It’s been three years since Monica Mathis lost her beloved dog Hazel while living in Iowa—so she’s still in shock, having been reunited with the pup because of a Florida beer can.
LISTEN to the inspiring story told on the radio by our GNN founder in the Good News Guru podcast below—or READ the full story after that…
The photo of the beer can was part of a recent initiative from Motorworks Brewing company in Bradenton, Florida to feature adoptable dogs from their local animal shelter on their 4-packs of beer.
The initiative has already resulted in several adoptions from the Manatee County Animal Services since it launched last month—but it has also helped to reunite Mathis with her dog from a thousand miles away.
Mathis, who now lives in Minnesota, had been scrolling through her social media feed last week when she caught sight of a Facebook post about the brewery’s shelter dog cans.
One of the cans in particular featured a photo of a dog named Day Day—but it looked exactly like Mathis’s lost dog Hazel.
Although it seemed like a long shot that Hazel could have ended up in Florida, Mathis called the Manatee County Animal Services and asked if they could check the dog’s microchip information.
The shelter says that they had already attempted to contact Mathis through her microchip information, but her last name and contact phone number had changed since Hazel first went missing.
“I was so lucky. So lucky that I saw that… that she actually got picked and got put on a can, because I would have probably never seen her again had I not seen that,” Mathis told KMSP. “It’s amazing. I am so happy.”
Mathis now hopes that their story will inspire other pet owners to keep their microchip information up to date.
Nobody knows how the dog got to Florida, but the happy ending is Lager than life.
(WATCH the news coverage below)
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Physicians from Thailand say that they may have found a curative treatment for the coronavirus after they used a cocktail of anti-viral medications to treat a woman with the illness this week.
According to Thailand’s health ministry, the 70-year-old Chinese woman tested negative for the virus 48 hours after she was treated with anti-HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, and large doses of the anti-flu drug oseltamivir.
Prior to being treated with the drug combo at Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok, she had tested positive for the virus for 10 days in a row.
Now, doctors say her speedy recovery from the illness could help solidify the drug combo as a treatment for the virus.
“This is not the cure, but the patient’s condition has vastly improved. From testing positive for 10 days under our care, after applying this combination of medicine the test result became negative within 48 hours,” lung specialist Dr. Kriangska Atipornwanich told reporters. “The outlook is good but we still have to do more study to determine that this can be a standard treatment.”
Two other coronavirus patients have reportedly been treated with the drug cocktail, and while the treatment was discontinued for one of the patients following an allergic reaction, the other patient also showed improvement.
(WATCH the news coverage below) – Photo by WION News
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For those of you who may not have watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers 31 to 20.
But, as usual, the world’s biggest brands recruited their best celebrity connections and creative consultants to show their talent during the commercial breaks.
Some of the ads were inspiring; others were downright bizarre—but we’ll let you be the judge of that.
Here are 13 of the most impressive Super Bowl ads from the big game.
13) A young football star named Maxwell “Bunchie” Young—who has become renowned for his speed in the league—is shown running a ball all the way to the Hard Rock Stadium while football stars young and old cheer him on. After Bunchie can be seen dashing across the country with the help of his athletic peers, the commercial cuts to the live coverage of the game with Bunchie running across the stadium field in delight.
12) Hyundai premiered the Remote Smart Park feature of the new 2020 Sonata with the help of Massachusetts natives Chris Evans, John Krasinksi, and Rachel Dratch. In addition to flexing their Boston accents, they were also joined by Red Sox legend David Ortiz.
11) Brian Cranston helped Mountain Dew prove that movie remakes can be just as good as the original in this The Shining-inspired advert for the soda brand’s new Mountain Dew with zero sugar.
10) Budweiser paid homage to “typical” Americans and their stereotypical—but inspiring—American ways.
9) Cheetos unveiled their new popcorn product with a little help from M.C. Hammer warning onlookers that they “Can’t Touch This” while sporting cheese dust-covered fingers.
8) Microsoft celebrated the new 49ers coach Katie Sowers as the first woman to ever coach at the Super Bowl.
7) Jason Momoa shocked viewers in this Rocket Mortgage commercial by shedding his rippling muscles and flowing hair so he could “truly relax” in the comfort of his own home—and while it may have been unnerving to see Aquaman casually shed his physique, it certainly caught the viewer’s attention.
