In the middle of Australia’s largest city the downtown business borough is now officially powered by 100% green energy thanks to the “largest standalone renewables agreement for an Australian council to date.”
The City of Sydney, which is home to a quarter-million people, has begun sourcing all of its energy from two solar farms and the largest wind farm in all of New South Wales.
The transition was facilitated through a power purchase agreement (PPA) with electricity retailer Flow Power. Although the historic deal costs AU$60 million, the initiative is expected to save AU$500,000 every year, according to Euronews.
The initiative is also expected to purge roughly 20,000 tons of CO2 from the city’s carbon footprint—roughly 70% of its total output—before 2024, which is several years earlier than its original goal.
“Cities are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, so it is critical that we take effective and evidence-based climate actions,” said Sydney Mayor Clover Moore.
“The City of Sydney became carbon neutral in 2007, and were the first government in Australia to be certified carbon neutral in 2011,” she added. “This ground-breaking $60 million renewable electricity deal will also save our ratepayers money and support regional jobs in wind and solar farms in Glen Innes, Wagga Wagga, and the Shoalhaven.”
Seventy per cent of the world’s emissions are generated from cities, so the action city governments take is absolutely critical. https://t.co/fatMzgPATd
The thin, slippery layer of cartilage between the bones in the knee is magical stuff: strong enough to withstand a person’s weight, but supple enough to cushion the joint during impact from decades of use.
That combination of soft-yet-strong has been hard to reproduce in the lab—but now, Duke University researchers say they’ve created an experimental gel that’s the first to match the strength and durability of the real thing.
The material may look like a distant cousin of Jell-O—which it is—but it’s incredibly strong. Although 60% water, a single quarter-sized disc can bear the weight of a 100-pound kettlebell without tearing or losing its shape.
Developers say it’s the first hydrogel—materials made of water-absorbing polymers—capable of withstanding tugging and heavy loads equally as well as human cartilage, without wearing out over time.
Led by Duke chemistry and materials scientists Ben Wiley and Ken Gall, the research could one day lead to an alternative for the 600,000 patients seeking knee replacement surgeries the U.S. every year.
A smooth rubbery tissue that covers the ends of bones and enables them to glide smoothly against each other, cartilage helps absorb a huge amount of force with every step—typically between two and three times your body weight.
However, cartilage has only a limited ability to heal and repair itself. Once worn by age, overuse, or trauma, it’s difficult to treat, says Gall, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke.
Duke researchers have developed the first gel-based synthetic cartilage with the strength of the real thing. A quarter-sized disc of the material can withstand the weight of a 100-pound kettlebell without tearing or losing its shape. Photo by Feichen Yang.
For patients who want to avoid or postpone a knee replacement that may only last 20 years, artificial cartilage can help. Hydrogels have been explored for use as a cartilage substitute since the 1970s and are used in soft contact lenses and disposable diapers. Researchers are attracted to these materials because of their slippery, shock-absorbing properties and because they don’t harm nearby cells. But until now they’ve proven too weak to be used in load-bearing joints like the knee.
The Duke team set out to change that. “We set out to make the first hydrogel that has the mechanical properties of cartilage,” said Wiley, a chemistry professor at Duke.
The new hydrogel consists of two intertwined polymer networks: one made of stretchy spaghetti-like strands and the other more rigid and basketlike, with negative charges along their length. These are reinforced with a third ingredient, a meshwork of cellulose fibers.
When the gel is stretched, the cellulose fibers resist pulling and help hold the material together. And when it is squeezed, the negative charges along the rigid polymer chains repel each other and stick to water, helping it spring back to its original shape.
“Only this combination of all three components is both flexible and stiff and therefore strong,” said co-author Feichen Yang, who earned a chemistry PhD in Wiley’s lab.
When the researchers compared the resulting material to other hydrogels, theirs was the only one that was as strong as cartilage under both squishing and stretching.
In one experiment, the team subjected it to 100,000 cycles of repeat pulling, and the material held up just as well as porous titanium used for bone implants, “which exceeded our initial expectations,” said co-author William Koshut, a PhD student in the Gall lab.
They also rubbed the new material against natural cartilage a million times. They found that its smooth, slippery self-lubricating surface is as wear-resistant as the real thing and four times more wear-resistant than synthetic cartilage implants currently FDA-approved for use in the big toe.
