Quote of the Day: “The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.” – Maya Angelou
Photo: by Bas Glaap
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?
As we all know, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry—and sometimes those of high school seniors do as well.
Timothy Harrison of Center Point, Alabama planned to attend his high school graduation. He’d even cleared it with his boss to take time off. But when the day of the ceremony dawned, Harrison found himself stranded.
The event was being held an hour away from home. With his family members working and no one able to drive him there, much to the surprise of his manager, Cedric Hampton, Harrison showed up for his regular 7 a.m. shift at the local Waffle House.
Once Hampton heard the details of Harrison’s dilemma—not only didn’t he have a way to get to the graduation, but he’d missed out on picking up his ticket, cap, and gown—the quick-thinking manager immediately marshaled his Waffle House troops for action.
“I could see in his eyes that he really wanted to go, and I was going to get him there no matter what,” Hampton told The Washington Post. “No kid should miss their high school graduation.”
After being ferried to school to retrieve his cap and gown, back at the Waffle House, the elated senior was outfitted in a brand-new ensemble picked up and paid for by his coworkers (with a little help from some generous restaurant patrons).
“We decided we were going to step in and take care of everything for him so he could really celebrate this day. A couple customers contributed as well,” Hampton told the Post. “Within a few hours, we were able to get everything taken care of.”
Harrison was now properly attired, but they still had to get him to the three o’clock ceremony on time. It was a close call, but thanks to Hampton, the soon-to-be graduate just made it. While his co-workers weren’t able to accompany the young man inside, they couldn’t have been prouder of him.
“When I sat down in that auditorium it was the best moment of my life,” Harrison told WBRC News. “This is a memory I will cherish forever… I’m going to tell my kids about this.”
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Harrison, who’s only been at his job a little over a month, nonetheless now considers his Waffle House posse like kin and credits his “work-family” patriarch Hampton for stepping in, stepping up, and being willing to go the extra mile for him.
“The old saying goes it takes a village to raise a baby,” Hampton told WBRC. “I’m just happy to be a part of that village.”
Once word of the day’s events made the local news, Harrison’s village got a whole lot bigger. Since the WBRC story aired, he was offered a full scholarship at Birmingham’s Lawson State Community College.
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It was only fitting that when Harrison recently toured the college campus, Hampton was by his side. “I am his full-time mentor,” Hampton told the Post. “I feel really good about what’s about to happen next for him, and I’ll always be there along the way.”
Life may not offer any guarantees, but at least Timothy Harrison knows that should his best-laid plans ever go awry again, he’s got a village in his corner to help him get things back on track—and it doesn’t get any better than that.
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In the land of endless fossils—aka North China—a new species of giant rhinoceros has been discovered in Gansu Province that ranks among the largest terrestrial mammals to ever walk the Earth.
Belonging to an extinct genus called Paraceratherium, which means “near the hornless beast,” the new species displays some different characteristics and carries with it a potential migratory pattern that may help to explain modern mammalian distribution.
The giant rhino is known to be one of the largest land mammals that ever lived. It has primarily been found in Asia, but its evolutionary relationships remain unclear.
Tao Deng and colleagues recovered skeletal remains of a new species of giant rhino dubbed Paraceratherium linxiaense, named for the Linxia Basin in northwestern China where it was found.
“The fossils were prepared [for study] by three professional technicians under [our] supervision from December 2016 to February 2017,” Dr. Deng told GNN. “When the perfect specimens appeared in our sight, their huge size and good completeness [gave us] a great surprise.”
Deng and his colleagues had been working in the Linxia Basin since the 1980s, but have only found fragments of giant rhino remains.
At the shoulder, paraceratherium would have stood 15.7 feet tall, weighing from 15 up to 20 tons, more than the largest African elephant ever recorded.
It had a long neck, contributing to its 23 feet in length, that would have supported a skull that itself was as long as a large child.
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Skulls reveal the creature had a trunk, and two tusk-like incisors, but likely no horn despite the fact that genetics have placed it in the rhinoceros family.
Despite its heft, paraceratherium lasted only about 11 million years, far less than other rhinoceros progenitors like Elasmotherium.
The authors’ analyses place this species in a group with another closely related giant rhino species called paraceratherium lepidum, which together have a close relationship with the giant rhinos of Pakistan.
These findings raise the possibility that the giant rhino could have passed through the Tibetan region before it became the elevated plateau it is today.
From there, it may have reached the Indian-Pakistani subcontinent in the Oligocene epoch (between 28 and 23 million years ago), where other giant rhino specimens have been found, and where modern rhinos until recently still lived.
This overland route could inform paleontologists of other potential mammal discoveries that, like paraceratherium, passed over the Asian continent during the Oligocene.
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Just as mosquitoes and the diseases they carry plague tropical societies, the harnessing of the mosquito society’s own plague, Wolbachia bacteria, is helping Indonesia combat Dengue fever.
