Category: Good News Network

It takes bravery to compete in college wrestling, and sophomore NJCAA wrestler Kendall Cummings needed every ounce of it when he decided he was not going to let a mamma grizzly bear maul his friend to death.

Last year, Cummings was out with his friends Brady Lowry, Gus Harrison, and Orrin Jackson in the Wyoming woods looking for shed antlers from elk, moose, and mule deer, which along with being a fun way to pass time in the woods, can also earn a college kid a few hundred dollars for a big pair of antlers.

The four buddies were out on the Bobcat-Houlihan Trail, which sits on the outskirts of Yellowstone when in the late afternoon, they decided to split up to cover more ground and meet back together on a large rock at the top of a hill.

Ryan Hockensmith at ESPN, detailing what would become a gruesome encounter, wrote that Brady turned around to warn Kendall not to step in this fresh pile of bear scat when what was likely a female grizzly bear, which can weigh around 500-pounds, slammed into him.

The impact from the bear knocked the young man over dozen yards, and she continued to swat at him as he rolled, “dribbling him” like a basketball, Hockensmith wrote.

Kendall was not about to let it happen, and after trying to use his voice to scare her away, he jumped on her back to distract her after she had managed to pin Brady up against a tree.

Then Kendall ran; as fast as he could. Grizzly bears can sprint over 30 miles per hour, and it wasn’t even a few seconds before she had turned around and lept on top of him instead.

“I can’t even express how grateful I am for him,” Brady told Cowboy State Daily. “I don’t know what I’m going to pay him back [sic], I don’t. I owe him everything.”

Grizzly bear attacks are extremely rare—8 in the last 150 years, with a risk rate of around 1 in 2.7 million.

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Hunters and others who work in the wilderness say the only way to survive an attack like this is to play dead, which is exactly what Kendall did as soon as he realized he could do nothing else.

Kendall suffered horrific injuries, but Brady, who had had the better of it, managed to escape the scene, call 911, and meet up with their two friends who were unaware of what was happening. Eventually, the bear lost interest in the limp body of Kendall who stumbled to his feet and back down the trail where he met up with  Brady and the others. The two were eventually medically evacuated by helicopter.

At a trauma center in Billings, Montana, surgeons stitched and reconstructed Kendall’s face and head, which the bear had repeatedly bit. Brady was taken to a less-equipped hospital in Powell, Wyoming, but was eventually transported to Billings, and to the same room as Kendall.

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Brady’s father Dallas drove all the way from Utah to Billings to marvel at the 21-year-old sophomore who was prepared to give all he could to rescue his son.

“You saved my son’s life,” he told Kendell.

“I would have rather died than have gotten away and known I could have helped,” Kendell told him.

100 days after the attack, last January, Brady competed in an NJCAA wrestling meet while Kendall, not yet medically cleared to go back to the mat, cheered him on.

With friends like these, am I right?

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Two New Orleans high school students claim to have solved a 2,000-year-old puzzle in mathematics, which scientists are saying should be submitted to peer review.

Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson from St. Mary’s Academy presented their findings to a meeting of the American Mathematics Society in which they explain they were able to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem using trigonometry rather than circular logic.

For the mercifully uninitiated, trigonometry is the study of triangles. Pythagoras’ Theorem deals with triangles that are not perfectly symmetrical, and it goes like this.

The area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides. It is written as a²+b²=c².

One of the interesting things about this equation is that for 2,000 years, no mathematician has been able to demonstrate the truth of it without simply using the equation itself as proof; what is called circular logic, and not accepted as truth evidence of proof.

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Johnson and Jackson reference Elisha Loomis’s The Pythagorean Proposition, a book investigating this concept, which “flatly states that ‘there are no trigonometric proofs because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean theorem,’” the girls wrote.

It was this conundrum that they managed to untangle, presenting “a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry—the Law of Sines—and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity,” they said in their abstract. The equation they cite for this is sin2x+cos2x=1.

While we let mathematicians work out whatever that means, Catherine Roberts, executive director for the American Mathematical Society, encouraged the young ladies to submit their work for peer review, and commit themselves further to the study of mathematics so they can further advance the mathematical literature.

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The two ladies were interviewed on WWL New Orleans, and said it was an “unparalleled feeling” to present their findings to the society.

“There’s nothing like it—being able to do something that people don’t think that young people can do,” Johnson said to the station. “You don’t see kids like us doing this—it’s usually, like, you have to be an adult to do this.”

WATCH the story below if you prefer to understand their genius further…

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Archaeologists made a huge discovery while examining a golden pendant when they decoded the words “He is Odin’s man”—making the object the oldest ever found to bear the name of the chief Norse deity.

Dating to the 400s AD, the century of the fall of the Roman Empire, the pendant is believed to have been owned by some sort of leader, since gold symbolizes status and Odin was the god of kings.

Odin, also known as Wotan or Woden—the king of the gods and god of kings. He was also the god of runes, wisdom, magic, and death, and sat at the pinnacle of the Northern European pantheon worshiped by Anglo-Saxons, Germanic tribes, Celts, and of course most famously, the Vikings.

The pendant, officially called a bracteate, was found in a gold hoard near the village of Vindelev on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula in 2020. The newly translated inscription of Odin’s name is 150 years older than the previous earliest reference found.

“It’s absolutely amazing,” said Lisbeth Imer, runologist, and writing expert at the National Museum of Denmark. “This means that Norse mythology can now be dated all the way back to the early fifth century,” she told Live Science.

The museum’s linguist, Krister Vasshus, described it as a “huge discovery” and a moment of “pure ecstasy.”