Moving the material from the lab to the clinic would take another three years at least, Wiley said. Initial safety tests suggest the material is nontoxic to lab-grown cells. The next step is to design an implant that they can test in sheep.
But the team says eventually the research could offer new options for people with knee pain, and get them back to doing the things they love without the long recovery times and limited lifetime associated with cartilage repair or knee replacement surgery.
Quote of the Day: “The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” – Pablo Picasso
Photo: by Hayes Potter, public domain – cropped
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He collapsed getting out of the car. He lay on the ground and wouldn’t move, just staring in front of him.
My collie, Nunuk, had just had surgery to remove two tumors on his hind leg, and his leg gave way as he walked the two steps down from the car.
At 65 pounds and with with two fresh 5-inch long incisions, it was clearly impossible for me to lift safely on my own. And there was nobody home and nobody coming home to help, a decided down-side of living alone.
Finding a warm blanket to cover Nunuk, I sat next to him hoping he would recover enough to walk the few steps into the house. With no improvement after 20 minutes, an emergency vet helpline suggested giving him additional painkillers. While waiting for those to take effect, I texted the neighbor to please not drive by for a little while, as Nunuk is a guard dog by nature and it was vital to keep him quiet.
We sat quietly, waiting for those painkillers to take effect. Hoping against hope they would work and he would be able to walk inside, in truth I felt unsure and worried.
Nunuk resting
And then, out of the silence of the early evening, my neighbor and his wife wordlessly appeared. With a bare minimum of words, we quickly formed a plan to scootch the blanket under the dog, each person taking one or two corners, and then carry him inside. The usually-reactive Nunuk did not protest beyond a few quizzical looks, and within seconds he was inside, warm and safe.
The neighbors disappeared as silently and wordlessly as they had appeared. It was as if two angels had appeared, completed their good deed for a being in great need, and then vanished.
Nunuk did not move for three hours, and then took only two staggering steps to his sleeping place.
I can only count my lucky stars that those two angels appeared in that hour of need. It was a beautiful reminder of the threads of connection that weave together a community, a neighborhood, and individuals.
An Indian architect has developed a revolutionary new way to serve the housing needs of a population, while also fighting air pollution.
Tejas Sidnal is the mastermind behind Carbon Craft Design: a Mumbai-based startup that specializes in capturing carbon emissions from the air and turning it into stylish tile.
Using a device called the AIR-INK, the company is able to draw CO2 out of the polluted city air, combine it with a mixture of marble chips and powder, and then press it into elegantly-designed tiles.
Since Sidnal says that India is in need of maintaining the world’s third largest housing industry, his sustainable tile recipe can help meet the industry demand for building materials in an eco-friendly way.
It has been ten years since NASA launched a specialized satellite to film the surface of the sun—and they have now released a gorgeous time-lapse video of its solar movements over the course of the decade.
The Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) has been taking high-resolution photographs of the sun every 0.75 seconds since it was launched into Earth’s orbit back in June 2010.
To date, the SDO has amassed more than 425 million pictures of the sun in 10 different wavelengths of light, totaling up to 20 million gigabytes of photos.
So as a means of celebrating the SDO’s 10th anniversary at the end of June, NASA selected 87,000 of the satellite’s photos and condensed them into a time lapse view of the sun’s surface, with each second of the video represents one day on Earth.
According to the NASA video caption, all of the photos were “taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the sun’s outermost atmospheric layer—the corona.”
“Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes,” the caption continues. “While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed towards the Sun, there have been a few moments it missed. The dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. A longer blackout in 2016 was caused by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully resolved after a week. The images where the Sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments.”
“SDO and other NASA missions will continue to watch our Sun in the years to come, providing further insights about our place in space and information to keep our astronauts and assets safe.”
(WATCH the time-lapse video below)
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Shout out to this @Morrisons security man keeping this good boy dry. He said ‘well you never know how dogs feel about the rain’ pic.twitter.com/B9CPWI7u5Q
This supermarket security guard in Scotland seems to be no stranger to the Peanuts cartoon line, “Happiness is a warm puppy.”
