Quote of the Day: “I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in its essence.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Photo: by Susan Weber, CC License, cropped
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A cruise liner full of passengers and crew members abandoned their planned 7-day vacation so they could help victims of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas.
The Celebrity Equinox left Fort Lauderdale, Florida with 3,000 guests last weekend with the intention of landing in Nassau at the end of their week-long voyage. After the storm hit the islands, however, they changed course for a different Bahamian island which had only been partially destroyed in the storm.
Rather than returning to Florida, the crew members and guests agreed to turn the trip into a humanitarian mission by preparing, packaging, and serving more than 10,000 sandwiches and water bottles to Bahamians affected by the storm. NBC News says that even the children aboard the vessel volunteered to help by making handmade cards for evacuees who might need some personal encouragement.
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Thankfully, the Celebrity Cruise guests are not the only ones offering emergency relief to the Bahamas—other cruise liners such as the Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line, Royal Caribbean, The Walt Disney Company and Carnival Corporation have all used their fleets to deliver supplies to the islands and provide transportation for families seeking sanctuary.
Additionally, Unicef just announced that more than 1.5 tons of life-saving supplies arrived in Nassau this week.
“This first supply shipment of UNICEF humanitarian items was freighted by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and includes over 400,000 water purification tablets, several 5,000-liter tanks for at least 2,000 people and 1,000 jerry cans,” says the organization.
(WATCH the news coverage below) – Photo by Royal Carribean
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The government of Denmark has just bought the last of the country’s circus elephants so they can live out the rest of their lives in peaceful retirement.
The government reportedly paid 11 million kroner ($1.6 million) for the elephants in anticipation of the country passing a ban on wild circus animals later this year.
The elephants, Ramboline, Lara, Djunga, and Jenny, were purchased from two different circuses. Though the government has no immediate plans for where the animals will live out their retirement, Animal Protection Denmark will reportedly be caring for the creatures until they can find a more permanent home.
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The purchase comes not long after the UK government passed a ban on wild animals being used for circus performances back in May. Another circus in Germany made headlines back in June after they became the first to use holographic animals in their show.
The United States has also moved closer to banning the use of circus animals since New Jersey and Hawaii became the first states to issue legislation against the notoriously inhumane practice back in December.
While there is already legislation in 145 US localities that offer certain limitations and restrictions on animal performances, New Jersey and Hawaii’s trail-blazing measures ban the use of any wild animal species, including elephants, tigers, lions, bears, and primates, in circuses and traveling shows.
Be Sure And Share The Good News With Your Friends On Social Media — File photo by Tambako The Jaguar, CC
In this groundbreaking new study, scientists are shocked to discover that a combination of common medications might help people to reverse their biological age.
Nine male participants between the ages of 51 and 65 were recruited for the small clinical study at the University of California, Los Angeles. The participants were given a growth hormone and two forms of diabetes medication over the course of one year in order to study the safety and efficacy of the drug combination in restoring tissue in the thymus gland, which is essential for powering a healthy immune system.
Consistent blood samples were collected from each of the patients before, during, and after the study. Not only did the samples reveal that the drugs had worked in helping to regenerate thymus tissue, it also showed that the cocktail had reversed the “epigenetic clocks” of the patients.
Furthermore, each participant had shed an average of 2.5 years from their biological age and their immune systems showed remarkable signs of clinical rejuvenation. The patients continued to display the epigenetic symptoms more than 6 months after the study’s conclusion.
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“This is to our knowledge the first report of an increase, based on an epigenetic age estimator, in predicted human lifespan by means of a currently accessible aging intervention,” say the researchers.
The “epigenetic clock” refers to the body’s biological signs of age. The authors of the study, which was published this week in Aging Cell, say that although “epigenetic age does not measure all features of aging and is not synonymous with aging itself, it is the most accurate measure of biological age and age‐related disease risk available today.”
This is not the first time that scientists have identified a method for reversing our biological age. Back in May, researchers from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) training for and completing a first-time marathon “reverses” aging of major blood vessels.
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However, the researchers who conducted the study at the University of California, Los Angeles, say that they were not anticipating such a remarkable response to the medication.