6) Facebook spotlighted their various social media groups with clips from all of the platform’s most niche categories of interest—all while being showcased to Twisted Sister’s “I Wanna Rock”.
5) Hip hop artist Post Malone is notorious for only drinking Bud Light—so when it came time for the beer brand to release their new fruity seltzer flavor, they recruited the tattooed musician for this quick advert about his amusing internal struggle between the new and original flavors.
4) For fans of the hit Adult Swim show Rick and Morty, the iconic characters found themselves trapped in a Pringles commercial in which they are swarmed by robots pushing the different chip flavors. While its premise is particularly ironic for the commercial, we admire its creativity.
3) The CEO of WeatherTech used this year’s Super Bowl commercial to talk about his dog’s cancer journeyand ask viewers to donate to the veterinarians who saved the pup’s life.
2) Reese’s used this cheeky little advert to talk about their new Take Five candy bar—“the best bar you’ve never heard of”—in the office workplace of some commonly used idioms.
1) In what is perhaps our favorite Super Bowl ad, Bill Murray pays homage to his hit movie role in Groundhog Day by hijacking the new Jeep Gladiator so he can have some fun days out with his marmot buddy—because “no day is ever the same in a Jeep Gladiator”.
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Quote of the Day: “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace
Photo: Villa de Leyva, Colombia – by Joshua Earle
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Exercises like yoga or weightlifting teach us the different ways in which muscles work and recover—but our body is full of hundreds of muscles, some of which are very small. Many people won’t know that just like hamstrings, abs, or biceps, the small collection of muscles around the eyes functions in the same way. Tight hamstrings can be stretched to relieve pain and promote blood circulation and recovery, and thusly tight eyes need a similar treatment.
If you’re experiencing discomfort in your eyes, there are simple actions like yawning, blinking, and exposing your eyes to natural light which you can do to keep your eyes in good shape and prevent strain during the workday.
Yawning and blinking create moisture and keep your eyes lubricated while natural light exposes your eyes to relaxing color spectrums and offers a break from the stress of the blue light field experienced when we look at screens.
If these don’t provide enough relief, you can try three common ocular stretches to help relieve the tension from working on computer screen for long periods.
1) Directional eye stretch. Without moving your head, start by looking up, down, left, and right, fixing your eyes in that position for the duration of a breath. Inhale look up, exhale look down, etc.
2) Focusing stretch. The human eye has four fields of vision, from our peripheral to our most forward-focused point. Keep your eyes fixed in one direction, cycle through focusing on each field of vision for the duration of a breath. Afterward, adjust the focus of your eyes to a point far in the distance back to something close to your face—and repeat.
3) Stretching around the eyes. This is where most of the tension and cramps in achy eyes are stored. Closing your eyes, take the pads of your fingers and gently massage the areas below your eyes, just between your eyebrows and eyelids, and your temples.
4) Palming. Palming acts a little like cupping in that you’re putting a little pressure via suction onto your eye sockets. To do so, place your elbows on your desk and cup your hands over your eyes, before gently leaning forward. Breathe slowly and hold for 30-40 seconds.
If your eyes are crying out for a bit of eyeball yoga—listen to them! You only get one pair, and these stretches will help you keep them in shape as long as nature allows.
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If you’ve ever liked or supported a page on Facebook that has to do with plastic pollution, you may have seen an advertisement for a $20 dollar bracelet made of plastic yanked from the ocean. 4ocean removes one pound of trash from the world’s oceans per bracelet purchased, and after a long almost 3 year slog, 4ocean is closing in on 8 million pounds of trash pulled from the sea.
Cleanup efforts are currently underway in Florida, Bali, and Haiti—and now 4ocean is expanding its presence and operations into Central America, an area that is suffering from a blight earning it the moniker “trash islands”.
Tens of millions of pounds of ocean trash are believed to be floating in and along Central America’s ocean and coastlines, due to minimal infrastructure and multiple river systems flowing from city centers directly into the oceans.
The 4ocean founders Andrew Cooper and Alex Schulze, who were included in Forbes’30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 last year, see Rio Motagua in Guatemala as a critical opportunity to stem the tide of garbage moving into the ocean.
