Despite the amount of cuts, poo, and “flipper bashing,” New Zealand veterinarians are enduring it all to keep an endemic penguin species alive on their beautiful South Island.
Martyn-de-Jong
An endangered species, and one of the rarest penguins in the world, the yellow-eyed penguin, or “Hoiho,” which means “noise shouter” in Māori, numbers between 4,000 to 5,000 birds.
For years a pair of facilities in Dunedin near the extraordinary Otago Peninsula, The Wildlife Hospital and Penguin Place, have been treating and releasing birds back into the wild.
“When I see the difference we’re making, especially for the hoiho, it’s a species I’m so passionate about and just being able to work with these birds and get them back into the wild, that’s actually the best part of the job,” says Dr. Lisa Argilla, a veterinarian at the Wildlife Hospital, to BBC Travel.
4,000 to 5,000 isn’t so low, but when one considers there are only 265 known breeding pairs, the fact that 95% of injured hoiho that arrive in the hospital recover to be released again highlights the two teams’ extraordinary contribution to national Kiwi conservation.
“If Penguin Place wasn’t here, I could almost guarantee that the population would be functionally extinct,” said Jason van Zanten, conservation manager at Penguin Place, again to the BBC.
Before the Wildlife Hospital opened in January of 2018, injured penguins found by Penguin Place, which has been operating since the ’90s, had to be shipped to the North Island for care. The immediate proximity with which hoiho can be treated has drastically helped the population.
However as the world’s first entirely tourism-funded conservation reserve, Penguin Place suffered greatly during the COVID-19 measures imposed by the government, and now has only enough residual capital to survive the next few months. With the return of warmer weather, Penguin Place needs a simultaneous return of tourists, or it will be forced to shutter its doors and leave the penguins to their own devices.
It’s not a bad trip to be fair. The Otago Peninsula’s wild coastlines, towering headlands, and sheltered fjords are home to a rich variety of natural scenery and animals, much of which remains conserved due to tourist dollars.
Until the tourists return for tours of the coastal reserve, Penguin Place has turned to donations, which you can contribute to on their website along with planning a tour.
(MEET a few of these Kiwi penguins in the video below.)
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Quote of the Day: “You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.” – Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Photo: by Gaelle Marcel
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
Reprinted with permission from World At Large, a news website of nature, politics, science, health, and travel.
Hans-Jurgen Mager
Norway is dismantling their last Arctic coal mine piece by piece and turning the area it sits in into a national park twice the size of Grand Teton in Wyoming.
The goal is to turn the Svalbard Archipelago, in particular the Van Mijenfjord, into a howling wilderness once again—the best managed wilderness in the world where polar bears, seals, and countless other Arctic species can thrive in what experts say will be one of the most resilient areas under threat from climate change.
Seeds aren’t the only thing famously stored underground on Svalbard. Coal has been mined there under state monopoly for 100 years. Despite climate change pressures mounting throughout the 21st century, it wasn’t until 2016 that a government white paper announced a moratorium.
Seven national parks, 15 bird sanctuaries, one geopark, and six reserves dot two-thirds of the 23,500 square mile (61,000 square km) archipelago of islands, fjords, mountains, and glaciers. 3,000 polar bears inhabit the area, and during the late summer more than 20 million birds of 80 different species nest on Svalbard.
x4ing, CC license
The Van Mijen Fjord has sea ice year round, and as such is an important hunting ground for bears. At the throat of the fjord, Svea Mine has loaded ships with coal for generations, but is now being dismembered rather than abandoned to ensure the area returns to a pristine natural state.
A June press release by the Norwegian government announced they were expanding the existing Nordenskiöld Land National Park to encompass the fjord, creating an additional 1,125 square miles (2,914 square kilometers) of wilderness called Van Mijenfjorden National Park.
“Our goal is for Svalbard to be one of the best-managed wilderness areas in the world. That requires us to implement measures to deal with climate changes, and pressure caused by increased traffic. The protection of the Van Mijen fjord and surrounding area is a direct response to this,” says minister Sveinung Rotevatn in the same release.
The borders of the new park lie atop the existing Sør-Spitsbergen National Park, making it easy for visitors to see both.
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Legend has it that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned gray overnight just before her beheading in 1791.
Though the legend is inaccurate—hair that has already grown out of the follicle does not change color—a new study from researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons is the first to offer quantitative evidence linking psychological stress to graying hair in people.
And while it may seem intuitive that stress can accelerate graying, the researchers were surprised to discover that hair color can be restored when stress is eliminated, a finding that contrasts with a recent study in mice that suggested that stressed-induced gray hairs are permanent.
The study has broader significance than confirming age-old speculation about the effects of stress on hair color, says the study’s senior author Martin Picard, associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
“Understanding the mechanisms that allow ‘old’ gray hairs to return to their ‘young’ pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it is influenced by stress,” Picard says.
“Our data add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human aging is not a linear, fixed biological process but may, at least in part, be halted or even temporarily reversed.”