“I’d expected to see slowing down of the clock, but not a reversal,” says geneticist and lead researcher Steve Horvath told Nature. “That felt kind of futuristic.”
These are only the results of a small trial and further research will need to be conducted in order to study the treatment’s efficacy on a larger group of participants—but the findings still “have huge implications” for treating age-related disease.
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Every single crew member who was aboard this capsized cargo ship has been rescued and brought to safety thanks to the quick response of the US Coast Guard.
Shortly after the Golden Ray vessel set sail from a Georgia port on Sunday evening, it overturned and caught fire. Rescuers worked through the night in order to rescue two dozen crew members from the vessel, but the fires eventually prevented them from searching for any more crew members—and there were four sailors who were still unaccounted for.
However, responders were relieved to discover that the men were safe after they heard them tapping from inside the engine room.
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Three of the remaining sailors had been trapped in the lower half of the ship while the fourth crew member was stuck in a separate glass room without any food or water.
With temperatures on the surface of the ship climbing to 120ºF (49ºC), rescuers managed to drill a 3-foot hole into the side of the vessel so they could haul the sailors to safety—and despite spending more than 30 hours in swelteringly harsh conditions, the sailors were checked over by medical personnel and declared to be in good health.
.@USCG and rescue crews have extracted the final #GoldenRay crew member safely. All crew members are accounted for. Operations will now shift fully to environmental protection, removing the vessel and resuming commerce. #HappeningNow #BreakingNews #Breaking pic.twitter.com/YgEM6Eb2qO
— USCGSoutheast (@USCGSoutheast) September 9, 2019
The Golden Ray, which measures in at 656 feet long and 106 feet wide, had been shipping automobiles to South Korea. Though it is unknown how many vehicles were lost in the accident, rescuers are happy to report that all of the crew members are safe and accounted for.
The US Coast Guard says they will now begin tackling the removal of the vessel from the water.
(WATCH the news coverage below)
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Quote of the Day: “Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
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Hear a serendipitous tale of blossoming community spirit in this week’s edition of MOTH Monday, a partnership with Good News Network that features inspiring videos from The MOTH, a nonprofit group showcasing the art of storytelling.
After a boy became tired of classmates in his public school making fun of his ethnic lunches, his ebullient mom decided to do something about it.
Tom Nimen and his brother and sister were attending a nearly-all-white school in Canton, Ohio in the 1960s.
He came home one day and stunned his parents by asking if she could please pack his lunch with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, instead of the Middle Eastern food that ended up embarrassing him. His siblings piped up and said they also wanted the Wonder Bread sandwiches with apples.
A week later at school Tom’s teacher announced that none of the students should bring their lunches or lunch money tomorrow.
“Unbeknownst to me, the next day, in comes my mother…”
“She was an artist. She dressed like an artist. She spoke like an artist; she had an attitude like an artist.”
She was very crafty at employing Middle Eastern hospitality to soften the edges of people around her.
(LISTEN to the storyteller on stage to hear what happened next—Jump to 3:15 to get to this point in the story…)
MORE ‘MOTH MONDAY’: Man Tells Heartfelt Story About How His Father’s Wrinkled Hands Sparked Their Reconnection
The Moth gives people an opportunity to tell a true story in front of a live audience, and sometimes their stories are chosen to air on the radio show, now celebrating its tenth year, and broadcasting on 485+ public radio stations—and on The Moth podcast, which is downloaded over 52 million times a year. The Moth’s third book, Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible is now available for purchase through your favorite booksellers.
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A common greenhouse gas could be repurposed in an efficient and environmentally friendly way with an electrolyzer that uses renewable electricity to produce pure liquid fuels.
The catalytic reactor developed by the Rice University lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Haotian Wang uses carbon dioxide as its feedstock and—in its latest prototype—produces highly purified and high concentrations of formic acid.
Formic acid produced by traditional carbon dioxide devices needs costly and energy-intensive purification steps, Wang said. The direct production of pure formic acid solutions will help to promote commercial carbon dioxide conversion technologies.
The method is detailed in Nature Energy.
