The Ground Game: Harris’s Turnout Machine vs. Trump’s Unproven Alliance
Sorry, MAGAs, just throwing billionaire money around isn’t going to replicate the grass roots enthusiasm of Team Blue!
From The NY Times (gift link):
In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns.
Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.
Interviews with more than four dozen voters, activists, campaign aides and officials in four pivotal counties — Erie County, Pa., Kenosha County, Wis., Maricopa County, Ariz., and Cobb County, Ga. — reveal a diffuse, at times unwieldy Republican effort that has raised questions from party operatives about effectiveness in the face of the more tightly structured Harris campaign operation. Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms of paid staff and doors knocked, and are counting on that local presence to break through a fractured media environment and to reach voters who want to tune out politics altogether.
“The national discourse kind of falls on deaf ears if it doesn’t feel real and localized,” said Dan Kanninen, the Harris campaign’s battleground states director.
If North Carolina goes blue
I love, love, love this wonderful scenario imagined by the chair of the Democratic Party in Mecklenburg County, NC, quoted in a diary by Kossack AlarmWillSound:
It's Steve Kornacki. He's got his big magic board. He's looking at all the states. And all of a sudden, Mecklenburg’s results come in. They do a double take. They’re looking at the board, and Steve goes and zooms in, and he says, “Something seems off here. Pull up the prior years". They pull it up on the screen. He gets out his pen, he starts marking up his board, doing the math real quick. And he says, "What the hell just happened in Mecklenburg?"
And then they call the election. Not just in North Carolina, but nationally.
Because ultimately, if North Carolina goes blue, Kamala Harris has a 97% chance of becoming President. And her path to victory goes straight through Mecklenburg.
- Drew Kromer
Kromer and the Mecklenburg Dems are doing their part to make this happen with a massive ground game of canvassing, texting, and phone banking. Want to help them? Here are the links:
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🍿 Repellent Republicans Rushing toward Ruin 🍿
I’m skipping this section because there are waaaaaaay too many items that could be posted here! DK always has lots of them on the Front Page and the Trending List if you want to fill up your schadenfreude bucket.
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The media messing up
Again, I could post dozens of stories in this section which would illustrate how out of touch and destructive MSM is, but instead here’s something to bear in mind every time you see those “Doom for Dems” headlines (🎩 to Nanny Ogg for posting this in Evening Shade on Saturday):
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Good news from my corner of the world
Federal student aid arrives in time for fall classes at Central Oregon prison
Taking college classes while you’re incarcerated is a true life-changer for the fortunate people who get that opportunity. Here in Oregon, the degrees offered allow the students to transfer easily to any of the state’s seven public universities.
From Oregon Capital Chronicle:
Central Oregon Community College is among just a handful of higher education institutions in the nation that can now offer federal Pell Grants to people who are incarcerated. COCC was the first school in Oregon to receive approval for its Prison Education Program, or PEP, at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution in Madras.
Pell Grants are the U.S. Department of Education’s single largest source of need-based funding for undergraduate students. The grants, which do not have to be paid back, typically go directly to students for them to use toward college expenses. But PEP Pell Grant money will instead head straight to higher education institutions, rather than to incarcerated students.
Congress restored federal student aid for incarcerated people in 2021, but approval of PEP applications did not start coming down the line until this year. ...The green light from the Education Department comes after COCC launched a new associate of arts transfer degree program at Deer Ridge this spring. This type of degree allows students to easily transfer into any one of Oregon’s seven public universities.
Portland woman writes book aimed at teaching kids about homelessness: 'Not lose sight of people’s humanity'
Blanchet House is one of the oldest organizations in Portland offering meals and assistance to those living on the street. Publishing this book explaining homelessness to children is another one of their acts of compassion and inclusion.
From KGW:
A new children’s book being published by Portland’s Blanchet House aims to teach children about homelessness and the circumstances that can contribute to it.
