The Springburn Winter Gardens from the front - credit, Leslie Barrie / Geography UK, CC 2.0.
The Springburn Winter Gardens from the front – credit, Leslie Barrie / Geography UK, CC 2.0.
A historic greenhouse in Glasgow is set to finally be revived after 40 years of dereliction.
$1.5 million will help a trust organized to save the building do just that, while simultaneously opening it up to events and perhaps more.
Located in the northern district of the same name, the Springburn Winter Gardens was Scotland’s largest greenhouse when there was still green in the house. Built in 1892, it played host to classical concertos and exotic flower displays behind the massive glazing held up by attractive British ironworks.
In the post-war years, however, the gardens and park began to decay with the general Springburn neighborhood, and in 1983, the Winter Garden was closed after a huge storm damaged it. It has ever since remained in disrepair and disregard.
Plans to tear it down were rebuffed by locals with long, fond memories of the greenhouse in Springburn Park, and in 2012, the Springburn Winter Garden Trust was formed to preserve the building, whose first charge was to perform emergency stabilization work in 2017.
This very trust just recently received £1.1 million from the Regeneration Capital Grant Fund which aims to renew community sites in disadvantaged areas around Scottish cities.
Sarah Robinson Frood owns a company called Innovate Rural, which is now developing a plan to take the first step towards restoring the greenhouse by turning it into a “living ruin.”
“On a basic level it’s going to make it accessible again and stop it falling down. There has been a lot of technical reporting over the past couple of years and that has shown it is in a precarious state.”
“It’s just about bringing it back into use after stabilizing it. It’s something like a ruined church or a bandstand, where the structure is still there and can be utilized while not being a completed or closed building.”
Ways of utilizing the heritage-listed building could involve making it into a hub for arts and culture, with leasable spaces, a performance venue, and cafe/bar.
SHARE This Story Of How This Historic Building Will Be Saved In Glasgow…
Quote of the Day: “Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.” – Alfred Montapert
Photo by: Jackie Hutchinson
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?
130 years ago today, the first Olympic Games of the modern era opened in Athens–1,500 years after the original games were banned by the Roman emperor. Because Ancient Greece was the birthplace of the Olympic Games, Athens was chosen as the perfect place to stage the first modern Games. Despite obstacles, the Games of the I Olympiad were regarded as a great success, attracting the largest international participation of any sporting event to that date. The Panathinaiko Olympic Stadium overflowed with the largest crowd ever to watch a sporting event. READ some of the highlights… (1896)
In cloudy old England, an architect has created his own phone app that displays which pubs are currently in the sunshine.
Mo Dawod was out in London in April last year when he decided that he wanted an iced coffee in the sunshine, but there was no way to know which cafes would be blanketed in shade.
So, later that night, he created his own mobile map using publicly available data, such as a building’s height and footprint, to create a shadow simulation for pubs, restaurants, and cafes.
What started as a simple ‘hack’ for himself quickly turned into the number one app in the UK—called Sunseekr—and Mo has since quit his day job in architecture to pursue it full time.
“I decided to share it with the community to see if anyone was also struggling like me and would be interested,” said the 34-year-old. “People went crazy. It went so viral on Reddit that night.
“I was astonished and shocked. After that I decided to make it as an app.”
“The app went number one in the UK in the lifestyle category four days after it became real. It was so surreal that all this happened from me just wanting to have an iced coffee.”
Mo, who is originally from Egypt, next looked at how to monetize his invention so he could pay his bills while operating the Sunseekr app—now with over 250,000 users.
Sunseekr app screen – SWNS
Last summer, he managed to get a sponsorship from Aperol, who used his map to create their own version showing where people could drink an aperitivo of Aperol Spritz in the sunshine.
With the app becoming less popular in the winter months, the founder decided to use the time to work on leveling-up the experience with new elements.
Venues now have a chance to be more featured, uploading pictures of their venue, mapping the garden, and pushing themselves on the explore page for £350 a year.
It uses a moon emoji if the location is in the shade, and a sun if it’s not. The app can also notify you when your favorite spot is getting sun beamed, displays closing and opening times, and offers the ability to leave comments and reviews.
“When I built this app it was more of a hack for the problem I had. Now I am trying to take it to the next level. I have rebuilt the whole app for summer 2026.
“It has been for me such a crazy journey. It was so unexpected. I never thought I would be running such a platform. I am so happy that I managed to put this together.”
A University of Michigan researcher stumbled upon a crucial caveat for every study of microplastics that has been scaring us for years now. Lab gloves may have skewed the data in the research.