Studying hair as an avenue to investigate aging
“Just as the rings in a tree trunk hold information about past decades in the life of a tree, our hair contains information about our biological history,” Picard says. “When hairs are still under the skin as follicles, they are subject to the influence of stress hormones and other things happening in our mind and body. Once hairs grow out of the scalp, they harden and permanently crystallize these exposures into a stable form.”
Though people have long believed that psychological stress can accelerate gray hair, scientists have debated the connection due to the lack of sensitive methods that can precisely correlate times of stress with hair pigmentation at a single-follicle level.
Splitting hairs to document hair pigmentation Ayelet Rosenberg, first author on the study and a student in Picard’s laboratory, developed a new method for capturing highly detailed images of tiny slices of human hairs to quantify the extent of pigment loss (graying) in each of those slices. Each slice, about 1/20th of a millimeter wide, represents about an hour of hair growth.
“If you use your eyes to look at a hair, it will seem like it’s the same color throughout unless there is a major transition,” Picard says. “Under a high-resolution scanner, you see small, subtle variations in color, and that’s what we’re measuring.”
The researchers, whose study was published June 22 in eLife, analyzed individual hairs from 14 volunteers. The results were compared with each volunteer’s stress diary, in which individuals were asked to review their calendars and rate each week’s level of stress.
The investigators immediately noticed that some gray hairs naturally regain their original color, which had never been quantitatively documented, Picard says.
When hairs were aligned with stress diaries by Shannon Rausser, second author on the paper and a student in Picard’s laboratory, striking associations between stress and hair graying were revealed and, in some cases, a reversal of graying with the lifting of stress.
“There was one individual who went on vacation, and five hairs on that person’s head reverted back to dark during the vacation, synchronized in time,” Picard says.
Blame the mind-mitochondria connection
To better understand how stress causes gray hair, the researchers also measured levels of thousands of proteins in the hairs and how protein levels changed over the length of each hair.
Changes in 300 proteins occurred when hair color changed, and the researchers developed a mathematical model that suggests stress-induced changes in mitochondria may explain how stress turns hair gray.
“We often hear that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, but that’s not the only role they play,” Picard says. “Mitochondria are actually like little antennas inside the cell that respond to a number of different signals, including psychological stress.”
The mitochondria connection between stress and hair color differs from that discovered in a recent study of mice, which found that stress-induced graying was caused by an irreversible loss of stem cells in the hair follicle.
“Our data show that graying is reversible in people, which implicates a different mechanism,” says co-author Ralf Paus, PhD, professor of dermatology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “Mice have very different hair follicle biology, and this may be an instance where findings in mice don’t translate well to people.”
Hair re-pigmentation only possible for some
Reducing stress in your life is a good goal, but it won’t necessarily turn your hair to a normal color.
“Based on our mathematical modeling, we think hair needs to reach a threshold before it turns gray,” Picard says. “In middle age, when the hair is near that threshold because of biological age and other factors, stress will push it over the threshold and it transitions to gray.
“But we don’t think that reducing stress in a 70-year-old who’s been gray for years will darken their hair or increasing stress in a 10-year-old will be enough to tip their hair over the gray threshold.”
A karmic war chest will be waiting for one Buddhist monk who’s spent decades rescuing stray dogs in Shanghai and bringing them to his monastery to live in peace and comfort, or to find a new home.
Since 1994, Zhi Xiang has rescued over 8,000 homeless pooches from the streets of the Chinese mega-city, caring for all of them.
In Buddhism, the highest goal is to reach the fourth stage of consciousness, whereby the trappings of reality fall away as the practitioner realizes life is merely an illusion. Yet the holiest of monks, the Bodhisattvas, don’t choose this path, and instead, like 51-year old Xiang, remain in this world to try and help people stuck in the cycle of life to escape.
With help from volunteers and his own Bao’en Temple workforce, Xiang currently cares for hundreds of cats and dogs. Costing nearly $2.5 million every year in labor and supplies, Xiang tries to get as many of them as he can into family homes overseas, using social media to reach out to perspective pet owners.
So far 300 dogs have been adopted by families in Canada, the United States, and Germany.
Zhi Xiang is no ordinary animal rescuer: he is a Buddhist monk and has given nearly 8,000 dogs a new life, either at his ancient monastery or at a shelter he runs in Shanghai.
Not a trained vet, Xiang loves and cares for the animals he saves as if he was, and while many are too sick, the younger or healthy ones move on to adoption shelters, or straight into the arms of new owners.
“I think they’re very happy so I feel it’s worthwhile,” he told ABC Australia. “But of course I miss them.”
“I have a dream that one day, when I have some free time, I want to go abroad and visit them, take photos with every dog that I rescued,” he said. “So when I get old and can’t walk, I have these photos to look at.”
If indeed Karma rewards those who sacrifice their own time and wealth to help alleviate the suffering of animals, that which Xiang awaits in his afterlife is greater than anyone can imagine, and rightly so.
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Turns out there are simpler methods than air-conditioning to keep a room or house cool and save you a ton of money.
That’s handy, given that depending on your temperature preference and frugality, running an A/C unit can cost anywhere from $14 to $211 per month.
Here in Italy, ground floor units don’t even have A/C, as all the buildings are made of block-and-concrete, and the windows all have wood-slat shutters to let the breeze in and keep the sun out.