Julie Showers is the communications director at Blanchet House, which provides services for people facing homelessness. Showers co-wrote the book with her mother, a former first-grade teacher. “Homelessness can be a really complex and difficult issue for parents and educators to talk to their children about,” said Showers.
This Oregon airport vending machine dispenses short stories for free
How delightful is this!! And I love that little Eugene beats Atlanta for the number of readers using the story dispenser.
From The Oregonian:
Travelers can find all kinds of goodies in airport vending machines – candy, soda, cosmetics, electronics. But in Oregon, only at Eugene’s Mahlon Sweet Field can an airport vending machine dispense a good read.
The airport houses the only Short Story Dispenser in the state. It’s not just popular; the dispenser by the French publishing house Short Édition produces the second most printings in the entire country, second only to that in the Planet Word Museum in Washington, D.C. “That airport in Eugene literally puts them on the map,” Kristan Leroy, Short Édition international sales director, said of the companies dispensers. “We have 300 dispensers in the U.S., in train stations all over the world and 55 public libraries in the U.S. Eugene’s is even busier than Atlanta, the busiest airport in the world.”
Readers can thank the Eugene Public Library, the Eugene Public Library Foundation and the airport, of course, for the free reading material. But it all starts with airport assistant director Andrew Martz, who first learned of the dispenser while at a conference in Philadelphia – home of Short Édition’s U.S. satellite office. “When I saw it in Philadelphia, it had an effect on me,” Martz said. “Free stories. I said, ‘I want that in my airport.’” Martz reached out to the library and in March 2022, the dispenser was installed.
The dispenser Martz saw in Philadelphia offered short stories broken down in categories by the approximate time the story might take to read. ... Instead, the Eugene dispenser offers readers a choice among stories by local authors, worldwide authors and children’s authors.
Short Édition charges $7,000 plus shipping costs for the dispenser and $2,300 for an annual subscription charge for content. That covers copyrights for the authors, access to the portals and unlimited access to content, Leroy said. Authors of stories submitted through Short Edition are paid for their work, both at the time of acceptance and end-of-year royalties. Lane County authors agree to showcase their work for free on the local Dispenser to reach a broader audience, while retaining their copyrights.
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Good news from around the nation
The Californians Rescuing Surplus Produce to Fight Hunger
A perfect win-win, powered by the efforts of lots of caring people.
From Reasons to Be Cheerful:
The 10,000-square-foot warehouse looks like organized chaos: A dozen employees move an average of 265,000 pounds or 132 tons here every day. “Share the Abundance” is written in bright blue letters across a yellow wall. The best part: All this healthy abundance is free. The nonprofit Food Forward receives the fruits and vegetables at no cost from wholesalers and donates them to those in need in 13 counties.
“Because we focus 100 percent on perishable fresh fruit and vegetables, speed is of the essence,” says Jen Cox, Food Forward’s chief development officer. “Hardly any produce stays here for more than 24 hours. The logistics are insane.”
In the US, more than 35 percent of the food produced (roughly 92 billion pounds) gets thrown out every year, amounting to an annual loss of $408 billion. At the same time, every fifth family is food insecure. Food Forward operates to fill that gap and solve both problems at once, hustling to distribute fresh food before it goes to waste.
Since its inception 15 years ago, it has rescued 217,000 tons of produce and distributed it to nearly 300 hunger relief partners, mostly in Los Angeles and surrounding counties, but every so often a truck of surplus travels as far as Texas. “We are providing enough food every day that would meet the USDA recommended daily requirements for 270,000 people,” Cox explains. “It equals millions of dollars’ worth of food they don’t have to buy if we can just grab it in time and move it.”
Preventing food waste also benefits the climate, not only because of the resources, water and energy invested in food production but also because food waste in landfills is one of the main sources of the climate gas methane. “Last year, we prevented the emissions of more than 21,000 metric tons of CO2e,” Cox says. “That’s the equivalent of taking 4,571 cars off the road for a year. And we prevented 1.4 billion gallons of water from going to waste in 2023, the equivalent of 2,129 Olympic-sized swimming pools.”