Scientists creating an epidemic of wolbachia among mosquitoes in Indonesia dropped rates of infection of Dengue by 77%, opening up new doors in the potential control of mosquito-borne epidemics.
Sometimes called “break-bone fever” due to the intense joint and muscle pain resulting from infection, Dengue, principally spread through the West Nile mosquito aedes aegypti, can put a human out of action for a month.
Spread throughout the world along trade routes out of Asia since the 2nd century BCE, there are now between 100 to 400 million infections worldwide every year.
The city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia was the site of a trial by the World Mosquito Program to see if perhaps Dengue could be controlled by using a species of bacteria often found lodged within a. aegypti. Wolbachia is perhaps the most common reproductive parasite that exists in the biosphere, and between 25% and 70% of all insect species carry it.
The logic is that this “miraculous” bacteria lives in the mosquito exactly where Dengue is trying to go, while also competing for resources like food. The theory is that wolbachia would out-compete and prevent Dengue from replicating.
It wasn’t a long shot as wolbachia was also used to prevent the spread of Zika virus in Brazil in 2016.
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Five million mosquito eggs were infected with wolbachia, and were left in buckets of water around the city over the course of 9 months to build up a consistent population of infected mozzies.
The results were vaccine-level successes, with spread of all four varieties of Dengue reduced by 77%, and the hospitalization rate by 86%, in 12 geographical zones of Yogyakarta where they were deployed compared to 12 other zones in which they were not.
Director of Impact Assessment at the World Mosquito Program described the results as “groundbreaking,” adding “we think it can have an even greater impact when it is deployed at scale in large cities around the world, where dengue is a huge public health problem.”
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What’s better than two likeable, excitable, Hollywood stars handing out perhaps far too much money to get into a business enterprise they know nothing about?
As Hollywood duo Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney embark on their new journey as owners of an English football club, someone clearly thought the same, because the venture is now the focus of a new FX documentary.
Josh St. Clair, writing for Men’s Health, documents the exchange that launched this bizarre venture—with DMs being exchanged between the two stars on Instagram for months without them ever meeting.
“The text buddies wondered whether they should buy a European football club. Then, Reynolds and McElhenney went ahead and actually bought a European football club. What do they know about running a football club? Reynolds: “We don’t know anything about running a football club.”
But, truly, this is a win – win – win for the town, the club, and television viewers. But first some backstory.
Despite sitting in the 5th tier of the English Football League, Wrexham A.F.C. in Wales has a proud footballing history. Founded in the mid 1800s, the ‘Red Dragons’ are one of the oldest clubs in the country, and have produced several prodigious players including Hall of Fame striker, Welsh icon, and 5-time title winner with Liverpool, Ian Rush.
For Americans, the 5th tier might be comparable to single-A baseball, but a step below that. With a pyramid of 8 levels, the bottom three tiers are sometimes occupied by official football squads of military units, or community-led clubs that literally train in backyards.
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It would be a big test for the newly formed ‘RR McReynolds Company LLC’ to turn the Wrexham ship around, but far from being led by Deadpool and ‘Mac’ from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Reynolds and McElhenny are taking the project very seriously.
After losing $1.1 million (£740,000) during the 2019/20 season, and after their aging stadium seating was declared unsafe, the club was in a bad way at the start of the COVID season of 2020/21. With fans unable to attend games, the principal methods of income for lower-league football teams was gone.
Reynolds and McElhenney , who will be referred to by their business moniker, “McReynolds,” got straight to work with ambitious plans, starting with the decision not to renew the contract of the first team staff and head coach Dean Keates, after he failed to reach the playoffs this season, a single-elimination that determines which clubs get “promoted” to the next highest tier.
“We are committed to returning the club to the EFL (English Football League, aka the top four divisions) at the earliest opportunity and feel that a change of manager will provide us with the best chance of achieving that objective,” the owners stated, sounding much more like real owners than Yanks unfamiliar with the concept of “points” and “promotions.”
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In an epoch of the ‘Beautiful Game’ where every season features rumors of a massive Chinese or Saudi takeover of a club somewhere in Europe, the local Wrexham supporters must have been shocked that the Hollywood duo were taking control of their club, but delighted to hear that a reported $2 million would be invested as a means of getting the club back into the EFL.
The $2 million will go towards refurbishing their 5,000-seat main stand in their home field of Racecourse Ground, developing a new 22-acre training facility, and signing new players.
McReynolds also appointed Les Reed, a former technical director of the English Football Association, as an advisor to football strategy and operations.
“We have recruited Les Reed as an adviser to create a football strategy for the club that will deliver the sustainable model we committed to create,” McReynolds said in a statement. “The search for a new manager/head coach is a fundamental part of the strategy and is our immediate priority.”