If installing brown wood-slat shutters isn’t an option, try with pieces of brown cardboard; cutting small mail slots out to shed light into the room, or change to darker curtains.
Beyond that, here are some innovative, and sometimes ancient ways to keep cool and save money.
Use ice
Ever heard the story about how kitchens, hotels, and even towns would have giant blocks of ice brought in on train cars for refrigeration purposes before electricity existed? That still works today, and it’s cheaper than A/C.
If you live in a 1-bed, 1-bath or studio apartment, try soaking a couple of towels, coiling them into C-shapes, and freezing them. Once they’re frozen solid, place them on your head like a crown, around your neck like an airplane pillow, or around the femoral arteries in your thighs. This will cool you right down.
Alternatively, you can freeze water into a large block by putting a bowl or plastic bottle of it in the freezer, (which will also save you money by keeping the freezer cooler and reducing the time it needs to re-freeze) and place it on a table in front of a fan. The air blown by the fan will be chilled as it runs across the ice.
Use evaporation
If you leave your windows open for the breeze in the summertime, soak your curtains in water. The breeze will evaporate the water, cooling it to a lovely temperature, before blowing it around your house.
Sleeping under a damp bed sheet with a fan over you will work as well as any A/C unit: As the water soaks into your skin and then evaporates, it will supercool you. A damp t-shirt would act similarly.
Change your meals
As strange as it sounds, there is a reason why spicy food all comes from hot places. No one’s cooking vindaloo curry in Latvia or Harbin, and that’s because the capsaicin chemical within spicy foods is an irritant that causes us to sweat. Sweat in a frigid Arctic wind will kill you, but in warmer climes it will cool you down.
Hot beverages are also great for this, particularly hot mint tea, as the mint will feel cool and refreshing, while the heat from the tea will cause you to sweat. Drink in front of a fan for maximum benefit (though note that if you’re in a humid area, this hack won’t work so well as the sweat can’t wick properly from your body).
Finally, salty and or rich foods are proven to make the core body temperature rise. To combat this, eat smaller meals more often, ditch salt and hot protein (a cold cut sandwich isn’t bad) for fruits and vegetables, and leave that oven and stove off to reduce the heat radiation into your house (saving you more money while you’re at it).
Other tips
Honorable mention goes to whoever got the idea to leave one’s moisturizers in the fridge. Imagine needing to rehydrate your skin, and it being nearly freezing cold at the same time!
Some ceiling fans are able to switch the direction they turn. In the winter, clockwise is better, but during the summer, counter-clockwise is where it’s at, pushing the hot air around the level of our head and shoulders down towards the floor and circulating the cold air—which naturally sinks—up towards the ceiling.
Cold shower anyone?
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Some people may say they’re dedicated to their jobs but others don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk—literally.
To make it to his shift as a Buffalo Wild Wings cook, Donte Franklin was leaving for work three hours early each day and trekking more than eight miles on foot to arrive on time. At the end of the day, the 20-year-old Oklahoman reversed his journey to walk home.
Franklin credits his amazing work ethic to his late mom, who passed away four years ago. “I really don’t care if it gets tiring. I just have to keep pushing,” Franklin told FOX News, “I walk just to make my family proud.”
Whether or not he’s got a guardian angel keeping tabs on him, Franklin’s life recently got an amazing and unexpected lift thanks to a stranger’s random act of kindness.
Michael Lynn was out running errands when he saw a young man—Franklin—walking in the sweltering summer heat. On his way back, he noticed the same young man—still walking—and decided to offer him a ride.
When Lynn learned more about Franklin’s 17-mile work pilgrimage, he couldn’t help but be more than a little awed. He decided to share the details of Franklin’s story on Facebook—where it was quickly shared more than 1,000 times.
One of the people who saw it was Kerri Collins. She and her husband are the driving forces behind a biker charity group called My Riding Buddies Oklahoma and Bikers for Elves (MRBO).
“Anytime I see something posted concerning anybody anywhere in Oklahoma, I immediately jump in and we do whatever we can as a group,” Keri Collins told KOCO. “It just touched me that this man is only 20 years old and is walking to two different jobs with nothing in the heat. It opened my heart because kids his age don’t do that.”
In appreciation of his extraordinary efforts, MRBO gifted Franklin with a brand-new bike prior to his next shift. His commute had just gotten a whole lot easier, but Franklin’s good luck was just beginning.
Inspired by the young man’s grit and determination, a GoFundMe page was set up in his name so he could buy a car. So far, close to $52,000 has been raised.
Franklin, who’s studying to be a welder, doesn’t have a driver’s license yet. While he plans to purchase a car eventually, in the meantime, he’ll be using the funds to help his family and taking his bike to work.
Donte Franklin says he considers everything that’s happened to him to be a blessing and believes that he and Lynn were fated to become friends. It’s something Lynn believes as well.
“As long as he wants to, I want to keep him in my life and I want to be in his life,” Lynn told KOCO. “… I told him, if the Lord opens the door for you, walk through it… I think it’s open for him and the rest is up to him.”
And we suspect, that’s not just talking the talk.