“Expanding our cleanup operations into Central America offers us an opportunity to create significant change in the ocean plastic crisis,” said Schulze. “Our plan is to not only remove millions of pounds of plastic by leveraging innovative cleanup technologies, but to also stop plastic pollution at its source by working with local communities to change plastic consumption habits.”
Photos by 4Ocean
Upon opening its Central American operations, 4ocean aims to employ more than twenty local workers, and utilize six trash-collecting vessels—as well as the 4ocean Mobile Skimmer, an original watercraft designed to remove large quantities of debris in high-density areas. In addition, they will install boom collection systems at large river mouths to minimize the amount of pollution that enters the ocean.
Last week, 4ocean’s Haiti team removed 65,000 pounds of trash from the ocean and rivers, and according to press contacts, 4ocean is aiming to remove 1 million pounds of garbage from the Rio Motagua and the Central American Atlantic in its first year on site.
4ocean is not the only group extinguishing trash in the world’s rivers. Boyan Slat, the young Dutch engineer who is collecting shipping containers of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, recently expanded his gaze to include the worst polluted rivers.
His river-going vessel, The Interceptor, is now keeping trash from reaching the ocean in Jakarta and Malaysia by extending a water-permeable barrier across the river. The Interceptor then scoops the plastic out of the water using a conveyor belt and deposits it onto a shuttle that moves across the length of the barge and deposits the trash into one of 6 dumpsters which is remotely brought ashore for recycling. (Check out the photos and videos here.)
Put your money where your social media mouthpiece is: Buy a bracelet, or donate to Boyan Slat’s genius Ocean Cleanup Foundation, to support its river work, too.
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In a remarkable legislative move that increased the amount of protected areas for wildlife in Germany by 25%, the German government moved in 2015 to convert 62 disused Cold War-era military bases into wildlife refuges.
This added up to about 76,600 acres of additional protected land in the country, according to The Independent.
Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said at the time: “We are seizing a historic opportunity with this conversion — many areas that were once no-go zones are no longer needed for military purposes.”
“We are fortunate that we can now give these places back to nature,” Hendricks said.
During the 50-year-long dreary standoff at the Iron Curtain between East and West Germany, minimal human activity along the old Soviet/NATO border allowed the wildlife that had been chased out of other parts of Europe to recover in relative peace. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, scientists and voices for nature of all kinds realized that the lack of human activity had created natural sanctuaries for endangered European wildlife all along the international and ideological border.
The 62 decommissioned German military bases were located on the West German side of the Iron Curtain, where they became a habitat for the middle-spotted woodpecker and lesser spotted eagle, as well as a top tier species that, like the last remains of the Old World shattered by World War II, was gone from Europe by the time the Iron Curtain descended across the continent—wolves.
Wolves at the Gate
Sport hunting competitions and the desire to protect livestock herds led to the regional extermination of the wolf. Writing for Science Magazine, Erik Stokstad reported that the wolf has returned to parts of Germany, in large part due to the reformed military bases which proved to be perfect havens.
“In the late 1990s, wolves began to dart into Germany from the forests of Poland,” he wrote. “The first litter of pups in Germany was reported in 2001 in Saxony-Brandenburg. They’ve since spread westward into six more of Germany’s 16 federal states, and monitoring data show their numbers are rising.”
Due to poaching, it was found that almost all wolf packs across Germany favored military bases over wildlife refuges, even though the refuges possessed fewer roads, and larger, denser sections of forest.
Guillaume Chapron, a wildlife ecologist at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, suggested that since deer populations on military bases aren’t managed by hunting, it means fewer poachers or hunters are coming in contact with wolves there.
Coupled with the lack of soldiers and wars, Chapron suggests that, like the 62 decommissioned sites in 2015, all military bases slated to be closed should be turned into nature reserves for this reason.
Bases and military installations in other countries along the Iron Curtain were closed down and turned into wildlife refuges, thanks, in part, to the European Green Belt initiative led by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his grassroots nonprofit International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
Today the backbone of green runs from the very northern tip of Finland down into Greece and eastward across the Carpathians before halting at the border with Turkey.
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Quote of the Day: “It was fortunate for South Africa that Mandela and I found it possible to work together even though big strains developed between us.” – F. W. de Klerk, former president of South Africa (began dismantling apartheid 30 yrs ago today)
Photo: February morning on Capitol Hill with a fox, by Lorie Shaull, CC license
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The majority of Americans say they would shell out an extra 36% above the retail price if they knew it meant their purchase was ethically sound, according to new research.
