Good morning, Gnusies! And welcome to the good news.
Let’s get started, shall we?
I’ve mentioned before that my dad is aware of the Good News Roundup, and we talk about it occasionally (particularly since a lot of my political knowledge about current goings on comes from GNR either directly or indirectly, so thanks to my fellow GNR authors and commenters!). Occasionally I’ll get a link in my email from him with the subject of GNR? and I hoard them. And I have one for you, from him, today.
"When everything pulled up — the ambulance and the fire engine — everyone was out in the street," Nieshoff recalled. Her neighbors were looking worried and gesturing "call me."
"But I was so focused on my son, I left the front door of the condo wide open, and my keys, my wallet, my phone — I left everything. I just got into the ambulance."
Once they got to the hospital, Nieshoff learned that Edward had experienced a grand mal seizure. The doctors whisked him away for a CAT scan, and she was left alone with her thoughts in the hospital room. She was a single mom, with no family nearby, and she was scared.
"I sat there and I thought, 'What am I going to do?'" she said. "I was feeling pretty alone."
And then, less than an hour later, a familiar face appeared at the door.
All I can say about this particular story is read it. Please. And take it with you.
People, dolphins, now elephants!
Wild elephants seem to address each other using distinctive, rumbling sounds that could be akin to individual names.
That’s according to a provocative new study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, which was inspired by earlier work showing that bottlenose dolphins have signature whistles.
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“We had to find a situation where a specific elephant was by herself, or at least not with the individual who made the recording,” [Mickey Pardo, a biologist at Cornell University] says, explaining that the team would then play the recording through a loudspeaker.
...
They used different recordings on different days. Depending on the day, the elephant would either hear a recorded call that was originally addressed to her or hear a call made by the same elephant that was not intended for her.
And, it turns out, the elephants generally seemed to know when a rumbling message was actually meant for them, suggesting that it contained something like a name. When they heard those calls, they approached the loudspeaker more quickly. They also vocalized a reply more swiftly, and made more response calls.
White storks — recently reintroduced in the UK after being extirpated for over 6 centuries — are breeding and spreading their wings across the country! Have the nest-cam:
There are plenty of areas in which the use of Artificial Intelligence is...problematic. This isn’t one of them:
An international research team utilized machine learning to identify 863,498 promising antimicrobial peptides, any one of which may be needed in the future to fight deadly drug-resistant infections like MRSA and VRSA.
“There is an urgent need for new methods for antibiotic discovery,“ says computational biologist Professor Luis Pedro Coelho, of the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. “It is one of the top public health threats, killing 1.27 million people each year.”
“Using artificial intelligence to understand and harness the power of the global microbiome will hopefully drive innovative research for better public health outcomes.”
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In a pre-clinical model of infected mice, treatment with the peptides produced results similar to the effects of polymyxin B, a commercially available antibiotic used to treat meningitis, pneumonia, sepsis, and urinary tract infections.
An additional 79 of these peptides disrupted bacterial membranes and 63 didn’t merely disrupt but specifically targeted antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli.
In Portugal, a country smaller than Pennsylvania, the gradual abandonment of the Greater Côa Valley has presented an unprecedented opportunity for rewilding in the small country.
The government has already set aside a quarter million acres of land for conservation, boasting an interesting mix of natural and semi-natural habitats of scrub, Mediterranean dry forests, and steep gorges.
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The arriving European bison will be managed in cooperation with the Rewilding Portugal team, who received the individuals from the forests of northern Poland, where over 4,000 bison roam wild.
“We are viewing this translocation as a pilot,” explains Rewilding Portugal team leader Pedro Prata. “The bison will be closely monitored to see how they acclimatize to the local landscape and climate. This is the first time that Rewilding Portugal team has managed bison, so it’s a learning process for us too. Members of the team will receive training in bison management.”
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Through their grazing, foraging, trampling, and fertilizing, bison help to maintain biodiversity-rich mosaic landscapes of forest, scrub, and grassland, as well as numerous micro-habitats, which host a wide range of plant and animal species.
That’s it for me!