(WATCH Dante’s story in the KOCO video below.)
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Quote of the Day: “There were two ways to be happy: improve your reality or lower your expectations.” – Jodi Picoult
Photo: by Na Inho
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
It brought to Mars a suite of scientific instruments including a weather station, ground-penetrating radar, and a laser spectroscopy device for blasting rocks apart to measure their mineral content.
It also brought a deployable Wi-Fi camera, which it left in the dust before driving off, to create footage of it driving down from the landing module and doing a series of maneuvers. This was the first footage of a rover driving on Mars which any nation has produced.
Audio clips of its metal wheels scraping against the disembarking ramps were also collected, which Chinese space authorities say demonstrates the characteristics of the Martian atmosphere.
“With the files we released this time, including those sounds recorded when our Mars rover left the lander, we are able to conduct in-depth analysis to the environment and condition of Mars, for example, the density of the atmosphere on the Mars,” Liu Jizhong, deputy commander of China’s first Mars exploration program, told Chinese media.
Earlier this year, NASA’s Perseverance collected video of its Ingenuity Martian Helicopter performing a flight test, and of the dramatic parachute deployment and landing dubbed the “7 minutes of terror.” China also collected its own video of the parachute deployment and landing.
Huge Zhurong update: Here's full footage of the Zhurong rover's EDL, showing parachute deployment, backshell separation, and landing, including very cool hover during hazard avoidance phase. [CNSA/PEC] pic.twitter.com/iWUXrFKf40
The solar-powered Zhurong, which was the name of an ancient Chinese fire god, has traveled 236 meters since it landed on June 15th, and it continues to perform system checks before heading off in search of data.
It was landed as part of the Tianwen-1 interplanetary mission, which also included a lander and an orbiter, all three of which were first of their kind for the nation—making China the world’s first nation to succeed with all three at the first go-around.
Some of the video taken may remind some readers of pre-Special Edition footage of Star Wars: A New Hope, when a young and plucky Luke Skywalker is traversing his desert home of Tatooine in his landspeeder. Enjoy the show.
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Is there anything better than the beginning of a beach vacation when you get your first sniff of the ocean? That chilled, briny, slightly sulfurous smell is almost better than the first sight of the sea.
But what makes the sea smell like the sea, or seafood taste like seafood? I once managed a gourmet cheese shop, and felt like I was detecting the scent of the sea whenever I pulled out the riper cheeses. Why is that?
Turns out there are several chemicals, abundant in marine life and processes, that give saltwater environments their signature smell.
Dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, is the classic sulfur smell of the sea, and is produced en masse by the bacteria species that eat phytoplankton. These tiny marine food web anchors are essentially plants that use photosynthesis to draw energy from the sun.
The DMS comes from the plankton’s self-generating sunscreen, which upon their death, is converted into DMS gasses by the bacteria that eat them. One article points out that seabirds follow the smell of DMS to locate areas for hunting, since the marine food web begins with plankton, which are eaten by tiny fish, which are eaten by bigger fish, which the seabirds then have for lunch.
As well as being produced by bacteria that eat cheese proteins, dimethyl sulfides are also quite pungent in the air of coastal saltmarsh and tidal wetlands. This, rather than plankton, is due to various species of saltmarsh cordgrass. Plankton may be absent from an area of ocean, but saltmarsh is filled with cordgrass species, and this is one of the reasons the salt marshes on the California coast smell much more strongly of the sea than the coast does.
National Marine Sanctuaries
Another food web compound that gives the sea its smell is bromophenols. This chemical is often described as smelling fishlike, and in high concentrations can smell of iodine. It also likely gives a lot of the iconic flavor to fresh crustaceans, fresh fish, or the best oysters.
Acquired through the diet of these animals, often through eating marine worms, other bottom feeders or fish eggs, bromophenols are actually added to farm-raised fish to try and give it the more identifiable taste of the ocean.
Lastly, a chemical produced in the eggs of seaweed species was found to have a very strong “beach odor” and that it was the calling card for seaweed sperm to follow. When isolated it smells strongly of seaweed, unsurprisingly, and if you’re relaxing on a beach where a lot of seaweed and kelp has washed up on, you could be smelling the pheromones of the plant.
The three of these together, along with a few others, account for the distinctive, unmistakeable aroma of a day spent at the seashore—with coconut-scented tanning lotion also wafting in the breeze if you’re lucky.
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For thousands of cross-country tourists, the Mississippi River is one which is for crossing, not seeing. But what if the crossing bridge was a beautiful pedestrian walkway filled with American bison?
The aptly named Bison Bridge is a proposition to reconnect America’s most iconic animal with its historic habitat in the most creative of ways—by repurposing an aged bridge slated for demolition as a wildlife crossing which provides safe passage for bison herds.
When local Mississippi River advocate and President & Founder of Living Lands & Waters Chad Pregracke proposed the idea for a Bison Bridge National Park to span the river and connect the Quad Cities spanning the states of Iowa and Illinois, it caught on immediately, and quickly earned endorsements and publicity.