The poll of 2,000 Americans found 63% of respondents voicing their willingness to pay an additional one-third more in price for responsibly-made and transparently-sourced products.
87 percent reported they would be more likely to buy something if they knew and understood all the ingredients in the product.
Conducted by OnePoll in conjunction with Nutrilite by Amway, the survey found that a resounding 87% of respondents agreed that companies aren’t transparent enough about the ingredients they put in their products.
It may be difficult for consumers to keep track of the claims on packages today, whether it’s ‘cage free’ or ‘cruelty-free’, but those companies that are going the extra mile to ethically source products are benefitting from an increase of dollars spent. Research released in June confirms that consumers are actually putting their money where their hearts are.
NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business did extensive research into U.S. consumers’ actual purchasing of consumer packaged goods and found that 50% of the growth in 2013–2018 came from sustainability-marketed products.
Products that had a sustainability claim on the packaging delivered nearly $114 billion in sales—up 29% from 2013. Additionally, these products grew 5.6 times faster than those that were not marketed as sustainable, in more than 90% of the 36 categories of goods researched.
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Photo by Dennis Schroeder / Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
In Denver, Colorado, the price of housing continues to rise, but opportunities to create low-income housing are expensive and, take years to build.
So when the Quality Inn and Suites on Quebec St. went up for sale, the president of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) saw a golden opportunity.
John Parvensky snapped up the 139-room complex for $8.4 million, secured with a mixture of private, city and state funds, and completed some brief renovations before christening it Fusion Studios. Fusion Studios, serving a variety of people in need, represents the 17th building he has opened in 3 decades of work.
Rooms are expected to be available for the people who come right in off the street or from shelters across the city, as soon as the end of the month.
For renters, vouchers can be secured by prospective tenants from the state and city to ensure that no more than 30% is required from their incomes for rent. Parvensky said on average, tenants can manage about $100 a month, with a lot of it coming from other benefits such as disability payments received.
Photo by Dennis Schroeder / Colorado Coalition for the Homeless
The floor and room plan is divided up by a person’s circumstances rather than by size and luxury. 28 rooms will be set aside for those awaiting trial for low-level crimes like public urination and trespassing. Another 10 are reserved for homeless folks who find themselves frequenting Denver Public Hospitals.
For individuals looking to move on to other forms of affordable and permanent housing or who have housing currently being constructed for them, another 25 rooms have been set aside. Britta Fisher, head of Denver’s housing department called Fusion Studios “practically instant housing”.
“We all know that we need more housing units, that we need them quickly,” she told Denverite during Tuesday’s opening ceremony. “I truly hope we can replicate this model and partnerships at other sites in Denver.”
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A 96 year-old Canadian woman was crying tears of joy after she accidentally fulfilled a lifelong out-of-this-world bucket list dream.
For decades, Jean Moffatt has been reaching out over the airwaves with her ham radio during her time volunteering at the Ontario Science Center teaching young whippersnappers how to use traditional amateur radio.
“You can always talk to other people, in other parts of the world,” Moffatt told CTV News Toronto. “You can send your signals to satellites. I’ve talked to people from the Arctic to the Antarctic.”
Recently Moffatt fulfilled a long-held dream of hers when her ham radio connection was relayed through northern Italy and allowed her to talk to Commander Luca Parmitano aboard the International Space Station.
She admitted to CTV that it had always been her dream to talk with an astronaut, and Commander Luca said it was his honor to speak with her. The near-centenarian asked him whether his opinions on extra-terrestrial life had changed since departing the atmosphere and what he thought about cleaning up the environment.
The idea for connecting her ham radio to the extra-atmospheric radio waves came after her 96th birthday. “She mentioned to me that one of the things she’s always wanted to do was talk to an astronaut,” Christine Pigeon, the volunteer coordinator at the Science Centre told CTV News.
An email with NASA and three months were needed, but when the rough connection finally went through, Moffatt’s conversation with Commander Luca brought tears to her eyes, with the radio gal admitting it was the “highlight” of her life.
(WATCH the inspiring CTV video below)
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Quote of the Day: “I want to take all the pain that I feel and celebrate, and turn it around.” – Stevie Wonder
Photo: by Mary Anne Morgan, CC license – cropped
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Rainwater runoff is notorious for polluting urban waterways by sweeping up all the chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, bacteria, and automotive oils that sully dense metropolitan areas.