Ethan Dearman, who patrols the parking lot of the Morrison’s grocery store in Giffnock, is being hailed as an ‘everyday hero’ after he was photographed holding an umbrella over a dog’s head in the rain.
Since the sweet moment was captured and posted to social media by 25-year-old Mel Gracie last week, it has racked up thousands of Twitter responses applauding Dearman for his kindness.
When Dearman was asked about the umbrella, he simply told Gracie: “You never know how dogs feels about the rain.”
This is apparently not the first time that Dearman has taken the time to show some love to his canine friends. After the photo was posted to social media, the dog’s owner came forward to identify the dog as Freddie and praised Dearman for his enduring kindness towards him and his family.
“Thanks to security man [Ethan Dearman] for putting the umbrella over Freddie when it started to rain!” tweeted Freddie’s owner David Cherry. “So kind! He’s always so nice to my brother Stuart, my dad, and our Freddie!”
Thanks to security man @dearmanethan for putting the umbrella over Freddie when it started to rain! So kind! He’s always so nice to my brother Stuart, my Dad and our Freddie!Here’s Freddie when he was a puppy! pic.twitter.com/TJuX41ozFE
Quote of the Day: “I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.” – Ringo Starr (turns 80 today)
Photo: by Zoltan Tasi, public domain
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 reported in an eye-opening new research paper, scientists have created tiny human livers out of human skin cells before successfully transplanting them into rats.
“What we are planning to do is to start making mini human organs that are universal,” explained the paper’s co-author, Alejandro Soto-Gutiérrez, from the University of Pittsburgh.”That would change the paradigm of transplants”.
The science-fiction-like procedure was done by taking adult skin cells and genetically altering certain genes and transcription factors to create what are known as “pluripotent stem cells.”
It starts with human skin cells called fibroblasts, in 2006 the pioneering field of genetic-editing led scientists to discover that they can simply take any cell from a living adult and turn it into a pluripotent stem cell.
“Pluri,” meaning plurality, indicates its ability to carry the genetic code of all organ types, which is how they can become liver cells.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the number of people on current waiting lists for liver transplants far exceeds the number of available liver donors. The cost is just as high: the medical journal Inversereports the average cost of a transplant, accounting for the entire procedure, is about $812,000.
New technologies always reduce the cost of existing products (remember how expensive flat screen televisions were?) and a new paradigm of made-to-order fabrication of organs would likely fulfill all the demand for transplants while lowering the cost at the same time.
As fascinating as it is a little unsettling, the science took a decade to perfect, but is far still from human trials. The tiny organs from human cells continued working normally after they were transplanted into rats bred to have suppressed immune systems – otherwise the body would reject the foreign organ.
The method and associated technology could produce part-time liver grafts, that could prolong the lives of people waiting on the transplant list.
“The long-term goal is to create organs that can replace organ donation, but in the near future, I see this as a bridge to transplant,” Soto-Gutiérrez told Inverse. “For instance, in acute liver failure, you might just need a hepatic boost for a while, instead of a whole new liver.”
(File photo by OPCW Laboratory in Rijswijk, CC license)
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When a category 5 hurricane makes landfall, few things borne of our civilization can resist the power of the winds and surging, violent waves.
Yet the tiny nation of Dominica—which is even smaller than its neighbor Dominican Republic—is on course to hurricane-proof its country after being devastated by Hurricane Maria.
The cat. 5 that struck the island two years ago, destroyed 226% of the country’s GDP and 90% of the structures.
Describing the project as creating the first “climate resilient” nation, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit addressed the UN general assembly in the aftermath of Maria’s landfall, asking for the funds to create such a nation—one that cannot only resist powerful storms physically, but also economically and spiritually.
“In the past, we would prepare for one heavy storm a year. Now, thousands of storms form on a breeze in the mid-Atlantic and line up to pound us with maximum force and fury,” he said to the UN.
Skerrit’s plan is to create cities of hurricane-proof structures that won’t leave mountains of debris behind after storms.
“The challenges are not just related to infrastructure. Resilience in our view is how vulnerable you are in the first place,” Pepe Bardouille told National Geographic.
That’s why they are starting with the building codes.