She discovered that residue from latex or nitrile gloves may be unintentionally contaminating lab equipment used to measure microplastics in the air and water, thus inflating estimates of the pollution.
The startling discovery began as a “wild goose chase” in the lab, when chemistry grad student Madeline Clough was working on a project to examine microplastics in Michigan’s atmosphere.
The researchers used air samplers which collect particles from the atmosphere and deposit them onto a metal substrate. Using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are then able to determine the types of particles.
When Clough examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were “many thousands of times greater” than what she expected to find.
“It led to a wild goose chase of trying to figure out where this contamination could possibly have come from, because we just knew this number was far too high to be correct,” Clough said in a University press release.
“Was it a plastic squirt bottle, was it particles in the atmosphere of the lab where I was preparing the substrates? We finally traced it down to gloves.”
Wearing gloves is recommended by all the current literature in the microplastics field, so Clough sought new answers.
The salient study
Particles called stearates—a kind of salt or soap—were found to be the culprits. Manufacturers coat disposable gloves with these particles to make them easier to peel from the molds used to form them.
They are “chemically similar” at a structural level to microplastics. They also look nearly identical—which can lead to false positives or inflated numbers of microplastic pollution, like Clough and her colleagues experienced.
File photo by Soren Funk
So the researchers designed a new experiment to figure out how widespread the problem is. They tested seven different kinds of gloves, including nitrile, latex, and cleanroom gloves, as well as the most common techniques microplastic researchers use to identify microplastics.
The experiment tried to mimic every point and variety of contact that would occur in a research environment touching a scientist’s gloved hand. This would include a filter or a microscope slide—any piece of technology that a researcher might use over the course of investigating microplastics.
2,000 false positives per millimeter
They found that, on average, the gloves imparted about 2,000 false positives per millimeter squared area.
“If you are contacting a sample with a gloved hand, you’re likely imparting these stearates that could overestimate your results,” Clough said.
The fewest particles were imparted by cleanroom gloves. They are made without the stearate coating; are low-lint to prevent contamination in the lab; and useful in “ultra-pure” controlled environments like electronics manufacturing and pharmaceutical facilities. Unfortunately, they are 2-5 times more expensive than standard medical or industrial gloves.
The researchers also designed another experiment to determine whether they were able to distinguish what a true microplastic looked like versus one of the stearate salts from the gloves using scanning electron microscopy as well as light-based microscopy.
They found that the stearate was visually impossible to distinguish from polyethylene, the plastic it resembles.
Credit: Madeline Clough / University of Michigan
But the chemistry team was also able to find other methods—in collaboration with grad student Eduardo Ochoa Rivera and U-M professor of statistics Ambuj Tewari—that can differentiate between the false positives coming from the glove and microplastics in the environment. This can help researchers revisit potentially contaminated datasets.
“For microplastics researchers who have these impacted datasets, there’s still hope to recover them and find a true quantity of microplastics,” said Clough, whose work was just published in the journal RSC Analytical Methods.
“This field is very challenging to work in because there’s plastic everywhere,” said chemistry and engineering Professor Anne McNeil, the senior author of the study.
“That’s why we need chemists and people who understand chemical structure to be working in this field.”
In the conclusion of their paper, the team extolled researchers to wear cleanroom gloves and take other precautions so as not to skew the data and unknowingly make the microplastics outlook even more alarming.
“We implore microplastic researchers to address glove-based contamination and avoid overestimating microplastic pollution in the environment.”
SHARE THIS HOPEFUL OVERSIGHT With Eco-Lovers on Social Media…
Reggae the Atlantic harbor seal with his beloved rubber duckie - Credit: New England Aquarium
Reggae the Atlantic harbor seal with his beloved rubber duckie – Credit: New England Aquarium
You didn’t know how much you wanted to see a video of a harbor seal playing with his rubber duckie—until now.
The New England Aquarium may call it an enrichment activity designed to stimulate its resident Atlantic harbor seals, but we call it adorable fun.
And, soon after posting a video on social media of Reggae, a 33-year-old seal playing with its beloved yellow duck, a new ‘influencer’ was born.
The post shared to Instagram and Facebook by the aquarium in Boston, tallied 80,000 Likes from viewers melting over the seal kissing and hugging the floaty toy.
Rebekah Miller, the aquarium’s manager overseeing the Atlantic harbor seals and California sea lions, told the Associated Press that the toys serve a purpose.
“It’s a great way to challenge our animals…and really allow them to use those problem-solving skills that they have.”
The facility is home to five seals, all of which were born in captivity, and all of which are curious by nature. So placing unusual items around their habitat, which is built to resemble a rocky New England coast, helps keep them engaged and mentally stimulated.