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The pair then hired on a trio of Wrexham Supporter’s Trust members as Vice Presidents, to ensure any decisions made reflect the fans’ preferences, and to create a strong attachment to community.
“The resources, both physical and human, will be provided where possible to help achieve our goal of achieving promotion at the earliest possible opportunity,” they said.
“Our goal is to grow the team, return it to the EFL in front of increased attendances at an improved stadium, while making a positive difference to the wider community in Wrexham.
The new docu-series Welcome to Wrexham has no present release date, but the Hollywood bros made an amusing promotional trailer with powerful ending… [WARNING: May contain language that you find offensive.]
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Beautiful to look at, flowers are a welcome addition to almost any environment, including the kitchen or restaurant. Avant-garde cuisine often features edible flowers, but you don’t have to have a Michelin star to join in—you only need to know which species are edible.
Some flowers we commonly plant are poisonous, or have poisonous components, while others can act like little multivitamins.
There are hundreds of flower species and varieties that can be added to salads, drinks, desserts, or other dishes, some of which you may already have in your yard. Furthermore their flavor is as varied as their colors and shapes, and no matter what taste you’re looking for, there’s probably a flower that possesses it.
For many gardeners, these species are already there and planted for their stalks and roots, but the flowers of this family have a mild taste that compliments other parts of the plant well.
Pickled chive flowers make a great addition to peppery cocktails like a Bloody Mary or Martini.
Beautiful in beds, pots, verges, or as a companion plant in a vegetable garden, marigolds (but not African marigolds) also have a zingy, lemony taste to them, and thus make perfect additions to desserts like cheesecake or fruit tarts.
Furthermore their yellow leaves contain a natural dye that’s known as “poor man’s saffron” and can be used to make yellow dishes, or even dye natural fibers.
The flowers from pot marigolds, a species known as calendula, not only add a touch of piquancy to a dish, but are good for wound healing as well.
Owing to their name, honeysuckles have a sweet nectary taste. As a kid growing up in Virginia, we would pick the flowers, nibble off the base and suck out the nectar like a straw.
You can also cook with them and their sweet taste compliments sweet dishes, or can be used to freshen up/take the edge off spicy or rich dishes. They can also be used to make jam.
The flowers from the watercress family can be eaten and have a very similar taste to watercress itself.
The peppery flowers are a colorful way to introduce flavor to bland salads, or can be used as a pepper substitute if someone is sensitive to peppercorns.
These prolific lawn denizens are very versatile plants, and can be eaten in many different ways. The flowers of all three can be eaten, and since they can often be found in the same meadow, instantly add color, flavor, diversity, and style to any salad.
Mint and chamomile leaves are sold around the world in teas, while dandelion leaves, though often quite bitter, are much healthier even than spinach.
Tulip flowers’ curved petals, as one homesteading blogger wrote, are perfect for freezing to use as temporary ice cream or yogurt scoops.
Their sweet lettuce flavor makes them great in spring salads as well.
While these flowers are often used to create scented soaps or perfumes, they can also be eaten, or cooked into a broth to flavor different dishes.
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Rosewater is common in Middle Eastern cooking, while lavender is sometimes used as an ice-cream flavor agent—only be careful with lavender flowers since their flavor is really intense and can make your food taste like laundry detergent if you over do it.
As the quintessential ornamental plant for professional centers and office blocks, most of us have seen pansies in every imaginable color.
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This color can be added to a salad no problem, and their mild lettuce taste wont get in the way of key ingredients.
Not only do hostas own beautiful waxy leaves, but most parts of this popular ornamental plant are edible, including their bunches of light blue and white flowers.
They are great, says Rural Sprout’s blogger, in a stir fry, and actually the entire hostas plant has the potential to be a productive foodstuff.
The fuzzy leaves of this plant sit under blue, cucumbery, edible flowers. As such the refresh-factor is high, and can be added to salads, or desserts.
One cool idea is to freeze them inside ice cubes to be added into drinks later.
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Quote of the Day: “In the end, these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?” – Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book
Photo: by Robert V. Ruggiero
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?
When a woman marries, she’s generally showered with gifts. But one big-hearted bride recently decided it was better to give than to receive. In fact she gave the biggest gift of all—the gift of life.
Just two days after she’d taken her vows, Debby Neal-Strickland in Florida swapped her wedding dress for a hospital gown in order to donate a desperately needed kidney. The lucky recipient? Her brand-new husband’s former wife.
Debby and Jim Strickland have been a devoted couple for a decade. Throughout their courtship, Jim maintained a cordial relationship with his ex, Mylaen Merthe, raising their two kids amicably, and while Debby and Mylaen weren’t particularly close, they got along fine.
And that’s likely how the relationship would have remained until fate dictated otherwise.