Along with saving Illinois millions in demolition costs, city authorities and regional planners hope re-purposing Fred Schwengel Memorial Bridge on the I-80 will draw tourists to a part of the country where the population hasn’t risen in 30 years.
“It’s a fantastic idea, a heck of a vision,” Kevin Marchek, who worked over 39 years for Illinois Department of Transportation, told local news last month. “We’ve just got to keep pushing this until it comes to fruition.”
The Chicago Tribune described the project as “a dream” and “too charming and creative to reject out of hand,” in an editorial, and several Tribal Nations also see it as a great way to shine a spotlight on the area.
Uniquely American
Rendering, Bison Bridge Foundation
The bridge, which would be the longest wildlife crossing on Earth, would feature an enclosed strip of prairie running across it, with viewing stations where passing pedestrians can observe the bison. Artist renderings put the bridge guardrails in glass, with chic cafes alongside them, to offer a comfortable and unobstructed view of the mighty Mississippi and the roaming animals.
For the Eastern Shoshone, the project offers a reconnection for both themselves and for other Americans to the heritage of the Plains Indians.
Jason Baldes, a tribal member, works for the National Wildlife Federation non-profit as tribal bison coordinator.
“The bison was known as the life commissary for my grandmas and grandpas,” Baldes told The Guardian. “It was food, clothing, shelter, and was also central to our cultural and spiritual belief systems.”
They were also essential to the plains as an ecosystem, acting as a “keystone species,” meaning that like the keystone in an arch, they held all the bricks together.
The vast herds which once totaled between 30 and 60 million stampeded across the landscape, trampling rampant growth, spreading seeds hither and yon, and allowing a very diverse mix of plants to grow, creating rich biodiverse soils. Their fur once shed is an important nesting material, and borrowing owls used to rely on their dung for making nests.
They’re living history, not only for the Native Americans, but for the history of American conservation, which one could say started with the bison when reckless overhunting brought their numbers down to just 300.
“But it’s not only important to Native American tribes, but it’s important to the American people to at least have an opportunity to learn about this history,” said Baldes. A true statement indeed.
(WATCH the video pitching the Bison Bridge project below.)
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Pressure to feel upbeat can make you feel downbeat, while embracing your darker moods can actually make you feel better in the long run, according to new research.
“We found that people who habitually accept their negative emotions experience fewer negative emotions, which adds up to better psychological health,” said study senior author Iris Mauss, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley.
At this point, researchers can only speculate on why accepting your joyless emotions can defuse them, like dark clouds passing swiftly in front of the sun and out of sight.
“Maybe if you have an accepting attitude toward negative emotions, you’re not giving them as much attention,” Mauss said. “And perhaps, if you’re constantly judging your emotions, the negativity can pile up.”
The study, conducted at UC Berkeley and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tested the link between emotional acceptance and psychological health in more than 1,300 adults in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Denver, Co., metropolitan area.
The results suggest that people who commonly resist acknowledging their darkest emotions, or judge them harshly, can end up feeling more psychologically stressed.
By contrast, those who generally allow such bleak feelings as sadness, disappointment and resentment to run their course reported fewer mood disorder symptoms than those who critique them or push them away, even after six months.
“It turns out that how we approach our own negative emotional reactions is really important for our overall well-being,” said study lead author Brett Ford, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. “People who accept these emotions without judging or trying to change them are able to cope with their stress more successfully.”
Three separate studies were conducted on various groups both in the lab and online, and factored in age, gender, socio-economic status and other demographic variables.
“It’s easier to have an accepting attitude if you lead a pampered life, which is why we ruled out socio-economic status and major life stressors that could bias the results,” Mauss said.
In the first study, more than 1,000 participants filled out surveys rating how strongly they agreed with such statements as “I tell myself I shouldn’t be feeling the way that I’m feeling.” Those who, as a rule, did not feel bad about feeling bad showed higher levels of well-being than their less accepting peers.
Then, in a laboratory setting, more than 150 participants were tasked with delivering a three-minute videotaped speech to a panel of judges as part of a mock job application, touting their communication skills and other relevant qualifications. They were given two minutes to prepare.
After completing the task, participants rated their emotions about the ordeal. As expected, the group that typically avoids negative feelings reported more distress than their more accepting peers.
In the final study, more than 200 people journaled about their most taxing experiences over a two-week period. When surveyed about their psychological health six months later, the diarists who typically avoided negative emotions reported more mood disorder symptoms than their nonjudgmental peers.
Next, researchers plan to look into such factors as culture and upbringing to better understand why some people are more accepting of emotional ups and downs than others.
“By asking parents about their attitudes about their children’s emotions, we may be able to predict how their children feel about their emotions, and how that might affect their children’s mental health,” Mauss said.
Source: UC Berkeley
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A schoolgirl didn’t fold under pressure and set a new world record for the fastest ever origami, by making 1,000 paper cranes.
15-year-old Evelyne Chia spent nine hours and 31 minutes creating the neat little paper birds, smashing the previous record of 12 hours.
She spent six months in training for the record attempt which also raised over £2,300 ($3,189) for NHS Charities Together.
Origami is traditionally associated with Japanese culture, and folding 1,000 cranes is supposed to bring good fortune.