Recreation of textile co-op at Cabezo Redondo settlement in the Bronze Age Credit: J. A. López Padilla; Reconstruction of a Bronze Age loom by Beate Schneider, on display at the Alcoy Archaeological Museum via University of Alicante / SWNS
Recreation of textile co-op at Cabezo Redondo settlement in the Bronze Age Credit: J. A. López Padilla; Reconstruction of a Bronze Age loom by Beate Schneider, on display at the Alcoy Archaeological Museum via University of Alicante
A wooden loom that survived a devastating fire 3,500 years ago has revealed key aspects of the Bronze Age textile revolution.
Most of the weights as well as components made from wood and plant fibers remained remarkably intact despite the blaze that burned down a settlement near Villena in present day Spain.
Scientists explained that the same inferno that destroyed part of the ancient village of Cabezo Redondo also helped preserve the loom that they say is “incredibly hard” to document in archaeology.
The discovery by a team of Spanish researchers is one of just a few known cases in which both the set of loom weights and components have been preserved.
Describing their research in the journal Antiquity, the team says that Cabezo Redondo was a major Bronze Age settlement between 2100 BC and 1250 BC, which included terraces on the slope of the hill, with workbenches, fireplaces, silos, and storage receptacles.
The economy was based on intensive farming, so the discovery of gold, silver and ivory ornaments, as well as glass and seashell beads, proved that the settlement was part of a large exchange network connected to other areas of the Iberian Peninsula, the Eastern Mediterranean, and even Central Europe.
Study co-author Professor Gabriel García Atiénzar, of the University of Alicante, explained that the fire generated a very specific archaeological situation and the collapse of the ceiling was crucial: “resulting in a sealed space in which the area was suddenly destroyed and immediately buried, enabling its preservation.”
The loom’s components – including charred timbers, clay weights and esparto ropes – were preserved beneath the remains of the collapsed ceiling.
3,500-year-old loom with wooden weights in Cabezo Redondo settlement – University of Alicante / SWNS
The loom was revealed during excavation on the western slope of the settlement, where the researchers found a raised platform with a dense concentration of clay weights. The evidence allowed the team to identify the device with a high degree of certainty.
“Although the loom was recovered from a collapsed area and some pieces were missing, the compact set of 44 cylindrical weights with a central perforation, most of them about 200 grams in weight, is characteristic of a vertical warp-weighted loom,” said Ricardo Basso Rial, a predoctoral researcher at the University of Granada.
“Several pine timbers in a parallel arrangement were discovered alongside the weights.
“Some of the thicker timbers, with a rectangular cross-section, are probably the remains of the upright posts of the loom frame; other narrower pieces, with a rounded cross-section, supposedly constitute the horizontal posts.”
The researchers also identified plaited esparto fibers associated with the structure, and even remains of small cords in the perforations of some weights, probably used to “warp” the threads to each loom weight.
Archeo-botanist Yolanda Carrión, from the University of Valencia, analyzed the wooden pieces.
“The preservation of the organic elements was due to the fire that charred the remains and to the fact that these remains were practically unaltered later,” she said.
“Paradoxically, the fire both destroyed and preserved the site.”
Reconstruction of Bronze Age loom by Beate Schneider, on display at the Alcoy Archaeological Museum via SWNS
A microscopic study of the wood determined it was made from Aleppo pine, widely found in the surrounding area.
“The observation of the growth rings suggests that the timbers came from long-lived trees that provided large-diameter pieces of wood, which indicates that the material was carefully selected,” said Carrión.
The ‘textile revolution’
The loom was part of a wider period known as the “textile revolution” in the European Bronze Age—characterized by technological and economic changes in production, according to the study.
“The textile revolution was the result of a combination of processes, including the expansion of livestock breeding for wool production, technical innovations in looms and spinning and weaving tools, and social changes that led to more intensive and diversified textile production.”
He says new forms of lighter spindle whorls and various types of loom weights, some of them lightweight enough to allow for the production of finer, more complex fabrics, such as twills, were present at Cabezo Redondo.
Fabrics themselves are rarely preserved in archaeological settings, so deductions need to be based on the study of tools. For that reason, the researchers say the loom recovered from Cabezo Redondo is especially valuable.
It allows scientists to “go from interpreting isolated loom weights to documenting a working loom with extreme detail: the wooden structure, the ropes, the weights and the architectural context.”
Part of a co-op
It was located in an outdoor space shared by several households, which suggests that production was a “cooperative” effort.