Wang and his group pursue technologies that turn greenhouse gases into useful products. In tests, the new electrocatalyst reached an energy conversion efficiency of about 42%. That means nearly half of the electrical energy can be stored in formic acid as liquid fuel.
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“Formic acid is an energy carrier,” Wang said. “It’s a fuel-cell fuel that can generate electricity and emit carbon dioxide—which you can grab and recycle again.
“It’s also fundamental in the chemical engineering industry as a feedstock for other chemicals, and a storage material for hydrogen that can hold nearly 1,000 times the energy of the same volume of hydrogen gas, which is difficult to compress,” he said. “That’s currently a big challenge for hydrogen fuel-cell cars.”
Two advances made the new device possible, said lead author and Rice postdoctoral researcher Chuan Xia. The first was his development of a robust, two-dimensional bismuth catalyst and the second was a solid-state electrolyte that eliminates the need for salt as part of the reaction.
“Bismuth is a very heavy atom, compared to transition metals like copper, iron or cobalt,” Wang said. “Its mobility is much lower, particularly under reaction conditions. So that stabilizes the catalyst.” He noted the reactor is structured to keep water from contacting the catalyst, which also helps preserve it.
Xia can make the nanomaterials in bulk. “Currently, people produce catalysts on the milligram or gram scales,” he said. “We developed a way to produce them at the kilogram scale. That will make our process easier to scale up for industry.”
The polymer-based solid electrolyte is coated with sulfonic acid ligands to conduct positive charge or amino functional groups to conduct negative ions. “Usually people reduce carbon dioxide in a traditional liquid electrolyte like salty water,” Wang said. “You want the electricity to be conducted, but pure water electrolyte is too resistant. You need to add salts like sodium chloride or potassium bicarbonate so that ions can move freely in water.
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“But when you generate formic acid that way, it mixes with the salts,” he said. “For a majority of applications you have to remove the salts from the end product, which takes a lot of energy and cost. So we employed solid electrolytes that conduct protons and can be made of insoluble polymers or inorganic compounds, eliminating the need for salts.”
The rate at which water flows through the product chamber determines the concentration of the solution. Slow throughput with the current setup produces a solution that is nearly 30% formic acid by weight, while faster flows allow the concentration to be customized. The researchers expect to achieve higher concentrations from next-generation reactors that accept gas flow to bring out pure formic acid vapors.
The Rice lab worked with Brookhaven National Laboratory to view the process in progress. “X-ray absorption spectroscopy, a powerful technique available at the Inner Shell Spectroscopy (ISS) beamline at Brookhaven Lab’s National Synchrotron Light Source II, enables us to probe the electronic structure of electrocatalysts in operando—that is, during the actual chemical process,” said co-author Eli Stavitski, lead beamline scientist at ISS. “In this work, we followed bismuth’s oxidation states at different potentials and were able to identify the catalyst’s active state during carbon dioxide reduction.”
With its current reactor, the lab generated formic acid continuously for 100 hours with negligible degradation of the reactor’s components, including the nanoscale catalysts. Wang suggested the reactor could be easily retooled to produce such higher-value products as acetic acid, ethanol, or propanol fuels.
“The big picture is that carbon dioxide reduction is very important for its effect on global warming as well as for green chemical synthesis,” Wang said. “If the electricity comes from renewable sources like the sun or wind, we can create a loop that turns carbon dioxide into something important without emitting more of it.”
Reprinted from Rice University
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A Washington DC police officer is being praised for going above and beyond the call of duty in order to soothe a boy with autism who was in the middle of a meltdown.
The incident took place back in July when Taylor Pomilla and her 4-year-old son Andrew boarded the Metro and prepared to head home. She had just picked him up from school, and she had been anticipating a quiet 45-minute ride home—but for one reason or another, that was not to be the case.
“For those of you that don’t know, when you have a child with autism, your child will have some good days and then they will have some bad ones. Today was one of those bad days,” Pomilla wrote on Facebook. “Andrew’s biggest behavior problem (that he has been working on by learning calming strategies) is that sometimes when he gets upset, it will go two steps too far, and escalate into a full on meltdown/breakdown.”