Mylaen, who’d long suffered from kidney disease, took a turn for the worse at just about the same time she’d learned her daughter was pregnant with her first grandchild. Her kidneys were functioning at just 8% of normal capacity. Without a transplant, her odds of survival decreased every day.
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The hunt for a donor match was on. Mylaen’s brother wasn’t a viable candidate—but miraculously, Debby was.
For Debby, the thought of a child growing up not knowing its grandmother—of a daughter dealing with grief when she should be concentrating on the joys of new motherhood—wasn’t something she was willing to let happen if she could do anything to stop it.
Having lost a brother to cystic fibrosis while waiting for a lung transplant, she knew time was of the essence. With a green light on the tissue sample and blood tests, Debby willingly scheduled the life-saving surgery for just 48 hours after her nuptials.
“It was the most amazing day of my life, until two days later. That was also the most amazing day of my life,” Debby told Fox News.
Since the successful procedure, Mylaen and Debby have bonded and now refer to one another as “kidney sisters.” Mylaen is watching her new grandson Jackson grow up from the home she currently shares with her daughter and son-in-law, even as Debby and Jim’s family of six foster children and grandkids has expanded to include Mylaen and her brood in its loving embrace.
RELATED: ‘She’s Our Miracle’: This Minnesota Teacher Donated a Kidney to the School’s Custodian
And all thanks to a “gesture from the heart.”
“This is what the world is about. Family. We need to stick together,” Mylaen told FOX. “She saved my life.”
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In a study of healthy volunteers, researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and discovered why taking short breaks from practice is a key to learning.
The National Institute of Health researchers found that during rest the volunteers’ brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions, suggesting rest strengthened memories.
“Our results support the idea that wakeful rest plays just as important a role as practice in learning a new skill. It appears to be the period when our brains compress and consolidate memories of what we just practiced,” said Leonardo G. Cohen, senior author of the study. “Understanding this role of neural replay may not only help shape how we learn new skills but also how we help patients recover skills lost after neurological injury like stroke.”
The study was conducted at the NIH Clinical Center. Dr. Cohen’s team used a highly sensitive scanning technique, called magnetoencephalography, to record the brain waves of 33 healthy, right-handed volunteers as they learned to type a five-digit test code with their left hands.
The subjects sat in a chair and under the scanner’s long, cone-shaped cap. An experiment began when a subject was shown the code “41234” on a screen and asked to type it out as many times as possible for 10 seconds and then take a 10 second break. Subjects were asked to repeat this cycle of alternating practice and rest sessions a total of 35 times.
During the first few trials, the speed at which subjects correctly typed the code improved dramatically and then leveled off around the 11th cycle. In a previous study, led by former NIH postdoctoral fellow Marlene Bönstrup, Dr. Cohen’s team showed that most of these gains happened during short rests, and not when the subjects were typing.
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Moreover, the gains were greater than those made after a night’s sleep and were correlated with a decrease in the size of brain waves, called beta rhythms. In this new report, the researchers searched for something different in the subjects’ brain waves.
“We wanted to explore the mechanisms behind memory strengthening seen during wakeful rest. Several forms of memory appear to rely on the replaying of neural activity, so we decided to test this idea out for procedural skill learning,” said Ethan R. Buch, a staff scientist on Dr. Cohen’s team and leader of the study.
To do this, Leonardo Claudino, a former postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Cohen’s lab, helped Dr. Buch develop a computer program which allowed the team to decipher the brain wave activity associated with typing each number in the test code.
The program helped them discover that a much faster version—about 20 times faster—of the brain activity seen during typing was replayed during the rest periods. Over the course of the first eleven practice trials, these compressed versions of the activity were replayed many times—about 25 times—per rest period. This was two to three times more often than the activity seen during later rest periods or after the experiments had ended, the study, published in Cell Reports explains.
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Interestingly, they found that the frequency of replay during rest predicted memory strengthening. In other words, the subjects whose brains replayed the typing activity more often showed greater jumps in performance after each trial than those who replayed it less often.
“During the early part of the learning curve we saw that wakeful rest replay was compressed in time, frequent, and a good predictor of variability in learning a new skill across individuals,” said Dr. Buch. “This suggests that during wakeful rest the brain binds together the memories required to learn a new skill.”
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As expected, the team discovered that the replay activity often happened in the sensorimotor regions of the brain, which are responsible for controlling movements. However, they also saw activity in other brain regions, namely the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex.
“We were a bit surprised by these last results. Traditionally, it was thought that the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex may not play such a substantive role in procedural memory.
In contrast, our results suggest that these regions are rapidly chattering with the sensorimotor cortex when learning these types of skills,” said Dr. Cohen. “Overall, our results support the idea that manipulating replay activity during waking rest may be a powerful tool that researchers can use to help individuals learn new skills faster and possibly facilitate rehabilitation from stroke.”