By Hugh Fiske, CC license
A CREAD to live by
Bardouille is CEO of the government’s Climate Resilience Execution Agency of Dominica (CREAD), and he believes that building a climate-resilient nation starts with every person considering how the planning decisions they make will hold up under winds higher than 150 mph.
CREAD has been charged with establishing uniform building codes, geothermal energy plants, a hurricane-proof hospital and healthcare system, and improving public transit.
“How to keep a society and economy in a small country with a limited tax base and a huge number of climactic challenges running on a shoestring. Those are the challenges,” Bardouille says.
But the Prime Minister’s vision also includes a prosperous ecotourism industry that could replenish the state’s coffers before and after storms deplete them.
There is one landfill on Dominica, and it’s nearly full. Cleaning up plastic waste and switching to biodegradable items like bottles, food packaging, and more will be key to CREAD’s strategy of helping the country look nicer for travelers. Plastic trash is whipped around in powerful storms and scattered hither and yon, despoiling the natural beauty of the country.
In 2018, GNN reported that Skerrit had enacted a ban on plastic and other debris such as single-use straws, and Styrofoam food items to try and aid in creating the image of a pristine Caribbean island that will attract tourists with deeper pockets. The following year, the Climate Resilience Act went into full force, and gave birth to CREAD.
The economy has since grown by 9 percent. Tourists are back on the beaches, and children are back in the classrooms. A new state-of-the-art hospital opened in August of 2019, while construction around the island has created five hundred new homes with another 1,000 on the way.
Described as “The Nature Island”, tropical rainforests filled with colorful birds encircle volcanoes looming above coral reefs and beaches of white, brown, and even black sands—things which typify Dominica as not just a place for margaritas and sunny days in a resort, but adventure and exploration.
As with so many countries, Dominica represents a great place for a vacation—and a vacation represents a way to directly and effectively support the climate-resilient economy.
A song that ‘went viral’ across a species of bird has been tracked by scientists for the first time.
Most of our feathered friends are slow to change their tune—preferring to stick with tried-and-tested songs to defend territories and attract females.
Now a 20-year study has found how one rare ‘tweet’ travelled nearly 2,000 miles across Canada and the US.
The analysis—based on recordings collected by bird watchers from 2000 to 2019—found that the new beat wiped out a historic song ending in the process. White-throated sparrows from British Columbia to central Ontario have ditched their traditional three-note-finish in favor of a unique two-note-variant.
Popular music often goes viral among people, especially when it evokes an emotional response, but the reason the new sound became so compelling among the striking sparrows remains a mystery.
Senior author Professor Ken Otter, of the University of Northern British Columbia, said, “One rare sparrow song ‘went viral’. As far as we know, it’s unprecedented.”
“We don’t know of any other study that has ever seen this sort of spread through cultural evolution of a song type.”
Changing their tweet
It is well known some bird species change their songs over time, but these cultural evolutions tend to stay in local populations. They become regional dialects rather than the norm for the species. But, for some reason the new two-note ending began spreading further afield.
SWNS
In the 1960s, white-throated sparrows across Canada whistled a song that ended in a repeated three-note triplet.
By the time Prof Otter moved to British Columbia in western Canada in the late 1990s and began listening to the local bird songs, the new two-note ending had already invaded local sparrow populations—and over the course of 40 years, songs ending in two notes, or doublet-ending songs, had become universal west of the Rocky Mountains.
The researchers began analyzing recordings of white throated sparrow songs that had been uploaded to online databases by a large network of citizen scientist birders across North America.
They found the new doublet-ending song was not only more popular west of the Rocky Mountains – but was spreading rapidly east beyond these western populations.
“Originally, we measured the dialect boundaries in 2004 and it stopped about halfway through Alberta,” Prof. Otter said. “By 2014, every bird we recorded in Alberta was singing this western dialect, and we started to see it appearing in populations as far away as Ontario, which is 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) from us.”
The scientists predicted the sparrows’ overwintering grounds were playing a role in the rapid spread of the two-note ending. They knew birds sang on the wintering grounds, so juvenile males might have been picking up new song types if they overwintered with birds from other dialect areas.
“This would allow males to learn new song types in the winter and take them to new locations when they return to breeding grounds, helping explain how the song type could spread.”
The researchers then attached sparrows with tiny geo-locators, which showed western sparrows who knew the new song shared overwintering grounds with eastern populations–that later adopted it.