Thankfully, cities across the west coast of the United States are rapidly applying a simple new method for combatting rainwater runoff: gardens.
These aptly-named “Rain Gardens” (also known as “bioswales”) are specifically designed to capture runoff and filter water before it enters the urban sewer system through city storm drains—and they don’t look half bad in front of your house, either.
According to a National Water Quality Inventory 1996 Report to Congress, rainwater runoff is the 2nd greatest polluter of water in estuaries—critical ecosystems for the health of shorelines and migratory and aquatic bird populations.
During storm events or heavy snow melts, single facilities that treat both storm water and sanitary sewage may become overloaded from urban rainwater runoff and discharge untreated waste into surface waters.
Bioswales are typically planted on a slope above the roadside or sidewalk and below the level of the front porch to a typical house or building. This allows water flowing off of roofs, stairs, gutters, and parking lots to run down across the bioswale—ensuring maximum absorption of toxins and pollutants.
The city of Portland has become just one of the many west coast cities that have hopped on the bioswale train in the US. Over the course of the last 10 years, Portland has been helping citizens install the bioswales in their front and back gardens. Not only that, legislators have even gone so far as to take care of the bill.
The bioswales are part of a massive overhaul of the Portland sewer system called the “Green Streets” initiative.
“Green Streets reduces and manage rainwater runoff through interception, evapotranspiration, throughfall, and attenuation,” details the authors of the 2007 Green Streets policy report. “One of the most closely monitored facilities—the Glencoe Rain Garden—has performed extremely well… and has retained 94% of the runoff.”
According to a report from Sunset, the project will add 83 Green Street policy rain gardens and planters to filter 7.1 million gallons of runoff, ensuring the water has greatly reduced its pollutant potential before entering the sewer system.
As mentioned in the Green Streets report, the potential certain plants have to remove pollutants like oils, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and harmful bacteria can be as high as 90%, while sediment content can be reduced by 80%. Since the gardens are also naturally drained and dried in 12 to 48 hours, there’s no risk of bioswales becoming mosquito breeding centers.
PPenvironmental created this simple DIY tutorial for building your own bioswale, whether in front of your house or near a creek or fresh water source, while Portland City authorities have launched this particular page where you can apply to have the percentage cost of installing a bioswale on your property recovered.
Plant Some Positivity By Sharing The Good News To Social Media – File photo by Chris Hamby, CC
Americans are rejoicing over a new report detailing how the life expectancy of US adults has increased for the first time since 2014—and it is largely because of a landmark decline in cancer mortality and drug overdoses.
According to the newly-released data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), American life expectancy increased slightly from 78.6 years in 2017 to 78.7 years in 2018.
Although this is only an improvement of 0.1 years, it is still cause for celebration; the trend is partially due to a notable 4.1% drop in overdose deaths from the previous year, which is the equivalent of about 3,000 fewer fatalities.
It is also the first time that the drug overdose rate has fallen in the US since 1999.
“I think these numbers suggest that some positive news is starting to come out of the many efforts to try to stem the tide on overdoses,” Kathryn McHugh, a psychologist at McLean Psychiatric Hospital and Harvard University, told NPR.
Additionally, fewer and fewer people are dying from cancer in the United States every year, with 2017 showing the largest single-year drop in cancer mortality ever reported.
The cancer death rate declined by 29% from 1991 to 2017, including a whopping 2.2% drop from 2016 to 2017, which translates to approximately 2.9 million fewer cancer deaths than would have occurred had mortality rates remained at their peak. That trend continued into 2018 with another 2% drop in mortality rates.
A group of middle schoolers from Bellevue, Nebraska is being praised across social media after they rallied together to surprise their teacher with a new pair of shoes.
Earlier this month, Logan Fontenelle Middle School teacher Trey Payne was heartbroken to discover that his favorite pair of sneakers had been stolen out of his classroom.
Since the shoes were also rather expensive, Payne’s students were particularly upset over the theft.
The students then pooled their money in order to surprise their teacher with a brand new pair of replacement shoes—and Payne could hardly contain his emotions.
In a video which has since been shared thousands of times across social media, Payne can be seen opening the shoebox and then promptly bursting into tears.