Source: NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
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Using a brain-training app helps people eat less junk food and lose weight, new research suggests.
The Food Trainer (FoodT app) trains people to tap on images of healthy foods—but to stop when they see unhealthy snacks, creating an association between these foods and stopping.
The new study, by the universities of Exeter and Helsinki, found that playing the game about once a day for a month led to an average one-point reduction of junk food consumption on an eight-point scale (the scale ranges from four or more items per day, to one or zero items per month).
Overall, people who used the app more also reported larger changes in their food intake.
About half of the study’s 1,234 participants followed the recommendation and played the game at least 10 times.
Across all participants, an average weight loss of half a kilogram (just over a pound) and a small increase in healthy food eaten was seen.
“As an example, someone who ate each junk food two to four times a week reduced this to once a week after using the app regularly for a month,” said Professor Natalia Lawrence, of the University of Exeter.
“Overall, the findings are really encouraging. The app is free and it only takes about four minutes per day—so it’s something people realistically can do—and our results suggest it is effective. “There’s some evidence that the benefits were stronger for people who were more overweight.
“We would expect to see this, because the app targets mechanisms that lead people to become overweight, such as the strong urges to approach and consume tempting junk foods.”
Dr Matthias Aulbach, of the University of Helsinki, added: “For anyone with unhealthy eating habits—perhaps developed during lockdown—FoodT might be helpful.”
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The study, published in Appetite Journal, used FoodT usage data, and the app also periodically asks questions about how often users eat certain foods, along with other information such as their age and weight.
The findings suggest that using the app regularly was linked with bigger changes in eating habits.
MORE: Researchers Discover Intermittent Fasting is Effective at Promoting Long-Term Memory in Mice
“If you’re trying to teach the brain something new, it’s a good idea to space out the learning over multiple sessions,” said Dr Aulbach.
“It may be helpful to do the training in different contexts—not just at home but at work and elsewhere, so the associations you learn don’t just relate to one location.
“From our results it seems important that you do the training regularly and don’t just stop. So keep it interesting and relevant for yourself so you won’t get bored with it: personalize the app as far as possible and pick the foods that you find really hard to resist.”
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The researchers stress that their findings should be interpreted cautiously, because there was no control (comparison) group and other factors (such as the possibility that people who did more training were also separately more motivated to lose weight) could play a part in the results.
Leaving a review on Google Play, one app user wrote: “Really useful. Seems to work on different levels whether it’s the green/red circle association of stop/go which psychologically makes you more aware, I’m not sure—but my cravings have reduced dramatically and I no longer eat in the evening mindlessly.”
Source: University of Exeter
Growing across much of Asia, it’s known by many names: including Indian Beech, pongamia, Karum tree, kranji, and malapari.
Pongamia pinnata is a member of the pea family that is being considered by Indonesian forestry experts for potential landscape restoration and the future of bioenergy.
A number of big challenges are bearing down on the Indonesian archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and the government has to find ways in which it can restore 14 million hectares of degraded land to keep its promise to the UN, while also developing a green energy sector worth 23% of total grid contributions in just 5 years.
The country’s natural gas and oil reserves are projected to dry up by 2030, even while energy demand—currently served by fossil fuels—is increasing.
Enter the pongamia tree: growing well on degraded or marginal land in both wet and dry climates, it can be found from India to the west, right the way across to Fiji in the Pacific. For centuries, its orange/brown seeds have been pressed into oil for leather tanning, soap making, wound healing, and more.
Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry and Environment’s Research is looking into pongamia for mass tree planting as they believe this special oil can be used to power a biomass energy revolution, as well as offering a new crop for local communities to thrive off of economically, and even use as food.
The trick with trying to plant all these trees in rural areas is they have to provide multiple benefits, for multiple parties, across multiple periods of time. Trees that grow fast may not live long enough to affect long term change within the soil, while trees that grow long and strong may be chopped down by citizens because they don’t produce anything.
Trees that produce forest products may not support a functioning ecosystem among them, or may not restore the land at all, but that is vital if 14 million hectares are to be renewed by the time of the Paris Climate Accord targets.
The coconut and the baobab both have the honor of being referred to as the ‘tree of life’ by certain Indigenous groups, and the pongamia could certainly be accorded that honor as well.
One of the fastest growing trees in the Indonesian Archipelago, it can thrive in arid and wet land, from sea level to 1,200 meters above it. Degraded soil, like the kind which can be found on the boundaries of agricultural land, suit the pongamia just fine, and it improves the quality of the soil as it’s a nitrogen fixer.
Modern extraction methods confirmed the oil’s potential as a biofuel crop, with one study finding 44% more oil per seed extracted than traditional methods. When combined with 5% gasoline, it can power diesel engines in vehicles without compromising performance. This is key as many of the more remote Indonesian islands are powered by diesel generators.
