Sean Hepburn has been photographing birds, like gannets and ravens, flocking on the Isle of Portland, Dorset for the past six years. But there is nothing like mumuration of starlings to inspire awe in any who watch them.
Sean Hepburn – SWNS
The amateur landscape photographer from nearby Weymouth took an interest in starlings after being amazed by the birds flocking habits.
Murmurations are the flocking movements of starlings, which can involve thousands of birds flying in complex aerial formations, seemingly in sync.
To create his interesting photos, the 55-year-old uses multiple exposures, taking around 200 pictures in just five seconds.
His pictures, which include the Portland Bill Lighthouse and the scenic the Jurassic Coast, show eye catching spiral shapes as the birds’ flight path is captured.
“I focus on starlings because they make quite spectacular pictures,” said the grandfather-of-three.
Sean Hepburn – SWNS
However he claimed it takes coordination and can be quite tricky to get his shots right.“I’ve been a landscape photographer for 20 years and wanted to get these images with landmarks in the background.
EMT paramedics have always been frontline heroes every day—well before the pandemic hit neighborhoods across the world. And now this Virginia ambulance worker has an American Doll made in her image to prove it.
RAA
April O’Quinn was one of five national winners in the “Heroes with Heart” contest run by American Girl Dolls, following a nationwide call for nominations.
Of the thousands of nominations the Mattel company received, the one sent in by April’s niece was chosen to represent the best of the COVID-19 frontline heroes who have been risking their lives to help others.
Young Lacey lives in Texas, and she is always telling people about her Aunt April, who works for the Richmond Ambulance Authority (RAA).
Lacey told American Girl that her Aunt contracted the coronavirus—but even after her long recovery, she chose to return to RAA.
“She didn’t hesitate for a moment,” Lacey wrote on her contest submission, which was published by American Girl.
April got a phone call last month from Lacey with the exciting news.
“Lacey was on the other side screaming that we had won! I was in shock,” April told WTVR news. “I had no words. I ended up crying because I couldn’t say anything.”
She got to watch via video chat as the girl opened her new doll after it came in the mail—and the likeness was pretty remarkable.
RAA
“The stars and brightness in her face and eyes were amazing,” said April.
The winners received a one-of-a-kind custom doll and outfit in their hero’s likeness and a $250 gift card.
“It’ll be something that neither one of us will ever forget. It’s a bond that I’ll hold with her forever,” April said of her niece Lacey.
In June, American Girl started selling an outfit for their dolls that inspires admiration for all the medical workers. Called the ‘Scrubs Outfit’, it includes pink scrub pants, a colorful nurses top, slip-on shoes and a matching fabric face mask.
WATCH the WTVR video below…
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Quote of the Day: “When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey.” (Arab proverb)
Photo: by Matthew T Rader
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The streets of Santiago, Chile may be a long way from Gotham City, but among its citizens dwells a true superhero. Far from being a fictional crime-solver, he’s a real-life hunger fighter who distributes food to the city’s homeless population on a regular basis.
With his Batmobile—or in this case, white SUV—fully stocked with a cargo of hot meals, he dons a shiny black costume complete with a cape and two masks (one with pointy comic book ears and eye slots; the other, for COVID-19 protection).
The self-proclaimed “Solidarity Batman” is doing his part to make life during Chile’s months’ long lockdown more bearable for some of those hardest hit by the current pandemic.
But this Batman’s do-good mission is about more than simply delivering food. Knowing that sometimes all it takes to nourish the soul is a little humor or a few kind words, he aims to feed people’s hearts as well as fill their stomachs.
He chose the Batman outfit to cheer people up, and it fosters a feeling of togetherness.
“Look around you, see if you can dedicate a little time, a little food, a little shelter, a word sometimes of encouragement to those who need it,” he told Reuters.
And, like Bruce Wayne, this modest caped-crusader prefers to keep his identity anonymous.
Yet, no matter who the man beneath the mask is by day, the message he delivers along with his meals is clear. As Simon Salvador, one thankful beneficiary of Batman’s compassionate outreach told Reuters, “It is appreciated…from one human to another.”