“It’s more than a pair of shoes, it’s about doing things to build everyone up around you,” said Payne. “I try to show my kids this and I think the lesson has sunk in for many, in turn, reaffirming my purpose and my ideals.”
(WATCH the tear-jerking video below)
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Effortless learning during sleep is the dream of many people—but the smell of roses may actually be the key to making that dream a reality.
According to an extensive new laboratory sleep study, German researchers found that smells have a very supportive effect on learning success when presented both during learning and sleep.
Researchers at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center, the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP) and the Faculty of Biology at the University of Freiburg have now shown that this effect can be also achieved very easily outside the lab.
For the study, pupils in two school classes learned English vocabulary with and without scent sticks during the learning period and also at night—and the students remembered the vocabulary much better with a scent. The study was published in the Nature Group’s Open Access journal Scientific Reports earlier this week.
“We showed that the supportive effect of fragrances works very reliably in everyday life and can be used in a targeted way,” said study leader Dr. Jürgen Kornmeier, head of the Perception and Cognition Research Group at the Freiburg-based IGPP and scientist at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Freiburg—Medical Center in Germany.
The smell of roses when learning and sleeping
For the study, first author and student teacher Franziska Neumann conducted several experiments with 54 students from two 6th grade classes in a school in southern Germany.
The young participants from the test group were asked to place rose-scented incense sticks on their desks at home while learning English vocabulary and on the bedside table next to the bed at night. In another experiment, they also placed the incense sticks on the table next to them during a vocabulary test at school during an English test. The results were compared with test results in which no incense sticks were used during one or more phases.
“The students showed a significant increase in learning success by about 30% if the incense sticks were used during both the learning and sleeping phases,” says Neumann. The results also suggest that the additional use of the incense sticks during the vocabulary test promotes memory.
Findings are suitable for everyday use
“One particular finding beyond the seminal initial study was, that the fragrance also works when it is present all night,” says Kornmeier. “This makes the findings suitable for everyday use.”
Previous studies had assumed that the fragrance must only be present during a particularly sensitive sleeping phase. However, since this sleep phase needs to be determined by an effortful measurement of brain activity through an electroencephalogram (EEG) in the sleep laboratory, this finding was not suitable for everyday use.
“Our study shows that we can make learning during sleep easier. And who would have thought that our nose could help considerably in this,” says Kornmeier.
While some Super Bowl commercials might be advertising various businesses and brands, this grateful pet owner took out a 30-second ad to raise money for the veterinarians who saved his dog’s life.
This is not the first time that David MacNeil has featured his dog Scout in a Super Bowl ad; the 7-year-old Golden Retriever has previously appeared in commercials for WeatherTech, MacNeil’s company.
This year, however, MacNeil’s $6 million time slot tells the story about how he almost lost Scout to cancer.
“There’s so many companies selling this snack or this beer, that car or truck or whatever,” MacNeil told WMTV. “I’m like, ‘What can I do that’s a really good thing to do to help the university and the school and animals?’”
Veterinarians diagnosed Scout with an uncommon heart tumor after he collapsed to the floor last year. They said that the senior pup only had one month to live, and it would be best if MacNeil euthanized Scout.
MacNeil refused. Instead, he brought Scout to the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine and begged them to help his beloved dog.
Since many cancer treatments for humans are also effective for dogs, Scout began undergoing chemotherapy—and after just six weeks of treatments, his tumor had shrunk by 78%. Two weeks later, it had shrunk by a further 50%.
As a thank you to the veterinarians who saved his dog, MacNeil then bought a Super Bowl ad encouraging viewers to donate to the university and its research.
“This is an amazing opportunity not only for the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the School of Veterinary Medicine, but for veterinary medicine worldwide,” said the dean, Mark Markel. “So much of what’s known globally today about how best to diagnose and treat devastating diseases such as cancer originated in veterinary medicine.”
(WATCH the news coverage below) – Photo by WMTV
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Quote of the Day: “We live in a society obsessed with public opinion. But leadership has never been about popularity.” – U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Florida)
Photo: in the public domain
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Electron microscopy image of lung cancer cells. Photo by LRI EM Unit.
This “exciting” new study says that protective cells in the lungs of ex-smokers could explain why quitting smoking dramatically reduces the risk of developing lung cancer.