On Navajo Lands, Ancient Ways Are Restoring the Parched Earth
This being the day after Indigenous Peoples Day, it’s satisfying to be able to share one more example of how much we can learn from indigenous cultures.
From Yale Environment 360:
Diné (the Navajo name for themselves) are well aware that climate change is making the weather on their semi-arid plateau weirder, wilder, and more destructive. Depending on elevation, precipitation in Black Mesa averages 6 to 16 inches a year; recent heat extremes — the Navajo government declared a state of emergency in 2023 due to soaring temperatures —mean that the scant water evaporates more quickly. Climate models predict the region will experience increasing droughts that decimate plant life, part of a growing trend of human-caused desertification across the globe, as well as higher-intensity seasonal rainfall, which can sweep away crops and roads. The ecological health of the reservation has also been weakened by deforestation from timbering operations and from overgrazing over the years.
Still, this season, [Roberto] Nutlouis, 44, has been able to skip his usual two-hour roundtrip drive to a reliable well to haul water home for his corn. His crop is healthy and hydrated because his land still holds last winter’s snowmelt. Clearly, his heavy labor over the past 20 years — during which he has built woven brush dams, gabions (wirework cages filled with rocks), earthen berms, concrete spillways and trenches, limestone aprons and walls, and stone-lined “Zuni bowls,” which stabilize eroding streambeds — is paying off.
Diné and others living in arid zones around the world have long used structures made of naturally occurring materials to capture and control water to grow crops and to mitigate the devastation of floods in ephemeral stream systems. Various Puebloans, including Zuni and Hohokam, used similar devices, as did the Aztecs. Arab peoples and tribes in India have incorporated stone water diversions for thousands of years. ✂️
Time and again over the last 15 years, Laura Norman, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, has seen evidence that when these structures — which Norman calls Natural Infrastructure in Dryland Streams, or NIDS — are placed in gullies, they slow water to mitigate erosion, collect nutrient-rich sediment and plant debris that nourish both crops and wild plants, help store carbon, improve groundwater recharge, and increase downstream water availability by as much as 28 percent. “It’s a snowball effect that counters degradation, and you get all of these ecosystem services,” she says.
Military Veterans Help Plug Worker Shortages at EV, Battery Plants Sprouting Up in the US
Another win-win: job-seeking vets filling needed positions in green factories.
From Bloomberg:
America’s biggest factory boom in generations is running up against a shortage of skilled workers. As manufacturers and technical colleges race to train employees for cleantech plants sprouting up across the country, one group is emerging to help fill the skills gap: military veterans.
Former Marines, Army avionics engineers and Navy technicians once deployed in combat zones including Iraq and Afghanistan are finding second careers at factories making electric vehicles, batteries and solar cells. They’re combining old-fashioned military discipline with new skills honed during active duty such as operating robots and drones.
“Mission-focused, adaptable, strong work ethic, ability to work under pressure and overcome adversity,” says Toyota Motor Corp.’s Jamie Hall, who oversees the hiring of thousands of workers at a new EV battery plant in North Carolina. “These folks have a lot of training and are prepared for those things.” The facility, some 70 miles northwest of the US’s biggest military base, Fort Liberty, has already hired about 90 vets.
The EV and battery industries are a big draw for vets as manufacturers prepare to open dozens of plants in the coming years, even as they face a slowdown in US sales. In Kentucky, Ascend Elements Inc. is building a $1 billion plant to process materials extracted from spent batteries so they can be used in new ones. About a third of the 70 or so workers recruited for the site so far are ex-military, including Cory Radcliffe, who spent more than three years in the US Marine Corps’ unmanned aerial systems task force. The 36-year-old says the skills he picked up working on military hardware are useful in his present role as construction manager, helping map out where machinery and equipment will be installed on the site, which is located some 20 miles away from his former base, Fort Campbell. “How do they interconnect, how do they interact?” says Radcliffe. “It’s constant troubleshooting.”
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Good news from around the world
The world’s spending to fight global lead poisoning just doubled
It’s about time!