I stood at the sink washing out my paint brush. The self-critic in my head was giving me a stern lecture about taking in yet another homeless cat.
My Aunt had passed away a few months earlier and we were in the process of cleaning out her house. Between that and my other responsibilities, I felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.
The cat had been living in a friend’s garage. She couldn’t afford to take him to the vet, so I offered, thinking it would be a checkup, some shots, and we would find him a home.
But after meeting with the vet I realized what I had gotten into. He had numerous issues, the worst of which, his eye had been injured and was now infected and would need to be surgically removed.
Hence, the reason the critical voice was giving me a lecture: On top of everything else I was now responsible for this pitiful looking, malnutrition, one eyed cat wearing a blue plastic collar, now named Willy.
Willy
And Willy wasn’t too happy about it all either. He was mad and liked to bite me when I tried to do anything to help him.
‘I’ll never be able to find him a home,’ I thought.
Then, I looked down at the dirty old paint covered utility sink and there she was. An angel looking back at me.
She was just a weird arrangement of paint and drain, but that didn’t diminish her message. She spoke loud and clear.
It’s been years since Willy showed up here at my work. We never found him a home because we all fell in love with him and his quirky personality.
He’s fat and happy and has adjusted very well to being an adorable spoiled one-eyed cat.
And, the angel is still in the sink.
Even though years of paint and water have washed over her, she’s just sitting there to remind me that we are all angels sent here to look after one another.
Auroral beads seen from the International Space Station - SWNS
They never had the computing power to figure it out before. But now, a NASA mission has unlocked some answers around the phenomenon of space auroras and how they form across the galaxy.
Auroral beads as seen from the International Space Station – SWNS
A special type of aurora, draped east to west across the night sky, like a glowing pearl necklace, is helping researchers better understand the science of auroras and their powerful drivers out in space.
Known as auroral beads, these lights often show up just before large auroral displays, which are caused by electrical storms in space called substorms.
They are atmospheric phenomenons made up of bands of light caused by charged solar particles following the Earth’s magnetic lines of force.
If a planet has an atmosphere and magnetic field there is usually an aurora.
Previously, scientists were not sure if auroral beads are somehow connected to other auroral displays as a phenomenon in space that precedes substorms, or if they are caused by disturbances closer to Earth’s atmosphere.
But powerful new computer models combined with observations from NASA’s THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) have provided the first strong evidence of the events in space that lead to the appearance of these beads and demonstrated the important role they play in the space environment around Earth.
By providing a broader picture than can be seen with the three THEMIS spacecraft or ground observations alone, the new models have shown that auroral beads are caused by turbulence in the plasma—a fourth state of matter, made up of gaseous and highly conductive charged particles—surrounding Earth.
The results will ultimately help scientists better understand the full range of swirling structures seen in the auroras—and learn how to better protect satellites orbiting our planet. (WATCH a NASA video about the beads below…)
“Now we know for certain that the formation of these beads is part of a process that precedes the triggering of a substorm in space…an important new piece of the puzzle,” said Professor Vassilis Angelopoulos, principal investigator of THEMIS at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Auroras are created when charged particles from the Sun are trapped in Earth’s magnetic environment—the magnetosphere—and are funneled into Earth’s upper atmosphere, where collisions produce the glow in hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms and molecules.
By modeling the near-Earth environment on scales from tens of miles to 1.2 million miles, the THEMIS scientists were able to determine the details of how auroral beads form.
Dr Evgeny Panov, lead author on one of the new papers and THEMIS scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, said, “THEMIS observations have now revealed turbulences in space that cause flows seen lighting up the sky as of single pearls in the glowing auroral necklace.
“These turbulences in space are initially caused by lighter and more agile electrons, moving with the weight of particles 2000 times heavier, and which theoretically may develop to full-scale auroral substorms.”
As streaming clouds of plasma belched by the Sun pass Earth, their interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field creates buoyant bubbles of plasma behind Earth.
Like a lava lamp, imbalances in the buoyancy between the bubbles and heavier plasma in the magnetosphere creates fingers of plasma 2,500 miles wide that stretch down towards Earth, scientists said.
Signatures of these fingers create the distinct bead-shaped structure in the aurora, experts say.