During this particular journey, Andrew refused to sit in his seat. When his mother tried to calm him down, however, he began throwing a tantrum.
“He started rolling on the floor, screaming, his shoe fell off and he flung it across the train, all while I’m on the floor trying to calm him down (in a dress) with all the candy I had,” wrote Pomilla. “Then he starts the kicking, hitting, pulling my hair while everyone in rush hour stares on the train, most thinking I was a bad parent who had an out of control child, even though really he can’t help it.”
After 20 minutes of unsuccessfully trying to calm her son, the overwhelmed mom exited the subway before their stop and tried to calm Andrew from a different station. Unfortunately, he continued to roll on the floor in meltdown-mode for 15 more minutes.
That is when DC Metro Officer Dominic Case appeared on the scene to offer a helping hand.
LOOK: When Boy With Autism Was Overwhelmed By First Day of School, Kind Classmate Soothed Him
Upon asking where Pomilla was headed, Case volunteered to ride with her and her son to help keep him calm. He then soothed the youngster by showing off his police gadgets and holding his hand as they moved about the subway system.
After they boarded the train, he sat with the little family for the remainder of their 30-minute journey. He watched videos with Andrew, took pictures with him, and even gave the youngster his badge at the end of the trip.
“He honestly restored my faith that there are good people still left in the world,” Pomilla later wrote on Facebook.
After Pomilla’s Facebook post went viral, she was able to reunite Officer Case with her son—and the two have since become best friends.
(WATCH the news coverage below)
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Researchers have found that focusing powerful non-invasive magnet stimulation on specific areas of the brain can improve the symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)—and it could soon help treat the large minority of sufferers who do not respond to conventional treatment.
OCD is broadly defined as recurrent thoughts or urges, or excessive repetitive behaviors which an individual feels driven to perform. Around 12 adults in every thousand suffer from OCD in any given year, although 2.3% of adults will suffer at some point in their life.
It is generally treated through exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy (which exposes the patient to the content of their obsessions or urges without performing the compulsions) and medication. However, between one-third and half of patients don’t respond well to treatment
Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (dTMS) is a type of brain stimulation technique where pulsed magnetic fields are generated by a coil placed on the scalp. This field activates the neuronal circuits at the target brain area, resulting in symptom improvement. It is clinically used for treatment of some difficult cases of depression.
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The work was presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Conference in Copenhagen. Dr. Lior Carmi from the Chaim Sheba Medical Center in Israel led an international group of scientists in a multi-centre randomized controlled trial (RCT) spread over 11 centers.
99 patients with OCD were assigned to either be treated with dTMS, or to receive pretend treatment (sham treatment). All the patients in the trial had previously failed to respond to antidepressant treatment.
Dr. Carmi said: “An interesting point about this trial is that we deliberately provoked the patients for about 5 minutes before each dTMS session. We did this by tailoring a provocation for each patient according to their own specific OCD obsessions. For example, if someone had obsessions about getting contaminated, we exposed him to a situation in which these obsessions were aroused, for instance, by touching a bathroom’s door handle or the trash can. Another example would be if someone had obsessions regarding [whether or not we they had closed] the water tap at home, we deliberately aroused the doubt about that.
“All these exposures were designed for each individual patient. During the first meeting with the patient we learned his symptoms and created a list of which exposures to use during the study. The idea is to deliver the treatment when the brain circuitry is aroused and not while the patient is thinking about the shopping he needs to do after the session will be over.”
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The sessions consisted of 6 weeks of daily dTMS (20Hz) treatment focused on specific areas of the brain related to OCD. This is the first time these areas have been targeted for this disorder. The degree of response was measured using the generally-accepted Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) questionnaire. After 6 weeks, 38% of those being treated responded to the treatment. They showed an average reduction of more than 30% in symptom severity, as opposed to 11% of patients receiving the sham treatment.
A month after treatment finished, the response rate was 45.2% in the active group versus 17.8% in the sham group. Around a third of both the treated group and the untreated group complained of headaches, but only 2 dropped out over the trial due to pain.