From Vox:
Lead poisoning has, historically, been a major blind spot in the global health world. The extent of the problem is enormous: A landmark study found that about half of children in poor countries are exposed to very high levels of lead. At least 1.5 million people die annually from cardiovascular diseases (like heart disease) caused by lead poisoning, imposing a global cost of about $6 trillion a year.
But the resources devoted to preventing poisoning were minimal. One estimate in 2021 found that charities and nongovernmental organizations were spending $6-10 million a year on the problem. That’s less than two cents per child poisoned by lead.
Thankfully, that number has just increased dramatically. Amid the UN General Assembly meeting in New York last week, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and UNICEF launched an initiative they’re calling the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. The endeavor is backed with $150 million in initial funding from USAID, the Gates Foundation, Open Philanthropy, and other sources.
$104 million of the funds, all from philanthropic sources, will be channeled through a Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF) led by Open Philanthropy, which states that it intends to disperse the money by the end of 2027. ... the money is meant to be allocated over four years, for about $26 million a year in spending. That by itself almost doubles current global philanthropic spending on lead poisoning.
IMF moves to ease billions in penalty fees for biggest borrowers
🎩 to T Maysle for mentioning this great news in a comment on Saturday.
These nations have suffered under punitve IMF fees for decades, impeding their attempts to get back on their feet financially. Considering that the IMF’s self-described mission is “furthering international monetary cooperation, encouraging the expansion of trade and economic growth, and discouraging policies that would harm prosperity,” this move realigns them with that mission.
From Buenos Aires Times (this is originally a Bloomberg story, but it’s behind a paywall on their site 😠):
The International Monetary Fund reduced borrowing costs for some of the world’s most indebted nations, making a concession to partners that have ramped up criticism of fees that they see as unjustly punitive at a time of higher interest rates.
The IMF’s executive board has agreed to cut what are known as surcharges, fees imposed on top of regular interest payments for countries that borrow more than their allotted share or take longer to repay IMF loans. The burden of those fees have been carried mainly by a handful of the Fund’s biggest borrowers including Argentina, Egypt, Ukraine and Ecuador.
Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Friday that the move will lower IMF borrowing costs for members by 36 percent, or US$1.2 billion every year. The number of countries paying surcharges in fiscal year 2026 will fall to 13 from 20, she said. ✂️
The Washington-based Fund has long imposed the fees as a way to discourage its biggest borrowers from becoming too reliant on its support. The IMF executive board rebuffed pressure to remove or suspend the surcharges entirely. They remain an essential part of IMF borrowing and “provide incentives for prudent borrowing,” Georgieva said.
The fees have gone to filling the Fund’s precautionary balances, the money on hand to protect against possible losses. But the IMF already reached a US$34-billion target for those balances ahead of schedule earlier this year, easing the need to continue collecting the fees.
Moscow Times warns that Russia’s coal mining industry is collapsing
The content quoted below is all that’s available without a subscription, but I think it gives us all the info we need to celebrate both the continuing decline of coal worldwide and the continuing decline of the Russian economy.
From Medium:
The first to bear the brunt of supporting Putin’s war effort was Russia’s gas industry, spearheaded by Gazprom. Soon after, the situation worsened for Russian Railways, with a sharp decline in industrial goods transport during the first half of 2024. Now, Russia’s coal industry is the latest to feel the pressure, seeking to join the growing list of sectors trying to fall off the cliff.
According to Rosstat, coal production in Russia fell by 6.7% year-on-year in July, and its total volume of 31.5 million tons was the lowest since the 2020 pandemic. Compared to the peaks shown in December 2022, coal companies have lost about 12 million tons of monthly production, or 27%.
Annual coal production is down by a third from its 2022 peak. A major reason for this decline is that both India and China are importing less coal from Russia. Exports to China fell by 8%, while shipments to India plunged by 55% in the first half of 2024. With little interest from the Western world in buying Russian coal, Putin is heavily reliant on China and India to sustain the economy. Any shifts in their demand are now directly affecting Russian industries.