“We have only recently gotten to the point where computing power is good enough to capture the basic physics in these systems,” said Dr David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
It requires very sophisticated algorithms and very big supercomputers.
Now that scientists understand the auroral beads precede substorms, they want to figure out how, why and when the beads might trigger full-blown substorm, the researchers said.
At least in theory, the fingers may tangle magnetic field lines and cause an explosive event known as magnetic reconnection, which is well known to create full-scale substorms and auroras that fill the nightside sky, experts said.
Since its launch in 2007, THEMIS has been taking detailed measurements as it passes through the magnetosphere in order to understand the causes of the substorms that lead to auroras.
In its prime mission, THEMIS was able to show that magnetic reconnection is a primary driver of substorms. The new results highlight the importance of structures and phenomenon on smaller scales – those hundreds and thousands of miles across as compared to ones spanning millions of miles.
After the initial success of the new computer models, THEMIS scientists are eager to apply them to other unexplained auroral phenomena, they added.
(The findings were published in the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.)
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72% of Americans in a new poll said that they are more likely to find “little joys” during the summertime—and that’s especially true this year.
83% of respondents agreed: it’s the little things in their day that bring the most joy—and just as many say these little things have become even more important to them in the past few months.
Luckily, the average respondent experiences four of these small things every day.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Bubbies Ice Cream, the survey found many of the little things respondents look forward to relate to nature and the great outdoors. The third most-popular ”little joy” was ‘feeling the sun on my face’
Listening to rainfall or a thunderstorm while inside, the arrival of a blue-sky sunny day, and the smell of the ocean, all made it into the top 30.
But it was family and friends that were a key factor in a third of the top ten “little joys”. Not surprisingly in 2020, seeing a loved one after being apart was #1.
Sleeping in a freshly made bed, having time to myself, and getting something for free rounded out the top five answers. Who doesn’t love finding money? That was also mentioned.
For many, who look forward to something in the kitchen, the smell of freshly-made baked goods and the first sip of coffee in the morning was a favorite answer.
“We’ve seen the joy that comes from these indulgences and know that celebrating the small moments in life is critical when it comes to navigating stressful times,” noted Katie Cline, Vice President of Marketing at Bubbies Ice Cream.
AMERICANS’ TOP 10 “LITTLEJOYS” 1. Seeing a loved one after being apart for a while 40%
2. Sleeping in a freshly made bed 39%
3. Feeling the sun on my face 39%
4. Getting something for free 39%
5. Having time to myself 35%
6. Hugging a loved one 33%
7. Finding money I didn’t know I had 32%
8. The first sip of coffee in the morning 30%
9. The clean feeling after a shower 30%
10. Receiving an “I’ve been thinking about you” type text 28%
What are your favorite little joys? Would sunshine and a freshly made bed make your top five?
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Quote of the Day: “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
Photo: by Sebastien Gabriel
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One English vicar just overcame his fear of heights—by climbing 165-feet to the top of his church spire.
Credit: SWNS
Reverend Sam Leach says he’s always had a fear of heights, but he wanted to set himself free by undertaking the ultimate vertigo challenge, while raising money for urgently needed repairs at his church in Devon.
He attached himself to a rope on Thursday and successfully scaled the church spire all the way to the top, despite feeling violently sick at the prospect.
Sam joined three others in climbing up and down in just under an hour. The feeling he had at the top? It was “exhilarating.”
“Actually,” says Sam, “I would do it again. The view was so amazing looking out over the town center.
“The fear this morning when I first got up there left my knees trembling. It was unnerving seeing a 25m (82ft) ladder on top of ten flights of scaffolding.
In the past, even going up an escalator was too much without hanging onto the rail.
“I was not worried about my safety as I was attached to a rope, I was worried about whether I would freeze on the rungs and not be able to go up or down.”
“I was really nervous but, strangely, not quite as terrified as I thought I would be. Maybe it was people praying or something, but when I got to it, I just looked straight ahead. I was not looking up as that’s what makes me go giddy.”
Credit: SWNS
Sam’s tip for others with a fear of heights? Just focus “on one step at a time.”