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The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) is accompanying the Indonesian Forestry Ministry on their research into pongamia, and one of their scientists, Budi Leksono, recounts that the trees can even be used for food, as when the seeds are pre-treated and dried they can be turned into a nutritious flour.
“I haven’t tried it myself yet,” Leksono told Forest News. “but in the trials, everyone said it was delicious!”
CIFOR is working to see if pongamia plantations are suitable for abandoned mining land and degraded peatlands, the latter being one of the most carbon-rich soils on the planet, and ideal for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. Recently this was done in Central Kalimantan Province on Borneo.
“We planted the trees a year ago, and so far they are growing faster than other similar species,” said Leksono. “This suggests they may be particularly tolerant to harsh conditions, and would then be especially promising for restoration and rehabilitation of degraded land.”
Lastly, another partner organization, the South Korean Forest Service, is seeing if Pongamia can be grown alongside other agri-forestry staples like coffee. The first step is seeing how the roots grow and where, to see if others can co-exist peacefully.
CHECK OUT: The World’s Oldest Known Cave Painting Has Been Discovered in Indonesia
It’s a case study that sometimes a nation has to look to their past to solve the problems of the future.
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There’s been a lot of talk about vaccines these days, but not for bees. But a Cornell student has figured that since our most important pollinators are regularly exposed to lethal pesticides, there ought to be talk about a bee vaccine.
James Webb did more than talk though, he invented one—a pollen-sized microparticle containing a compound that neutralized one of the most commonly used and toxic pesticide bees encounter. Once fed to bees, they demonstrated hugely increased survival rates after being exposed to the pesticide compound malathion.
Beemunnity is a marketable supplement/vaccine for beekeepers that was demonstrated in a study—published in Nature journal—to prevent 100% of bee deaths from malathion (whereas the survival rate of bees exposed to malathion in the control group was 0%).
The enzyme it contains enters the digestive system and breaks down the malathion before it reaches the bee’s brain.
The first product was only effective for one major chemical used in agriculture pesticides, but Webb is trying to develop others, as well as have one for wild bee species ready by the end of the year. For example, the same pollen-inspired microparticle technology can be filled with a special oil that soaks up other pesticides like a sponge. The bee leaves the particle behind when it goes to the bathroom, but the pesticides don’t return to the environment.
“So far we have not found one pesticide which cannot be captured by the technology,” Webb writes.
“I always thought there was a lot of research going into seeing if bees were dying, and the extent to which bees were dying, but not really many solutions,” Webb told Adele Peters of Fast Company.
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Webb acknowledges this is a last resort, but that until industrial agriculture can get pesticides out of their operations, his products will help beekeepers and enthusiasts alike to protect their bees.
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Quote of the Day: “I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.” – Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Photo: Siberian iris by GWC
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?
In the Bible, God’s unwilling messenger Jonah is cast into the sea and swallowed up by the Leviathan, where he spends three days and three nights rethinking the error of his ways before being tossed on Nineveh’s shore to complete his appointed mission.
On Friday, June 11th, 56-year-old Wellfleet, Massachusett’s resident Michael Packard wasn’t fleeing the wrath of the Lord when he dove into the waters of Provincetown’s Herring Cove Beach. He was diving for lobster.
But in a straight out of Jaws scenario, like Jonah before him, in one fell swoop, Packard found himself seemingly in ‘the belly of the beast’—a humpback whale’s mouth.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard told the Cape Cod Times. “I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth.”
Packard’s first terrifying thought as he struggled in the darkess was that he’d been scarfed down by great white shark. While it didn’t take him long to realize the gullet in which he was uncomfortably lodged belonged to a whale rather than a toothy shark, his prospects for survival still didn’t look good.
As panicked as Packard was, the whale was more than a little distressed as well. A humpback’s usual diet consists of fish, krill, and other small marine animals. Cumbersome humans are definitely not on their preferred menu.
According to marine biologists, the most likely explanation for the feeding faux pas was the medium-sized humpback, dining on a school of sand lances on the ocean floor whilst moving with great momentum, unintentionally vacuumed up the stunned commercial diver along with his morning meal.
“They can basically open their mouth through 90° and kind of unlock their jaw and have it drop down,” New England Aquarium’s lead whale researcher Peter Corkeron said in an interview NBC News-10 Boston.
“The water off the Cape is pretty murky,” Corkeron added, “and when whales are doing these feeds, they’re moving really fast… This [was] just an accident. I imagine the whale had this, ‘Oh my goodness!’ moment and probably got rid of him as quickly as it could.”
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Thrashing its head, the whale made for the surface in a major hurry, where it speedily spat the gobsmacked Packard back into the briny water. The entire episode took under a minute, but it was enough for Packard to see his life flash before his eyes.
“I was completely inside; it was completely black,” Packard told Cape Cod News. “I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead.’ All I could think of was my boys—they’re 12 and 15 years old.”