But even skilled origamists don’t usually accomplish the impressive milestone in just one sitting.
Evelyne has just finished her GCSEs at Colchester County High School for Girls in Colchester in Essex.
SWNS
She began folding the little paper birds at 9am on Tuesday, and folded her 1,000th crane at 6.31pm.
She said: “I wanted to do a fundraiser as I have a long summer now as I’ve just finished my GCSEs.
“I wanted to do something that would get people’s attention, so I thought what better way than by trying to set a Guinness World Record at the same time?
“I applied to do this in January, and was told I had to beat a time of 12 hours.
“In ancient Japanese culture, there is a legend that says if you fold 1,000 paper cranes you can make a wish to the Gods and it will come true.
“When I completed the challenge, I made a wish that I would raise enough money to make a difference for healthcare workers, and I do feel like I’ve done that.”
Evelyne was taught by her mother Ivy how to do origami when she was just six years old.
She said: “It’s been a hobby of mine for a long time. I like making little animals, like rabbits or cats. Sometimes I’ll make them as gifts for my friends.”
But despite her proficiency in the paper-folding art, she said she “surprised” herself with how quickly she was able to fold 1,000 paper cranes.
She explained: “I’ve had practice sessions over the last six months where I’ll time myself for an hour and see how many I can fold in that time.
“At first it took me about two minutes to fold one crane, but then I started to get quicker and quicker, and eventually my average speed was about 30 seconds for each one.”
The determined teen did not take a break once during the nine and a half hours to eat, drink, or even to go to the bathroom.
She said: “After a while I kind of went into autopilot, and I was doing it from muscle memory.
“It helped that there was people around me on the day of the attempt to act as witnesses to the record.
“There were people wandering around and coming up to talk to me, so I could distract myself by talking to them, and I wasn’t just working in silence.
“There was so much going on around me that it helped to push me to work faster.
“During the last hour, I was on a Zoom call with a member of the British Origami Association, and she was talking to me about the significance of origami and paper cranes.
“That really helped to push me through to the end.”
Quote of the Day: “In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” – Max Ehrmann, Desiderata
Photo: by Jeffery Erhunse
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An amputee who can only walk for 20 minutes at a time has climbed England’s three highest peaks—a feat that took him 27 hours.
42-year-old Ben Lovell had never climbed a mountain—and in 2017 he had to have his right leg amputated due to a blood clot.
SWNS
These days the strain on his leg means he can walk 20 minutes, covering about a mile, before he has to take off his prosthetic and rest before climbing again.
But the former road worker scaled the Lake District’s Helvellyn in seven hours, Scafell in nine hours, and Scafell Pike after another 11 hours of trekking.
The father-of-two raised thousands of pounds to pay for kids with prosthetic limbs to join his fitness boot camp and holiday retreat in Tenerife, called AmpCamp.
The Yorkshire man said: “It’s never about how long it takes me; it’s just about getting it done.
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“Helvellyn was really hard and pretty scary because we lost the track and ended up climbing the side of the peak.
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“I was in a lot of pain but that’s a mental thing and you’ve just got to get past it.”
Of walking on boggy ground, he explained: “It puts such a strain on your other joints and other leg, and using crutches, which I have to do, is really hard on your back and shoulders.”
After Ben’s amputation four years ago, he suffered anxiety and depression, but now goes to the gym five or six times a week.
In the past few years, he’s completed a sponsored 13-mile walk round a reservoir on crutches and a 15,000-foot parachute jump.
The reason he founded AmpCamp? “With these holidays we just want to give people a place to go where they can feel safe and confident, and where they can relax without stigma, and if you need to take your leg off for a bit everyone understands.”
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Does life imitate art or does art imitate life? In one stunningly decorated Russian coffee shop, the answer is a bit of both.
Café Bw, whose interior is designed to mimic a two-dimensional cartoon world, lets its 3D patrons step into the pages of their very own black-and-white comic book and thereby become part of the art.
Cafe BW
“The idea came up to create a place that would be interesting mainly due to its interior—of course, with a good coffee,” Bw creator and owner Solon told My Modern Met.
The café’s stylized two-dimensional renderings of everything from cats, cacti, and laundry drying on a line—to a full-size flat piano—form perfect backgrounds for Instagram-worthy photo ops.
“Our customers have been delighted!” Solon told MMM. “People deliberately come to us to take unusual pictures. Our employees are also delighted with the work and some even waited months for vacancies to open.”
Cafe BW
Bw has locations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but it’s not the only venue to offer fantasy fans a two-dimensional dining experience.
Cafe BW
In Seoul, at Café Yeonnam-dong 223-14 (an homage to the Korean TV show, W, whose “IRL” and webtoon protagonists move between the two worlds), it’s the clientele who put the “animated” into the bistro’s anime ambiance.
Cafe BW
Of course, for anyone who came of age in the 1980s, this particular “toontastic” intermingling of dimensions is already a familiar part of the pop culture landscape.
Back when MTV was all about the music, one of its most frequently played videos was a-ha’s iconic Take on Me, where boy and girl meet, they fall in love, and fight wrench-wielding bad guys on both sides of the comic book/real-world divide.