Hospitality Is The Key
Sam’s church, St Mary Magdalene in Torquay, is covered in scaffolding at present for external repairs which were funded by a grant from the UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Credit: SWNS
But while the work has been ongoing, $9,000 (£7,000) in new repairs became necessary in the kitchen—a vital part of the church’s outreach to the community.
Hospitality is a key value of the church, Sam says. ”It’s not about the building, it’s what we can offer the community—and the kitchen is vital to that.”
If you’d like to donate to Sam’s church, visit here.
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One very fun uncle made his young nephew’s dream come true by building a rollercoaster in the backyard that was based on the 11-year-old’s design.
Credit: SWNS
Leigh Downing used the sketches made by his nephew Calden Ashley to bring to life a 230-foot-long ‘Big Dipper’.
Leigh, alongside his 20-year-old son Charlie, used plastic pipes for the rails. They then put together old bits of scrap metal and wood to make the frame of the coaster.
The inventive duo even used an old wooden cutting board as the seat of the ride which circles Leigh’s green space in Llandyrnog, Wales.
They built it as a surprise for little Calden who was fed-up after being unable to see his friends during summer vacation with its bummer lockdown restrictions.
Former engineer Leigh said, “Calden has been rollercoaster mad for as long as I can remember.
“Even before he was tall enough to ride, he was designing them on a computer. It all started a couple of years ago when I had an operation and was off work for a couple of months. I gave Calden a wooden marble rollercoaster kit I had when I was a child. He was so thrilled with it.
“My son Charlie built him a small wooden rollercoaster that he could ride.
“He was absolutely ecstatic with the end result, but a couple of years on had got a little bored with it. We hatched this latest idea during lockdown… We did it all in eight days.”
Charlie, who passed his maths GCSE when he was 11-years-old and skipped his A Levels to go straight to university to study maths and science, is a hobby mechanic.
Leigh, who has a background in engineering, added: “We said to Calden, you do the design. He designed it from start to finish including every twist, turn and bunny hop.
Leigh said the build has brought Charlie, Calden, and himself together. He added: “I feel we did something absolutely amazing.”
“Our next plan is a full steel rollercoaster with a corkscrew and a loop which, of course, will rely on Charlie’s maths degree coupled with Calden’s rollercoaster designs.”
Paris Williams is six years old. Like many of her first-grade peers, she’s adorable, but this little girl is also driven by a mission to help others who are less fortunate. So driven in fact, that she’s launched her own nonprofit foundation, Paris Cares, to feed the homeless in her area.
Credit: FOX/YouTube
Paris’s mom, Alicia Marshall, says her daughter’s inspiration to become a hands-on good Samaritan was the title character of Cari Chadwick Deal’s children’s book, “One Boy’s Magic,” who also uses his powers to feed the homeless.
“She was reading books at school about giving and she came home one day, and she was like, ‘I want to give back to the homeless. What can we do to help the homeless?’ Marshall told KTVI FOX 2 News. “We kind of brainstormed some ideas and we came up making care packages.”
“I wanted to give something to the homeless,” Paris explained, “like the boy in the book.”
Paris might not have had a magic wand, but she didn’t let that stop her.
Turning instead to more practical magic and the help of her parents, Paris assembled and delivered (via non-contact drop off) more than 500 care packages containing food and other essentials to downtown St. Louis’s homeless, as well as handing out approximately 250 meals to essential workers.
But Paris wasn’t satisfied to simply donate goods. It was important to her to forge a bond with the people she was trying to help. After filling each package herself, Paris drew a picture or wrote a personal message on each one to create the kind of human connection so many of the homeless sorely lack.
“It makes me really proud because with everything that’s going on in the world this small child who is entering first grade has such a big heart,” Marshall said. “She wants to give. She wants to help others.”
Paris has already accomplished a lot by anyone’s standards, but if she has her way, she’s only just getting started. She’s looking toward holding a Thanksgiving hot-food drive for the homeless and also hopes to start a Christmas toy fund for kids in need.
“I want to inspire people to do good things,” Paris said.
Out of the mouths of babes, it seems, comes not only wisdom and truth, but kindness and generosity as well.