The phenomenon of a species completely replacing a historic song that had persisted for decades is almost unheard of in male songbirds—and the researchers reported their findings in Current Biology.
However, the researchers found the new song did not give male birds a territorial advantage over counterparts. But what about mating advantages?
They now want to find out whether female birds have a preference between the two songs because in previous studies the females tended to prefer the local song type.
“In white-throated sparrows, we might find a situation in which the females actually like songs that aren’t typical in their environment—and if that is the case, there is a big advantage to any male who can sing a new song type.”
Prof Otter and his team are excited to continue utilizing private recordings from bird watchers who contribute them on apps and websites across the continent, giving researchers a much clearer picture of what is going on.
“It is allowing us to do research that was never possible before.”
WATCH the two songs below – Story by Mark Waghorn, SWNS
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A touching video from Brazil shows a woman and a cow performing a heart warming duet.
Shot in the idyllic countryside of Minas Gerais, the footage shows Patrica Varela Favano, singing while she relaxes in a barn with a cow known as Master Sidarta Gautama.
As Patricia continues to sing, the Bovine sweetly joins in with melodic moo’s that are guaranteed to melt your heart.
Patricia, the 48-year-old who runs the Santuario Vale da Rainha with her husband Victor said:
“There is no intellectual knowing at the level of what is happening here however we can feel there is serenity, joy, and deep peace about life and how we interact with mother nature and even among us humans which are known to be part of this rescue”
“Human souls can be touched and filled through it, giving a sense of knowing that there is a deeper meaning of life and an order that underlies all of existence.”
This cow had been destined for fame, perhaps, since it was named after The Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama in Portugues).
WATCH the video below… (Photo by SWNS)
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Quote of the Day: “No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.” – Dalai Lama (turns 85 today)
Photo: by Kristopher Roller, public domain
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?
Researchers from the UK and Switzerland have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business police Artificial Intelligence systems’ biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging choices.
The collaborators from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, and EPFL – Lausanne, along with the strategy firm Sciteb Ltd, believe that in an environment in which decisions are increasingly made without human intervention, there is a very strong incentive to know under what circumstances AI systems might adopt an unethical strategy—and to find and reduce that risk, or eliminate entirely, if possible.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed in commercial situations. Consider for example using AI to set prices of insurance products to be sold to a particular customer. There are legitimate reasons for setting different prices for different people, but it may also be more profitable to make certain decisions that end up hurting the company.
The AI has a vast number of potential strategies to choose from, but some are unethical and will incur not just moral cost but a significant potential penalty if regulators levy hefty fines or customers boycott you – or both.
That’s why these mathematicians and statisticians came together: to help business and regulators by creating a new “Unethical Optimization Principle” that would provide a simple formula to estimate the impact of AI decisions.
As it stands right now, “Optimization can be expected to choose disproportionately many unethical strategies,” said Professor Robert MacKay of the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick.
“The Principle also suggests that it may be necessary to re-think the way AI operates in very large strategy spaces, so that unethical outcomes are explicitly rejected in the optimization/learning process.”
They have laid out the full details in a paper bearing the name “An unethical optimization principle”, published in Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday 1st July 2020.
“Our suggested ‘Unethical Optimization Principle’ can be used to help regulators, compliance staff and others to find problematic strategies that might be hidden,” said MacKay. “(The) inspection of which should show where problems are likely to arise and thus suggest how the AI search algorithm should be modified to avoid them in future.”
Reprinted from Warwick College
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Gardening businesses have been booming during the coronavirus lockdowns, and nurseries have busily tried to keep up with the unexpected—and unprecedented—demand.
Tending plants has always been one of the world’s most popular hobbies, but no one was prepared for this surge in gardening—and nurseries are still propagating as fast as they can to keep up.
The renown seed company Burpee sold more seed packets this spring than at any time during its 144-year history, according to Reuters. Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society has seen a five-fold rise in queries for gardening advice on its website during the lockdown.
Even sales of houseplants are up, as people look for ways to brighten their days in lockdown.