“Researchers have tested TMS for OCD in the past, but this is the first time we have stimulated this region of the brain and done so while we tailored exposures to each patient,” says Carmi. “In addition, we have done so using a standardized protocol in a multi-centre randomized trial (at 11 cites in U.S, Canada and Israel). This means that we have achieved these positive results although the variety of patients and variety of clinicians who rated the response. Where the existing treatment works for OCD, it can work well; our method is primarily aimed at those who do not respond to conventional treatment.”
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Professor Jose M. Menchon from Bellvitge University Hospital in Barcelona praised the research, saying:
“This is a very exciting study because it shows positive results in OCD using deep transcranial magnetic stimulation. Until now, the clinical trials with TMS in OCD had been carried out with non-deep TMS, which may have limitations in its effect because the magnetic field can only reach the cortical surface. However, deep TMS allows reaching and modulating deeper brain regions that can be more critically involved in OCD. Deep TMS may become a useful therapeutic strategy if these positive results are confirmed in further studies.”
Be Sure And Share The Exciting Good News With Your Friends On Social Media – File photo by Plus Lexia, CC
James O’Brien was only 18 years old when he had ammonia sprayed in his face, leaving him blind in his right eye.
Now 24 years later, he is the first UK patient to undergo a pioneering new treatment that has repaired the vision in his eye.
Surgeons at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital used stem cells to replace the scar tissue in O’Brien’s eye. The treatment has taken decades to develop, but since O’Brien underwent the operation last year, he can finally see his wife’s face with both of his eyes.
Physicians now hope to use the surgery to reverse blindness in acid attack survivors just like O’Brien.
(WATCH the news coverage below)
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Quote of the Day: “There is no path. You make the path as you walk.” – Antonio Machado
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On a recent podcast, world renown comedian Kevin Hart recalled the moment at 19 years-old when he finally followed his mother’s advice, and it paid off—big time—both for his wallet and his heart.
Hear our Good News Guru tell the inspiring story on the radio in Los Angeles—during the September 6, 2019 Ellen K. Morning Show on KOST-103.5.
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In a recent survey of 2000 Americans, housecleaning was shown to have some mood-boosting effects—but that doesn’t mean everybody does it willingly.
The majority of respondents said cleaning gave them a sense of accomplishment (65%) and helped them clear their mind (63%).
Half of these adults said they are most often motivated to clean when they’re happy. In fact, 63% of those surveyed find the experience of cleaning to be relaxing—even more so than getting fresh air (61%).
But that’s not the only reason people clean.
A whopping 70% admitted that tidying their home was a way of putting off having to do other things, with the average procrastinator using that trick four times a week.
The survey showed that 86% of respondents do feel on top of their chores, but the last deep clean of their kitchen happened over a week and a half ago. That’s no surprise because the kitchen is most dreaded of all.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of DishFish, makers of multipurpose sponges and non-scratch scrubbers, the survey honed in on people’s attitudes toward dirty dishes and how they get through the cringe-worthy task.
More than two-thirds of people (69%) let their dishes pile up between washings with 20% saying “always” letting them stack up in the sink, which left them feeling stressed.
More than any other room, the kitchen was rated as “very difficult” to tackle. And most people enjoy scrubbing their toilet or taking out the garbage more than washing dishes by hand.
How do they get through it? 66% listen to music while they clean.
72% have a go-to song that they blast while tidying up their home, with “Uptown Funk,” “Read All About It” and “Work” being the three favorite tunes on America’s cleaning playlist.
WHAT’S ON AMERICA’S “CLEANING PLAYLIST”? SURVEY SAYS…
• “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson feat. Bruno Mars
• “Read All About It” by Emeli Sandé
• “Work” by Rihanna
• “All of Me” by John Legend
• “But a Dream” by G-Eazy
• “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 feat. Cardi B
• “Pretty Hurts” by Beyoncé
• “Beautiful Girls” by Sean Kingston
• “I Don’t Care” by Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber
• “Good Feeling” by Flo Rida
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Clean Up Negativity By Sharing These Fun Results With Your Friends On Social Media — File photo by Jessica Merz, CC
A 29-year-old student pilot in Australia is being hailed as a hero after he managed a “perfect” airplane landing during his first flying lesson.