“This indicates that different household groups may have collaborated on activities such as spinning, weaving and milling,” said Paula Martín de la Sierra, a predoctoral researcher at the University of Alicante.
“Other artisanal activities in the village, such as metalwork or ivory craftsmanship, seem to have been concentrated in specialized areas.
“In several graves at the site, teeth recovered from female remains have a degree of wear characteristically associated with spinning and weaving, as these women probably used their incisors to hold fibers in place or cut threads.”
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?
Crowds gathering in Tiananmen Square during the Qingming Festival. The gathering was carried out as an action in memory of Zhou Enlai.
50 years ago today, the April 5th Incident (known as the Tiananmen Square protest) helped pave the way for the end of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and with it, Maoist communism in the country. Leaders at the time along with eyewitnesses believed there was nothing organized about the incident, and it was in fact a spontaneous coming together of all members and classes in society to mourn the passing of recently-deceased Premier Zhou Enlai, who was seen both as a national hero and victim of internal power struggles within the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo. READ about this famous and singular protest… (1976)
Mordecai the bunny – or “Morty” for short – doesn’t have any thumbs; but that doesn’t stop him from absolutely dominating at Jenga.
The little rabbit used to spend his days in a backyard hutch, neglected without companionship or attention. In fact, Morty was so ignored at his old home, he developed a botfly infestation: a nasty parasite that preys on furry mammals.
After he was rescued by animal shelter workers, however, he was eventually treated for his condition and transferred to PETA.
A staffer there named Kendall Bryant then adopted Morty as her own—and he has been enjoying a life of luxury ever since.
Morty now enjoys running around his new home, snuggling with Kendall, and “supervising” meal preparation in the kitchen.
But most of all, he enjoys a good game of Jenga. (Watch the video below…)
On March 25, an autistic bowler who recently entered the Professional Bowlers Association achieved something he’s been dreaming about for years—his first-ever 300 game.
For most casual bowlers, a sanctioned perfect game is rare. For Matt Sipes, it represented so much more than just 12 strikes. It was the result of years of dedication, focus, and determination, and although there have been challenges along the way, he never gave up on his goal.
“It’s something I’ve dreamed about my entire life,” the former collegiate bowler told GNN.
“To finally achieve it feels almost surreal. I’m so grateful, and I hope I can inspire other athletes on the spectrum.”
Since playing his first game at age six, he’s loved the sound of the pins crashing into each other—but it was the sense of calmness and the sense of belonging he felt that changed his life.
Bowling was something that clicked right away. The energetic child with ADHD growing up in Wood Dale, Illinois, had “so much fun” that he kept asking his mom to take him back to the lanes.
He bowled competitively in the Junior League and later in high school.
“When I graduated from high school, college was not really on my mind. I thought I would just get a job and keep bowling in leagues,” he wrote in an essay for Bowlers Journal.
But his coach suggested Matt try out for a college team—and he got a scholarship to Judson University in Elgin, Illinois, not far from his home.
“That’s when everything changed.”
He has competed in leagues and tournaments for 15 years, both locally and across the country in Las Vegas, Reno, and Baton Rouge. One of the highlights was playing in the Pro Bowlers Association LBC National Championships and Open Championships.
“Competing at that level makes me feel like my hard work is paying off. And it is so cool to sometimes be bowling alongside the pros.”
For his mother, Christine Sipes, watching him throw that final strike in his perfect game at Wood Dale Bowl was overwhelming.
“It wasn’t just about the score—it was about seeing his hard work, resilience, and love for the sport come together in one unforgettable moment,” she said.
Perfect game score of 300
(Watch the video of that final strike in a video below…)
“Bowling has helped me become the person I am today,” said the 23-year-old.
Native American dice as old as 13,000 years– Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution American Museum of Natural History and Wyoming University (SWNS
Native American dice as old as 13,000 years – Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution, American Museum of Natural History and Wyoming University (SWNS)
Tribal casinos in the US may seem a more natural fit, after hearing about new research showing that Native Americans were making dice for gaming thousands of years before anyone else in the world.
Evidence revealed that the earliest known dice in human history were made and used by hunter-gatherers on the western Great Plains more than 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.
That was thousands of years before the earliest known dice from Bronze Age societies in Europe, Africa and Asia, according to scientists.
The new study, published in the journal American Antiquity, indicates that dice and games of chance have been a “persistent” feature of Native American culture for at least the last 12,000 years.
The earliest examples were from 12,800 years ago, discovered at archaeological sites from the Late Pleistocene Folsom era in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico—and the artifacts predate the earliest known Old World dice by more than 6,000 years.