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Good news in medicine
New Scanner Creates Highly Detailed, 3D Images of Blood Vessels in Just Seconds
Another amazing breakthrough in medical science. There seems to be at least one of these every week!
From Medscape:
A new scanner can provide three-dimensional (3D) photoacoustic images of millimeter-scale veins and arteries in seconds. The scanner, developed by researchers at University College London (UCL), London, England, could help clinicians better visualize and track microvascular changes for a wide range of diseases, including cancer, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and peripheral vascular disease (PVD). ✂️
The case studies "illustrate potential areas of application that warrant future, more comprehensive clinical studies," the authors wrote. "Moreover, they demonstrate the feasibility of using the scanner on a real-world patient cohort where imaging is more challenging due to frailty, comorbidity, or pain that may limit their ability to tolerate prolonged scan times."
PAT works using the photoacoustic effect, a phenomenon where sound waves are generated when light is absorbed by a material. When pulsed light from a laser is directed at tissue, some of that light is absorbed and causes an increase in heat in the targeted area. This localized heat also increases pressure, which generates ultrasound waves that can be detected by specialized sensors. While previous PAT scanners translated these soundwaves to electric signals directly to generate imaging, UCL engineers developed a sensor in the early 2000s that can detect these ultrasound waves using light. The result was much clearer, 3D images.
"That was great, but the problem was it was very slow, and it would take 5 minutes to get an image," explained Paul Beard, PhD, professor of biomedical photoacoustics at UCL and senior author of the study. "That's fine if you're imaging a dead mouse or an anesthetized mouse, but not so useful for human imaging," he continued, where motion would blur the image.
In this new paper, Beard and colleagues outlined how they cut scanning times to an order of seconds (or fraction of a second) rather than minutes. While previous iterations could detect only acoustic waves from one point at a time, this new scanner can detect waves from multiple points simultaneously. The scanner can visualize veins and arteries up to 15 mm deep in human tissue and can also provide dynamic, 3D images of "time-varying tissue perfusion and other hemodynamic events," the authors wrote.
No cervical cancer cases in HPV-vaccinated women
Proof of how important it is to vaccinate young teens against HPV.
From BBC:
A new study has found that no cases of cervical cancer have been detected in young women who have been fully-vaccinated as part of the HPV immunisation programme. The Public Health Scotland (PHS) research said the HPV (human papillomavirus virus) vaccine was "highly effective" in preventing the development of the cancer.
HPV is a sexually transmitted infection and is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer - the fourth most common cause of cancer in women worldwide.
The vaccination programme started in 2008 with girls offered the vaccine in their first year at secondary school, aged 12 or 13. The vaccine, which is now offered to boys, also helps to protect them from other HPV-related cancers later in life, such as head, neck and anogenital cancers as well as genital warts.
Cervical cancer is the most common cancer in women aged 25 to 35 years of age in Scotland. In total, about 300 women in Scotland are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year. Screening is offered to all women aged 25 to 64.
Public Health Scotland collaborated with the Universities of Strathclyde and Edinburgh on its research and included every woman in Scotland who is eligible for the cervical cancer screening programme in the figures. ...
Dr Kirsty Roy, consultant in health protection at PHS, said: "It shows how effective the HPV vaccine is as there have been no cervical cancer cases to-date in fully vaccinated women who were given their first dose at age 12-13 years. ...Vaccination against HPV is shown to be effective in preventing cervical cancer, and along with regular screening for early detection and treatment, it is possible to make cervical cancer a rare disease."
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Good news in science
The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology
This is a fascinating article, much too long to summarize effectively here. Please do click the link when you have the time for a good long science read.
From Quanta:
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a honeybee. In many ways, your world is small. Your four delicate wings, each less than a centimeter long, transport your half-gram body through looming landscapes full of giant animals and plants. In other ways, your world is expansive, even grand. Your five eyes see colors and patterns that humans can’t, and your multisensory antennae detect odors from distant flowers.
