see if I can get to £20,000.”
The boy blew past that goal, hitting milestones of 100 consecutive days, then 200 days, then 300 days.
His dog Digby was more than welcome to spend the night and keep this Cub Scout warm through the nights.
During one December storm, his tent blew over but he repitched it so he could cross-off another day on his calendar. His dad kept him company during Storm Bella and its 70mph winds.
He even had to get a new tent when the first one sprung a leak.
When Christmas season arrived, the family decorated his tent with lights and santa ornaments. Sleeping outside, maybe he hoped to catch a glimpse of the red-suited guy when his sleigh flew by.
Max’s mission attracted national and international media attention and he was invited to camp next to the lion’s enclosure at London zoo and in the Downing Street garden, according to The Guardian.
Last week, the boy from Braunton celebrated his 500th consecutive night on an adventure that was spurred on by tragedy but raised more than $770,000 from strangers around the world for the life-giving service of hospice.
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“Nutritious ancestral plant of the Mayans, its flowers a treasure, a small but
powerful grain; eat the leaf and the grain, which is ideal for roasting and making
popcorn.”
This brief description, on a website translated from Spanish, belittles the grand potential and grander history of a humble but potential superfood that could replace nutrient-deficient grains across the developing world.
The first growers of the grain called amaranth were the always ahead-of-their-time Mayan peoples of Central and South America. It was also cultivated by the Aztecs.
When Spanish conquerors arrived in the 1600s, they threatened anyone seen growing amaranth, because the spiritual connection they had to the plant was thought to undermine Christianity, according to a recent article in The Guardian. Now free from such persecution, the ancestors of Mesoamerican peoples across Latin America are bringing this once-common crop to the attention of the world’s markets.
A source of all nine essential amino acids, as well as several key minerals like iron and magnesium, amaranth is a pseudo-cereal, lying somewhere between a seed and grain, like buckwheat or quinoa—and, it does not contain gluten.
Additionally, it’s now being grown and marketed in high-end products for the beauty industry, in essential oils, and health food stores, in far-flung places like South Asia, China, India, West Africa, and the Caribbean.
With nearly 75 species in the Amaranthus genus, some amaranth species are cultivated as leaf vegetables, some for grain, and some for ornamental plants that you may have planted in your garden.
Densely packed flower clusters and stems grow in a range of striking pigments, from maroon and crimson to ochre and lime, and can grow from 3 to 8 feet tall. Some of them are summer annual weeds, commonly referred to as pigweeds.
The total value, since the 1970s when amaranth first began appearing on the shelves of stores, has ballooned into a global trade that’s now valued at $5.8 billion.
And, one Pueblo woman from New Mexico thinks it has the potential to feed the entire world.
Much of the revival of traditional amaranth cultivation methods, which involve saving the seeds of the best plants, similar to corn cultivation by Mexico’s campesinos, have created a seriously-resilient crop. A 2010 article from the New York Times detailing the rise of weeds resistant to the Monsanto herbicide “Roundup,” explained that amaranth, considered a weed by some, displayed such resistance.
Organizations like Qachoo Aluum in Guatemala, a Mayan word for Mother Earth, sell these ancient grains/seeds on their website, and host workshops to help indigenous communities regain food security through ancestral methods of cultivation.
Regain is a key word here because, as The Guardian article details, government forces had been persecuting the Mayan population and burning their fields. Farmers kept amaranth seeds in secret jars buried underground, and when the two-decade war ended, the remaining agriculturalists began to spread the seed, and the growing methods, across the countryside.
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Qachoo Aluum rose from the ashes of this conflict, thanks to more than 400 families from 24 Guatemalan villages, who have been traveling every year to the United States to share their ancestral knowledge about the crop to predominantly indigenous and Latin-language garden centers.
“Amaranth has completely changed the lives of families in our communities, not only economically, but spiritually,” said Maria Aurelia Xitumul, a Mayan descendent and member of the Qachoo Aluum community since 2006.
The interchange of seeds—a vital part of healthy ag systems, has revived friendly connections between the Guatemalan Qachoo Aluum and their New Mexican Pueblo relatives.
“We’ve always viewed our seed relatives as relatives and kin,” said Tsosie-Peña, who believes the resilient, nutritious plant can feed the world.
A perfect plant for drought-prone regions, amaranth has the potential to improve nutrition, boost food security, foster rural development, and support sustainable land care.
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