“Historians have traditionally treated dice and probability as Old World innovations,” said the study’s author Robert Madden.
“What the archaeological record shows is that ancient Native American groups were deliberately making objects designed to produce random outcomes, and using those outcomes in structured games, thousands of years earlier than previously recognized.”
Unlike modern cubic dice, they were two-sided “binary lots”—carefully crafted, small pieces of bone that were flat or slightly rounded, often oval or rectangular in shape, sized to be held in the hand and tossed in groups onto a playing surface.
Folsom era Native American dice – Courtesy of the Department of Anthropology at University of Wyoming (via SWNS)
The two faces of the binary lots were distinguished by applied markings, surface treatments, colouration, or other visible modifications, much like heads or tails on a coin, with one face designated as the “counting” side.
When thrown, they reliably landed with one side or the other facing upward, producing a binary—or two-outcome—result.
Researchers say that sets of the dice were also cast together, and scores were determined by how many landed with the counting face up.
“They’re simple, elegant tools,” said Madden, a Ph.D. student at Colorado State University.
“But they’re also unmistakably purposeful. These are not casual by-products of bone-working. They were made to generate random outcomes.”
The study introduced a new test—a checklist of measurable physical features for identifying North American dice archaeologically—derived from a comparative analysis of 293 sets of such dice documented across the continent by Stewart Culin in his 1907 Bureau of American Ethnology book, Games of the North American Indians.
Native American ball games, 1845 illustration- The New York Public Library Digital Collections (cropped)
Researchers applied the test systematically to the published archaeological record, essentially re-examining artifacts long labeled as possible “gaming pieces” or otherwise overlooked to determine whether they meet the new objective criteria for dice.
In most cases, Madden said the evidence had been in the archaeological record for decades, but without a clear standard for identifying dice, it had never been analyzed as part of a larger pattern.
“What was missing was a clear, continent-wide standard for recognizing what we were looking at.”
Using the new approach, he identified more than 600 diagnostic and probable dice from sites spanning every major period of North American prehistory, beginning in the Late Pleistocene. They appeared at 57 archaeological sites across a 12-state region, associated with a variety of different cultures.
Historians of mathematics widely regard dice games as humanity’s earliest structured engagement with randomness, an intellectual precursor to probability theory, statistics, and later scientific thinking. Until now, the origins of such practices were thought to lie exclusively in Old World complex societies beginning around 5,500 years ago.
“These findings (show) they were intentionally creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that leveraged probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers.
“That matters for how we understand the global history of probabilistic thinking.” But Madden had other theories, too.
“Games of chance and gambling created neutral, rule-governed spaces for ancient Native Americans. They allowed people from different groups to interact, exchange goods and information, form alliances, and manage uncertainty.
“In that sense, they functioned as powerful social technologies.”
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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY – Week of April 4, 2026
Copyright by Rob Brezsny, FreeWillAstrology.com
ARIES (March 21-April 19):
Now is an excellent time to decide your favorite color is amaranth (a vivid red-violet), or sinopia (earthy red-orange), or viridian (cool blue-green, darker than jade). You might also conclude that your favorite aroma is agarwood (deep, smoky, resin-soaked wood), or heliotrope (cherry-almond vanilla), or petrichor (wet soil after a rain). I’m trying to tell you, Aries, that you’re primed to deeply enhance your detailed delight in smells, colors, tastes, feelings, physical sensations, types of wind, tones of voice, qualities of light—and everything else. Indulge in sensory and sensual pleasures!
TAURUS (April 20-May 20):
My Taurus friend Elena keeps a “gratitude garden” in her backyard. When she feels grateful for a specific joy in her life, she writes it on biodegradable paper and buries it among her flowers, herbs, and vegetables. “I feed the earth with appreciation,” she says. “Returning the gift.” She feels this practice ensures that her garden and her life flourish. Her devoted attention to recognizing blessings attracts even more blessings. Her cultivated appreciation for beauty and abundance leads her to discover more beauty and abundance. Elena’s approach is pure Taurean genius. I invite you to create your own rituals for expressing your thankful love. Not just paying dutiful homage in your thoughts, but giving your appreciation weight, texture, and presence in the actual world.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20):
Many of us periodically slip into the daydream that everything would finally feel right if only our lives were somehow different. If we’re single, maybe we imagine we ought to be partnered; if we’re partnered, we wish our beloved would change, or we secretly wonder about someone else entirely. That’s the snag. The blessing is this: In the days ahead, you’re likely to discover a surprising ease with your life exactly as it is, and feel a genuine, grounded peace. Congratulations in advance!