It had been Max Sylvester’s first time in a Cessna training aircraft when his instructor suddenly fell unconscious mid-flight.
Alone at the controls, he immediately contacted a nearby control tower and told them of his predicament. In a sound clip that was released by ABC News this week, Sylvester can be heard describing his instructor’s condition, saying: “He’s leaning over my shoulder, I’m trying to keep him up but he keeps falling down.”
Through radio contact with air traffic officials, Sylvester was guided through an emergency landing at Perth’s Jandakot Airport.
“You’re doing a really great job,” the air traffic controller told the trainee. “I know this is really stressful. But you’re going to do an amazing job and we’re going to help you get down to the ground, OK?”
An hour after his instructor fainted, Sylvester safely landed the plane—and local pilots say that they have never seen anything like it.
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Chuck McElwee, owner and operator of Air Australia International for 28 years, says that he never would have expected such a perfect landing from a rookie student, especially because it had zero impact to the plane.
“I’ve had worst damage happen on good flights where nothing went wrong,” he mused.
(WATCH the news coverage below) – Photo by Sky News
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For the first time ever, a clothing company has come up with a sustainable way of making tee-shirts out of wood pulp and algae so they can be composted at the end of their life.
London-based tech startup Vollebak designed the Plant and Algae T-Shirt so that wearers can simply compost the shirt by burying it in their backyard.
The shirt’s fabric is made out of sustainably sourced eucalyptus, beech, and spruce trees that are chipped, pulped, and spun into textile yarn. The ink on the shirts is made entirely from algae that the designers grew in a bioreactor.
“Instead of passing lake water through a cotton net, we pass water from the bioreactor through a filter,” reads the Vollebak website. “This process separates the algae, leaving a soupy algae paste. This paste is then dried in the sun to create a fine powder, and this powder is mixed with a water-based binder to make algae ink.”
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Since algae can’t survive out of water, it then turns into a natural pigment which fades to different colors over time. This way, Vollebak designers say that no two shirts end up looking the same after they’ve gone through multiple washes.
“The Plant and Algae T-Shirt feels like a normal t-shirt when you wear it. It’s not going to start biodegrading if you go for a run or hang it up to dry,” the website continues. “It’ll only start to biodegrade when you bury it in the ground or put it in the compost. It needs the fungus, bacteria and heat from the Earth to start to break down. If you want it to biodegrade, you have to bury it in the ground.”
The tees, which can biodegrade in 8 to 12 weeks, were developed to be an innovative solution to textile waste. According to a report from the EPA, about 10.5 million tons of textiles were sent to landfills in 2015, amounting to roughly 7.6% of total landfill waste.
Other sustainability reports say that it can take anywhere from 25 to 40 gallons water to dye 2 pounds of fabric with the textile industry uses almost 25 trillion gallons of water every year.
Though these Plant and Algae T-Shirts are currently being sold at $110 a pop, the idea could spark an entirely new generation of eco-friendly clothing.
“The wood is turned into fabric using an environmentally-responsible and closed-loop production process,” says the website. “In practice this means that over 99% of the water and solvent used to turn pulp into fibre is recycled and reused. And on the Higg MSI scoring system—which measures the impact of producing a kilogram of fibre taking into account fossil resource depletion, water scarcity, eutrophication and global warming—this fabric scores 10 against cotton’s score of 60. Our eventual aim is to score 0.”
The company’s waterproof and highly breathable Solar Charged Jacket, which is made to glow in the dark (even after being near only a light bulb) and can roll up in your hand, was named as one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2018.
(WATCH the video preview below)
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This wiener dog and his best friend—a rescued baby porcupine—might be the cutest dynamic duo you will see on the internet this week.
Zookeeper Estelle Morgan has been hand-rearing Diablo the porcupette since he was rejected by his mom at Cotswold Wildlife Park in Oxfordshire, England.
When Diablo was just a few days old, Morgan took him home to give him a better chance of survival and introduced him to her dachshund puppy Fig for some essential social interactions to help with his development—and the two critters quickly became best friends.