If you’d like to pitch in to help Paris feed the homeless, donations can be made directly to Paris Cares Foundation, or you can purchase Paris Cares masks and T-shirts via her Bonfire Account.
(WATCH Paris’ adorable story below.)
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Separated from his mother as a puppy, one lucky pooch by the name of Foxtrot has become a UN refugee camp mascot in a ‘bare bones to milk bones’ story that could bring a smile to any face.
Credit: UN World Food Program
When the Myanmar military began a brutal crackdown on the country’s Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority in 2017, hundreds of thousands fled over the border. A million displaced people are now sheltering in refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar area of Bangladesh.
The UN’s World Food Program (WFP), along with a number of other charities, has been there from the beginning, working to ensure every refugee is fed.
”Foxtrot was found when a variety of charity organizations were participating in a beach clean-up,” Colleen Callahan at WFP USA told GNN. “A four-month old puppy followed them until finally Gemma [one of the volunteers], decided to take him under her wing. After that he almost died—there was no vet in Cox’s Bazar, so a nurse brought him back to life.”
“Since then he has been given the official title of ‘chief mascot and mood manager’ at WFP,” explains Callahan.
Regularly led about the camp to visit temporary schools and canteens, as well as different WFP events, the chief mascot is usually “wearing a WFP cape, or special capes for big days like International Women’s Day.”
Credit: WFP
The photograph above features Foxtrot entertaining the kids at one of the camps’ learning centers, and perfectly captures his importance in the relief efforts.
Humanitarian Pup
“One of the jobs I like the most is making sure no one gets too stressed out,” writes one of Foxtrot’s human team members on his adorable biography at the WFP website. “If I see someone looking like they need some stress relief, I run up to them with a toy in my mouth and push my head against their leg.”
WFP
“Humans are simple creatures and it’s amazing how well this works in relieving any tension,” ruminates Foxtrot.
Through his Instagram, Foxtrot helps to raise money and awareness of the crisis the Rohingya people are facing while reaching people the WFP wouldn’t normally be able to reach.
Even though he’s just a small dog, he has a big job. An inspired and happy volunteer worker is an effective one, and for the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar, a reason to smile is a very valuable thing.
Credit: WFP
If you’d like to donate to Foxtrot and the team of World Food Program heroes in Bangladesh, just head here.
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A lot of entrepreneurial energy has been thrown into using algae as a replacement for petroleum-based plastics in the creation of consumer goods, and now some California researchers have applied this technology to one of the ocean’s greatest polluting burdens—flip flops.
Credit: Stephen Mayfield, UC San Diego
The world’s most popular shoe, the flip flop accounts for a huge amount of plastic waste that ends up in the ocean: Some models have suggested they account for a quarter of all plastic in our seas.
UC San Diego partnered with the startup company Algenesis Materials to produce a commercial grade polyurethane foam from algae oil to create a sturdy flip flop that will biodegrade in around 16 weeks.
With a biomass content of around 52%, the flip flops are still entirely biodegradable, but that hasn’t stopped the collaboration from looking to create a 100% biomass shoe.
“People are coming around on plastic ocean pollution and starting to demand products that can address what has become an environmental disaster,” said Tom Cooke, president of Algenesis, to UCSD news. “We happen to be at the right place at the right time.”
A biological loop
In testing to see whether or not the polyurethane algae flip flops would degrade, Steven Mayfield, professor of biology at UC San Diego, and his team buried them in compost and normal soil.
Having discovered the 16-week decomposition time frame, Mayfield et al. also discovered that the varieties of bacteria and other microorganisms that were working to break down the shoe left parts of it intact in a way that would allow them to be reused.
“We took the enzymes from the organisms degrading the foams and showed that we could use them to depolymerize these polyurethane products,” said Mayfield. “We then showed that we could isolate the depolymerized products and use those to synthesize new polyurethane monomers, completing a ‘bioloop.’”
Monomers and polymers refer to the molecular structures that make up plastic.
“Our polyurethane can be used for foam cushions in chair seats or car seats, padding in luggage straps, yoga mats, foam insulation, and even car tires,” Mayfield told Digital Trends.