For years, biologists have wondered whether bees have another grand sense that we lack. The static electricity they accumulate by flying — similar to the charge generated when you shuffle across carpet in thick socks — could be potent enough for them to sense and influence surrounding objects through the air. Aquatic animals such as eels, sharks and dolphins are known to sense electricity in water, which is an excellent conductor of charge. By contrast, air is a poor conductor. But it may relay enough to influence living things and their evolution.
In 2013, Daniel Robert, a sensory ecologist at the University of Bristol in England, broke ground in this discipline when his lab discovered that bees can detect and discriminate among electric fields radiating from flowers. Since then, more experiments have documented that spiders, ticks and other bugs can perform a similar trick.
This animal static impacts ecosystems. Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.
This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate and infest other living things.
Mathematicians discover new class of shape seen throughout nature
There’s always something left in the natural world to examine more closely.
From Nature:
Mathematicians have described a new class of shape that characterizes forms commonly found in nature — from the chambers in the iconic spiral shell of the nautilus to the way in which seeds pack into plants.
The work considers the mathematical concept of ‘tiling’: how shapes tessellate on a surface. The problem of filling a plane with identical tiles has been so thoroughly explored since antiquity that it’s tempting to suppose that there is nothing left to be discovered about it. But the researchers deduced the principles of tilings with a new set of geometric building blocks that have rounded corners, which they term ‘soft cells’.
“Simply, no one has done this before,” says Chaim Goodman-Strauss, a mathematician at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City, who was not involved in the work. “It’s really amazing how many basic things there are to consider.”
It has been known for millennia that only certain types of polygonal tile, such as squares or hexagons, can be packed together to fill 2D space with no gaps. Tilings that fill space without a regularly repeating arrangement, such as Penrose tilings, have attracted interest since the discovery of non-periodic structures called quasicrystals in the 1980s. ...Mathematician Gábor Domokos at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and his co-workers returned to periodic polygonal tilings — but considered what happens when some of the corners are rounded. ✂️
Studying the nautilus “was the turning point” of the work, says Domokos. In cross-section, the shell compartments looked like 2D soft cells with two corners. But co-author Krisztina Regős, also at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, suspected that the actual 3D chamber had no corners at all. “That sounded unbelievable,” says Domokos. “But later we found that she was right.”
Good news for the environment
Scientists hopeful antidote can help protect bumblebees from pesticides
This could be the breakthrough we need to help bumblebees survive, given how difficult it is to get Big Ag to stop using pollinator-killing pesticides.
Scientists have developed a “vaccine” for bees against pesticides – and it appears to work, according to an initial study.
According to the findings, published in Nature Sustainability, hydrogel microparticles fed to bumblebees in sugar water caused a 30% higher survival rate in individuals exposed to lethal doses of neonicotinoids, and significantly milder symptoms in those exposed to lower doses that would not usually be lethal but can cause harm. Neonicotinoids harm bees’ nervous system, paralysing and ultimately killing them. They are used to to control a variety of pests, especially sap-feeding insects such as aphids, and root-feeding grubs.
Scientists from Cornell University in New York were trying to find a way to protect bees from the widely used pesticides. Neonicotinoids were totally banned in the EU only last year – a previous ban allowed their emergency use. The UK has allowed their use every year since 2021, but the Labour government has said this will stop. The pesticides are still used in many US states.
The researchers found that the microparticles physically bind to the neonicotinoids and once absorbed, the pesticides and microparticles pass through the bee’s digestive tract and are excreted, without causing the same harm. The antidote has the potential to be selectively applied to other pesticides.
This treatment improved the bees’ motivation to feed and led to a 44% increase in the number of bees able to walk a route mapped by scientists. Bees become so unwell that they are unable to flap their wings when they are exposed to neonicotinoids but, using a high-speed camera, the researchers found that impaired wingbeat frequency after exposure improved significantly with the treatment.