People are taking time to reconnect with the earth, and an added bonus arrives for the climate every time a plant goes into the ground because it pulls out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“I believe the bulk of the boom is coming from existing gardeners,” said avid plantsman, Tony Avent, founder and proprietor of Juniper Level Botanic Garden and Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, North Carolina. “However, at our open houses, we see a tremendous number of younger people, generations X, Y, and Z. They’re learning to garden more sustainably.”
Gardening in the Summer
Many people also think you cannot plant in the summer, which is simply not true.
“Summer is an incredible time in the garden, adds Avent. “Many plants don’t emerge until mid-June or early July, and all the tropical-looking plants are at their peak in the summer months—the cannas, the elephant ears, and lilies—so we see a peak in sales of tropical-looking plants in the summer.”
Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh
Depending on the zone you live in, many vegetables and herbs can still be planted in July—from Brussels sprouts, beets and broccoli in zones 6-7 to corn and cucumbers, okra and onions, in zones 8-10.
“The establishment time for a plant is so much faster in the summer months, and the watering time for new plants is much shorter,” explains Avent. “If you plant in the winter, you can get by with infrequent waterings, but if you plant in summer, you need to water every day. But the tradeoff is that you only have to water for a week or so before the plant is fully established.”
Pollinators are also more active in the summer months and can be a gardener’s good friend; native bees, honeybees, butterflies, but also wasps.
Avent says wasps are actually predators of many beetles, so you want them in your garden. Instead of “getting caught up in spraying every time you see an insect,” like generations did in the 50s and 60s, remember that gardens are naturally balanced systems that can take care of pests as long as your plants aren’t stressed—and not all bugs are bad.
To see how gardening is done by professionals and get inspiration for your own yards, visit a park or local botanical garden this summer.
Public gardens like Avents’ nonprofit Juniper Level Botanic Garden in Raleigh have COVID-19 restrictions, but some are still open. A gift to NC State University, the grounds will be open for public viewing two weekends this summer: July 10-12 and 17-19.
“Nature is fascinating, and there is no more active time than summer. Everything is fully at work.”
Throughout our lives, we’re faced with a variety of challenges. Some are simple to overcome, while others are much, much tougher.
Regardless of the situation, learning how to adapt effectively can help you navigate through changes and, often, emerge in an even better position for the long run.
Here are 5 ways to adapt during challenging times.
1. Increase Your Capacity
During a time of increased uncertainty, some of the aspects that actually help us deal with stressful situations like healthy eating, exercise and getting enough sleep can be the first to drop off.
Whether it’s stress or comfort eating, being too busy to exercise or worrying so much that you struggle to get to sleep, each aspect of wellness is especially important when you’re faced with a challenging situation.
Be deliberate in how you go about increasing your physical, emotional & mental capacity during these times. Set specific times for exercise in your calendar, plan out your meals for the week, dedicate time regularly away from technology and train yourself in how to switch your focus from negative to empowered.
There are infinite possibilities here. Make sure your daily actions align to increasing (instead of decreasing) your capacity to deal with the uncertainty as it arises.
2. Improve Your Flexibility
Adapting to change requires a high level of flexibility. Without it, you’ll find yourself wanting or needing things to go a certain way, wishing things were different, and struggling to deal with the challenges that come your way.
Droid Gingerbread, CC license
One way to improve your flexibility is to plan out your best and worst case scenarios (and every scenario in between) along with how you will deal with each situation, should it occur.
While many of these scenarios won’t be ideal and most will never come to fruition, knowing how you will deal with them allows you to proactively pivot when needed and helps reduce the fear that can otherwise be a driving force in your decision making.
3. Master New Skills
What skills do you want to become masterful at? Maybe it’s communication in your relationship or leading a team effectively while working remotely. Perhaps you want to master your relationship with food and the choices you make.
Having clarity about this and then putting an action plan in place can mean that even during a time of crisis, even at an extraordinarily low point in your life, you still come out the other side stronger, wiser and better equipped to capitalize on future opportunities.
When faced with a challenging situation in your life, choose 2-3 things that you will become masterful at. Then dedicate time consistently to mastering those skillsets as you’re going through that challenge.
Building this into your life can help you feel unstoppable, because even in the most challenging of situations, you know you are benefiting rather than suffering from it.