CANCER (June 21-July 22):
A cautious voice in your head murmurs: “Proceed carefully. Don’t be overly impressed with your own beauty. Stick with dependable methods. Live up to expectations and avoid explorations into the unknown.” Your bold genius interrupts: “Tell that fussy, boring voice to shut up. The truth is that you have earned the right to be an inquisitive wanderer, an ingenious lover, a fanciful storyteller, and a laughing experimenter.”
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22):
In medieval European gardens, there was a tradition of creating “pleasure labyrinths.” They were walking meditations that spiraled inward to a center, then back out again. There were no decisions and no wrong turns, just the relaxing, meditative journey itself. I think you need and deserve a metaphorical pleasure labyrinth right now, Leo. You’ve been treating every choice as a high-stakes dilemma and every path as potentially problematic. But what if the current phase isn’t about making the perfect decision? Maybe it’s about trusting that the path you’re on will take you where you need to go, even if it meanders. By cosmic decree, you are excused from second-guessing every turn.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22):
Your eye for imperfection is a gift until it becomes the lens through which you see everything. The critical faculty that drives you to refine and enhance may also shunt you into a dead end of never-being-good-enough, where impossible standards immobilize you. In the coming weeks, dear Virgo, I beg you to use your vaunted discernment primarily in the service of growth and pleasure rather than constraint. Be excited by buoyant analysis that empowers constructive change. Homework: For every flaw you identify, identify two things that are working well. You won’t ignore what needs attention, but instead will compensate for the excessive criticism that sometimes grips your inner critic.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22):
You Libras shouldn’t expend excessive effort trying to force the external world to be more tranquil. That’s mostly a futile task that distracts from your more essential work. The secret to your happiness is to cultivate serenity within. How do you do that? One reliable way to shed tension is to continually place yourself in the presence of beauty. Nothing makes you relax better than being surrounded by elegance, grace, and loveliness. Now is a good time to recommit yourself to this key practice.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21):
In computer science, there’s a concept called “graceful degradation.” When a system encounters an error, it doesn’t crash completely. It loses some functionality but keeps running with what remains. According to my reading of the astrological omens, Scorpio, you’d be wise to acknowledge a graceful degradation like that. Something isn’t working as you had hoped and planned. A relationship? Project? Adventure? In classic Scorpio fashion, you’re tempted to burn it all down. But I encourage you to practice graceful degradation instead. Keep what still works and release only what’s actually broken. Not everything has to be all-or-nothing. You can lose some functionality and still run. You can be partially out of whack and still be valuable. PS: The awkwardness is temporary.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):
At your best and brightest, you are a hunter—though not the kind who stalks prey with weapons and trophies in mind. Your hunt is noble: the fervent pursuit of adventures that nourish your curiosity and the brave forays you make into unfamiliar territories where intriguing new truths shimmer. And now, as the world drifts deeper into chaos, you are called to respond with even more exploratory audacity. I invite you to further refine your hunter’s craft. Lift it up to an even higher, more luminous form of seeking.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):
Capricorn meditation teacher Wes Nisker guided his students to relax the relentless mental static that muddled their awareness. But he also understood that excessive striving can sabotage the peace we’re seeking. I invoke his influence now to help you release some of the jittery goal-obsession you’ve been gripped by. Nisker and I offer you permission to temporarily suspend the potentially exhausting drive to constantly be better and more accomplished. Instead, just for now, simply be your authentic self. Loosen your high-strung grip on self-improvement and allow yourself the radical luxury of purposelessness.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18):
Here’s a danger you Aquarians are sometimes prey to: spending so much energy fixing the big picture that you neglect what’s up close and personal. You may get so involved in rearranging systems that immediate concerns get less than your best attention. I hope you won’t do that in the coming weeks. Your aptitude for overarching objectivity is a gift because it enables you to recognize patterns others can’t detect. But it may also divert you from the messy, intricate intimacy that gritty transformation requires. Your assignment: Eagerly attend to the details, which I bet will be more interesting than you imagine.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20):
In horticulture, “hardening off” is the process of gradually exposing seedlings started indoors to outdoor conditions before transplanting them. Too much exposure too fast will shock them; no exposure at all will leave them unprepared. Let’s invoke this as a useful metaphor for you. I believe you are being hardened off, Pisces. Life is making small, increasing demands on your tender self. Though this may sometimes feel uncomfortable, I assure you that it’s preparation, not cruelty. You’re being readied for a shift from protected space to open ground. My advice is twofold: 1. Don’t retreat back into the ultra-safe greenhouse. 2. Don’t let yourself be thrown into full exposure all at once.