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Although he suffered a dislocated knee and a great deal of soft tissue damage, for a lobsterman who’d been recently ingested and disgorged by a 25-ton marine mammal, Packard survived the encounter remarkably intact—and thankful to be alive.
While it’s a story that’s likely to take on biblical proportions in the retelling, at least for everyone concerned—man and Leviathan—this is one whale of a tale that’s got a happy ending.
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Bonsai is the Japanese art of growing ornamental, artificially dwarfed trees.
Masahiko Kimura began creating his first bonsai designs in his mid-teens.
Featuring dead wood sculpted by tools of his own design, they broke traditional rules dating back centuries.
Perhaps Kimura’s rebellious rule breaking shouldn’t be too surprising: His first dream? To be a rock and roll star.
Over the decades, Kimura’s unique style has gone on to become accepted and even revered—with fans nicknaming him “The Magician.”
These days Kimura—who is now in his 80s—is one of the country’s rare bonsai masters, and he has apprentices all over the globe.
(WATCH the video to tour Kimura’s bonsai garden below.)
(MEET Kimura in this interview with the great bonsai master.)
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In the “nasty” swamps of New Guinea, a frog specialist has discovered a new species which he decided to call the “chocolate frog.”
Far from the fugitive confectionaries containing famous witch or wizard trading cards from the Harry Potter series, the real thing is a close relative of the Australian green tree frog, only coated in a chocolate brown skin.
Steve Richard’s home of South Australia can be a paradise, but the same can’t necessarily be said for the environment he decided to work in. New Guinea is covered in dense jungle and mangrove swamp. It’s one of the least-explored jungles on Earth, and filled with poisonous plants and animals.
Nevertheless, despite nightmarish conditions, Richards has discovered 200 frog species in its depths.
The chocolate frog, or Litoria mira, was found by Richards and his team in 2016, but analysis had to be given time to stack up before it was confirmed that, rather than being a population that migrated to New Guinea somehow, L. mira was its very own species.
Part of the difficulty is that Australian green tree frogs have been known to both exist in New Guinea and turn brown. But subtle difficulties helped the herpetologists make the call, including small patches of lavender skin around the eyes, and the fact that the chocolate frog was a bit smaller.
Profiled by The Guardian, Richard’s explains that he accidentally disturbed an overhanging nest of giant hornets during the course of collecting the frog specimens, and had to sprint in order to escape the insects’ wrath.
“…It took so long to find this frog,” he told the British newspaper. “It’s swampy, it’s spiky, there are lots of malaria-carrying mozzies, it floods, there are crocodiles and not many roads. It’s a really unpleasant place to work.”
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New Mexico is known for its adobe dwellings, Kyoto for its wooden temples, and now, in rural Nigeria, there are villages making waves for their plastic bottle houses.
Discarded plastic bottles can be found along too many miles of Earth roads—and in Nigeria, one of the most populated African countries, there are enough to create a new sustainable construction business.
In fact, there are now houses being built with discarded plastic bottles that are filled with sand and set into a wall via a lattice pattern. The homes are offered for lower prices which helps rural villages.
And, this greener construction method is strong and durable, able to withstand earthquakes—and even bullets.
Called bottle-brick technology, Al Jazeera reports that the walls are 18-times stronger than regular bricks.
In the central state of Kaduna, the project employs out-of-school or jobless youth filling bottles with sand before stacking them amid a glue of traditional mud technology, and securing the outside with a net. The result looks quite striking and can cost a third less than traditional housing in the region, with raw materials being almost free.
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As many as 14,000 plastic bottles will go in to making a house, and staff at the Development Association for Renewable Energies are hoping to pitch the project to the Nigerian government in order to secure some additional funding and expand the enterprise.
One thing is certain, the harvesting of bottles from rubbish-strewn roadsides is benefitting the neighborhood and the planet.
(WATCH the Al Jazeera video…)
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Although people in industrialized nations have access to modern medical care, they are more sedentary and eat a diet high in saturated fats. In contrast, the Tsimane have little or no access to health care but are extremely physically active and consume a high-fiber diet that includes vegetables, fish, and lean meat.
“The Tsimane have provided us with an amazing natural experiment on the potentially detrimental effects of modern lifestyles on our health,” said study author Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor of gerontology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “These findings suggest that brain atrophy may be slowed substantially by the same lifestyle factors associated with very low risk of heart disease.”
The researchers enrolled 746 Tsimane adults, ages 40 to 94, in their study. To acquire brain scans, they provided transportation for the participants from their remote villages to Trinidad, Bolivia, the closest town with CT scanning equipment. That journey could last as long as two full days with travel by river and road.
The team used the scans to calculate brain volumes and then examined their association with age for Tsimane. Next, they compared these results to those in three industrialized populations in the U.S. and Europe.