4. Nurture Your Creativity
All growth occurs outside of your comfort zone. It’s also where creativity & innovation lives. But with so much uncertainty happening in the world right now, fear can often creep into our lives and start calling the shots, holding us back from confidently stepping into the unknown.
Finding time for creative & innovative thinking is vital during these times of uncertainty, because in order to adapt and overcome the challenges you’re facing, you need a solution that you are yet to come up with… if you had the solution already, you wouldn’t have the problem.
To do this, dedicate time in your calendar each week specifically for creativity & innovation.
Then start with a ‘what if’ question to spark your curiosity. For example, ‘What if there was a way for us to increase sales by 10% without increasing costs?’ Or ‘what if there was an effective way to balance my priorities now that I’m working from home?’
Utilize these blocks of time in your calendar to brainstorm potential solutions, commit to what you will implement, and then action accordingly.
5. Track Your Progress
What gets measured gets managed. Whether it’s your sales targets at work, personal finances at home or health & well-being goals, having a way of tracking your progress helps to give objective feedback into how on or off track you are to achieving your goals.
This is especially important during times of great change, because in order to avoid getting too far off track, there will be times that you will need to tweak or transform your actions & overarching strategy.
Determine how often you’ll track your progress (daily, weekly, monthly for example) and have a way of easily reporting that progress. This could be as simple as a basic spreadsheet.
Then build accountability into your calendar, where you check in on a consistent basis and ask yourself and/or your team the following four questions:
1. What worked well? 2. What didn’t? / What was challenging? 3. What am I going to do about it / what will we do differently? 4. What do I need help with?
Answering these four questions will help give you the clarity you need in order to build upon what is currently working, drop or fix what isn’t, and to also get any help you need.
By utilizing each component laid out above to adapt during challenging times, you’ll be much better equipped to deal with any challenges that come your way, regardless of how big or small they are.
Cameron Brown is an International Speaker & Executive Coach, working with CEO’s and executive teams to improve their individual performance and performance of their teams. Watch and learn how he worked together with 80 people in 40 countries to make a music video to inspire the world…
An Afghan translator who spent 9 years risking his life to assist U.S. forces in Afghanistan has just celebrated his first Fourth of July as a U.S. citizen.
Although his duties as a translator never required it, Janis Shinwari saved the lives of several American soldiers—and one of them decided to return the favor by offering to bring Shinwari and his family to the U.S.
If he would have stayed in Afghanistan, the translator “wouldn’t be alive today,” he told CNN Heroes in 2018.
Shinwari was aiding U.S. forces over a decade ago because he wanted his country liberated from the terror of Taliban rule. Although he knew he was risking his life, he did what he thought was right for his country.
In 2008, Capt. Matt Zeller was about to die during a battle with Taliban forces, until a man who identified himself as a U.S. translator dragged him out of harm’s way. They may not have known each other before that moment, but the experience forged an unshakable bond.
“Since that time, we become even closer than brothers,” Shinwari said.
Photo from Matt Zeller (left)
With the Taliban in pursuit of Shinwari, Zeller began working furiously to get him a visa so he could leave the country. Initially, they expected the process to only take a couple of months, but it actually took several years. Thanks to Zeller’s persistence gathering signatures on a petition, and meeting with several members of Congress, Shinwari and his family fled to the U.S. in 2013.
Once he arrived, Zeller helped him with every aspect of his new life in America—including raising $35,000 with a GoFundMe campaign.
Shinwari finally became eligible for citizenship this year, and on June 30th, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli administered the oath of allegiance to Shinwari and his wife, officially making them U.S. citizens—just in time to celebrate their new country’s Independence Day.
During the ceremony, Shinwari was thanked for his brave service and saving the lives of 5 Americans.
ICYMI: Yesterday, @HomelandKen joined a naturalization ceremony welcoming 20 #NewUSCitizens at our Washington office. Included were Mr. Janis Shinwari & his wife. Shinwari was a translator alongside our troops in Afghanistan & saved the lives of 5 Americans. Congrats to all! pic.twitter.com/CJgrqIiMBb
Though Shinwari is grateful for his life in the U.S., and the kindness from countless strangers, he hasn’t forgotten about the other brave translators in Afghanistan.
He and Zeller started the nonprofit No One Left Behind, which has helped more than 5,000 translators and their families to settle as refugees in the US.