“Odin’s man,” in this case, is believed to have been called Jaga, or Jagaz—a name that is a fair distance away from the names carved into the hundreds of runestones that dot Scandinavia from the Viking period, or which appear in the Norse or Icelandic sagas, perhaps suggesting he, and extension perhaps Odin worship, came from farther inland.

The inscription is written in runes—the alphabet from Iron Age Scandinavia and Germania. Runic language changed every few centuries, with many words falling out of use. The deciphering team from the National Museum of Denmark believes the discovery can reshape the study of early runic language, and potentially open up all-new interpretations of unknown passages.

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Bacteates were popular jewelry in Iron Age Scandinavia, and more than 1,000 have been recovered by archaeologists, many of which bear inscriptions like the ones found at Vindelev.

For example, the “Odin’s man” bracteate was found to have been stamped by the same die used on another bracteate uncovered in 1852.

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“So, the National Museum has been in possession of an inscription with the word Odin on it for 170 years—but we didn’t know until recently,” Imer said.

At the moment, the team is assuming this means the entire Norse canon is backdated along with Odin, since Odin’s presence in the Norse versions of stories like Genesis, Exodus, and Revelations from the Bible, is nearly ubiquitous. In short, almost none of the other stories can be told without him.

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Mr. Pickles, a 90-year-old radiated tortoise and the oldest animal at the Houston Zoo, became a father for the first time last week.

Mr. Pickles and his 53-year-old partner, Mrs. Pickles, welcomed three hatchlings that could live for up to 150 years if well taken care of.

Native to southern Madagascar, radiated tortoises are Critically Endangered and rarely produce offspring, Houston Zoo officials said.

“The new hatchlings came as a surprise when a herpetology keeper happened upon Mrs. Pickles as the tortoise was laying her eggs at closing time,” the Houston Zoo blog reported.

“The animal care team quickly went to work uncovering the eggs and getting them to the safety of the Reptile & Amphibian House. The soil in Houston isn’t hospitable to the Madagascar native tortoises, and it’s unlikely the eggs would have hatched on their own if the keeper hadn’t been in the right place at the right time.”

Arriving in 1996, Mrs. Pickles has lived at the Houston Zoo alongside Mr. Pickles ever since. The kids have been named Dill, Gherkin, and Jalapeño.

The new parents have been key to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan for this exquisite reptile that has unfortunately fallen afoul of the illegal animal trade.

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In 2018 10,000 radiated tortoises were found in a private home in Toliara, Madagascar. Rescuers transported them to Le Village Des Tortues (“Turtle Village”), a private wildlife rehabilitation facility in Ifaty, 18 miles north of Toliara.

Preventative measures for insuring against the extinction of the reptile has been the establishment of breeding colonies on the Reunion Islands and Mauritius where the conditions are similar to its home in Madagascar.

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Europe’s love of train travel is about to transform the continent’s solar energy production as the Swiss are set to begin installing solar panels in between train tracks.

The startup called Sun-Ways is waiting for a sign-off from the Federal Office of Transport to start installing their panels between the tracks near Buttes Station in the west of the country.

With the Swiss national railway network stretching beyond 2,000 miles of track, estimates place the amount of power generation at potentially beyond 1 terawatt hour or 2% of the entire gross annual consumption.

“There are over a million kilometers of railway lines in the world,” co-founder Baptiste Danichert tells SWI Swissinfo. “We believe that 50% of the world’s railways could be equipped with our system.”

A great way to incorporate solar panels into an economy is to find a place where flat ground is used by other industries, like canals, pastures, or warehousing.

Some companies use solar panels to generate power over agriculture, a strategy called “agrivoltaics” while India and California use their massive canal networks and hot sun to generate power while saving land.

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Sun-Ways’ invention uses a specialized train car to lay down solar panels as if it were unrolling a carpet to save on labor costs.

At the moment, the idea is facing some pushback, including concern that the reflection of the sun off the panels could distract drivers, and that in areas with heavy snowfall, the panels would be a large waste of money.

Dust, debris, and damage from the vibrations of the rails could all potentially interfere the panels, but Sun-Ways have said they are taking all of this into account with the design and materials of the panels. For dust, they added that brushes could be attached to the undersides of trains to clean the panels as they drive by.

Their pilot at Buttes remains highly anticipated.

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In the far western desert of Texas, a striking 3D-printed hotel with Swedish style will take shape over the coming years to present both the beauty and savings of 3D printing to the country and the world.

The architecture is handled by Swedish design architect Bjarke Ingels, while the printers will be supplied by Austin-based 3D printing company ICON, that’ve really taken the technology to the next level with 3D-printed batteries and whole neighborhoods besides.

The two are teaming up to transform the El Cosmico hotel/campground in Marfa, Texas, into a 62-acre remote hotel with an infinity pool, art exhibition hall, outdoor bathhouse, and outdoor kitchen, all designed as an homage to both the desert surroundings and the cosmic show on display in the night sky above.

The local West Texas earth is being added to the 3D printing cement mixture to ensure the luxury cabins blend in with their surroundings.

“The promise of 3D printing is that the printer doesn’t care how complex the design is, if it uses organic curvature, dome-like shapes, or hyperbolic paraboloids,” Ingels, an early investor in Icon and a frequent design collaborator on its 3D-printed projects, told AD.

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“All it cares about is how long it takes to print and how much material [it is] going to deploy, so you can make a square box or a beautiful domed house at the same cost.”

That cost can be around 30% less than traditional methods, as well as 350% stronger depending on the size and scope of the project.

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The hotel rooms will all feature skylights to allow unobstructed viewing of the night sky, and expansive views of the Davis Mountains. Just next door is Big Bend National Park, one of the largest in the Lower 48, and a paradise of desert exploration.

El Cosmico “2.0.” is predicted to begin construction in 2024.

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