The scientists found that the difference in brain volumes between middle age and old age is 70% smaller in Tsimane than in Western populations. This suggests that the Tsimane’s brains likely experience far less brain atrophy than Westerners as they age; atrophy is correlated with risk of cognitive impairment, functional decline, and dementia.
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The researchers note in their study, pubilshed in The Journals of Gerontology last month, that the Tsimane have high levels of inflammation, which is typically associated with brain atrophy in Westerners. But their study suggests that high inflammation does not have a pronounced effect upon Tsimane brains.
According to the study authors, the Tsimane’s low cardiovascular risks may outweigh their infection-driven inflammatory risk, raising new questions about the causes of dementia. One possible reason is that, in Westerners, inflammation is associated with obesity and metabolic causes whereas, in the Tsimane, it is driven by respiratory, gastrointestinal, and parasitic infections. Infectious diseases are the most prominent cause of death among the Tsimane.
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“Our sedentary lifestyle and diet rich in sugars and fats may be accelerating the loss of brain tissue with age and making us more vulnerable to diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” said study author Hillard Kaplan, a professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimane for nearly two decades. “The Tsimane can serve as a baseline for healthy brain aging.”
The Indigenous Tsimane people captured scientists’—and the world’s—attention when an earlier study found them to have extraordinarily healthy hearts in older age.
That prior study, published by the Lancet in 2017, showed that Tsimane have the lowest prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis of any population known to science and that they have few cardiovascular disease risk factors. The very low rate of heart disease among the roughly 16,000 Tsimane is very likely related to their pre-industrial subsistence lifestyle of hunting, gathering, fishing, and farming.
“This study demonstrates that the Tsimane stand out not only in terms of heart health, but brain health as well,” Kaplan said. “The findings suggest ample opportunities for interventions to improve brain health, even in populations with high levels of inflammation.”
Source: University of South Carolina
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Quote of the Day: “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?” – George Eliot
Photo: by juan pablo rodriguez
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?
Before too long, you may be able to buy a breath mint that rebuilds your tooth enamel while it whitens your teeth, thanks to a team of researchers.
The University of Washington team is preparing to launch clinical trials of a lozenge that contains a genetically engineered peptide, or chain of amino acids, along with phosphorus and calcium ions, which are building blocks of tooth enamel. The peptide is derived from amelogenin, the key protein in the formation of tooth enamel, the tooth’s crown. It is also key to the formation of cementum, which makes up the surface of the tooth root.
Each lozenge deposits several micrometers of new enamel on the teeth via the peptide, which is engineered to bind to the damaged enamel to repair it while not affecting the mouth’s soft tissue.
The new layer also integrates with dentin, the living tissue underneath the tooth’s surface. Two lozenges a day can rebuild enamel, while one a day can maintain a healthy layer. The lozenge—which can be used like a mint—is expected to be safe for use by adults and children alike.
The researchers have been discussing commercial applications with potential corporate partners, according to Professor Mehmet Sarikaya, the team leader.
The lozenge produces new enamel that is whiter than what tooth-whitening strips or gels produce. It has another distinct advantage: Conventional whitening treatments rely on hydrogen peroxide, a bleaching agent that can weaken tooth enamel after prolonged use. Since tooth enamel can’t regrow spontaneously, the underlying dentin can be exposed, with results ranging from hypersensitivity to cavities or even gum disease. The lozenge, on the other hand, strengthens, rebuilds, and protects teeth.
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While fluoride can also fortify tooth enamel, it does not actively rebuild it. It also dilutes relatively quickly, and its overall effectiveness depends largely on diligent oral hygiene. At the same time, the lozenge can also be used in conjunction with fluoride, Dr. Dogan said. The fluoride can be in a very low concentration, he added—about 20 percent of what is found in most fluoride toothpastes.
“We have three objectives in the clinical trial,” Professor Sarikaya said. “First, demonstrate efficacy. Second, documentation. Third, benchmarking—seeing how the whitening effect compares to existing commercial treatments.” The researchers have already tested the lozenge on extracted teeth from humans, pigs, and rats, and also on live rats.
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The team also plans to develop related products for use in dental offices, Dr. Dogan said, expecting this phase of trials to start in March or April. “Each study will take two weeks, and we expect these trials to take no more than three months,” he said. The team is also developing a toothpaste for over-the-counter use, but has not fixed a timetable for its introduction.
In addition, the researchers are investigating a gel or solution with the engineered peptide to treat hypersensitive teeth.
This problem results from weakness in the enamel that makes the underlying dentin and nerves more vulnerable to heat or cold. Most common products currently on the market can put a layer of organic material on the tooth and numb nerve endings with potassium nitrate, but the relief is only temporary. The peptide, however, addresses the problem permanently at its source by strengthening the enamel.
Source: University of Washington School of Dentistry
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