It’s their way of paying back the indebtedness they feel for each other, genuinely believing neither would be here today if not for the other’s care and assistance.
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?
Today’s Independence Day marks 244 years since the birth of the United States, so in celebration of the holiday, we’ve gathered 21 inspirational quotes on the essence of liberty, freedom, justice, and independence, the principles on which the country was founded:
1. “It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.” –Samuel Adams
2. “Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” –Napoleon Bonaparte
3. “Without freedom I am a slave in shackles on a ship lost at sea. With freedom I am a captain; I am a pirate; I am an admiral; I am a scout; I am the eagle souring overhead; I am the north star guiding a crew; I am the ship itself; I am whatever I choose to be.” ―Richelle E. Goodrich
4. “Patriotism is a thing difficult to put into words. It is neither precisely an emotion nor an opinion, nor a mandate, but a state of mind – a reflection of our own personal sense of worth, and respect for our roots. Love of country plays a part, but it’s not merely love. Neither is it pride, although pride too is one of the ingredients. Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all. And it’s a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings.” ―Vera Nazarian
5. “This, then, is the state of the union: free and restless, growing and full of hope. So it was in the beginning. So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.” –Lyndon B. Johnson
6. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” –Ronald Regan
7. “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” –Martin Luther King Jr.
8. “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” –George Bernard Shaw
9. “May we think of freedom not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.” –Peter Marshall
10. “The history of free men is never really written by chance, but by choice; their choice!” –President Dwight D. Eisenhower
11. “For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” –Nelson Mandela.
12. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” –Albert Camus
13. “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. “I believe in America because we have great dreams, and because we have the opportunity to make those dreams come true.” –Wendell L. Wilkie
15. “Liberty is a constant battle between government; who would limit it, people; who would concede it, and patriots; who would defend it.” ―Samuel R. Young Jr.
16. “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” –Thomas Paine
17. “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” –Voltaire
18. “We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.” –William Faulkner
19. “Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.” –John Dickinson
20. “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” –Abraham Lincoln
21. “Listen to me, there is freedom in love. Every day should feel like independence day.” ―Evy Michaels
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Though he grew up in Tennessee and tried college for a while, it wasn’t until he moved to Massachusetts and began driving a school bus full of teens, this he became inspired to head back to the classroom himself.
Clayton Ward credits the students he was transporting to their Framingham high school for helping him rediscover his dream of earning a college degree.
“I really enjoy working with kids, especially the high school students, and during the bus routes, we would chat about their classes. As a history buff, I would share lessons that I learned in school and we talked a lot about academics,” said Clayton.
“After several of these discussions, some of the students would tell me they wanted me to be their teacher. I think they only said that because I was a different person than their regular teachers, educating them in a different way to pique their interest.”
But, however small that mention was from those kids, it stuck with him and provided the motivation to complete a goal he had started years before.
Talking to the students on his school bus every day, “renewed his sense of passion for expanding and teaching young minds.” He enrolled at MassBay Community College in May 2019 with the goal of earning his degree, transferring to a four-year institution, and some day teaching history to high school students—just as he did with the kids on his bus route.
Clayton worked full-time, driving the school bus while attending classes full-time at MassBay. He focused on doing the best he could in all his classes, and it paid off.
He earned a spot on the Dean’s List every semester, was inducted into the Phi Theta Kappa National Honor Society, and graduated with a perfect 4.0 average. Last month he earned the All-Divisional Award for having the highest GPA in the Humanities and Social Sciences division—and in the Liberal Arts program.
“It wasn’t always easy. I would drive my route in the morning and afternoon, take a class in between shifts, and take night classes and classes online to complete my degree requirements. I would think of those students and all the years I wanted to make this happen, and it helped me focus my energy.”
“Many years ago, I heard a quote from my former middle and high school band teacher, which helped me stay the course and get to where I am now. My teacher said, ‘Discipline is not doing what you are supposed to be doing when everyone is watching. Discipline is doing what you are supposed to be doing when nobody is watching.’”
And, thanks to lots of free time during the pandemic, in just one year, Clayton has completed his Associate in Arts degree in Liberal Arts and will transfer to Framingham State University in the fall to pursue his bachelor degree in History, with a minor in Secondary Education.