The hard work of the scientists like Mayfield, and the manufacturers at Algensis, led to the establishment of the Center for Renewable Materials at UC San Diego, which focuses on the development of sustainable solutions to consumer plastic pollution using algae.
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Quote of the Day: “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” Rabindranath Tagore
Photo: by Gary Bendig
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?
Weddings are meant to be joyous celebrations. Of course, even the best-laid plans can run into a snag or two, but when Texas couple Carlos Muniz and Grace Leimann were confronted with the ultimate wedding crasher—COVID-19—it looked as if their dreams for a shared future were about to be shattered. Thanks, however, to the inspired intervention of one caring nurse and his co-workers, tragedy was averted.
Rather than partying with bachelor pals during the week of his scheduled wedding, the groom found himself fighting what looked to be a losing battle with coronavirus in San Antonio’s Methodist Hospital ICU. Hooked up to an ECMO machine (an advanced form of life support), Muniz’s condition continued to steadily decline.
After learning of his patient’s derailed nuptials, nurse Matt Holdridge was immediately struck with an idea shot straight from Cupid’s bow. The original ceremony might have been scuttled, but why not organize a wedding for Muniz and Leimann in the hospital instead?
“The ball just kind of got rolling from there,” Holdridge said in an interview with CNN. “A lot of people started volunteering for it. Before you knew it, every nurse in the unit knew about it and was trying to figure out ways to make it more special.”
For many critically ill patients, having a positive frame of mind can sometimes be as integral a component to recovery as medical treatment. As it turned out, giving Muniz the extra incentive of matrimony proved to be just what the doctor—or in this case, nurse—ordered.
With the wedding back on, Muniz rallied remarkably. “We were able to remove his feeding tube and he was able to eat on his own and drink on his own,” Holdridge reported. “Everything about his overall picture got better and better.”
The couple tied the socially-distanced knot with a bedside ceremony held on August 11. Leimann wore a traditional white dress accessorized with a matching veil and hospital mask. Muniz, along with best man Holdridge, sported matching tuxedo T-shirts. Rather than the bride walking down the aisle, the groom was wheeled in—bed and all—to the accompaniment of stirring music by a wedding party of elated hospital staffers.
It’s been said that “marriage is about two people and weddings are for everyone else.” Nowhere could that adage have been more true than on this particular occasion.
Holdridge told CNN that planning and bringing off such an uplifting event in these trying times proved to be a huge morale booster not just for the happy couple, but for the entire hospital staff as well. “We needed that just as much as they did,” he admitted.
Guess it just goes to show that even in the age of Coronavirus, sometimes love really does conquer all.
WATCH the beautiful wedding below…
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Just over two years since Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC) promoted their ’25 Most Wanted’ list of ‘lost species’, a series of rediscoveries has reduced that number down to 20.
On expeditions around the world, in recent months scientists have been going into the deepest jungles, and to the remotest parts of various countries, all in the name of preserving biodiversity.
Take a look at the charismatic flora and fauna that are now known to still be with us, and celebrate these fascinating finds.
From ‘Lost’ to Found
1. Jackson’s Climbing Salamander
Last Seen: 1975. Rediscovered: 2017
Credit: Carlos Vásquez Almazán
The first species on the 25 Most Wanted list to be rediscovered happened by complete accident, and actually occured months before a GWC-planned expedition to Guatemala’s Cuchumatanes Mountain range to look for the animal.
Discovered by a guard at the GWC-founded Finca San Isidro Amphibian Reserve while on patrol, the story of the “golden wonder” rediscovery will make your heart swell with joy, and includes the culmination of herpetologist Carlos Vásquez Almazán’s life’s work, as well as the rediscovery of two other lost salamander species in the process.
Long and gold like crystallized honey, with a black racing stripe down its back, the salamander’s rediscovery was “for me personally… a moment of sheer joy,” says Vasquez.
2. Wallace’s Giant Bee
Last Seen: 1981. Rediscovered: 2019
38 years is a long time to go without seeing the world’s largest species of bee, one that possesses a wingspan of 2.5 inches. Four times larger than the European honey bee, this giant insect was rediscovered in 2019 on the Indonesian islands known as the North Moluccas.
You can hear the passion in Clay Bolt, the man responsible for its rediscovery, when he spoke to GWC about what it was like to scratch the second species off the 25 Most Wanted List.