Cancer Research UK-funded researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and UCL have discovered that compared to current smokers, people who had stopped smoking had more genetically healthy lung cells, which have a much lower risk of developing into cancer.
The study shows that quitting smoking could do much more than just stopping further damage to the lungs. Researchers believe it could also allow new, healthy cells to actively replenish the lining of our airways. This shift in proportion of healthy to damaged cells could help protect against cancer.
These results highlight the benefits of stopping smoking completely, at any age.
“People who have smoked heavily for 30, 40 or more years often say to me that it’s too late to stop smoking—the damage is already done,” said the study’s joint senior author Dr. Peter Campbell from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
“What is so exciting about our study is that it shows that it’s never too late to quit—some of the people in our study had smoked more than 15,000 packs of cigarettes over their life, but within a few years of quitting, many of the cells lining their airways showed no evidence of damage from tobacco.”
He later told BBC News that he and the research team “were totally unprepared” over the seemingly “magical” occurrence of the airway regeneration.
Photo by Sanger Institute / UCL
Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the UK, accounting for 21% of all cancer deaths. Smoking tobacco damages DNA and hugely increases the risk of lung cancer, with around 72% of the 47,000 annual lung cancer cases in the UK caused by smoking. In the US, it is estimated that around 229,000 cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed in 2020.
Damage to the DNA in cells lining the lungs creates genetic errors, and some of these are “driver mutations”, which are changes that give the cell a growth advantage. Eventually, an accumulation of these driver mutations can let the cells divide uncontrollably and become cancerous. However, when someone stops smoking, they avoid most of the subsequent risk of lung cancer.
In the first major study of the genetic effects of smoking on “normal”, non-cancerous lung cells, researchers analyzed lung biopsies from 16 people including smokers, ex-smokers, people who had never smoked, and children.
They sequenced the DNA of 632 individual cells from these biopsies and looked at the pattern of genetic changes in these non-cancerous lung cells.
The researchers found that despite not being cancerous, more than 9 out of every 10 lung cells in current smokers had up to 10,000 extra genetic changes—mutations—compared with non-smokers, and these mutations were caused directly by the chemicals in tobacco smoke. More than a quarter of these damaged cells had at least one cancer-driver mutation, which explains why the risk of lung cancer is so much higher in people who smoke.
Unexpectedly, in people who had stopped smoking, there was a sizable group of cells lining the airways that had escaped the genetic damage from their past smoking. Genetically, these cells were on par with those from people who had never smoked: they had much less genetic damage from smoking and would have a low risk of developing into cancer.
Electron microscopy image of lung cancer cells. Photo by LRI EM Unit.
The researchers found that ex-smokers had four times more of these healthy cells than people who still smoked—representing up to 40% of the total lung cells in ex-smokers.
The research, published this week in Nature today, is part of the $26 million (£20 million) Mutographs of Cancer project: a Cancer Research UK Grand Challenge initiative. The project detects DNA “signatures” that indicate the source of damage, to better understand the causes of cancer, and discover the ones we may not yet be aware of.
Dr. Kate Gowers, joint first author from UCL, said: “Our study is the first time that scientists have looked in detail at the genetic effects of smoking on individual healthy lung cells. We found that even these healthy lung cells from smokers contained thousands of genetic mutations. These can be thought of as mini time-bombs waiting for the next hit that causes them to progress to cancer. Further research with larger numbers of people is needed to understand how cancer develops from these damaged lung cells.”
While the study showed that these healthy lung cells could start to repair the lining of the airways in ex-smokers and help protect them against lung cancer, smoking also causes damage deeper in the lung that can lead to emphysema—chronic lung disease. This damage is not reversible, even after stopping smoking.
Professor Sam Janes, joint senior author from UCL and University College London Hospitals Trust, said: “Our study has an important public health message and shows that it really is worth quitting smoking to reduce the risk of lung cancer. Stopping smoking at any age does not just slow the accumulation of further damage, but could reawaken cells unharmed by past lifestyle choices. Further research into this process could help to understand how these cells protect against cancer, and could potentially lead to new avenues of research into anti-cancer therapeutics.”
Dr Rachel Orritt, Health Information Manager at Cancer Research UK, added: “It’s a really motivating idea that people who stop smoking might reap the benefits twice over—by preventing more tobacco-related damage to lung cells, and by giving their lungs the chance to balance out some of the existing damage with healthier cells. What’s needed now are larger studies that look at cell changes in the same people over time to confirm these findings.