Cafe BW
Like its 21st-century counterparts, Take on Me is set in a coffee shop—which leaves us to wonder, does too much caffeine lead to comic book fantasies, or does life really imitate art?
There’s a ‘wonder tree’ in Honduras that’s acting as a game-changer—creating organic farming livelihoods, climate resistance, and hope to farmers in the Central American nation and elsewhere.
Because of this tree, the oft-used method of tropical land clearance—which tragically tends to yield one good crop, without another one ever following—is being replaced with another form of agroforestry that ticks every box, and which has rural farmers running towards regenerative farming methods.
This form is called Inga alley cropping. It has been pioneered by a British surveyor in Honduras named Dr. Mike Hands, and the method is built around one special tree class called Inga. This member of the legume family contains over 300 varieties, and its endemic characteristics gave Hands the basis of his revolutionary form of agroforestry.
It would go on to be described as the tropical equivalent of ‘turning water in to wine’ by the Independent and the Guardian—who named Hands one of the top 50 humans saving the planet.
“In the 80s, he worked in about a dozen tropical countries and everywhere it was the same story of slash and burn, where a family could raise a crop one year, and the next year the crop failed; and scientists couldn’t explain why,” says Lorraine Potter, a spokesperson for the Inga Foundation, a non-profit looking to transform the lives of rural Honduran families through Inga alley cropping.
250 million farmers worldwide are estimated to practice slash and burn agriculture—the carbon released from the burned trees and soil is calculated to contribute to 73% of greenhouse gas emissions from the developing world’s agriculture.
“He was trying to figure out why these systems failed, and why families had to keep burning three acres one year and another acre the next year… and he made a breakthrough and found out it was the phosphorus that was depleted,” says Potter.
One of the 17 essential nutrients for plants, and one whose functions cannot be performed by any other, plants can’t last long without adequate phosphorus, and it would turn out the phosphorus in the soil was being depleted or washed away without properly being replenished.
The breakthrough
Pineapples growing in an Inga alley, Inga Foundation
Dr. Hands would go on to trial a dozen different species before settling on Inga, despite being cautioned against it.
Potter explains that an Inga alley is like a bowling alley—where the gutters are is where the trees grow, and in the lane is where the crops grow. Hands’ configuration of placing the trees just 20 centimeters apart, less than what most seed packets will advise for cabbage plants, created the perfect conditions for both food crops and cash crops.
But why and how does it work? It starts with the sheer uniqueness of the Inga tree.
Inga can grow up to 25 feet in the first year of its life, and is tolerant of poor soil conditions, heat and drought, and flooding. Its broad leaves partly shadow the ground below—enough to prevent crops from overheating and weeds from taking over, but not enough to block out the sunlight from reaching the crops.
Being a member of the legume family, Inga is a nitrogen fixer. This means it pulls nitrogen out of the air, and stores it in its roots, where a family of bacteria add a hydrogen atom and convert it to ammonia, allowing plants to consume it. All plants need nitrogen. It’s why fertilizer is made, and nitrogen fixers are a necessary part of any permaculture or regenerative agricultural model.
At about 16-18 months of life, the Inga trees in the alley are cut to chest height, giving families all the firewood they need, and covering the ground in the leaves, which decompose and re-energize the soil below.
“The first year they recruited 40 families. The families were concerned: How does planting trees give them food?” says Potter, explaining the infancy of the Inga Foundation, which recently won the Ray C. Anderson NextGen Award along with a $100,000 grant to practice Inga alley cropping.
“So they planted half their crop with the Inga alleys and the other half they did their normal slash-and-burn planting. There was a horrific storm of about six inches of rain. It washed away all their slash-and-burn crops, [but they got] a crop with their Inga alleys,” said Potter. “So everyone immediately wanted to plant the rest of their land with Inga alleys.”
After that, she would say, no more families would have to be recruited, and now there are 300 families in the surrounding valleys practicing Inga alley cropping.
So far the methods of Inga alley cropping have been adopted by farmers in Honduras, Peru, Belize, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Madagascar, DR Congo, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Laos, and Sarawak.
Green for green
Following the realization that they could plant all their normal food crops with the Inga alleys, the farmers turned towards cash crops. They’ve so far grown black peppercorns, cacao, turmeric, chilis, cardamom, vanilla, citrus, and others produce.
This generates legitimate revenue, allowing the farmers to improve their lives. These products are awaiting ‘Organic’ certification, which they meet easily due to the regenerative nature of the model—both in terms of natural weed control ending the need for pesticides and herbicides, and the use of organic fertilizer during the trimming season.
Interestingly enough, as the success of the Inga alley cropping has grown, the farmers have begun pushing the envelope. Some have started growing low-maintenance fruit trees, while others are actually reforesting the areas of land they used to decimate with fire.
Others are planting hardwoods to augment the forest environment and provide further opportunities for income and food security. These include Cordia megalantha, which is used to make high-quality furniture, but also produces sweet-ish tasting fruit, and other luxury hardwoods like mahogany and Dalbergia.
