Welcome back friends to the Monday Good News Roundup, where yours truly, with help from my team of Bhu and Killer300, bring you stories that will help you get your week off to a good start, so lets get this show on the road and get to the stories.
In a study of healthy volunteers, researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and discovered why taking short breaks from practice is a key to learning.
The National Institute of Health researchers found that during rest the volunteers’ brains rapidly and repeatedly replayed faster versions of the activity seen while they practiced typing a code. The more a volunteer replayed the activity the better they performed during subsequent practice sessions, suggesting rest strengthened memories.
Before we get to more substantial fair, a friendly reminder to take care of yourself when you are doing anything, including learning a new skill. Remember, a well rested brain is a productive brain.
A new anti-militaristic, internationalist movement is growing in Italy thanks to port workers who, in the 1903 words of famous Italian anarchist Pietro Gori, have declared a ‘war against the war’. Since 2019, workers have been refusing to load ships with weapons or other military equipment that could be used to kill civilians. These workers are part of a larger, expanding international network, from the US to New Zealand, and across Europe and Africa.
More and more people are turning against the military industrial complex. People are tired of fighting for the benefit of the ultra rich, and they are taking a stand.
Erica Chenoweth’s remarkable recent book, “Civil Resistance,” is another contribution to the growing mountain of evidence for the power of nonviolence. While armed resistance long enjoyed a rarely questioned reputation as the most effective way to defeat oppressive domestic or occupying regimes willing to use force to impose their rule, Chenoweth and others have done much to dispel that myth. They have shown how movements using nonviolent methods — strikes, mass demonstrations and vigils, boycotts, stay-at-homes, slow-downs, nonviolent blockades, parallel government, and other forms of noncooperation and disruption — can not only defeat such regimes, but are actually successful two-to-three times as often as violent ones.
We have been fighting by not fighting for years, just because armed resistance is flashier doesn’t mean that the nonviolent way isn’t just as, or more effective.
Over the last 20 years, supported by an army of volunteers, the project team has sown nearly 75 million seeds. Around 9,000 acres of coastal bays are now blanketed with eelgrass, which has improved water quality, increased marine biodiversity and helped mitigate climate change by capturing and storing carbon.
The project is “game changing,” says Carlos Duarte, a seagrass expert and marine science professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, both in its sheer scale and the raft of long-term data it provides on the climate benefits of seagrass.
A decade ago, Duarte and Orth nicknamed seagrass “the ugly duckling” of environmental conservation, because so few cared about it. That’s slowly changing as the huge benefits it offers are recognized. Despite covering less than 0.2 percent of the ocean, it is responsible for about 10 percent of the ocean’s ability to store carbon. It provides a vital habitat for marine life, boosts commercial fishing, helps purify water, protects coastlines and even traps and stores microplastics.
Its not too late, we can still fix the damage that’s been caused to the environment, we just have to keep at it.
dvance ticket sales have been on since June 14 for former president Donald Trump and former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s stadium tour, but they haven’t come close to selling out.
As Politico pointed out Friday, Ticketmaster listings for the Orlando, Dallas and Sunrise stops and the AXS page for the Houston event still have plenty of available seats. What’s more, Politico spoke to employees in the box offices of the venues Trump and O’Reilly selected for their “History Tour” and got the inside scoop on how the sales — or lack thereof — compare to those for other upcoming events.
“We have concerts that are doing a lot better than this,” one box office employee in Orlando is quoted as saying in the Politico piece.
Ah yes, Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Also Dumb. Its so nice to not have to think about them constantly, and also nice to see they are still struggling to maintain relevance in a world leaving them behind. Goodbye and good riddance you morons.
And that’s it for the week, everyone have a good week, I certainly intend to. And thanks to everyone who makes the GNR possible, and to all our loyal readers, you guys are the real heroes.