“It was absolutely breathtaking to see this ‘flying bulldog’ of an insect that we weren’t sure existed anymore, to have real proof right there in front of us in the wild,” said Bolt, who spent years researching the right habitat type with trip partner, Eli Wyman.
“To actually see how beautiful and big the species is in life, to hear the sound of its giant wings thrumming as it flew past my head, was just incredible. My dream is to now use this rediscovery to elevate this bee to a symbol of conservation in this part of Indonesia, and a point of pride for the locals there.”
3. Velvet Pitcher Plant
Last Seen: 1918. Rediscovery: 2019.
Illustration credit: Originally published in Danser, B.H. 1928
As mentioned above, this species disappeared from the scientific record just as quickly as it entered. Hailing from the bizarre world of carnivorous plants, the velvet pitcher plant was rediscovered in May 2019 on the slopes of a mountain called Kemul, which GWC describes as sitting in the “most remote, last-remaining large patch of true wilderness in Borneo.”
4. Silver-Backed Chevrotain
Last Seen: 1990. Rediscovery: 2019.
Credit: Global Wildlife Conservation
Knocking three species off the 25 Most Wanted list in a year, GWC was delighted when they were able to confirm the existence of the aptly-named “fanged mouse deer”—the first mammal on the list to be rediscovered.
Scientists know almost nothing about the general ecology or conservation status of this species, making it one of the highest mammal conservation priorities in the Greater Annamite Mountains of Indochina, one of GWC’s focal wildlands.
Using local knowledge, the GWC-backed research team placed camera traps around areas where locals claimed to have seen a chevrotain with a silver stripe down its back, distinguishing it from the lesser mouse deer, which is far more common.
This resulted in 275 photos of the species. The team then set up another 29 cameras in the same area, this time recording 1,881 photographs of the chevrotain over five months.
5. Somali Sengi
Last Seen: 1968. Rediscovered: 2020.
Credit: Steven Heritage at Global Wildlife Conservation
The discovery, as GNN reports, of the “tiny elephant shrew” marks the first African animal on the 25 Most Wanted list to be found, as well as the only one to be found living in relatively stable and healthy populations.
A distant relative of goliaths like the manatee and elephant, this tiny incarnation of trunked-mammals races around as fast as an olympic sprinter, vacuuming up ants with its nose in much the same way as the aardvark.
An expedition beginning in 2019 looked to utilize local knowledge about the sengi from the people of Djibouti, rather than the country of the sengi’s namesake. The locals got it completely right, and it took only one trap filled with coconut, peanut butter, and yeast to find the little guy.
“It was amazing,” Steven Heritage, a research scientist at Duke University in the US, told the Guardian. “When we opened the first trap and saw the little tuft of hair on the tip of its tail, we just looked at one another and couldn’t believe it. A number of small mammal surveys since the 1970s did not find the Somali sengi in Djibouti—it was serendipitous that it happened so quickly for us.”
Looking forward
Using renowned and talented artists to help depict the 25 Most Wanted on the GWC website, the conservation charity tries to portray the animals as works of art, and their potential extinction as akin to losing a priceless painting or sculpture.
GWC is currently awaiting a DNA test result to confirm whether or not the Fernandina Galapagos Giant Tortoise can become the first reptile on the list to be rediscovered. So who knows? Soon that Most Wanted list may go down to just 19.
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After six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a body of scientific work is emerging that shows our immune system is capable of remembering COVID-19 and producing a lasting immunity.
This immunology work also supports the theory of cross-protection, whereby the body can mount a timely and appropriate defense on the simple inference that Sars-CoV-2 is a lot like other coronaviruses.
Over the course of the pandemic, medical fears have been shaped as much by what the future holds in terms of second waves and mutations during the cold of winter, as by what has been happening in the world at any particular moment.
However, studies both peer-reviewed and not, are seeing positive changes in the human innate immune response to COVID-19 that suggest the diseases’ days of unfettered infection are numbered.
For example, in one peer reviewed study from Nature, immunologists in Singapore studied the cellular memory of T-cells, an important immune cell that weaponizes other immune responses in addition to tracking and eliminating pathogens on their own.