WANT MORE? Listen to Rob’s EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, 4-5 minute meditations on the current state of your destiny — or subscribe to his unique daily text message service at: RealAstrology.com
Quote of the Day: “We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering.” – Sharon Salzberg
Photo by: Ishan Gupta
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?
51 years ago today, Microsoft was founded as a partnership between childhood friends and computer whiz-kids Bill Gates and Paul Allen. The company became the largest seller of software in the world, developing MS-DOS for early IBM PCs, and later, Windows, and Microsoft Office. Its market capitalization has topped $1 trillion, and through various acquisitions has become one of the most valuable brands in history. READ more about their long string of successes… (1975)
Ergos app reshapes how small farmers sell their crops in India - Courtesy of Kishor Kumar Jha / via Better India
Ergos app reshapes how small farmers sell their crops in India – Courtesy of Kishor Kumar Jha / via Better India
From the Indian state of Bihar comes the story of a life-changing argi-tech application that’s giving farmers unprecedented control over the financial destiny of their crop.
Called Ergos, this digital “grain account” is linked to a network of “grain banks” where farmers can store their crops, monitor inventory and national prices, and sell when they’re ready too with the touch of their phone.
Farming is a hard job with no shortage of anxieties. No small landowning farmer has the hours to spare during harvest season to build a network of brokers, couriers, and sales teams that would be necessary to get their grain to market at a price that will reliably put food on their table.
That’s where that most infamous and mostly necessary figure in commerce comes in: the middle man. Before, one farmer said, middle men would quote prices, and farmers had little choice but to sell or risk their crop wasting away.
This status quo was something Kishor Kumar Jha and Praveen Kumar hoped to end. They founded Ergos, the system of grain banks and accounts to remove these middle men and allow farmers complete control of their sales decisions.
Ajay Kumar Chaudhary, a 66-year-old farmer from Bihar’s Kalyanpur, spoke to the Better India news outlet about his experience using Ergos, and how it transformed him from distressed seller to patient trader.
“If they said the price has fallen by 10 [rupees] today, we had to sell at that rate,” he explains. “Now we decide when to sell. If the price is not good today, we can wait. Maybe after a few days, the rate becomes better.”
“If we need money immediately,” Chaudhary says,” we can take a loan at about 1% interest and keep the grain stored The loan is automatically repaid when the grain is eventually sold.”
Borrowing money in the developing world can be extremely costly. If you think a 19.5% interest on your Discover card is a lot, try signing for some of the rates that these Bihari farmers are subjected to: often 50, 60%.
Undoubtedly some of that is predatory. On the other hand, consider the risks involved in lending money to a poor farmer who has little in the way of farm machinery, sanitary grain storage capacity, A-rated collateral, or effective pest control measures.
The farmer reiterated that in his profession, there are no shortages of uncertainties: weather, political decisions, pests and crop health, and of course, market pricing. But with the introduction of Ergos, at least one major dependency has been removed.
The benefits, explains the business’s founder Jha, extend beyond the farmer and his finances, and indeed touch the whole nation. India loses approximately 18% of her harvested grain every year, Jha says, through improper storage facilities. The village grain banks operated by Ergos use scientific best-practices for keeping grain stored for long periods without rot.
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Japanese diaper brands on a shelf - credit 維基小霸王- CC BY-SA 4.0.
Japanese diaper brands on a shelf – credit 維基小霸王- CC BY-SA 4.0.
In the 1990s, a pair of Japanese municipalities estimated that the landfill they shared was going to be full by 2004.
Unless they did something to start reducing the size of their waste streams, the towns would have to sacrifice more precious land, or truck their waste much farther afield to another site.
Their response was to ramp up recycling of the clearest categories such as glass, paper, and metals, before moving on to more complicated streams, particularly a very stinky one: dirty diapers.
“Ultimately, our top priority is to reduce our trash and extend the life of the landfill,” Kenichi Matsunaga, an environment official for the city of Shibushi, told the Japan Times.
Billions of diapers—used by the very youngest and the oldest in society, are discarded every year in Japan. Made of layered, super-absorbing fibers and other materials, they aren’t readily recyclable.
Located in Kagoshima Prefecture, a new recycling initiative for diapers separates and shreds this core material in a way that prepares it for reuse while saving millions of tons of landfill-bound waste.
Shibushi, and the nearby town of Osaki, recycle 80% of household waste—some four-times the national avergae. Here, the company Unicharm aimed to pioneer its diaper recycling method where locals are already used to sorting their trash.