“Bees are crucial for crop pollination and agriculture and food security, so it’s important for people to take bee health seriously,” said the lead author, Julia Caserto. She added that this could help mitigate the effects of pesticides, which are still widely used. “We want to try and overcome these pesticide exposures in managed bees so that we can still have sufficient crop pollination for us all to be sustainable,” she said.
A breakthrough in wildfire detection: How a new constellation of satellites can detect smaller wildfires earlier
Google finally does something really good and really useful!
From Google Blog:
Wildfires are becoming increasingly common due to hotter and drier climates around the world. Until now, firefighters have had to rely on satellite imagery that’s either low resolution or only updated a few times a day, making it difficult to detect fires until they’ve grown larger than a soccer field.
Google Research has teamed up with leaders in the fire community to create FireSat — a purpose-built constellation of satellites designed specifically to detect and track wildfires as small as a classroom (roughly 5x5 meters). With FireSat, authorities will have high-resolution imagery that is updated globally every 20 minutes, helping them respond to fires before they become destructive.
To kickstart this work, Google.org provided $13 million in funding to the initiative led by the Earth Fire Alliance, a nonprofit established to launch the FireSat constellation, with additional support from the Moore Foundation.
To achieve this breakthrough in wildfire detection, the Google Research team contributed to the development of custom infrared sensors for the satellite — in partnership with Muon Space and the Environmental Defense Fund — that could better detect small-scale fires. Using AI, FireSat will rapidly compare any 5x5 meter spot on earth with previous imagery, while also combining factors like nearby infrastructure and local weather, to determine if there's a fire. To validate our detection model for smaller fires and establish a baseline dataset for the AI, we flew the sensors over controlled burns. Next, Muon Space plans to launch the first satellite in early 2025, with the full constellation to follow in the coming years.
Once launched, FireSat will provide near real-time information about the location, size and intensity of early-stage wildfires so firefighters and emergency responders can respond quickly and effectively. In addition to supporting emergency response efforts, FireSat’s data will be used to create a global historical record of fire spread, helping Google and scientists to better model and understand wildfire behavior and spread. This will expand our existing work on fire simulation in partnership with scientists in the U.S. Forest Service.
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Good news for and about animals
Brought to you by Rascal and Margot, and the beautiful spirits of Rosy and Nora.
Migrating birds find refuge in pop-up habitats
Rascal loves this story about farmers helping migrating birds.
From High Country News:
...intensive farming and development have destroyed 95% of the Central Valley’s wetlands, and as the wetlands have disappeared, the number of migrating birds has plummeted. Shorebirds like the western sandpiper, which dwell in seashores and estuaries, are particularly imperiled, declining by more than 33% since 1970.
In 2014, in the middle of a particularly punishing drought in California, a network of conservation organizations called the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership tried a new strategy to help migrating birds: paying rice farmers to create “pop-up” habitat. The program, which is called BirdReturns and was initially funded by The Nature Conservancy, has since created tens of thousands of acres of temporary wetlands each year.
Rice farmers in the Central Valley flood their fields when the growing season ends, generally around November, and keep them flooded until February to help the leftover vegetation decompose. They plant their crop after the fields dry out in late spring. The program pays rice farmers in the birds’ flight path to flood their fields a bit earlier in the fall and leave them flooded later in the spring. This creates habitat when the migratory birds need it the most, as they fly southward in the late summer and early fall and pass through again on their way north in the spring.
Daniel Karp, a researcher at UC Davis who studies conservation in working landscapes and is not involved in BirdReturns, sees the program as a rare conservation win. Most of the time, small farms that grow many different crops, plant hedgerows and pollinator-friendly flowers are the best way to conserve biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes. But although rice farmers grow only one crop, their large fields are an exception. While it’s far from a complete solution, “it’s this weird rare circumstance where you have a large industrial-scale intensive agricultural system that can simultaneously support wildlife,” Karp said.
Couple Can't Cope With What They Find Cat Doing When They Come Home: 'What'
Margot’s reaction to this story was “How come they were surprised?”
