Good morning, Gnusies! Welcome to another Wednesday Tuesday, this Tuesday, the 20th of May, 2025. A lot’s been going on in my neck of the woods, but it’s time to sit down with a cup of coffee and a friend or two, so I hope you’ll join me in celebrating some good news.
Before we get started, though, I want to thank my fellow GNR author niftywriter for trading with me last week! Thanks so much!
Kindness leads to kindness:
At Lux Cleaning and Alterations on 1610 W. Campbell in San Jose, owner Ali Shirkhodaei says the pro bono work is about fulfilling his long-held ambition to infuse his career with acts of kindness.
“I think it will definitely give them some hope that the community they live in cares about them,” he told San José Spotlight. “It’s not about just getting, it’s about giving. That’s the part that brings all of us joy.”
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Spotlight reports that just recently, a woman came to him for a shirt pressing en route to a tech company interview and, afterward, she stopped by to tell Shirkhodaei that she got the job—all before leaving a 5-star Yelp review saying “I definitely felt the love of my community.”
Ali said he and his team were more excited than she was.
Spotlight described him as possessing a typical immigrant work ethic: finishing in four days what other tailors will do in four weeks, and cleaning complicated items like Indian sarees and wedding dresses. He does it all with a smile, hoping his customers pay forward the kindness elsewhere.
It’s always neat to learn about ancient civilizations.
A new study sheds light on the economic networks, rituals and political influence the Mexica Empire (the word the Aztecs used for themselves) relied on to maintain their economy and grip on power.
The research, conducted by Tulane University and the Proyecto Templo Mayor in Mexico, reveals how obsidian—a volcanic glass used for tools and ceremonial objects and one of the most important raw materials in pre-Columbian times—moved across ancient Mesoamerica and shaped life in its capital, Tenochtitlan.
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Archaeologists found that while the Mexica primarily used green obsidian from the Sierra de Pachuca source, they also acquired obsidian from at least seven other locations, including regions beyond their political borders, such as Ucareo, in the Purépecha territory in West Mexico. The findings suggest a sophisticated economy that relied not only on conquest but on active long-distance trade, even with rival polities.
“Although the Mexicas preferred green obsidian, the high diversity of obsidian types, mainly in the form of non-ritual artifacts, suggests that obsidian tools from multiple sources reached the capital of the Empire through market instead of direct acquisition in the outcrop,” said lead author Diego Matadamas-Gomora, a PhD candidate in Tulane’s Department of Anthropology.
“By studying where this material came from, we can explore the movement of goods across Mesoamerica.”
Local problems? Local solutions.
There is arguably no other monocrop so capable of thriving in an intact, natural ecosystem, and in Ethiopia, where coffee is a major export, the adoption of climate-compatible and conservation strategies among coffee growers recently proved a major success, with over 5,000 acres of land reforested, 45% increases in household income, and a 70% increase in exported coffee.
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In the ecologically critical Ilu Ababor Zone of nation’s western region of Oromia, where Coffea arabica is native, Farm Africa led a project on sustainable agriculture among coffee growers inside 19 local forest management cooperatives totaling around 4,000 people between 2021 and 2024.
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Of the project aims regarding forest management and conservation, the objective was to instruct the landholders and growers in ways to get everything they needed from their forest homes without felling too many native trees.
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Coffee production, marketing, and returns, have all improved. 73% more coffee from the Ilu Ababor region is now export-quality than in 2021, and 44% meets the standards for specialty grade, which is up by 20% from 2021.
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There’s so much good news to read in the report on the project’s success beyond the headline data, like the Abdi Bori co-op’s incredible rise which saw coffee revenue increase by a multiple of 20 from 2018 to 2023, or Solomon Mekonnen’s story of turning his land into a forest farm that produces export-grade coffee, firewood, and organic honey, or the tremendous involvement of women at all levels of the education and participation.
I visited Cahokia Mounds outside St. Louis when I was growing up; now Ohio’s earthworks are being reopened to the public.
Two thousand years ago, members of the Hopewell Culture — a group of Indigenous tribes that lived in what is now Ohio and other parts of the Midwest — began building a series of massive mounds and enclosures that exemplified their engineering skills and advanced knowledge of the cosmos.
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Visitors who showed up on opening day were astounded by the work: Constructed with only simple hand tools, the 20-acre circle and 50-acre octagon are part of the largest connected geometric earthworks ever built. If you were to draw a line connecting the centers of the Great Circle, another Ohio earthwork, and the Octagon’s Observatory Circle, it would point to the northernmost spot where the moon rises on the eastern horizon.
“They figured out the complicated rhythms of the sun and moon and aligned their sacred earthworks to those rhythms as a way of connecting their ceremonies with the cosmos,” Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks’ website explains.
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Every 18.6 years, Native Americans would journey to the Octagon, which could hold up to 75,000 people, to watch the northernmost moon rise. “They participated in building the giant earthworks and later came to worship there — particularly on special days, such as the northernmost moonrise, which was built into the architecture of the earthworks,” Lepper told Smithsonian Magazine, adding, “These Hopewell Earthworks were the center of a continental religious movement.”
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The Hopewell knew a great deal about soil too, as they only used varieties that would keep their mounds intact. “They were intentionally created to last a long time,” Jennifer Aultman, chief historic sites officer for Ohio History Connection, explained to Smithsonian. “[The Hopewell] were incredible soil engineers.”
New frogs! Who doesn’t like new frogs?
In 2023, Evan Koch — a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of the Czech Republic — led a team through the Juruá River basin forests of Brazil on an expedition.
In their travels, they stumbled across a new species of Ranitomeya (a genus of poison dart frogs) that they dubbed “an Amazonian hidden gem.”
The color of the amphibian was so striking that the researchers decided to name it Ranitomeya aquamarina.
“The specific epithet ‘aquamarina’ is a Latin adjective that means ‘pale blue-green’, referring to the coloration of the dorsal-lateral stripes of the new species,” Koch explained in the research, which was published in the scientific journal PLOS One.
Photos are at the link — it is gorgeous, and well deserves to share the name of a gemstone.
That’s it for me, folks!
And now, the weather.
(I swear my name is STILL not Cecil Baldwin. Promise.)
