Uplifting News

[Truman]

These Are the ‘Positive’ Tipping Points That Could Slow Global Warming

• An academic paper suggests key tipping points can significantly reduce carbon emissions, which would help to slow global warming.
• Government policies are making coal uneconomical.
• Electric vehicle pricing structures have helped reduce the number of petrol and diesel cars on the world's roads.

There may be light at the end of the tunnel in the battle to reduce carbon emissions.

Governments and institutions could help halt carbon emissions with just a few carefully selected policy measures, according to a new paper, which looked at the experience of the energy industry and changing trends in road vehicle purchases.

If chosen properly and applied internationally, such "tipping points" could set off a series of other changes that snowball into a movement with enough critical mass to slow global warming and reduce natural disasters.

These Are the ‘Positive’ Tipping Points That Could Slow Global Warming

 

[Truman]

Why this Australian girl has cleaned graves for eight years
Why this Australian girl has cleaned graves for eight years

Australian Tj Kleeman was four when she moved with her family into a house next to a cemetery.

Scared of ghosts, she began cleaning graves to overcome her fear.

Eight years on, Tj is still cleaning graves - but for a very different reason.

The 12-year-old girl who cleans graves

 

[Truman]

Scientists Accidentally Discover Strange Creatures Under a Half Mile of Ice

ater that night in his tent, Smith watched the footage, and recognized a rather glaring problem. The video shows a descent through 3,000 feet of blue-green ice, which suddenly terminates, opening up into dark seawater. The camera coasts another 1,600 feet until the seafloor finally comes into view—mostly light-colored sediment, which Smith was after, but also something dark. That dark thing turned out to be a rock, which the camera hits with a thud, tumbling face-down into the sediment. The camera quickly rights itself and scans the rock, revealing something the geologists hadn’t been after at all. In fact, it was something highly improbable: life.

Scientists Accidentally Discover Strange Creatures Under a Half Mile of Ice

 

[Truman]

Strippers & Booze for Wild Sendoff!

Larry Flynt's "Celebration of Life" will amount to one big happy ending -- a fitting homegoing for the man who built a porn empire.

Flynt's famed Hustler Club in Las Vegas is planning to honor its founder with one helluva sendoff next weekend that will mirror Larry's lifestyle. The club's popular dance group, "Sexxy After Dark," will perform during the ceremony.

There will also be an on-stage memorial presentation followed by a rooftop balloon release. We're told bartenders will be serving up a signature vodka drink called the Flynt Goldfinger.

Larry Flynt's Celebration of Life Will Have Strippers and Booze

 

[PoppaJ]

Rare White Buffalo Spotted in Missouri's Ozark Mountains


The return of the white buffalo represents the dawn of a new age of peace and good fortune to Native Americans

 

[PoppaJ]

The man who once had a segment on his radio program called “AIDS Update” that celebrated the deaths of AIDS sufferers has died.

 

[bob1]

Brittany Memory says her little Yorkshire Terrier, Penny, gave her a warning something was wrong when she sat straight up on the bed Monday night. The power had just gone out, but it was storming outside so she thought her dog was alerting her to something else.


“I actually thought someone was in the house, and I leaned up and turned on the flashlight on my phone,” Memory says. “And about that time it sounded like a train.”

Within seconds she says the so-called train sounded like it was just outside her bedroom. She didn’t have time to concentrate on anything but protecting her son.

“When I looked, I didn’t have time. If I had waited a second, me and my son would have been out the back door. I didn’t have time to grab Penny.”

Brittany Memory, Penny's owner, explains where the dog was sucked out of the house from the tornado (Source: wect)
An EF-3 tornado ripped homes off foundations and knocked 18-wheelers over on Green Bay Rd. in Ocean Isle Beach. A couple miles away, the destruction was far more devastating. Three people were killed and ten were injured.

The powerful twister lifted everything in Memory’s house and blew mirrors off walls. The ferocious winds also sucked Penny, her dog, out of the back of the house.

“She flew out right here in the back with all my covers,” she said pointing to the back of her house that now has a large gaping hole. “It ripped the sheets off my bed. She was just bundled up in it.”


Memory said she had a hard time explaining what happened to Penny to her son.

“I was terrified, I didn’t think she was alive. But I just kept telling my little boy ‘she’s an animal, she’ll be okay, God’s got her. Everything’s going to be all right. We’re safe and everything can be replaced, we can’t.’”

Little Penny eventually found her way back home a few hours later. She was shivering and traumatized, but otherwise unharmed.

“She just had a little bit of glass stuck to her and we took her to the vet and everything is okay.”

 

[Jim Tucker]

Mardi Gras parades got canceled by Covid-19. So people in New Orleans turned their houses into floats

(CNN)When New Orleans' mayor announced that the city's legendary Carnival parades would be canceled on account of Covid-19, Megan Boudreaux wasn't surprised.

Like so many, the mom and insurance manager had known in her gut that the weekslong fête would take 2021 off. Revelers of all ages packed at least three deep along routes that wind for miles seemed the textbook antithesis of social distancing.
Visit New Orleans' house floats wherever you are


"So, I kinda made a comment: 'Well, that's fine, I'm just going to decorate my house,'" said Boudreaux, who invited her neighbors to turn their homes, too, into stationary versions of the ornately designed floats that populate the four dozen or so parades that roll in the city each year. This way, she figured, partiers could stay 6 feet apart while visiting outdoors and enjoying the artistry of the annual countdown to Lent.
The idea, like a splay of bead strands hurled skyward toward an endless carousing crowd, has spread.
Nearly three months and 3,000 house floats later, Boudreaux said last week, "here we are," with homes across New Orleans and its suburbs -- even some as far away as Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates -- dolled up for the inaugural Krewe of House Floats, this ever-resilient city's answer to a deadly pandemic threat.

 

[Jim Tucker]

Comparing the price of electricity from new power plants in 2009 and 2019, one graph shows how the price of solar photovoltaic power (from solar panels) plummets from $359 per megawatt hour to $40, the cheapest of any of the power options on the chart and an 89% decrease. If housing prices declined at that same rate, Our World in Data researcher Max Roser writes, a home that cost $3,590 to rent in 2009 would cost just $400 in 2019. Over the same time period, the price of coal barely budged, from $111 per megawatt hour in 2009 to $109 in 2019.

 

[Teresa]

Researchers recover oldest DNA ever found — from a mammoth more than 1 million years old

Researchers have recovered the oldest DNA ever found, dating back more than one million years. The achievement marks a milestone in DNA research and shows scientists now have the tools to probe even further back in history than once thought possible.

The DNA comes from the molars of three mammoth specimens from the Early and Middle Pleistocene period from northeast Siberia, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The main goal of the research endeavor was to sequence genomes from before and after the origin and evolution of two other branches of the mammoth family tree, woolly and Columbian mammoths.

Researchers recover oldest DNA ever found — from a mammoth more than 1 million years old

View attachment 88308
Based on the locations of the samples, preserved in permafrost and discovered in the 1970s, they have been named Krestovka, Adycha and Chukochya. The Krestovka mammoth is approximately 1.65 million years old and Adycha is about 1.34 million years old. Chukochya, at about 0.87 million years old, is believed to be one of the earliest known woolly mammoths, the scientists said.