It may be largely about generating food and an income for the farmers, but the world benefits from their efforts, as between 2012-2019, the Inga Foundation has calculated that over 284,000 tons of CO2 have been sequestered or avoided through the use of Inga alleys. This number will come to 450,000 tons by the end of 2021.
It’s truly amazing what one man, in the right place, next to the right tree, can do.
(WATCH the Inga Foundation video about their work below.)
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Whereas a cancer screening requires making an individual appointment with a physician, this simple blood test can screen for 50 separate cancers and detect them at a rate well above the average for tests.
Researchers have been working on this for years. Reporting on a large study released in March 2020, GNN learned that if we could achieve earlier detection for just half of cancer patients, we could save millions of lives every year worldwide
Aimed at individuals who are age 50+, the ease and thoroughness of the test process can help detect some difficult-to-diagnose cancers when they’re in their early stages, such as some blood cancers, ovarian, head and neck, and pancreatic cancer.
Developed by a U.S. biotech company called Grail, the trials of around 3,000 people looked for small leaks of altered DNA that seep from tumors into the bloodstream.
The test uses machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to look for changes in DNA “methylation.” DNA Methylation is a record of the changes—often damage—which DNA experiences over its lifetime—and is being theorized as a possible detector of cancer, but also as the truest marker of biological aging.
Some cancers, like pancreatic, were detected with 63% accuracy even at stage 1.
Critically, the most successful rates of detection were found in non-solid tumors, i.e. tumors for which there are no screening methods, like liver, pancreatic, and oesophageal cancers.
Best of all, the false-positive rate was less than .07%, compare this to 10% for mammography, and the test was able to detect the location in the body where the cancer was growing at a rate of 90%.
Another trial of the Grail test conducted by the UK’s National Health Service and of 140,000 volunteers recently wound up, and those results are expected in 2023.
In a statement, the NHS cancer chief Peter Johnson said: “This latest study provides further evidence that blood tests like this could help the NHS meet its ambitious target of finding three-quarters of cancers at an early stage, when they have the highest chance of cure.”
“The data is encouraging and we are working with Grail on studies to see how this test will perform in clinics across the NHS, which will be starting very soon.”
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Paleontology has a way of throwing curveballs at science more than other disciplines. For example, these days we have the fascinating case of the “Dragon Man,” after a Chinese family has donated a complete human cranium that’s far bigger than any other cranium seen in the Homo genus.
The skull—which was kept hidden in a wall for 90 years—is now being theorized as a new species in our genus, and one that shares more commonalities with us than the Neanderthal.
It was three years ago that a farming family donated the skull, which had been found in the province of Harbin in China’s far north, to Harbin GEO University. The story goes that it was discovered by a family member in a muddy bank during construction of a bridge, and that unsure of what to do with it, they hid it inside a wall for almost a century.
Now, after painstaking chemical detective work and analyses against other Homo sapien craniums, researchers Ji Qiang and Ni Xijun are positing it is a new species, Homo Longi or “Dragon Man.” He is dated as having lived 136,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene, and the mineral contents found within the bone are strikingly similar to other human remains dated from the same period found in Harbin.
“The discovery of the Harbin cranium and our analyses suggest that there is a third lineage of archaic human [that] once lived in Asia, and this lineage has [a] closer relationship with H. sapiens than the Neanderthals,” lead-author Ni Xijun told Smithsonian.
The basic routes to the new species conclusion were that it’s the largest of all known Homo skulls. It has a comically thick brow, and square-shaped eye sockets. More advanced work included comparing 600 morphological characteristics of the Longi skull with 95 other skulls from varies species.
Dragon Man, Chuang Zhao
A following mathematical analysis suggested that modern humans evolved down through three separate lineages, one being H. longi and a number of other Pleistocene Asian humans like those found in Hualongdong and Dali.
Another possibility is that the skull is actually what scientists have for years been calling a “Denisovan,” a mysterious group of humans that existed in Siberia but who left behind only a few teeth and two bone shards.
Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London contributed to the project, but he feels it’s not worth creating a new species name, as it’s generally understood that shapes of skulls, shoulder-width, nasal cavity size, or any of the characteristics we use to distinguish species today weren’t important at the time when it came to breeding. There are individuals today who carry a surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA.
“I prefer to call it Homo daliensis, but it’s not a big deal,” Springer said, speaking with The Guardian. “The important thing is the third lineage of later humans that are separate from Neanderthals and separate from Homo sapiens.”
“Certainly this specimen could be Denisovan but we have to be cautious. What we need is much more complete skeletal material of the Denisovans alongside DNA,” he added.
One thing’s for certain—the huge skull housed a big brain, and both were fitted to a big body. The skull belonged to a man in his 50s, and would have been as tall as modern adult males. His grossly enlarged nasal cavity fits the needs of a high-octane hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and is typical of animal adaptations necessary to survive in the brutal cold of the northern winters.
The other Asian species like H. dalinesis lived down in the tropical south. Paleoanthropologists feel that the large brain cavity inherent in both skulls would suit the challenges of surviving in two different harsh climates, and that other adaptations developed later.
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Quote of the Day: “If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.” – Elon Musk (turns 50 today)
Photo: by Frosty Ilze
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