According to Morgan, the prickly pair now spend all day playing together.
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“When Diablo gets excited he will do a buckaroo-style run, where he thrashes his head around and jumps up in the air,” she said. “Under close supervision, they will run around the garden together and Fig has been very gentle and patient with Diablo.”
Diablo was born to parents ‘Hannah’ and ‘Prickle’ at Cotswold Wildlife Park in Burford, but the decision was made to hand-rear the baby porcupine when his mother rejected him.
“[Diablo’s mother] Hannah previously had twins in February that she is still caring for, so it is likely she wasn’t really ready for another baby so soon,” says Morgan. “His unexpected arrival was a big surprise for all of us.”
Little Diablo was “very feisty” from birth, but is now showing his softer side and building his social skills with best buddy Fig.
He is currently being bottle-fed by Morgan in her kitchen at her home located within the wildlife park.
“When Diablo was first born he … wasn’t scared to give me a nip,” says Morgan. “Now he has settled into a good routine and will comfortably follow me around the kitchen and will even come to me for reassurance.”
For the first month, he was fed one bottle every two hours to get him into a good routine. At the time, he weighed just 300 grams (half a pound)—but now at six weeks old, he has grown to a whopping 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) and developed a liking for apples and sweet potatoes.
“My most stand out moment hand-rearing Diablo was when he latched on and suckled on his own from the bottle for the first time,” says Morgan. “This happened when he was three days old and was just a huge relief for me—the first few days are always worrying.
“Now, at six weeks old, he is tasting solid foods so he can go longer in-between feeds, which also means I’ve been able to get more sleep,” she added.
(WATCH the adorable video below)
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Quote of the Day: “There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill.” – Deepak Chopra
Photo: by Mon Œil, CC License, cropped
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When devastation and trauma struck David Lawrence’s perfectly healthy, happy family, the courageous father responded by making the impossible… possible.
At 11 years old, his son David Jr. underwent surgery on his brain stem to remove a life-threatening growth. After the procedure, the surgeons and doctors said that David Jr. would never walk again.
Seeing his son paralyzed from the neck down and facing life as a quadriplegic, David Sr. stayed by his son’s side through months of intensive rehabilitation. Then as the devoted dad was researching different therapies, David Sr. came across Hyperbaric Oxygen treatment.
Since David Sr. has been a scuba diver for many years, this therapy sparked his interest—so he began taking David Jr. to a local swimming pool for a new kind of workout. Kitted out in dive gear, David Jr.’s progress was amazing.
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The physical “workout” that David Sr. designed for his son helped to rewire his nervous system until—over time—it brought life back to his once-paralyzed body.
David Sr. consistently reminded his son that he could do it, encouraging him to push through the pain and exhaustion and keep his goal in focus. Fast forward 10 years and David Jr. is now getting his PhD at university; he walks, runs, and works as a scuba instructor for his father’s business, The Scuba Gym in Clermont, Florida. After David Jr.’s mom, Kim, and his two younger sisters jumped on board, rehabilitation has become their family business.
This is the true and inspiring story that motivated me—Lyndi Leggett (above)—to bring the scuba therapy to Australia, as a scuba instructor and leadership trainer on the Central Coast of New South Wales.
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The therapy techniques that David Lawrence developed over the last 10 years have served to help people with disabilities and special neurological needs to improve their muscle tone, reduce their pain and spasms, stand up and walk with a quad cane, and even progress to walking unassisted. Furthermore, scuba therapy improves lung function, lymphedema, and boosts the lymphatic system.
Our clients at The Scuba Gym in Australia have been able to seek employment, sometimes for the first time in their lives, rather than being dependent on disability services that can often be inadequate.
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All it takes is the desire and commitment to work hard. So often we hear from our clients that their medical team had reached the limit of what traditional rehabilitation could offer them. It takes pioneers who think outside the box—or in our case, outside the wheelchair—to bring hope back to people who’ve been told that there is none.
We challenge and change the way healing and rehabilitation is approached and combine that innovative thinking with a passion for scuba diving—because in an anti-gravity environment, where the restrictions of land don’t apply, we can achieve incredible things.
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