From Newsweek:
A couple from Atlanta, Georgia, couldn't believe their eyes when they came home to find their cat watching Secret Life of Pets, despite leaving the TV off before going out.
In a video shared on TikTok in September by the couple, under the username @sav.gif, the tabby cat can be seen lying on the couch in front of the television, watching the comedy movie, as her owners try to understand how she managed to put it on. "We left and the TV was off. We came back and she had put on Secret Life of Pets. What," reads layover text in the clip. And the poster added in the caption: "The amount of buttons she had to press to get there …"
While there isn't as much research around cat intelligence as there is for dogs, what we know is that felines are definitely smarter than we give them credit for, and may be even smarter than their canine counterparts.
Both cats and dogs' intelligence have often been compared to that of a human toddler, but while pups are known for doing incredible things like serving in the army or the police, felines almost never take on these roles. So does that mean that they are not clever enough?
The answer is no. Berit Brogaard, professor of philosophy and director of the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research at the University of Miami, said in an article published by Psychology Today that perhaps cats won't do any of these things because they are "too smart to be enslaved by humans."
This dog sat in a road until a car stopped, then led man into woods to save injured human
Rosy sends happy woofs to Gita from the other side of the Rainbow Bridge — Gita is the best girl!!
From USA Today:
Gita, 13-year-old rescue dog, is being hailed a "true hero" for flagging help after her elderly owner fell...in Washington state last month, Stevens County Sheriff's Office said in a news release.
Deputy Colton Wright was patrolling a rural wooded area in Stevens County when he spotted a dog sitting in the middle of the road. With no visible residences nearby, the officer assumed the dog had gone missing and tried to get Gita into his car so he could try to find the owner. However, Gita firmly refused to get into the vehicle, prompting the deputy to check the surrounding areas.
...As he tried to get the dog off the roadway, the animal "took off up a slightly travelled, unmarked roadway." The deputy followed the dog, who led him to a small summer cabin. As he was checking around the area, he found "an elderly male laying on the ground calling for help a short distance from the cabin."
Turns out Gita had been seeking help for her 84-year-old owner, who had fallen… The injured man, who also [has] several other medical conditions that needed regular medications, had been on the ground for hours "and may have had serious consequences" if he had not been found, authorities said. ✂️
Johnson told the local media outlet that he woke up that day to his glucose machine telling him his blood sugar was low. He was about to grab some juice from the fridge when he saw that Gita needed to go outside … Keith followed her and was about 20 to 30 feet from the cabin when [he] decided to turn around and head back. Just as he turned, a wave of dizziness hit him and he fell, breaking his hip. "She knew I needed help, and she knew what she needed to do to get it," Johnson said. ✂️
"We credit Gita for saving his life that day," the sheriff's office said. "The loyalty and heroism of our furry friends never cease to amaze us." ✂️
Johnson is now recovering at a medical facility, where Gita frequently visits him, according to KREM 2.
All of our animal news editors wanted to include this good news about the winner of Fat Bear Week!
In a rematch, mama bear Grazer defeats rival that killed her cub to win Fat Bear Week
I think we can count on Grazer to emerge from hibernation with at least one cub next spring — she has definitely put on enough fat to feed several cubs and still have plenty of energy for herself.
From NPR:
The winner of this year’s Fat Bear Week is a mama bear whose cub was killed by her opponent — a bear she faced off against in last year's voting.
Out of more than a million votes, 128 Grazer won over 32 Chunk, a male bear weighing more than 1,200 pounds. Grazer received more than 70,000 votes, compared to Chunk’s approximately 30,000. Grazer also won the contest last year, defeating Chunk in 2023.
In July, two of Grazer’s cubs fell over a waterfall in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. They were carried downstream near Chunk, “the most dominant bear on the river,” according to explore.org, the organization that documents the bears using live cameras. Chunk attacked the cubs and one died from its injuries. The surviving cub was a contestant for the 2024 Fat Bear Junior.
The annual Fat Bear Week honors bears that have sufficiently bulked up in the months before entering hibernation.
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