People with or recovering from COVID-19 displayed immediate memory T-cell activation to the virus’ proteins.
People with an infection history—going back as far as 17 years—of SARS-CoV-1 which emerged in China around 2002-2003, had long-lasting memory T-cell responses that ”displayed robust cross-reactivity to the N protein of SARS-CoV-2.”
And, perhaps most interesting, SARS-CoV-2-specific memory T-cell activation was found “in individuals with no history of SARS, COVID-19 or contact with individuals who had SARS and/or COVID-19.”
The last point is certainly enough to give us hope. And yet more positive research emerges.
Antibody Activation
Another study, this one not yet peer-reviewed, found that the response of antibodies—one of the primary classes of immune cells used to defend against pathogens—stayed active in saliva up to 115 days after the onset of symptoms in COVID-19 patients.
While antibody and T-cell responses in the blood have been extensively studied, this work, published in the preprint publication, has been one of the first to look at responses in mucus cells. The scientists note this is an important area of research since the virus infects in the upper respiratory tract.
“The immune response is doing exactly what we would expect it to,” Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto who worked on the study, told CNN. “At least at about four months, which is, as far as, most of us can measure at this point in the pandemic.”
Work on yet another kind of immune cell, the ‘helper’ T-cell as opposed to the ‘killer’ T-cell, was completed earlier in the year when several studies published in Nature and Science found that the helpers could also, more than half the time, identify COVID-19 and sound the alarm, and that these helpers were present in patients that had never been exposed to COVID-19.
The evidence of re-infection is, at this point, non-existent, which suggests humanity’s collective immune system is working well to combat it.
“So that is all good news,” Gommerman said. ”That means that people who are infected with this novel coronavirus should have the capacity to mount what’s called a memory immune response to protect themselves against infection.”
Need more positive stories and updates coming out of the COVID-19 challenge? For more uplifting coverage, click here.
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This is the heartening moment a tiny premature baby helped his dad propose to his mom on the hospital ward.
Credit: SWNS
Little Cobie Sellors was born ten weeks early, weighing just 3lb 9oz, and it was a tricky time for his parents Sian Stafford and John Sellors.
Unable to introduce him to family and friends due to COVID-19 restrictions, romantic John enlisted the help of his two-day-old son and the nurses to help him surprise Sian.
On August 3 popped a note in Cobie’s incubator alongside the engagement ring, asking if ‘Mummy would marry Daddy’.
Sian was so overwhelmed at seeing her son had been able to stop using his breathing machine, at first she didn’t notice the note—but of course eventually said yes.
John, from Pinxton in Derbyshire, England said, “I’m not usually the romantic type, but I really wanted to do something to lift Sian’s spirits and she had been dropping hints for a while about wanting to get married.
“The nurses were great and really helped make it a special proposal to remember,” added the 29-year-old new father. “They just told me to take Sian for a coffee and that they would sort it out for when we got back.
“When we got back the message and ring were there and it was such a lovely moment, I can’t thank them enough.”
Credit: SWNS
The 26-year-old woman said, “I was so shocked, I really didn’t expect it and I was really overwhelmed.
“I was concentrating so much on Cobie that I didn’t even notice the note and the ring at first!
“But then John said, ‘look, I think Cobie wants to know something!’ Then I read the note and it was such a surreal but happy moment.”
The pair, who have a daughter Ruby, four, have been together for eight years. They’re going to start planning the wedding once they have Cobie safely home.
Lynsey Lord, a deputy sister on the neonatal ward at Mansfield’s King’s Mill Hospital, helped with the planning of the surprise proposal. She said, “It’s not often we get the chance to be involved in a proposal on the unit and this was certainly a first for me, but it was so lovely to see the family all so happy, especially during what has been such a difficult time for everyone.”
Have you heard of a proposal as sweet as this one? We’d love to hear about it.
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Quote of the Day: “Be positive, stay strong, and get enough rest. You can’t do it all, but you can do your best.” – Doe Zantamata
Photo: by Shifaaz shamoon
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?
He’s fat and happy and has adjusted very well to being an adorable spoiled one-eyed cat.