“The results add to existing evidence that, if you smoke, stopping completely is the best thing you can do for your health. It’s not always easy to kick the habit, but getting support from a free, local Stop Smoking Service roughly triples the chance of success compared to going it alone.”
Georgina Laurie and Des McCarthy who now both work at Samaritans. SWNS.
In a strange twist of fate, this suicide hotline volunteer only recently discovered that she has spent the last four years working next to the man who talked her through her own suicidal crisis.
60-year-old Georgina Laurie contemplated taking her own life 7 years ago after enduring the sudden death of her husband Dennis.
“A year prior to that, I’d had a stroke, so my whole life completely changed and I couldn’t cope with that,” recalls Laurie. “I got really depressed, really down and I really couldn’t see there was a way forward in life for me.
Thankfully, a fateful phone conversation with a volunteer from Samaritans—an international nonprofit dedicated to preventing suicide—was enough to help her change her mind, put one foot in front of the other, and keep going.
“I had no intention of ringing Samaritans and no intention of ringing and telling anybody,” says Laurie. “I was in bed, I was coughing and I dribbled water and I went into my bedside cabinet to get a tissue and believe it or not, a Samaritans card flicked out.
“I hadn’t really considered them at all and I thought ‘I will give them a call’ and it wasn’t to be talked out of what I was doing—I wanted the universe to know what I was doing. I didn’t leave a note or anything.
“So I phoned up and this gentleman answered and for an hour listened to me wittering on, and I know I was talking about the difficulties in the family since my husband died, and it was really difficult.
“I told him what I was going to do. He didn’t judge me; there was no judgement, there was no trying to change my mind,” she continued. “I felt completely that I could trust him and open up. For an hour I was wittering away, but still determined to go through with what I had planned.
“I decided I had chatted enough and I said ‘I’m going to go now’ and at that point the Samaritan said to me on the phone, ‘I would just like to say one thing; this all sounds totally exhausting.’
“And I hadn’t thought about that and I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I am exhausted; I am emotionally and physically exhausted’ and then I put the phone down.
“I started to think, ‘if I am exhausted, if I really am that mentally and emotionally exhausted, am I making the right decision?’ and it was enough just to get me thinking.”
The experience eventually inspired the English grandmother from Kent to begin volunteering for the organization so she could help those going through the same kind of despair.
About two and a half years after the phone call, Laurie decided to join the Samaritans branch in Strood, which has around 60 volunteers. She has since risen through the ranks of the organization and begun mentoring other volunteers on how they can get involved.
She has now spent 4 and a half years working in a booth alongside branch director and long-time volunteer Des McCarthy—although she only discovered it was he who had talked her through her troubles.
Laurie had been in the middle of an evening shift when she suddenly had her epiphany over the identity of her anonymous savior.
Georgina Laurie and Des McCarthy who now both work at Samaritans. SWNS.
“It was about five months ago. I was training one of my mentees and my mentee was on the phone, so I had more time to listen to what Des was saying, albeit subconsciously,” recalls Laurie. “I suddenly heard Des say, ‘it must have been exhausting for you’ and it was like being transferred back all those years, I couldn’t believe it.
“It was really one of those serendipitous moments and I realized that it was Des I had spoken to.
“I couldn’t bring myself to say anything that night,” she added. “We were actually at another volunteer’s birthday party and I had confided in another volunteer and he said ‘here’s an ideal opportunity to tell him’, and it just organically came out.”
Laurie’s call could have been diverted to any of the Samaritans’ call centers in the UK—and the fact that McCarthy was the call handler was completely random.
“I don’t have a stock of phrases,” McCarthy said about the seemingly innocuous comment. “Some people will have a comfort in using a stock of phrases when they begin, but I don’t think I ever had. It’s not something I say very often at all.”
HeMcCarthy, a former police officer, is stepping down in his role as director after three years and passing on the baton to Laurie, who will take over next month.
“It just seems like a natural little process. It was so humbling to be asked and I think it’s a nice all-round story about someone who’s been in despair who did call Samaritans,” said Laurie. “Des didn’t try and talk me out of doing anything. All he did was do what we say on the tin; we listen, and listening is just enough sometimes.”
(Interested in volunteering yourself? WATCH the Samaritans video below…)