Residents’ diapers are collected, but only if their names are written on the bags to ensure accountability. Then, they’re washed and shredded until their component elements of plastic, pulp, and super-absorbent polymer (SAP) are separated.
Previously, GNN has reported that the company has used this material to make toilet paper, but now have advanced their method and machinery enough to reuse the pulp in diaper manufacturing.
The recycled diaper toilet paper – credit: Osaki Municipal Government’s SDGs Promotion Council
The process uses ozone, a sterilizing gas, to clean and deodorize the pulp to the point that it passes sanitary requirements. The company is currently working on ways to prepare the SAP for reuse, and expects progress by 2028.
The country is probably the only one in the world where more diapers are produced for incontinent elders than for babies. Larger and more robust, they take up more space in landfills.
Japan wants to aim for 100 cities and towns to be recycling diapers by 2030, “or at least to start talking about it” reports Japan Times.
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12-year-old Nathan Yuill donates Easter baskets to Providence Alaska Children's Hospital (Courtesy of hospital via FB)
12-year-old Nathan Yuill donates Easter baskets to Providence Alaska Children’s Hospital (Courtesy of hospital via FB)
Nathan Yuill was diagnosed as a child with stage-4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but the good news is that he’s two treatment courses away from what is anticipated to be a bell-ringing remission announcement.
But before his time in Providence Children’s Hospital came to an end, 12-year-old Yuill raised $2,000 to give almost every child there a colorful, present-filled Easter basket.
Clinical Nurse Manager of Pediatric at Providence, Nicki Thurwanger said that the carts they normally use to transport meals and other things from room to room were overflowing with the baskets—all donated and put together by kind, nearby residents.
“When the kiddos are here, every day becomes challenging and hard, and you look for the little things that make you be a kid,” Thurwanger told Alaska News Source.
“And so I think that’s what things like this give back is, yes, you’re in the hospital, but you’re a kid, and you get to still be a kid when you’re here.”
Nathan’s mother, Dena Yuill, said she was shocked when donations for the project, dreamt up by her son, topped $2,000 in just 24 hours.
“He’s amazing. I wish I had half the strength he does,” she said.
124 baskets in total were distributed in time for Good Friday in Providence and the nearby Alaska Native Medical Center.
SIMILAR STORIES:
Children certainly get to have more fun for Easter than their parents, and thanks to Yuill, his fellow patients get an opportunity during a difficult time to just be a kid again.
WATCH the story below from Alaska News Source…
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Teen Aiden Andrews finds megalodon shark tooth while diving in Florida - Courtesy of Fossil Junkies
Teen Aiden Andrews finds megalodon shark tooth while diving in Florida – Courtesy of Fossil Junkies
A Florida teen will have quite the story for his friends to chew on when they all meet back in class after spring break.
16-year-old Aiden Andrews found the 6-inch-long tooth of an ancient shark known as a megalodon while diving near Sarasota.
This was the largest shark species in history, and is believed to have had a stronger bite than any other creature to ever live. The largest megalodon known weighed an estimated 50 tons in life, and stretched 60 feet nose to tail.
Aiden was on a shallow-water dive expedition with his dad Brian through a fossil-hunting tour group in Venice, Florida, called Fossil Junkies when he pulled the giant gnasher from the silt off Manasota Key, near Sarasota.
Though experts call it a rare find, Fossil Junkies seem to be experts in knowing where to look, as their homepage is covered in smiling, ecstatic divers holding their megalodon teeth.
Though the megalodon shark was enormous, its teeth do seem to have a habit of ending up in small hands.
In 2022, GNN reported that a 6-year-old walking on Bawdsey Beach in the UK turned up a 4-inch-long tooth of a megalodon, buried for at least 3 million years.
Semi-professional fossil hunters with trowels and knee pads for kneeling in the mud told the father and son at the time that it’s nearly unheard of to find megalodon teeth in Great Britain, despite the fact they have been found nearly everywhere on Earth.
It’s not that unheard of, as it turns out, because in 2023 another young man, 13-year-old Ben Evans, found a 10-million-year-old megalodon tooth at Walton-on-the-Naze Beach in Essex.
On Christmas Day, 2022, Molly Sampson from the Chesapeake Bay area went fossil hunting with her dad after receiving a pair of insulated waders and a sifting basket from Santa Claus. She too pulled up a ‘meg’ tooth that was roughly 15 million years old.
Molly told local news that when it comes to megalodons, every inch in the teeth was 10 in the body, so Molly’s would have been 50 feet long.
WATCH Aiden pull up the tooth from the shallows below…
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